With the release of major-label debut What Will We Be (Warner Bros.), Devendra Banhart proves once again he has the potential to be one of his generation’s major players. His voice, with its careening vibrato and fuse-blowing intensity, sounds something like Marc Bolan’s, but his repertoire may be more all over the map than anyone making records today. He combines a love of arcane folk music with hard-rocking psychedelia and an ability to sing beautifully in English or Spanish, a skill he learned growing up in Caracas, Venezuela. He refers to himself, jokingly, as a “fake hippie,” but he appears to be the real thing, a refreshing return to the revolutionary thinking that once seemed capable of changing the course of human events. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen again? Banhart will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Frank Haines
Frank Haines is an interdisciplinary magician, a creator of worlds and one of the funniest, coolest and smartest people I’ve ever met. I met him when I was helping install his show at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts in San Francisco about a decade ago. Whereas most everyone else ignored me, he and equally mindblowingly amazing artist Christopher Garrett were the only people that talked to me. (Making fun of me, of course!) I still look up to them. (And they still make fun of me—ha!)
Shim Co
Melissa Shimkovitz (pictured) is an artist I met in New York about five years ago when she was working on her Voodoo-EROS label. The travails of that job left little time for her to work on her own stuff. A couple years went by, and she found some time and space, and holy moly, just look at the pieces on her site! I can’t not yell out, “Wwwoooowww,” while looking at her pieces. Amazing, freeeeeeeeeeesh, dope, eldritch, luminary, wwwooowwwnneesss!
Alicia McCarthy
Alicia McCarthy is one of the greats, forever. When I was a young girl, galumphing my way through the San Francisco Art Institute, she was—and still is—one of the grandmasters, the heavies, the heroes of the music/arts/everything community in S.F. She also taught me to remember my friends (or to include strangers who’s art I loved) if the opportunity to show came about. I remember at her solo show in NYC, she had a wall of friendship. Her work worked so well with it, it made more than a couple of us cry. I love ya, Alicia, and I owe you the world. Thank you to Sarah Cain for so many years ago saying, “You gotta check out Alicia McCarthy’s work!”
