Thursday 30 August 2012

Deep Impact

A welcome invasion from out of space: extraterrestial hotness supplied by new Odda Magazine and Dutch stunner Ton Heukels.










For more stylized homoeroticism, check out the Odda magazine's website
And this. 


Diana Ross, Love Hangover, Live at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas (1979)


Saturday 25 August 2012

Pride & Perseverance

Magdalena Abakanowicz is one of Poland's most important living artist.
On a rainy day in the early 90's, my parents were to meet her. My father, an amateur collector who doesn't believe in galleries, had found the artist's number in the telephone book and called her up to look at some drawings.

Abakan admired (Tate Modern). Woven from mostly found objects such as harbour ropes























They arrived early at the given address. This suburb of Wrocław was calm and green, and they decided to go for a walk rather than wait around. They held hands and gazed at decaying villas, built by Germans when the city was still called Breslau.


And so, they arrived late. Abakanowicz greeted them with aristocratic coldness at the studio door. She had to be somewhere soon, she said brusquely to the strangers who had made her wait. My father inspected the drawings with inexorable calm while my mother, enraged by the reception, paced around the studio. Arms crossed in front of her shoulder-padded jacket, the strut of her pumps sent echoes through the room like sharp reproaches.
"We're not buying from her", she hissed when the artist turned her back. My father, impossible to offend, had found some works he liked. But desire to keep domestic peace won over Saatchiist ambition. The couple left without a purchase. One with a smile of regret, the other with eyes full of spite. 

Cecyna Flower, 1999 (MoMA collection)
I gasped when my father told me the story almost twenty years later. These days, Abakanowicz's work is found in all important collections in the world, public and private. Gone are the prices of barely post-communist Poland (£100...).

Agora, 106 iron figures in Chicago's Grant Park, 2004-2006


I didn't think I would ever forgive my mother for her pride, until my dad told me last week that he had found two Abakanowicz sculptures on eBay. For a laughable price. Photos were sent to Warsaw galleries to confirm authenticity, emails exchanged with the seller, a discount granted. The thing seemed too good to be true.

And then, my mother said no. No. And again, my father backed down. What was this sabotage, I wondered. And this caving in. Could she still be holding a grudge? I wanted confessions, a catharsis of hurt egos.

Instead, I bought the sculptures myself.  And I am sending one home.  

Embryology at the Venice Biennale 1980
Burlap, cotton gauze, hemp rope, nylon and sisal - approximately 800 pieces

Tuesday 21 August 2012

Clicks of Guilt

I am quitting my job. In an effort to delete all traces of my deviancy, I am sorting through the pictures I've saved onto my desktop over the past 2 years. There is material for both incrimination and visual recycling.  


Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista, British Vogue, May 1990

Hussein Chalayan, spring-summer 1998

Malgosia Bela, for The Last Magazine, 2012


Cindy Crawford in Monaco for Helmut Newton, US Vogue, November 1991 

David Lynch and Isabelle Rossellini, by Helmut Newton, 1986

Helmut Newton polaroid


John Stezaker, Untitled

Saturday 18 August 2012

On Heat

Fashion and film agree on what young people should be doing in these temperatures. 





1+2 - Fashion shoot from Citizen K, 2011
3 - Bertolucci's Dreamers, 2003
4 - Larry Clark's Ken Park, 2002
5 - Larry Clark's Kids, 1995


Wednesday 15 August 2012

Murder with Taste

Some things get better with age. When I was 14, I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley and thought I'd enjoyed it. Seeing it again today made me realize how many references and codes I missed. A stylized summary is de rigeur.


Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) leaves the grotty Meat Packing District in New York with a leather tote bag (right now the same bag is being carried by trendy gays in the equally trendy MPD)...


...and goes to Sicily to befriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) and hold her bag, while she struts around like a waspy Sophia Loren. 

But Tom has his eyes set on firmer things. Dickie's butt, for example. (Supplied generously by Jude Law, Marge's boyfriend).



Unsurprisingly, Tom ingraties himself with the couple. Even Ripley sees that dandy trumps corduroy.



But when Dickie rejects Tom's advances and tells him he's a bore, heads roll.

Marge suspects that Tom might have murdered Dickie. Yet she is too busy picking out a fabulous leotard outfit to stop Ripley from covering his traces and eloping with her gay best friend, Peter. 

The End. 

Tuesday 14 August 2012

A Geographic Advantage

A massive blogger's silence while I was in Ethiopia. The internet is not as ubiquitous there as in our spheres.

Global scale: City-to-City Connections with the Internet (2011)

Updates coming very shortly.