Another Hero Dog
Service Dog Saves Blind Owner’s Life During House Fire
By David Chang
A service dog is being hailed a hero after she jumped into action and saved her blind owner’s life by alerting authorities to a house fire in Philadelphia Thursday morning.
The fire started inside Maria Colon’s home on the 4300 block of Oakmont Street in the city’s Holmesburg section. The woman was asleep at the time, but awoke at the smell of smoke.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, It’s smoke. And I can’t breathe,'” Colon, a Puerto Rico-native who lost her eyesight in 1992, told NBC10’s George Spencer Friday.
She shouted the word “danger” to her service dog, a golden Labrador named Yolanda, prompting the dog to dial 911 on a specialized phone. Yolanda had been trained to step in and call for help when Colon used the emergency word.
“I hear the phone — tke, tke, tke. And she’s growling. And I said, ‘Oh my lord, she called the police,'” Colon recalled.
Remington Steele Instagrams The Art Market
Are Pierce Brosnan and High-Profile Collectors Really Using Instagram to Buy Art?
Photo: Instagram/@piercebrosnanofficial.
The New York Times has finally caught on to a little trend we discovered almost two years ago: collectors—many of them high profile—using Instagram to purchase art from galleries and auction houses.
What took the Grey Lady so long to catch on to this wonderfully democratizing trend? We’re unsure, but we do know that it was one Pierce Brosnan who exposed the world of social media sales, which is hidden in plain sight.
In late April, Brosnan visited the showroom of Phillips auction house in London and posed for a quick photo in front of designer Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge, which he then posted to his Instagram account along with the caption “let the bidding commence.”
Later that week, the auction house broke the world record for a design object, selling the work for an impressive $3.7 million.
Mobstr vs. Pressure Wash
by Yahoo Makers
Graffiti buffs and street artists battle authorities and clean-up crews all the time, but they’re rarely as long or as good-natured as this one. A London-based street artist who uses the moniker Mobstr played cat and mouse for nearly an entire year with a determined and persistent cleaner. He finally conceded defeat and documented the battle on his site, mobster.org. “I cycled past this wall on the way to work for years,” Mobstr wrote. He noticed that when the surface was tagged in the red area, it was painted over, and when it was tagged on the bare brick, it was pressure washed. This gave way to full on battle that started on July 17th, 2014 and continued until just a few days ago.
Nikki Finke’s Hollywood Dementia
Nikki Finke Is Now Making Up Her Stories (Sort Of)
Photo: Jen Rosenstein
For Nikki Finke, fiction was always the enemy. “As a journalist, that was the worst thing you could say about something,” she says. “That’s fiction.”
In the years she spent covering the entertainment industry for the L.A. Times, L.A. Weekly, and her own Deadline website, Finke became famous — and famously feared — for telling the unvarnished (and highly entertaining) truth about everyone in Hollywood, even her own business partner, Jay Penske. “I am a very old-school journalist,” she says throatily over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “I believe you make the comfortable uncomfortable, and that’s the whole point of doing it. A friend of mine who is in the business always used to say, Why do you always act surprised when people hate you for something you have written? And I said, But it’s the truth! My feeling was always the truth trumps everything. You know, the point is to try and get at that. As uncomfortable and difficult as it is.”
One thing the truth doesn’t trump: non-compete clauses.
Last year, a legal battle with Penske over Deadline resulted in Finke walking away with a reported multi-million-dollar settlement and a sworn promise not to report about the industry for anyone else. For a while, it seemed Penske had done something people in the industry had been trying to do for years: Put Finke out of commission. Under their agreement, Finke couldn’t even go online and expound about the Sony hack — the kind of cataclysmic event that would have had the old Finke, who goes on reporting benders the way studio executives used to go on coke binges, sleepless for days.
Finke clears her throat. (“In 2010, I completely had an operation to remove a parathyroid and they paralyzed one of my vocal cords. I couldn’t talk, I would croak. Of course all the agents would go, ‘That’s so sexy.’”) “The hack presented Hollywood the way it really is,” she says. “It demonstrated what Hollywood insiders have always known.” (She’s being careful, but you can hear it in her voice: TOLDJA!)
Ernest Ranglin Rips It Up
Reggae giant Ernest Ranglin plays rare Seattle gig | Concert review
Guitarist Ernest Ranglin, one of the founders of ska and reggae guitar style, gave a rare performance in Seattle Saturday, Aug. 1.
If ever there was a “once in a blue moon” concert, it was Saturday night’s show at Nectar by Jamaican guitar legend Ernest Ranglin. The club billed the night as Ranglin’s first Seattle appearance, but backstage, the guitarist said he thought he may have played here before — perhaps with a jazz band, perhaps as a reggae artist, or maybe with a world music band.
