This is pretty self-explanatory. David Kassan. iPad. Painting.

Source: Drawn!

Image by Yutaka Tsutano, licensed under Creative Commons.

These days, the word porn has morphed into a blanket term meaning raw, unfiltered stuff and/or things. For example, people refer to “food porn” when they’re perusing beautiful, extremely focused and well-lit pictures of delicious-looking food. The usage pops up all the time, but this may be a personal favorite: It's called Bookshelf Porn, and ‘tis dope. Maybe you’re not into bookshelves. In which case I pity the fool.

(Thanks, Swiss Miss.)

Source: Bookshelf Porn

Image by Let Ideas Compete, licensed under Creative Commons.

Oliver Stone is not a subtle filmmaker. His projects, like the director himself, tend to voice bold opinions and provoke strong responses—and his latest, South of the Border, about the new wave of leftist leaders in Latin America, is no different. Recently on Utne.com, critic Rob Nelson called the film a “countermyth” to prevailing media coverage and came away impressed by its entertainment value if not its evenhandedness. Fellow critic Anthony Kaufman, however, sees the film as crossing over into “counterpropaganda,” glossing over Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s human rights abuses with its “reductive calculations.” Apparently, asking people how they liked the film is like asking them who shot J.F.K.: You’ll get a different answer every time. —The Editors

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has received a bum rap. Along with his comrades in the Latin American “New Left,” Chavez has routinely been called a dictator, Stalinist and “menace to the West.” If you watch enough cable news, you might think the former soldier was conspiring with Iran to launch a military attack on U.S. soil at any given moment. Such preposterous claims require neutralizing, which is why Oliver Stone’s new documentary South of the Border offers a useful counterpoint to the dominant conservative propaganda that bellows constantly from U.S. politicians and media outlets.

But in the race to depict Chavez and his cohorts in Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil, among others, as part of a widespread and faultless “Bolivarian” revolution, Stone’s project suffers from the same reductive calculations that we often get from the countries’ right-wing critics.

Dictatorships or pure socialist democracies? An axis of evil or an axis of hope? The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between. But in Stone’s documentary reality, the extreme poles are reified, with wacko Fox News pundits on one side, deriding Chavez as a “coco” drug addict, and the president himself, on the other, depicted as a teddy-bear-ish savior, hugging random passerby and preaching utopian dreams.

“Who is Hugo Chavez?” asks Stone early in the film, as part of his running narration. The documentary begins with a short history lesson: Venezuela’s economic collapse in 1989, Chavez’s failed military coup in 1992, his presidential election victory in 1997, and the shocking and short-lived CIA-supported unrest that briefly removed Chavez from power in April 2002. The street violence and voluble political roller coaster ride of that infamous week gets a more comprehensive investigation in the 2003 documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Nonetheless, as the opening salvo in South of the Border, this crisply edited history lesson on Venezuela’s ups and downs, and the United States’ and International Monetary Fund’s efforts to suppress progressive change in the country, makes for a strong and compelling introduction.

But then Stone switches emphasis to Chavez the man, producing a hagiographic portrait and linking him none too subtly to Simon Bolivar, the legendary 19th century Venezuelan leader who fought for independence from Spain. We see Chavez’s birthplace, and get to know the politician as a human being rather than a combative soundbite from the news. In one bright ironic scene, Stone and Chavez are visiting a newly constructed corn-processing plant to show off Venezuela’s thriving state-supported industry, and Chavez wryly jokes, “This is where we’re building the Iranian atomic bomb.” Stone quickly replies, “Don’t say that!” perhaps fearing what Glenn Beck might do if he got hold of the quote.

More problematic is that Stone pre-empts any inkling of levelheaded criticism. Stone's narration even criticizes “human rights” as merely “a buzz phrase,” evoking accountability only to point out the double standards of its usage: “Columbia has a far worse human rights record,” says Stone, “but gets a pass in the media that Chavez does not.” And that means we shouldn’t take note of Venezuela’s human rights record?

