Gross! In a fun Garbage Pail Kids way. But wait: under the coy crude veneer of Allen Cordell’s music videos for Beach House, Tobacco and Future Islands, there’s a natural grace at work. An innate understanding of rhythm, a surprising sympathy for our fellow man. Characters with creepy faces dance angrily amidst gooey special effects, and somehow, the repressed desires bubbling beneath the surface manage to wrench your heart. Or maybe that’s backwards— maybe it starts with a sense of humanity and then pulls the rug out to reveal the absurd. Like, “Longing. It’s beautiful, yeah, but it’s also ridiculous.” Either way, misery and frustration are the unlikely fuel for a nervous humor here. We’re encouraged to laugh, even as we cheer on the lonesome-hearted.

Cordell’s paintings exist in a similar cloud of uncertainty, appropriating images of pornography, horror films, animals and anonymous strangers to unsettling effect. Those thrilling and frightening parts of childhood rendered in sharp relief.

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RuPaul’s Drag Race production house World of Wonder dispatched their wildly gregarious ace journalist Damiana Garcia (aka Michael Lucid of Pretty Thingsss) to cover the opening of Albert Reyes’ Never Dies the Dream at Mastodon Mesa. She navigated the dangerous corridors of Reyes’ legendary haunted maze like a pro, warding off werewolf harassment, snatching up interviews and finding her inner self!

Watch Damiana’s in-depth coverage below, followed by two videos I filmed for her earlier this summer. The first explores the opening of Ryan Trecartin’s mind-blowing Any Ever show at MOCA and the ensuing Dis Magazine Pool Party, and the second was filmed at L.A. leather bar The Faultline’s annual Tom of Finland Foundation Fundraiser!

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There’s a buzzing in the air, a dual feeling of danger and excitement— destruction and creativity— in the fallen urban environments that fuel director Shan Nicholson’s work. His lush new video for El-P’s haunting instrumental “Time Won’t Tell,” revels in a nostalgia for the anarchic freedom of childhood, and heralds the pleasure of building something new out of the ashes of something old.

It’s almost a direct dramatization of the themes underlying Downtown Calling, Nicholson’s first documentary and the story of New York City in the late 70’s. Narrated by Debbie Harry, it’s a movie all about self-made entertainment blossoming from an environment of social unrest and economic chaos. In retrospect, it seems crazy. What enabled the downtown renaissance in New York when many other major metropoleis just crumble with a whimper? What’s the magic ingredient that makes the boys in “Time Won’t Tell” play instead of fight?

In that same era, the EPA decided to give rad photographers money to take amazingly frank pictures of urban decay, and they called it Documerica. Somehow it feels like the whole thing would be decried as “communism” these days, making the existence of these images all the more miraculous. After the jump, take a look at some of Danny Lyon’s phenomenal photographs of New York kids from Documerica.

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The sounds that emerge from the clear red vinyl of Superhumanoids’ Urgency EP feel like home. It’s the kind of music that instantly puts your nerves at ease on a long nighttime drive, striking a perfect balance between shoegazing coziness and dreamy danceability. Superhumanoids are not only an impossibly charming L.A. indie pop quartet, but also one of my favorite new bands this year— so it is with great honor that I present to you the exclusive world-wide debut of their brand new music video!

Watch the wistful and hilarious “Persona” above, and then read on for an interview with razor-sharp director Eli Gunn-Jones!

Where did the idea behind “Persona” stem from?

Oftentimes I prefer my videos to echo the theme or premise of the song, or at the very least have some sort of tangential relationship to the track. After talking with Cameron for a bit about what Persona meant to him—how it was conceived, the writing process, etc— I let it float around my head for a while. I kept coming back to the idea of surveillance, of trying to encapsulate or define another through a wide swath of observations both traditional and unusual. Trying to understand somebody’s core without any personal interaction. The other elements like the 70s attire, vintage recording gear, his car, those were all stylistic choices to better engage the audience and create a fuller, more complete world.

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“Words” is a gorgeous and spectacular ouroboros of visual wordplay produced by Everynone to tie in with one of the world’s greatest podcasts— right up there with This American Life, no joke!— WNYC’s Radiolab. You’d be remiss not to listen to their latest episode, which is all about words and the function of language in our brains.

Video for Caribou’s “Sun,” directed by Simon Owens. What fun! But how do I find this mysterious, Inland Empire-esque ballroom? Maybe it’s like that episode of Beverly Hills, 90210, where the gang exchanged an egg to get directions to the “secret underground club” where Emily Valentine laced Brandon’s drink with U4EA.

Brian Khek is a young digital artist from Chicago, who, if his website’s links are any indication, seems to run in the same circles as some of my favorite denizens of that windy, windy city—Brad Troemel, Micah Schippah, and Carson Fisk-Vittori. They’re all graduates of SAIC—the new RISD? Discuss. What kind of crazy cyber-drugs are they putting in the water up there? Khek’s pieces rise to the surface from deep chambers of the virtual world’s collective unconscious, blithely challenging the ancient eminence of all things organic. Primo.