If, at 83, Ranglin’s memory is a bit hazy, that can be forgiven considering his lengthy, multi-phased career. In an informal interview, he talked about his first records in the fifties, and his own influences, which included jazz great Charlie Christian.
But when Ranglin came onstage, his musical memory was flawless. Over the course of a 90-minute set with Avila, he put on a clinic that touched on jazz, ska and, most certainly, reggae guitar.
Though he’s modest, Ranglin was one of the inventors of reggae and played with Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff. Saturday he skipped their repertoire, and stuck to reggae classics like “Satta Masa Ghana.”
Mr. Lear Speaks His Mind
TV legend Norman Lear gives 6 strong opinions about American life
by James Hibberd • @JamesHibberd
(Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
Legendary TV producer Norman Lear stopped by the Televisison Critics Association’s press tour in Beverly Hills to promote an upcoming PBS documentary covering his career that’s set to debut next year. But what seemed to most impress reporters was the 93-year-old’s opinionated tangents, covering politics, TV, America and mindfullness. Below are six highlights from a press conference with the creator of hits like All in the Family, The Jeffersons and One Day at a Time:
— On politics: “Everybody knows me to be a progressive or a liberal or lefty or whatever. I think of myself as a bleeding-heart conservative. You will not f— with my Bill of Rights, my Constitution, my guarantees of political justice for all. But does my heart bleed for those who need help and aren’t getting the justice that the country promises them and the equal opportunity the country promises? Yes. I’m a bleeding heart, but I think myself to be a total social conservative. The people who are running just don’t seem to have America on their minds, not the America I think about. When I was a kid we were in love with America. As early as I can remember, there was a civics class in my public school. And I was in love with those things that guaranteed freedom before I learned that there were people who hated me because I was Jewish. I had a Bill of Rights and a Constitution, those words out of the Declaration that protected me. And I knew about that because we had civics in class. We don’t have that much in the country anymore. So before World War II or shortly after, we were in love with America because we understood what it was about and that’s what we were in love with. I believe everybody’s patriotic today. Everybody loves America. But I don’t need their flag plans to prove it. I’d like to go back to civics lessons.”
— On waking up: “I want to wake up feeling as I usually do, loving the day. The title of my book is Even This I Get to Experience, and that’s the way I basically look at life moment to moment. And now I’m looking out at you. I was 93 on Monday. So it took me 93 [years] and five days to get here. It took you every split second of each of your lives to get here for me. So I’m way ahead of you. It took all your lives to get here, so this moment is the moment. Even this we get to experience.”
— On the Golden Age of television: “I think this is the Golden Age. I understand what the Golden Age was when I was coming into television, and it was those years of Playhouse 90 and Philco Playhouse. But there’s great drama and some great comedy on television today. I can’t see it all.”
Blue Moon Rising
Once in a ‘blue moon’ happens Friday
This AP file photo from 2010 shows a blue moon from Nairobi, Kenya. There will be a blue moon Friday. Sayyid Azim AP
Full-moon lovers will get their fill this month, when the earth’s satellite makes its second July appearance on Friday.
Dubbed a blue moon — the special occasion happens only about every two-and-a-half years because the lunar year and calendar year don’t quite match up. The last blue moon was in August 2012 and the next won’t be until January 2018.
“It’s a rare lunar occurrence,” said Barb Yager, an officer with Miami-based Southern Cross Astronomical Society. “People get excited about it.”
The name is deceiving because the moon isn’t actually blue; it appears to have a bluish hue only if there is volcanic ash. In fact, the name has come to mean something that happens only once in a while.
300 Vespa to Yuma
Armie Hammer Feared Death In Arizona Desert On Vespa Adventure
By WENN
Actor Armie Hammer Had No Idea How Close He And His Friends Came To Becoming Stranded In Mexico Last Year (14) After Getting Lost In The Arizona Desert While On A Cross-country Vespa Roadtrip.
The Social Network star embarked on the ambitious journey across America, known as 4k to Hardway, last year (14), shunning luxury hotels to camp in the wilderness, while taking in the scenery as they travelled off the beaten path from California to Florida.
However, Hammer admits they worried they had taken on more than they could handle on numerous occasions, especially when they thought they might actually die in the desert.
He explains, “Things got weird. I mean, you’ve got a group of guys crossing the country, staying in the middle of nowhere.
“We had some close calls… like, at one point, we stayed outside of Yuma, Arizona and we were like, ‘OK, we’ve got to get from Yuma to Phoenix, but there’s no main roads, except for an interstate (highway)…’ Everyone pulls out Google maps (on their phones)… and they go, ‘You know, it looks like all desert from here to Phoenix, but it looks like there are roads. It doesn’t say roads (sic), but it looks like there’s trails. I think we can make it.’
