Sixpack France and Blues Inc. are proud to announce
the Japanese premiere of “It Was On Earth That I Knew Joy“,
a short movie directed by Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, produced by Sixpack France.

17 posters inspired by the movie will also be exhibited.

STEVEN HARRINGTON, SEB JARNOT, SANGHON KIM, MUSEUM STUDIO, CODY HUDSON,
JUSTIN KRIETEMEYER, PIOTR LAKOMY, LOWRIDER, PARTNERS & OTHERS,
JONATHAN ZAWADA, FAKER, LA BOCA, NEIL DOSHI, BENBO GEORGE, HOUSE OF KIDS

+ An exclusive installation by PMKFA.

IT WAS ON EARTH THAT I KNEW JOY
Exhbition from August 20th to September 2nd, 2010
Opening Ceremony on August 20th, 2010

Public / Image.3D
Address : 1F 2-32-2 Ikejiri Setagaya ku Tokyo 154 0001
Phone 050-8882-0087

IT WAS ON EARTH THAT I KNEW JOY - TRAILER

A massive collection of impressive unknown images…

Check them out on www.them-thangs.com

Our friends Russell Maurice and Daniel Sparkes will be exhibiting soon in Copenhagen.

The show is entitled “KEISTA MEDIS ANIMACIJOS IMONS (STRANGE TREE ANIMATION COMPANY)”.

Please have a stop if you are around.

More infos: http://www.sonsofstudios.com/

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Sixpack France presents:
PLAYTIME FESTIVAL
August 11-12-13, 2010
@ Privé, Avignon, South of France

In a scene of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, released in 1967, a seemingly quiet cocktail settled in a new upscale hotel slowly goes out of control : as time flows, dance moves get crazier, and people start happily destroying parts of the brand new dance hall. As the orchestra plays, the square patrons look more and more oblivious of their usual principles, of themselves, and of their fresh modernist environment. Parts of the ceiling fall down, lights look unsafe, smokes float around, but some people really seem like they want to dance all night long to the sound of the orchestra’s eerie psych-latin jerk. Spasmodic moves, general confusion, and an exhilarating ignorance of conventions : the Playtime party is of an overwhelming kind, since it invades the bodies of « non-party people », of people usually disconnected with their own bodies and emotions – typical French people of the sixties, actually, but what if these guys could be our role models now ? Because, frankly, who cares about being cool and stylish, about thinking smart and looking sharp, if it’s just a mere excuse for avoiding any kind of emotional outburst and just becoming some pitiful control freak severed from any physical dimension – and please don’t even start with the whole « that’s a dandy attitude » thing, that’s much more embarassing than you trying non-ironically to dance.

Playtime’s jerk dancers probably live in the same massive, high-tech suburbian houses than the ones featured in another Tati movie, Mon Oncle, and that’s why watching them dancing like there’s no tomorrow is so enjoyable. Doing the jerk, they turn into parts of giant, dionysian, confused and confusing body. That’s what Sixpack France’s Playtime festival would love to trigger : a desire for carelessness, outrageous dancing (whether you dance well or not) and destroying material things. Maybe that’s what the avant-garde needs. Or maybe that’s even what the avant-garde is, today. We’ve been spending more than a decade caring obsessively about being cool and witty, fine-tuning our attitudes, pronouncing smart, in-the-know stuff, neutralizing and freezing pretty much everything, and confirming how true this whole social « distinction » theory was. So we guess it’s high time we have to let ourselves go, and that doesn’t have to mean being a frat boy. Remember the Playtime Royal Hotel dancers, remember this vibration that takes them higher without even realizing, and then begging the orchestra to keep on playing. This is our very own avant-garde, here, at Sixpack France.

