“Crack The Surface” is a web documentary series on urban exploration and its practitioners (see episode 1 & episode 2). The ongoing series is by British urban exploration site Silent UK.

via Nerdcore

Has Anyone Said This Shit? is a search engine for the many, many spin-off videos from the “Shit Girls Say” meme (the search engine has indexed more than 675 videos so far). The search engine was created by F.A.T. in collaboration with Lindsey Weber and Tanner Ringerud of BuzzFeed.

via F.A.T.

“The New French Hacker-Artist Underground” by Jon Lackman is a fascinating Wired article about the French UX collective, a shadowy group that uses covert actions to preserve neglected historical and cultural treasures in Paris. Over the past 30 years, the group has infiltrated art museums to demonstrate security flaws, and says it has completed 15 covert restorations, including the 2006 repair of the Pantheon clock:

A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s.

Thanks to Deborah Yoon for the tip!

photo via UX

Urban Dictionary TV is a site that plays user-submitted videos for Urban Dictionary word definitions. It is a collaboration between Urban Dictionary and the VHX video platform.

via VHX

In December, we posted about the comedic YouTube videos series “Shit Girls Say,” which is based on a Twitter account of the same name. Well, Shit Girls Say is now a full-on Internet meme with a plethora of derivative videos: “Shit Black Girls Say,” & “Shit White Girls Say…to Black Girls,” & “Shit Asian Girls Say” are some of the more popular spinoffs.

There are many peculiar holiday traditions around the world, but the various Catalan Christmas traditions that put a happy holiday face on defecation (figuratively, mostly) may be the most fascinating. I learned about the Caga Tio (“shitting log”) from my pal Dave Thau writing in Boing Boing many years ago. Here’s Dave’s summary of the shitting log tradition:

Fifteen days before Christmas, caga tio makes his appearance in the dining room, where he must be fed at least once every day. He likes oranges, crackers and sweet wine. In some families, caga tio starts small, but grows as the days progress toward Christmas.

Then on Christmas, the log, which has been fed and treated like a family member for weeks, is expected to produce. The children in the house proceed to beat caga tio with sticks demanding they be given presents. Here’s what that looks like:

A translation of one version of the charming chant these kids are singing:

Shit log,

shit turrón,
hazelnuts and cottage cheese,
if you don’t shit well,
I’ll hit you with a stick,
shit log!

Another version encourages the log “don’t shit herrings,” which is pretty good advice for us all. Once the beating has ended, the blanket is lifted off the caga tio. And there below the ass end of the log are presents including little brown candies or, if you haven’t been good, you’ll find the aforementioned salty herring fish. Here’s a video that goes into more detail. But that’s not all, there are more feces-centric Catalan traditions.

Catalans also make candy shaped like poop and “Caganers“, little figures of peasants or famous people shitting. We wrote a few weeks back about the biggest Caganer of all-time. For everyday household use, you’ll want a modest-sized caganer, and Caganer.com is the definitive resource. You’ll find dozens of defecating figures like Tiger Woods and Sarah Palin, the FC Barcelona football team, even cartoon characters like Astérix and Sponge Bob (whose poop is yellow, it turns out). Catalan shit-expert Stephen Fry explains that caganers are the essential decoration for every crib at Christmas time.

See Previously: World’s Largest El Caganer, 19-Foot Tall Defecating Giant in Barcelona

Origin is a print magazine that founder and publisher Maranda Pleasant created in early 2011 to be a “collective source for Arts+Culture+Conscious Lifestyle”. It bridges the West Coast and East Coast with lifestyle and cultural connections in Texas. The magazine launches nationally this month and featured contributors are Deepak Chopra, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Henry Rollins and more.

Connection. Cohesion. Collaboration. Creation. Celebration. Community. Change

One Platform for: Art. Culture.Conscious Lifestyle. Humanitarianism, Sustainablity and Yoga. We are creating a cohesive and connected Art+Conscious Community that cross pollinates with West Coast and New York. We support an Art Community that Collaborates + Creates, bridging the gap between the artist and the collector. We are a channel for transformation, connection, vison, intention and creation. We Integrate Art.Music.Yoga.Health: All the same…just different mediums of transformation.

The launch party for Origin, The Book of Ice and Building Hope happens Wednesday, December 14, 2011 starting at 9 PM at The Wooly in New York City. The Book of Ice is an art book about Antarctica by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky). Building Hope is both a book and a film from Turk and Christy Pipkin that “tells the inspiring story of a partnership with a rural Kenya community to build the area’s first high school”.

