You know how all of your stoner buddies (or maybe you yourself were actually a ‘stoner buddy’) talked about how the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon synched up perfectly with the movie Wizard of Oz? Well, now here is your chance via the magical internet to watch the entire thing.
“A day in the country; sun, music & skate. An event organized by Ra and Buddywood to skate one of the few available ditches near Madrid.”
Full credits here.
Brothers Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez, aka The Date Farmers, are the shiznit of the art world at the moment, blowing up all over the place. The duo incorporates found objects, commercial ephemera and Mexican folk art that is a bit of a mash up of Basquiat and Barry McGee. There’s a cool video of the duo in action over at Current TV. They really are (or were) date farmers from Indio, a dusty farm town to the east of Los Angeles.On exhibit now at the ACE Gallery in LA through March.
It’s nice to run across a full format documentary on Vimeo and it’s even better when the subject matter is quirky and interesting. AFOL is a documentary that features a selection of AFOLs (Adult Fans Of LEGO) from the Pacific NorthWest sharing their passions and inspirations.
Lookout everybody. It’s Halloween and things could get crazy. Pumpkins, murder, satan and candy! There’s a time and a place for everything I guess. Have fun and happy Halloween.
Alright, this is a rare pop culture related post but this kid really caught my attention as he seems to have a lot of people. He’s 2 years old and was up to 40 packs a day but supposedly now down to 15. People would come from all over his Sumatran village to peep his mad smokin’ steez. Relax, I am being sarcastic.
I know, it’s like watching a train wreck not to mention the kid is a natural born ham (pun intended). I just think this is one of those rare sign-o-the-times videos that Banksy or someone such as needs to incorporate into a solid art piece. This kid handed the pop-culture-relevance over on a smokey silver platter.
I have taken a much more profound interest in interior spaces and how people, especially creative people choose to express themselves within their living and work spaces. So I was pretty excited to stumble upon The Selby where you can take a peek at the work and living spaces of people like Philippe Starck (whom I love), Karl Lagerfeld and Stephen Powers aka ESPO (whom you can see in the image above).
I felt pretty enlightened by Charlie Brooker’s little report on ‘how to report’ the news. I feel like with a camera, a cheap suit and an afternoon I might be able to throw a little somethin’ somethin’ together and make it look pretty sharp.
“INFAMYBMX presents the official trailer for “You Got That.” An all street BMX dvd filmed in the Philly area. Featuring: Brendon Reith, Dan Conway, Otto Ayala, Fran Meehan, Eric Capone, Ryan Landman and Evan Ayala. Edited by Ryan Landman. The DVD is out now and available at INFAMYBMX.COM or anywhere Animal Bikes products are sold.”
Looks pretty insane.
This is kind of spectacularly amazing just on the premise of it being an incredible feat of editing. Then beyond that there is just entertainment value of pulling some real crap out of context and seeing how glaringly ridiculous it actually is. I think subconsciously you know some of these lines are horrible when you watch films, but years of unrelenting advertising and big budget movie culture teach you to tune it out as if it were an autoimmune response.
There is a nice cache of inspirational randomness including old adverts, movie posters, book covers and general strangeness in the Flickr pages of Junkyard Dogs. All of which is inspirational for the visually and creatively inclined.
“A short skateboard video from Salazar Productions featuring, Bradley Sheppard, Alien, Nate Lacoste, Chris Connolly, Nate Roline, Stacy Gabriel, Desmond Hoostie, Mike Klinkhamer and Rob Rickaby.”
Directed By Liam Mitchell
Shot By Nathan Drillot and Liam Mitchell
James May is building the first house ever built from legos in the Denbies Wine Estate in Dorking. He has vowed to live in it, at least for a few days until he thinks it may fall apart. Who knows, with the way homes are built these days, this one might hold up longer than he thinks.
The animated gif I posted last week got such a huge response that I figured I would start posting one here and there. I first peeped this one at Dropular.
Kirk Demarais does bad art good with some really funny movie-based celebrity portrait paintings that look like something painted by the girl from Napoleon Dynamite. They seem to be selling very well and they are hard not to like and would definitely be a talking piece. The family from ‘The Jerk’ above is classic.
I have been wanting to get this off my chest for a few days now. Michael Jackson was a big creative influence on me as a child. I wanted so badly to be famous and emulate his success. Growing up, I was a music and stage prodigy in my small midwestern town and held tightly to the desperate dreams of world stardom. I told my mother at the age of 5 that I would someday move to LA and be a movie star.
Our generation was fed dreams of Michael Jackson meets Michael Jordan fame and stardom for breakfast. It’s what compelled many of us to push our way into the world and a promise the world could never keep (remember Fight Club?). I ate Wheaties for breakfast, moonwalked across the linoleum kitchen floor in my gym socks and begged my parents for a pair of Air Jordans. Hollywood beckoned.
So now that the ‘King of Pop’ has passed and I find myself in the beginning of my middle years it is hard not to take it in and ask, ‘where is all of this going’? Is fame worth the price paid? And even if it is, what does achieving it accomplish. Yes, there is the obvious. This is a given. You gain access. Access to a world that few people experience. You get to sleep in a room with a 30 foot high ceiling. You can board a private flight to your villa in Paris anytime you feel the urge. You can eat or drink or inject anything you can think of. This much is true and indisputable. There is a genuine and compelling draw there. But after all of the gold dust settles, what are you left with? The desire to genuinely love and be loved? The need to feel fulfilled and experience a sense of purpose? Does fame and fortune provide these things?
