Now that's some crazy creativity

Check out this incredibly oh-snap-worthy video. (I will be surprised if you don't utter "Oh snap!" several time while watching it.) It might take an extra minute to load...and it's so worth the wait. I'm serious. Soooo worth it. Thanks for sending it along, dpe!


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Sock puppet nation

I love this blase sock puppet. Whassup sock puppet? I didn't make it, but I wish I had (this person did). My attempts at sock puppetry turn out more like this:



Which is not so bad, I know, but I aspire to the artistry of Mr. Blase up there. Yeah, man. And thinking about it further for a moment, I just realized who that rad puppet kind of reminds me of:



Janice from the Muppets. Right? Or at least, like, they should hang out together or something.

Update: The incredibly musically aware dpe emailed me this pic, to show who Janice looks like — indeed, right down to the crazy Isis gem necklace. Nutty! So Janice is like some kind of Carly/Joni hybrid (see comments, below). Whoa.

A hot (and I mean HOT!) wedding adventure

P. and I flew down to Texas for three days of extravaganzas celebrating the wedding of our friends Mark and Emily. Boy are those two ever married, now! I mean, they are MARRIED. Did you ask if they're married? Well, they're MARRIED. As in the-knot-has-been-seriously and ceremoniously tied-eth. I wish I could post all the silly pictures I have of P. and the wedding, but P. is a man of mystery and will not allow it. So be it. I will have to turn your attention to some other interesting things in San Antonio.

The iguana in the hotel, for instance. I have mixed feelings about this iguana. I'm sure he's not on the payroll. I kept imagining him sneaking out to the parking lot for a smoke and to complain to one of the two toucans, who were also in work/residence. Does he look happy? I can't tell.



Then there was the architecture. Does a pig live here? Is he working in a local hotel, too? Is this where he comes home to watch T.V. and plan his next attack against America's unflagging love of bacon?



There was record heat going on, 100+ degrees day and night (or at least it felt like it), so the discovery of Fruterias was a source of much joy.



I cannot even begin to explain how yummy and awesome the Fruterias were. There is very ripe and delicious watermelon, pineapple, strawberries, coconut, and cantaloupe in those huge styrofoam cups, so cleverly wrapped higher to contain as much fruit as possible. And OK, I know, some of you have heard me crowing about Fruterias and want me to shaddup already. But I'm telling you...if you ever see the magical word "Fruterias" on the side of a building...walk into that building.

We'll see us again very soon

My good friend Vera was in town last week (or was it the week before last? Jeez.) from Hamburg, Germany, and we hadn't seen each other in five, count 'em, FIVE! whole years. Vera is a true glamorpuss in that she's both super smart AND super foxy. She is a fashionable European intellectual, people. She will whack you upside your head with her Isamu Noguchi knowledge and then blast past you with a crazy scarf-tying technique that no one on 7th avenue has even thought of yet. Watch out, is what I'm saying.

I spent part of the visit trying to learn the real, true way to say "Vera." I say it very American, like V-EAR-RA (with the E like "EEK!"), when it should be more like V-EH-RA (with the E like "EH"). Oh, Veehhhrraa!

One of the many things I admire about this woman is how whenever anyone is about to take her picture, she looks suddenly very serious (and glamorous) whereas I usually look like some sort of demented clown whenever a camera is around. So when we took a picture of us after dinner at Seymour Burton, I tried to drop the silly expressions and go for a more no-nonsense look.



Which didn't work out so well. I look like someone just stole my bike or something. Damn. Now let's see what some smiles on these faces look like. Preferably with as much cheekbone interlocking as possible.



That's better.

I love the internet so much

I've been working on a drawing lately that I can't tell you much about because it's ultimately going to be a little surprise, heh heh. But it's been making me wonder if I ever would have gotten back into drawing with such gusto if it weren't for my pal, Internet. Without el Internetto, I probably would have taken one trip to the Mid-Manhattan library to look in the picture files for interesting snaps of alligators, etc., and by the time I got home and was finally ready to draw, I'd be like, "Damn! This is exhausting!" and lose interest. Now, all I have to do is get all Googley and I've got all the images I want, if not way too many I'd rather not have. It's so much fun to have a huge picture library at my fingertips. I love you, Internet! Anyway. Here are a few images that have come in handy for my latest drawing, which I will undoubtedly post about at some later date. Unless, of course, it ends up sucking tomatoes, in which case, it will never see the light of day, and you will thank me for not exposing your impressionable eyeballs to it.



