Watch the Video of Rocking Son of Dschingis Khan. Another video surfaced on the internet by the German disco group Dschingis Khan. It doesn’t have the best video quality but I think that it might be more awesome than Moskau or the self titled one or Loreley. Thanks Scott and Lee.

David Mitchell proves that there is a reason for creating art, and it’s not the Da Vinci Code. Mitchell read passages from his new book Black Swan Green and answered questions for a lively audience at Cody’s on Telegraph tonight. His previous book, Cloud Atlas is my favorite contemporary fiction book, and, especially after hearing Mitchell speak tonight, he is my favorite contemporary author.

Mitchell took a while to get warmed up, drinking tea, reading from his new book, and then soliciting questions. He began to freely speak about art and his process for writing. He spoke of a universal reason for making art with so much sincerity  that I almost wanted to cry. He talked about those fleeting moments of happiness - fleeting moments when everything is just right - and you notice and then they’re gone. Art is a way to make those moments tangible. And he is right.

This almost seems like an impressionist view of art, but it’s not, at least I don’t think so. It’s not so much about capturing a particular physical moment, like the sea bathed in light, but more of communicating a feeling, presence, or state. It’s about putting elements together to create a happiness that is life. Cloud Atlas is that. Cloud Atlas helped me see the world in a different way. One person tonight interpreted the “present” in Cloud Atlas as a car chase that leads to an insane asylum. Mitchell said, yes, and then the insane asylum blows up!

Mitchell said that he’s always learning from his work, and that he cringes when he goes back to older works and sees mistakes he has made, but then he is that much better. When asked about what he thinks about genre writing versus literature, he gave a nod to Dan Brown for encouraging people to read, but went on to say that one strategy is to take a cliché, say from a genre, and manipulate it slightly to create something original and interesting. I immediately thought of ways to apply this to the visual arts. What a perfect cure for postmodernism: the cliché with a hook. Cloud Atlas is completely postmodern, but it’s held together with an undeniable artistic strength that comes from thoughtful sensitivity of expression.

I haven’t read Black Swan Green yet, but it’s on my list. It is a more traditional novel, loosely based on Mitchell’s teenage years. He’s now working on a historical novel.

I got the May 2006 issue of Harpers this afternoon and found two very interesting articles that relate back to blogs I posted in January about debt and pigs. The first was written by Michael Hudson and is billed as “An Illustrated Guide to the Coming Real Estate Collapse”. It indulged in a little bit of sensationalism comparing home mortgages to medieval serfdom, but went on to effectively explain the factors that have led to the current American real estate market with twenty slick info-graphics by Nigel Holmes. Some of the statistics were jaw dropping, like the charts showing American mortgage debt sky rocketing compared to the G.D.P., the statistic that nearly half of first home loans taken last year were done with no money down, and the increasing popularity of “interest only” and “negative amortization” (less that “interest only”) loans. The article sites the real estate bubble in Japan during the 1990s and culminates in a graph illustrating the concept of “negative equity” (the state of having more mortgage debt than your house value) with big, pointy teeth chasing down a hapless homeowner. As a die hard, Bay Area apartment dweller, I eat this kind of stuff up, but I also think it is an important read for all those young couples who are scrambling to buy a house before starting a family and people who plan to get rich by selling their house and moving to Iowa. Ridiculous mortgage debt doesn’t provide security and financial freedom unless you own a bank.

The second article is titled “Swine of the Times”. It deals with the industrial and scientific development that has led up to modern pigs. It was written by a San Francisco, freelance writer, and meat eater named Nathanael Johnson and steers clear of most of the slaughter house horror stories you would expect from a Peta brochure. Instead the article focuses on breeding and artificial insemination processes. The industry has gone through rapid change in the last couple of years. In 1990 only 7% of Americas pigs were produced using artificial insemination. Today it is 90%. The author mentions a few disturbing reminders about impoverished Midwestern farmers and porcine living conditions, but the overall tone of the article is relatively light (given the subject matter). I actually found myself laughing out loud at a couple of antidotes about uncomfortable visits with farmers who were in the midst of shepherding along pig reproductive activities. If this all sounds like your idea of fun, pick up a copy unless it has been banned in your town because it mentions pig penises.

My buddy Kevin Bonner has a new portfolio site with recent design work. It’s pretty smooth… even though he didn’t include any of the ads that I modeled for. ;)

Sorry, I am on a roll with these strange, old, foreign videos. Here is a 1986 insect repellent commercial from the Ivory Coast called Super Timor.

I’m back from vacation and I am breaking from the format a bit with this week’s show. This is a five minute montage of street musicians and other video clips from my trip to Barcelona. Enjoy!