A little Christmas gift for you all on this beautiful morning!

Merry Christmas everyone! In honor of the special day, I thought I’d share a clip from my favorite band (The Roots) and one of my favorite shows (Late Night With Jimmy Fallon). Enjoy!

Editor’s Note: This post is from November 2010, taken from a previous blog and included with Initial Descent.

It doesn’t take too much time walking around Portland’s Pearl District to recognize the artistic qualities of the city. It is, after all, a breeding ground for hipsters. While I was expecting the gallery vibe downtown, I stumbled upon one of the more interesting public art projects I’ve seen while biking back to my friend’s house in Northeast Portland…the Public Isolation Project along East Burnside Avenue.

While it strikes you at first glance as a model for an apartment complex or something, upon second glance you realize that a real person is in there, living her life, in full public view. A collaboration between photographer Joshua Jay Ellis and freelance production manager Cristin Norine, Norine is living for an entire 30 days–or all of November–in the fully glass-walled space, using only social media to communicate with the outside world. E-mail, Skype, texting, Twitter, and that’s it…an experiment designed to personify how this very social media engulfs us all with 24/7 accessibility and little privacy. And quite a site to stumble upon!

An interesting site on East Burnside Ave.

Travel throughout Ghana, and talk to Ghanaians around the world, and you’ll be hard pressed to find one who isn’t passionate about music. As a tribute to that, we thought we’d kick off this blog with a video by Ghanaian-German reggae artist Delle, who’s Pound Power video gives us a nice glimpse into the importance of music in Accra and throughout the nation.