We’ve talked before about our friend Aska Matsumiya and her many projects but haven’t given much shine to her first love – one of LA’s best kept musical secrets: Moonrats. The former Seattle-based trio of young parents, tour mates, and creators of magic have been working on a new full length album set to drop later this year and at the end of June are packing up a school bus mounting a family style West Coast tour with fellow Angelino upstarts Warpaint.
If you’re in the area and want to see the Moonrats before they hit the road you should try to check them out tonight as they join forces with the fixed gear cyclists of all shapes and sizes who will be converging upon LA’s Montalban Theater for Spin Move Sessions Volume 4.
Bill Owens’ photographs set the standard for capturing the classic american suburbs. Just beyond the rows upon rows of perfect houses, large haired wives, husbands in bowling leagues and young children playing make believe were lots of people with lots of stories to tell.
The “then and now” comparisons which arose from the decades to follow only serve to make these little time capsules all the more wonderful. For example the above frame “Richie on a Big Wheel 1972″ often referenced in the pre-production of Where the Wild Things Are compared to Owens selects of Richie all grown up.
Jeff Scher is an artist and filmmaker who creates small heartfelt animated pieces using individual watercolor and pencil stills set to simple music. The pieces are released every few months and his latest entitled ” he Parade” can be viewed via Sher’s Animated Life column for the NY Times. Below is an old gem Sher put together with a nice poem by Billy Collins.
1. Day of the Locust (Nathanael West)
2. What Makes Sammy Run? (Budd Schulberg)
3. Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion)
4. Mildred Pierce (James Cain)
5. Ask the Dust (John Fante)
6. Oil (Upton Sinclair)
7. Walking the Dog (Walter Mosley)
8. The Tortilla Curtain (T. Coraghessan Boyle)
9. The High Window (Raymond Chandler)
10. Less Than Zero (Bret Easton Ellis)
Like all great cities, Los Angeles both conforms to its own stereotypes and inspires vastly-ranging conceptions of itself in the minds of artists. No two novelists see the city the same way, but there are certain factors common among great LA novels. (A great LA novel isn’t the same thing as a great novel that takes place in Los Angeles– the differences are subtle but crucial.)
Herewith, a top ten list of LA Novels. The disparities between the books are endless, but the shared traits are easily catalogued: ennui, a certain cynicism, heat, hope, desperation and a sense of doom. I don’t know what this says about living in LA, but I’m always happy to speculate.
Wizards + Fog Machines + Italo-disco + The Alan Parsons Project + Pink Floyd = Pink Project. Established by club DJ/Kano producer Stefano Pulga in 1982, Pink Project thrust the concept of mashups into Italy’s popular consciousness with “Disco Project,” a track that fused together The Alan Parsons Project’s instrumental tracks “Mammagamma” and “Sirius” with “Another Brick in the Wall,” forgoing the use of a single sample– they even enlisted an Italian children’s choir to sing the famous anti-education chorus a capella. The tune was an instant hit, resulting in a series of mysterious public appearances by four anonymous individuals covered in dark robes miming along to the recorded song. The true identities of the people under those robes remains a mystery to this day.
Pink Project tried to repeat their success with “B-project,” a follow-up single that spliced together “Billie Jean” and Greg Kihn Band’s “Jeopardy.” Sadly, it turned out the Italian public’s craving for mashups had already been satiated. Anyway, it’s not like there’s room for improvement on the beat in “Billie Jean.”
Stacey Rozich is a Seattle-based illustrator doing nice beautiful things with pens and paints. If you are a fan of paintings of animals, or humans in animal costumes she is definitely worth a look. As Rozich herself notes “Where the Wild Things Are was and still is important to me and generations of individuals.” As for the showings at her gallery space in Pioneer Square – “Not an event goes by where someone doesn’t make a Sendak comparison.”
1. Great band (obvs.) and great song
2. Dinosaurs drinking apple juice
3. The masks
4. Wardrobe by Brian Lichtenberg
5. Shot at the Cabazon Dinosaurs, from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (they’re now a creationist museum)
6. Songs that end with explosions/asteroids are always good
The clip’s director, Steven Andrew Garcia, has a blog called Brain Sheer where he posts rad behind the scenes photos along with portraits of people and bands we love, like Where The Wild Things Are graphic designer Geoff McFetridge, Kim Gordon, Abe Vigoda– and whaddya know, he’s even got a couple nice pictures of Spike! Here’s a shot of Mika Miko minus the dinosaur masks and one of Geoff proudly showing off his bike:
British artist Sophie Alda’s pastel colored gouache paintings of mystical monsters and hoardes of sweatpant-wearing middle-aged folk are lovely and endearing, with occasional glimpses of unsettling humor shining through the confectionary sweetness.
One of my favorite media experiences is when you discover something and literally have no clue whether it is supposed to be a joke or not. A recent addition to this category is FATE Magazine, a pocket-sized rag dedicated to keeping everyone updated with “True Reports of the Strange and Unknown”.
A recent issued featured a stock photo of The Rock superimposed against a picturesque alpine scene, with cover articles like “Confederate Prison Ghosts” and “UFOS in Little America”. Other topics addressed in the text-heavy magazine included coyote-dog hybrids, vampires, ju-ju men and the Devil Snakes of Ansuam (what are those?)
Needless to say, FATE is a confusing and fascinating publication––and one with an ample history, having allegedly been established in 1948. So I guess it is real. Or real-esque. You can decide for yourself.
Subscribe to RSS