Summer Roams+Reads=flower girls, gypsies, head busters and beatniks.

23Aug10

Your image in the dictionary
This life is more than ordinary
Can I get 2 maybe even 3 of these
Come from space to teach you of the Pleiades

Can’t stop the spirits when they need you
This life is more than just a read through

(thx…Can’t Stop by Red Hot Chili Peppers)

Chinese astrology says I am a wood rat and my genes say I am Romanian, of dark, fortune telling gypsy blood. Like a rat I am scrappy and fit, always on the move, finding and creating solutions every time. From a young age I would often run away, hit the road to get back on track with a dive into the unknown. A clairvoyant rat in a bandana headscarf, who climbs the rafters for the bigger, pulpier read. My scrappy, ratty survival tendencies are always operating in bespoke or illuminated sense surround to help others in times of need, transcending situations via my vivid dreams which often portend the future, or thriving via my lust for freedom, passion and shiny bits put together as life boats.

Like proverbial lovers on their quest, running through starry fields towards each other in a Rorshach test, our surfing and searching networked culture’s physical boundaries are being scrapped, stripped and re-made whole.

We are now all migratory Global nomads on roam looking for a home, refugees from earthquakes, divorces, corporate cages, Eating and Praying Lovers or Stars of our own Holy Grail search for self and sanity. They can be seen as divine comedies, starring all of us, modern cartoon Ulysses, ala my favorite Coen Brother’s movie, O Brother Wherefore Art Thou?

“O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story…”

“Roam, if you want to, roam around the world, the trip begins with you.” (B 52’s)

Here, one Summer weekend, adventure, the streets, the subways and the rooftops of NYC called. New places and faces I’ve never seen just like that before, some one block from my home. Flower Girls, Head busters and Beatniks. Juxtapositions of stone, bone, plant, woman and man. From downtown halfway-house experiments like The Highline to the rooftop of The Met to cafes and Farmers Markets…Home is in the heart. Every step marks our pilgrimage for truth and love…be it fantastical leaps or exhausted shuffles…we will get there because there is no there.

We’re here. Like Crazy, Man.

To be filled, one’s everything must be empty on a walk, taken apart like Osiris and planted in that black fertile field of deeply felt space, as the strides gradually take over the brainwaves, stimuli rushes in and eventually re-orders all to a new poetic pulse.

Street Find, Head Busters #1, was the above Baby Basquiat painting by a nameless child artist hanging in an impromptu grade school class’s outdoor art show to beautify a construction site.  I saw it as a universal head like a constellation soup of stars and airplanes. I like the painter’s palette this blockhead seems to have in hand and in honor of any journey’s serendipitous gifts, here is what happens when your camera goes on the fritz (which mine did at the end of this journey, and so timelessly, like a confounding gypsy, I put the end at the beginning.)

But before it did…”Come with me thru word and sound” to the words of the unstoppable Anthony Keidis’s song and a little house track to take you Home:

The Leon Levinstein street photographs I saw in my pilgrimage to The Metropolitan Museum of Art on this day seemed to bestow a mantle of YES on my own street snapping. The fact that this flowered damsel marked the transition for me back unto the “civilized: street” from my hybrid city/field trip to the Highline, one of New York’s green Utopias, and seemed to be the modern version of Leon’s photo, taken before ever seeing the exhibit…I felt beyond Sartorialized and Sanctified.

Can’t stop the spirits when they need you
Mop tops are happy when they feed you

The world I love, the trains I hop    To be part of the wave can’t stop

The world I love, the trains I hop    To be part of the wave can’t stop

J. Butterfly is in the treetop
Birds that blow the meaning into bebop

Next Stop…The Highline, a former railway line turned into a park, that mystically floats us mid-belly of the beast of Gotham and mid-brain between our linear Manhattan minds and our wildflower libertine Souls.

