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

Clare Crespo AKA YummyClare has spent a good portion of her adult life figuring out new and exciting ways to get kids interested in cooking. She’s written books, she’s prepared meals, she’s given speeches and now she’s started a club. The Yummyfun Kooking Club is an online/real life combo-pack designed to stoke your kids out on the art of making grub. By becoming a member you and your junior chef will receive three awesome new recipes each month and all the tools you will need to prepare them. What’s more you can check the Yummyfun site for all sorts of updates, dvds, blog goings-ons and general all around kid-related goodness. Yummy? Yes. Fun? Also, yes.

San Francisco is a town of many pleasant associations. To start, there’s sourdough bread, Pier 7, 826 Valencia, the Embarcadero, fog, Keith Hufnagel, Barry McGee, burritos, bridges, hills, bookstores, FTC, Amoeba, and so forth. The list goes on.

That’s why it’s particularly exciting that Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly comes to us in the form of a faux Sunday-edition sized San Francisco newspaper, the fictionally titled San Francisco Panorama (above, a sample page). The issue features news dispatches, sports and arts coverage, comics from Chris Ware, Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman, three pull-out posters, a books section, a weekend guide and more. The best part? It will be sold on the streets of San Francisco. For those unlucky enough to live elsewhere, copies can be scored online.

Examining a Marc Bell drawing is like gaining entry into the mind of a psychotically talented and slightly autistic doodle-machine. It’s art that’s fun to look at but funner to snuggle up with, which is why we’re happy that the Vancouver artist has released a book of comics and artwork on drawn and quarterly. Hot Potatoe combines experiments in typography with comic stories and stand-alone assemblages, and at an imposing 272 pages, the book contains enough of Bell’s work— or “Fine Ahtwerks” as he calls it— to keep you armchair-traveling for hours.

It’s worth mentioning that Bell scored a glowing mention in the New York Times, where Ken Johnson compared his drawings and paintings to “medieval manuscript pages with collage and sculptural elements sometimes added” and praised the “wild shifts of space, time and scale.” Meanwhile, LA Weekly has called the artist “a riddle wrapped in a conundrum further wrapped in salty bacon.” Yummers!

Hey London, come out and ask Spike questions tomorrow! It’s going to be a blast!

Saturday, December 5
Apple Store Filmmaker Q and A

5.15pm – 6.00pm

Regent St, London W1
Hosted by Adam Buxton

The appeal of zines, mini-monographs and small books is hard to explain. There’s something about the intimacy and concreteness of a handheld object that can’t be replicated by art that hangs on the wall or books that roll off the presses in editions of ten thousand. Anyone who’s traded zines through the mail or gotten his fingers fuzzy with cut-n-paste grime knows the feeling.

A worthy addition to the medium comes in the form of Mike Paré’s Thought Forms, a limited-edition book released by San Francisco-based independent publisher Seems. Combining geometric abstraction with graphite drawings and portraits, the small book combines elements of the exquisite and the special with, well, the affordable. Described as “explorations of youthful transcendence and bliss through music, meditation, gurus, be-ins and skateboarding,” the book is certainly something to treasure.

We absorb art in different ways. There’s art that makes you grin, art that makes you gag, art that you meet with a perfectly neutral expression. Then there’s art that slaps you in the face with its sheer loony brilliance. Occupying this last category is Meredith Dittmar, a Portland-based sculptress who works with clay to produce tableaux as wacky and gorgeous as something out of a dream (or nightmare).

Influenced by a childhood of pet pigs, spy games and hay forts combined with a computer science education and a career in interactive design, Dittmar creates her work primarily with Premo polymer clay and wire. In a nutshell, it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. Read an interview with the artist at Fecal Face, then check out her website. Kinda makes you want to spend an afternoon inside her brain.

To celebrate the DVD release of Aaron Rose’s epic art documentary, Beautiful Losers, approximately a million rad people and entities including Amoeba Music and Oscilloscope Laboritories are coming together to host an all-out bash at Cinefamily in Los Angeles. Spike, Harmony Korine, Geoff McFetridge, and Mike Mills are just a few of the contributors to the special event, screening rare short films and exclusive interviews. Tickets are available here.

Introducing two new Wild Things renditions from the wilds of the web! First up (above), a pair of artfully-rendered stompers by the talented Evan Schultz.

Second (below) a Wild Things cake that is either ten-feet tall or photographed in such a way as to look GIANT. Either way, cool beans!

Perusing the website of designer Rob Matthews (whose zine, If Drawings Were Photographs, we posted about recently), I came across a boss illustrator named Trevor Burks, Matthews’ dear friend and the inspiration for an amusingly creepy art piece/t-shirt entitled I Miss Trevor Burks. Burks’ cleanly geometrical drawings seem to suggest the story of a generation growing up on a trajectory parallel to the increasingly complex polygons of their video game platforms. He also made an awesome mural depicting a dog licking a cat licking a gnome.

Perhaps the most intriguingly nostalgic series in Burks portfolio is Skate Myths, a set of drawings examining “personal mythologies surrounding growing up skateboarding in a small town.” Burks was kind enough to break down some of the influences behind these pieces for We Love You So:

The illustrations were based off of different environments we would skate as kids, and the characters were constructed with forms and colors from their surroundings with the idea that those were an integral part of our personalities. All of the gestures and interactions between the characters were formed from real situations too.

Every now and then when we skated in public, a small audience would gather; generally one or two younger kids who were horribly fascinated by what we were doing (despite how well we were doing it). In one illustration that character is shown as a kid with a grass and dirt colored head holding a football as he watches an older kid with a cement colored head skate in a parking lot.

Another thing we would do was alter our surroundings to make them more skate-friendly. It was so natural back then to put together some janky set-up to skate on. It might have been the juvenile carelessness of looking at the world of objects exclusively for their form and how we could use it to our advantage, but it was creation at its purest and we loved it. As children, our attempt to rationalize only went so far, we had to fill the rest of our time with our emotional response to the environment.

Looking for something to pore over as you sip your cocoa by the fireplace this winter? Try a spell with Geoff McFetridge’s brand-new Recent Work, a beautiful 16-page collection of Where The Wild Things Are-related work that the artist completed for his old pal Spike, with the influences of Sonny Gerasimowicz (who invented the creatures for the film) and the Art Direction of K.K. Barrett.

Perfect for bookshelf or xmas stocking alike.