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 …
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.
I’m a total packrat, a lifestyle that I inherited from my mother. As much as I chide her for keeping old papers and magazines around the house (just TRY to throw out a damn National Geographic down there, man), the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. My problem is, I can see the artistic potential in freaking EVERYTHING and I hate letting something interesting just go to waste.
Old comics with the covers tore off and gnawed up corners still have these insane ads in them that could totally go on a t-shirt one day, and if someone writes me a love letter or a christmas card, I can’t bring myself to just wad that sentiment up and throw it on top of some old coffee grounds.
When I was visiting my folks a few weeks ago, I found some old drawings of Transformers I did in 5th grade. Touching them made me come unstuck in time, and I swung instantly back to my childhood bedroom in Herndon. I was sitting at that desk my Dad built for me one snowy afternoon, drawing the Transformers and listening to the Saint Elmo’s Fire soundtrack on cassette. Look, it was my first tape.
Here’s the art itself:
I’m excited about the Transformers film for a number of reasons:
1) I was super into Transformers as a kid, and experiencing the story again reactivates memories that make me feel good 2) The movie looks cool as all hell (cool and good are two very different things) 3) It’s the purest example of a sheerly commercial film that has ever existed.
Seriously. This is a movie based on a cartoon that was developed to market a line of toys that had been popular in Japan to American children. There’s no originality or artistic integrity to squander here, no mythos or greater canon to honor — it’s just gonna be flames and explosions and giant hunks of metal left right and center. It’s going to be the cinematic equivalent of smoking banana peels and I can’t wait.
Life is good, but hadn’t a damn thing worth writing about happened in a little while. Here’s a batch of links to tide you over and make that workday whistle right by …
When people talk about art as a religious experience, they invariably invoke Michelangelo, Da Vinci, or Greek statuary, as though God stopped speaking to people hundreds of years ago and this art are well-read love letters from a long-dead romance. Fuck that. When I look at great sci-fi art I feel the earth slip away and get chills that radiate from the back of my skull all the way down my arms.
Psychologists have shown that people are more engaging when they synchronise their movement to their voice or to the voice or movement of another person. Michalowski argues that robots will need a sense of rhythm if people are to accept them. “In the future you are going to be talking to some robot and just the ability of the robot to nod to what you are saying will make it easier to interact,” he says.
Check out this video of that cute little fluffy robot, dancing to Spoon. If marshmallow peeps could dance like that, they might appeal to our hearts and escape our gnashing jaws each springtime, surviving to populate the entire planet.
Way out, deep in outer space, cosmic bullets are piercing a giant cloud of space gas. There’s a cheap joke in there somwhere, but I can’t quite find it … Anyway, from Space.com:
Each bullet [image] is about ten times the size of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun and travels through the clouds at up to 250 miles (400 kilometers) per second—or about a thousand times faster than the speed of sound … As the bullets plow through the clouds, they leave behind tubular orange wakes, each about a fifth of a light-year long.
The photo is like, the best Trapper Keeper cover ever.
According to a number of sources, the I (Heart) Huckabees set was an utter emotional trainwreck. Director David O. Russell is widely reported to be brilliant, demanding and exasperating in equal amounts, and he and Lily Tomlin tangled like hell on the set. Defamer and WFMU’s Beware of the Blog have more detailed posts on the matter, both well worth reading. Even if you don’t read the posts, plug the headphones in and watch one of the best spontaneous displays of truly rotten behavior that I have ever seen:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: akpc_most_popular() in /home/.sockey/jeffsimmermon/andiamnotlying.com/wp-content/themes/fluidsolution/right.php on line 81
