sundance

Other peoples’ family drama is better

This week on GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS we’re going to give you some relief. Had enough of your family for the year? Tag along with Jared to Tenisha’s family reunion and take care of family time, Southern style. Because really, aren’t other peoples’ family issues way better than your own?

Women run the social entrepreneurship show

When Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work founding the Greenbelt Movement, the word “pioneering” got thrown around a lot, and often applied to the Nobel laureate’s gender. Maathai was a pioneer, but not because she was woman: if anything, social entrepreneurship involves recognizing the value of activities often denigrated as “women’s work.” This year, the United Nations Environment Programme’s SEED Award continued this fallacy with its creation of a “gender equality” prize: just a quick look at the 34 other social enterprises it recognized with awards this year shows that when it comes to creating businesses around activities that value people and planet while creating a profit, women seem to “get it” much more often than their male counterparts.

A rewrite-the-ending-contest to affect social change

Through our friend, Lynn Harris, writer, co-creator of Breakup Girl, and now communications strategist for something called Breakthrough, we heard about a “Rewrite the Ending” contest (which ended last month):

Show of hands- How many of you wish that:

- Andy (Pretty in Pink) had ended up with Ducky?
- After Willy dies (Death of a Salesman), his wife gets a great sales job without having to play the “poor widow” card?
- When Simran’s father finally releases her hand (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge), she runs for the train to Goa and finds happiness on her own?
- Ariel (Little Mermaid) had kept her voice and won American Idol.

In other words: How often have you been enjoying a book, movie, play, or TV episode…when all of a sudden things take a turn for the sexist, misogynist, needlessly violent, or worse? Have you ever wished you could jump into a story, shout at the characters, grab the pen (or keyboard) of the writer, and make it turn out the way you think it should?

Of course we have! So I (Lo) entered the contest (you could do it via Twitter, Facebook or email, from 140 characters up to a couple hundred words). Here was my entry:

A Very Stanley Kubrick New Year’s Eve

Just admit it. You don’t really want to go out on New Year’s Eve. It’s amateur hour! Someone will probably puke on you and you won’t be able to get a cab. And if you don’t live someplace with cabs there is a good chance 90% of people on the road will be drunk. Do yourself a favor and stay in. We’ve got you covered with a Stanley Kubrick double feature.

London’s Boxpark: Trendy short-term retail space

When the Dekalb Market opened in Brooklyn last Summer, the use of recycled shipping containers gave potential tenants a sense of stability: developers didn’t have long-term access to the land, so businesses could open shop in a structure that could be easily moved if that access dried up. Apparently, such flexibility has universal appeal (especially in a down economy): London’s new Boxpark development is also constructed from shipping containers, and designed to make relatively short-term use of land that might find buyers or other developers once the economy picks back up.

Trend of elaborate marriage proposals. Stop!

Meme Proposal | Tim * Audrey from Crazy Monkey Studio on Vimeo.

One of my closest friends proposed to his girlfriend over the weekend. He did it neatly and simply. There was a time when a guy was ready to propose to his future wife, it was relatively simple for most: a walk somewhere or maybe at the restaurant of their first date, drop to your knee like Tim Tebow and bust out the ring. But nowadays, thanks to the Internet, some of the more creative fellas out there with their elaborate videos are starting to set people’s expectations of the proposal, to paraphrase Jimmy McMillan, too damn high!

January is the movie dumping ground – but not this time!

Traditionally, January is the time when studios dump their loser movies into the recycling bin of the public’s consciousness, tossing ill-fated action flicks with monosyllabic actors or woebegone romantic comedies with badly matched C-listers into theaters because people are too cold to leave the house anyway.

By January, the Oscar rush has come and gone, and it’s the time to cut one’s losses and release some of those less golden efforts in hopes that they might find an audience despite it all, even if it’s just angry people who get off on yelling epithets at the screen to impress their passive-aggressive dates.

The (Bisexual) Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

In a review of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (the new U.S. version starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara), the US Weekly critic Mara Reinstein writes of Lisbeth Salander, “The brazenly bisexual, leather-clad, withdrawn title heroine…” Wait — brazenly what? What does it even mean to be brazenly bisexual?

Toward a 2012 peace treaty in the battle of the sexes

As you may have noticed (we’re not exactly subtle on this point), we don’t buy the idea that men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and shuttles between the two are infrequent at best. We tend to think that women and men are a lot more alike than rumor (or headline) has it — especially when it comes to sex and love. But this is not to say that men and women are alike in all matters of love and lust. We’ll even go so far as to admit that some of the cliches about the gulf between men and women turn out to be true.

