I’m a big fan of the ABC Family show Pretty Little Liars. It’s an endurance piece about four millennial girls under constant surveillance, trapped in a feedback loop of dramatic glances and threatening text messages in an endlessly autumnal studio back lot approximation of an American small town. A faceless, omnipotent cyber-bully named “A,” who may or may not be the girls’ (dead) best frenemy, Allison DeLaurentis, fucks with them on the daily. No secret is safe and no moment is ever private from “A.”

Much of Pretty Little Liars makes little to no sense, but it always manages to reel me in with its hypnotic, fugue-like tone. I’ve been thoroughly entertained by its 70 episodes to date, so I’m being a friend when I say this, Pretty Little Liars: y’all got some fucked up food politics.

In Food Horror, I set out to examine the many moments in Pretty Little Liars’ first three seasons that stigmatize food, whether it’s presented with a feeling of unease, danger, or overt rejection. Aside from the 16 minutes of “food horror” I’ve compiled above, there are a countless dining scenes where food is conspicuously absent—often supplanted by the girls’ favorite diuretic, coffee. Sometimes they simply sit in front of a plate of prop salad and ignore it.

The show’s narrative touches on eating disorders in season one, when it’s revealed via flashback that Ashley Benson’s character, “Hefty” Hannah Marin, is a recovering bulimic. Her food issues were at the crux of her relationship with friend-slash-tormentor Allison, who once counseled Hannah on how to throw up: “I can show you how to get rid of it.” This small effort to work bulimia into the show’s discourse feels like a hollow gesture, since much of Pretty Little Liars reads like a how-to guide on making it through a meal without taking a bite.

It’s important to consider cultural messaging about health, body image and beauty embedded within entertainment targeting young girls. In 2012, Internet outrage lead social networks like Tumblr and Pinterest to adopt policies censoring individuals with eating disorders from sharing “thinspiration” tips. Silencing these organic online communities is an easy way to feel like we’re addressing eating disorders, but it does nothing to fix the systemic problems that allow body shame to permeate for-profit entertainment products aimed at women.

Shout out to Ashley Benson for killing it in the Spring Breakers part Emma Roberts reportedly left because she refused to gain 15 pounds for the role. Shout outs to Christian Marclay, Rainer Werner Fassbiner, gainers, Netflix, Rich Juzwiak and YouTube (the form, not the actual service).

XOXO
- G

Dear Future Shipwreck readers,

I’m thrilled to announce a project very close to my heart: The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame.

Gengoroh Tagame is an extraordinary, prolific artist widely recognized as the master of bara manga. Tagame comes from a long line of sexual provocateurs like Jean Genet, Yukio Mishimia, and Tom of Finland. His comics and paintings are scintillating, drenched in masculinity, and rife with sadomasochistic fantasy.

Tagame’s comics are nearly impossible to find in English. I felt like that was a criminal oversight, and it turned out I wasn’t alone! After I made a video for Future Shipwreck about gay manga last year, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my friend Anne Ishii had privately translated some of Tagame’s comics for the collection of Chip Kidd. Chip is not only of the world’s greatest graphic designers, but also a connoisseur of obscure Japanese comics (see also: his awesome collection Bat-Manga: The Secret History of Batman in Japan) and a huge fan of Tagame’s work.

So the three of us got together, and now we’re working with Tagame and the fantastic art book publisher Picturebox to put out the first offical English-language collection of Tagame’s work! The volume will include 10 stories from Tagame’s prolific catalog as well as a brand new story commisioned by Chip, exclusive sketches, and an introduction by gay literary icon Edmund White.

Read the full scoop on The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame over at The Comics Reporter. I’m visiting Tagame in Japan this fall, so expect plenty of fun surprises! Stay tuned as we get closer to the book’s Spring 2013 release. I hope you’re as excited as I am! It’s time Tagame got his dues.

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!

2010: it was rad. Super rad, even!

