maurag.com

This guys work is borderline too steampunk for me..but I absolutely love and respect what he is doing. Crafting what he loves with his hands. Merging his artwork with his passion on wheels. Good stuff. This video is outstanding.

Check more about him here:

http://www.chabottengineering.com
http://www.zero-eng.com/ - more harley inspired

A tad on the long side but really a pretty strong effort, super clever. Loving the soundtrack too, which is also mixed by the artist Karim Rejib

Thank you Cool Hunting for a sweet video/song. I am loving the Afropean 1970’s chic vibe.

LE JOUR D’APRES / SIKU YA BAADAYE (INDEPENDANCE CHA-CHA) from BALOJI on Vimeo.

So..this video from Invincible was banned from MTVu for being “suicidal”. How is it that this video is viewed as more of a threat than the regular line up of hiphop videos. For real. A gay jewish hip hop emcee writes a song about depression and that’s deemed “too problematic”? Weird. Read more here:

Salon Article

Invincibles site

Thanks Jaxon. That is beautiful.

My new friend Chip (see reservation art down below) turned me on to this Academy Award winning movie. It’s frankly incredible that I hadn’t known about it before. The movie is about the recent history of the Navajo and Hopi tribes and their tangling with the US Government and Peabody Coal. Relocation, environmental hazards, genocide, mistreatment, corporate and government power, coal and uranium strip mining, water rights, native american traditions, prophesy…this has been going on for over 100 years. This film has friends of the family in it, locales that are within miles from my childhood home. I shared the bus with these indians, some of my best friends in the day were from this area..my brothers wife is from this area, they were married in the traditional way….it’s all processing with me right now. I’m not sure there is any area in the United States right now that is as wrought with issues as this area. All under my nose.

The movie, while interesting and revealing, should certainly be taken with a grain of salt..and a big scoop of blind eye for the horrible sound track and low production values. It looks like its from the 1970’s but it’s not. Good on em for trying to get the word out though.

BTW…seriously…the movie Avatar..you can NOT tell me isn’t inspired in some way by this story. Effort to move the natives off their sacred land so “unoptanium” (uranium) could be mined, kill the tree of life, natives understood balance of mother earth and sanctity of life…Na’vi (Navajo)…come on. Unfortunately…nothing is simple or easy. Nuclear power is a pretty great power source..does it all have to be handled so crookedly though?

More good stuff from W+K.

We are all joined to each other by invisible strings. Not just the people we know and love. Even strangers who live in different lands. We kid ourselves that events occur in isolation. We think our thoughts don’t change anyone’s mood - and that our actions will change nobody else’s life than our own. But though we can pull some strings more easily than others - and though we may try to stop our own strings from being pulled - we are connected.

Jonathon Cainer

I used to call this the undercurrent of consciousness..I think it’s true. Not just on an emotional level..but on a intellectual level, and maybe even some sort of unseen physical level..once you get into investigating synapsis and neurons and other things that are tough for me to understand. Not as unrelated as this might seem..but I just saw Avatar..which seems to weave a lot of American Indian and Eastern Indian beliefs, fantasy aesthetics and left wing politics into some strange concoction of 3-D multi-million dollar imax’ness. I didn’t think I was going to like it much..but I feel for the 3-d hook..and I dug it. Interesting..and visually compelling. It’s still your standard Hollywood shallow throw all the expensive effects in and no one will notice the bad script or cheesy lines or over acting kinda piece..but still. Go see. In the theater. With the glasses on an imax screen..don’t gyp yourself. (and watch this trailer in the HD version..yum)