Dear Sir or Madam

The new Wooooo is so good. Great interviews with great people. Great design (by Andre Wiesmayr) in a handy paperback book format. Here are some samples:






You have to get it.
It's $10 including shipping and worth every penny.

I refuse to call this post "Crocodile Rock"but I can't think of another title.

Emily and I were surprised and delighted to walk into the opening party for the brand spanking new Crocodile last night and find Robyn Hitchcock on stage with Bill Rieflin, Scott McCaughey, and former Croc owner Peter Buck. It was a perfect inaugural performance for the impeccably remodeled space, which feels much bigger but maintains its intimacy very nicely with a well-placed bar and delicious Via Tribunali pizza in the kitchen. We stayed to see The Quiet Ones (pictured…sort of), who I have been wanting to see for a long time, and then had to break out, but I'm way excited to see more shows there (Destroyer on May 6th, for example). Big congratulations to Kerri, Roy, and the rest of the crew.

Your Weekly Mr. Littlejeans

Don't let the cuteness fool you – he's a cold-blooded killer.

New Wooooo!

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...with Agyness Dean on the covers and an interview inside by Wooooo mastermind Jason Crombie. Tons more great interviews (all geniusly copy edited by Emily and me…unlike this post).

Go here for order info.

Buy two and put one in plastic. Get a t-shirt while you're at it.

Chronicles and Other Scenes

This looks interesting too. Wandering bohemian Michel Auder has videotaped pretty much the entire past forty years of his life, including time spent hanging around with his ex-wife Viva and the rest of the Warhol crew, and with his other ex-wife Cindy Sherman. 5000 hours worth of footage has been distilled into a new feature film entitled, well, The Feature.



There's a review in The New York Times today and you can see more Michel Auder stuff here.

Slipping Away

This new movie, co-written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes, has a lot of potential (obligatory inclusion of the overrated and annoying Maggie Gyllenhall notwithstanding).



I can already see it filed right between the [selective] Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson wings of our burgeoning little video library.

Via the always captivating TBTL.

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Update: after I saw the movie I felt compelled to write this.

Fine Print

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Drew Christie: Seattle City Hall 1882

I've been working on a fun project recently with Light in the Attic Records, and Seattle-based artist Drew Christie did a bunch of illustrations for it. I'll reveal that whole thing pretty soon, but in the mean time I wanted to post up some of Drew's other work – these are all linoleum cuts printed on old book pages.

Rahm Emanuel's War Chest

Mending Torn Net (from a series of images of old time Ballard)

The Birth of the KGB

Klezmer!

I really like the one above in particular: A Dispute Arises at the Thunderbird Logging Camp. You can feel tension in the stances of the two men and the way the front guy is clenching his fists. The guy in the back looks like he's more hesitant to get into it with whoever the wrongdoer is, but he's gonna back up the front guy regardless.

Go check out Drew Christie's blog, Democracy for the Cartoons, for much more.

Sense and Sensibility

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Carine Roitfeld photographed by Hedi Slimane.
Photo courtesy of New York magazine.

There are few people in the world whose personal flavor I admire (or career I envy) more than that of Carine Roitfeld, French Vogue's Editor-in-Chief. Roitfeld is a former stylist and muse to Tom Ford during his time at Gucci, and her sensibility informs a much edgier and better-designed version of the fashion rag presided over by her American counterpart, Anna Wintour (gleefully skewered by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada). Being an unabashed fan of both her substance and style, I am looking forward to seeing Roitfeld featured in the upcoming installment of CNN's Revealed, which follows her during the recent fashion weeks in New York and Paris. Here's a quick preview:



The full show premieres this Wednesday, March 18 at 4:30 a.m. EDT (with a first encore presentation the same day at 1:30 p.m. EDT). Be sure to tune in to what promises to be a fascinating and entertaining profile. Like just about everything she does, it seems, it's a must-see.

Carine at 19, looking like a California girl. Courtesy lefashion and Teen Vogue. You can check out more current photos at jakandjil.com, here.

My Own Beliefs are In My Song

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Last Thursday night, Emily and I met up with our friends Spyridon and Lisa at Northwest Film Forum to check out the latest edition of Soul Nite. In addition to dynamite clips of Ike & Tina Turner, Sam & Dave, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Stevie Wonder, founder and host Peter Lucas screened a tightly curated selection of Sly & the Family Stone footage in celebration of Sly's birthday. They set up a bar in the movie theater, served birthday cake, and had a DJ spinning Sly-inspired cuts from the year 1969 (since the evening was also part of 69, NW Film Forum's ongoing exploration of films from that year, forty years later). It should come as no surprise that Kerri was there chicing up the place, and we were also lucky to catch up with Spyridon's cousin Shawn, who used to have a record store on Vashon Island and is himself no slouch in the music knowledge department.

Here's a very low-quality video of one of the Sly clips they showed:



Going into the night, that's kind of what I was expecting – that they would show some soul videos, and that it would be entertaining to watch them with friends in a theater, but otherwise not too different than watching on YouTube. I could not have been more wrong – seeing these performers on the big screen was totally overwhelming. I'm not saying it was like actually being there and watching live performances, but something about being in the theater with the lights off, and the focus that provides, made it feel like discovering soul music all over again, or at least in a new way. It makes it somewhat possible to put yourself in the mindspace of someone watching Sly Stone, at the end of the 1960s, tell the audience "Don't hate the black. Don't hate the white. If you get bitten, just hate the bite." Folks know "Everyday People" from Toyota commercials, but at the time it was revolutionary as it made its way out to mainstream America. It expresses love and complex emotion in such a way that you could only call it Soul music. And it's also just fun as hell to watch the crowd go nuts as the Family Stone does their thing.

The next one is May 13th for Stevie Wonder's birthday...can't wait.