Here’s one for all you DIY photogs, lomos and designers out there: the Lomographic Society International is partnering with the tee-shirt company Threadless on a contest to design some gear inspired by Lomo’s 10 Golden Rules of Photography.

Rule 1: Take your camera everywhere you go
Rule 2: Use it any time — day or night
Rule 3: Lomography is not an interference in your life but part of it
Rule 4: Try the shot from the hip
Rule 5: Approach the objects of your lomographic desire as close as possible
Rule 6: Don’t think
Rule 7: Be fast
Rule 8: You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film
Rule 9: Afterwards either
Rule 10: Don’t worry about any rules

Known for supplying the recent resurgence in plastic, “toy” cameras like the Diana, the Holga and the Lomo — cheap-bodied, high-saturated, medium-format relics of the American 50s to 70s, Soviet Russia and good Commuists worldwide — the Lomographic Society was founded in Vienna in the early 90s by a couple of guys who accidentally rediscovered the magic aesthetic of these cameras. The society’s guerrilla style and rules of irreverence quickly outgrowing its supply, Lomo expanded to Berlin a few years later and held simultaneous inaugural exhibitions in New York and Moscow.

Watch out of your design wins! Besides the 2,000 Dollars in prize cash, you could also gain a heap of Lomo camera tricks. With those in your pocket, you’ll soon find yourself in a vast global network of street photogs and creatives who will nod knowingly every time you snap off a little plastic shot.

More on Lomographic here and on the contest here.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Blu may be one of my favorite street artists working today. His work, as instantly identifiable by style as it is by sheer scale, has also been humming a high current through the world art net recently, culminatingin an invitation to do a piece on the side of the Tate Modern in London and a solo show at the Galleria Patricia Armocida in Milan, which opened last week.

Like a global graphic novel, Blu’s tenuously allegorical grotesques and often mythological figures appear on building-sized panels dispersed from Saõ Paulo to Berlin and from Nigeria to Palestine. There isn’t a narrative that binds them to be “read” together — at least not one I see — but each sketch is also a skit, a scene acted out in the borderlands of comedy and drama. A little bit of surreal life sliced out of a dreaming child’s acidic nightmare by a sure, clever surgeon.

The life that Blu gives his creations is what sets him apart most and nowhere is that life more evident than in the epic stop-animation above that he made last winter.

More Blu here.

Blu (June 18 - July 25, 2008)

Galleria Patricia Amocida

via Bazzini n°17, Milano

“Tr: To Drink and To Penetrate Jubilantly,” Jean Faucheur

Every time I turn a corner into a bookstore, at least a dozen new graffiti books threaten my faith in this form. Ostensibly “art books,” these publications simply flood shelves with terrible photographs of mediocre wheatpaper posters and wall-scrawls as empty as the cans that were wasted on them. Art book? No — and it undercuts the value of graffitti to give these paperweights that pretense.

Then there are the gems, few and far between. Graffiti Paris, available this month from Abrams, is not exactly a gem, however. It suffers from the kind of documentary, head-on photography that leaves the graphic in the frame but little else, decontextualizing the work from the neighborhood that produced it. Especially in Paris, where geography permeates identity, that context is key.

But Graffiti Paris is still one of the better books out there. Paris is full of strong, living, fighting and politicized graffiti and Fabienne Grévy, the art historian and photographer who created Graffiti Paris, has a great eye for picking the quality pieces off a wall overrun by quantity.

As Grévy notes in the introduction, Graffiti Paris includes photographs taken over the last 15 years. The project’s priority was to preserve a record of Paris street art from the 1990s and late-80s, street art that will soon be worn away. In other words, the point here was never to make an “art book” exactly and, as a record of some of the best graffiti to grace The City of Lights in the past decade, Graffiti Paris is really rather good!

I’ll admit it — I know it has been years since Bleach was the hot anime to be up on, but I still watch it.

So, just in case there are others out there who, like me, have not yet otherwise acquired fansub versions of the latest Bleach film, Memories of Nobody, check out the limited New York Premiere at Union Square tonight and tomorrow night.

Tite Kubo, Bleach’s creator, will be on hand both nights and tonight, June 11th, the films producer and character designer will also be speaking.

Bleach: Memories of Nobody
Wednesday, June 11th and Thursday, June 12th
7:30pm
Union Square Stadium 14
14th Street and Broadway, New York

Way back in November of last year, we did a post on BombIt!, a rapid-rising documentary that crossed the globe hunting down interviews with those elusive, top graffiti talents like Marka27 and Retna (L.A.); Cope 2, REVS and Taki 183 (NYC); Nishiba (Japan); Boleta and Jorge Tavares (Brasil); Blek le Rat (Paris); and about 40 others from the Netherlands, Mexico, Italy, Sweden, South Africa, Lebanon, Belgium, and Germany, to name a few.

Unprecedented in scope, BombIt! appeared to be the deserving heir to Wild Style’s throne when we saw it last November and now, with the TriBeCa Film Festival under it’s belt, Antidote Films by side and an L.A. Premiere this Friday night, BombIt! is blowing up bigger than ever.

