Film by Finisterre and Huck. Directed by Mikey DeTemple.
“The ocean doesn't give a fuck about you.”
A blunt statement from this short film about four New Yorkers escaping their everyday lives and why they surf.
The ocean doesn't care—it's all about why you care about the ocean and your relationship with it. Check it out.
Artwork: wall mural by WRDSMTH
Blue elephants—I so want to read blue elephants! Paste up by @wrdsmth.
Love it.
I'm almost scared to find out what's in the news each day. So, it's great to discover someone who's work you admire talking positive. Here's Kendrick Lamar getting down to basics about what's important in life.
Love.
Artist Cai Guo-Quiang recently brought some magic to the streets of Philadelphia, with this Public Art event titled, Fireflies, to celebrate 100 years of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Using a fleet of rickshaw pedicabs, he created 1000 handmade paper lanterns that were lit and moving as the pedicabs made there way around the Parkway. Known for his pyrotechnic artwork, Guo-Quiang makes the connection of the lanterns with his childhood home in Quanzhou:
“In a way, these lanterns are the fireworks of my childhood that can never be put out. When I was a kid in my hometown, there were a lot of lanterns I could play with and these became extensions of my dreams.”
Magical and joyful.
Just been listening to Bjork's new single, The Gate. Simply divine. Can't wait for the album!
Sean Yoro aka the hula, has just finished this amazing mural at the Bay of Fundy, St John, New Brunswick, working with 28ft tide changes. Check it out, it's amazing.
Discovered this through the wonderful 'Water Journal', a short animated film by Quentin Marchand with sound design and original music by Theophile Moussouni. Enjoy!
Artwork: paste-up by @ender.art
Heavy heart. Waking to find out about Barcelona. This week—Charlottesville and now this...enough with violence, hate, bigotry, intolerance and fear.
Artist Olafur Eliasson posted this on his IG after finding this on a walk home from his studio.
Makes you wonder.
Trying to write—bug-eyed, unfocused, thoughts meandering. Chocolate would be good...
Four Tet has just released a gorgeous new work, Two Thousand and Seventeen. I've been listening to it on repeat! Check it out.
Artwork: street art by murmure, France
Art work by street artiste murmure in France (http://murmurestreet.fr—link).
Some things last...
Artwork: wall mural by Seth, Per aspera ad astra
Love this. From SETH (@seth_globepainter) as part of a Unicef schools project in the Ukraine. Titled: "Per aspera ad astra", "Through hardships to the stars".
Image: Poster by Jeremy Deller, 2017
British artist Jeremy Deller has fessed up that he's the creator behind a poster that's been cropping up around London, pointedly having a go at Theresa May and her electoral platform: Strong and stable my arse.
Bloody brilliant.
Artwork: wall mural by Findac, Resurrection of Angels
Quite gorgeous—Resurrection of Angels by fin dac (@findac). Love those wings—want some!
Artwork: wall mural by Banksy, Dover, 2017
This popped up on my IG feed and pretty much across the media today, Banksy's nod to Brexit in Dover: a worker chipping away at a star on the EU flag. It's sombre, sobering and the task appears daunting.
In an interview to coincide with today's release of the Bad Seeds retrospective compilation, Lovely Creatures—The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (1984-2014), Nick Cave had this to say about the restriction of narrative song writing:
“The idea that we live life in a straight line, like a story, seems to me to be increasingly absurd and, more than anything, a kind of intellectual convenience [...] I feel that the events in our lives are like a series of bells being struck and the vibrations spread outwards, affecting everything, our present, and our futures, of course, but our past as well. Everything is changing and vibrating and in flux. So, to apply that to songwriting, a song like I Need You off the new album [Skeleton Tree], time and space all seem to be rushing and colliding into a kind of big bang of despair. There is a pure heart, but all around it is chaos.”
Just finished reading Angie Thomas' YA novel, The Hate U Give.
Powerful, necessary and one of those amazing books that defies categorisation. I read it in one sitting. The title comes from American rapper Tupac's idea of “Thug Life” (T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.) which stands for, “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody”. And in the character, Khalil's words, “Meaning what society give us as youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out. Get it?”
Sucked in from the first page, the story of 16 year-old Starr who witnesses the shooting of her friend, Khalil, was partly inspired by Thomas's life, but pivotally by the continual and tragic killings of unarmed black people by police in America. Endemic racism, blind assumptions, police brutality and fear, prejudice, ghettoisation, class rivalry, gangs, how young people fall into crime, the limitations of choice, and the constant struggle to live and find hope, love, humanity and light in the bleakest and most violent circumstances. Thomas' book encompasses all this and so much more with an engaging voice, nuanced complexity, vivid characters, and humour. Great writing that resists simple conclusions or clear cut divisions.
A must read.
Artwork: by @l.e.t._les.enfants.terrible, Stay Weird
From one of my fave street artists L.E.T. (@l.e.t._les.enfants.terrible), a great stencil work: Stay Weird.
Strange how a year ago I wrote a post about today being William Shakespeare’s birthday and 400 years since he passed away. I also happened to mention a wonderful film by Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive, because Jarmusch featured the character Christopher Marlowe played by John Hurt as the writer of Shakespeare’s plays. And he was a vampire!
Kind of full circle, I’ve just watched another Jarmusch film (I’m a huge fan!), Paterson. What’s marvellous is that it’s a film about a poet, so on Shakespeare’s birthday, I think it’s timely to mention it.
Quiet, nuanced and understated, it spoke to me. Set in the New Jersey city of Paterson, the poet played by Adam Driver has the same name as his hometown, and goes about his days, earning a living as a bus driver, but writing poems whenever he can. The city was also home to one of Paterson’s favourite poets, William Carlos Williams, and where Allen Ginsburg was born. Such intertwined connections run throughout the film, which follows the arc of the days of the week, and at its heart, is a meditation on creativity, process, how the mundane can inspire, how small acts weave a wondrous tapestry of a life deeply felt, observed and interpreted. And the importance of love, reflected most in the relationship between Paterson and his wife played by Golshifteh Farahani. The support, understanding, tenderness and passion between the two beautifully underpinned the story. And when a pivotal act causes Paterson to question his ambition, serendipity and destiny comes into play.