Fader

We've been looking for another excuse to hear Vito Acconci deliver at "textural architecture" speech. And to see David Grubbs jam solo and to win a photo of Terry Richardson's outie bellybutton. There is also a puppet show. Why not? What better excuse for a plethora of bizarre than to benefit little Myat Moondog Haggart, whose young life has been plagued by brain problems. Full flyer with lineup is after the jump, stop by on Sunday if you can. more...

Helen Storey’s career as a designer began at Valentino 25 years ago and has landed in the chemist’s lab. In a series of projects emphasizing the importance of sustainability, she has created a dissolvable water bottle, a purifying pillow and in her latest collaboration with chemistry professor Tony Ryan, she has created a line of dresses that are soluble in water. In their exhibit Wonderland, intricately sewn dresses are hung from a small crane and slowly dipped into large fishbowls, creating a silky rainbow effect upon contact and eventually dissolving into a clear sludge. The exhibition, which premiered in London in February, will reopen in Sheffield for all you lucky Brits from June 18th to July 13th and is imagined by Ryan as a way of “stimulating the public conscience in visual and dramatic ways, and empowering people to dream about alternative ways of consuming.” For a video interview with Storey and Ryan, go to SHOWStudio.

FADER 54 is an Aaliyahxtravaganza, as the world's beloved Baby Girl graced the cover of our fourth annual ICON issue. We made this issue with as much care and tenderness as we ever have and, accordingly, soon we will post an exclusive mix by DJ Caps to celebrate the very special Ms. Haughton. But! As ever, we also delved into the sparkling waters of newness: we explored Britain's burgeoning bassline scene, trampled Swedish snowcaps with soon-to-be-superstar Lykke Li, and linked up with woozy Tropicalian El Guincho on Barcelona time. We also went deep with dervishy princess Sahra Motalebi, clowned everyone with Chip tha Ripper, ate crepes with Jeremy Jay, and lost our minds just the way we like to with The War on Drugs. Get the essence of all these folks—and approximately 42,000 other heater-makers--on our Issue 54 download, which is totally totally freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (that was a symbol of how free: totally free).

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Over the last several months we've noted the (RED) campaign calling in cultural heavyweights like Damien Hirst and Kim Gordon to raise money and awareness for the global AIDS crisis, but we've been wondering when they would get Eric Koston involved. That dude is God on ecstacy. Nah for real, he is pretty good with the skateboarding, and he and artist Andy Jenkins (holler Freestylin' magazine!) partnered to design a special edition Girl deck for the (RED) campaign, which you can peep above. Go the Girl's page on (RED) to see Eric do some tricks and Jenkins talk shop, then go buy the damn thing.

"What I might call her élan, her soul," says Rick Powell, Duke University professor about one of Barkley Hendricks '70s portraits of black Americans. It's a funny mashing of experts talking art and some really old rad personal style that we just cannot replicate in current times. We wrote about Hendricks' first retrospective happening now at Duke's Nasher Museum but have yet been unable to make it to North Carolina to see the exhibit (though we—and you—have until July). This video tour of the exhibit is second best, but we'll take it. Because even if we went right now Hendricks wouldn't be there rocking a sweet neckscarf and he is on YouTube. Win some/lose some.

FADER Films' Michael Skolnik finally released Without the King, his documentary about Swaziland's King Mswati III (NY Times review here), and it's still showing in New York! It just got extended at the Quad Cinemas at 34 W. 13th Street (between 5th & 6th Aves) after a successful first weekend. GO SEE IT BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

It's supposed to rain in New York on Sunday so we're going to fly out to LA for some sun and good times because we ball like that. We're just gonna to go to this Ooga Party and fly back. And pay for the whole thing with dried up chewing gum.

From the Ooga Booga blog (Ooga Blogga?):

Please join us this Sunday evening 6-8pm for the launch of Oliver Payne's new zine, Safe Crackers!!!! This will be the debut of issues 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and each issue is narrowly focused on topics such as The Wire, Hot Chip, Wolfboy, Growing, and Rei Kawakubo! We will also unveil the newest window installation by Joe Denardo of Growing, along with DJ tunes by Hot Chip! Free and everyone welcome always!

When we were in high school our math teachers didn't know anything about math because they were really water polo coaches and our english teachers were really german professors but the kids at Newark, New Jersey's Arts High School got real with Parisian art/fashion collective Andrea Crews. AC's art director Maroussia Rebecq taught them to make insane sculpture ensembles out of second hand clothing and this is a (err, crappy ) video of the process, which mostly shows the kids playing musical chairs, spinning into a psychedelic fairy tale of rainbow sucking goblins, and having no sense of adult remorse, which, unfortunately, we have now that we're older.

Tonight at 6pm the documentary Captured, about photographer Clayton Patterson and the LES neighborhood, will be showing at NYU's Cantor Film Center. Patterson has seen things we'd never want to see, experienced the Lower East Side in ways most of us will never know, and interfered with people we'd never want to mess with, but he also manages to capture a truly insane New York from junkies to drag queens, hipsters to the homeless. The documentary focuses on the deterioration of Patterson's neighborhood, where he once found a story in every corner, to its contemporary homogenized state.

