Lili Todd is a rad cartoonist. She also happens to be eight years old. With help from her dad, illustrator Mark Todd, Lili has been releasing her own mini-comics for several years, demonstrating a keen knack for designing cute characters and a clever understanding of print layout flaunted in works like Robot Dressup and Change My Face, an interactive exquisite corpse-esque zine. While Lili’s not exactly an artistic wunderkind, you can tell that she cares about her creations and loves sharing them with others. The sheer enterprise of a girl who made personal appearances at both APE and Comic Con is admirable enough, without the added benefit of her comics’ irresistibly endearing Sanrio-esque charm.
One of her latest works, Polley Makes Snowcones: Book #2 seems almost allegorically autobiographical in its ruminations on work and play. The story begins with an optimistic bear waking up and exclaiming, “It’s snow-cones day! Yippy!” before frantically setting up a booth to share her frozen treats with a long line of animal friends. In the middle of her hectic day, Polley notes, “This is work,” but never gives up. At the end of the comic, Polley awakens to announce once again, “It’s snow-cones day!” She’s accepted both the joy and the strain of work and forges onward, extending what we first assume to be a day-long flight of fancy into a lifetime project.
Diplo and Switch’s DJ supergroup, Major Lazer, has been providing plenty of irresistable summertime jams with tracks like “Hold The Line (feat Mr. Lexx and Santigold)” and “Pon De Floor” off their LP Guns Don’t Kill People– Lazers Do, an insane dancehall concept album about “a Jamaican commando who lost his arm in the secret Zombie War of 1984.”
Major Lazer also just released a rad new mix last week for the clothing label Mishka’s “Keep Watch” series. The mix is a must for any discerning lover of life, worth the download alone for the uhholy juxtapositions of artists as diverse as Rye Rye, Bjork, and Ace of Base. Major Lazer even managed to slip in a new track of their own called “Baby Riddim,” which boasts devastating rhymes from a post-pregnancy M.I.A. Download the whole mix here, or check out Switch’s “Baby” remix over at The Fader.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Literary mastermind Thomas Pynchon has a new book out this week, only the seventh novel in his 45-year career. Clocking in at a slim 416 pages, the hardboiled noir Inherent Vice is being marketed as Pynchon’s “most accessible” book yet, but don’t count on anything so gauche as a straightforward narrative from the king of postmodern prose.
Taking place just after the cold conclusion to those free-loving 1960s, Pynchon’s heavily influenced P.I. Doc Sportello leads us through the paranoid haze of beach-side L.A. culture, crossing paths with a motley crew of oddball characters including “surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.” Yep, sounds like Pynchon. Check out this online commercial for the book, narrated by the enigmatic author himself:
Always With Honor is a design collective “specializing in map, icon, and information design.” Their honorable mission is to create work that “helps break down complex information into simple (and fun) designs that are easily understood an enjoyed.” In practice, this comes off like a clever mixture of Ikea, behavioral engineering and fine art.
Projects have included a visual breakdown of the Obama’s vegetable garden, a graphic essay of Supreme Court nomination facts and a map highlighting the world’s most unusual travel destinations. The collective’s aesthetic is bright, colorful, economical and profoundly expressive. To pore over an Always With Honor project is to revel in all the stimulating parts of learning without any of the struggle.
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Maurice Sendak wrote and designed this awesome early Sesame Street skit. Who else could seamlessly weave together nine alcoholic pigs, a deceitful rascal named Bumble, and a stern mother who works 29 minutes a day over the course of a whirlwind animated segment? But the best part is hearing Jim Henson’s voice come out of young Bumble at the end! How lovely it is to see the brief convergence of two great artists who were clearly on the same wavelength.
3-D cinema has existed for more than 80 years, cyclically dazzling before disappearing and then re-emerging to infiltrate successive generations. We’ve been in the midst of a serious surge in the past decade, cardboard glasses unexpectedly slipping back onto mainstream moviegoers’ enchanted faces with mixed results. Sure, a feast of aesthetic eye candy like Coraline or Up might benefit from the technology, but do slasher films and teen pop stars really need to enter the third dimension?
One thing is clear: 3-D needs to be on sweaters. Yes, there’s been a severe deficit of 3-D knitted goods and rad design duo BLESS is here to fill that gap with their chic 3-D ski sweater, the anaglyphic centerpiece of their Winter 09/10 collection. Check it out over at today and tomorrow.
We’ve gotten a few emails regarding this this unauthorized music video/short film experiment and can’t tell you much about it other than what you can already see – A: Lightning Bolt is an awesome band , B: Someone made a pretty nice Wild Things costume and took it to the streets. The rest is for you to figure out.
John and Faith Hubley were a husband-wife team of amazing experimental animators who created 22 films together, not to mention the classic “Letterman” segments on Sesame Street with the voices of Gene Wilder and Joan Rivers. One of their many Oscar-nominated short films, Windy Day, used a technique the Hubleys played with on several occasions: creating a vibrant, animated world set to an audio recording of their two young daughters’ meandering, playful conversation. The film beautifully captures the fluidity of a youthful imagination, employing a refined lexicon of visual language to tie together those wayward, impulsive narrative strands that make children’s stories so special.
In case you were curious about where these two girls with such amusing daydreams are today, Georgia went on to form a little band you might have heard of– Yo La Tengo. And her older sister Emily has been carrying on the family legacy, lending her sick animation skills to Nickelodeon and films like Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
We love Brandon Jan Blommaert’s images of elaborately-composed sculptures that he crafts from found garbage. It’s like Wall•E meets Gregory Crewdson meets H.G. Wells. Plus Photoshop!
For a bonus adventure, visit Blommaert’s cryptic website and find yourself spinning down a rabbit hole of text, images and audio files that lead nowhere but do so with a maximum visual punch.
Subscribe to RSS