Sterling Hundley
via:

Autolux

"Awesome video for an Autolux song. The process of ink and charcoal drawings set to music in a way that really works.  Created by Nomono in collaboration with Freiland Films"

via: 

via:

Migration

[ed.  A powerful photo-essay depicting the grim conditions under which these young women work.]

The phenomenon of foreign women, who line the roadsides of Italy, has become a notorious fact of Italian life. These women work in sub-human conditions; they are sent out without any hope of regularizing their legal status and can be easily transferred into criminal networks.

Many are Africans working as prostitutes to send money home to their families.
For nearly twenty years the women of Benin City, a town in the state of Edo in the
south-central part of Nigeria, have been going to Italy to work in the sex trade and every year successful ones have been recruiting younger girls to follow them.

The Nigerian trafficking industry is fueled by the combination of widespread emigration aspirations and severely limited possibilities for migrating to Europe.

Ensuring a better future for one’s family in Nigeria is a principal motivation for emigration within and outside the trafficking networks. Working abroad is therefore often seen as the best strategy for escaping poverty. The success of many Italos, as these women are called, is evident in Edo. For many girls prostitution in Italy has become an entirely acceptable trade and the legend of their success makes the fight against sex traffickers all the more difficult.

Full series here:

Produced by Japanese pop art king Takashi Murakami, actress Kirsten Dunst was directed by McG in a video for the song Turning Japanese by The Vapors.

via:

Carlos Dugos
via:

A Mouse-Eye View

Eagle Owl attacking Photron camera at 1,000 frames per second

Sole Mate

Christian Louboutin and the psychology of shoes.

by Lauren Collins

One afternoon in early March, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin decided to go for a ride on his Vespa. He had just had lunch at a brasserie near his office. The bike, a navy-blue model, was parked by the curb. Louboutin put on a helmet. He pushed the visor up and mounted the machine. I got on behind him. We accelerated tipsily and zoomed off into Paris traffic, dodging bollards and side mirrors.

Louboutin opened up the throttle on Rue de Rivoli. The day was bright and cold. My eyes were tearing. There was a carrousel, a stripy blur. Somewhere in the Second Arrondissement, a traffic light turned red. Louboutin idled at the intersection. Two women came around a corner, unwitting participants in a street-corner défilé. One of them was pushing a wheelchair. Her passenger had a blanket over her lap and, on her feet, a pair of golden shoes that, glinting in the sunlight, looked as though they were encrusted with coins.

The scene, Louboutin said, was “something out of Buñuel.” A similar thing had happened once before, when a disabled woman showed up at a signing session—Louboutin autographs shoes, as an author does books—and presented him with a pump of medium height. “I thought, If I were in a wheelchair, I’d like to be in super-high heels,” Louboutin said. “But it’s funny. People have a strong relationship to their body, and it was quite moving, I thought, that this person, who is paralyzed, still cares about what’s correct for her feet.”

In homage to the Surrealists, Louboutin once created a pair of pumps with a hydrodynamic shape, a bulging eye above the pinkie toe, and tessellating rows of black and gold scales—the foot as a fish. He has designed pairs of shoes with heels of mismatched heights. For a private client, a mine owner, he made a pair of shoes with ruby soles. (Instead of working under armed protection, as the client wanted him to, Louboutin paved the soles in zircons and shipped them to Hong Kong, where the decoys were replaced with real gems.)

In 2008, in a cave in Armenia, scientists discovered what is thought to be the world’s oldest leather shoe, a fifty-five-hundred-year-old cowhide moccasin—a woman’s size 7—with laces and straw padding. But, somewhere between the Chalcolithic age and the Kardashians, shoes went from abetting to embellishing, and even impeding, the feet as a way of getting from one place to another. (The offices of fashion magazines often smell like locker rooms, owing to the rows of stale sneakers and ballerina flats that lurk beneath the desks of carless career women.) To Louboutin, shoes are less interesting for their physical properties than for their psychological ones. A shoe can be an icebreaker, or an inkblot. Louboutin said one day, in the course of praising a Viennese fetish boot from the nineteenth century, “A shoe has so much more to offer than just to walk.”