News is breaking today that Michael Jackson was an insomniac. I battled insomnia as a child, maybe it is some kind of strange creative curse. He was also spending somewhere between 48,000 to 100,000 on prescription drugs. Yes, that might be overstated hype, but even if it is one-fifth of that amount, that is a lot of drugs. What was he drowning out? Why couldn’t he rest? He had reached the very top. What did he see from that vantage point that all of us think we wish we could see? Maybe a climb to the top only reveals the same mountain range we all face in a clearer view. I don’t know. But I do know he was a tortured man. You can derive that from just the heresay.
So have we been fed a lie? Is fame bullshit? I think it is. Where is our culture and our society heading if we pour all of our hopes into singular individuals at the behest of the masses? When will we begin to usher in the era of societal awareness where we acknowledge that each of us is in fact, an absolute conclusive fact, a citizen of the Earth. How can you feel fulfillment or purpose when the carrot is dangled just far enough out that not only can you never reach it, so that if you actually do the effort will corrupt and destroy you.
When will we have enough of this? I think there is a natural limit to things that we are usurping. This race that we are engaged in does not account for the wasted human potential that we are shedding everyday. Balance and a sense of purpose cannot be attained in a society that lifts it’s entertainers to the level of God while promising it’s teachers, scientists, fathers, mothers, workers, engineers, architects and designers IOUs. It’s a bald faced lie that is making the pursuit feel worthless. We are on a wheel that is spinning and not going forward. There are outer limits to every structure and we have reached the wall in our capitalist pursuits. What about our souls?
After all his fame and fortune, Michael Jackson wanted what we all want. He wanted to be loved. He wanted to be a father. He wanted to shop for groceries and feel like he brought home food for his family. He wanted friends. He wanted to be understood and appreciated for who he really was. He wanted to rest peacefully at the end of the day knowing and feeling these things. After all that access and all of that wealth, he still craved for the simplest of things.
That is something to think about. And it is a reason to wonder if there isn’t another way of living, loving and sharing that we are denying ourselves in this modern society. Maybe it is time for a change. We have had our share of empty promises. Isn’t it time for grander pursuits and an acknowledgement for our worldly responsibilities to our fellow man? Fame is about an individual, and that leaves everyone but 1 person out of the picture. But this world still has room for all of us, and we are all still very much in the picture.
There is something about all of this that bothers me and sometimes keeps me up at night. And that feeling is always in the back of my mind and just won’t go away. I hope Michael Jackson found someone who really did know him. I hope his children loved him for who he really was. I hope he rests now in true peace where he is finally free from the bonds of a confused and misled public.
I hope that we one day turn away from this flawed deceitful pursuit and turn inward to find the core of our spirit and uncover the true reason that each of us chose to come here to inhabit the space we have been allotted on the third planet from the sun.
Alright, I just saw this posted at Cpluv and figured I had better put it up. This is a quick shot-in-the-arm documentary from Shawn Bannon. It is a fascinating little morsel of culture to be sure. I am kind of ambivalent about the entire hipster culture scene though. I always have been. I have always kind of ridden the fringes of different social groups and have done the same with hipsterdom. Some of my friends tease me that I am hipster, but I have always thought otherwise. I have a very regular fulltime job, a mortage and a wife. I will probably have some kids soon too. I came from a very working class family, and I have never been given anything in my life. Ever. I have worked for everything I have and continue to do so. I have no privileged upbringing to rebel against. So sometimes I feel a bit like the everyman and I don’t exactly live the Jack Kerouac Bohemian lifestyle, if you catch my drift. I am not saying that every hipster was raised on the east coast and is rebelling against Oxford roots either.
So what is your take on this? Are we seeing a genuine rise of a new kind of hippy that is truly outside the circle and championing an alternative lifestyle that expunges the slavery of the American dream? Or is this just a bunch of privileged white kids who had it good and have decided they are too cool for school (and will later transform into fashion-conscious yuppies)?
Like I said, I am ambivalent and just not sure what I think. A part of me thinks this is really cool and would love to get in there with them and ride through the tunnels screaming like a banshee and another part of me just wants to call BS on the whole scene. Most of my friends could be described as hipsters, and I know a big part of my audience is. And I am not saying that the L.A. bike scene is the typical hipster scene either. I think it is a little bit of something different. Again, ambivalence.
Leave a comment and tell me how you feel. I am genuinely curious. Cool or not?
WRK/PLY is day long non-conference built to challenge our normal conventions of work and play. Weʼve chosen 6 speakers whose lives illustrate the value of mixing play and work. They will be sharing their methods with our audience, both through focused conversation and a 20 minute interactive play element in each of their presentations. We donʼt know exactly what they are planning, but from what we’ve heard you should expect the intriguing and the absurd.
Speakers include:
Architecture + Design: Andre and Dan, dress code
Culture + Lifestyle: Steve Hindy, Brooklyn Brewery
Media + Technology: Gavin McInnes, Street Carnage
Fashion + Style: Rebecca Turbow, Safe Clothing
WHEN
Saturday, March 28 , 12:00pm – 7:00pm
For more information, visit http://lvhrd.com.
