More than half a century after his death, Albert Einstein’s name is still used as a synonym for brilliance. Although a simmering political climate anchored by two world wars affected the trajectory of the German intellectual’s life considerably, forced emigration and a Nazi-issued bounty on his head failed to dampen Einstein’s enthusiasm for learning and discovery. Inspired by the tenacity of one of history’s most intelligent refugees, Project Einstein works to inspire disadvantaged youth throughout the world to achieve greatness in spite of their surroundings.
     Project Einstein is one of several initiatives launched by Digital Democracy, a New York-based non-profit organization that relies on the ever-increasing capabilities of mobile and internet technology to give a voice to isolated and impoverished communities around the world. The inspiration for this particular project occurred while conducting photography training with youth in a Bangladeshi refugee camp, and has grown into a digital pen pal program spanning South Africa, Haiti, and Thailand.
     Much of Digital Democracy’s campaigns work directly with local organizations in order to tailor their initiatives to the community in need. Project Einstein’s latest venture, taking place in the Zona Reyna region of Guatemala, is a joint effort with state development group Proyecto de Desarrollo Santiago (PRODESSA).

Released this year by Magnolia Pictures, Countdown to Zero is a powerful documentary that explores the nuclear weapons’ potential for unimaginable destruction and offers a singular solution for preventing such catastrophes. Lawrence Bender, the film’s producer, has been nominated for Academy Awards for films such as Inglorious Basterds, Good Will Hunting, and Pulp Fiction. The last documentary Bender produced was the Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
     Jeff Markey got the chance to speak with Bender last week in LA, and discussed his involvement with the anti-nuclear proliferation group Global Zero, the film’s portrayal of the current threat of nuclear disaster, and what citizens of the world can do to help.

Why and how did you get involved with a documentary about nuclear weapons?
Well, having produced An Inconvenient Truth, I was able to witness firsthand how a movie can educate and inspire a movement. It was a great thing I got to do on that film and with Al Gore. I recieved a lot of incoming phone calls when that movie came out [from] people wanting to do an Inconvenient Truth of different subjects and issues. I got a phone call from Bruce Blair and Matt Brown from the Global Zero organization. … They said, “We want to do a documentary about another great threat facing us — nuclear weapons.” And that made sense.

The summer monsoon rains arrived in Pakistan last month. And with one-fifth of the country now submerged, they have yet to stop. The rain continues to fall and the flood waters keep rising, making for a waterlogged crisis of Biblical proportions: an estimated 1,600 Pakistanis are dead, but that figure only begins to hint at the disaster’s scale, as 20 million have been displaced, according to the country’s prime minister. All of this adds up to the region’s worst flood in eight decades.
     For a nation already afflicted by widespread poverty and with half of its labor force devoted to agriculture, the months ahead will be extremely trying now that 17 million acres of farmland are under water and 200,000 head of livestock have been lost. The extended food shortages resulting from this situation will require generous donations of international aid, but so far the world has been slow to respond. As of last Tuesday, less than 40% of the U.N.’s requested $459 million in relief funds had been made available (though an additional $43 million had been pledged). The United States has been chief among the countries responding to the disaster, but aid organizations have been reporting donor fatigue in the wake of the tremendous outpouring of funds after the Haitian earthquake earlier this year. In a time of economic hardships across the globe, we may be seeing evidence of limits to generosity and of public weariness at the prospect of managing the fallout from yet another catastrophe in a remote corner of the world. But the disaster’s proximity to other calamitous events makes it no less severe.

American comedy writer/director Tom Schiller is known for his distinct style and offbeat humor. Notable for his eleven-year stint writing and directing short films on Saturday Night Live, Schiller’s impressive oeuvre of work also includes the 1984 unreleased classic feature, Nothing Lasts Forever, and over 300 comedic TV commercials. Schiller may not be as prominent as his SNL cohorts Lorne Michaels or Bill Murray but he has certainly been as pivotal in shaping the landscape of comedy. With the recent revival of Nothing Lasts Forever, Schiller has achieved a cult status. In preparation for his upcoming screening at The Cinefamily in Los Angeles, Schiller spoke with PLANET° about growing up on the set of I Love Lucy, why Nothing Lasts Forever was never released, and how Fellini got him out of a ticket.

Your father was a staff writer on I Love Lucy. Did that have any influence on your interest in comedy?
Yes, well I had it by osmosis…you know what I mean? You can’t say it about yourself, but others told me I was funny. My filmmaking techniques would have translated fine into comedy. I was able to do it. And also, growing up being on the set of I Love Lucy, I certainly learned a few things from that….

“Hallo?” Jahmek Power shouts into his mobile phone, the sounds of a raging party drowning out his valiant attempts at being heard. “I’m at a pahty. I’m going to leave the building because it’s way too loud.” Once outside, the situation gets worse as party-goers start asking the artist known as Jammer for directions. “This is the pahty here. I’m doing an interview bruvva,” he says as his patience wears thin. “Because I’ve come outside, they think I work here or somefink.”
     Contrary to what it might sound like, Jammer is in fact an extremely professional fellow — particularly when compared to his fellow grime masters, like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, and Tinchy Stryder. Grime superstars (and unknowns) are notoriously unreliable, notoriously competitive, notoriously antagonistic. Jammer is none of these things. “A lot of people didn’t expect to be in the situation they are in,” Jammer says of the grime mentality. “They had a talent. They loved music. They done it and didn’t know they were going to get that much interest. I don’t think they was really ready for it. I’ve been doing this for ten years. I have an understanding of how things work and how necessary it is to let people know about what’s happening.”

