12.18.09
Posted in Good Stuff at 12:01 am by thomas
Today I noticed a surprising spike in traffic to FlickrPoet, and after a little bit of digging I found the source for all this sudden interest: FlickrPoet has been mentioned on the Flickr Blog!
It’s been interesting to follow the buzz that the Flickr Blog can create – within hours I saw hundreds of users come to the site, mostly from an ever-expanding tweet cloud on Twitter.
The comments in many of the tweets as well as emails to me and comments left on the Flickr API page for FlickrPoet have been great – it’s fun to think of so many people spending a few minutes on that site and playing with the creative options of the app. Several people mentioned that they wrote small poems right there on the site – how neat is that!
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12.14.09
Posted in China, Culture, Good Stuff, Photography, Travel at 11:01 pm by thomas
China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups in the country, a fact that is easy to overlook when one travels through the major population centers which look dominantly Han. A trip into the countryside very often reveals a different picture, with smaller villages sporting very different faces and sometimes also different attire from the typical Chinese street clothes.
Here is a gorgeous look at the 56 ethnic groups (long page with big photos), from the western deserts to the eastern ocean shore and from Russian enclaves in the far north to tribal villages in the jungle near the Burmese border.
I wasn’t able to find much information about this amazing photo shoot, but it is obvious that serious funding and much work was involved in creating these unique tableaus – each of the photos must have taken several days to prepare and clearly much care was taken in selecting the members of each community and in encouraging them to put on their traditional clothes.
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12.07.09
Posted in Culture, Media at 11:46 pm by thomas
New York based artist Josh Gosfield has created a quite astonishing piece with his “Gigi Gaston, The Black Flower” exhibition, which just recently closed at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Manhattan.
Gosfield manufactured the life story for an imaginary 1960s French singer, complete with posters, records, many magazine covers and even a music video and documentary material. All of it done to excess.
I would have loved to see the pieces in real life and really hope this show makes it to the Bay Area sometime – the style of the artwork on the records and the magazine covers captures the feeling of the 60s in every detail and the range of the created evidence of Gigi’s existence is amazing.
Gosfield spent more than a year working on this project and not only must have photoshopped his heart out, he also commissioned songs to be written and created a short film documentary about the life and times of Gigi.
What is interesting to me is that while browsing through the pictures and looking at the videos, knowing all along that this is fake history, every now and then doubt sets in – maybe Gigi Gaston did exist! And if so, where is Gigi now?
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12.06.09
Posted in Culture, Good Stuff, Media at 9:47 pm by thomas
Due to some random link-clicking I ended up on the Star Trek Phase II website, which I had not been on for several years… This is the site of a group of Star Trek fans that spend considerable time and energy on creating new episodes of the original series. It is interesting – and frankly quite amazing – how far fan-films have come!
Their latest episode – Blood And Fire – has amazing production values way beyond any of the original Star Trek episodes and probably even better than most of what you’ve seen on Next Generation. The torrent site at the link above has both parts 1 and 2 of the double episode.
The story of Blood And Fire is very deep and is based on a script that was originally developed for a never-realized Next Generation episode. It deals in one story arc with homosexuality, and in a pretty action-packed main story line with a rescue from a bloodworm-infested research vessel while the Enterprise is under attack by Klingons.
But what is really standing out is the technical quality of the show – the props, the lighting and the color coordination are spot-on and the special effects are quite impressive.
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