“Kiosk” is such a satisfying word to say. Try it. “Kiosk”. That would make a really nice name for a dog.
Technically, a kiosk is a little booth that sells inexpensive consumables. In the case of KIOSK, it’s a store that offers a range of products displayed exhibition-style and sourced from all over the globe. According to the store’s manifesto, “We feature the things that generally go unnoticed, products created by not one personality but objects that are the result of local aesthetics and needs. Their value is sometimes hard to see in today’s market.”
Sounds good enough on paper, but in practice the theory is frankly awesome. Currently KIOSK is focusing on Portugal, and the available goods range from Adufe Drums made of goat skin to playing cards from the oldest card producer in Portugal, Litografia Maia. Each item is accompanied with a short history that has the effect of deepening its charm. Scrolling through the website has the effect of a stimulating micro-vacation— if you’re stuck at work, it makes a great alternative to the real thing!
As we mentioned last week the online premiere of Spike’s latest short “I’m Here” has been making a major splash. While the robot love story is available for a free screening every hour online on a first come first served basis, it has also been making its rounds in the real world.
The London premiere at 14 Bike Co drew a great crowd, as did the recent Paris screening which you can read about at Dazed Online. The film will be making its way through Europe playing at outdoor venues (see the freight container pictured above) and with any luck should be hitting the small screen here in the US quite soon. Stay tuned!
Shopping is only fun if you can find something truly worth spending money on, and that task is a tough one to undertake these days. Luckily, Art in the Age exists as a perfect antidote to mall fatigue.
The site takes its title (and philosophy) from on an essay by the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, who mourned the loss of “the aura” of objects as a consequence of mass production lessening the spiritual value of its commodities. (You might have to read that sentence twice—we’re tryna distill an entire essay into a sentence, so, you know. Some stuff is lost in translation. The full essay is here, scholars!)
ANYHOW, Art in the Age sees Benjamin’s essay as the spark of inspiration to form a beautiful collection of well-crafted and aura-filled products. Some examples include letterpressed notecards, zines, this incredible Edgar Allen Poe alliteration print, books by Elizabeth Peyton and so much more. Start emptying your piggy bank!
God bless the internet. Nothing puts us in a better mood, really, than locating incredible labor-of-love websites that provide endless hours of fascination. The Shorpy Historic Photo Archive is one such website.
With the motto “ALWAYS SOMETHING INTERESTING”, Shorpy is a vintage photography blog collecting high-quality images from the 1850s through the 1950s. The only unifying thread is that the images be interesting. That’s it! By this logic it’s possible to come upon a Howard University home-ec classroom circa 1925, a burning sugar cane field in Puerto Rico, civil war smokestacks, and a whole category devoted to pretty girls throughout the ages.
The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago in Jefferson County, Alabama. The origin story is here. We think the internet can claim victory, now.
It’s here, just in time for the weekend! We first brought you word of Spike’s new movie last August, when it was still just a “secret robot short film.” After the Sundance premiere in January, Nieves released a zine, Opening Ceremony designed flipbooks and a window display, and now finally Absolut has posted I’m Here in its entirety online. Go check out the robot romance if you’re 21 or older, and stay tuned for even more radness surrounding this lovely short!
Direct from the shimmering ether of a distant galaxy, Mia Doi Todd’s voice visits Earth to humble us humans. It is a voice that exudes an aura of fascinating fragility underlined with titillating tempestuous tones.
Pairing Todd’s velvet vocals with director Michel Gondry’s whimsical aesthetic brilliance, the music video for “Open Your Heart” is a feast for the senses. With the help of a marching band from Riverside, a carefully considered wardrobe color palette, and the beautifully bland Los Angeles cityscape, Gondry’s video accompanies as much as it elevates the dreamlike tune. We’re a month or two late for the frenzy of blog postings about this clip, but even if you’ve already watched it, take the time to revisit Gondry and Todd’s casual genius.
Tiny Furniture is filmmaker Lena Dunham’s second feature film (her first, Creative Nonfiction, premiered at SXSW in March of last year). The premise is this:
22-year-old Aura returns home to her artist mother’s TriBeCa loft with the following: a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her Youtube page, a boyfriend who’s left her to find himself at Burning Man, a dying hamster, and her tail between her legs.
What Aura proceeds to go through is kind of a like a second puberty. (A puberty of the mind?) Played by Dunham (who also wrote and directed the film), you can catch Aura’s misadventures at SXSW this year—screening times here.
Dunham is a woman of many (possibly a billion) talents: she makes short films, she writes, she blogs, she creates comic web series(es) about goofy aspirational art stars…and more!
Founded in 1959 by Richard Coyne and Robert Blanchard, the Journal of Commercial Art was the first U.S. magazine printed by offset lithography. Devoted to graphic design, illustration and advertising, the journal was published by Stanford University Press (it still exists, but is called Communication Arts, and, well, the covers aren’t as good-looking.)
In celebration of the amazing early covers, Words and Eggs and Silver Lining have posted a selection of covers from the early 1960s. Have you ever seen covers so beautiful? Why don’t magazines still look like this? (Hint hint.)
Francois Truffaut is widely remembered for his brilliantly uncanny exploration of childhood in The 400 Blows, but a lesser known picture called L’argent de poche (alternately known as Small Change or Pocket Money) may be his true masterpiece of the genre. Presenting a vast array of vignettes about youth, Truffaut weaves together a joyously mischievous slice of life triumph. Small Change bursts with color and features a cast of wonderfully natural non-actors in a range of epic moments “from the first bottle to the first kiss,” as Truffaut explained it.
The Film Desk has graciously re-released the film with a beautiful restored print that’s currently touring North America. It’s playing in Los Angeles at Cinefamily this Sunday, and then heading to Wisconsin, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Ohio. Check out the full list of cities and dates, and don’t miss a chance to see this sparkling film on the big screen!
San Francisco-based painter Ashlee Ferlito started out at Yale as a biology major but switched to art— a move that we can’t imagine happens very often within the ivory tower. Ferlito’s love of science abides, though, even as it intertwines with the influences of painting masters like Velasquez and Goya. The artist’s subjects have lately tipped towards animals (horses, swans, bulls, diabolical dogs, butterflies) and the cosmos (Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter), all rendered in glowing oils.
Best of all, Ferlito blogs about her painting endeavors in fascinating detail. You can watch the paintings evolve as Ferlito fiddles with them, fixing this and that and generally perfecting the images (”In this piece I was aiming for bark-like explosive feeling, an oppositional energy outward, so after it was pointed out to me that it seemed like the dog on the left was being stabbed I went back into the painting to try to rectify the situation.”)
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