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

Pity the soul that has never had the pleasure of playing with a rainbow parachute.

These lovely photos come from Japan/New York-based photographer Justin Waldron, whose work is unbelievably soft and warm, like perfect memories of childhood vacations to magical places. Glowing in subdued sunlight, speckled in flowers and wrapped up in blankets, Waldron’s images are eloquent poems about fleeting moments and sublime spaces.

Via Of Paper And Things.

We usually limit Lance Bangs to one awesome photo per week but when he sent over these shots from Little Rock we couldn’t resist sharing ASAP.

Dear God, please make me a camouflage creature in a rainbow paradise. I want to change colors at will, like a mood ring. When I grow up, I’m going to be a peacock.

Mesmerizing. Lucy McRae and Mandy Smith’s Chlorophyll Skin is so simple and yet so genius. $5 concept: cover someone in Q-Tips and then pour a rainbow of colors all over their super-absorbent second skin. Set it to Fever Ray and the result is undeniably iridescent.

Beautifully distorted bodies seem to be Lucy McRae’s stock in trade:

Where things like habit and taste are concerned, the nature vs. nurture debate can be endlessly pondered and studied. Where things like the human instinct to play with dirt are concerned, however, there’s no debate. Somewhere inside of us there’s a gene which dictates that we need to roll around in the mud, pick up snails, poke at worms and generally have a familiar relationship with the earth as children. And as adults, too–though perhaps a more cordial relationship.

For those with access to backyards or other flora-and-fauna-filled terrain, these urges can be easily satisfied. For those city-dwelling individuals who don’t have a patch of grass to their name, there are, luckily, other options to turn to. One such pocket of ingenuity exists in the Carnivorous Creations desktop bog.

The kit, which is available at ThinkGeek*, includes a Growing Dome, a bag of peat mix, a seed packet and a selection of plastic geckos. Combined in the right manner, these things yield a garden of Venus fly traps, Sundew plants and Cobra lillies, all of which eat insects.

Clearly, any plant that can digest an animal is awesome. Now, anyone with a square foot of table space can exercise his green thumb and bring such fascinating organisms to life. Finally, a happy irony in the world of consumer goods: the fact that only a human could invent such an efficient way of encapsulating nature.

*along with snow ball launchers, Darth Vader USB hubs, night vision goggles, and other essentials.

I’m not sure why Sonny wanted to cut his finger off. But I guess when he was half way through, he decided it was a bad idea. I concur. Sending big hugs to you Sonny. We are coming over for dinner tonight with some treats. Warners, send him something good!

Matt Furie has fathered a legion of beguiling beasts in his rainbow-hued drawings, expanding his own personal zoology each time he confronts the infinite emptiness of a blank page. Even while they approach the mind-boggling biodiversity of those interminable Pokémon, Furie’s characters manage to convey an emotional depth that approaches Jim Henson levels. Depicting moments of sensuality, rage, despair and intense lethargy, the artist approaches his work with a deadpan sense of humor that often comes wrapped in a burrito of delicious sincerity. Here are his thoughts on children’s literature.

Did you have any favorite picture books as a child?

Where’s Waldo series, The Far Side Galleries, Richard Scarry’s Best Storybook Ever, The first book I could ever remember reading was about a yellow bear-like animal that had colored spots. This animal felt bad because he didn’t fit in at the zoo. He could use his spots like frisbees and make them bigger, smaller, etc. It seemed like a Dr. Seuss book but different. I also remember really liking this book called This is Weird about some kids on a boat that end up on an abandoned and haunted island full of weird trapdoors and tunnels and old houses and paths and ladders.

What are your childhood recollections of Maurice Sendak’s work? Are you influenced by his visual language?

I liked the Wild Things book when I was little but it wasn’t until I started researching children’s books in college that I came to appreciate it. I like that book a lot but I’m a bit unfamiliar with his other stuff. I read the book The Art of Maurice Sendak and remember him saying that the monsters in the book were based on his relatives and his experience with them being too scary and all in his face at family dinners when he was a kid. I also remember him saying that a lot of his ideas involve eating/the fear of being eaten. As for his visual language, I thinks its a perfect balance of skill, childishness, flatness, and light.

Do you think you’ll ever make a children’s book of your own? What would it be about?

That would make my mom really happy. I’m not sure what it would be about but I know it would be a fantasy. It would start off in the real world of a kid (like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Neverending Story, Princess Bride, Where the Wild Things Are, Harry Potter, Labyrinth, and pretty much every good children’s fantasy plot). There would definitely be lots of wacky and magical creatures.

Were you prone to retreating into imaginary worlds, growing up? If so, please describe!

I used toys, video games, t.v., movies, and drawing to retreat into imaginary worlds. I remember being in the backseat of the car and looking out of the window and pretending that I was a creature running and hopping along the trees. I think every kid is prone to retreat into imaginary worlds.

Like Sendak’s Wild Things, the creatures in your work often defy biological classification. Is it a challenge to come up with such alien forms?

Nothing I could ever come up with could ever be stranger or more fascinating than what’s out there.

Nathalie Djurberg is a Swedish artist who specializes in entrancing (and occasionally freaky-deaky) short videos of handmade puppets shot in stop-motion. As befits someone who was awarded the Silver Lion For a Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennale in 2009, Djurberg is a provocateur, producing videos that are thoroughly in bad taste.

This isn’t a bad thing. It’s not easy to make demented art that avoids being shmaltzy and calculatedly shocking. New York art critic Jerry Saltz–a familiar champion of good bad art–describe Djurberg’s work as “magnificently raucous but charming”, and conjuring “a place where the center does not hold and things fall apart.” It may not be for the faint of heart, but really–these days, what is?

Not long from now, the cinematic language of digging through the past will be irrevocably transformed. No longer will we believe in the thrilling sight of harried protagonists furiously spinning through reels of microfiche in the dim recesses of their local libraries, searching for that one obituary that promises to validate all of their fears and unravel the unthinkable mystery. Those same sequences of historical investigation will all be relegated to the much less theatrical setting of a glowing laptop screen, as Google News quickly spells out the twist ending without any of that exciting legwork.

Google announced this week that they were quadrupling the number of articles freely available in their News Archive Search. While this may rain on the parade of few hack screenwriters of made-for-TV movies, it’s definitely good news for the rest of us. Perhaps most exciting is their inclusion of the entire Village Voice back catalog, giving the world instant access to fifty years of New York’s art, culture and politics. Searching for Maurice Sendak brought up some interesting results.

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The GoodTimesKid is a film about two men named Rodolfo– strangers to each other, but both residents of L.A. One Rodolfo lives on a houseboat and the other erroneously enlists in the army. And then there’s Diaz, the girl who can’t decide which Rodolfo she loves and is prone to break out in adorable jigs at a moment’s notice. Curiously comedic and jarringly delightful, GoodTimesKids is a nearly wordless Godard-esque romp directed by Azazel Jacobs, the mind behind Momma’s Man and the lovely short film Let’s Get Started which we posted recently.

The GoodTimesKid is finally getting a release on DVD today, and there will also be a celebratory screening/release party Thursday at the Downtown Independent in Los Angeles. Check it out on the big screen if you’re in town, or add it to your Netflix queue!

Another great infographic from Good magazine: “The Evolution of the Squirt Gun.” Illustrated by Jason Polan, a giraffe-obsessed methodical art ace who once created a hand-drawn catalog of every piece of art on display at MoMA.

See Also: This guy, who owns every Super Soaker ever made.