Flaunt Magazine

The 8th annual Siren Festival, presented by the hypocrites at the Village Voice, was this past weekend at sort-of-worth-going-to Coney Island. Since nobody else could be bothered to leave their air-conditioned apartments Saturday morning, we sent Summer intern Alex Gavin there for nine hours of heat-stroke and his first lesson on how to really judge people, the good-old-fashioned NYC-on-NYC way.

Did you wake up Saturday a broke-ass twenty-something with no plans? Well, me too, but The Siren Music Festival had it covered. For the 8th consecutive year, the Village Voice offered a generous sampling of live entertainment by orchestrating fourteen bands into a giant hipster-magnet just off Surf Ave. All this mobbin’ was packed into nine hours of frantically paced sets from the who’s who of the indie scene at the unobjectionable cost of absolutely nothing. That’s right, for-fucking-free. While most festivals have pawned the value of band exposure for that of AT&T, it is nice to see The Voice kickin’ it old school in the land of Christopher Wallace at the always colorful, Coney Island.

After weaving through the strollers that dotted the bustling boardwalk, I arrived at Main st. for Parts and Labor. This Brooklyn-bred quartet sprinkled rhythmic electro-subtleties over brutal riffing to create auras of an undead A/V club, and as the last chords bled out, I cruised over to Stillwell to scope the other stage. Sweeping through pockets of the deep-fried air that radiated from vendors trafficking their wares to the hungry, hungry hipsters, I found myself absorbed in two divergent soundscapes: the menacing synths of Parts and Labor yielded to Film School’s airy reverb; the dueling resonance vied for space amongst the sandy planks of the walkway. Muted tones from both stages reverberated throughout the Wonder Wheel, and with each step, Film School faded in over the unbridled glee of nearby carousel giggles. In this moment, a symbol of childhood innocence whirled in perfect rhythm with music characterized primarily by drugs and excess.

As the sun lost control of the day, the roasted-pink shoulders of a formerly pasty populace squared up for some Beach House. The dulcet duo of Victoria and Alex swayed cozily in time with their Gila opener and dedicated a haunting Heart of Chambers “to sweat, and sweating,” as the heat graciously dissipated in their presence.

As I approached the only foreseeable drawback to Siren— that is, deciding between Stephen Malkumus and Broken Social Scene, my choice was clear: BSS. Not simply because BSS serves as the SNL of modern music by spring-boarding careers of former members to solo success (e.g. Leslie Feist), but, to be honest, I had snuck in [ed. note: bitch is underage] a few beers throughout the day and Stephen Malkumus was just too rigid for my buzz. Rewarding this judgment, BSS opened with a belting, horn-driven “KC Accidental”, washing down a day in the sun with a flawless set that peaked at a mind numbing “Cause = Time”. After the last encore faded, spiraling lights from nearby rides befell the area, unveiling a luminous new visage of the moon-drenched Coney Island. Siren came to a close, and a new neon landscape emerged on the horizon.

Photos and Text by Alex Gavin

We emoticon-artists eat your digital sympathies for supper.

Put that in your strife and smoke it.

Everyone knows that summer is for balling, and we’ve just passed the half-way mark of S’08. This means one of two things happen: either you 1) attempt to turn the sweaty sexcapades and shitfaced 6am fuck visits into some sort of “deeper” relationship, or 2) ditch the one you’re with and try to squeeze more fun and fluids out of the dwindling summer months.

Sure, you kids were having a blast after you met at 1Oak, but then suddenly he stops calling or reading his BBMs and some DJ tells you that he and this “unsuccessful but insanely beautiful” Russian model hopped on his NetJet for two weeks of premarital drugsex in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton, not to mention a quick visit to Nizhny Novgorod to meet her parents and get a hand-job in her childhood bedroom.

Or her: Her insistence for unprotected sex didn’t mean anything about trust or commitment (nor was she trying to trap you into pregnancy to hijack your 90k of student loans), she just neglected to share with you her rationale that she’s on birth-control and everyone has HPV and that’s good enough for her. But you forgot she was still in college and has zero responsibilities whatsoever so she skipped town to go get blackout wasted with her gorgeous, hedonistic, bi-sexual, common-senseless friends on some guy’s private Balearic Island eating MDMA every day until they take the superyacht of the videographer of that orgy none of them seem to remember to Saint Tropez, with a hot jaunt to Cannes to stay with the son of some Islamic Sayyid whose father rented him the Presidential Suite in the Hotel Martinez for the week.

