Hey, we got new digs! We’re super excited to show you.
You can now visit us at http://blog.pushthefuture.org
See you there!
For those of you who are still worrying over the potential loss of your early morning newspaper, www.rayogram.com/news provides the perfect compromise between your nostalgia and your desire to meet the future. A friend of mine recently turned me on to this website and I am finding it far more engaging to read than my normal diet of www.worldnews.com. Both websites act as aggregates for news from around the world, but Rayogram provides the extra perk of displaying an actual color scan of the front page of the newspaper. This gives you a better visual of what is making the front page and where – two factors that are important for critically analyzing the media.
Max Timander and Spencer Tweedy,
apparently the mop-top is an industry standard for music critics 
Since it’s release in the year 2000, I have remained impossibly enamored with the movie, Almost Famous. William Miller ({atrick Fugit) is a 15-year-old wonderkid who pitches to the Rolling Stone a cover story of the rising-star band, Stillwater, and the Rolling Stone accepts. It is a story based on the early years of Cameron Crowe. Crowe met the editor of the Rolling Stone when he was 16, on a trip to Los Angeles, and was then hired to tour with the Allman Brothers.
As both a writer and a music lover, I am obssessed with this fairytale, especially because Crowe managed to achieve success in such youth. Growing up, I told myself the golden age of rock n’ roll journalism and those once-in-a-lifetime-chances were over. Lester Bangs was dead. I wouldn’t be exposed to Chuck Klosterman until 2005 and besides, they just don’t make bands like they used to anymore. Everything is about self-promotion as well – even Brendan Kelly of Lawrence Arms has his own blog, the Bad Sandwich Chronicles. (Though addicting and wholly inappropriate, I can’t decide whether his random tangets help or hurt the band, but a voice straight from the source is far more interesting than anything a rock critic has to say.)
However, I am happy to say today that for all you Cameron Crowe wannabes – don’t lose hope! The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently ran a front page story on a 12 year old rock blogger, Max Timander. Mx2007, as Timander refers to himself online, has been churning out music reviews on his site, areyourockin.com for over year. What’s so cool about it -(aside from the fact that he’s only freakin’ 12 years old!) – is that along with reviewing big names, he also keeps on a pulse on the local Twin Cities music scene – an appeal that a major music magazine can’t achieve. Timander’s blogroll will lead you to another young arts and entertainment reviewer, Spencer Tweedy, who is also just 14 years old. Tweedy is equally full of insightful and honest rock n’ roll opinions, but to be fair, he may have had a little help from his dad, Jeff Tweedy of the indie-folk band, Wilco. Regardless, I am so impressed by these young up and coming entrepreneurial Cameron Crowes and so should you! 
Keep on rockin’ in the free world!
Everyone appreciates a good commercial, but this year’s 2009 CLIO Design and Moving Images Award Winners for print leaves us in love with still image advertisement. Here are a few of our faves…
Gold Winner, Guinness‘ Stop Public Service Campaign
Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide, Petaling Jaya
Gold Winner, Volkswagen Customized Trucks Campaign
AlmapBBDO, São Paulo
Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, Martinez
Henkel, TBWA\PARIS, Boulogne-Billancourt
AlmapBBDO, São Paulo
Your cell phone keeps you more connected than you think – and not always in a good way. Recently, the Enough Project and You Tube teamed up to launch their “Come Clean 4 Congo” video campaign to raise awareness on how your small electronics purchase could be fueling one of the deadliest wars in the Congo. The current death toll reaches 5.6 million (with 2,000 more dying per day) and 70% of the world’s rape is reported from the Congo. In order to fund their armies, the three warring militias take control of the lucrative mines and extract bribes from transporters, local and international buyers, and border control.
According to the Enough Project’s report “Can You Hear Congo Now?” The four principal conflict minerals are:
•Tin (produced from cassiterite)—used inside your cell phone and all electronic products as a
solder on circuit boards.
• Tantalum (produced from “coltan”, 80% of the world’s supply is located in the Congo)—used to store electricity in capacitors in iPods, digital cameras,
and cell phones.
• Tungsten —used to make your cell phone or Blackberry vibrate.
• Gold—used in jewelry and as a component in electronics.
