Design Dish: See-thru airplanes, Archtober and Mexico’s inverted skyscraper
From the coolest new products to dramatic feats of engineering, here’s what has us excited in the design world this week.
The Boeing Dreamliner: Airplanes have looked more or less the same since the 1960s, but this week Airbus revealed plans for a super slick new generation of planes with a transparent “skeleton” structures, allowing for unobstructed views of the surrounding sky. Think of it as the flying version of those glass-bottom submarines at Disneyworld. The planes won’t roll out until 2050, which means I’ll have to stay all excited about this until I’m in a nursing home.
Read More »Africa’s farm land: a new source of exploitation
Quick: think of something that Africa has in abundance. Given the tenor of most of the news we get from the continent, answers like poverty, disease, and social unrest may pop into your head. All of those answers are correct, unfortunately, but governments around the world, as well as investors, are seeing something else: land, particularly farmland. With aquifers falling beyond their refresh rates and soil fertility eaten up by erosion, over-farming, and/or deforestation, many governments are looking for new places to grow food. And Africa, as it has for centuries, is looking ripe for exploitation. According to the World Bank, “approximately 56 million hectares of arable land has been purchased or leased worldwide, 70% of which took place in Africa…
Read More »10 things you didn’t know about Stanley Kubrick
1. You’ve been saying his last name wrong: It’s pronounced Cue-brick, not Koo-brick.
2. He wanted to be a drummer: Specifically a jazz drummer, until his dad bought him a Graflex camera for his 13th birthday and there was no looking back…
Read More »Lars von Trier’s rambling director’s statement on MELANCHOLIA
Lars von Trier’s thoughts on making MELANCHOLIA are so stream-of-conscious and disjointed they’re almost incoherent, but it’s still his ‘official’ statement – and really, would you expect anything else of him?
It was like waking from a dream: my producer showed me a suggestion for a poster. “What is that?” I ask. ”It’s a film you’ve made!” she replies. “I hope not,” I stammer. Trailers are shown … stills … it looks like shit. I’m shaken.
Don’t get me wrong … I’ve worked on the film for two years. With great pleasure. But perhaps I’ve deceived myself. Let myself be tempted. Not that anyone has done anything wrong … on the contrary; everybody has worked loyally and with talent toward the goal defined by me alone. But when my producer presents me with the cold facts, a shiver runs down my spine…
Three new “SenseMotion” Vibes from Lelo
It’s always fun when something truly innovative comes along in the sex toy industry. Remember the first vibrating egg women could use internally? Or the first vibrating love ring worn by men during intercourse? Or the more recent We-Vibe worn by women during intercourse? Those all had a pretty high wow-factor when they first appeared on the scene.
Now our friends over at Lelo, one of our favorite “pleasure object” producers, have taken those three designs and given them a new twist with motion-sensor technology (the kind of thing in smartphones and video game consoles) that allows their vibrations to be controlled by the movement of a wireless remote control that works up to 39 feet away!
Read More »MONEYBALL: Can sports neophytes like this film?
Are you about to saunter leisurely into this Bennett Miller blockbuster, as thousands of Americans have done already? Should you have even an ounce of baseball knowledge before seeing a film about baseball strategy? Well, maybe. It ain’t ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (Oliver Stone, 1999), a family drama that requires only the most basic understanding of football. MONEYBALL is slightly different. Watching Brad Pitt act his heart out as Billy Beane, the manager of the Oakland A’s, is much more satisfying if you understand how and why players are traded and the ingrained culture that preceded Beane and his Assistant GM’s innovative method for evaluating undervalued players. But are there other factors at work to keep you engaged just in case you’re a baseball-ignorant heathen? Yes…
Read More »Real Time Farms: Yelp for the local foodie
Do you use a service like Yelp to check out a new restaurant before visiting? Do you read other people’s reviews and maybe even leave your own? Most of us do (at least the former), but if you’re interested in the sources of the food the restaurant serves, you may be out of luck. Unless it’s one of those relatively rare places that promotes its use of locally-sourced ingredients, or even lists the farms from which it buys, you either have to ask a lot of questions or take your chances…
Read More »Illustrated missed connections
Since 2009, artist Sophie Blackall has been illustrating very artful and charming depictions of submissions on Missed Connections, one of my favorite time-wasting features of Craigslist. If you aren’t familiar with this subsite because you’ve been quarantined from the Internet in the past decade, it’s basically a message board for the hopeless romantic-optimists who were too shy to ask out a person when they initially saw them. Or as Sophie poetically describes: “Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I’m trying to pin a few of them down.” This is nicer than what I like to tell them, “You’ll all be FOREVER ALONE!” Kidding.