“We get off the pavement and it’s like a dirt road, it’s hardpacked… Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, this is the adventure, we’re owning this…!’ Then all of a sudden, the road gets so soft, you can’t sit on (your bike), you have to walk, next to your Vespa, as you’re pushing it up a dune…”
Ingress All Around
The digital story that surrounds you right now: Ingress
In our current Innovation Issue, we listed augmented reality gaming, and specifically Ingress, as an area with the potential to change the way brands approach their audiences. Here, mobile technology expert Lars Cosh-Ishii explains why the platform has such big implications.
Ingress merges the physical and digital worlds through large-scale gaming events
The Ingress platform by Niantic Labs, operating as a startup within Google, has managed to place a graphic skin over the physical world in multiple compelling ways: it’s dynamic, immersive and fun.
Founded in 2010 and led by John Hanke, who spent six-years building and running Google Earth and StreetView, the product opened for general release in December 2013. His team has secured a passionate global following and checks key boxes from user-generated content via mobile to location-based profile data capture and community engagement.
With over 8 million downloads reported as of late last year, the platform is clearly gaining traction. One might say this is where Second Life meets Real Life, and the canvas of potential is both infinite and relevant.
Perhaps as a result of living in Japan for many years, where the past and future are always present, it’s fairly obvious to me that Ingress will ultimately enable a turnkey solution—platform as a service—for clients to create their own branded portals. Actually, the next steps along that path seem well underway with the new Endgame project, based on a book by James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton, the Ancient Societies universe. Expect amazing mixed-reality experiences ahead.
LOCAL AUTHOR FESTIVAL: James Frey to give free talk at Avon Public Library on Thursday, July 30, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Local Literary Events Include Author James Frey, Twain Summer Program
Author James Frey, who gained fame and notoriety from his 2003 memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” will give a free talk at Avon Public Library on Thursday, July 30, from 6 to 8 p.m. as part of the library’s Local Author Festival that runs through Aug. 24. (Bebeto Matthews / Associated Press)
Avon Local Author Festival
The Avon Free Public Library‘s free Local Author Festival will run through Aug. 24 at the library, 281 Country Club Road.
Children’s Night is Tuesday, July 28, at 7 p.m., with Donna LeBlanc, author of “Explorations of Commander Josh: Book One — In Space” (SDP Publishing, $14.95); Shannon Mazurick, author of “Gemma: The Search For The Gem” (AuthorHouse, $15); J. C. Phillipps, author of “The Simples Love a Picnic” (HMH Books for Young Readers, $16.99); and Martha Ritter, author of “The Nearly Calamitous Taming of PZ” (Bradley Street Press, $13.99).
Author James Frey, who gained fame and notoriety from his 2003 memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” will give a free talk at the library on Thursday, July 30, from 6 to 8 p.m. Frey also is co-author with Nils Johnson-Shelton of “The Calling” (HarperCollins, $10.99).
Local authors will sell and sign books at the library’s Farmers Market from 4 to 7 p.m. on Mondays. Glenn Maynard, author of “Desert Son” (Black Rose, $15.95) and Nan Arnstein, author of “Rocky Shores” (CreateSpace, $16) will sign on Monday, July 27.
In addition, the library is offering a free Story Walk on its grounds during July and August based on the children’s book “Market Maze,” by Roxie Munro, a story about collecting things to take to a farmers market. Visitors can solve the maze and find objects hidden in pictures.
Information: 860-673-9712, ext. 235.
Gertrude Stein Remembered
The Inimitable Style of Gertrude Stein
By Carl Cannon
Image from France Culture
Sixty-nine years ago today, as the first crop of baby boomers was being born, iconic American expatriate Gertrude Stein died in Paris. Her life partner, Alice B. Toklas, was at her deathbed.
In one of their last conversations, Toklas later wrote in her autobiography, Stein asked about the meaning of life: “What is the answer?” she inquired.
When Toklas failed to reply, Stein laughed and said, “In that case, what is the question?”
Born in Pennsylvania in 1874, Stein had lived in Paris as a girl before her parents brought her back to the United States. She lived in San Francisco and across the bay in Oakland as a young woman before gravitating to Baltimore, where she had relatives, and then to France after the turn of the century.
It was in Paris that she made her reputation. A famed wit, hostess, and avant-garde writer, she collected artists more than art. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were friends and frequent visitors, and after World War I, she and Alice Toklas expanded their salon-type dinners to include a cohort of restless young American writers that included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos.
It was to Hemingway, supposedly, that Stein said, “You are all a lost generation.”
Other than the “lost generation” line, Gertrude Stein’s most famous quote is probably her put-down of a teeming California city. Many decades before Jerry Brown resuscitated his political career by becoming mayor of Oakland, Stein dismissed the place by saying simply: “There is no there there.”
