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Andrew Shaylor’s Hells Angels Motorcycle Club
Andrew Shaylor a United Kingdom based photographer released a book entitled, Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. It attempts to document the life of the club beyond its image as rough, gritty bikers. Given access to meeting rooms, Hells Angels events and pictures of members’ bikes, it humanizes the group as a bunch of guys, hanging out and riding motorcycles.
Most members are over 30 and appearances are world weary. Shaylor comments that the group prefers new members have life experience before joining, and for a lot, it shows. Leathered faces, deep creases and graying hair. Toothy grins and countless tattoos.
The tattoos. The death head varies from chapter to chapter and can only be worn by a member in good standing. Many get the death head, in some form, tattooed on their body–signifying their commitment for life.
Interspersed between the portraits, Shaylor showcases life as a member. These shots mostly come across as snapshots or vacation photos. Hells Angels life is just as candid as a drunken frat party, too. At the end, and it seems random and I’m not sure if they add context, but Shaylor included portraits of members’ families–wives, sons, daughters, girlfriends. I suppose, they’re normal too.
The subjects all reside in the UK. If you expected the more famous California Sonny Barger Hells Angels, you’d be disappointed. But would those portraits be any different?
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Three Cups of Tea
If you’re going to come away with anything from Three Cups of Tea, the story of Greg Mortenson’s mission to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, let it be the value of perseverance. To consistently focus on accomplishing something, despite the obstacles of lack of money, knowledge or cultural understanding, great things can happen if one learns from mistakes and continues to go forward. This theme even is displayed by those he is trying to help, as the conservative mullahs of the region see that Mortenson isn’t in their land to convert them or over take them, but to sincerely help children, specifically girls.
The story starts slow, after Mortenson’s failed attempt to climb K2 and stumbles into a poor region without schools. We learn he is the son of a Lutheran missionary who grew up in Africa and is out of place when he returns to California. After coming back to the states, making a promise to return to Pakistan, Mortenson begins to raise money. He gains some traction from within the mountaineering world and receive a donation from Jan Hoerni, a wealthy scientist and climber, for his first school. The attempt to build the first school is fraught with errors, mostly with Mortenson expecting to return, buy supplies and build a school. The culture of Pakistan slows him down. And first a bridge must be built. Nearly two years later, the school does get built, but only after navigating his own ignorance and that of the Muslims in the region.
As Three Cups of Tea progresses, it bounces back and forth between Mortenson’s inability to generate funds as quick as he’d like and his three to four month sabbaticals in the mountains of Central Asia. A cast of supportive and not so supportive characters carry the story along. From the kidnappers in the remote province of Waziristan to village elders such as Hajj Ali in Asia or his eventual wife and board members stateside, each is portrayed in a respectful depth. Eventually, Mortenson’s cause explodes after September 11th. (He happened to be in Afghanistan during the attacks.) He’s vilified for wanting people to understand what it will take to make the region a safer place. The Pentagon calls him in for a presentation, to which he sees why progress won’t be made in a Rumsfeld led Pentagon. Finally, after a Parade magazine feature, he receive an outpouring of support.
The book is an inspiring piece to the adage that one person can make a difference. At times it’s slow and over written in sentimental prose, but it gives a picture that perseverance to foster understanding and education is fundamentally important to peace.
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Locke & Key – Welcome to Lovecraft
The story of Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft starts with a seemingly random act of violence–two deranged kids show up at a family’s home and kill the father. This initial act is told haltingly between the incident, the funeral and the arrival to the family’s new home in Lovecraft, Massachusetts.
It seems heavy handed, but of course creepy things are going to ensue in Lovecraft, MA, where the family unsettles and encounters the mysteries of the house. The youngest, Bodie, discovers by accident that he can walk out a door and die, float free as a spirit, return to his body and un-die. He also befriends a ghost at the bottom of the outhouse well. Meanwhile, the middle sibling, Kinsey takes to school and finds a spot on the girls track team. Ty, the oldest, broods quietly. The latter two siblings refuse to believe Bodie and unknowingly cross paths with harbingers of future plot points.
The story unfolds, following the surviving deranged killer across country as he seeks a powerful key for a spirit that seems to be guiding him. This book sets up the premise of the house with keys that open doors to places or states of being. The art is well done by Gabriel Rodriguez, and the story is solid, penned by Joe Hill (aka son of Steven King). It’s violent, bloody and people say ‘fuck’ a lot.
After one collection, it’s hard to say how well developed the characters are, for example, we see more of the killer and what makes him crack than we do of the mother. Bodie seems to be the kid no one listens to, Kinsey’s the self aware girl that feels out of place and Ty is the misunderstood jock who ultimately does right. Again, it’s a solid story with enough of a premise that could go a long way, so it will be interesting to see if the characters develop being their archetypes.
