Category Archives: fashion

David Bowie @61

Happy Birthday Mr. Bowie

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueUOTImKp0k&]

Life on Mars (1972) by Bowie

David Bowie was 25 when he made this composition. As with many artists, their most productive and innovative period is between 20 and 30.

I loved the androgynous persona of Amanda Lear-ish Ziggy. I wonder who did the make-up.

Some Amanda Lear androgyny Euro-disco:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxFHfOsxx_w&]

“Enigma (Give A Bit Of Mmmmh To Me)” (1972) Amanda Lear

Previously on Jahsonic: Seu Jorge, a cover version of “Is there Life on Mars”

When hip-hop’s selling perfume and boy band’s selling grief

“Everything Is Everything” is a poem by Paul Heaton read by Bootsy Collins (listen) in a spoken word performance featured on Late Night Tales: Fatboy Slim.

Poem About Everything and Naught:

When hip-hop’s selling perfume

And boy band’s selling grief

The blues man’s market life insurance just won’t flip underneath

Jazz just chucks its concrete into transparent handkerchief

Everything is anything to anyone … (read)

They Call Us Misfits

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFCy2xP3Vuw&]

Dom kallar oss mods (English title: They Call Us Misfits) is a 1968 Swedish documentary film directed by Stefan Jarl and Jan Lindqvist. The film, the first in what would become a trilogy, is an uncompromising account of the life of two alienated teenagers.

The Mods from the original title Dom kallar oss mods indicates that Mods in Sweden were not the Mods we know from British subculture. The youths depicted would have been described in English speaking countries as as hippies.

My girls and fashion

Bonnie, Fara, Fee

Today was my introduction to the work of Tim Walker, which is wonderfully theatrical, fantastique and narrative, without seeming far-fetched. The current issue of Stern Fotografie has a special on his work. Here is a preview:

The breeding of money

Donald Kuspit on contemporary art in Artnet:

By way of introduction, I want to quote some lines from the tenth and final Duino Elegy of Rainer Maria Rilke. Describing the “booths” in a fair — let’s call it an art fair — “that can please the most curious tastes,” he asserts that there’s one “especially worth seeing (for adults only): the breeding of Money! Anatomy made amusing! Money’s organs on view! Nothing concealed! Instructive, and guaranteed to increase fertility!”

I will suggest that the irrational exuberance of the contemporary art market is about the breeding of money, not the fertility of art, and that commercially precious works of art have become the organ grinder’s monkeys of money. They exist to increase the generative value and staying power of money — the power of money to breed money, to fertilize itself — not the value and staying power of art. —Donald Kuspit

Punk Rock: So What? (1999) – Roger Sabin

Punk Rock: So What? (1999) – Roger Sabin
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

From the publisher

It’s now over twenty years since punk first pogoed its way into our consciousness. Punk Rock: So What? brings together a new generation of writers, journalists and scholars to provide the first comprehensive assessment of punk and its place in popular music history, culture and myth. Combining new research, methodologies and exclusive interviews, Punk Rock: So What? brings a fresh perspective to the analysis of punk culture, and kicks over many of the established beliefs about the meaning of punk.

Punk Rock: So What? re-situates punk in its historical context, analyzing the possible origins of punk in the New York art scene and Manchester clubs as well as in Malcolm McClaren’s brain. The contributors question whether punk deserves its reputation as an anti-fascist, anti-sexist movement, challenging standard views of punk prevalent since the 1970s, and discussing the role played by such key figures as Johnny Rotten, Richard Hell, Malcolm McLaren.

Tracing punk’s legacy in comics, literature, art and cinema as well as music and fashion–from films such as Sid and Nancy and The Great Rock `n’ Roll Swindle to the work of contemporary artists such as Gavin Turk and Sarah Lucas–the contributors establish that, if anything, punk was more culturally significant than anyone has yet suggested.

Contributors: Frank Cartledge, Paul Cobley, Robert Garnett, David Huxley, David Kerekes, Guy Lawley, George McKay, Andy Medhurst, Suzanne Moore, Lucy O’Brien, Bill Osgerby, Miriam Rivett, Roger Sabin, Mark Sinker. Roger Sabin is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design.

Roger Sabin also edited Below Critical Radar : Fanzines and Alternative Comics from 1976 to Now (2001) – Roger Sabin [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] and Adult Comics: An Introduction (1993) – Roger Sabin [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

8 Women (2002) – François Ozon

8 Women (2002) – François Ozon
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I saw this on Belgian TV yesterday evening, for about 20 minutes before I fell asleep (not out of boredom). I liked what I saw (but I like nearly everything by Ozon) and it reminded me of Agatha Christie (see quote below) and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (the clothes and general fifties styling).

As for the influences of the movie, they are numerous. Of course, this film is an adaptation from a play that evokes the Agatha Christie universe but Ozon felt like scattering his movie with all kinds of allusions: Vincente Minelli, Douglas Sirk (the deer in the garden). These allusions are especially linked to French culture: the French TV program “au théâtre ce soir” but also Jacques Demy (the bright colors, the songs) and French cinema before the “new wave”. More than allusions, they are tributes from a director who once said “I don’t care about new-wave”. –dbdumonteil via http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283832/usercomments [Oct 2006]

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_femmes

See also: Ozon – film – 2002 films – French cinema

Momus on thin models

Audrey Marnay

Momus:

I find calls to ban “unrepresentative” or “abnormal” models from the catwalk farcical not only because I’m a thin person myself, or because I’m an artist whose work is often about beauty, and who doesn’t think that art should restrict itself to merely average levels of beauty. It’s also because I’m fundamentally anti-rockist. In other words, I’m against “keeping it real”, and I think that claims that a catwalk show, or even a street fashion shoot, are only valid when they’re “based on a true story” are overblown. (If rockism is Stanislavskian, all about realism, anti-rockism is Brechtian, about drawing attention to the fact that all spectacle produces illusion.) —Momus

Digression #1: Vanessa Beecroft Google gallery