Month: January 2014
It was done by CETE and VEW, two graffiti artists born and raised in New York City. ANIMAL got in contact with the outlaws over email, via a trusted source. For obvious legal reasons, they didn’t give us their real names or ages, but were more than happy to discuss their creative exploits. After all, […]
The human brain, for all its power, is a fallible thing. Look no further than /r/illusionporn, or the myriad optical tricks floating around elsewhere on the internet for proof. Now, German researchers have come up with a new practical application for the mind’s endless capacity for fooling itself: scratching itches without actually scratching them. Christoph […]
To create the video for Gabriel Garzón-Montano’s “Everything Is Everything,” filmmakers Santiago Carrasquilla and Joe Hollier shot footage, played it back on an iPad, scanned the iPad screen, then animated those individually-scanned frames together. The resulting clip occupies a pleasing middle space between analog and digital, with warm, inviting shots interrupted by disarming glitches and splashes of color. […]
ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original “idea sketch” next to a finished piece. This week, Brooklyn-based artist Yao Xiao talks about making the official cover art for Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” single. Initially, the very first line about the piece was in an email I received one evening last month — just a simple […]
The Grammys performance that launched a thousand “White Man Group” jokes and surely confused as many midwestern moms and dads now has an official studio version. Here’s Kendrick Lamar guesting on the remix of Imagine Dragons’ inexplicably inescapable “Radioactive.” Kendrick’s verse is about what you’d expect: he leans heavily on the growl that may become […]
Barry Miles’s new biography about a drunken junkie queer transgressive literary giant — Call Me Burroughs: A Life — is getting solid reviews. It appears to be “the authoritative record of Burroughs’s life.” It’s quite detailed, and ace “in terms of breadth, erudition, and sheer narrative combustion.” One detail, often gone amiss, are the last words of then 83-year-old writer. […]
The 7 train extension will not be ready to ride by June after all. Despite $2.4 billion and an inaugural trip by then-mayor Michael Bloomberg last month, the project, which would bring the line to 11th Avenue and down to 34th Street, is running behind schedule, and is now projected to open late summer or […]
Pussy Riot, fresh out of prison, is set to make an appearance at the Barclays Center February 5 for an Amnesty International benefit concert. Certain members of Brooklyn’s Russian Orthodox community, predictably, are not happy about it. Serge Lukianov, an Orthodox priest, called the event “satanic,” and called it appalling that “people are making them into […]
For advocates of safer streets in New York City, the NYPD’s indifference to traffic violence is all but a given — why else would so few deaths go uninvestigated? Now, at least one police source is making that apathy explicit to the New York Post. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “Vision Zero” plan, the department’s weekly TrafficStat […]
This was the 10th Annual Idiotarod — a dogsled street race, but with people instead of dogs and shopping carts instead of sleds — now known as Idiotarodorama or Desistarod because of morons in Alaska who issued a cease and desist (read below). No one called it by the new name or talked law Saturday. They […]