It started off with a totally blank slate: fresh out of a four-year relationship, I found a studio apartment in Silver Lake and began living alone for the first time in my life. Before I really had time to process the sheer terror and excitement of total personal autonomy, I was swept up in the blinding momentum of co-curating an art gallery with my dear friend, Mya Stark. Both of us were total virgins to the gallery world, but more than thrilled to make it up as we went along. Meanwhile, I was made ends meet by working night shifts as an extra in cell phone commercials and writing about art for Spike Jonze’s blog, We Love You So.

Springtime brought a full time gig with the world’s raddest children’s book author, Dallas Clayton, and the opening of a utopian pop-up shop in Tribeca with Family. We Love You So came to an end in April, so I started concentrating on Future Shipwreck in earnest, with the help of one of my favorite writerly voices: the divine Dan Rosplock. Since then, we’ve cooked up more than 200 posts (and more than 1000 posts on our tumblr, Future Shipwreck Lite).

Our goal has been to share as much awesome artwork as possible, while providing useful context and some entertaining ramblings to ponder along the way. We’ve interviewed some amazing people, covered L.A. art shows, shot documentaries, and evengiven away original artwork to our awesome readers! Along with contributions from Oregonian genius Grace Pettygrove and the impeccable Katie Vonderheide, Future Shipwreck has evolved into something splendiferous in 2010, and I’m beyond stoked to see where this site goes in 2011!

I’m proud to be a part of Dallas Clayton‘s life. His ideas are awe-inspiring and revolutionary, but he has a real knack for wording them in a way that everyone can understand. And then he illustrates them with a subtle sense of humor and grace that seems seriously scarce in children’s books these days. I’m proud to have been a part of the journey his sophomore book, An Awesome Book of Thanks, has taken two pages of text to a painstakingly detailed series of drawings, to an endless series of TIFFs and PDFs, to an actual book that you can touch and smell and put in a child’s hand and see their face light up.

Watch out the video that I made with Dallas to announce the new book, and then read An Awesome Book of Thanks for free! If you’re in L.A., don’t miss Dallas’ book launch party at Family this weekend. There will be cupcakes!

Dallas Clayton has a new website that houses his poems for grown-ups. It’s filled with incredible illustrations, photos from his wild adventures on the road (touring elementary schools with An Awesome Book), videos and some of his best writing from the past and the present. It is rad and I can say that with confidence, as I helped him design it. Add it to your bookmarks ASAP, and if you’re on Tumblr, follow him! Take a look at some particularly excellent Dallas Clayton drawings and writings, after the jump.

Previously:
+ Video: Dallas Clayton on Opportunities
+ An Awesome Dallas Clayton Interview

HEADSHOT

Every evening
he buys his smokes
and looks up at the wall
behind the counter
hoping it’s gone.

Every evening
it stares back at him,
the ghost of his faded attempt
8 x 10
black and white
bleached and curled by time
dead center
bookended by a sad comedian with a pony tail
and a professional Lose Weight Exercise lifter who signs his autograph with a smiley face.

NIGHT (GREATER THAN) CLUB

Last night
we cleaned our closets
of old books, clothing, movies, and other small but valuable items
that we no longer appreciated.

We spread them out on my bed
and bundled each into a tidy care package,
then wrapped them with the paper
left over from Christmas
and fit the packages with a note
explaining its contents
and how useful it might be
if discovered by the right person.

Some that were less exciting
or less useful
we added stories to
like how they were magical
or given to us by wizards,
and some we drew pictures on
and made quite colorful.

We drove around the city
leaving them at bus stops,
in parks, on doorsteps,
hidden inside newspaper machines
for strangers to find
and hopefully open
and be happy about.

In the process
we also discovered
a twenty four hour Korean spa
built into a four story shopping mall
with a laser light karaoke bar in the basement
where they will record your song onto compact disc.

For twenty dollars you can spend the night in the spa,
steam, shower, sauna, and sleep
in a big comfy leather chair
until eleven AM.

For seventy dollars you can get a massage
that includes acupressure and a deep cleaning face scrub.

Also there is a fruit stand in the parking lot
run out of the back of a delivery truck.

The peaches are delicious.

