BRAHMS is the new project of Brooklyn based Cale Parks and Eric Lyle Lodwick (Vulture Reality.) I first discovered Cale Parks through his percussion, piano and vibraphone duties in the band Aloha (who just released a new record yesterday.) Since that band he’s released two solo records and played with one of my Ohio favorites White Williams.
BRAHMS are fairly new, have only recorded a 4 song demo, played a slew of shows around New York the last few months and are playing somewhere around 10 times at SXSW in the next week but somehow seem like they’ve been around a long time.
You can grab their 4 song demo (for free and that I listened to non stop all weekend) from the band by signing up to their mailing list at their website. Visit them on myspace/facebook, follow them on twitter or visit their blog. (they’ve got it all covered.)
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If you haven’t bought yourself a copy of Sam Lipsyte’s new book The Ask, now would be the time to run out and do it. Failing that, ask around amongst your friends and see if anyone else has scored a copy yet. Very few books qualify as smart, pee-your-pants funny, and deadly relevant all at the same time. In this regard, Lipsyte hits the bullseye.
Witness, for proof, this head-over-heels rave from Lydia Millet in the New York Times Book Review, wherein she described the book as one of very few “half-crippled, doughnut-gobbling man-apes of the literary world,” which clearly means something incredible, even if we’re not sure precisely what it is.
Lipsyte, who also wrote the great and hilarious novel Homeland, will be reading at New York’s McNally Jackson bookstore on Tuesday, March 16th. His work will also appear in the forthcoming issue of n+1 Magazine. Dude’s all over the place, and we love it!
Being a talented painter of a certain kind living in New York in the 1980s, Donald Baechler was lumped in with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf as a constituent of a certain downtown art scene. In reality, his work didn’t share many concerns with the graffiti-influenced aesthetic of his peers. Baechler’s singularity may or may not have something to do with his longevity, which is impressive. Clicking through his early paintings into the later flower paintings, crowd portraits, and sculptures is a trip in the best sense of the word.
Take a peek at the artist’s studio here, and check out this mini-profile in the T Magazine blog, in which the artist reveals as inspirations his striped socks, backyard, and three de Kooning drawings which he found on eBay for fifty bucks each. Score!
Tremendously tasteful and refreshingly warm, Humberto Leon and Carol Lim are the truly rad duo behind one of the world’s most innovative and chic international boutiques: Opening Ceremony. Humberto and Carol are no strangers to Spike. They recently celebrated his new short film, I’m Here, with an elaborate window display and a series of fabulous flipbooks, and they lovingly paid homage to Where the Wild Things Are with a remarkable line of clothing (and wolf suits!) inspired by Max and his wild pals.
Now Spike is turning the tables on this delightful pair of creative masterminds in a two-part documentary for VBS. Check it out and join us in relishing the tubular team’s eerily oracular telepathic connection, freewheeling fun-fueled business strategy, and Carol’s uncanny ability to cry on command. Plus, exclusive footage from the party for Opening Ceremony’s brand new store at the Ace Hotel, featuring a dazzling duet by Dirty Projectors and Solange Knowles!
“Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers,” begins the jacket copy on each edition of Melville House’s “The Art of the Novella” collection. It’s true: despite the pretty name (say it out loud: “no-vell-a”), novellas are a chronically ignored form of literature. Many of the thirty slim novellas released by Melville House are available for the first time in book form, which is surprising considering that the authors include Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Cervantes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Balzac and Leo Tolstoy.
But then, novellas are sort of like the tweens of the literary world: potentially flighty, awkwardly positioned, easy to underrate. Luckily, the publisher has culled stellar examples of the form and printed them up with minimalist covers available in color schemes that range from “1960s rec room” to rainbow sherbet. Each one is thin enough to fit in a coat pocket but fat enough to provide more than a few hours of reading. The volumes make design objects as satisfying as they do reads, and that’s saying a lot.
Two of the best are written by Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno. The former novella, written in 1853, tells the tale of Bartleby (whom The New Yorker referred to as “the proto slacker”), a man who works assisting wealthy men with their business on Wall Street until he decides, one day, that he’d rather not work, or do much of anything. Benito Cereno was written two years later and focuses on the true-life story of a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish merchant ship in the late 18th century. If you’ve been meaning to read Moby-Dick forever—and who among us isn’t?—this pair of novellas would be the perfect appetizer to nibble on while you build up the necessary appetite for that epic. Happy reading!
Curious Pages is a blog devoted to exhuming old children’s books and and sharing their aesthetic peculiarities with the world. Succinct explanations accompany shiveringly detailed scans for a result that will prompt wistful sighs of nostalgia and explosions of good cheer in about equal doses.
You’ll want to collect some supplies around you before you start scrolling through the site, because you’ll be scrolling for a while. Hot cocoa, a glass of water, and a nourishing snack of some kind should do it. We’re posting a few samples above, but the full effect of the collection is best experienced by diving right in.
“Hey, do you want to draw a picture together?” That’s the core question of Sumi Ink Club, and of course you do. You musn’t hold back. Embrace your desire to be a part of this ongoing two-dimensional performance piece, pick up a brush, and join the club. Founded by Luke Fishbeck and Sarah Anderson of the oft-participatory band Lucky Dragons, Sumi has fostered collaborations in museums, bookstores and art galleries across the globe since 2005.
Tomorrow from 1-4pm, Highland Park’s raddest new gallery– THIS Los Angeles with Little Paper Planes– hosts the latest meeting of Sumi Ink Club. The invitation is open to you (and all your family, friends, and also your enemies) to play, interact and put your imagination to work as part of something bigger than yourself. Go get ink on your hands.
As most write-ups on the career of Al Jarnow will tell you, you are probably more familiar with his work than his name. An early contributor to Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact, Jarnow’s animations are sure to strike a familiar note to anyone who was raised in a PBS household, or learned to count along to a TV with knobs on it. Recently, vinyl reissuers and all out crate-diggers The Numero Group revisited Jarnow’s work remastering, color-correcting and compiling over forty of Jarnow’s animated shorts into Celestial Navigations, perhaps the most futuristic thirty five year old work your kid is going to see this year.
Watch this beautiful video from Yours Truly of The Morning Benders (whom I’m proud to say are a local San Francisco band) playing the first track off their upcoming full length Big Echo. After listening to the album preview I can safely say this will be one of my go to records for the next few months.
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Holy ketchup! Can’t believe we’ve waited so long before sharing The Rumpus with y’all. First things first: the name! Yes, it connotes images of wild Max rumpus’ing with the Wild Things, and maybe that is intentional. Maybe not. In any case, it’s an appropriate moniker for an internet magazine devoted to assembling and evaluating the most piquant arts and culture available to the world.
The San Francisco-based joint was founded by Stephen Elliott as a solution, partly, to what he thought was a certain blandness spreading among internet publications. “The Internet was supposed to diversify content,” Elliott said in a 2009 interview, “and it did as far as blogs and very specific pages. But for magazines it’s had the opposite effect. All the major online magazines are focusing on the exact same stories.”
“We try to introduce people to art they might not have heard of,” Elliott sez in the same interview. “Our target audience is smart temps. We update at least 10 times a day. Our original features and interviews tend to be around 1,500 words, intelligent content you can read while your boss is focusing on something else.”
The Rumpuscovers everything: books, comics, art, film, and other stuff relevant to keeping us on our toes. It is frankly wonderful, to be frank.
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