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A very good friend, colleague and aspiring DJ, Rob Quinn, AKA Little Square Dot, has been up to his old tricks and his new mix is definitely worth a listen. Best served with friends and wine and some cocktails and who knows what else…. Just press play and enjoy.

In 1981, Duane Elgin wrote a book titled Voluntary Simplicity: toward a way of life that is outwardly simple, inwardly rich. This concept was, and still is a timely one, and one that incorporates some key values that have been lost over the past decades. Voluntary Simplicity comes as man, particularly in developed countries, pursues the avenues of capitalism, consumerism and the “American Dream.” The question that has to be asked is, why is it that Horatio Alger impacted such thought, generated such a movement and an anti-consumerist lifestyle as retaliation against capitalism, and a focus inward, towards the family and the individual? The answers are obvious; the planet’s environment is now endangered, resources need to be conserved for our children’s future and working for a wage is, for the most part, unfulfilling and often requires the worker, selling his or her labour, to do things he or she may not think are right, that society is unjust, and that social resources are not equally distributed. Therefore, this cultural movement seeks to correct these problems. Voluntary simplicity is a virtue, and as year after year the earth becomes more and more polluted, robbed of its non-renewable resources and the majority of its inhabitants become overweight, unhealthy, abused and unjustly treated, this concept comes closer and closer to a universal idea that could trump any other. This article identifies the core values and ideas of Voluntary Simplicity and examines whether or not the concept will solve the environmental problems we face today.

Just what exactly are the tenants of the movement, and how does it seek to solve the problems we all see and experience in the present? It can be separated into a few ways of thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire, England. An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.

Bricollage and collage art is a staple of the post-modern, as in a lot of avante-garde art, and the Semprematist movement and even in Dada. Hockney’s images are incredible and I plan on making use of a decent 50mm lense and a load of prints, like these.

In the spirit of Be Kind Rewind, this hilarious video was produced with surprising accuracy and hilarity, encompassing the key elements of the film with basically no budget and a heck of amount of creativity. Enjoy, my friends.

Defining Rave Culture is a complicated and difficult task. So many of its aspects are subjective and compile a myriad of experiences that can range from the spiritually enlightened to the sobering, apathetic negativity that contrasts at the other end of the spectrum. The definition of “rave” can be as complex, and sometimes as highly structured as a rave event itself. Raves could exist for a few hours, a whole night, or an entire weekend. A rave could be an indoor party with 10 people or an outdoor extravaganza with thousands. Participants could be anyone, young or old. There may have been two DJ’s or a dozen, all spinning an endless supply of electronic genres and sub-genres of music, like techno, happy hardcore, trance, jungle, house, breaks or drum and bass. Many “ravers” took drugs like ecstasy, MDMA, acid, marijuana, and some may have taken nothing at all. Other than DJs, electronic music, willing participants and a venue, what can be called a rave defies limits. “Rave eventually came to signify a culture that [was] in constant flux”. This article seeks to ask and answer why and how the scene came to be and discuss the rave, that of its origins in the 1980’s and its hazy phasing out in the late 1990’s into the dance club based scene of today, the people who inhabited the culture, the facets that made the culture what it is, and the scene now. Read the rest of this entry »

On the count of ‘four,’ Salvador Dali leaped and Halsman’s assistants threw three cats and a bucket of water across the scene, while the photographer’s wife held up the chair on the left. It took twenty six attempts and five hours before Halsman had the result he wanted. The picture is entitled Dali Atomicus, and both he and Dali formed a collaboration for more than forty years. Halsman also produced 32 images for the book Dali’s Mustache. Halsman is best known for his portraits and had more than 100 Life covers to his credit, a record, as well as Einstein’s famous mug.

So, after much deliberation, I’ve decided that I’m going to pop my 3D film cherry on Tron: Legacy. This is kind of a big step for me, as in the past I’ve largely decried the growing trend towards throwing some extra effects into a movie and charging double the price. For me, a movie is at its best when it’s able to be enjoyed on a majority of technology; sure, it might be a little too much to ask to make sure that the latest HD films work on my crappy 12” CRT, but when I’m not getting the “full experience” on a TV that’s only maybe 5 years old? Gentlemen, we then have a problem.

But this is different. This, my friends, is Tron. This is the sequel to the film that made every nerd’s pants tight when it came out in 1982. This is what gave them (and by extension, us) fantasies about living in a video game. Read the rest of this entry »

The perfectly formed body builder is as faultlessly presentable as the spacecraft behind him. All the others, though, have a long way to go… LaChapelle is interested in the everyday, less because of anthropology than because it is inescapable and because “good taste is the death of art” – Truman Capote.

LaChapelle started off as a busboy at Studio 54 in New York and then ended up working with Andy Warhol. His idea about photography is that it is a break from beauty, an intermission. Once he was hired by Details magazine in the early 1990′s, his work went “crazy.” He now receives commissions from almost any celebrity who wants to add that pizazz to their portfolio of head shots, the latest is Lady Gaga of course….

Saw the movie 9 recently and was pretty blown away at its originality and quality. You should check it out. Here is the amazing 10 minute short film that Shane Acker, the director made at UCLA for his graduate thesis. Acker was producer, artist, renderer, foley artist and writer/director. Pretty amazing for a one man show.

Tonight at 9 p.m. on HBO, the new WWII miniseries The Pacific airs. For the past two months HBO has been airing weekly, the epic companion Band of Brothers from 2001, as a build up. Band of Brothers is available on DVD now and was quite possibly and arguably the best and most expensive miniseries ever produced. There is also a documentary that ties actual experiences from Easy Company, the company that the miniseries followed through the beaches of Normandy, the liberation of Holland and the push to drive back the Nazis from Bastogne and the Rhine and into Germany during 1942-1945. Its called We Stand Alone Together, and it compiles actual stories and footage from all the battles. The full feature is located in the link.

The reason why EVERYONE should watch and read about these experiences, is because they are the most important acts of humanity to come out of the 20th century. The reason we can do the things we do, the reason we can have the things we have and go the places we go is simply because of the courageous and heroic acts of the brave men and women who faught and died in the World Wars.

So the next time you complain about your cell phone range, your stupid car and the fact that there is a line up at the club, shut the fuck up and relax, at least your not stuck in a fox hole in Bastogne, waist deep in someone elses shit, with German artillery shells landing all around you in the middle of February.

Billy Eggleston is a tough photographer to discuss, mostly because I wouldn’t know where to begin, or stop for that matter. I mean, I have loads of awe for his vision and his pursuit of it, because in so many ways, he is the father of modern fine-art photography. He brought the colour to fine art photography, the irony, and the vernacular, and pretty much anything you see in colour hanging in art galleries today or marked up in the portfolios and facebook albums of the amatuers and professionals alike.

 I feel a certain relationship to his photographs, they’re the type of photographs that when once viewed, plague your everyday visions. You seem to tell yourself that everything you see should be photographed. His photos remind us of an excited kind of nostalgia. Eggleston once commented on the fact that everything around him was so ugly, to which his friend responded “Well, take photos of the ugly stuff then.” Indeed, it can be seen that what he seemed to do was not just take photos of the ugly and mundane but transform them into beauty. The ordinary is gorgeous.