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He’s an 83-year-old queer experimental filmmaker, they’re the sprawling Italian family responsible for making the world’s greatest knitwear. This is the fantastic video that brings them together. Kenneth Anger shot the Missoni family frolicking in a series of Italian courtyards in this ad for their Fall/Winter 2010 collection, and it’s kind of beautiful. I’m amazed how similar in its aesthetics and visual conventions this is to Anger’s work from the late 1940s and 50s, and yet how effectively mesmerizing the magic of Kenneth Anger remains. Once you find that sweet spot in your work, sometimes it’s a good idea to just linger there forever.

I love Rafter, I love Asthmatic Kitty, I love this video and I love director Matt Wells! He was last seen directing Tim Heidecker in a video for Clues’ “You Have My Eyes Now,” a slow-motion feast for the eyes ruminating on the crushing social barriers standing in the way of human-mannequin love.

Being an all-around rad dude primarily, and a master of children’s literature on the side, it’s only natural that An Awesome Book author Dallas Clayton finds himself frequently pulled into fantastic situations. Like how on his last book tour, he ended up reading to both pre-schoolers on a sheep ranch in Bodega and college students at a crusty punk house in Eugene.

Or how he was recently invited to paint a mural on the walls of Silver Lake children’s boutique Tomboy. I accompanied him on a midnight mural-painting mission and shot a little video (with my beloved new GH1) about the opportunities that keep popping up as a result of being Dallas Clayton.

Successful blogging relies on a set of conventions that limit its own potential. Frequent posting keeps readers interested but tends to discourage in-depth analysis. Cross-platform compatibility restricts layout design to single-column vertical scrolls. Font options are scant, low-resolution images reign and non-linear flairs are frowned upon.

All that is slowly changing, and web journalism is starting to look more like, well, journalism. These cautious baby steps towards a prettier Internet are arriving through the advent of Apple’s “apps,” which allow designers to work within the fixed canvas of an iPad screen, as well as boutique websites that shun daily RSS traffic and search engine optimization in favor of paced-out content that’s as well written as it is visually appealing. The transition is not without its pitfalls— emulating a newspaper layout can easily veer into the realm of tacky 1994 CD-ROM design. Grain & Gram is one of the few sites getting it right.

It’s a brand new “gentleman’s journal,” built around beautiful photo essays that focus on one man, his work, and his personal style. Combining elements of blogs like Backyard Bill and The Selby with the rare class of fashion magazines like Fantastic Man, Grain & Gram is a promising new entity both as a style blog and as a design inspriation. Breaking the rules and transcending them in the process, its in-depth portraits of contemporary men are supplanted with intimate interviews, side-column tangents, and gorgeous video content, like the clip below from their feature on scruffy motorcycle-riding printmaker Nick Sambrato.

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Gay Chicano Joe Jimenez writes beautiful poems. I felt almost hypnotized as I heard him speak recently at Stories Cafe in Echo Park. He had just arrived after a long trip from San Antonio— and yet his words exuded an air of tranquil confidence, bewitching in their casual rhythm.

I couldn’t help wishing I could see Jimenez’ vivid, autobiographical poems translated into visual language. The wish was quickly granted when I discovered that the great Dino Dinco is fully on the same wavelength. He shot a gorgeous short film on 16mm with Jimenez last year, called “El Aubelo.” Check it out, along with a couple of Joe’s poems, after the jump.

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I know you don’t need any more incentive to leave the house tonight than the mere mention of an amazing screening of video art— but would it be the cherry on the cake to know there’s going to be a pygmy goat present? Because there will be. And his name is Oreo.

The brilliant Ben Bigelow curated Goat Helper with Michael Mallis, and they’ve built an entire goat-themed happening based around a series of thrilling videos from some of my favorite people. To name a few: Jacob Ciocci & Shana Moulton (two of the geniuses from Deterioration, They Said), Party Food, Jon Clark, Mike Jitlov (The Wizard of Speed and Time), and the creator of Gumby, Art Clokey. Swing by Show Cave in Eagle Rock to check it out tonight! The screening starts at 9:00 PM sharp— goats can’t stand it when you’re late.

This LIVE screening of experimental video art and animation is framed within a performance including: light installation, live video, goat themed food art, costumed “Helpers”, and of course Oreo the beloved pygmy goat.

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Kool-Aid Man in Second Life completely blows my mind. It’s a project in which artist Jon Rafman— using the aforementioned anthropomorphized drink pitcher as his avatar— regularly leads guided tours throughout the awe-inspiring, deeply unsettling, and often hilarious multiverse of Second Life. The sheer WTFery of that virtual realm is so vast and elusive, you’ll have to see it to believe it.

Second Life served as the setting for art podcast Bad at Sports’ recent interview with Rafman/Kool-Aid Man, where the artist’s rumbling autotuned voice muses on a series of fascinating existential subjects as we float through the technicolor backdrop of “the ultimate tourist destination… turbo-charged Las Vegas and Dubai combined. Where every possibility and combination of landscape and architecture can exist.”

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Leave all your worries behind and disappear into a state of Healing Relaxation.

Don’t miss the rest of Adam Cruces’ videos, they’re all pretty much amazing. He seems to have a soft spot for Final Cut Pro-drenched deadpan visual puns and mesmerizing glitches. For instance, floppy disks flopping around, Michael Jackson moonwalking the moon, and a mind-bending flipping flipping gymnast, just to name a few. Why not try on a new bathing suit while you’re over there? Which animal print do you think goes best with my fair complexion?