“Clocks, calendars, timetables and guidebooks assure us: there is an order to things,” begins Dr. Clock’s Handbook. “In Dr. Clock’s absurd world, on the contrary, things are not always what they seem. Logic leads to surprise, paradox reigns with looking-glass rules, things quickly slide from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
Indeed. A hefty book of thick many-colored pages, Dr. Clock’s Handbook is a collection of absurdist writing and thinking published by the legendary Redstone Press. Among those represented are Ed Ruscha, Flann O’Brien, Franz Kafka, Damien Hirst and David Shrigley. No kidding!
To page through the book is to feel a rush of mental pops and fizzes. Concrete teepees! Zebra stew! Nonsensical proverbs! (”Cold meat lights no fire”.) Every possible form of off-the-wall thinking is included in this compilation, which combines photographs with recipes, manifestos, diagrams, charts and essays. The editing is shrewd––there’s no filler––and the content is endlessly generative. You could use this as a creative manual for any type of project; just keeping a copy perched on your desk could induce boundary-pushing ideas to bubble up from the ether. Dr. Clock’s Handbook is one of those volumes that you might read every day and never get sick of. A desert island book, for sure.
Born in Shanghai in 1930, J.G. Ballard studied medicine at Cambridge and authored sixteen novels, getting his start as a die-hard Science Fiction scribe. His stories combine an impeccable politesse with a perversity reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s adult fiction. Some end with a twist. Others are written in such a tone of subdued weirdness as to make you shudder between paragraphs (with pleasure).
Anthony Burgess and Martin Amis were both fans of Ballard, and the writer was often compared in his lifetime to Saki, Borges, Kafka and Poe––not a shabby bunch. Amis wrote that “It is a solecism to talk about degrees of uniqueness (either you are or you aren’t), but Ballard was somehow uniquely unique.” The impression holds true after paging through a new volume that contains more than 1,000 pages of Ballard tales and weighs more than a large cat. This is one for the permanent collection.
Taken on their own, any one of these elaborate elements would be rad: the lovely branch sculptures, the fiberglass oak tree replete with fur-lined nook– to say nothing of the massive bunk-bed fortress. Put it all together and the experience is simply divine. These pictures cannot do justice to the outstanding amount of effort put into the Where the Wild Things Arepop-up shop– an effort that paid off in spades. And of course, Christian Joy’s insane costumes looked marvelous as the vibrant centerpiece of all the Space 1520 wildness.
Across the courtyard, Spike and Lance Acord took over the gallery, filling it with Sonny’s astonishing early sketches– the crucial seed of inspiration that blossomed into the film’s unique character design. Alongside those rad drawings, the gallery was covered in enormous, beautifully printed photos from a league of brilliant photographers Spike had invited to document the breathtaking bizarreness of Where the Wild Things Are’s production.
Sonny, meanwhile, made an entire gallery wall his canvas, composing a dreamy painting of Max and Carol taking a nap the night before the opening. Spike would like to note that he lent at least a couple of brush strokes to that massive mural. Really, it couldn’t have been done without him. Even Max Records stopped by the gallery, in town to shoot a rad-sounding robot-related short film. No relation to Spike’s recent robot short, but can one ever have too many robots? No. Of course not.
The Wild Things is a book by Dave Eggers adapted from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and based on the screenplay by Eggers and Spike. Got that? Cool.
In typical McSweeney’s fashion, The Wild Things is as much a tactile and visual experience as a literary one. A title silhouette of wolf-suited Max against a burgundy jungle background gives the volume a treasure-box feel, like something you might store beneath your pillow between chapters.
The novel is a cross between a children’s book and a book for adults, and the idea of a novelization originally belonged to Sendak, who suggested it to Eggers. Fittingly, the book is a pleasure to read: tender, colorful, and as richly imagined a work as you’d expect from Eggers. Or Sendak. Or––in this case, in some ways––both!
