Image by Ralph Steadman
In this excerpt from his newest novel, Sasha Fletcher takes us on a walk through town on a chilly evening, with the cold winds coming in "from the North or the East or some other place full up with trouble and nonsense." Click here to read the full story.
Ryan Ridge's short stories carry a sort of essence of the 21st century. His brief prose style parallels with our abrupt, social-media-driven way of communicating in the modern world. The following tales--centered around the recently gentrified community of Echo Park in Los Angeles--capture the dark tensions behind everything from climate change to Charlie Chaplin tramp stamps. Click here to read the selections.
photograph by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari
He was a “he,” which meant the dummie knew already that there was only two things in the world that mattered and he wasn’t either of them. Were, were! There was the online world of instagram photos and sexiness. Everything that was young or female and sexy or famous and rich and arching its back in a photo, which he wasn’t and then there was the physical world of problems, such as taking a shit and what was written on the wall, and having to go upstairs to take a shit because someone was already in the bathroom, which was the janitor, probably, and him being on campus, and him being in his office, and his being on campus, and him being a fuckhead professor, which you shouldn’t and couldn’t really even say as a fuckhead who was a professor. Fuckhead. click here to read the full story
Fiction writer and nonfiction essayist Luke B. Goebel – author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours – gives a history lesson like no other in this 8,000-word essay (separated into four parts) on the artist colony haven known as Marfa, Texas. From the Nazi prisoner of war camps of the 1940s to the great minimalist Donald Judd planting his roots here, Goebel brilliantly weaves his own historical narrative with art history’s narrative – he also combines his fears, his hopes, his aspirations and his yearnings for this art Shangri-La in the Texas badlands that is still hinged on the neon Americana of yesteryear’s no vacancy sign. It is a romantic, madcap, delirious tale that takes you on a romping ride through the hellish landscape of Goebel’s free associative wax poetics that at times gets caught up with the rolling tumble weeds and amber colored dust of the desert, but never leaves you lost and begging for water. Click here to read the full essay.
Read "Snow's Tight and the Two Whores – Abandoned and Unfinished" the latest true tale of scoring, shooting up and burning out on the streets of Los Angeles by writer Max Barrie. Click here to read the story.
"...Women in the past, they usually reacted like a dog ate their homework. Of course, I'm referring to the ladies that weren't handing me an invoice after I ejaculated..." Max Barrie talks about the "vagina of his dreams," being in the friend zone and the ultimate torment of both rejection and self realization in the latest installment of his non-fiction short story series A Trendy Tragedy. Read the store here.
Writer Max Barrie waxes poetic in a darkly humorous riff on suicide and depression - with a few tragic stories thrown in the mix - in the new installment of his non-fiction short story series A Trendy Tragedy. Read the full text here.
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.
"I almost drowned in SoCal’s sea of superficial diarrhea… and I’m not out of the deep doo yet. The fact that I haven’t blown my brains out— is well… not really that miraculous. I’m a big pink muffin and I’m afraid that if I make my exit too soon, I’ll just be shit out someplace worse… like Sylmar." Writer Max Barrie describes fear and loathing in Malibu and mainlining rainbows in this rabid tale of materialism in Lost Angeles. It's an important and cautionary tale that all should take heed. Read the short non-fiction story here.
Read 'Beauty and The Light-Switch Are Thick As Thieves'. It will be the first installment of a short non-fiction series, entitled A Trendy Tragedy, by Los Angeles based writer Max Barrie exploring sex, drugs and growing up in the vapidness of Beverly Hills and the entertainment industry. Click here to read.
Train Yourself to Lose is a new collaborative artist book by Dan Colen and Harmony Korine - poetry by Korine and paintings by Colen made with the brightly dyed deli store flowers seen all over Manhattan. Purchase here.
