sundance

So You Think You Can Dubstep?

Garo Sparo, couture fashion designer.

We know what you’re thinking: “How can I possibly celebrate my love for club culture in between the all new episodes of UNLEASHED BY GARO?!”

Here it is, ladies, gents and gender benders — The Gossamer Swatch Session Mix Tape. Coming to you once a week as tribute to couture fashion designer Garo Sparo. Watch as Garo, part-time psychiatrist and full-time dream weaver, helps his clients battle their inhibitions and unleash their true selves in our all new original series UNLEASHED BY GARO. Fridays 9p.

Check out this week’s mix tape below.

Famous photographs with Instagram filters

In a fusion of the old and new, analog and digital, Mastergram is a relatively new Tumblr that takes iconic photographs and applies filters from the popular iPhone social app, Instagram. There’s an irony in this exercise, which I find practically blasphemous, because many of the Instagram filters attempt to mimic a pre-digital quality and add a false sense of depth and artistry to often prosaic photos. I was pleased though to see on the site that my all-time favorite photographer Weegee is included. As I previously wrote here, I consider Weegee to be “the godfather of the 21st-century urban blogger.”

CONTAGION billboard grown from bacteria

You’ve heard of viral campaigns, but you probably haven’t encountered bacterial marketing – or, more specifically, a billboard crawling with live bacteria cultures. But that’s exactly what marketers from Warner Bros. Canada put together last week: not one, but two enormous, mounted petri dishes inoculated with cultures of penicillin, mold and pigmented bacteria. Over the course of the week, the cultures eventually grew to spell out CONTAGION, the title of the star-studded flick (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Jude Law) that hit theatres last week.

Fashion Week Day 4 recap: Spring 2012, the future looks bright

See what we have to say about what Preen, Marc by Marc Jacobs and Derek Lam sent down the runway.

Go backstage at Rebecca Minkoff, where the hair was the mane (couldn’t help myself) attraction.

Not sure how to rock the 70s look? We break down easy 70s style, courtesy of a monochromatic silk suit by Rachel Zoe that will make you say “I die.”

Naked News: Ben & Jerry’s Schweddy Balls

• Ben & Jerry’s best flavor ever: Schweddy Balls!
  
  
• A little baldy on little baldies: Moby wants to make a porno with average-sized willies.
  
  

5 reasons why WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? still matters

If you’ve taken a look at the schedule for The Green programming this month (and the rest of what’s on Sundance Channel this week), this Sunday’s showing of WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? may have caught your attention – and even had you scratching your head a bit. After all, aren’t electrified vehicles now alive and well? The Nissan LEAF (a fully electric car) and the Chevy Volt (a plug-in hybrid with a 40 mile all-electric range) are getting lots of attention, and boutique automakers like Tesla are still plugging away (so to speak). Gearheads are converting their own cars to electricity and even offering the service to others. And director Chris Paine’s next film is called REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR. Doesn’t all of this prove that this five-year-old documentary is already dated?

The mullets of Medellin

The mullet, a hairstyle often mocked and scorned by the “East Coast liberal elite” for its “low-brow” cultural associations, is elevated to the realm of art in this portraiture photo series by Stefan Ruiz. Along with journalist Rainbow Nelson (side note: that’s a pretty sweet name!), Ruiz highlights and celebrates in “The Mullets of Medellín” the intersection of two ubiquitous aspects of Medellin culture: the stylistic pervasiveness of the mullet and the religion of soccer, starring the above subjects, held in the city’s stadium Estadio Atanasio Girardot. This presents a refreshingly updated look at a city known more for its association with Pablo Escobar, drug cartels and the related shocking violence of the 1970s through the early 1990s. Pop culture references like “Entourage” and its plot line involving a biopic of Escobar, has made it difficult for mainstream perception to move beyond the city and country’s past despite positive trends.

Animated edibles by Alexandre Dubosc

Alimation from Alexandre DUBOSC on Vimeo.

My interest in baked goods was already pretty keen without there being a cultural incentive to drool in their direction. For his new short film, “Alimation,” French visual artist Alexandre Dubosc crafted a series of edible “zoetropes,” or moving illusions for this year’s Annency International Animated Film Festival. With everything from fresh crepes to elaborate, multi-tier cakes, the film is as mesmerizing as it is mouth-watering.