Stone’s apparent willful ignorance of Chavez’s faults undermines his film’s legitimacy. By excluding any mention of Chavez’s penchant for prosecuting dissenters, his undermining of judicial independence, and his wholesale consolidation of political power into the president’s office (see Human Rights Watch’s 2008 Report, “A Decade Under Chávez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela”), the film comes off more as counterpropaganda than elucidating commentary.

It’s only in the film’s final moments—seemingly tossed in and given little explanation—that Chavez’s autocratic tendencies are evoked, when Argentina’s former president and current First Husband Nestor Kirchner suggests that a fair and democratic government requires 20 candidates on the ballot, not just one.

Indeed, when Stone leaves Chavez for a cross-country tour, traveling from Bolivia to Argentina, Paraguay to Brazil and Ecuador to Cuba, the film’s widening focus is welcome. With each stop, Stone hammers home the film’s ultimate and most valid point: that IMF policy has crippled Latin America. And the country’s move towards social movements and self-sufficiency—and its dream of a united South American economic powerhouse with a single currency—is the ultimate kiss-off to U.S. hegemony.

Which is all well and good. But Stone’s continued efforts to mitigate the rabble-rousing reputations of Chavez and Morales feels a tad disingenuous—showing them riding a bike, kicking a soccer ball around, and kissing children.

It’s only in Stone’s brief conversation with Paraguayan bishop-turned-president Fernando Lugo that the positive potential of progressive politics in Latin America truly feels authentic, democratic—“of the people and for the people.” As Lugo says, “Fifteen years ago, no one would have ever thought that an indigenous person would be president, that two women would be presidents, that a metal worker would be a president, that a soldier would be president and least of all, that a bishop would be president,” he adds. “We are committed to honest, transparency and to give back dignity to our institutions with more social justice.”

Coming from the soft-spoken and sympathetic Lugo, the film’s propagandistic tone briefly slips away and one feels a tinge of sincerity at its core. Maybe Stone is on to something, after all.

Image by Jose Ibanez, courtesy of South of the Border.

What would you do with nine clunky cigarette-vending machines? Louis Rastelli, an author and cultural historian based in Montreal, decided to fill them with small-batch art objects like books, sketches, cassette tapes, short films, zines, photography, and bedazzled finger puppets. “Any piece of art small enough to fit in a box the size of a standard cigarette pack” can be sold, reports Taddle Creek. The vending machines, which Rastelli has renamed Distrobotos, can be found in cafes and libraries—and even some bars. Most importantly, the Distrobotos cut the middleman out of the arts business. Each item sells for $2—and unlike at a big-box retailer or consignment shop, artists are taking home nearly 90 percent of the sale price. Talk about a smokin’ deal.

Source: Taddle Creek

Image by sfllaw, licensed under Creative Commons.

Oliver Stone is not a subtle filmmaker. His projects, like the director himself, tend to voice bold opinions and provoke strong responses—and his latest, South of the Border, about the new wave of leftist leaders in Latin America, is no different. Critic Rob Nelson calls the film a “countermyth” to prevailing media coverage and came away impressed by its entertainment value if not its evenhandedness. Fellow critic Anthony Kaufman, however, also writing on Utne.com, sees the film as crossing over into “counterpropaganda,” glossing over Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s human rights abuses with its “reductive calculations.” Apparently, asking people how they liked the film is like asking them who shot J.F.K.: You’ll get a different answer every time. —The Editors

A suitably flashy attraction at the Cannes Film Festival last month, director Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps stars Shia LaBeouf and Carey Mulligan as a young Manhattan power-couple facing the potential loss of its fortune—and that of a hot commodity in utero. A next-generation Wall Street in more ways than one, the bloated sequel finds Stone staring down the global economic crisis for two and a half hours, only to conclude that what the world needs now is . . . more babies!