Louboutin sells more than five hundred thousand pairs of shoes a year, at prices ranging from three hundred and ninety-five dollars, for an espadrille, to six thousand, for a “super-platform” pump covered in thousands of crystals. The sole of each of his shoes is lacquered in a vivid, glossy red. The red soles offer the pleasure of secret knowledge to their wearer, and that of serendipity to their beholder. Like Louis XIV’s red heels, they signal a sort of sumptuary code, promising a world of glamour and privilege. They are also a marketing gimmick that renders an otherwise indistinguishable product instantly recognizable. Elizabeth Semmelhack, the senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum, in Toronto, told me, “Louboutin took a part of the shoe that had previously been ignored and made it not only visually interesting but commercially useful.” With flickers of telltale color, Louboutin’s shoes issue their own press releases: Oprah interviews George W. Bush, Beyoncé attends the N.B.A. All-Star Game, Carla Bruni strides into No. 10 Downing Street. Louboutin does not advertise, and he says that he does not give shoes to celebrities. (He offers them a discount.) Still, he has elicited the most frenzied attention to soles since the days of Adlai Stevenson.

Read more:

3-D Street Art

3D street art — alternatively known as pavement, chalk or sidewalk art — is a form of anamorphic art pioneered by American Kurt Wenner. Sprawling over sidewalks, walls, and public spaces, artists use chalk or pastels to render pictures that use mathematical continuation of perspective to give the illusion of three-dimensionality. Though the medium is widely regarded as a modern art, street art traces its origins back to the Renaissance.

Renaissance Roots

The penchant for putting chalk to sidewalk was practiced widely by Italian vagabond artists. Known as the Madonnari because of their copious reproductions of Madonna, the artists would travel between festivals, creating religious works from brick, charcoal, colored stones and chalk. Giving credence to the ‘starving artist’ stereotype, the Madonnari lived solely off the coins passers-by tossed at them for their skill. This practice continued for centuries until the hardships of WW2 significantly reduced the numbers of the Madonnari. However, the art form was revitalized thanks to the International Street Painting Festival in Northern Italy, and the tradition has morphed and continued to date.

More pictures here:

$1000. Best . Roomate. Ever

[ed.  As far as I can tell this looks like a legitimate post on the San Francisco Craigslist and seems to be the meme of the week.  Whether or not this person would in fact be the Best. Roomate. Ever...  you decide.]

Konichiwa bitches. Are you looking for the most kick-ass fucking roommate that ever lived? If so, look no further. You fucking found him. I'm a 25-year-old professional marketing agent with experience at bad-ass companies in New York Fucking City. That's right! What you know about experience? I graduated from Auburn University in Alabama, and moved to NYC at the ripe, tender age of 22. After deciding that New York was a stinky shit-hole, I moved back to Alabama to cultivate more professional experience. Why? So I can make millions of dollars and not have to post shit like this on Craigslist.

Anyway, so I landed this job with a marketing firm in San Francisco, and I have no fucking clue where to live. Honestly, I'm moving there in 3 weeks, so I don't give a shit if I have to sleep in your bathtub.

A bit about me: I'm respectful, quiet, clean and I won't bother any of your shit. If you leave shit out, I'm just like, "Oh fuck I better not mess with this shit, because it's not mine." I turn off lights. I clean toilets. Fuck it. I'll even cook for you. That's right! My dad is a chef and taught me everything there is to know about cooking southern cajun cuisine. I'll fry green tomatoes, cover them with marinated crab meat and smother that shit in bearnaise. EVERY. GODDAMN. NIGHT. Don't eat meat? That's fucking FANTASTIC! I'll make a zucchini and yellow squash carpaccio that will knock your fucking socks off.

I also read a lot. I fucking LOVE books. Vonnegut, Palahniuk, Hawthorne. All that shit. I read Tuesday's with Morrie the other day. It's a sad story, but I learned something about life, love, knowledge and the pursuit of something greater than myself. Fucking smart. Do you like movies? I fucking love them. We can watch the shit out of some movies together if you like, or go get drinks, or work out, hike, play video games or play a game of one-on-one basketball, or I don't have to talk to you at all. It's completely UP TO YOU!

Sometimes I play guitar. Are you going to love getting baked and listening to Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd? LIVE? WHENEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT? Of course you are! I'll take requests and learn any song you like, because I have the voice of an angel and the acoustical stylings of James Fucking Taylor. AWWWWWW SHIT YEA!

