Winter jam and bingo thing-o

by Rich Awn

Tonight’s the night folks!

I’m calling a BINGO benefit for all those awesome shows that go on in Prospect Park.  This means if you come early enough, you’ll get to drink with me for free and win some SWEEEEEET prizes as I call out the numbers and funny it up!

Here’s a sample of the jams:

Here’s the deets:

Friends
of Celebrate
Brooklyn!

& Giant
Step
present

WINTER
DANCE PARTY

with

featuring
the Shady Horns of Sam Kininger

and Ryan Zoidis plus DJ CHRIS
ANNIBELL
(Afrokinetic)

Become
a Friend at the Party and you’ll be entered to win 2 round-trip
tickets on jetBlue!!

$15
General Admission Tickets

$50
VIP tickets

VIP
tickets only include open bar.

GA
and VIP ticket holders should come early for BINGO in the
lounge!

Fun
prizes include CD box sets, concert tickets, gift certificates and
more!

7:30pm
doors
8:00pm pre-show open bar +
BINGO
9:00pm DJ Chris
Annibell
10:00pm
Soulive
Midnight DJ Chris Annibell

SATURDAY,
FEBRUARY 7, 2009
THE BELL HOUSE
149 7th Street btw 2nd &
3rd Aves
Gowanus, Brooklyn (map)

Celebrate Brooklyn is a program of
BRIC ARTS | MEDIA | BKLYN
www.briconline.org

Get down at this undeniable dance party to kick off Celebrate Brooklyn’s
Friends membership program for summer 2009.

Instrumental
soul-funk trio and groove machine, Soulive are made up of
guitarist Eric Krasno, organist Neal Evans and drummer Alan Evans.
(Celebrate Brooklyn! Alum 2001 & 2005)

Brooklynite DJ Chris Annibell
(Afrokinetic) spins a seamless mix of afrobeat, funk, Latin grooves,
reggae, and rock.

The Bell House is
a gorgeous and unique music venue crafted out of an old 1920’s
warehouse, it boasts a lounge featuring beer from independent and
local breweries, 25 foot wooden arched ceilings, unobstructed views
from any part of the main space and a huge dance floor!

Questions??
Contact Jessica Kepler @ [email protected]
or call BRIC at
718-855-7882.


PS.

Here’s a sneak peak at the prizes… SHHH!

- pair of tickets to a show at Union Hall

- pair of tickets to a show at The Bell House

- $50 gift certificate to Flirt boutique

- cd boxset of funk jams called What it is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves

- cd boxset of British Indie bands called The Brit Box: UK Indie, Shoegaze and Brit-Pop Gems of the Last Millenium

- wine gift cert from Slope Cellars

Music by Soulive.


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Elephant poo paper cleans up

by Rich Awn

For no other reason than this kinda made me chuckle when I first caught wind of it on GreenUpgrader.com and then again when thepoopoopaper Twittered me, it seemed irresistibly interesting.  Turns out this elephant dung paper ain’t no joke but a potent little eco craze that’s helping keep these mammoth beasts thriving in the wild.

The diet of an elephant consists mainly of fruits, fibrous grasses and bamboo.  These plants can be used to make paper on their own but requires a rather toxic process to achieve what an elephant’s digestive system does on its own.  What’s left behind is the undigested plant matter that is first washed, combined with some other plant fibers, molded into “cakes” or “wafers”, left out in the sun to dry, and then peeled off it’s tray to make poop paper products!

The process is as brilliant as it is beneficial.  The dung used is collected from conservation parks creating a clean environment for the animals while the whole process from elephant grazing to paper raising creates jobs down the entire line.  The Elephant Poo Paper Company, Ltd. even goes so far as to donate a portion of your purchase from their “Poo-tique” to elephant conservation services worldwide.

Who knew poo could be so cool?  Hooray!


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Rocketboom: Get boomed

by Rich Awn

Why am I suddenly so obsessed with Rocketboom?

