One of the best YouTube moments for me this year was the recut trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Lately, trailers have become mockeries of themselves, either giving away too much of the movie (I feel like I’ve already seen all I need to of the new Bond) or falling into a formulaic pattern that often renders a good flick into generic drivel. It seems that very few films are willing to take a risk and get creative with how they promote their work, instead surrendering to the tried and …

A very cool collection of Russian covers of Bret Eason Ellis novels, the above being for The Informers…
…a Kubrickesque fake trailer for Lunar Park on YouTube…
…and Bret Easton Ellis on the Why the Teletubbies are Evil.
More on Ellis over at Not An Exit.

Snow is a rare thing in Vancouver especially in November. Normally it stays up on the mountains enticing us to strap boards to our feet and hurl ourselves downhill. But for the past 24 hours, this city has been getting dumped on.
Feeling somewhat ill-equipped to tackle the winter wonderland outside my window, I’ve chosen to spend the afternoon holed up with a roaring fire, a glass of beaujolais and the task of figuring out what killed our garburator. But there have been many others out enjoying this uncommon event …

The Black Flag logo by Raymond Pettibon.

Currently showing at the Met and corresponding with a book of the same name, Robert Polidori’s New Orleans After the Flood: Photographs hauntingly documents the post-Katrina devastation of the once Big Easy. With the same passion that affected his photographic essay on Chernobyl in 2001, Polidori once again succeeds in capturing the magnitude of loss and human folly in each frame.
For more info check out John Updike’s review of After the Flood in the New York Times Review of Books.

I have been well aware lately that my media viewing habits are turning increasingly from my television to the computer. Even those few shows that I do enjoy from the paltry mainstream offerings are generally viewed on my own time by downloading episodes from p2p and watching them on Quicktime.
And then there’s the Youtube phenomenon. I am a complete addict. The variety, freedom and sheer excitement of hunting down some rare or nostalgic clip takes the concept of channel surfing to a whole new level. It comes as no …

On June 13th, 2006, artist Jeroen Witvliet bought a number of newspapers and proceeded to cut out images from their pages. From this collection, he would select those which he responded to most and paint them. In doing so, they became something new; stripped of its context and caption, the painting forced you to confront the image for what it was.
As Jeroen writes:
“I come across images of people described as insurgents and a mention of their nationality, no other description given. Persons are being categorized and abstracted by …

A search for “skateboarding” on YouTube garners almost 70,000 results, which is not surprising seeing as the hand held video camera has been a required component of the sport since the very beginning. Most of the clips that you’ll find are homespun amateurs documenting clumsy kick flips off the sidewalk curb. But others such as Rodney Mullen, Daewon Song or Stefan Janoski, are pure poetry.