Short List 2.21.12

1.  Leanne Shapton: Thursday Nights Out. 
Shapton has a style that almost makes you think you could be an artist. You think this partly because her watercolors all seem drawn with a fat brush, are more water than color, and don't seem to care about staying in the lines, if there are even lines.  It's also because she's making art out of the spare minutes of her life.  A friend in a chair, a friend at a restaurant.  Makes you realize how much art is happening around you at all times.

2. "Urnatur," an eco hotel featured on the blog Anthropologist.

When I first saw this photo and video spread, I thought that it was only a place for faeries, or at least people from Iceland or whatever remote northern European woods it was located in.  And then we figured out it was a hotel.  We could stay there.  We never, ever will, but we could.  That sense of possibility lets my imagination take quick trips there every once in awhile.

Places like this always prompt me to wonder "what if?"  The simplicity, the proximity to nature, the lack of wires and wi-fi and, well, electricity, doesn't look threatening here as much as it does liberating. 


3.  Reggie Watts, "I Just Want To"

Kind of like Leanne Shapton, Reggie Watts makes you want to buy a piece of audio sampling equipment from a local pawn shop and start making your own amazing music.  Even my 7 year old, when watching this, said "Dad I want one of those."

Hill short list 2.7.12

1.  This Must Be The Place
As stated on their web site, TMBTP is a "series of short films that explore the idea of home;
what makes them, how they represent us, why we need them."  Three short video clips depict dramatically different settings that each, in their own way, count as a home.

2. A Restless Transplant
Guy quits his job in NYC with some fashionable magazine, buys a van, travels around the west surfing, camping, and taking pictures.  Brief captions accompany the photographs that document this trip, which I have been following for a few months now.  I can't decide if there is a purpose to it, or if he is learning anything, or if he is just accumulating material for a book so that he can somehow cash on in it all.  But I keep watching.

3.  Bout Time: Claressa Shields
Short film about a high school student in Flint, Michigan who is training to be a boxer.  Some desperate images of the city and her surroundings contrast with her own sanguine attitude, but she admits this is all a tool to help her survive a situation that ruins most people. 

Hill Short List 1.31.12

1.  The Sartorialist: Lunch for 25
   
     The Sartorialist is a great example of how one blog and an internet can make your career.  Scott Schuman went from being a Hoosier like the rest of us, a Hoosier who developed a taste for clothes and started taking street photographs of people whose style he liked.  He posted them to his blog.  And now it's his job.  He travels the world, hitting Milan Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, or just rambling through cities he's never been to, photographing all the while.
     This post contains a short film of a dinner he pulled together somehow with some of the most popular, most stylish men he'd met in the street.  They're strangers for the most part, but they have high taste in clothes and they just look good sitting down to schmooze for awhile.  I sometimes think about who I would invite if I had that hypothetical dinner party of famous folks, but here's a video of someone who actually made theirs happen, and it's fun to watch.

2. From The ByGone Bureau: "Fear and Gaming: Being and Nothingness in Minecraft."

   I haven't finished this article yet, but it's about a game that is fascinating me right now even though I have never actually played it.  I'm kind of afraid to, actually, knowing how one game can eat up your waking hours, or at least mine, if I'm not careful.  Minecraft is a game that my nephew wasted most of time I saw him during this past winter vacation, and it's back story is kind of like Scott Schuman's, if I understand it right: obscure software coder makes a game for the heck of it, it catches on, he's rich.  And from what I can tell, there is little purpose to the game either other than making buildings and showing it to your friends.  So I'm curious about what makes it so special.  I'll either probably respond to the article or to the game itself.  Not sure yet.

3. From the Times, "Lone Wolf Commands a Following."

    For the first time in 90 years, a wild wolf is living in California.  Depending on how you feel about wildlife, or things that happen in far-off states like California, this may or may not be interesting to you.  It is to me, and it's made a little more interesting because this wolf is wearing a gps collar that lets you track him online. People have started twitter accounts in his name even; he's quite a sensation over there.  I think this one grabs me because it parallels a little of what we're seeing happening around here, too, with coyotes in the country and even wolf sightings up in northern Michigan. 

4. Also from the Times: "Harnessing Gaming for the Classroom."

    One of those articles you come across when you are on the Times site and see the list of "most read" articles on the right side. The title of this is what interested me--I could see someone using it as a source for a research project that is probably going on right here at Homestead, right now.  Seems like something of interest, but I haven't read it yet.  I'm just putting it here so I remember to get back to it.