Maybe because it’s a little too glib… just a hair too clever for its own good.  Or perhaps those stunning femme digitales on camera are so sincere and seductive that Rocketboom.com’s daily dose of internet noggin fluff succeeds in whacking you upside the dome with a light saber and leaves your dismembered memes sputtering about on the floor gasping for air.

“Meme, you say?”

Yes, meme (MEEM).  First coined as a philosophical neologism of ontology in 1974, the term now describes a bite of culture, like an amino acid in the double helictical spiraling chains of DNA that encode our digital life.  Memes are identified by the good folks at Rocketboom, posted, linked, and later examined in the labs of the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies.  Findings reveal the social significance of such memes as Star Wars Kid, Technoviking, fail, pwned, owned, Magibon, and the Rickroll phenomenon.

Rocketboom spares no expense with fancy taped maps as backgrounds and generously provides supplimental hand-drawn diagrams on marker board to help make difficult concepts like “WTF factor” and “KUWAII ^___^” easier to understand.  Here, the hyper-future is propagated through a phonograph with video segments that are fun to watch and written just snarkily enough to have some spice without an over-saccarine saturation.  As far as talking techhead digital video digests go, Rocketboom totally boomed me.


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Alberta oil sands catastrophe pending:
Act now

by Rich Awn

Hey Americans!

Thought it would be helpful to direct your attention to this little letter put together by some freaked out Canadians about an industrial catastrophe that will nullify Quebec’s carbon reduction efforts.

As stated, if Enbridge is allowed to implement the “Trailbreaker Plan”, increase production and supply this pipeline that ends at the marinas of Portland, Maine, the emissions and massive holes in the ground will leave a tangible and indelible scar on the planet; it will distort and disfigure life as we know it.  This is real.

Submit your attention as a concerned neighbor and read about the players and the plans below.

Good Guys:

Equiterre

Environmental Defense

Forest Ethics

Bad Guys:

Enbridge (Trailbreaker Overview)

Photo by Arkaiyen.


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Greenhouse open for eco-conscious clubgoers

by Rich Awn

Full Gothamist article here.

This post was originally scheduled for News but I thought, “how is this news?”  I mean, it’s significant but it’s not the kind of thing that’ll  determine the pace of the world’s environmental progress/decline.

But I digress.  My feelings about LEED nightclubs and decor that screams GREEN the minute you walk in is something that puts me in a quandary and schedules this post under the Category, “EEEEEK-oh!” - a category loosely defined as “the sound my brain makes when reacting to something that reeks of greenwashing.”  Posts filed under EEEEK-oh! may be a cautionary tale with an undercurrent of truth that connotes a good deed despite it’s flashy exterior.

I digress again.  Does anyone remember the “Pink Room” at the 90’s NYC club, The Tunnel?  The Pink Room looked like the walls had been stuffed with that Pink Panther-endorsed insulation and everything was plushy and furry with globular mirrors all over the place.  Seems like not much has changed since those ecstasy-heavy days but instead of fiberglass insulation as decor, now it’s some other fake fur crap.

Decor aside, has anyone figured out how to do the kinetic energy dance floor thing yet???  That’s seemingly the most intuitive innovation to making a club green but then again, you need people to fill the floor to make the lights come on.  Is clubland still packing the house like it did in the 70s, 80s, and 90s?

Photo by Katie Sokoler.


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How to build a ZERO impact rocket (for Halloween)

by Rich Awn

Woah!  Been a minute since I’ve posted in here… what HAVEN’T I been doing!!!???

HAPPY HOLLOW-WEEN!!!

Here’s how you deal with Halloween and stay green and save money -  FIND EVERYTHING!  Step by step on how to retrofit a sustainable rocket (as your costume).

1.)  Get lucky.

Riding by at break neck speeds on my Cannondale about two weeks ago, I noticed this fully formed cardboard structure on the side of the road.  Without stopping, having only seen it for 2 seconds, and about a half a mile down the road, using my powers of Halloween intuition, I thought it might’ve made the best rocket costume ever.