White heat is screaming in the jungle
Complete the motion if you stumble
Go ask the dust for any answers

The dust on this day included peeking at treasures of the Past in the Met on the way up to the roof for my pilgrimage to the Starn brothers’ Big Bambu installation. On the way, I passed Salome’s seductive smile as painted by Henri Regnault in the late 1800’s, considered a masterpiece of contemporary art in its day. Interesting that the notes that say he painted from an African woman and then changed the skin tone, indicative of the Orientalism fascination of the time, as “darker” immigrants from Europe and African descendants migrated and integrated. Here, from the same time, George Bellow’s “Roumanian Girl.” I began to realize that the art my instinct drew me to affirmed my wandering gypsy ways as a kind of dance, symbolically taking off my head (mind), as Salome did with the head of John the Baptist…and wandering all the way out into Space.

Kick start the golden generator
Sweet talk but don’t intimidate her

Can’t stop the Gods from engineering
Feel no need for any interfering

Come back strong with 50 belly dancers.

Rita Hayworth’s Mata Hari-ish strip tease in “Gilda” among other key Screen Siren acts projected large woke me up at The Costume Institute’s American Women exhibit. It was much more engaging than the rote artfully preserved garments in idealized painted settings on faceless people so small and so white it’s spooky. Although I admire curator Andrew Bolton’s romping feel via the categories I confess I am always bored when “The Chosen People” are just reflective of the gilded lily upper crust, “The Heiress”, “The Bohemian” “The Flapper” or “The Screen Star,” not ever reflecting on the influence of every day street culture which we know to be equally shifting culturally, if not the very root of the change itself.

Flappers? Bohemians? In our Great Gatsby fantasies they originated at art salon parties however I am quite sure the ladies of Harlem jazz boites and Prohibition secret places shimmied way before an heiress did. Perhaps the abrupt ending of the exhibition in the 30’s and 40’s signifies just when these color and class style boundaries began to come crashing down. Thank you for Josephine Baker and Grace Jones in the montage of many real woman in the end to represent what could easily be a whole other exhibit. The Anna May Wong inclusion was much appreciated in the screen stars section, however the Thud of the invisible sign at the exhibit’s end, “No Coloreds Allowed” left me with a funny taste.

I am grateful to curators such as Valerie Steele at FIT who present costume in a scholarly but non-sterile, even thrilling way (think flying Ralph Rucci gowns.) In her book, The Black Dress, the designers of classic black head to toe gowns are venerated, such as Hayworth’s Gilda gown and Anna May Wong’s golden dragon dress worn in the films, which actually did give me chills to see on display in the Bolton survey.

Upon leaving the anti-climax antechamber filled with all the style-influencers not shown, I decided not to wait for the costume exhibit I always see in my visions and vowed then and there to produce it.

A sensory stew of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Perseus and Sekmet, the Lioness Egyptian Goddess of War and Hunting on the way up to the roof to see the Starn boys exhibit confirmed my vows. Nothing like a journey to instill inspiration for new paths beyond the caves and dusty corners in our minds.

Can’t stop addicted to the shindig

Chop top he says, “I’m gonna win big “

Choose not a life of imitation
Distant cousin to the reservation

Defunk the pistol that you pay for
This punk the feeling that you stay for

In time I want to be your best friend
East side love is living on the westend

“The word Bohem-ian is also an Egyptian word. The verb-stem of this word is Bohem/Bahm, which means to be/make obscure or dark/black/mysterious/mystical. Bohem-ian will thus mean mystical, which describes the mystical nature of the Hispanic Romany religious practices.” Bahm is a A Balm.

Knock out but boy you better come to
Don’t die, you know the truth is some do
Go write your message on the pavement
Burnin’ so bright, I wonder what the wave meant

“…Eventually a cresting wave…,” is the Starn Twins explanation of their Met rooftop installation, “Big Bambu,” in the interview you can listen to via the digits 212.457.8727 on your mobile.  This colossal monument to the temporary, the play on the brand of rolling papers and Cheech and Chong’s 1972 pothead album, little fluffy cloud orbs, headbuster Sean Lennon’s “Spaceship”” on the Ipod…and un-winded people winding in and out of the bamboo maze…all fit my wood rat on the rafters sensibilities to a “T.”

and now my eyes have opened
I watch the stars glow
The sky is like an ocean

The world I love, the tears I drop

To be part of the wave can’t stop

Ever wonder if it’s all for you

The world I love, the trains I hop
To be part of the wave can’t stop

Here is where the Starn wood rats do their thing in Beacon NY.

