Do you ever listen to an album for the first time and feel no connection to it at all? Like it just whizzes overhead, on some cultural plane beyond your grasp? Your friends might be raving about it, but all you can do is look back at them with a blank stare, like they’re speaking a different language. It’s not that you think the album is bad, it’s just that you can’t get into it. You try listening to it twice and maybe even a third time, and you start to feel more and more frustrated. Stupid, even. You may ask yourself, “What is everyone else seeing here that I’m missing completely?” But even reading verbose five-star reviews praising the album for its conceptual genius or it’s visceral beauty can’t help you understand the attraction. You think about deleting it from your iTunes library out of spite, but something nagging tells you to keep it around.

Time passes by. Months, or even years, and then one day you wake up with a song from this album stuck in your head. It’s 4:30 AM. You take an aching shower and get dressed without realizing it, and you’re sitting in your Geo Metro in the buzzing, velvet moments before morning starts, trying to decide what to play on your drive to work. The Los Angeles freeways are eerily vacant, and the only drivers on the road are begrudgingly reserved compared to the flashy type of driving you’ve come to expect from the city. Today, maybe, you’re going to be an extra in the unnecessary cgi/live action remake of a childhood classic, and you’re just barely dangling on to your consciousness. And then it hits you. You have a strong urge to listen to that unsettling album– just when everyone else seems to have forgotten about it– and in this unexpectedly quiet moment, it finally seems to make sense. Alvin and the Chipmunks hot-wired my love for Daft Punk.

I came across two great photo essays yesterday. The first is an art project from China, called 13 Months in the Year of the Dog. Two photographers selected daily news items and recreated them with dramatic lighting and highly theatrical composition. The result is an eerie series of beautiful and surreal images that bend the brief stories into dramatic worlds of deeply resonant emotion. The set feels not unlike to the fantastic Gregory Crewdson‘s work.

How To Be An Alaskan Fisherman is an essay for Fecal Face by Corey Arnold, a hip young photographer who also happens to be a fearless fisherman, traversing the open sea off the coast of Alaska, leading a life of danger and adventure. With brilliant photographs, he illustrates the steps one must take to transform from a naive art school student to a toiling laborer in an exotic and incredible locale. It reminded me that I should maybe make a five-year plan towards getting my ass off the computer and out into the big wide open world with all of its odysseys and adventures.

Listen to “Amor” by Eydie Gorme Y Los Panchos [download]

I went to the post office today to send some head shots and resumés to talent agencies. The reason for this is that I want to stop walking around in the background of commercials and start walking around in the foreground of commercials, and start getting paid a lot more for it. Traffic on the way to the Highland Park post office was slowed down because of a movie shoot that was happening on the sidewalk half a block down from the post office, and it was kind of annoying. I didn’t bother to check for celebrities, as I was in a rush. But after dropping off the envelopes, I was on the way back to my car when I overheard a girl walking nearby talking on her cell phone.

“You’ll never believe who I just took a picture with!” she was saying. “Ice Cube! Ice Cube, fool!” My heart dropped, and immediately I turned around, walking back in the direction of the movie shoot. I had to get a better look at him. I was able to get a glimpse from about fifty yards away, and he looked adorable in an orange jumpsuit and a little mini-fro, waiting for the scene to get started. I stood there for maybe thirty seconds, and then walked away, savoring the memory. To celebrate this awesome celebrity encounter, I must now share with all of you a story I wrote a while back, and have never found the right moment for releasing it. Now is the time. Enjoy! (more…)

Mike Mills, the amazing graphic designer and music video director (and the director of the underrated film Thumbsucker), has created five abstract music videos for Blonde Redhead’s new album, 23.

The video for “Top Ranking” (one of my favorite tracks on the album) features his girlfriend, Miranda July, doing “one pose per second” in front of a simple white wall. “Silently” is simply a slideshow of textual descriptions that plays out like script notes for a video that we can only watch in our imaginations.

