The In Crowd

 

This looks like a hot-ass book on street wear sh-t:

 

All Gone is the first book, imagined by La MJC, Indesignwetrust and colette.

 

As a bible for the streewise, All Gone pays hommage to 180 collectors products launched during 2006 : Sneakers, Designer Toys, Tees, Skates, Collectibles...

 

A tribute to limited edition, featuring : A bathing ape, Acapulco gold, Alife, Amos, aNYthing, BBC, Bounty Hunter, Clot, Crazy smiles, Crooks & Castles, DC Shoes, Dr Romanelli, Futura Laboratories, Huf, Ice Cream, Jordan, K-swiss, Mad Hectic, Mahatoys, Married to the mob, Medicom Toy, Neighborhood, New Balance, Nike, OriginalFake, PAM, Puma, Reebok, Revolver, SBTG, Silly Thing, Span of sunset, Stüssy, Supreme, That's them, Twelve Bar, Undefeated, Vans, Visvim, W)Taps...

 

All Gone also featured original artworks from :

 

KAWS, Futura, Delta, Michael Lau, James Jarvis...

 

Each product is accompanied by a descriptive text, explaining the concept, story or design of the item. All Gone featured interviews from :

 

Nigo, Hiroshi Fujiwara, James Jebbiah, Paul Mittleman, KAWS, James Jarvis, Edison Chen, Madsaki, Christian Hosoi, Dr Romanelli...

 

All Gone is a hard cover book of 178 pages, with English texts only.

 

Stickers and poster included inside.

 

All Gone is a limited edition of 500 copies! Click here to buy. (Spotted via High Snobiety)

Details on the re-release party for the paperback edition of "Where'd You Get Those? New York City's Sneaker Culture 1960-1987," the seminal sneaker history book by NYC renaissance B-boy Bobbito Garcia: 

Touré. You know the brother. If he's not on CNN or VH1 playing media analyst or pundit, he's on BET interviewing big dogs like Nas & Hova and Dave Chappelle. But with his burgeoning multi-media career, it's easy to forget he actually began as a journalist. Enter the recently published Never Drank the Kool-Aid to remind us.


Kool Aid is a collection of his essays for various outlets from Rolling Stone and Vibe to the more high brow New Yorker. Dude doesn't just write about hip hop either. One of the best essays in the book tells the story of an Ivy League scholarship kid from the hood who turned his back on (or used, depending on your point of view) his smarts and incredible educational opportunity to become a major currenty counterfeiter who plied his goods with big league drug dealers. I smell screenplay! Other notable pieces include an interview with Roots drummer Questlove that did the rounds of the blosphere a couple years back in which he asserts (credibly) that crack created hip hop as we know it today and one on Solar records mogul Dick Griffey, the man who mentored Suge Knight (also featured in another of the book's essays) into the music industry and essentially bankrolled the launch of Death Row Records.

Ironically for someone who questioned Cam'ron's sexuality while on the promo grind for his book at Hot 97 in New York, the book is pretty heavy on gay-related content. There's a piece on Caushun the "gay rapper" and another that asserts that hip hop culture as whole has a (not-so-subtle) homosexual subtext (!). But given author Tom Wolfe's pronouncement that Touré is "Oscar Wilde as a street thug" maybe I shouldn't be so surprised after all? I'll leave it at that. Definitely a worthwhile read though especially for those who like to think of themselves as having one foot in the streets and the other in the library.

 

Also just arrived in paperback is Jeff Chang's acclaimed hip hop history book Can't Stop Won't Stop. If this isn't the best book ever written on this music and culture, it comes pretty close. The book is so rich in detail and information, I imagine people who were actually there when some of the events he writes about were happening could still learn a thing or two. Absolutely essential - just don't think you're an expert on hip hop after you read the damn thing.

 

More:

- Click here to learn more about Never Drank the Kool-Aid.

- Click here to learn more about Can't Stop Won't Stop.

As spotted in this weekend's New York Times Style magazine:

 

"Not so long ago, Africa was to soccer what Jamaica was to bobsledding. No more. This year, five of the continent's teams have qualified for a chance to win the most-coveted trophy, the World Cup. In "The African Game," a new book bankrolled by Puma, the Nigerian photographer Andrew Dosunmu documents African football fanatics, from the beaches to the bleachers. (The journalist Knox Robinson contributed essays.) And with South Africa set to be the host of the 2010 world tournament, the book is as well timed as a scoring header on a corner kick. Only one thing is missing: a world champion to call Africa's own." (click here and here for more)

 

Nik Cohn, the journalist whose article in New York magazine about a Brooklyn disco dancer (who he later admitted was completely made up and based loosely on his observations of a 60's mod in Shepherds Bush, London) was adapted into the screenplay for the cult movie Saturday Night Fever, has a new book on New Orleans hip hop called Triksta:

 

"Nik Cohn’s love of hip-hop goes back to its beginnings, and his love of New Orleans even further, to when he passed through on tour with The Who and discovered a place whose magic has never failed to seize him. As a white, foreign-born writer without money or bling, he would seem the least likely rap impresario imaginable, yet he plunges into this violent and poverty-ravaged world as a would-be producer. His passionate involvement with the music and the people who make it leads him through a New Orleans–wards, clubs, and projects–hidden from anyone not born to it: a journey into the heart of the hip-hop dream. En route, he immerses us in lives we scarcely think about, and then only with ignorance and fear, lives at once desperate, heroic, and endlessly enterprising as these men and women driven by talent and passion struggle to survive. Cohn captures a music that’s hugely popular but rarely understood, and with transcendent humanity he reveals this beloved city in all its tragic beauty." (For more click here)