No contemporary artist can really compete with the epic genius of Henry Darger, a man who spent much of his life writing a 12 volume 15,000 page opus entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. It's pretty much impossible to capture or decode Darger's compulsive art-making process, but The American Folk Art Museum is paying homage to Darger with their new exhibit Dargerism: Contemporary Artists And Henry Darger. 11 "insider artists" are displaying works inspired by Darger alongside some of his original masterpieces. We'd rather watch In the Realms of the Unreal again, but whatever, Dargerism—it's a movement!

Do you remember when Jeff Koons made a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and you were watching with your little cousin and she was like "Ooh a rabbit" and you were like, Yeah, that's a rabbit, but you knew it was also more than that, a movement and some weird inching of two different worlds not so different but endlessly far apart? Rodney Graham's Rotary Psycho-Opticon is like that except in reverse. He created a gigantic movable, uh, thing that is a replica of a gigantic prop from the video for Black Sabbath's "Paranoid". His show opens with this piece and others tonight at 303 Gallery. They have white wine on ice.

(Very) occasionally we find an event fun enough to bring our troll/hunchback bodies out into public. That event is not even the Mets' home opener, Barney's warehouse sale or the red carpet opening of Meet Joe Black (though we debated it for a while) but the preview opening at the Museum of Modern Art for the Pop Rally exhibit featuring DFA DJs. That is so many things at once (museum, exhibit, record label, DJs) and also free alcohol. We put a multicolored shawl over our entire bodies to blend into the beautiful people (we weren't all born that way) and danced under a tent of moonlight and cotton candy. These mixes are what silkworms sound like when they sing. We heard, we listen close.

Here is a sentence we probably would not write: "Yeah you with the hook nose and the Bloc Party haircut that's just long enough in the back so dudes will still know you're a girl and hit on you at parties." But Jayson Musson wrote it for us. He also wrote a lot of other sentences, put them in a few really plain fonts and blew them up big into a book called Too Black for B.E.T. and to celebrate its release there is a party tomorrow in Philadelphia. Words are probably also throwing a party, possibly in a dictionary, thanking the book for ordering them in a desirable way. They're bored with all that poetry and newspaper shit (too plain) but that text message abbreviation garbage is driving them nuts, too. Someone needs to treat them right. Information about one of those parties is here.

We've lately been pretty satisfied with the movie interpretations of our favorite books (No Country for Old Men and um... well we can't think of anything else, but we heard Jane Austen's Emma is getting remade into Lil Mama's "Lip Gloss" video). And we're DYING to see the film version of Jose Saramago's broad, stunning Nobel Prize winner Blindness, about a blindness epidemic and the subsequent apocalyptic breakdown of society. Realllll talk. It's directed by Fernando Mereilles (City of God!) and stars Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Danny Glover, Sandra Oh, Alice Braga and most importantly GAEL GARCIA BERNAL. Today we got the trailer in the email and basically passed out from awesome.

Paul Lacy's book Brooklyn Storefronts is out, and it is photographs of Brooklyn storefronts. The NY Times has a slideshow up of a few of the images from the book, which you can see here. We would like someone to paint our office with fading glamor. FADER OFFICE GOOD IDEAS MADE AND SOLD HERE in blue and pink script with diamonds and stars.

We can't say we were weirded out when we found out that the concept for Harmony Korine's next film was that a Michael Jackson impersonator meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator and she takes him to a commune where she lives with a Charlie Chaplin impersonator and a Shirley Temple impersonator. Like, at one point in our lives we watched Gummo in an empty house at 3am and felt gross for a month afterwards. This one looks a little more wholesome, but no less strange.

The most inconsistently published and consistently invaluable column on TheFADER.com, Video Journeys, is back, spurred on by the news that Matthew McConaughey is reading the script for Universal's film adaptation of Magnum P.I.. more...

UNDFTD on La Brea is hosting a photo event tonight celebrating the Nike Dunk or something crazy like that. It's called Being True and features images inspired by that phrase from mega brohomié Jason Nocito and former FADER contributors Angela Boatwright and Kenneth Capello, along with basically every hot shit youth culture photographer of the last decade, all of which are listed on the flyer after the jump. The show was curated by Emma Reeves and Aaron Rose and Mika Miko is jamming it out. Get there early though because UNDFTD is not used to tons of dudes waiting in a line on the sidewalk. more...

We read a lot. What else is there to do? We listen to music all day, read all night. Many of those nights have been taken up reading and rereading Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories, and she has a new collection out, Unaccustomed Earth. In Boris Kachka's short profile for New York magazine, Lahiri talks about her elegant simplicity, something we wish we had a lot more of (we're gross). "I’m the least experimental writer. The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that’s never really interested me." She doesn't know it, but she just explained why we like Vampire Weekend so much. And Jonathan Safran Foer so little. Zing!