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

Sorry about all the gif posts lately, but seeing as this one is film-centric I thought it’d be worth your ten seconds today. Three Frames. Lots of fun. Endless possibilities.

via twbe

McDonald’s PlayPlaces, tree houses, Nintendo, inflatable pools: these are the uniquely youthful worlds that serve as backdrops for Khalif Kelly’s staggering, nostalgic paintings. Freezing forgotten childhood moments of both the frenzied and docile variety, Kelly’s work is like a pre-raphealite rendering of Peanuts. His subjects’ gracefully expressive poses to seem hint at the dramatic depth lurking beneath youthful playacting.

A playground fight could be a monumental development for the children in Kelly’s paintings– a Radio Flyer ride has the power to transform identities, and an enterprising drink stand might shape attitudes about gender, race, and politics. Treading a line between the personal and archetypal, draped in drama but sharply comic, Kelly’s work seems to invite interpretation and intentionally push buttons to illicit a range of surprising emotions.

Thierry Goldberg Projects in NYC will be opening a Khalif Kelly solo show on September 9th.

Fairy tales vary endlessly, but their essence often boils down to an encounter between innocence and evil. Donkey Skin, or Peau d’ane in the original French, is a 17th century tale by author Charles Perrault that filmmaker Jacques Demy adapted for the big screen in 1970.

Donkey Skin is Demy’s third musical after The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, two technicolor gems that also star Deneuve. Being both a Demy production and a film based on a fairy tale, Donkey Skin is predictably bizarre, disturbing and lovely all at once: a poisoned bon-bon of a movie. This is not one to pass up if you happen to encounter it on eBay or in the bargain bin. The innocence-vs-evil theme will appeal to anyone who’s ever been a kid, and if that doesn’t clinch it, the crucial role of a jewel-pooping donkey will.

One of the most powerfully emotional scenes ever seen in a children’s film: the death of Artax in The Neverending Story. Who didn’t feel for Atreyu and his trusty steed? Let us not forget this noble horse who tragically subsumed to the darkness. Keep Artax in your mind, next time you find yourself wading through The Swamp of Sadness.

Before Google, inquiring minds had to rely on the local library to research such intriguing topics as Opus Dei, Area 51, Skull and Bones, the Illuminati, and other such perennial areas of interest. Then Google arrived, and same minds had to rely on their crack research skills to distinguish the factual material from the bogus.

Now, inquiring minds need nothing but Arthur Goldwag’s Cults, Conspiracies & Secret Societies, a bible of data about anything that ever contained a whiff of exclusionary intrigue. Goldwag breaks down the information with measured analyses, defining cults the way a social scientist or psychologist might, to denote “a coercive or totalizing relationship between a dominating leader and his or her unhealthily dependent followers. What makes a cult cultish,” Goldwag goes on, “is not so much what it espouses, but how much authority its leaders grant themselves–and how slavishly devoted to them its followers are.”

For the Conspiracy section (which covers Tupac Shakur, 9/11, Marilyn Monroe and everything in between) Goldwag uses the word as “more of a metaphysical than a legal concept,” noting that “when used in conjunction with “theory,” the word “conspiracy” is practically synonymous with “determinism”, and a malign determinism at that: it is the paranoid certainty that nothing happens by accident, that somebody bad is pulling all the strings.”

As for secret societies, Goldwag demystifies those hidden orders by stating straight out the gate that “Here in the real world, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the closest kept secret of many secret societies is the fact that they haven’t got all that many secrets worth keeping. Much of the solemn claptrap and mumbo-jumbo associated with fraternal orders is just that–stagecraft, juvenile secret-decoder-ring stuff, designed to foster the sense of the group, to strengthen its members’ sense of shared identity.”

With such a sensible and well-informed guide, you’ll never turn to Wikipedia again for those late-night Stealth Blimp research junkets.

Aha. A max/starry night combo. Well done.

Fip Buchanan, Avalon Tattoo, San Diego

Travis Millard is a real beast. The kind of guy who always seems to be drawing on something, in something, or around something. His illustrations and Fudge Factory Comics have been a staple in the skate/design world for quite a spell and judging by his newer zine work he doesn’t seem to be losing momentum anytime soon.

In a world where new technologies are more often developed by multi-national corporate task forces rather than mad geniuses in their garages, James Dyson is one of the few remaining celebrity inventors. Father of all sorts of fancy vacuum technologies (if you have a bagless cleaner at home, you have Dyson to thank) and futuristic hand-dryers, perhaps his most appealing creation is the above-pictured crazy upward fountain. Wrong Garden is based on a logic-defying lithograph by M.C. Escher: the famously paradoxical Waterfall.

Simulating the same sense of gravity-defying perpetual motion as Escher’s illustration, Dyson’s fountain relies on a series of underground air pumps and diversionary bubbles to trick onlookers into thinking they’re seeing something they’re not. Check out this 2003 article from the BBC for a full explanation of the trickery at work.

Via Make.

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Friday is as good a day as any to browse some of David Shrigley’s greatest hits.