Come and tell me when it’s time to

Yea, though I walked through the valleys and peaks of art…I had enough of the dust of the museum, the flowers, sky and stars, it was time for being a beatnik and cafe hanging. I headed for my favorite simple, luxe spot with arcane but snappy Euro fare, Cafe Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie, where Otto Dix’s portraits of the Weimar cafe society were on exhibit. Here I could sit, fixate on food, coffee and the people parade before me.

I’ll get you into penetration
The gender of a generation
The birth of every other nation
Worth your weight the gold of meditation

This chapter’s going to be a close one
Smoke rings, I know your going to blow one
All on a spaceship persevering
Use my hands for everything but steering

Meanwhile, back on Earth, after a simple delicious meal and esoteric chain smoking, I spyed Sevag Mazakian, Manager of Cafe Sabarsky, with his back to some of NYC’s best desserts as he became suddenly fixated by something out the window.

After I showed him the picture, he said “It’s not so penetrating”, he said he was actually just stalking “The Better Sweets Outside Sabarsky” aka, the new Ice Cream Truck and its Vendor that replaced the one from last week. (see what happens when you sit in one place too long? The body, the details take on weight.)

Sweetheart is bleeding in the snowcone
So smart she’s leading me to ozone
Music the great communicator

Use two sticks to make it in the nature

Popsicles on a stick are one summertime street buzz and the real high green buzz of NYC is all about Green Markets with fresh farm organic vegetables and fruits…astral-bodybuilding gold indeed. After my meal at Sabarsky, I finally made it to the one 3 blocks up from me and for $23. I brought a stash that lasted a week and a half of color and bursting dirt flavor on my plates.  The week before, at the Union Square market, a took home a Vietnamese cilantro plant and herb advice galore from devoted shoppers for my indoor herb garden I am building as my headboard for my bed.

I’ll get you into penetration
The gender of a generation
The birth of every other nation
Worth your weight the gold of meditation

So just why is NYC so damn sexy in the Summer? Let me put my own Beatnik poet hat on and venture that all the metal mental power of the Phallus rockets are a bit chop-topped, soothed by Miss Green, rounding out edges of steel and slicing sunshine. Buildings look a little more strip teasing, we are a little more belly-dancing in the Beast somehow when the green is pumping in our veins. The heat shimmer shakes the City and Planet, pulsing like a spaceship quivering, knowing the journey is a joke, and caring even more because of it.

This chapter’s going to be a close one
Smoke rings, I know you’re going to blow one
All on a spaceship persevering
Use my hands for everything but steering

The world I love, the tears I drop
To be part of the wave can’t stop
Ever wonder if it’s all for you
The world I love

Come and tell me when it’s time to

Can’t stop the spirits when they need you
This life is more than just a read through

written by Jade Dressler

“Star House Episode 01” House mix from Claude Serieux (listen loud on the phones)

image of Black Sea swimmers from Romanian photojournalist, Petrut Calinescu, on a journey documenting the people and cultures around The Black Sea

Filed under: NEW YORK   |  5 Comments
Tags: Andrew Bolton, Anna May Wong, Anthony Keidis, Balm, beatnik photos, Big Bambu, Bohemian, Cafe Sabarsky, cheech and chong, chinese astrology, claude serieux, Coen brothers journey, costume institute, Egypt Lion Goddess, Egyptian dancers, Egyptian Goddess, flower woman, flowers girls, George Bellow, Gilda, Grace Jones, gypsies, gypsy Egyptian, Henri Regnault, how to seduce, J. Butterfly, jade dressler, Josephine Baker, Leon Levinstein, little fluffy clouds, Mata hari, Metropolitan Museum roof, mop tops, new york city subway photos, NYC farmers markets, NYC green markets, O brother wherefore art thou, orientalism, Otto Dix, Perseus, Petrut Calinescu, Pleiades, Pliades, pulp fiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rita Hayworth, Salome image, Salome painting, Sean Lennon, seducing woman, seductress, SEkmet, Sevag Mazakian, seven sisters star, sexy NYC, Spaceship, Starn brothers, tempter woman, The Black Dress, the flapper, the highline, The Met roof, Ulysses, Valerie Steele, wood rat

