As promised: Harmony Korine’s new short film, Act Da Fool, featuring Provenza Schouler’s new collection. Fashion label with imagination meets filmmaker with imagination. It makes me happy when Korine chooses to remind us that there’s a whole big incredible world out there, decaying and thriving and reinventing itself everyday. This is beautiful.

Gross! In a fun Garbage Pail Kids way. But wait: under the coy crude veneer of Allen Cordell’s music videos for Beach House, Tobacco and Future Islands, there’s a natural grace at work. An innate understanding of rhythm, a surprising sympathy for our fellow man. Characters with creepy faces dance angrily amidst gooey special effects, and somehow, the repressed desires bubbling beneath the surface manage to wrench your heart. Or maybe that’s backwards— maybe it starts with a sense of humanity and then pulls the rug out to reveal the absurd. Like, “Longing. It’s beautiful, yeah, but it’s also ridiculous.” Either way, misery and frustration are the unlikely fuel for a nervous humor here. We’re encouraged to laugh, even as we cheer on the lonesome-hearted.

Cordell’s paintings exist in a similar cloud of uncertainty, appropriating images of pornography, horror films, animals and anonymous strangers to unsettling effect. Those thrilling and frightening parts of childhood rendered in sharp relief.

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Photos and art pieces by Brooklyn-based Jesse Hlebo, who also makes zines, cassette tapes, and other rad objects that exist in real life, through Swill Children.

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Yan Yan is a sage, a scalawag and a wordsmith. Here are some of the things you’ll find in his stories: Palo Alto paleontologists and their lovelorn teenagers, Rem Koolhaas, asshole anarchists who wax theological at hardcore shows, Paris Hilton and the amnesiacs who love her, solar-powered parkas, and the therapeutic qualities of taking a warm bath in a postmodern igloo on the Alaskan tundra.

Yan Yan ensured my lifelong allegiance at the age of fifteen, when he exposed me to the sublime weirdness of Hong Kong cinema on a hot summer day in his parents’ suburban living room. Since then, we’ve shared some memorable adventures on both coasts, and I’ve had the privilege of watching his writing flourish over the years. Also, he plays Ukulele.

Not long after graduating from Columbia, Yan absconded New York for China and its shimmering promises of an unknown future. So in his absence, I was stoked to learn that ultra-rad small press Medium Rare has published a beautiful box set of five Yan Yan zines. Take a look at the collection in all its glory below, along with some pictures I snapped of the rapscallion raconteur himself, last time he visited L.A.

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Satoshi Kon was not just an incredible director, he was a man who understood the inner workings of our collective fantasies. Dreams, no matter how strange or wonderful, aren’t just magically conjured from the ether—they are built very carefully, sometimes deliberately from the people, objects, and ideas we encounter every day. Even our most intimate, personal desires which seem to stem from a deep-seated, primal urge can only reveal themselves to the mind’s eye in the guise of things we have found in the world around us: love appears as a celebrity’s face, truth sounds like an advertising slogan, happiness feels weirdly similar to your old Power Rangers pajamas. Whatever mundane symbolic vocabulary you might need to converse with your subconscious, Satoshi Kon knew it and he was fucking fluent.

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Before the Work Is Done: Tipping Point #4, an oil painting by Rhode Island-based artist Jemison Faust. Who among us hasn’t been there? You’re trying to get some shit done, but there’s just all this stuff lying around in a soul-crushing mess, taunting you with its accusatory tranquility. Man, staring at this painting is making me feel guilty for the rotting colony of dirty dishes that’s been lingering in my sink for weeks. BRB!

Via New American Paintings.

Of all the spots in the world to find work as a paramedic, fate brought Michael Julius to Putnam County— one of the poorest places in Florida. This strange and forgotten locale, which Julius characterizes as a sprawling, sandy 827 square mile plot of land “pocked with hundreds of small lakes, and tucked in tangly forests,” provides Julius’ on-the-job photo series, Rescuing Putnam, with a shockingly vivid sense of physical space. It’s the lurking presence of Putnam’s residents, living (and dying) “in trailers and shacks, along webs of unpaved roads,” that provides Rescuing Putnam with its resigned, melancholy psychological space.

