Matthew Newton

Black Friday means no rules. Some people misinterpret it to mean “deep discounts,” but that’s not entirely accurate. The $100 flat screen TVs and truckloads of Silly Bandz are merely a distraction. In truth, Black Friday is a dry run for the end of days. And as far as dry runs go, the masses fail miserably–and on a grander scale–each year.

It’s a very short piece, but fascinating to see such fleeting moments slowed down to 1000 frames per second in crisp detail. What appeals to me so much about these types of videos, is how they dissect a few seconds of life and show us what we’re missing, what we’re unable to see.

When I came here it was because of the quiet and calm it afforded. I wanted a place to retreat, where I could sulk or celebrate or create new memories from nothing. A place far from the gunshots that rang out in my old neighborhood, in the crumbling house that sat at the edge of a crooked cobblestone street, squeezed between the decay of the ghetto and houses too dilapidated to gentrify.

Maxime Luère‘s short film, A Life On Facebook, tells the accelerated life story of Alex Droner. Through the stream of information on his Facebook profile we see him accumulate friends and photos, fall in and out of love, and eventually grow old and logout.

You always hear about how New York’s Times Square was more fun way back when, when hookers and porno ruled, before America’s terror mayor Rudy G. “took back the streets” by banishing the Squeegee Men and welcoming Disney into the fold. And maybe it was.

We see him applying construction adhesive to a small ceramic tile ‘Invader’ piece and sticking it to one of the steel uprights. As he works, a voice booms from a speaker atop the hill, announcing that the L.A. City Park Rangers are monitoring his activity.

Lloyd Kahn, the do-it-yourself pioneer and former champion of the geodesic dome, is the focus of a new documentary titled Shelter. Directed by Jason Sussberg, and shot in 16mm film, Kahn discusses how home is more than a shelter, that it provides an intangible sense of safety and warmth that you feel the moment you walk in the door.

Next Monday, Matt Lauer’s interview with George W. Bush will air on NBC. Bush is on the circuit to hustle his new memoir, Decision Points. Yesterday, in advance of the televised interview, excerpts of the transcript were made available to press. The transcripts are fairly boring, but there is a bright spot.

The term itself is absurd: Influencer. Any reasonable person would laugh at such a title, perhaps go as far as classify it as a fairly pretentious way to view one’s self. But it turns out more and more “young creatives” have adopted the moniker as a badge of honor, an indicator of how they perceive their role in life.

I finally took in the film this morning however, and holy shit. It’s easy to see the moth-to-light appeal of Ninja (Watkin Tudor Jones), Die Antwoord’s cartoon-like emcee who can’t speak three words without saying fuck, and lines like this: “If you don’t know what I’m saying, don’t worry about it, it’s like we’re in the fucking future now.”

Without fail the parents lumber toward me, their dead eyes locked on me like tetanus. My pale face a beacon of terror and confusion in a sea of multi-colored playground equipment. It draws them in.

It turns out grocery stores throw away tons of food. However, if you’ve ever worked at any slave wage grocery job, you already knew that. Either way, there’s a new documentary out called Dive! that looks at all the wasted food and those who seek to reclaim it from America’s dumpsters.