Want to win this complete series of Where The Wild Things Are decks? Thanks to Meza and the genius crew at Crailtap you can! Here’s how: Where The Wild Things Ought To Be – the basic idea is to send in images or GIFs or videos inserting Wild Things artwork, clips, etc into places that could use some “wilding-up.” For example:
Simple? Fun? You bet!
Email entries to email hidden; JavaScript is required. We’ll be posting our favorite ones along with Crailtap. Best entry wins the complete series of decks. Get to work!
The difference between 19th century toys and 20th century toys basically comes down to one factor: spectacle.
Notions of the spectacular are hard to define but easy to recognize. Any toy or game that involves the slightest bit of bedazzlement––from Simon to Super Nintendo––is a 20th century toy. Flashing lights? Neon? Modulated noises? Artificial sounds in general? These are all 20th century toy innovations for 20th century kids.
Our 19th century predecessors relied on simpler (but not necessarily less interesting) appliances for their recreation. Balls, sticks, hoops, buckets, and endless combinations thereof formed the majority of playtime diversions.
To compare the two, we selected prime examples from each category. At left: a carefully-crafted Landscape Stamp Set consisting of five natural rubber and wood stamps that can be used to create images of a classic wooded hillside. Simple as can be. You can’t get more 19th century than a stamp set.
And, at right: a high-fidelity Sound Machine boasting 16 amplified noise effects for use on demand. Sounds include a rocket, a fart, a boing, a whistle, a drumroll and a burp, among others. Everything about this little red appliance, from the matte plastic veneer and sans-serif typeface to the “cash register” sound effect, dates it firmly in the 20th century. Maybe even the 21st.
So who wins? As far as aesthetics, it’s a tough call. Both toys have a distinctive, refined appeal. And you can’t really call a winner where creativity is concerned either, since both toys demand a certain imaginative vigor for true enjoyment. While the Sound Machine is arguably more spectacular, the Landscape Set has a perennial appeal that may surpass its own novelty.
Children are sticky. They’re smelly and messy and their fingers are dirty and their diapers are poopy. Elizabeth Fleming’s photos of her own family are about the beauty in that truth. Chaos and tenderness intertwine as she captures frightening bed stains bathed in late-afternoon sunlight, framing bruises and band-aids in soft-focus cocoons. Her aptly titled ongoing body of work, Life Is A Series of Small Moments, is a startlingly intimate meditation on both the rumbling anxieties of being a parent and the fleeting magic of childhood.
Ever since the earliest astronomer tried to make sense of the endless night sky, human beings have sought order in systems of chaos. We’re driven to control disarray by understanding it, either scientifically or poetically. Both of those widely divergent approaches to the unknown have been boosted by the last century’s giant strides forward in technology.
Not only can we now map the human genome and access centuries of human thought at the click of a mouse, but technology has also introduced vast new quarries of chaotic, random material for artists and poets to obsess over. And that’s just what Glitch: Designing Imperfection is about– it’s a book celebrating the anarchy of distortion, the creativity intrinsic to grisly computer crashes.
This illuminating volume meditates on the meaning and meaninglessness of glitch– the beauty and the terror of pixelated, involuntary abstraction– through enlightening interviews and work from dozens of rad digital media wizards like Johnny Rogers and Cory Arcangel. Sifting through 900 submissions, the curators of Glitch: Designing Imperfection have spent four years compiling the definitive resource on the visual art of synthetic chaos.
Books and movies have one small thing in common: they combine aural and visual stimuli to the purpose of telling a story. But what about the other senses? One’s mind gets to wandering.
Where Wild Things are concerned, the answer may lie at I Hate Perfume, Christopher Brosius’s laboratory of unconventional scents. Rather than pander to classical tastes with rose and lilac-scented vials, Brosius creates formulas designed to invoke the most intricate of memories. Three of the scents developed at the I Hate Perfume workshop happen to bear a particular relationship to Where the Wild Things Are, due to their relevant subject matter. To wit:
If Max’s voyage had an olfactory accompaniment, it would no doubt be Brosius’s Eternal Return, a perfume designed to simulate the scent of sailing toward the shore. The mixture blends the smells of ocean air, wooden ships, and “a faint hint of cypress trees growing on a cliff above the water.” Sounds about right.
Then there’s Wild Hunt (which NAILS the wild rumpus in odorific terms)––the bottled and compressed scent of an ancient forest complete with “torn leaves, crushed twigs, flowing sap, fallen branches, old leaves, green moss, fir, pine, and tiny mushrooms”. Finally, there’s Memory of Kindness–based on the perfumer’s reveries of childhood–which has to be the smell of Max returning home.
