Few things are as hard to describe as happiness, an emotion defined more by the objects and events that elicit it. Perdiz magazie tasks itself with collecting these highly rarified  moments with hopes of distilling and imparting happiness to its readers. Different components of the emotion–love, hopes, creativity, pleasure–form the content, and the candy-colored graphic design beckons the eyes like sweets to a child.

The long planned tribute to Arthur Russell Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell is now available to listen! The 26-track collection includes covers by Robyn, Blood Orange, Hot Chip, Sufjan Stevens, Devendra Banhart and many more. The tribute has been put together by AIDS charity Red Hot. Stream the compilation in full via npr!

While I’m sure almost all of you have heard of Shirin Neshat, a tribute. Best known for the photographic series Women of Allah, two-screen video works, and the film Women Without Men (2009), her work addresses the female experience and sexual politics in Islamic societies.  As in Turbulence (1998) here, Neshat’s use of lush chiaroscuro seeks to articulate potent ideology, vibrant culture, and unforgiving social codes lived by her subjects.

Maybe the most inadvertently accurate footnote on Ricardo Bofill’s architecture from the 1980s comes from Cyprien Gaillard, our interviewee of issue #24 who actually, at the time, introduced us to the work of Bofill. A mixture of fascination and skepticism exemplified beautifully in Gaillard’s short film The Lake Arches, shot, of course, at Les Arcades du Lac – see a few posts down.

Video: The Lake Arches by Cyprien Gaillard

First released in 1986, Obsession – the first fragrance by Calvin Klein, set the clue for coolness. CK’s autumn/winter 2014 menswear collection once again presented perfectness on the catwalk: Sweatshirts appeared throughout the show emblazoned with the Obsession logo and that of the brand’s other era-defining smell, Escape, from 1988 and Eternity. All combined with the military influence of an army-surplus colour palette (without using camo!). With the late 80’s and early 90’s chic, CK definitely revived an era that was marked by the sharpness of its own classic design and scents.

Rebel girl Kathleen Hanna is back! The lead singer of the punk band Bikini Kill and dance-punk trio Le Tigre, rose to national attention as the reluctant but never shy voice of the riot grrrl movement. She became one of the most famously outspoken feminist icons, a cultural lightning rod. Her critics wished she would just shut-up, and her fans hoped she never would. So in 2005, when Hanna stopped shouting, many wondered why. Through 20 years of archival footage and intimate interviews with Hanna, THE PUNK SINGER takes viewers on a fascinating tour of contemporary music and offers a never-before-seen view into the life of this fearless leader. There will be several screenings before the film will be available on DVD. Check it out here!

“You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad.” How is this possible when someone you dearly loved for 21 years is gone…? Laurie Anderson made the most powerful and intense dedication of love to her recently deceased husband Lou Reed, by writing an essay. It is a farewell, but it is also the most genuine way of talking about a relationship to someone.

When you marry your best friend of many years, there should be another name for it. But the thing that surprised me about getting married was the way it altered time. And also the way it added a tenderness that was somehow completely new. To paraphrase the great Willie Nelson: “Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that’s what makes the jukebox spin.” Lou’s jukebox spun for love and many other things, too – beauty, pain, history, courage, mystery.

Read the full piece here!

Bomba Estero | A Take Away Show | Part 1 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

To those who live to scour Berlin’s soundscape, teeming with many a diamond in the rough, Petite Planètes will stand as the ultimate lovesong (excuse the cliché) to music’s overlooked, obscure, or near obliterated.  Uniting documentary, music video, and art film,  Vincent Moon began his series in 2008 when he left his successful career in music film for wanderlust.  On the road with a backpack and camera, he found a sleeping giant–Tom Zé, in the late 1960s one of the leaders of Brazil’s Tropicália’s musical arm but whose fame political suppression had then stifled–resulting in the first Petite Planète.   Since then, Moon continues to roam, having plotted a trail through six continents and a constellation of artists: Singapore’s One Man Nation, Colombia’s Bomba Estéreo (see above), and Russia’s Retuses to name a few.  A staunch supporter of local, DIY aesthetic, Moon crafts films that are austere yet starkly intimate, striking a tone of melancholy suitable for performances that are both debuts and swansongs.  At times he follows the subjects casually crooning in their homes while the camera meanders between their knicknacks and their spellbound faces.

On a more socio-anthropological level, his present focus on documenting traditional and spiritual music amplifies certain questions that have percolated since Petite Planètes’ inception.  How does tradition be comfortably transition into ephemera?  Does the archival of sacred song, which usually draws power from secrecy, signal the performers resignation to their disappearing lifestyles?  As a European project, does Moon’s ‘experimental ethnography’ and similar works ex. Ron Fricke’s Baraka ultimately engender exoticism and narcissistic Occidental feedback?

Hard to say, but freeze the central image of Tom Zé’s chapter and you can forgive Moon for not struggling more with P.P.’s complexes.  On the rooftop the man is a solitary crack in the São Paulo sky–a powerful frame of sheer beauty and emotion.  With the series title, the image echoes Le Petite Prince. Its universe buzzes with innumerable microcosms ruled by strange and wonderful personalities, but only a few are imparted to stranded pilot by the eponymous prince, stirring the reader’s curiosity into restlessness.  Here, Moon acts the prince, we the pilot, and these musicians all kings, perhaps wise, perhaps doomed, but kings of their locales, their small planets.

At Kulturhuset in Stockholm an extensive exhibition of Imogen Cunningham’s work is displayed all summer until September 8th. Cunningham (1883-1976) explored many techniques, among them beautifully ghostly platinum prints also featured in the exhibition. Cunningham’s modern photography is timeless and has inspired many in her time and after, especially in her way of creating new shapes within another form. Her work often depicts landscapes, architecture, dear ones and artists around her. The composition and especially the almost graphic shapes she creates in her pictures, whether it being of a naked body or a decaying leaf, is always prominent and ceaselessly inspiring.

All images from the series Endbahnhof by Kate Seabrook