NYC today: UNIQLO presents Curtis Kulig, a DJ set from Pictureplane & more! See you there.

Going to SXSW? Don’t miss Boiler Room!

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Headed to SXSW this week? VICELAND has you covered. For full details and RSVP, head here.

When we first saw the line up for the new photo show opening tomorrow at the Aperture Foundation Gallery, simply titled Photography, we fell out of our chairs. The show features new (new!) work from William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley, Martin Parr, Terry Richardson, and Stephen Shore. You don’t have to be a photo nerd to know that this selection of artists are some of the most important photographers making work today. To have new work by them all in one room is crazy. We decided we had to sit down with Ken Miller, the curator of the show, to figure out how he pulled it off. Turns out it was pretty simple.

VICE: What’s up, Ken? How did this project start?
Ken Miller: It started with a sort of unrelated exhibition of abstract photography that I did in Tokyo about a year and a half ago. That was kind of a weird way for it to begin. It was a show with Sam Falls, Marcelo Gomes, Mariah Robertson, and this Japanese photographer named Taisuke Koyama. Somebody from Fujifilm came by and I guess they liked the show, so they got in touch. They took me out to drinks and showed me these cameras they were coming out with and were like “Do you think you could get photographers to use these?” The cameras were really nice, so I was like, “Yeah probably, it’s a free camera.”

We started putting a list of photographers together. I was initially thinking of people I’d worked with before, who seemed easy to approach. Then I thought, Fuck it. I’ll just ask ambitiously and worst comes to worst, they’ll say no. And amazingly, basically everybody said yes. Of the initial people we asked, only two passed for different reasons. It was remarkably easy.

That’s pretty amazing.
I don’t want to sound like an advertisement for the camera, but it’s a digital SLR that works like the camera you studied in college. It has a lot of manual functions. So, I think there’s a certain nostalgia for a lot of these photographers who think “Oh, this works like a classic point-shoot Nikon” and they were psyched about that. You sort of forget photographers are camera nerds too, so they wanted to try it out.

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John Waters Is Doing a Christmas Show and We Interviewed Him

John Waters is one of my favorite filmmakers, writers, and speakers. Every time he says or does anything I think, Wow, you are so smart and fun and I agree with everything you say. I love you. I’ve read all of his books multiple times. I’ve made drawings and paintings based on photos of him from when he was young and had long greasy hair. For a while my voicemail message was, “Oh Aunt Ida! Yeah, Aunt Ida! Don’t you look hot today!” On a purely personal level, John Waters is huge. He is also huge on all other levels. It makes me supremely happy that John’s work has seeped into the public consciousness through his Broadway musicals and either inventing or telling the world about tea bagging.

John is going to be performing a live Christmas show on December 3 at the Tarrytown Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York. As you might have guessed, I am very excited about that. Kimya Dawson will be performing at this show, and I am very excited about that too. When Robert Johnson, the show’s promoter, asked if I would like to interview John Waters to help spread the word, I came very close to dying right there on the spot.

So here it is. I hope you’ll read my brief interview with Mr. Waters and then go see his show on Monday. 

VICE: Hi, John. It’s Nicholas from VICE. How are you doing?
John Waters: I am fiiiine.

Thanks for speaking with me. In recent years you’ve been doing a lot of spoken word events. Why?
This isn’t just in recent years, I’ve been doing it for 40 years. Divine and I would tour the colleges and we had a little act where a fake cop would come on stage and pretend to bust us for depravity. Divine would strangle him and hit him with a chair. I did it from the very beginning—it was the only way we could promote our movies! It’s changed very much though. I don’t come out with any movies or talk that much about my movies any more. Certainly I’ve been doing it for a long, long time though. Even the Christmas tour has been going on for ten years. 

I’d like to know about your Christmas experiences, but I suppose you should save that for the actual event.
No, you can ask me about them! I love Christmas, but I understand that some people hate it! It’s a very stressful time. I talk about everything concerning Christmas, including what I hate about it—and there are a lot of things I hate about it. Things like the behavior at Christmas parties, recycling gifts, gift baskets… Gift baskets should contain cigarettes, candy, and drugs, things you would never buy for yourself.

I can see why you’d be into Christmas so much. I’ve heard people say that art is a heightened form of life. In a lot of ways Christmas is also a heightened form of life.
Christmas can unfortunately be a heightened form of capitalism too, but I don’t mind that because Christmas is good for criminals. Shoplifting is easier, there are presents in the car you can steal… At the same time, most stores survive off the commerciality of Christmas. I find that funny. 

