Photography Benefit for Haitian Earthquake Relief

In December, FADER photo coordinator John Francis Peters visited Haiti, returning with a series of beautiful photos that took on a whole new meaning after the devastating earthquake. The outpouring of support for Haiti has been amazing so far, but there is always room a need for more, and tomorrow night Haitian Arts and Crafts, along with Peters, will be presenting a series of his photos at Yes Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to benefit Hôpital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti. Read what Peters and FADER staffer Judnick Mayard had to say about their trip here and see some of his photos from the trip here.

Artist Boo Saville and her Bogmen and Ghosts

!WOWOW! began as a funny night at the back of a pub in South London, or so art shaman Matthew Stone told us back in FADER 49. Since Stone and his cohorts started their free form performances and darkly bacchanalian gatherings a few years ago, a bunch of new stars have crept out into the art world at large, and artist Boo Saville is one of their newest and brightest. Saville is most fascinated with people in the moments after they die, hence her super-detailed pictures of ancient bodies found in peat bogs and macabre shrunken heads, which she draws with ordinary ball-point pens and toilet bleach. It’s her way of finding life in death, or if you consider her ghost monoprints, a spookily beautiful peephole into the afterlife. Her solo show “Totem” opens in London next week, at the Trolley Books Gallery.

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Aziz Ansari Makes an iTunes Playlist, Doesn’t Mention FADER

What the fuck dude? Thought we had something!!!?? [Ed. This is getting weird.]

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Everything Nicholas Felton Did With Other People in 2009

For a year, every time he had a “meaningful encounter” with another person, regardless of his relationship to them, Nicholas Felton asked that person to complete a survey about their interaction. From these 560 surveys, Felton boiled down his everyday into chompable bits of life. His average encounter length was four hours, he was in 15 different cars, ate at 111 New York restaurants. Out of 300 distinctly reported moods, only eight were negative and he was most usually described as “happy.” As Felton is a designer, often of charts, with a very keen eye for minute detail, he’s graphed and annotated all of the responses, creating a very specific annual report of his life in 2009. On his website, you can view all of his charts and order a print edition of the report.

Folkstreams Answers Life’s Greatest Questions

How certain things on the internet escape us for so long is a mystery. Case in point this time: Folkstreams, an online archive of rare American roots music documentaries created by filmmaker Tom Davenport with help from the University of North Carolina and with the assistance of many others. Some friends of The FADER mentioned it on Twitter yesterday and we went there immediately, finding not just the treasure trove of musical history that the site houses but the answer to a question we’ve had for over a decade. In Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie, the titular character makes a video tape of found footage meant to inspire her curmudgeony neighbor. One bit is of an old gentleman with a peg leg walking out into the dusty street and suddenly breaking into a wild softshoe/hard leg routine. That, along with the horse joining a cycling race, always had the exact desired effect on us, but we admittedly we never really tried to find the source material, preferring to let it be movie magic. As it turns out, that old fellow was from Davenport’s own film Born for Hard Luck: Peg Leg Sam Jackson, which you can watch in full on the site, and knowing where it came from hasn’t really spoiled the magic at all. If anything, it makes us want to hang out with Jeunet, or Audrey Tautou—we’re not picky!

Video: Spike Jonze “I’m Here” Trailer

We’ve kind of known about this since Absolut asked us to create the Visionary Podcast series, but even so, seeing the end result is undeniably awesome because just five minutes ago we were wondering how we could actually become our laptops so that tweeting and blogging and Facebooking every single minute of ours lives would literally become an involuntary action like blinking or breathing, leaving us tons of time to make out with other laptops and such. Spike, as always, is one step ahead of us. If you happen to be in Sundance right now, you can see the full 30-minute I’m Here short film, presented by Absolut, today.

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Actual Birds Cover Sonic Youth (in Spirit)

French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, in a soon-to-open commissioned installation for the Barbican gallery in London, has set up perches of guitars and other auditory objects for a flock of very cute zebra finches to pluck at with their orange beaks and tiny talons. The coincidental result of their improvised strumming sounds akin to early Sonic Youth. Apparently, the light dissonance of Thurston Moore attacking his guitar with a screwdriver didn’t die out in 1984 (actually, he still plays like that), it just transferred to some canary cousins.

Machotaildrop is the Avatar of Skate Movies

It’s amazing we hadn’t heard of this movie until Tiny Vices posted the trailer last week—skating, absurd comedy, fire, flannel=daily google alerts—but we have now and it’s looking to be really good. Machotaildrop is ostensibly a skateboarding movie, but only in the same way that our parents’ home movies are about band/soccer/spelling bees and not embarrassment and failure. Or maybe its directors, Corey Adams and Alex Craig (winners of Fuel TV’s million dollar short film contest) realized that we’re all jaded by the conventional skate part-tour van-party-puke-skate part plot of most videos and that what we really need is an intertwined narrative that is equally Terry Gilliam and Paul Thomas Anderson and Rick McCrank’s facial hair. Accident or cinematic revolution, we’re excited about this development and look forward to seeing each of the bizarre scenes in this trailer played out in full glory.

Slideshow: Abigail Portner’s Insider/Outsider Art

Abigail Portner’s drawings and paintings focus primarily around the themes of children, masks, skeletons and animals. Her images are at once both filled with positive light and dark feelings. As one of the chief visual collaborators with Animal Collective—her drawings have become tour posters and t-shirts, while more recently she has evolved the work to stop motion animation for the “In The Flowers” video and designed large scale stage sets for the band’s NYC shows last summer—and sister of the band’s Dave Portner, her art has become an inseparable part of the band’s uncompromising visual identity. But she is also forging a career in her own right. Although she studied fine art at Parsons, her work sheds the constraints of formal education and is reminiscent of outsider art with its contorted innocence and warped fairytale style. It is both accessible and difficult, simultaneously sweet and disturbing. Portner is currently consumed with extending the illustration she contributed to the The FADER’s special Animal Collective-curated issue to an infinite series of panels, and in this audio slideshow talks about producing work which has come to define the band’s visual image but also stands outside this context in its own right.

Aziz Ansari Talks Up Skerrit Bwoy Pon De Jimmy Kimmel Show

Our worlds got a little smaller the other night when Aziz Ansari—comedian, actor and author of our current issue’s interview with Animal Collective—went on the Jimmy Kimmel Show and talked about Diplo—producer, DJ, Twitterer and F62 coverstar—and Skerrit Bwoy, star of Major Lazer’s “Pon de Floor” video, preeminent daggering artist, man who we frequently @ with on Twitterand dude we profiled in F54. This is starting to feel like Hands Across America! More importantly, we find it amazing that Skerrit is getting national attention for a dance that has caused an epidemic of broken wangs in Jamaica. Watch the clip above, wherein Aziz describes his fateful meeting with the boys in Australia, and check out DJ Gravy’s blog for some interesting anecdotes about Major Lazer. And remember: don’t try daggering at home unless you want your nutsack to resemble a Guinness Book-sized eggplant.

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