Sneakers have been an obsession for many since sportswear started becoming everyday-wear in the ’70s, and moreso as they became emblems of singular style when hip-hop took over in the ’90s. As with any fashion phenomenon embraced, if not started, by youth culture, creative expression and individualized takes were bound to become big factors as the trend grew. The new book Art & Sole (out now), written and designed by Intercity, shows off the myriad forms in which global-brand fashion merges with the artistic sensibilities of designers both underground and mass-market. Nike, New Balance, Adidas, Vans, Puma and more get made over in limited-edition collaborations that collectors the world over covet (we especially love the creations from British shop Crooked Tongues). After perusing the book, get busy on ebay…there are a lot of awesome sneakers to be had.
BOOKS
Personal Trainers
BOOK PREVIEW: Paris Vs. NYC
For those romantics in love with Paris and New York, Vahram Muratyan‘s blog Paris Versus New York has been a treasure trove of valentine’s to both cities in the form of drawings comparing and contrasting the similarities of each. A collection of these charming images are compiled in a new hardcover of the same name (out this week), and are even more appealing in this format. Quasimodo vs. King Kong, Depardieu vs. DeNiro, Pompidou vs. Guggenheim, baguette vs. bagel, the Pyramide de Louvre vs. Apple’s Fifth Avenue cube, and even pigeons vs. rats, all make for a loving look at two iconic cities.
More illustrations after jump. [Read more...]
Saul Bass: Design Legend
Graphic designer Saul Bass‘s film work is widely regarded as the most iconic ever created, from his bold poster and ad designs (above) to his attention-grabbing, mood-setting opening credit sequences (video below). That there has not been a biography of the man until this point is a mystery, but his daughter, designer Jennifer Bass, has seen fit to preserve his legacy in print with the weighty coffee-table book Saul Bass: A Life In Film & Design (out now). The great revelation in this book is that Bass’s design impact was not limited to the world of film, but also included everyday products that we had no idea came from his visionary mind: AT&T, Quaker Oats, Continental and United Airlines, Dixie Cups, Kleenex, United Way, The Girl Scouts of America, and the list goes on (graphic below). Fifteen years after his 1996 passing, many of these logos are still part of our daily lives, and his film work remains unsurpassed (check out the fanboy homages to his work where the opening credits of contemporary films, like Star Wars, get re-imagined as Saul Bass designs). One quibble about the book: for celebrating the work of someone whose designs were so bold, especially in the case of films (where his type and graphics seem billboard-ready), the images presented here are oddly small, and the font size throughout the book is tiny; there’s a lot of unused space in the minimal page layout that could have benefitted from everything being larger. Regardless, this is likely to be the definitive book on Bass’s work for quite a while.
Holiday Book Gift Guide
We at Modern Tonic wish you a very fashionable holiday season. With that in mind, here’s a selection of page-turning stocking stuffers that will keep everyone on your list in vogue.
The Pedro Almodovar Archives, Edited by Paul Duncan & Bárbara Peiró (out December TBD)
Remembering Christmas, Tom Mendocino, Frank Anthony Polito & Michael Salvatore (out now)
Harper’s Bazaar: Greatest Hits, Glenda Bailey & Stephen Gan (out now)
Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, Michael Pollan & Maira Kalman (out now)
In a time when we’re stuffing ourselves to the gills with holiday treats, Food Rules takes us back to the simple pleasures of eating – and eating well – through Pollan’s memorable, witty principles and Kalman’s whimsical illustrations.
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, Edited by Thierry-Maxime Loriot (out now)
A Very Ugly Christmas
Like it or not, the holiday season is officially upon us. From the moment the pepper spray got broken out in Black Friday’s wee morning hours, Holidaze 2011 has been moving towards us like a runaway freight train. While there’s lots of things we love about the holidays, there are more than a few things that leave us bewildered, among them the amazingly tacky bedazzled and over-decorated Christmas sweaters that get hauled out of the mothballs to be worn at an office Christmas party or family gathering near you. But three resourceful guys (Brian Miller, Adam Paulson, Kevin Wool) subvert these eyesores into something to actually enjoy, with their celebratory Ugly Christmas Sweater Party Book (out now), based on their website of the same name. While partially devoted to ideas about how to create your own party where everyone dons this gay apparel, the bulk of the book is made up of photos of some of the most egregious Yuletide offenders, complete with spot-on descriptions. Props to these guys for finding the appeal and humor in something so unfashionably, well, ugly.
