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

Art collective Paper Rad haven’t lost their touch. It’s been a while since we’ve heard their camp, but it seems like they’re everywhere you look, now. Jacob Ciocci is currently travelling the US on his 2 Blessed 2 B Stressed Tour in support of his solo music and a new 45-minute DVD-R containing the above video, Peace Tape. Paper Rad-adjacent band Extreme Animals, who recorded the soundtrack for Peace Tape, are touring this summer as well. Fecal Face has an interview with Ben Jones, another fantastic artist in the PR orbit, that’s as intense and brutally honest as it is absurdly comical:

After having been around the artworld for a hot minute, what are yours thoughts on it? You have made fun of it time and time again, and with just cause. Where is it right now, where do you think its going?

Any really good artist, or just any happy smart person can explain quickly and simply why things like fame, or the art world, or war are essentially meaningless and then also how these things attract young stupid white kids, or people with mental problems, or classic Americans as a result of the of these populations having low consciousness and/or intelligence. If you really are into the art world or TMZ or the Taliband it means you have a type of retardation.

But at the same time, since these populations have such a predictable and simplistic understanding of life, I think it is okay to inject good ideas and good energy into these retarded systems, so that we can help evolve the universe. And to do this you have to sometimes wear the right kind of shoes or try to think up clever answers to questions I guess. I don’t know, I think the next big thing in the art world is going to be The Beastie Boys.

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What has been greatly inspiring/uninspiring to you?

Love, jogging, Pantera, punching the air or bushes, yelling at a cat on the street “why are you looking me!” then coming home and cooking some baked beans and listening to the Adam Carolla podcast and then being like, hmmm, webmd.com…search…depression…hmmmmm oh look its 3 am, time to “go to bed”.

Green Apple is a rambling independent bookstore in San Francisco. As a kid I lived several blocks west of the bookstore, and spent a lot of time combing the Used Sociology section (full of racy books), the graphic novels and the Nancy Drew section. The store smelled like fresh envelopes and old dust. You could stand around reading for hours. It is still a great place to find books.

As with any mecca of specialists, Green Apple boasted an astoundingly knowledgeable staff. I remember one long afternoon spent browsing the SciFi paperbacks in search of Philip K. Dick novels. There wasn’t much I hadn’t read, so I asked a guy in a Green Apple shirt what he might recommend in Dick’s place. He paused, ruffled his beard, and cocked his head sideways to scan the SciFi titles.

“Arthur C. Clarke,” he decided, plucking a thin volume from the shelf. It cost one dollar. “Clarke is the poor man’s Philip K. Dick,” he explained, and rang me up without asking if I wanted the book. Which I did, of course. Of course I did.

We met an artist/bagmaker/embroiderer in Paris. Her website doesn’t show much, but here are some of the things she had in her bag that I loved. I’m trying to trade her something good for the Catcher in the Rye one.

Once upon a time, Brad Troemel was an acclaimed young Chicago photographer who maintained a personal website full of clever and visually striking images organized in the typical portfolio way. He also ran an incomparably shrewd and culturally attuned blog on the side, full of funny and sad musings on art, sharp interviews with his heroes and contemporaries, and best of all, grotesquely marvelous found photos and video culled from depressing MySpace pages and party-photo sites for all ages Miami night clubs. Both of those sites are now gone.

Troemel’s new home on the information superhighway is an collective Tumblr page called Jogging. It’s not completely clear who else is the group, and that seems to be how Troemel likes it. Rather than producing artwork in the format of tidy projects to be archived on individual artists’ static websites, Jogging’s ephemeral and anonymous format enables Troemel and his conspirator(s) to create an endless stream of new material updated regularly– freeing them from consciously curating their own work. It also allows the artists to explore different mediums without forcing them to adhere to specific labels. For instance, a photogaph of a banana resting precariously on a rusty nail can be an “installation,” while an image of a potato suspended from a wall by a band-aid can be a “sculpture.” There’s a tounge-in-cheek commentary on the conceits and expectations of contemporary art running throughout the work on Jogging, and it’s that sense of humor that allows Troemel to transcend the formal seriousness the blog’s artwork seem to be founded upon.

