Dive into the archives.
- Philly Phil
When I was back home a couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to see my friend Phil Forsyth on his 31st birthday. Phil is an all-around amazing person. A poet, a card shark, a relentless b-baller, a green thumb, and, most important for this post, a full bodied music lover. Phil is the kind of guy that, when you show up at his birthday party, gives YOU a present. That’s how I got “Rank Strangers”, the wonderful countrified mix illustrated above and featured below.
I’m gonna get into the music in a second, but first I want to big up two of Phil’s projects that I hope you’ll check out and support.
First, Philadelphia Orchard Project, a non-profit collective that works with community-based groups and volunteers to plan and plant orchards in the many unused spaces around Philly.
POP provides the plants, trees, and training. Community organizations own, maintain, and harvest the orchards, expanding community-based food production. Orchards are planted in formerly vacant lots, community gardens, schoolyards, and other spaces, almost exclusively in low-wealth neighborhoods where people lack access to fresh fruit.
Second, is Phil’s blog, where he drops incredible amounts of knowledge on urban farms, edible landscapes, permaculture, and sorts of good shit.
As you can imagine, planting orchards in vacant lots and blogging about permaculture doesn’t necessarily make the ends connect, so Phil also has a commercial landscaping business called Forsyth Gardens, and if you’re in the US and want an incredible, edible garden, then you need to holla at them.
So, to the music… Even though Phil is one of the warmest, most loving people I know, he’s got a taste for the darker side of life and it’s represented on every one of his mixes, but this one maybe more than most. Here’s a small selection of bitter pills…
The Everly Brothers – I wonder if I care as much
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
My pride is made to say forgive,
and take the blame for what you did,
It’s your mistake I’m thinkin’ of,
I wonder if I’m still in love.The Statler Brothers – Half a man
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I know you’re looking for someone to bow down to you,
and to lift their head and smile each time you call.
But the more I think about, the less I think about it,
and the more I think it just ain’t worth it all.Tanya Tucker – Blood red and goin’ down
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Daddy said: “Now come girl, we’re headin’ down the road to Augusta.”
And faintly through his clenched teeth, he called Mama’s name, then he cussed her.
He said: “Girl, you’re young, but some dude has come along and stole your mother.
Ah, but you can’t steal a willin’ mind ’cause mom is always lookin’ for a lover.”Tom Waits – Tell it to me
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I know, you will not see me, but I know you have a daughter
And I hear she has my eyes
They say she calls him “father”, and he’s proud of her
And even believes all of your liesDownload the whole beautiful collection here.
Popularity: 5% [?]
- Drunken Lion Mixtape #8: Rainforest Mix
There’s a new Drunken Lion mixtape out now. #8 in the series, the first mixed by Mr. Mike Speciaal. For your listening pleasure click here.
Popularity: 5% [?]
- Urban China: Informal Cities at New Museum
In all of last week’s drama I completely forgot to mention that my friends at Urban China are having a big exhibition at the New Museum in NY (!) I’m still in Beijing working on a book based on their magazine that unfortunately won’t be ready in time for this. But I’ve put up some of the material that’s going into it here, here, here, here, and here. If you liked that and will be around New York between now and the end of March I strongly urge you to check it out. Here are some images from the installation…
After NY the show will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Big!
More info at the New Museum site…
Popularity: 4% [?]
- Calling all Berliners…
Get your asses to the AedesLAND Gallery this Friday (or any other day between then and March 26) and check out “True Cities,” an exhibition of photos by artist/curator/editor/writer/very friend Charlie Koolhaas. Here’s some more info from the PR release:
‘True Cities’ is a collection of photographs by Charlie Koolhaas featuring four global cities that determine, in different ways, our political and cultural landscapes and that will increasingly shape our collective destinies in the future. Within a single space, ‘True Cities’ weaves a photographic patchwork of urban fabrics from Guangzhou, Dubai, Lagos, and London, creating a multi-layered picture of an intricately connected world.
Charlie Koolhaas is a Dutch artist raised in London who currently works from her studio in Guangzhou, China. Trained as a sociologist, throughout her career she has worked as a magazine editor, exhibition curator, writer as well as photographer, and in her photos we see this multidisciplinary approach applied to the urban experience. In ‘True Cities’ she brings together hundreds of disparate images of different places to bounce off each other, resonate, and begin a dialogue.
