reminds me of a video i saw probably 6 months ago by AKQA, another san francisco based operation. someone remind me why i left again?

microwaves sing jingle bells to you.

incidentally, my friends over at Hal Riney partnered with Chau for a new spot, directed by one of their favorite directors, Tim Goodsall.

I <3 HOTDOGS has quickly become one of my new favorite sites.

Reaching across just about the widest breadth of film history, I <3 HOTDOGS does little more than select a handful of stills from movies, but their shot selection and consistency keep me coming back time and time again. there’s something to be said for simplicity.

As it turns out, this interview Pance and I did/shot with Jonah in April of 2007 for ‘Sup was both enlightening (acronym-wise) and, looking back, a fun, off-hand prediction of things that have since come to pass. Namely, Claire! She’s a full-fledged partner, and fully amazing, on the(ir) new album, See Mystery Lights. Love it.

Nice one, bros.

This is quite possibly the best live auction cable access show ever to come out of the great state of Oklahoma.

Great tenors don’t go on diets: they know great tailors! According to his dossier, Beniamino Gigli was a tailor’s apprentice when he was 10.

This entry continues my series of images of old guys that inpsire me.

In 2007, Partizan constituent, Saam Farahmand (27 at the time) was crowned “Best Director” at the CAD Music Video Awards, after a prolific year of creating promos for Good Shoes:

These Puritans:

and a pile of videos for The Klaxons:

And he’s only gotten better since then; creating a globe-trotting documentary about SoulWax, shooting commercials for Sagem and this stunning spot for chocolatier Anthon Berg:

And most recently, Saam directed this fantastic short film for Alexander McQueen’s collaboration with Puma.

As if this all wasn’t enough, Saam’s opened an art gallery in London to help expose emerging artists, and continues to produce films with his beautiful mix of simplicity, effortless chic and a twist of sci-fi. I for one can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Have you ever solved one of these? Well that’s called CAPTCHA and this is the dude who made it up. It basically started as a test to determine legitimate users vs. spamming software and it worked very well. But Luis thought he was wasting too much of Humanity’s time (±1.666 Million hours in 2007). So what did he do? With the advent of reCAPTCHA, every time you solve one of those annoying verification puzzles you are helping to decipher and digitize some of the 150+ years of non-digital, non-computer recognizable NY Times archives that exist as scans or microfilm. Keep in mind, this started last year and Ahn expects to be done by the end of 2009.

Some other interesting notes:

The Empire State Building took 7 million human-hours to build.

The Panama Canal took 20 million human-hours to build.

9 Billion Human-Hours of solitaire were played in 2003.

Granted, the energy output of a game of solitaire is not equal to one of manual labor, but think about the scale of this. Thanks to Nova Science Now for bringing this up.

John Cassavetes life is the missing John Cassavetes picture, and in 1984’s “I’m Almost Not Crazy”, documentarian Michael Ventura follows Cassavetes through the production of his “last film” “Love Streams”. (1986’s “Big Trouble” is actually the last film he directed, but it was not his script, and has long been speculated that he took the project on merely for the paycheck.)

Cassavetes, known for his fiery disposition, and his ability to evoke incredibly powerful performances from his actors, is in true form here. No holds are barred, and in a time where teams of publicists keep filmmakers from really speaking their mind (well, most of the time at least) it’s refreshing to see someone unmoved by politics and unthreatened by studios public relations departments; saying whatever he wants, whenever he wants.

Watch the entire 60 minute documentary right here: