The last of the UK’s summer music festivals has just wrapped up on the Isle of Wight. With 20,000 extra people than last year, the festival was in danger of losing its laidback family vibe. But despite the foot-traffic gnarls, the famous Bestival fancy dress spirit boomed with a craft tent and Oxfam store to soup up your space-themed outfit. Check out a random hodgepodge of shots including a double thumbs up from Dubstep wonderboy Reso, some of the craftiest kids in the UK, Crazy P, as many blonde dreads as you could possibly imagine and some sterling shoes.
So who and what is Javelin exactly? Good question. As far as we know, they’re a Brooklyn-based music-making duo comprised of two dudes named George Langford and Tom Van Buskirk, that, according to their MySpace sometimes includes “and friends”. Their happy indie hip-hop beats have been creating a slight stir amongst the New York waters and beyond (the esteemed/feared Pitchfork hailed their track “Vibrationz” off their Jamz n Jemz album as ‘Best New Music’), and have even attracted the attention of David Byrne via his record label, Luaka Bop.
Javelin’s sound is much like their cover art; a hypercolour cut and paste collage of the merrily nonsensical. They have the same pastiche aesthetic as a band like, say, the Avalanches, with a sense of the carefree – or even better (and rarer to come by in music) – a joyful ability to convey that they don’t take themselves or their music too seriously. According to the duo’s MySpace, this and month and next will be quiet times for Javelin, in order to concentrate on their forthcoming 12-inch vinyl release in November, and a full-length album due out early next year.
Colorful Soft Vinyl Monsters of Hedorah, Mecha-Godzilla, Girara, Gezora, Woo, etc!!! The Soft Vinyl toys aka Sofbi is the Japanese figurative/monster toy made of soft vinyl with vivid colors painted on it. Back in the 60’s and 70’s Sofbi was popular toy for kids. After more than 30 years from then, it is now reproduced as fantastic and fascinating collector items, which was lead by Yuji Nishimura of the sofbi manufacturer M1GO, who has been a pioneer in the field of reproducing and re-evaluating Sofbi and received high acclaim for his techniques in the course of production, from his use of vivid colors and spray work to his strong concern about “Made in Japan”. The world of M1GO’s Sofbi monsters was fully explored at TOKYO CULTUART by BEAMS (in Harajuku), a place featuring art, design and culture deliverd from TOKYO to the world. For the M1GO exhibition, there displays Sofbi archives in addition to feature 100-limited edition of Hedorah monsters selling by lot.
Thought the most glamorous thing about the Women’s Institute was the Helen Mirren vehicle about a racy calendar? You thought wrong. Jazz Mellor, daughter of The Clash’s Joe Strummer, is reclaiming granny activities for the cool kids.
There is a certain magnetism of the city of Berlin. People may arrive for a short visit, spending a few days straddling the saddle of a beaten-up bike, only to leave months or even years later. It seems that the diversity, complexity and unpredictable nature of the city is not only hard to leave, but hard to describe. In the true Berliner spirit of creativity and expressionism, the mammoth project24h Berlin does a pretty fascinating job at documenting and presenting a day in the life of this weird and wonderful city.
Napoleon Dynamite once uttered some now very famous words: “Girls like guys with skills”. We’re pretty sure that conversely guys like girls with skills, so basically what this means is anyone with skills is destined for some level of happiness. Enter now the Brooklyn Skillshare, your vehicle to take you to destination: happy place.