“Impure Hair” displays a single static shot of a cloudy Los Angeles vista with a rainbow gradually appearing on the horizon. “The Dress” is a montage of ordinary people staring into the camera and crying on an isolated black background, and “23″ plays the love story from James Cameron’s Titanic backwards like Memento.

Rather than going the more obvious route of depicting the band floating in a meaninglessly lush fantasy world of clouds, Mills grabs our attention with the incongruities between his visions and the songs. The simplicity of these videos subverts the complexity of the music, separating the visual element from the music we’re ostensibly being sold. In varying degrees, the songs take a back seat, becoming subliminal or taking on the function of a forgotten memory echoing above a scene we’re watching unfold.

+ Found via Viewers Like You
+ Radar has an interesting interview with Miranda July

Listen to “Silently” by Blonde Redhead [download]

Blonde Redhead, one of my favorite bands, just released the marvelous 23 last month to mixed reviews. While many have rightfully lauded the album, other misguided souls have criticized it for being too lush, too baroque and too multi-layered. I revel in such overindulgence.

I was introduced to the band in 2004 when their last album, Misery is a Butterfly, came out. I was immediately taken by the ethereal voices of Kazu Makino and Amedo Pace, and the sad, brilliant melodies that made up the deceivingly simple songs. My friend Matt had picked it up on the night of its release, and we listened to it together in an SUV while we drove down desolate country roads on the way to a remote, unseen cemetery. That eerie excursion may have been the best introduction to an album that haunted me for the rest of the summer.

Under its spell, I submerged myself in the similarly dreamlike literature of Haruki Murakami, and isolated in my room, imagining what it might have been like for Kazu after she was trampled by a horse in 2002. She fell off while riding the animal, became trapped underneath it as she fell, and had her jaw shattered by its hoof. What kind of thoughts go through your mind while you’re a singer in a hospital bed, waiting to see if you’ll ever be able to move your jaw again? (more…)

The other day I got bored and looked at every designer’s fall 2007 collection included on Condé Nast’s informative men’s fashion website, men.style.com. Like its corporate brothers GQ and Details, the style recommendations on that site are often tasteless– or at least boring, catered more towards the 40-something international playboy set than the young men out there who care less about brand name and more about a unique perspective. But luckily, the site provides a reasonably comprehensive database of top designers’ collections, providing users with the ability to make their own style decisions without the filter of a photo editorial on yachting essentials.

The thee pictures above are from the runway shows for Trovata, Lacoste, and Missoni, respectively. They were three of my favorites from this season, because almost everyone else seems to be putting out lines of all gray and black clothing, which is yawn central. It’s fine to indulge in drab monochromatics every once in a while, but it seems way overdone this season. Trovata’s line in particular tickled my pickle, because its stated source of inspiration was a “fictional 28-year-old private-school teacher in Manhattan in 1981,” a theme that reminded me of The Squid and the Whale and The Royal Tenenbaums. (more…)

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So my boyfriend just happens to be a superstar DJ, who goes by the name of Rudy Bleu. He’s been at it for years, playing at clubs all around L.A. Most recently, he’s been doing regular nights at The Akbar and The Eagle in Silver Lake, and at Pehrspace in Echo Park. His main project at the moment is Outré, a crazy fun dance party that he puts on with Cody Wayne.

He took time out of his busy schedule to prepare a rad new mix for the 7th Future Shipwreck podcast. Here’s what he has to say about it:

There’s a lot of fun shit going down in the next couple of weeks, and I’ve got it all laid out for you in a handy table right below the jump. Miranda July, Patrick Wolf, Brian De Palma, apocalyptic movie screenings, rockin’ dance parties, and more! (more…)

There’s the end of the world movie, and then there’s his closely related brother, the post-apocalypse movie. They both bring us to a familiar world that has gone beyond critical mass, but post-apocalyptic cinema allows us to catch our breath and examine things on the fringe more carefully, without the frantic pacing of an impending doom. Here I will present to you two of my favorite post-apocalyptic films: 1975′s misogynistic Don Johnson spectacular, A Boy and His Dog, and the more pensive, breathtaking 1985 offering, The Quiet Earth. (more…)