Hasta La Ideas

Music and animal hijinks come together in a handmade children’s book by Breathe Owl Breathe

For a child, the ritual of bedtime reading is as important as the story. They enjoy the togetherness, the feel of the pages and the imagination that the illustrations inspire. It’s refreshing to hold something that looks and feels like a family treasure, which is exactly what Micah Middaugh of the band, Breathe Owl Breathe has given us in his new children’s book “The Listeners / These Train Tracks.”

Structured as two stories that read from either cover into the middle, the endings culminate at the centerfold where a seven-inch vinyl record awaits, holding two musical renditions of the stories by Breathe Owl Breathe. Everything from the canvas cover to the pages—hand-printed from wood blocks—was made in Michigan by Middaugh, the final product a result of three years’ work.

“The Listeners” is a comic tale of the friendship between an ostrich and a mole who meet by chance one day in a hole. The mole with sightless eyes and the bird with flightless wings join to form a band called “The Listeners,” and perform together in an underground concert for their friends. “These Train Tracks” is a story of metamorphosis, in which a set of train tracks transforms into everything from a caterpillar to the night sky to a set of pajama buttons. Its mood is both whimsical and soothing, a perfect end to a child’s long day.

“The Listeners / These Train Tracks” is a limited-edition production and is available from Breathe Owl Breathe’s website, shipping in time for the holidays on 6 December 2011.

It’s no secret that Chip Kidd is a big Batman fan. In fact, just a couple of years back, we were talking about exactly that, when we wrote about the famous design keeping tabs in his journal of all things Batman-related at that year’s Comic-Con. Now it seems that Kidd is making that love official, with the news coming last month that DC Comics had brought aboard Kidd to pen a full-length graphic novel and artist Dave Taylor to visually bring it to life. Though the news about Batman: Death By Design, which is set to be released sometime next year, has been circulating since mid-October, there have been a number of great interviews with both Kidd and Taylor out there, with new illustrations popping up from the book here and there. We point you first to Newsarama, who recently interviewed Kidd, learning that one of the story’s main villains is a new creation made by the designer himself. Named Exacto, Kidd describes him as “an architectural critic as a Batman villain.” Comic Book Resources also has a great talk with the designer from right after the NYCC event, wherein he talks a bit more about the artistic direction the book will be taking. Here’s a bit about coming up with the name and where it all goes from there:

I actually came up with the title first. I thought, “If it’s me and you know who I am and what I do, then I’m going to come at this whole thing from a design standpoint.” I’ve said for many years that Batman himself and especially the way he’s evolved is brilliant design. It’s problem solving. And we get into that in the story. Beyond that, it became about me going “What if?” What do I want that I haven’t seen? And really, the overall Art Direction for the book is “What if Fritz Lang made a Batman movie in the late 1930s and had a huge budget? Go!” There’s the visual platform.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Get thee to Los Angeles. The Getty-led artfest known as Pacific Standard Time, an unprecedented series of concurrent exhibitions that highlight the significance of art in postwar L.A., is in full swing and lasts through the spring. Once you’ve devoured Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s new tome on the ‘60s art scene and reread City of Quartz, relax by the pool with the latest dishy page-turner from Michael Gross. The intrepid author of 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery switched coasts to write Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust For Land in Los Angeles (Broadway), a scandal-studded survey of 16 trophy estates in L.A.’s best neighborhoods. But don’t mistake this book for a text-based tour of movie star homes. This is La-La Land, “a figurative geography as much as a real one,” writes Gross in the opening pages. “It’s a place of pregnant possibility and polar opposites, good and evil, American dreams and nightmares, sudden rises and vertiginous falls. So it appeals equally to dreamers and schemers, all of them gambling to survive on an L.A. mountaintop.” With a Joel Silver-produced HBO series in the works (Unreality television?), Gross talked with us about his adventures in “the mecca of self-invention.”

Having focused on Manhattan with your last two books, what led you to look west for Unreal Estate?
I never want to repeat myself but to some extent that’s just what the book business wants. So in order to continue writing social history/exposes, I have to find new subjects. I thought of writing a book about the South of France and my then-publisher countered with the suggestion that I write about L.A. Once I started looking into it, I saw a fantastic untold story and I was off to the races.

You tell the story through 16 homes. How did you go about selecting these homes? Were there particularly criteria that an estate needed to make the cut?
The homes had to be special and redolent with history, and they had to have a chain of ownership that helped me tell the story of the region and the people who populate it. I started with about fifty, winnowed it down to about eighteen, and then focused on six, through which I could tell the larger story.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Competition: we’ve teamed up with the American Hardwood Export Council to give away ten copies of Timber Wave, a book documenting the installation of the same name by architects AL_A and engineers Arup at the V&A museum in London. 

The three-storey-high red oak sculpture was erected for the London Design Festival and remained in place for a month.

Watch an interview with architect Amanda Levete and festival director Ben Evans here and a movie about its manufacture here.

The project is a collaboration between AL_A, The London Design Festival, AHEC, Cowley Timber and engineers Arup.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Timber Wave” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers.

Read our privacy policy here.

Competition closes 29 November 2011. Ten winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

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An insider’s perspective on London’s clubland 1976-1984

There’s a seductiveness that surrounds the London club scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was an era that spawned a host of new music, a few new drugs, some serious fashion and Boy George. With his new book, “We Can Be Heroes,” Graham Smith packages the nostalgia for those who romanticize or actually remember it.

As a young man, the untrained photographer got his hands on a 35mm Praktica and began snapping friends and musicians in the early punk scene. He started out processing them at home in a cupboard, storing them away as mementos. Later, when the media caught on to the trend and began reporting on what they called “The New Romantics,” Smith and others felt that it was misrepresented. The photographic coverage was always from an outsider’s perspective, and attracted poseurs who flocked to be part of the scene’s cool factor.

Smith’s intensely personal photos depict his cohorts, many of whom went on to become major icons. Among the book’s 400 images are stills of Gary Kemp, the Sex Pistols, Boy George, Iggy Pop and Robert Elms. Smith conducted 60 interviews with artists and club regulars and wrote the book with Chris Sullivan, a friend and fellow ne’er-do-well. “We Can Be Heroes” offers a glimpse into the interiors of legendary old spaces like Billy’s, the Mud Club, the Blitz and Le Beate. The book also includes DJ set lists, club flyers, magazine covers and other paraphernalia of the bygone era.

Due out on 8 December 2011, “We Can Be Heroes” is raising funds to get made through the donation-based site Unbound, and still needs supporters. To help bring the book to life, head over to the site and make a pledge. There are a range of donation options—£50 will get you a signed first edition and the satisfaction of knowing you helped record a pivotal moment in music history. In the meantime, the book’s on display through 23 December The Society Club in London.