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

It’s that magical time of year again! The Believer’s annual film issue has hit newsstands, and this time it includes an interview with Harmony Korine (”Goldfish swallowers, pygmies—to me, that’s the greatest thing in life”), an essay on seven unproduced screenplays by famous intellectuals, an interview with Charlyne Yi, a dispatch about Iranian cinema (”Watching Shrek in Tehran”—you can read that one online here) and, best of all, a DVD featuring six short films by Karpo Godina, a Yugoslavian filmmaker whose early short films are collected on DVD for the first time here.

Plus more! So much more. Scope out the table of contents here, get stoked, and buy yourself a copy or two.

It’s hard to summarize the work of about someone as varied and un-pin-downable as Paul Sahre (pronounced “say-er”), but here’s a stab at it. (Deep breath.)

First, Sahre is an illustrator and graphic designer who contributes to places like Good Magazine and the New York Times, among many others. He also designs book covers for Rick Moody, Chuck Klosterman and Ben Marcus, lives in New York and, in his own words, “finds comfort in the fact that we are hurtling thru space.”

Sahre’s brilliance lies in the fact that his illustrations—always surprising, always ingenious—manage to broaden and deepen whatever text they accompany, no matter how disparate the topic. An OpEd about fixing Washington? No problem. A book that makes the case for vegetarianism? Why, yes. And so forth.

And last but not least, here’s a nice little video of Sahre talking about Old Spice, beauty and G.I. Joe.

Discovering Shary Boyle’s work is like biting into a pretty little pastry, only to realize, as your taste buds tingle and your mouth starts to water, that what you’ve actually sunk your teeth into is a sumptuous three-layer cake.

Maybe you’re been beckoned by her vibrant yet vexing illustrations. You surf to her website and take them all in, reveling in these seemingly sacrosanct tragicomic scenes from some distant galaxy’s breathtaking fluorescent apocalypse. An instinct in the back of your mind warns you to run, RUN– but it’s too late: you’re been ensnared in Boyle’s wild world. Next it’s her sculptures that catch your eye, those oddly silent, secret-filled sculptures, and before you know it you’ve discovered her creeping, carefully understated paintings. And what’s this– she does live projection? Yes, you discover, she tours with Toronto musician Doug Paisley in a group called Dark Hand and Lamplight, accompanying folk singing stallion Will Oldham to taverns in Big Sur where she lights up an overhead projector and makes magic with entrancing illustrations.

Once you’ve digested all the sickly sweetness and savory sensations of Shary Boyle’s work, a deep satisfaction settles in your belly– followed swiftly by an insatiable craving for more.

As beautiful as the album cover above Luke Temple has taken his 4 track project and enlisted some more musicians to take his music to the next level. This first single “Collector” from Here We Go Magic’s new album Pigeons which will be available June 8th on Secretly Canadian (one of my favorite labels) and is his most driving upbeat track I’ve heard yet from him so far.

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You can get an MP3 of this track by visiting the Secretly Canadian site.
Listen to more at Myspace.

Swiss-born artist Clarina Bezzola mainly wears the hats of sculptor and performance artist, but lately we’ve become fixated on her psyched-out kooky drawings and gouache paintings. These portray a world of trash heaps and severed fingers, multi-armed women and anonymous human bodies into abstraction. Bezzola is a pro at painting the most grotesque elements in a light hand that renders them deeply engrossing, if not exactly pretty.

The artist opened her most recent show of sculpture with an Albert Einstein quotation: Every Belief in Separateness is an Illusion! and proceeded to explore that liminal space between interior and exterior worlds with gnarled tree stems and more severed fingers. It is teh radness.

Durr, is there anything more scintillating than the phrase “renegade graphic designer”? Usthinks not. Ji Lee, an exemplar of the term, fashions intricate, miniature interiors that he terms “parallel worlds” and—the best part!—installs them on the ceilings of homes and corporate offices. “People don’t look at the ceiling anymore,” Lee writes on his website. “It’s a dead space. So I wanted to bring a small wink to this space.”

In this week’s edition of T Magazine Ji Lee explains further. “I’m interested in exploring areas like the back of business cards and ceilings— why are they left empty?” Indeed, why?

One of Lee’s parallel worlds contains a cherry-red electric guitar, psychedelic Hendrix poster and potted plant. Another features a cozy leather club chair, Oriental rug, and newspaper folded atop an ottoman. Lee ’s project combines the innate appeal of small objects with a whimsical absurdity and the vaguely sci-fi notion of universes that coexist in secret. Please enjoy.

Shane Jones’ novel Light Boxes opens with a beautiful little epigraph by Joseph Wood Krutch which reads:

“The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.”

We can all agree on that, no? The snippet foretells the book’s central conflict, which is a battle against the month of February. Only “month”, in this case, is a misnomer: the February of Light Boxes is an endless season of bleakness, a metaphysical state, a spiritual personage, sort of, and an oppressor above all.

Not to get anatomical here, but the form and the language of Jones’ novel are important to think about, because both are unusual. The book is divided into segments of a few paragraphs or a few sentences, and the prose will splinter freely into a recipe, a list, a monologue, a catalog or a cryptogram without warning. Somehow the transitions feel seamless, like reading the direct transcription of a story told by someone with no regard for conventions but an instinctive grasp of narrative.

Don’t want to spoil the plot—it’s delicate!—but trust us that this pocket-sized treasure is worth devouring.

The floodgates have opened and bidding has begun on Binki Shapiro’s awesome auction Crafts for a Cause! All proceeds will go towards the critically underfunded earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. An impressive assortment of artists and musicians have crafted more than 60 unique objects for exclusively for this auction, and now’s your chance to get your hands on them.

Where else can you get a pair Kubrick’s rare Daft Punk toy robots custom-decorated by the band? How about the Taylor guitar that Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste learned to play on? A Pentax camera pimped out by Drew Barrymore? And how about some one of a kind drawings by Spike? Crafts for a Cause has it all, and the money goes to a great cause! So go put in your bids!

The great thing about zines is that they encourage the dissemination of unusual enthusiasms. Or collections of unusual enthusiasms. Dan Murphy is an Illinois-based enthusiast of horticulture and music and biking who is currently in grad school studying green roof technology (COOL!) and produces a steady stream of zines, our favorite of which is his recent issue of The Juniper.

Issue #12 includes writings on happiness, a recipe, discourses on microbes and emergency preparedness and bike-riding. And more! If you ever wanted to get a closer read on the type of person who knows the difference between Mad-Dog Skullcap and Baikal Skullcap, here’s your chance.

We know F.Scott Fitzgerald for a few things: his preppy coming-of-age tale This Side of Paradise, his coining of the term “Jazz Age”, and his authorship, lastly, of everyone’s favorite tale of doomed romance, The Great Gatsby. But there’s another Fitzgerald, too! The one who wrote a brutally realistic novella with political aims and a rather dark mood, called May Day, and published it in July 1920 in exchange for $200.

As part of its awesome series The Art of the Novella, Melville House is reissuing the 94-page classic with a bubblegum-pink cover that is probably the best use of irony we’ve seen thus far in 2010.

Another novella to check out in a series full of treasures is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Sherlock Holmes mystery published in 1901 shortly after the author returned from a stay in South Africa. It tells the story of a wealthy landowner (found dead, naturally), a lust for revenge, a family curse, a contested inheritance and a freakishly scary dog (possibly diabolical!)

Anyone with a fondness for clues and sleuthing will dig The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is not only classic Holmes but more of it, too. Read it out loud to a friend for maximum shiver-inducing effectiveness.