a dog's life

riley (a friend-of-a-friend's dog) has got it made. here he is, getting measured for his tailored gieves & hawkes winter coat.








oh look, and here he is on the vogue blog. obviously.

goosebumps

happy friday, pals. go get yourself a beer from the fridge. you've had a tough week and we're proud of you.

heaven can wait

deliriously weird and wonderful new video for charlotte gainsbourg & beck's new song:

a series of small cheers

let's hear it for wooden soldiers!
i want this little parade of wooden soldiers an unreasonable amount.

let's hear it for mat bickley!
anyone who can carry off a corduroy blazer while swearing like a sailor on shore leave, do his own dentistry, discuss miranda july and then send you on your way with a massive bearhug is a-ok with me. he's like a gold-toothed, foul-mouthed bill ackroyd circa 1986. also, his blog is marvellously weird.

let's hear it for throaty colds!
i can momentarily sing brian jonestown massacre's anenome roughly in the same key as mara keagle.


let's hear it for obsessive consumption!
the art project by kate bingaman-burt, not the pasttime. although lord knows i've done enough of the latter of late...you'd forgive me if you could see the cobalt blue skirt of wonder, though. ANYWAY. the obsessive consumption project documents the artist's personal daily purchases - and credit card statements - illustratively. must really turn the brief sting of a rash purchase into a slow ache. act in haste, repent at leisure, etc.

i'd consider giving it a go if it didn't make me apoplectic just to think about. i can't work out whether i'd be more self-conscious about my extravagances (another bottle of red! taxi!) or my scrimping (another tin of beans for lunch. 3 for £9 pants.).

binge. purge. repeat.

in the queue

when the filmmaker richard rogers ('dick' to his friends) died in 2001 he left behind countless reels of film for the one project he couldn't find a way to finish - a documentary examining his own life. his wife asked his former student, alexander olch, to make the film her husband couldn't - he was just too close to the subject to see the story. turns out that making the autobiographical documentary required actors, scripts, and more than five years of olch's own film-making time.

it looks like it was worth it.



via to the marvellous hollister hovey.

the peckham experiment

following on after a fashion from the last post, i'm going to check out the peckham experiment, which rewards the audience for further economic tanking. do you want crisps or a job? hmm. what flavour are the crisps?

from the exhibition website:

Ellie Harrison’s Vending Machine [...] will distribute free bags of crisps throughout The Peckham Experiment – this largesse is, however, dependent on the machine receiving bad news about the UK economy via an internal BBC information-feed. This basically means that what’s bad for the rest of the country is good for exhibition-goers! (although the actual crisps are probably quite bad for you….)

it's part of a 'social health project' called The Peckham Experiment. and as i'm currently conducting my own peckham experiment i'm definitely going to have a poke around...

hoarding your goodness doesn't make you richer

Every morning I scramble to cram myself onto a crowded train full of already armoured commuters. Everyone’s staking their claim, chafing against the day, ready for a confrontation. It’s a bloody ego battle played out in hot looks and hair flicks. Who slams into you when the train judders, who’s going to be first off when the doors slide back – suddenly becomes this crucial measure of who’s best, or more important, or – something. I don’t know. Do any of us know?

I do it too, every morning. But I’ve been thinking about opportunities to be kind. This morning I decided to let everyone off ahead of me. I smiled. I gestured for them to move first. Even those people who met my gaze (Londoners are conscientious objectors to eye contact) looked at me suspiciously. But one lady looked surprised, and smiled widely at me, and said thank you, and she meant it. We gave each other the opportunity to be kind, and I felt a bit less of an army of me by the time I stepped onto the platform.

Maybe I’ll forget tomorrow, or be crabby, or late. But days are just ordinary moments strung together like beads on a string, and I want my fingers to hover longer over the sweet options. If you’ve got it, give it away.

image above from masaaki miyara via flickr.