Have you ever noticed how some people put a pair of headphones in, and it’s like it’s the performance version of Thor’s hammer? Like by putting those buds into their ears, they are suddenly blessed with an incredible singing voice, perfect pitch and total invisibility? Put on some sunglasses and an iPod and all of a sudden nobody is on the train except Simon Cowell and Dr. Dre, and both of them are hiring. It’s kind of like having a low-budget version of Rock Band that only plays R&B.

You never hear anyone singing Coldplay or Dave Matthews, is all I’m saying. I prefer it that way.

And don’t get me wrong here — sure, sometimes the phenomenon is a little annoying. But other times it is completely the most awesome thing that can happen to your whole week, a beautiful, off-kilter accident.

Like this guy that sat across from me on the J Train last weekend singing Chris Brown’s “Winner.” Check this thing out, it’s beautiful. I love how he doesn’t let his performance stop him from pouring himself a little sip of something from his thermos, then gets his soul stole by the music before the cup hits his lips … and caps it all off with a shameless crotch scratch. Also of note is how quickly the guy next to him stops giggling and starts ignoring the whole thing.

Don’t let me spoil it for you, though – check this out for yourself. It’s stuff like this that reminds me that the world is alive and beautiful and full of strange surprises …

Popularity: 3% [?]

Few things are sadder than when someone takes something intrinsically whimsical and attempts to surgically remove all of its joy and innocence, subsuming it to a cold and calculating corporate structure.  With a mission statement to “…unite and support businesses that offer value-added balloon designs featuring Qualatex products,”  it sounds like the Qualatex Balloon Network does just that.

Lucky for those of us who still have souls, they have provided us with a whole new type of joy in the form of this bizarre vintage balloono-facist training video:



(Via Everything Is Terrible.)

Popularity: 4% [?]

I just stumbled across this awesome dub job done a couple of years ago by the guy(s) over at AKJAK, who replaced Darth Vader’s lines in Star Wars with James Earl Jones dialogue from other movies:



(The intro is a little awkward, and the song at the end is just puzzling… so I’ve set it to skip ahead to 0:44 when the absolute gold kicks in, and as far as I’m concerned, you can stop at 8:40. But it’s your life.)

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Flipping through my Flickr contacts, I was chuffed to discover that our lad Poster Boy has been collaborating with another practitioner of imprompru aesthetic interventions, tape-slinger Aakash Nihalani:



There are more on Nihalani’s website, under STREET ART > COLLAB.

Chances are, if you have working eyeballs and have been around northwestern Brooklyn or lower-mid-Manhattan lately, you’ve seen Aakash Nihalani’s tape-cubes. The things that I enjoy about his work are things that I myself gravitate toward in my own art-activity: bright colors against dull city surfaces, and simple gestures which serve to highlight and elevate small details that would otherwise seem insignificant. (And I also, obviously, have an affinity for colored tape as an artist material.)

Here are a couple of videos that I found of Aakash in action:

Popularity: 3% [?]

My friend Jim O’Grady is a Moth GrandSLAM contest winner — a great storyteller and a great guy. He’s been a reporter for the New York Times, and works for some mysterious think tank that he says is “physically located on Wall Street, but in no way associated with finance.”

The thing about these story shows is that they let anybody onstage, which gives the show its spirit and beauty. It keeps it from being the province of writers and actors and “who do you know” and lets the voice of the people come through. It also allows people to weep onstage and do some lame standup comedy from time to time. It’s always a crap shoot, and the surprises are the best part.

Jim’s reliably awesome — he has his nights when he kills, sure. But even when he’s not at his best, he’s still really really good, and whenever he gets picked to come to the stage the audience is in for a treat.

Here he is at a Moth StorySLAM this summer, on the theme of “Respect.”

You can see a story by The Moth’s Juliet here:

Juliet Respects ‘Mannequin Dan’

And two of my stories here:

Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band
Reverend Al Sharpton Hates Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band

Popularity: 3% [?]

Jesus’ teats blasting eight solid sunbeams, I am SO in love with this video. It’s got everything all together — lurching grinding trippy catchy electronic sounds and a montage of seriously strange video clips from the ’80s. There’s industrial instructional stuff here, infomercial clips, vintage exercise videos, people stepping in sticky stuff and sandwiches and just a little bit of cheesy porn.

That’s just a dildo, though, not an actual cock.

So yeah, this is probably NSFW, but I mean, really. The dongs in this thing are obviously phonies, and they’re just kind of waving around. Any boss with half a brain would see that they’re just comedy dongs, not used with any sort of intent here.

I can never tell what’s safe for work and what’s not, because I just can’t get my head around the fact that a disembodied rubber dildo could be at all offensive in anyone’s workplace, unless that workplace was like, an Amish barn-raising or something.

But somehow I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. Anyway.

This video is for the song “Truck Sweat,” directed by Tobacco, for music also by Tobacco from the album “Fucked Up Friends.” Tobacco, as some of you may know, is a member of the psychedelic super-group Black Moth Super Rainbow. On with the clip and let the dicks fall where they may:

Popularity: 2% [?]

Clearly, France’s attempt at faking a moon landing was hindered by budget constraints.