POWDER AND RAILS SEASON 2 - DAVE SEOANE
Dave Seoane’s takes us for a tour of his basement live/work space in Portland, OR. Dave’s home office constitutes world headquarters for renowned Nemo Design. With Dave, we talk about the good old days of the early Tahoe scene and his transition from snowboarder to filmmaker. Dave’s turn behind the camera is well known among snowboarders: his oeuvre includes some of the most creative snowboarding movies ever made like Roadkill, Subjekt: Haakonsen, and The White Album.
From filmmaker Pierre Wikberg:
When I saw Subjekt: Haakonsen for the first time a new world opened up. I guess the film was quite different from other videos at the time as far as intro, parts, etc were concerned. A lot of it was filmed in Riksgränsen, which was my neck of the woods. Dave Seoane, Terje Haakonsen, and company made that place look like the best place on Earth: creative jumps, lines and some very fun, organic, uncontrived riding.
Check out previous episodes of Power and Rails here.
CRANKING TO SONIC YOUTH
Ben Rayner
Self-published
Ben’s third zine this winter (after Don’t Tread on Me and California Dreamin’) consists of photos taken at ATP in Minehead last month, when he and a load of guys from our London office, as well as US editor Jesse Pearson, went to the festival to film interviews with J. Mascis, Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon for VBS.TV. As with everything Ben does, it looks like more fun than most people have in a year crammed into a few days. There are guns, parties, music-y people, karaoke and fireworks. What more do you want?
benrayner.blogspot.com
——————————————
Clicking this long blue line will take you to a magical place (more commonly referred to as viceland.com) where you can peruse through more titillating book reviews compiled by the Vice staff. You won’t be disappointed.
AN INTERVIEW WITH JACK FRITSCHER
Jack Fritscher is the award-winning author of hundreds of stories and articles, and 20 books including Gay San Francisco, Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982, and his memoir of his bicoastal lover, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera. He is the founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of the legendary international leather magazine Drummer. He is about as informed as anyone on the history of erotic fiction, its importance, and the state of erotic publishing today. According to him, religion and nipple clamps were invented for the same reason, namely that everyone likes being bottom of the domination pile.
So what is it about fiction that is so important?
Storytelling is important to the human psyche. It is quintessentially important to GLBT culture in its final uncloseting. In the 1970s, gay magazines worked to develop gay authors. Drummer magazine helped create the very leather culture we reported on each issue. Now killed by the internet, that fertile magazine culture that churned out new material every 30 days has been replaced by dozens of annual gay-fiction anthologies of the splendid kind invented by the Canadian critic Richard Labonte and edited by, for instance, the legendary Susie Bright in her straight-and-gay mixer Best American Erotica.
I am an academic who immigrated from the university ivory tower to the corporate world, and to the gay dolce vita of GLBT publishing. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. In my hybrid career, I’ve written academic books and papers, biography, history, and fiction, and directed films. These days many gay fiction authors are trending toward publishing autobiography, biography, and non-fiction history. In 1968, I was impelled to write Leather Blues as an erotic-fiction novel and send it to a publisher. In 2009, one is more likely to shoot a video documentary about S&M leather and post it on YouTube.
Check out the rest of the interview here.
Remember that video we posted yesterday that VICE Brazil shot at the most recent Smirnoff Experience party in Sao Paulo? Evidently Pedro from Bonde Do Role was there shooting his OWN secret rival documentary. His is less of a general partylogue and more of a man-on-the-street type thing, but the impudence is galling all the same. We hope this doesn’t end in A VICE-vs-Bonde baille funk dance-battle. Anyhoo, watch in delight as Pedro runs around the joint making suspicious, hyperbolic claims and mispronouncing the band name YACHT.
Let’s get this Friday going with some amazing birthdays. Sound good?
Let’s get started!
Cliiiiiiick heeeeeeere!
Man. We are SO giving this one to you! Because c’mon, it’s almost Friday and we know you’ve already mentally checked out of work and any kind of logic based thinking anyway. Enjoy.
