Flaunt Magazine

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

Flaunt ventured to Brooklyn’s newly chic playground of design and culture aptly labeled DUMBO, to take part in the inaugural 2008 New York Photo Festival (NYPH). The festival, curated by Martin Parr, Lesley A. Martin, Tim Barber, and Kathy Ryan, was initiated to highlight the future of contemporary photography in an exhibition sprawled across thirteen gallery spaces over four days. The Vernissage, aka the Curator’s opening ceremony, was hosted at the powerHouse Arena, offering a full-fledged buffet for guests to snack on as they enjoyed beverages courtesy of Stella Artois, VOSS Water, and Rums of Puerto Rico.

The highly successful ribbon cutting party kicked off the festival where Flaunt’s installation “Made in L.A.,” towered twenty feet over the Arena headquarters. The assembly boasted nine years of fashion photography from an impressive collection of renowned Los Angeles photographers. To further push the L.A. agenda, the edgy fashion house Monarchy came on board to design the staff t-shirts for 300 of the volunteers. The first run was a huge success drawing photographers, editors, and buyers from all over the world who came to witness the world through the contemporary lens.

Photos courtesy of Andrew J. Dimpfl

UPCOMING FLAUNT EVENT:

Fifty Thousand plus attendees gathered this weekend at the Los Angeles Coliseum in Downtown Los Angeles for the 15th Annual Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) Revlon Run/Walk for Women. Attendees poured onto the stadium grounds by the thousands to run or walk in support of breast cancer research, many donning the names of loved ones that have been affected by the illness. Prior to the start of the race participants were treated to a kick-off ceremony hosted by Tom Selleck, and Carrie Ann Inaba, and Revlon celebrity brand ambassadors Halle Berry and Beau Garrett. Performances by Jesse McCartney and Melissa Manchester segued into the lighting of the Olympic torch and the gunshot that started the race.

The race took anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours for participants to reach the finish line inside of the Coliseum where they were greeted by an energizing performance from The Go Go’s. Upon completion, in addition to a personal sense of accomplishment, every person received a gold medal and complimentary snacks. In it’s massive size it was quite evident that this illness affects everyone and is not restricted by race, class, or gender, making it all the more empowering to be a part of such a massive charitable event.

In Support/In Memory of Kathy Hawthorn, Jean Henderson, Cheryl Gross, and all the women in our lives that have been affected by this illness.

While much of Los Angeles had fled to the desert to party like it was the 70s, the ticket-less donned their most festive attire and trekked to the World of Wonder storefront gallery for depARTed, an art show Inspired by the Expired. Flaunt.com joined curator Daniel Franzese in hosting the opening night bash serving up Karma California Brut and FIJI water to attendees. Everyone from Tupac to Elvis to Anna Nicole Smith were memorialized through mixed media as part of a collective pop-culture remembrance project. The show runs through May 19th at 6650 Hollywood Blvd. in Hollywood.

Photography provided by Melissa Manning for thelookpartnership.com

Check out the new Reap/Sew video on Flaunt’s YouTube page documenting the runway show during our recent L.A. Fashion Week event at Elevate Lounge in Downtown Los Angeles.

Stay tuned for more videos at www.youtube.com/flauntmag!

On our recent photo shoot for issue 93 at Smashbox Studios in West Hollywood, Mila Kunis wasted no time on polite phrases, jumping right into calling our photographer Don Flood a d-bag in the most endearing way possible. The lovable Kunis is a total sweetheart, funny, and very afraid of heights.  With her 70s Show shoes retired, Kunis hits the big screen in the new Judd Apatow flick Forgetting Sarah Marshall in theaters now. Here are some behind the scenes photos of Mila in action. Thanks to everyone who worked on the shoot!

Stylist Johnny Wujeck getting Mila into some great pieces.

Mila was not into this crane at all!

Additional photos courtesy of Johnny Wujeck and Marcus.

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