Help a Guy Out
Long time, no see, my little gilded lilies…but that’s entirely my fault. However, I see that you all have kept this blog alive even if I haven’t contributed to it in a long while. For that, I thank you…it let’s me know I’m not the only crazy person out there ^_^
But now my husband needs a little help. I’m attaching his request below. Please spare a moment of your time and help him out. He deserves to win this and so much more…after all, poor bastard got stuck with me as a wife! Anyway, here’s his request:
“Hey Guys,
My name is Tan. I’ve entered a contest to win a new wheelchair accessible van. I’m a student at Florida State University working on my Bachelors in Communication, an active student on campus as a member of the AAF student chapter, I work as a tutor for Disability Student Services at Gulf Coast State College, and am an active member of the community, supporting the local arts, small community business leaders, and a child advocacy organization. This summer I’ll also be working on a field study of a public relations program that my wife and I created to help the local organization Every Child 1 Promise. But without reliable transportation I’ve recently been unable to participate in all the things I love doing–for the first time in nearly 14 years since having my accident, I’ve been forced to become a shut-in.
Please help me rejoin the world by voting for my video. The link is provided for you below.
Follow the link and when you vote enter the code 974.
http://www.nmeda.com/mobility-awareness-month/heroes/florida/panama-city/1684/tan-nguyen
When you’ve done that, please share this note and link with yout friends so they can help vote for me. Voting ends May 13th, so I need all the help I can get. Thank you for all your support!
You are allowed to vote once per IP address per day. So please vote for me every day.
I also want to send a special thank you to all those people who had such nice things to say about me and wanted to be a part of my video. Thank You!”
**Note: Another friend called the company and they told her that once you use the code the first time it links the code to your email address. So as long as you use that email address the next time you vote, the code will automatically be tallied to your new vote. You can vote once per IP address daily. If you vote using multiple IP addresses, you can vote 5 times per email address daily. Any time you use a different email address, the first time you vote you need to enter the promo code and then same rule as above applies each time you enter that email address to vote.
Little Hugs Left Behind
Talk about a cry-fest. Even Gilding cried like a ninny when she read this one.
Diagnosed with brain cancer, 6-year old Elena Desserich was given 135 days to live–she lived 255 (2007). After her passing, Elena’s parents began finding hundreds of notes hidden in any nook and cranny throughout their home, all of them from their daughter. What must have been an exhaustive feat during her illness, Elena created these little love notes, a few of which are shown here:
…these notes were found tucked in backpacks, dresser drawers, between bookshelves and CD cases.
Elena’s parents have had these notes published in a book entitled Notes Left Behind to fund the non-profit organization The Cure Starts Now, dedicated to fighting pediatric brain cancer. Visit Notes Left Behind for the full story and details on where you can purchase the book.
Now if you’ll escuse this deviant; she has to go take care of this blasted heart that has suddenly grown two sizes too big. No body likes a nice Gilding.
Via: neatorama
Discarded and Silvered
Hmmm…so this is interesting. Some collect sterling silver tableware, now they can collect silver garbage table settings. Its an interesting concept using tried and true techniques to create something modern and unique, but truthfully the pieces can remind us just how much garbage we really produce with our fast food nation and need for easy living.
Tithi Kutchamuch’s Reincarnation project is an examination of how to bring value to discarded objects: an egg box, a plastic spoon, a stirrer, a mouthwash bottle, an artificial flower, a polystyrene burger box, and a stack of cupcake cups. By reincarnating them in silver, Kutchamuch offers them a second life as a valuable table setting. This time, if the user tires of them, they can be traded instead of thrown away, thanks in part to their uniqueness and because of thier new material value.
Kutchamuch uses a lost wax casting technique where the discarded objects are used instead of wax. In casting, wax models are immersed in plaster, the waz is then burnt out, and molten metal is poured into the resulting cavity. In Reincarnation, the discarded objects are used in place of the wax, creating not only the necessary plaster cast’s cavity, but also capturing all the nuances of textures, stamps, ripples and folds, and even the inperfections and damages of the discarded item.
