Thursday, November 27, 2008

My buddy Greg says he's never using a microwave again...

This experiment makes the argument that we just don't know what longterm effects the microwave has on our bodies...

What! I'm Listening to...(Part 11)

Though she's not as good as Julie London, I've broken down and started listening to Diana Krall...There's also Michael Weinstein who is a self-professed scrounger of old standards. Also, a song here and there by the Fray, though they sound too much like Coldplay...Calvin Harris is notable slapstick music, I like MGMT a lot...they have a rawness to their music that makes them stand apart from others...For those hiphop/R&B listeners, Alex got me listening to a bit of Ryan Leslie. On the French tip again, check out Daniel Belanger...For that Latin Ska fusion (their style is hard to pin down, obviously they have a lot of influences) sound, I've found La Vela Puerca...Bryn Christopher has a couple of songs that I like...Soulful...I've also been digging on Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Robert Johnson of late...Little Jackie is from Brooklyn and they are a lot of fun...More to come...Stay tuned.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Stations of the Elevated Pt. 3 of 5



STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED (1979) is an astonishingly beautiful film about graffiti-covered trains hurtling through a strange urban landscape of a decaying civilization. The music of Charles Mingus counterpoints the recurring visual riffs of the tension-filled imagery. Steve's film teacher at SVA filmed the movie, Manfred Kirchheimer...This segment is my favorite part with the bench of writers' comments and also mattress jumping from abandoned buildings...

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Support the Puerto Rican Freedom Project...Courtesy of Division X...



I'm proud of you too Lou...

Made to feel Small man creates mini art that sells big...Courtesy of Fred...


Needle Sized Art



I can't believe this guy paints with a hair plucked from a housefly...And all on a fragment of a grain of sand...You can't even breathe very hard around these works and you have to have the steadiest hands ever...

More Juxtapoz Riflings...


...Intel today announced the start of Mass Animation, the first collaborative, worldwide effort to produce a computer-generated animated short film for theatrical release...
Starting today, artists around the world are invited to animate the shots of a 5-minute, CGI-animated short film titled Live Music, which is produced and directed by Yair Landau, former president of Sony Pictures Digital. The collaboration, through a unique application built on the Facebook platform, will run through January 30th, 2009. Animators, regardless of experience, may begin work immediately, and community voting will open November 24th, 2008 at www.facebook.com/massanimation.
The film Live Music is inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and early CGI films...See Juxtapoz.com for more text on this project...
Fabio Napoleoni is the creator of Marcenivo, an illustrated “used up doll” character who travels around the planet with a heart in hand. Dripping with emotion and metaphor, this character serves as a representation for a time during which the artist’s baby daughter was fighting heart abnormalities and had to undergo numerous major heart operations...See Juxtapoz.com for the interview...

B-Movie Composer was a MONSTER...

Irving Gertz, Composer for Monsters of the Movies, Dies at 93

Published: November 20, 2008 from NYTimes.com

Irving Gertz, a prolific though often uncredited B-movie composer whose melodies haunt a spate of pictures with words like “Hell,” “Thing” and “Creature” in the titles, died on Nov. 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93.

Kathleen Mayne

Irving Gertz in 1998.

His death was announced by David Schecter, a producer at Monstrous Movie Music, an independent record label specializing in science-fiction, fantasy and horror film music.

Active from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, Mr. Gertz composed or contributed to the scores of more than 200 films. He was most closely associated with three Hollywood studios: Columbia, Universal and 20th Century Fox.

Among the movies on which Mr. Gertz worked are many that if not precisely classics are enduring representatives of their genre: “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” “It Came From Outer Space,” “The Creature Walks Among Us,” “The Monolith Monsters” and “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.”

His other film credits, taken together, read like found poetry. There were “The Deadly Mantis,” “Curse of the Undead” and “The Thing That Couldn’t Die.” There were “The Alligator People,” “The Leech Woman” and “Cult of the Cobra.” There were “Destination Murder,” “Experiment Alcatraz” and “Target Hong Kong.” There were “Shark River” and “Massacre Canyon.”

Mr. Gertz contributed music to many television shows, including “Land of the Giants” and “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.” He also composed concert music.

Irving Gertz was born on May 19, 1915, in Providence, R.I. Musical as a youth — he played the piano, clarinet, tuba and string bass — he attended the Providence College of Music and studied composition privately with Walter Piston.

Hired by Columbia Pictures in 1938, Mr. Gertz interrupted his work for service in the Army Signal Corps in World War II. Returning to the studio after the war, he studied with the composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

Mr. Gertz is survived by his wife, the former Dorothy Stadler; two daughters, Susie Anson and Madeleine Herron; and four grandchildren.

