You look at a John Wesley picture and you feel a thousand things at once. As a part of the Venice Biennale, Prada, or the Prada Foundation, is presenting a retrospective of the American pre-pop master’s vivid work (The Daily Beast has posted the online gallery). But “blockbuster” retrospectives aside, you look at a John Wesley picture, or a bunch of John Wesley pictures, and the world is a sweeter, harsher place. Wesley must dream in skin-tones. His lines always billow, his vision is extraordinary. Let’s just pray that his increasing recognition doesn’t end up in a commission for an animated vampire film.

The Juan MacLean finally have a new album out. A much-anticipated garden of electronica songsmithing, The Future Will Come is tremendous, careful, and sleek; it will blow your little mind-feet! The Juan MacLean is touring with The Field (What’s the deal with band names that demand the definite article? Is it related to the demise of newspapers?), starting tonight in Los Angeles, hitting San Francisco on Saturday, and then taking off all over the world, including a stop at (!) The Montreux Jazz Festival. Mosi Reeves has a dope article about The Juan Maclean in The San Francisco Chronicle this week, where frontman/producer John MacLean says that the band’s sound is “a consequence of making electronic/dance records for predominantly indie audiences.” I have such an indie crush on DFA Records, it’s ridiculous.

Was Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster mad at DC Comics–or even his own creations–for betraying him? Was he taking some sort of delight in putting his characters through this alternate world? (NSFW) …more

“Excluding men and showing only women is a revolutionary gesture of affirmative action. But the museum is avant-garde. It’s part of the Centre Pompidou culture to do things differently. And we like a lot of drama. This is going to be dramatic in a big way.” The Pompidou is preparing for a year without men. The LA Times reports.

Sir Richard Bishop is a lot of things to a lot of people. He’s a gentleman! He’s a post-punk Guitar God! Now the half-Lebanese indie instrumentalist is about to release an expansive little record on Drag City called The Freak of Araby. It’s somewhere between the energized peacefulness of Yair Dalal and the teasing kitsch of 3 Mustaphas 3 (video), with a slight hint of Fairuz’s boldness. Veering from the meditations of “Entra Omri” to the spastic yelps of “Blood-Stained Sands,” the songs are miniature epics. It’s gonna take me awhile to place this record, but I know it’s good. Bishop’s on tour, starting tonight.

My friend Margaret has some good ideas, like DJing a monthly night of Northern indie pop. She might call it Nordic Track. That’s a perfect name, indicating how we would skate to Jens and Beyond. Maybe it will happen someday. For now, we have the San Francisco Popfest 2009. They’ve invited poppy folks from all over the place to come play in SF, starting tonight. The bands have names that would make Jonathan Lethem proud: Suburban Kids with Biblical Names, The Hidden Cameras (who’ve had to cancel their appearance due to visa problems…), My Teenage Stride. The Popfest has put together a sweet video pastiche of many of the artists that will be performing. Here are some highlights and extensions. …more

The future and the past converge in this month’s art coverage. Fecal Face interviews Damon Soule about having multiple dreams at the same time.  Gene Moreno and Ernesto Oroza tell e-flux about Little Haiti. In Cabinet, Aaron Schuster writes about The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future. Nick Cave’s transcendent politics leap off the page, via Natalie Bell, in Art Papers. Jim Jarmusch talks to Amy Taubin in Artforum, and for Nafas/Universes in Universe, Omnia El Shakry takes on the controversies surrounding the jury selections of Egypt’s 20th annual Salon El Shabab.

Sébastien Tellier recently toured the States, bringing a spacious European balance to “sex music” from this side of the pond, such as the brilliant, raunchy new Peaches album, I Feel Cream (which imeem is streaming for free, thanks to XLR8R). Tellier proves that sexiness and emptiness are never far apart. (pics and video after the jump) …more

“I got the idea to exchange each word in a poem I’d written with an emotionally equivalent sound. When I had exchanged all the words, I had made an electronic composition without even knowing it. After that I’d found my technique and no longer had the need for words.” Vice interviews intergalactic musical mastermind Ralph Lundsten.

She always knew it would come to this. A screaming horde of bucknaked smutcrazed rapists banging on her glass ticket kiosk. She crossed herself and with a single prayer commended her soul to the Lord’s Everafter and consigned her flesh to the Devil’s own Here and Now.
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Kindle, iPhone, Stanza, “media pads,” whatever. Sick of news about things you can’t afford that do things you don’t need done? Head to the Donna Seager Gallery and put your little mits and screen-numbed eyes on the dope selection of treasures at the “Fourth Annual Exhibition of Handmade and Altered Artist Books,” The Art of the Book, which runs through May 31st. Seager is a gem in the art world, and this is why. Artists this year include William T. Wiley, Victoria Bean, Tor Archer, Erin Sweeney (dress book!), and Richard Lang of Electric Works, who has written some Museum Stories!

Having been delivered by a (former) Merry Prankster in a Santa Cruz hospital, I was especially enthralled to learn that Gus Van Sant has received Ken Kesey’s blessing to make a film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Please, Lord, may it not involve Jack Black. [via Galleycat; thanks, Ron!]