Via MOCO LOCO
Stranglehold on Water Conservation
Designer Elisabeth Buecher’s My Shower Curtain is a Green Warrior [above] uses innovative materials and inflatable technology to slowly trap you while you shower, leaving you only a few showering moments to take care of bathing necessities before it comes closing in around you. Buecher explains:
My approach to design can sometimes appear shockingly radical but I have got different reasons to legitimise that. An alarm clock is not what we can call a pleasurable object. It is often even painful to be awoken by it. However it is a necessary object, which regulates our lives and the society. Thats what I call the design for pain and for our own good. Some of my designs seem to constrain people, acting like an alarm clock, awaking people to the consciousness of their behaviour and giving them limits. People often need an external signal to behave more. In France the government added thousands of new radars on the roads to fight excessive speed. And it worked: there are far less people killed on the roads of France today. I call it design of threat and punishment and I use it as an educational tool.
Hmmm….strangled to death or poked to death in the name of water conservation…or, you could just use an alarm clock to tell you when to get the hell out. But one supposes the lack of impending death wouldn’t be nearly as fun, then would it.
Via: MOCOLOCO
Bureaucracy kills
“In nature’s death sentence, execution occurs while waiting for a decision. Bureaucracy kills nature. Demand approval for preservation laws of the rain forest.”
from the SOS Mata Atlântica Foundation: Stamps campaign
Via: Ads of the World
Racebending
So Mr. Gilding is particularly up in arms about this newest cinema development, and even Gilding has to agree that his outrage isn’t the ramblings of a crazed artist, but is in fact justified.
M Night Shyamalan has taken up filming the wildly popular animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, originally a Nickelodeon show. The show, of which Shyamalan’s film is based, featured Asian characters in a fantasy setting inspired by and following some cultural aspects of a variety of Asian cultures. The characters fight with East Asian martial arts style, have Asian features, dress in clothing from Asian cultures, and write with Chinese characters. In short, it was an inspiring cartoon for many Asian American children as it broke from the predominantly white American media. The Gilded Duo’s own niece and nephews found a particular kinship with the animated series being that the characters looked like them and held to many of the Asian traditions that they themselves grow up in, even living in America.
But on December 9th, 2008 the lead roles were cast for Shyamalan’s upcoming film The Last Airbender and all of them were cast as white actors. That started a barrage of protests, from the creation of websites like RACEBENDING.COM to outraged blog posts like the one written by Margaret Cho.
And to add insult to injury, here’s some comparison pics for you:
Above, the characters from the animated series: Katara and Sokka, siblings from the peaceful and oppressed Water Tribe; and Zuko, prince of the tyrannical and genocidal Fire Fire Nation.
Above, the most recent casting form the film: Nicola Peltz as Katara, Jackson Rathbone as Sokka, and Dev Patel as Zuko (though originally the role of Zuko was cast as Jesse McCartney, a blond haired, blue-eyed pop singer).
Gilding has to agree with the ensuing protests. Movie houses have been notoriously spoken of in Asian communities for their inaccuracy in casting Asian specific roles with any ole Asian culture — such as casting Korean of Thai extras to play the parts of Vietnamese actors in Vietnam War era films — you know, because hiring locals of the film’s location is so much easier than actually hiring Vietnamese people, showing no understanding of the cultural relativeness that they are all different peoples and don’t look as much alike as they think they do. While this is most certainly a slight, casting white for Asian is a serious offense.
Efforts to stop or delay the film’s production until casting is changed to accurately reflect the culturally relevant necessity of casting Asians for Asian roles is underway. Petitions are circulating; even one available at RACEBENDING.COM. Paramount, and other movie houses, need to understand that perpetuating stereotypes and denying the cultures of the world are not acceptable. The message being sent is that being Asian isn’t OK, it’s somehow less. That’s not the message Gilding wants sent to her niece and nephews.
There are some amazing responses by Asian Americans on Margaret Cho’s blog that Gilding encourages reading.
Bitter and Betrayed, Those Slumdogs of Millionaires
The children of the multi-Oscar winning and $300 million earning film Slumdog Millionaire have yet to be able to escape their station in the caste system of India as they and their families still live in abject poverty in the dregs of Mumbai.