This is Graycie, courtesy of a blog called "My Seattle Pets," who hopefully has been adopted by now. Graycie, you are one foxy momma. You inspire me.



This image is for desktop wallpaper, apparently, created by some dude named Michael Chavez. I have a major crush on this lizard. Look at how freaking cool he is, especially his curly fingers! If I saw this lizard crawling by me, I'd turn into a total construction worker at lunchtime and start whistling and tossing out inappropriate propositions. Obviously, Mr. Lizard, you inspire me, too.

And the beautiful birds above are from the Philadelphia Print Shop Ltd. Thank you all, but thanks especially to this guy, who apparently had a serious hand in helping create el Internetto.

I love this idea

This excellent lady photographer, Gail Albert Halaban, recently started a project taking photos of New Yorkers and the neighbors they see out their windows.



If you're interested in being part of the project, email her! Check out her blog to read more about it, and see the first few shots she's taken. And you can see more of her work in general on her website.

Don't forget to click on the pics if you want to see them bigger. Some of these, you just gots to see biggah.

The pillow as weapon

There was some mad pillowfighting last week when two little munchkins named Henry and Hazy came to town with their cool-headed, foxy (and wildly ambidextrous) mama Brook. The sad fact is, I didn't take many pictures. Why? Because I was often running from a pillow myself. And the few times I did have my camera, a certain someone (HENRY!) always managed to do a good, quick duck-and-roll away from me. But I did take this action snap of the All-Powerful Hazel Louisa trouncing some dude named Wolf.



Wolf, were you perhaps trounced because you made the fatal mistake of taking off your glasses, therefore making APHL blurry in your eyes, and sealing your fate? If so, I'm sorry, my brudder, I'm sorry. Next time. NEXT TIME!

Holding paws

I've been ruminating about otters ever since I watched one of the super charismatic little mammals in the Los Angeles aquarium a few weeks ago. Sadly, I don't have any pictures of him to share; just imagine an otter spinning around quickly like a log in the water to the amusement of many schoolchildren and you get the idea.

What is up with how crazy cute they are? They hold paws sometimes when they're sleeping, just so they can stick together while off in dreamland.



P. left this image on my computer's desktop the other day, which reminded me of the oh-so-understandably popular video on YouTube of (perhaps these same) otters during nap time. It took a second look at this picture for me to notice their little triangle noses, and their closed eyes.

Oh, and according to Wikipedia, one of the rarest otter species on earth is called, gloriously, the Hairy-Nosed Otter.

Uh, yes, this is exactly why you stopped by to visit this blog today. So you could stop thinking about like, the IRS or whatever, and focus on something REAL. Riighhht??

Doucet doubletake

I know, this blog is about to become the Dynamite Doucet Emporium, run by spiral-eyed Julie Doucet groupies, like me. Apologies in advance!

I've been reading 365 Days, an illustrated journal by YES, OK, Julie Doucet, published a couple years ago by Drawn and Quarterly. And here's how she drew herself before she went to sleep one night:



Well of course it reminded me of this painting, mentioned in this post.



Right, right? Isn't that cool? Huh, huh?



I'm probably going to start seeing this type of image everywhere, now. In the clouds. In my cornflakes. What, oh what, does this repetitive Woman, Book, and Cat imagery mean?

Salton Sea finale

So after we saw the little volcanoes and the abandoned hotel, smelled the Salton Sea, climbed up Salvation mountain, and drove through Slab city and the tiny, ancient town of Calipatria, which boasts ownership of "the world's tallest flagpole," we stopped for gas in another small, stuck-in-time town, named Brawley, and saw this:



Well, high-ho silver!



Frank became understandably preoccupied with it and took these inspired shots. I love this one, especially. The horse has been returned to his first love: the wilderness!



What a storefront. About 100% too freaking patriotic for my taste, but I like what they did with their awning, yes, indeed I do.

Into the desert

So back to that crazy adventure day a couple weeks ago. Early in the day, we walked around an abandoned hotel on the odiferous Salton Sea, with many compelling artifacts, like this aforementioned skateboarder's paradise of a swimming pool.



We snuck around inside the hotel, avoiding a very intimidating bunch of birds that had taken up residence. And then we went to this beach where a community had basically been given the boot by the sea. Salton Sea is extremely salty, and will do a real number on your car if you just leave it lying around nearby for a few years.

Frank and I took pictures of each other.





While Patrick took pictures of the windy sea.



And then we marched off to Salvation Mountain.