You can check out what we had to say about this baby adult here.
It’s no secret that Vice likes to have fun. We work pretty hard and so we’re constantly throwing ridiculous parties all over the globe, often for no good reason at all. Take the fun-havers in our Sao Paulo office, for instance. So often are they not working, we got to wondering what it is they actually do and just how much fun they are having. To find out we requested that they pull together some sort of visual documentation of whatever it is that makes them get dressed each afternoon. In their minds they completed the assignment. In ours, they just turned the cameras on at a Smirnoff Experience event in their home town and acted totally, insanely normal, without so much as even pretending like there is a magazine to make and stories to be typed. The night involves some sort of lazer-tag-looking facility, which, come to think of it, is actually probably still pretty cool in Brazil. Watch for yourself and see if you understand—we certainly don’t.
OK, WE don’t know if you believe in God or space shuttles or voodoo or whatever, but something really spooky just happened. About 30 minutes ago we put up a link to an interview the Huffington Post did with Shane Smith about Liberia and titled it “Huffpo Is On Our Jock.” Meaning, of course, that the Huffington Post likes our content and is promoting us, not literally that we have a boner and the Huffington Post is really excited by this fact.
TEN MINUTES LATER this went up in Huffington Post’s style section. It’s about how they like our Work Hard, Play Hard fashion spread from this month’s issue. You know, the one where all the models have RAGING fucking HARD-ONs???!
We don’t know if we’re at the nexus of some sort of synergistical psycholinguic planetary alignment of the cosmos or Huffpo’s just got some kid on staff who spends his morning railing speed and looking for colloquial phrases to literalize. Either way, right now we feel like the conduit for some pretty heavy, transdimensional-type power whose capabilities we’re only beginning to understand. It’s like we just slipped the missing shard into the Dark Crystal.
Only time will tell whether good or evil shall come from this discovery. For now, let’s see what happens when we try this little sentence out, “The New York Times sucks our ass.”
A FRIENDLY VISIT WITH ANDO GILARDI, ITALY’S PREMIER CURATOR OF NAKED PEOPLE
We recently drove up through Piedmont, a couple dozen miles or so beyond Genoa, and into the sleepy northern Italian hamlet of Ponzone to meet Ando Gilardi, an 89-year-old Italian photographer, author, journalist, editor, and the perviest old perv on the peninsula—a man, we’re embarassed to admit, we hadn’t known existed a few short weeks before. It was then, on a glorious day in Milan, that we had found two of his magazines, Fhototeca Materiali and Phototeca, in a secondhand bookshop. They were unlike anything we’d ever seen.
His magazines featured strong, principally erotic images, grouped by precise but obscure iconographic motifs. Their garish layouts would go from a two-page collage of dozens of blowjobs to a juxtaposition of Victorian-era erotic cartoons and 1980s porn-VHS covers, with poems and bits of esoteric texts strewn (seemingly) at random throughout. As an editor, this guy was unmatched in his talent for titling and assigning themes to issues: “Racist Dickheads and Sons of Bitches, There’s a Pogrom Tonight and I’ve Nothing to Wear,” “The Artificial Whore,” “Assocracy,” and “Catastrophes, Damn Bad Luck, and Final Solutions” are a few. We soon discovered that these wonderful works were only a sampling from an oeuvre of half a dozen publications that Ando has guided during his career. We were instantly hooked.
…So we spoke to him for a few hours about everything from photography to why Ando thinks that women hate sex. Check it out here.
Maggie Lee is one of the most adorable, talented, and enthusiastic tiny balls of joy we’ve ever met. She surrounds herself with weird ideas and even weirder people and music and then sometimes throws it all together into short videos. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you go “Huh?” but “Awwww!” at the same time!!
She sent us six of her videos to watch, and we were like “Coooool!” so we decided to post them on the blog and share with all of you. Check ‘em out.
Also, if you need to be entertained for hours and hours, check out her blog. It’s sweet.