Director Danny Boyle had made claims that the families would be given apartments and that trusts were set up for the children to be turned over to them when they completed school. Some six weeks after the Oscars, the families remain living in the slums — one child’s family lives under a tarp while another’s still has raw sewage running directly in front of her family’s ramshackle shack. The families say no one has contacted them and the financial support provided by producers has barely extended past the meager acting fees initially paid.
Past controversies around the children’s treatment has focused on the children’s meager incomes, each having been paid less than $3,000.
James Nye at Barcroft Media writes:
Dressed in the most expensive clothes they had ever worn, Slumdog Millionaire’s child stars thought their life of poverty and deprivation was over after the film’s haul of eight Oscars. They had been promised new homes, money and an education. But six weeks after being flown to Hollywood and lavished with praise Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail feel angry, bitter and betrayed.
Mention the name of Danny Boyle, once seen as the hero who would rescue them from the slums, and disappointment is etched across the face of the two children plucked from poverty to star in his hit film. ..
While it is arguable that its not the producers responsibility to purchase the families apartments, or set up trust funds, or pay for the children’s education, the argument becomes moot when those are the exact things the producer himself guarenteed to give. At the least, he made a verbal contract, whether the families knew or understood that. Furthermore, the verbal contract was sealed with millions of witnesses as the Director Danny Boyle made the verbal proclomation in the records of public press at the time of the Oscars.
Just because you can get away with that kind of shitty treatment because you’re in another country that allows this kind of abject poverty for even its children in a social and religious system that justifies it, doesn’t mean you — who are not of that faith or society — should be allowed to. This isn’t an arguement for cultural relativism, for if it was, then for the sake of that sociological ethic those children wouldn’t have been cast in the film to begin with. But the producers own actions set a bad precedent. Don’t believe, then take for example since the film’s huge sucess, nine-year old Rubina Ali recently earned thousands for shooting a soft drink commercial with Nicole Kidman — a fair slightly better than her filming comrade has gotten, but certainly its not the fair value of stock, advertising rights, and overall gross payment that an American child would have received.
Perhaps enough bad press will pressure the producers to keeping their end of the contractual promise they made to these families and to the media they so proclaimed their bleeding hearts to.
Via: cele|bitchy
Green Jeans
Catching the eco-friendly trend train, Levi Strauss Eco Jeans campaign is witty and earthy, if a little B-rate horror flick freaky.
From advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, art director Ross Ventress, and photographer Simon Harsent, the campaign features Levi’s designer denims on green bodies of wildly growing vines and weed-like plants. Its a visually interesting campaign and while it hops on the green banwagon, its a refreshing breath of air that its not hammering us over the head with the obvious greenmania, but rather it’s smart, latching onto the viewers intelligence to recognize the advertisements agenda.
And while blogs across the webisphere argue over what exactly Levi’s intended meaning to “organic” is — as copyranter points out, “that “organic” can mean all kinds of things that are far from environmentally friendly” — Gilding just appreciates that this campaign isn’t sexually objectifying woman like Wrangler’s recent campaign did.
Salute Your Cunt!
My vagina is coming!
Have you seen my vagina of late?
It is dark, black and hairy
Iti is warm, lukewarm and sexy
It is the crucible of paradoxes:
It is both weak and strong
Soft and hard
It builds and destroys
It makes and breaks
It is sometimes the conqueror, sometimes
the conquered
Men crave for it, but turn around and
destroy it
My vagina is coming
In fact, it is already here
Here to sing a canticle to the world
Here to remind the world of its
indespensability
It is the door through which all
humanity goes…
~Afuba, Mfor Divine
The Vagina Poem
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I am e my
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and asha so that
med, no I you may
am woman go on
growling with enter living
sophisti with in pink
cation caution velvet
and I can br eleg
ooz aek ance
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P.S.U.D.’s
On this, the anniversary of the passing of one of Life’s Joys, Gilding has decided to spend the occassion in celebration of her memory with some gloriously fun puddle stompers of unusual design (P.S.U.D’s — like R.O.U.S’s only not furry and life threatening.)
Smith and Hawken’s Red Wellies Soap & Dish feature their classic red wellies captured in a luxurious hand and body soap and come in a light, garden-inspired fragrance of citrus with a touch of mint.