Luckily for fans of the intermittently radical filmmaker, another new Stone movie has arrived this year with somewhat more to say about the evils of predatory capitalism. South of the Border, Stone’s documentary tour of Latin America, fingers the International Monetary Fund for its role in oppressing the economies of Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and four other Latin countries. The director’s hero is Hugo Chavez, and his enemy is the mainstream media, which has vilified the Venezuelan president for daring to resist the pull of U.S.-led corporate interests.

Not to say that Stone has left his Hollywood credentials at home. South of the Border often plays like a nostalgic star vehicle for the camera-loving Chavez, whom Stone at one point directs to mount a kid’s tiny bike and tool it around the modest backyard where he used to play with his grandma. Elsewhere on the road trip, the filmmaker chews coca leaves and kicks a soccer ball with Bolivian president Evo Morales, and cheekily offers to broker a deal on behalf of Paraguayan leader Fernando Lugo. “Chavez would make you a loan,” Stone assures Lugo, “if I talked to him.” (Money never sleeps, indeed.)

That Stone appears more of a celebrity journalist than an investigative one hardly diminishes the documentary’s value, at least not as entertainment. Admiringly regarding Chavez as a “bull,” Stone has made a movie that’s entirely of a piece with his 2003 hagiography of Fidel Castro, Comandante, whose HBO producers deemed too fawning for broadcast.

Stone, whom HBO persuaded to ask tougher questions of Castro in a substitute doc called Looking for Fidel, has been mostly silent on the sad fate of Comandante. But judging from South of the Border, a Cinema Libre release that strongly implicates CNN in the promulgation of anti-Chavez propaganda, the director might say that Time-Warner-owned networks have a problem with one-sided reportage only when it comes from the left.

“Millions of people watch these [cable news networks] consistently, night and day, throughout North America,” Stone announces at the start of South of the Border. “Do they believe what they see?” The film’s opening salvo includes a George W. Bush-era CNN report that “leftist menace” Chavez had “ripped off” ExxonMobil—by establishing his nation’s own multibillion-dollar oil project. (Only weeks ago did an international court finally rule in favor of Venezuela in ExxonMobil’s lawsuit.)

As much a countermyth as Stone’s JFK, South of the Border salutes what it sees as a new hotbed of radical energy. The film expresses solidarity not only with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela—the world’s third largest supplier of petroleum—but with other Latin American nations that support Chavez’s model of independence from U.S. economic influence.

Albeit more fun than stimulating, Stone’s documentary is forceful enough to have inspired blowback even before its opening in New York this Friday. An item posted this week by James Hirsen on Examiner.com delights at the news that South of the Border has bombed in Venezuelan theaters, and jokes that Stone needn’t worry because the film will be a “big hit with Ivy League Marxist professors, socialist public union leaders and the 27 people who watch MSNBC.” Millions of CNN fans will likely prefer Stone’s other new film, Money Never Sleeps, wherein even Michael Douglas’s greedy Gordon Gekko proves capable of spiritual redemption.

Photo by Jose Ibanez, courtesy of South of the Border.

Every time I think I’ve grown tired of gimmicky global music pairings—klezmer meets calypso! chanting monks go techno!—I run into another combination that suggests there’s some deep universal taproot of musical expression. The latest strange bedfellows I’ve come across: Appalachian and Nepalese music. The musicians behind the documentary The Mountain Music Project—A Musical Odyssey from Appalachia to Himalaya set out in search of threads between the two traditions, and from the looks (and sounds) of this trailer they found plenty:

The Bluegrass Blog reports that the film has been nominated for best music feature in the World Music and Independent Film Festival.

Source: The Mountain Music Project, The Bluegrass Blog

I don’t know whether to ride on Kara Ginther’s custom bike saddles or display them in a gallery—and fittingly, her designs have been put to both uses. By meticulously hand-tooling Brooks leather saddles, the choice of discerning bikers from slouching hipsters to tweed-clad dandies, Ginther rides that fine line between art, craft, and style. Here are some of my favorite works from her Flickr stream.

