Dis Magazine refuses to stop blowing my mind. Every time they release a new photo set, it’s more extravagant and outrageous than the last! Their freshest fashion spread brings back the chic early 90s trend Ebola for some hot— like, “my body temperature is 110 degrees” hot— medical gear and near-death illness-inspired looks.

I was so stoked on the Ebola virus back in the day! I used to carry around The Hot Zone like a Bible. It’s nice to see my favorite Congolese Filoviridae making a comeback. Bird flu can suck it.

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 weight 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.

It’s the last weekend of Summer. So why are you online? Save the excuses— but at least if you’re going to waste the day indoors, basking in the cool glow of your LCD screen, why not take a break from absent-mindedly clicking endlessly through an ever-expanding deluge of static cyber content?

Take a deep breath, relinquish control, and allow yourself to be passively entertained by awesome video art for the next 40 minutes. How? By sinking into Permanent Vacation, a series of videos curated by awesome L.A. gallery space Show Cave. Watch as 16 different artists ruminate on the transient nature of relaxation, including stellar entries from the likes of Hazel Hill McCarthy III, Genesis P-Orridge, Richard Bott of Animal Charm, and Eric Wareheim. Summer might be ending soon, but “forever is just around the corner.”

The concept of vacation can conjour up feelings of escapism or a total disregard of the mundane. Vacation is a chance to “let your hair down” and to enter a contrived oblivion of excess. But what if what was meant to be temporary continues forever? PERMANENT VACATION supposes the effects of a never-ending story.

Café Royal Books, the publishing house run by British photographer Craig Atkinson, boasts a solid catalog of rad zines from some really innovate artists like Paul Paper and Justin Waldron. They also publish the great Field Trip Magazine— a big, luxurious periodical dedicated to “analogue photography.” Atkinson’s latest project is a Pop Up Library of zines and limited edition art books that will be exhibited over two weeks in Preston, UK this November. They have more than 200 publications in the collection so far, but they’re looking for more— so don’t hesitate to submit your own awesome zine!

The show will include a ‘pop-up’ library, open to the public, with a librarian. All the titles on show will be catalogued and available to the public on a reference-only basis [so the books won’t leave the building]. If you’re interested in submitting your publication please email craig@caferoyalbooks.com for further details.

Andreas Banderas, like so many tech-savvy, scrappy young up-and-comers in today’s art world, is a dude constantly on display. With so many fabulous blogs, tumblrs, zines, and purveyors of limited edition prints putting fantastic work into circulation, the physical space of the gallery is no longer the unassailable holy-of-holies it once was. Art can be encountered casually, at home in your underwear. It’s no longer a destination in and of itself, but, often, just something to do.

In this sort of environment, the intuitive strategy would be to make yourself as conspicuous as possible, flood the viewer’s senses until they are inundated and forced to reckon with your overwhelming gestures. That’s what makes Banderas’ relatively staid, deliberately arranged images so casually alluring because they allow the act of exhibition itself to be the attraction. These are mundane and illusory settings waiting for the audience to animate them, secret compartments for the treasures of the mind. There’s no sense of coercion in their appeal, only hopeful invitation.

The openness of Banderas’ style, its willingness to support your whims and desires makes it particularly conducive to accommodating the visions of others. And accommodate it has, synthesizing itself into a slew of formats, both low-key and commercial, as well as innumerable collaborative projects. Like an aesthetic bodhisattva Banderas takes on many forms in a mission to elevate all our minds towards a realization of our own imaginative potential.

As promised: Harmony Korine’s new short film, Act Da Fool, featuring Provenza Schouler’s new collection. Fashion label with imagination meets filmmaker with imagination. It makes me happy when Korine chooses to remind us that there’s a whole big incredible world out there, decaying and thriving and reinventing itself everyday. This is beautiful.

Gross! In a fun Garbage Pail Kids way. But wait: under the coy crude veneer of Allen Cordell’s music videos for Beach House, Tobacco and Future Islands, there’s a natural grace at work. An innate understanding of rhythm, a surprising sympathy for our fellow man. Characters with creepy faces dance angrily amidst gooey special effects, and somehow, the repressed desires bubbling beneath the surface manage to wrench your heart. Or maybe that’s backwards— maybe it starts with a sense of humanity and then pulls the rug out to reveal the absurd. Like, “Longing. It’s beautiful, yeah, but it’s also ridiculous.” Either way, misery and frustration are the unlikely fuel for a nervous humor here. We’re encouraged to laugh, even as we cheer on the lonesome-hearted.

Cordell’s paintings exist in a similar cloud of uncertainty, appropriating images of pornography, horror films, animals and anonymous strangers to unsettling effect. Those thrilling and frightening parts of childhood rendered in sharp relief.

Photos and art pieces by Brooklyn-based Jesse Hlebo, who also makes zines, cassette tapes, and other rad objects that exist in real life, through Swill Children.

Yan Yan is a sage, a scalawag and a wordsmith. Here are some of the things you’ll find in his stories: Palo Alto paleontologists and their lovelorn teenagers, Rem Koolhaas, asshole anarchists who wax theological at hardcore shows, Paris Hilton and the amnesiacs who love her, solar-powered parkas, and the therapeutic qualities of taking a warm bath in a postmodern igloo on the Alaskan tundra.

Yan Yan ensured my lifelong allegiance at the age of fifteen, when he exposed me to the sublime weirdness of Hong Kong cinema on a hot summer day in his parents’ suburban living room. Since then, we’ve shared some memorable adventures on both coasts, and I’ve had the privilege of watching his writing flourish over the years. Also, he plays Ukulele.

