Street Peeper, Seoul Korea

This man looks incredibly modern to me, feel free to disagree. [Street Peeper]

Finally, Hillary Clinton is in Vogue, literally. [Vogue]

Watch fashion designer Gareth Pugh make a one of kind garment, ask him questions about it, then buy it online. [SHOWstudio]

Congrats to French designer Sophie Theallet for winning the 6th annual CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund! [Style.com]

DJ AM’s shoes are on ebay, fab or foul? [Ebay]

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Did you know that this week is “Geography Awareness Week?” To celebrate this occasion, National Geographic asked the 100 US senators to draw an outline of their home state from memory on a square approximately the size of a cocktail napkin and note at least three important locations or landmarks in their state.

It’s almost not fair that Senator Al Franken of Minnesota is included in this survey. As I previously mentioned here, we know Sen. Franken is an overachiever in this department, as he’s demonstrated that not only can he accurately draw his homestate but a complete map of the United States as well. Anyway, check out his and a few other senators’ efforts (including my home state!) after the jump. View rest of the drawings here.

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Hey, it’s me the resident design and furniture nerd over on SUNfiltered. You’d feel really sad for me if you realized what great pleasure discovering these classic Herman Miller commercials over on Grassroots Modern.

Herman Miller is the American manufacturer who brought the world the designs of Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi and George Nelson among others. They were groundbreaking in the 50s and 60s spearheading the Modernist movement in the US. Their unique approach to design is reflected in the often-time hilarious moments of these ads.

The use of humor and the dated references still don’t outshine the chairs. They’re the real stars and always will be.

Other posts like this:

• Why it Matters: Green Design

Listen Here:

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Most sports movies will try to convince you that it’s not about winning, it’s about how you play the game. Not DOWNHILL RACER (1969). In fact, one of the primary reasons Robert Redford struggled to get this film made was because no one had made a sports movie with a protagonist whose amorality and arrogance had no effect on his winning streak. He chose to center the narrative around downhill racing pretty much because baseball and football were already taken.

Redford plays David Chappellet, a backwoods kid from Colorado whose raw and untrained talent for downhill skiing lands him a spot on the US team with a shot at the Olympics. After he first makes a name for himself he goes home to stay with his dad, whose more interested in mending the fences on his ranch than in hearing about his son’s travels. He can’t understand why David would try so hard at something he’s not even getting paid for (yet). “Because I’ll be a champion,” David earnestly replies. “Yeah,” his dad says. “The world’s full of them.” Things aren’t much better back on the team, where David’s stubbornness and lack of emotion has managed to isolate him from his teammates, his girlfriend (Camilla Sparv) and his coach (Gene Hackman), whose forced to placate him nevertheless; He’s the only chance they have at winning a gold.

The new Criterion release features not only a restored, hi-def transfer of the film, but also new interviews with the screenwriter, James Salter, and Redford, who take us through the struggle to get the film made, including the battle over Polanski, who was almost the director until he left the project to make ROSEMARY’S BABY (which the studios actually tried to get Redford to star in as a way to keep him busy enough to forget about making DOWNHILL RACER). It may not have been a commercial success, but as a portrait of a man who exists only to win and the world that encourages him, it’s a stunning, subtle, unrelentingly honest film.

Other posts like this:

• Criterion releases REPULSION
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A simple, but neat music video for their song “Sleep-walking” by Russian band Everything is Made in China, or EIMIC. One blogger saw this band at the Illosaarirock Festival in Finland and recently wrote:

EIMIC took the stage and absolutely mesmerized the entire crowd. 1000 people stood in perfect silence as the band fill the tent with lush synths, beautiful melodies and epic, Caspian style drums keeping everyone entranced.

Take a listen before they appear on the cover of Time Out for an article about breakout bands from Russia.

[Via]

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Finally! An ad for a cleaning product that doesn’t feature a woman going into an orgasmic paroxysm over a new mop. Only on Madison Avenue does doing the chores turn a woman on. Sure, Pine-Sol may have shamelessly ripped off the Porn for Women books with their new ad, but we don’t care. The ad (above) features a woman pulling into her swank house in a snazzy convertible, then climbing a rose-petal-strewn staircase to find a smokin’ hot topless dude mopping her floors. We love Pine-Sol even more for keeping on Diane Amos for this ad. She has starred in Pine-Sol’s ads for 16 years, and, as she told the New York Times, “I run a household and have kids. I look like I mop.” We can’t believe it took Madison Avenue this long to capitalize on the no-duh notion that dudes who pull their weight in the household chores department are more likely to get laid. Though, for the record, we should point out — as we did here last month — that a recent study found that doing housework increases the amount of sex in a relationship no matter who mops. But we’re not going to write any letters to Pine-Sol pointing this out just yet — we want more ads featuring hot semi-naked guys doing chores first.

