Blog

Adam Stoddard recently found common cause with the enthusiastic craftsmanship of lowrider culture, and I found myself nodding along vigorously:

The thing is, this particular brand of “functional absolutism” that’s widely held in tech circles is a bankrupt philosophy. It leaves no room for beauty, no room for expression, no room for investing time and care in something for no other reason than you find it satisfying to do so.

Should every website be the subject… See more →

In “Homie the Clown,” a fan-favorite Simpsons episode, Homer Simpson goes to clown college. The lessons he receives in baggy pants, balloon animals, and tiny bicycles were probably not drawn directly from the curriculum of an existing clown college, but they at least evince an awareness that such institutions actually exist.

In an adjacent hemisphere of the late 20th century entertainment world, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a gonzo B-movie throwback, mines campy scares from… See more →

Look at this super-fun microsite Jason Santa Maria designed for DJR’s super-fun font, Megazoid!

Another practical effects showreel barely disguised as a movie featuring the maniacal killer Art the Clown, a try-hard whose yearning to be a horror icon is as plain (and plainly mortifying) as our Commander in Chief’s yearning for a Nobel Prize. Despite the fact that Art, after being introduced gearing up Rambo-style in an unearned montage, indulges in some hacksaw shenanigans nasty enough to arouse the kind of guy who owns more than one Cannibal… See more →

It seems as though Terrifier is the slasher franchise of the moment, with 2024’s third installment reportedly becoming the highest grossing unrated film of all time, so it’s time once again for me to hold my nose and commune with the zeitgeist.

You’d be forgiven for assuming Terrifier’s stabby antihero, Art the Clown, was the product of an 11-year-old Fangoria subscriber’s very first ChatGPT prompt, but Art actually made his debut in a 2008… See more →

This pair of presentations from Calder Ruhl Hansen and C.C. Elian examines the fascinating writing systems they’ve created at the intersection of typography, calligraphy, hieroglyphics, cryptography, and algorithmic art. Elian is known for Elian Script, which distills the Latin alphabet into simplified forms that can be combined into words in an endless variety of orientations, evoking the expressiveness of Eastern calligraphic traditions. Hansen’s works include an ingenious system of English syllabic pictographs and a means… See more →

When I changed high schools after the ninth grade, there was some confusion about how each school handled its history curriculum, and in the shuffle, I lamentably never got a formal education in 20th century world history. I assume this is why I was never required to read this book. Reading it now, decades late to the, uh, party, it’s hard not to wonder how it would have affected me as a teen.

Would it… See more →

I always assumed there must be something transcendent about this 1980 live-action Popeye adaptation, seeing as a) it sure seems like a really dopey idea, b) there was nothing in Robert Altman’s critically admired oeuvre at that time (or since) to suggest he was the obvious guy to direct it, and c) it was the brainchild of Robert Evans, who produced The Godfather and Chinatown. Could it really be as artless a ploy as, “We… See more →

What the folks at LA Taco, not the LA Times, figured out was that while it was impossible to have on-the-ground reporting from sweeps happening across a metro area as colossal as LA, we live in a time where most everything is documented and uploaded to social media in near-real time. They took to compiling these social media videos and reports into a vertical video Daily Memo that simply runs down where ICE has conducted… See more →

See more posts →