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Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

Two weeks before the release of his latest film, The Extra Man, Paul Dano is back in his hometown for a week to promote the movie before flying back to New Mexico to continue filming alongside the likes of Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig (in the not-so-subtly titled Cowboys and Aliens). The Extra Man, in contrast, seems to be more in line with Dano’s previous work. The film is a quietly quirky adaptation of a novel by that quintessential young New York writer, Jonathan Ames.
     I meet Dano in a garish, orange-and-pink room in a SoHo hotel. The room was likely picked by a publicist but seems as though it could have been a set piece in the new film. After some conversation about the décor, Dano asks my permission to make a quick phone call to his girlfriend, Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of Elia). Since his break-out role in 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine, the young actor has worked with a string of A-list actors (Kevin Kline, Katie Holmes, and John C. Reilly star with him in The Extra Man). Still, he considers himself “a very normal dude”. We caught up with him to talk about how he picks his distinctive roles, how much he identifies with his characters, and his plans for the future.

On a recent afternoon during the Paris menswear fashion week Stephan Schneider, the German fashion designer of the esteemed Antwerp school, was milling around his brightly lit showroom, talking to the buyers and eyeing over the models that were changing clothes like human jukeboxes. A soft-spoken man in his forties, Schneider has been working since the mid ’90s, gaining a loyal following among those who, although interested in fashion, would not be caught dead next to a fashionista. His clothes possess a quiet, quirky spirit that is easy to overlook, a spirit of a reflective kid who stands in the school hallway during the break watching other teenagers act out their lives. Acting is the last thing that comes to mind when looking at Schneider’s deceptively simple, almost preppy creations. “There is no drama in my clothes,” says Schneider.
     That is not to say that the clothes are not alive. The little details, such as different shades of color on the sleeves of a coat or a contrasting band peaking out from under the shirt’s collar, give Schneider’s garments their zest. “My customer is always a boy inside, even a man who is 70,” says Schneider. “The charm of my customer is that they can keep a boyish attitude inside, and that I want to keep in the clothes. There is always a bit of humor in them.”

“I thought it was the apocalypse,” says Diplo. That is how the Grammy-nominated DJ/producer describes attending a baile funk party in Rio de Janeiro, a culture and city he immersed himself in to film his documentary, Favela On Blast. There — “at the end of the world” — the pavement gave way to dirt paths even the police feared crossing; a redheaded man holding a machine gun stood next to his Black brother, while another man wired the electricity for a congregation decked out with a hefty sound-system.
     According to Diplo (whose real name is Wesley Pentz), baile funk developed on its own without a guiding hand from the record industry. During a 2004 Hollertronix show in Philadelphia, two Argentine girls handed him a cassette. “It was like a Smiths record looped up, like an 80s record, a little kid screaming over the top and heavy bass drums and all this surface noise,” Diplo recalls. “I thought it was the best music I had ever heard.” With no information on the hybrid of heavy metal and Miami bass readily available in these early days of the Internet, Diplo headed to Brazil to conduct his own investigative research. Once he was initiated into the often dangerous and drug-laden scene, he felt as if the blend of people coming together made it seem like “all the things bad in the world — European colonization, African immigration, and the industrial revolution — were all set right.”

Last Friday saw the fiftieth, and final, of Ryan McGinness’ 50 parties project. Conceived of one year ago by the New York-based artist, the project involved fifty consecutive parties, one thrown each week, in McGinness’ studio. Since New York’s rave culture of the 1990s died and turned corporate, it may be safe to say that we’re all sick of crowds, bouncers, and sponsorship. With a “No strangers. No sponsors.” tagline, these parties revived the concept of the artist’s studio as salon and incubator for discourse and intimacy among the creative community. NYC photographer Nathan Perkel was not only lucky enough to come by a standing invitation, but he received permission from McGinness to take aside party goers to photograph them in his studio. With the context of the events removed, viewers are left to imagine height of the celebrations these fantastic dressers were attending. Following the end of the project, Perkel answered our questions about his favorite themes, the parties’ impact on New York party culture, and what it was like to attend the events as both participant and detached voyeur.

There’s something comforting yet mystifying about Laurie Anderson. In a single breath, Anderson can wax provocative about economic apocalypse before discussing an upcoming Christmas record by her piano-playing dog, Lola Belle. Yet, no matter how hyper-intellectual or flat-out absurd her words and works might seem, in conversation she somehow straddles the line between pretentiousness and preposterousness without ever succumbing to either. Since her breakthrough work from forty years ago, Duets on Ice, in which she wore ice skates frozen into a block of ice and played violin until the ice melted away, through her ten-plus albums featuring collaborations with William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Antony Hegarty, and husband Lou Reed, Anderson has mastered the far-flung worlds of avant-garde art, literature, film, experimental music, and even technology, inventing instruments such as tape-bow violins and voice filters. Using the voice filters in much of her spoken word and musical works, Anderson cultivated a male alter-ego (in an act she calls “audio drag”) named Fenway Bergamot, whose visage and voice take center-stage on Anderson’s latest album, Homeland, which continues her critique of American identity and injustice.

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Buy Homeland at iTunes. Visit Nonesuch Records to hear song samples. And for more remixes of “Only An Expert”, visit Indaba Music.