We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

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Deigo from Framestore got his book signed by some of the animators. Animators are apparently the best people to get to sign your book.

Thanks to Dinosaur Jr. for still existing and to Mark Locke for making this video for “Over It” from their new double album Farm out next week on Jagjaguwar.

I came across divine t-shirt designer Milton Carter’s site through an interview he conducted with The Fiery Furnaces’ graphic designer, Mike Reddy (Reddy’s work is rad too– especially his illustrated interpertation of the aforementioned band’s Blueberry Boat record). Carter’s t-shirts and bags are explicitly nautical, tropical, mellow and beachy, exuding an air of respect towards the natural world. With Ed Hardy T-shirts littering the fashion landscape, graphic T’s in general have become increasingly scrutinized– but luckily Carter’s work never crosses over into cheaply ironic or needlessly ostentatious territory, favoring simplicity in design over pointless rococco flair.

Former child model and current renowned photographer Cara Phillips is behind an eerily alluring series of portraits called Ultraviolet Beauties. Shot using the same invisible skin damage-revealing technique that cosmetics corporations have employed in recent years to scare consumers about the long-term effects of sun exposure, the subjects in Phillips’ portraits (chosen at random on the streets of Manhattan) appear to be caught in pious moments of tranquility. These everyday people seem momentarily unaware of the invisible scars that overwhelm their own faces, while the viewer is treated to a voyeuristic sneak peek into an array of seemingly malignant prognoses. From her project statement:

As an artist, I am fascinated by a technology that allows me to see inside of my subject, to see deeper than what a normal camera lens can record. To me it is in the subject’s vulnerability, where I find a beauty that transcends the flawed and damaged surface.

“Chalk drawings spotted in the schoolyard of a small rural school in Australia. Drawn on an old chalkboard by the principal over twelve years ago.”

Thanks Cameron!

Bompas & Parr aren’t the only artists to use molded gelatin as their medium of choice. San Francisco artist Liz Hickok has been working in Jell-O for years, crafting scenarios like this depiction of the Marina District in commemoration of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. The installation is set upon a shake table for quaky verisimilitude and shrouded, of course, by a mass of San Francisco fog.

“Once I began building my own model cities out of Jell-O,” the artist writes in her statement, “I found that the jiggly, iconic childhood dessert is not only perishable, but also uncontrollable. Each time I take a picture of one of my cityscapes any building may begin to sweat or even liquefy, taking on a new persona.”

Check out the video here.

The arrival of Where the Wild Things Are was the aesthetic equivalent for the picture book that the famous 1913 premier of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was for modern music–electrifying, controversial, precedent setting–a point of departure from which there could be no easy return to the same old forms and subjects.

-John Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak

Before Labyrinth, before The Muppets were making appearances on The Orson Welles Show, before Sesame Street sparked a revolution in children’s entertainment, Jim Henson was just a University of Maryland graduate with a B.S. in Home Economics, experimenting with televised puppeteering in five-minute segments on a local NBC affiliate. But like most of us, he still had to find a way to pay the bills. Hence, some of the weirdest and funniest commercials of the 1960s. While most of the ads on TV in that day were still relying on cardboard representations of the nuclear family grinning with acidic alacrirty while they delivered straightforward salutes to prefabricated post-war aspiration, Henson and his felt creations brought something unexpected into the ad world:

…till then, [advertising] agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people laugh.

How is this not an episode of Mad Men, yet? Watch below to see Henson getting away with murder (sometimes literally) thanks to a motley crew of adorably lovable irreverent proto-Muppets. And if you’ve got eight minutes to spare, check out this oddball romp of a metafictional behind-the-scenes film looking into the Muppets, Inc. marketing department.

Jennfier Venditti’s critically acclaimed 2007 documentary about an off kilter adolescent boy making the best of his small town life is probably one of the most thought provoking glimpses into childhood committed to film in recent years. Like similar small town outsider stories and to a degree this genre of documentaries as a whole there is a certain element of “woah this kid is unbelievable” sympathy/humor that draws you in but it is the pure relatability which keeps you watching. A profundity in the simple. Revelation in the mundane. A true reminder of just how close we all once were to being swallowed up by school, dating, being accepted and trying to escape.