These Are Their Stories: Art Based on Law & Order

What mustaches have to do with dead bullies and subway-riding bears.

Earlier this year, the world bid one of television’s longest-running and most revered series adieu — after 20 seasons, Law & Order came to a grand finale. From its iconic characters to the unmistakable dun-dun sound, the show has inspired a cultish following and a number of tributes that transcend the TV airwaves and cross into a variety of media.

These Are Their Stories is a series of artist interpretations of the one-line episode summaries found in the show’s DirectTV program guide. From oil on canvas to comic panels to dioramas, from the literal to the abstract to the downright bizarre, the artwork spans the entire spectrum of artistic style, genre and creative conception by a wide range of artists. (Including Brain Pickings favorite Jason Polan.)

A Band of Teens Attacks a Piano Student by Scott C.

Victim Falls Off a Subway Platform by Lisa Hanawalt.

Detective Benson's Brother by Love Ablan

The brainchild of California artist Brandon Bird, the project has been going strong since 2002, even snagging a Webby award along the way.

Goren Takes on a Chess Master by Carly Monardo

Death of a Bully by Box Brown

Boy Scavenges for Food in the Garbage by Lacy McCune

The project reminds us of Postcards to Alphaville and while Law & Order: Artistic Intent may not be coming to a channel near you anytime soon, the concept offers a lovely example of the cross-pollination of the arts.

via @kirstinbutler

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Hidden Music Top 3

Dr. House gets down, web design goes hip hop, and your salad performs at Carnegie Hall.

IT’S NOT LUPUS, BUT IT’S GOOD

For the most part, we have nothing but contempt for today’s tabloid-driven, paparazzi-infested, mind-blowingly superficial celebrity culture. So when we stumble across celebrities who surprise us with true talent and unexpected substance, we can’t help digging.

Plus, we love House.

We’re talking, of course, about The Band from TV — a multi-talented lineup of Hollywood A-listers (and, okay, some reality show B-listers) including drummer Greg Grunberg (of Heroes, Alias and Felicity fame), guitarist James Denton (Desperate Housewives), vocalists Teri Hatcher (Desperate Housewives), Bonnie Somerville (Cashmere Mafia), and Bob Guiney (The Bachelor), violinist Jesse Spencer (House), plus a few more musically talented actors, and our favorite: Dr. House himself, the ever-talented, agelessly hot Hugh Laurie on the keyboards.

These guys rock it out on stage like you wouldn’t believe it. And although they don’t have any full-length studio albums yet, you can catch them on the House soundtrack — for the ultimate Laurie in all his glorie, you know.

Any profit they make goes to a number of charities that hit close to home for some of the band members and their families. (Greg Grunberg’s son has epilepsy and Teri Hatcher is living with lifelong childhood trauma.)

We recently heard BFTV’s mean cover of the The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” — and we’re believers.

DROP IT LIKE IT’S CODE

Musical talent hides where you least expect it. Just ask Mo Serious, the Poetic Prophet a.k.a. SEO Rapper — he’s not your average code-wrangling designer.

He’ll teach you all about CSS, web standards and proper design practice with lovably cheesy hip-hop beats and rhymes delivered straight from the trenches of your typical cubicle farm.

Because, you know, ain’t no street cred in rapping about the ghetto if you don’t live there, yo.

Gotta give it to the man for original lyrics like “Everyone will wanna follow you like Twitter” and “client satisfied like they eating on a Snicker.”

Also great: the two seemingly unfazed cubicle ladies going about their cubicle day in the background.

THE OTHER CARROT TOP

Ok, so we’ve learned music can be in your TV and in your CSS. One more place it can be: your kitchen. Enter the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, a symphony performing solely on vegetables.

Carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones, celery bongos, you name it (and eat it), they play it. The orchestra, founded 10 years ago in — you guessed it — Vienna plays across a number of genres: contemporary music, beat-oriented house tracks, experimental electronic, freestyle jazz, noise (we can see that one), dub, and more.

We must say their music is rather… interesting. (Just a heads-up: our 8th grade English teacher used to say that “interesting is what you call an ugly baby” — we concur on this one.)

And while we encourage you to look for yourself, we’ll take our asparagus grilled for now.

Monkey See Monkey Make NBC Look Bad

How rocks stars are making capitalism look really, really, really bad.

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You’ve seen the promos. You’ve heard the promos. You’ve smelled the promos. The 2008 Olympics have been a long time coming, and now they’ve finally come. And while we have high hopes for U.S. Olympic teams, we sure hope the performance of the American teams tooting the horn is no predictor of the nation’s competitive edge over other nations.

Case in point: the BBC promo for the Olympics make NBC look like a bunch of sponsor-grubbing YouTubers.

“Journey to the East” is based on the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West and follows the adventures of Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy as they make their way to the other end of the world using Olympic athleticism to overcome the literal and abstract hurdles.

If this looks and sounds familiar, it should be: the enachanted short film (because we can’t bring ourselves to call it a mere video) is the brainchild of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, the duo behind the pseudo-band Gorillaz. (Albarn is perhaps better known as the frontman of Blur and the mastermind behind The Good, the Bad & the Queen.)

The 3,000-frame animation took 12 weeks to complete and required 12-13 drawings per second of screen time, eating up 50 pencils and over 8,000 sheets of animation paper. If you think that’s quite a production, just wait for the audio: it was recorded on unusual Chinese instruments, 20 of them total, with a choir of 38 Chinese singers studio-dubbed to sound like 76 people. The two parts — the animation and the music — were developed simultaneously over the course of the 4 months so they woud fit together in the most perfect, organic way possible.

…And now it’s back to “This segment brought to you by Exxon-Mobil.“

Blame It on the Weatherman

Why World War II put Al Gore in business, and how Mae West helps keep it 72 and sunny.

WAR, COMICS, WEATHER

Every once in a while, we uncover an utterly unexpected and rather bizarre connection between seemingly random and unrelated elements. That’s exactly what University of Pennsylvania grad student Roger Turner has done with his accidental-discovery-turned-thesis about the link between comic books, military training and weather reporting.

In ‘Toon with the Weather is an audio slideshow revealing the fascinating historical reason for why the 8 o’clock weatherman delivers his spiel the way he does.

It all comes down to the IQ of WWII aviators. Turns out, the military hired pilots for their physical ability, sight and mental endurance, not necessarily for their… erm… cognitive capacity. So when said pilots had to be taught basic weather knowledge from meteorological textbooks, the military had to dodge more blank stares and huh’s than they did Nazi airplanes.

The solution, as usual, was to make things simple — so the military borrowed from the emerging comic book culture and decided to use cartoons to illustrate the weather. The pilots got it, the Nazis got theirs, and the military was happy. A whole culture of weather comics was born, full of weather-based characters (think mean bully-like cumulonimbus clouds), humor, even pop culture references to anyone from FDR to Mae West and other pin-up girls.

After the war, many of those first-generation TV weathermen were ex-military meteorologists who decided to present the weather to the general public in the same style they had used to educate the pilots. They used simple maps and cartoon-like imagery, which we still see today — those sun-behind-cloud graphics, red and blue arrows, and rain illustrations that grace the nightly forecast behind the hot chick who looks nothing like a retired WWII pilot.

Some things stay the same, some things luckily change.

Even as the discussion on climate change gets more and more heated, we see the same iconography and graphics used to illustrate the process — take Al Gore’s latest TED talk, chock-full of those same simple shapes and cartoon-like graphic sensibility.

Watch the slideshow and learn something cool to make you sound all intelligent and well-read at the next dinner party.