His filmography also includes many westerns, among them “Hell Bent for Leather” and “Hell Canyon Outlaws,” as well as “Top Gun,” “The Lone Gun,” “Gun Brothers,” “Gun Fury,” “Gun Belt,” “Gun for a Coward” and “Money, Women and Guns.”

Still other films on which Mr. Gertz worked, like “Francis Joins the WACS,” starring Donald O’Connor and Francis the Talking Mule, are beyond category.

The Buzz is About Toyo Ito...


He wants to build a museum in Berkeley, CA that is wrapped in a honeycomb pattern with walls only a few inches thick...Above is an example of his work...Here is a model of Ito's Berkeley idea...The museum would replace the existing Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, a bunkerlike building completed in 1970 that was badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Hydroponics...not just for marijane...

I took a taxi ride with a driver who predicted one day soon it would take a day's wages just to have a meal and that we will be having food crises so awful there will be riots...I think maybe he might be right unless we can prepare for it by doing things like having hi-rise grow centers in cities...

Urban growers go high-tech to feed city dwellers

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press Writer Jacob Adelman, Associated Press Writer Fri Nov 21, 5:11 am ET from Yahoo.com

POMONA, Calif. – Terry Fujimoto sees the future of agriculture in the exposed roots of the leafy greens he and his students grow in thin streams of water at a campus greenhouse.

The program run by the California State Polytechnic University agriculture professor is part of a growing effort to use hydroponics — a method of cultivating plants in water instead of soil — to bring farming into cities, where consumers are concentrated.

Because hydroponic farming requires less water and less land than traditional field farming, Fujimoto and researchers-turned-growers in other U.S. cities see it as ideal to bring agriculture to apartment buildings, rooftops and vacant lots.

"The goal here is to look at growing food crops in small spaces," he said.

Long a niche technology existing in the shadow of conventional growing methods, hydroponics is getting a second look from university researchers and public health advocates.

Supporters point to the environmental cost of trucking produce from farms to cities, the loss of wilderness for farmland to feed a growing world population, and the risk of bacteria along extensive, insecure food chains as reasons for establishing urban hydroponic farms.

However, the expense of setting up the high-tech farms on pricey city land and providing enough year-round heat and light could present some insurmountable obstacles.

"These are university theories," said Jim Prevor, editor of Produce Business magazine. "They're not mapped to things that actually exist."

The roots of hydroponically produced fruits and vegetables can dangle in direct contact with water or be set in growing media such as sponges or shredded coconut shells. Most commercial operations pump water through sophisticated sensors that automatically adjust nutrient and acidity levels in the water.

Hydroponics are generally used for fast-growing, high-value crops such as lettuces and tomatoes that can be produced year-round in heated, well-lit greenhouses. So far, production is not large enough for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to track.

The country's largest hydroponic greenhouse is Eurofresh Inc.'s 274-acre operation in southeastern Arizona, where more than 200 million pounds of tomatoes were produced in 2007. Most large-scale commercial operations are in the arid Southwest, where water-efficiency is prized, or the sometimes frigid Northeast, where the method can be used year-round in heated greenhouses.

The technology has benefited from nearly three decades of NASA research aimed at sustaining astronauts in places with even less green space than a typical U.S. city.

Hydroponics bears the dubious distinction of being a growing method for marijuana.

Fujimoto said one of his research assistants got a call from the FBI after using a credit card to buy nutrients for the campus greenhouse at a hydroponic-supply store.

There's clearly nothing illicit going on at the greenhouse, where thin streams of water pass silently though dozens of long white plastic tubes arranged in rows across chest-high stands. Rose-shaded lettuce leaves, pale-green stalks of bok-choy and sprigs of basil poke from the holes in the tubes.

Fujimoto aims to prepare his students to operate the urban hydroponic businesses that he thinks will gain importance in the future. They sell their lettuces, peppers, tomatoes and other produce to an on-campus grocery store and at a farmers market.

In Ohio, the ProMedica Health System network of clinics used a Toledo hospital roof to grow more than 200 pounds of vegetables in stacked buckets filled with a ground coconut shell potting medium. The tomatoes, peppers, green beans and leafy greens were served to patients and donated to a nearby food shelter, hospital spokeswoman Stephanie Cihon said.

When the project resumes in the spring, the hospital plans to expand into at least two community centers in economically depressed central Toledo, where fresh produce is hard to come by.

"From the health-care perspective, the more we can increase people's lifestyle changes and encourage them to eat better, it's going to impact our services greatly," Cihon said.

