Swiss photographers Matthieu Lavanchy and Jonas Marguet met while studying at the University of Art and Design Lausanne. In collaboration with others, Marguet founded the publishing house Aplustrois in 2008 as a side project. The publisher “considers the editorial object (book, booklet or other format) as an essential complement to any artistic event. The aim is not to document or comment on the event, but rather to push it further and explore new forms starting from it”.
     When Aplustrois was approached by a theater troupe that was working on a play that dealt with themes of the public perception of obesity and the concept of BBW — “big beautiful women” — Marguet and Lavanchy created a book of still-lifes about Western society’s complex relationship toward food, and “the tension between seduction and repulsion”.
     Grotesque towers of chocolate cake and a strangely melded pair of dining room chairs pull our associations with food and dining to their absurd extremes — and pseudo-scientific beakers and equipment seem to allude to our desire to measure out portions and study our food while simultaneously attempting to ignore the baseness of the instinct to eat. Curiously absent of human figures, Lavanchy and Marguet’s images manage to be funny, strange, and disturbing through their objects’ startling manipulation.

Neuf Veltes Remplissent un Quartaut is available for sale here. It is also on sale at Dashwood Books and Capricious Space in New York.

“We were already, already bored/Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling”, sings Win Butler on “The Suburbs”. With its simple pianos and otherwise stripped-down sound, the opening track from Arcade Fire’s third album immediately announces the Montreal band’s attempts at (and, perhaps, anxieties over) departing from the baroque bombast that has become its hallmark. Given the name of the album, much focus has centered on how Arcade Fire might be moving from the political provocations of Neon Bible to critiquing the impact and ennui of residential sprawl in modern society. And while that theme appears throughout the album, just as salient is the corresponding unease with passing time and the inevitability of change as Butler croons that “the clock keeps ticking” over unadorned guitars on “Modern Man”. Yet, The Suburbs’ standout tracks are those that indeed dwell in the past, reminding the listener of the grand theatrics of Funeral and Neon Bible, such as “We Used to Wait” and “Suburban War”, which features the lyrics: “You said the past won’t rest/Until we jump the fence and leave it behind”.

Two weeks before the release of his latest film, The Extra Man, Paul Dano is back in his hometown for a week to promote the movie before flying back to New Mexico to continue filming alongside the likes of Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig (in the not-so-subtly titled Cowboys and Aliens). The Extra Man, in contrast, seems to be more in line with Dano’s previous work. The film is a quietly quirky adaptation of a novel by that quintessential young New York writer, Jonathan Ames.
     I meet Dano in a garish, orange-and-pink room in a SoHo hotel. The room was likely picked by a publicist but seems as though it could have been a set piece in the new film. After some conversation about the décor, Dano asks my permission to make a quick phone call to his girlfriend, Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of Elia). Since his break-out role in 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine, the young actor has worked with a string of A-list actors (Kevin Kline, Katie Holmes, and John C. Reilly star with him in The Extra Man). Still, he considers himself “a very normal dude”. We caught up with him to talk about how he picks his distinctive roles, how much he identifies with his characters, and his plans for the future.

When Coco Chanel began to design the clothing that would usher in the laissez-faire attitude of the Roaring Twenties, she distinguished her work with an unusual color palette and fabric. Her controversial use of low-cost jersey in sportswear piqued the interest of her wealthy clientele and sent a ripple through the fashion world. Decades later, the fabric has become commonplace throughout the industry, but in the hands of the right designer, jersey can still turn heads.
     Enter Christiane Gruber, the designer behind the Austrian line Awareness and Consciousness. A graduate of Vienna’s University of Applied Arts, Gruber honed her craft under the tutelage of Raf Simons and has also logged hours with Haider Ackermann and A.F. Vandevorst. Clearly influenced by the clean lines of her mentors, Gruber’s own line, founded in  2005, has built a reputation on uncomplicated silhouettes rendered in multiple layers of high-quality draped jersey.
     While shapes of her collections remain consistent, it is Gruber’s ever-changing color palette and one-of-a-kind, often hand-dyed prints that make her work unique. The earthy hues of Awareness & Conscousness’ spring 2010 effort produced an effect much like the unpredictable beauty of agate, which was strung up on chains and used as pendants to accessorize the collection. Striking a delicate balance between painstakingly manipulated design techniques and an effortless and natural final product, Gruber appears poised and ready to redefine the use of jersey yet again.

