There’s something about paintings of hot girls doing strange things. Girls in someone’s stomach, girls in someone’s brain, girls feeding tiger-rugs.

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I’m mesmerized by the weird yet strangely wonderful work of Daito Manabe, a Japanese video artist who puts electrodes on his face to make glitchy electronic music.

As we posted last week, famed Japanese pop singer and director Nagi Noda recently passed away due to complications during surgery for injuries she sustained in a traffic accident last year. She was only 35. Known for her quirky music videos, bizarre short films (involving weird poodle people and other anthropomorphic creatures), and the amazing album covers she designed, Noda will be sorely missed by the international art community, which can only wonder what more amazing weirdness she would have come up with in the years to come.

Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s retrospective opened in New York on Friday and they turned the Brooklyn Museum garden into a series of Canal Street-styled knock off stores to celebrate his most counterfeited Louis Vuitton bag for the opening party. What a cool concept! [photos by Joe Fornabaio for the New York Times]

I was rulking (half-run; half-walk) through the inner city a little while back, killing time and thoughts with mindless banter (yes, one way conversations have their benefits) when I noticed a grown man crying hysterically on the opposite side of the road to me. He was probably in his early-thirties, slightly disheveled and seemingly oblivious to his surrounds. It was a disconcerting sight – raw emotion revealed in the full glare of the midday sun. But who knows what calamitous news he may have just received; what heart wrenching decision had just changed the course of his life. Part of me wanted to turn and run as if I’d never seen it. A bigger part of me wanted to go up to him, give him a hug and open my heart up to the truth of his tears. In the end I did neither and simply continued on down the road, leaving him to his grief; and his grief to my conscience. Yes, tiny imperfections, a window to the soul. The Ancient Greeks knew it, the Babylonians knew it. Heck, even Leonard Cohen knows it. ‘Ring the bells that still can ring’, he said, ‘forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’. It got me thinking about the austere nature of modern society, about our collective shudder at the sight of unbridled emotion. I pass a thousand strangers every day, each one of them as faceless as the next. But perhaps I should pause for a moment and look them square in the eye, slowly peeling away their onion layers of skin to reveal the living, breathing person within. [illustrations by Yuko Shimizu]

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