Thu Tran’s cooking show Food Party is simply eggcellent. From its humble beginnings as a video art project put together by a group of friends in Tran’s Ohio apartment to the airwaves of IFC, Food Party has only gotten crazier and more hilarious. It’s a sickeningly adorable puppet show spattered with moments of intense evil, coated with a sauce of irrational genius and deep fried in a vat of unicorn poo. Even the Grey Lady is hip to Thu Tran, for good reason– the hostess and of Food Party is a fascinating character, with a deliciously demented mind that seems to come up with brilliant ideas faster than even the rococo excesses of Food Party can accommodate. Perhaps her wild origin story can help us understand the way Tran thinks:
…Whenever [our father] would make a stew he would make us guess what animal we were eating. “It’s a goat!” “It’s a kangaroo!” “It’s a deer!” “It’s an alligator!” Normally my brothers and I would be wrong, but we didn’t care, we would eat it anyway. The weirdest thing might have been cubes of solidified pork blood, or fresh coagulated duck blood topped with its chopped innards, basil, and roasted nuts.
I didn’t realize it was weird until I would talk to my friends at school about it, and they would wrinkle their faces like ogres in total disgust. I would have to change the subject immediately to something like the kind of mousse and gel combo I had to use to make my 5th grade permed hair look lustrously wet and beautiful.
“Just when you’re thinking you’re intellectually alone in the world, something like n+1 falls into your hands,” wrote Jonathan Franzen in The New York Observer, and the description is a pretty accurate one.
n+1is a twice-yearly print journal devoted to the best writing and thinking of our time. Sounds like a robust claim, but then again, the magazine delivers big-time. Mingling all-star contributors with stellar unknowns, the magazine’s editors combine a sharp sense of humor with bone-crushing smarts and a flair for the unusual. Don’t be fooled by the magazine’s super lo-fi website––they keep it that way on purpose. The magazine itself is a beauty.
Past topics have included the concept of hype, a philosophy of pop music, the internet, hedge funds, neoliberals, dating, Bolaño, and a summer in Uzbekistan. No telling what the future will bring, but it ought to be good. Anyone who thinks that our country is getting dumber should get themselves a subscription, stat, and correct the impression.
Marc Jacobs Advertising 1998-2009 by Juergen Teller published by Steidl
When a book weighs more than five pounds you can really call it a book anymore, can you? A book is something to tote around in your back pocket and read on the bus or when waiting for the dentist. A book is not something that requires two people to carry it.
So we can’t really call Juergen Teller’s massive volume Marc Jacobs Advertising 1998-2009 a book. More like a tome. Or a treasure chest, really–– a trove of images featuring everyone from Kim Gordon to Cindy Sherman to Meg White to Harmony Korine, shot in Teller’s signature loony style. In terms of bang for buck, the book is a solid investment: you could spend days flipping through it and still discover details you hadn’t seen before. We don’t usually think of advertising as something to be preserved for the ages, but Teller’s collaboration with Marc Jacobs has always been much more than that.
Nothing is better than pulling on a spanking-new pair of socks. One of the key metrics of popularity in grade school was whether you had box-fresh socks on your feet every day; better yet if you had box-fresh novelty socks on your feet. Luckily, most of the sweetest socks of memory are somehow available in adult sizes, like these illusion high-top socks and gun-holster cowboy socks. So good you’ll want to throw your shoes in the rubbish bin.
Simplicity is best. Not sure if that’s a truism or just true, but it’s always a good axiom by which to live. We’re big fans of these notebooks for a few reasons: their clean colors, the artfulness of the letterpressed covers, the animals that look straight out of a Rudyard Kipling book, and the slim but sturdy size of the things.
A good notebook isn’t easy to find, particularly one with a sweet French fold and a couple of built-in ribbon bookmarks. This is one to tuck under your arm next time you go adventuring.
An abstract comic? What the hell is that? And more importantly, what’s the point of a comic if it doesn’t tell a story?
These are the questions a book like Abstract Comics raises right off the bat. Thankfully, it also answers them. The anthology, edited by Andrei Molotiu, covers the time period of 1967-2009 and is in all respects a Serious (capital S) volume. The cover is hefty, the pages are thick, the introduction is lengthy and–inhale deeply– there are footnotes.
In his intro, Molotiu offers the definition of abstract comics are “sequential art consisting exclusively of abstract imagery”. So far so good. The definition expands from here on to include “comics that contain some representational elements, as long as those elements do not cohere into a narrative.” Also good. R. Crumb is mentioned, as is de Kooning and Lichtenstein; abstract comics are compared to abstract film, and from there on out, it’s best to just flip through the book for examples of what Molotiu is talking about.
And there are some fine examples to discover. Damien Jay, Bill Boichel, Warren Craighead III and a host of other contributors are represented in a volume dedicated to a niche that most of us haven’t even conceived of. Worth a look, for sure, and maybe more.
This just in! The Where The Wild Things AreiPhone App just got approved. Download it and touch Carol’s furry belly to see what happens. It’s up at Apple now. It’s free!
If Maurice Sendak walks the line between mother-approved fantasy and unsettling human fears, Edward Gorey races past it, embracing everything gloomy, malicious, and nightmarish with unbridled glee. Naturally, the macabre situations and midnight-black humor of Gorey’s tomes for tots have upset more than a few mothers and librarians. His books, they claim, are for adults and shouldn’t be placed in the unsoiled hands of an innocent child.
But what kid wouldn’t appreciate the sinister rhyming alphabet in Gorey’s Grashlycrumb Tinies? “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears.” As Maurice Sendak once noted, “Ted Gorey is perfect for children; and that’s the saddest thing of all, that they [his books] weren’t allowed to be published that way.” Give your slightly strange nephew a Gorey book for Christmas and watch his face light up!
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