Sense Satiated. I Lake Very Much The Towns of Como and Bellagio

06Jul10

…the spicy and sugary scent, filled with lives and steeped in ideas yet unknown, reached around the world to pull me instantly into a Stendhal syndrome, as I sat bathed in the blue glow of my Mac, midday, middle of Manhattan. Filling slowly my nose and reaching deep into me, it soothed and surprised me as it returned again and again for weeks, rising and melting within me like an immersion into a warm bath. As there was never a literal perceivable physical source for the scent, I eventually realized it always came as I deeply relaxed or felt a truth resonate.

“Pittaspora!” claimed Alberto, the preternaturally handsome Direttore of Fragrance Resources, identifying the heady scent coming from the bushes lining Lake Como, Italy. We stepped into a heavenly cloud of the scent as we disembarked from our 1968-vintage, restored, zero-emissions Riva speedboat after a Prosecco-infused thrill ride around the lake unto the boat dock at the new CastaDiva Resort, via the expert arrangements by the dashing Giancarlo Porcu, Tango dancer and GM of the newest 5-star resort in Lake Como in 100 years.

Driven to sensorial overload by the sexy curves of the Riva, the cool lake spray and the dashing speedboat driver Erio Matteri, (who, of course, is De Niro and Brangelina’s private captain) my boat mates were the CastaDiva interior designer, Erasmo Figini, the CEO of CastaDiva, Gabriele Zerbi, all three in the front waving to their “I Heart The Lake” friends at their Villas as they passed and Alberto Rimoldi and Daniela Fedi, Il Giornale’s fashion editor and her daschund, who all sat enthralled next to me. The scent that visited me in Manhattan was here lushly covering the hillsides, a most powerful and seductive top note to the ecstasy that is Lake Como. (And Villas, Villas, Villas are definitely the Real Thrillas)

The next day, I abandoned myself further on a leather lounger in the pink Himalayan sea salt room senses soothed to Opera music at the spa in CastaDiva, where Stendhal himself stayed and clearly invented his syndrome. The Resort is is built around a legendary gem, the restored Villa of Giuditta Pasta, Soprano muse to Bellini, which she modeled after La Scala where she found her fame and she employed many of the same famed artisans for the stone, wood and Florentine floral sgraffito designs. As the Pittaspora scent came through the salt walls carried on the moisture from the lake, as it is designed specifically to do…Time and Place became Pure Beauty.

Welcome to Lake Como, welcome to the “beyond” magic that is Italy. Where a flower perhaps designs its scent to pull you towards it like a hungry lover and a spa is designed to converse with the moisture of a Lake.

A steeping in the senses of the earth and the passions of those that have walked it for centuries inspire Italian living. It can’t help itself to breathe “design” intertwined with every moment when such beauty permeates.

From that first synchronized moment of bright afternoon in literal and logical New York City while the sun at dusk shimmered and stirred Lake Como’s James Bond-like adventures and stirred the Pittaspora to release its Secret Life of Plants-style persuasion pulling me to Italy…to my Sommelier seatmate on the return trip back to the States, Francesco Baravalle, of the family-owned Cascina Bruciata vineyards, who told me of his passion weaving of sky, rain, dirt and fruit into wines…Italy really got me good this time!

