It is hard to talk of a genius to whose work you have always been attracted, and for a writer it is not easy to admit that for once, images speak louder than words. But when one comes in contact with the work of Alexander McQueen, whose untimely end last year devastated the fashion world, one has no choice but to put down the pen and just look.
     The new exhibition of McQueen’s work opens tomorrow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Curated by Andrew Bolton of the Costume Institute, this show is a comprehensive overview of McQueen’s oeuvre. It is safe to say that this time the Met has outdone itself in its ambition to give a creator his due. The show is awe-inspiring in its tremendous scope and execution. Where it truly succeeds is in its ability to show how multifaceted McQueen’s talent was. His work combined historical and social commentary, cultural criticism, and romantic fantasy. The mind-blowing complexity of the garments speaks not only of McQueen’s skills, but also of his uncompromising nature. And while I am often hesitant to say that fashion is art, in McQueen’s case this seems like an apt comparison.

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On their fourth album, this Swedish collective — founded in 2005 by Emanuel Lundgren — never veers far off the course of sunny skies. Forever Today soars with the lightness of youth and wraps up before any understanding of suffering can take root. The new album follows 2010’s 27 Songs from Barcelona, which featured the prolific wunderkinds cooking up one solo per band member per track. As one of contemporary music’s more celebrated and fully functioning collectives, I’m From Barcelona commands the feel of an intimate group, and their magnanimous approach floods each track with inclusivity. Whereas other collectives of a similar ilk seem fine-tuned for promotional purposes, the ironic hipster trope is not to be found with this bunch.

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There’s something simultaneously childlike, hippieish and fanciful about a treehouse. Who would build their home in the supple, swaying branches of a tree? And who would feel comfortable living perched so precariously off the ground? The answer is, apparently, lots of people. A new book in DOM Publisher’s “Design and Construction Manual” series, “Treehouse,” offers up serious, practical, advice, and also some inspiring contemporary examples.
     Most of the treehouses featured in the book are in Central Europe, and tucked within immense, leafy perennials that look as if they’re centuries old. The book’s overarching image, of a small cottage tucked within an explosion of foliage, has a fairy-tale resonance. The trees offer protection from sun and rain, and a sweet retreat from the pressures of everyday life. Treehouse living fulfills our yearning for a simpler, more elemental way of life, one less bound up in materialism and more closely aligned with natural rhythms.
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I once saw a photo of Yves Saint-Laurent’s living room, and its cluttered opulence looked positively oppressing. Years later I discovered the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, and I found its regard for simplicity, sparseness, and the natural cycle of life refreshing. Wabi-sabi is lived-in beauty found in imperfection, the decay of all things, and the transience of all being, natural and unnatural. It prizes cracks in old vases, uneven texture of the ancient walls, and the withering of trees. It acknowledges the slow but intractable march of time, and in accepting it finds tranquility. Breathe in. Breathe out.

     Like other things Eastern, and therefore exotic, wabi-sabi has often been bastardized by interior designers and their wealthy clientele. Axel Vervoordt, a Belgian art and antiques collector, could surely qualify as an impostor, but in his new book Wabi Inspirations ($65, Flammarion), he is careful to point out the sincerity of his interest in the unadorned and unassuming beauty of wabi-sabi (or simply wabi). The effort does indeed seem genuine and the gorgeous book is an important photographic document, since, despite wabi-sabi’s popularity, there is a dearth of its visual representation. The 255-page volume is a tour of properties redesigned by Vervoordt in the wabi spirit, often with the help of the Japanese-Belgian architect Tatsuro Miki. With their soft light and sparse interiors these spaces become sanctuaries. But it is the vividness of textures that really makes you want to run your hand over the photographs. Or just live in them.
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“Sometimes I’ve got the jungle under my skin”, Merrill Garbus sings on “Es-so”, from the follow-up to her 2009 debut, BiRd-BrAiNs. There indeed seems to be a wildness within Garbus and her experimental music. Stylizing her stage-name as tUnE-yArDs and album title as W h o k i l l, Garbus’ disregard for standard syntax befits the haphazard approach to her songwriting; for a joyous madness certainly pervades the hodgepodge of raucous harmonies, spiking horns, rumbling rhythms, and jazzy bass (courtesy of Nate Brenner). The Afro-pop aesthetic and her swooning vocals can, at times, evoke Vampire Weekend — but only if the polished sheen of Ezra Koenig’s compositions had been cut up and obliterated in the midst of some spastic frenzy. On the single “Bizness”, Garbus yelps, “I’m a victim, yeah/Don’t take my life away/Don’t take my life away” — an urgent, desperate plea that is countered by its hypnotic, almost childlike harmonies and video. On W h o k i l l, Garbus serves up ten tracks that are defiantly bizarre yet still irresistible — a rare balancing act that heralds a truly original talent.

