Leo Villareal's Multiverse

I took this video at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's not the best quality but you get the idea. It was really cool to walk through, especially emerging into I.M. Pei's East Wing Building, with a basement full of contemporary art, on the other side.

Weekly Doodle

Simple but appropriate.

Lomo's Russian Winter in New York

Last week I went to a workshop kinda thing at the new Lomography shop in Manhattan. There were loaner Diana+ cameras (though I had my own with me of course!) and free rolls of 120 film for all. We went walkabout in lower Manhattan and took some pictures, including experimenting with the Diana's pinhole setting, as in my picture above. More on my flickr. If you're interested in future events, you can get on the mailing list at the Lomography website.

Department of Eagles

Just got the album "In Ear Park" and I love it...

Rock-Afire Explosion

Playing Arcade Fire's "Neighborhood #1"

Iggy Pop, Pete n' Pete

Writing about Dead Man yesterday reminded me about Iggy Pop's forays into acting, including one of my favorite TV shows of all time, "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," which aired on Nickelodeon from 1993-96.
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Iggy played the father of little Pete's best friend Nona (Michelle Trachtenberg) in a few episodes. Steve Buscemi also made a couple of appearances as the father of big Pete's best friend Ellen, and Bebe Neuwirth played the mail carrier.


The show is a brilliantly strange and offbeat portrayal of suburban life in the 90s from the kids' perspective. Big Pete is a classic angsty teenager. Little Pete (Danny Tamberelli) is a model of standing up for kid-nation against nefarious grown-ups. Not to mention he's got ill steez: oversized red plaid flannel shirts, a matching hat, baggy jeans and big stompy hiking boots. Plus his pride and joy, the lovely Petunia:

I secretly want a tattoo like this. I've definitely drawn her on my arm a couple times for parties!
The music's not half bad either, it was all done by a band called Polaris. The opening is iconic, at least in my book.
Iggy Pop's endorsement says it all. This is a part of 90s culture worth looking back on.

Weekly Doodle

Dead Man

I had the pleasure of seeing Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man, made in 1995. The cast is stupendous, with the lead played by Johnny Depp and appearances by Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Alfred Molina, Gabriel Byrne, and Billy Bob Thornton. Thornton is unrecognizable as latent homosexual bible-thumping trapper "Big George," living (presumably in sin) in the middle of nowhere with Iggy Pop wearing a dress as Salvatore "Sally" Jenko and another gruff male companion. In one of the more hilarious/disturbing scenes in the film, Depp's William Blake (yes, like the poet) happens upon them in the woods and Big George fawns over his hair, wondering how he gets it so soft because he can't seem to do anything with his.
Central, of course, is the character of Blake, of whom one of the film's taglines says it all: "No one can survive becoming a legend." I love his look: his prim plaid suit and glasses eventually deteriorate to a raggedy fur coat, no glasses, streaks of paint on his face and a crushed top hat. Blake had never heard of his namesake, the English poet and artist, until enlightened by Nobody, the Native American man who saves him in the wilderness. Later, when approached by two sheriffs who ask, "Are you William Blake?" he replies, "Yes. Do you know my poetry?" then shoots them in cold blood. Badass.

When the bounty hunters on Blake's tail find the sheriffs, one of them has fallen into the artistic arrangement of the image above. One of the film's most shocking and memorable moments follows, but I won't spoil it.
The film is beautiful, frightening, and funny all at once.
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As a side note, having seen Alfred Molina's name in the opening credits, I was looking for him throughout the film, and didn't realize that he played the priest at the trading post until the end--for some reason I thought Gabriel Byrne played two parts, because Molina looked so much like him in his scenes! I had never noticed a resemblance between them before, but it's something about those intense eyes...


Separated at birth?!?

another silly story

Inside a rose there lived a muskrat with a top hat who sang trilledy-dee all the live long day.
In silver expeditions to the turquoise wool of my childhood I ate a superb truffle pie called "Trumblehead."
Existing as a dirt brick would be kind of cool I guess.
Paper cupcakes at a party for chips would be tres jolie, n'est-pas?
Vibrating along in a jiggly, finger-breaking triple D kind of fashion I rainbow'd into astronaut-helmets-r-us for a spot of tea and a chat with a peckish purple rhinoceros of the sort one often sees with pink leather fingerless gloves of the pop star variety.
Aquamarine barnacles, quite geloid in nature, trumbled in salty seas of kelp-tastic singularity. I sit in armchairs to discuss the phenomenon of barnacular splendifery.

Weekly Doodle

An Absurd Tale

Once upon a time there was a leech who supped upon vast mouthfuls of freckle creations. There are camels upon the great plains of taffeta. This is the time for a serious story.

There was a girl and another girl and they loved each other very much. They had matching rhinestone-studded joke books and silver remotes of doom.

Wait! Pause.
Once there were two unicorns who made love upon a field of poppycocks. Cheese dust fell upon them in waves. They couldn’t be together because their families had warring dock properties.
A frog had some interesting financial propositions to do with coffee bean prospects. Mounds of detritus rained from the heavens as mammoths galloped ‘cross emerald-studded caterpillar filaments.

Joy and insipid hair exodus gelled into pudding-mass with a nose like that of Helen Keller’s dog.

Fingerprints studded the helm of the silver child-like prow of the vessel on which Jews of every description could be viewed dancing among the Band-aid fibers like the hand-lines of a beautiful head shake.

David Chadsey wore a gown of silver taffeta that flowed like toilet paper as he stepped regally amidst the flames, the rabid rhinos, elephants and hippos chanting “Fi-re, Fi-re” as they tossed their righteous horn heads in indignation.

Meanwhile Master Señor Kandel, lord of all that is holy, strolled among the duct tape billowing from flower patch to flower patch amid the joyous peals of maggot-laughter that rang out from pink marshmallow puff archways as in olden times.

Rachel had a well-oiled mustache much like that of Salvador Dalí and she coiled it maliciously as she grasped Annie by her curly Colombian hairs.
HOW MUCH FOR THE LITTLE GIRL?
So saying she turned the many strands of her many-stranded mustachio in such a way as to ensnare Annie against the train tracks of Western China.

Some kind of gelatinous carousel-horse skipped along under sun lamps of the orange coin variety.

“You’re like your own father!” she proclaimed loudly as she contemptuously tossed gold coins (for they lived in a nation with no paper bills).

In the Pleistocene era Annelid segmented worms wandered the Earth with no regard for human laws or textures.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was built elfin peoples rejoiced and performed a nose-dance to please the ages. Climbing upon the empty rinds of a burgeoning adolescent consumer society the whiffs of despairing nature moaned at their own inability to alter the irreparable future.



Written on a journey to somewhere else.