sundance

The top ten biggest offenders from AOTL with Joe Zee, season one

With everyone in a serious tizzy over the Friday night premiere of season two of All on the Line with Joe Zee, I realize that some readers may not have caught the epic dose of reality that was season one. Luckily, you can watch the entire season on iTunes for $20.What else are you going to do this week in between bouts of turkey-induced stupor? And watching Joe dole out tough love to struggling designers is as addictive as tryptophan is soporific. I got a sneak peek of season two last week and I’m dying to see the rest of the designers that get sent under the gauntlet…

Tolerance, but not quite acceptance: Nashville’s gay situation

Non-Southerners tuning in to the Sundance Channel Original Series GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS may not quite know what to expect out of the second season’s Nashville setting. As a reality show focused on gay men and their straight girlfriends, will the series be taking on more of a fish-out-of water tone by moving the action to the South? As in “Dorothy, I don’t think we’re in the West Village anymore?”

Young Love: Now playing on Sundance Channel

Xavier Dolan, Niels Schneider and Monia Chokri in HEARTBEATS.

This week Sundance celebrates hot, young boys in love, starting tonight with a young Leonardo DiCaprio in TOTAL ECLIPSE. Leo plays 19th-century bad boy teen poet, Arthur Rimbaud (think lots of blousy shirts and sultry looks), who sends some of his poems to the famous writer, Paul Verlaine (played by David Thewlis, who won Best Actor at Cannes for the role in 1995). Verlaine is so impressed he invites Rimbaud to come stay at his house, but when he arrives he’s shocked to discover that Rimbaud is a crude and obnoxious sixteen-year-old kid. Still, he falls in love with him (in reality, Rimabud was nowhere near as cute as Leo, but hey, love is blind and Verlaine was no looker either), but it’s not a great match. Things don’t usually go well when you abandon your wife and kid for a hot teenage poet, whom you become so possessive of that you shoot him in a jealous rage. Luckily, Verlaine only hit Rimbaud’s left wrist, and he was a righty anyway. Hindsight’s a bitch, eh Paul?…

Some helpful tips for bringing your GBF to Thanksgiving

The holiday season, at heart, is seizure inducing. Family gatherings, while always well intentioned, usually unravel after one poorly timed drink peppered with an insensitive comment. It’s amazing how a single meal can create a yearlong grudge or cold war. But what usually keeps family members in line is some form of distraction, or the prying eyes of a guest. Bringing along your GBF kills two birds with one stone, as long as you both mind the gap between your personal dynamic and the family’s values. So in the spirit of Thanksgiving, we’re grateful to offer you some tips for bringing your GBF to the holiday table (and gracious guest pointers for the boys).

New robot artist, the “Senseless Drawing Bot”

SENSELESS DRAWING BOT from yang02 on Vimeo.

Although they’re primitive and rudimentary in design (not that I could ever make such a thing) built with household object à la Make, Japanese artists So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi are the creators behind what they call the “Senseless Drawing Bot.” Reflecting the artists’ interests in typography, from the formal (calligraphy) to the recent (graffiti), they built and programmed a robot that merges these forms.

Creative reuse: the Texas-shaped serving board

Got a Texan on your holiday gift list? As someone who grew up about 20 minutes away from the state line, I feel confident saying there’s one things that all residents of the state like, and that’s Texas itself. If you don’t believe me, take a visit and start counting the “Don’t Mess with Texas” bumper stickers – they add up fast.

Abilene entrepreneur Kyle Douthit clearly understands this. And as a former countertop installer, he also knows how much of the material from a job gets thrown away. He put two and two together, and about five years ago started collecting pieces of acrylic countertop, cutting them into the shape of the state and giving them away as gifts to family and friends to use as cheese boards, bread boards, etc…

Best of Kickstarter, 11/21

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.

TECH

Desktop 3-D Printer: The 3-D craze continues with the first personal three-dimensional desktop printer. As it turns out, a 3-D printer is not something that makes weird images you can look at with 3-D glasses, but it actually prints out three-dimensional objects.

Capta: I’m a major dropper/smasher of iPhones, so this weird octopus-like contraption, the “Capta,” seems like an excellent solution for clumsy folks like me. Rigged with a magnet at the back, you can mount the suction cups to different surfaces to keep your phone out of the way but still accessible…

How different are girls’ and boys’ brains?

It’s a favorite question of ours…okay, of mine (i.e. Lo’s), and my personal answer is that yes, there are differences, but not as many or as great as our culture presumes. The bias we have as a society actually influences the development of boys’ and girls’ brains (which are elastic) so significantly as they grow that by the time they’re adults there’s much more difference than there would be if we lived in a more egalitarian, less Men-Are-From-Mars world. In other words, it’s a self-fullfilling prophecy. So while there are differences, we would do better to celebrate our similarities, or at least our potential for overlapping skills and desires and tendencies, so that both sexes don’t feel limited by narrow gender roles…

Love Lust & Holiday Feasts: Something to be truly thankful for

Love Lust & Holiday Feasts airs Monday, November 21 at 8pm, only on Sundance Channel.

