It’s hard to sum up what is so great about Axe Cop. The stories began whilst the two were playing with toys during a week’s break over Christmas. In a truly inspired moment, Ethan decided to sit down and make sense of Malachai’s narratives, and after a week the first four episodes were drawn (at first just for friends and family).

Since then, Axe Cop has become an internet phenomenon. A friend has kept the site running under the weight of 45,000 (and rising) viewers a day. There is a growing merchandise store. Hollywood, no doubt, is just collecting its keys and wallet.

Yes, it is hilarious and endlessly inventive on its own terms. But it also provides a great example of the endless nature of creativity. Over several weeks, with a combination of unrestrained play and learned visual language and skill, we have a universe as rich as, say Futurama or Watchmen… and Axe Cop seems to be only just scraping its own surface.

By way of an absurd example… Axe Cop has a buddy Flute Cop, a delightfully chubby, mustachioed, and fierce brother Axe Cop forgot he had (but was fortunately reunited with over a job interview). Flute Cop was later turned into a dinosaur soldier, then an avocado soldier, and in a further triumph, a uni-avocado soldier.

The entire universe is endlessly enjoyable. A standout moment in Episode 4 features a couple who had lost 1,000 children having them all restored to life, plus an extra two billion. Axe Cop and Uni-Avocado Soldier have to save them all on a snow world from being eaten - by a snowman, and a tree “that sang really annoying songs.”

Ethan’s drawings are superb, not only grounding the facts and bringing the absurd to life, but also very touching - in their patient respect given to the inner world of a five year old.  Ethan plans to keep drawing Axe Cop as long as he can eke the details out from Malachai. Judging by the six episodes so far, there is plenty of material in this rich inner world to come.

Tichý wore rags and would make his own cameras out of junk found on the street - lenses from old glasses, tin cans, sewing spools, and old cardboard rolls from packaging. His prints were made at home from equally primitive equipment.

His works are so great because they are sincere and completely without irony - the whole story is there within each picture. From the rough edges of the paper, blurry focal control, and unsuspecting pose of the models - the direct opposite of shooting several hundred frames with a digital SLR, each of Tichý’s images positively steam with care and desire.

As Sarah Wichlacz writes, “this is what makes his work so damn appealing; it is not over thought and overwrought imagery made to please an academic gallery audience. Tichý’s techniques are interesting and unique; the subjects timeless and erotic.” Tichý knew what he was doing, however. As he himself said, “the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.”

There is nothing quite like a great hypnotist in action. One of the best to combine skill and theatrics is the UK’s Derren Brown, and his show Trick of the Mind. In it he uses hypnotism and magic to do edgy stuff, like forgetting where they were going, or paying for stuff with blank sheets of paper.

Then there is this great hypnosis video of Derren Brown robbing a guy, just by asking him for his stuff.

Derren also uses his skills to show how fraudsters like some psychics use techniques such as cold reading. Fascinating stuff. You can get the great Trick of the Mind DVD set on Amazon.

TVTopes.org is a great wikipedia-like that seeks to catalog all the tricks and conventions of TV and film. These are not cliches (that are, by definition, uninteresting), but rather - common archetypes that TV viewers subconsciously expect to see, and that a skilled scriptwriter can manipulate to make engaging stories. “We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.” Check out Evil Twin, Blessed With Suck, and Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever.

Comedians regularly pay attention to tropes in art, films and TV. For instance, this is all you need to know to report the news.

Those Steps Again:

1. Start witha lackluster establishing shot, of a significant location
2. A walky talky preamble, pacing steadily towards the lens. Don’t forget the all important hand gestures. Ignore everyone ‘like you’re gliding through the f*&$% matrix’. Ask a questions/
3. A filler shot to give you something to look on while the presenter babbles on about facts. (Optional monochrome, as more of those facts appear on the screen.)
4. Obligatory shot of overweight people, with their heads cut off.
5. Lazy and pointless vox pops.
6. Another bit of dull visual abstraction to plug a gap.
7. Some dowdy man opening letters in the kitchen (human interest).
8. To wake you up after the boring man - some animated charts, and a lighthouse keeper being beheaded by a laser beam)
9. A wry sign-off (with a bad pun if you’re lucky).

Zombo.com is for when:

• You have had a long day at work, and then your boss asks you to stay later.

• You are unsure about your true direction in life, and are maybe thinking of making a substantial change.

• You know what and how you want to do something, but you are unsure exactly when the best time to follow through on an idea will be.

