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A hard truth for the lovers of the traditional dramatic arts: wide spread appreciation for opera is long gone. Blame it on the medium being less accessible, or the fact that its profound melodramas, its weighty melodies are no match for today’s instant, multi-stimuli interactive media.
But what’s to say opera can’t be engaging and readily consumable, even in this day and age?
| Recommended by Rhys Dipshan | Monday, February 22nd, 2016 | No Comments » |
Let’s be honest, it can be hard making adult friends, especially as we get older and our peers are becoming increasingly occupied with keeping tiny humans alive and healthy. Or when work moves us to a new city, away from our usual support networks. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could skip all the boring smalltalk about the weather and the traffic, and see who’s likely to become a friend? The ladies of Vina have noticed this problem, and are starting a networking app to match awesome ladies up with awesome new lady friends.
The new Hey! VINA app is a social matchmaker for introducing new girl buddies. (You might have heard TechCrunch call this the Tinder for friends. IT’S NOT TINDER, YOU GUYS! Unless your goal is to ignore the whole personality matching part and pick potential friends based on the sexiness of their profile photo. Takes all types, I guess.) The app promises to match new buddies up by personality style and shared interests for maximum friend compatibility. So far, Hey! VINA has just one short quiz, and it doesn’t ask any of the essential friendship questions yet (What kind of drunk are you? How late is too late to text and expect a reply? Who’s your favorite Doctor?) but it’s still in beta so I can assume those questions are on the way.
The app is live and matching pals in NYC, LA and SF, with plans to spread to other cities and start matching new friends soon.
| Recommended by Meg Stivison | Wednesday, February 10th, 2016 | No Comments » |
When a person gives away a book, chances are part of the book stays with them. But what many may not know is that from time to time, something of them stays with the book too.
Forgottenbookmarks.com exists solely to discover what others have left behind in what they read. Most of the time, it’s pressed old leaves, but there is also no shortage of gems, be they menus from steak houses across the country, black and white pictures of strangers and their families, hosts of hand-written recipes, centuries-old newspaper clippings, children’s tickets to county fairs, and even the page of flattened Skittles. Some finds date back to the 19th century, while others are kitsch of the 1970s and 1980s.
The website was started by a woman named Michael who began working at her family’s bookstore in upstate New York at age seven. Now the proprietor, she sorts through 500 to 600 books a day, and finds maybe five or six items of interest.
Among the memorabilia, of course, is an indisputable homage to quirky and unusual bookmark aesthetics. Take for example the leather bookmark from Bermuda with a tab reading “Here I fell asleep,” or similarly, the one from the obstetrician’s office in shape of a bespectacled man reading a book entitled “my eyes tired here.”
| Recommended by Rhys Dipshan | Thursday, January 14th, 2016 | No Comments » |
The current nostalgia over everything from the ’90s and late ’80s has triggered a recent surge in retro art trends. But unlike the fad of pixel art, ANSI/ASCII art, or text mode art, is still created the old fashion way–and largely by the same people, too. ANSI/ASCII art is art composed of numbers, letters, and symbols. Although thought by many as a dead medium, the text mode art scene is kept afloat by a large pool of international artists who continue to create, transforming an outdated art form that was largely used for BBSes into a legit underground art movement.
| Recommended by The Absolute Staff | Friday, January 8th, 2016 | 2 Comments » |
The art of film is the art of kinetic, dynamic narrative. One film still is never meant to be inert or isolated, but builds upon and weaves into another. Even films with still frame shots are still in motion – the pause is one through time, it feels unnatural, tortured. But what if you took that dynamic out of film and insert a wholly different sensory narrative – creating in effect a whole way to experience the story?
You would get Peter “Peterski” Nidzgorski’s Nevver.
Nidzgorski’s Tumblr page is, in simple terms, “a song and a film still, daily.” And from the look of it — a plain page with post-card size pictures over unimposing play buttons, a page of more grey-blue negative space with no more than four posts and tiny, oft-missed direction arrows — Nevver is a humble and modest site against which its film stills seem magnanimous and powerful.
And each film still does have power – each comes alive, just not before your eyes.
When Nevver guts every aspect out of a film save a static photo, and re-plugs what was lost through a curated song, it creates in essence a new film, a collage of different sensory experiences, where you hear the narrative and imagine it on what you see.
Nevver is a death of film and a birth of music. Not only does it invigorate what is heard, but it acts as a discovery tool for songs and bands one never knew, never remembered they knew, or never heard played before, the way it is through an emancipated shot.This Tumblr Teaches You The Art Of Hearing Music
| Recommended by Rhys Dipshan | Friday, December 18th, 2015 | No Comments » |
If there is anything certain about screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s The Dionaea House: Correspondence from Mark Condry, initially written as a web pitch to a yet-unmade movie, it is that piercing horror best takes hold through evocative fragments, through investigating the silent dead ends and meticulously stirring a sense of authenticity.
The tale begins with emails from Eric’s adolescent friend Mark, who writes of receiving an unsolicited newspaper clipping naming one of their former friends as the culprit in a gruesome public murder of a married couple in Boise, Iowa.
The circumstances of the shooting are peculiar, and after Mark’s investigation into his friend’s murders leads to his ultimate disappearance, Eric posts all the emails on the web, “in hopes that you’ll better understand why he did what he did.”
| Recommended by Rhys Dipshan | Thursday, November 12th, 2015 | No Comments » |
If the world has been shrinking ever since the onset of the internet, perhaps Google Street View is primarily to blame. At least that’s what the good people at Mapcrunch want us to believe — just flip through instant Street Views of a host of countries from every continent (yes, even Antarctica) and revel in the festively painted desert houses of Mexico, the dreary vast farmland of Belgium that looks eerily like Quebec, or the deserted plains of South Africa you could be forgiven for thinking were Iowa.
But it’s not all endless roads and open land — there’s an indoor filter that lets you see inside the buildings in a host of countries, from a military museum in Thailand, to a classroom in Tokyo, to a German cheese and meat shop and organic Mexican bodega (international food shoppers eat your heart out). There is also an urban filter that weeds out the countrysides and suburbs and plunges you into the concrete layers that is Hong Kong and Seoul and the quaint isolated settlements that are, let’s be honest, as urban as places like Bermuda or Mongolia get.
| Recommended by Rhys Dipshan | Monday, November 9th, 2015 | No Comments » |
