cheesebikini?

I’m in love with Blogotheque.net’s videos of musicians wandering through Paris.

Start with The Arcade Fire video: the whole band crowds into an elevator, plays “Neon Bible” there and emerges to wander among an enormous crowd of fans while playing “Wake Up.”

They provide Youtube-quality thumbnails, but don’t miss the luscious high-rez DivX download versions of each video.

(Thanks, Jeremy, for turning me onto this.)

“Complete” is a stretch. But these are 8 strong minutes:

Rats, I’ll be out of town when he plays Bimbo’s in San Francisco Feb. 29.

Congratulations to Peter Bober, who was just elected mayor of Hollywood, Florida.

Pete was my college roommate in Austin and one of my best friends going back to high school days in Florida. Best of all, he unseated Mara Giulianti – a notorious mudslinging, scandal-plagued mayor who sold out to shady condo developers and other unsavory interests.

Giulianti spent nearly four times more than Pete on the campaign, but the underdog toppled the 20-year incumbent.

“You have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you.” – Joseph Campbell

“If you take three steps toward the gods they will accidentally trample you. Then they will curse and scrape you off their boots like dog doo.” – Campbell Joseph

San Francisco coffee freaks rejoice: a new Blue Bottle cafe opened today at 66 Mint Street (near 5th and Market). And they have a $20,000 brewing device called a siphon bar that might even put the Clover to shame, according to an article in today’s New York Times.

I tried a cup of their C.O.E. Cooperativa Vasquez from Nicaragua. It was the most expensive cup pot of coffee I’ve ever had but it was delicious, and what a spectacle.

More photos.

“If you take a handful of grapenuts, and don’t add milk, and hurl them as hard as you can at somebody’s face, you can take out both their eyes, and maybe kill them. I can’t believe I spent the whole day at the hospital and they told me to go to the dentist.”

[Editor’s note: You just never hear that sort of thing in a San Francisco cafe.]

“There are no bedbugs in the forest, because there are no beds in the forest.”

Dr. Jay Parkinson in New York City has taken an amazing approach to medicine. He offers personalized, very responsive basic health care for $500 per year. Have a health concern? IM him, e-mail him, or send him photos or video and he’ll quickly advise, treat or refer you to a reasonably-priced specialist.

His Web site almost makes me want to move to New York just to escape the typical American health care hellhole I’m trapped in. But I wonder whether this approach can scale.

[Thanks Ryan Shaw].

Blu is brilliant. Blu uses places in the real world as living canvasses for wild animations.

Press the play button, and keep an eye on the windows:

Why note the windows? Because there you see the time scale as sunlight comes and goes. The animation has to move extremely slowly, compared to normal human life.

This is fantastic. If I could draw, I’d create one of these right in the heart of a busy city.

Envision a New York subway stop as a canvas. Traffic would slow the animation down during rush hours, the artist often blocked from the work and the images often crowded out of view by the masses. During offpeak hours the animation could speed up and spread out a bit as the artist has more freedom to move around. You’d have a time-lapse video of the human subway activity, and the animation could interact with the lightning-fast real-world people flashing by.

You’d have fictional characters sharing a real-world place with real people, but living in a completely different frame of time. Living at plant speed.

This opens up a lot of fertile idea space when thinking of digital art and communication tied to urban spaces.

Here’s another. Watch for the real people flashing past through the doorway:

Bravo Blu. I can’t wait to see the memes you’ve unleashed escape the gallery and invade the cities.

[Thanks Jason Purcell.]

Directions:

1. Download and open this PDF file.
2. Buy a pack of 3 1/3″ x 4″ white inkjet mailing labels. (About US$10 for 150 at any office supply store).
3. Print the PDF file on the labels.
4. Apply labels in public restrooms.

Doing this early and often will bring you good luck.

Want to alter it? Here’s the original Word template file.