The Enough Project and YouTube’s call for filmmakers to produce a short, 1-minute documentary on how cell phone purchases are linked to the war in Congo is the first step is raising awareness on this issue. Most people have no idea where their cell phone materials come from and there is no legislation currently in place to reveal the origin of these supply chains.
Even though most of us already own a cell phone that was more than likely produced with some of these conflict minerals, there is hope. As soon as conflict-free phones are introduced to the market, we can switch to one of those, and then we can donate our old phone to Hope Phones. Hope Phones is an organization that works in collaboration with kiwanja.net, the Hewlett Foundation, and FrontlineSMS: Medic, to provide phones to health care workers in developing countries. For every cell phone donated, the money from trading in the old phone goes towards purchasing new phones for health care providers. By giving remote communities a cell phone, they can stay in closer contact with their doctors, receive better care, and cut down on the response time when a medical emergency arises. A $10 cell phone will give 50 families access to emergency health care. Cell phones, like everything, can produce both bad and good, but as long as we’re aware of both sides of the conversation, we can make it work things work the right way.
If we erected a Statue of Sustainability today, her placard would undoubtedly read: give me your chocolate, your plant-based products, and your people-powered Priuses; at least, that’s what the latest innovations from Toyota, Coca-Cola, and the NASCAR racing industry would imply…
* Toyota released a behind-the-scenes preview of their 2010 Prius commercial that is choreographed and constructed entirely out of people. It looks like a scene straight out of a Dr. Suess book made for TV! Love it. Have a look at the video below where the production team describes the innovation and logistical challenges behind its debut.
* Despite Coca-Cola’s tarnished human rights image abroad, they are making important strides in sustainability at home with their partnership with the World Wildlife Fund. The Atlanta Coca-Cola headquarters has put out a fully-recyclable bottle prototype that is made entirely out of plant-based plastic. Traditional PET bottles are made from petroleum, a non-renewable resource, but the new plant bottle is made with up to 30 percent plant-based materials.
“The Coca-Cola Company is a company with the power to transform the marketplace, and the introduction of the PlantBottle(TM) is yet another great example of their leadership on environmental issues,” said Carter Roberts, President and CEO of World Wildlife Fund, U.S. “We are pleased to be working with Coke to tackle sustainability issues and drive innovations like this through their supply chain, the broader industry and the world.”
*Last, but obviously never least – race cars are always in the lead – is the introduction of a plant-powered Formula 1 race car from the Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre as a part of their WorldFirst project. The Vegetable Car boasts a carrot-based polymer steering wheel, wing mirrors made of potatoes, and a bio diesel engine that – I kid you not – runs on “waste chocolate.” And the sustainability measures do nothing to compromise speed, the Vegetable Car can still hit upwards of 125 miles on hour!
“Following the recent turmoil in Formula 1 arising from the high costs of running competitive motor racing teams, and doubts in sponsors’ minds over the commercial value of their involvement, the viability of motor racing is being critically questioned,” the WorldFirst website explains. ” We are seeking to prove to the motor industry that it is possible to build a competitive racing car using environmentally sustainable components.”
Move over Mother Liberty, the call for sustainability is getting louder and more creative every day.
Here is a sweet, new rotoscope animation for the latest Under Stars and Gutters video, 3,167. These guys are all my friends from Northern Ireland: an art student and three musicians collaborating in the mediums that they love. The animation was created by Brendan McCarey, a Design and Communications student at the University of Ulster-Magee in Derry, Northern Ireland. McCarey printed out all 1,831 frames and proceeded to hand-draw them, adding additional effects in pencil as he felt inspired.
“I used this style because it is simple,” McCarey explains. “It goes back to the basics and I think that represents the band and the music best: punk music is a return to the basics…I’m not trying to make them look like Hollywood stars because I want to show that the band doesn’t take themselves too seriously. Like the drummer, I just drew his arms and his head so you could just focus on his energy.” McCarey took about a full semester of study to complete the animation, but the drawings themselves took just over two and a half weeks. Below, I have posted the original video so that you can see what elements of the original McCarey chose to keep.
Under Stars and Gutters is a three-piece punk band from the northern coast of Ireland, comprised of Adam Carroll, Johnny Lowe, and Mark Easton. All three of them have been involved in many musical endeavors over the years and their popularity continues to grow. Like McCarey’s art, the music of Under Stars and Gutters is honest and energetic. However, bias be known: aside from their awesome creativity, the main reason why I like these videos so much is that it’s proof my boys have come a long way from the Irish drinking fiends I knew over two years ago! Cheers to that!
