40 years old – and gone. Lee Alexander McQueen, I hope you’re out drinking with Yves Saint Laurent and your old friend Isabella Blow, collaborating on new shoots with Irving Penn and Bob Carlos Clarke and other fashion greats who’ve left us in recent years. Your vision was singular, your talent unparalleled. You summoned ghosts in front of our disbelieving eyes, and crafted runway landscapes of rain, fire and snow. You challenged norms by collaborating with unconventional beauties such as Beth Ditto, and stunned us with your visions of antlered seraphs, Leigh Bowery-inspired harlequins and dashing turn-of-the-century brutes. In the wake of what appeared on the outside to be a successful, inspired year for you, it’s hard to imagine what was in your heart at the moment you took your life. But we all have our demons. May yours finally be at rest.
Just a cute little video for a cute little techno song: a budget version of the Sofia Coppola’s Antoinette cast engulfed in a messy food fight for a video called “Lightworks” by the Acid Girls – a band consisting of these two mustached dudes. What’s interesting about this video is that it was paid for by Toyota Scion. As part of their marketing efforts, Scion pours tons of money into the arts. But most of the artists in Scion’s stable always struck me as rather safe, rather dull. This music video isn’t “transgressive” by any means, but there’s something genuine about it that I found missing from many of the other artists on Scion’s A/V site. The word I’m looking for may not even be genuine, but silly. I mean that in a good way.
In 1930, the MPAA drafted the Motion Picture Production Code, also called the Hays Code – named after its creator, Postmaster General-turned-Hollywood-censor William Hays. The original text can be found here. “Sex perversion” (aka homosexuality) was forbidden, as were scenes of miscegenation, safe-cracking, “dances which emphasize indecent movements,” surgical operations, and “white slavery.” The Hayes Code went into effect in 1934, ending the brief, unregulated era of talking pictures that had started in 1927 and was known as Pre-Code Hollywood. (Two great Top 10 lists of Pre-Code films can be found here and here). Over at Sociological Images, Gwen Sharp has uncovered a photo from the era that intentionally incorporates the code’s top 10 banned items into one image. “The photograph, [taken by A.L. Shafer, head of photography at Columbia], was clandestinely passed around among photographers and publicists in Hollywood as a method of symbolic protest to the Hays Code.”
Silent-era glam, cure Balkan patterns and futuristic, sovaldi fortified silhouettes: this is the work of Lamija Suljevic, buy a 22-year-old designer based in Stockholm. In her new collection, shot by Emma Johnsson Dysell and unveiled last week, the Bosnian-born designer reflects on childhood memories of the home her family had to flee when she was five years old. “When I think of my hometown, I think of old techniques and handmade garments,” the designer told styleskilling blog. “Having that with me during my design process has become one of my strengths. If I’m working on my collections, I work wholeheartedly. Nothing else is good enough. If my grandmother were alive she would be proud, and things like that are very important to me.” Some of the old techniques incorporated into these garments include braiding, embroidery, pleating and crochet. Prior to this collection, Suljevicreleased some vintage-romantic looks on Lookbook under the label name Lamilla.
Just in case you missed this announcement elsewhere, Zo is selling these gorgeous contoured vinyl stickers of her original artwork over at her site, Biorequiem! There are two designs: Cumulus Confection, which appeared as one of the Coilhouse section headers in Issue 02, and Poke, an artwork that Zo released as fine-art print some time ago. The stickers are coated with a UV finish, making them resistant to discoloration over time. Get ’em before they’re gone!
Jay-Z’s hypnotic music video for the song On to the Next Onewas released as “the first music video of the decade” on the morning of 01/01/10. Of course, Vigilant Citizen – who you’ll remember for his incisive analysis of Lady Gaga’s true Masonic origins – was immediately on the case. Jay-Z has been on the Citizen shitlist ever since the rapper wore a “Do What Thou Wilt” shirt last August, so with the release of this video came righteous vindication and the kind of breathless analysis that causes sharp spikes in the purchasing of duct tape and canned beans amongst the site’s core readership. God-fearing truthseekers weren’t the only ones dissecting the macabre clip. In an article on Jay-Z’s ties to the art world, Slatecommented on the clip’s symbols of wealth and status:
Jay-Z and the director Sam Brown jumble bluntly evocative status symbols—a bulging stack of hundreds, Armand de Brignac champagne—with more mysterious symbolism—a bell jar containing taxidermy birds, a swirling ink blot, those whipping cords (which, it bears mentioning, are lifted from the 2002 video for Interpol’s “Obstacle 1”). Some of the most memorable shots in the video are of black paint pouring down a diamond-covered skull. The skull is a replica of “For the Love of God,” a Damien Hirst sculpture that the British artist fabricated for about $30 million in 2007 and sold for a purported $100 million (to a group of investors that includes the Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk and, oddly, Hirst himself). Like the Jaguar XJ, Hirst’s skull telegraphs extreme wealth, but that’s not all: Screaming its value while begging to be mulled over, it’s a status symbol and a puzzle in one.’