The Playtime festival will feature Jean-Baptiste de Laubier’s (aka Para One) movie, called It Was On Earth That I Knew Joy, a short that pays an oblique yet sort of obvious homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée, in which video rushes from a destroyed world are being watched, or say, broadcast by a post-apocalyptic computer. Then we’ll have three nights of general sound with a danceable edge : on the 11th, at the « Le Privé » club, DJ sets Jean Nipon (who just released an unbelievable mix CD on Six Pack), and by the Adam Kesher boys, from Bordeaux. On the 12th, the club will host some nice guys from the NYC beardo-disco elite, Rub-N-Tug and Château Marmont. And the 13th, things will get all mixed up with « Le Privé » virtual mainstays Tekilatex & Orgasmic (aka Sound Pellegrino Thermal Team), and an older, but nonetheless flamboyant duet, the mighty Optimo, from Scotland, from whom we can expect dislocated yet juicy grooves, quite similar to the ones heard in the Playtime soundtrack, and also to the curved-up, tangled lines featured on a poster for another Tati flick, Traffic, whose artwork was an obvious inspiration for the festival’s flyer.

Check out PLAYTIME Facebook Event !

Sixpack France will present its Spring/Summer 2011 collection at SEEK Berlin.

We kindly invite you to visit our booth!

SEEK (Berlin)
July 7-8-9, 2010
SEEK @ PREMIUM INTERNATIONAL FASHION TRADESHOW
Luckenwalder Straße 4-6
10963 Berlin

www.seekexhibitions.com

(Illustration : Jonathan Zawada)

Nice!

Robert Crumb, Woody Allen, Kurt Cobain… What do these artists have in common? They are all magnificent losers! We are not the bleak kind here at Sixpack, yet we can’t help but feel a special fondness for these neurotic, depressed and worn down characters who transform, through art, their defeats into victories.

Which is why we pounced on Wilson, the latest comic book by Daniel Clowes, another great expert on anti-heroism.

Let us recall the characters of Eight Ball, the periodic comic book that brought Clowes to light in the early 90’s. David Boring, the Art School Confidential students, but mostly Enid and Rebecca, the two post-teenagers from Ghost World (later portrayed by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson on screen), their icy humor and their unforgiving and sarcastic outlook on society. Through them all, Clowes has never ceased manhandling the myth of the winner, that persistent diktat of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed well-being, overthrowing accepted values. Clowes has set his slightly sociopathic to outright misanthropic characters as new models of coolness. A tribute to “haters”. Normalized happiness made outdated and tacky. Post-adolescent disenchantment as the new esthetic, long before the birth of grunge culture and its subsequent digestion by pop culture.

Tick tock tick tock. Years go by. Like his creator, Wilson, previously unpublished character, has just hit 40 and all the hassle that goes with it. Death of the father, return to the dreary hometown - Oakland - and ensuing reassessment. The midlife crisis in all its glory. Wilson’s bitterness is heightened by a world whose meaning decidedly eludes him. When some suit he meets explains that he makes his living “implementing managerial strategies”, Wilson simply retorts: “Oh God, it’s so terrible the way people live!”

But Clowes’ genius resides in his ability to sidestep hopeless cynicism. He has instead developed and mastered the art of sarcasm and irony. His intelligence and humor change venom into a delicate nectar, drama into black comedy. Transforming shit into gold: an essential quality of the magnificent loser!

In spite of life’s difficulties, disillusionments and a stint in prison, Wilson remains this eternal tender-hearted optimist who relentlessly reaches out to people and hopes for the best in every situation. Cynicism as his desperate declaration of love. Or, like Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote: “The misanthrope only hates men at first the better to love them later”.

What if the true modern-day hero was that depressive guy from around the corner?

Wilson, available on Amazon (Published by Drawn & Quarterly)

French version soon available from Editions Cornélius

Thanks to Olivier and all Fairtilizer team !

Hello Jean, can you introduce yourself to our readers?

I’m your best friend living near you on Elm street. I was the one who came up with the black out idea for The Soprano’s ending. I was born in the Institubes crew in Paris.
Recently I founded Subventions to build a glass roof for Roland Garros Stadiums, because when it rains, you still want the game to continue.

