A.C. Newman of The New Pornographers! Feist! Jim James of My Morning Jacket! Sarah Vowel! Demetri Martin! I like these people! I like their musical and comedic styling! They’re all going to be on one stage! The stage of the Beacon Theater in New York! August 26, 2007! I think I can stop screaming now!

Aaaaaaanyways, it’s an event to benefit 826nyc, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping students ages 6-18 improve their writing skills by providing free tutoring. 826nyc is run by the people at McSweeney’s, of whom most of my writer friends are just jealous (success is a double-edged sword for artists, isn’t it?). Is this show, entitled Revenge of the Bookeaters, a more effective way of raising funds for 826nyc than the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company? Well, would you rather spend $40 on a great night of music and comedy or on an empty paint can labeled “invisibility liquid?” I leave the decision up to you.

What’s not to like about these new 5-color prints from Grant Barnhart, our friend and fellow Spear Collectiver? The one on the left (grrrrr!) is actually a concert poster for Andrew Bird who, by the way, is one hell of a whistler. The one on the right, ‘Conversation with Asphalt,’ has all of the traditional Barnhart animal imagery, but this time it’s tied into a sea-faring story. If you can read his writing, maybe it will guide you to the sunken treasure. They’re available online at DUI Studio– $75 for ‘Conversation with Asphalt,’ and $20 for the Andrew Bird poster. Hurry up, before Carmel buys them all!

In a classically A+B = Cha-ching! moment, the latest way to exploit thirteen year olds and their flailing parents has been discovered:

A) Digital cameras see a broader spectrum of light than the human eye; B) The “camera-phone generation” is taking poorly lit bathroom-mirror pictures of themselves and putting them on myspace. Dude. If we visualize the specific sensitivity differences between biological and silicon based imaging apparatus, we could use our proprietary patent-pending projection systems designed to exploit the effect of these broader light spectrums- that’s like making things show up in pictures that are invisible in real life! Oh, SNAP!

First beyond-concept use of this technology: tee-shirts that get extra special when the flash goes off. Like glow-in-the-dark, but glow-in-the-flash.

It has potential. On the other hand; you’re photogenic or you’re not. Now, get this to work on people’s faces…

Via Gizmodo

One of my favorite things about living in New York is seeing the way people get dressed up just to leave their apartment. Okay maybe not dressed up, but put together. Time is being spent on outfits in New York, and that makes me happy. If I’m going to feel isolated and spend most of my time people-watching, it’s a big bonus if the people I’m watching look interesting. This is a feature of most serious metropolises. London, Rome, Shanghai…people try to look their best at all times in these cities. It just adds to the sense that the city (your city) is the place to be.

Street Peeper is a street fashion blog that photographs well-dressed people on the streets of world capitals for the rest of us to look at and discuss. It is NOT The Sartorialist; it goes beyond the New York scene on a daily basis and it skews younger, so you can actually afford to replicate (or re-appropriate) some of the looks featured on it. And I haven’t even gotten to Street Peeper’s best feature: all of the photos are tagged, telling you what everybody is wearing, and clicking on the tag, Street Peeper shows you other people around the world who are wearing the same thing. (Just look at all the people wearing Cheap Monday jeans. Just look at them!) It’s a great global fashion trend-spotting tool, designed specifically for us people-watchers.

Josh thought it imperative that he call and tell me that he saw Sia’s new video just now which — in addition to accompanying the standard incredibleness that is anything she creates — is flat-out WEIRD in that “OMG, this girl is wicked awesome, I’m glad she didnt suffocate while she was singing with that condom over her head,” kind of way. But seriously: Clothespins? Plastic cling wrap? Sticky tape? WTF is going on here? Check it out for yourself, and keep and eye out for her forthcoming album, Some People Have Real Problems. You can even take a stab at designing her new album artwork, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Related: Breathe Me

This morning, on the way to the coffee shop where I write, I passed a young lady with headphones in her ears. A normal enough occurrence for a rainy Friday morning, but the feeling that something was terribly out of place plagued me until we finally passed at the walk light, when I saw that her headphones were attached to… a CD player. Also normal enough, right? Right? On paper, I think I could have taken that in without too much mental distress; why, then, should my brain subconsciously register a product (that still occupies a very valid amount of Target shelf space) as alien, or at the very least, unusual?

The success of the iPod is something we are all well aware of. However, how a product actually revolutionizes its category (or creates a completely new one), is something slightly less comprehensible. In today’s icky world of convergence vs. divergence, we are daily bombarded with poorly-contrived, “breakthrough” products that serve to complicate, not simplify, our lives. The ones that lose send us running back to our old standbys; the ones that win force us to move along.

Aside from the iPod, I can think of few products (in my lifetime, anyway) that have truly made their predecessors irrelevant. Excess is theme in the U.S. — no shock there — but what keeps the ball rolling is our pursuit of the next big thing. So, for today’s TSF, we’d like to know: is there any product at all, either currently in production or still undeveloped, that you see as potentially/realistically life-changing? Are you aching for a fridge/laptop combo? Hands-free Vespa? Are you sick of this crap?

I was getting a little nostalgic for my hometown of Hell-Ay (that’s L.A. for non-natives, an endearing name for the city we love to hate) so I did a virtual travel jaunt back there via Internet by visiting all my fave stomping grounds, including Giant Robot magazine’s shop-slash-gallery GR2. I’m totally bummed I’m missing out on University of Phillipines graduate Louie Cordero’s excellent exhibit called Delubyo (which means “Deluge” in Tagalog, I’m guessing), his first solo show in the city. Mesmerized with the gross-out factor, Cordero meticulously painted monsters on different sizes of canvas and paper in all their veins, stringy, drippy, guts, fleshy and wrinkly glory; or in his own words, the creatures are “dead humans mutated into weird zombies-like landscapes.” Robert Williams and Basil Wolverton, eat your heart out. No, not in front of us, please.