The rituals of Christmas morning on YouTube

Well, another Christmas has come and gone: The excitement, traditions, and rituals of Christmas morning which were private and unique to each family has now become a source of public entertainment thanks to YouTube, Facebook, online communities, and the countless other vehicles for information sharing and connecting on the Interwebs. We all remember popping up on Christmas morning as a kid (at an ungodly hour in retrospect) with a rapturous and feverish glee, forcing our parents to wake up, and then euphorically opening the presents which had contained all of our hopes and dreams at the time. The difference nowadays is that this crackhead-like (if I may use that phrase here) exhilaration and joy of children on Christmas morning is now a source for millions of views on YouTube. Unless you’re a modern day Rip Van Winkle, you’ve all seen this priceless reaction video of this kid opening his Christmas present to discover a Nintendo 64 or as he screamed “a Nintendo Sixty-Foooooour. OH MY GAWD.” Yeah, that video has over 15 million views on YouTube. Bookending the Nintendo 64 kid is this classic video where a new Nintendo Wii on Christmas morning is too much to handle for the lucky boy or in this instance, utter hilarity for the adults.

Like these two videos I mentioned, each Christmas brings the rest of us a few more videos that enters our collective consciousness.

Joe Zee on Cesar Galindo

His Challenge: I have known Cesar in and around the fashion industry for years. He’s a veteran designer and we have many mutual friends in common and you can’t be in this industry as long as we have and not be acquainted. However, I don’t know Cesar well at all, so going up to see him for the first time in this aspect was exciting – and daunting.

Get more GWLBWLB: Kristin breaks some big news…or not

Everybody loves a little good news. And we’re pretty sure nobody likes it more than the folks slugging it out in a war zone. It must be pretty frustrating missing a call from your wife when you’re in Afghanistan…but, at least Roman didn’t know what he was missing (yet).

5 perfect gifts for your “I’ve already seen that on the Internet” friend

I know for a fact that most of you have not finished (or even started) your holiday shopping due to that deadly virus known as procrastination. Well I’m here with a few unique gift suggestions for your impossible-to-shop-for loved ones.

1. For your “foodie” chef who is also obsessed with designers’ trendy incorporation of brass knuckles, I recommend this brass knuckle shaped meat pounder.

2. One of my favorite online memes to emerge has been the Sad Keanu Reeves meme, and if you’re shopping for a “Redditor” or someone who hasn’t met a meme they didn’t like (hint: me), then this toy model of Sad Keanu Reeves is perfect.

Sundance Film Festival follow up: TAKE SHELTER

It’s no secret that Jessica Chastain has had a breakout year. You probably saw her in THE HELP, perhaps saw her in THE DEBT or TREE OF LIFE, and should definitely head out to see her in TAKE SHELTER. It was one of the few films that went into the 2011 Sundance Film Festival with a distribution deal and between powerhouse performances Chastain and the film’s star Michael Shannon (REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, Boardwalk Empire), it’s easy to see why.

Santa’s busy night

Even as an Apple fanboy, I’m a bit skeptical as to whether Santa uses Siri as they assert in their new holiday commercial, but if this analysis by The Atlantic is accurate then Apple might want to update the commercial and show that instead of 3.7 billion appointments, Santa has approximately 526 million children he has to visit. Given certain assumptions (one, Santa exists, obvi), The Atlantic ran a study to determine just how many kids he has to visit on Christmas night. Their chart above illustrates what Santa and his reindeers’ busy night would look like as he raced around the world.

There are just over 526,000,000 Christian kids under the age of 14 in the world who celebrate Christmas on December 25th. In other words, Santa has to deliver presents to almost 22 million kids an hour, every hour, on the night before Christmas. That’s about 365,000 kids a minute; about 6,100 a second. Totally doable.

Especially when you consider the uneven distribution of kids in the world. Santa needs to hit 22 million kids every hour. If Santa starts at the International Date Line and heads west, the first four time zones he passes barely contain that many kids waiting for presents. He’s already got three hours in the bank. Until, you know, he gets to Europe, which kind of breaks his schedule.

The top 10 sex scandals of 2011

It’s the most top-10-list time of year! And we’re not even going to try to resist its allure. 2011 was no stranger to sex scandals (is any year?). Most were political and/or not really all that surprising. And so, without further ado:

photo of DSK graffiti via Flickr

1. DSK

2. Shirtless congressman on Craigslist

3. Arnold’s love child

A GWLBWLB night before Christmas

It was the night before Christmas and all through New York City there were scores of singles reaching out via text, email, Facebook, or the old-fashioned phone call, making plans for the evening. My girl Cherri’s family was scattered across the country so she relied on her friends for company and a stiff drink celebrating the birth of Christ. I wanted to stay in and brace myself for the onslaught of family, but met her anyway. The whole BGF thing isn’t some television gimmick.

Creating spaces: Rolex mentor and protege Anish Kapoor & Nicholas Hlobo

Both Anish Kapoor and his Rolex Arts Initiative protégé Nicholas Hlobo had big years in the art world. Both mounted large-scale, interactive sculptures at the Venice Biennale in addition to solo exhibitions around the world. But the two artists still found time to meet at Kapoor’s London studio to develop the trajectory of Hlobo’s work.

Green tech finds: Earthships and solar get affordable

Think “green tech” automatically means “expensive?” Nope: costs are dropping on everything from Earthships to solar power.

An affordable Earthship: I’ve been in love with the Earthship building concept for years, but no way I’d ever be able to afford one. That may be changing, though: the “Simple Survival” model Earthship is designed to provide the amenities of these self-sufficient structures without the “mortgage bondage.” Check it out above.