Art & Copy

Art & Copy

The moment I saw the previews for this movie I wanted to see it. In your face PR and Marketing that stands up in the face of have-to’s and mediocrity. You will not watch this movie an feel uninspired, especially if you have an idea or two bouncing around in your head.

Crips & Bloods

Crips and Bloods

An etymological look at the notorious gangs formed in LA known as the Bloods and Crips. It was interesting to see the movie’s point of view on how slavery, civil rights and unrest and racism slowly and with little stabs at this south LA community created resentment and hate the bubbled up into an uncontrollable burst of violence. It was also interesting to see the physiological introspection and consciousness that the gangsters in this movie possessed. They are able to self reflect even with a low education, low income and low social awareness communities which makes for an interesting view. Honestly they made some pretty good points about the one-sided nature of history related to south LA and gangs. Another interesting moment is how 3 boys described how they wanted to be in the Boy Scouts of America and were not allowed because they were black and how it turned out to be the 3 creators of what ended up being the seed to what grew into the Bloods and Crips and LA gangs as we know it in its stead. Yes, this movie is pretty one-sided from the view point of the gangster as a victim but walking through the history I would be pretty pissed too.

Afghan Star

Afghan Star

Pretty maddening Movie. This movie tracks the stars of the new show Afghan Star (An Afghan rip-off of American idol) after Afghanistan had recently softened its stance on singing, TV and entertainment being banned from the country. The maddening part is watching people praise their new found freedom and love for the ability to finally express themselves as being “an empty house finally filled in their soul” and then having to watch those same people shake their head in disgust when a woman on the show decides to dance on TV to express her joy and passion for music. Watch this movie and step back and think how often are we so short-sided with freedom, vs real freedom. (Bloods and Crips also has a — when is freedom freedom aspect to it as well in a very different way).

Helvetica

Helvetica

Okay, when I saw this movie I was really intrigued so I was looking forward to watching it. For one, how much can a movie dive into one font? Secondly, these people are passionate about design. In all honesty it was kind of long and it got old halfway through but the first half was full of info and good tidbits on design, business and how a font can be so influential and have such history. To be honest I never finished it.

iPhone Video

iPhone Safari is purpoted to be trying to release HTML5′s newest spec that allows video tags. This means that we will soon be able to watch video inline easily not only on the web in general but on our pretty little phones.

Some of you may be saying, “I already can playvideo on my phone”. Which although true isnt really the whole picture. Have you noticed that when there is video you must play in in a seperate quicktime panel that pops out. Witht the inclusion of this new spec you will be ale to just press play from within the web  page.

For developers this also menas that including images in a pahge will be as easy as using a simple <video> tag as appose to needing to use a plugin like quicktime or flash. As Isaac put it, we are one step closer to getting rid of flash.

Example:

<video src=”http://www.ananova.com/about/vap_windows_check.wmv”>
your browser does not support the video tag
</video>

Boxee

Isaac just demoed a great peice of software for the mac or PC called Boxee. Boxee is loaded on your computer and plays online video from hundreds of sources including videos from your local hard drive, hulu, youtube, and digg. Simply hook your computer up to your TV and watch these shows and click through options and menus with your remote. Best of all its an open source project so downloading is free and you are able to improve the product or add your own video modukes as you please.

Since Boxee allows you to login to your favorite social networks you can see what friends are watching while you watch and more. The bads: since it’s open source and downloaded software when a web site  that boxee pulls from is changed those interfaces in Boxee fail as well until you download a newer build. Its a great tool and relly merges computer with tv experience, definitly a project that has been needed for a long time and meant for the open soure community.

See more about what Boxee can do below:

Chamber Music

Wu-Tang, Chamber Music

Found this new album on http://newmusic4.us (Shows recently released albums and a sle of ways to get them from torrent to youtube to amazon etc….)

It’s very Wu and it’s new and thats all I could ask for. Some times I want a completly new take and some evolution form a musician sometimes I just want more of what I like….This is just more of what I like as far as I cant tell.