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“Divine” Madness
People do some crazy stuff to get famous. All it took for Harris Glenn Milstead, aka Divine, was to dress in drag and eat a little dog poo in Pink Flamingos. It helped that his friend John Waters was around to channel his friend’s subversive impulses into the glory days of midnight movies, but who knows what craziness Divine would have gotten up to anyway? Postcards from Divine (out now) – compiled by Dan Marshall, Michael O’Queen, Noah Brodie and Milstead’s late mother Frances, with Technicolor photos of Divine in grand plumage and anecdotes from peers like Waters and Mink Stole – is a decade-long glimpse into Divine’s world. These intimate scribblings, written to his parents from 1977 to 1987 while he toured the world, are a respite from his famous self. They normalize a zaftig drag queen who merely had to be his over-sized self to become a legend.
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Tune In Tokyo
How do you measure, measure a year? When Tune in Tokyo (out November 29) author Tim Anderson (pictured above) fled to Japan to escape his post-adolescent malaise, his three soul-numbing jobs and his uncommonly understanding boyfriend in North Carolina, his units of measurement included, among other things: bowls of ramen, pounds lost (thanks to said bowls of ramen) and disapproving looks he attracted from the natives. But to quantify Anderson’s bitingly funny sojourn into the blindingly lit, insanely crowded “America on Opposite Day” is to miss the point. The innumerable funny/awkward/terrifying experiences he relates don’t ultimately yield tangible results: at trip’s end, he’s still in debt, still directionless and still waiting for a glimpse of the elusive Japanese lesbian he’d been hunting throughout his Eastern tenure. But what his seemingly frivolous forays into experimental Japanese jam bands and dance clubs wallpapered with massive vaginas have yielded is a sharply written, richly detailed comedy of manners – the perfect escape hatch for your impending quarter-life crisis.
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Book Preview: Gorgeous Guys
Calling the Mammoth Book of Gorgeous Guys (out now) “mammoth” is sort of like the guys on pick-up sites with their wildly unreliable self-measurements: the book could be a stocking stuffer for the holidays; it’s actually pretty compact. And while it’s positioned as simply pics of muscle guys, it’s a bit more than that. Editor Barbara Cardy has curated hundreds of nude male photographs from a wide range of male and female photographers, some whose pics are straightforward and many more leaning towards artsy. While a few of the photographers may be familiar, like Tom Bianchi, there are dozens whose work is much more under the radar…and that’s what makes this book worthwhile. It’s a great introduction to the work of artists that deserve to be seen, complete with background and biographical information, as well as generous samplings of their pictures. Even though this book is much smaller than suggested, it doesn’t mean it won’t deliver on its promise.
More photos after jump.
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Mama’s Boy
Coming out to your parents is like getting a colonoscopy: it’s necessary and ultimately the right thing to do, but MY GOD is it temporarily uncomfortable. Although we’d prefer to bleach those memories from our brains, we’re thrilled that author Robert Rave decided not only to publish his awkward mother-son moments – baby’s first Fire Island, baby’s first boyfriend, baby’s first cybersex session (quickly interrupted by mom’s first IM) – but also to enlist his sweet, unassuming, Midwestern mom as a co-author to enhance (and occasionally correct) the signposts of their mom/mo relationship. In their adorably funny joint memoir Conversations and Cosmopolitans (out November 8 ) doe-eyed Robert struggles to find his niche among the Manhattan gay mafia while mom Jane endures her own battles, including neighbors who speak to her as if her son died. Throughout all the embarrassment and tears and innumerable Weight Watchers points, their bond evolves and strengthens – and unexpectedly makes us look forward to our own mom’s prying, passive-aggressive phone calls.
Late Fall Book Preview
The Steve Jobs biography isn’t the only book out this season. Music, travel, love, loss and laughter fill the pages of our most-anticipated late fall reads.
Blue Nights, Joan Didion (November 1)
Following up her harrowing memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, American treasure Didion explores the devastation and emotional aftermath of losing her daughter with depth, honesty, and a window into her own mortality.
The author of the George Miles novels shocks and captivates with this haunting father-son story set against the romantic backdrop of France.
Everybody’s favorite talking shell (and YouTube sensation) gets the literary treatment; read the endearing children’s book before it becomes a TV series.
Double Life: A Love Story From Broadway To Hollywood, Alan Shayne and Norman Sunshine (November 8 )
A dual memoir by a gay couple together for over fifty years. With their careers and lives intersecting the entertainment business in New York and Los Angeles, the book chronicles a relationship that began in 1958, when homosexuality was a considered a disease, and culminates at their 2008 Nantucket beach wedding.
