Surf Discovery for Social Survival is the surf/music feature film born from the collaboration of Chris Gentile from New York-based surf brand Pilgrim Surf + Supply and Keith Abrahmsson from the record label Mexican Summer. Together they started this ambitious project to connect surf, sound and sight and make a film that would satisfy most senses. World-renowned surfers including Stephanie Gilmore, Ryan Burch, Creed McTaggart and Ellis Ericson joined musicians Allah-Las, Peaking Lights, Connan Mockasin and MGMT ’s Andrew VanWyngarden on this surf journey starting from a secret spot in Mexico, to the southern atolls of the Maldive Islands, and ending in the cold waters of Iceland. Click here to read more.
[BOOKS] Mujercitos Compiles Tears Sheets From a Notorious Mexican Tabloid Featuring Transvestites
The results of detailed research from Susana Vargas and art critic Cuauhtémoc Medina, Mujercitos gathers photographs of men dressed as women featured in the periodical Alarma!, known as a nota roja or "red page" newspaper for its bloody content, from the 1960s to the 1980s. This volume collects a selection of key Mexican newsprint tearsheets, with the original layout and typography, each of which represents a mujercito, or "effeminate man," in a highly sexualized, objectified way. Vargas' contextualizing research explores the ways in which these photographs, printed in sensationalistic "true-crime" newspapers, participate in the larger national imaginary of non-normative sexualities in Mexico. In studying these representations of mujercitos, Vargas further traces Anglo-North American theories of gender/sex performativity onto Mexican society, only to discover the multitude of ways in which the relation between gender, sex, sexual orientation and desire is permeated with concerns of race and class in Mexican culture. Click here to buy.
Read Bruce Licher's Remembrance of An Amazing Adventure In Calexico with the Late Chris Burden →
photograph by Bruce Licher
Chris Burden, who passed away a few days ago at his home in Topanga Canyon, California at the age of 69, was known for his performance art pieces that bordered on terrorism, like the time he took a pistol and fired several shots at a passenger airline taking off from LAX. In another piece, entitled Coals to Newcastle, which is a British idiom for doing something stupid or pointless, Burden sent a toy rubber-band model airplane with marijuana strapped to it over the border into Mexico. In the following eulogy of the late groundbreaking artist, Bruce Licher - a former student and founder of the LA post-punk band Savage Republic - describes his adventure in Calexico with Burden during the preparation and making of Coals to Newcastle. Read the whole story here.