A Peek Inside The New "Tom House: Tom of Finland in Los Angeles" Book

Tom House: Tom of Finland in Los Angeles, from the Rizzoli imprint, is a delicious peek inside the legendary former residence of Finnish erotic illustrator and painter of all your gay fantasies, Touko Laaksonen. The home, on a quiet suburban street in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, is where Laaksonen, most famously known as Tom of Finland, lived and worked during the last ten years of his life. The men and muses he lived with still live there to this day and maintain the home just as he left it, albeit with a lot more of his artwork on the walls. To the un-gay eye, this house may seem like a den of iniquity, but in reality it is a shrine to the late Tom of Finland and it is a testament to freedom of sexuality and desire. Straight or gay, Tom’s House is a must visit when you spend time in Los Angeles, and the book is an excellent way to visit if you can’t actually be there. All in all, the book is also one of the best testaments to the legacy of Tom of Finland.  Click here to purchase Tom House: Tom of Finland In Los Angeles.

Bombs & Candy

From Rizzoli publishers comes first monograph, entitled Bombs and Candy, on Kata Legrady's works presenting a collection of drawings, photographs, sculptures, and video installations. Kata Legrady belongs to that long and bountiful line of artists for whom an object offers the stimulus for artistic thought and action. Her work takes the form of a symbolic encounter between two distinct universes: on the one side, weapons of war, and on the other, confectionary. In other words, there is a short-circuit between the lethal and the inoffensive; a tension between childhood and destruction, between carefree and suffering. The use of Smarties--those famous multicolored 'pills'--cannot but evoke the "colored dots" used by Roy Lichtenstein to create his enlarged and framed comic strip images. With the difference, however, that these Smarties are not used to create images but to decorate weapons, covering them systematically, although this is not enough to make them unusable or unrecognizable. In the hands of the artist, machine guns, grenades and knives become strange and colorful, almost beautiful and appealing. There are also bombs of various formats and size, varying from a few centimeters to several meters. This time, they are not recovered objects, however, but sculptures of essential form covered in metallic industrial paint.

[BOOKS] Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles

In 1946, the tabloid photographer known as Weegee relocated from New York City to Los Angeles. Abandoning the grisly crime scenes for which he was best known, Weegee trained his camera instead on Hollywood celebrities, starlets, autograph seekers, and shop-window mannequins, sometimes distorted through trick lenses and multiple exposures. “Now I could really photograph the subjects I liked,” said Weegee of his newfound career in Los Angeles, “I was free.” Presenting approximately 200 photographs, many of which have never before been shown, the book, Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles, explores Weegee’s related work as an author, filmmaker, and photo-essayist.  You can purchase the book here.