Viva Life

HOPE – A benefit

SH — Sat, 28 May 2011 21:57:32 +0000

It all began with a feeling of sadness and frustration after watching Japan, one of the dearest places I’d visited, filled with the kindest people, destroyed by an earthquake. With the damages totaling $300 billion and not being able to donate a large sum of money, I decided to take action instead. I enlisted the resources of the best people I knew that could help pull together and create something that would generate maximum exposure + maximum good vibes, and HOPE was born.

Thanks to my uber-ambitious friends at Trashed Magazine, the warm hearted Uniting Souls and ultra talented SkyCubeMedia families for partnering up to party for a purpose. The fabulous Chicago house music legend Johnny Fiasco is not only donating a set but traveling 22 hours back from a gig in Dubai to Seattle to play for this special night alongside eight of Seattle’s favorite locals. Won’t you travel a shorter distance and join us this Memorial Day Sunday? 100% of the proceeds going to Red Cross.

RSVP on the Facebook Event Page here.

The Weeknd

SH — Sat, 28 May 2011 21:21:56 +0000

The mysterious new artist The Weeknd, who popped up on the scene from Toronto, is receiving much attention and just released a new song from his upcoming mixtape. The song is called “Rolling Stone” and will be part of his Thursday project, a part of a trilogy which includes House of Balloons and Echoes of Silence, the latter to be released in the summer and autumn respectively. You can download the whole album House of Balloons at the-weeknd.com.

Sounds Like: The Weeknd layers House of Balloons with samples (Siouxsie and the Banshees’s 1980 “Happy House,” Beach House‘s 2006 “Master of None”), electronic synths and hip-hop references, accompanied by Frank Ocean from Odd Future and How To Dress Well. There are also traces of The-Dream, Drake and Aaliyah throughout. (Rolling Stone)

Penny De Los Santos Food Photography Workshop

SH — Wed, 11 May 2011 18:59:29 +0000

Meet Penny De Los Santos. She’s an award winning, internationally published photojournalist and food photographer that has visited over 30 countries on assignment.

She’s is a senior contributing photographer at Saveur Magazine and a regular contributor for National Geographic and Martha Stewart Living. Her photos are some of the most beautiful that I’ve seen. Not only does she photograph food, but culture and travel, two of my other passions. Check out her beautiful site here, and follow her adventures on twitter @pennydelossantos

Penny De Los Santos - Food Beauties - 2011

Penny De Los Santos - Food Beauties

Want to learn more? From Penny? From your living room? Yes!

First off, thanks to Althea of Apple Water Photography, who gave me a heads up on creativeLIVE, an online, world-wide creative classroom where you can learn about a variety of topics including photography, programming, creative software, fine arts and more. How cool is that?

Penny is hosting a FREE three-day online Food Photography course on creativeLIVE. I’m planning on watching the classes, and have been invited to the Sunday farm table oyster roast dinner at creativeLIVE on Sunday. SO excited!

Details on the workshop:
Free Online Food Photography Workshop by Penny De Los Santos
May 13 – 15, 2011 – 10:00 am Pacific Time Friday – Sunday. If you watch the course LIVE as it happens this weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) it is 100% free. If you can not watch live, you can pick up the videos for $99 afterward.

Check out this video ‘The Power of Food Photography’ filmed by Penny DeLosSantos.

The Power of Food Photography from Penny De Los Santos on Vimeo.

Life and Times

SH — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:14:40 +0000

Jay-Z has launched his new cool-hunting venture Life And Times this week with this video “Welcome to the Future.” The photo-grid layout is bold and innovative but still easy to navigate–and the grid itself is already curated with features that are legitimately cool, from French fashion blogger Garance Doré to the debut album by avant R&B kids The Weeknd.

If you look at Jay-Z as a brand, and I think that’s what he’s going for… it only further showcases him as an all around tastemaker. Will be interesting to see how much of a personal touch Life+Times will showcase, but in the meantime we’ll be checking out the coolness that is featured.

The 2011 TED Prize Winner

SH — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 23:25:22 +0000

Ted Talks are usually 18 minutes of inspiration you can count on from the geniuses of our generation. However, this years Ted Prize winner, chooses to remain anonymous. The French street artist behind sunglasses and a hat known only as JR is the 2011 TED Prize winner, and rightfully so. It may be his unexplained community engagement fueled, large scale guerrilla art or my being raised by two artists, but I found this was one of the most moving stories I’ve seen on TED.