Actually, that five-word description — and three of them are the same word — come at the end of a longer, punctuation-less sentence. These days, one must type it carefully, or the spellcheck function on the computer will correct it for you — the consecutive “theres” being confusing to an intelligence of the artificial kind.
Gertrude Stein’s brainpower was the opposite of artificial. Her deathbed conversation with Alice B. Toklas? She was witty that way all the time.
Oakland wasn’t the only place subject to the Stein wit. She was dismissive of entire regions of the U.S., notably the Midwest. Referring to her pal Ernest Hemingway, she once said, “Anyone who marries three girls from St. Louis hasn’t learned much.” (For the record, Hadley Richardson and Martha Gellhorn were both St. Louis natives, but Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife, was Iowa-born. But you get the point).
As for that lack of a comma in the Oakland put-down, it wasn’t an accident, either. That was Stein’s signature style.
The Kings of YA
‘Paper Towns’ Producers on Keeping Up With ‘Twilight’ Stars and Making John Green Cry
by Rebecca Ford
Wyck Godfrey (left) and Marty Bowen / Hussein Katz
Temple Hill’s Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey went from Hollywood roommates to kings of YA movies after producing the ‘Twilight’ series. Now, as they follow ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ they explain how they discover unknown actors and how much power they give authors.
Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey were 27-year-old acquaintances climbing the Hollywood ladder when they moved into a house together on Temple Hill Drive in Beachwood Canyon. Perhaps because they met during their formative years, the roommates turned best friends have kept their production company young at heart, with a focus on low- to midbudget films aimed at teens, young adults and women (the occasional Nerf war in the hall helps).
Bowen, a former UTA partner, and Godfrey, a veteran producer, founded Temple Hill in 2006 and hit paydirt with the Twilight franchise, producing five films in three years that went on to earn a collective $3.34 billion worldwide. They found YA gold again in 2014 by adapting John Green‘s book The Fault in Our Stars into a $12 million Fox film that earned $307.2 million. Bowen and Godfrey, both 47, moved quickly to adapt Green’s Paper Towns (out July 24) and next will take on the author’s debut novel, Looking for Alaska, at Paramount. In the process, they have made stars of such unproven talents as Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, Shailene Woodley and, they now hope, Cara Delevingne and Nat Wolff of Towns.
With books-to-film as its backbone, the 10-employee Temple Hill has juggled multiple projects at once, producing Nicholas Sparks adaptations (Dear John and The Longest Ride) and the Maze Runner franchise (the second installment, The Scorch Trials, is set to open Sept. 18) while also working in TV on the upcoming Fox series Rosewood. The duo also signed to produce a Power Rangers reboot and James Frey‘s Endgame. And they’re expanding into publishing, teaming with HarperCollins to develop emerging authors. Bowen, a married father of 3-year-old twins and a newborn, and Godfrey, a married dad of three teen boys, sat down with THR to discuss Green’s allure, how they find stars and female voices in Hollywood.
Alex Morgan Aiming To Change Attitudes With THE KICKS
Alex Morgan Hopes Her TV Show Changes Attitudes About Women Athletes
by
U.S. women’s national team and Portland Thorns star forward Alex Morgan and her teammates have been appearing on red carpets, late-night talk shows, and celebrations around the country in what appears to be a sea change of sorts for the attention given to women athletes.
But her latest project, which might end up making even more of a difference in how women athletes are publicly perceived than her team’s recent World Cup win, is one you may not have heard of unless you have middle-school aged kids: Morgan is producing a children’s television show for Amazon.
Read More: Who Attends the Women’s World Cup?
Morgan’s show, The Kicks, is based on a bestselling book series she wrote for middle-schoolers about four soccer-playing girls. The show is just a pilot for now, adapted from Morgan’s books by David Babcock, a writer and producer who worked on big network hits like Brothers & Sisters and Gilmore Girls. The episode is filmed mockumentary style and portrays Devin, the main character, as a normal—awkward at times—tween girl struggling to fit in after moving across the country. Her move is also complicated by the fact that her new school’s soccer team is terrible.
The show doesn’t shy away from showing Devin makeup-less and sweaty during practices and games. This Saturday, July 25, The Kicks wraps up a month-long Amazon pilot season, which features six different shows for kids. Amazon will decide which shows to greenlight for full series based on user ratings and reviews.
Ingrid Sischy Gone
Ingrid Sischy: An Appreciation
Photograph by Gasper Tringale.
As the art and fashion worlds mourn the loss of a beloved original, Vanity Fair’s Editor recalls Sischy’s genius for mixing the pleasure of friendship with the business of truth-telling.
