Dr. Dog has 2 songs floating around from their new album Shame, Shame due out April 6th from Anti. They always seems to take what they do best and just add a little bit to it each record which in turn never lets me down.
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John D’Agata learns, in the opening pages of his new book, that las vegas means “the meadows” in Spanish. The place was named so in 1829 by the pioneers who settled the 335,000 acres of valley, and it is the central misconception that underlies About A Mountain.
Another fact about Las Vegas: it is the fastest growing metropolitan area in America. D’Agata begins his book as he helps his mother move to the city, carrying books and a cat and boxes into her new home not far from Lake Mead, the artificial lake formed by Hoover Dam that provides 97% of the city’s water supply.
The author learns, while he’s in town, of a plan to store nuclear waste inside a patch of federal land called Yucca Mountain, located ninety miles north of Las Vegas. Not surprisingly, this plan has come under debate. Also not surprisingly, people have voiced vehement opposition to it. The half-life of the toxic waste proposed to be stored in Yucca Mountain is an estimated 28 million years. Take a minute to absorb that.
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About A Mountain is a work of such masterful reporting and whoa-dude moments that it makes for the most contradictory kind of page-turner: D’Agata evokes curiosity, suspense and dread in such equal measures that you almost don’t want to know what happens next. Except, of course, that you do.
Catch a taste of the book at The Believer, the real shebang is here.
The endless stream of awesomeness that eminates from Julieta Venegas is staggering. From her early ’90s musical infancy as the accordianist in ska-punk band Tijuana No! to the multi-instrumental force to be reckoned with she has blossomed into, Venegas has brought us a constant stream of eminently catchy and deceptively complex pop. Her latest LP, Otra Cosa, boasts a sublime single called “Bien o Mal.” It’s a song that typifies the sunny-melancholoy dialectic that runs throughout the singer’s work. Agustin Alberdi’ gloriously gaseous clip for the song can be found below, and for extra radness, revisit the video for classic Julieta jam “Seria Feliz.”
Joseph Lobato of TOLA! (not a made up word, just an acronym for “Take Over L.A.“) made this majestic little video of Hernan Montenegro and his bike. Really, I’m just posting a video of someone riding a bike. But it’s such a blissfully visceral video. Doesn’t this just look like fun? Let’s go ride bikes.
If you’ve ever read anything by David Foster Wallace, or if you’ve ever read anything about David Foster Wallace, you’ll know first and foremost that his style and his genius were unmatched in the modern era of “less is more literature.” Say what you will about the practical application of implementing hundreds of pages of footnotes to help broaden the understanding of your story, or layering characters so deep that they often fold in upon themselves, the steps that he took to advance the cause of what great writing can be will no doubt still be a topic of debate on college campuses and coffee shop sofas for decades to come. While DFW left us with only a handful of titles to his name (each one a delightful gem) he also left a substantial library of notes and notebooks. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired the archive and has been diligently digitizing the papers one by one so you too can have a flip through the (virtual) pages.
The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace’s books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace’s college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters; teaching materials and books.
Highlights include handwritten notes and drafts of his critically acclaimed “Infinite Jest,” the earliest appearance of his signature “David Foster Wallace” on “Viking Poem,” written when he was six or seven years old, a copy of his dictionary with words circled throughout and his heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.
Wallace’s materials at the Ransom Center will reside alongside the papers of contemporary writers such as DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Doris Lessing and James Salter, as well as those of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.
Wallace’s publisher Little, Brown and Company is donating its editorial files relating to the author to the Ransom Center. Wallace worked with Little, Brown and Company beginning in 1993.
Partners & Spade is a store-cum-gallery-cum-studio-cum-performance space in Lower Manhattan established by Andy Spade and Anthony Sperduti. How to describe the storefront? It’s a bit like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse for creative adults— a place where you can look at art, browse and buy neat things, and generally soak up the conceptual shenanigans of the two founders.
Along with hosting art shows, the two are fond of hosting one-shot events in the vein of ping-pong tournaments, avant-garde preschool classes and, for two memorable weekends, a fanciful French bakery with treats baked in-house by artist Will Cotton. The macarons were impeccable.
It’s to our great delight that Spade and Sperduti have recently launched a website worthy of their space. If you’re not in the neighborhood, an online tour makes a fitting substitute for the store experience. Be sure to check out the custom fixed gear bike, the backdated confidence trophies, and the Stacy Wall skate deck!
Stop, breathe, and take a moment to appreciate how rad bugs are. Let’s send waves of positive thought about insects into the Universe. Here in the English-speaking world, where they are semiotically bound to concepts of destruction and annoyance, bugs could use some respect and affection. Not so much in Japan, as we learn in Jessica Oreck’s dazzling documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo.
…While people of many other countries fear all manner of creepy crawlies, the Japanese love and respect them: they’re sold live in vending machines and department stores; they’re the subject of the No. 1 videogame MushiKing; and a single beetle recently sold for $90,000. Insects have been an integral part of the centuries-old traditions of the country, once described as the “Isle of the Dragonflies.”
The film’s gorgeous imagery links people with the strength of beetles, the music of crickets, the magic of fireflies and the endless colors of butterflies. Using bugs like an anthropologist’s toolkit, the film uncovers Japanese philosophies that will shift Westerners’ perspectives on nature, beauty, life, and even the seemingly mundane realities of their day-to-day routines.
Take the rare opportunity to reflect on the elegance of the microscopic and watch this film. It’s playing tonight at Cinefamily in L.A., for one night only. The screening will also feature a Q&A with Oreck.
Watch the official video for it above and stream the entire record by going to thelocalnatives.com. They just earned a “best new music” over at Pitchfork and are hitting the road starting this month headed all the way into June so be sure to check them out.
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Kim Gordon designed it, Chloë Sevigny worked the runway, Mike Mills drew the logo, Kathleen Hannah pimped it out, and Spike helped run the fashion show. X-Girl was a perfect storm of creative energy in 1994, and here’s the very Nineties video to prove it:
If that’s not enough nostalgia for you, how about a Vice Magazine photo shoot with Chloë showing off the X-Girl line? Still begging for more? Here’s Vice’s interview with co-designer Daisy Von Furth, where she talks about styling some “cute kid” named Mark Ronson in a photo shoot for Spike’s Dirt magazine, and mentions that Chloë will soon be starring in some movie written by “this kid Harmony Korine.” Also: Doc Martens, flannel and black skinny jeans are so out in ‘94. Which, if I’m predicting the trend cycles correctly, means you’d be wise to invest in some ringer tees and vintage X-Girl before the kids on Gossip Girl start sporting A-line minis.
If you were able to magically return to your ten-year-old self and make a list of all the things that fascinated you, it would probably look like a diagram of Radio-Guy’s obsessions. We mean this as the highest possible compliment.
Radio-Guy is Steve Erenberg, who collects and displays old anatomical models of the brain, dental mpression tray wall hanging displays, portable operating chair circa World War I, old radio batteries, vintage space-age looking televisions, steam engines, salesman samples, old x-ray tubes and tons of other stuff. Oh, the best part? YOU CAN BUY IT ALL! The result would look like the dream bedroom of a very precocious and science-minded 19th-century kiddo.
If the phrase “nickel-plated” revs your engine, consider a tour through the site. And start saving your pennies.
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