Not long after graduating from Columbia, Yan absconded New York for China and its shimmering promises of an unknown future. So in his absence, I was stoked to learn that ultra-rad small press Medium Rare has published a beautiful box set of five Yan Yan zines. Take a look at the collection in all its glory below, along with some pictures I snapped of the rapscallion raconteur himself, last time he visited L.A.

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!)

Before the Work Is Done: Tipping Point #4, an oil painting by Rhode Island-based artist Jemison Faust. Who among us hasn’t been there? You’re trying to get some shit done, but there’s just all this stuff lying around in a soul-crushing mess, taunting you with its accusatory tranquility. Man, staring at this painting is making me feel guilty for the rotting colony of dirty dishes that’s been lingering in my sink for weeks. BRB!

Via New American Paintings.

Of all the spots in the world to find work as a paramedic, fate brought Michael Julius to Putnam County— one of the poorest places in Florida. This strange and forgotten locale, which Julius characterizes as a sprawling, sandy 827 square mile plot of land “pocked with hundreds of small lakes, and tucked in tangly forests,” provides Julius’ on-the-job photo series, Rescuing Putnam, with a shockingly vivid sense of physical space. It’s the lurking presence of Putnam’s residents, living (and dying) “in trailers and shacks, along webs of unpaved roads,” that provides Rescuing Putnam with its resigned, melancholy psychological space.

Throughout a decade of bloody ambulance rides and smoldering ranch homes, Julius’ camera served as his closest confidante, silently sharing both the madness of these unsettling emergency response calls, as well as the warm, intimate world of the medics and firemen who commit themselves to this stressful way of life. Insig.ht conducted a fascinating interview with Julius, where he reflects on the growing sense of disillusionment that crept up on him over the years:

Statistically, this is a career that doesn’t lend itself to a lengthy service. The average career span for your basic garden-variety medic is 3-5 years. For me, the burnout was as much about the physical toll on the body as anything. Every three days I would essentially stay up all night. This, compounded by the repetitive aspect of the job, is exhausting. By repetitive I mean that I eventually realized that I was seeing the same people over and over. Some are actually sick though many are not, or at least not in an emergent sense. The skill-set to evaluate the needs of your sick and hurt patients eventually became a hindrance because I saw how so many of them were in fact not sick at all. It’s frustrating. Towards the end of my career I told a drug seeking patient, who had just finished performing a hilariously bad seizure, “You know, seizure patients usually urinate on themselves.” I wanted to see her piss herself. That’s pretty cynical.

We end up at the same houses. Houses full of thieves and alcoholics, with the same adolescent boys sitting on fence posts, or car hoods, or tossing footballs; and, when we arrive they pitch their thumbs, mumbling, “They’re in the back.” And in the back are the same old patients, face down in their vomit. It breaks my heart to see these boys conditioned to this. The very last patient of my career spit on me and said, “Clean that up, bitch”. It’s a river of misery and it goes on forever.

Oh shit, Mastodon Mesa news bonus round!! Dudes, truly, I cannot tell you how excited I am about our new show at Mastodon Mesa. Basically, it’s this: 25 of our favorite artists exhibiting work inspired by found photography, alongside thousands of forgotten snapshots from Mark Kologi’s immense collection. The line-up is insane! Come join the fun at Private Investigation and sort through decades of anonymous memories on Wednesday, September 15th!

Featuring: Ben Aqua, Beastburn, Derrick Beckles (TV Carnage), Jordan Crane, Stephanie Davidson, Kirk Demarais, Steven Andrew Garcia, Adan de la Garza, Desiree Holman, Michael C. Hsiung, Parker Ito, Nathan Jones, Mike Kitchell, Sage Keeler, Mark Kologi, Roz Leibowitz, Suki-Rose Otter, Paul Pescador, The Perlorian Brothers, Christian Ramirez, Benjy Russell, Tanner America, Brad Troemel, Richard Vergez, Adam Villacin and Melissa Wallen.

After the jump, the full flier for Private Investigation, plus a hyperbolic manifesto for the show.

While printed photography rapidly vanishes, digital photography’s presence grows exponentially. Found photos, once relegated to the shoeboxes of scattered private collectors, then shared through the limited mass media of curated zines and art books, today proliferatewithout restriction in cyberspace. Context-free photos from all time periods are distributed through blogs, image searches, and social systems like Tumblr, FFFFOUND! and dump.fm. Individuals and niches are democratically determining the natural lifespan of found .JPGs. In the process, found images fuse with the personal identities of the “finders” and stand in as a form of communication. How does this technological and social shift effect the aura of these photographs, and what does it mean for the future of photography?

Found photos will serve as the inspiration and springboard for a broad spectrum of multi-disciplinary artists in Private Investigation. Under the crushing weight of a million memories divorced from the minds of their rememberers, this tactile and experiential show is an invitation to explore the mysteries of voyeurism, collection, appropriation, and anonymity.

RuPaul’s Drag Race production house World of Wonder dispatched their wildly gregarious ace journalist Damiana Garcia (aka Michael Lucid of Pretty Thingsss) to cover the opening of Albert Reyes’ Never Dies the Dream at Mastodon Mesa. She navigated the dangerous corridors of Reyes’ legendary haunted maze like a pro, warding off werewolf harassment, snatching up interviews and finding her inner self!

Watch Damiana’s in-depth coverage below, followed by two videos I filmed for her earlier this summer. The first explores the opening of Ryan Trecartin’s mind-blowing Any Ever show at MOCA and the ensuing Dis Magazine Pool Party, and the second was filmed at L.A. leather bar The Faultline’s annual Tom of Finland Foundation Fundraiser!

It’s about girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire. It’s about the great things in life. The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor.

Harmony Korine on Act Da Fool, his soon to be released short film for rad fashion label Provenza Schouler.
Consider us stoked. Peek at some behind the scenes photos and the film’s gorgeous poster after the jump, and read more about the collaboration at Nowness.