October | 2010 | ChinaShop

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Comic Books Featured A Cynic’s Guide to New York Comic Con

October 15, 2010 - 9:31 am

I’ve been a creator at New York Comic Con since 2005. From first fateful NYCC, during which I dealt vodka shots and launched my sequential art career, to last week’s Javitz Center insanity, I’ve seen the sweaty highs and lows of The Second Greatest Comic Con. Here are the lessons I’ve learned.

1.) Comic Con happens at Afterparties

Every year I go to the Javitz Center, I marvel at the solid crush of humanity. Cross-dressing Hit Girls, aged Lolitas, the omnipresent storm troopers. The convention floor is a perfect theatre of geek awesome. But, for a creator sans table, its not where the con is at. Comic-Con for us has more to do with the 72 hours of drunkenness that start at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s legendary Thursday night bash, progress through Friday and Saturday’s boozing (often sponsored by DC, MTV, or Darkhorse), and end with us pouring our woes to raconteur and alcohol connoisseur Jimmy d’Aquino of Comic News Insider.

While free top-shelf liquor is a potent lure, afterparties are the best chance to get an honest appraisal of the industry one works in. You find out which imprints are being gutted, which writer got his book optioned. Sometimes parties even give you the only proper food you’ll eat all weekend. Which brings us to point #2

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Gallery Urban Exploration sCratched- 2 Blocks in Austin

by Dustin Downing

October 14, 2010 - 9:52 am

I was always the kid who could find the remote, to this day, I herald it as the sole reason I must be my father’s favorite son. No matter if lost deep within a couch crevasse, perched in a planter high above the window sill, or complacently waiting atop the TV (no one ever looks); my peepers were a peepin.

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Music Tortoise: Slow, Mid-Paced, and Ludicrous Speed

by Shop Keeper

October 14, 2010 - 9:49 am

Whaddya get when you mix indie experimentalism and bizarre, electronica noise with what could be the soundtrack to a Luis Bunuel or Fellini flick? While a great many of their songs admittedly do crawl along at a sluggish pace, Tortoise’s name may still be somewhat of a misnomer. But with the diverse musical terrain these boys cover, I found it difficult to distract myself. For those of you with 2-second attention spans like me, just pushing ahead to the next track guarantees a new universe of influences, soundscapes and harmonies. You’ll even get some crazy-fast dance beats in there if you’re patient.

And despite their seemingly endless network of connections throughout the Chicago indie scene, this genre-defying/defining quintet is still miles ahead of the pack. It’s almost like watching one of those above-mentioned film auteurs: what seems most frightening can sometimes be the most fun, in that it’s challenging, perhaps even enlightening. Tortoise explores and embraces manifold musical directions, all in a sort of seamless transmogrification, and what began as irritation and annoyance becomes a sort of charming idiosyncrasy: The staccato pluck of guitar strings until it becomes a singular meandering drone — it will grow on you. The static humming of a television on after-hours, basic cable — you’ll see how it compliments the insane 6/5 time signature and jazz drumming. The missing vocals — c’mon. Live a little, will ya?

Crawl if you must, but get yourself over to Red Bull Music Academy now for a little character-building — and an exploratory, sprawling live set.

Music WhoMadeWho: What’s in a Name?

by Shop Keeper

October 13, 2010 - 12:07 pm

WhoMadeWho is one of the latest in this seemingly endless sprawl of non-stop indie/post-punk bands, all crawling out of the woodwork to get a piece of the rotting foundation of rock and call it their own. They’re like roaches when the lights come on — you have to be quick, otherwise you’ll miss ‘em. Shitty (crumby?) analogies aside, what we once called contemporary rock has peeled off in a million different directions, and with WhoMadeWho, we’ve yet another modern rock group that’s already being labeled by everyone and their brother, when the point, if I still remember correctly, is to enjoy the f&#king music for what it is and stop trying to define it.

So by ‘post-punk’, perhaps the label categorization may be a bit off, as the boys are being called ‘disco-punk’, ‘indie-punk’ and any other genre label they can stand having thrown at them — so perhaps you should just eschew the superlatives, and love it for what it is. That being said, even if you utterly despise disco, you’ll find that the basslines are unabashedly, unapologetically so– albeit less in that KC/Donna Summer/The Trammps way, so much as a “post-disco/new wave” in that Duran Duran way — and still no less difficult to resist. “The Loop” could be called Disco via Atari 2600, while “Space For Rent” could be more post-disco via huge Muse influence. Yet another band that perhaps is better left as undescribed as possible, they’re better at being heard. You guessed it — Red Bull Music Academy has what you need.

