I've moved!

I've outgrown blogspot and I've decided to move... so now you can see more of the same lovely, good stuff you've come to expect at my new address!

minimumwageartblog.wordpress.com

i'll see you all over there! It's much more pleasant.

berlin is such a lucky city.  those berliners have a beautiful and efficient subway system (up-to-the-minute arrival times and round-the-clock trains? yes please!) and an urban design that somehow synthesizes the need for large green spaces and predictable street grids, AND has the world's finest beer gardens (if i'm going to drink beer outside, it might as well be legal and while i'm surrounded by well-maintained greenery and quaint garden furniture!).  berliners probably also would not write run on sentences like that last one, and i appreciate that.

all this, plus delicious beer, PLUS the world's greatest graffiti.  i treasure the photos of the graffiti i snapped over there.  each time i saw real-life pieces by os gemeos and jr and banksy and swoon and blu i felt like the luckiest girl on earth.  there was actual jumpings-ups-and-downs and some dolphin-pitched squeals every time.

so! one of the pieces that provoked squeals of joy was blu, who is actually italian, but seems to like berlin.  blu also makes these incredible time-lapse videos of his works that seems incredibly inefficient, but i suppose that is the italian way.  this video is 10 minutes long.  10 MINUTES!  but if your options for the next 10 minutes are to look at some ridiculous photos on the interweb or watch this video, your time is much better spent here.  it's amazing.
BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

 From the Zaragoza Urban Art Festival in Spain.  Thanks, Wooster Collective!

oh, the marvelous details of ms. oh's plant-and-animal-full life!

saelee oh and her laser cutter made this insanely detailed and delicate piece titled 'all together now'.  they're all sold out, but ohmigoodness, isn't it a wonder?

more from the same genius on her site!

octopi-wrassling grandmothers

the amazing elderly women of jeju island in korea free dive off the coast for tasty treats up to 60 feet underwater.   they have no need for diving equipment; these ladies are TOUGH. 

photographs from Brenda Paik Sunoo, and these shots will be published in her book Moon Tides this fall.  slightly more info about her here.

mr. shawn smith makes complicated things out of tiny blocks of painted wood.  lovely, eh?

i especially like the idea of pixellated vultures devouring a typewriter.  i am certain those typewriter arms are going to give them indigestion, though.

 more from mr. smith here.

buried treasure

workers in the london tube system recently opened up a closed-off section of the notting hill station and found these amazing posters still intact and proudly advertising items to nothing but rats and beetles.  this part of the station closed down around the 1960s when elevators were replaced by escalators.

more photos at mike hayworth's flickr account! 

as long as there's no packing tape spiders.

a giant packing tape cobweb showed up in vienna.  they used 530 rolls of packing tape to create this giant sticky mess.  i bet everyone climbed out of there completely lint-ball-free.

made by the numen group.

i have to deal with crowds of skunks chasing me all the time

and that is why i love that jon han painted a picture of a girl being chased by her own crowd of skunks.

a kind reader asked if i'm still painting since i hardly ever post my own art anymore - it's true, i do! here's a few from the farmer's market set last week.... and some are for sale at etsy, since i retreated from the rain before i sold out!

mr. mackie frequents dark corners.

and when he's in those dark corners, he picks up owl pellets. yes, owl pellets! those magical/excrement-like bundles of joy/disgust that you dissected in summer camp! then he creates incredible things, like balls of skulls. i bet he makes an incredible mess doing all this.

I LOVE messes.

alastair mackie! keep up the good work! also, give me a call if you need help dissecting those pellets. i'm the best owl pellet dissector around.

see more of mr. mackie's work here. there's all sorts of mysterious found objects and scientifcally-altered things there. you won't be disappointed.

migrating birds.

the family and i migrated to the migrating bird festival - there were lines of seabirds passing overhead almost constantly!

this shark can ollie better than you ever could

haroshi makes lovely sculptures outta ratted-up skateboards.

helpful graffiti.

Doesn't this make every walk through the neighborhood a bit more suspenseful and exciting?  who knows what kind of characters you can run into if you look for them.

via wooster collective.