Elaine and I both have watched this several times today: the fourth installment in Amanda Palmer's music video set/short film for her new album. There's an intensity to this piece that is just riveting.
...As if it ever left. I've written about Jennifer Strunge's Cotton Monsters before, but I'm posting this little update to let you know that she is updating her Etsy shop at around 8 PM EST this evening with over FORTY brand-new Cotton Monsters. Also, there will be tote bags. Jennifer packs a whole lot of personality into such tiny little monsters, so now's your chance. Don't say nobody warned you.
So if you have several hundred dollars to spare, instead of several thousand dollars, now's your chance to pick up some snazzy paintings. I'm particularly digging the sushi, lemons and starfish paintings by Jennifer Tong, myself. Don't touch that "Lemon, Little Lemon" painting. I have dibs on that!
Square America is a journey into faded beauty - snapshots and fleeting glances at a world both close by, and far, far away.
The vintage photographs are wonderful, but the real genius lies in the curatorship. This is an online exhibition in the best sense of the word. The themes bring out all that is latent in those images - everything blurred and sharp, bright and lost.
Look at how he has grouped them! There are people sleeping, smoking, and at dance lessons - 'a beguiling mixture of awkwardness and grace'. The groups are evocative, lonely, unexpected. We see the half-pauses, the stockinged leg, the moments before a childhood fight. There are photographs of the dead, of the limits of memory, of rising and falling. There is love.
The emotional content grabs you by the shoulders. What of 'On the Beauty of Absence' - an album where most, but not all, the photographs have been torn away? Or 'Defaced', where the faces have been destroyed, obscured, or omitted? Some of these faces have been scrubbed out, a violence on the page.
Alone, they would be powerful. Put together, they are transformed.
This is one man's journey through everything precious about the discarded, and the line he carves through the photos is as beautiful as the photographs themselves.
It is a dream, a story, a yearning and a contemplation. It is a site worth returning to. One to bookmark, and to fall into as often as you can.
Our friends over at Paper Tiger have released yet another gorgeous and very limited edition print, this time by artist Nate Frizzell. The print, entitled "Nest," comes in a small edition of only twenty-five prints and is also available as a hand-touched artist edition print. These are absolutely breathtaking just on my computer screen, so I can only imagine how lush and vibrant they'll be in person.
AND!! For the rest of this month, Fabulist readers will get a bonus "mini-print" with any order just by mentioning "Fabulist" in the comments section, as well as an extra 15% off their purchase when using the code "buyer."
Yes, it's exciting news, and these are very exciting times. Happy July to you!
I am not joking. These paintings are based on real-life events.
But for the rest of you, who aren't hip to Kentuckian ways, you should probably check out Kathleen Lolley's upcoming show "Myth & Magic" at Giant Robot San Francisco. I'm betting they'll have an online gallery up after the show opens on July 19, but in the meantime, you can get a sneak preview on Kathleen's Myspace page. Which also just happens to be one of my favorite Myspace pages of all time. Her interests include "surrealism, comics, alchemy, mystery, birds, strange text & folk lore," and it really comes through in her work. Those just happen to be some of my main interests as well, so I'm well excited for this one.
It's entirely possible you aren't singing "With my freeze ray I will stop--- the world" in the back of your head right now. Which probably means you haven't seen Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. And certainly, you haven't seen the first episode five times, as I might have done, so far, already. It's only up for a blink of an eye and then it vanishes, so this is my public service announcement to make sure that Joss Whedon's new online ephemeral baby about singing superheroes continues to spread like wildfire.
I had the pleasure of attending the Ed Harcourt show at the Doug Fir Lounge in Portland, Oregon this past monday. I'm going to share a little bit of that experience with you here now, so that if by some sheer stroke of luck his short tour is going to be anywhere within an eight hour radius of you, you'll get in your car or plane or motorized go-cart or Big Wheel and roll yourself on down to the venue. Because you know how to treat yourself right.
First of all, Ed plays keyboards like he was practicing in the womb. If you've heard his music, you know this, but it was an absolute wonder to witness. And his bass player is some gorgeous minx with black, marcelled hair and pouty lips and she plays a KILLER bass. And all the band members were relentlessly charming, stylish and goddamn talented, and the songs were spot-on, and Ed's between-song patter is more entertaining than a lot of comedians' stand-up routines. Which yeah, says something about the state of comedy these days, maybe, but also says a lot for how absurdist and self-deprecating the man is. I mean, with jokes involving Bill Withers and ducks and stories about how his mother was a bearded lady and his father was a circus clown, how can you go wrong?
But most important is the music. And he really gave it to us, wandering out into the audience and serenading us with "Until Tomorrow Then" while the lights dimmed overhead and the microphone seemed like an extension of his soul. And soon after, we all parted ways, taking a little bit of that shared experience with us into the night. And that's the way it should be, huh?
If it's a writer's job to say the unsayable, then 'White Winos' does the job, and then some.
Each circle, each iteration, comes closer and closer, brushing up against a truth before turning its head away at the last minute. 'I always get nervous when the glow gets...'
washthis on 
