Book of the Day > Eat. Cook. L.A. Published by 10 Speed Press. “An intimate culinary portrait of Los Angeles today—a city now recognized among food lovers for its booming, vibrant, international restaurant landscape—with 100 recipes from its restaurants, juice bars, coffee shops, cocktail lounges, food trucks, and hole-in-the-wall gems. Once considered a culinary wasteland, Los Angeles is now one of the most exciting food cities in the world. Like the multi-faceted, sprawling city itself, the food of Los Angeles is utterly its own, an amalgam of international influence, disposable income, glamour, competition, immigrant vitality, health consciousness, purity, and beach-loving, laid back, hip, unrestrained creativity. With 100 recipes pulled from the city's best restaurants but retooled for the home cook —like Charred Cucumber Gazpacho, Roast Chicken with Spicy Harissa, Vietnamese Coffee Pudding, Blackberry Mint Mojito Ice Cream and Thai Basil Margaritas — EAT. COOK. L.A.; Notes and Recipes from the City of Angels is both a culinary roadmap and a sophisticated insider's look at one of America’s most iconic and fascinating cities.”

Book of the day and exhibition launch/ book signing tomorrow (4-6) in collaboration with @hubbyco – THIS SHOW IS SO GOOD! > Gary Cannone: Forever Now. See the great piece in the L.A. Times about the exhibition ! "Albums by Conceptual Artists" originated as a crowd-sourced online project in which Gary Cannone encouraged like-minded artists to infiltrate popular and obscure album covers with content from the history of contemporary art in a communal act of parody. Begun as a Facebook comment thread, a Tumblr site of the project soon followed and grew to over five hundred album cover contributions ranging from transgressive to silly, from informative to obtuse. Cannone sees the series as a form of fan fiction, a positive creative act often using arcane minutiae linking the worlds of art and music done by and for art nerds. The artist’s formative influences include 70s comedy such as Norm Crosby, Wacky Packages, Carol Burnett, Mad Magazine, and the disembodied PA from M*A*S*H (the TV series). He is a 2019 recipient of a California Community Foundation’s Fellowship in Visual Arts grant and his artist’s book, Time Settings for a Microwave Oven with Broken Three, Four, and Nine Buttons was recently acquired by The Getty Museum. His current work explores the phenomenology of furniture in gallery spaces through the lens of a prop comic." 

Book of the Day > Shio Kusaka. Published by Gagosian. “Shio Kusaka's ceramic work often incorporates playful details and subject matter, from basketballs and fruit to dinosaurs, raindrops, and wood grain. However, in this new body of work, she further explores her geometric abstractions, offering a more direct view of her technical mastery as she adheres to a single-process approach to study the possibility of endless permutations. In previous abstract works, Kusaka often ended a line or grid pattern once it became distorted by the curvature of the pot, producing fragmented, interlocking patterns that appear as overlapping drawings, contradicting the three-dimensional volume. In these new works, however, she takes an almost topographic approach by carving, painting, and even drawing with pencil intricate lines along the surfaces of each pot, allowing the shape of each vessel to dictate the curves of the lines.”

Book of the Day > Bad Luck Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs From the Petrified Forest. Published by Ice Plant. "The Petrified Forest National Park in Northeast Arizona protects one of the largest deposits of petrified wood in the world. Despite stern warnings, visitors remove several tons of petrified wood from the park each year, often returning these rocks by mail (sometimes years later), accompanied by a "conscience letter." These letters often include stories of misfortune attributed directly to their theft: car troubles, cats with cancer, deaths of family members, etc. Some writers hope that by returning these stolen rocks, good fortune will return to their lives, while others simply apologize or ask forgiveness. "They are beautiful," reads one letter, "but I can't enjoy them. They weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience. Sorry…." Bad Luck, Hot Rocks documents this ongoing phenomenon, combining a series of original photographs of these otherworldly "bad luck rocks" with facsimiles of intimate, oddly entertaining letters from the park's archives."

Book of they day > Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston. Published by University of Mississippi. "The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston is an examination of the life and work of the artist widely considered to be the father of color photography. William Eggleston was born in 1939 and grew up in the Mississippi Delta town of Sumner. His innovative 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York helped establish color photography as an artistic medium and has inspired photographers and artists around the world. Edited by Ann J. Abadie, the catalog contains fifty-five Eggleston photographs, thirty-six that were featured in The Beautiful Mysterious exhibition at the University of Mississippi Museum from September 2016 to February 2017. Eggleston’s longtime friend William Ferris, a celebrated folklorist, donated all the photographs to the Museum. The photographs range from 1962 into the 1980s, representing each of Eggleston’s projects during that time. Some of the photographs are inscribed with Eggleston’s rare handwritten notes about location, people, dates, and projects. Eight of Eggleston’s early dye transfers are in the collection. Many of these works had not been on public display before this exhibition, including black-and-white images that are unique-copy single prints. This is a penetrating examination of the influence of the Mississippi Delta and the American South on Eggleston’s work and of Eggleston’s influence on photography and other creative fields."

Book of the Day > Toilet Paper 17. Published by Damiani. “Toilet Paper is an artists' magazine created and produced by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, born out of a passion or obsession they both cultivate: images. The magazine contains no text; each picture springs from an idea, often simple, and through a complex orchestration of people it becomes the materialization of the artists' mental outbursts. Since the first issue in June 2010, Toilet Paper has created a world that displays ambiguous narratives and a troubling imagination.”