Never stop wandering.
The irony does not escape me that the day after I graduate from college, a new PNAS study is released stating that mind-wandering is actually beneficial to brain activity. I could have definitely used this excuse for the first 22 years of my academic career or when trying to convince my parents that “off the beaten path” does not necessarily mean “off the rails.” Alas, I’ve got at least 30 years of the work world ahead of me – so I guess for me and you both, research showing the daydreaming and mind-wandering are actually beneficial to your health comes better late than never.
Scientists Kalina Christoff of UBC and Jonathon Schooler of UCSB both created a project based on “experience sampling” to capture daydreaming through the use of an fMRI machine. Participants in the study were given an extremely tedious task to complete and when their minds began to wander, fluctuations in their brain activity were monitored. The results show that mind-wandering actually institutes a unique mental state that allows for other parts of your brain to work in more tight-knit cooperation, thus making you more productive. This level of productivity is most pronounced when you are not even aware that you are daydreaming. Not bad.
Jonah Lehrer is an important contributer to the daydreaming=productivity scene. On his blog, he notes that daydreaming actually helps us with problem-solving because were are allowed to hypothesize “what-ifs” and engage to “mental time travel” in search of solutions. Lehrer condemns the association of procrastination and daydreaming with laziness, arguing that abstract thought is often the way that many great inventions are made. (He cites the Minnesota born Post-It note as an example). “The hard part is maintaining enough awareness to catch your creative insight when it happens [and change it into something productive]“, he states.
The PNAS study also reflected that while for years, daydreaming was thought to be a “resting state” and a distraction to our day-to-day thoughts and tasks, it is actually one of the more predominant and productive modes of the human mind. This makes me feel a bit better about the time I just spent staring out the window while trying to write this blog. Sigh.
Even more intriguing – the brain doesn’t stop at daydreaming either. Take a look at Jill Bolte Taylor’s story if you really want to push your boundaries. She is a brain scientist who was able to experience her own stroke and live to tell about it. Her talk gets a little kooky when she attempts to describe what it’s like to no longer be able to define the boundaries of her own human body and her subsequent time spent disconnected from her left brain chatter, a state of mind which she refers to as “la-la-land,” but her insights are incredibly valuable. There is still so much we don’t know about the brain so it’s silly we’ve attached a stigma to daydreaming. It’s ability to unwittingly spark imagination and innovation on an abstract plain makes daydreaming one of our most crucial tools for creativity.
Yesterday, I was walking a beat through downtown Minneapolis when I stopped to observe a road construction crew that was in the process of re-paving 2nd Avenue. The huge concrete paver crawled down the road. Hard-hatted men worked to scrape off the manholes and move the concrete to areas in need and the sun beat down. I was in awe at the scope and efficiency of their endeavor. They worked without sweat, complaint, or intimidation at the enormity of their task and I felt as though I were in the presence of superheroes…Mankind is capable of creating some truly awesome structures to behold. I took a step back to marvel at the skyscrapers that surrounded me. Their stiletto silhouettes glittered in the sunlight, serving as further affirmation of all that we can accomplish when we put our minds to it. I smiled.
Just as suddenly as I was admiring our man-made ingenuity, I became exposed to another beautiful element of reality: human solidarity. In a matter of minutes, the workers from a local bakery shop had poured out into the street, side-stepped the wet concrete, and presented the road crew with upwards of seven different platters of cookies. It was an absurd scene. Cookies for concrete?! I watched as the road crew fumbled to handle these chocolate frosted delicacies with their concrete-caked, sun-baked hands and laughed. They were laughing too. In fact, in that moment, I felt like the whole city of Minneapolis was engulfed in glee.
Some of you might imply that I was witnessing a phenomenon known as “Minnesota Nice” but I know for a fact that this kind of sincerity and compassion is not a strictly Midwestern gene. We only have to take a step back and open our eyes a little wider to see that every day, everywhere, good people are coming together to solve a problem, support one another, and make a difference. Whether its food for peace, cookies for concrete, or locks for love, we’re pushing the future in a positive way. Dear Minneapolis, thanks for reminding me of that.
