Cartoonist Tim Hensley stopped by Giant Robot 2 yesterday to sign copies of his epic new graphic novel, Wally Gropius. It’s an irresistable satire about a Huey Lewis-obsessed teenage millionaire who falls under the threat of disinheritance if he refuses to marry “the saddest girl in the world,” launching an increasingly bizarre odyssey involving an icy seductress with a taste of money, men and national anthems.

(more…)

A brief glimpse at the cinematic endeavors initiated by comic auteur extraordinaire Matthew Thurber during his residency at Thirty Days NY. Will the world ever see the brilliantly demented films he made that week? We can only pray. For the woefully unacquainted, Thurber is a genuine genius whose work feels like the byproduct of an all-night paranoid Chatroulette session between Thomas Pynchon, R. Crumb and James Ensor. Hyperbole has previously gushed from my fingertips about Thurber’s comics Hong Kong Bong and 1-800-Mice, both of which you would be remiss not to seek out and devour with your eyeballs, post-haste.

Delicate, yet cautiously inquisitive, Katie Shapiro‘s photographs seem to breach the silent cocoons surrounding her subjects. Don’t miss her fascinating series Old World Charm, in which she documents the gradual gentrification of her Los Angeles apartment building.

(more…)

In 1978, kooky experimental writer and awesome-hair-haver (seriously, check it out) Georges Perec came out with Life: A User’s Manual, a very long and painstakingly detailed novel about everyone and everything in a single Paris apartment building. The concept: take off the façade and you see all the individual lives happening at once, the little, walled-off segments coalescing into one grand scene.

These days, artist Stephane Prigent achieves a similar and equally stunning effect with his drawings except, where he goes, no narrator dares to tread. There is no overarching plot, the characters in his panels don’t even seem to occupy the same time-space continuum. What’s more, the viewer’s natural inclination to forge a complete story out of these fragments is eternally frustrated. There are too many sharp edges and not enough context to ever get a solid grip on what’s happening.

It is a testament to the quality of a particular riddle that anyone should want to solve it. Prigent’s images are so captivating that the mind struggles to make sense of them even when it knows, deep down, that this is impossible. Why does the man with the melted ice cream head shoot black flames into the monochrome rainbow? Why do neon ghouls of varying emotional temperaments wander about their respective wildernesses? We are left without answers, trapped on an exhilarating peak of joy and confusion.

(more…)

After a veritable minefield of obstacles threatening to shut down the show at every turn, the title of Albert Reyes’ solo show at Mastodon Mesa has proven prescient: NEVER DIES THE DREAM. Come down to the gallery to see it tonight between 5-8pm, for one night only. We are being evicted tomorrow, so this is your one chance to check it out Albert’s amazing maze before it all comes crashing down!

Ladysmith Black Mambazo x M.J. What is perfection but a blissful marriage of image and sound, song and dance?

For those of you who haven’t heard (which means you did not watch the newest season of Drag Race in its entirety, which, in turn, means you really need to rethink your priorities) RuPaul has recently come out with a new book: Workin’ It!: RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style. In this multi-part series I will attempt to integrate some of the many profound insights contained in this rosy tome into my own ways of interacting with and thinking about the world. Come, friends, follow me on my mystical journey to attain Ru-vana.

[ Read Part 1 ]

Once in a while, a great philosopher will find a way to express an incredibly complex idea in such a way that it is easily, almost naturally understood and yet, still, hard to explain. The issue being addressed isn’t reduced or solved, it’s simply well put. “God is dead.” OK, good to know, Nietzsche. So, now what?

Wigs: they’re a vital source of RuPaul’s undeniable glamour, but their essential meaning remains mysterious. Do they symbolize a deep-seated shame of one’s natural deficiencies, a refusal to accept the body’s inability to express the mind’s ideal self-image, or are they like magical talismans, calling forth a new, better, more confident you from the obscure recesses of your being? Ru’s ruminations on the subject are filled with cryptic wonder:

I was mesmerized by those hairy marvels of modern man. To me, the whole concept of being able to instantly transform your identity with a mop of synthetic hair represented the totality of advancements made in the industrial age: a cheap, non-biodegradable tool of vanity. It made me feel proud to be an American.