Sure enough, it turned out to be the coolest rocket I’ve ever seen made of cardboard, definitely some kind of Scandanavian kids toy judging by how well it’s crafted.  Kicking myself for not having come for it the night before, I found it the following day (luckily) to have been kicked in, stomped on, and pissed on.  The smell of stale urine actually tuned me away at first and I finally stiffened up and vowed to restore it to is original splendor in the name of all things hallowed.

2.) Cut out the urine-soaked base.

Working on the refurbishing and retro-fitting for the zero rocket, the foul odor emanating from it’s interior was stifling.  With a few quick slashes of a box cutter, the problem was solved and peace was restored to the restoration.  Be sure to cut out just enough for the structure to fit firmly on the hips without compromising the structures overall integrity.

3.) Add a harness.

Using the camel back attachment for my girlfriend’s hiking bag, I laced a piece of nylon rope though holes I made 1″ apart along the back, poking them through with a fillips head screwdriver.  Just like lacing a sneaker, I cris-crossed the rope over the back of the camel back and under the shoulder straps at the height necessary for the rocket to sit comfortably just below my waist and high enough for me to see out every port hole.

4.) Add an interior light.

Using rechargeable batteries and this cool old fluorescent light I found in the bottom of a tool box, I used the aforementioned “shoe string” principle to attaching the light.  Less holes were necessary and shorter rope but it worked just fine.

Et voila!  As you can see from the slide show, it looks amazing… and the best part about it is that it’s recyclable and/or you and an agressive mob of candy-crazed trick-or-treaters can bash the hell out of it at the end of the night.


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Current.com: The Collective Conscienctiousness

by Rich Awn

If you’re not getting enough from your bookmarking sites, readers, comment apps, and content penetrators, stop squirming and start sharing on Current.com.

Recent noodlings around this explosive and intelligent community have seen two Green Air posts make it to the homepage and one almost made it on TV! While that may sound tawdry, I assure you this is like total vilification amid the hulking mass of Google AdSense supported contamination out there.

The ultra-sympathetic and largely discerning user base rapidly shares content through a media accelerator that does most of the work for you.  Once a url is submitted, pictures from the submission can be selected, descriptions can be made, heart palpitating headlines can be added as well as links, files, and a webcam soundoff recorder if you can’t bark your point accross loudly enough with words.  Customizable notifications are available and I would recommend customizing with a heavy hand.  I checked all the boxes and allow 100% of the updates on new submissions and comments to be emailed to me and admitedly, it’s a bit much.

What’s slightly unnerving from a traditional broadcast perspective is how the Current TV News segment has the sound of total automation and the complete absence of anyone real producing it.  The tin-throated cyber female announcer delivers the generic interstitial copy with perfect diction and the top stories are there from the most votes accumulated from (what we hope are) human users.  This isn’t to say I’m not totally impressed by it… I’m just worried talking heads may be obsolete pretty soon!

I’ll say I’ve had more fun and ease of use with Current than any other social bookmarking site I’m on (and I’m a whole lot).  So if you go, add me!


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Fish Phone

by Rich Awn

It’s your first date and you’re at the pricey seafood restaurant of her choice.  You want to impress and seem savvy by ordering the “right” dish.  You seem to remember reading something about tuna… yeah, tuna… it’s bad right?  Wait… or was it salmon… or grouper?  DANGIT!!!

Before you soak your shirt with anxiety and opt for the garden salad, your aquaculture-alert-on-the-go cell phone function has arrived… introducing, Fish Phone!

Our fishing-forward friends a the Blue Ocean Institute are the master mariners behind the “first sustainable seafood text messaging service.”  From geared up smart phone users to pay-as-you-gosters, anyone can tap the up-to-the-nanosecond news on species with significant environmental concerns.

The fish are ranked according to Blue Ocean’s evaluation of species’ life history, abundance, in the wild, habitat concerns, and catch method or farming system.  Health advisories are also provided indicating unsafe levels of mercury, PCBs, and dioxins.

Now take a deep breath, order the halibut, and get on with the courtship you eco STUD!

Thanks Fish Phone!

Photo by soxer123.


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Music Information Helps Grow Ears

by Rich Awn

It’s been three hours and I can’t stop looking/listening to the fertile aural bounty of EarFarm.com!