Ingrid Sischy, the writer and critic, died today in New York. It was sudden, but also not so sudden. She had been under the care of the legendary oncologist Dr. Larry Norton at a New York hospital for some years. Her health was up and down, but her spirit and her work ethic remained heroically steady. Not once did I ever hear her complain about the fate she had been dealt. Or even talk about it much. She just got on with things. There were so many aspects of her character to admire, but I found her saucy, cheerful stoicism to be highly attractive.
Ingrid became part of the Vanity Fair family nearly two decades ago, back in the days when my fortunes at the magazine were more than a little wobbly. She was coming off a long career in art criticism, writing for her pal Bob Gottlieb at The New Yorker, and I will tell you that with her by my side, my future seemed a lot rosier. She could write about anything, but what interested her most were art and fashion, and she traversed those two hothouses like a bemused empress. She had a crisp mind and an almost uncanny focus when she sat down to write. She was a fun, conspiratorial gossip, but never with malice or envy—the working tools of so many gossips. That conspiratorial manner was evident in her work life as well. I adored cooking up stories with her. I was a sucker for her pitches and I could tell that her editors at Vanity Fair, Bruce Handy and Doug Stumpf, were as well. When she wasn’t producing nuanced, beautifully written pieces for Vanity Fair, she jumped back and forth between the U.S. and Europe, working for Jonathan Newhouse as a sort of international ambassador for the Italian, French, and Spanish editions of this magazine.
Wisdom from Jim La Pierre
from Recovery Rocks @ The Bangor Daily News
How to be Better Healers & Helpers
By Jim LaPierre
I’ve never liked being viewed as an expert but I do enjoy being interviewed by students. To those training in the healing and helping professions, I’m a cool old guy who has been doing this stuff since the nineties, which to most of them was a long ago period involving playgrounds.
I got to spend some time with an especially lovely student recently. He’s so young, handsome, anxious to learn and to get things right. We could have spent all day talking without running out of things to say. After he left I remembered an email interview I did with another student last semester that includes a lot of advice I wanted to share with him and to all who seek to serve others (brand new or otherwise):
Please know that you are supposed to be scared shitless every time you start something new. I wish someone had told me that it’s okay to be scared. For future reference, everything you feel is okay. It’s how you deal with it that matters. Don’t. Do. It. Alone. Enjoy brief periods of solitude. Beyond that, what you need to do alone should be limited to things that occur in a bathroom.
Journal, blog, write. Even if it’s bad poetry, write.
Take time off frequently. Burn out is a constant threat that deserves your respect.
Go to therapy. Always go to therapy. Before, during, and after, go to therapy.
Develop kick ass self care plans and actually do them – not just nice ideas with good intentions- things you habitually do.
Cope. You bear witness to suffering and you must not absorb it. Learn how to stand by the fire without getting burned. Empty yourself of what you inevitably internalize – the imagery, the painful words, and the sound of gut wrenching sobs – empty it all in writing, with colleagues, in art, in prayer. Empty it.
Learn from every person you ever serve.
Don’t focus on text books or self help books. Read the Tao Te Ching. Read Marianne Williamson, Mary Pipher, Brenee Brown, James Frey, and Tom Robbins, Read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and everything Narcotics Anonymous has ever published. Collect stories from your clients’ healing and pass them along as inspiration to others.
Discover what each individual is passionate about. Learn about them on their terms and in their language. Honor whatever they believe and help them utilize their beliefs as a means of healing.
Speak powerfully. Never speak like a social worker. If something fucking sucks, don’t refer to it as a “challenge.” Call a spade a spade.
Hug people. People need hugs.
Owner of The Red Wheelbarrow Identified
The Forgotten Man Behind William Carlos Williams’s ‘Red Wheelbarrow’
image from cliparts.co
For decades, much has depended on his red wheelbarrow, streaked with rain, next to some white chickens, even if no one has known — or perhaps even wondered — exactly who he was.
But now, the owner of the humble garden tool that inspired William Carlos Williams’s classic poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” will finally get his due.
On July 18, in a moment of belated poetic justice, a stone will be laid on the otherwise unmarked grave of Thaddeus Marshall, an African-American street vendor from Rutherford, N.J., noting his unsung contribution to American literature.
“When we read this poem in an anthology, we tend not to think of the chickens as real chickens, but as platonic chickens, some ideal thing,” William Logan, the scholar who recently discovered Mr. Marshall’s identity, said in an interview.
The discovery doesn’t change the meaning, he said, but “knowing there was a man with a particular wheelbarrow and some chickens does help us understand the world the poem was embedded in.”