Tonight in Berkeley, Donald Richie comes all the way from Tokyo to talk about his life in Japanese film and the arts in general. He’ll be chatting onstage with Telluride Film Fest co-founder Tom Luddy. The event is being put on by Berkeley Arts & Letters. I’ve been looking forward to meeting Donald since I began working at Stone Bridge Press some years ago. Whether scribbling about the Inland Sea, Truman Capote’s mysterious visit to Japan, or sensual divinities (in Erotic Gods: Phallicism in Japan), his writing is both authoritative and deeply personal. Susan Sontag wrote that “his lateral view opens up fresh perspectives on many human gestures and ways of doing art and society.” In the East Bay Express, Anneli Rufus has a nice take on Donald, as a prelude to the event; in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Johnny Ray Huston also has a thing or two to say. Want a preview of Donald’s voice? Check out this curious 2005 interview with Michael Krasny.

There are a number of reasons I wish I were in London today. Most of them are aesthetic. Take photographer Chino Otsuka’s Imagine Finding Me series, where the Tokyo-born, London-based good-kind-of-manipulator morphs together images of her former and current selves doing those portraity things that selves are bound to do. The Daiwa Foundation Japan House is showing the 2005 series through June 5th (Wallpaper has the scoop). Like to listen but not to watch? Here’s some (totally unrelated) London grime for your clean little ears.

I hate agreeing with Harold Bloom. But what can I say? I fall easily and oddly and often (if sceptically) into Bloom’s spells of (particular) historical illumination and (annoying) lucidity. …more

Despite–or maybe to spite–bitter winds, spring is in the air. The art world and its rags are responding in kind. In Oslo, rabbits are about to do funny things with humans. Vartan Avakian investigates his (heroic!?) namesake for Bidoun. With an eye for natural light, Hiroshi Sugimoto plays dress up with lightening and the Kyoto Costume Institute in Modern Painters. In frieze, Diedrich Diederichsen illuminates the erotic epiphanies of architecture. Marcel Dzama, whose Dracula shivers me timbers, talks to the Tate about his spooky new video for Department of Eagles. In Art on Paper, Santi Moix takes a road trip with Cervantes. And The Art Newspaper reports that the recent major art theft in Syndey included a number of fakes!

Pandora too much work for your lazy ass? There’s a new indie-throbbing Music That Matters podcast over at KEXP (via Morr Music). Stellar rock photographer (and folky musician) Henry Diltz was a guest DJ at KCRW–the historical insight is better than the music. Stones Throw recently dropped the new Thank You Jay Dee podcast and a uber-groovy Mayer Hawthorne “radio” show; subscribe/stream now since they don’t archive episodes. And, “In the early 1960s, James P. Coyle and Mal Sharpe roamed the streets of San Francisco, microphone in hand, roping strangers into bizarre schemes and surreal stunts;” The Sound of Young America interviews ‘em (includes original clips!).

Too much revelation at your indie fest? Too much Jesus? Shut up, naysayer. I want more. …more

The new issue of Bidoun has glitter on both covers, smells like a pack of baseball cards, and includes a stellar essay by Negar Azimi, “I Often Dream of Slavs.” The last issue of frieze celebrated FILE Magazine‘s idiosyncrasy; the new one features the best solo shows of 2008. ARTnews takes on art and the UAE, art on paper thinks about the “willfully parasitic Museum in Progress” (online version is shortened), and over at e-flux, Monika Szewczyk discusses the art of conversation. Issue 24 of the resurrected Journal of Artist Books has a darn pretty cover (image). In Bookforum, the unpredictable William T. Vollman jumps into the ethics of photography.

The de Young Museum in San Francisco is holding Andy Warhol tryouts for Warhol Live. Do you have to do everything he did? Do you gots to “interview” Steven Spielberg on a bed? Must you have annoyingly advertised exhibitions in London? I hope that anyone who catches the live performance of 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests will be as thrilled and exorcised as I was by Britta’s rendition of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep it with Mine,” set against Nico‘s screen test (Dylan wrote the song for Nico). A thousand times better than Marriane Faithful’s version (video)!

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I was looking for flesh at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last Thursday. But alas. The promo photos for “Irreverant: Contemporary Nordic Craft Art” feature Louise Nippierd‘s spectacular jewelry-sculptures on real people, but at the opening of the show the socially conscious pieces were slightly withdrawn and resting on fabric busts. Nonetheless,  there was a lot to take in, from lush, minimalist textiles to a purple-reed jacket, animal chandelier (Frida Fjellman must dream of these critters), and smirking, half-dead fox. In Italy on Sunday, the Galleria Civica Di Modena will open a similar pair of exhibitions (via e-flux): Mark Dion’s take on the aesthetics of hunting culture, paired with Gabi Dziuba’s jewels (as presented by Christian Philipp Müller). These are good signs that …more

Is it possible to resuscitate and reinvigorate the nonviolent resistance movements of the 20th century?

It’s all about the row boat of life.

Some peace boats (video) have a duty free shop and a Japanese club soundtrack. Involved with the Peace Boat US, the Global Campaign for Peace Education focuses on teachers and learners.

Bernard Avishai asks the new Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, What’s love got to do with it?

Are we caught up in the pornography of horror because we ignore historical lessons in pluralism?

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Executive Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, on “Obama, Gaza, and True Nature.”

Wendy MacNaughton’s visual blog provides “drawings of people on public transportation on their way to and from work. Five days a week, twice a day, twenty minutes each way. And other commutes to boot.” The effect is somewhere between the chillingly under-acted and over-costumed TV series Mad Men, a song by The Zincs, and drunken half-memories of watching Slacker. So it’s a lot like riding the underground, just without those stupid screeching sounds. …more

This week I wrote about Aurobora Press for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. For the past fifteen years, …more