A pastel rainbow of brash, geometric lines are contaminating a disquietingly familiar landscape. Sharp streams of light are pouring down upon us now like extra-strength silly stream, firework trails fading into the night– precariously dangling fiber-optic cables transmitting the secret signals of an impotent global conspiracy. Jules de Balincourt’s artwork is fixated on depictions of an America on the verge of collapse, contrasting the dark drone of a disaster premonition with the relentlessly colorful spurts of his bright abstractions. Pitting nostalgic depictions of luxury vacation resorts against comically ominous text and the threat of a natural world in crisis, Balincourt’s work often feels like a smiling pastiche of political art– but you get the feeling that his concern for the future is entirely genuine. Terror and humor overlap in a bewitching duality of the kind that only a Frenchman living in New York could hope to produce.
Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964. The movie starring Gene Wilder (tag line: “It’s Scrumdidilyumptious!”) came out in 1971. A second version hit theaters in 2005. Which is all to say that the story of a loony inventor revealing his sugary trade secrets to a bright young kid holds a certain perennial appeal.
Part of this allure lies with the story’s masterful structure: part mini-bildungsroman and part fairy tale, it combines adventure, supernatural phenomena, moral perils and a grand journey. Some of the story’s greatness is also due to the inventive genius of Roald Dahl. And part of it––a large part––stems from the concept of magical candy. Who doesn’t love magical candy?
Katrina Markoff is a real-life Willy Wonka of sorts, if Wonka was a globetrotting woman who trained at Le Cordon Bleu. Markoff’s company, Vosges Haut-Chocolat, specializes in exotic candy bars meant to be nibbled in the tiniest of savoring bites (no Violet Beauregards allowed.) The Black Pearl bar––speckled with ginger, wasabi and black sesame seeds––tastes like the result of Wonka running wild in a sushi restaurant. The Habana bar is crunchy with plantain chips (Wonka-Goes-To-Cuba), and the Enchanted Mushroom bar, with Reishi mushrooms and walnuts, is like a chocolatey trip to the forest floor.
If it all sounds weird––well, it is. And that’s definitely not a bad thing.
Last year, Dallas who runs this blog here, gave me a book he was going to print, “An Awesome Book” He wanted to make a book to spread his optimisim and enthusiam for the world in the form of a picture book. I loved it.
The book is about having dreams. When it came time to find an illustrator, he couldn’t find one, so he drew it himself. And when it came time to find a publisher, he couldn’t find one, so he published it himself. And this is what his book is all about. The book has now sold thousands of copies all over the world and he is starting a foundation, “The Awesome World Foundation.” Watch the video as he tells the whole story. What a beautiful thing you made Dallas.
The billboards are going up, the character posters are hitting bus benches, the fun is about to begin. Yep, we’re less than a month away from the theatrical release of Where The Wild Things Are and everyone around here is getting pretty excited. In the coming weeks we will have a lot of great WTWTA related tidbits for you as well as updates on all of the screenings,parties, giveaways and generally rad stuff that will be happening in the lead up to the launch. And what better way to kick things off then with a party!?!
Our friends at Urban Outfitters Space 1520 are opening the doors to our Wild Things pop up shop this Saturday. The shop will feature Wild Things costumes (like the one pictured above) designed by Christian Joy, Wild Things merchandise, opening night DJ sets by Squeak E. Clean and all sorts of wild art and film goodies. A portion of the proceeds from the pop up shop will go to benefit 826 LA which is a really fantastic charity.
Spet. 19, 2009
1520 N. Cahuenga Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028
7pm-10pm
Art as food. Simple idea, brilliant execution. Photographer Megan Fizell has been cooking up exquisite edible adaptations of classic still lifes and sculptures, blogging her culinary experiments in glorious detail over at Feasting on Art. Under her capable hands, Van Gogh’s Red Poppies and Daisies becomes lemon poppyseed bread with blueberry honey butter. Fernando Botero’s juicy watermelon still life is a zesty watermelon margarita.
Even Jeff Koons gets the treatment, his cast-iron moustache sculpture naturally transforming into a crunchy mostaccioli cookie. While few of the resulting foods bear much resemblance to their fine art forebearers, the art-themed spin on this tidy cooking blog is a clever hook that keeps us coming back for more. And the mouth-watering photographs don’t hurt, either.
Subscribe to RSS