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.
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”!
Watching L’amour fou, the documentary about the art auction conducted by Pierre Bergé after the death of his partner of 50 years, Yves Saint Laurent, is a little less inspiring than watching Herb & Dorothy, the 2009 documentary that’s also about art collecting (and then unloading late in life). But I’ll get to the reasons why in a minute, because first I want to praise this movie for what it gets excellently right:
1. You get to see a tiny amount of very intimate, loving footage related to the relationship between YSL and Bergé. Bergé’s eulogy for his deceased husband is as moving a moment as you’ll see in theaters this year. And, earlier, some vintage one-on-one conversation footage where YSL playfully tells his man that he enjoys male “body hair” and that he wants to live in “a large bed, a full one,” should clear up any clueless viewer’s ideas about them being strictly business associates. Bergé was YSL’s daddy bear.
Left: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Right: one of YSL’s Mondrian-inspired dresses.
2. Bergé is not the kind of guy to waste time mourning the past. His clear-eyed approach to the dismantling of the couple’s astonishingly large art, furniture and rare object collection is a study in not being attached to things when it’s time for them to exit your life. Besides, he had plenty of time to mourn while YSL was alive and trying to simultaneously drown himself in booze and snort up all the cocaine on the planet. During that time Bergé stood by and took care of his clinically depressed, sickened, addict partner and kept all the paperwork in order so that YSL could design clothes and then hermit himself in a private room, put on a caftan and inhale a small pyramid of blow.
3. You get to see a healthy amount of Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux, YSL’s muses. One light and warm (de la Falaise), one dark and swaddled in black leather (Catroux), they are cool injections of French womanhood into YSL’s insular gayness. Catroux, especially, is like something a writer would invent, never without her sunglasses, even at night.
Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux
4. Their lives were an orgy of luxury and shopping. They bought houses, art and more houses and more art. “One fine day a Mondrian came into our lives,” says Bergé, like it flew into their window and decided it was happiest living next to that Picasso over the fireplace. And then, when it was done, Bergé sent it to the auction house, a place he describes as “the undertakers of art.”
5. Thrill to the head-scratching vagaries of the art auction secondary market where an Ensor fetches more than a Degas.
6. This sort of thing:
And if, in the end, it’s all a little less inspiring than Herb & Dorothy, it’s because of that wealth. Extreme capitalism, even when it’s predicated on the work of a design visionary like Yves Saint Laurent and subsequently used in the service of building an awesome art collection, is sort of automatically less interesting than going on a journey with two extremely ordinary, working class collectors like Herb and Dorothy Vogel, whose lives revolved around living on her librarian’s salary and amassing crazy amounts of conceptual and minimalist pieces (when no one else wanted them) on his postal worker’s income. It’s easy to see a Brâncusi and say, “I’ll take it,” when you’re swimming in cash, or getting a Warhol piece for free because you hang out with him and he decides to photograph you. It’s way more dangerous to risk your retirement savings on work you love just because you love it, become Christo’s cat-sitter and then later donate all of it to various museums without asking for anything in return.
But again, this isn’t meant to harsh on these guys. YSL backed up his decadence with a legacy of his own amazing art worn by fancy ladies the world over. The planet needs people like him, people who live their lives exactly as they please. And if that life involves getting high with Mick Jagger and flying around France in your own private helicopter and asking Betty Catroux what she wants for dinner and she says, “Cigarettes,” then that’s cool, too.
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!
It turns out heaven is a place on Earth, bathed in a cloud of dust on the tracks between Black Butte, Oregon and Mt. Shasta, California. That’s where train hoppers have created the Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture, a museum celebrating the splendor of transience, complete with a zine library and punk venue in two refurbished antique boxcars. When I visited the Center during a summer gathering, I couldn’t help but marvel at the togetherness of such a collective, and the very existence of a place where a phrase like “queer feminist train hopper” is nothing to gawk at.
Amidst such a vibrant sub-subculture, sometimes resident and full time punk virtuoso Robnoxious is well known for providing a good bit of community glue through his zines, illustrations, and screenprint designs. Heavyweight zine distro Microcosm now carries a wide selection of Rob’s prolific output, exposing a much broader audience to gems like You Fucked Up– a dreamy post-apocalyptic anarchist fantasy series whose fourth and final installation arrives in early 2011.
Shut Up and Love the Rain, released in September, is an earnest and hilarious comic diary of young Robert’s discovery of human sexuality and his own latent queerness. He doesn’t stigmatize or shy from the details, and the result is a narrative that empowers us all to utter our tales of awkward adolescence. As much as I enjoy Rob’s bare, yet whimsical illustration style, my favorite sections of Love the Rain are his text memoirs. These may be the most frank accounts of youthful experimentation I’ve ever read, and his triumphant tales of masturbation will have you fetishizing the banana in ways you never imagined. The latter half of the zine takes on a more sentimental tone– featuring an intimate interview with Rob’s parents about his father’s transgender coming out story (you can also read this section on his blog). It’s a sex-positive feel-good family dramedy for the rest of us.
Arthur Russell was a perfectionist, a tinkerer, and something of a recluse. His East Village apartment was a cave, filled from floor to ceiling with musical equipment, records and unfinished demo tapes. Sometimes Russell was so cut off from the outside world, his only connection was an extension cord trailing back to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment, supplying free electricity to his private cocoon.
Living in that state can get a little overwhelming. At a certain point, you’re bound to feel an intense desire to untangle the ball of yarn your life has become, one thread at a time. That’s what the song “Time Away” is about, for me. It’s about getting your shit together and clearing out the cobwebs in both your physical and mental space. The tidying of a room can be a majestic and deeply profound act. It can be as triumphant and vindicating as running a marathon or baring your emotions to someone you love.
I listen to this song whenever I need to take a few deep breaths, look at things from a wider perspective and pick up my pants off the floor, even if I might wear them today. Take a listen below, and then check out the compilation it comes from, Love Is Overtaking Me, an album that’s truly incredible from start to finish.
Salt ‘N Pepper Bear, a gift from the miraculous Jason Villegas. I’m gonna treasure this piece forever. Now I just have to find a prominent spot to display it on my wall!
Distortion: why does it rule? Back in 1936, Walter Benjamin famously theorized that our desire to have the work of art, that thing of mysterious origin and affecting beauty up close, to bring it into our comfortable private space on our own terms we are only too happy to accept the reproduction. The fact that this pretty much always entails a disruption of its original (some might say “pure”) form is a necessary compromise in this never-ending pursuit of personal aesthetic fulfillment. Most of us would gladly take a low-resolution jpeg of Justin Bieber into our home before the artist himself. Though imperfect, static, and two-dimensional it’s just a lot more manageable.
Artists like Cédric Fargues take delight in this kind of degeneration. If what we can get from the original source is always kind of fucked up from the start, why not fuck it up in a way that’s pleasing to our sensibilities? He uses Photoshop (or some analogous image editing software) in the same way psych bands use guitar effects pedals: not as a substitute for authenticity, but as an enhancement, as a style. His works fluctuate between too-pristine garden ornaments and melting, swirling celebrity portraits, all of which are suspended over a stoic digital dreamscape. If words can’t express what you’re feeling how about a virtual flowa?
Destroy all icons. Arrange your environment with utter precision and then launch it into the infinite isolation of space. If we can’t have everything we desire, at least we have the wonderfully off-putting simulated realities of Cédric Fargues.
, an album that’s truly incredible from start to finish.