With more than just one music man running the rat-a-tat show, Matt Tyson, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, has about 5 other awesome contributors taking amazing pictures and videos of live shows ‘n stuff, pumping out new music/band/album reviews that span the musical galaxy, all wrapped up in a delicious design by Destroy Space.  The writing is jumping off the screen with wit but not too much wiseassishness, instead they cleverly refer to other sites where provocative bile can be found spewing.

For you epic jammers, there are Iliad-like write-ups for songs over 8 minutes long.  The section’s bite-sized title is “8+” but packs a wallop as Matt and the gang probe their winding coils of gray matter to make connections, pontifications, and cosmic realizations about the long songs that set those tingly moments.

Reset your system preferences and ready your heady for some radio razzle dazzle! Ear Farm Radio is like a little pop-up piece of key lime playlist pie. Lots of new bands, song titles, and easy peasy Japaneasy usability. From one radio crackhead to another, Ear Farm’s got the good stuff goin’ on!

What more can I say? If you’re still reading this, you’ve already wasted 5 seconds of time better spent cultivating the phantasmagorical fields of sounds sprouting up over yonder at EarFarm.com!


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Can’t (bicycle) Chain Me Down

by Christine Zhuang

In the grand old tradition of looking to the Europeans for acts of social and environmental advancements, several American cities such as Portland, San Francisco, Chicago have instituted a bicycle rental system similar to the very popular program in Paris which promote cycling over gas guzzling and environmentally unsound cars as an alternative form of transportation. After all, bicycles are cheap and eliminates the hassle of looking for a parking space to cram into. Then why are so many of these bicycle programs failing in the U.S.?

For one thing, it seems many of us simply cannot be trusted with returning bicycles. But there are bigger issues than just petty theft.

The U.S. is geographically much larger than all Western European nations, which explains our overreaching and sometimes overwhelming amount of highways and freeways. That said, there are not enough bicycle paths for people who live more than 5 mile from their workplace or school; especially in large cities where traffic laws are really seen as guidelines rather than regulations. And don’t get me started on those of us who find it very difficult to travel light and are too vain for perspiration.

The root of these bicycle sharing problems I find are buried deeper than the pretensions of efficiency. To have bicycles become the new wave of transportation is ideologically backwards. (Probably why so many opt for vintage bike models. Surely not for the kitsch.) Instinctively for many, the future revolves around moving forward. It is more pertinent for the government to focus on is improving the public transportation system in this country. A Green solution that would not only help the environment but lessen traffic. This is one Rise of the Machines I can get behind.

Photo by Joe S.


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Fake CO2 Sucking Trees: A Dialogue

by Rich Awn

Hmm, well… on the one hand, you’ve got your real tree doing it’s thing, living off carbon dioxide and being old.

Right.

And on the other, you’ve got the artificial thing made of the “proprietary material that behaves like sodium hydroxide,” one of the most corrosive, awful, caustic substances you can get your hands on (and if you get it on your hands, you’re in trouble).

Okay, we’re following you.

Now enter kooky investor dudes to the wacky professor’s lab who say, “We’re going to help you, Dr. Wackypants.  We’ll be with you every step of the way in trying to develop more eye sores for the world to feel better about their fossil fuel consumption.”

Starting to lose you here.

Wait, it gets weirder.  Now investor dudes and wacky professor succeeded in mimicking the behavior of real tree leaves by using vertically arranged sheets of proprietary paper (I especially love the bit where they’re using stuff like bunched up wads of yarn and testing the wind resistance… CLASSIC!).  The fake leaves, now caked in carbon dioxide, get rinsed creating some carbon dioxide swill “for storage” and the whole doohicky runs on electricity.

Lost you.

Yeah. I’m lost.  But my only lingering question is why did the wacky professor let his 12-year-old daughter handle lethal sodium hydroxide only to win SECOND PLACE in the elementary school science fair???

No clue.

Nova video here.

Photo by Carol Esther.