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Buy this at Other Music or iTunes. After the jump, check out the video for “Bizness”.
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This Earth Day, after a year that has seen an unprecedented oil spill, devastating natural disasters, and an ongoing nuclear crisis, it’s a good time for some positive news about the environment.  Those looking to counterbalance the fatalistic stories that have dominated the headlines with a few reasons to feel more optimistic about the future sustainability of life on the planet will be happy to find scores of promising items in My Green City: Back to Nature with Attitude and Style, edited by Robert Klanten, Sven Ehmann, and Kitty Bolhöfer. 
      The newly published book is an illustrated guide to a number of the design trends that are guiding the global movement toward the greening of our urban spaces.  Individually, none of the small developments will likely make the lead story on the evening news.  But like stubborn weeds peaking through the cracks in the pavement, they are slowly gaining ground in cities everywhere and supplying evidence that the metropolitan centers of the future will be more unrefined and far wilder than the stark grids of steel and cement previously envisioned.
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As a longtime fan of interactive gallery shows and general flights of the imagination, I always get excited for a Mike Shine opening. On Saturday, Shine’s third installment of his ongoing Flotsam narrative, Der Wilden Mann: THUS SPRACH FLOTSAM; METAMORPHOSIS 3 opened at Copro Gallery in Santa Monica. Outside the gallery, a band played and the line for cans of Tecate and wine served in small plastic cups hugged the right side of the ramp leading up to the entrance. Inside, the air was sharp with fresh sod and varnished wood, comforting smells that together with the honky-tonk rock music wafting in through an open window, gave the gallery a bucolic feel.
      Shine is notorious for mixing it up and this show is no exception: Nordic mythology, carnival oddities, hand-painted signs and whirling wheels of fortune cover the brown and mint green walls in an impressive array of framed paintings and painted objects. At the center sits a large, Norse style longhouse (with a grass roof, the source of that wonderful earthy smell) you can enter and explore. Later, talking to Shine, he shows me a photo of close friend, skateboarding legend and filmmaker, Stacy Peralta sprawled across this very roof, laying sod.
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Academy award-nominated actor, Mark Ruffalo has his directorial debut, SYMPATHY FOR DELICIOUS, out this month. The film was written by Christopher Thornton who Mark Ruffalo met while studying acting at the Stella Adler Theatre in Los Angeles. Ruffalo and Thornton also star in the film. SYMPATHY FOR DELICIOUS is about a paralyzed man’s (Delicious Dean, played by Christopher Thornton) journey to cope with his tragedy and a Priest (Joe, played by Ruffalo) who is trying to encourage him to realize Dean’s gift and his own dream to build a shelter for the homeless on skid row in Los Angeles. Dean is paralyzed in a motorcycle accident that leaves him unable to walk, in a wheel chair and living out of his car on skid row. However he is also left with the ability to heal people. It should be mentioned that Christopher Thornton is also paralyzed from a rock-climbing fall when he was 25. Ruffalo’s and Thornton’s 10-year collaboration leaves us with a film that explores the effects of tragedy, the conflicts between spirit, ego and superficiality and the struggle of compassion over material obsession and in the end the victory of salvation.
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Some people are surprised when they learn Wes Eisold — the creative force behind the blackened synth-pop group Cold Cave — was once the vocal-cord thrasher of hardcore bands like Give Up The Ghost and Some Girls. But, for Eisold, who spent a childhood constantly moving from city to city, change is as defining a characteristic as his cryptically dark lyrics are. Eisold just released Cherish The Light Years, his second full-length as Cold Cave, and it’s a marked departure from the lo-fi bedroom production on which the band first made a name. In fact, it’s a fully-blown electronic pop record, one so committed to its mode that comparisons with decade-specific new wave is an unavoidable knee-jerk reaction. But, to consider Cherish The Light Years only in this context would be, for Eisold, completely missing the point. Currently on a European tour, Eisold spoke with us about his artistic evolution, album aesthetics, and, among other things, how he decided to completely commit to his music.

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