Flaunt Magazine

blur blur blur. Teen angst is the new old new aesthetic, made tactile and visceral by all our own personal brands of self-loathing and the celebration of pity, parties and photoblog mobs. Not to mention recent artist’s/web-baby’s infatuations with: ambiguously young drop outs in oversized flannel with oversized bank accounts underplaying their beauty, smoking by oversized LA pools following their tiny perky tits and social ladder steps, stumbling drunk and sexy and blind by their bangs, knees tangled in too long t-shirts and isn’t the Sun so obnoxious and don’t we just not give a fuck. Then there’s the easy East Coast parallel aesthetic mentality: there are no backyards in NYC and we are on the street and we’re in small bedrooms and we’re in small bars and we’re naked at night, and nudity and the street and smallness means something about something and we don’t know what but isn’t everything here the best thing ever; It’s-always-summer-on-the-internet when we love ourselves in pictures and we hate to love love. I mean like GAWD. there is NOTHING to do in [hometown]. Let’s get fukkkd. I need soft focus. I need soft tongues. I need to wake up having forgotten I fell asleep. Are you getting all this on camera?

As M83, Anthony Gonzalez’s first three magnificent albums have been flirty if not infatuated with romanticizing teenage romance. His latest album, “Saturdays = Youth” is a love letter to the death of love letters, a full-blown dedication to our memories of youth: invented, lionized, repressed, reckless and totally unremarkable. For the new video to the album’s single, “Graveyard Girl,” Gonzalez brought back the director for his previous videos, Matthew Frost. And Frost brought with him his own fixation on popularity and cute outcast girls who say, “who needs popularity when I’ve got myself all to myself. Point me to the pet cemetery.”

And as a wonderful treat of wonderfulness, Frost casts for his new video, playing his go-to-role of Popular Girl/Stay Away From My Boyfriend, Freak (But Inside I’m Sad And Alone And Not What I Seem And You Don’t Know What I Have To Go Through) is a Flaunt favorite: model/angel Ruby Corley (myspace.com/rubycorley). One of the video’s main faults though is simple: As if the redhead Graveyard Girl who mourns the death of her domestic pet wouldn’t be the coolest fucking chick around.

In spite of all this: who we did or did not fingerbang, how bad it hurts when it hurts the worst, the insufficiency of exclamation marks, etc. it’s important to remember one thing: all dogs go to heaven. m834eva

DJ and Spank Rock producer XXXchange (Alex Epton) is into some hot titties shit. The last Spank Rock EP, Bangers and Cash, was inspired by/heavily sampled 2LiveCrew’s nut-and-cum-centric Miami Bass bukkake-rap. It’s stellar juicy dance tunes to squirm to. Get on it.

And just released/soon to be playing in every we-don’t-play-Justice-just-music-that-sounds-like-it anti-hipster hipster party: new get-nude tunes from XXXChange: a spit-and-grind remix of Panda Bear’s Brian-Wilson-On-Ayahuasca song “Comfy in Nautica” from last year’s tasty and over-eaten “Person Pitch.” The remix takes Panda’s Por-Tu-Gal! tribal dance influence and replaces it with gritty NYC-via-Baltimore grime-rave beats and electro-trash pseudo-relevancy.

In short: it’s fucking goooooood.

Click me to download/sweat till you bleed.

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Remember “Gangsta’s Paradise?” Yeah well the new Coolio is quite frankly the craziest cooking host on My Damn Channel. Check out clips from his new show Cookin with Coolio

Graveyard
Tee Pee Records
Graveyard’s self-titled debut is a time warp to the 1970s, with psychedelic rock at its peak. Though this seminal music era influenced many bands, few are as committed as Graveyard to recreating it note for note. Songs like “Blue Soul” and “Satan’s Finest,” seem to suggest the quartet was raised together in the middle of an isolated Swedish forest, where their only means for survival were a steady diet of Black Sabbath and Blue Cheer. Although the band does little to reinvent this genre, at times appearing to solely mimic their hash-adorned influences, Graveyard does possess an admirable heavy metal consistency in their music. Their opening track, “Evil Ways,” begins with a pulsing drumbeat, building to a smooth bluesy riff that propels the rest of the song, while “Submarine Blues” is a tight hook-filled little number, short and sweet. The first half of “Blue Soul” has a mellow, almost jazzy bass line, but through the introduction of some beefy guitar chords picks up steam in its second half. Many bands attempting to refashion yesterday’s music embark on an ultimately fruitless journey, but Graveyard delivers a riotous time warp, completely worthwhile.

