Looking at McQueen for like the 57th time my jaw still drops. The show is just warped, it’s like it’s from another world, like the models/creatures just stepped off of a space ship or out of the deepest oceans and gave Paris a little slap in the face. So this is when I contradict the latest post about shoes being boring this season. Compared to stuff like Nina Ricci last season, they were and I stand by that there have been a million flats everywhere. But then comes McQueen and makes me have to change my story. A little at least. These ones look like some sort of mutant wales:

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We have two pairs of tickets to Melissa Auf der Maur’s show at the Knitting Factory Brooklyn on 10/17 as part of Royal Flush Festival. Here’s what you have to do to win. To enter, simply send your name, contact details and the answer to contest@intandemmag.com. Subject line should read Melissa Auf Der Mar Giveaway. Two winners will be chosen on 10/16.

Question: What is the name of Melissa’s solo debut?

Drawing and Notification: Winners will be selected from all eligible entries in a random drawing. Winners will be notified by e-mail.

The Rural Alberta Advantage (pictured left to right: Amy Cole, Nils Edenloff and Paul Banwatt)

The Toronto based Rural Alberta Advantage is a three-piece outfit comprising of singer-guitarist Nils Edenloff, multi-instrumentalist Amy Cole and drummer Paul Banwatt. Their music may strike as a lost post folk Neutral Milk Hotel album but listen carefully and you will find RAA’s unique and raucous sound born out of small town prairies and crushing despair. From their early DIY beginnings to their stellar live shows, Edenloff believe his bands formation might have been kismet, “I think at the very beginning we realize there was something special between the three of us playing together.” Signed to Conor Oberst’s Saddle Creek label, after their appearance at SXSW in Austin, Texas earlier this year, RAA is keen to be on your best of list.

IN*TANDEM chatted with Nils Edenloff as the band made its way to New York (see photos and videos of their 10/17 show at the Bowery Ballroom).

IN*TANDEM: Let’s start from the beginning how did RAA form? How long have you all known each other? How did you meet?
Nils Edenloff: Well, Paul and Amy use to play in another band with a friend of mine. So that friend of mine, we went to high school in Alberta, and upon moving to Toronto he started a band with Paul and Amy. Throughout the course of them being in a band, the four of us was sort of hosting an open mic night in Toronto. It was a pretty depressing open mic night. We were all like no one would show up. After a while, this other friend of ours and Amy were sort of like “we’re kind of done with this. We need a break.” Then we were like “we like the bar tab they give us and we like playing music.” So we continued on with it. And that’s more or less how the band sort of got its first start I guess. Paul and I were tons getting material ready for an open mic night that no one would come to. I guess the whole idea from the band hasn’t strayed much from the original set up where there’s a lot of percussion and the guitar tries to fill out some of the sound as possible with some added distortions and stuff. I guess that’s really sort of how the band got started. That was a while a go that was back in 2005.

After we were doing open mic night, we played a couple of shows here and there. We’d have five people in the band. We’d have Paul and I so he was sort of a little loosey-goosey initially. It was about 2006 when Amy started playing with us and the three of us started working as sort of a unit. I guess really that’s how the band sort of started. After we played our first show together it felt special as a band.

IN*TANDEM: Let’s talk about your debut album Hometowns, how did the recording process come about?
NE: We’ve been playing together for a while and a friend of ours introduced us to this producer from Toronto named Roger Leavens. He basically owns a studio during the day and at night he’ll sort of work his way to indie bands he enjoys. This friend of ours introduced us to Roger and we started recording the album. It was sort of a long process. We’d record in the evening when he had time. That would be one evening a week and sometimes it wasn’t every week. It was sort of a long drawn out process. In the end, there were good and bad points to it I guess. It was good because we had time to reflect on a lot of stuff. I guess at the same time it was bad because we had time to reflect on a lot of stuff. [laughs] You kind of drive yourself crazy obsessing over certain things but in the end we’re really happy with the way everything turned out.

Read the full Q+A after the jump. Read more…

This past Saturday, Bushwick’s (that little nabe that could) newest talked about address “Castle Braid”, held the first annual MBP Urban Arts Fest. The event featured live graffiti artists, an array of galleries featuring sculptures and painters, free beer, skate demos, DJs, as well as booths to purchase the work, and honestly, is there anything better than all those things combined?. Castle Braid, located on the corner of Troutman at Evergreen, is the new, shiny home to artists including graphic designers, filmmakers, photographers, and musicians. The building is bursting at its seams with both hipsters and amenities for the ultra cool res. With a fully functional multi-media room, screening rooms, a large gym, practice/ rehearsal studios, and a yoga room, it leaves you asking when you would ever need to leave. You can visit the calendar at http://www.castlebraid.com for future events and get your ass to Brooklyn to che-che-check it out!

(R.teal)

So what is up with the shoes stomping down runway this season? Flats everywhere! Yeah, duh, Dior stuck with some platforms, and of course there ARE heels in most of the shows. But there is also- oh so many flats. Certainly gorgeous flats, but still FLAT shoes. As in without a heel. I just feel like since everything else on that runway often is so unattainable to us mortals, shouldn’t the height of the shoes stick with that standard? The weight of the models. The price tags of the clothes. The hair-do’s. The straight face, no giggling. Impossible. Flat shoes? Not so impossible for the average girl. I don’t know, maybe I have the wrong attitude?

But looking back, I think of Naomi Campbell falling in Vivienne Westwood with a smile on her face. I recall Dior Resort models a few years back with their skinny, pale legs all over the place. And leave it to Alexander McQueen to include two big heels instead of one.

Oh, but stay tuned, because tomorrow I am going to contradict everything I just said about heels going flat these days.

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When Rufus Thomas was “Walking the Dog” in 1963, musician and outsider artist Daniel Johnston was busy “Walking the Cow” 20 years later.

In the ‘90s, a slew of Kurt Cobain photographs were taken of him wearing a shirt with the image from Johnston’s Hi, How Are You? album cover. Since then, Johnston’s two-track, bipolar, lo-fi, manic depressive songwriting has been the stuff of wanting-to-impress-your-friends-with-obscure-music-by-putting-a-song-on-a-mixtape dreams. Guilty.

But dreams are for sleeping. In 2005, Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary, “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” premiered at Sundance and had many indie-band-shirt-wearing music junkies rethink their track lists.

Today, Johnston has teamed up with Dr. Fun Fun and Smashing Studios and created an iPhone game based off of Johnston’s froggy alien guy from the cover of the aforementioned album. The game is set to his original music and art and is, apparently, much like Frogger. Sorry, guys.

Preview the game on YouTube!

-Lya Edwards

I’ll be honest. I came to the 2009 New York Film Festival’s screening of Trash Humpers rather terrified of what I was going to see. It really is a logical fear, especially if you’ve seen the trailer. Especially after my last experience with David Lynch’s Inland Empire, I really doubted my ability to sit through at least an hour of jarring absurdity, the one that I came to know from one of Harmony Korine’s most famous movies, Gummo.

Trash Humpers is Korine’s return to the exploration of nihilism and juvenile absurdities, a very different creature altogether in comparison to Mister Lonely. In Trash Humpers, a group of creepy looking cretins (a woman and three guys, played by Korine, his wife and two friends in old people masks) wreck havoc around Nashville, Tenesse. Constipated, the Humpers roam seemingly aimlessly through small town America, vandalizing, teaching kids to put razors in apples and humping trash.
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