Respect Authority

Famed street artists/masochists Blu and David Ellis recently completed another one of their exercises in redefining the word “painstaking” for the Fame Festival. It’s been making the rounds in the Blogodome the past few days, but I can tell you this much if you haven’t seen it yet… it’s a pretty good replacement for mushrooms.

It’s a truly stunning work of art combining painting, video, installation, and even some demolition to create a sort of moving, growing painting that is truly more of a mixed media creation than simple animation. The environment is critical to the entire piece and certainly adds to its ability to consistently surprise the viewer.

In a word, awesome. In another, thanks a lot Mom for yelling at me for drawing on the walls as a child and crushing any chance of me actually enjoying adult life.

Last month, skateboarding blog to rule them all, Crailtap, hosted a contest calling for edited video compilations of a bunch of unused footage from skateboarding’s first epic poem, Fully Flared. A couple weeks ago they announced the winner, so if you live in an area of the world where skateboarding is actually possible this time of year, it’s entirely likely you missed it since you weren’t frozen (heh) to your computer screen the whole time like some of us poor unfortunates.

Apologies to those of you who have seen the following video already — but hey, the Internet’s a big place and there’s always plenty of free low-quality pornography to look at! …Frankly, the fact that you’re here as opposed to looking at shitty porn already indicates something considerably abnormal about you (potentially either a good or bad thing).

Winner Cosme gives the outtakes a delightfully light-hearted animated treatment, turning them into skate video and art piece alike. The sketchy, flowing rotoscoped animation is a perfect fit for the laid back, line-heavy style of many of Lakai’s riders, although there’s certainly nothing sketchy about any of the tricks performed. Skate puns! …I literally can’t imagine those appealing to really… anyone, actually. I’ve finally discovered something unmarketable in the marketing blackhole that is the skateboarding industry! And they dared to say punk rock is dead.

One of my favorite things about the Girl, Chocolate, and Lakai teams is that there has always been such an emphasis on clean, effortless style masking the absurd difficulty level behind the kind of tech wizardry all those fuckers seem inherently good at. It’s always impressive to regularly produce some of the hardest tricks ever performed on a skateboard and still somehow make it look fun. And fuck, what’s more fun than cartoons?

Oh yeah, that would be cartoons and marijuana at the same time. I think I’ve said all I need to here.