Williams’s 16-word poem, first published in 1923, was hailed as a manifesto of plain-spoken American modernism. Williams himself declared it “quite perfect.” A staple of classrooms and anthologies, it has inspired endless debates about its deeper meaning — how much of what, exactly, depends on the red wheelbarrow? — not to mention provided the name of an English-language bookstore in Paris, a craft beer from Maine and an episode of “Homeland.”
But Mr. Logan, a professor at the University of Florida who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review, may have taken the poem’s fullest measure yet. His roughly 10,000-word essay on the poem, published in the most recent issue of the literary journal Parnassus and titled simply “The Red Wheelbarrow,” considers the poem from seemingly every conceivable angle.
Alex Morgan Scores EA’s FIFA Cover
Alex Morgan Will Be the First Female Cover Star for EA’s FIFA Video Game – U.S. soccer player cracks gender barrier
The cover of FIFA 16 will feature a woman for the first time.
Female sports stars often don’t get as much money, endorsements or respect as their male counterparts. But in a nice victory for women’s soccer, Electronic Arts is poised to announce today that Alex Morgan will be the first female soccer star to appear on the cover of its EA Sports FIFA video game.
Morgan, the striker who helped lead Team USA to the 2015 World Cup title, will share the cover spotlight of the new FIFA 16 with Lionel Messi, the world’s top male footballer.
This year will be the first year that EA Sports adds women soccer players to the FIFA-licensed title.
Gamers will be able to play as one of a dozen different women’s national teams. They are USA, Canada, Brazil, England, Mexico, China, Germany, Australia, Italy, France, Spain and Sweden.
Morgan won’t be the only female soccer star getting the cover treatment. Christine Sinclair, captain of the Canadian team, will appear with Messi on the cover of the Canadian edition. FIFA 16 goes on sale in North America on Sept. 22.
In a statement, Morgan said she’s excited her sponsor EA Sports is “putting such an important spotlight on women’s soccer.” The two female stars are “perfect cover athletes based on their accomplishments,” David Pekush Sr., manager of North American marketing for EA Sports, said in a statement.
I don’t know, people – it seems like the sharks are really pissed off at us right now.
CASTING PITT: Evan Ari Kelman on Tribeca
Learn How This Student Brought His Thesis Project To Tribeca
As an undergraduate student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, writer and director Evan Ari Kelman founded production company LIONEYES PICTURES through which he directed and produced commercial content for multinational brands. Kelman was awarded the 2015 Undergraduate Wasserman Directing Award from NYU. Today he’s here to talk to Casting Pitt about how he brought his thesis film, Bandito, to the Tribeca Film Festival.
Casting Pitt: We talk about crowdsourcing a lot at Casting Pitt and we’re always trying to find creative ways to get the most out of a crowdfunding campaign. As someone who successfully funded your film through Kickstarter, what is your number one piece of advice to filmmakers looking to successfully crowdsource?
Evan Ari Kelman: My number one piece of advice is to craft a pitch video that is entertaining, informative and fast-paced. Your video needs to capture and hold people’s attention immediately. If you can entertain them at first impression, they’re going to walk away with the knowledge that you know what you’re doing. Unsuccessful campaigns are boring, they’re dreary. You don’t really get a sense of the filmmaker’s personality. They can be very textbook in a monotone sort of way and I don’t think that gets people excited about a project.
My Kickstarter video features me talking and walking through a multitude of spaces. I made sure there was a sense of movement throughout the entire piece. The combined elements of the fast-paced nature, the quick cuts, humor, and personality, all came together to elicit very positive responses from my backers.
CP: And as far as a budget for a crowdfunding video, can you talk a little about how much you do or don’t have to spend?
EAK: I didn’t spend a dime on my own pitch video, so I know that it’s possible to create one without any money. Of course, I had some basic video equipment, my DSLR, and some props, but the trick is all about taking advantage of what’s already available to you. For example, I shot in the Tisch building at New York University, which has some incredibly cool film facilities. Using those spaces in my pitch, I made it visually clear to an audience that we had the capabilities to create high-quality work. So it’s not about spending money to ‘wow’ an audience, it’s about intelligently using what you already have to communicate your potential. Proving energy, passion, and a commitment to quality doesn’t depend on the amount of dollars spent on a pitch.
Fight Club For Real
Real-life fight club: The models, marines and millionaires who illegally do battle on New York’s underground fighting circuit
These gritty photographs show the real-life fight club where models marines and millionaires pummel each other during matches in New York’s underground fighting circuit.
The photo series called ‘Old One Two’ by photographer Devin Yalkin captures the raw and unfiltered nature of the illegal fight clubs which take place in venues across New York city.
Reminiscent of the 1999 Hollywood movie called ‘Fight Club’ starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton there is a no-holds bar attitude among strangers who step into the ring ready to draw blood on their opponent.
The fights take place in random venues dotted across New York City, where a baying crowd watches as fighters go head-to-head in the ring.