In a New York City schools program run by Cornell University, students grow lettuce on a school roof and sell it for $1.50 a head to the Gristedes chain of supermarkets.

Cornell agriculturist Philson Warner, who designed the program's hydroponics system, said his students harvest hundreds of heads of lettuce a week from an area smaller than five standard parking spaces by using a special nutrient-rich solution instead of water.

The numbers have some researchers imagining a future when enough produce to feed entire cities is grown in multistory buildings sandwiched between office towers and other structures.

Columbia University environmental health science professor Dickson Despommier, who champions the concept under the banner of his Vertical Farm Project, said he has been consulting with officials in China and the Middle East who are considering multistory indoor farms.

He is also shopping his concept to engineering teams in hopes of having a prototype built as he seeks funding.

"Most of us live in cities," he said. "As long as you're going to live there, you might as well grow your food there."

Bad Press for Graff by Blaming Graff for contagious criminality...

Graffiti is a symbol of an area unable to keep up with its upkeep usually and in most cases where you might actually see aerosol murals, it is about beautification...This article implies that graff is vandalism in all cases and causes people to act lawlessly...Spraypaint is just another medium. I think this is a study with no basis...

Nov 20, 2008 02:03 PM from Sciam.com

Candid criminal: undercover psychologists find bad behavior may be contagious

Susannah F. Locke

Attention, shoppers: If the cart you selected has a handle greased with Vaseline, you may be an unwitting participant in an undercover experiment.

Ditto if you find an envelope stuffed with cash hanging out of a mailbox.

More than 600 people unknowingly took part in a series of "field experiments" in Groningen in the Netherlands designed to test the Broken Window Theory, which posits that evidence of bad behavior begets bad behavior. That is: if someone sees, say, graffiti scrawled on a building, he or she will be tempted to do the same or commit some other illegal or mischievous act.

In fact, sociologists often cite the theory as a possible reason that petty crime in New York City dropped in the 1990s after the city scrubbed buildings, trains, buses, walls . . . clean of graffiti.

In an attempt to test the theory, psychologist Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen report online in Science that they conducted six experiments.

In their paper, "The Spreading of Disorder," they explain that they scattered shopping carts around a parking lot to provide a chaotic backdrop for one experiment. They then smeared their handles with petroleum jelly to discourage customers from messing with the setup. (They say the deterrent worked "without exception.")

The researchers discovered that people in the shopping-cart laden lots were more likely to throw fliers placed on their windshields on the ground than those in a cart-free lot (58 percent compared to 30 percent).

In another test, they left envelopes visibly containing cash sticking out of public mailboxes and found that folks were more likely to make off with the money when the mailbox was covered in graffiti. In four other experiments, the researchers consistently found that graffiti, litter, fireworks (apparently a no-no in the Netherlands in the weeks leading up to the New Year), and other violations led people to litter, steal and do other naughty things.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Mr. Rogers Bboy Video...courtesy of Chris B.

Amy Brown was Producer for "Rebuilding Hope"...


Jen Marlowe's (Director of "Darfur Diaries") latest movie is "Rebuilding Hope" where she follows three of the "Lost Boys" back to their native Sudan villages...It is an amazing work...She is also looking for donations to the movie to its completion and then 100% of the proceeds will be going to the "Lost Boys' " projects back in their homes where they plan to build a school, a medical facilty and also to bring fresh water to the area...For further info, contact Jen at JenMarlowe@hotmail.com. Much love to Amy. Btw, at the reception they had Sake2me...I think I'm gonna turn into an alcy now...

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Friday, November 14, 2008

Latest juxtapoz Riflings and Industrial Decay...

Sheperd Fairey's contribution to the President Elect...
Ron English and "The Lost History of Kiss"...
Kris Kuksi's "Fantasma"...
Greg Gossel...
AIDS crew's stained glass of Biggie...
Armsrock's sketches from his studio in Germany...
Anthony Micallef's "Parasite"...
Now here's one of my favorite new blogs...Industrial Decay...It's simply amazing...Thanks for the recommend, Alex...

My roots are splitting...

Report: NKorea hints it will expel SKoreans

From Yahoo.com By KWANG-TAE KIM, Associated Press Writer Kwang-tae Kim, Associated Press Writer 55 mins ago

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korean military officials told South Korean business managers to move their factories out of the North, a report said Friday — a strong sign the regime is serious about shutting down the border in a further deterioration of inter-Korean ties.

The high-level military delegation made the comments during a rare inspection of a joint industrial park in Kaesong last week, South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported.

