big "T" little "urkey"

Friend and one-time co-worker Anna O'C is taking time off from the path of righteousness to visit Istanbul. Put me in mind of this little Turkish delight from years gone by. Oh, how I loved these guys:

They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) from They Might Be Giants on Vimeo.

Kohler

Just found this sweet Kohler vid on YouTube starring me! Don't pay any attention to the misspelled subtitle. It's really me. Check it out:

Drawing for dummies

Saw this somewhere online, I forget where, found it on Google the next day. Still making me chuckle. Make sure you follow the directions perfectly.

Making a tiny difference in the world.

That's what it's all about. Via Wine and Bowties, which also recently featured the really groovy music of The Stepkids, here's Ben Wilson, who is definitely making a tiny difference making paintings on the tiny pieces of discarded chewing gum that people spit out onto the sidewalks of London. Check out the article on Wine and Bowties here.

Plant alphabet!

Don't know what reminded me of this old series this morning, but here it is, all in one place for the first time ever. The plant letters were a part of the bigger "plant a day" project, some of which can be seen here.

50 paces

This has been the most colorful autumn I remember.

I went for a walk in the woods this morning and brought my camera. I'd been painting leaves on leaves (click here.) but wanted to actually photograph some leaves on leaves. I set myself one rule: I wouldn't take any leaf more than 50 paces from where I picked it up. I wanted to make this project reflect a very specific locality. Here are this morning's pics, unedited. (ha. I came back and edited them later.) The first one I took was the fern and the big red leaf. It's my favorite.

See ya later kids. Goodbye wife, goodbye house.

I'm moving to the mouth of this river in Australia and surfing trawler wakes all day every day and drinking one too many of the local beers every night. Please do not forward the mortgage bills. Thank you. xonorm

Creative Destruction: Chapter 3 part 2 from CREATIVE DESTRUCTION on Vimeo.

Cage the elephant

Someone blogged this video the other day and I've played it a dozen times since then, bought the song, built a mix tape around it and recommended it to everyone. The only thing left to do is to blog about it. So here it is. I hope you're happy now.

After the aforementioned dozens of plays, I looked on YouTube for more songs by Cage the Elephant (love the name by the way; it's really grown on me.) and found another video of the same song. Funny. One of them (above) looks like the big budget major studio version, the other looks like the indie version. Interesting. Enjoy them both and if you want a copy of the mix tape, leave a comment saying so.

Sign off

These things have been bouncing around the blogosphere for months now and every time I see one of them, I love it so much. So here is my very own post about the work of German artist Josef Schulz. Spend a little time on his website, there's a lot more super awesome stuff there.

Fresh commission

A collector approached me a couple of weeks ago to do a portrait of her girlfriend as a birthday gift. I explained that portraiture was not my strong suit and suggested that perhaps I could do a painting of her surrounded by the objects she holds dear. The concept was approved but as soon as I began, it morphed into a combination of short story and little watercolors. I am so proud of how it turned out. Here it is, click on it to see it bigger. (A statue of Guan Yin was one of her prized possessions.)

I don't like Mondays

I heard this song the other day in the car on a mix tape my buddy Pete made for me. I thought, "oh, that's a nice song, catchy, nice hook, etc." and so I played it the next time I was in the car and whaddaya know, the missus started singing along. "You know this song?!" I asked, no doubt with the surprised attitude of the one in the relationship who thinks they're much more musically hip than the other. "Yeah," she patiently explained, "it was huge. A huge hit." Here's the song. (assuming it hasn't been removed again for some reason)

Now here's the crazy part. The missus told me that the song was about a young girl who killed a bunch of people and said she did it 'cause she didn't like Mondays. No freakin' way! NO WAY! Yes. It turns out that it's true. (Here's the snopes.com story.) Brenda Spencer was 16. On Monday morning, Jan 29, 1979, she started shooting at students at the elementary school across the street from her house. (Here are more facts from Songfacts.com about the song) She killed 2 people and wounded more. A reporter got her on the phone and asked her why she did it. She said: "I just did it for the fun of it. I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." Incredible. Just incredible.

All of a sudden, what had been a typical happy superficial pop song had a terribly, tragically macabre interior. All of a sudden a piece of popular art that solely existed in the sheltered ivory tower world of small consequences (sadly, that's where art lives for me) had horrible roots in the harsh and real world of profound consequences. I love it.

Is it good? Bad? Disrespectful of those whose friends and relatives were killed or injured? Does the song glorify the murder? Honor the memory of those who died? Help us as a society to know more about the horrors that are all around us? Is that really helpful?

Here's one thing for sure: here's a piece of art that raised all kinds of interesting questions. And that's awesome. Here's a piece of art that used its superficial appeal (nice melody, catch hook, etc.) to draw people in to deeper questions. Bravo.

Bravo.

Holy snorkel Batman!