The violent event is completely unsanctioned but still draws in fighters who range from male models to millionaires.
Yalkin uses his lens to capture the striking, raw, enigmatic and intoxicating fights that are as far from mainstream boxing events as can be.
Dancing Mushroom Man
No Mo’ MobCrush Beta
The Twitch For Mobile Gaming Just Ripped The Private Beta Tag Off Its iOS App
by Alex Wilhelm (@alex)
Mobcrush took its iOS and OS X apps out of private beta today, opening the duo to all users of those platforms. The company intends to release a Windows app in the next few weeks, and an Android application will touch down before the end of summer.
As a company, the Santa Monica-based Mobcrush is a bet that mobile gaming will eventually have as large a spectator audience as desktop gaming. Livestreaming console and PC games, an oddity five years ago, has become a well-known content variety with millions of viewers tuning in to tournaments and individual players’ streams around the world
Initially, I was skeptical of Mobcrush’s thesis — can mobile games be as compelling as their desktop cousins? Mobcrush argued to TechCrunch that mobile games are becoming increasingly complex, and that many new gamers are mobile-first from the get go.
Morricone Scores “Hateful Eight”
Ennio Morricone To Score ‘Hateful Eight’, Quentin Tarantino Reveals – Comic Con
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Oscar-nominated composer Ennio Morricone will be doing an original score for Quentin Tarantino’s new movie The Hateful Eight, Tarantino said today during the film’s panel at Comic-Con. It will be the first Western score for the prolific Morricone in 40 years and reunites the two after some harsh words were apparently smoothed over after their collaboration on Django Unchained.
The five-time Oscar nominee was a classmate of Sergio Leone, the king of the spaghetti Westerns, and he scored a bunch of iconic films in the genre including A Fistful Of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and of course The Good The Bad And The Ugly. Morricone has also penned for the likes of John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols and Oliver Stone as well as Giuseppe Tornatore, for whom he did the score for Cinema Paradiso.
To the moon, Wall-E!
REVEALED: How Nasa plan to send robots to Moon to build colony humans may one day live in
By Jon Austin
OUR moon has huge cavernous craters which open onto the surface, but sunlight never reaches the bottom, making them very dark and extremely cold. But Nasa thinks one day human colonies could be set up inside them.
Human colonisation of the Moon, after robots have hopefully made it hospitable, is one of a series of wildly ambitious preliminary proposals the space agency is being funded to explore further.
The Moon proposal would involve a test run at the Shackleton Crater, twice the size of Washington DC, on the Lunar South Pole.
This means sending a rover droid vehicle to set up solar reflectors, which would reflect sunlight so it went inside the crater and caverns below.
The crater would be filled with solar-powered transformers which could then be used to power equipment and make it hospitable to humans.
Robots would have to be programmed to build a mini Earth oasis on the Moon before anyone could live there.
Fairey Arrested For Graffiti
Police Arrest Shepard Fairey in Los Angeles Over Outstanding Detroit Warrant
by Christie Chu
Graffitti art by Shepard Fairey on the side of a vacant building on Gratiot Avenue in Detroit. Photo: Courtesy of John T. Greilick / Detroit News.
Graffiti artist Shepard Fairey, who was recently charged with a felony after he reportedly vandalized several buildings during his stay in Detroit, was arrested earlier this week in Los Angeles, according to the Detroit News.
Last month, Fairey, 45, known for his iconic Obama “Hope” posters, was charged with two counts of malicious destruction of property after an arrest warrant was filed in Detroit.
The artist was commissioned to paint a 184-foot by 60-foot mural at One Campus Martius, a public park, and he openly told the press he planned on creating illegal works during his visit. Around this time, several “Obey” logos and murals were seen in the city’s downtown area.
The Greatest Female Athlete Ever
The Astonishing Greatness of Serena Williams
After winning her fourth consecutive Grand Slam title on Saturday at Wimbledon, the tennis star has become one of the most accomplished American athletes of all time.
No major sport—with the possible exception of gymnastics or swimming—worships youth like tennis. The best athletes in basketball, soccer, football, and baseball tend to reach their peak in their mid-20s, an age when experience, physical strength, and wisdom converge. But the arc of a typical professional tennis career tends to resemble that of a pop star: Ascendant at 17, dominant at 21, washed up and finished by 30.
Serena Williams, too, was a teenage tennis prodigy, a precocious girl following her older sister Venus from Compton, California, to the sport’s greatest stage. In 1999, the 17-year-old Williams won her first Grand Slam title, defeating Martina Hingis at the U.S. Open. More championships would soon follow, and before long Serena was mentioned in the same breath as the sport’s greats. King. Navratilova. Evert. Graf. Williams.
But Serena, unlike the others, has forgotten to go into decline. On Saturday, the 33-year-old Williams defeated Garbine Muguruza 6-4, 6-4 to win her sixth Wimbledon title, concluding her 28th consecutive victory in a Grand Slam match. To the casual fan, another Serena victory has the shock value of a Meryl Streep Oscar nomination. But it’s worth pausing, if just for a moment, to consider just how remarkable Williams’ career has been.
Swifty Taylor and the USWNT
Taylor Swift Brings U.S. Women’s World Cup Soccer Team Onstage at Concert—See the Photo!
Kevin Mazur/LP5/WireImage
Taylor Swift just got herself a new group of world champion besties!
The pop star has brought up onstage many of celebrity friends since her 1989 tour started in May. On Friday, at her show at MetLife Stadium in Easter Rutherford, New Jersey, she introduced members of the U.S. women’s soccer team, who won the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup last Sunday.
Swift brought out players such as Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd and Abby Wambach, who spurred massive cheers from the crowd as two giant American flags waved behind them.
“How does it feel to have them home?” Swift yelled to the audience, as seen in a video posted by NJ.com.
“The Snake” Gone
Ken Stabler, former Raiders QB, dies
Former Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler died Wednesday from complications resulting from Stage 4 colon cancer, the team confirmed Thursday. He was 69.
“The Raiders are deeply saddened by the passing of the great Ken Stabler,” owner Mark Davis said in a team release. “He was a cherished member of the Raider family and personified what it means to be a Raider. He wore the silver and black with pride and poise and will continue to live in the hearts of Raider fans everywhere. Our sincerest thoughts and prayers go out to Kenny’s family.”
A native of Foley, Alabama, Stabler threw for 27,938 yards during his 15-year career in the NFL, compiling a 96-49-1 record as a starting quarterback and a win over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl XI. He played for the Raiders from 1970 to 1979, winning the NFL MVP award in 1974 and earning Pro Bowl honors four times.
“I was head coach of the Raiders the entire time Kenny was there, and he led us to a whole bunch of victories, including one in Super Bowl XI,” former Raiders coach John Madden said in the team release. “I’ve often said, if I had one drive to win a game to this day, and I had a quarterback to pick, I would pick Kenny. Snake was a lot cooler than I was. He was a perfect quarterback and a perfect Raider. When you think about the Raiders you think about Ken Stabler. Kenny loved life. It is a sad day for all Raiders.”
Alex Morgan’s book series THE KICKS Now On Amazon TV!
US Women’s Soccer Star Alex Morgan Goes Hollywood with New TV Pilot
After helping the US Women’s Soccer Team win the 2015 World Cup, star forward Alex Morgan is bringing her soccer and writing skills to Hollywood in the form of a new TV pilot, “The Kicks.”
Based on her series of bestselling books, “The Kicks” follows Devin Burke, a soccer obsessed 12-year-old who moves to a new city and finds herself on a losing team.
Watch it now at http://amzn.to/1BHYqcl
“While Americans were busy buying Simon and Garfunkel records, West Germany was tripping the f†ck out.”
8 Krautrock Artists You Need to Hear Right Now
By Tim Sommer
Imagine if the legendary rock leviathans of the late 1960s and early 1970s didn’t have the Gollum of pop radio whispering hoarsely in their ear, “Make it around three or four minutes long, repeat the chorus three times, and how ‘bout a nice bridge in E-minor?” What magic would the Stooges, the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, the Pretty Things, and others have achieved if there had been no awareness that radio was a destination?
During the first half of the 1970s, a pile of West German musicians escaped from pop’s three-minute veal cage, and the results were fantastic. This movement—not just a branch, but a whole forest of rock fashioned without the radio in mind—came to be known as Krautrock (a vaguely offensive but generally accepted label). Its progenitors created eminently logical magic: They took the fierce, feral essence of the old gods of rock and roll—Eddie Cochran, Bo Diddley, the Troggs, anyone capable of playing two chords while having a firecracker up their ass—and imbibed it with a truly progressive and revolutionary spirit.
Krautrock is an entire secret history of rock unto itself, and we don’t have the space here to trace its origins, ephemera and trajectory. (I’ll leave that to Julian Cope, who is to this subject what Doris Kearns Goodwin is to L.B.J.) Instead, let’s focus on a few of the absolutely essential artists and tracks in this gorgeously mesmeric movement.
Here are eight Krautrock artists you really need to know about.
Two songs that utterly personify Krautrock are “Autobahn” by Kraftwerk and “Hallogallo” by Neu! (please note that Neu! are the only band permitted to use punctuation in their name without being mercilessly ridiculed). Kraftwerk were a blueprint for the future; Neu!, an outline for a future that hasn’t arrived quite yet.