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

Sent to us from our great friend and WTWTA artist Geoff Mcfetridge

We have been working on raising money and awareness our close-friend, Kenny Brime who has been diagnosed Chronic Lymphatic Leukemia.

We’ve raised approximately $5000 thus far just from pure donations. Amazing!
We just finished a benefit shirt for Kenny with Bad Brains and ROIR Records to further help Kenny and to expand awareness of Leukemia in general.

I’ll be releasing the shirts on Tuesday, April 6 through the Solitary Arts site. Two shirts and only 48 of each were made. Each shirt comes with the Solitary Arts inner tag. Artwork is original/official Bad Brains, the ROIR Records logo, and Kenny’s own artwork adorning both the front and back of each shirt.

Rose Clark does a lot of things— too many to name in one place but all worth examining more closely at her website. The artist/designer is effortlessly versatile, producing everything from an Edwardian tuxedo shirt and wearable paper trousers made from Tyvek to a poster made in homage to the Bodoni typeface (with information about its creator and history of use) to a research project examining the history of pattern cutting in folk clothing around the world.

There’s so much to see here; we haven’t even mentioned the gorgeous book designs and collages from found photos and abstract landscapes. Clark’s is the kind of astonishing range that can make a person crazily envious or crazily inspired or both. We’re sticking firmly with “inspired”.

Emily Cheng’s projects are tinged with humor and exquisite taste and influenced by everything from Mexico City architecture to fallen trees to radio infrastructure maps.

Her experiments—some documented online here— include a USB teddy bear based on Deleuze & Guattari’s writings on the rhizome (see above), a hypothetical tour bus for Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales (it features wall-sconce lighting and goblet holders) and an installation that metaphorically (or metonymically?) contains the elements of a cloud storm in one room via white balloons suspended at varying heights.

The connecting thread among Emily’s works is a conceptual rigor matched with technical perfection and…most importantly…a distinct element of zaniness. Behold.

Apropos of our post on the Theme Park Maps archive, WLYS reader Hugh kindly pointed us in the direction of the Bill Tracy Project. Reader, if you are interested in spelunking down into your most fearful childhood memories, we’d recommend you start paying attention right now.

According to its manifesto, the Bill Tracy Project is a website founded in order to “consolidate all known Bill Tracy information into one dedicated resource, thus, creating the largest official source of information pertaining to this subject in existence.” Um…who is the Bill Tracy to whom we owe such a fervent resource? Good question!

As for an answer, hmm. Where to begin. Tracy was a master of dark rides—theme park rides, that is, designed to convey guests through an indoor space. Early dark ride technology centered around things like ultraviolet lights and fluorescent paint and moved onto mechanically complex systems designed to give the illusion of, say, a female victim being severed in two by a circular saw.

Tracy’s hallmarks included complex facades and detail-oriented creepiness, and some of his most famous rides included the Whacky Shack at Joyland Amusement Park in Wichita, Kansas and The Haunted House at Trimper’s Amusements in Ocean City, Maryland. Check out the site’s insanely comprehensive biography as well as the section full of rad concept drawings and ride layouts. Spectacular!

There will be more coming about this as we draw closer to the premiere but we just wanted to hip you Jeff Tremaine’s new documentary on BMX legend Mat Hoffman. Jeff directed it and Spike and Johnny Knoxville produced as a part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series which features a list of some amazing filmmakers and storytellers diving deep into the ESPN archive and shedding some light on some fantastic athletes and unique moments in sports history. Stay tuned!

Mina Fina, in her own words, “wakes up everyday with good intentions but ends up eating cakes.” Oh, but she does so much more! Living and working in Slovenia, the artist is a wellspring of creativity. She makes videos, books, drawings, websites, zines, keeps a Polaroid diary, sends exquisite cards to her friends and collaborates on installations.

If it were possible to reproduce Mina Fina’s entire portfolio right here, in this blog post, we’d do it. We like it that much, and want to share it that much. Given the constraints, however, you’ll have to go spelunking on your own. The best we can do is supply a bouquet of links and point to the news page of Mina’s website, which keeps us up to date on her output.

Finally and also worth mentioning is the artist’s interactive experimental comic book project Enoletnica/YearBook. We were lucky enough to obtain a copy of the book project, which is a gorgeous, sturdy diary-calendar divided into twelve months. Cryptic drawings, prompts and designs cover each page, and a sheet of stickers is included for customizing the book. Instructions and further keys to interpreting the book are available each month the book’s corresponding website.