Quick note to share a friend's latest musical efforts. Ian Rhett is a singer/songwriter in San Francisco who wrote, recorded, produced, and made the music video for this new piece. Ian is a cool cat with loads of talent so I invite you to check out his efforts in the video below. If you dig the piece be sure to rate it on youtube to get him more visibility.
Just saw this docu-comedy and though it is 11:35pm and past my bedtime I felt the need to share this link so that many of you can find salvation this holiday season. Let your soul find comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone in your credit card worship. You are not alooooone in your over extended and underfunded home equity lines of credit. You have come to a cross roads in the depth of the "Shopocolypse"!
Let Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir lead you to the promise land and liberate you from the false idols of Mickey Mouse and the logos of... OK you get the idea. Definitly check out this film. Is produced by Morgan Spurlock so you know it's good.
One of single (test) most productive tools for a mac is Quicksilver which is a free plugin that allows you to quickly hit a few keys and conjure up all kinds of wickedness from your system. And now it looks like Ubiquity brings this genius to the Firefox browser. Check out the video below for a demo and here is the link to go get it: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Here is yet another documentary telling us that no matter how shiny the paint job is on our Titanic... we are still headed for the iceburg. I haven't seen this one yet, just heard about it and wanted to pass it along. Here is the site link: http://www.iousathemovie.com/
I will be sharing more on the inspiration I am finding in Napoleon Hill's life and work but for now check out this video, apparently the only one in existence, of this brilliant and humble fellow who has influenced all of us whether we know it or not.
This is one of those documentaries that just seems to leave you wondering what in the hell we are thinking as a species. How we have gotten so far from our connection with actual life that a human being could concoct a way to feed a cow a grain based diet of corn, that is known to kill the animal, just long enough to fatten it for slaughter. To cut a whole in the side of a living cow to study which antibiotics can be used to keep it alive long enough to make weight for slaughter.
This film gives you the opportunity to listen to farmers discuss how their crops are the worst crap ever grown on US soil and how they know it but need the money and can't care what the corn is for. How they grow only corn, and corn of only one kind, that is not edible just to get the government subsidy check and can't even grow thier own food anymore.
King Corn brings home the notion that we are all complicit in this insanity... each time we buy a coke, shop the local walmart, eat that cheesburger, we are making an abstracted choice to continue on this course of lunacy. I guess that is key... that this is all abstracted away from a direct connection to us. We never see or smell the slaugher house, we don't live next door to the family working in the Chinese factory, and we have gotten as fat and blind as all our diabetic neighbors so we don't recognize the mess we are in.
Vanilla Sky has always been one of my favorite films because of its ability to convey that dream like sense of situations, characters, and emotions. I have been intending to watch the original Spanish film "Open your eyes: Abre los ojos" that Vanilla Sky was remade from and finally took the time last night when I saw it was on Hulu.com.
I enjoyed the original even more than the remake and found the fact the Penelope Cruz is playing the same role to add to the sense of recurring dream like story line. Given that I saw these in reverse order I suppose I was seeing her play the role for the second time first and then the first time... well you get the idea. This is mos def on the top 10 list of lucid dream films and well worth watching a few times. I have included here from Hulu for your viewing pleasure. (Yes the commercials suck, especially the trippy Friskies one, but hey it is free!)
[UPDATE] This looks like the place to go for the scoop: http://www.savetheinternet.com/ here is a page from google.com as well: http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html
I am just digging into the net neutrality issues and trying to get a brain around what is going on. I found this video to be an interesting place to start. Check out the video: http://foureyedmonsters.com/neutrality/
I think this again is the same struggle of "ownership"... much like open source approach to software, DRM free music, and on and on. Copyright infringement, pattent infringement, etc etc.. Do corporations with legal empires have a right to own all that can be thought and sold?Is there some greater collective ownership of knowledge, information access, freedom of expression, that is struggling to be achieved?
Here's a couple more:
Here's a commercial from the cable companies claiming net neutrality is a scam! funny stuff:
From a design point of view the planning and ingenious design that has gone into this piece is astounding... it has a dream like quality to the experience and you have to keep reminding yourself you are watching snapshots of a wall mural.. at one point the mural reaches out and eats some paper hanging on the wall!! Freakin genius!!
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Been meaning to post this for a week... this is the team who wrote the bomb-diggity book Subject to Change giving a talk at Google about the material in the book. I have to say I am amazed at the rows of empty seats! I can tell you this much.. I would be front and center for this one.