What’s your new release about? Why Sixpack, and why should we listen to it?

It’s a pre-summer mix containing winter moods. It’s a collection of sounds that I love; sounds that make me fall in love with some girls more easily. It’s a love affair between Lionel Vivier the owner of SIXPACK and I. He came to me one day, driving his famous TOURANE car, and asked me this :

“Dude, can you do me a favor?”
“Whatever you want because I love that you look like Wolverine, which is my favorite Marvel character.”
“I want one hour of music with oldies. Tracks we believed in when we where young.”
“Like when we were doing shitty skateboarding?”
“Yes.”
“Like when we where stuck in suburbia with no hope of getting out ?”
“Yes”

No doubt about it, the dude was like me. He loved the same obscure gems lost in the vinyl ocean and the internet tornado. So I decided to forget about house, techno and contemporary stuff, and dive into my collection.
It was so nice to re-edit some lost songs by artists like Fleetwood Mac or Todd Rundgren; distort, accelerate, twist them and force them to obey me. The result is something very emotional to me.
It’s like my bedroom soundtrack with no commercial sense. There is nothing to promote here. Just take the car, cruise, and push play.

What do you like the best about your job?

That I’m getting paid to play whatever the fuck I want. So it means that the promoters and the audience are paying me because they trust me. It’s a real privilège. Also, I don’t know what other job I could do. I’m too much into the past. For music its perfect, but for a modern job it could be bad.

Internet has changed a lot of things in the music industry: faster communication, new ways to monetize music… from your experience what are the pros and cons?

I’m not into digital. I hate mp3s. I rework every mp3 I play. I use my software, to get a warmer, bigger sound. Of course, I’m happy I don’t have to carry my vinyls bag anymore. It’s too heavy and fragile. So playing with cd’s and the internet are the same. They make your life easier. But the darkside of the internet is that there are no longer distinctions. Free music or paying music, bad music and good music; for youngsters, it’s all on the same level. You don’t have to look for the grail anymore. You are no longer forced to have the “intention” to create your own musical quest, your own musical identity. Now evey kid can say, “Oh i know the Detroit and Chicago scene by heart! I love thoses guys!” just because he had downloaded 10 giga the day before! So, for me its a problem of self education and the relativity imposed on music. The loss of artistic values.

As a result of the internet, what has changed about the way you work as an artist? How do you use the internet on a day to day basis? How do you see it evolving in the coming years?

It changed nothing for me; I’m slow and stay slow throughout creation.
I like facebook, every day.
I think the web will get stronger and stronger, like a drug. Then one day there will be a serious back lash, and it will be the end of this delicious anarchy. It’s already happening, I think.

As an artist, has your current source of income evolved in the last 10 years?

Not really, because I also do illustrations and stuff. I think that when you are working in a creative area you should do many different things if you want to survive.

Do you think a label is still relevant in 2010 and what do you expect from it?

Yes, because it’s like a bottle of wine. You know that Château Petrus is a sign of quality, so you can buy almost all of their products with your eyes shut. When you see INSTITUBES or SIXPACK you can never go wrong, I think. It also represent a community of friends and artists who share the same visions. It’s emultation for your work.
You are stronger as a group than on your own.

What do you think about giving away music for free?

I think it sucks, I think it’s cool.
I steal movies everyday, so, I can’t say, really.

Recommend a music site, a club, a movie, an artist, a clothing brand and label?

http://www.tofu-magazine.net
It’s about art, videos, music.
It’s complete and strange, perfect.
The best club is yet to come.
“Phantom of the Paradise,” my movie for ever.
Fred Perry, Dry and Just.
INSTITUBES, do you know this one?

Where are we going?

I remember one of the best album title ever, “All Music Has Come to an End,” by Christian Vogel.
But for real life, I think we are living in the ROMAN AGE part 2 and, like it’s namesake, this empire will fall, soon.
So let’s start learning Indian and Chinese.

Credits: Fairtilizer, June 2010