The 5:04 PM mutant art car, a back-end crushed 1978 Olds Cutlass Supreme, was created by Michael Michael (aka Danger Ranger) and its fun history begins with the San Francisco Bay Area Loma Prieta earthquake.

On October 17, 1989 at 5:04 PM, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area and a brick wall collapsed on the rear half of an Olds Cutlass parked by Clayton and Page streets. Michael Michael saw it there and the creative wheels began to turn. “I bet that will still run”, he mused, and he placed a note on the car offering to buy it.

Within a few days, the car had changed hands, and with the addition of a new paint job and a license plate bearing the exact time of the earthquake, it became a conceptional art piece and a testament to the powerful forces of nature…

In 1991, 5:04 was the first “art car” to make an appearance at Burning Man, beginning a trend that has grown to epic proportions.

The 5:04 PM (aka the Earthquake Car) is now sporting a shiny new paint job and, as it was Burning Man’s first art car at the desert’s festival, is on display at Mutant Rides: Origin of a Species Burning Man art car and costumes exhibit at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada. The exhibit opened October 7, 2011 and runs through July 25, 2012. Artist Kevin Evans took a photograph of The 5:04 PM at the 1991 Burning Man which shows its original color and condition after the earthquake.

photos by Eric Baron and Michael Michael

Skinemax by Smash TV is an hour long trip back through the 1980s and early 1990s starring Kurt Russell.

Skinemax is Koyaanisqatsi for a generation raised on late night television and B-movie VHS tapes. It’s long form entertainment for short attention spans. An hour long VJ odyssey, it will move your body and warp your mind.

A nostalgic look back at a half remembered childhood growing up in the 80s and early 90s, Skinemax takes a close look at the culture of that era. The images that motivated, delighted, and terrified us on the silver screen, set to propulsive modern music that pines for a simpler time.

via MetaFilter

Zach Weiner takes a look at How Culture Ends on his awesome comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

RE/Mixed Media Festival, a two day event celebrating the diversity of remix art and culture, takes place October 21-22 at One Arm Red in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

RE/Mixed Media FestivalThe RE/Mixed Media Festival is a 2-day celebration of collaborative art-making and creative appropriation. It’s the artists’ contribution to the ongoing conversation about remixing, mashups, copyright law, fair use, and the freedom of artists to access their culture in order to add to and build upon it.

Featuring: Performances, panel discussions, hip-hop, sampling, beat-box, film & video, fashion, food, DJs, technology, interactive installations, painting, sculpture, software, hacking, and much more!

Filmmaker, multimedia artist and self-described ‘extreme hobbyist’, Jared Whitham, has spent ten years filming The Garage Sale Documentary, a quirky documentary about the ‘last free American market place”, and has over 200 hours of footage to show for it. He recently launched a fundraising campaign to gather money to pay for all kinds of equipment, the acting skills of garage sale guru and actress Phyllis Diller, guest speaker quantum physicist Fred Alan Wolf, Japanese language translation services, and of course, Whitham’s personal costs to finish the film.

The first important social exploration of the American Garage Sale. In times of financial crisis, increasing numbers of people gather supporting each other at this great American pastime. Money stays in town. Dreams are made, bills are paid and treasures are found. Cultural boundaries are broken, supernatural events take place and you finally meet your neighbor.

A place were anything can be discovered. Stories are shared and humanity shines. Where great wealth and prosperity is uncovered through friendship, exchange, and community action. Practicing the true American concept of “No Taxation with out representation”. A non-corporate grass roots activity of eccentric renewal. Citizens create a sustaining root system for communities across America.

Whitham also runs the online Garage Sale Channel and his own eccentric show, the Jared Whitham Show.

The Antics Roadshow, a hour long television documentary created by Banksy “charting the history of behaving badly in public, from anarchists and activists to attention seeking eccentrics”, premiered last weekend on UK’s Channel 4.

There is an interview with Joey Skaggs that starts at the 28:45 mark.

via The Art of the Prank

The Glove and Boots puppets Fafa and Mario explain the Evolution of the Hipster.

Tiki Oasis 11, South of the Border, a four-day long celebration of all things tiki, takes place August 18-21, 2011 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in San Diego. Produced by Baby Doe and Otto Von Stroheim of Tiki News, this year’s Tiki Oasis is a “Retro Tijuana-style Tiki Party” complete with a “Burros, Black Velvets and Other Delights” art show, a Whipped Cream Girl Pin-up Photo Contest (à la Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights album cover), and lots of great performances, music and vendors. If you are headed to the event, don’t miss rockabilly crooner, Big Sandy, perform with the lucha libre mask-wearing surf rockers, Los Straitjackets, as that’s sure to be a great show.

