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.

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!

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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.

Clockwise from top: States of Matter, Natalie Portman in one of Rodarte’s Black Swan costumes, and Dave White at MOCA (photo by Chris Gardner).

I think about the La Brea Tar Pits a lot. It’s my favorite place in Los Angeles.

One of the things I like about the main tar pit is that it’s a neighbor to the LA County Museum of Art. Separating them is a permanent outdoor installation of huge concrete Donald Judd cubes. I like the way the cubes are enormously heavy, solid, orderly and immobile, but 20 feet away is a bubbling pit of tar that seems alive and chaotic and—if the movie Volcano is to be believed—possibly even going to kill us all some day and swallow those cubes whole.

Donald Judd: Untitled (for Leo Castelli), 1977

That block of land at Wilshire and Fairfax is also slugging itself around my brain while I’m inside MOCA at the Pacific Design Center at the Rodarte: States of Matter show. Because when you walk inside, the lower level is engaged in a similar kind of boxing match between the witchy, mentally ill Black Swan ballerina costumes that Kate and Laura Mulleavy created for Natalie Portman’s freakout, and several other black dresses that have been assembled from dyed cheesecloth and gauze, black feathers, metal lace and black vinyl embossed in a way that resembles a gnarled, lumpy, horror-creature dream. Hedora from Godzilla vs The Smog Monster appears to have been skinned alive after emerging from the oozing, bubbling Tar Pits and then turned into a shoulder cap for a dress. While you stare at it wondering how and why, you realize that if you took a very close-up photograph of all the elements going on at once, it would seem like a scorched, doom-landscape. Not a dress, but something that could swallow a giant Donald Judd cube. And that is fantastic.

Photo: Autumn de Wilde

Climb the stairs for more dresses and more Black Swan gear. Now the entire space on MOCA’s second floor is a strobe light show of flurorescent black and red competing for attention and, at times, simultaneously submerging the area in darkness. None of the clothes are black but the narrative is still a scary bedtime story.

At the top of the stairs is a group of white dresses suspended on wires that, in the black light, turn to into floating Haunted Mansion ghosts but, at, odd intervals, in brightest light, have the feel of a pearl-draped grandma who decided to add bedspread fringe to her sleeves just to remind you that she’s about to turn a hundred and she’s not done having it her way quite yet. Gnarled, nubbly wool pops up all over the place, and one of the dresses features a bodice that looks like a shearling breastplate. Everything here is white or near-white and, depending on when you look at it, in darkness or in light, it can feel both romantic and full of strange dread.

Photos: Ourcroissant

If you move over there are white incarnations of the black ballet costumes from below and, then, in the back corner, the film’s “Oops I just stabbed myself in the stomach because I’m crazy” costume, its hand-made open red wound popping out like a really gross flower, front and center.

The shock of that garment tempers the Dario Argento-ish smeared, streaked red dresses from a 2008 collection hovering nearby. They haven’t been splattered, though. They’ve been soaked and left to precision drip. Again, order co-existing with chaos. These are my favorite pieces in the show, because they remind me of a fake blood-stained white porcelain teapot by the Spanish artist Antonio Murado that a friend gave me, the perfect dresses to wear to a crime scene tea party or teen slasher prom night. They’re the last thing you witness. They’re the horror movie’s “Final Girl.” They’re everything beautiful and terrifying, all at once.

Antonio Murado: Salome Coffee Set

Dave White is the author of Exile in Guyville, film critic for Movies.com, a contributor to L.A.’s “Slake” and KCRW’s “UnFictional.” Find him on Facebook.

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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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!