This guy has taken it to the next level recreating covers in MS Paint and I especially appreciate his subject choices. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.
you can also find a huge collection of these MS Paint renditions in this set which has been collected from various user submissions on music forums. it’s a goldmine!
i just got this copy of The Getaway by Jim Thompson in the mail thinking the cover artwork was so badass. Then I came across this gallery of his vintage editions that is completely next level:
You should watch this cool 1954 semi-abstract animation of Edgar Allan Poe’s legendary short story, preferably while while sipping on a cask of Amontillado.
Here’s another blatant steal from my friend Joy. I’m loving these images by Mark Weaver. They look organic and analog, not too graphic designey at all…
many thanks to Joy for sharing this link.
Marrying my love of movies and animated gifs, Three Frames is a fantastic tumblr site that publishes one animated gif a day from a classic movie, using only three frames total for an awesome herky-jerky effect. It’s pure genius.
//from Play Time
these scuptures constructed from colored pencils are just so mindblowing that i think that my brain just fell out of my head. they remind of sea corals
My friend Alexis, the one who gave me the Hitchcock inspired piece that hangs in my hallway, has some new works showing at Park Life tonight at 7pm. She told me her new stuff was inspired by Ed Ruscha (one of my biggest crushes ever) in the sense that this time she uses her distinct aesthetic to spell out phrases. For example:
She got a nice write up on sfgate.com here and Fecal Face paid her a studio visit and I highly recommend checking that feature out to get a good sense of what an awesome person she is and why I and many others adore her. Remember how I complained that I want more science-fiction with a feminine touch? Alexis has done that before:
Her stuff keeps getting better and better and I’m proud of her. If you can’t make it, you can check out the set of her new works on her flickr.
This is the same idea as the Cover Versions post, but instead of records in book format it is now movies. Killer
Attention bookworms and record geeks! Look at this set called Cover Versions. so creative!
Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books.
The Sleeveface photo pool on Flickr is an endless stream of record nerd fun. Covers with giant faces on them are so much fun to use this way.
I love John Lurie’s deadpan sense of humor and I’ve mentioned his Fishing with John show here before. He’s better known as a musician and actor first, but he is also a visual artist. Look at his paintings, especially the titles he gives them.
Uh-oh! Guess who just figured out how to rip video clips from her DVDs?
Well, it’s The Day After Earth Day and I think I speak for everyone when I say THANK GOD we can all go back to throwing trash out of our windows again. YES!!! Oh wait… you don’t do that?
Um, oh I just found out about this cool site called Free Music Archive and it’s great because they have very reliable music nerds who curate collections of quality music that you might not know about. Anyway, WFMU, the best listener-supported public radio station in the entire universe has a site and I highly recommend checking it out. WFMU put on a showcase in SXSW that I briefly attended only to meet the program director and sadly missed the Obits set. But it’s up on there too! I know documenting everything can sometimes bite you you in the ass, but most of the time I’m grateful this modern phenomenon exists so that I never miss a moment of value.
Speaking of Obits, “Fake Kinkade”, an angry and loud song about being duped into buying a forged Thomas Kinkade painting is my new Happy Place when I am under stress. I really don’t know how to explain why without sounding pretentious. Just a warning, I am about to get hardcore nerdy about why this song is so beautiful and powerful to me primarily because I can’t remember the last time modern music moved me this way. Have a listen:
I’m not sure if you are familiar with the artist Thomas Kinkade but you’ve probably seen his stuff everywhere and not realized it.
Check the wikipedia entry
Thomas Kinkade (born January 19, 1958 in Sacramento, California) is an American painter of realistic, bucolic, and idyllic subjects. He is notable for the mass marketing of his work as printed reproductions and other licensed products via The Thomas Kinkade Company. He is self described as “Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light” (a trademarked phrase), and as “America’s most-collected living artist”.[1] It is estimated that 1 in 20 homes in the U.S. feature some form of Thomas Kinkade’s art, according to Media Arts, the publicly-traded company that licenses and sells his products. He has received criticism for the extent to which he has commercialized his art — for example, selling his prints on the QVC home shopping network. Others have written that his paintings are merely kitsch, without substance,[2] and described it as chocolate box art.[3]
Not only do I not relate to his subjects but he is a highly successful commercial artist who manufactures prints on canvas with technology made to look like original real oil paintings. I’m not as much of a cynic or misanthrope these days but when I see his paintings of glowing country gardens and serene dewy pastures in pastel hues I think to myself, What a beautiful lie. He is a business man who has a natural talent for painting. But there is no soul within those brushstrokes and his artwork seems vacant to me—from the moment the vision was born to the factory where it was made thousands of times over by machine and not man.
So why does this angry & loud song give me peace? Because I can appreciate the beauty in achieving clarity from jarring, ugly realizations. The best and deepest smarts you can attain don’t come from school, but I think from rough and painful life experiences. It’s a new kind of freedom and level of understanding that one can only really earn by sacrifice and upsetting means. And the narrator of “Fake Kinkade” invested in something believed to be authentic, only to later realize he was fooled “by a forger in a foreign country I don’t like.” It’s a great revelation, at least to me, because I have never considered that the artist could simultaneously by the forger. And it has my favorite combination in song-writing: visceral/blistering/controlled chaos sounding with angular guitars and angsty vocals, but the lyrics are cerebral, meaningful and downright poetic:
As a person who has an unhealthy obsession with Americana, I love that this song can satisfy that fetish while showing a darker side of the white picket fence. One in 20 homes in America have a Thomas Kinkade print?! It’s a smart but not so obvious or obnoxious metaphor for dissing systematic herd mentality, inauthentic & mass produced “inspiration” and escapism in America all within a succinct 3 minutes. And although I am for the most part very content with my life, indulge in escapist entertainment every now and then and have material desires myself, I never forget that my deepest bonds with people is usually based on the common idea of being very suspicious of people who appear to be happy all the time. Why? For that to be possible in any lifetime, either they are so sheltered or sedentary that they have never, ever encountered a harrowing challenge or worse, it’s a bullshit facade. And Thomas Kinkade paintings are the perfect iconic symbol of being happy all the time. It’s such profound and brutal commentary but done in the best creative way ever. I hate it when ideas I agree with are too heavy-handed and beat me over the head in a self-righteous manner. So in conclusion, um, this song is FUCKNG GREAT!!!
My friend Alexis Mackenzie was asked to do a shirt for the Select Series from Threadless and it’s great just like she is.
Also, thanks to everyone who voted for my silly t-shirt so far and much thanks to Allan from Mission Mission and Plug1 from What I’m Seeing for spreading the word. It’s been scored 477 times so far with 3 days left to vote. fingers crossed!
Just picked up two film nerd limited run shirts Maria Forde drew for my local video store for $12 each. She rules and I’ve talked about how much she rules here before.
my friend alexis offered this piece to me for my birthday present awhile ago and i recently got around to picking it up. it’s now hanging in my hallway and one of the first things you see when coming into my house. it was a for a show she did for the giant robot store called “at the movies” and it was inpired by alfred hitchcock’s vertigo. gah!!! it’s perfect for me.
Q) How awesome are these Life magazine photos from the Muhammad Ali/ Joe Frazier fight?
A) Really fucking awesome
just a corner of the interweb for me blab on many things
