Stoked on both the song and the video for Twin Sister‘s new single, “All Around & Away We Go.” Directed by Mike Luciano.

Julee Cruise’s “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart” wormed its way into my ear yesterday, and it won’t leave. Cruise sings it at the Twin Peaks roadhouse in one of the series’ most sublime episodes, “Lonely Souls.” That incredible hour of television, which aired twenty years ago this week, is one of just a handful of episodes directed by David Lynch himself. He casually swings the episode’s narrative from unfathomable heights of bittersweet melancholy to the depths of gut-churning terror, and this haunting tune helps shape the mood.

Here’s a clip of Cruise performing the number in Lynch’s little-seen ballet Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted. After the jump, watch the scene from “Lonely Souls,” complete with Lara Flynn Boyle lipdub.

(more…)

I’m proud to be a part of Dallas Clayton‘s life. His ideas are awe-inspiring and revolutionary, but he has a real knack for wording them in a way that everyone can understand. And then he illustrates them with a subtle sense of humor and grace that seems seriously scarce in children’s books these days. I’m proud to have been a part of the journey his sophomore book, An Awesome Book of Thanks, has taken two pages of text to a painstakingly detailed series of drawings, to an endless series of TIFFs and PDFs, to an actual book that you can touch and smell and put in a child’s hand and see their face light up.

Watch out the video that I made with Dallas to announce the new book, and then read An Awesome Book of Thanks for free! If you’re in L.A., don’t miss Dallas’ book launch party at Family this weekend. There will be cupcakes!

(more…)

Becky Stark, ethereal singer, advocate for peace and love, and gifted sloganeer, has teamed up with Rhode Island animator Peter Glantz to manifest a series of prints and videos called Peter and Becky’s Fun Fun Slogans! Their latest transcendentalist message for the world is “Change Your Relationship to Nature” and the accompanying print features an awe-inspiring drawing from the unbelievably skilled hands of nature-loving genius Kevin Hooyman.

Hooyman spent more than 100 hours drawing and coloring the image for this print, and it shows. Take a peek at the incredible piece after the jump, and watch Becky and Peter’s earlier collaboration with Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad: a music video for Lavender Diamond‘s “Like a Prayer.”

+ Comment on our Facebook page with ideas for how to change our relationships with nature! The comment with the most likes on Tuesday at noon wins a free print.

(more…)

Jay Carroll of the lovely style blog One Trip Pass shot this hypnotic little clip at the Pendleton factory.

Via 01 Blog.

I, Popeye is Takeshi Murata‘s radical reinvention of everyone’s favorite cartoon sailor as a 3-D sad sack, confronted by inconsolable inadequacy and unspinachable ennui (as opposed to the sinister sexual schemes of his familiar foe, the interminably burly Bluto). It’s an unauthorized fan-fiction short film legally enabled by the archaic conventions of of European copyright law, which unexpectedly propelled Popeye into the public domain last year.

Murata twists a cartoon of heroic triumph into a litany of failure—the opposite of what Disney does when adapting a tale that, in the Grimms’ telling, doesn‘t end happily. The halting, minor-key version of the Popeye theme song in Devin Flynn and Ross Goldstein’s soundtrack and the leering, moneyed Popeye pictured on the anti-hero’s T-shirt—a caricature of pop-culture icon as commodity—are two details that contribute the video‘s effect. But the key factor is the medium itself. By rendering the characters in the kind of slick three-dimensional animation commonly associated with big-studio production, Murata intensifies and complicates the discrepancy between the official Popeye and his own “folk” version.

Murata’s short is on exhibit at The New Museum’s just-opened Free, which brings together a bevy of Internet and Internet-adjacent artists like David Horvitz, Jon Rafman (Kool-Aid Man!), and Rashaad Newsome. This stupendous-sounding show, curated by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome, also features the IRL premiere of Ryan Trecartin and David Karp’s revolutionary web video project, Riverofthe.net. Throughout Free‘s three-month run, the museum will be hosting a series of in-depth talks with the creators of such marvelous online entities as DIS Magazine and Kickstarter. Delicious!

Howard is a bittersweet animation from the brilliant British illustrator Julia Pott. She’s also made great visuals for The Decemberists and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and a fantastic little non-fiction animation called My First Crush.

Tao Lin is well known for his wily literary accomplishments, which include writing a book called Shoplifting from American Apparel and then selling it at Urban Outfitters, inciting the ire of Gawker with his mysterious Internet pranks, and basing his latest novel, Richard Yates, around the suicidal angst shared between a pair of lovers named Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning.

But when he’s not busy changing the face of literature or sparking hip hop-level firestorms of blogtroversy between improbably irascible haters and die-hard fanatics, Lin indulges himself in the visual arts. His subject? Hamsters. His tools of the trade? MS Paint, Photoshop and construction paper. At a book tour stop in L.A. Tao took the time to chat about his process, share some juicy details on his forthcoming iPhone App, North American Hamsters, and gives us a quick lesson on how to draw a hamster.

At their normal scale, Conrad Ruiz‘s paintings are epic, dazzlingly detailed and savagely visceral. Laser-beaming minotaurs, nut-crushing wrestlers and Super Saiyan pop stars burn with adrenaline-drenched zeal and hyperbolic intensity inspired by “the pleasure and pain of the male orgasm.” Twenty years from now, the unshakable imprint of these images will linger in your brain, whether you like it or not.

Now, Ruiz excitedly embarks on the painstaking painting of his– and possibly our entire planet’s– largest watercolor ever. I tracked down the San Francisco-themed “disasterpiece” this week in Fontana, where it was discretely strapped to the backside of a two-story home on a severely suburban cul de sac. Conrad was kind enough to give us an exclusive sneak peek at the canvas as he begins this unprecedented artistic odyssey. So without further ado, I’m proud to present Conrad Ruiz, the World’s Largest Watercolor, some wistful tales of youthful indiscretions and a paean to the transformative power of punk play-fighting.

Conrad Ruiz is represented by the awesome Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, which courteously provided the images of his work for this feature. Take a look at some more of his fantastic paintings after the jump!

(more…)

Heavyweight world champion video artist Ryan Trecartin has teamed up with the brilliantly innovative founder of Tumblr, David Karp, to invent an extraordinary new way of using language and cognition through online video. The fruit of their collaboration has just been unleashed on the Internet today, and it’s called Riverofthe.net.

The site combines the random nature of systems like Chatroulette and Stumbleupon with the creative conventions of YouTube and Vimeo, allowing anyone to anonymously upload a video clip up to 10 seconds in length, describe it in three tags, and then “throw it into the river for public viewing.” The interface-free front page of Riverofthe.net simply starts with a random video clip and then follows it with every other clip that shares that tag (displayed in the lower left corner). The only way to control what you’re seeing is to choose a new tag or add more content to the River. Essentially, the whole project is an endless film that is constantly evolving, never played in the same sequential order, and authored by everyone.

It sounds complicated, but actually it’s quite intuitive. I’m honestly flabbergasted at the plethora of possibilities this platform presents– but the best part is, it’s SO FUN! I hope everyone I know starts contributing to the River, shaping it into a massively layered and altogether unimaginable art piece. Art Fag City has a great interview with Ryan Trecartin where he explains the concepts behind the site in more detail. I’m posting a long-ish excerpt after the jump and strongly recommending that you go baptize yourself in the River.

(more…)