The exhibition will include a series of 200 images viewed like a large book that spans the entire wall of the AedesLAND space. Within these pages images of Lagos, Nigeria are paired with images of Dubai, UAE. In the arches of the gallery hanging photographs place Guangzhou, China and London, UK side by side so that they feel like two distant suburbs in the same city. ‘True Cities’ is an exhibition of the world. It is about cultural fusion and confusion, connections, moments of creativity and pain. By looking at the opulent and insignificant, the broken down and the emerging, these photographs depict the mundane and the absurd with equal enthusiasm.
It’s sure to be eye and mind opening. If you can, check it out…
For more info, visit the AedesLAND site.
Download the opening invite here.Popularity: 3% [?]
- Stoned Kitty: “Salted Sessions is my shit”
Last time I saw my friend Jesse he gave me a copy of Salted Sessions, an instrumental EP he’d just made under the name A La Shook. It’s been in steady rotation ever since and is now a household favorite, particularly with the cat pictured above. Jesse’s now put the EP up on his website for the recession-proof price of Free.99
Here’s a sample:
A La Shook – 77
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
DOWNLOAD
right-click + save link as (mac) / save target as (windows)To download the whole thing, press HERE
Check out more of Jesse’s music on his site jessekoolhaas.com
Popularity: 4% [?]
- TD Year in Review
I just received this XMas/New Year’s card from my friend Theo of TD Architects. It’s rendered in Theo’s often-imitated-never-duplicated collage style and covers some the key events of 08. I was thinking about making a year in review type post, but this is better. Click To Read.
Popularity: 3% [?]
- Habitus 04: N.O.L.A.
A few months ago I mentioned a trip I made with my friend Josh to the great city of New Orleans. He was putting the finishing touches on the fourth issue of his magazine Habitus and I was tagging along. (Wrote a post about, want to hear it, here it go…)
The issue is out now and it’s very good, probably my second favorite so far. (Issue 02: Sarajevo is still holding down #1) Here’s a little blurb on the content…
Our edition features some of the leading writers and thinkers from the city and beyond: including Rodger Kamenetz, Andrei Codrescu, Nancy Lemann, and others. In addition to our usual array of terrific fiction and poetry, we have a meditation on disaster and memory from Ari Kelman, a celebrated environmental historian, a photo essay documenting the city’s unique and exuberant street culture from photographer L.J. Goldstein; an extraordinary memoir of the intersection of African-American and Jewish roots in one New Orleans family from Ronne Hartfield; interviews with musician-historian Ned Sublette and the Brazilian urban-planning innovator Jamie Lerner; and many more exciting features.
Regardless of the fact that’s its my friend’s project, Habitus really is a unique and constantly edutaining publication. Order a copy yesterday or better yet subscribe…
To celebrate the issue I want to post up a conversation that I sat in on while I was down in NO. It was between Josh and Ronald Lewis, an advocate and spokesperson for the city’s Lower Ninth Ward and the founder of The House of Dance and Feathers , a museum that honors the cultural traditions of the Mardi Gras Indians and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs of New Orleans. The conversation provides as much background as you’ll need, so I’m just gonna get to it. VERY good read for anyone interested in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, parade culture, or hearing a southern black man describe the horrors of eating Gefilte fish…
Joshua Harry Ellison: How did this place get started?
Ronald Lewis: Well, you know, I started this before Katrina. I had a little building called The House of Dance and Feathers…
JHE: Here?
RL: Yeah. But it was a smaller building that faced the street. That picture in front of you there, that’s how the interior of the original building looked. And Katrina took all of that. And I remember, right after the storm, me and LJ [Goldstein] made contact with each other, and he came out with his little club – the 69 Social and Pleasure Club, Krewe du Jieux, and everybody – and got me some help to clean out my house and get my life back started.
Then I spoke at a conference called Reinhabiting NOLA at Loyola University, with Rachel [Breunlin]‘s husband Dan Etheridge and Dr Helen Regis. I spoke and told them that I needed help to rebuild to show that this could happen after all of this devastation. And the help came, and out of that came this: the new House of Dance & Feathers – a living story out of all this pain and suffering and misery.
Popularity: 4% [?]
- Haas & Hahn in the house
UPDATE: I wrote a short piece on the project for Art Review. Check it here.
