MUTO: An ambiguous animation painted on public walls

The show builds on their great stage act by using their satirical songs (mostly) in musical fantasies which occur as part of their every-day life. Such as when Jemaine falls asleep at the laundromat and sings It’s Business Time.

Some other favourites:

• Inner City Pressure – Pet Shop Boys style
• “The Humans are Dead” wherein they take on robotic personas from the distant future (earlier live performance or a different version from the show) includes such gems as a binary solo and the chorus “We used poisonous gasses, and poisoned their asses”.
• Foux Da Fa Fa – a ’60′s French fantasy inspired by the girl at the pâtisserie.

I was pretty well hooked from the first episode where Jemaine and Brett sing a song of the broken-hearted, protesting “I’m not cryin’” (they’d been cutting onions making lasagna for one). The best bit from that song was this:

I’m sittin’ at this table called love

Starin’ down at the irony of life.

How come we’ve reached this fork in the road

yet it cuts like a knife?

Ah, sweet ironic cutlery.

The FNDMNTL site (man is that hard to type) has some sample tunes on it for you to check out. (Check your speaker volume – the music played without prompting.) So go have a listen, and let me know what you think or if you have any other tips on music I should check out. It’s definitely time for more new music in my life!

Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books…

The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

The pictures might take a while to load, but they’re worth it. I would love to see these in person.

On a related note, I recently watched 11th Hour. As I watched the opening scenes – a bunch of quick flashes of extreme weather, disaster, and so on – I thought “Oh god, another environmental shock pitch. I can’t bear it.” But thankfully, it shifted from that into really interesting interviews. No, they weren’t all sunny, but they did give me some hope.

Take for instance Ray Anderson, who is on “Mission Zero” for his company to have nil impact on the environment by 2020. For a company that produces carpet, that’s quite a mission. For instance he’s working with local municipalities to fuel his factories using methane from local landfills. (I’ve seen him before, in The Corporation I think it was, and I tell you, I could listen to him all day. What a lovely speaking voice and nice energy on-screen.)

There were varying, interesting perspectives on the roots of the environmental crisis: spiritual (more interest in consumption of the earth than protection of it), legal (waters, ecosystems have no rights), etc.

I also watched Manufactured Landscapes recently, so all of this has me thinking a lot about my choices and purpose. I sometimes struggle with fatalistic ideas, like “what’s the point of worrying much about my own little impact when there are so many worse crimes against the environment, every day, around the world. What’s the point?” On the other hand, watching these images of rural Chinese families making their living by hammering bits of metal out of our computers’ wasted parts, or young men wading in the crude oil left in beached freighter ships they are dismantling… It was a very visceral connection for me. Those things I buy from far off lands require oil to transport them across the oceans. Many of the new electronics we all covet, with their built-in obsolescence, are shipped back over the oceans to pollute the homes of others.

In short, our choices do matter, and if you’re struggling to remember that as I was, you could do worse than see these works of art.

P.S. I’d love to hear what you think…

We’ll have Colin’s other site in WordPress shortly — can’t wait to see what he does with that one!

As an artist I find the eyecandy fabulous, inspiring, dumbfounding. There are so many incredible shapes and patterns in nature. The variety of behaviours and habitats is stunning.

It’s also a series full of complete wonderment. I found myself at times with my jaw hanging open and letting out the most sincere expressions of “WOW!” I’ve had in a long time.

Alan has spent decades suffering with insomnia. The film documents his personal journey to solve the puzzle. It seems he’s tried everything (including valerian root, that’s found in an herbal remedy I take for my busy brain sometimes). But with the birth of his first-born child, the pressure is on to stop living jet-laggged in his own timezone.

I enjoyed his collage sensibility, how he combined vintage footage with contemporary scenes and sounds.

Some of the family footage was a bit painful to watch — a bit too reality-TV for my taste. But perhaps I’m in the minority in my distaste for reality-TV.

When I saw the insane organization of things in his studio, I thought “Wow, this is what you can do with a few extra hours a night!”. I have often wished I needed less sleep than I do. But overall, I wouldn’t trade my “bed” for his. I do love my sleep.

Although I have no shortage of sites to read most of my online reading follows similar veins related to design. So I thought a good way to begin my search was to look for blogs mentioning places I’d like to travel to. Here’s what I found:

1. Portugal – João Leitão of Portugal has an impressive body of posts in his Travel Diaries. There are 14 posts on Kazakhstan alone and refreshingly, none of them mentions Borat. I like that he’s posted lots of pictures and even some music videos from the places he’s been to.
2. Venice – Weird Venice isn’t updated often, but the latest post there at the moment gives sage advice for tourists in any city: Get up at 5am and see the city as it awakens. Luckily the author also links to Venice Daily Photo. I’ll definitely spend more time on that site when I finally make my dream trip to the Venice Biennale.
3. Miscellany – I discovered in my travels (hah) that wordpress.com/tags allows you to find all kinds of WordPress-hosted sites based on their tags. Currently “Life” is the most popular tag. Go figure.
4. South America – Dave’s New Adventure is filled with good writing and lots of pics. Each post closes humorously with a picture and caption of “The author hard at work…” at something that changes each time (…flirting, trying not to fall off a cliff…).
5. New York city – I also found something from a little closer to home: NYC Bloggers. It claims there are a million blogs in the city, and links to about 6200 of them. Similar to the Techcouver project, it organizes information based on a transit map.

So that list isn’t exactly 5 blogs, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. And if you’re still short on things to read (fat chance, I imagine!) then Christine and Mhairi have shared some interesting links as well.