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Urban Composting Made Simple

by Tracy Fay

Dear Readers,

I’ve been bestowed the Greenest graces of friend and fellow blogger, Tracy Fay, author and founder of ModernUrbanLiving.com to share her inspiration and simple tips on urban composting.  We look forward to more from Tracy and if anyone is interested in guest posting, I’m all ears!

Yours,

Rich

————————————————————–

I have many fond memories of the garden my family kept at our Colorado home. One memory stands out above all others is my step father’s almost fanatical devotion to composting. Thanks to his constant drilling we became accustomed to saving all the leftover food scraps for the compost pile we kept in the corner of our garden.

Now far removed from the mountains of my home state, I still experience a strong twinge of guilt every time I toss an apple core or an orange peel in the garbage. I always thought composting wasn’t exactly conducive to living in a cramped New York City apartment. Then I read a post on Green Air that inspired me to challenge that perception and I designed a simple but effective solution to help do my part for the environment and banish my gardening guilt forever.

Read the rest of this entry »


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Visit Izzit:
Sniffing Out the Green Stuff That’s Up to Snuff

by Rich Awn

Ever wonder if your local pizza place is donating it’s fry oil to veggie deisel converts?

Allow your queries to be queer no more - introducing IzzitGreen.com!

In the spirit of quitting-your-job-to-save-the-world, founders Peter Hughes, President, and Tom Permatteo, CEO, jammed their skills earned in the corporate tech trenches into an environmental particle accelerator and out popped this nifty website.  What it does is allows you, the interested participant with varying shades of Green, to be proactive in how you shop, eat, and enjoy life.

Izzit does a lot of the work for you by providing guides and background information for a constantly expanding category list of businesses.  With forums and groups under development, your quiver will be flush with Green arrows to grill your favorite establishments and then discuss with other Izzit members in your zip code.

The niftiest thing about joining Izzit and telling your friends is that they’ve partnered with the Food Project, a Community Supported Agricultural organization, who will donate a serving of fresh, organic, locally grown food to a neighbor in need.  TOO COOL!!!

The Green A-Team stands by the burgeoning community of IzzitGreen.com… so sign up and have some fun!

Photo by Alex Denniston.


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Get the Gas Edge!

by Rich Awn

Here’s a cool little noonad.

The all-knowing Tracy of ModerernUrbanLiving.com hooked me up with this goodie today:

Plug in your closest gas station price and it’s distance in miles, then plug in the distance and price from station in the next state over with the ultra-cheap gas prices and let GasEdge.com do the math.

Turns out it’s worth it for me to drive to Jersey for gas (and here’s why).  Any Manhattan and Brooklyn gas station owners reading this might want to pay heed.


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Do Environmentalists Dream of Green Sheep?

by Christine Zhuang

Full Guardian article here.

A few months ago, one of the biggest news stories of the year hit the press. Photos of a “lost tribe” were circulated and piqued the interests of everyone from anthropologists to tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists. Accompanying the photos of men in red paint huddled outside their straw huts were accounts of savagery that included shooting arrows at helicopters. This was a fantastical story that had people salivating.

But that was exactly the case. It was all a fantasy. This is not to say that the tribe really consisted of out-of-work actors on a back lot in Hollywood. However, the lost tribe was not exactly lost. Photographer José Carlos Meirelles admitted that he only sold the photos as an attempt to bring awareness to deforestation; not exactly the typical reason for creating media hoaxes.

This event reveals a new aspect to the plight of the environmentalist and several questions beg to be asked. Is sensationalism the only way to get us to pay attention? How far will other environmentalists go for their agenda to see light? And are we really so apathetic to issues regarding the Earth that we will act only to pretend-play Indiana Jones?

It is a bit pathetic to think that we need shock tactics for us to come to realizations with what we are doing as a population and the effects these actions have. Maybe it is our mundane (as well as hectic) lifestyles that push seemingly frivolous environmental agendas to the back of our minds. Or maybe, we simply don’t care. And in that case, José Carlos Meirelles has started a new wave of environmental activism that can actually make us sit up and take notice.

Photo courtesy of Harcourt Books.


