The Giving Tree

I felt like revisiting childhood stories today and immediately I thought of this classic favorite -- The Giving Tree. To my delightful surprise, I stumbled upon a movie version narrated by Shel Silverstein himself.



Unconditional love means that you're willing to give your all and never expect anything in return.

New Blu and David Ellis Combo!

COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.

Sing Sang Sung

Wildly colorful organic animation to Air's lovely "Sing Sang Sung". My kind of music video! Suddenly, I have an urge to watch Yellow Submarine again.

AIR MUSIC VIDEO SING SANG SUNG from MATHEMATIC SAS on Vimeo.

Life feeds on life...

Gigantik from Nigel Upchurch on Vimeo.

Los Angeles Rainwater Harvesting, Hook It Up!

Angelenos sure welcome any rainfall we can get, especially in this heat. Why not harvest every raindrop, reuse and strategically direct that rainwater to save potable water costs and local water quality? We need all the forward-thinking solutions possible as LA County still has worst water quality in the state.

Here's a solution and a fabulous way to get ready for the season ahead: enroll in the City of LA's new, first-of-its-kind free Rainwater Harvesting Program.

Thanks to the City's new water-conservation initiative (hooray!) and a grant from the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, Los Angeleno property owners or businesses in the pilot communities Mar Vista, Sawtelle and Jefferson can get hooked up with a free rain barrel plus installation or a free downspout disconnect. I wish this was happening in my hood too! Certainly this promising news could set important future standards for Southern California.

Join your community in this exciting momentum towards sustainable LA living and help spread the good word. Be one of the 600 lucky ones to participate in the pilot by signing up at LA Rainwater Harvesting Program or by calling 562.597.0205.

Joni Mitchell - California

Sublime.

Annecy Awesomeness

Here's a wildly impressive collection of short animations from Gobelins for this year's Annecy.

Le Grand Content

Stumbled upon this hilarious short trying to make sense of the everyday nuances and variables of our data-overload world through flow charts and graphs.

New Urbanism - Scratching the Surface

Constructive destruction, vividly captured:


We got to build to last. Here's a fantastic short and straight-forward wake-up call against sprawl:

Mixing Genius - Kutiman

This is inspiring and incredible! Unrelated yet interdependent music/youtubing weaved and edited by mix-master Kutiman. "I'm New" is my favorite track off his Thru You project, where what you see is what you hear.

Resource depletion

How Long Will Our World Last?

"Most people get worried about how much energy reserves we have left, but as this graphic shows, that's the least of our problems. The real problem is the materials we use to make things.

Energy could be harnessed from eternal sources, like the sun, the wind, or the seas. But there is only a limited amount of elements in planet Earth and—what's worst—bringing them from other planets will prove impractical with our current technology (and the technology that will be available in the next century).

In the meantime, copper—which is everywhere around you—will be gone in about 61 years; antimony—widely used in medicines—will be depleted in 20 years; while indium, rhodium, platinum, or silver—which are present in many essential consumer electronics—won't last much longer. And those estimations are only valid if we manage to consume half of what we are consuming now.

So, unless we really push technology forward, dramatically increase our recycling rhythm, or something extraordinary happens first—like Apophis obliterating us or the Large Hadron Collider blows us to another dimension, or Nazi zombies getting out of their crypts to make bacon of all of us—we and our children are going to have a really hard time pushing the world forward.

I guess we will have to keep taking life one weekend at a time. "

[via Gizmodo]

Wabi-sabi

A Drop Of Blue Salt from Vida Vega on Vimeo.
A beautiful, simple animation I came across today inspired by the Pablo Neruda sonnet below.

Sonnet IX: There where the waves shatter
by Pablo Neruda

There where the waves shatter on the restless rocks
the clear light bursts and enacts its rose,
and the sea-circle shrinks to a cluster of buds,
to one drop of blue salt, falling.

O bright magnolia bursting in the foam,
magnetic transient whose death blooms
and vanishes--being, nothingness--forever:
broken salt, dazzling lurch of the sea.

You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence,
while the sea destroys its perpetual statues,
collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness:

because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics,
galloping water, incessant sand,
we make the only permanent tenderness.

It's business time.

This prick. Is he for real? I think he's dead serious. Miami Vice's business card "doesn't fit in a rolodex because it doesn't belong in a rolodex." His ego is apparently too big for it also (nevertheless pretty pretty hilarious):


My friend passed on a more legit source on the topic. Here's a fun article about making creative business cards.

I'll continue taking my advice from a real leader -- Mr. John Wooden. A few words of Coach Wooden's wisdom:

1. good values attract good people
2. love is the most powerful four-letter word
3. call yourself a teacher
4. emotion is your enemy
5. it takes 10 hands to make a basket
6. little things make big things happen
7. make each day your masterpiece
8. the carrot is mightier than a stick
9. make greatness attainable by all
10. seek significant change
11. don't look at the scoreboard
12. adversity is your asset













(click to enlarge)

I was also very moved by J.K. Rowling's brilliant speech to Harvard students last year, passed along recently by a friend. She humbly expresses the fringe benefits of failure and the importance of imagination. I highly recommend it!

Oh yea, it's Business Time. Conditions are perfect. With that said, goodnight world.

M. Ward - Chinese Translation

Twitter hits the streets

I like this clever graff tweet seen on the streets via Questionmarc.