A lot of people ask me, "Hey, you're from Alabama. Are you racist?" And, the answer to that question is, no. I'm not racist or judgmental at all. I love everyone. I'm a secular humanist. I FUCKING LOVE PEOPLE. That's the only requirement to being a secular humanist actually. You have to like other human beings and want to help them for no other reason than they are human regardless of race, religion or sexual preference. WTF?!!!? Pretty fucking cool right?

I own almost nothing! I'm driving my car from Alabama to California in which I'll be transporting two duffelbags of clothes, one laptop computer, one guitar, one cell-phone with charger, 8 pairs of shoes, one picture frame, probably some condoms and a shitload of beef jerky and Pringles for the trip. Though, you can expect the jerky to be gone upon my arrival. Unless you'd like me to pick up some on my way into the city. See?! I'm the most considerate person you've ever met. I'm offering to buy you shit already!

Am I interested in your pad? You can bet my nomadic ass I am! I only require 4 walls, a ceiling and a floor to shelter me from the elements. Other than that, anything else will be considered a convenient plus. I'm taking being a roommate to the next level. Email me! I'll hook yo ass up with Facebook links, background checks, credit reports, phone numbers, resumes, references, awards, sexual history, pictures of karate trophies and a list of the top 10 women I'd like to bang before I die. If you want a next-generation roommate who consistently blows your fucking mind with awesomeness, then hit me up. I'm ready to give you money.

via:

Triclosan

by Andrew Martin

The maker of Dial Complete hand soap says that it kills more germs than any other brand. But is it safe?

That question has federal regulators, consumer advocates and soap manufacturers locked in a battle over the active ingredient in Dial Complete and many other antibacterial soaps, a chemical known as triclosan.

The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing the safety of the chemical, which was created more than 40 years ago as a surgical scrub for hospitals. Triclosan is now in a range of consumer products, including soaps, kitchen cutting boards and even a best-selling toothpaste, Colgate Total. It is so prevalent that a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the chemical present in the urine of 75 percent of Americans over the age of 5.

Scientists have raised concerns about triclosan for decades. Last year, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat from Massachusetts, pressured the F.D.A. to write regulations for antiseptic products like hand soap, including the use of triclosan. The process of creating regulations was started more than three decades ago, but has been repeatedly delayed. In the meantime, Mr. Markey has called for a ban on triclosan in hand soaps, in products that come in contact with food and in products marketed to children.

The concern is based on recent studies about the possible health impacts of triclosan, which the F.D.A. said, in a Feb. 23, 2010, letter to Mr. Markey, “raise valid concerns about the effect of repetitive daily human exposure to these antiseptic ingredients.”

Several have shown that triclosan disrupts the thyroid hormone in frogs and rats, while others have shown that triclosan alters the sex hormones of laboratory animals. Others studies have shown that triclosan can cause some bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics.

Read more:

via:

via:

via:

Friday Book Club - The Chronology of Water

From Amazon:

I've read Ms. Yuknavitch's book The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary. Chuck Palahniuk, Pygmy

I love this book and I am thankful that Lidia Yuknavitch has written it for me and for everyone else who has ever had to sometimes kind of work at staying alive. It’s about the body, brain, and soul of a woman who has managed to scratch up through the slime and concrete and crap of life in order to resurrect herself. The kind of book Janis Joplin might have written if she had made it through the fire - raw, tough, pure, more full of love than you thought possible and sometimes even hilarious. This is the book Lidia Yuknavitch was put on the planet to write for us. Rebecca Brown, author of The Gifts of the Body

The Chronology of Water’s central metaphor works beautifully: we all keep our heads above water, look around, and enjoy our corporeal life despite all the reasons not to; beyond that, the book is immensely impressive to me on a human level: the narrator/speaker/protagonist/author emerges from a seriously hellish childhood and spooky adolescence into a middle age not of bliss, certainly, but of convincing engagement and satisfaction. David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

This intensely powerful memoir touches depths yet unheard of in contemporary writing. I read it at one sitting and wondered for days after about love, time, and truth. Can't get me any more excited than this." Andrei Codrescu, author of The Poetry Lesson