And those are the only two situations that could possibly occur. And that’s fine. It’s tradition. But breaking up is hard to do. So for advice on responsible-meets-reckless sex, and how to break it off, we look—where else?—to the 90s.

“Three important rules for breaking up: Don’t put off breaking up when you know you want to: prolonging the situation only makes it worse. Tell him honestly, simply, kindly, but firmly. Don’t make a big production, don’t make up an elaborate story—this will help you avoid a big tear jerking scene. If you wanna date other people, say so. Be prepared for the boy to feel hurt and rejected. Even if you’ve gone together for only a short time and haven’t been too serious, there’s still a feeling of rejection when someone says she prefers the company of others to your exclusive company. But if you’re honest and direct and avoid making a flowery emotional speech when you brake the news, the boy will respect you for your frankness, and honestly he’ll appreciate the kind of straight forward manner in which you told him your decision. Unless he’s a real jerk or a cry baby, you’ll remain friends.” - Nada Surf, “Popular”

But for those of you left behind, there’s plenty of sweat in the sea. Don’t stress. Go get bizzy.

Before Patrick Bateman, there was Lestat de Lioncourt. And before the vampire Lestat, there was Caligula. Beyond impeccable personal style, mastery at soliloquy, and refined taste for tapestries and bloodlust, these fine gents have something else very special in common: they were all misogynistic dicks. And I truly believe that, simply enough, it was just because they never met the right special little lady. A woman who could understand them. A woman they could french-kiss without feeling compelled to chew off her tongue. You know, a real keeper. And why didn’t they find these women? Not because they don’t exist. Oh they’re out there: beautiful, articulate, compassionate women looking for the right sociopath to teach how to love. No, it’s because these guys were LAZY, terrified little boys who always went for the proximity fuck/homicide, rather than try to meet someone new and really put themselves on the line.

I mean, Bateman’s secretary Jean was meek and annoying, and all those girls in his social circle were vacuous twats. The hookers seemed nice, but he really didn’t give them much of a chance (in terms of emotional bonding or escape from bondage). Lestat’s Claudia was pre-pubescent and just wasn’t that into him, a point she finally made clear after nearly a century when she slit his throat and stabbed him repeatedly. Caligula’s sisters, whom he raped and prostituted, I don’t believe tried to set him up with any of their friends. And what with the ubiquitous orgies taking place in his palatial brothel, rarely did he take the time to sit down and get to know someone face-to-face (it’s really not the most inclusive position for an orgy).

Guys guys guys. Let’s be proactive, here. Don’t settle for what’s right in front of you. There are so many amazing women out there, you don’t have to project your fantasies and desperations onto the ones immediately around you. It’s unfair to them, and it’s unfair to you. Use the internet, get on J-Date, find someone you can RELATE to, and then turn her into a vampire or kill her with a nail gun. It’s not hard. Just imagine: a splendid night at the theater, a couple bottles of Barolo, perhaps that new pheasant recipe you two have been dying to try out, and then, when you’re at home and about to film her perform cunnilingus on a whore you picked up in Hell’s Kitchen and you say “don’t just stare at it, eat it,” she’ll look back at you with eyes that say I love you I love you I love you instead of, “why do you have all that rusty dental equipment in your nightstand?”

The point of this whole rant is that, if those three boys were alive today (or, you know, ever), I’ve found the perfect girl for them. The gorgeous and talented Human Ear Music artist Geneva Jacuzzi. Check out her new video for the song “Love Caboose” directed by Travis Peterson.

So if there’s a girl out there for those three role models, there’s got to be someone for you. Go get ‘em boys. And remember: bring flowers and don’t bite unless asked to. The safety word is: romance.

The truth will set you free. My ass. Truth is a myth. Freedom is arguably tangible, in that I know other people don’t have it, and I spent the 4th of July at a Demolition Derby in Mount Vernon, TX drinking 18-year-old Bourbon, smoking a Cuban (Montecristo #4), wearing my old cowboy hat and YSL, while the woman next to me wore a sleeveless tee older than me, eating a “Frito Pie” with one hand, holding a sleeping two-week-old baby with the other. If deliberate obesity and arbitrary American smog (in the middle of a gas crisis, no less) don’t exemplify freedom, I couldn’t tell you what does. And Truth? Most people I know see Truth as a series of meticulously constructed fantasies we use to delude ourselves into waking up each morning, only to be free from them (i.e. buy into them deeper) by recklessly romanticizing drugs and alcohol. Art Collective Party/Concert? All the better to delude ourselves with. So if you’re in LA and down to breakdown, The Veritas Empire presents our boy Mickey’s band White Arrows this Friday at The Unknown Theater, right around the corner from the Flaunt LA Chateau. Bring your brass knuckles, bad jokes and anti-barber styles.