Throughout a decade of bloody ambulance rides and smoldering ranch homes, Julius’ camera served as his closest confidante, silently sharing both the madness of these unsettling emergency response calls, as well as the warm, intimate world of the medics and firemen who commit themselves to this stressful way of life. Insig.ht conducted a fascinating interview with Julius, where he reflects on the growing sense of disillusionment that crept up on him over the years:

Statistically, this is a career that doesn’t lend itself to a lengthy service. The average career span for your basic garden-variety medic is 3-5 years. For me, the burnout was as much about the physical toll on the body as anything. Every three days I would essentially stay up all night. This, compounded by the repetitive aspect of the job, is exhausting. By repetitive I mean that I eventually realized that I was seeing the same people over and over. Some are actually sick though many are not, or at least not in an emergent sense. The skill-set to evaluate the needs of your sick and hurt patients eventually became a hindrance because I saw how so many of them were in fact not sick at all. It’s frustrating. Towards the end of my career I told a drug seeking patient, who had just finished performing a hilariously bad seizure, “You know, seizure patients usually urinate on themselves.” I wanted to see her piss herself. That’s pretty cynical.

We end up at the same houses. Houses full of thieves and alcoholics, with the same adolescent boys sitting on fence posts, or car hoods, or tossing footballs; and, when we arrive they pitch their thumbs, mumbling, “They’re in the back.” And in the back are the same old patients, face down in their vomit. It breaks my heart to see these boys conditioned to this. The very last patient of my career spit on me and said, “Clean that up, bitch”. It’s a river of misery and it goes on forever.

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Oh shit, Mastodon Mesa news bonus round!! Dudes, truly, I cannot tell you how excited I am about our new show at Mastodon Mesa. Basically, it’s this: 25 of our favorite artists exhibiting work inspired by found photography, alongside thousands of forgotten snapshots from Mark Kologi’s immense collection. The line-up is insane! Come join the fun at Private Investigation and sort through decades of anonymous memories on Wednesday, September 15th!

Featuring: Ben Aqua, Beastburn, Derrick Beckles (TV Carnage), Jordan Crane, Stephanie Davidson, Kirk Demarais, Steven Andrew Garcia, Adan de la Garza, Desiree Holman, Michael C. Hsiung, Parker Ito, Nathan Jones, Mike Kitchell, Sage Keeler, Mark Kologi, Roz Leibowitz, Suki-Rose Otter, Paul Pescador, The Perlorian Brothers, Christian Ramirez, Benjy Russell, Tanner America, Brad Troemel, Richard Vergez, Adam Villacin and Melissa Wallen.

After the jump, the full flier for Private Investigation, plus a hyperbolic manifesto for the show.

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RuPaul’s Drag Race production house World of Wonder dispatched their wildly gregarious ace journalist Damiana Garcia (aka Michael Lucid of Pretty Thingsss) to cover the opening of Albert Reyes’ Never Dies the Dream at Mastodon Mesa. She navigated the dangerous corridors of Reyes’ legendary haunted maze like a pro, warding off werewolf harassment, snatching up interviews and finding her inner self!

Watch Damiana’s in-depth coverage below, followed by two videos I filmed for her earlier this summer. The first explores the opening of Ryan Trecartin’s mind-blowing Any Ever show at MOCA and the ensuing Dis Magazine Pool Party, and the second was filmed at L.A. leather bar The Faultline’s annual Tom of Finland Foundation Fundraiser!

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It’s about girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire. It’s about the great things in life. The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor.

Harmony Korine on Act Da Fool, his soon to be released short film for rad fashion label Provenza Schouler.
Consider us stoked. Peek at some behind the scenes photos and the film’s gorgeous poster after the jump, and read more about the collaboration at Nowness.

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Art inspires fashion all the time— but simply taking photos of an installation piece and printing them a dress? That’s some future shit! The new winter collection from Shenzen-based fashion label ffiXXed uses images of James Deutsher’s awesome installation We are Building a Civilised Space Here (also the title of their collection) as the aesthetic foundation for the two pieces seen above. It’s an audaciously direct approach, sure, but the results are stunningly effective, and palpably romantic. What a lovely way to reimagine the “floral print” dress!

Via Real Normal.

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There’s a buzzing in the air, a dual feeling of danger and excitement— destruction and creativity— in the fallen urban environments that fuel director Shan Nicholson’s work. His lush new video for El-P’s haunting instrumental “Time Won’t Tell,” revels in a nostalgia for the anarchic freedom of childhood, and heralds the pleasure of building something new out of the ashes of something old.

It’s almost a direct dramatization of the themes underlying Downtown Calling, Nicholson’s first documentary and the story of New York City in the late 70’s. Narrated by Debbie Harry, it’s a movie all about self-made entertainment blossoming from an environment of social unrest and economic chaos. In retrospect, it seems crazy. What enabled the downtown renaissance in New York when many other major metropoleis just crumble with a whimper? What’s the magic ingredient that makes the boys in “Time Won’t Tell” play instead of fight?

