White Sands National Monument in New Mexico has always been a place of wonder to me, both before and after I visited it. It is a desert, not of sand, but of glimmering white gypsum crystals forming 275 square miles of towering dunes, making it the largest concentration of gypsum in the world. Exiting the road, I drove until the concrete faded into white. Cameras in hand, I started climbing and......read more
The global fight against climate change is an overwhelming challenge, so it makes sense to start pick the lowest hangng fruit first. While the slow wheels of politics and legislation creep forward, we can do the simple things that make a difference today. A new study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shows that using roofs that are white or light instead of black or dark significantly......read more
How do you break the world record for largest sculpture made of recycled materials? Get a bunch of kids to do the work for you! Inhabitat reports on 5,000 Spanish elementary kids collecting 50,000 containers to make a record-breaking castle of milk cartons. You've seen Simon Christen's stunningly epic time-lapse portrait of San Francisco. Now check out a similarly amazing video that......read more
If you're not listening closely, "Santa's Sack" by White Ghost Shivers sounds like another family-friendly Christmas song. Listen closer, and you realize the lyrics are slightly more, er, adult-oriented. Eric Power's mixed media animation brings the suggestive lyrical content to the forefront. Because Santa only comes once a year......read more
Julia Pott's video for "White Corolla," from the 2009 album Advance Base Battery Life by (the unfortunately named) Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, is a tale of love between animals. Great illustration work by the London-based animator. Check out more of Pott's work on her Youtube channel....read more
As our Mexican brethren will no doubt attest, few foods pair together so well as beans and avocado. It's a culinary coupling that rightfully takes its place among the world's greatest food duos, right up there with peanut butter and jam. At Food Coma, Emma brings the two together in snack format, with a fresh and flavorful Avocado and White Bean Dip that nails our three kitchen requisites of......read more
Since moving to LA from Maryland in 2002, Nicholas Alan Cope has been documenting the infrastructure of his adopted hometown in stark, black-and-white photos. Those images of the city's geometric modern architecture are collected in a new book, "Whitewash," out this month on powerHouse. Cope relies on stark abstraction and the power of contrast to deliver what looks to be a surreal and special......read more
Surrealist sculpture and green architecture collide in this hillside Austrian home that might make M.C. Escher blush -- and Mies van der Rohe cringe. The detached house, designed by Weichlbauer Ortis Architects, is covered in a soft synthetic turf, offering a strange yet somehow literal take on green wall design. With willfully superfluous windows extending from other windows and weirdly placed......read more
Here's another video for Dexter Tortoriello's bliss pop project, Houses. Directors LAMAR+NIK made ice sculptures using a series of handmade clay molds, then took time-lapse stills of the melting process in a garage. The entire budget: a little over $200. Houses' recording process was similarly lo-fi. The entire All Night album was recorded off-the-grid in Hawaii, on a laptop......read more
There's not a ton to this video. Actually there's very little. But the song is some lovely, blissful pop, and there's an interesting backstory. The standout single from All Night, Houses' first full-length, "Endless Spring" was recorded in Hawaii where sole bandmember Dexter Tortoriello spent time with his partner living off the grid. In his words: "We moved out to a little cabin in Papaikou,......read more