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

The lovelorn robots from I’m Here have taken over the window display at Opening Ceremony’s New York boutique! Amazing artist Meryl Smith, who created some of the props for the film, designed the installation using original costumes, props and robot parts from I’m Here. Looking for a belated Valentine’s gift? Opening Ceremony’s got you covered with three rad double-sided I’m Here flipbooks:

Want to get some really rad crafty items made by some of your favorite artists and musicians and help out a great cause while you are doing it? Of course you do! WLYS best bud Binki Shapiro has organized some of her contemporaries to craft a bunch of one of a kind items to be auctioned of online on March 15th to help raise money for the Haitian earthquake relief efforts. It’s called Crafts for a Cause and here’s what Bink has to say about it:

My name is Binki Shapiro, and I play in the band Little Joy. In an effort to raise money for the relief efforts in earthquake-devastated Haiti, I’ve rallied a bunch of artists to contribute custom-made artwork — t-shirts, tote bags and other personalized items — for the Crafts For A Cause auction. All proceeds will go to Artists for Peace and Justice, an amazing charitable organization founded by my dear friend Paul Haggis. To learn more about them, visit www.artistsforpeaceandjustice.com

The list of items and participants is growing daily and so far includes Spike’s drawings, Conor Obert’s guitar, Natalie Portman’s ballet slippers, and all kinds of other goodies from Sia, Vampire Weekend, The Stokes and many many more. What a great idea!

Long time friend of WLYS Leo Fitzpatrick is having an opening this weekend at half gallery in NYC. In true Fitzpatrick fashion the above flier pretty much has nothing to do with the type of art being showcased which are some great collages laid out from the carcasses of old paperback novels. If you are in the area you should definitely stop in!

We first introduced you to Kansas City, MO’s Capybara in our Sound Advice: The Worlds Best Ever mixtape (it was one of our favorite songs in that mix.) If you didn’t catch them in that here’s another tune to get you familiar with them. Their record Try Brother was one of my most played records of 2009 and I hope you enjoy it.

Most recently they scored the movie One Too Many Mornings that premiered at this years Sundance. You can hear those the songs and pick it up for yourself by going here.

Learn more about the band at http://www.capybaramusic.com

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It’s no easy feat to take an interesting photo of the unadorned American landscape. Ansel Adams kinda trademarked that shtick a long time ago. But Anna Shelton’s hushed paeans for the fertile Oregonian wild make magic in our eyes. These images are lonely, but not melodramatic. Reverent but not fawning.

Shelton, a musician with roots in Florida and Ohio, takes plenty of great photos that aren’t just trees and nature. Time-ravaged buildings, old cars, and blasé animals of all kinds play a big part in her visual language, but these quiet landscapes are perhaps her most breathtaking.

Eat When You Feel Sad by Zachary German is a novel about watching television, feeding a cat, microwaving veggie burgers, Gchatting, riding a bike, drinking orange juice, wishing for a girlfriend, listening to music, brushing one’s teeth and getting mustard on one’s clothes. It’s written with the kind of exacting detail we usually associate with instruction manuals or a child’s recollection of a dream, although it’s actually neither.

Tao Lin rhapsodizes on the book’s back cover: “Moving, funy, emotional and—in a revolutionary way—both highly-readable and avant-garde, Eat When You Feel Sad excites me very much in terms of literature and also life itself.”

Novels, as they say, can come in many forms.

Oh hey look, we have a new favorite artist of all time.

Johnny Ryan is the pen-wielding psycho genius behind Angry Youth Comix and a man who lists his interests as eating Teddy Grahams in Garfield slippers whilst watching Trading Spaces. His series Angry Youth Comix is a hard-to-describe chronicle of characters named Loady McGee, Sinus O’Gynus, Blecky Yuckerella, Boobs Pooter, and Sherlock McRape (among others) practicing various forms of juvenile pranksterism. “Raunchy” doesn’t quite go far enough in describing the content of Ryan’s comic oeuvre, but it will have to do here. (Hide it from the kids?)

Ryan’s bio notes that “As a child, he had a Prince Valiant hairdo, orthopedic shoes, and was occasionally chased with BB guns by neighborhood bullies.” If this isn’t the biography of a genius, we don’t know what is!

Around here we don’t do much posting about the wave of internet auteurs who have been multiplying in number on what seems to be a daily basis. Not because we aren’t psyched on them, but because it’s honestly hard to keep track. The blessing/curse of all this free media is that there are only so many video mashups you can ingest in a given seven-day period before they all start to blur together. Today though, we’d like to introduce you to Everything. It’s a web-sized sampler platter of contemporary video savants, some you might know, some you might not. All are weird, off-kilter, and 100% office-cubicle-lunch-break ready. Above is Episode 4. Start there and work your way backward.

Do you find your world bland and uninspiring? Is there a widespread dearth of eye-catching subjects to photograph in your normal, everyday life? Matthieu Lavanchy’s work reminds us that you can always just make something up. You can literally make something beautiful to take a picture of, right now, and all you need is some cardboard and soiled mattresses and wood scraps and moldy carpet.

Lavanchy, who is only 23 and already amassing accolades galore, is a New Yorker by way of Switzerland and a pal of Tiny Vices superstar Tim Barber. He photographs meticulously crafted sculptural installations and otherworldly interiors that exist in no other world than the image itself. These are magical nowhere places that seem to spring straight from Lavanchy’s sneaky subconscious to remind us of life’s terrifyingly endless possibilities.

How can you not suppress a chuckle when faced with Art Vandelay, a multipurpose art showcase named after George Costanza’s alter-ego on Seinfeld? Giggles aside, the cleverly-named project offers a mine of fresh talent that’s worth trolling through.

Along with monographs, artist’s books and magazines, Art Vandelay offers a series of well-selected (and reasonably priced) prints by Anna Giertz, Anthony Burrill, Colin Henderson, Alex Bec and more. If you’re looking to fill some blank walls or decorate a clubhouse, this is your spot.