-Jordan Koos

Flaunt.com, Mind[medium], and V2 Vodka, along with cabaret hosts Adarsha Benjamin, Marc Edouard Leon, and Reverend A. Pogany, presented an evening of bands and bad behavior this past weekend in industrial Downtown Los Angeles. An art-skate warehouse on 6th St. housed an evening of live performances by Voxhaul Broadcast, The Red Hearts, The Pharmacy, DJ Dorion, and DJ Jag L.A.. Guests packed the house, many dressed in their finest corsets, garter belts, bowler hats, and vests; some accenting their costumes with feathers and sequins, others preferring to entice with copious amounts of unfettered skin. Bands performed at the base of the warehouse’s indoor mini half-pipe, and walls and floors shook as the crowd calamitously danced to the rhythms and hooks of the evening’s sweet ol’ rock-n-roll jooks. Other highlights: an ugly photo booth, a cotton candy machine, a grilled cheese sandwich bar, and all the V2 vodka cocktails your tiny heart could ever desire. Despite the torrential rain, this party was definitely one of the most radical Flaunt events of 2008 to date. Rest assured there’ll be more where this came from. Stay tuned for additional pics and Youtube video coverage…Photography by Melissa Manning forTheLookPartnership.comFor additional photos from this party check outTheArabParrot.com.

For those of you who couldn’t make it to our Sundance soiree, here’s another chance to catch Voxhaul Broadcast in all their glory along with The Red Hearts, The Pharmacy, and sets by deejays Dorion and Jag L.A.. Come enjoy the music, kick it with the Flaunt crew, and show off your finest cabaret inspired regalia.

Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series
Prestel Publishing

Separating the images in Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series from the legend himself is hopeless. His mythos is unmistakable, especially due to a recent surge in Dylan obsession and fetishization spurred by the film I’m Not There. Coinciding with the first ever exhibition of his paintings at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in Germany, the book reveals over 170 never-before-published fully painted variations of genre sketches he created while on tour in America, Asia and Europe between 1989-1992.

The drawings reveal similarities between his visual and musical aesthetics, sharing quirky yet pensive qualities, thereby unmasking his artistic perspective as observant yet surreal. Using a color palette similar to Matisse (though his actual skill is a scratch on the surface of the aforementioned master), Dylan’s paintings of landscapes, nudes, and portraits, are each infused with specific emotional tones that solicit various feelings ranging from melancholy to amusement.

By digitally transferring his drawings; Dylan colors the same image repeatedly using different hues in watercolor and gouache, exploring how color can denote a vibe, while usually forgoing natural representations. His figures are full of character and life, such as Portrait of a Woman Smiling, while the fluidity of his curvilinear strokes suggests motion or a sort of dance between the figures. His Corner Flat paintings are particularly intriguing as he switches both the colors and the figure from each painting to the next, drastically altering each narrative within the same setting.

The distance between himself and his subjects suggests non-involvement, perhaps connecting us to his previous personal experiences while beckoning reflection. The featured essays further analyze Dylan’s works, drawing valuable parallels between his paintings and his life, rounding out yet another attempt to grasp the inner workings of this mastermind.
-Claire Presthus

January 25th, 2008 - New York - The American Museum of Natural History was packed wall to wall by industry insiders, the hipster set, and lovers of the underground hip-hop world for Flavorpill’s One Step Beyond concert featuring none other than Kanye West’s DJ of choice, DJ A-Trak. The show was opened by Windy City ‘flowicists’ The Cool Kids, who performed some of their most notable cult favorites. The night was brought to another level, as show headliner Kid Sister rocked the house with her tongue twisting hip-pop lyrics and a fist-pumping performance. As many thought the night was winding down Kid Sister brought Kanye West on stage to perform their duet “Pro Nails.”

Photos courtesy of Ashley Walker

Hot Chip:
Made In The Dark
DFA/Astralwerks

While much amusement befalls in darkness—and most of it naughty—Hot Chip’s latest full-length album Made in the Dark is (almost) as stimulating. The electropop Brits’ follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Warning struts their artistic credibility by utilizing dense rhythmic textures incorporating various instruments, synths, and vocals. The result is a scintillating jambalaya of repetitious layers that add thrust to their poppy songs (see Exhibit A: ‘Ready For The Floor’). These driving layers also create an engulfing trance similar to that which is stirred after hours of carpal tunnel syndrome inducing thumb gymnastics on NES. ‘Shake a Fist,’ released earlier on limited 12”, juxtaposes mechanical clashing and distortion with tribal sounding percussion, evoking feelings of a particularly disorienting spring break spent in an African factory warehouse, while the thumping beats tap into a primal urge to shake something (and possibly copulate with machinery). The quintet also proves equally apt at introspective, melancholy ballads, as on the title track, which provides a soul-filled come down to their other songs. But be warned: Hot Chip’s songs are so damn catchy; it’s highly likely they’ll be crammed in your cranium indefinitely.
-Claire Presthus

Flaunt and Dewar’s celebrated the release of issue 89 at Gallery Bar in New York City. DJs Mike Nouveau and Mike Simonetti peppered the packed house with a stimulating set as party goers eyeballed the explosive work of cover artist Rosemarie Fiore while dangerously downing copious amounts of Dewar’s cocktails.