She rocks with paper and scissors

I love stop-motion animation. I love it even more when it is about this sweet book by my friend Julie. This -- or her first Ninja book -- would be a great treat in a young reader's Easter basket (that is your hint to go on Amazon right now and buy one. Or two).

Julie made the stop-motion video herself. She is super-talented. She also paints and makes jewelry, has a kick-ass sense of humor and excellent taste in movies. Check out her Etsy store for more.

A book worth a thousand pictures

Four of my favorite things: books +the art of paper cutting + stop-motion + man with foreign accent = great video about the joy of reading, via the New Zealand Book Council:

Orson Welles to the principal’s office please

Rival high schools in Shoreline, WA are duking it out on YouTube with two clever “lip dub” videos, each filmed in one continuous shot, one take, and a cast of hundreds.

Shorecrest threw down the gauntlet with Outkast’s “Hey Ya”:

And Shorewood came back with Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True”:

The first one is very fun and clever, but the second one is quite amazing. The lip sync is a bit off but consider that they were doing it backwards! We never did anything this cool when I was in high school…

More here.

The Orson Welles remark in the title references the opening shot in his film Touch of Evil, filmed in one continuous take (my college film professor would be amazed that I remembered this bit of cinematic lore). Scorsese also used the long tracking shot extensively in Goodfellas, and Hitchcock filmed the entire movie The Rope in ten total shots. Geez, I’m a geek.

Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy

This is not new, but it’s new to me. So funny and, sadly, so true.

Thanks to this fabulously talented friend for posting it on Facebook.

I found the bit about flying especially relevant: today I flew to/from Washington DC for biz. There & back -- with meetings in between -– in less time than it would have taken to drive round trip. Yes, Louis CK, that is amazing. The airport I flew out of, however? Not amazing. The Fisher Price airport is more sophisticated than the crazy place I flew in and out of...

Have an incredible, amazing, awesome, easy, superlative weekend

A lobster, an octopus and a trilobite walk into a bar...

Early November in Connecticut is catch-as-catch can with the weather, so we were blessed today with bright sunshine, fair skies and temperatures in the mid-50s, a rare treat this time of year. New Englanders know to treasure days like this, as the next one may not come along until late March. I made the most of it by spending the morning on a two and a half hour walk on the banks of the Connecticut River with two neighbors and three dogs, and the afternoon at a Kite Fly at Hammonasset Beach. My dad is an avid kite-maker and flyer, and his kite club had a great day for its last fly of the season. Amid the traditional kite shapes and wind socks were fanciful beasts like the trilobite, lobster and octopus (partially hidden) above. These creatures are enormous, made of yards and yards of fabric and tethered to the ground with huge spikes or tied to truck bumpers. Their lines (which are not "kite string" but heavy kite twine and in some cases, rope) buzz and hum with the tension of hundreds of pounds of wind force keeping them aloft. It takes two to four people to bring them down and roll them up. While taking these shots I nearly beheaded myself on a staked twine; I didn't notice it until the kite shifted in the wind and the hum of the twine changed pitch!

{A close-up of the trilobite. This kite is 90 feet long.}

{A string of small fish kites and windsocks, with a large sled kite. And by "small" I mean 10 to 12 feet. I love the puffer fish on the bottom}

{It's hard to appreciate this size of this sled kite when it is in the air, until you see it in proportion to the two men trying to bring it down}

{It was a good day for horseback riding as well}

{My camera doesn't have a good wide angle lens so it was hard to capture the complete menagerie}

{The trilobite on the ground, getting ready to hibernate for the winter}

{Everybody run, there's a lobster loose!}

{A better shot of the octopus}

{Even Flat Stanley got in on the action}

Que syrah shiraz

{flights of wine and cheese at Bin36 in Chicago}

I'm in Chicago this week for one of my company's conferences and last night took the fab assistant Kelly and our VP of sales to one of my favorite restaurants, Bin 36. They have a great wine selection and offer it by the flight, glass or bottle, as well as in their retail shop (unlike CT, where our blue laws prohibit retail sales and consumption sales under the same roof). They also have an amazing cheese bar that makes me so glad I'm not lactose intolerant. The wine flights all have clever, pun-y names and the restaurant's Wine 101 & 102 classes have converted hundreds of wine neophytes into oenophiles. The decor is very urban loft contemporary and the menu is eclectic and planned with wine pairings in mind. If you are ever in Chicago I urge you to make time to visit.

On a related note, the owner of my favorite wine shop in CT doesn't know my name and always refers to me by the name of a wine I asked him about when I first visited his shop last year. "Hi Carmenere!". I guess there are worse things than being mistaken for a delicious Chilean red.

It's like crack

Addictive stuff. You've been warned.

Va-va-voom

The lovely Christina Hendricks, who plays "Joan Holloway" on AMC's Mad Men, rocks an emerald green Tadashi Shoji jersey knit dress at the Emmys on Sunday night. Attention Posh: eat more than a grape for lunch and you, too, can look this hot.

A diva's work is never done

Sorry for the long absence folks, I've been busy with the installation of my self-portait series...

Opening my boutique...

and getting my photo taken for Russian Vogue.

Actually my life is nowhere near this glamorous and I've just been busy with work stuff and haven't had time to post anything interesting.

Addictive photo fun by PhotoFunia.

These ain't no kindergarten scissors

{Impenetrable Castle (detail), 2005, by Peter Callesen}

I am so envious of artists who work in a medium like this, their skill, their patience. It's not like an oil painting, where if you make a mistake you can paint over it, or a dress, where you can rip out the seam. One slip of the knife and kaput! hours of work, ruined.

Peter Callesen, the Danish artist behind these creations, magically turns two-dimensional paper into three-dimensional images. He calls it "obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in most of the cuts."

{Cut To The Bone, 2007}

"Some of the small paper cuts relate to a universe of fairy tales and romanticism, as for instance "Impenetrable Castle" inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", in which a tin soldier falls in love with a paper ballerina, living in a paper castle. Other paper cuts are small dramas in which small figures are lost within and threatened by the huge powerful nature. Others again are turning the inside out, or letting the front and the back of the paper meet."

{Erected Ruin, 2007}