If that's not a sign of Twitter being top of pop culture mind virtually everywhere right now, then this awesome "Flutter" mocumentary surely is...yep, it's the nano-blogging movement:



via Laughing Squid (great blog from sf)

the truth is all there is

I love this song (the Truth/Handsome Boy Modeling School) and Roison is just amazing. She even busts J-Live's part here...


and I want her coat too!

Earth forming underwater

A mind-blowing, rare video of pillow lava and earth forming underwater in Kilauea, Hawaii:

Wild Geese

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
(one of my favorites of her beautiful poetry)

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Roland Kirk got soul! sweet and misty

Live in Montreux, 1972

Blind to their own beauty

Peep the toxic nudibranchs (the naughty sounding official term for these soft, outer-worldly colored, hermaphroditic sea slugs!). They produce a truly brilliant defense. With more than 3,000 species painting nearly all depths of salt water, their unique anatomy allows them to easily exercise some cryptic behavior and camo into textures and colors of surrounding sea plants. Others don't mind shining and instead utilize their vivid coloring to show predators they are oh so poisonious thangs. Too bad we don't have the same defensive mechanisms. For me, unfortunately, it's called riding the mood swing. They are even "blind to their own beauty" with "their tiny eyes discerning little more than light and dark. Instead the animals smell, taste, and feel their world using head-mounted sensory." Here's something we don't get to appreciate everyday -- this stunning National Geographic photo/video gallery on these bad ass sea creatures.

It's no surprise either that the seriously prolific artist and naturalist (among other things) Ernst Haeckel tried to capture these beauties in his Artforms in Nature studies. If you don't know Haeckel, be prepared to have your mind officially blown. His jellyfish and coral renderings are my favorite!

Kind of Blue...and bliss.

Holy moly. My dream skateboards have arrived!! Check out these masterpiece decks by SF based skate company Western Edition. This Miles '59 quintet arrangement of decks celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Miles Davis' seminal work: Kind of Blue -- greatest album ever. period. I'd have to admire these on my walls. It'd be blasphemy to have 'em hit pavement.
Thank you, Miles!!!

via Vinyl Meltdown

"Nature that Imagines"

via Art MoCo:

Gary Brewer combines a classic sensibility with so-called eccentric impulses to create lush, detailed paintings of botany that evoke the world of science fiction, many leagues under the sea. Orchids and anemones play an important role in Brewer's latest series of work, A Seductive Nature, along with lichens, sponges and corals. The artist uses drawings, models, photos and maquettes to explore potential, and the results are a blend of observation and invention.

I wish I was still in the Bay for what I'm sure will be a mind-blowing art show by Gary Brewer. His Orchid series is my favorite. How cool is this quasi-Orchid, quasi-Kelp sea creature?!

I'll end on a beautiful quote from John Laroche (played by Chris Cooper) in Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation:

Point is, what's so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. There's a certain orchid that looks exactly like a certain insect so the insect is drawn to this flower, its double, its soul mate, and wants nothing more than to make love to it. And after the insect flies off, spots another soul-mate flower and makes love to it, thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean, how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives? But it does. By simply doing what they're designed to do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live - how the only barometer you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower, you can't let anything get in your way.

Kudos to Jon Stewart!

via The Big Picture.

Stewart is one of the best and most honest journalists (an oxymoron these days) we've got!

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Check out other uncensored clips of Jon Stewart demolishing Jim Cramer and schooling America at AlterNet.org.

Visual Treats: My Favorite Food Blog

Every foodie's dream web site: Food Gawker -- an inspiring delicatible gallery where aggregate food bloggers showcase their goods and recipes. Time to feast the eyes and feed the tummy...oh yeaaa.

And if that doesn't do it for ya, maybe the Italian "Let's Pizza" vending machine will. It whips up "flour, water, tomato sauce and fresh ingredients into hot pizza in a few minutes for a price as low as $4.50."

Passionate Virtuosity

"My feeling about technique in art," John Barth told an interviewer in 1968, "is that it has about the same value as technique in love-making. That is to say, on the one hand, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and, on the other hand, so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate
virtuosity."

- Charles Harris, "Reading John Barth"

via Rob Brezny's Astrology Newsletter

Twit Universe: To Infinity and Beyond!

This social satire sparked a lot of questions. With the advent of online social networking, are we living from the inside-out or the outside-in, now? How do we give our lives meaning and identity, online? Do we trivialize? Do we constantly seek the approval networks? Do we inflate our sense of self-importance? Or do we simply love sharing more? Have we traded human-to-human relationship building for online, speedy interactions? Are we actually moving forward? But, have we also exchanged monologue for dialogue -- saying goodbye to a pyramid of top-down authority communication and hello to honest conversations between people all over the world?...Or just the privileged, with computers, internet know-how and access, without a great firewall? Sometimes, to quote Pablo Picasso, "computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

Here's Bill Maher this week on our mind-boggling obsessions with twitter, useless iphone aps ("pull my finger", no joke) and even those damn snuggies:


A hilarious addendum via current TV from Super News! on Twitter.

Nature Rocks!

Remarkable MOOG sounds from seals! This video clip from Warner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World" is amazing.

Her Morning Elegance

(...because somehow I often find myself doing the same).