VICE is pleased to announce our 2012 Photo Issue exhibition. If you’re a big ol’ dummy and somehow missed the release of our accompanying Photo Issue, then here’s the perfect way to correct that mistake. Mirroring the issue, the show features the work of such talented photographers as Roger Ballen, Nick Haymes, Jaimie Warren, Asger Carlsen, Philip Cheung, KK + TF, Yumiko Utsu, Synchrodogs, Gregory Halpern, Lele Saveri, Peter Sutherland, Hannah Whitaker, and many more. Pristine copies of the 2012 Photo Issue will also be available to pick up at the gallery.

The show will be held at the Black and White Gallery at 483 Driggs Ave. in Williamsburg, from Thursday, August 9^th, through Sunday, August 12^th. Doors open to the public from noon to 6 PM daily.

Special thanks to our sponsors for making this exhibition possible: Scion, 42 Below, Averna, Marc Moto, and We Must Remain the Wildhearted Outsiders.

After eight years, hundreds of sleepless nights, and no less than three premature amazon.com pre-order pages, the second volume of DOs & DON’Ts is finally an actual, for-real book you can actually buy. For real. Like, right now.

We packed DOs & DON’Ts Book 2 with the greatest, most pant-ruining DOs and lowliest, most infuriating DON’Ts from the last decade, as well as all the special celebrity guest editions of the column written by the likes of Rob Delaney, Sam McPheeters, the Fat Jew, and more, then wrapped the whole thing in an eye-catching blueface (NOT BLACKFACE) Jaimie Warren self-portrait and said “There. Fin.” THEN we had a team of lifestyle gurus ergonomically engineer the completed book to perfectly fit both the cistern of the standard US-made toilet and the knees of the standard joint-roller’s lap, and we said “Um, fin again.” Then we laughed for nearly ten minutes at saying “Finnegan” in a French accent (we were a little high).

Long story short, this is the book you’re gonna be wanting on your coffee table, nightstand, bathroom caddy, or wherever else you traditionally use other people’s humor to get laid or balm the wounds of not getting laid. Click here or here to order your copy from the internet right now, or click HERE to RSVP for the book release party July 11 in DUMBO, where you can buy a copy in-person, like a human.

There is also an e-book version where you can zoom way the fuck in on all the pictures to really digest the details, a desktop-calendar version you can use to keep track of your period on, and a moderately-expensive, limited-edition personal DOs & DON’Ts version where the editor will come to your house or place of work at a time of your choosing with some beer and read up to 50 pages aloud for you and your friends. Keep your eyes on the blog for details on each.

Happy summer you guys!

VICE

Do you remember our French friend Estelle Hanania? She graced the pages of our magazine with photos of the London Hasidic Jewish Carnival, we featured her on our blog with aliens and cheerleaders posing together, and now she is having an exhibition in Paris with her longtime friend and collaborator Christophe Brunnquell. The show is called “La Guerre du Feu” which is French for “The Quest for Fire.” Basically Estelle and Christophe sent us a bunch of creepy photos of naked girls covered in paint, masks, and horrific cannibal drawings. We loved them so much because they make us scared and weirdly excited at the same time.

If you are in Paris, go to Hanania and Brunnquell’s show at 12MAIL! If not, you can still check out the photo gallery below!

Opening 5th april from 6 PM to 9 PM.
The show will continue untill June 1st.
12MAIL - Red Bull Space
12 rue du Mail - Paris

www.estellehanania.com
http://www.hananiabrunnquell.com/

We’re Throwing a Party in Pakistan

It’s no secret that we’re super big in Pakistan. When we step off the plane at Benazir Bhutto International we’re greeted with a sea of paparazzi snapping photos and shoving mics in our faces hoping to get the big scoop on VICE for the 11:00 news. Our popularity is probably due to the time we’ve spent hanging out in their gun markets. Or maybe it was our coverage of the Taliban in Pakistan. Or, for the fashion-forward Pakistani, it was most likely the trip we took to Islamabad’s first fashion week that reserved us a special place in their hearts. Whatever the reason, we figured with public interest as strong as it is in the country, throwing a party there is a no-brainer. It’s a wonder we didn’t do it sooner. So tonight in Karachi, we’re having a free show at the M.A.D. school (music, art, and dance) featuring //orangenoise, the Chand Tara Orchestra, and Basim of the Kominas. The party is from 9 to 11 PM and, as with all of our stateside events, it’s free. See you there.