Shuella — otherwise known as the “shoe umbrella” — was born of frustration for ruined designer shoes in inclement weather and were fashionably constructed to be worn over your high-heeled beauties with the slip of a clutch and velcro fasteners.
Feeding the need for a little Rainy Day Gardening, these colorful ceramic baby rain boot planters are packed with everything needed to start a garden — except the rain, of course.
Ah, Gilding sees some measuring a ‘boot…Ok, that was a tad too corney. The Regina Regis Rain Wellington Boot is not different in design than any other run of the mill Puddle Stomper except that it features a rain measuring scale imprinted on the boot’s side. Some have attributed the boot’s design as a demonstrative message to the rising sea levels and increased flooding that has become a threat to many, but there’s no accounting for crazy Brit’ thinking .^_~.
Some prefer the gold leaf gilding of ornate framed mirrors, but we prefer to stare at our reflection in a Puddle Stomper Mirror.
Ah, a Sterling Silver Wellington Boot Cufflinks. What could be classier than a puddle stomper on your sleeve.
Hmm…so many ways to puddle stomp, where to stop. For now we shall say ado, but not before mentioning the poshest puddle stompers around — the boots of Project Joy Boots. A non-profit organization, Project Joy Boots was established in the grief and joyous memory of Marisa Joy Williams, a young technical theater major tragically lost to family and friends this day last year. Rising from the ashes of hurt and the tears of love, Project Joy Boots set out to spread the love of puddle stompers — a personal favorite of Marisa’s and often used as a canvas for any given mood of artistry she was in at the moment — and raise enough money to establish a scholarship in Marisa’s name for other technical theater students of Gulf Coast Community College. A separate portion of funds raised from the auctioning off of these puddle stompers turned works of art is donated to the Humane Society. To make a contribution to Project Joy Boots or to donate your own pair of artistic made-over puddle stompers or to see the many boots that have been created and donated by family, friends, and artists far and wide alike, visit their facebook page, Project Joy Boots.
Imagination Dies When a Child Doesn’t Read
This year’s The Gift of Reading campaign from the Literacy Foundation conveys one simple message: “When a child doesn’t read, imagination disappears.” Playing off such childhood favorites as “Faith, trust, and pixie dust” and its darker counterpart “Everytime someone says ‘I don’t believe in fairies’, another one drops dead somehwere!”, the campaign’s slogan is a quickly catchy statement that floods us with good memories of childhoos daydreams with the dangers that happen when we “don’t beleive.”
Equally gruesome to the idea is the visual depiction put forth in the campaign posters:
Peter Pan in a wheelchair, a frail and elderly man where life and time have left their mark on him. Looking up at a shooting star from out of an open hospital room window, he appears sad, weighted down by the hospital bracelet on his wrist.
Cinderella wanders the corridors of a hospital, leaning on her IV drip like death walking. Wearing her ball gown, only one slipper upon her foot, her skin is sallow and her body gaunt, she is vidibly worn down by illness.
Think that’s hearbreaking, you should see Little Red Riding Hood die in the TV advertisement.
Link: Literacy Foundation
Casa Per Tutti–The House for Everyone
Designed Prototype
built for the 2008
Architecture Triennale
in Milan, Italy, Casa Per
Tutti, was concieved by
its designers, I-Beam,
as a transitional shelter
for refugees returning to
Kosovo. There was a
need for an alternative
shelter to the typical tent
solution that could
easily realize a solution
to the problem of
housing the displaced
that could then be transformed affordably and easily into a permanent home. The home even realizes its potential as a modular, prefabricated solution to affordable housing. The principal building material is the wooden shipping pallets which are versatile, recyclable, sustainable, easily assembled, and inexpensive.
The evolution of one 16′
by 16′ shelter into a
permanent home
requires approximately
100 palettes nailed or
strapped together and
lifted into place. Tarps
draped over the basic
structure or plastic
corrugated sheets
prevent water
penetration until
enough debris, stone,
mud, earth, wood,
corrugated metal or any
other materials from the immediate surroundings can be gathered to fill the wall cavities and cover the roof. Pallets may be pre-assembled with styrofoam insulation, vapor barrier, plywood or corrugated sheathing prior to shipping. As infrastructure is restored and cement or other materials become available the filled pallets can be covered with stucco, plaster, or roofing tiles transforming the makeshift shelter into a permanent home within a year or two. Consequently, the Pallet House adapts to almost every climate on earth and the basic structure can be built in less than a week for under $3000.
