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My good friend, DJ Miles Tackett, just rounded out a successful 7 year anniversary party for LA’s best funk & soul club, Funky Sole. You couldn’t have asked for a better night at Jimmy’s Hollywood bar that featured some of the scene’s premier DJs as they got the crowd going with hours of deep funk and soulful grooves. Check out the first half of Funky Sole Vol.1, a mix that Miles concocted from out of his crate to celebrate seven years of redefining the LA nitelife scene.

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To keep current with what is going on with Funky Sole, log onto: http://www.myspace.com/funkysole

The real questions should be: what would Jon ever do if Garfield, America’s favorite sarcastic feline and other characters such as Odie the dog and Nermal the kitten were to pass on from Jim Davis’ cartoon strips? Well Dan Walsh, hailing from Dublin, Ireland, thought up this very idea and thus began his auspicious creation of Garfield minus Garfield. In this strange comic landscape, Jon Arbuckle sans domesticated animals, magically transforms into a pathetically lonely and at times deranged suburban bachelor →

A friend forwarded me this short by one of the current animator greats, Sylvain Chomet. His name might ring a bell if you had seen his 2003 film, Les Triplets de Belleville (2003) . This 25-minute short, The Old Lady and the Pigeons, was created right before the feature length and already displayed Chomet’s distinct style: his delicately hand-drawn retro animation. If you enjoyed this clip, check out the complete version on Daily Motion: La Vieille Dame et les Pigeons. Charming caricatures come to life, milling about a backdrop imbued with warm autumnal colors. And hysterical moments abound as obese pigeons plop on sidewalks with mouths gaping like goldfish, their overbloated stomachs competing for space with their lungs. →

Check out this elaborate animation short by the Blackheart Gang, who are a South African collective of artists, designers and animators living in Cape Town. The intricate details and delicately hand drawn and CGI rendered images of the film evoke a singular baroque romance populated with gothic modern and vintage characters. A warbling opera chorus narrates a harrowing tale of how the singing stork-like pacifists were terrorized by Otto, a monstrous black octopus. An eerie, and utterly original animated →

“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck and a head full of questions, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview.” This was what humbly began as a 38-year-long project they named I Met the Walrus. Revolving around Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “bed-in” peace protest, this short was produced by Levitan and written, directed and animated by Josh Raskin in such startling brilliance and captivating wit that it literally floored me and my friends at the local animation festival last year. →