Courtesy of my big sis and the internet archive comes this episode of Diver Dan, the coolest show from my youth. Dig the Soviet-era bad guy Baron Barracuda.

Memphis

Went to visit my pal Yves in Memphis. It's a little depressing, a little religious and very hot down there. Saw this sign and snapped a pic. Not in the picture are the dudes hanging out in front of the deserted stores beckoning me over to buy some drugs. God bless America.

Love this. (via Coolhunting)

Watch it full screen!

David Foster Wallace

From a short story by David Foster Wallace published in the Dec. 14, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. What follows is a single sentence from a paragraph where he's talking about the benevolent voices he hears.

Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me—as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands—particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident that I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn’t need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother’s dry humor and love became, stacked atop the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor. I do not have any real idea what my mother—an exceptional, truly lovable woman—made of having a child who sometimes suffered actual fits of ecstasy; and I do not know whether she herself had them. Nevertheless, the experience of the real but unobservable and unexplainable “voices” and the ecstatic feelings they often aroused doubtless contributed to my reverence for magic and my faith that magic not only permeated the everyday world but did so in a way that was thoroughly benign and altruistic and wished me well. I was never the sort of child who believed in “monsters under the bed” or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father (who clearly “enjoyed” me and my eccentricities) once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called “antiparanoia,” in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/12/14/091214fi_fiction_wallace?currentPage=3#ixzz0rCNL5vTh

"Countless screaming argonauts"

After a few days of blurting out (to call it singing is an overstatement) lyrics from this song which has been stuck in my head, I decided to find it on youTube. Lo, there's a video of it that I've never seen before. Not just some crappy-visuals-shoehorned-together-to-a-tune but an honest-to-goodness video made just for this song that I started loving when it first came out in 19eighty-whatever. A long time ago. Enjoy.

A peep from Patch

Thanks to Steve for this idea:

Happy spring holiday season

David van Tieghem and Diego Stocco

Via Swiss-Miss.com comes this fab vid that opens my mind just like David Van Tieghem playing the city in the early 80's did. (video below)

Diego Stocco - Music From A Bonsai from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

David Van Tieghem from 1983 or so:

Via Wine&Bowties, lovely little film:

Tokyo/Glow HD from Nathan Johnston on Vimeo.

Postcard monsters!

It doesn't happen that often that I see something that someone else has done and immediately want to start doing it myself. Monster postcards are an example of that. Saw it somewhere online in the blogosphere (can't find it now), went right out, bought some postcards and started right in.

Fun for the whole family.

Kawaii

Oh my, oh my. I think I'm in love again.

Lately, here at chez Mossmag, we've had our eye out for klassic or kult kawaii (click and read the definition if you don't already know) and the good lord, rewarding our vigilance, dropped this ridiculously kampy kute kuddly ukelele duo U900 on our kollective laps, via Drawn, the cartoon and illustration blog.

They're officially my 6th friend on myspace.

1976. Oh my.

Still funny. Video link broke, but you'll get the idea from this:

Yeah baby!

This is exactly the kind of Democrat I want. Move over Rove-r.

Selleck waterfall sandwich. Really.

Via the fine folks at BrandFlakesForBreakfast comes this Dada masterpiece. Our 6 year old asked what Dada was the other day and I pointed out Meret Oppenheim's beautiful masterpiece of absurdity, her "Indefensible object":

I wonder if he's old enough to wrap his developing mind around the perfection that is SelleckWaterfallSandwich.

Salinger's dead. Long live Salinger.

My first literary hero. There's a great obit from the Washington Post, and you can read it here.

Something delightfully f'ed up about this spot

Is it the unicorn? The clown? The kid in the green striped shirt?

Dictionary.com is the shit!

Okay, just supposing you're studying spelling words with your kid and you're talking about how the letter "t" sometimes makes a "ch" sound, as it does in "culture" and "eventually" and just supposing that you decide to go to dictionary.com because you know that they have a little button you can press so that you can actually hear the word being spoken by an even-tempered female or male voice. Now isn't that fun.

Now suppose that your kid asks do they have any dirty words on there and so you oblige their curiosity because maybe you actually share their curiosity and so you poke around a few 'dirty' words, including "jerk", which your kid asserts isn't dirty at all and so you move on to "turd."

Just suppose.

And then, just then, when you get to that dictionary.com entry, you find a sponsored link selling cheap turd.

Now here's the question: would you find that strange? Would you follow the link? Would you tell your friends, just in the off chance that they're looking for some quantity of turd at rock-bottom prices? Would you?

Let me know.

Rosnnto!

Via accidental mysteries, which has some nice commentary, too. Watch it there:

http://accidentalmysteries.blogspot.com/2010/01/gibberish-rap.html

OOOOPS! LINK IS LOST!! CLICK UPDATE LINK BELOW:

CLICK HERE!!

updated link

Benji Hughes

I like Benji and this song: