Ava Lowrey is a 15 year old peace activist from Alabama that creates simple yet hardhitting animations about the war in Iraq. She comes at the issue, in the different films, from different perspectives ultimately showing the affect of war.

The images are graphic.

(from Crooks and Liars)

transgen.jpg
Originally uploaded by raccuia.

My mother was kind enough to give me this Easter Bunny in glowing yellow/green foil. I think it could be chocolate transgenic Easter bunny.

Oh, how the times are a-changin.

On the 19th of August 2003, a car bomb explosion killed 17 people including the UN's chief envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. A CBS cameraman recorded the events directly following the explosion. Mark Pesce put the footage to music. What results is something hard to watch but even harder to turn away from.

Ryan Air's Michael O'Leary talks about travelling free on airlines in the near future.

I don't know why I find this amusing. It could be the silliness or the blatant copyright infringement. Or the fact that it follows a tradition of Star Wars parodies or that it seems, um, like 30 years too late.

Actually it does remind me a bit of Hardware Wars which, more than the original Star Wars movie, inspired in me an interest in film.

I am not sure Store Wars would instill a desire to buy organic goods (but it might promote amateur filmmaking).

There has been a lot of discussion on the blogs I frequent about a young man named Gilles Trehin. Gilles draws very vivid, intricate, and believeable representations of an imaginary city he calls Urville.

I like this short documentary about his work and I found his appreciation of the socio-political aspects of the real world and their impact on his interior vision equally intricate and vivid.

The work in some ways reminds me of the drawings of Achilles Rizzoli, a strangely introverted draftsman who represented people in his life as buildings.

No. Wait. It's just an eclipse.

Hardhitting images in this visual project make explicit the ill effects of radiation.

Here is an interesting article about expanding the role of videogames and reconceptualizing what gaming can entail.

feet.jpg

There were a few articles and speeches from the SXSW festival that I found intriguing simply because the implicit theme was self-defined, community-based media production and control.

This piece by Derek Powazek highlights how out of touch Hollywood is.

Bruce Sterling's speech was powerful. The end portion, to me, is a moving call for an authentic populist movement in America.

UPDATE:

Video from the session that Derek discusses.

I keep thinking about how art students go to museums and copy the masters. This is the 21st century action film equivalent, I suppose.

We went to the theater last weekend to see Curious George. The film is very "smooth" (that's the term that comes to mind) as the story has few intense moments. The most disturbing thing is when the Man in the Yellow Hat lets George get taken away by Homeland Security (he eventually ends up in Guantanamo but the torture scenes are kid friendly).

Although stylistically divergent from the illustrated books, the story is really very engaging for kids (and me, of course, but what's the difference really?).

What I liked about the movie actually has nothing to do with the hour and half at the theater. It has more to do with the lack of the usually kiddy movie hype and the website. The hype thing maybe due to the fact that I didn't notice the ads but I don't remember the usually mess of promotions.

My eldest daughter and I stumbled upon the movie website from the Apple Quicktime trailers page. The Curious George site opens to fill the screen and includes several different environments that kids can click and explore. It reminds me a lot of the discussions back in the web 1.0 day when cyberspace was a location and websites became "destinations". Maybe it 's broadband, or maybe it is the raw 2 dimensionality, or the renderings, or whatever but I thought that the interface as space, though seemingly old school, really was fun to explore and play with.

As fun as the movie and the website are, I still must admit that I have a soft spot for the original George.

It's not just me. Larry Mc Murtry, who along with Diana Ossana adapted Brokeback Mountain for film, remarked backstage at Sunday's Oscar awards something to the effect that of the films he has written that have been nominated for an Academy Award only the film that was set in a urban setting won an Oscar (Terms of Endearment).

The New York Times ran an article also talking about Los Angeles selecting a film that reflects itself.

It is something that we in the rural west and mid-west feel and it is something that extends well beyond gay cowboys and the movie industry. Rural areas are just as complex and deserve equal attention. How about some respect?

Houtlust is a site documenting creative public awareness campaigns for serious social issues. Very powerful work.

I love  this project and have to admit that it is because I find the photographs that come slipped inside Christmas cards excruciatingly awful.  Usually that one image has to summarize an entire year or give a fresh representation of the family (see how we look now!).

There is entertainment value in that, I suppose.  But this bloke's Christmas card pictures are fun and has got me thinking that we all could use a little more play in our lives. If not for yourselves or your hapless victims then for the sake of making photography ever so slightly less "redundant". So, here I throw down the gauntlet: next get-together try a little fiction or roleplaying.  And send me the results!

The only thing left for this guy to do is grow horns and shave his head to reveal the mark of the beast.

In the age of hypersensitive intellectual property rights (or what I have coined Hypersenintrights™®) it is fun to look back at the other ways people have ripped off musicians!

(from Design Observer)

Muslim protests over Danish caricatures of Mohammad are, I am sure, confusing for Americans.

The media babble tends to center on Freedom of Speech vs. Religious Tradition and Belief. But I think that is a veneer of sorts. The real issue at hand is post-colonial cultural friction infused with a healthy dose of new globalized reality. What do I mean by that? Let me break it down:

All over Europe and the US there are immigrant populations from 3rd world countries and former colonial states. Post-war, mid-century European economies needed to modernize and did so by having workers from all over the world migrate and take those jobs deemed undesirable. I am sure that it was assumed that those foreign workers would go home eventually. But the reality of it is that many didn't. The result is a large Muslim influx throughout Europe and immigrants becoming citizens. Whether Europeans want to admit it or not, they now have growing populations of Muslims that want to be integrated without losing their Islamic identities. As I mentioned before, in regards to the Paris riots, when those populations of disenfranchised Arab youths (for example) are considered neither European nor from their parent's native culture then they have a comfortable built-in Islamic identity.

There is profound discomfort and a feeling that the original European cultures are rapidly being influenced, transmogrified, or otherwise being challenged by the growing ranks of Muslims within their own populations. It would be far too simple to suggest that the Danish, in this latest incident, are pushing back and saying, in essence, this is our culture, this is how it works here, and if you don't like it, leave.

The problem with this idea (beyond it being more than bit puerile) is that it does not take into account how utterly useless and antiquated the notion of nation-state is in the global economy. Denmark needs the rest of the world to survive economically and a big chunk of the globe flies the crescent and believes that Mohammad is a messenger of God. We in the West may value our free speech and want to defend it at all cost. But in other parts of the world some things are still sacred and beyond parody.

The riots and discontent are certainly being fomented by religious leaders and even governments now but I am sure that the ignition point started right in country, right in Denmark. The Muslim identity rises above borders here as well, fuelled by the internet, global news, and even international air travel.

The lessons to be learned from this, I suppose, are that we in West seriously need to listen to the cultural anthropologists and start to realize that there are other cosmologies flourishing in the same national garden. For things to change and get better we need to accept difference and, in the least, give some consideration to how we are all influenced by one another on a global scale and, in fact, really do need each other.

As I am sure we will find out, the cost (and I mean literally costs as in economic effects as well as socio-political) of failing to do so will be enormous.

glamour.jpg

(Click image for larger version)

I was scanning some old work and found this from a previous life. The drawing uses some standards for fashion illustration: catwalk poses and a body that is something like 14 heads tall.

This drawing was intended to be very glamourous.

The work is ancient - owning a computer at that point in my life was but a dream - thus it is watercolor, pencil, color pencil, and oil pastel.

I have others (should I admit that?) but chose this one because I felt the looseness worked in support of the theme.