50 Words 4 Snow

      Sullarniq: Eskimo for snow blown in through a doorway.

↑ "Nocturne in Grey and Gold - Chelsea Snow" James McNeill Whistler (1876)

        Tuaq: Eskimo for lump of old ice frozen into new ice.

↑ "Hunters in the Snow" Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565)

       Qanipalaat: Eskimo for feathery clumps of falling snow.

↑ "Moscow. Red Square" Boris Kustodiev

      Pukak: Eskimo for snow crust.

↑ "Ipatiev monastery in the winter light" Aleksey Savrasov (1870)

       Nittaalaq: Eskimo for air thick with snow.

↑ "February" Grant Wood (1940)

      Here's a little send-off from Kate Bush — it's my favorite song on 50 Words For Snow:

      For extra credit, check out the title track "50 Words For Snow". (SPOILER: Stephen Frye monotonously recites Inuit snow words for eight minutes. It makes me feel like I'm watching performance art that I reaaaaaaly shouldn't be giggling at but I juuuuust can't help it... You know. But, like, in a good way.)

      Inuit words via Azimuth.

Smoke Bomb

      I would love to experiment with colored smoke bombs but, when you live on an island, using flares and distress signals for art will warrant a visit from the coast guard. Even inland. So, you know. Excitinnnng!

↑ Vita Cagnone for D-Mode Magazine by Antonella Arismendi

↑ Untitled by ▲ Levitsky

↑ Silence/Shapes no. 2 by Filippo Minelli

↑ Silence/Shapes no. 11 by Filippo Minelli

      Roger Moore's James Bond gets desperately creative with a smoke flare in A View To A Kill (1985)

So, like, PRETTY MUCH: During a snowy downhill chase, an orange Commie helicopter blows up Bond's orange stolen Commie snowmobile and he uses the broken ski from the now defunct Commie snowmobile to shred down the glacial mountain doing 'gnar tricks 'n cliff jumps (Tom Sims) while dodging Commie machine gun fire (all while wearing a white parka trimmed with fur and makin' it look, like, so easy) and when he gets to the bottom of the mountain the orange Commie helicopter is still raining bullets down so he grabs for his pack and draws out a distress flare and with a practiced hand shoots is straight into the cabin of the 'copter and the Commie pilots are pissed and they start spinning out of control in a beautiful haze of smoke, blaze orange against the white snow and blue sky, and then they BLOW UP. James Bond then makes his way to a submarine disguised as an iceberg where a beautiful scantily clad babe is waiting for him to make out with her.

Jusko's Fantasy

      MOSTLY NAKED BABES WITH SWORDS! OILY SHIRTLESS BARBARIANS WITH ARROW-WOUNDS! MARTIAN MONSTERS WITH POINTY TEETH! LARA CROFT! These illustrations by artist Joe Jusko are a treat, you know, like a giant spoon full of sugar - or maybe an entire roast chicken that you can eat with your hands?

↑ Lady Death

Björk

      Here she is, the queen of Iceland! Björk Guðmundsdóttir! When the days are so dark and short up here on the island I start eating lots of gjetost and lighting candles all the time.
      Björk's 1992 MTV Cribs house-tour of her Icelandic nest is awesome. She has this enormous and beautifully modern chandelier with blue taper candles in her living-room. As she lights the candles for the camera she chirrps and trills:

"I think this big room definitely needs a center-point, you know? And a light in the middle... I think chandelier is a heart of every home and in the winter its, like, dark - It's dark almost twenty hours a day. It's quite amazing how these candles can - they actually [light] up the whole flat and in a nice kind of way."

       I love how her possessions have been curated.  Everything is special!

Je te présente:

      Napoleon Bona-Dolly Parton! I've always wanted to see Napoleon Bonaparte in Dolly Parton drag. so.... I guess this is how I've just spent my entire evening.