Read More »Naked News: In space, safe sex may be the only kind of sex
- Sex in space? Maybe. But scientists still aren’t sure that reproduction works in the microgravity of space.
- Economists say adult circumcision is not the most cost-effective anti-HIV tactic.
- Study finds that moderate exercise makes middle-aged women feel better about themselves, while intense work-outs make them feel like shit.
- New York considers Medicaid for transgender surgeries.
- The rape definition in federal crime statistics is too narrow, critics, say. Read More »
Does Lynch match up to Kubrick’s creep powers?
We’ve got a great line up on Sundance Channel this month, but one film that we’re really excited to be showing is EYES WIDE SHUT – so excited, in fact, that we’re airing it three times (which, if you’re like me, means you’ll be watching it three times, too). But thinking about EYES WIDE SHUT – Kubrick’s final, posthumously released film – got me thinking about what other movies can possibly compare to Kubrick’s surreal vision of bottled up fantasies that drive the men that obsess over them to the fringes of society’s underground? The story is based on Arthur Snitzler’s 1926 novella, Traumnovelle or “Dream Story,” about a doctor who goes on a two-day psychological bender of mind-alteration that culminates in a masquerade ball, which, like Kubrick’s film, involves that old fashioned combination of masked men and orgies…
Read More »Art Buzz: Cow tongue sculptures and an alien obelisk in the Tuileries gardens
No time to scan all the blogs in your Google Reader? Never fear! We’ve rounded up the four art world happenings that have bloggers and gallery-goers buzzing this week.
Adrián Villar Rojas 300-foot Alien Obelisk
Buzz has been building around 31-year- old Argentinean sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas ever since he was chosen to represent his country at this year’s Venice Biennale…
Read More »Is eco-friendly the casual footwear of choice this Fall?
For years, the environmental impact of your sneakers was handled almost exclusively on the back end. Programs like Nike’s Reuse-a-Shoe still collect those worn, stinky sneaks and turn them into products ranging from play court surfaces to soles for more shoes. While the company that spent much of the 90s getting hammered for its poor responsibility record has led the way in these efforts, others shoe makers are following suit – and even taking some more innovative steps…
Read More »I wish every week was Sandwich Week
In celebration of GOOD Magazine’s Sandwich Week, they’re rolling out the sandwhich porn on their site, and for someone who dreams up drool-worthy sandwich combinations on a regular basis, that’s dangerous rabbit hole to go down. But I can’t resist. And really, why should I? What’s the worst that could happen – I wake up in a pile of pastrami after a rye/mustard/pickle-induced coma? Bring it on. Check out the carb-heavy coverage…
Read More »Best of Kickstarter, 10/3
We scoured the pages of Kickstarter to bring you this week’s best projects. Have a great Kickstarter project of your own or see one you think deserves some extra attention? Let us know about it the comments and we may just feature it in our weekly roundup…
Read More »Childhood fears: Tom Cruise and Brussels sprouts
Okay, real talk, just for a minute. Tom Cruise is fucking scary. I’m not talking TOP GUN, homo-erotic, shirtless, volleyball-playing Tom Cruise – I’m talking couch-jumping on Oprah, Scientology, did-he-just-really-say-that, oh-shit-he-really-did-just-fucking-say-that, Tom Cruise. Or, to be more concise and perhaps politically correct, EYES WIDE SHUT Tom Cruise…
Read More »Creep-fest, kink and Kubrick: what to watch this week on Sundance Channel
As the weather gets chilly, so does our schedule of October films, packed with plenty of spine-tingling flicks to get you in the mood for Halloween. This weekend we’ve got back-to-back gruesome gore with…
Read More »Digital 3D film from 1972
40 Year Old 3D Computer Graphics (Pixar, 1972) from Robby Ingebretsen on Vimeo. The geeks and AV club’s tables at the Internet’s cafeteria went agog over this recently unearthed gem: a 6-minute film from 1972 that might arguably be the first celluloid example of digital 3-D rendered images back when such technology was rudimentary at [...]
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