MORE FROM EM & LO:

• Twilight, Take Me Away! Teen Vampires & the Moms Who Love Them
• What You Need to Know About the Stupak Amendment
• The Unspoken Rules of Locker Room Behavior

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It’s a strange thing to reach adulthood and see, for the very first time, a film everyone else saw before they hit puberty. For me that film is PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE. I’m not going to lie; when I was a kid, Pee-wee really freaked me out. I thought he was creepy and weird and unnecessarily loud. But as part of Tim Burton’s retrospective, MoMA is screening all of his films, starting last night with PEE-WEE, his 1985 feature film debut. After Paul Reubens saw FRANKENWEENIE (a full-length remake is due out in 2011) he chose Burton to direct PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE, which had, until that point, been a stage-show at the Roxy in L.A. and of course, an HBO special.

Although PEE-WEE has graced many a “Worst Films” list and I was prepared to leave the theatre unimpressed, I really, really enjoyed it. I can see how his non-sensical world would have scared me as a kid: he’s a man who acts like a child, who has no parents and lives all alone and doesn’t go to school and doesn’t work but has money. I guess I was kind of confused. But seeing it now, it works. It’s clever, and the Pee-wee character and his world is very well written. I actually laughed out loud throughout the film. The Alamo jokes? Priceless! Simone and her ‘big but?’ Hilarious! But the best part is that now I’ll finally get all the pop-culture references.

MoMA will screen Tim Burton’s films (schedule here) as well a special series “Tim Burton and the Lurid Beauty of Monsters,” which begins December 2 and last throughout the exhibition.

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Want your phone to sound like a woodpecker? Got’cha covered… that and more at this week’s green tech finds.

• Scots get paid to recycle: British supermarket chain Tesco has been testing out Tomra recycling machines (which “pays” recyclers with reward points) at one branch in Edinburgh, and is so happy with the results that its expanding its offerings to another store… with more planned.
  
  
• Research product sustainability right in the store: GoodGuide has released an iPhone app that “…lets you scan bar codes for what the guide calls “impartial” health, environmental, and social responsibility ratings of not only the products you are scanning but their companies, too.” (via CNET Health Tech)
  
  
• Plug-in electricity management: Want to know which appliances are the biggest energy hogs… and track their electricity use? Zerofootprint claims its TalkingPlug will be able to do all of this and more… without any expensive wiring or meter upgrades.
  
  
• CO2 + Sunlight = Ethanol: Joule Biotechnologies claims its developed a process that “…can use direct microbial conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons, powered by solar energy, creating biofuels such as ethanol without biomass or agricultural feedstocks…” (via Green Living Ideas)
  
  
• Farm-fresh food online: Local Dirt is a new online service that extends farmers market hours to 24/7. Consumers and farmers can come together to buy and sell whatever’s available… (via sustainablog)
  
  
• Move over, bike messengers: Adam Schacter’s CarGo concept is designed for hauling small cargo loads in an urban environment… with the flexibility to expand for slightly larger loads. (via Gas 2.0)
  
  
• Solar-powered spacecraft: The Planetary Society plans to launch the first of three solar-powered spacecraft next year. (via EcoGeek)
  
  
• Is that a sparrow in your pocket…?: Sprint and the Audubon Society have released a series of 28 ringtones created from recordings of bird calls. (via MNN)
  
  

What other cool green tech stories did you see this week? Share them with us below…

Image credit:

Other posts like this:

• Green tech finds (7/30/09)
• Green tech finds (7/23/09)
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Elvis Costello, host of SPECTACLE: ELVIS COSTELLO WITH… on Sundance Channel

Catch Elvis Costello on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report airing Thursday, November 19th and in a jam-out session with The Roots on NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon airing on Friday, November 20th. Costello will be on to discuss the return of his music/talk Sundance Channel original series SPECTACLE: ELVIS COSTELLO WITH… premiering on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 10:00pm et/pt featuring U2’s Bono and The Edge. Among the confirmed guests for the seven-part season are: Bono, The Edge, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow, Lyle Lovett, John Prine, Ron Sexsmith, Neko Case, Jesse Winchester, Ray LaMontagne, Nick Lowe, Levon Helm, Richard Thompson and Allen Toussaint.

The inaugural season of SPECTACLE featured an extraordinary and eclectic roster of legendary musicians and fascinating personalities including: Sir Elton John, Tony Bennett, Lou Reed, Julian Schnabel, Smokey Robinson, The Police (Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers), James Taylor, Herbie Hancock, Rufus Wainwright, Rosanne Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Diana Krall, John Mellencamp, Jakob Dylan, She & Him (Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward), Norah Jones, Jenny Lewis, Renée Fleming and President Bill Clinton.

Season one of “Spectacle: Elvis Costello With…” will be available on DVD hitting shelves on December 9th.

LEARN MORE:

SPECTACLE on Sundance Channel

Elvis Costello Official Site

The Colbert Report

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

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