coolest thing ever no. 21

(you'll note that these cool things are not in chronological order)

it's okay, though. Right? Well. Watch this, and let me know.

coolest thing ever no. 34

I've been reading "soon I will be invincible" by Austin Grossman.

One of the superhero characters is Lily, a transparent woman. This idea is totally fascinating to me: she's not invisible, but by being see-through, she still manages to escape scrutiny. you never quite know what she's up to (a key part of her superpower -- try stopping an adversary you can't quite see) and nor can you discern her true intentions, since her body language and facial expressions are obscured.

perhaps she would look like this:



The above image is from a collection by Tony Ariawan.

Do transparent people have invisible hearts?

the mannequin hunt

So I have a new and strange obsession.

No, it's not tube drawings of what was going on in Miss South Carolina's head, nor is it the brilliance of Canada's own Michael Cera (if you haven't already, go see Superbad right this second)...

it's mannequins.

Montréal storefronts offer a startingly large number of these strange, ill-used plastic creatures. Best viewed at night, they come alive under buzzing fluorescent lighting while the rest of the world meanders drunkenly along.

We've been sucessfully tracking them for the better part of the last month, with decidedly bizarre success.

Behold our recent spoils.

A flock in their natural habitat. Some inter-fighting
must have occurred at an earlier date
(observe amputated hands and missing digits)

Although orphaned by her kin, this amputee
remains gracefully austere

Here, an older specimen quietly accepts her morose fate

These juveniles have engaged in an apparently fatal game
of "spin the baby bottle"

Nothing creepier than baby dolls

Model slash chef mannequins, ready for work

This week we hope to reach the Valhalla of Mannequin-land: the Magasin de Mannequenerie on Sherbrooke. If our next expedition proves fruitious, I will post the results here.

wednesday afternoon musicart jam

first off, SCANDINAVIA RULES!!!

look at this really beautiful and fun stop-action drawing animation from Swedish duo Minilogue:



the artwork is done by a swedish illustrator named Kristofer Ström.

he also has a lovely website that details his (really rad and diverse!) work and interviews in many style/art/life magazines and blogs.

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and...Did I just have an AUDIO ORGASM!?!?

It's Erlend Oye-fronted awesomeness band The Whitest Boy Alive covering Robin S.'s "show me love"...



From the same concert, at Iceland's Airwaves Festival, they also cover "I like to Move it", "I've got the power" and "Music Sounds Better With You"...which, now that we are on the topic, is totally one of my top 10 disco house party anthems of all time...

GENIUS MUCH?!?!

Of course now I have to go home and scan a picture of the lady raving from like '99...Yes. I am going to do it, so don't try and stop me.

More from the Whitest Boy Alive..."golden cage" is my current song obsession, which incidentally has a really really cool video.



Optical illusion instructions

+

norwegian bands together

= bliss.

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what else...oh, !!! isn't from Scandinavia, but they have a new album, and a beautiful new website!


cats and wolves!!! playing music!!! aaaaaa!



check it out here!

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basically, europe rules.

QUOOB.TV

this is a great Italian music/film/art site with new uploads and a great user interface. Basically YouTube for Europeans, but with way better organization and way less videos of skateboarding dogs. What, you don't understand Italian? Neither do I, but I can figure out most of this site due to my knowledge of Spanish and French...heh.

i dare you to not spend way too much time on this site. I DARE YOU!

love and bubbles

ladymika.

the world is pretty

Check out when the eagle fails to launch.

lights in dark times...

first off, let me quote from the SANTA LIBERATION FRONT!!!:

"The North Pole is not a nudist colony. Mr. and Mrs. Claus must don their traditional red faux fur suits. With temperatures on the rise, clothes have been shed, distracting and upsetting workers."

Did you know? Al Gore didn't tell you?



and now a little aesthetic break.



when in dark times
I walk along these decembered streets
and come upon such childish delight
in glowing things moving slightly here and there:
so I think there may be a place
for good wishes and hopeful wonder.
warmth in truth,
despite all the cold and smallness
this errant faerie finds in solitary meanderings.

painting with m. dunnet

pretty images on an ugly day

did you miss RESFEST?
I did, even though I meant to go. Like usual I was too busy being coldependent...

Resfest combines innovative film, music, art, design, culture and technology in a festival that takes place in more than 40 cities around the world.

Here are some of my favorite animations and music videos from this year's tour.

An interesting, catchy Korean entry commenting on identity, urbanism, and, presumbably, bitches and hos:



Hipsters vs. jackass vs. artnoize:


(Don't try this at home)

"For '200 Nanowebbers', Semiconductor Films have created a molecular web that is generated by Double Adaptor's live soundtrack. Using custom-made scripting, the melodies and rhythms spawn a nano scale environment that shifts and contorts to the audio resonance. Layers of energetic hand drawn animations, play over the simplest of vector shapes that form atomic scale associations. As the landscape flickers into existence by the light of trapped electron particles, substructures begin to take shape and resemble crystalline substances."


basically, just really cool.

my favorite director, Michel Gondry, doing Beck's "Cellphone's Dead":



Jamie Lidell's "New Me":



this is one of my favorite songs from last year:



A beautiful and strange animation from the artists at LEFTCHANNEL:



and finally, a crazy, Tim Burtonesque animated short from the Black Heart Gang:


Wait for the rat.

painting and drawring

looking for some inspiration?



Kenichi Hoshine and James Jean's illustrative/conversation project
A P O L I T E W I N T E R is just the kind of artistic/lyrical marriage I totally covet in my own creative endeavours. It's beautiful, melancholy, amusing, disturbing, erotic, and provocative all at once.



a polite winter...is just the way it is turning out, incidentally.

sleepy

Ever find a filmmaker that presents the world in a bizarre way that strangely enough mirrors the odd manner in which you view the world? Or maybe you are not bizarre. I'm sorry, if you aren't.

Michel Gondry is that filmmaker for me. The subconcious memory erasing in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where things aren't lit properly and fall away? That dim/bright juxtaposition that seems so awkward and frightening? Yes.

The flying sequences in The Science of Sleep that illustrate Stephane's troubled attempts to contact his neighbour? That's how I fly in my dreams.

When Stephane gets confused between French, Spanish and English? Welcome to my mind when all three languages (and sometimes Portuguese, too) get jumbled up in my brain. "Hola, ma cherie, Cómo estás? Yo pensé à toi ayer...I'm sorry, je suis um pouco confundido..."

The creative process of this movie inspired me to move away from click-easy communication and get back to basics.



I came home and drew, paint and wrote until 2 in the morning...I started to think about how no one writes letters or hardly even postcards any more. I thought about how my mother would send me little letters from her travels across Canada, carefully written and decorated with little collages and stickers and images from the places she visited. Naturally I didn't appreciate it at the time...However now it really seems as though people just right-click, slap something up on Photobucket and a comment or a bulletin later, real heartfelt human communication turns into just a temporary fingerprint on Myspace.

Several disjointed dreams and interrupted sleep cycles later, I awoke. Getting out of the shower, I thought about how my own mother will only communicate with me via email. I realized i don't even have her mailing address (she lives on my street several blocks up) and I screamed quietly.

So. Send me your real, physical, address. I might send you a thought, or a poem, or a small piece of tangible reality you can hold in your hand and know that we exist.

More inspiration lies at postsecret, a public/private art project that encourages strangers to make postcards detailing their secrets and send them into this blog.

a repost from my "other" blog

a monday poem:



maple dawn

here is a small, unassuming morning
when the leaves turn
they sigh and welcome us gently
to a new and damp autumn day.