The newspaper quoted a South Korean businessman with a factory in Kaesong who met with government officials Thursday, a day after the North said it would shut its side of the border on Dec. 1

Forcing South Korean firms to pull out of the joint business complex in the city just north of the heavily fortified border that divides the two Koreas — a project that fueled hopes of reconciliation — could further escalate tension on the divided peninsula.

Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon was not immediately available for comment Friday.

The delegation also told South Korean businessmen that the sprawling complex sits on land belonging to the North Korean military, the newspaper said.

The North's military pulled some of its troops and equipment from Kaesong to clear the way for South Korean firms to set up their factories there in an apparent move to boost cross-border cooperation and earn hard currency. It was a huge concession from the military.

South Korean firms began to set up factories in Kaesong in 2004 at a time of warming relations between the communist North Korean leadership and South Korea's then-liberal administration. But relations have soured since conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office in February, pledging to get tough with Pyongyang.

Ties deteriorated further in July when a North Korean soldier fatally shot a South Korean tourist visiting Diamond Mountain, another joint project in the North. Seoul since has banned tours to the popular North Korean mountain resort.

On Wednesday, the North's military announced it would "restrict and cut off" cross-border routes starting next month.

Tightening the border primarily would affect South Korean firms that transport raw materials to more than 80 South Korean factories in Kaesong that employ about 35,000 North Korean workers. The complex marries Seoul's technology and management expertise with Pyongyang's cheap labor, and has been a key source of much-needed hard currency for the impoverished North.

South Korea said Thursday that it urged the North not to halt the development of the joint industrial zone seen as a model for joint economic cooperation and a prominent symbol of reconciliation.

The two Koreas technically remain at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.

White Specks in the distance...

Looks like the Eye of Mordor to me...

First fuzzy photos of planets outside solar system

Friday, November 07, 2008

Chalk Art Revisited...Courtesy of Lisa V.














From Dolly to DoDo Bird?

Scientists hope to clone extinct species

From CNN.com - TOKYO, Japan (CNN) -- Japanese scientists have produced clones of mice that have been dead and frozen for 16 years -- a feat that could lead researchers to one day resurrect long-extinct species, such as the mammoth.

Dolly was cloned using cells from live animals. Now scientists believe they can resurrect extinct species.

Dolly was cloned using cells from live animals. Now scientists believe they can resurrect extinct species.

Until now, scientists have only been able to produce clones using cells from live animals. This is how researchers created Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult animal.

Researchers had thought that frozen cells were unusable because ice crystals would have damaged the DNA. That belief would rule out the possibility of resurrecting extinct animals from their frozen remains.

But the latest research -- published in the journal, Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences -- shows that scientists may have overcome the obstacle.

Researchers at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, used cells from mice that had been frozen for 16 years at -20 Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit).

They extracted the nucleus and injected it into eggs whose DNA had been removed. Several steps later, the scientists were able to clone the mice."This is the first time a mammal has been cloned from a sample stored at conditions reasonably close to what might be expected in permafrost," Teruhiko Wakayama, who led the study, said in a statement.

"(It) gives some hope for those who might seek to clone extinct species from frozen carcasses."

Cat Plays the Theremin...inspired by Chris B.

Thursday, November 06, 2008

What! I'm Listening to...(Part 10)

Buckcherry has a rock punchiness that bites you from behind even in their love ballads and a lot of their song titles are quite morbid..Sara Bareilles has a soulful beauty to her music...Platinum Pied Pipers is my new fave R&B/Soul find...The New Pornographers are a good Alternative choice...Manu Chao is good mellow music, he is a French-born singer and political activist of Spanish (Galician-Basque) origin, and sings mainly in Spanish, French and English but occasionally in a number of other languages....Ratatat is simple electronica, nothing complex...Sargento Garcia AKA Sergent Garcia has a dancehall feel to their Latin music...Amparanoia is also on my Latin listening list, as well as Tonino Carotone (has a Tom Waits reggae sound)...On my World list is Balkans-born Goran Bregovic (he's got a gypsy band sound to his stuff)...I like Telephone from France too...They're a decent Rock band...Also on the French tip is Les Negresses Vertes...Honorable hiphop mention goes to Atlanta's MC Shy-D and Foreign Legion (Trav's Frisco buddies)... Soundtrack gurus Apollo Four Forty came back to haunt me during a rerun of S.W.A.T. on tv...Their electronic grooves make movies that much better...For that loungey jazz sound, I've gone back to Julie London...She's got pipes that are soothing and smooth...Guns N Roses long-awaited latest album, "Chinese Democracy" about to drop on 11/23/08 too...Meredith, thinking of you...This is my list so far...Will keep you posted...

Zulu Nation's 35th Anniversary...