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London 2090:
UK Arc Fest Freaks Take Over

by Rich Awn

INSANE imagry from Squint/Opera is what happens when you sandwich architectual peanut butter with imagination jelly.

The London Festival of Architecture is doing it’s swinging thing from June 20th-July 20th and where else can you get architects to dream up an ecopolyptic invasion of the body snatchers?

Dezeen has more eye candy.


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Balloonacy!!!

by Rich Awn

I discovered this floating balloon thingy in the corner of my daily go-to Green product site, GreenUpgrader.com, and thought, “Hmm… that’s cute.”

Clicking further I thought I’d get involved and post the available widget and embed my own little floating balloon thingy.  Keeping in constant with the “air” theme we’ve got going here, I thought Green Air might make a natural home for some of the balloon racers to be… and so did Orange, the masterminds behind Balloonacy, a surprising and fun way to float around the internet.

Still uncertain how the whole thing would pan out, our site was accepted as part of the Race Map and is now on the float path of those cute animal-shaped animated balloons that you can boost and move as you go.

There’s a whole bunch of prizes you can actually win from this like a luxury private villa with a pool and tennis court, your own private chef, spending money, jet skiing, windsurfing, para-sailing, speed boat rides… DANG!

Other than prizes, I haven’t yet unraveled the purpose of this whole thing other than it looks cool and it’s fun but then again, what more purpose do you really need in a web thing these days?  Float on balloons!

Background site from Alan O’Connor.


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Mother Nature at the Movies

by Christine Zhuang

It has been a week since the release of M. Night Shyamalan’s new sci-fi thriller “The Happening“. So if you have not seen it already, you probably know what the big twist is; the trees are upset about how humans are abusing the planet so they decided to emit a chemical that induces suicide. Makes sense to me.

Not the bit about the conspiracy-yielding trees. That’s just silly. What does make sense is that the movie industry takes the side of the Mother Nature. After all, what makes a more compelling story than the tale of an underdog?

“The Happening” inspired me to look at other films that have also featured the fight between man and nature. There are good ones and bad ones that come to mind. Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” is a prime example. With giant wolves and boars and menacing civilizations devouring everything in its path, it is easy to see just how extreme the entertainment industry views the battle for preserving the environment. Another example is “Congo”, a mid-90s B-movie that creates a fantastically exaggerated tale of what happens when a species is driven towards extinction by man’s greed.

What strikes me the most, however, is that according to the entertainment industry Mother Nature has a fury that can not be doused by the power of free love and peace. There cannot be a common ground for the two sides to stand on, there cannot be a compromise. For one way of life to live, another has to die. Maybe this is because with entertainment comes hyperbolic portrayals. Or maybe in the end, to take another Hollywood cliché, there can be only one.

Photo by Persefone Loki.


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EarthFirst Opens a Can of Organic Whoopass on the Green Arena

by Rich Awn

Before I started Green Air, I thought I might start something called HateMail.com, a forum for people to bash the hell out of each other with words. I find we humans love to hate as much as we love to love.

It’s out of love for the environment that EarthFirst’s concentrated lightening bolt of ecollectual energy exploded onto the Green scene in February of 2008. The battalion was mustered by Jordan Heller, Founder and CEO, commandeered by Michael Hoffman, President, deployed by Shea Gunther, VP Content and Blog Publisher, sniped by Stephanie Rogers, Writer, and drilled by Danny Alpert, Executive Producer, Video.

The result is a neatly arranged tower of environmental power. Simple to navigate, headlines that excite, writing that resonates and riles, and rich media content that sets a new bar for rapid fire blogs in the eco know. Green Air proudly salutes these soldiers of truth and, as the EarthFirst squad makes known, “Greenwashers and jerkasses of the world: beware. We’re watching.”


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The digg Mutant Carnival Frat Nerd Bacchanal

by Rich Awn

It happened but a block away. My dear friend Shawna from the Rosen Group dropped me an invite and seeing the location, I had no choice but to succumb.

The kindly Melody Lowe, also of the Rosen Group, made sure my superior press access was granted despite the hundred people packed outside Studio B who were later rained on (I snuck in before the downpour thankfully). To my surprise, the whole place was JAMMED! For what? A popular social network thingy that’s on pretty much every single news site, blog, and web page worth it’s 2.0 salt? Who ARE these people???

