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

Dave Eggers, Tophe Eggers , Spike Jonze.

Thirty-something Dutch artist Roel Wouters studied graphic and typographic design in the Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam, and is into crafting his own tools. He is also “currently investigating the outsourcing of control,” or introducing unpredictable elements into his projects “in order to leave space for emerging, surprising results that reveal processes directly connected to the world around us.” (Artist’s statements: yeah!)

One of Wouters’s projects is Conditional Design, a term which refers to an approach that values processes over products and studies things that adapt to their environment. Areas of interest include internet memes, the concept of abstraction, something called “human programming” and X.

The project is defined by a manifesto and practiced by Wouters and three of his designer acquaintances. Check out the below video by Wouters for a taste of his philosophy, and meanwhile revel in the fact that the artist’s name sounds exactly like the noise that someone makes when they’re talking underwater.

Does anyone lay claim to the knowledge of all the Peanuts-related merchandise ever created? Someone knows. Someone out there has that information in their mind. We’d have to track them down and ask them, but something tells me the Peanuts Cook Book has got to be in the top ten raddest peripheral objects ever derived from the imagination of Charles Schulz. Recipes include:

Lucy’s Lemon Squares
Great Pumpkin Cookies
Security Cinnamon Toast
Charlie Brown’s Mother’s Buttered Oven-Potatoes

Paula Deen who? It’s all about Lucy with her Divine Divinity and Snoopy’s Steak Tartar. Found via Kitsch’n.

Pop culture and the beauty industry’s tendency to turn childhood into a commodity is the concept that inspired Erik Mark Sandberg’s series of unsettling paintings, Hairy Children Portraits– but they can be enjoyed just fine if they’re simply taken as weird for weirdness’ sake.

Debuts on itunes September 8th.

Heidegger used the word “Zuhandenheit” to refer to objects that one only notices when they go missing. New York-based artist Zak Kitnick makes a practice of bringing these objects to the fore, forming his work from switch plates, linoleum, Venetian blinds, fencing and shelving units in order to “draw attention to the easy to use and easy to ignore objects that structure our daily existence,” as he puts it.

Kitnick is indeed the best authority on his own work, but he wants the viewer to understand it as well. “It’s important to me is that the work is not a game of charades,” he says. “The work is not about trying to guess what I’m thinking. The idea of charades is like the idea of illustration. If I had something simple and singular to say, I would say it. I do think of a lot of the work like a text, but a text that is read all at once. I wish that I could talk that way. I wish that I could say everything at once. The work is a like a text, except it has to be more like a poem. It’s asking what do you think. It has questions.”

In The Art of Maurice Sendak: From 1980 to the Present, playwright Tony Kushner ponders the naysayers of illustrated children’s books, those elitist fools who consider the medium a disreputable lower art form– a bastardization of literature– soiled by its alleged impurity and sacrilege. Is impurity such a crime?

And you can see their point, you can comprehend their distaste, those purist picture-haters, those iconoclasts! For who has not been seduced and then abandoned by the impure? What is a picture book for children? It’s a trick! Its purpose is to lure kids into the gingerbread cottage, the prison-house, the labyrinth of language.

Why are there picture books? Centuries ago, recognizing how strenuous a chore reading is going to get for anyone lucky enough to grow older and graduate to really difficult books, some useful person invented the illustrated book to start kids reading. The picture book performs an allurement; it offers to kids an already familiar language, the visual, as a seductive entry into a not yet familiar, forbidding, and more treacherous world—the world of written language, of serious abstraction, of sayables and unsayables. Children’s literature makes us fall in love with books and we never recover—we’re doomed. Having spent one night In The Night Kitchen, we’re on our way to Proust and Hegel and the Holy Scriptures.

As Spike mentioned earlier, Yahoo HD exclusive.

Flashback. Remember when your mom made dinner and it was something gross? And you were all, “I don’t like tuna casserole.” And she was all, “Tough bananas. If you don’t like it, how ’bout YOU cook dinner?”

This line of logic is frustrating to young children but imminently satisfying to older ones. After all, we don’t exactly have the skills to fend for ourselves at a young age. But once you grow up and figure out how to make your way, doing things yourself is often the best way to get them done right.

Bon Bon Kakku takes the concept and turns it into a community. The site encourages visitors to design their own fabrics for viewers to see and vote for. If the fabric is popular enough, it will be manufactured and sold on the website.

The cherry on the sundae is that the available designs are really good. It’s enough to reinvigorate your belief in the merits of crowdsourcing. And in the case that you’re not super keen on any of the designs, you can always submit your own. “If you have never found nice fabrics to buy,” the website asks, “why don’t you design them yourself?”

Well, why not?

In 1993 Roddy Doyle wrote one of the best books about childhood ever published and, fittingly, won a Booker Prize, possibly the most prestigious award in English-language literature. The book is Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and it’s written from the perspective of a ten-year-old kid growing up in a suburb of North Dublin in the 1960s. The thing is, it really IS written from the kid’s perspective, replicating the consciousness of a young’n through its language, observations and insights.

If the Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is occasionally hard to follow, it’s also achingly realistic. This probably goes to show that ten-year-olds have more complicated emotional lives and intellects than we commonly give them credit for.

In a review of the book for Entertainment Weekly, Tom De Haven wrote that “Even the best writers seldom capture the temper and shifting textures of childhood with approximate, let alone absolute, fidelity.” Doyle’s novel is awe-inspiring for the simple fact that it accomplishes exactly this.