As a film-obsessed pre-teen growing up in France, Zal Batmanglij’s dream was to export the children’s program Choudenshi Bioman to the States. “People ask you when you’re a little kid, ‘Do you want to be a fireman or a ballerina or something?’ I said, ‘No, I want to bring Bioman to America,’” recalls the 32 year-old director at the Crosby Street Hotel. “But someone beat me to it. They called it Power Rangers.” Luckily, Batmanglij got a video camera when he was 12, and never stopped making movies — though he never finished one until he met his future best friend and fellow filmmaker, Mike Cahill, at Georgetown.

The two collaborated on their first two shorts, Substance and Lucid Grey, the latter of which Batmanglij notes was “about a couple who goes to a college party and has various sexual encounters separately, and then come together and break up realizing all sorts of things about their lives.” It won the top prize at the university’s film festival, and attracted the attention of then-17-year-old aspiring actress Brit Marling, who gave them a standing ovation from the front row.

When Batmanglij, an anthropology major, was later accepted into the American Film Institute he brought Cahill and Marling out to Los Angeles with him. “I just didn’t want to go to school by myself and they were my best friends,” he says. “It seemed crazy to move out to LA from the East Coast but we did it and then we became other’s family.”

This familial connection bled into the work, which started with Batmanglij’s thesis film, a 35mm short called The Recordist, which starred Marling. “We had such a healthy, fun experience, it just seemed right, so we were like, ‘Let’s just keep going,’” he explains. Marling and Batmanglij wrote their first feature, Sound of My Voice, about a cult-leading, basement-dwelling Angeleno woman “from the future” who becomes the obsession of an undercover documentarian and his girlfriend. When they couldn’t get it made the two hit the road on a 2009 summer odyssey — catching out on trains, dumpster diving, joining collectives, taking rideshares across 14 states — that would change the way they approached the film industry.

[Read more]

I’ve known Alex Lukas since he was a runty little Rhode Island School of Design illustration major teenager more than a dozen years ago. Ever since, he has been hitting my mailbox every once in a while with his newest ‘zines. I have close to fifty of them now, and while I’m missing a few, taken together they really reveal what Alex is all about.

This slideshow of recent images by Alex show some of his ‘zines and some of his new works on paper. The visual lines between print and handmade blur a lot in his work when you see them as a group, and I like that.

Alex is a very good researcher. Not really in the sense of someone you’d hire as a research assistant, but in the sense of someone who is really, really stubborn and will pound away trying to figure out what he needs to do to get the visual that’s in his head onto the paper he’s working on, whether that’s a relatively quickie ‘zine or one of his massive works on paper.

[Read more]

As I send this in, it’s the evening of Friday the 19th, and the second of the suspected bombers has just been captured. I have no idea where this will go from here, but hopefully this is over.

I live in Cambridge two blocks from where the Boston Marathon bombing brothers apparently lived. It is the strangest thing to have your neighborhood be international news, but of course I love my neighborhood and my hometown. After all of this insanity cools off, I’m sure there will be some of you interested in coming by to have a gawk at the apartment building on Norfolk St in Cambridge where these two crazies lived. It’s only natural to be curious about it, and I don’t blame you.

If you’re going to come, let me suggest you stop for a good meal while you’re here, so you can help out some local businesses which have had to shutter for the time being. In fact, I’ve heard that many of them are serving up food to the hundreds of law enforcement personnel on the scene. That’s classy. What’s more – the eating is great, and is one of those often cited as a ‘best up and coming dining neighorhood’ in the Boston area.

Here’s a few personal recommendations to try that are within a two-block radius of the Norfolk and Cambridge Street intersection that you’ve seen on the news:

[Read more]

Every morning Bill Plympton wakes up at six, goes to his drawing board, gets a piece of bond and a No. 2 pencil and sits down to the business of animating the indelible, noirish figures that have garnered cult status as Plymptoons. What began in high school with drawings of bugs and plants for the Portland Yellow Pages has grown into an empire that encompasses political cartoons, animated shorts, features, advertisements, music videos (his first for Madonna; his latest for Kanye), and a forthcoming Rizzoli book (Independently Animated: Bill Plympton) with a Terry Gilliam forward. Along the way he’s filled his shelves full of awards, not to mention earned two Oscar nods. On the eve of the release of his latest feature, Idiots & Angels, we caught up with the industrious illustrator at his Chelsea studio to talk about the new feature, working with Kanye (vs. Weird Al), and what’s really going down on the animator groupie circuit.

—Michael Slenske

photographs by David Potes

Gibsonton, Florida is the only place in America that is classified as a Residential Business Zone – meaning you can store and display business materials near your home. This law was enacted in the 1940s, when a large community of carnival performers decided to make Gibsonton their home. It meant they could train their animals – elephants, bears, monkeys – in their homes, and even store carnival rides right on their front lawns.