Gallery Random Camera Random Camera: Caught Red Handed

by Dustin Downing

October 13, 2010 - 12:05 pm

“My son was a burglar.”, mutters Esther as I worry that my missing sock is lost and scared. “I didn’t quite mind because he would occasionally bring me nice things from the places he was buglar-ing. And always red, my favorite color.” I’ll get back to her in a second…

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Music Tuesday Newsday: New Releases from Belle and Sebastian, Shawn Mullins, David Gilmour, and Dimmu Borgir

by Shop Keeper

October 12, 2010 - 1:57 pm

A bit of a scarce week here, many will consider Belle and Sebastian’s triumphant return is enough to make up for what’s lacking. David Gilmour has taken his guitar to jam with UK electronica stars The Orb; a reformed Dimmu Borgir unleashes some more Norwegian black magic, and Shawn Mullins smokes again. Yep, slim pickins… see ya in a week!

Darius Rucker – Charleston, SC 1966
Celtic Thunder – Celtic Thunder Christmas
The Band Perry – The Band Perry
The Orb Featuring David Gilmour – Metallic Spheres
Belle & Sebastian – Write About Love
Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz
Shawn Mullins – Light You Up
Mark Salling – Pipe Dreams
Big Time Rush – BTR
Dimmu Borgir - Abrahadabra
Circle Of Animals – Destroy the Light
The Crown – Doomsday King

Fashion Ink Cosmetics

by Nicole Pajer

October 12, 2010 - 10:26 am

Anna Castillo is a celebrity makeup artist/stylist, an Active Duty Air Force member, and the founder of Ink Cosmetics, which carries a full line of cosmetics and skin/body care products, including tools for men’s skin care. Anna developed the cosmetic line “as a more affordable means for artists to experiment, express, and cultivate their creativity with high pigment cosmetics.” From prepping models for New York Fashion Week to beautifying high-profile celebrities, Anna has a lot of experience under her belt. She is, however, most proud of her upcoming plans for Ink Cosmetics, which she shares with China Shop in her interview below:

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Music Chilly Gonzales: A Movie With No Plot

by Shop Keeper

October 12, 2010 - 10:24 am

Chilly Gonzales trumps himself as a “musical genius” right out of the gate on his Fireside Chat on Red Bull Music Academy Radio, so he’d better have the chops to back it up. (Though lately he prefers to announce his tagline as un génie musicale“, seeing as how he’s living in Paris.) Yeah, the guy is very tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing, but he can actually back a lot of it up: he’s already been in the Guinness Book of World Records for longest continuous piano concert (27 hours, to be precise), and got his start early with the band Son, a three-piece, Elvis Costello-y group which sparked enough interest in the executives at Warner Bros. to get them picked up.

They had a small hit with “Pick Up The Phone,” which earned them some noteworthy success in their Canadian homeland, as well as gigs opening for The Barenaked Ladies. Known as Jason Beck then, Chilly always seemed uncomfortable with his heritage, and, according to his Wikipedia page, “developed [the pseudonym Chilly Gonzales] into his popular stage persona as a ‘Jewish supervillain MC’.”

Just to drive the point home, Beck/Gonzales also helped pen a song for his band Son called “Making a Jew Cry”, much to the irk of some peeps at Warner. But despite what may be a somewhat self-loathing attitude, Chilly has been able to apply his multi-talented musical abilities to all kinds of different scenarios: throwing concerts at legendary music halls, helping craft remixes for other artists, shooting his own feature film, and spending recent years working with such renowned artists as Leslie Feist and Peaches. Recently he signed with Mercury Records, and is headed back into the studio.

So there ya go. But perhaps Chilly puts it best himself, when he announces: “I’m a movie with no plot, written in the back of a piss-powered taxi…I’m an imperial armpit, sweating with Chianti…I’m a toilet with no seat, flushing tradition down…I AM EUROPE.”

Comic Books Featured Dark Horse Comics Launches a Revolution

by Shop Keeper

October 12, 2010 - 10:22 am

Dark Horse Comics, the publisher that revolutionized creator-owned comics announced a new and ambitious digital publishing plan that’s set to do the same for sequential storytelling in the digital medium! By creating and managing its own digital publishing program—the Dark Horse Bookshelf app—Dark Horse Comics has eliminated third party fees on its digital editions. Not only will readers be able to enjoy Dark Horse comics at lower prices, but comic creators will receive a greater percentage of each digital sale. In short, readers pay less for their comics and creators make more money.

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Art/Design Featured A Cardboard Los Angeles Emerges

by Nicole Pajer and Dustin Downing

October 11, 2010 - 11:11 am

Even with this crazy recession, there is no way around the fact that real estate is expensive in Los Angeles. What if you could purchase a brand new home for $12, decorate it the way you want to, and place it in whatever LA county community your fancy? Would that resolve your house hunting woes?

The British Theater Company made this daydream a reality when they brought the Home Sweet Home concept to the Skirball Cultural Center. Over a ten day period, visitors banded together to create a cardboard City of Angels complete with homes, stores, bridges, billboards, zoos, farms, skateboard parks, circus tents, Capitol Records Tower, Disney Concert Hall…you name it.

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