The rest of Workin’ It delves deeply into the logistics of wigs and the insanely intricate processes required to purchase, maintain, ship, and attach them, but this passage seems to effortlessly epitomize the central tenets of wigging out. The tools of transformation are strange things indeed. Usually, when they work well it’s almost like they’re not even there. An expensive, high quality synthetic wig just looks like natural hair. As technology advances it becomes less and less distinct from the person using it.

That being the case, scientific innovation depends as much on creative people using the materials available to them in novel, perhaps even radical ways just as much as it does on the increasing sophistication of corporate manufacturing techniques. All of your latest internet sensations (Twitter, ChatRoulette, etc.) were technologically feasible long ago, but it wasn’t until they captured the public imagination that they “became a thing,” a recognizable entity in and of themselves without which much of the wisdom of Ashton Kutcher may have been lost to history.

The point here is that, yes, wigs might be pretty to look at, but they wouldn’t be worth discussing at any great length if not for great pioneers like RuPaul who chose to use them in a way that permanently altered our cultural consciousness for the better. Maybe technology will eventually overcome illness and death, but it’s people like Ru and the inspirational value of what their imaginations can achieve that make us happy to be alive.

Next Week on Future Shipwreck Book Club: RuPaul Makes a Pit Stop or Food for Thought, Fuel for the Race

Ted Danson dancing on a moonlit pier in Florida. I love the world. A sublime scene from Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 Body Heat, a neo-noir erotic thriller also starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and a virtually unrecognizable Mickey Rourke.

The dazzling, disorienting photographs, rhinestone-encrusted canvases and shimmering porcelain figurines of Mickalene Thomas comprise a world of cultural aesthetic absolutes taken to their logical extremes. As Thomas pushes these amplified visual tropes beyond their tipping points, she allows the women in her images to wrest control back from their decorative trappings in a way that feels like a liberation for both subject and viewer.

Artist Kara Walker explains it best:

…Mickalene Thomas’s chocolate-colored sisters with statuesque thighs, supple flesh, and meandering hair announce the promise of womanist agency. The space-age domestics or mother Africa soul searchers of her odalisque photos are draped over sofas and swathed in layers of contrasting “exotic” prints—a porn trope as much as it was a fact of ’70s interior design. Thomas’s bodies begin as substrata, canvases to a libidinal urge reminiscent of depictions of the Other in early photography and pornography (and, in turn, historical photographs’ mimicry of Western painting traditions). But, while relying on the familiar arrangements of white-male painting tradition, Thomas allows her photographic compositions to spiral inward, away from the superficial tropes of exotica, toward the complex sexuality of her models.

Via Bomb Magazine.

(more…)

Bait me with promises of ventriloquy and you’ll ensure my attendance to any event. That was the strategy employed by Mya, my trusty Mastodon Mesa co-curator, to lure me to the screening of cuckoo 1981 Z-movie Carnival Magic this weekend. The film is about a magician, his talking chimp, and their friends in a travelling carnival– but the only problem is that everyone in the movie is beyond creepy, especially the chimpanzee, who repeatedly requests (in gravely, growling tones) to be scratched by teenage girls.

The film was hilarious and mind-blowing, but the icing on the cake was the presence of magician Dave Markham, warming up the crowd in front of Cinefamily with his wisecracking sidekick Squeaker, a psychic wisenheimer who bears an eerie resemblance to Davy Jones. I had my new camera with me, so I captured the wary movie buffs as they responded to Squeaker’s sassy inquiries.

Don’t miss the rest of Cinefamily’s “Fucked Up Kids’ Movies” series, running each Saturday in May. Coming up: a night of E.T. rip-offs featuring Mac and Me, the sadistic South African kids movie Lost in the Desert, and misguided Bugsy Malone wannabe Hawk Jones.