Solar Decathlon’s Team New York discovers NYC’s most underutilized real estate

The phrase “underutilized real estate in New York City” may strike many as an oxymoron: isn’t every square inch of the city covered in asphalt, concrete, buildings or park space? If you’re equating “real estate” with “land,” you’re right, but like early 20th-century developers that saw opportunities to build upward, Solar Decathlon 2011′s Team New York thought creatively about the notion of available space in the Big Apple. While land’s at a premium, the students from the City College of New York’s Spitzer School of Architecture and the Grove School of Engineering realized that many of the city’s buildings have flat rooftops – and those rooftops represent 1.6 billion square feet ripe for sustainable development.

The %#*! hits the fan with the Climate Reality Project

Notice any unusual weather patterns lately? Any hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, drought or flood come your way? If you’ve lived on this Earth in the last year or two then the answer is, undoubtedly, yes. But if you’re someone who refuses to believe that these dramatic changes in our weather are a sign that maybe humans haven’t had the best impact on our environment, get ready to wake the %#*! up. This Wednesday, climate change deniers get an extra dose of reality with the Climate Reality Project, a 24-hour, global, livestream event that reveals, once and for all, the very real scope of the climate crisis.

The Climate Reality Project asks you to make time for reality on Wednesday, September 14 at 7PM, in your time zone. “Pick a faraway place or a city near you. Make it yours for one day. We’re hitting every time zone, but only once…Choose a location and get involved.” If your hometown isn’t represented, pick some place you’ve never been to (French Polynesia, Tonga, New Delhi or Seoul) or maybe never even heard of. Personally, I’m choosing Ilulissat. But prepare yourself for some serious talk on climate change, and stand ready to take action. This isn’t a fluffy, pictures of dolphins in net, tear-jerking talk-the-talk but no walk kinda thing. Did you watch the videos m ss ng p eces made? Would they create poop and hurl it at a fan if this wasn’t for real? Just watch the behind-the-scenes: Al Gore is pissed, and really, why aren’t more people? As the man says, if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

Down the runway and behind the scenes with Full Frontal Fashion

Fashion Week is well underway and Full Frontal Fashion is on the scene to bring you everything from the runway to behind-the-scenes looks at the pre-show madness as well as all the pretty faces who line up every year to watch the spectacle unfold.

See what Thakoon, Altuzarra, Monique Lhuillier, Alexander Wang and The Row are sending down the runway this season.

Fashion strikes on the runway and the front row at Alexander Wang.

Best of Kickstarter, 9/12: THE HAPPY FILM

We’re starting off the week with a new Kickstarter projects so good we’re not including any others. What am I talking about, you ask? What’s this Best of Kickstarter thing we’ve been blogging about every Monday? Well, it seems like everyone is pitching their idea to Kickstarter. We think that’s great, but with great power comes great responsibility, and while the 23-person Kickstarter team does their best to filter out the winning projects from the thousands and thousands of proposals they receive, there are still hundreds of thousands of new projects that launch each week. That’s a lot of ways to spend your hard-earned five bucks. Too many ways, actually. How can one person sort through it all? Relax, we’ll do it all for you.

Okay, so remember when I told you about Stefan Sagmeister’s latest project, THE HAPPY FILM? Of course you do (just nod politely to validate me)! And remember when I said you should contribute, so you went to the website and looked around all confused because you couldn’t find the ‘donate now’ button? Well, live in confusion no longer, my friend. The happy dudes behind THE HAPPY FILM have now made it really easy for us to help them fund their movie by making it an official Kickstarter project.

Topless sunbathers read pulp fiction, fight for equality

When we first heard about the NYC-based group calling itself the Outdoor Co-Ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society, we initially assumed that it involved topless people watching the Tarantino movie outdoors somewhere, in some weird take on the whole ROCKY HORROR phenomenon. We were relieved to learn that the pulp fiction in question is actually, well, pulp fiction (the idea of celebrating Tarantino with female toplessness kind of grossed us out). But we’re still a little uneasy about the whole thing.

