objects at Brave New Films

Authors@Google: Porochista Khakpour

2008-10-29T03:31:18Z

The Authors@Google program was pleased to welcome writer and novelist Porochista Khakpour to Google's New York office to discuss her debut book, "Sons and Other Flammable Objects".

Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in Los Angeles. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Paper, Flaunt, Nylon, and Bidoun, among many others.
Her debut novel "Sons and Other Flammable Objects" received much acclaim from The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. It won the 77th Annual California Book Award in "First Fiction," and was a Chicago Tribune "Fall's Best" selection and a New York Times "Editor's Choice."

Khakpour builds her luminously intelligent debut around the travails of an Iranian-American family caught in the feverish and paranoid currents immediately after 9/11. Darius Adam and his wife, Laleh, flee revolutionary Iran for the alien territory of Southern California, settling in an apartment complex with the allegorically enticing name of Eden Gardens. Son Xerxes grows up with psychological dual citizenship: regular American outside of Eden Gardens, but the son of bitter Darius and clueless Lala inside. Xerxes finds true paradise in watching Barbara Eden, the star of I Dream of Jeannie.
Against this background of a parody paradise, Khakpour plays out the events following 9/11, which will, grotesquely, unite the Adam family. By then Xerxes, 26, is an unemployed college grad in a New York airshaft-view apartment, as far from Eden Gardens as possible.
Khakpour is an elegant writer, and she imparts a perfect sense of the ironies of being Persian in America, where the blurry collective image of the Middle East alternates between blonde genies in bottles and furrow-browed terrorists in cockpits.

Thid event took place on June 24, 2008.

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Another Fast Flying ORB

2009-01-07T22:34:39Z

Fast Flying ORB film in "Nightshot" mode using a IF filter.

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Multiple UFO's Flying around

2009-01-07T22:34:39Z

I was filming Chemtrails with my Sony video camera using a IR filter and "Nightshot" mode, I noticed a plane flying past so I tried to zoom in on it. I then captured a very bright UFO flying around with multiple smaller ones flashing in and out of frame.Towards the end both plane, which you see in upper part of screen, and the UFO's moved into the clouds and were lost from view.

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UFO's in Chemtrails

2009-01-07T22:34:38Z

I was filming Chemtrails with my Sony video camera using a IR filter and "Nightshot" mode, hence the Green Color, when I noticed a 3 UFO's emerge from the chemtrail. The speed at which the 3rd UFO catches up to the first UFO, then stops,rotates around it is incredible.

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Riz Khan- Street Talk- 15 August 07

2008-10-25T15:30:42Z

In a special edition of Street Talk, Riz Khan meets the entrepreneurs of streetwires, who use wires and beads to make funky objects. Meet South African comedian Kurt Schoonraad and a local reggae artist.

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Philip Rosedale - Creators vs. Consumers in Second Life

2008-10-15T03:31:31Z

Complete video at: fora.tv

Linden Lab founder and CEO Philip Rosedale discusses the unique creative opportunities offered to users of the online virtual world "Second Life."

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Second Life: What Do We Learn If We Digitize EVERYTHING?

What is real life coming to owe digital life?

After a couple years in the flat part of exponential growth, the steep part is now arriving for the massive multi-player online world construction kit called "Second Life." With 1.7 million accounts, membership in "Second Life" is growing by 20,000 per day. The current doubling rate of "residents" is 7 months, still shortening, which means the growth is (for now) hyperexponential.

For this talk the founder and CEO of "Second Life," Philip Rosedale, tried something new for him - a simultaneous demo and talk. His online avatar, "Philip Linden," was on the screen showing things while the in-theater Philip Rosedale was conjecturing about what it all means. "This is a game of 'Can I interest you more in what I'm saying than what's going on on the screen?'"

He showed how new arrivals go through the "gateway" experience of creating their own onscreen avatar, explaining that because intense creativity is so cheap, easy, and experimental, the online personas become strongly held. "You can have multiple avatars in 'Second Life,' but the overall average is 1.25 avatars per person." The median age of users is 31, and the oldest users spend the most time in the world (over 80 hours per week for 10 percent of the residents). - The Long Now Foundation

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Philip Rosedale - Second Life Object Creation Demo

2008-10-15T03:31:33Z

Complete video at: fora.tv

Linden Lab founder and CEO Philip Rosedale demonstrates object creation in the online virtual world "Second Life."

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Second Life: What Do We Learn If We Digitize EVERYTHING?

What is real life coming to owe digital life?

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