In spite of Troemel’s somewhat convoluted concept (see: the only statement of any kind on the site, an erudite interview with Troemel conducted by fellow Vice magazine shooter Maciek Pozoga), the work itself is indelibly fun. Who doesn’t like to see the unsettling texture of Gogurt out of its ordinary context? Who isn’t curious to read a full-length spec script for a brand new episode of Friends? I especially like the solemnly methodical video pieces on Jogging, like the conspicuously unreal eleven-second wonder A Renewed Interest in Craft: I Make a Basketball Shot, and Fountain, Rain, Sprinkler, in which we are treated to 41 seconds of a fountain and a sprinkler wasting gallons of water on an anonymous vast and well-manicured lawn during a rainstorm. Check out Untitled, a brief yet endearing video of a “performance” Troemel enacts on a slow day at the mall.

This is a Sour video shot by people all over the world on their web cams. The amount of pre-planning and choreography by the directors Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland, Magico Nakamura and Masayoshi Nakamura remotely from the other side of the world is of Michel Gondry level complexity.

 
Update: Check out our interview with the filmmakers and find out how they made this!

Nursery school, for most, is a grab bag of murky memories. Peanut butter and jelly on Ritz crackers, finger paint, the odd brawl over who got to drive the toy firetruck– these are the recollections we maintain from our earliest years as members of social society.

The kids at Beginnings might have a different set of memories when they grow up. A nursery school program that began in the fall of 1983 in an East Village apartment, Beginnings is known for its progressive educational philosophy and– best of all– its dedication to the principles of green living.

How does this manifest? Take The Materials Center, for one. Located in the attic of the nursery school, the Center is packed with recycled and found objects that kids can use for problem-solving, play and art projects. Some of the options include seed pods, pinecones, abandoned birds’ nests, keyboards, cardboard tubes, cellophane, lamp shades, clock parts, sponge foam, wood chips, spice jars, spools and egg cartons.

“From the perspective of young children, with their strong inclination towards symbolic play and their tendency to transform objects based on their own interests and imagination,” the school explains, “these materials are ripe with possibility.”

“Illustrating Pierre gave me the privilege of doing a grown-up book,” Maurice Sendak told his biographer and friend, Tony Kushner, “which I said I’d never do. It was my commentary on the book. I loved it so much–it didn’t need illustrating.” Saying he’d never intended to illustrate a grown-up book is almost an understatement. Throughout his career, the man behind Where the Wild Things Are had passionately decried the very concept of anyone illustrating classic adult novels. But Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities was an easy exception to the rule– it’s one of Sendak’s favorite books and the namesake of his aggresively ambivalent Nutshell Library character. When esteemed Melville scholar Hershel Parker asked Sendak to lend his artistic talent to a revised edition of the book, Sendak pulled out all the stops, hiring John Dugdale to help him create the extravagant William Blake-inspired illustrations for Pierre. Writes Kushner:

As he had done before starting work on Outside Over There, Sendak met with a photographer and models and had them assume poses based on sections of Pierre. John Dugdale, a remarkable photographer and a friend of Sendak’s, used for the session the old daguerrotype camera with which he shoots his exquisite, evanescent still lifes. To the anachronistic presence of Dugdale’s plate-and-bellows camera; to the intoxicating effect of Melville’s swoony prose, never more fuschia or fustian than in this novel; and to Sendak’s decision to use, as the true parent and original visual midrash on the story, the strange mannerist art of Blake, can be attributed the serioso extravagance of the compositions, of the illustrations themselves.