Event tickets are still available but Crowne Plaza Hotel rooms are sold out.

illustration by Derek

photo by Big Sandy

See also:

- Tiki Oasis 10 Extravaganza

- Tiki Oasis 9, Tiki Surf City -

- Tiki Oasis 8, Voodoo Vacation on Zombie Island

- Tiki Oasis 7, Hawaii A Go Go In San Diego

- Tiki Oasis 6

My Damn Channel has just launched Slacktory, a new satirical internet pop culture blog edited by Nick Douglas.

Plenty of blogs act like the newspapers of the internet, reporting and aggregating news. We’re the magazine. A little bit MAD, a little bit Spy, a little bit Ken Kesey.

William Breathes of Denver’s Westword alt weekly is America’s first marijuana critic. Maintaining his anonymity in the manner of many restaurant critics, Breathes has been reviewing Denver medical marijuana dispensaries and their products since 2009 (see today’s article and video about Breathes by Justin Rocket Silverman of The Daily).

GQ correspondant Devin Friedman takes a look at Middlebrow Culture, “The Taste That Dare Not Speak Its Name”.

via Anthony De Rosa & Richard Blakeley

Everything is a Remix Part 3, the 3rd installment of the 4 part series on the history of remixes by Kirby Ferguson.

San Francisco artist Wendy MacNaughton has been documenting San Francisco micro communities through a series of wonderfully illustrated narrative comics entitled “Meanwhile.” MacNaughton has visited the Mission District’s dive bars, Market Street chess players, and most recently she spent a month observing and drawing at the San Francisco Public Library Main Branch (for which she won an Awesome Foundation award.)

submitted by The Awesome Foundation

illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton

Broke-Ass Stuart takes a look at what it’s like living in San Francisco on The Bold Italic, featuring illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton.

photo by Andria Lo

A delicate dance between spectator and athlete, a mediation on the properties of the pendulum, and unabashed grin-making installation art piece, Competitive Swinging by Paolo Salvagione, is now up at the Headlands Center for the Arts Gymnasium in Sausalito, CA.

Paolo Salvagione is the principal clock prototype engineer for The Long Now Foundation‘s Clock Of The Long Now, and was also an artist-in-residence at The Headlands Center last year. This year, when he was asked to create a piece for the old gym, he jumped at the chance:

“I had no idea what I would do, I just knew I loved the space. The piece reveled itself slowly. All the ingredients were there in my mind, dreams, childhood playground memories, pendulums. The challenge of a space that big is how to activate it, it was built in 1907. I spent the evening there with bottle of wine and watched the space as the sun set. I noticed period hardware on the ceiling that once held climbing ropes, a common military exercise. From that observation the piece came together. The old basketball court ask for 5 people a side and the building has 5 window on each side. The nature of athletics asked for competition, my sense of humor loved the idea of competitive swinging.

The next challenge was finding the right swings. In 1992 the rules, concerning playground equipment, were changed. The base of a swing had to be light enough not to break skin if a child was hit in the head with it. Hence the super light plastic swings in contemporary playgrounds. I was determined to reference the swings of my youth and decided to recreate the classic wooden swing with a rope instead of a chain. It was also my intent to make the swings perfectly quiet. I wanted to swing in the space in complete silence. There were a few moments where I thought my efforts to get to this swing-of-the-past seemed absurd but when the installation was complete I knew I had made the right decisions. An installation like this only comes to life when populated, with people, with smiles.”

With his work on the Long Now 10k Clock, and also as a former racing bicycle designer, Paolo rides the line between engineering and art. When asked if he is an artist moonlighting as an engineer, or an engineer in artist clothing, he responds:

“The engineering I do with the Long Now Foundation is monument scale art. My discipline informs my art, my art informs my discipline. The two are so tightly wound in my mind that I have a hard time thinking of one without the other. I feel compelled to show people the dimension that they live in but have forgotten about.”

The closing reception for Competitive Swinging will be at the Headlands Center on May 8th, form 12-5pm.

In the meantime, call ahead to the Headlands Center to see the piece yourself.

If These Knishes Could Talk, The Story of the New York Accent, is a documentary by Heather Quinlan about the decline of the many accents of New York City (someday the Korean-Italian Staten Island accent may be a thing of the past.) Quinlan is raising funds to finish the film on IndieGoGo.

via Doobybrain

“Drunk”, the latest Hipster Animal by Dyna Moe.

Dyna Moe, who made all those great Mad Men illustrations, has been creating a series of Hipster Animals.