I got a chance to test-drive the new Smartcar Fortwo as research for a guest blog post on Men.Style.com, GQ/Details magazine’s blog.
And yeah, if it was too rainy to ride my bike, I might drive one of these things.
After a week and several rounds of edits, here’s the post itself.
Last week, I posted about the giant mashed-up colorform graffiti on the New York Subway system. The post got picked up by Gawker, Art Fag City, Neatorama and some others, garnering a little attention.
A few days later, I got a comment that said:
i know the guy who does this stuff. i can get you more info and pictures of the originals if you’re interested. these pics don’t do the originals justice. you have pics of them after they’ve been tampered with …
I got a bunch more photos out of him, and he’s right … these are way, way more fun, especially this Iron Man remix:
I am in Southwest D.C., lying in my girlfriend’s bed, and I want this moment to freeze and stay forever. I want this feeling to stop and hover, solid but malleable, so I can stretch it out like a tarp and wrap it up tight around my entire life.
I am just waking up from a nap on fresh cotton sheets and giant fluffy pillows, a nap wrapped in fresh green air lovingly kissed out from the hundreds of trees down here.
I love the smell of New York air — of dirty metal, concrete and a distant whiff of urine — but it’s not napping air.
I started this nap by lying very still and reading Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, a perfect horror novel that bounced right off of my sleeping face shortly after I got into the good part. It’s still here in bed for me, waiting for me to pick it up. I will, in a minute.
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. — George Orwell
The problem with writing stories, actual stories for a blog is that, eventually, you run out. You’ve got to post daily, more or less (less in my case) and eventually you hit Peak Story, where you’ve told all the ones you’ve lived and are now reduced to writing about things you experienced while on your ass in front of a screen.
At least, that’s been my experience. Writing a fresh, original story every day is freaking exhausting. And just because someone has a few good stories, they don’t necessarily have a good blog.
Storylog.com aggregates great stories from all over the web, publishing at least one solid one daily. This is exactly what I want when I’m reading blogs — actual, well-done storytelling delivered daily and reliably.
This one, below, is one of my favorites, taken from a special section called simply “Time For Some Stories.”
From the site:
(These) stories were copied from a message board thread on vivavinyl.org because they needed to be preserved for posterity. Every single one of these stories was written by a seriously cool Canadian man in his mid-20s who goes by the username “davesecretary“ … They are presented below in their original form: IN ALL CAPS.
Usually, all caps infuriates me, but here I think it adds an air of breathless excitement, like a little kid is telling you about the coolest thing that JUST happened outside!!!
Anyway, here goes:
********
RIGHT SO IT’S KINDERGARTEN AND IT’S SPRING AND EVERYTHING IS THAWING AND MUDDY. AND ALL THE KIDS HAVE THOSE RUBBER BOOTS THAT GO UP TO OUR WAISTS. THE THING TO DO IN THE MORNING BEFORE CLASS STARTS IS TO FIND A BUDDY, GO FIND A NICE SOFT MUDDY SPOT IN THE PLAYGROUND SOMEWHERE, FACE YOUR FRIEND AND START SQUISHING YOUR WAY DOWN IN THE MUD UNTIL IT’S ALMOST UP TO YOUR WAIST.
WE DID THIS BECAUSE IT WAS FUN. SO KYLE AND I ARE FACING EACH OTHER AND BOGGING OUR WAY DOWN IN THIS MUD PUDDLE. WE GET IT ALMOST TO THE POINT WHERE THE MUD WILL START TO SEEP INTO OUR RUBBER BOOTS. I LOOK AT KYLE AND SAY “HEY KYLE, CAN YOU DO THIS?!” AND I TAKE MY FOOT OUT OF THE BOOT, WIGGLE MY LITTLE SOCKED TOES IN THE SPRING AIR FOR A FEW SECONDS, AND PUT MY LEG BACK IN MY BOOT, WHICH IS FIRMLY LODGED IN MUD.