JR’s career as a photographer began when he found a camera in the Paris subway. In his first major project, in 2001 and 2002, JR toured and photographed street art around Europe, tracking the people who communicate their messages to the world on walls. His first large-format postings began appearing on walls in Paris and Rome in 2003. His first book, Carnet de rue par JR, about street artists, appeared in 2005.

In 2006, he launched “Portrait of a Generation,” huge-format portraits of suburban “thugs” from Paris’ notorious banlieues, posted on the walls of the bourgeois districts of Paris. This illegal project became official when Paris City Hall wrapped its own building in JR’s photos.

In 2007, with business partner Marco, he did “Face 2 Face,” which some consider the biggest illegal photo exhibition ever. JR and a grassroots team of community members posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on both sides of the security fence/separation barrier. He embarked on a long international trip in 2008 for his exhibition “Women Are Heroes,” a project underlining the dignity of women who are the target of conflict. In 2010, the film Women Are Heroes was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and received a long standing ovation.

JR is currently working on two projects: “Wrinkles of the City,” which questions the memory of a city and its inhabitants; and Unframed, which reinterprets famous photographs and photographers by taking photos from museum archives and exposing them to the world as huge-format photos on the walls of cities. It asks the question: What is the art piece then? The original photo, the photo “unframed” by JR or both?

JR creates pervasive art that spreads uninvited on buildings of Parisian slums, on walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa or in favelas in Brazil. People in the exhibit communities, those who often live with the bare minimum, discover something absolutely unnecessary but utterly wonderful. And they don’t just see it, they make it. Elderly women become models for a day; kids turn into artists for a week. In this art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.

After these local exhibitions, two important things happen: The images are transported to London, New York, Berlin or Amsterdam where new people interpret them in the light of their own personal experience. And ongoing art and craft workshops in the originating community continue the work of celebrating everyone who lives there. As he is anonymous and doesn’t explain his huge full-frame portraits of people making faces, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passerby/ interpreter.

You can watch the entire moving Ted Talk with video on TedPrize.org. You can also participate in JR’s newest project at insideoutproject.net

Tast(y) Washington

SH — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 06:00:51 +0000

Just a few to choose from

Where can you taste over wine from over 200 Washington wineries all in one place? Taste Washington, where I (happily) was this last Sunday. Taste is the nation’s largest single-region wine and food event featuring over 700 Washington state wines alongside 50 local restaurants to showcase the finest in cuisine.

I partnered up with Diane LaVonne, of Diane’s Market Kitchen, an urban cooking school four blocks south of Pike Place Market, to help with marketing and speaking with her potential students about her message of using all locally sourced products in her classes. After learning most of the parings at Taste would be savory, we created a tasty carrot cake bite with all local ingredients.

Cakes awaiting frosting - Sarah Hunt photo

The bites included organic carrots from Willie Greens, free range eggs from Skagit River Farm in Sedro Wooley, freshly milled whole-wheat flour from Nash Farms, organic sugar, and ginger and cinnamon from Market Spice in Pike Place Market. The secret ingredient for a moist carrot cake bite? Apres Vin reisling grapeseed oil. I’ve gotten the chance to taste their grapeseed oils many times, and they’re worth checking out. To top it off, a creamy, Beecher’s Honey Blank Slate frosting that landed an impressed nod from the Beecher’s team. I smell future collaboration.

Grand Tasting

Sunday’s layered afternoon included an industry tasting, VIP session and finally the Grand Tasting for a curious general public, where one can move through the booths tasting wine, learn what foods to pair it with, and see cooking demonstrations by celebrity chefs.

Wine and food highlights for me were Terra Blanca‘s ONYX Red Bordeaux Blend, Goose Ridge Estate Sol Duc Meritage Red Bordeaux Blend, and Tulalip Casino‘s tender braised beef short rib, Oregon bleu cheese potato puree with Cabernet cherry demi. Heaven.

For more information on how to attend Taste Washington events, go to the Taste Washington website. For more information on Diane’s delicious cooking classes, go to Diane’s Market Kitchen website.