The International Documentary Association presents the 14th annual DocuWeek. Audiences in New York and Los Angeles have the opportunity to view some of this year’s best independent non-fiction short and feature length documentary films. DocuWeek takes place July 30-August 19 at New York’s IFC center and Los Angeles’ Arclight Hollywood.
     IDA is a nonprofit membership organization that supports documentary filmmakers throughout the world by promoting an increase in public awareness of documentary film form as well as expanding filmmakers’ opportunities and access to aid for production, distribution and exposure. IDA’s DocuWeek helps these select films meet Academy Award consideration by providing a week-long public theatrical exhibition in both New York and Los Angeles, the Academy’s minimum requirement for a film to be considered for an award.
     Since DocuWeek’s premiere in 1997, the showcase has qualified more than 160 short and feature films for Academy consideration, and produced seventeen Oscar nominations. This year’s lineup includes twenty-two films by filmmakers from around the world spotlighting a wide range of topics.

For a full list of films as well as showtimes in both Los Angeles and New York, visit The International Documentary Association.

For as long as I’ve been aware that something called literature existed, people have been lamenting its demise. In Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart’s new novel published this week by Random House, literature has already died what was, apparently, a rather quiet and unnoticed death. And, while the decline of print is one of the many subtly interwoven themes of the novel, I’ve never felt more hopeful about the future of literature than I did when I finished this book; the medium is safe, as long as novels like Super Sad True Love Story are being written.
     Set somewhere in what is often ominously and lazily referred to as the not-too-distant-future — which, of course, means that its true subject is the present — Super Sad True Love Story tracks the romance between Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park. The former is a middle-aged, balding depressive who is likely the last person on Earth who still owns, and for that matter reads, books. The latter is a 24-four-year-old recent graduate of Elderbird College (with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness), who is remarkably cute, often cruel, and ultimately sympathetic. Both are the children of immigrants, desperate to fulfill their parents expectations and desperate to overcome the insecurities that are the scars of their upbringing.

The vibrant collection of objects on display now through January 10 at Why Design Now?, the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Triennial, answers that question quite simply. Design matters because absolutely everything in our environment, from our eating utensils to the cities we live in, is designed, and the materials and methods with which they’re produced have a powerful impact on our culture and the environment.
     Appropriately, the curators have included objects of every scale. The show includes drinking glasses with grip-like profiles to aid those with limited manual abilities, and renderings for Masdar, a new remote desert city in Abu Dhabi that will be the world’s first isolated, self-sustaining, zero-energy community.
     The exhibit projects a curious ambivalence about technology. Some of the high-tech artifacts included, like the iPod, the Kindle, and twitter, have already become seemlessly embedded in our lives. They’re advanced, but commonplace. Other high-tech objects seem to belong to a distant, Jetsons-like future. There’s a giant, rotating dish-shaped solar collector with gleaming mirrored facets, and plans for a communal electric car system that would allow city-dwellers to borrow and deposit vehicles at designated stops.

Rag & Bone, the hip American clothier, was founded in Kentucky in 2002, at the beginning of the premium denim craze. The idea was simple, to make great jeans. The business took off quickly and in several years the company went from a manufacturer of good denim to a full-fledged clothing company with fashion shows on the New York calendar. Fast-forward to today and the company is going back to basics — pun intended. Rag & Bone recently introduced three new women’s lines, JEAN, SHIRT, and KNIT, that, according the press release, are supposed to “constitute the foundation of every modern girl’s wardrobe”.
    Last Friday, the new duds got a New York home of their own. The prime real estate on the corner of E. Houston and Elizabeth used to house Café Colonial, somewhat of a neighborhood landmark. Rag & Bone paid homage to the former tenant both implicitly — by keeping the original tile floors — and explicitly — by writing a love note on the side of the building. Inside, the no-frills wood and metal décor is in tune with the no-nonsense offerings. The modern girl gets three types of jeans (made in the USA), seven different tops (from the oxford to the shirt-dress), and several t-shirts. There is also an adjacent shoe store that houses footwear and accessories from the main line.

Rag & Bone, 73 East Houston St. New York, NY.

Last summer, like the scattered showers that unpredictably color a July afternoon, Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno, better known as Best Coast, drizzled a handful of noisy love songs upon the Internet — each one adding a few minutes to the season’s soundtrack. The songs were lo-fi and reverbed to the point of distortion but, with Cosentino’s disarmingly sweet voice, proved to be an essential summer combination. Nevertheless, with every addictive melody chugging along at a similar mid-tempo, repeat plays made overdose inevitable.
     The songwriting on Crazy for You, Best Coast’s full-length debut, is more diverse and assertive than on the band’s early singles, making those songs sound like rough demos of half-baked ideas. The noise here has been turned down, morphed into a vibrant haze that surrounds and buoys Cosentino’s voice in a real ’60s-girl-group style. Songs wobble between the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain drum-n-fuzz of “Honey” to the up-tempo indie-pop of “The End” — and though there’s still plenty of reverb, it sounds like Cosentino’s the one controlling it, not the other way around. Even when she’s saying nothing at all, just oohing along with the music, it’s still great to hear her sing.

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