Bookshop now open — email your order (or order online) and receive 15% off all books, catalogs, editions, magazines, monographs, multiples, and videos, between November 24, 2009 and January 1, 2010. All orders placed by December 11th, will be delivered by December 24th. Orders placed online will receive a 15% refund. Happy Holidays!

Publishers
032c, A&R Press, Bas Morsch, Book Works, Capricious, Charlie White, Christoph Keller Editions, C Magazine, Coins, David Kordansky Gallery, Fillip, FormContent, Four Corners Books, Glen Cummings, Adam Michaels, Harsh Patel, Hassla Books, Hunter and Cook, Hypen Press, JRP|Ringier, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Laura Bartlett Gallery, Laura Palmer Foundation, Manuel Raeder, Mono.Kultur, Museum Paper, Nieves, OK-RM, onestar press, Paperback, Paper Monument, Passenger Books, Peres Projects, Seems, Primary Information, Semiotexte, Slavs and Tatars, Steidl, Textfield, The Power Plant,Tramnesia, True True True, Turner, Vier5, Walker Art Center, Wallspace, Walther König, Wear, and more.

Though he is still crawling, 9-month-old Thurston Conder takes about 10 seconds to have the run of the house. It’s not that he’s exceptionally fast; he just doesn’t have that far to roam. Thurston shares 380 square feet with his mom and dad, Kelly Breslin and Ryan Conder, and a medium-sized mutt named Charlie.

Our pal Ricky’s blog; kindred spirits with Andy’s, for sure. Gets me even more curious to visit Pasadena flea markets, which I never get around to, commuting from the west side of LA.

Two projects that fit loosely into a larger idea of supporting ideas that work quietly and locally.

I have a few projects from this Porto-based label via trades with my friend Isabel (who produced the work above, from BF10/Wanda II). BdF’s website is pretty clear and concise as to aims and background information, so there’s not much else to say here other than this is one of my favorite imprints.

I met Maki Hakui in NYC at this years Art Book Fair, and her magazine School was the only title I ended up shelling out cash for. I support her mission to avoid discussing the usual aspects and figures of Japanese art culture, and going straight to intimate, direct dialogues with its lesser exposed – but equally interesting – women creatives.

Book launch & reception

Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
Director’s Roundtable Garden | LACMA

Please join the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department to celebrate the release of the WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES publication, meet some of the authors, and start your own discussions.

Books will be available for purchase at the special discount price of $25 (plus tax).

www.wordswithoutpictures.org

Yrsa Roca Fannberg, In Total Ecstasy (sexual), 2008. Watercolor on Paper, 18 x 26 cm

by Jennifer Doyle

“Art versus Sport” is the name of Yrsa Roca Fannberg’s blog detailing the ups and downs of being an artist and Barcelona Futbol Club supporter. Entries alternate between meditations on the trials of experimental documentary filmmaking and the melodramas produced by loving perhaps the most storied side in the world. Illustrating this blog are Fannberg’s watercolor studies of life on the pitch—men in training, leaping into each others arms, throwing their bodies in the air, or glued to the ground in stupefied defeat.

It is tempting to think that Art and Sport sleep in separate beds. The discovery that one is at home in bohemia is often accompanied by parallel experiences of deep social isolation, of awkwardness and bullying, of being taunted for walking, running, or throwing “like a girl.” Maybe in your childhood, men and boys gathered in the living room around televised sport spectacle while you sprawled across your bedroom floor on your belly, pouring over magazine photos of Andy Warhol, Halston, and the superstars of Studio 54. For many of us in the arts, sports provided the childhood setting for our exile from normalcy. We tend to imagine these worlds as separate spheres, in which sport is fully masculine, and art is coded socially as effeminate and queer.

Full essay published in X-TRA contemporary art quarterly, Summer 2009.

Such a bonkers work ethic; I don’t think this Flickr account represents even 20% of his total output.

Inside Motto Berlin, Skalitzerstrasse 68, Im Hinterhof.

“We are proud to announce the European launch of Fillip 9 in partnership with Konst-ig, Stockholm, and Motto Berlin. As part of these transcontinental events, Fillip staff and board members will discuss recent writing and artist projects that situate the publication within the larger landscape of international art criticism. This will also be an opportunity to expand discussions begun during our recent Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism series presented this past February in collaboration with Artspeak, Vancouver.”

All are invited to attend and participate in these discussions:

About the current issue
In Fillip 9, Diedrich Diedrichsen provides an in depth discussion of Paul Valéry and pop music, and critic Shepherd Steiner considers the Martha Rosler Library project through the lens of the Boolean search. The issue also features conversations between Lea Feinstein and Christian L. Frock on second wave feminism and last year’s proliferation of feminist art shows, and between Boris Groys and Andro Wekua on art practice and production today and in the former East Europe. In addition, Fillip 9 includes an interview with Steve Lambert of the New York Times Special Edition project among exhibition reviews and other texts.