A trio of strikingly different designs:

A nautical-themed commission in which “I had a lot of fun playing with waves and water,” notes Ginther:

A paisley-style design for Ahren Rogers, owner of Banjo Cycles in Madison, Wisconsin:

This holiday pattern was “inspired by Scandinavian sweaters and toasty nights by the fire,” according to Ginther:

This fancy folk-style saddle “was commissioned to be a display piece,” notes Ginther. “I wouldn’t usually put this much color on a saddle that was to be seriously ridden."

A fleur-de-lis and other floral designs dress up a herringbone pattern in this striking black saddle:

Finally, here’s where the magic happens. This is Ginther in her studio in Madison:

(Thanks, Bike Hugger.)

Source: Kara Ginther

Images copyright Kara Ginther, courtesy of the artist.

Depending on your perspective, Hostess Twinkies are either a) a tasty treat or b) a disgusting abomination wrapped in plastic. But have you ever wondered what makes these spongy snacks so yummy/horrific? Photographer Dwight Eschliman decided to find out. For his 37 or So Ingredients project, he individually photographed each component. Raised by a "health nut," Eschliman says he never saw a Twinkie until he left home for college. Now a father, he thinks a lot about what makes up the foods that we eat. Check out more of his work at his website.

Images courtesy of Dwight Eschliman

The most beautiful maps are somehow useless. You look at them not to decide where you’re going, but rather to see constellations that are rarely visible: details that, from the ground, never coalesce into a coherent picture. Eric Fischer has fashioned a set of maps that depict just such constellations. Using photographs from Flickr and Picasa, Fischer has placed a colored mark on a map where each picture was taken. As he explains:

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can't be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven't taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

The results (above is Stockholm) trace where people go and what they photograph, arcs and blocks and spangles of presence.

(Thanks, The Map Room.)

Source: Eric Fischer

Image by Eric Fisher, licensed under Creative Commons.

In literature and film, those with disabilities often appear as antagonists, or as weirdos, or as wounded souls in need of rebirth. Think of Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump. Or look even to Clifford Chatterley in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The same is true in speculative fiction, but Redstone Science Fiction wants to change all that. Check out the magazine’s new contest!:

Redstone Science Fiction is calling for contest submissions that incorporate the values discussed in the essay The Future Imperfect by Sarah Einstein.

What does a world, or space station, or whatever look like when it has been designed to be accessible to everyone and how would people live together there?

The submissions should portray disability as a simple fact, not as something to be overcome or something to explain why a character is evil. The submissions should also incorporate the portrayal of disability in a world where universal access is a shared cultural value.

This could be tricky, since they’re seeking material in which disability is an essential ingredient, yet also an element of the background, not exactly the main action. Are you up to it?

(Thanks, io9.)

Source: Redstone Science Fiction

Image by {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}, licensed under Creative Commons.

On May 3^rd, the book blog GalleyCat announced its “World’s Longest Literary Remix” contest. As Jason Boog explained at the time:

We are proud to launch the World's Longest Literary Remix contest today, as nearly 150 pre-registered GalleyCat readers will rewrite a Horatio Alger novel for fun and prizes. The contest concludes on Monday, June 7th.

These GalleyCat readers signed up to rewrite one page of Joe's Luck: Always Wide Awake. When the contest concludes, we will publish the remixed text as a free digital book--complete with illustrations.

But check this out: one contributor—a freelance game designer going by the handle Sparky—has submitted her entry as a mashup of the old Apple II game, Oregon Trail, and her one page from Alger’s novel. If I could be more delighted by this, I would ford the rapids in a tiny wagon with my over-large family and then contract typhoid fever. But I can't, because this is awesome.

Source: GalleyCat

Image by eyllom, licensed under Creative Commons.

Are you looking for a laborious artistic project to fill your summer hours? Consider these globe-making instructions—all geared towards mapping your local city—from the folks at English Russia. There might be some grammatical errors, but you can’t misspell enthusiasm. Actually, you can. It’s a challenging word. But, seriously, make your own globe!

(Thanks, The Map Room.)

Source: English Russia

Image by Minnesota Historical Society, licensed under Creative Commons.