BEST

Just before bed
I kiss my son
and ask him what he thinks he will dream about.
He responds:
“About a forest, with a big pond, and rainbow, and there are unicorns there
under the rainbow and they are playing tag with me, and my dad is there too.”

I consider this a victory for the forces of good.

Satoshi Kon was not just an incredible director, he was a man who understood the inner workings of our collective fantasies. Dreams, no matter how strange or wonderful, aren’t just magically conjured from the ether—they are built very carefully, sometimes deliberately from the people, objects, and ideas we encounter every day. Even our most intimate, personal desires which seem to stem from a deep-seated, primal urge can only reveal themselves to the mind’s eye in the guise of things we have found in the world around us: love appears as a celebrity’s face, truth sounds like an advertising slogan, happiness feels weirdly similar to your old Power Rangers pajamas. Whatever mundane symbolic vocabulary you might need to converse with your subconscious, Satoshi Kon knew it and he was fucking fluent.

I first encountered Kon’s work as a rather disgruntled, closeted queer teen in the suburbs of northern Kentucky. Like so many other awkward weirdos before me I decided to create an imaginary sense of community for myself via nerdy obsession, in this case with Japanese animation. Even back in those pre-Adult Swim, Web 1.0 days when anime was still a relatively “new thing” from an American’s perspective, there were very few of those exotic Eastern oddities that could compare to the all-out nightmare head trip of Perfect Blue. Following the career of a young pop idol, Mima, who decides ditch her bubblegum-glamorous popular persona in exchange for a “serious” acting gig in a rape/revenge murder mystery, Kon dragged protagonists and viewers alike into a treacherous mass delusion involving stalkers, intrusive blogging, and self-assassination. To an out of place homo such as myself these images of oppressive social expectations, of friends and strangers trying to hijack your dreams and force you into their twisted idea of “what should be” made a lot of sense. Of course, my life was not nearly so scary or dramatic as Mima’s, but I never forgot Kon’s bizarre-yet-familiar vision of all the crazy shit you have to go through just to make a new identity for yourself.

Over the years, as anime became increasingly mainstream, Satoshi-san continued to produce a body of work that quietly and masterfully managed to blow my mind and alter the manner in which I think about the ways we are all fundamentally connected on a basic mental level. There was Paprika, part psychedelic group therapy session, part detective story, Tokyo Godfathers, a heartwarming, vaguely Kurosawa-ish tale of social outcasts working out personal issues by caring for an abandoned baby, and the TV series Paranoia Agent which explored the mysterious power of urban legends and showcased the bombastic genius of electronic maestro Susumu Hirasawa. For most people any of these things would be a career-defining achievement, but for Kon they seemed more like variations on a theme. From Magnetic Rose to Millennium Actress you could never quite be sure whose mind was imagining what in this endless circuit of shared perception, but the confusion was enthralling nonetheless because we were all in it together.

This past Tuesday, it was announced that Satoshi Kon had died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 46. He is survived by his final project, a movie called Dream Machine which others will now take up and complete. It seems oddly fitting that this last work should be passed along so gracefully. His last message to us was this:

With feelings of gratitude for all that is good in this world, I put down my pen. Goodbye now. Satoshi Kon

(Translation and some great images via Ryan Sands of Same Hat!)

FACT: the year after Indiana University faculty member Alfred Kinsey published his famous Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, future cult leader and mass murderer, Jim Jones, began his undergraduate studies here. The way I figure, weird historical overlaps like that must be happening all the time, so why not explore a little and see what kinds of hidden treasure the Hoosier State has to offer?

So far I’ve discovered a combination haunted train/railway museum, two gas stations–one abandoned and one active–frequented by juggalos, and the secret lakeside retreat of none other than John “Cougar” Mellencamp. They will be presented here for your amusement… whenever I get around to it. Until then, enjoy this delicious pun brought to you by one of our many local churches.

I usually try to CC Satan, Shiva, and Osiris on those, just to cover my bases.

Spike Jonze designed some awesome air dancers for Opening Ceremony. Head over to We Love You So to see more photos of these glorious balloon beasts in action!