Ashes to Ashes:

Shy to Shine:

PUMA partnered with the Tate Britain museum in an art exhibition by Turner Prize Winner and renowned artist Martin Creed. Launched in the Central Gallery of Tate Britain, Creed developed Work No. 850, a living art exhibit centered on the simple idea that a person will sprint as fast as they can every 30 seconds. Celebrating physicality and the human spirit, Work No.850 investigates the body’s flow of nature and presents the beauty of human movement in the purist form. Each runner participating in Creed’s Work No. 850 wore PUMA’s Complete Running footwear and apparel. The exhibit runs through the Fall of 08.

Silver Jews - Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

B’Ezrat Hashem: The words are Hebrew, and they mean “with God’s help” or “with the help of the Name.” You will find those words on the liner notes of the new Silver Jews album, Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea (Drag City), immediately below the dedication to Jeremy Blake, the artist who committed suicide last year by walking into the ocean. Now, I know some people are weirded out by the fact that David Berman has a newfound faith in (a) God, but you really shouldn’t act so surprised. The faith may be new, but the yearning for it isn’t, and anyone who doesn’t believe me can go throw American Water on the stereo and skip to track five. “The meaning of the world lies outside the world,” Berman declaims on “People.” Clear enough for you? Or how about the chorus to “Long, Long Gone (on the Tennessee EP)?” “Oh Lord, please come down from the mountain,” David and Cassie Berman croon slash plead, “some of us are broke and having problems.” The line is obviously intended to be funny, but where you find the humor—in the presumptive “irony” of a direct-address to God, or in the jaw-dropping understatement that “some of us are…having problems”—says at least as much about you as it does about Berman. Put it another way: when a man’s talking about—or to—his God, the assumption that he’s kidding comes at your peril, not his (or His).

What we’ve got here is not a newfound interest in seeking, but rather a long search which has—in some sense—come to its end: the sought-after has been found. Of course, as Berman sings on the very first track of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, “when failure’s got you in its grasp / and you’re reaching for your very last / it’s just beginning,” and I see no reason why what’s true for failure shouldn’t also be true for triumph. Apocalypse equals rebirth, ergo rebirth equals apocalypse. This notion of conjoined and convoluted beginnings and endings, births and deaths, informs pretty much every song on LMLS, even the goofy “Aloyisius, Bluegrass Drummer,” the totally baffling “Candy Jail,” and the marvelous “San Francisco B.C.,” a new entry to the Jews‘ small but remarkable catalogue of story-songs. (See also: Bright Flight heartbreaker “I Remember Me,” and the vaguely Lovecraftian vagueries of “Farmer’s Hotel” on Tanglewood Numbers.) “San Francisco B.C.” is a twisted pomo-noir in which cops and robbers and punks and barbers chase each other around the foggy city. The wacked-out detective romance unfolds over the course of six delightful minutes of rapid-fire Bermanisms: “since her dad, a local barber, had been beaten to death / she had become a vocal martyr in the vegan press.”

LMLS is a moody, weird, high-minded gem with choruses that dare you not to sing along. It’s good country music and it makes me love being alive. To all remixers, DJ’s and other arbiters of taste: if “Party Barge” doesn’t become the breakout dance hit of this summer, there’s something wrong with all of you.

Justin Taylor (www.justindtaylor.net)

Flaunt joined Showtime and the Wounded Warrior Project to present the opening night of Eye of the Storm, a unique photography exhibit curated by Dane Jensen, and showing at Reform Gallery in West Hollywood. Guests enjoyed Ocean Vodka cocktails, Peroni, and Fiji Water while perusing a motley collection of war-time photographs taken by the country’s best contemporary military photographers working in Iraq and Afghanistan. One hundred percent of the proceeds from the show go to benefit wounded veterans through www.woundedwarriorproject.com.

Flaunt’s involvement corresponds with a ten page story on the exhibit currently featured in the Issues Issue #94, on news stands now.

Photos courtesy of Melissa Manning for thelookpartnership.com