Okay as promised
I just bought a pen and ink drawing by Shintaro Kago, who is an insane, brilliant manga artist. I managed to pick up the cover to Antlion Versus Barabara Girl (アリ地獄vsバラバラ少女) – it echos another one of my favorite pieces of his, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have it. Many excellent pieces are still available – ordering instructions are here. NSFW!!!
Andrew Bell does the cover for my 2009 Holiday DVD
I just got this in my email – so exciting, thank you Andrew! I was going to save the reveal for December, but it’s so rad I have to show you now. This is probably the last DVD; next year I expect to be sending out USB sticks.
BUYING
Kaws X Yue Minjun
Anybody in Taipei?
ALSO: very very rare interview with Kaws up at I-D Magazine (he worked over their most recent issue) – he seldom talks to any media outlet.
Takashi Murakami “Mr. Wink”
FINALLY MINE. I had a chance to buy a small Murakami painting in 2000 for $800; turning that down was the worst financial mistake of my life. I understand if you dislike him or aren’t into the factory aspect or whatever, but art is personal and I’ve always liked this piece in particular. Click to enlarge!
It’s already morning
Totally fun story of the week: an interview with the staff of Yujin’s planning department. Yujin is a Japanese company that makes toys in little plastic bubbles you get out of vending machines (in Japan).- Song of the day: Daliah Lavi, Vielleicht schon Morgen, the source vocal for Jürgen Paape’s So Weit Wie Noch Nie, which you know from Erlend Oye’s deathless DJ Kicks volume. (Sendspace link via ILM)
- Amazing video from 1997 of Kaws putting up the bus shelter pieces that made him famous – he replaced the MTA locks with his own! (via SlamXhype)
Quiet day
Words cannot express how much I’m looking forward to the Mother 3 translation
maybe a screenshot will do it
Entourage reads my mind
Great episode. A Patrick Nagel print is hanging in Drama’s new condo:
Dope!! I’ve been thinking it’s time for PN to make a comeback.
Dinoscarves!
Last night my little sister had a piece in Sweaterfest, an art exhibit in a warehouse downtown. In keeping with the lighthearted theme, Kate decided to address the intersection of traditional handicraft and cold-blooded prehistoric reptiles.
and here’s my favorite non-Kate piece, a tepee made from sweaters.
Pushead update
Okay, so here’s my Jar of Pus collection as it stands. I’m just missing the jumbo silver. For the Kaws X Pushead companions (not pictured) I lack the silver and bronze, and then I’m done.
A visit to Necromance
Today I went to Necromance, a store on Melrose that sells death – the bones of various animals, specimens in formaldehyde, taxidermy. The prices are affordable. The beauty produced by the natural world so challenges human craft that you would expect it to be priceless, but of course the biological methods of reproduction cost nothing so it isn’t. For $20 I bought a turtle shell, a bee in lucite, two small fish, and a pair of human teeth.
The teeth were $4, and honestly, I’m on the verge of taking them back because I feel like buying them is the worst thing I’ve ever done. In my private language teeth are an overdetermined signature of life – power – and it makes me incredibly sad that some are scattered as carelessly as dice. I am willing to keepsake these teeth, only: are they male or female? Were they pulled while they were living, or dead? What was the person like? Could they have been a killer, in war? I really don’t know if I can take it.
Taking it is the reason I went in the first place. I’m afraid of death – my coping mechanisms against it grow more tender as I age – but the way to subduct fear is exposure. You can’t expose yourself directly to the close-ended nullity of death, but you can take on its physical traces. And start eating meat again.
I’d stop there, but there are two other necessary items to note about the store. They say that nothing they sell is killed for sale – the bones and skeletons are byproducts of our carnivorous/corrupt world, and some of the other pieces are antiques, previously traded. My turtle, for example, was probably made into soup.
The second thing is that in a small corner of a single glass-fronted cabinet they sell a few pieces of Nazi paraphernalia – stamps, an ivory hairbrush with a swastika. This disturbed an otherwise pleasant visit. I spoke to the girl behind the counter and she said they had lots of complaints (she shrugged) but they dealt in the grotesque and that was part of it. I was more sad than angry, and I didn’t want to argue, but I didn’t care for the explanation. Besides a few medical instruments and butterflies mounted in standard English cases, nothing else they carried was specifically historical in the way of this Nazi tat. A dead bat has a special beauty; a stamp with Hitler’s face does not. The girl behind the counter was a pretty goth, with carefully black hair; I suppose the currency of those items was settled for her, but not for me…
Pushead Jars of Pus
And then there were two! If anyone wants to part with the bone or red varients, let me know.
Galatea and Repliee
Two new links in the sidebar – to David Byrne and Insert Credit, the Pitchfork of video game sites. Their thematic joint – android girls. On August 17 (you gotta scroll down – no permalinks) David posted about Hiroshi Ishiguro’s android woman and compared them to Pygmalion and Galatea. I want to address Ovid’s preface:
Pygmalion saw so much to blame in women that he came at last to abhor the sex, and resolved to live unmarried.
