The Cardboard Gods blog
Whether or not you give a damn about baseball cards, you should read Josh Wilker’s captivating blog, Cardboard Gods. Using vintage Topps imagery — the stagey, shaggy and strange captures of forgotten ballplayers in the 70s — as a launching pad, Wilker takes off on flights about everything from memory to athleticism to middle-aged failure. The guy’s such a great writer it hardly matters. Post after post after post is a winner.
Tagged: 1970s, baseball cards, Cardboard Gods, Josh Wilker
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Iconic 70s movie: The Shout (watch the full film)
The ’70s still remain one of the best eras for cinema. This is The Shout, a totally nuts movie starring John Hurt (he’s the first guy to die in Alien), Susannah York, and Alan Bates.
Happy End: seminal Japanese folk band from the 1970s
Legendary in the Japanese music scene of the 70s, the folk-rock band Happy End was virtually unknown (and probably still is) to the Western world until Sofia Coppola included their hit, Kaze wo atsumete, in Lost in Translation. The childlike simplicity of the tune is addicting, especially when played by two anonymous Japanese men with a recorder and a guitar.
Injecting you back into the 70s with his expired polaroids, director and photographer Neil Krug’s work will encourage you to pull out your Hendrix records and flash back to the days that were. Capturing beautiful yet simple images recreating a psychedelic world of cowboys and Indians, and all with a vintage feel, Krug encapsulates that golden era of music with an impressive portfolio of work ranging from music videos and photography for bands like Tame Impala, My Chemical Romance and Ladytron.
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Also by MATTHEW SPECKTOR
People contort all kinds of ways to describe a really original writer, but Big Machine is an amazing piece of work. A true American Gothic ‘horror’ in the vein of Poe, or Melville or James — this book is authentically scary, compulsively strange, and hugely exciting on the sentence level. It’s also funny as hell. A riff about the Washerwoman cult, who rewrite the Bible in bizarre contemporary idiom, is worth the price of admission by itself. Read more
Sometimes pessimism is more encouraging than optimism, because more is true. I’m a huge fan of Straw Dogs, but the English counter-Humanist philosopher’s Heresies is just as bracing: ‘Belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking classes’. Living in Los Angeles, where a brittle, self-obsessed ‘hopefulness’ is everywhere, I might need this writer (who certainly shouldn’t be confused with the Men Are From Mars guy) even more than you do. But you do, you do.
More timeless than current’. But I recently finished a long and complicated novel about Hollywood in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and am just now buckling down to write a short nonfiction book about this film, part of a series for Soft Skull Press. A little peremptorily written off as a mere ‘entertainment’, and also overshadowed by the in-fact-not-quite-as-good Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, this is a pretty dazzling effort: a coded Watergate-conspiracy narrative, a comment on the perils and pleasures of being fooled that’s also twice as much fun to watch as you remember. Which was pretty fun to begin with.
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Oh wow. Bahnhof AB, the hosting company responsible for keeping the under siege Wikileaks site up, is located in a futuristically renovated cold war nuclear bunker thirty metres below Sweden’s White Mountain. [Photos by Jann Lipka/Rex Features] Read more
UK illustrator Sophie Alda seems to capture that hazy second between sleep and wakefulness in her surreal images, which are executed in the most delicate of Easter egg colors.
The very talented Jess Snow, the first video artist to be featured by Female Persuasion — the original site for provocative and political female artists — has created this ethereal short video for Lost At E Minor. We feel it. We love it. [see also the promo video Lifelongfriendshipsociety created for us]
This striking design — still in the planning stages — aims to covert a desolate, disused sand mine into a thriving environmental preserve and eco-resort. The development lists an impressive array of green designs, including living walls and a five-acre green roof, and effortlessly succeeds in that all important eco-feature of blending in with its surrounding environment. Read more
If you ever wondered how the fine people from DC dressed, Curator of DC Style has the answer for you. One of my favorites, this blog features pictures of DC citizens in creative and fashionable attire.
Every now and then you encounter a band whose sound cannot be confined to CD, Vinyl or a MySpace Music Player; a sound so incredible that it must be experienced first hand, in the flesh, where it can do some well-deserved damage to your eardrums. Sydney’s Dead Farmers are one of these bands. Read more
The Hussy Summer 2009 Exotic Escape collection is up for viewing. I quite like the leather Zanzibar sandals for a stylish casual look that’s slightly sophisticated. While there are a few nice dresses in the new line, I much prefer the accessories and clutches. That’s partially why the rest of the globe has come to love this iconic Aussie label, right?
WE'RE POSTING / SOME OF THE BEST
Michelle Blade’s psychedelic artwork
Michelle Blade’s washed out paintings are deceptively simple, her washy acrylics creating psychedelic textures and conjuring ghostly figures from the past. Read more
Pitched as ‘Ulterior Motives in Contemporary Art’, Disorder Disorder is running until November 14 at Penrith Regional Gallery. It’ll be well worth the trip out west of Sydney: the Australian, Japanese, American and European cast reads like a warriors of street art roundup and includes Mike Giant, Ed Templeton, Anthony Lister [artwork above], Ozzie Wright, and Jonathan Zawada. Read more
Baltimore Mural by Josh Van Horne
My friend Josh Van Horne, a local Baltimore artist, did this amazing mural in our neighborhood that depicts the history of this warehouse-laden area.
Benjamin Edminston’s psychedelic heads seem to have some fearful wisdom behind their blissed-out eyes. Read more
Mathematics? Leave me out. Fashematics? Now you’re talking! This gem of a site is a runway equation that adds up to a whole lot of wonderful.
Created by graphic t shirt label, the-affair, and printed on beautifully soft American Apparel. Limited edition of 200.
If you have a Twitter feed that focuses on cool pop cultural things and you’d like to swap Tweets with Lost At E Minor and other like-minded Twitterers, drop us a note (with Tweet Swap in the title). We have a system in place and we’d like to have you in on it! [illustration by Brad Fitzpatrick]
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