↑ Napoleon Bona-Dolly Parton (2012)

Grandpaw

      Hi friends and pals!
      I've been busy digitizing Grandpaw stuffeddoggie's amazing Kodachrome slide collection.  I'll be posting a few daily at stuffeddoggie.tumblr.com ❤

Goldfinger Brownjohn

      Simplistic in concept and artfully minimal in design, artistic director Robert Brownjohn's title sequence for Goldfinger (1964) is perfectly executed.  What a brilliant idea to project sequences from the film onto the gilded body of glorious 'glamour-girl' Margaret Nolan!  A simple/cheeky idea, meticulously executed + perfect typography + the velvet rumble of Shirley Bassey = quintessentially sexy spy-junk history! His piece is not only timelessly modern and sophisticated, but stands alone as one of the most iconic pieces of 1960's design and cinema.


      SPEAKING of which... One of the MoMA's exciting recent acquisitions is none other than a series of photographs by Herbert Spencer which document Robert Brownjohn's preparatory studies for the Goldfinger title sequence! NYC friends, this collection is being presented in conjunction with the film exhibition 50 Years of James Bond and is on display until March 18th, 2013. The following are just a few of the photographs on exhibition. So beautiful:

Little Trouble Girl

      Director Mark Romanek's video for Sonic Youth's "Little Trouble Girl" is so beautiful. The combination of 90's colors and 70's Los Angeles topped by the feeling that you're watching the entire thing with your face pressed up to a surveillance TV screen is so perfect. Kim Gordon and Kim Deal (The Pixies, The Breeders) are such languorous beauties!  Their voices and stares remind me so much of the listless teenage musings of the Shangri-Las (1, 2, 3).



      Once, right around the time that we started playing Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, my brother and I spent an afternoon aimlessly searching a large abandoned cooperate office building for ammunition, red and green herbs, and infected zombies. Groping around the doorways of windowless offices searching for a light switch was just about the creepiest thing ever... but sometimes, a few bars of eerie wavering fluorescent light would flicker on and my desolation would blossom into the weirdest most indescribable feeling of awe.
      As I walked around kicking white ceiling tiles and tripping on tangled telephone wires, I thought about how impractical Jill Valentine's outfit was and wondered what the office was like when people still worked there.

Wrestlemania 2012

       Sting vs. The Undertaker. Competing for the Worrrld Title!  From the moment I walked into the arena I was a dead man walking.  How can you compete with a 6'10'' undead from Hell who feels no pain??  My foe refused to submit to the Scorpion Death Lock as the heinous Paul Bearer laughed and squealed in my face...  All it took was one Tombstone - and the rest is Wrestlemania history.

"My sole purpose in this lifeless world... is to collect the souls... of the unfortunate people... that cross me." -The Undertaker

 

Inkee Wang

      How awesome is the work of Yingqi Wang, aka. Inkee Wang?  I love her prints, I love her colors, her weird people! Inkee, your work is lovely.

Blueee

      Here's a little fantasma of magical blue undersea watery things:

↑ "Entertainment at the Bar" Lawrence Schiller (1960)

↑ Marilyn Monroe by Lawrence Schiller

↑ "Palm Springs Fashion no. 8" Lawrence Schiller (1964)

↑ Linda Evangelista for Vivienne Westwood, FW 1995

↑ via meow

↑ via meow

↑ Sofia Coppola by Jurgen Teller

↑ Piece from "Plato's Atlantis" Alexander McQueen SS 2010

↑ via meow

↑ unknown

Frosts and Branches

      Time to turn up the collar on that overcoat and break out the Robert Frost poems, kiddies! Sit 'round the smouldering fire in an old-timey New England fashion and think about the holes in your stockings, everyone!!  Seriously though,  I have such a soft spot for fall but I can't say just why because I'm not entirely sure myself. It's just so cold and damp and everything sinks down into hollows and it smells so secretive and... fall has the best NIGHTTIME AND GLOAMING!