We are very pleased to present a special audio project for the issue, a yellow vinyl 45 by artists Cranfield and Slade, which is included in each copy of the magazine. The edition is produced in collaboration with the Or Gallery, Vancouver, and in support of the artists’ forthcoming album 12 Sun Songs by the Or Gallery, Christoph Keller Editions, and JRP/Ringier.

Good friend of mine Johan Prag is a Swedish Art Director working, living and breathing
in Tokyo, Japan. His new blog “And Seen” just launched. Take a look, its worth to bookmark.

by A. O. Scott

The first thing you see in “Tyson,” James Toback’s powerful and troubling new documentary, is an old television clip showing Mike Tyson, on Nov. 22, 1986, defeating Trevor Berbick to win the W.B.C. heavyweight title. Just 20 years old, Mr. Tyson was the youngest fighter to win that belt, and to see him take it is to recall, especially in light of the shambling, thuggish caricature he would later become, what a dazzling and ferocious boxer he was in his prime.

The only thing more astonishing than the speed of his combinations was their force, and his ability to blend quickness with brute strength quickly overpowered his early opponents, not many of whom lasted very long in the ring with him. Mr. Berbick, a taller, heavier and more experienced fighter, was done before the second round was over, and what the slow-motion video shows most indelibly is the terror on his face before the referee mercifully called a TKO.

The essence of boxing is violence, but few fighters have refined it — have embodied it — quite as effectively as Mr. Tyson has; he sometimes speaks to Mr. Toback’s camera about the murderous clarity he took into the ring with him. He says he used to imagine his fists smashing through his opponent’s faces and out the backs of their heads. The pure terror in Mr. Berbick’s eyes (and in those of most of the other fighters Mr. Tyson met during his rapid rise and brief reign) suggests that he might well have been capable of wreaking that kind of damage.

But the damage surveyed in “Tyson” is mostly self-inflicted. Fear is certainly one of the film’s motifs, but it seems that Mr. Tyson suffers from at least as much as he inspires. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid,” he says at one point, giving voice to his state of mind in the moments before a bout. He also remembers being bullied and humiliated as a child in Brooklyn, but in listening to his moody, rambling and frequently thoughtful disquisitions on his own life you are struck by intimations of a dread much deeper than the fear of physical harm or loss of face.

With a single exception — his relationship with his trainer and mentor, Cus D’Amato — Mr. Tyson’s experience of the world has been marked by mistrust and suspicion, by a view of other people that is hard and pitiless. They are users, operators, “leeches,” he says, but he rarely claims to be any better. He is only human.

Most of the movie consists of the former champ sitting in a house near the Pacific Ocean, speaking into the camera as if no one else were around. This produces an effect of almost unnerving intimacy — it is a bit scary to be so close to him — but also an upwelling, perhaps unexpected, of compassion. It is hard to imagine anyone more radically alone.

Whether or not he deserves our sympathy is a fair question. It is easy, and not entirely unjustified, to look at Mr. Tyson, his left eye ringed by a Maori tattoo, his head shaved clean, and see a self-pitying, self-justifying man who squandered his talent and good fortune and caused much more hurt than his brutal profession required. He started out as a street criminal in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and was plucked from juvenile detention by Mr. D’Amato and his associates, who disciplined the young man’s natural volatility and turned him into a fighter.

But Mr. Tyson never learned to control his brutish, self-destructive instincts. His brief first marriage, to the actress and model Robin Givens, was marked by accusations of abuse, and in 1993 he went to prison after being convicted of sexually assaulting a beauty pageant contestant in Indiana. By now he may be better known for ranting and press conferences and for biting Evander Holyfield’s ear during a 1997 fight than for the mighty pugilistic feats of his youth.

And a lot of people, even passionate boxing fans, might prefer to forget about Mr. Tyson rather than spend 90 minutes in his company. But “Tyson” is worth seeing even if you have no particular interest in the sport or the man.

It may lack the detachment and the balance that Barbara Kopple brought to “Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson,” the 1993 documentary she made for NBC, but Mr. Toback’s film, partly because it restricts itself to Mr. Tyson’s point of view, offers a rare and vivid study in the complexity of a single suffering, raging soul. It is not an entirely trustworthy movie, but it does feel profoundly honest.

From time to time the screen is divided into two or three almost identical images, and the sound is edited to make it sound as if Mr. Tyson is in dialogue with himself, his words echoing and overlapping. These effects emphasize the film’s main point, which is that Mr. Tyson is too mercurial, too self-contradictory, to be easily summed up.

