A Zen Garden in Every House

I have just realized that doing the dishes is like making a zen garden. Temporary, repetitive, pointless and enlightening.



Do not botch the dishes.

A Susan Boyle Situation

Millions of people are seeing this these days. Comments are being added every second on YouTube. And I would have been so happy to have this video posted on my Tracking Greatness blog. However, the embedding capability was disabled by YouTube. You will have to click on the link below. Enjoy.

Ladies and gentlemen, Susan Boyle.

Who Will Kick Your Ass?

Mass Hysteria could. And if you speak French it's even better. Mouss has sensible things to say.

Try it at the gym when you have a cold. It helps.

Art Toys

There is an art movement loosely called Low Brow, or Contemporary Figurative Art, mainly active on both American coasts. And it has become common practice for the artists associated with the movement to produce limited edition vinyl toys of their most famous characters. A good example would be this Booted Glamour Cat developed by Wootini and STRANGEco.



Vinyl toys are collectible items. They are nice adult toys, not in the sense that they are made to be pumped into bodily cavities but because they often look aggressive, are sometimes depicted tearing each other apart, smoke, drink, carry weapons and bleed.

They are becoming more easily available now in specialized stores and art galleries. The best spot I know in Quebec to purchase limited edition vinyl toys is Galerie Yves Laroche. On the web, you might want to take a look at Kid Robot, for example.

Guaranteed to keep you young and wild.

Knock On Wood

The Young Gods have a long history of making a lot of noise using a keyboard, a drum set and a singer, as demonstrated here with the good old Gasoline Man.



But now, the album Knock On Wood is an opportunity to dig a little deeper into their music. A slight difference can be heard in this version of the same Gasoline Man, free of technological artifice.



In this one, not so surprisingly, one can possibly feel some influence from The Doors.

Knock On Wood is a fascinating album for the industrial music fan to listen to when nobody is watching.

Supply and Demand

Shepard Fairey is one of the most visible American artists these days. This has been particularly true during the recent presidential campaign with his ubiquitous image now known as the "iconic Obama poster". This piece and a couple of hundred others can be seen until August 16, 2009 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.



Obey.