I’m still in Rio and it is pretty damn mind-blowing. I plan to write something about this trip, but I’m not sure when. I estimate I’ll need approximately 3 weeks inside a sensory deprivation tank to recollect myself, and I’ll hopefully get to work after that. For now I want show some images from the thing that brought me here – Rio Cruzeiro, an amazing painting that my friends Jeroen & Dre (aka Haas & Hahn) just completed in Vila Cruzeiro, a favela in Rio. I’ve written about their project a few times, so for some background check these posts: 1 2 Or better yet check their site Favela Painting.
Here’s a tour of the painting I made on my first day here. The weather wasn’t good that day, so hopefully I’ll take some more before I leave…
There’s some really nice photos from the painting’s ‘grand opening’ last weekend. They were taken by Douglas Engle. Check em here.
Props boys.
Popularity: 4% [?]
- Beijing Rising
Through a miracle of Facebook, I just became aware of this beautiful/bleak video made by Neville Mars of Dynamic City Foundation. Neville strapped a camera to a helium baloon and flew it over Wang Jing, a neighborhood in northern Beijing. During the Olympic viewing frenzy, some people asked me to explain what Beijing was like before the Games. I wish I’d had this clip then, it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary waffle.
Check out more DCF projects at the bURB site.
Also, buy their book The Chinese Dream.Popularity: 4% [?]
- Save the date
For a while now I’ve been hyping up Favela Painting, a project created by the Dutch imagineering duo Haas & Hahn. (Check this post and this one and this one to see what I’m talking about…)
Well, their efforts are finally reaching a climax with the completion of their latest and greatest work “Rio Cruzeiro” and to celebrate they’re hosting a weekend of fun, sun, and hopefully no guns in Rio. Here’s some text from the announcement:
Haas & Hahn proudly announce the inauguration of Rio Cruzeiro, a Favela Painting Project, on 17-19 October 2008
Rio Cruzeiro, an artwork by Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn. A +2000 m2 painting of a Japanese style river based on a design by master tattooist Rob Admiraal. Painted together with kids from the community of Vila Cruzeiro, the most infamous favela of Rio de Janeiro.
The weekend of the 17th – 19th of October will feature an opening party, photo exhibit and video installations in the center of Rio de Janeiro. On the 18th the painting will be unveiled, followed by a huge blockparty. There will be photo opportunities for the press, guided tours through the community and the whole day will be planned in cooperation with the IBISS Community Center.
If you’re in the neighborhood come through and check it out. Even if you’re not and aren’t planning to be, change plans and come check it out. It’s guaranteed infotainment for one and all. I’m going, so you know it’s the shit! Nuff said.
For more info: www.favelapainting.com
Popularity: 4% [?]
- A handshake from Lok
My friend Lok Jansen is an architect, illustrator, and all around awesome person. He lives in Tokyo with his equally awesome wife Naoko and I don’t see them enough. Fortunately, Lok occasionally hits me off with some of his latest work, and somehow the space between here and there feels smaller. Yesterday was such a day – in my inbox, amongst the boring work shit and junk mail, I found a glowing orb of flavor in a the form of email from Lok with 4 sketches attached. The sketches are inspired by the urban villages around southern China. (I wrote a little bit about a visit I made to one in this post from a while ago.)
Anyway, these sketches are great. Here’s what Lok said about them:
I’m doing these for a new cityscape or two about the Urban Villages. Went and spent time in a couple of them in Shenzhen and in Guangzhou. Places like the Handshake Apartments (Wo Shou Lau) in Shenzhen, and Ba Deng Cun (巴登村). After the mostly Japanese cityscapes I was looking for something new and was of course struck by the very high density, the amount of life, activity, struggle and joy. Which is why I added people to these for the first time – to have them contrast with the wild machine-like surroundings, and have the environment stand for the overwhelming situation the people are trying to overcome. I was impressed by peoples ‘let’s make some money’ attitude, but also struck by the vulnerability of each individual. And of course I wanted to do tribute to the pajama stylo.
Here they are (click to enlarge highly recommended):
And as an extra bonus, here’s a short film Lok made while walking through the “handshake apartments” (握手楼, so named because the buildings are packed in so tight that neighbors can shake hands out of their windows) in Shenzhen. I think a lot of what Lok mentioned is evident here and it makes the sketches that much more beautiful.
Popularity: 5% [?]
- Favela Update
I’ve written a couple of times before about Favela Painting, an amazing project that my friends Jeroen & Dre are doing in Brazil.
