Archive for April, 2008
Frontline is always good but “Bush’s War” is on another level. In twenty years, when they’re teaching the Bush Administration and the Iraq War in high schools and colleges, this will (or at least should) be mandatory viewing. And since we all happen to be living this particular bit of history right now, this might be an ideal time to catch up on what’s been going down. Even if you’ve read all the right papers and watched all the right programs, listened to NPR and consulted Chomsky on it, whatever… you’ll still get a new perspective out of watching this piece. It’s long and slow like it should be and never would be on any other American TV station. I don’t know how they got all the interviews they got (people like Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Bremmer and Dick Armitage being remarkably candid) but they did and the resulting documentary is without equal because of that. What else can I say to get you to watch this show???? It’s the antidote to finding yourself in 1984.
From time to time, I’ll use this blog to promote artists that I really believe in. The first of those is Audrey Kawasaki, whose amazing paintings you’re looking at right now. I met Audrey when she was an undergrad at Pratt, here in Brooklyn. She pulled out some pictures of her paintings one day and I flipped because it’s not often that a 20 year old art student busts out pictures of this quality – let alone any artist. As far as I know, she’s out in LA now and has gotten quite a bit of recognition. Congratulations Audrey!
The other real story here is that all the major networks seem to be doing this now. (You can watch Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galataca on NBC’s site.) Funny timing… right after the writers strike. I hope we all recall that the networks were holding out specifically not to have to pay royalties on online content. In retrospect, they were clearly planning to start uploading their entire back catalogs, en masse, as soon as the deal was signed. Greedy greedy. 
This video’s from a BBC ad. It seems they’ve discovered a colony of penguins unlike any other.
That image is not Photoshopped. It’s a real rice paddy in Japan shot from above. Here’s an excerpt of the article : “Each year, farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture create works of crop art by growing a little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru-roman variety. This year’s creation — a pair of grassy reproductions of famous woodblock prints from Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji — has begun to appear (above). It will be visible until the rice is harvested in September.” For the full article and more pictures click here.
I think that we all agree on this… We miss the mix tape. iPods and mp3′s have been great to us, sure, but anyone who went to high school before Napster knows that something special happened when you sat down with the old dual cassette deck, wrote out your song list, and poured your whole heart into a Memorex. Well, the mix tape is still dead. But the internet has finally done something about it. Meet Muxtape. It’s a website where people can upload a mix. You can play back anyone’s list and they can hear yours. You can’t copy the song files (which, I think, adds to the charm) and the aesthetic is wonderfully bare-bones. It’s just about the music. No other BS. So go pull out your favorite old mixtape, dust it off, upload it and put it up so the world (and maybe even that cute girl from your chemistry class) can hear how special you are. Last year, I was traveling in Spain and a friend of mine over there asked me if I’d heard of Daniel Tammet – an autistic British man who learned to speak Icelandic fluently in one week. As a language teacher myself, I was very skeptical. Well, my friend (who’s a language teacher himself) swore up and down that Daniel’s feats, which went far beyond just learning languages, were all quite well known in Europe because there’d been a TV show produced about him in the UK. One year later, a friend in the US asked me if I’d seen “The Boy with The Incredible Brain?”. As soon as he started describing it, I knew it was the same program… and he’d found the entire thing on Google video! I’m not going to spoil any of the details of the movie but you and everyone you know should watch it – this boy’s brain really is incredible. He’s autistic but was somehow spared all the downsides of autism and is fully functional. He’s also synesthetic , which in short, means that two regions of his brain are cross-wired. (In his case mathematics occur visually). I imagine, he’s a glimpse of what we’ll all someday be capable of. Plus there are “cameos” by the real Rain Man and Ali G’s real-life dad! Be warned, it’s about 48 minutes long. $5 Fish-Eye Fun – Make A Wide-Angle And Fish-Eye Photo Lens – video powered by Metacafe
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