Ai Weiwei's new book Weiwei-isms is a collection of quotes demonstrates the elegant simplicity of the Chinese artist and political activist's thoughts on key aspects of his art, politics, and life. photograph by Ai Weiwei
A memoir penned by the former model and current creative director of Vogue Magazine Grace Coddington is now available
Gainsbourg: The Biography
Torbjørn Rødland's photography is direct but idiosyncratic, pushing at the boundaries of aesthetic and social norms. His fifth book, Vanilla Partner, continues in this vein, combining images of fetishized isolation in a layout that rejects the linear structure of thematic photography books. Rødland’s practice navigates through the problematic and seemingly unchanging heart of popular photography. Accepting neither the humanist realism of most photographic portraiture nor the postmodern role-play, Vanilla Partner explores the cultural complexities and archaic foundation of contemporary image-making. Reconstructed scenes of ultrasoft BDSM read like twisted metaphors for photography’s ability to freeze or capture. The book title, dripping in innuendo, also poses a question about the ambiguity of the relationship between the artist and his medium. Is Rødland acknowledging the medium’s straight foundation or does he see himself dominated by it? Many of the images also have explicit political references, often linked to the 1980 US Presidential election. Vanilla Partner brings together works made in Oslo, Tokyo, Beijing and Rødland’s current home, Los Angeles. Torbjørn Rødland was born in 1970 in Hafrsfjord, Norway. Since the mid-90s his photographs have been exhibited widely. Vanilla Partner is available to purchase here.
British-born, Los Angeles-based poet John Tottenham photographed by actor Adam Goldberg (Dazed and Confused, Saving Private Ryan). John Tottenham's new book of poetry, entitled Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment, is out now on Penny-Ante Editions. Tottenham writes hilariously savage, self-lacerating verse about the artistic ego that always slyly implicates his audience. His readings have been a staple at literary readings in the Los Angeles area, and he is well known among the town's art and literary circles. In performance, at least, his literary voice comes across as a pitch-perfect channeling of the Dostoevsky character from Notes From Underground. And his truth hits always have his audiences doubled over with laughter.
Walter Pfeiffer’s Scrapbooks from 1969 to 1982 are a very unique Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities). Pfeiffer’s Polaroids and photographs alternate with miscellaneous objects – newspaper clippings, postcards, packaging, tickets – and brief punning notes. Pfeiffer assembles all of this into a large collage full of surprising references and comparisons that is both a visual diary and creative foundation of his artistic work. In his scrap books, Pfeiffer’s keen view of Eros, Zeitgeist and popular culture, his disrespectful humor as well as his appreciation for the poetry in the mundane and banal, are sharply revealed. They offer a view into Pfeiffer’s meandering and playful universe and are a contemporary document that captures the Zeitgeist of the 1970s and 1980s with ephemeral elegance. Walter Pfeiffer's Scrapbooks 1969-1985 is available here.
Tillmans's latest project sets its sights on the world. Over the period of more than two decades, Wolfgang Tillmans has explored the medium of photo-imaging with greater range than any other artist of his generation. From snapshots of his friends to abstract images made in a darkroom without a camera or works made with a photocopier, he has pushed the photographic process to its outer limits in myriad ways. For this collection of photos, his fourth book with Taschen, Tillmans turned away from the self-reflexive exploration of the photography medium that had occupied him for several years by focusing his lens on the outside world—from London and Nottingham to Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania, Saudi Arabia, and Papua New Guinea. He describes this new phase simply as “trying out what the camera can do for me, what I can do for it.” The result is a powerful and singular view of life today in diverse parts of the world, seen from many angles. Says Tillmans, “My travels are aimless as such, not looking for predetermined results, but hoping to find subject matter that in some way or other speaks about the time I'm in.” The exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans: Neue Welt / Wolfgang Tillmans. New World will be on show at the Kunsthalle in Zurich until November 2012. The monograph will be available on October 30, but is available for preorder now.
Taschen has released 1,344 pages of artist Robert Crumb's hand-picked selections from his notebooks.This six-book boxed set is the first collection of Robert Crumb sketches to be printed from the original art since the hard-bound, slipcased, seven volume series issued by the German publisher Zweitausendeins between 1981 and 1997. The edition by Taschen has been personally edited by Crumb himself to include only what he considers his finest work, including hundreds of late period drawings not published in previous sketchbook collections. Robert Crumb: The Sketchbooks. 1982-2011 is now available by Taschen.
This artist’s book documents Dan Colen’s 2011 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York, as well as his June 2012 Gagosian exhibition in Paris. Drawing from mass media, local environment, and subculture, Dan Colen’s art imbues the ordinary, the disenfranchised, and the tribal with provocative new status. This publication includes over fifty new works, including Colen’s series of Grass, Gum, Confetti, and Stud, with extensive details of the works. There is also text by Harmony Korine. Now available by Rizzoli.