They’ve spent most of the last few years making movies, music videos, and murals in Vila Cruzeiro, a
slumshantytownfavelacommunity in Rio. The neighborhood became world infamous in 2002 when a journalist named Tim Lopes who’d been working undercover investigating a local drug gang was viciously beaten and burned in a roadside ditch. The incident caused a lot of employers to pull out of Vila Cruzeiro and the area still suffers from a reputation as an ultra-violent, almost uninhabitable place.The Favela Painting project was created partly to counteract this image and raise awareness of the people who quietly endure behind the haze of shock stories and homicide stats. It launched in 2006 with ‘The boy with the kite’, a mural that Jeroen and Dre created together with local kids on the side of a building that eventually became the neighorhood’s first art gallery. It generated a lot of positive press for the area. Here’s one piece from The Guardian.
And here’s a short clip about the mural with interviews with Vito and Mauri, two of the guys who helped make it.
On the strength of that, last year Jeroen & Dre started working on a much more ambitious painting – a 2000M² monster depicting a carp-filled river, rendered in the style of Japanese tattoos and woodblock prints. The work is ongoing, but here are some of the latest pics…
They’ve also been putting videos of the process up on youtube, including some awful ones from when they need the shut down and run for cover when gunfights break out.
This is a great project, one that deserves support. You can read a lot more about it on their website – www.favelapainting.com . There’s also an option for giving donations, which I know they’d appreciate.
Popularity: 4% [?]
- Awesome Book: The Chinese Dream
Very Friend Neville Mars and his colleagues at the Dynamic City Foundation have just released an amazing new book called The Chinese Dream. Neville is an architect from Holland. We met in New York in ’99 when he was working with a couple friends on a film called NYNTEEN NYNTY NYNE, and over the years I’ve come to deeply admire his commitment to quality and overall flip mode ethic.
He moved to China four or five years ago, lured by an announcement that China planned to build 400 new cities of 1 million inhabitants each by 2020, or 20 new cities a year for 20 years. He co-founded DCF, a kind of amorphous collective of sociologists, planners, researchers and designers, and got to work. In 2003 they launched the Urban China 2020 project, an in-depth study of the effects of China’s flash-urbanization and what designers could do in response. To expand the pool of participants, observers, critics, etc. a couple of years ago DCF established an online collaboration platform called BURB for open-source research and design.
The Chinese Dream (010, 2008) is the culmination of these efforts, a 784-page opus that I can honestly say is the most beautiful book on China I’ve ever seen. Besides that I can’t say much more, though, because I haven’t actually read it yet. Neville showed it to me last month between drinks and in poor lighting conditions, but I was honestly blow away by it. So I’m riding with that emotion. (Nev holla)
Here are some sample spreads, in case you think I’m exaggerating. Click to enlarge…
To view many more and read the book’s introduction, check out the Chinese Dream fact sheet here.
I don’t think it’s arrived in western stores yet, but you can order the book from the publisher’s site here.
For all the Beijing heads, here are a few places where you can pick it up…
FakeSpace www.fakedesign.co.uk
Bookworm www.beijingbookworm.com
Timezone8 timezone8.com
Onewaystreet Library, Yuanmingyuan www.onewaystreet.cnPopularity: 4% [?]
- nu un
For the past few days I’ve been in Guangzhou meeting up with friends and celebrating the opening of a new shop for United Nude, a fashion company owned by my friends Rem and Galahad that’s dedicated to improving the overall sexiness of women around the world. I was too busy hugging and irresponsibly drinking to take any photos of the opening, so here’s a shot from UN’s spring/summer collection, which I think demonstrates the brand’s core strengths: innovation, beauty, and stripper friendliness.
Check out the rest of the collection here.
Buy United Nude here.Popularity: 3% [?]
- Zaplin & Powernap present: A Morricone Gangster
My friend Jesse aka Powernap and his partner Zaplin have thrown their hats into the Jiggaman remix ring. As I mentioned a while ago, that is a very crowded ring, but, somehow, the best of the best find ways to keep it fresh. A Morricone Gangster is a good example. It samples the shoot-em-up sounds of legendary composer Ennio Morricone and gives the American Gangster album a welcome dose of international flavor.
Here’s a sample: Morricone Gangster remix of “Sweet” (ironically one of my least favorite songs on the original album)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
DOWNLOAD
right-click + ‘save link as’ (mac) / ‘save target as’ (windows)Download the album free from the Morricone Gangster site.
I’m a little late putting this up, but whatever. Classic material stands the test of time.
Popularity: 4% [?]