Q&A with Core77 design winner: Solar Puff

Ben Kaufman’s company, Quirky, is all about finding great ideas from regular people and turning them into real, marketable products, and Core77 is all about covering the best and latest in design and technology. Throughout the Quirky series, we’ll be bringing you stories from designers, inventors and entrepreneurs who’ve either already brought their product from concept to completion or are right in the middle of that process – and all without the help of a company like Ben’s.

Today we bring you the story of the Solar Puff, runner up for the Core77 Design Award for DIY/Hack/Mod. Designed by Alice Minsoo Chun of Studio Unite.

Weekly movie trailer roundup: THE RUM DIARY vs. FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS

Thirteen years ago, Terry Gilliam teamed up with Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro to make a film based on Hunter S. Thompson’s acid trip of a book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now, Depp stars in yet another adaptation of an uncontrolled substance-induced Thompson binge, THE RUM DIARY. Depp plays a journalist out on assignment (sound familiar?), but instead of Del Toro as his sidekick, Depp’s swarthy drinking buddy is played by Michael Rispolo, who gets bonus points for a nicely grown-in beard and what appears to be excellent comic timing. He’s in Puerto Rico this time, back before the U.S. planted a Starbucks and a McDonald’s along the main plaza. As far as I can tell from the trailer (I have not read the book), the plot line is somewhat more coherent than Gilliam’s 1998 Thompson adaptation, which is not to say it looks better. It goes like this: Depp drinks the hotel mini-bar dry, has a few laughs with a comely blonde (Amber Heard) and tries to expose Aaron Eckhart and his cohorts for a corrupt, possibly government-related scheme that receives little elucidation in favor of the more colorful, rum-soaked scenes they’re using the to sell the movie.

9/11 StoryCorps animations from the Rauch Brothers

The 9/11 media blitz is well under way, and will rise steadily by the hour until we hit total saturation on Sunday. I’ve been subjecting myself to quite a bit already, ranging from news analysis to anecdotal retellings. Regarding the latter, NPR certainly knows how to go to the heart of the emotional matter, but it’s been this series of Rauch Brother animations that have so far been the most resonant material for me. The Rauch’s have basically created a visual to a selection of 9/11 StoryCorps interviews, part of the oral history project which, amongst many other goals, aims to record one interview for every life lost. If you haven’t encountered StoryCorp before, it’s fantastic. Members of the public simply book an appointment and then bring a friend or loved one to a roving StoryCorp “booth” for an interview about his or her life. The StoryCorp site features edited excerpts from these interviews, categorized by topic. And, as one might imagine, there’s a sizable 9/11 section. The Rauch Brothers use their playful style for these heartbreaking stories, lending them an extraordinarily moving, as well as surreal effect; We’re watching cartoons suffer, for Godssake.

A shopper’s guide to crappy 9/11 products

The 10th anniversary of September 11th is a time for reflection, family, and apparently, shopping. From commemorative iPhone speakers to decorative dinner napkins, it seems consumerism will truly triumph over all – including good taste and common sense. Here, a list of the best (worst) crap available to gear up for the big day.

Gif.TV

I’ve previously shared the rise of .gif animated images, which have crawled out of “the seedier corners of the Internet, in profiles of message board users and the like” and “have started to emerge as a medium of some artistic merit in their own right.” A sub-genre of .gifs have been given the fancy pants title of “cinemagraphs.” As an example, check out these 30 cinemagraphs from Kubrick films.

GIF.TV brilliantly jumps on this digital bandwagon. It’s your one-stop-shop to view .gifs within the familiar medium of a TV set. Flip the switches to find new, randomized .gifs, which are occasionally breathtaking in its artistry, but, more often than not, are simply hilarious in their repetition.

New research shows we still have no f-ing clue about the female orgasm

The female orgasm is a mystery, and not just in that how-the-hell-can-I-make-my-girlfriend-climax kind of way. Scientists just can’t seem to figure out what it’s there for. The most recent theory – popularized in the 2005 book The Case of the Female Orgasm – was that it was just an accidental evolutionary by-product of the male orgasm. Meaning, the orgasm is important for men (no shit) and women share biology with them in the same way that men have non-functioning (unless you count orgasm via nipple clamps) nipples. But anyway, a recent study of thousands of twins and how they do or don’t orgasm, failed to prove this theory.