For one, there’s Brian Brushwood, a hyperactive Vaudvillian “bizarre magic” sideshow performer of a special brand of fire eating/puppetry/comedy acts during which I found myself sandwiched somewhere in the lame VIP section (stands for Very Inopportune Position… to grab free stuff thrown into the crowd). I somehow managed to pull some hairy zoom shots of his act and get a whiff of arm hair as he torched what was left of it. His last prank actually got me so I tip my hat to “Schwood.”

Read the rest of this entry »


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What’s the opposite of Green? - Part 1

by Rich Awn

According to the color wheel, it’s red.

According to the sassy young lass I recently met milling around the meat pop hors d’oeuvres at the last Internet Advertising Bureau cocktail party, it’s purple.

Our candid conversation regarding her exasperation with the landslide of questionable Green information spilled all over the media and in advertising lately is what prompted her conjecture.

“I don’t give a s*%t about being Green,” she said bluntly, “I mean, my building actually requires it’s employees to use the stairs instead of the elevator.” I bit my tongue and asked if she was disabled. “No but I can’t stand all these companies and newscasters using the environment as a sales pitch.”

To that I couldn’t help but agree.

Read the rest of this entry »


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Cradle to Natural Fiber Cradle

by Rich Awn

I nearly died when I saw this… Full PlentyMag.com article here.

If you think about it, you’re going into the ground (unless you’re cremated or you have a mausoleum or something). The ground is all dirt and microbial creatures so when your corpse gets all pumped full of embalming fluids and sawdust and whatever else goes in there (I shutter to think), packed into a lacquered cherry coffin, and set to disintegrate, all those things seem to prohibit that effect.

Death is sad. Polluting the earth around your final resting place seems sad too.


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Green is the Theme at the 2008 ICFF

by Rich Awn

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) has been raging for the past 5 days or so. Hundreds of exhibitors from students to the world’s top designers packed into the Brutalist setting at the Jacob Javitz Center in Manhattan to show off their fabulous furnishings.

With reclaimed objects and materials the pervasive medium for the most modern creations, it was clear that our living environment seeks to mimic our natural environment (even if it’s a garbage dump). The desire for these products has resulted in a market-wide pandemonium and manufacturers are starting to find ways to make products that are comfortable, nice to look at, and comprised of stuff that won’t destroy us in the not-too-distant future.

I’ll defer to the friendly ModernUrbanLiving.com experts for the front line take on this year’s eco-tastic event.


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Green Upgrader:
GET UP!

by Rich Awn

Anyone need an upgrade? Not just for your ‘puter, this is the kind of improvement that makes your LIFE function more optiomally - its Green Upgrader!

“Matt (the Brains…the founder of this site), Doug (the Brawn, although he thinks he’s the beauty), and Sara (the Beauty, and the Greenest one on our team, she keeps us in line)” are SKILLIN’ it up in New England hangin’ off cliffs and Greenifying the digi-scape with a GORGEOUS site devoted to helping you make the simple upgrades to a better way of life.

Mostly product-based information, the site functions neatly and is a crisp nugget of solid information, beautifully written and composed to make any blogger blush. Stay tuned for some good times with the Green Upgraders and Green Air!


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Alternative Consumerism as Butterfly

by Rich Awn

It’s not a grunge revival. It’s nirvana of another sort - The Alternative Consumer!

Like a whimsical butterfly flitting it’s hyper-ambitious wings from flower to flower, coast to coast, the think tank of Maureen O’Connor, Jamie Bosso, Ross Dumaine, Jessica Howell, Zach McGrath, Kyla Buckingham, Molly Roberts, Lori Guner, and Seamus the Eco Friendly Dog bonds like complimentary polymers through strange molecular geometry to form a new form of Green matter, stronger, smarter, and faster than anything before it!

It’s a mixed bag of eco news, products, innovations, and cool stuff that makes AC so enjoyable. Truly an oasis of the mind.


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