Erik Moe Art & Design

A couple of weeks ago Wear Your Wig To Work Day asked to be my friend on MySpace. I wasn’t quite sure if I should respond since I usually only get MySpace friend requests from high-school David Bowie cover bands for some reason. After doing a little research, and consulting a friend who showed up on the WYWTW WWW site, I can fully recommend that you wear your wig to work tomorrow. Me? I work at home on Fridays. And, of course I always wear a wig at home.

Related: CP has a sudden interest in performance theory | Philebrity is wary

Thanks to “MM” who called my attention to the Library of Congress’ mind-blowing exhibition of color photographs commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II at the turn of the last century. The photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, used an innovative process involving multiple plates for each image, and the images were presented as projections rather than prints. The process is not the mind-blowing part, though. What really is striking about these images is the way they force you to feel more immediately connected to the past. The rich color in these images forces you to think about the way black and white has become a mental filter that distances us from the subject of an image. The Fabric Merchant he photographed in 1911 seems just as alive as photographs I took with my digital camera last week. (No disrespect to last week’s companions intended).

The“X More Days” campaign is really taking off with some help from DNC event planners. At the Kerry-Clinton-Bon Jovi rally in Philadelphia yesterday, the crowd was given thousands of “More Days” signs to wave. The variation they handed out omits the smirking Bush head and instead says “8 / more days to / a fresh / start” on a red and blue background. Will these continue to appear at rallies all week? Or was this just a Philly thing? Here is a gallery with “8 More Days” images culled from a few newspapers.

Have you spotted X More Days images/stickers around? I’d love to see how you are using them and where they’ve been posted. Send me pictures! I’ll send a prize to the person who sends the best photo documentation of this strange phenomenon. Also, let me know if you run across them on the internets .

Artists Komar and Melamid have done market reasearch to determine the type of paintings most liked and unliked by America (and other countries). Based on their research, they created America’s Favorite Painting, which is a “dishwasher-sized” blue and green landscape with George Washington, some Norman Rockwell-esque children, and deer. Oddly, I wouldn’t mind having this image in my home.

Flâneur, the journal of urban wandering, has finally been updated. The new postings include a nice piece on New Orleans, but the most remarkable is The Lance Project by Mindy Tucker, which is a series of photographs of anonymous people who resemble her deceased friend Lance. The series perfectly captures that momentarily haunting sensation of seeing a friend from anther time or another place in the face of a stranger.

In my ongoing effort to become an internationally-known performance artist, I’ve concocted a new scheme for traveling the world. I am getting into the business of television disabling . Book your appointment today!

The net-art website rhizome.org (which is free on Fridays) today pointed me towards this video of conceptual / performance artist Joseph Beuys singing a protest pop song. Beuys is a character who is fascinating to me. Most of the time he did not appear with bands that look like Ah-Ha, but rather did things like covered his face with honey and attempted to explain photographs to a dead hare (explanation, picture). He is at once political and surreal –a tough combination to pull off. He spent much of his later career in lecture-performances explaining the power of art-making and how this is a truly liberating force that all people can and should use. Which is exactly what I believe, but have a hard time getting across to non-believers. Maybe if I were to cover my face in honey.

Forgive me if I haven’t pointed you in the direction of the high-bandwidth flash/shockwave web-zine CBC Radio 3 until now. Every week or so they publish a new edition with an all-new soundtrack of lesser-known Canadian bands playing over some impressive documentary photography, art, interviews, etc. The latest edition (2.6) features selected books from the Philly-based airstream trailer Projet Mobilivre - Bookmobile Project that nicely simulates the experience of browsing inside the real trailer’s traveling collection of book art.

To those of you who don’t really understand why I won’t shut up about Minnesota, consider for a minute the recently unveiled font “Twin.” I understand that sometimes you need to format something in a simple 12 point New York or Georgia. There are other times when Geneva or Monoco can give you a nice sophisticated feel. Chicago definitely has a certain nostalgia factor that should not be overlooked. But does your city’s font change shape with its current weather conditions ? I don’t think so. Does Philly even have a font?

AND if that weren’t enough, while going back to the University of Minnesota Design Institute website to retrieve the link for Twin for you, I just happened to accidentally find out about the even more amazing Big Urban Game . It involved moving giant inflatable game pieces around Minneapolis and St. Paul from September 3-7. Claes Oldenberg must be proud.