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Lanny’s Alta Cocina
Lanny’s Alta Cocina Mexicana, located at 3405 W. 7th St. in Fort Worth, provides a welcoming, relaxed and upscale dinner experience. Inside an old, one story World War II era house, only a dozen or so tables are available for seating. I saw about ten tables of various sizes, small tables for couples, tables seating four and larger set ups of either round or rectangular for bigger gatherings. An inviting waitstaff never rushes your menu choices and seem keenly observant as when to approach for another drink or additional water or when to offer to take your plate away. A full bar is stocked with top shelf liquor and the wine cellar is on full display behind glass doors. In a sense, it’s comfortably trendy, removed from the pretentiousness some upscale places offer–warmly lit with music quiet enough to share an intimate conversation over good food.
The food is a unique take on gourmet Mexican with several fish entrees. First, the bread. Lanny’s bread is amazing. Hearty wheat bread, flavored with herbs they probably pick from the garden growing outside is served fresh from the oven and comes with an oil and chile garnish. I split a tapas of Kobe carpaccio and light greens. The raw beef was light and flavorful and melted richly upon first bite. For my main course, I had the potato wrapped sea bass. Paper thin and fried potato slices wrapped the large server of meat, holding in the juices. It came served atop a bed of rice with olives, cheery tomatoes and a thin, light sauce.
Lanny’s is a place where you go and spend the entire evening. It’s high dollar, but you’re paying for one of the more unique restaurants in Fort Worth that provides a slow, relaxed and friendly atmosphere to enjoy company and food.
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Homemade Angry Birds game
A mother made a homemade variation of Angry Birds with the birds made out of various household items. Angry Birds Live, she calls it.
I used a tennis ball for the red bird, a ping-pong ball for the blue bird, modeling clay for the yellow bird, an Easter egg for the chicken, and a black dodge ball for the bomb bird. I had an old set of cardboard blocks that they never really used, and they were perfect. I printed out pictures of the pigs on labels and stuck them on paper bags.
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Light painting with an iPad
To do light painting well, it takes , planning, coordination and patience. Achieved with long exposures and a bright, glowing source of light moving in front of a camera, cool things can happen. But what if you could program your light source to emit patterns of light? That’s about what you get below.
Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
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Lost World’s Fairs
Lost World’s Fairs show cases how damn awesome HTML5 is in the hands of a capable designer. Initially, the project came about when Microsoft asked the designers to showcase Internet Explorer 9’s support for WOFF.
Says Jason Santa Maria:
Today marks the beta launch of Internet Explorer 9. To celebrate the release, Nishant Kothary from the MIX Online team at Microsoft reached out to me to help showcase its support of WOFF.
Atlantis is the most clever of the trio, using page scrolling to the effect of traveling down, down, down to the ocean floor.
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The Wilderness Downtown
The Arcade Fire released their second video for their latest album The Suburbs with, The Wilderness Downtown. It’s a synthesis of web technology, music and video to create an experience. It uses HTML 5 to drive much of video so for now Google Chrome or Safari 5 are the only browsers that can play it fully. (Firefox can, albeit somewhat lacking).
Before the video begins, you’re asked to enter the street you grew up on, and then the video begins to load. In the video, multiple screens pop up, one with video of a unisex person running through a suburban street and other windows playing animations. You’ll write a message to your younger self, and that address you entered will appear as a Google Earth flyover.
This isn’t their first foray into viral, interactive videos. With their last album, they released a web video, Neon Biblethat let you interact with Win Butler’s hands.
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Just start
Jason Z. of the 37 Signals crew writes when web developing, the first step is to start.
While it would be easy to recommend stacks of books, and dozens of articles with 55 tips for being 115% better than the next guy, the truth is that you don’t need learn anything new in order to begin. The most important thing is simply to start.
I’d go one step further and say this is true for any creative project. Just start. Don’t worry about what you don’t know and focus on what you do know and build from there. There will be moments when you’ll need to learn something, but to think you need to know everything up front will only fuel the analysis paralysis, or bluntly, instigate the fear of failure.
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Scott Pilgrim – The Movie
Scott Pilgrim – The Movie is a fun, hilarious adventure, action, nerd fest. Colorful visuals and engaging action sequences support a well directed cast as Scott Pilgrim must defeat seven evil exes. Indeed, Michael Cera plays the same character he always plays, but Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona steals the movie with a great performance. Purists will decry that the plot differs from the books and lacks the emotional core Brian O’Malley conveyed in the original plot, but the core of the story–an apathetic, mooch of a loser, learning to love others and respecting himself–is still there.