↑ "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" Grant Wood (1931)

↑ "In the Golden Gloaming" John Atkinson Grimshaw (1881)

↑ "A Manor House In Fall" John Atkinson Grimshaw

↑ "The Magic Circle" John William Waterhouse (1886)

↑ "The Mystic Wood" John William Waterhouse (1914-1917?)

↑ "Autumn Landscape at Dusk" Vincent Van Gogh (1885)

factory, topknot, seafoam

      I never feel like the same stuffeddoggie twice. 

↑ Katiusha Feofanova

        
         My interests always seem to influence my life aesthetically:

      Reading a James Herriot book = wearing wellingtons, can-do attitude
      Watching RuPaul's Drag Race = extra 15 minutes of makeup
      1982 Iron Maiden =  EDDIE THE HEAD, EYELINER 
      Nancy Nova's The Force = increased wear of high-waisted pants
      Adriaen van der Speld & Frans van Mieris = wearing silks, moisturizing 
      Shaun the Sheep = drinking tea regularly, using jam spreads

        etc, etc.

Doing Mischiefs

      i'm just a pastry stealing up to no good sneaky little scoundrel of a wet-haired doggie

↑ Private

      you gonna finish that sticky bun??

Hedgehog in the Fog

      Get your daily dose of Hedgepig here:
      Hedgehog in the Fog [Ёжик в тумане] by Yuri Norstein (1975)



      One of my favorite stories of all time is "The Overcoat" (1842) by Nikolai Gogol. This lovely little tale of woe follows a humble bureaucratic drudge by the name of Akaky Akakievich as he scrimps and saves for a new overcoat. I just got myself an overcoat. It's thick and black and warm - and rather than consult my zealous tailor, Petrovich, I bought one ready-to-wear. 

      Yuri Norstein is one of my best-loved animators. Not only does he have an appreciation for hedgehogs, owls, and bears, he has also been working on a film adaptation of "The Overcoat"!  Norstein started work on this feature-length magnum-opus in 1981 but there's still no end in sight... Since its inception, the project has suffered many setbacks, including the loss of the project's cinematographer and Norstein's close friend Alexsandr Zhukovskiy. Dear Yuri, how sad. You can take a little glimpse of Norstein's process in this little tour of his studio. I hope that someday the world will be able to experience a full telling of this Russian classic through the eyes of one of Russia's finest visual storytellers. 

↑ Still frame of Akaky Akakievich from Yuri Norstein's yet-unfinished "The Overcoat"

$ Spy vs. Spy

      Have a Liberace's budget for a high-fashion Spy vs. Spy Halloween costume? FABULOUS! The following items that can be shopped at yoox.com:

Pants Moschino $270 shop
Boots Balmain $775 shop
Hat Dsquared2 $215 shop
Coat Calvin Klein $375 shop

Now where did I set down my glass of '99 Salon Blanc de Blancs Le Mesnil-sur-Oger??...

 Original Spy vs. Spy title artwork by Antonio Prohías (1961?).

Fishin' Fer Squids

      This week I went squid fishin. We caught a baby tuna and two little pollocks. Tuna was very angry and burped and squirmed a lot, and the Pollocks got caught in the eyeballs and became floaters. We set out, bushy tailed for some squids, but just ended up eating/chumming the water with a bag of cool ranch Doritos.

Behind the Polyester Curtain

      I really like seeing replications of clinical portraits set next to each other - Watching my mom snip apart my creepily stoic school photos to gift them to my cartel of adoring childhood fans (Grandmaw and Grandpaw stuffeddoggie) always made me cringe. These pictures were all taken with different intentions but they seem to have that same quality of stare.

↑ Some street photobooth pictures for a visa extension. Private

↑ "Self portrait at 17 years old"  (2007) by Gillian Wearing

↑ "ID photo" by Emma Ross

↑ "Passport photos at 15, 17, 18" by becstarr

↑ "Family Passport Photos" by supernab

↑ "buddy icon" by friedkampes

↑"Passport Photographs" by Rie Louise