Summer Reading Part II: Magazines

Magazines to covet and store away for early morning lounging with a big cup of coffee and the records playing that you never get to listen to.

Now that I have told you about all the ridiculous behemoth books I am trudging through in the post below, I want to tell you what I'm actually excited to read on my bookshelf.

I live in a part of Oakland with at least four good used book stores and one amazing magazine store all on the same street.  Print is not dead here, and the paper love is certainly not lost at Issues Magazine Shop, where I got all of these magazines.  A place stacked with used books and hoards of magazines, no one inside is using a Kindle, I'm pretty sure.  Personally, I need the heavy paper thing, in my hand, and ready to go anywhere with me.  I want to get sand in it at the beach and stain it with coffee rings and rip out the pages I like.  How are you going to keep up with that, Kindle?  Oh, I digress, as usual.

I found a big row of old Parketts at Issues one day, with a pretty great sale sign on them- I think it was $30 for 3 or $12 each.  Whatever it is (there are still some left), Joe, the owner, was smart enough to bring them in from some garage sale and sell them for a fraction of their original $45 price tag.  Who buys $45 art magazines?  Fancy art people who appreciate the bi-lingual German and English text and the readable interviews, (so much more so than Artforum), and good color images, that's who.  And me, when they are old and smell like yard sales.  So I paid my $30 and picked out these 3:  One with the fashion-obsessed Sylvie Fleury, the belated, porn and neon sign rat's nest-maker Jason Rhoades, and the Pop icon James Rosenquist, one with the supremely slick and superficial Richard Phillips and some other people, and one with neo-Mannerist/contortionist John Currin and the strangely undefinable Laura Owens.  Good, now I can read about art that is not a performance freakshow or a site-specific minimalist yawn-fest.  

Issues 58, 71, and 65

I did look it up, and while it seems that Parkett is out of print, it's not- it's just that they only publish two magazines a year ("books", they call them) and a subscription is $90.  Also, the entire back stock is available as set, but they don't even publish the price, so whatever.


Oh, hurray for the Spring fashion back-breaking fetish objects like Pop, AnOther Magazine, Love, Purple, and The Hunger.  Around July or August, I get soooo restless, knowing the Fall one is just around the corner, ripe with all the imagery I NEED.  How do I explain the obsession with the September Issues?  It goes so far beyond the infamous Vogue issue that lists its page numbers like a trophy on the cover.  They are ripe with promise, full of newness and coziness and culture just when summer feels like it's getting too fucking hot and dry and the whole world is just waiting to burst into flames.  The Fall fashion spectaculars promise that right around the corner is a return to art, beauty, literacy, and decency when all you've been able to do for the past couple months is suck back light-colored beer and waste away in crappy jean cut-offs.

So, with that meandering introduction to these magazines, these are the sisters of the Fall issues, the Spring editions.  Available only twice a year as well, the Spring issues come at a time where you might be saying, "It's about goddamn time!"  However, spring is busy in my world of art school freak-outs, and I never get a chance to actually read the magazines I buy until the doldrums of summer.   This way, I have a win-win, with the time to peruse the fat, bible-sized Spring compilations right before I get the Fall issues and all the world is well.

Fatties!: Purple Issue 17, Love Issue 7, and a new one, The Hunger Issue 2

These are not big idiot books, either, I must tell you in case you aren't a fashion freak like me.  I mean, there is a lot of writing about fashion and designers, and that's for the industry people.  Reading about clothes when you aren't a designer, a stylist, or a woman who lunches is boring.  However, there is always a ton of contemporary art and music, sometimes literature, and lots of dark and weird images for my work.

Here we have a super awesome interview with painter, Lisa Yuskavage in Purple, and man on fire (rad) in Love, and a super dead goth dude in The Hunger for the art archive, as well.

Now a weird find, 'A' Magazine was edited and curated by my two fashion heroes, the Rodarte sisters, Kate and Laura Mulleavy.  I really don't know whether to believe the romantic story circulated in every interview of their lucky break as two wanna-be designers from Pasadena who studied art history and literature at UC Berkeley and broke the wall down into the New York fashion industry with a portfolio of paper dolls during fashion week.  Whether that part is correct or fairy tale, I am totally in awe of their approach to their fashion collections, which have the weirdest, most unique influences and inspirations each season.  They cite horror movies, the light at dawn and dusk, the California wilderness, and other totally obscure and wonderful visions in creating their almost unwearable designs.  If ever there were fashion designers who were more artists than designers, it would be these two.  I found this magazine which is made by them, cover to cover, and features their clothing but also their favorite things and references.

The like Grizzly Bears

And films by Terence Malick like "Days of Heaven"

And they interview the artist, John Baldessari

And horror movies, of course

Also in the Rodarte curation is Lake Tahoe, Garbage Pail Kids, The Wizard of Oz, etc, etc.

Looking up 'A' Magazine, I just learned they have other issues curated by other fashion people like my very favorite, Ricardo Tisci of Givency, with every page to scroll through.  Check out the link above!

Finally, this last small book, Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment, I didn't get at Issues but found at my friend's house while I was housesitting.  Made by a small publisher, Paper Monument, it covers the subject of the art assignment, something I've never seen in a good-read book before.  It was filled with assignment ideas, rantings of instructors who don't believe in such a thing, anecdotes of what not to do as a teacher... it was totally engrossing as someone who is learning how to teach art.  I highly recommend it if you are into that sort of thing.  You can order it online here for $15.

Draw it with your eyes closed image from their website.

Summer Reading Part I

It's that time again, for a big pile of books that I may or may not really read by September.  What kind of weirdo would even try to read more than one fat classic?  However, stop into any Barnes and Noble or Borders and they will have you feeling like it's really pretty essential to your summer experience.  Somehow even though I don't go to those stores much anymore, it's become engrained in me to get really ambitious with a stack of really tried and true classics as well as some more readable memoirs, along with the requisite massive fashion magazines that come out in the Spring and some reference books I buy whenever I find a good one for the home art library.  (See last year and the year before for more reading lists I was only partially successful with).
The pure tradition of having a summer reading list feels a lot like one of the other traditions I have been born and raised on: shopping for a new school wardrobe, which I will still fulfill every year until I die even though I'm not technically going to school anymore.  Does it count for school staff?  That's Fall anyway and we're in Summer right now, so let's get smart in the sun before we spend all the money we don't have.  (That's me talking to myself).

The Daunting Reading List

I swear to you, I am not trying to be pretentious by putting books in here that are supposed to make me look fancy but that I am never planning on reading, like how most people put hardbound copies of Shakespeare's entire collection on their bookshelves.  Come on, who can get through the downright impossible Elizabethan language and understand what the fuck they are saying?  Unfortunately, I have to have my Shakespeare handed to me in cleaned up, modern language movie form, like that Romeo and Juliet movie with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio.  I know, I know.  Anyway, YES, I really am reading, have started, or plan to read all of these books.  Some might take me a year, but a few I have already finished!

Moby Dick by Herman Melville  The classics seem like not only a good idea, (hey, they have stuck around through decades and even centuries and people still read them so they must be good, right?), but I am constantly worried that I might not get a cultural reference that is assumed most smart people would.  No one wants to be the dumb one at the party,  (even though I really don't go to parties), but I also want to know if a movie I would have otherwise thought original is a blatant ripoff of a classic masterpiece.  So, yes, I am reading Moby Dick, and it is pretty boring.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller  Naughty, naughty Miller.  Damn, dude, try to get a plot in there while you are talking about every dirty whore in Paris in the 1930s!  It's my readable book when I am sick of War and Peace and Moby Dick, (which is often), and I am really quite surprised that it was written at all eighty years ago during what I would assume was a sort of demure time despite the flappers and drinking and all that jazz.  Ba dum bum.  Anyway, he uses 'cunt' more than any author in the English language, and it's really rambling.  However, with this book he really cleared the way for the rights of free speech and the end of morality clauses, and I can see where one of my favorites, Nabokov, takes his cues.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy  What do I even need to say?  This is still on my reading list from to years ago and I am still trudging through it!  The thing is, I read Anna Karenina and loved it.  I was hoping this would be more of the same, but the problem is that the peace part is great and the war part is soooo long.  You really get the feeling Tolstoy was a history nerd, and if there were Napoleonic War reenactments during his time, he probably would have been out there impersonating the Glorious Russian Soldiers.  I would really like to finish it, but honestly, I have to skip the war stuff whenever he starts talking about right and left flanks and each General and you know, war stuff.  Is that sacrilege?

The Best American Essays 1997  Call the year completely random, but I would like to read more essays.  I feel more connected to them, to a style that does not need to have some ridiculous made-up story, or a plot, or an arc.  It's just so much more simple to write down something you know or think.  And I would like to get some reading in because I secretly want to write them myself.  I grabbed this off a church yard sale table for a dollar, and also scored a record box set of Gregorian Chants and a book on the artist, Andrew Wyeth, for a total of $10!

Peregrinations of a Pariah by Flora Tristan and Valencia by Michelle Tea  What an awesome way to experience each memoir by ballsy, independent women two centuries apart from each other by reading them at the same time.  I found the Tristan book at my favorite store, Issues, as it was handed to me by the owner, Joe- looks like a good one?  Written in 1838, Tristan was a French woman who wrote for the London Journal and is described as a "Militante Féministe".  This book chronicles her travels aboard a ship to Peru from France, (which took five months back then!), as she tries to claim her family's inheritance and also gain a divorce from her husband, a big Catholic no-no at the time.  She writes with such passion and frankness that it is completely surprising that it was published almost two hundred years ago!  (Also amazing- a quick search on wikipedia reveals she was the grandmother of the artist, Paul Gaugin- whoa!)
Now enter the late 1990s in San Francisco as dykes and misfits from all over the country flock to the grungy riot grrl gay mecca of the Bay Area.  Michelle Tea, a celebrated feminist thrift-store-T-shirt-punk poet became a local legend with this and other works.  In the very '90s Valencia she chronicles the quick ruination of her naive girlish self, and introduces the reader to "sex positive" leather-bound S&M dykes, the life of a prostitute, and fisting.  Whoa!
It's amazing how self-absorbed both novels are as Tristan chronicles her every fainting spell and bouts of boredom and Tea drags one through every crush and mini relationship and post-breakup obsession.  Both have a social consciousness and message, as well as a critical eye towards the hypocrisy of the times they live in.  I definitely recommend reading them in tandem.

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust  Recently my friend scoffed at me for answering, "He's Ok", to a question on whether I liked this Proust book or not.  What I meant was, it's not like I think I could do better, but I'm giving a Twenty-First century response to something published in 1913.  Like my experience with Shakespearean language, its hard to take in his slowww scenes about very internal experiences by the protagonist as a contemporary reader in our current time of very short, abrupt, fast-paced daily life.  I mean, the beginning where he waits for his mother to kiss him goodnight as a boy takes him like fifteen pages!  I'm not giving up on Proust, (or on any author who gets their own reference as in "it was Proustian"), but I don't know if I could handle all seven volumes which ultimately make up the whole work Remembrances of Things Past- this is just volume one!  However, I already felt I scored a victory as I read Steven Wolf's blog which referred the madeline scene in Proust and I got it!

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky  Am I trying to punish myself? Yes.  I gave up on this after about thirty pages but recently my bookaholic friend, Mandy, told me to try it again because it's one of her favorite books.  Ok, but only after War and Peace.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh  Well, I grew up on this movie and I had the soundtrack, too.  It made heroin withdrawals look like the worst thing in the world and I think it was single-handedly responsible for keeping me off drugs.  One pass through it's written phonetic slang of marble-mouthed British kids, though, and I'm not sure I will be able to slag through it.  I'll give it a shot.

I Bought Andy Warhol by Richard Polsky  I originally gave this to my friend, Libby, as a Christmas present, so I am just borrowing it.  Found at Issues, too, I had surprisingly never heard of it despite the fact it was only written ten years ago and features a honest, first-person account of an art dealer's history of making and losing money in the art world.  It is very readable, but a little stumbly.  I found that while he has some interesting anecdotes and it's great to get a view of the time period where pop and contemporary art really started making those collectors millionaires, he lingers on weird details and isn't the world's best writer.  Even still, I think I will finish it.  There's also a sequel, I Sold Andy Warhol.

