If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you’ll know that me and David are suckers for brightly-colored comic-themed street art. Particularly if there’s a visual non sequitur involved. Like this poster I saw plastered around the streets of Philadelphia this weekend.

It’s an image of Marvel’s Doctor Doom charging toward the viewer with the phrase “Well, at least things can’t get any worse” superimposed over top in bright pink text …

Pretty much perfect, I think.

Although it contradicts the Simmermon family motto, which I swear I am not lying about. My dad always says

You know, Jeff, we have a saying. “Things go on like this for a while, and then they get worse.”

From The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Vol. 1, No. 11, November 1983:

One of the best things about working at an art school is finding stuff like this on the bulletin boards:

I don’t know if I want a man-sized version of this kid’s t-shirt, or a t-shirt of this picture itself, or just want to rent the kid for a day or so:

You can order your own t-shirt here, but the kid himself is probably a little more pricey.

I can’t look out my office window on a grey rainy day like today without imagining Spinners weaving through the buildings, crowds of people with glowing umbrellas and shady eyeball craftsmen working their frigid magic on the streets.And as the 21st century grinds on, I’m more and more convinced that Blade Runner is coming true. It’s like some window in an alternate future was left open, just a crack, and all that alternate reality is whispering through, one invention at a time.

Listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack really helps this vision coalesce, too. Vangelis’ haunting ambient score over the sounds of busy, rainy city life are mixing really well with the view outside. A great geek friend of mine hooked me up with the motherlode too, a while back: a collection of ambient background noise and sound effects from Blade Runner.

And of course, I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I didn’t want to share … help yourselves to ambient background sound and effects from Blade Runner, as well as Vangelis’ score, laid over sounds from the film:

Blade Runner sound effects

Vangelis’ Blade Runner Soundtrack, Part 1
Vangelis’ Blade Runner Soundtrack, Part 2

If any of you are motivated to mash up or remix these sounds into something, please share …

The previously mentioned lord and master of 21st-century New York subway graffiti is at it again. He’s started a Flickr page under the name “Poster Boy NYC” with a lot more images, but these are the ones I liked the best out of the current crop of new releases.

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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 …

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Listen: transdimensional travel already exists. It’s not as dramatic as ripping open a hole in the fabric of space-time and shaking hands with some lizard men on the other side, or painting a pentagram in infants’ blood on the floor of a church and conjuring up a smoldering slobbering demon.

I was walking back from a bar in Clinton Hill this summer, and even though I’d had a pretty good evening, I was feeling kinda sorry for myself. I’d just moved to New York and my work had dried up, my girlfriend had dropped me, and I was sharing a bedroom with another grown man. I’d had a decent dinner and a few drinks and was flagellating myself internally for spending money, any money at all, when my resources were at such a rapid dwindle.

A breeze kicked up and a piece of paper hit my foot. I picked it up and fell through a wormhole in my own reality to a serious realness congruent to, but utterly different than my own. The letter was from a guy in prison to a friend on the outside. Although technically written in English, the words were in a language I barely spoke.

You can see the letter itself here:

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My friend Eric called me up late the other night from somewhere outside of Barcade, panting breathlessly in the cold. “Dude, don’t go to bed yet,” he said. “I’m bringing something over for you.”

And what a something it was! In its heyday, he looked like this, functioning as an expensive karaoke toy.

More photos after the jump …

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My friend Steve forwarded me an incredible found letter the other day. Here’s a clip, click here or on the photo for a link to the entire thing:

This letter’s writer has a life so far removed from my own that I can’t believe we both speak English. I am not sure that I ever wrote love letters like this to girls when I was this young Crip’s age, and I’m sure that if I had, I wouldn’t have threatened an other “niggas.”

Underneath the smitten Crip’s bravado and posturing, and not far underneath it, either, he is lonely, desperate, wanting someone who is in all likelihood out of his grasp. His looks won’t catch his girl’s eye, so he’s turned to the creative arts, the romantic refuge for everyone whose physical charms are exceeded by their creativity.

However, if that’s the case here, my man must have a JACKED up face — his prose clinks like bullet casings on wet concrete. With nerve and bravery like this, though, he’s sure to have found someone to share his corner of the Crip kingdom with by now, as long as he hasn’t been shot yet.

It saddens me to think that love letters are a dying art form — that e-mail sent the penned missive the way of the dodo bird and now e-mail’s heading out, too. Soon lovelorn Crips and geeky kids will have to confess their passion in strage gluts of emoticons and beeping sounds, leaving me and Cyrano and this ugly little Crip to sit around in the museum case of the mind, slowly collecting dust.