Gosh. Is there even a vocabulary for the way that smells influence our perception of things? Will we ever have the equivalent of an olfactory soundtrack to films? to books? Life comes with its own built-in version, after all. And childhood is definitely the most powerful origin of smells. For these reasons, the whole concept of I Hate Perfume is a slightly mind-boggling enterprise.
Maybe Smell-O-Vision is due for a high-concept comeback.
A few things made Shel Silverstein a natural for the world of kid’s books: his whimsy, his mischievous glee, his masterful line drawings (a wonder of simplicity and expressiveness!) and his well-crafted rhymes.
The imagination played a key role in all of Silverstein’s books, but especially in his classic A Light in the Attic, in which traffic lights turn blue and triangles attack squares, among other flights of fancy.
The Chicago-born Silverstein also had a playful instructive streak which nourished the childhood urge to gain mastery of the adult world. In “How Not To Have to Dry the Dishes” he encouraged children to drop dishes on the floor in order to avoid that “awful, boring chore”. In “Stop Thief!” he explained whom to contact if a thief happened to steal your knees (answer: the police). Silverstein effectively trained several generations of kids in how to transform mundane daily doings into wild larks–– carpe diem, basically, but in everyone’s language.
Take five, you’ve earned it! Stop all that hard work just long enough to watch this rad clip of Mark Gonzales skating around the dreary streets of New York accompanied by the sounds of Ciccone Youth’s “MacBeth.” The Gonz never ceases to amaze. His entire existence is an ode to human beings’ limitless potential to create their own fun.
This video was originally included in a DVD supplement to The Journal in 2006.
The internet has done a few great things for art. One of them, no doubt, is the sudden ease of widespread (and even anonymous!) collaborations between far-flung talents. Craig Frazier’s DraWords project is a prime example of this quality. A renowned illustrator and designer––he’s done everything from US Postage stamps to features for the NY Times Op/Ed Page––Frazier offers new comics weekly on the DraWords site and invites readers to submit their own captions, with the best one documented for posterity.
Whether you fill in the blanks or not, browsing Frazier’s cartoons is a neat exercise in figuring out the ingredients of humor, and the many ways of telling a visual joke.
(Symbiosis, a biology-inspired dance performed by members of Pilobolus at the 2005 TED Conference.)
Veteran experimental dance troupe Pilobolus has performed everywhere from Sesame Street in the 1970s to the 2007 Academy Awards, where they contorted their bodies into a bunch of giant silhouettes symbolizing Little Miss Sunshine and Snakes on a Plane. Discarding the normal rules of dance and incorporating mind-boggling acrobatics into a built-from-scratch physical language, Pilobolus has redefined modern dance several times over.
In 1999 the dance troupe teamed up with a pair of unlikely collaborators: Maurice Sendak and opera director Arthur Yorinks. It was the first time Pilobolus had allowed outsiders to contribute to their unique process, and the result was a dark and masterful rumination on the Holocaust called A Selection. While the end result may have been a brilliant success, the journey to that point was awkward and contentious, to say the least. Mirra Bank’s 2002 documentary Last Dance provides an intimate look at the backstage drama, the dance’s evolution, and Sendak’s imagination at work.
While the dancers freely improvise in early meetings, we see Sendak sketching figures and jotting down wild, poetic interpretations of bizarre contortions, constructing a theater piece based around a living Rorschach test. Fusing the dancers’ fluid instincts with abstract narrative elements culled from Brundibar (the Czech opera that Sendak later adapted into a picture book with Tony Kushner) and the real life drama of Theresienstadt, Sendak imprints a sinister, melancholy mood into the piece– but not without his signature pension for playfulness. Watching A Selection come to life is a thrilling and rare chance to see the birth of a collaborative artwork, even for someone (like myself) completely unversed in the world of dance.
Highlights from Last Dance include Sendak’s brilliant costume designs and decorations, the constant presence of an exceptionally peculiar dance critic, and a villainous choreographer/Gallagher-doppelganger’s futile attempts to wrest control from Sendak by complaining that the author was making the dance “too narrative.”
For “Cheeseburger in Paradise”, an entry in the Gowanus Studio Space Jell-O Competition, artist Rachael Morrison crafted a fast-food dinner that included a walnut and vanilla gelatin bun, vanilla gelatin cheese, lemon-lime gelatin pickles, coconut gelatin onions, cherry and cherry cream gelatin tomato, and pistachio gelatin lettuce. The french fries are vanilla gelatin with tomato flavored gelatin ketchup. Even the Coca-Cola is gelatinous, made from a black cherry coke flavor with coconut gelatin ice cubes.
As a fitting cherry on top, the entry is named after the Jimmy Buffett song that celebrates a harsh cheeseburger craving. Yum. Nothing like Buffett to stoke the appetite.
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