Dugdale was the perfect choice to help Sendak realize his vision. After gaining commercial success early on and working for clients like Bergdorf Goodman, Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren, Dugdale suffered a series of AIDS-related health problems in the early 90s including seven strokes and CMV retinitis, a devestating disease that causes blindness. Miraculously for Dugdale, he emerged out of the ordeal with one eye somewhat functioning. While he was no longer able to shoot high-paying ad campaigns, Dugdale still had enough vision left to concentrate on his very personal body of work, which is comprised of haunting still lifes and breathtaking portraiture.

There’s a delicacy to the aesthetic produced through Dugdale’s nostalgic methods (he often shoots in the antiquated cyanotype process) that seems to reflect the artist’s own fragile nature. His tasteful nude portraits are a reserved and reverent pean to the beauty of the human form– the perfect foundation for a marriage with Blake’s tortured soul and Sendak’s cynically optimistic smirk that begot the elegant illustrations in Pierre.

New Royal Billboard on La Brea.

Major fire behind the Getty.

We have to move out of the office soon. We’ve accumulated a lot of stuff.

Jared Steffensen’s installations and sculptures address divisions between public and private space, examine organic and artificial environments, and imagine the natural world overlapping the domestic. While the aesthetic– hyperreal woodland forest scenes– could easily lend itself to caustic kitsch, it doesn’t. Against all odds, it’s adorable. Steffensen’s work reminds us that good art doesn’t have to be cynical or detached: we have permission to sincerely appreciate a cotton-ball cloud, a tropical beach occupying a suburban living room, or a pair of cowboy boots sprouting a redwood forest.

The rubrics regarding food have traditionally been things like nutrition, deliciousness, and convenience. Advances in food science over the past fifty years, however, have added a new requirement in innovations: novelty. It is no longer enough for a food to taste good and store well. It must also raise eyebrows, stimulate the imagination and provoke spasms of delight.

These are foods like Go-Gurt, bacon chocolate, liquified cheese in a tube, Cap’n Crunch’s Oops! Choco Donuts cereal, energy bars flavored like carrot cake, and Gatorade in flavors like “Be Tough” and “No Excuses”. If the average grocery store carries 47,000 products, there’s a good chance that you’ll come across at least a few hundred items that will make you say “whoa”. It’s true.

On the higher end of the food spectrum there’s molecular gastronomy. And somewhere in the middle are Grāpple® brand apples, a Willy Wonka-esque product consisting of fresh crunchy apples that are engineered to taste like grapes. Yes. This is not fiction! Grāpple® brand apples launched nationwide in 2004, to the mixed delight and confusion of schoolchildren and novelty food bloggers everywhere. The company describes its product as “similar to biting into a very sweet Fuji apple, and then swishing your mouth with concorde grape juice.”

Being exceedingly curious about such a product, I contacted one of the owners and Head of Marketing and Media Todd Snyder for a quickie questionnaire:

Where did the idea for Grāpple brand apples come from?
The apple industry has been looking for new tastes for many, many years. But the only way of accomplishing this (when thinking ‘inside the box’) was to cross popular or unique apple varieties with other prominent apple varieties. This creates apples which have a tarter taste, sweeter taste, blend of sweet/tart, different textures, colors, etc., but doesn’t combine taste treats of non-apple flavors or products which may very well be outstanding in combination.

Think of the different types of Peanut Butter…crunchy, or creamy — but one day this flavor was combined with Chocolate, and this combination was amazing!

Thus, our R & D department at our family business, C & O Nursery of Wenatchee, Washington, began extensive testing of flavoring apples. While many items (different flavors, different apples), produce different combinations – some very good – the combination of Fuji with Grape was a truly outstanding taste experience — totally unique in the fruit/apple world.

Awesome! How are Grāpple brand apples made?
While there are many steps involved (I can’t go into specifics due to the patent application), the basic process involves bathing a specific type of apple for a specific period of time, under a strict set of other criteria. At no time is the apple injected or punctured in any way.

What’s your favorite way to eat a Grāpple?
Fresh out of the warehouse – nothing finer!

If you could combine the tastes of two other fruits, what would you combine?
I’ll say Pineapple with Coconut – cuz I like Pina Coladas! Great taste without the alcohol.