sunday, creepy sunday

this morning started with a virtual tour of redon, which led to rops, which led to alfred kubin, and then somehow to the arcade fire video for black mirror.

some kubin:






and one rops:

well-done work

Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Is it done yet?
Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Is it done yet?
Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Is it done yet?

Fake Empire stills via Shots Ring Out


How about now? Now?

seven more sleeps

One of my favourite bands are coming from Brooklyn next Wednesday and playing a free show at Sneaky's. I can't wait. I've had their song "Forts" in my head/on my myspace for about a year. It'll be cool to finally hear it live. The wait is kind of killing me though.

BOGGS

cognitive dissonance

soooooooo yeah. apparently thurston moore hangs out in my home town?

what?

serious stalking to ensue. stay tuned, kids.

we are not the marines

we left a man behind.... shame on us.

KoTV @ SpaExcess (photos obvs. not by me!)

FYI: Spa Excess = a bath house in the village. FIRST BATH HOUSE!

Who wants a ride on the slurp ramp?

hollywood north

My friend Carrie sent me this a few days ago... I am posting it now. Lazy. So lazy. Also, I have lost the ability to sleep. So I am brain dead...

Sicko


Apparently our hometown is getting the North American premier of Michael Moore's new doc? Weird... I can picture the theatre its going to play it (its in my old neighbourhood), and the giant suburban parking lot that stretches out in front of it... glamorous it is not. Ugly? Well, people protested the design of this theatre. And Londoners DO NOT protest outside of the confines of the University... and even those were always pretty poorly attended. So yeah. Ugly. I'll see if I can find a pic.

post secret

Tonight my friend Isis and I went to OCAD to hear Frank Warren speak about his community arts project Post Secret. Isis and I are both named after Bob Dylan songs. I feel that its a real bonding factor in our friendship. That, and the fact that she is hilarious and really fucking smart.

Anyway, Post Secret is actually amazing, it was started in 2004 (I think... fuck I'm bad at dates... oh the double entendre! Hahahahah! HAH! Sob!). Moving on: people from all over the world have sent this guy anonymous postcards that they have made and written a secret on, something that they haven't told anyone. Sometimes they're hilarious, and sometimes reading them makes you feel like you've been kicked in the stomach. Its weird/reassuring that certain things are just so terrible, but so universal. Frank said that he gets a lot of cards about suicide, and a lot about peeing in the shower.

He has all these secrets mailed to his home address, he gets about 1000/week. Then he posts 20 on his blog every Sunday. He's also published them in 3 different books. He talked about how he felt that making art wasn't about studying or formal training and more about the personal courage needed to take something you've made and show it to other people. That totally resonated with me. I know that if I were to send in a postcard (and I probably will), it would be something really fucking emo or emo-political or emo-ironic. Something I would deride as being completely lame if the lights were on and everyone could see me. Oh fuck, we're bordering on dramatic here. Also, bordering on using the word "fuck" one too many times in a note. Just check out his blog:

Post Secret

I read ink

I've been reading Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle since I found it last week in a used book store in London. Shockingly, its fucking depressing. Like Sylvia-Plath-writing-about-terminally-ill-children-in-the-Sudan-depressing. Its a 400+ page novel that describes the minutiae of three days worth of living in a part of the Russian gulag designated for professionals and academics. While they aren't made to do hard labour like the other prisoners, they're still captives of Stalin's Soviet government. The title references Dante's first circle of Hell and the limbo-like state these guys live in. I'm at the part where its looking as though they are about to sacrifice themselves to the hard labour camps in Siberia in order to make some sort of moral point. I'm missing Nabokov, he never moralizes.



Anyway, it was all getting to be a bit heavy and doing absolutely nothing for my mood, so I switched. I'm now re-reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I find it hilarious. It makes me laugh out loud, which books rarely do. But I've read it already, and everything I bought last weekend is in the same depressing vein as The First Circle, with the exception of the Anais Nin, but I don't think I can deal with her right now... so basically this was a long-winded plea for summer reading recommendations/book loans. I can deal with "dark" or even "bleak", just not "hopeless" or also anything with the word "Shopaholic" in the title. Go.

architecture for the deranged

My most recent obsession is with monuments people have built to... well, their own insanity. I don't know, maybe insanity is too harsh a word. But they definitely aren't expressions of normality... but I guess art never is. Although I find Monet pretty fucking boring.

This kind of started a few years ago when my Nana came back from Prague with a book for me on the bone cathedral, Sedlec Ossuary. The interior of the building is decorated and furnished with items constructed from human skeletons, like 40 000 of them. Apparently a lot of Czechs died during the Black Death and wanted to be buried here. Too many. So when the cathedral was reconstructed they put this carpenter dude in charge of making some sense and order out of all these bones. Personally, my first instinct would be incineration, then a bone chandelier. Luckily for lovers of the macabre (ME!!), he thought differently:





I really, really, really need to see this IRL. Its hurting me.


Also: a friend of mine was working in LA last summer and was telling me about driving into Watts after dark (picture a skinny Jewish boy with glasses, sorry Fred, but you are) to see the towers while being followed by an LAPD helicopter the entire time. I had never heard of the towers despite the fact that Fred claims they are in basically every LA-set film or tv show. Anyway, this Italian guy spent about 33 years of his life building these 17 towers on his property, mostly from steel and wire, but also using mortar to inlay stuff you might find in your recycling bin, to make the most beautiful mosaics. Then he moved because he didn't like his neighbours.





After nearly being demolished by the city, the towers are now a National Historic Landmark. Which makes me feel like an even bigger jerk for not knowing about them.


So I think my whole thing is that these guys, a woodcarver and a construction worker, built this shit with none of the pretense usually attributed to the art world, or without any concern about being viewed as "artists". Also the scale of their work kind of awes me. I'm looking for more examples of this kind of thing... so if you know any, link pls.

americans

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHAH


hahaha

hah


hahahahahahahahah

heh

raging party at the coc?

Not sure if this is a sign of spring's arrival, but ummmm... a lot of people seem to be venturing out onto the street more. To barf. This morning I walked by a higher than usual number of vomit puddles. I think I saw about 4. Granted, I do live quite close to Queen and Bathurst, a corner which is no stranger to puke. I think its the combination of sketchy bars (I miss you, Queenshead!) and Pizza Pizza.

But on my way to York and Adelaide, I passed the new Canadian Opera Company building and saw this:



Seriously? Like you got tanked at intermission and barfed up your snack (I always get a Haagen Daz ice cream bar!)? And that is a LOT of puke.

I was really happy that no one from my law firm busted me taking pictures of someone else's puke.

just me?

Or does Steve Carell (of Daily Show and Little Miss Sunshine fame)...


look just like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (of Israel has no right to exist and I am a crazy extremist who is destroying an otherwise incredible society fame)?

pink elephants

Thanks to Carrie, I read a lot about fetuses, neonates (what docs refer to babies as!) and the nastiness that can occur when someone is kooky enough to get themselves knocked up. Even a perfectly healthy pregnancy is like a Japanese horror film that lasts nine months. But, when your best friend is in med school and asks you to edit papers for her, you become exposed to some pretty unique medical nightmares. Google "stone baby". I fucking dare you.

So I've come to view the fetus as a gross and somewhat dangerous phenomenon. Pics of them generally freak me out, however, I found this on National Geographic.



Elephant fetus! I won't lie. I THINK IT'S SO CUTE!!! And it looks a little like the Elephants in Fantasia. Only a little less creepy. .