The sideshow-ification of Gibsonton, a nondescript fishing town in Florida, started out ordinarily enough.

Jeanie Tomaini and her husband Al were the first of the new wave of settlers to move to town – they opened a seafood restaurant called Giant’s Fish Camp, but food wasn’t exactly what they were best known for. You see, Jeanie was born with no lower extremities and was known on the sideshow circuit as the Half-woman. At two and a half feet tall, she was almost four times smaller than Al, who was said to stand over eight feet tall. The town seemed to accept them and, before they knew it, many other sideshow families moved in.

[Read more]

I really didn’t even want to try interviewing Barry McGee about his show opening tomorrow in my hometown at the Boston ICA. He’s well known to be hard to pin down and clearly doesn’t enjoy doing them. So instead, I asked a few people to write a sentence or two about him. It says a great deal about Barry that so many artists, some who know him well personally and some who do not, got back to me with such alacrity.

— Caleb Neelon

photo by Dave Schubert

[Read more]

Art thieves are the trickster gods of cinema. Stealthy and dashing, they seem to just outwit security systems and charm open even the most intricate safes. In the end, they always have one last trick up their sleeve—one you didn’t see coming—to outfox the cunning cops. And, even if they are ultimately motivated by greed, they are portrayed as aesthetes, connoisseurs of mankind’s finest artistic achievements. Like folk heroes, their crimes are seen as victimless, daring redistributions of wealth. Whereas bank robbers are desperate ex-felons with bottle blonde girlfriends chain smoking slims, art thieves are cool cat burglars dancing through laser beams or bon vivant millionaires in it for the thrill.

That is, if they are successful. We like our tricksters pristine—challenged perhaps, but ultimately undefeatable, omniscient even—Thomas Crownes and Danny Oceans. If their plan is botched however, as it is in Danny Boyle’s Trance, that panache crumbles into paranoia and the thieves become just that, common criminals. The gods fall from the heavens to become Melville-ian characters in the red circle.

[Read more]

Over the course of three years, photographer Colin M. Day has traveled to and from a marijuana farm in the wilderness of Northern California. These are the resulting photographs.

Goldfield, Nevada is one of those eery towns that exploded during the gold boom of the early 1900s, only to be deserted almost completely in a matter of years. Millions of dollars worth of gold were produced in Goldfield between 1903 and 1940, and the town turned into an entertainment hub: legendary boxing championships took place there, and the Northern Saloon in town was said to be so long, 80 bartenders were needed to serve the length of it.

It only made sense then to build an opulent and oversized hotel to accommodate the newfound riches in town. This was the Goldfield hotel. When it was built in 1908, it was advertised as one of the most spectacular hotels in Nevada, with a lobby adorned with black leather upholstery, gold-leafed ceilings and mahogany trimmings, and 150 rooms outfitted with the best furnishings  available.

[Read more]

New York-based artist Glen Baldridge pays respect to Brad Pitt’s finest performance–as Floyd the stoner roomate in 1993′s classic crime/love story, True Romance–with this fully functional, limited edition, white porcelain, honey bear bong.

Get Floyd here

[Read more]

“No one will ever kill me, they wouldn’t dare.” – Former Bonanno family underboss and lifelong criminal Carmine Galante was so merciless, callous, and—most of all—fearless, that he didn’t think for a second he’d go out in the blaze of gunfire that killed him in Bushwick that summer afternoon.

Shortly before 3pm on Thursday July 12, 1979, three masked gunmen rushed into the backyard of Joe and Mary’s Italian Restaurant where Carmine Galante—the man responsible for countless assaults and robberies, an estimated 80+ murders, and famously carving out the HOV lane on the heroin highway to the US in the 60s—was eating lunch in the restaurant’s backyard. Moments later, he was dead on the ground, a lit cigar still hanging from his mouth.

[Read more]

In 1974, students in a Greenwich Village elementary school were asked to write essays on what they would say to Muhammad Ali if they ever had the chance to meet him.  As part of a hidden camera show skit, Ali snuck into the classroom dressed as a janitor, disrobed into only his boxing shorts, and surprised the kids.

–Ilana

This week we wanna tap into a little bit of design zeitgeist. Per usual we’ve been on almost permanent vacation from the stinkfest known as New York’s design scene, so these two will probably be nothing new to you.  But by merit of their nauseating ubiquity paired with a grade on the snarkmeter that could poison a toad, we have no other choice but to call them in.  So without further ado, Roman and Williams, report to The Principals Office!

[Read more]

The team at Playdate Bike Club makes products as aesthetically dope as they are functionally impressive.  Founded in 2008, Playdate turns out top-quality, high-performance bicycles with a throwback feel.  The unique High-Riders boast cro-moly steel frames, chrome chopper handlebars, a spacer stack design and retro banana seats.  Standard and step-through variations on their four basic models are available exclusively through their website.  Apparently, further customization of saddles, grips, and cranks is also possible through a scheduled consultation with a bike expert. Playdate bikes start at $650 and ship internationally.