The timing couldn’t be better. The graffiti culture documented by Charlie Ahearn’s classic was, in a sense, local to New York City and has since incubated on a global scale, rearticulated and reimagined on our local streets and neighborhood cultures.

Urban space still excludes folks and voices and as long as it does, graffiti will drop its bombs, but the messages and the means are changing. Hear what glocal graffiti means in the 21st century from the artists who give it voice.

BombIt! L.A. Premiere
Friday, June 6th
Laemmles Sunset 5
8000 Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood
1:00//3:15//5:30//7:50//10:10pm

Earlier this month, Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky almost gave me a heart attack. He’s been a mainstay on just about every iPod in circulation right now since his incredible, very smart and very addictive original spins and remixes first got bootlegged back in the 1990s.

With his second book, Sound Unbound, Miller made my brain explode — at least six times. A collections of writings about the ideas and practices of remix, digitalism, experimental arts and racialized culture, Spooky has nailed it: accessible and fascinating thoughts from the folks you want to hear them from.

Steve Reich breaks down his relationship with tech; Spooky theorizes sampling with precision and a word styling that reads like experimental electronica; Dick Hebdige un-images utopia; Ron Elgash eviscerates race and circuitry; Naeem Mohaiemen finds hip-hop’s Muslim roots; Brian Eno rants about bells; Saul Williams explores linguistics; and Chuck D’s in there too for good measure.

In all, there are 36 essays by some of the best and brightest wits and talents out there who work with remixes. Sound Unbound, in all likelihood, is destined to seen on taste-makers’ shelves and classrooms for a long time. And, it looks good.

There’s a CD in the back of the book that is probably the greatest mixtape sonic-scape of remix lore in history.

More here.

Texan James Pants’ multi-genre Welcome album, which dropped yesterday from Stones Throw Records, hold a surprise  in every track — soul, electro and some slick combination of punk and disco — but is catchy as heck.

“Ka$h,” featuring Deon Davis, is a wet dream of tambourine and xylophone hipster falsettos and “You’re The One” with Gary Davies sounds like someone shot poor Donna Summer into space before recording “I Feel Love“, but in a good way.

Listen to “Ka$h” here and check out James Pants’ tour schedule — he’ll be in L.A. tonight and tomorrow — for Welcome here.

Since 1968, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance (CMTD) has been fighting a good fight with more than a little success. Seen by few and recognized by even fewer, the CMTD fights for immigrating artists who, like other talented and professional folks who change countries, often find not only that their credentials are belittled but that immigration sunders the connections that would enable them to continue living as culture-makers.

But the work of the CMTD is not just about the first generation; it’s about the next and the one after that. In their decades of operation, their courses and touring artists have sparked the American-born to remember additional roots — other ways to voice themselves and move through space.

Celebrating 40 years of reconnecting artists — and artists-to-be — living in diaspora in New York, the CMTD will host a benefit-cum-dance party next Thursday, June 5th at the Hiro Ballroom.

Performing are David Oquendo, whose Afro-Cuban, rock-inflected jams earned him a Grammy; Merita Halili and the Raif Hyseni Orchestra’s soprano Albanian folk tunes; the all-women Cherish The Ladies traditional Irish music troupe whom BBC named the Best Musical Group of the Year (during the benefit dinner); and Banghra’s sonic steel sweetheart, DJ Rekha.

Directions here and more information on the CMTD’s work here.

The CMTD Benefit and Dance Party
Thursday, June 5th
9 : 00 pm — 11 : 30 pm
The Hiro Ballroom
16th Street and 9th Avenue, NYC

Williamsburg, NYC wishes it was cool enough to host events like THiRSTNY multimedia extravaganza on the regular. With a deep commitment to transculturals, THiRSTNY pulls artists — installation, performance and visual — dancers, musicians, designers and writers together to find a common aesthetic in their mutual thirst to create.

Watch these media, missions and artistic and cultural backgrounds fuse together through live art and performances this Thursday in Williamsburg as the hipster set who inhabit the cool-glut neighborhood thirst on, wishing THiRSTNY came to call more often.

Drink up here and get directions here.

THiRSTNY
Galapagos Art Space
Thursday, May 29th
9 : 00 pm — ???
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Kicked off with a Truth and Soul remix of Dinah Washington’s “Cry Me A River” that echoes like liquid smoke in a hot lounge, the latest Verve Remixed compilation doesn’t mess around.

Like the three volumes before it — all crammed with delicious remixes of sweet, sweet old soul, funk and motown loves — Verve Remixed 4 puts living legends like Antibalas, 9th Wonder, Cinematic Orchestra and Diplo into the studio with larger-than-life legends like Anita O’Day, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown and — because no Verve would be complete without it — the High Priestess of Soul herself, Nina Simone.

The series as a whole, re-released as a four volume box set also this week, is one of my favorite examples of remix magic. In these tracks, remix is not the shoddy production trick it’s become, but finds again it’s power to transcend; the voices that cooed and screamed sonic life into this American century’s social movements go hoarse again, brought to bear through remix on the ills we still live with and the fights that don’t stop.

As the Priestess sings, “I can’t stand it no more, so why don’t you give me some”; check out Dinah’s Truth and Soul here.