No need for a temporary refugee shelter or inexpensively adaptable natural home? How about building one of these for that childrens playhouse your kids (or in Gilding’s case, nieces & nephews) keep giving you puppy-dog eyes for. Go to your nearest Walmart or Home Depot or some such other capitalistic bane to American economic society and they stack the pallets up outside to be taken for free. Some nails, plastic rain tarps, and imagination and your kid can have one kick-ass playhouse. Build it tall enough and Mommy and Daddy have a naughty playroom when the kids go to bed .^_~.
Oh, by the way, this wasn’t the only design. There are a few others; all using shipping pallets. Clicking on the arrows above the pictures allows you to scroll through more images of that particular design and most give you a full 360 of the structure.
Link:
I-Beam
The Gilded Muse
In her book, “Queen of the Artist’s Studio”, German born artist Andrea Geyer would come to describe the moment at which her eyes met “the gaze of a woman” who was “golden” and “balancing delicately on top of a ball.” A first encounter with the famous statue at the tip of the Municipal Building that she describes as a “moment of intimacy between two living beings.”
Staring from her window at a studio on the 33rd floor of the Woolworth Building, where she was starting her artists residency, Geyer discovered that the statue, known as Civic Fame, bore the likeness of Audrey Munson, a long-forgotten New York model whose face and figure served as the muse for artist’s statues across Manhattan — 15 statues to be exact.
“All girls cannot be perfect 36s, with bodies of mystic warmth and plastic marble effect, colored with rose and a dash of flame,” Munson wrote, serving not only as the artist’s muse but also a critical voice against society’s lack of respect for models and challenging the prevailing standards of decency and beauty. Her strong nose and confident body had Munson celebrated as a personification of the Greek ideal of female body, but the fall from such peaks of Olympus in the second decade of the 20th century found Munson spending the last 65 years of her life in a mental hospital. Saki Knafo of the New York Times writes, “as though by an ironic oversight of some sculptor god, [Munson] ended up in an unmarked grave without even a tombstone bearing her name.”
Geyer, with the help of a New York arts group called Art in General, is raising money to buy a monument for Munson’s grave, in a cemetary in the upstate New York town of New Haven, near Oswego.
Accordian Relief
Designed for disaster relief, the Recovery Shelter can house a family of four for a month with eco-friendly components, is cheap to produce, easy to produce, transports, configurate, and is reconfigurable, and adaptable to multiple environments. The shelter can be set up by a single individual in minutes, and collapsed into either of two configurations (horse-shoe or flat). And its made of 100% polypropylene, hence the recyclability.
The ridges of the Recovery shelter, created by its accordian-like design, can collect drinking water, and the structure can be covered in local materials for better insulation.
Shelter for the disaster ridden aside, the Recovery Shelter would make one bitchin’ camping tent.
From designers Matthew Malone, Amanda Goldberg, Jennifer Metcalf and Grant Meacham.
Link: Yanko Design
Vertical Oklahoma
Hoping to spread his vision for “vertical farms” Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, created the concept of a 30-story tower that could feed thousands of people back in 1999 with his graduate students. Since then, the “verticle farm” has captured the imaginations of architects and various city-planners.
The concept of using skyscrapers had design significance for Despommier, who explains that the skyscrapers could protect a city’s food supply from floods and droughts, and from pathogens that attack crops. Fellow architect Augustine Rosenstiehl pointed out that a verticle farm has to be adapted for a specific place, much as the design of any skyscraper, which also makes the concept of a “vertical farm” feesible.
But Despommier doesn’t just see plopping one of these skyscraper farms in the middle of whatever crevice the city can squeeze it into. He believes that entire communities can be developed surrounding these “vertical farms”. He notes that critical to this concept’s success is architecture; stirking designs that make people vie for having one as the central view in their backyard.
Many of the design modeled after Despommier’s concept can be seen here.