The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City by Elizabeth Currid One of the only books left over from my thesis research that I still actually want to read, I'm hoping this one sheds a little light on the inner complex workings of cultural production and profit.  I'm also hoping that from the title, she will be a little acerbic about New York as the hipster capital I recently saw first hand.  (I seem to be the only one who objects to Brooklyn as the new 90210)

That leaves the following research books for art references and occasional perusing:  The Art of Andrew Wyeth (from the church sale), Son of Heaven: Imperial Arts of China for headdress ideas and patterns, Pierre et Giles, an awesome pre-David LaChapelle photo duo of visual overload, and a Taschen book about the Still Life, which I originally bought for the Still Life class I was going to teach that was cancelled.

Now I'm tired and I haven't even touched my books.  Haha.

I was quoted in Groupon!

Have you heard of this thing, Groupon? You can sign up for this service that emails you a new cool deal around your city everyday. I didn't know about it until NPR was debating whether it was too mainstream to have Gap coupons on there. Anyway, I went in to my favorite magazine shop, Issues, last week and Noella, the owner, told me that Groupon had quoted my blog! Apparently they do their own research to feature the stores participating and, what do you know, I came up in the bloggosphere! It's funny to be quoted- I feel quite authoritative now. Anyone else want my opinion? Read the blurb here.

(photo from Groupon)

A Neighborhood Stroll

I really love it when I have an afternoon off to take a walk around my cute neighborhood and up to Piedmont Ave. It feels like I live in a nice, small community full of cool shops and good restaurants nestled in the larger area of Oakland and can be comforting within the hard edges of the city.

Of course, one of my favorites is Issues Magazine Shop, which I have written about before. Somehow it doesn't matter how my day is going. When I walk in, I feel welcome to spend as long as I like perusing the great selection of magazines for my art projects, like my collages. This week I found both owners, Joe and Noella, in their usual good spirits rocking some sweet, mellow reggae. There is also always some good old-fashioned people-watching. I have often wondered who buys weird magazines like the high fashion French children's magazine, Milk, (in which I have scored some great Dior, etc ads), and I had the chance to see a woman with a stroller and husband in tow inquire about one. I ended up with a 70s library book on Oceania masks, a new Dutch fashion mag with great bloody hunting photos called Blend, the awesome English all-around pop culture fest, Wonderland, and Vice, an ever amusing free read.

Next I picked up my so-necessary coffee beans from Peets and enjoyed a free cup while perusing the Piedmont Library's regular outdoor book sale. All books are 50 cents! I found a classic that I've never had the chance to read, Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

On the way home I looked at the lovely gardens of all the cute houses nearby and scoped some free plant samples. I took a cutting of both morning glory and passion flower vines which I will put in jars of water in my window. I also made a mental note of the gorgeous garden on a corner which will be ripe with seeds for the taking in a month or two. Peach colored hollyhocks, fuschia cosmos... I am so looking forward to making my garden at school more beautiful!

Favorites: Issues Magazine Shop, Oakland, CA

Selection!
Fun music finds.
Just look at all those fashion mags! Also available: anything from belly dancing to guns to Korean brides to video games.
Noella and Joe, photo from their website

Issues Magazine Shop, located at 20 Glen Avenue at Piedmont, Oakland, CA, is one of my favorite places in Oakland. I have lived in Oakland for almost six years but have not found very many places that I love returning to. I have found that there is a lack of ease, comfort, and friendliness in many Oakland spaces. Blame it on a hipster, from-the-middle-of-nowhere-but-now-king-of-the-mountain attitude from many young service employees and entrepreneurs, as well as a jaded, down-on-their-luck attitude from the older service employees with master's degrees waiting tables for chump change.

Regardless of the reasons, I generally find the service is Oakland to be crap and the attitudes are off the charts, but NOT at Issues! Yea, I finally found a store in my neighborhood that sells tons of great magazines, books, music, and other stuff with a pleasant and really neighborly atmosphere! Issues is run by co-owners, Joe and Noella, who do an excellent job stocking their store with enough magazines to keep every walk of life under the sun entertained. Bonus attractions are their hand-picked art, music, and pop culture books and super rare music selections. Yes, I am a magazine addict, and I spend enough time thumbing through there to be a regular, but more importantly, they make me feel like a regular, too. Go visit if you're in the Piedmont neighborhood!

http://www.issuesshop.com/