From Yesterday's Observer

Many Observer-reading friends sent me a link to this article about pop star Mika last night, with the following fantastic tidbit:
"Waiting outside afterwards is a gaggle of 100 fans, including two who have dressed up as Lollipop girls, after the song. That sort of dedication is apparently typical of his hardcore followers. On his website, Mika recently started a dialogue with the illustrator Sophie Blackall, who posted a drawing of a girl in an ingeniously designed dress. Last night in Berlin, one fan - a man - turned up dressed exactly as the girl in the drawing. "I don't know if other artists get that sort of attention," he says, "because they laugh when I speak to them about it." "
I haven't felt so honoured since a Mexican fellow had a full back tattoo done of my drawing for Tim Burton's Big Fish. Sadly I never got a photo of that.

Here is Our Surreal Scroll

More than twenty surreal children turned up at the library yesterday to shuffle nouns and verbs and adjectives and elbow each other (ever so politely) for their bit of the scroll to embellish. It was SUCH FUN! Some of my favorite lines were:
The noisy trumpet laughs at fire
You gave an elegant ribbon
[to] A running confident monkey
The jumping round ear
is stealing a tiny moon
in embarrassing pointed waters.

Please excuse the bumpy video...

Exquisite Corpse in the Library

If you happen to be in New York this Saturday, in the vicinity of the Mulberry Street branch of the Public Library, around 2pm, I'm going to be playing a version of my favorite game with thirty feet of paper, a bunch of Surrealist children and fistfuls of nouns, verbs and adjectives. It should be fun. Click on the picture for more info. (Incidentally I found this picture in my desk along with sheaves of others, from many late nights, with many (obviously) talented friends. Unfortunately I can't remember whose work this is. Feel free to claim credit if you recognize your limbs.)