Merry christmas (nearly)

Haven't heard them playing this one in the shops during the festive period.

Fun house

This picture is enough to get me donning my skates and hot-footing it to Amsterdam...

After closing more than five years ago to undergo extensive renovations, and suffering several false starts along the way, the STEDELIJK MUSEUM in Amsterdam finally opened its doors once again this week. The building alone makes the museum worthy of a visit, as it dates from the late 1800s and is dressed in an impressive red brick façade, though to the delight of Amsterdamers and tourists alike, at last some (but sadly far from all) of its rooms are now starting to be filled with the museum’s vast collection of contemporary artworks. Among those on display are pieces such as the amazing black and white room by Ms. BARBARA KRUGER.

Don't forget, it's only a 20 minute flight or something. Easy peasy.

Pheromone Party time

For the last few weeks I've been working with the wonderful Charly, landlady of Charly Inc. on one of our many weird, wonderful and ever so slightly random projects for INQ Mobile.

Working alongside megastar French Canadian ad agency Sid Lee we have created the world's first.... PHEROMONE PARTY!!
Yes indeed, it's a party filled to the brim with pheromones.
Given that INQ target the young and the restless this seemed like the perfect way to land in town with a bang.
The first party is on Thursday at a brand new space called The Airshop in Toronto followed by parties in Vancouver and Montreal.
We hired the services of those ever reliant hipsters at Vice to help us with reeling in the fun brigade so fingers crossed it's a party to remember.
Expect lights, lazers, doughnuts, pheromone machines, cool people, great music, confetti cannons and loads more.

I'll post photos of the all the crazy shenanigans post Thursday as well as details of some of the other stuff we have planned in Canada for INQ.

Beer bottles inspire this...

Another snippet of the eclectic selection of talents that came together for the Becks Music inspires art campaign that I worked on.
This is DJ Cheeba who's being hailed as 'the new DJ Yoda' (surely DJ Yoda isn't cool anymore?) performing a very special DJ set using beer taps and bottles to create a very memorable show.
You can watch this with your very own eyes if you check out the Becks Vier Facebook site

This is why I don't like the fashion industry

What a load of morons fashion people can be.
I assume this was all about irony and having a sense of humour but I think this is just grim and tasteless.
On the other hand I'm very surprised that a massive company like Selfridges who I would imagine have stupidly boring rules and regulations about everything even had the guts to show something like this.
In case you can't see from the image above they decided to HANG a piece from their currently Mcqueen collection as some form of eye-catching window display.

Shoe thing

OK so I thought I had a good eye for fashion and at times managed to carve out my own 'look'. After seeing these shoes and a bunch of other very special designs my own personal style is about as exciting as that of David Cameron.
Pah.
For inspiration, laughs, confusion or to merely fill five minutes of your life I suggest you check out this
list of the top twenty weirdest shoes

Music inspires art y'know

Becks Vier from Aoife McArdle on Vimeo.

Melted Zone from Konx-om-Pax on Vimeo.

I worked on the recent Becks Music inspires Art project that you may have heard or seen.
The campaign consists of lots of mini festivals at venues around the country encompassing all things musicy, arty and everything in between.
One of the key elements of the campaign consisted of lots of wonderful musicians pairing up with amazing directors to make short films that they then soundtrack with totally new music. The short films have been exclusively previewed on each leg of the tour.
Shown above are films created by Plaid and the fantabulous Aoife Mcardle and Grant White, the Skittles-inspired rainbow of colour animation is the vision of Tom Scholefield aka Konx-om-Pax and the coolest new Scot on the block Hudson Mohawke. The last one is the handy work of Mercury nominated musos The Invisible and Poppie Skold.
In addition to these there are short films by the one and only Lightspeed Champion (written, directed and soundtracked by him alone!) and those brooding New Cross kids These new puritans directed by Saam Farahmand.

You can find out more about it here
and I'll post a few more picture and the last couple of films at a later date.