Huge images of local women’s faces have been emblazoned across one of Brazil’s most dangerous shanty towns, Favela da Providencia. Renowned French photographer and street artist JR traveled to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to meet women for who crime, violent loss of loved ones and arbitrary repression are part of everyday life.

Through a series of striking portraits the project named “Women Are Heroes”, JR aims to share the stories of these women who have led difficult lives by virtue of their surroundings. Coming from different origins and generations, you reach their stories and understand their vision of life in the context of conflict. In each photo you can see a different part of the women’s expression of life. This perspective unites hill and asphalt to give a face to the favela. Blown up and displayed on the facades of houses in the favela, the sheer size of the images will ensure that their presence is felt in the street.

A 12 year-old girl from Lebanon has razor-sharp crystals coming out of her eyes. A very bizarre and unexplained condition.

Party madness this past Friday evening as my husband Lars DJ’d at his monthly residency at Moonshadows in Malibu. (Name sound familiar? Well, Moonshadows is the restaurant/bar where Mel Gibson was partying it up the night of his infamous run in with Malibu police a couple years ago.) This spot is always great times..outdoor deck lounge overlooking the pacific ocean, the crowd, amazing food, stiff drinks and of course the MUSIC.

We started by sitting outside at a table on the deck, overlooking the ocean, and enjoyed an incredible gourmet dinner from the Moonshadows restaurant. And then Lars got behind the DJ decks, dropping some sweet music to start out the beautiful early evening. Soon after his guest DJ for the evening, our very good friend Tony Watson and his lovely wife Angie showed up. Tony is one of my favorite DJ’s in LA and listening to him play is always a treat. Both Tony and Lars dropped some serious dope records throughout the night, never staying within a specific genre or style. As the night went on the place became more and more packed and soon the party was jumping and getting crazy. People were dancing, singing out loud and screaming. I’ve never seen Moonshadows get that nutty. All in all..although I was having a sober evening, (Lars drank plenty for the both of us… haha! ) I had a seriously good time and met some great new people.

Click on the image mosaic above and it will take you to my flickr set of all the photos both me and Lars took. Or you can view the slideshow.

Just discovered wordle, a typographic word cloud generator that allows you to create a custom type graphic extracted from the rss feed of any website or from any set of words or sentences that you type. What I really love about this application is the ability to tweak the layout to create various color schemes, fonts, horizontal/vertical type..etc. It’s can definitely be addicting. You also have the option to add your creation to the wordle gallery. The one I created above is generated from katize.com. And the one below, I created (very appropriately) from one of my favorite websites, ilovetypography.

My husband Lars just broadcasted the 250th episode of his weekly XM Radio show Deeper Shades of House. For this special occasion he recorded a two hour classic house special. I’ve been bumping this show at home and in the car and wanted to share it with you. Make sure to check out the playlist on his site deepershades.net.

1st hour:

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2nd hour:

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