directingfilm:

The Most Influential Filmmaker You’ve Never Heard Of: 

I still refer to Lenny Lipton’s 1972 book Independent Filmmaking as a resource for low-cost celluloid (not digital) production.  A recent interview by Don Diego Ramirez showed me that Lenny has done more in his life than just write a few books on 8mm and 16mm production.  I was amazed by the breadth of his work.  Creativity that truly knows no bounds. Some highlights:

• He pioneered early documentary filmmaking - with films such as Revelation of the Foundation.
• He pioneered 3D cinema.  Note the photo above.  The man is holding two Super 8 cameras: this is, in essence, how 3D films are shot today.  Lenny even wrote an article in that magazine about shooting 3D Super 8 films in the 1970s.
• Authored the seminal book Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema (1982).  
• His 3D work was used by NASA in the Mars Rover.
• James Cameron acknowledged Lenny’s work in the making of Avatar.
• He wrote Puff, the Magic Dragon with Peter Yarrow, later made popular by Yarrow’s group Peter, Paul and Mary.
• He also kept company with Tim Leary and Ken Kesey, novelist of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and lived with Salvador Dali.

Don’t just be a filmmaker.  Be an artist.  Read more about this fascinating filmmaker here.

~ü

coolchicksfromhistory:

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, 1961.

Joan, a 19 year old Freedom Rider, was sentenced to two months in prison for her involvement in the integration of a Jackson, Mississippi bound train.  She served more than the required two months because each addition day reduced her $200 fine by $3.

In the Fall of 1961, Joan transferred from Duke University to historically black Tougaloo Southern Christian College because she felt integration should be a two way street. 

Today Joan is a retired teaching assistant living in Virginia and mother to five sons.  After the 2008 election she brought her Obama pin to the grave of Medgar Evers.  

journalismworkshops:

quatermain:

OS X Programmers/Companies: Read This

So, yesterday Apple launched the new iBooks Author application for the Mac. It looks great, produces fantastic dynamic content, and more than one person assumed that it was outputting ePub3 files. However, that was not the case, as is extensively documented by Daniel Glazman (co-chairman of the WC3 CSS working group) on his blog:

A wysiwyg EPUB3 editor will not be able to edit correctly an IBA document because of the different mimetype and the proprietary CSS extensions. iBooks Author is not able to reopen a iBook it exported in their pseudo-EPUB3 format because there is no Import mechanism! That means that on one hand EPUB3 readers cannot reuse a document created by iBooks Author because of its HTML/CSS/Namespaces extensions, and on the other iBooks Author cannot create an iBook from an existing EPUB3 document because it cannot import it.

In actuality, it even goes a little further than this.

Read More

I’ve been using iBooks Author for the last couple of days, and I am loving it. It seems like a great way to produce interactive books for the iPad, but leaves out all of the other e-readers. I’d love to see what comes of his idea to create an easy to use application for making standard interactive EPUB3 files.

shapefutures:

We set aside one day of the year to return to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s values when we should be educating about and exemplifying them all year round.

Every year we remark on how far we’ve come in pursuing Dr. King’s dream, when these days I frequently see more steps backward than forward, frequently in backlash and fear of actual progress.

The same pieces of biography, the same speeches, are retold again and again, but how often do we actually examine Dr. King’s life in a way that shows people that he was human, prone to anger, and that his rooting in nonviolence was a conscious channeling of that anger rather than an absence or a quelling of it?

MLK was a hero and a role model and if we truly believe that, we need to strive to be more LIKE him, not to put him on a pedestal and dedicate an annual service-day in his name.  We need to be critical of the institutions in place and look for solutions to the causes of continuing social injustice, not ways to alleviate or mask the symptoms.  We need to treat one another like human beings and unite with others in working toward true equality.  We need to acknowledge inequality and social injustice and actively work against it.  When it applies, we need to recognize our own privilege and use whatever that may grant us to be active forces in trying to dismantle that imbalance of power.  We need to call others out, to educate, to act.

Many of the people who read this blog probably do much of this already, and are always willing to do more.  Some do so to the point of burnout. Much of this is just preaching to the choir — but maybe some small piece of it will spark a new idea somewhere.

We cannot be complacent in the recognition of a great man in such a way that deters us from continuing his work.  And if that is what MLK Day is going to be, it falls short of representing the man it’s supposed to honor.  If we could extend the message of that one day and connect it to our thoughts and actions throughout the year…then, we might have something I think he could be proud of.  But we can’t pat ourselves on the back.  Not yet.

world-shaker:

1…1-2…1-2…

fastcompany:

There is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered a “normal” 40-hour work week.

The Case For A 21-Hour Work Week

It would create jobs and stop the unsustainable cycle of rampant consumerism. Sure, it would also require a wholesale reordering of our economy, but that might happen whether we like it or not.

Read on->

fastcompany:

“It’s irresponsible not to use the tools of the day,” he charges. “People say, Oh, if I master Twitter, I’ve got it figured out. That’s right, but it’s also so wrong. If you master those things and stop, you’re just going to get killed by the next thing. Flexibility of skills leads to flexibility of options. To see what you can’t see coming, you’ve got to embrace larger principles.”

Generation Flux: Baratunde Thurston

“Isn’t video editing too complicated and time consuming?
Magisto - magical video editing. In a click!”    

I’ve always wanted a computer that could edit for me. Looks like this is the start. Looking forward to when it can pick out the best soundbites from an interview and put them together too.       

omerm:

Edwin

(Source: highsnobiety.com)

i12bent:

The Dead…

T.S. Eliot, major American-born, naturalized English poet - died this day in 1965, aged 76, from emphysema, aggravated by decades of heavy smoking…

—

“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Others