Bara is awesome. It’s a type of Japanese erotic manga for gay men, but unlike the much more well-known genre Yaoi, no one has published Bara comics in English. Die hard fans of Bara in North America must order the books overseas or hunt down scans on the Internet.
When my friend Blake Besharian invited me to make a series of prints on his letterpress, I decided to pay Bara homage. I collaged my favorite panels from Seizo Yebisubashi’s manga “My Hometown Hospitality” into new visual narratives, emphasizing the transitions, exteriors, and moments of stillness that establish the subtle mood and tone in Yebusibashi’s artwork.
“Bara by Letterpress” is a limited edition series of six prints. If you’d like a set, here’s your chance! Post this video on your blog/Tumblr/Twitter and then leave a comment below with a link to your site. Next week, I’ll randomly select one commenter to receive a set of all six prints!
Here are some links to help you investigate Bara on your own:
Bara Resources: Bara – Wikipedia page. G-Men – G-Men is the foremost magazine that publishes Bara comics. Site mostly in Japanese. Japanese Gay Art – An Australian fine art blog devoted to the genre. G-Project – A Japanese store that allows international orders of Bara manga. Seizo Yebisubashi – All-Japanese website for the Bara artist. Gengoroh Tagame – Mixed Japanese and English site for the legendary Tagame.
In addition to his thriving career as a cartoonist, Matthew Thurber moonlights as a musician whose manic stage energy allows him to actually fly. Here he is at Family, performing a short set of bizarre and amazing vaudeville tunes about balloons, furniture and cats.
Look, I’m going to try and display some restraint here. If I’m not careful, I could easily scare you away with the ocean of magniloquent praise swelling inside me. So let me be delicate in my wording– calm, cool and collected to help you understand the unparalleled beauty of Matthew Thurber‘s 1-800-Mice.
It’s an epic mystery about the moment in our future-history when human-tree marriage is on the cusp of social acceptance. An intersex mouse named Peace Punk roams the world seeking the entrance to Valhala, evading a trio of angry assassins through an underworld of never-ending hardcore festivals and viral video production palaces. A tightly wound mouse detective goes undercover amongst a pack of nihlistic terrorists, confronting his own criminality in the process. And a cog in the machine at 1-800-Mice (the world’s fastest courier service) learns the grisly truth behind a mysterious drug made of dead trees.
If that sounds like a lot, it is! There’s a whole Universe behind this story, and it feels like something dreamed by Henry Darger and Alajandro Jodorowsky after a night of getting stoned, prank-calling Marilyn Manson, and watching Monty Python. But don’t worry about keeping up with all the details: readers of 1-800-Mice will learn to truly appreciate a sudden nosedive into the surreal. Each panel says a lot, even when the narrative speaks in tongues.
Thurber’s particular poetry is a web of jokey stand-up observations, noirish voice-over, drifting existential questions, imaginary buzzwords, playful puns and casual dick jokes. He constructs a foreign language with familiar associations and unexpectedly deep capacity for humanity (even in interspecies characters). You’ll be reading a goofy exchange between a death cultist dentist and his vampiric assistant, and suddenly you’ll tap into a quiet sense of melancholy embedded within the panel. It’s an interplay that grants Thurber’s gonzo fantasy a surprising scope of emotional depth. Plus, heads explode, reality collapses, and you have a new message on MindBook.
1-800-Mice is published by the awesome PictureBox press, and it looks beautiful. The hardcover feeels really special, and it has pretty colors on it. Plus, there’s an endorsement from Matt Groening on the cover! Check it out at one of Thurber’s upcoming readings!
Mike Mills is one of my favorite multi-hyphenate creative people, and has been for a long time. Back in the era of my tidal obsession with Air’s Moon Safari, I read up everything I could on the band, and Mills– the designer who’d crafted their rad cover art. I watched as many of his music videos as I could track down with the middling assistance of dial-up internet and my primary pre-YouTube rad video source, the late great RES Magazine. Ever since then, Mike Mills’ creations– in print, feature filmmaking, documentary, graphic design and music video have only grown successively more and more awesome.
His latest endeavor is his most intimate and most emotionally evocative work yet, the film Beginners. It tells the story of a sad graphic designer (Ewan McGreggor) learning to love (Melanie Laurent) late in life, and his elderly father (Christopher Plumer) who comes out of the closet in the twilight of his life. It’s a simple story but its scope is epic: it’s about mortality, growing up, the unchangeable nature of historical circumstance and seeking connection in a disconnected family. As heavy Beginners‘ themes are, Mills juggles story and concepts with significant grace, blending melancholy and humor in a way that somehow manages to reveal the intimate inner lives of his characters.
Beginners is in theaters now, and I strongly urge you to check it out on the big screen. And luckily, since Mike Mills can’t be confined to one medium, he’s released a companion book to the film called Drawings From the Film Beginners. It’s full of funny and charming sketches that relate to the Ewan McGregor’s character in the film, who also designs album covers for a living.
Thanks to Focus Features, I’m stoked to announce that we’re giving away a copy of the book, as well as a dropcard that will let you to download the Beginnerssoundtrack for free. Comment with your favorite work by Mike Mills and we’ll choose a winner at random this Friday!