• When you are generally happy with your life, but perhaps want to be challenged just a little more.

• You are “up the family way”.

Turn up your speakers and get all Zombo.com

Update: You can now get your own Zombo.com T-Shirts

My favorites is a good old spoon bending, a double sided coin, and a bunch of card tricks, but this simple trick doesn’t require anything but a balloon (say, at a party), someone’s mobile phone (or any object). Oh, and an 11 year old boy in the UK with a video camera, telling you how to do it. Simply grab the object and make it pass through into the balloon:

I have heard two stories as to how Arnold makes his films. One is that he is incredibly old-school, material focused, making many thousands of copies of short sequences of 35mm film, and then cutting and compiling these fragments by hand. Another account is that he employs digital techniques to repeat a small number of frames many times more than would be possible through traditional means.

Either way, the technique yields psychologically powerful results. Sound is left embedded to the relevant frames, and together these materials reveal ‘hidden’ (or inserted) subtexts to the original source material, such as anger, control, abuse, and - more often than not - Oedipal tendencies.

Perhaps the most famous is Passage à l’acte (made in 1993 - click the title to see a small selection on You Tube - which takes several seconds from the 1960’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird, and draws out the tension to elephantine proportions. Just as extreme is Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), which takes Mickey Rooney and other actors’ scenes from the Andy Hardy movies, to explore love in many twisted forms. To watch the full 40 minute version as it was intended (well, if you were shrunk to the size of a mouse) - here it is below. Click to just about any point in the timeline to see something visually astounding.

A true cinema classic, Brick overlays teen high school movie locations with the language and plot of hardball detective stories, most directly those of 1920’s author Dashiell Hammett. (A favorite of the Coen Brothers, Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, and the main influence for the Coen’s Miller’s Crossing - The Glass Key.) The film’s visual style is a homage to classics such as Cowboy Bebop, Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns, and the 1974 classic Chinatown.

Writing the script and raising the money himself - mostly through family and friends - Johnson manages to avoid cuteness or artifice (as in the musical Bugsy Malone) or the aimlessness that often appears in post-film school DIY efforts. Brick is a completely focused, engaging piece of cinema, well deserving of its Sundance award for Originality of Vision.

Brick’s dialogue takes a short while to get into, but the effort is rewarded with gems that would otherwise be unavailable (its insider lingo detective talk sounds more like Shakespeare, or scenes from A Clockwork Orange).

Just as impressive as the script is the direction - with unconventional camera angles and action often occurring just outside of the picture frame, both propelling the action forward. Notably, it includes some of the funniest fight scenes in cinema. Also noteworthy is the acting of the young cast (including a very Heath Ledger-like Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The pace lags a little after the first half, but (thanks to months of rehearsals with the cast, and extensive location scouting and planning) each scene appears as a classic of its genre.

Shot in only 20 days, mainly in easily accessible locations, such as the director’s own high school (whilst closed for the weekend), an abandoned house (demolished shortly after shooting) and a borrowed, unfinished mansion, Brick also uses inexpensive and in-camera tricks (such as pulling black plastic off from the camera, or driving a car quickly backwards, and screening the footage in reverse). The soundtrack was composed by the director’s cousin (composed over iChat, and largely recorded with improvised instruments, directly into an Apple PowerBook’s inbuilt microphone). The film works with these constraints, however, and it would be hard to imagine any improvements given a greater budget or time.

An impressive work for any director, Brick is even more impressive as a first feature. It is all the better for repeated viewings. Pick up a copy from Amazon (cheap these days). Film or literature junkies can also read the lovely script online.

The stories behind some of the most iconic album covers’ creation are often interesting - often because of the unexpectedly prosaic reasons for these resulting iconic images. Such as this following account for the famous red and blue lightning bolt on David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album:

‘Bowie was interested in the Elvis ring which had the letters TCB [taking care of business] as well as a lightning flash. It was decided that Bowie would have a flash on his face. Duffy drew inspiration from the mundane objects in his studio and, along with make-up artist Pierre La Roche, copied the red and blue flash off a National Panasonic rice cooker lying nearby.

“I drew on his face the design… [we] used lipstick to fill in the red,” he says.’

Source: BBC

Explore the site by the ‘art’ tag to find gems like this, which is (we think) a human amputee with a kitten head, being mourned by a mysterious black-clothed figure.

Prices for this stuff seem to be in the under $10 range, or else above $50,000 - which is a pretty good indicator that it could be trash or truly inspired.