He is by turns boastful, angry, remorseful and bewildered, choking up when he recalls Mr. D’Amato, whose death in 1985 remains the central tragedy of Mr. Tyson’s life. He relates the details of that life with candor and feeling, and also with an analytical ardor that is moving because it reveals his struggle to figure himself out.

Without the sympathetic presence of Mr. Toback, whom he has known for many years, it is unlikely that Mr. Tyson would have opened up in this way. And it is also likely that without Mr. Tyson’s presence, the director would have been unlikely to restrain his own self-indulgent impulses.

Mr. Toback’s fascination with hyperbolic visions of masculinity predates his filmmaking career, going back at least to a notorious 1967 essay on Norman Mailer. As a screenwriter and director — from “Fingers” to “Harvard Man” — he has been preoccupied with brutality, vanity and sexual conquest, and with the interplay between those elemental impulses and the refinements of art and culture.

His protagonists tend to be variously romanticized versions of himself: intellectuals seduced by fantasies of crime, risk, sexual wantonness and violence. Even in his most interesting projects he frequently loses track of the difference between exploring such fantasies and indulging them, but in “Tyson,” his first nonfiction film, he is held in check by the irreducible, excruciating realness of the man in front of the camera. The transaction between them is charged with a strange kind of magic. The filmmaker allows the fighter to have his unchallenged say to justify, condemn and contradict himself. In exchange Mr. Tyson has enabled Mr. Toback to make his best film, which is also, paradoxically, his most personal.

“Tyson” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has profanity and violence.

TYSON

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by James Toback; director of photography, Larry McConkey; edited by Aaron Yanes; music by Salaam Remi, with the song “Legendary” by Nas; produced by Mr. Toback and Damon Bingham; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 30

via South Willard

via South Willard

A live twitter page that posts daily activities/spending by a working band.

The band “on November 3, 2008 was incorporated as Francis and the Lights, LLC., and accepted an $100,000 investment from the The Normative Music Company”.

Twitter
Wikipedia

Photograph by Michael Wells

Municipal de Fútbol is distributed by D.A.P.

Rafael Rozendaal’s food diary. I don’t know why I like these (online food diaries) so much. Maybe I appreciate the humanity in such an oversaturated and therefore overly postured medium.

Scanwiches? www.scanwiches.com!
Thanks Ray!

image links to Lined & Unlined

Erstwhile Brooklyn archivist BJ Rubin has spent the past year digitizing his collection of rare and out-of-print vinyl and posting them to his blog. Scratches, pops, and all, there is some amazing material here to discover. I’ve particularly been enjoying the fantastic early singles by Glass Candy.

“Brittle Women” is a dark disco-punk classic. Get it here.

All things Desi, curated by Mansi Shah.

Above: Chacha Chaudary’s Pinki.

Fellow TheBlowUp alumnus Kate Sennert is a founding member of this [currently] web project. I hope they update frequently.

THIS LONG CENTURY is an evolving index of passing thoughts, recommendations and personal observations. Represented are individuals working across highly imaginative fields: art, design, literature, science, theory, etc. This project seeks to expand the notion of creative discipline and provoke verbal and aesthetic exchange.

“As a part of the ART LA Saturday Programming series, I’ll be reading from Municipal de Fútbol on 1/24 at 1pm on a panel with my collaborators — at the Ruskin Theater, which is located across the street from the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica.”
— Jennifer Doyle

A slide show, reading and panel discussion exploring the different sides of Municipal de Fútbol: photography, writing, art, and design will take place. Municipal de Fútbol celebrates what is arguably Los Angeles’s largest subculture, the world of those playing in the myriad of soccer leagues across the city, far below the radar of sports media. A project initiated by designer Jonathan Maghen, Municipal de Fútbol was inspired by the pick-up and amateur soccer games played in the densest parts of east and south Los Angeles. Centered on Michael Wells’ photographs of weekend and night games played on dusty fields and in urban parks across the city, Municipal de Fútbol explores the possibilities of “Fútbol Angelino”. Jennifer Doyle will present contributions to the project, and talk about the collaboration of design, photography and critic and this inspired marriage of art and sport.

Winter Sale:
70% off Dries Van Noten, Raf Simons, A.P.C., Patrik Ervell and Band of Outsiders
50% off Common Projects
Sunday 21 December at 11am, South Willard

South Willard will be using FedEx 2nd day for all domestic shipments ordered by 2pm monday, for Christmas delivery

Ben Drury is laying low on a blog of sorts he’s set up. Lots of random good stuff, including projects for Newham Generals.