The City Dark is a feature documentary about light pollution and the disappearance of the night. The film follows filmmaker Ian Cheney, who moves to New York City and discovers skies almost completely devoid of stars. Posing a deceptively simple question — why do we need the night? — he leads viewers no quest to understand what is lost in the glare of city lights.
Upon one of the first things I noticed when I moved to Los Angeles was the inability to see the stars in the sky. Of course the city has plenty to offer to compensate, but that dull tint that covers the night skyline of heavy urban environments is still a sad thing. Looking forward to this flick.
You’ll feel as though you’ve taken a few tabs after watching this strangely edited/remixed clip of Captain K on a voyage to the great beyond.
[via Nerdcore]
Dublab the prolific collective for audio/visual programming in Los Angeles turns 10 this October. In celebration, they’ll be throwing 10 events from the 1st to the 10th, including everything from screenings, exhibitions, and retrospectives as eclectic as you’d expect. Come to enjoy and support.
Eric Wareheim forgoes the crackheads this time for a go-around at Depeche Mode’s Hole To Fill — complete with the signature style and material you’d expect from the man who did the Major Lazer vid.
Werner Herzog is opening up a film school based around weekend seminars. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet and talk with the famed eccentric filmmaker. I love the mantra by how these classes are to be run, here’s a taste:
4. The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.
5. The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.
7. Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?
8. Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.
9. Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.
Reads almost like a satire but that’s always been the fine line that Herzog has walked all these years. Simply put — Awesome.
[Rogue Film School via Chud]
Thanks to appropriately-titled Find La Food Trucks for consolidating all your mobile-dining options on one page. Living on the east-side makes it difficult to check a fair number of these but I’ll vouch for an enjoyable dog at Let’s Be Frank, and an adequately priced delicious Sunday brunch from the Gastrobus.
A project that took place over the course of several months and many many many shots, each taken at 6-minute exposures.
Working in the dark, dry highlands of Chile with a Nikon D3 digital camera (50 mm lens open at f5.6), Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier patched together 1,200 photos of the night sky into the composite that you see above.
While many of the most stunning space images come from huge telescopes or Hubble, Brunier wanted to create photographs of space that were closer to the commonplace human experience of just going outside and looking at the sky.
“I wanted to show a sky that everyone can relate to — with its constellations, its thousands of stars, with names familiar since childhood, its myths shared by all civilizations since Homo became Sapiens,” Brunier said in a release. “The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera under the dark skies in the Atacama Desert and on La Palma.”
Duffy grows some of the hottest and rarest chile peppers in the world. Duffy–who 6 years ago knew nothing at all about chiles except that they were good in his homemade salsa–runs the website Refining Fire Chiles (he recently bought a secondary domain name, Super Hot Chiles, which also links to the site), from which you can buy fresh chiles, chile plants and chile seeds.
Not just any chiles either, but Bhut Jolokias, Trinidad Scorpions, Naga Moriches and Trinidad 7 Pots, to name only a few. Bhut Jolokia chiles have been tested at one million Scoville Heat Units (SHUs), which puts them as the world’s hottest chile pepper.
I’m curious to see how these taste but am not quite ready to meet death yet.
[Squid Ink]
Quite the site to behold. I’ll save any snarky remark and just graciously thank LA Times or whatever intern they set to document all the dispensaries on Los Angeles in a Google interactive map.
Differentiating the sheer number of restaurants and kbbq joints that line block after block in Koreatown can sometimes be a challenge. Sure, by now the network of food communications and blogging have allowed for a fair handful of established institutions to differentiate themselves as predominant de facto destinations — Bosam at Kobawoo, Korean blood sausage at Western Soon Dae, an icy bowl of arrowheat noodles at Yu Chun, or perhaps some nourishing abalone porridge at the hole-in-the-wall Mountain Cafe?
But really, despite this prevailing sense that everything to be found has already been unearthed, how many restaurants get lost in the shuffle and left waiting to be discovered?
It was with this thought and a tinge of anxious excitement that led us to Don Dae Gam, resting solely on a tip via the twitter of “The Belly of Los Angeles” and LA’s own intrepid food explorer, Mr. Jonathan Gold.
Don Dae Gam is the second KBBQ establishment for restauranteur Jenny Park of Park’s BBQ. Tucked between 11th and 12th street off Olympic boulevard, the restaurant sports a large and open interior space scattered with circular steel tables and stool-seating setup for parties of 3~5, and larger long-table seating arrangements in back for parties of 6+. With an aesthetic that’s noticeably modern and an atmosphere designed towards the casual, it becomes clear — this is an environment designed for conversation and consumption, with an emphasis on the latter in mass quantities of pork and soju.
We opted for the “Combo #3″ platter — pork neck, chop, belly, marinated pork rib, and pork intestine so good the experience could only be described as revelatory. As per custom, an array of banchan was laid out before us as we waited in anticipation for the meat. The grills are gas-powered but are of the newer hybrid variety lined with baskets of charcoal near the base. As we sipped our soju, the meat arrived in a tear-inducing platter of sheer beauty.