In that same era, the EPA decided to give rad photographers money to take amazingly frank pictures of urban decay, and they called it Documerica. Somehow it feels like the whole thing would be decried as “communism” these days, making the existence of these images all the more miraculous. After the jump, take a look at some of Danny Lyon’s phenomenal photographs of New York kids from Documerica.

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Bert Mebius is this beguiling Dutch dude who I don’t know much about. He sent me an e-mail introducing himself, along with some stupendous sketches. He makes a new drawing every day, and posts them on his website, bertmebius.nl. I asked him to write a little bit about who he was, so he sent me a nine-part manifesto called One Day I Failed As An Artist. It’s pieced together out of ruminations on art school, flashes of violent dreams, childhood memories about going to the movies, and the lyrics of Jean Ferrat. It’s kinda long, so here’s just a small segment that may shed some light on the mind of Mebius, impenetrable illustrator of the Netherlands:

5. On the day I failed as an artist, I wrecked my studio.

I was at my work table (where I spent hopeful hours doing nothing nearly every day), kicked over the chair and up-ended the table. Which took a bit of an effort; it was a heavy table. Everything in my studio was of the highest quality.

After the table it was the turn of the cupboards where I kept my materials. I pushed them over, spilling out their barely used contents: pens, brushes, pencils, chalks, tubes, pots, bottles, rollers, buckets, marker pens, spray cans, tape, stags of paper in all shapes and sizes, scores of sketchpads ( in all shapes and sizes), boxes with clippings, scrapbooks, projectors, rulers. I pulled out the phone plug and hurled the phone into a corner. Then came the paintings, or more accurately the empty canvases I had stretched and prepared myself, which were stacked in layers against the walls. I kicked them, booted some of them to pieces and slung them onto the pile. Ventian blinds and curtains were next. The bookcase (art books, art magazines) was the last to hit the floor. Hier und jetzt: das tun was zu tun ist by Jörg Immendorff ended up on top. Pure coincidence.

6. My failure as an artist did not consist of the fact that I had destroyed my studio (nor the days, weeks, months of stagnation and inertia that preceded it), but that I had failed to photograph the aftermath. I only realised this much later, when I saw Jeff Wall’s The Destroyed Room.

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The idea of photography as a way - to experience the world as it is not, in different ways - is fascinating to me, transforming the known into an unknown unapproachable virtual reality that is able to contain an enormous power.

So sayeth artist Anne de Vries and, amazingly, his work is actually able to back it up. Take one look at his pictures and it becomes clear: anything, no matter how utilitarian or mundane, can be reconfigured, distorted, replicated, or marked in just such a way that it is no longer a familiar object, but a foreign concept. It turns out the boundary between reality and unreality is remarkably thin. Our minds are constantly on the lookout for a foothold into the abstract: stick a pair of eyes on a chunk of wood or and a soul is born. Combine colorful construction paper with eerie smut and suddenly sex is something altogether alien. A few well-placed exercise balls and a couple smears of paint, and our dreamy muscle man is now inhabiting a breathtaking nowhere space.

Since his materials are digital and limitless, it’s impossible to predict the form de Vries’ next project will take or the possibilities it might reveal. But one thing you can rely on is that he will give the people what they want: something new. De Vries champions the image as an act of creation, rather than documentation. Construction rather than reproduction.

If you work as an artist with the same medium you cannot avoid the question, why make more images if there are already so many? This question became central in my practice, through my work I try to find answers and formulate more questions.

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The sounds that emerge from the clear red vinyl of Superhumanoids’ Urgency EP feel like home. It’s the kind of music that instantly puts your nerves at ease on a long nighttime drive, striking a perfect balance between shoegazing coziness and dreamy danceability. Superhumanoids are not only an impossibly charming L.A. indie pop quartet, but also one of my favorite new bands this year— so it is with great honor that I present to you the exclusive world-wide debut of their brand new music video!

Watch the wistful and hilarious “Persona” above, and then read on for an interview with razor-sharp director Eli Gunn-Jones!

Where did the idea behind “Persona” stem from?

Oftentimes I prefer my videos to echo the theme or premise of the song, or at the very least have some sort of tangential relationship to the track. After talking with Cameron for a bit about what Persona meant to him—how it was conceived, the writing process, etc— I let it float around my head for a while. I kept coming back to the idea of surveillance, of trying to encapsulate or define another through a wide swath of observations both traditional and unusual. Trying to understand somebody’s core without any personal interaction. The other elements like the 70s attire, vintage recording gear, his car, those were all stylistic choices to better engage the audience and create a fuller, more complete world.

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