Tune in Tokyo, Tim Anderson (November 29)
Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, Mark Yarm (out now)
The explosion – and implosion – of the Seattle grunge scene, as told by the music-makers who lived it, is given its due by former Blender editor Yarm.
(Mindy Kaling photo by Autumn DeWilde).
The Revolution, Televised
It’s near impossible to quantify the impact that MTV has had on pop culture – from turning music videos into an art form, to breaking or transforming acts from Madonna to Michael Jackson to The Boss, to bringing rap into the mainstream – all before we entered the reality programming era (which MTV had a hand in, too). But music journalists Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum do an impressive job with their oral history I Want My MTV (out Thursday). On over 550 unauthorized and “uncensored” pages, insiders share their detailed (or hazy, depending on the drugs and booze imbibed) memories of the network’s founding and subsequent glory days. It’s part voyeurism, part nostalgia, part social commentary – the perfect pulp non-fiction read for the cooling months ahead.
Into The Woods
“Cruising” has long been part of gay culture and while it sounds so old-school, it carries on in our Grindr and Manhunt world. Certain men, perhaps unable to get their needs fulfilled elsewhere, hang out in a public space, seeking other like-minded men. Through codes and visual cues, they telegraph their interest, find their match, and take off together. Photographer Chad States‘ book, Cruising (out November 8), artfully depicts recent, real life encounters, taken throughout the U.S. Some of the subjects knew they were being photographed (he says that while the pics are not staged, they are “performed” by willing subjects, sometimes with others moving to join in and not seeing him shooting from a distance). Though faces and details are obscured by branches, shade and distance, the heat from these anonymous encounters emanates and intrigues. It’s all shot in broad daylight in mostly bucolic, tree-filled settings, and no judgments are to be found…in fact, States says in a Q&A at the end of the book that he actually set out to romanticize these encounters. Cruising is how certain people need or want to connect, and it will live on long after Grindr has been replaced by whatever’s next.
Photos from Cruising by Chad States, published by powerHouse Books.
The Rite Stuff
San Franciscans, with their city’s well-earned reputation as a culinary paradise, have no shortage of world-class restaurants and shops. At the apex stands Bi-Rite Market. Relatively small, the shop, curated with razor-sharp precision, offers an extraordinary selection of local foods. Every aisle is packed with the very best locally-sourced goods from farmers, vintners, chocolatiers, bakers and other specialty food artisans and suppliers. If Bi-Rite sells it, you know it’s good. The shop’s owner, Sam Mogannam (whose father and uncle bought Bi-Rite in the ’60s), has put together Bi-Rite Market’s Eat Good Food (out October 18), an intelligent and useful guide and cookbook framed by Mogannam’s accomplished approach to cooking and shopping. Filled with practical tips and tasty recipes (and crammed with color photos and a vibrant layout), the book is the embodiment of the Bi-Rite experience. Even if you live far from San Francisco, Eat Good Food will make you feel like a shop regular. And that’s a very good feeling indeed.
(April 2012 will see the publication of sister store Bi-Rite Creamery’s own ice cream recipe book. Mmmmm…salted caramel ice cream….)
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“Beautiful” Stranger
Alan Hollinghurst is one of those brilliant authors who deftly captures the homosexual experience while transcending the niche of “gay fiction.” After winning the Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty some seven years ago, Hollinghurst returns with The Stranger’s Child (out tomorrow), a social satire that’s lush with his trademark elegance, ironic wit and privileged characters. Spanning nearly a century, this epic tale begins with a country weekend where a charming gay Cambridge student named Cecil Vance writes a love poem (mistakenly assumed to be for a woman) that becomes part of the British literary canon. In the following years, delicious Vance family dramas play out and a curious biographer begins to delve into the past, uncovering how certain desires persist even while revisionist history can supplant the truth.
Video interview with Hollinghurst after jump.
Photo Book Preview: Tatt Book
Fact: tattoos’ cross-over into mainstream culture hasn’t always maintained the aesthetic integrity that this ancient craft intends to embody (hello, tramp stamp). But JK5 (AKA Joseph Ari Aloi, a multi-hyphenate creative genius who counts tattoo artistry on his lengthy resume) and others like him in cities across the globe are pushing boundaries and elevating the form to another level, celebrated in the stunning Tatt Book (out today), which JK5 curated. Twenty-five of the most talented inkers in the field are memorialized in words and pictures, justifying their lengthy wait-lists and celebrity clientele like Marc Jacobs, Penelope Cruz and the late, great Heath Ledger. It’s a proper tribute to anyone who sees skin as a canvas ripe for artistic expression.
More pics after jump.