Flooded with light and incandescent beauty, Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water cuts through the heart of the reader. These fierce life stories gleam, fiery images passing just beneath the surface of the pages. You will feel rage, fear, release, and joy, and you will not be able to stop reading this deeply brave and human voice. Diana Abu-Jaber, Origin: A Novel

Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water is a brutal beauty bomb and a true love song. Rich with story, alive with emotion, both merciful and utterly merciless, I am forever altered by every stunning page. This is the book I’m going to press into everyone’s hands for years to come. This is the book I've been waiting to read all of my life. Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild

via:
image credit:

The Dollar Store Economy

by Jack Hitt

Heather Mann writes a blog called Dollar Store Crafts, which evolved from her occasional trips to the extreme-discount dollar stores near her home in Salem, Ore. Her readers admire her gift for buying really cheap stuff and then making cool and beautiful things from the pile. Her knockoff “alien abduction lamp” is jury-rigged from a small light fixture, two plastic bowls (flying saucer), a clear acrylic tumbler (tractor beam) and a small plastic toy cow (abductee) — all purchased for about five bucks. When I looked up, Mann was already around the corner, having fun with a bottle of discount detergent boasting a “bingo bango mango” scent. Just up the way was a bin of brown bags marked either “A Surprise for a Boy” or “A Surprise for a Girl.” Mann’s 5-year-old niece accompanied us on our tour and was crazed with excitement over these, and the truth is, we were all in the same exact mood. All around us, strange things hung here and there, urging us on an unending treasure hunt. Perhaps, like me, you have driven by and occasionally stopped in a dollar store and assumed that there were two kinds of customers, those there for the kitschy pleasure of it all — the Heather Manns of the world — and those for whom the dollar store affords a low-rent version of the American Consumer Experience, a place where the poor can splurge. That’s true. But current developments in this, the low end of retail, suggest that a larger shift in the American consumer market is under way.

We are awakening to a dollar-store economy. For years the dollar store has not only made a market out of the detritus of a hyperproductive global manufacturing system, but it has also made it appealing — by making it amazingly cheap. Before the market meltdown of 2008 and the stagnant, jobless recovery that followed, the conventional wisdom about dollar stores — whether one of the three big corporate chains (Dollar General, Family Dollar and Dollar Tree) or any of the smaller chains (like “99 Cents Only Stores”) or the world of independents — was that they appeal to only poor people. And while it’s true that low-wage earners still make up the core of dollar-store customers (42 percent earn $30,000 or less), what has turned this sector into a nearly recession-proof corner of the economy is a new customer base. “What’s driving the growth,” says James Russo, a vice president with the Nielsen Company, a consumer survey firm, “is affluent households.”

The affluent are not just quirky D.I.Y. types. These new customers are people who, though they have money, feel as if they don’t, or soon won’t. This anxiety — sure to be restoked by the recent stock-market gyrations and generally abysmal predictions for the economy — creates a kind of fear-induced pleasure in selective bargain-hunting. Rick Dreiling, the chief executive of Dollar General, the largest chain, with more than 9,500 stores, calls this idea the New Consumerism. “Savings is fashionable again,” Dreiling told me. “A gallon of Clorox bleach, say, is $1.44 at a drugstore or $1.24 at a grocery store, and you pay a buck for it at the Dollar General. When the neighbors come over, they can’t tell where you bought it, and you save anywhere from 20 to 40 cents, right?”

Financial anxiety — or the New Consumerism, if you like — has been a boon to dollar stores. Same-store sales, a key measure of a retailer’s health, spiked at the three large, publicly traded chains in this year’s first quarter — all were up by at least 5 percent — while Wal-Mart had its eighth straight quarterly decline. Dreiling says that much of Dollar General’s growth is generated by what he calls “fill-in trips” ­— increasingly made by wealthier people. Why linger in the canyons of Wal-Mart or Target when you can pop into a dollar store? Dreiling says that 22 percent of his customers make more than $70,000 a year and added, “That 22 percent is our fastest-growing segment.”

This growth has led to a building campaign. At a time when few businesses seem to be investing in new equipment or ventures or jobs, Dreiling’s company announced a few months ago that it would be creating 6,000 new jobs by building 625 new stores this year. Kiley Rawlins, vice president for investor relations at Family Dollar, said her company would add 300 new stores this year, giving it more than 7,000 in 44 states.