“YES I CAN!!” KYLE SHOUTS BACK AT ME DESPITE ME BEING ONLY A FOOT AWAY FROM HIM. KYLE TAKES HIS FOOT OUT OF HIS BOOT AND IMMEDIATLY FALLS BACKWARDS INTO THE MUD. BECAUSE ONE LEG IS STILL IN THE BOOT HE IS KIND OF PINNED. THE SUCTION FROM THE MUD IS TOO MUCH FOR HIM TO SIT UP, AND HE CAN’T TURN OVER BECAUSE HIS LEG IS STUCK IN THE BOOT.
Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.
Then I saw this ad for Star Wars that had been chopped and remixed with bits from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit and I heard a horde of angels singing a song titled “Shit Yeah!”:
You can see the whole billboard and a gold-bikini Princess Leia mixed with Iron Man after the jump …
It starts with a simple, relentless drumbeat, punctuated with a catchy, almost tribal woodblock sound. Then the pulsing synth starts and you just feel the whole rollercoaster lurch away from your feet and you drop into a throat-hitching freefall, esophagus rippling while your heart screams with ecstasy.
It samples a bunch of the awesomest movies ever like Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface.
Maybe it sounds like steam rising off a jungle or a low, purple-red sun rising in a time-lapse movie of a highway jammed with traffic, fog burning away. It sounds like aerobics, but the cool kind. Like the aerobics in a montage from a very inspirational Hollywood movie about training to whip somebody’s ass in a dystopian future. There’s one thing that’s very clear about the hidden message in this song, though: there’s a great big busy productive world happening out there, and just for this one day, you want no part of it.
The stranger’s skull was an inverted teardrop set with a tarsier’s oblong, expressive eyes, eyes blast-shielded by chunky, industrial glasses. A chiseled obsidian bowl-cut accentuated an already fashion-forward skull shape fairly dramatically, with a twist: the bangs on the left half of the forehead were cut at least three inches shorter than the bangs on the right half.
His features were delicate, feminine, sculpted by master craftsmen under bright lights and powerful magnifying glasses. A slender slip of a John Waters moustache sat atop his light longbow of an upper lip, its partner shielding a slight soul patch in the same dusty fox-toned hue. An everlasting job-stopper curled down his long, delicate neck into the comfort of a lime-green sweater neck-sheath, subdued neatly under a boxy brown jacket.
What really brought all home, though, was his makeup — faux-flesh-toned pancake makeup, accentuated with blush. But instead of using blush-colored blush … he used a metallic silver.
Sort of like this drawing:
This is the story that I would have told last night at The Moth for the theme “Making Peace.” I don’t think I’ve run it here before. Any constructive criticism is greatly appreciated.
I’d been dating this girl who was confident and cool with beautiful tattoos, so gorgeous she’d make a whole room turn and feel ugly whenever she walked in the door. I’d just lost a pile of weight and was giddy with the sudden attention — giddy enough to miss the warning signs and get my newly narrowed ass dumped in about three weeks. I had no idea why, didn’t see it coming at all.
I lived in tired little termite buffet painted the color of dingy Band-Aids. A small community of grizzled vagrants in electric wheelchairs would commune around a trash fire in the alley behind my house most afternoons, drinking Thunderbird. Sometime around twilight most nights, one guy with a blurry swastika tattooed on his forehead would rev up out into the road, barreling upstream against one-way traffic. I had decorated the interior of the place myself — carpeted the entire house in Astroturf, green for the living room, the stairs, and upstairs hallway, my bedroom in neon blue with a giant American flag for a bedspread. Waking up each morning was like a Lego funeral at sea.
All the furniture in the downstairs was inflatable — a couch and two easy chairs. There was a sculpture on the front porch that I’d made myself out of several deer carcasses and a giant head covered in glowing white war paint.
In hindsight, I may have been dumped for aesthetic reasons.
You’ve noticed a bit of a posting drought here lately, I’m sure. It happens to the best of us, and also to me, all the time. I get tired, or cranky, or things just don’t seem worth posting.
Or, I get involved in other projects. Projects like The Moth.
