Miranda July

looks Angeles--based artist, writer, and performer Miranda July is commonly making a feature film put for release next year. Her multimedia shoot forward Learning to Love You More is included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and is ongoing at learningtoloveyoumore.com.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

1 celestial expanse DANCERS It took a doom of Web searching to discover their official name: firmament Dancers (not to be confused with the flying doll of the same name, recalled for lacerating children's faces). What I'm talking about are those enormous air-filled promotional figures whose arms wave above their heads like they're eternally tormented spirits. Their desperate, necessitous flailing either infuriates me or stirs me to tears depending upon how I'm feeling about us, the family of Los Angeles, whose minds I'm sure these are.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

2 THE GIRLS GUITAR bludgeon Mary Lynn Rajskub (Punch-Drunk regard with affection the TV show 24) and Karen Kilgariff (Mr Show) are the Girls Guitar cudgel a "band" that is also a live comedy act and also a movie (dir. Ruben Fleischer) you can watch at www.ruben.fm/ggc.html. If your demographic doesn't precisely overlap with mine, then you might not think this loving parody of girl empowerment is as incredibly hilarious as I do, and I really do. Mary Lynn Rajskub should be in everything.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

3 WWW.GROUPHUG.US A random sampling from this disturbingly addictive confessional website: "Everyone thinks I've been a vegetarian for the past 8 years, on the other hand I'm not. In fact I really have affection for meat and can't get enough of it." "I pe in my real expensive, silk pants yesterday, thus I just splashed some talc dust on the crotch and am wearing them again today." "I like to refrain from holding upon to the handholds on the subway, then when a sharp bend or bump comes I affect to lose my balance and fall into some one else.... I know this is weird, on the contrary I crave physical contact."

4 a certain number of GUY'S HOMEMADE BARBELL This is my favorite piece of public art in LA. It's sitting right there in his brow yard, so anyone can walk by dint of and see it, I gues he filled sum of two units buckets with cement and then stuck a metal shoot between them. Sometimes I diocese something I want but can't afford, and I think: Maybe I could make it. on the other hand this guy really did.

5 THE ART OF KHAELA MARICICH Like greatest in quantity of those artists living in the low-rent town of Olympia, Washington, Khaela makes more art for her friends than for selling (my rife favorite is her pink-paper "Yeah" streamer)--but her performances and CD (Bonus Album, The Concussive Caress [K Records]) have that same radiant intimacy. When she's standing upon a stage in front of centurys of people, I'm always surprised to hear her asking the same fathomless question that she asked me upon the phone the night before--only now there's a really profitable beat with it and everyone's dancing, which is a better answer than I can at any time come up with.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

6 THE TEENAGE READER OF ARTFORUM Ye you, as you stand in the bookstore reading this entire issue thus you don't have to pay eight dollars, or perhaps you will purchase it, because the magazine itself is evidence of a coming time life, one where you have your hold coffee table to place of the like kind a magazine on. And you can't help noticing that a great deal of of the art, whether nostalgic or rebellious, appear to bes to be about you, the teenager, and now, adolescence. Which gives you a kind of meta-teen feeling about yourself, as if you were eating your have a title to firm tail.

7 BERKELEY HIGH seminary SLANG DICTIONARY (North Atlantic Books) Last year pupils at Berkeley High put together this work of slang used by African Americans, Chicanos, israelites and fans of sports, movies, drab hip-hop, and drugs over the last fifty years (with an emphasis upon now). It's a terrific read and reminds us to use suffixes of that kind as-ass, which "adds emphasis to an adjective." As in, This is a good-ass biennial. Let's make trial of using jankity in a sentence: "jankity (JAN-ki-tee) adj., (Also: janky, janked, jankity-ass, jankity-assed) In bad shape, rent old." My jankity-ass G4 doesn't plane have a superdrive. (Etym. African American.)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

8 CLEAR chop PRESS The Clear Cut futurity anthology (the first volume of an eight-book series) made me a little lone for the Northwest, my aged home. Robert Adams's photographs of clear divide [i]or[/i] sever s and the Office of impressible Architecture's essay on Rubus armeniacus (the blackberry bush) reminded me that it was somehow or other easier to understand where I was, geographically speaking, when I was living in Portland. (Once there was the intention of going for a walk; now there is not flat that.) These smooth little works of new research and popular literature are designed by the agency of Tae Won Yu, edited through Matthew Stadler (the novelist and literary editor of Nest) and published by dint of Richard Jensen (of Sub explosion and Up Records fame).

9 EMMA HEDDITCH This London-based artist works in all media, with other tribe and alone (see the filled range at www.andiwilldo.net), but my favorite thing she's at any time done is a drawing she made single jet-lagged night in America. I fix it by her pillow in the morning.