Zebra finches playing guitars

As you may know by now, sometimes wildly awesome things that have been around for a long time fly completely over my head for months (sometimes years) before I discover them. Barbican Centre might be one of those things. It's an arts complex in London that features visual art, music, dance, theatre, film, and education events. One part of the complex is called The Curve, for very apparent reasons:


The Curve is home to Curve Art, which is "A series of new site-specific commissions created for The Curve by contemporary artists." The one up right now looks awesome. It's by a French artist named Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, and features a bunch of musical instruments arranged throughout the space (mostly electric guitars, it seems). Also in the space: a bunch of little zebra finches!

Boursier-Mougenot’s installation for The Curve, his first solo exhibition in the UK, takes the form of a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a random and captivating soundscape.

If that sounds a little confusing, this video should help:


I love that! I like the concept alone, but the way that bright green and flecks of orange are brought together amongst muted grays and butter creams – with distortion and tiny tweets as a background – makes me smile throughout the entire thing.

[img via the exhibition page]
If you're in London before the 23rd of May and end up catching it, let me know! Special thanks to Roxy for sharing this with me.

Brutus Casa

This is kind of a part II about the package I recently got from my friend Fumio. Here's the first thing I saw when I opened it: an issue of Brutus Magazine.


I first heard about Brutus when they profiled Naked a little while ago. This issue seems to be a special one, centering around interior design. Maybe it's the Hiragana, but Japanese magazines seem to be laid out so much nicer than ours. This is one of my favorite pages:


Don't you just want to live there? I think it's a bakery. It reminds me of the bookstore in... I think it's Norwegian Wood... that the girl inherits from her family. The one where she cooks a big feast for the main character in the kitchen upstairs, and there is a fire somewhere in the distance. This page made me daydream for several minutes.

Speaking of Murakami (but a different one), here is the most endearing picture of Takashi Murakami I've ever seen, wearing a big ball of his own work, and a flower crown hat:


(are you in a good mood yet?)

This is the best part. The cover of this magazine was very big. It wasn't a page at all, actually: it was a page-sized, flat box attached to the front and serving as the cover. There was a little window cut out of the inside, revealing...



Sometimes the most delightful things come out of putting two completely different ideas together. In this case, a plate and a magazine. Would you ever have dreamed of opening a strangely-big magazine cover and having a little dish slide out?