Read more:

Rita Sklar
via:

The Debt Crisis at American Colleges

by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus

How do colleges manage it? Kenyon has erected a $70 million sports palace featuring a 20-lane olympic pool. Stanford's professors now get paid sabbaticals every fourth year, handing them $115,000 for not teaching. Vanderbilt pays its president $2.4 million. Alumni gifts and endowment earnings help with the costs. But a major source is tuition payments, which at private schools are breaking the $40,000 barrier, more than many families earn. Sadly, there's more to the story. Most students have to take out loans to remit what colleges demand. At colleges lacking rich endowments, budgeting is based on turning a generation of young people into debtors.

As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings. The College Board likes to say that the average debt is "only" $27,650. What the Board doesn't say is that when personal circumstances go wrong, as can happen in a recession, interest, late payment penalties, and other charges can bring the tab up to $100,000. Those going on to graduate school, as upwards of half will, can end up facing twice that.

Students are now more than $1 trillion in debt to their college educations, yet schools are encouraging the cycle.

Is it a bubble?

If you want to get a name as an economic seer, try this one. The next subprime crisis will come from defaults on student debts, starting with for-profit colleges and rising to the Ivy League. The parallels with housing are striking. In both, the written warnings aren't understood, especially on penalties and interest rates. And in both, it's assumed that what's being bought will rise in value, in one case the real estate, in the other the salaries which will accrue with a degree. One bubble has burst; the second is already losing air.

Still, there's a difference. With mortgage defaults, banks seize and resell the home. But if a degree can't be sold, that doesn't deter the banks. They essentially wrote the student loan law, in which the fine-print says they aren't "dischargable." So even if you file for bankruptcy, the payments continue due. Hence these stern word from Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers. "You will be hounded for life," he warns. "They will garnish your wages. They will intercept your tax refunds. You become ineligible for federal employment." He adds that any professional license can be revoked and Social Security checks docked when you retire. We can't think of any other statute with such sadistic provisions.

Read more:

Has the Patent Game Changed? Just Ask Kodak

by Tim Carmody (excerpted)

The intellectual property hustle used to be so simple: purer, even. Patent holders extracted licensing fees, lump-sum settlements or cross-licensing agreements from nonholders, who paid up to avoid messy lawsuits or injunctions. It was a drag for almost everyone involved, but the stakes were comparatively small. Now, multibillion-dollar portfolio sales have put blood in the water, attracting an entirely different kind of shark.

We’ve already seen this play out once with Motorola. It’s easy to forget now that just a few weeks before Google stepped in to buy the company, investor Carl Icahn publicly and privately urged Motorola to sell off its patents, either for cash or by (again) splitting up the company.

This put both Motorola and Google in an awkward spot: If Motorola couldn’t find a buyer, the company could be torn apart; if Google didn’t step in, they risked losing another patent bidding war. In the end, Motorola was able to negotiate a premium price, and Icahn now stands to pocket millions of dollars.

Right now, it looks like a seller’s market. Because nobody seems to be kicking the tires to see exactly what they’re buying, the conventional wisdom is to sell. Like Motorola a few weeks ago, RIM is in a tough spot, so this pressure is hard to resist. If RIM were to publicly announce that it wasn’t for sale, its already-weakened stock, temporarily buoyant from acquisition rumors, would fall to the ground.

It’s even harder for Kodak, which really does have a substantial patent portfolio and is in an even weaker market position. On Wednesday, Bloomberg ran an analyst-driven story titled “Kodak Worth Five Times More in Breakup With $3 Billion Patents“:

Kodak’s stock jumped 16 percent overnight, fueled by rumors of a Motorola-style takeover or patent sell-off.

Steve Lohr’s “A Bull Market in Tech Patents,” published Wednesday in The New York Times, begins by detailing the broader downside of the patent craze: billions of dollars to purchase or defend existing patents is money companies like Apple or Google don’t have to spend on new products or research.

But that money doesn’t simply evaporate. “It’s a transfer of wealth from innovators to bondholders and stockholders who have no motivation to innovate,” Harvard Business School economist Josh Lerner tells the NYT. “It’s disturbing.”

Read more:

Economic Policy

[ed.  Federal Reserve and European Union economic recovery plans.]