The folks who made "Lazy Teenage Superheroes" had a lot of fun doing it, and they spent almost nothing. With an outlay of only $300, they filled the video with impressive special video effects, sound, music and humor. I read about this video at boingboing and truly enjoyed watching this 13-minute film. Watching this project made we want to know more about the people who made the video. Here's the video website.
Here's a "secret" hand gesture for those of us who follow Bertrand's orbit.
And I admit that I enjoy Gnarly music
We got a good blast of snow yesterday. This is the view out the front door that greeted my children this morning, right after they heard that school had been canceled.
Many of us, much of the time, run around snapping lots of photos to document our lives. There is an alternative to this "fast photography," as described by Tim Wu at Slate. It is a technique for enhancing our experience of the moment:
[S]low photography is the effort to flip the usual relationship between process and results. Usually, you use a camera because you want the results (the photos). In slow photography, the basic idea is that photos themselves—the results—are secondary. The goal is the experience of studying some object carefully and exercising creative choice. . . . Step 1 in slow photography is spending a long time studying the subject. As one guide enjoins, "pay more attention to your subject than to your camera." . . . When you look carefully and avoid trying to label what you see, you inevitably start to notice things that you mightn't have otherwise. . . .Step 2 is the exercise of creative choices—the greatest pleasure that our automatic cameras rob us of. What should be in the frame and what should be excluded is the most obvious decision, but there's also exposure, depth of field, and more technical choices beyond that. Making such deliberate decisions requires a little bit of courage, for you cannot blame the camera if the results are bad. Yet these choices are, to my mind, the whole game. They are what individualizes photography, what puts the stamp of your personality on the photo.
I'll try to get myself under control. But you see, I've been sitting at my desk for 15 hours today, creating an extremely complicated legal document that is finally finished. For the last 2 hours of this almost-torture, I have been listening to an album called Xinti by Sara Tavars. Gad, such intense, gorgeous music! (See, I even used an exclamation point). I've never met Sara, but . . . her voice . . . her fantastic song-writing and that excellent guitar playing . . . This is music that removes you from wherever you are and puts you in a place where everything is OK. I've never met Sara, but I love her. She's got me wrapped around her finger. This is pathetic, in a good way. When visitors come over to the house when Xinti's playing, they all demand to know who is making that incredible music. Sara is. And it's really daunting to try to describe exactly what kind of music she creates. Here's the description of her work from Amazon:
Brimming with Cape Verdean guitar licks, Angolese rhythms and warm Portuguese vocals, Sara never sounded more intense. This is a startling collection, packed with surprises that displays how progressively richer and more expansive Sara Tavares' vocal repetoire has become since her previous album "Balance". Her songs are lyrcial, sensual and more textured. They are intimate but also wrapped in irresistibly funky rhythms drawn from the Cape Verdean / African / Brazilian / Caribbean diaspora.
Have you ever listened to music of that genre? Maybe it's time you tried. Or buy Sara's album as a gift for someone you love, and they will love you back. It's unfair, because Sara did all of the work to make that music, and all you had to do was buy it. Here's a cut called "Sumanai" from Xinti (and you'll find quite a few of her other tunes on Youtube):