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The sight of a tiny handmade puppet hitting a tiny handmade crack pipe will likely make you laugh. If that doesn't work, try a tiny puppet blowing up a tiny drug lord's house. These scenes, from William Child's puppetry biopic of Pablo Escobar, manage to tell Escobar's actual story of a life of crime with the humor that comes with the territory of handmade puppet animation. According to It's Nice That, the five-minute film is supplemented by a box set, which includes a book of production photos that didn't make it into the film. Watch the short film below. 

"El Patrón" was created by William Child. See more of his work on his website, including a video for Action Bronson.





We appreciated the days when Hedi Slimane worked with promising unknown bands on runway soundtracks, but that doesn't diminish our enthusiasm for a good fashion week collaboration. Hedi Slimane and Liars made for a fine team at Saint Laurent's Women's Spring/Summer '13, Collection VIII show at Paris Fashion Week. Liars frontman Angus Andrew remixed the "Mr Your On Fire Mr" single as a 19-minute, punky-dance epic for Slimane's Saint Laurent show. It maintains intensity and heightens the experience, never settling in as background music. No easy feat. 

Between the rise of Chance the Rapper and a continuing epidemic of gun violence, Chicago's West Side has been a regular feature on blogs of all stripes lately. But director Eric K. Yue captures a different kind of stardom in his short on basketball playing Chicago high schooler Sire, who treats the camera to a blend of natural charisma and self-promoting ego.

The film is part of "Tribute," a collaboration between Dazed & Confused and Mainline films focusing on the state of youth and we are already curious to see more. Read an interview with the director at DazedDigital.com.

The sisterly trio Haim just released its debut album Days Are Gone (Pitchfork finds it winning). In contrast to the album's overall hygenic-sound, the "Desert Days" video directed by Tabitha Denholm for the album track "Honey & I" has a bit of grit in it—and even electric guitar. The clip finds the ladies holed up at a cinder-block house found by the director on Air B&B and striking poses in pick-up trucks. 

Electronic R&B slinger Autre Ne Veut's latest video from the much-gushed-about album Anxiety is just out—and it should also bring a bit more attention to BANGS's director Allie Avital Tsypin. Upon initial viewing, the movements of the formally-dressed partygoers seem very odd—but near as we can tell, they're synched up pretty tightly with the musical elements in the song. The tuxedoed men appear to lock with the kick drum, for example. The arty video is a production of MOCAtv—and also pumps us up for a live October tour from the Hampshire College grad otherwise known as Arthur Ashin.

Trust us that by the end of the new Holy Ghost! clip for "Okay," you'll appreciate the bluish color distortion of the opening scenes for much more than a digital filter. The video follows the pair through a bunch of screen-within-a-screen transitions, until the progression ends in a gallery space with a cameo from their awesomely weird Dynamics cover art. Check out the clip below, with some stills of the type-heavy title cards. 

Head to Pitchfork for Holy Ghost!'s fall tour dates. Dynamics is out now from DFA









The pop star who once proudly told us she was a material girl, now stands for global freedom of expression. This month, she launches her Art for Freedom, an online initiative to further change via artistic creation. The project, created by Madonna herself and curated by VICE, will be distributed by BitTorrent—that's right, one of those file-sharing networks where one used to be able to nab bootlegs from the Virgin tour.

Madonna's secretprojectrevolution film, a 17-minute film she co-directed with Steven Klein, will be distributed as a BitTorrent Bundle on the network. The film, plus bonus content, is free to download beginning September 24 at 2pm EST at bittorrent.com

"I hope my film and other submissions to Art For Freedom will be a call-to-action and give people a place to voice their own creative expression to help fight oppression, intolerance, and complacency," says Madge.

The global, digital platform won't just be for Guy Ritchie's exes, however. Creative members of the public will be able to submit to the Art For Freedom platform by uploading original artwork or tagging their posts #artforfreedom. In other words, most content will be crowd-sourced, with VICE presumably pushing the good bits to the top. 

Is this platform made to last; is it going to amount to anything at all? It's hard to say—we'll check again post-launch.

 

Taiyo Kimura's video for Superchunk's hardcore-inspired tune "Staying Home" is a bizarre, low-tech, and kind of gross (as in the eating curry and rice from the toilet in a Mac mask bit) clip, but a perfect fit. Mac McCaughan encountered Kimura's work at a gallery show in Durham, NC, hung out with him in Tokyo, and eventually approached him about doing a video for a tune from the new I Hate Music. In an ART INFO post, McCaughan says of Kimura, “He always manages to do this thing in videos where you kind of think you know what you’re looking at, then you realize you’re not sure what you’re looking at.”

Read more at ART INFO.

To mark the release of Coming Apart, the debut LP from Kim Gordon and Bill Nace's Body/Head, the band collaborated with pioneering filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern for a series of 10 videos. The clips resemble a portrait series, with each one focusing on a single, and sometimes glitchy, movement from one male and one female character, or an interaction between the two. As Ad Hoc points out, Gordon also collaborated with the photographer for Sonic Youth's "Death Valley 69" video in 1985. The complete series is available on Matador's YouTube channel, and two videos are below. 

Revisit our feature interview with Kern by one of his former subjects, and check out Marc Masters's Body/Head interview published this week at Pitchfork.



The side project of Melody's Echo Chamber guitarist Pablo Padovani, Moodoïd invites extra attention to its new EP, and that's not just with the slick mix courtesy of Tame Impala's Kevin Parker. The video for "De Folie Pure" delights even as it makes us a smidge uncomfortable in its wild mix of international sounds and dress. We'd hope its meant in the best way. 

The Moodoïd EP is out this week on Les Disques Enterprise.