Kick your un-creative butt into high gear

Based solely on the fact that Stefan Sagmeister dropped his name in a sentence to this effect: he helps me get ideas – I picked up “Creativity Workout: 62 Exercises to Unlock Your Most Creative Ideas,” by Edward “master of creative thinking” De Bono. It’s basically a book of exercises to help you generate ideas, whether you’re looking for business solutions or a little kick in the pants in a creative project. All the exercises are based on tables of random words that you select randomly, the idea being that in order to think outside the box you need to approach your problem from the outside as well. De Bono posits that totally unrelated words will shed new light and lead to active ways of thinking and creative solutions.

When I read through his introduction and discovered that this was the concept for the entire book, I was pretty let down. It seemed so hokey, like problem solving tricks your fourth grade teacher might use in class. But no matter how much I cringed at De Bono’s self help speak, I just kept thinking: Sagmeister. Sagmeister does this stuff, so who was I to turn my nose up at it without even trying it out?

Bring on the Oscar movies! And the Oscar fatigue!

The season of grossout comedies and screechy animated romps is spewing to an end as we brace ourselves for the period when actual quality films might come out of the darkness. And these films know they’re quality.

In fact, the releases from now till December 31 have been aggressively devised to win Oscars and will be prestigiously rammed down our throats until someone votes for them!

The top choices:

* Ages ago, George Clooney went from TV star to Oscar bait, and his new one will hardly stop his pedigree parade from marching on. It’s The Ides of March, directed by Clooney (who costars with Ryan Gosling), and seeing as it examines dirty politics from the inside, it couldn’t be any more tawdrily topical. Opens October 7

* Leonardo DiCaprio gets a star role—and hopefully some nice gowns—as FBI head J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. It doesn’t take an investigator to smell Oscar potential here. October 21

Political rock-paper-scissors

Our design crush Christoph Niemann‘s latest illustration for his Abstract Sunday art column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine takes the hand gesture game of “rock, paper, scissors” and updates it for the modern political era. If kids can use this classic game to settle disputes such as who gets the last piece of pie (I will fight you to the death if it’s strawberry rhubarb) or as a tie breaker in the game of shotgun aka who-gets-the-front-seat, then perhaps it can work for the gridlocked politicians in Washington by following some of these new additional gestures invented by Niemann. I feel like President Obama has been using a lot of “pretty please with a cherry on top.” Not permitted: the middle finger.

Valuing the unexpected in cinema

Yesterday, a brand new crop of Filmmaking MFA students appeared before me at Ohio University, as suddenly as Fall weather. It’s that time – August is gone, baby, and us teachers are back in the classroom. One exercise conducted yesterday involved each person articulating what he or she values in the cinema – not a specific type of character or scene, but a methodology, strategy or approach that can be identified from film to film. I noted a pattern: many valued the experience of feeling surprised – when the storyteller crafted moments that veered from a familiar course with either plot or character (INCENDIES, above, does just this). Our collective expectations have been molded through years of watching films, so an innovation of form, complexity of plot or sophistication of character truly do deserve value. I thought back to my own summer movie-going experiences and measured how a few stacked up. Watch out, hold up – the teacher is giving out grades:

A glowing army in Hamburg, Germany

In the wake of the Japan’s tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown disasters, people were extra skittish about the threat of radioactive poisoning (especially Lindsay Lohan, who promptly evacuated herself from Los Angeles even though her hair already looks like a victim of toxic fallout). To poke fun at our paranoia, art collective Luzinterruptus installed 100 “radioactive” figures in a field outside Hamburg’s Dockville Festival. The effect is surprisingly eerie, each figure outfitted in protective white clothing and lit from within. With their heads pointed at the ground, it appears to be a giant alien army advancing from the forest.

Green tech finds, 9/8/11

Harvesting runner power, turning plastic back into oil and becoming a (virtual) upcycling magnate: your green tech finds for the week.

Charge your phone with your shoes: If you run or walk regularly, you’re creating mechanical energy that’s going to waste. The Instep Nanopower concept offers a way to capture that power and transfer it to electronic devices via wi-fi. (via Inhabitat and @EcoverUS)

Become a Trash Tycoon on Facebook: Tired of Farmville? Guerillaapps new Facebook-based social game Trash Tycoon (which is sponsored by upcycling company Terracycle) gives you the opportunity to build a virtual recycling empire. (via Crisp Green)