–Ilana

For decades, legends swirled around the odd Salt Lake Cemetery tombstone for Lilly E. Gray, “Victim of the Beast 666″. One such tale told that she had died during an exorcism, but her death certificate states that she died of natural causes, or simply that several of her internal organs gave in. Another yet surmised that Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666 himself, was responsible for her demise. This theory simply has no legs, since Crowley had passed away in 1947, nine years before Lilly.

As it turns out, the real explanation is probably more banal than the curious thousands who have visited the spooky gravestone would  have wanted it to be. Lilly E. Gray was married to a kook. Indeed, in an application to the Utah State Board of Pardons dated March 15, 1947 her husband and lone survivor, Elmer L. Gray, proves himself to be either hilarious or one paranoid son of a gun. Throughout this document, he refers to himself as being “kidnaped, a bum” and mentions several times that he has been kidnapped “by democrats.” One can only assume that good ol’ Elmer either believed his spouse had her soul manipulated by Satan himself, or just thought it would make a funny tagline for her to carry on into eternity. There you have it, mystery solved.

—Alix / @alixmcalpine

(h/t: ufodigest)

Lacrosse, for flagrant stealing, you’ve been called to The Principals Office!  Sport design is an overlooked corner of creativity. Some might describe that corner as a bastion of rampant, irreverent, or even reckless creativity.  Lacrosse is an even more obscure, as the Lithuanians are fond of saying, “corner of that corner.”  If you didn’t know, two thirds of The Principals come from Baltimore; the steaming, crab juice-soaked, hot-bed of Lacrosse; a deservedly overlooked sport stolen from the Native Americans and re-appropriated by Jeep Wrangler-driving, collar-popping, suburban cool guys.  It’s a sport that somehow retains a preppy refinement while simultaneously satisfying the warrior spirit of pubescent stick-wielding meatheads. To grow up in Baltimore means that by your third birthday you have a crab mallet in one hand and a lacrosse stick in the other.  But as the new century trudges on, this once localized sport has popularized from the brackish waters of the Chesapeake through Midwestern fields of grain to the great unknowns of the wild, wild West.  But during this diaspora Lacrosse lost something.  As if to make this pyrrhic victory, it had to sell all the cool it had stockpiled from the Air Gate days. It’s no longer enough to bastardize the Native American legacy it once cherished, what does that mean to a Hot-Mess munching Iowan tween anyway?  What Lacrosse needed Skateboarding has in spades, and it obviously was not a genius who matched these two polar opposites together, or at least blatantly stole from one.  Stealing from Skateboarding culture is nothing new (as we saw two weeks ago in the dreaded Stair Rover).  This isn’t the first time Thrasher’s logo has been swiped and it won’t be the last. But for Lacrosse to do so is a step so far into the twilight zone. When you robo-trip your way out of this wet dream, the tennis team manager will still be finger-banging the homecoming queen.  Thus leading us all to beg the question, does this mean The Principals will get a date to the Prom after all?

[Read more]

Been a while since we called an actual person into the Principals Office. In fact, we don’t know if we ever have. The last 7 posts were written in a boredom-induced fog, fueled by unhealthy quantities of Adderall and Crab Chips.  Either way, it seemed about time we expanded our territory to something that could actually respond to our rants, to the Corpus Vile if you will.  But being called to The Principals Office doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Sometimes there are commendations to be received. Sometimes we like to celebrate our students for things like punctuality or perfect attendance.  Today we’d like to single someone out someone for distinguishing themselves in a distinguished field: the field of Excellence.  That’s right, it’s an abstract field, but Dr. Steve Brule is an abstract man.

[Read more]

Skateboarding is a popular sport; the amount of Sportos, Dweebies and Wastoids trying to cash in on it could drown a whale.  Unfortunately there’s just not enough time in our busy schedule to call every one of these turdburgulars into The Principals Office. Only the darkest and most depraved will have that distinct displeasure. We thought we had our man with the Razor Scooter, but then came the Snakeboard and we knew the layers of crapulence had only been scratched. So we waited, and as we sensed middle America’s thirst for danger being quenched, as countless industrial design students dreamed then gave up on “reinventing the skateboard”, we sat in the shadows patiently, ready at any moment to strike.  But now finally it’s here, have you heard?  It’s called the Stair Rover and it’s being called into this week’s Principals Office, because well, it sucks.

[Read more]

Welcome to our new weekly column by The Principals, where every Friday they summon someone or something to the Principals office. Lessons will be learned, tears might be shed, parents could be called.

Riding the theme of “architectural gimmicks” put forth by a commenter last week, today we’re calling the Arduino into our office.

[Read more]