We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

As if this spot weren’t awesome enough – ClumbMumble points out that Nike SB tried to up the “skateboard shoe commercial” ante with this banger.

What happens when the chief Where The Wild Things Are score maker and her phenomenal bandmates “lose their minds in order to recover purity and truth”? You’ll have to check out Barnaby Clay’s YYY’s short “Snakesweat” up for one week only on Pitchfork TV to find out. Hint: it’s weird…

We’ve been getting a lot of emails about the merchandise surrounding the Where The Wild Things Are release. In case you were curious, these vinyl gems have been spotted in pre-order all over the internet.

This Recording is a brimming repository of short pieces written by the smartest and funniest young men and women operating on the internet. No cultural figure or event escapes their eye, whether it be Harry Potter, Kristen Stewart, Liz Lemon or, in this case, Wes Anderson. This Recording is a daily point of reference and a source of insight more reliable than the entire A&E staff of the New York Times, combined.

The piece starts off with a quickie rundown of the Wes Anderson filmography before jumping into an illustrated and mp3-studded account of Anderson’s perfect mixtape. It’s both a well-rounded and unpredictable assembly, featuring stalwarts like Van Morrison alongside lesser-known performers like Seu Jorge. You could well analyze the list for insight into Anderson’s films, but you could also do the opposite.

Music has always been a key emotional ingredient in the director’s ouevre, and it makes for a pleasant thrill to see how Anderson scores his own life.

Significant Objects is a project that teams the art of antiquing with the creativity of some of the web’s best writing talents. Snatching an assortment of items found languishing in the dusty purgatory of America’s yard sale and thrift store netherworld, the project’s curators pair each object with a writer who is asked to write a fictional story shedding some light on the backgrounds of these doodads and trinkets. For instance, in the hands of stained glass artist Mimi Lipson, a strangely patriotic (bi-centennial?) mug advertising the Halston clothing line becomes a prop in an entry from the lost diaries of Andy Warhol. Given out as a party favor at the Dupont Brothers‘ birthday party, Warhol muses, “Maybe I should get some mugs made up for Interview. Are they camp?” Eventually, though, he decides that they’re tacky and then he ends up regifting it to Brigid Berlin. Sure, why not? It’s possible.

And the best part? You can bid for these “significant” objects on eBay and own your very own piece of fake history!

Here is a masterpiece that Cheryl Dunn shot of Mark when some giant fancy museum in Germany asked him to do an art show there and instead of hanging art he did this. This is the footage cut down into a video for Coconut Records.

We posted a couple weeks ago about the incredible headdress Karen O. sported at the Glastonbury Festival, but it’s just too rad of an outfit to not express further appreciation towards, especially in light of the lovely detailed photographs that have popped up online since the performance. Christian Joy, Karen’s long-time clothing collaborator and personal wardrobe stylist (don’t you wish she was yours?), even shared some behind the scenes photos of the outfit being born in the atelier. Those moccasins! Nike, if you’re listening, can we get a limited edition pair of Karen O fringe moccasins for Christmas?

Alison Malone’s photo series The Daughters of Job explores both the eerily spectacular and sadly quotidian aspects of being a teenage girl in a Masonic cult/youth group. As a former member of the Daughters, Malone was granted unprecedented access to document the secretive group. Her unique perspective also lends the photographs an air of nostalgia as she searches for meaning in the sacred geometry of these Pennslyvanian Masonic lodges.

As we mentioned recently Lauren Dukoff’s new book Family is hitting stores and this week in LA our friends at Urban Outfitters Space 1520 are having a kickoff party on the 18th. Some of your favorite next-gen folk stars will be jamming live and it promises to be a wild session. Stop by if you’re in town.

My parents allowed me to read anything in the house. If it was on the bookshelf, it was fair game. This is how I learned many things: how to cuss, how to use the dictionary as a demystifying tool, how to develop a distinct taste in literature.

The cussing part came courtesy of Charles Bukowski, the poet and novelist deemed by Time to be the “laureate of American lowlife”. His books were on the shelf because they were good, for one thing, but also because Bukowski was a compadre of my grandfather’s. I don’t think either of my parents dipped into the stash of novels and poetry often, but I sure did: the stories were rough, plainspoken and filled with salacious details and philosophical tangling. It helped that the volumes, all published by Black Sparrow, had remarkably cool covers.

I started with 1971’s Post Office and, since it suited my tastes, moved on to 1982’s Ham on Rye. From there, it was a short hop to the writer’s accessible poems and letters. Any way I came at it, an hour spent reading Bukowski was an hour spent inside the mind of the dirtiest (and cleverest) old man I’d ever met.

If my parents only knew.