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!

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On a recent trip to Chinatown, some invisible force drew me into the POVevolving gallery, where I was confronted by an 18′-long foam skeleton. The piece, Dead Man, dominates the space, floating just a few inches above the floor. It reminds me of those wooden mannequins that pervade art classes across the globe, except huge and suspended in an indefinitely cadaverous pose. Dead Man is the centerpiece of New York artist Clark Goolsby‘s show STRANGE/LOVE, comprised of paintings and sculptures rendered in pleasing shapes and a fluorescent color palette that I’ll never not adore. Pictures after the jump.

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There’s so much rad art scattered throughout the world, it can all feel little overwhelming. Luckily, in the 21st Century, we have a plethora of mediums through which to disseminate all that radness: the Internet, magazines, coffee table book anthologies– and perhaps the most quaintly archaic of the bunch– art fairs! Fairs provide you with something that none of the above can: a visceral sense of the endlessness of culture. Direct contact with the people who get paid to have good taste. A labyrinth of beautiful objects that you can examine with an awe-inspired scrutiny that even the best computer monitor cannot allow.

New American Paintings and Future Shipwreck teamed up to take a look at the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair this year, and ended up speaking with some of the raddest people around: Jessica Silverman of Silverman Gallery (home to Conrad Ruiz and Luke Butler); Wendy Yao of my favorite store on the east side of L.A. (Ooga Booga); Katharine Mulherin, whose gallery represents Winnie Truong, and many others! It felt like going to Disneyland, but with more turtlenecks.

What Tom Neely and his friends at Igloo Tornado started as a joke on a cocktail napkin years ago has blossomed into a mini-phenomenon. Henry & Glenn Forever is their hysterical mini-comic about the imagined tender love affair between intensely macho punk icons Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins, with digressions into their domestic duties, lovemaking practices, and friendship with the satanic couple next door, Daryl Hall and John Oates. The resulting patchwork of approaches in aesthetic and humor somehow manages to fuse gay jokes with gay’s jokes, striking a chord with punks, comic book geeks and homos alike– though Danzig himself is less than amused.

Last Friday night saw the opening of “Henry & Glenn Gang Bang,” an art show full of new pieces inspired by the original comic from a variety of vantage points, including works by queer comic king (and creator of Wuvable Oaf) Ed Luce, rising art star Eric Yahnker, and Jar Jar Binks aficionado Levon Jihanian. Take a peek at pictures from the opening below, and go check out the show at La Luz De Jesus before it comes down this weekend!

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When you were eight, nine years old, did you love Dilbert or The Far Side or Cathy? Jump Start? For Better or For Worse (if you were a total dork)? Those were simpler, blissfully ignorant times, before the veil of childhood was lifted and the funnies quickly lost their luster. Grown-up comics gave way to the operatic brooding of superheroes, or alternately, the navel-gazing existential musings of indie comics. Neither genre is widely known for its guffaws and belly laughs. Lucky for us, we’ve still got weirdos like Robert Crumb, Matt Furie, and Johnny Ryan running about, producing deliriously funny cartoons.

Add to that list another comedian undercover as an artist: Lisa Hanawalt. Hanawalt’s formal artistic skill is unparalleled, suave and refined– so graceful and gorgeous, it’s doubly fun to watch her gleefully defecate upon it with an array of dizzyingly crude subject matter. Hanawalt’s work is the perfect mixture of adorable animals, gentle bon moths, and beyond the pale dead baby jokes, poop jokes and/or dick jokes. I can almost picture her as a happy little kid, obsessed with drawing majestic stallions, before something deliciously insidious crept into her mind and persuaded her to draw deeply unsettling, even nauseating images of anthorpomorphized creeps and unstable human bodies from beyond the uncanny valley.

Check out pictures from the second issue of her excellent comic book I Want You, below. The Fan Mail page is especially awesome, and paints a picture of Hanawalt as the type of person who’d be more than just a little bit fun to hang out with. Don’t miss her fantastic new series for The Hairpin, “Rumors I’ve Heard About Anna Wintour.”

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I love Twin Peaks. I also love art, pie, and Clifton’s Cafeteria. So you can imagine the immeasurable magnitude of my excitement when all of these things collided last weekend at “In The Trees,” an art exhibition celebrating the 20th anniversary of David Lynch’s masterpiece.

Nowhere else on earth could have been more appropriate to host such an event than downtown L.A.’s world-famous surreal woodland forest-themed cafeteria, Clifton’s. Supplementing the already-perfect surroundings, they gave us free pie! And donuts! A red-curtained Black Lodge filled with David Lynch art pieces! Grace Zabriskie decoupage! I’m hyperventilating, simply reminiscing about the glory of this event. Take a look at some pictures from the opening, below.

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Melancholy GIF masterpieces from Laura Brothers. Brothers is just one of the many stellar artists exhibiting technology-inspired work in Synchronicity’s new show, Man, Such As We Know Him, Is A Computer.

Synchronicity, run by Chris Gere and Future Shipwreck’s own Katie Vonderheide, is one of L.A.’s most reliably awesome art galleries. Sadly, they’ve been in limbo for a few months now thanks to jackass East Hollywood landlords raising rents– so this show will be taking place at Mastodon Mesa‘s space in the Pacific Design Center.

Spencer Longo has taken on the task of transforming the gallery’s interior with an all-encompassing cyberdelic installation. Come check it out tomorrow night, January 20th– and get sucked into the net! The show includes work from Rafael Rozendaal, Peter Burr, and Owleyes and a boatload of other rad people. Don’t miss it!

Leilah Weinraub has spent eight years working on Shakedown, “the story of a black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles.” What started as documentation of the club’s by-women for-women performances (which Weinraub used for video installations) soon grew into something much more personal and meditative, as she began to focus on the lives of the performers outside the club. The deeper she became invested in the project, the clearer it became that a wider narrative of labor, community and symbiosis was being woven through the individual tales of the women who make up Shakedown’s extended family:

The film is anchored in the stories of three women: Ronnie Ron, the creator and emcee of Shakedown, a large butch/stud lesbian and former Jehovah’s Witness; Egypt, a single mother, beauty pageant fanatic, and dedicated self – (re)inventor; and Jazmyne, the complicated and sometimes conflicted “Queen” of Shakedown.

Go check out the video on Leilah’s Kickstarter page, and consider making a contribution towards the completion of this epic untold tale!