Colombia-born Juanita Cardenas has lived in Bogota, Miami, New York, Buenos Aires and Barcelona. Her drawings? We love ‘em. Her puppets? Freaky and rad. Cardenas has a talent with color (dig her virtuosic use of pink—not an easy hue!) and an eye for unexpectedly pleasing compositions; there’s no doubt about either of those things.
We’re equally entranced, however, by the artist’s sketchbooks, which are been scanned and offered up for greedy eyes to devour. Each turning of the page reveals a fresh experiment, whether that be a figure drawing or a tangle of lines or a rainbow of abstracted faces, like sherbet spilled across the paper. Totally enchanting.
Photographer Daniel Weiss has an eye for the elegiac (or straight-up bizarre) detail that makes a picture tell a thousand words. His photographs are witty, pretty and wise. Check out the New Yorkers series and the Street Scenes, both of which are spirited and immaculate. We love ‘em!
Weiss also keeps up a photoblog which actively documents his NYC adventures: a stroll down 9th Avenue, an encounter with a karate-chopping Frenchman named Jean-Pierre who claims a past friendship with Frank Sinatra and enjoys feeding squirrels in the park, buskers in the subway, and more. It’s a huge pleasure to scroll through, like taking an epic walk around the city with a pair of fresh eyes.
Phantogram is a duo from Saratoga Springs, NY and I’m pretty sure from the blog posting and comments I’ve seen and received directly this band made a lot of new fans by playing shows at SxSw this past week.
My friend Mike told me about the Phantogram record Eyelid Movies and I was really into it after a few listens. The synths, sampling, drum beats, melodic kinda 90’s sound with energy and the really pretty female / male vocals. It really grows on you quickly and I suggest you listen a few times and find the many videos floating around from their live performances.
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Listen to: “Mouth Full Of Diamonds”
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Listen to: “Turn It Off”
Find out more at Myspace. Pick up Eyelid Movies. Go see them live.
“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!
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.”
Aside from having a comic-book superhero name and a magical way with the paintbrush, Zohar Lazar has also the following things going for him: a melancholic and deliriously beautiful imagination, an inborn sense of mischief, a glorious color sense and, by appearances, a seriously committed work ethic. In summary, he is unambiguously great.
In his spare time Lazar pumps out breathtaking illustrations for a few lucky big guns (Rolling Stone, GQ, The New Yorker) and and contributes to awesome comics collective Meathaus. Worth mentioning, also, that the artist did a stellar album cover for They Might Be Giants, which itself just sort of seals the deal.
Nichole van Beek’s gouache paintings are like Magic Eye images for grown-ups: they’re hypnotic, colorful, and contain promises of secret knowledge for those willing to put in the effort.
Van Beek is as much a sculptor as she is a painter, and her mixed-media installations are crafted with ingenuity (she enjoys making her own tools) and an eye for spareness from materials like driftwood, tape, yarn and grip-tape. Both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional brands of van Beek’s work will turn viewers googly-eyed, which is probably the point. She gives you full permission to stare.
I guess everyone has their wild side, and mine was halfway between being really shy and kind of a goofy spazoid. I never bit anyone, like Max, but I slapped a lot of butts.
The declaration that occurs to me whenever I pop in to the Lower East Side bookstore Bluestockings is always the same: ZINES LIVE!
Along with Nieves and a handful of indie bookstores scattered across the country, Bluestockings is one of the few outposts dedicated to circulating the little xerox-machine magazines and keeping zine culture alive.
There are attractions other than zines at Bluestockings, including regular events and author readings, shelves of well-curated volumes (sample sections: “Global Justice”, “Activist Strategies”, “Size Acceptance”), a café with tasty coffee and plenty of space to kick back and flip through the latest issue of Radical Teacher magazine.
In other words, Bluestockings is exactly the oasis that I dreamed about as a teenager. Better late than never, right?
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