If you don’t have Thanksgiving on the brain (or the stomach) then stop reading this and get yourself to a hospital, because you might not have a pulse. For everyone else, here’s something to be truly thankful for: These last few days before we all sit down to dinner at 2pm on Thursday are the only thing separating us from the onslaught of Christmas ads, movies and music we’re going to be bombarded with nonstop from early Friday morning until the end of December. In fact, the Christmas pushers have probably already started encroaching on your last few days of pre-holiday madness. Last night I heard the first irritating strains of “Jingle Bells” as I shopped for groceries. So I guess it really is that time of year again. Sigh. It’s beginning – true – but it hasn’t completely yet begun. And until it does, until the countdown that begins December first is on, I’m going to relish all the good things about the holidays, namely the food.

The more I ask people what they’re making for Thanksgiving, the more I’m hearing about interesting renditions on classic recipes. A ham with a curry and brown sugar glaze for an Indian twist, or brussels sprouts tossed with roasted sesame oil and a splash of soy for some Asian flair…

Top 10 Tips for the Straight Girl at the Gay Club

Jared and Tenisha at the GWLBWLB premiere party in Nashville.

If you’re a girl like me, you’ve taken a Saturday night off from sitting in your sweatpants or going to the dive bar next door to talk to some ‘starving artist’ that will never call you. Instead, you pregame heavily with your Mr. Right Gay and take a 20 dollar cab to his favorite gay club, where you watch him flirt with a sea of mostly shirtless men to dance remixes of Robyn. Believe me, it’s not a sacrifice. However, if you’re a newbie to the whole ‘straight lady in a gay pond’ thing, you might need a couple of tips on how to maximize your night of fun.

Check out these Top 10 pointers for the Gay Clubbin’ Straight Girl.

Perez Hilton wants to spread the love

Growing up, I was an easy target for bullies. I was a chubby, gay kid who preferred watching musicals to playing football. I was an outsider who never really fit in.

Bedazzling for the Lord — Check out MORE GWLBWLB

So, what do you think of Shane’s Jesus t-shirts? Well, we’re never going to turn down something sparkly, but perhaps they were a bit…much? Sherrié certainly seemed to think so. Everyone is entitled to their own spiritual journey, so let’s check out the journey that brought us these fabulous shirts. They certainly didn’t just emerge fully formed and perfectly bedazzled, you know.

Weekly movie trailer roundup: TWILIGHT vs. HUNGER GAMES

I might be the best, most impartial judge around when it comes to a face off between Twilight and The Hunger Games, and their respective movie adaptations. I’ve never read the books, never seen any of the movies and never harbored a secret crush on any of the actors – for real (sorry Taylor Lautner, I know you’re kind of a big deal with pre-teens and their moms, but I just don’t get it). I do know the basic story lines, though. One’s got vampires and werewolves and shit, and the other one’s got sci-fi teenagers fighting to the death in a gladiator-meets-Tron kinda deal. Those are the obvious things, but do you wanna know the other major difference? One looks like it suuuucks…

The world’s slowest roller coaster in Duisburg, Germany

Not to sound like a pageant contestant or anything, but I really like roller coasters. Big loops, crazy heights, upside down swirls—you name it, I’m into it. This isn’t true, however, of most of the friends and family members I find myself with at amusement parks, many of whom prefer to calmly eat their sugar-dusted funnel cakes and then maybe take a ride on the Ferris wheel, if they’re feeling saucy…

WEEKEND: some seriously moody pain

On our wedding anniversary my husband wanted to see HAROLD AND KUMAR, but I persuaded him to see WEEKEND, Andrew Haigh’s gay one-night-stand romantic drama. We both love Wong Kar Wai’s HAPPY TOGETHER (1997), another gay romance that chronicles the end, not beginning, of a relationship, as well as Barry Jenkins’ MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY (2008), a one-night-stand movie that tracks a flinging couple nearly moment to moment over a short time period, which WEEKEND does, too. This is practically a genre! It will clearly have something for us, we thought. And after we got over the fact that Haigh is using the same title as one of the most famous French New Wave films ever made, off we went…

The dark art of ApocaLego

Kevin “Crimson Wolf” Fedde (quite a nickname to live up to) is one of a surprising number of LEGO builders and fans (there are over 1,000 members on its Flickr pool) who dabble in the dark art of “ApocaLego,” a popular subgenre devoted to constructing sets with apocalyptic themes, be it a “zombocalypse, bioplague, robot insurrection or nuclear conflagration.”