Naked Kids, aside from being a phrase you probably shouldn’t Google, ever, is the garage rock sensation of the summer. It’s official, I’m calling it now. In your face, other garage bands! Their electrifying debut record Fresh Meat is the scintillating soundtrack to a hazy day at the beach, cruising on your beach cruiser– or a humid night at The Smell stumbling florid-faced around a mosh pit with the raddest 15 year olds punks ever.
My friend (and occasional leather bar wingman) Nik Johnson is the creative force behind Naked Kids. He sings and scribes the band’s immediate, agile tunes and executes them with effortless grace alongside Siobhan Kelly and Jason Hanakeawe. In honor of Future Shipwreck premiering Naked Kids’ first official music video, “Thugz,” I asked Nik some questions about music, boys and odors, and then took some photos of him with his head in the sand. Watch “Thugz” below and read on to get the skinny on Naked Kids’ upcoming weed BBQ!
What are your songs about? What inspires you to write music?
I dunno, they seem to have a social and political edge to them. I write lyrics in layers. So like take “Thugz”: face value, you can say its about wanting to be a better person. Like, everyone can vibe on that, but when you get into the layers of it, it’s about a number of things. One layer is talking about how we are all going to die, potentially at the same time. Another layer’s about why people are who they are today and what the fuck happened to end up like this. I get inspired by lots of things. Everything from the behavior of people, paranoia, how rad my dog is, getting dusted, cute guys, friends, even cool music, but that’s rarely the case.
What’s the first album or cassingle you ever owned?
I can remember getting KISS’ Destroyer when i was a toddler. I used to love KISS. I remember when I stole my older brother’s Suicidal Tendencies and Metallica tapes, too. I grew up in the south Chicago suburbs in the 80s and Metallica was so huge. All the heshers wore jean jackets and Metallica shirts. Pretty tight. I got really into Nirvana and Green Day later. I didn’t really buy singles until I was older. I think the first single i got was a maxi-single. That song by Paperboy, “Ditty“. I bought that and my little brother got Da Brat’s “Funkdafied“. I eventually stole that shit from him.
What qualities do you admire most in a man?
Dark eyes, dark hair, smells like Alec Baldwin.
Is there an odor that brings your happiness?
Whiskey breath and weed. Sometimes I smell like Fatburger too… that usually makes me smile.
What would happen at the ultimate Naked Kids show? Where would it take place?
Prolly the L.A. Forum with Nirvana and The Shaggs. Or maybe at our practice space. All my friends would be there with a pound of weed on a BBQ. Clam-bake that shit out, even the peeps who don’t smoke would be DUSTED. You should go, I’ll make it one of our “secret shows”!
It’s a jungle is the name of the the installation dominating Henry Taylor‘s show at Blum & Poe. It is a jungle, but it’s also a graveyard and a playground, a densely layered labyrinth of refuse and memories cobbled together in the most pleasing manner. Bleak black bottles of bleach, mops and spears envelop artifacts from cherished memories of African-American culture. The spectre of racism looms near, establishing a mood as melancholy as it is magnetic– but Taylor refrains from placing obvious value judgements on his juxtapositions and references, instead opting to create an emotional data set from which viewers may extract what they choose.
Huge, gorgeous paintings fill the rest of the gallery with family and friends, heroes and archetypes rendered in vivid colors and passionate brush strokes. Taylor hails from downtown L.A. and he seems to takes pleasure in capturing the beating heart of his community. For instance, from an interview with Artinfo:
The stunned-looking woman seated in a chair in a 2010 canvas, for example, is a crack addict Taylor met on the street and paid to pose late one night. Asked whether he worries about letting strangers into his loft, which also functions as his studio, Taylor, 52, shrugs. “I wanted to work. You gotta get what you gotta get. So far so good. One girl stole my CD player.”
A feeling of intense intimacy creeps up on you in the midst of Taylor’s work. Little by little, he pulls you into his world and you’ll find yourself reluctant to leave. Check out some photos I took at the gallery after the jump, and head on over to Culver City to see it in person before the show closes this Saturday!
Annie Lapin‘s paintings represent a healthy mix of cerebral contemplation and audacious instinct. Framed by centuries of art history, Lapin’s work culls from the conventions of landscape painting and then obscures those familiar elements with unsettling layers of abstraction. I teamed up with Boston-based magazine New American Paintings to interview this renowned painter in her downtown L.A. studio, and take a look at her unique process.
I’m on the road with author/illustrator/philanthropist/magic-maker Dallas Clayton, and I keep mulling over this question: Has there ever been a kids book tour more fun than this? Maybe some Shel Silverstein tour, maybe. Really, this has to be in the top 3 2 craziest kids book tours of all time.
From L.A. to Phoenix and Tuscon and now El Paso, we’ve been sharing moments of sheer jubilation with the most extraordinary elementary school kids. Dallas is kind of a whiz at his job: rolling into a room full of kids and stoking them out with just his imagination. Our friend Micky Adams has true knack for compelling everyone to dance with the power of his bubbly folk tunes, as I jog around the room, documenting the madness from all angles.
Best of all, we’ve been getting into the randomest side adventures along the way: night frisbee in a truck stop parking lot, karaoke at a friendly bear bar, and the Arizona goth club we stumbled upon and somehow managed to demolish the dance floor with our wicked shadow-dancing. With 10 more days on the tour, I couldn’t be more excited to see what happens next. I shall return to Future Shipwreck in full force this April, and until then, peruse the pages of the Future Shipwreck Tumblr for your fix of rad art!