But Slate’s art-fag analysis is just part of the big cover-up, because this video’s occult powers are clearly beyond anything that even Vigilant Citizen could conceive of, as explained by Derek Jones from the Light of the Lamb Church (Mr. Jones’ breakdown is, perhaps, the true masterpiece here).
Satanic mind control issues aside, the video itself is well-played. Watching this clip is like stumbling across yet another mind-blowingly amazing, anonymous Tumblr blog where nothing is contextualized, nothing is credited, and nothing stays on top for long (hello, NOWITSDARK). Incredible images flash past your eyes as you continue to scroll down… sometimes you’ll recognize a film still or some fashion editorial from 10 months ago, but most times you have no idea, though you feverishly wish you did. You look at the image properties for a clue, and of course it’s only named something like “tumblr_kwqnmlcOoe1qa2t6ho1_500.jpg”. You will probably never know. This video captures the awed anxiety of seeing too many disembodied things in rapid succession.
These images, created by conceptual art/illustration/photography unit Neon O’Clockworks, appeared in the Japan/Victorian issue of Yaso Magazine. (Yaso, a Japanese-only art magazine published in Tokyo, has issues with themes like “doll,” “vampire” and “Svankmajer” – more about this incredible publication, with pictures and reviews of specific issues, later this week!) The series that these images come from is called “Timeless Prelude,” subtitled “Victorian Period & Huge Head” – click here to see the entire project. The artists write that the series was inspired by the huge wigs of bygone eras, along with Japanese geisha makeup. The result is a nostalgic, Sarah Moon-esque atmosphere that dips into the 1700s and the 1900s, Kabuki stylings and German expressionism, East and West. Not to be missed on their site are some of the other projects: the Kragenedechse installation (make sure you see the room of silence and the exhibition’s window display!), the Japan Avant-Garde portraits and the Dressed/Naked book.
In 2007, David Lynch published a short book on Transcendental Meditation, titled Catching the Big Fish. Roughly half the book is devoted to extolling the virtues of meditation in decidedly Lynchian terms: “I call [depression and anger] the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve.” The other half reads like a scrapbook of anecdotes (“There’s a scene [in Eraserhead] in which [Henry] is on one side of the door; and it wasn’t until a year and a half later that we filmed him coming through the other side of that door”), musings (“there’ a safety to thinking in a diner”) and filmmaking advice (DV, DV, DV). One of the most touching sections describes Lynch’s first and last meeting with the great Italian director Federico Fellini:
I was shooting a commercial in Rome, and I was working with two people who had worked with Fellini. So I said, “Do you think it’d be possible to go over and say hello to him?” And they said, “Yeah, we’ll try to arrange that.” There was an attempt on a Thursday night that fell through, but Friday night, we went over. It was about six o’clock in the evening in summer – a beautiful, warm evening. Two of us went in and were taken to Fellini’s room. There was another man in the room and my friend knew him, so he went over and talked to him. Fellini had me sit down. He was in a little wheelchair between the two beds, and he took my hand, and we sat and talked for half an hour. I don’t think I asked him much. I just listened a lot. He talked about the old days – how things were. He told stories. I really liked sitting near him. And then we left. That was Friday night, and on Sunday he went into a coma and never came out.
The book’s rapturous tone can feel surreal when keeping the author in mind. Just imagine Lynch saying out loud, to you, “when you dive within, the Self is there and true happiness is there… it’s bliss physical, emotional, mental and spiritual happiness that starts growing from within.” But in another section, Lynch addresses the obvious question: is he’s such a blissful guy, why are his films so dark? “I fall in love with certain ideas. And I am where I am. Now, if I told you that I was enlightened, and this is enlightened filmmaking, that would be another story. But I’m just a guy from Missoula, Montana, doing my thing, going down the road like everybody else.”
Lynch states that meditation changed his life. Coilhouse readers, who here meditates? Is it as healing as David Lynch says? Who’s never meditated properly, and doesn’t really get how it works (me!)? Lynch’s passion and clown suit metaphors make me want to try again.
In the past, I’ve talked about how, with a few bright exceptions, the term “fetish photography” has pretty much become an embarrassment in the past decade, about the pornographic banality that eventually killed risk-taking publications like Skin Two. In an alternate universe, Skin Two No. 64 just came out, and this was the cover. Balanced, graphic, authoritative – not too dissimilar from Irving Penn and vintage Vogue. Image by Fräulein Ehrhardt, modeling by Koneko.
These Nomi-inspired pieces were created by Hungarian designer Eva Nyiri. Her first collection, a slick robotic-samuri affair titled “Black on Black,” sparked awe on blogs such as Haute Macabre earlier this year. Nyiri’s work represents a new breed of sophisticated, grownup-goth Eastern European fashion designers, along with fellow Hungarian Dora Mojzes (Nyiri’s best friend of 10 years), Serbian-based Marko Mitanovski, and Slovenian prodigy Tea Bauer.
This week, German photographer Madame Peripetie – who you may remember from the impossible-shoe Insectarium series – published her new collaboration with Nyiri, titled “Warriors in the Dark.” The full shoot consists of twelve images, and can be found in the latest issue of Nico Magazine. More images from the shoot can be seen at the Larapixie blog. Expect more great things from both Peripetie and Nyiri in 2010!