I don’t think loving an android would entail hating women. Unless an android had a distinct personality – we’ve written them as servile but strong, which means that’s how they’ll be when they arrive – falling in love with one would be a boring fetish, mere displacement. I think the desire for robot girls is a desire for a fourth sex – a category without exhausting baggage.
See, I told you I’d come back to android girls.
Aphrodite animates Galatea (Edward Burne-Jones )
James Jarvis is awesome
Last night I went down to Santa Monica to meet James Jarvis, who was signing at Kid Robot. Turns out that not only was he signing, he was doing detailed sketches for every fan who turned up. What a lovely, lovely guy. I had a chance to talk with him and gleamed a couple of interesting facts: he thinks of himself as an illustrator or a cartoonist as opposed to a true fine artist, and drew a further distinction between theory-based art and (not his words here) ‘true art,’ a concept I whole-heartedly agree with. He brought up Doré as an example of an illustrator who made good with beautiful paintings. I complimented him on his Beach Boys cover for Relax Magazine and asked if he still had it and he said that he’s kept all of his originals(!) and wants to put out a big sketchbook with reproductions. Bring it on! As for the toys, he told me he thought of them as total mass produced fun items, anyone who wanted them should have them, and that limited editions flew in the face of that – huge cosign. Special shouts to my linemates who made the long wait fun – Carl, Color Ninja, Stephanie. Here’s the piece he did for me – getting it framed! I asked him to stick in the moon and he went all out with the starfield. Thanks James – it was a pleasure!
Invader at sixspace, Los Angeles, 6/11/05
Went to the show. I was sort of underwhelmed; when I first saw his mosaic invaders in Paris years ago I was charmed and intrigued; seeing the stuff in a gallery was antiseptic to say the least. The prices were out of control; pieces from his “alias” series of mosaics preserved in blocks of clear resin (really cool looking) ranged from $1800-$6000. I may actually make one myself for my house, although I won’t copy one of his designs. Didn’t get a chance to talk to the man as he was being interviewed for G4 TV. I did take some pictures. I don’t mean to down Invader; his shit is still rad, I just like it better on the street. The sixspace staff were really really nice too – They’re moving to Culver City – a sign of the times in LA!
Sony Playstation concepts
These come from Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center, by Paul Kunkel, the guy who wrote AppleDesign, a book I’m still kicking myself for not buying when I had the chance.
This is the joint Nintendo/Sony unit from 1998 – as a compromise with Nintendo, it had a cartridge slot as well as a CD-ROM drive.
They went through two dozen controler concepts. Sorry about the lousy scan.
My favorite, the logo iterations.
Maybe someday a design study will surface for the PS2.
Why do I want to get money?
Besides being able to afford medication when I’m old? To buy clothes from countries with child labor laws, son.
Fucking LA rain – I need more shit with hoods.
I love comic books
I went down to Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in Westwood to meet Jim Lee, Al Garza and Joe Casey (writer on The Intimates), and stood on line forever, which was worth it, because both Jim and Al were kind enough to do sketches for me, which made my night. I admitted that I didn’t really like superhero comics these days, which is true, although I did in fact like Hush tons, which you should cop if you’re into Batman because it’s the tech. (Warren Ellis’ Iron Man is also really good so far, so is Identity Crisis, and there are others.)
Here’s a picture I took with my Treo of Jim Lee taking a picture of me with his Treo:
And here are the sketches – thanks, you guys!:
Al’s Ninja Boy
Going basically made me want to write comics.
Loopy Looks At Paintings
Last night I went to Renoir to Matisse: The Eye of Duncan Phillips at LACMA. DP was an active, dedicated collector with a bunch of money and pretty good taste who, with the help of his wife, a painter with a good eye for talent, amassed a nice group of pictures. (You could also say that Marjorie Phillips, with the help of her husband, a millionaire, amassed…)
I’m not one of those study-every-detail-of-every-work museum-goers. I spend time on the pieces that knock me back and zip past the others. This time, there were three, in order of magnitude: Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party is the most famous, and it’s good; a big canvas, tons of detail, your (my) eye runs diagonally from the upper right to near the lower left of the scene, it’s engaging and pleasant, easy to read, and shows the painter at the height of his powers. It doesn’t tell tell the future, and that’s why it’s at the bottom of my shortlist.
Second is van Gogh’s The Road Menders, less ordered than it’s cousin Entrance to the Public Gardens in Arles from the same period but more emotional; the trees have souls, the folk live; VVG cannot be doubted.
But my favorite came as a total surprise: Gustave Courbet’s The Mediterranean, which I’m at a loss to fully explain. I’ve seen his famous stuff in the Musee d’Orsay, A Burial at Ornans and The Painter’s Studio, both of which are fantastic but, you know, real. So, so, line break, carriage return: The Mediterranean. Rocks, beach, ocean, sky, but a monster, overwhelmingly powerful. I stood in front of it for four minutes and came back to double up. I admit the possibility that it plays on personal longings, preferences, hopes, but god! it could be a scene from the afterlife, and moves. If you’re in LA, if you’re going to be on any of the other Phillips Collection stops, go see it.
I write 