Write a haiku, win a sex toy

Over on our home base blog we’re running a contest to give away the Oden, a brand new, luxury, wireless remote-controlled, vibrating couples’ ring from Lelo. But we figured, hey, the holidays are upon us, why not spread the (potential for) love and open it up to all you fabulous SUNfiltered readers? The Oden is part of Lelo’s new Insignia line of pleasure objects that allows you or your partner to control the sensations wirelessly with just the tilt of a hand. Yes, iPhone and Wii technology has finally made it into your bedroom. It goes for $179 – so here’s your chance to score big with little effort and zero cash!

It’s not you, it’s me: Managing your inner drama queen

The fruit never falls too far from the tree, so people naturally absorb behavior from their parents, but also friends. I mean we choose to keep our friends around, why shouldn’t they be as much of an influence? And if we know we’re prone to letting drama queens and their episodes into our world, don’t be shocked to recognize a bit of thespian flair inside you.

Best of the Web: Smell your Facebook updates & Google gets jiggy wit it

Google Music: Yesterday, Google launched its first music sharing and downloading platform, “Google Music,” as a direct competitor to iTunes. Yes, you have to buy the songs (drag), but users can share whatever they purchase with friends for one free listen…

Between the Lines: BAM’s best kept secret

Between the Lines, BAM’s brief, three-part series of specially curated nights of “thinkers, storytellers and drinkers from across the arts and sciences” is the kind of one night, mini-explosion of creative and intellectual power that really ought to take place more than three months a year. I went on the last night of the 2011 season, a line-up that included writers John Jeremiah Sullivan and Clancy Martin, a short film about a robot from the future by Chema Garcia, a film by Ari Kuschnir about the conductor Benjamin Zander and his attempt to lead an orchestra through Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 after just a handful of performances, followed by the Brooklyn-based string quartet, The Mahlerettes…

A Thanksgiving miracle: No more gross holiday food

Watch Love Lust: Holiday Feasts, Monday, November 21 at 8PM on Sundance Channel

Logic would seem to dictate that if eating pumpkins seeds is my favorite thing about Halloween, Thanksgiving, a day devoted to eating, would be my ultimate holiday. I love cooking, I love gorging on things I cook, and I love making other people gorge on things I cook. The whole shebang should be my personal holy grail – a day full of so much culinary and gastronomical bliss that my head nearly explodes with pleasure. And it would be, if only I didn’t find Thanksgiving food so repulsive…

Decriminalizing gay: Belize with a ‘Z’, like Liza

Before today, the only way Belize was ever topical was when I was discussing chic places to escape winter with my nouveau riche fashion friends. Inevitably the eco-resort off its coast where the petit bourgeois, and Tiger Woods, go to getaway from the drama, came up. But now it seems the former British colony is going to be the test case for progressive politics on a global level as its court prepares to hear an argument to decriminalize homosexuality. Belize is poised to be the Tunisia of a Gay Spring. As if there weren’t a cruising scene in that jungle already.

Opening night of Diego Rivera at MoMA

I felt lucky to attend the opening night party for the Diego Rivera exhibition “Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art” last Tuesday. The (always welcomed) open bar aside, I was excited to get a preview of some of the works of an icon like Rivera, an artist for whom I also have a sort of nostalgic attachment; his relationship with Frida Kahlo was the focus of one of my earliest group projects as a freshman at Brown. In tribute to their mercurial relationship, I tried to convince my friend to show up with a unibrow. Alas, she refused…

What the Dutch can teach us about sex

No, we’re not talking about the relative appeal of sex in clogs. We’ve long sung the praises of Holland’s approach to sex, and, in particular, its approach to sex education. Holland has results that we can all agree are worth aspiring to (even bat shit crazy Michele Bachmann).

2012/13 Rolex Arts Initiative mentors announced

As the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative celebrated the achievements of its 2010/11 program at the NYPL this weekend, we eagerly awaited the announcement of who the next six mentors in dance, film, literature, music, theatre and art would be. And it comes as no surprise that they’re all amazing and highly accomplished, precisely what the program looks for: true masters in their fields.

Dance: Lin Hwai-min (Taiwan)

Ever since he founded the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan in the ’70s, Lin Hwai-min has been hailed as Asia’s premier choreographer and a pioneer of contemporary dance. His choreography blends traditional theatre elements with Western dance techniques, creating an arresting style that prompted The New York Times to declare “Lin Hwai-min has succeeded brilliantly in fusing dance techniques and theatrical concepts from the East and West.”

Film: Walter Murch (U.S.)

Acclaimed for his work as a sound mixer and editor on films like AMERICAN GRAFFITI, THE CONVERSATION, APOCALYPSE NOW and THE GODFATHER series, Walter Murch literally coined the term ‘sound designer.’ And who better to do so than the man who won an unprecedented double Oscar for both sound mixing and film editing for THE ENGLISH PATIENT?