“Back to basics!” cry the Lumieres. Here’re some snips from the Lumiere Manifesto:
Lumiere video arises from the tradition of the French Lumiere brothers. Credited with some of the first footage captured, in 1895, the Lumieres are also recognized for holding the first public film screening, showing ten shorts that lasted only twenty minutes total. At the time, Louis Lumiere stated, “The cinema is an invention without a future,” believing that everyday photography and video [or film, as the case was] was ultimately nonsensical. Yet, we stand firm that Lumiere principles are essential to our existence as artists, media producers, visual creatures, and world citizens. Continue Reading »
Sometime in the mid-90s, I received a manuscript from Sarah Hafner. The result was a chapbook of stories called Some Girls. Sarah’s writing was hilarious and cutting at the same time, so when she asked me to consider her novel, The Elements of Style, I said, Sure, send it on over. I loved it and tired for a long time to raise the capital to publish this fine novel. It never came to be, and eventually I sold Permeable Press. Thankfully, Vivisphere bought The Elements of Style and brought it out as a handsome paperback. As one reviewer put it:
A mature Salinger arrives on the scene and it’s a woman! Continue Reading »
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
Harper Collins, 2007
Cloth, $26.95
A third of the world’s fossil fuel habit goes to supporting agriculture. Though that’s not the reason for the rise in organically grown food, it’s a good one. (The main reason is concern for the health of body, soul and soil.) A third of the world’s oil goes to growing and trucking food around the planet—and, in the U.S. at least, food transportation is tax deductible.
No wonder the industrial food chain is so addictive. Not only can we get what we want when we want it (apples in late winter and spring from New Zealand, to give just one example), but we can get it cheap, too. Continue Reading »
Another in our series of educational science videos, this time we visit the Bonneville Fish Hatchery to dive into the mysterious lives of sturgeon. Dr. Sullivan informs us that these ancient creatures, which can live as long as two hundred million years, are in no way related to science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon.
You can type your own message into the placards from Pennebroker’s famous 1966 film of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” You can read Puck’s message or make your own. This is — obviously, I guess — a marketing thang, so let me help out by suggesting you buy six or seven Bob Dylan CDs. Puck could use the lunch money.
Since this Dylan thing plays on the edge of the Creative Commons (in a strictly controlled way, of course — there’s really nothing being placed in the Commons there), let me point you to the pirates over at Torrentfreak, who have leaked something like 700 megs of email from MediaDefender, a group that is playing the BitTorrent field like undercover cops. Are they collaborators, hitmen, or what for the record and movie industry? In any case, one way to keep the Commons open is to make like a hydra and propagate.
Fox is using intimidation tactics on its affiliates to get them to run pro-war in Iran (read it again: Iran) programming. Fox’s “political experts” (AKA poli-spurts) cite a build up of nuclear weapons as a good reason to start the bombing in five minutes. Read all about it here and sign the networx open letter here. And then go watch some videos over at the Willie Nelson Peace Research Institute.
I knew Kirk was a talented guy, so when Dr. Sullivan wrote to say, Check out this guy’s flickr stream, I was pretty sure I was in for a treat. But I didn’t think my mind would be blown by the man’s irrepressible use of color.
Of this old Plymouth, Kirk says:
I visited a junkyard near home yesterday and took these shots. It seems this yard was abandoned in the late 50’s since all the cars seem to be that old. Continue Reading »
God is fungi. God is the stuff of the web—the food web, the web of life, call it what you will—and without fungi, we’d be less than dead; we never would have existed—“we” meaning every living thing on the planet. Fungi are everywhere, and everywhere essential, and what is god if not the ultimate mixmaster, the one who breaks it all down so the big bang beat can begin again?
“The process of decay,” Lucy Kavaler writes, “is… essential in making room on this small planet for new living things.” Kavaler wrote that line just a couple years after Carson’s Silent Spring was published. “The development of life on earth is related to the evolution of fungi.” Continue Reading »
“Back to basics!” cry the Lumieres. Here’re some snips from the Lumiere Manifesto:
Sometime in the mid-90s, I received a manuscript from Sarah Hafner. The result was a chapbook of stories called 
. Sarah’s writing was hilarious and cutting at the same time, so when she asked me to consider her novel, The Elements of Style, I said, Sure, send it on over. I loved it and tired for a long time to raise the capital to publish this fine novel. It never came to be, and eventually I sold Permeable Press. Thankfully, Vivisphere bought 
A third of the world’s fossil fuel habit goes to supporting agriculture. Though that’s not the reason for the rise in organically grown food, it’s a good one. (The main reason is concern for the health of body, soul and soil.) A third of the world’s oil goes to growing and trucking food around the planet—and, in the U.S. at least, food transportation is tax deductible.
You can type your own message into the placards from Pennebroker’s famous 1966 film of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” You can read 
God is fungi. God is the stuff of the web—the food web, the web of life, call it what you will—and without fungi, we’d be less than dead; we never would have existed—“we” meaning every living thing on the planet. Fungi are everywhere, and everywhere essential, and what is god if not the ultimate mixmaster, the one who breaks it all down so the big bang beat can begin again?