Where Frank and I climbed to the top — and that mountain is about three stories, enough to inspire some high anxiety. I really didn't want to fall on my butt and roll down over the bumpy, painted clay letters of LOVE to my death.



A lot of paint goes into this guy's project.



Tons of people visit it every year, and the mountain and Slab City, which the mountain is like a gateway to, were recently featured in the movie Into the Wild. I was 100%, so fully a tourist there. Being out in the desert, totally dependent on a car, I gotta say, it's amazing I wasn't BUGGIN'. I mean, of course I was buggin', but I wasn't like, BUGGIN'-buggin'.

The muddy truth of it all

Damn, I miss my homey Frank now that I'm back in the big city. The mad adventurous day that he and Patrick took me on, touring the highlights of the Salton Sea, was so unforgettable and so epic, it will take a couple more posts of the highlights to explain it.

We'd driven to a cool place or two (a date farm, with tons of date samples to munch on and frothy ice cream date shakes to consume, and an abandoned seafront hotel with a skateboarders' paradise of a pool all grafittioed up? HEAVEN!) and then we were driving down a long, dusty desert road when suddenly Frank stopped the car and Patrick jumped out with his camera. Before I knew it, Patrick was running around taking tons of pics of all these little, gurgling mud volcanoes. He ended up with amazing photos like this one:



Slo mo mud splotch! Meanwhile, Frank took pictures like these, in which he thinks I ended up looking "totally hot!" Oh, yes, I am so incredibly HAWT.



You can get a sense of Patrick's enthusiasm for the volcanoes from these pics, I think. He was totally entranced.



Aw, man. It's hard living far away from people you're nuts about.

Underwater awesomeness

I went to Palm Springs last week to hang out with my BF-freakin'-F Frank, but first we stopped at the Los Angeles aquarium in Long Beach. And that was fun, you know, fish really are amazingly inspiring, so colorful and unique, and sea otters are really, really cute — even all the billions of school kids around us were showing varying strains of cuteness. But then, suddenly, we noticed this one exhibit — and it didn't have any signs explaining what it was — we just saw them, these crazy-looking what, sea worms?



Have you ever seen anything like these guys? We certainly hadn't.



They were just hanging out in the pebbles like that, but then when fish swam by they'd all suddenly shrink down, and when the coast was clear they'd rise back up again, like little musical instruments.

I really can't say enough about how magical and Dr. Suess-y they were. They reminded me of Richard Scary's excellent apple-eating, one-sneaker-wearing Lowly Worm.

Here's another image of Lowly, hanging out with the equally memorable Huckle Cat. (Look at the fun this worm and cat have together with just a simple basket of apples. Impressive!)

But it turns out they're NOT worms. They're EELS! Garden eels, to be exact. WOW. Here's a clearer picture of some that apparently live in some random aquarium somewhere.

Man. I pretty much thought I'd seen it all underwater-wise, which doesn't really make any sense since I've never even snorkeled. But you know, I'm an obnoxious New Yorker. Well, these eels humbled me, people. I really haven't seen it all, underwater-wise. I need to get with some snorklers, and quick.

Travis Millard

I thought Julie Doucet drew these amazing portraits, but aha. They're by a dude named Travis Millard. My mistake!

They're from a catalog of a UK comics exhibition that Erica got me for my birthday. (Thanks, Erica!)

So genius. This second one is the image I kept thinking of when I'd hear someone gleefully say February was over. I love February! I love winter! I know, it's weird, but there you have it.

I can stare at both these illustrations for a very long, appreciative time.

Also, it's impossible to post today without mentioning that dumb effing idiot Eliot Spitzer. WTF?! I mean, W-T-flying-F?!

New t-shirts

These two kooky kids took a moment from their busy schedule of karate class and trampoline jumping to show off their new t-shirts, inspired by this post.



YAY! NEW T-SHIRTS!

Birthday shrug

It was my birthday last week, and, despite being completely shocked and stunned that I'm suddenly 39 effing years old (w-h-a-a-t??), I was thrilled to receive the amazing gift of a handmade shrug from my sister Brook.



This maybe isn't such a great show-off-your-new-shrug shot. But these pics were taken on my actual birthday, so they're at least very authentic in that sense. Brook has always been the mad talented knitter of crazily dope garments. She made this one from a pattern in this book.



"That's right, I said I'm 39 years old! And I just get better with time, like the fine wine in the summertime. And I know it looks like I'm totally holding this cat hostage, but I'm so not!"