Speeding around the Lake and the lake towns of Como and Bellagio with my photojournalist, author and supreme architectural observer friend, Paul Clemence, we could not stop our heavy breathing over the sense saturations. We revered it all, from medieval bricks and stones to the neat bones Fascist architecture as in the Casa de Fascio di Giuseppe Terragni in Como, a landmark for architecture students from around the world. The arts, streets and wares of Lake Como and Bellagio, a resort since the 1st century, speak to this sacred marriage of beyond time and space biology, ancient history and modern imposition which in concert satiate the senses. Here is just one breath of what we saw, gasped and almost fainted over.

In Italy, green botany welcomingly winds into human habitation and buildings everywhere you look from the terraced gardens of the city buildings to the recent fruit orchard installed at Milan’s Garibaldi station built during the Salon by the artists with amazelab and to the upcoming 2015 Milan fair, entitled, “Universal Exposition: Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.”

Even a Fascist landmark will frame the hills begrudgingly and even delicately.

The lake towns of Como and Bellagio satiate the senses as they are nestled like precious eggs by what most people would call mountains and locals call “hills,” the lushest green forests holding the Lake, which all agree, changes colors and moods like a live painting.

…A look through a fence can reveal a surprise kitsch kitchen garden in Bellagio to…

…a palm tree at the end of an alley…

…to a hillside that looks back at you like an animal, unquestioning in it’s natural yet artful and perfect state…

In the towns smooth round stones are laid patterned for the leather soles of humans to tred and absorb the multiple of objects fashioned from the flora and fauna surrounding. Walls might be made of millions of tiny moss trees, replicating the hills and flowers or follies, Medieval graffiti or trompe l’oeil and every turn of a corner unveils surprise Italian style from a wall’s lichen colony to a “I’m liken that silk/cashmere/diamond thingy-thing on me.”

In Como’s heart, Piazza San Fedele was, until the 19th century, the grain market and the same echo of voices in the square pulse through the tiny rooms of these sweet saintly relics made of herringbone patterned stone and timbered framing, now housing Ubik, the slick art bookshop tucked between more modern era buildings. In the center, where once sheaves of grain mountains lay stacked, a proud student display of architecture or designs for Como silk scarves underscores the timeless lineage of design.

As bikes and mopeds doggedly curve around the corners of quirky examples of the 12th to 21st century architecture of the square, graffiti talks across the ages on the walls of the splendid church of S. Fedele with its elegant 12th century apse, and then unfolds Musee Civico and Museo Garibaldi, while one heads on via Vittoria on the way back towards the Duomo.

…a passageway can lead to a garden, an art exhibit or a high tech warehouse and cafe devoted to Como’s famous silk manufacture.

…Mulberry tree ripening berries actually look like the silk worm cocoons, growing on the Lake’s “hillsides” for centuries.

The soft arts are spun from Lake Como’s silk worm cocoons and while the inhabitants of the cocoons never make it into actual butterflies, for the inhabitants of Como it is a serious business and for wearers of silk worldwide, butterfly status is assured as they flit about in the color and lightness loved by couture designers, the likes of Pucci and Viktor & Rolf. The most intriguing manufacturer is Mantero with their concept store and cafe, La Tessitura. Housed in a restored 1887 textile mill, with original glass ceilings, wooden beams and cast iron columns, the building highlights the re-purposed materials and sustainable designs.

Today the raw silk is mostly imported from China, but the finishing dying, weaving, designing and printing is still done in Como.

Another Como-only find is Moresi cashmere, on Via Vittorio Emanuelle, very chic, simple but intriguingly shaped dresses and tops…a sure sign of exclusivity when their website doesn’t even let you see the styles.  If the visible is giving one Stendhal-like palpitations, surely it is the “Exclusive Stories” those happenings inside the Villas, the custom-made, the bespoke lives, the layered history and goings on that stir imaginings to make the head spin.

Back in the boat to Bellagio…

Bellagio’s surprises are more of the postcard variety, the town is swarming with tourists, but the real pleasures are underground or up in the hills where the olive groves and century old churches can be found.

in Bellagio, just under a grove of olive trees…we found “Gepetto” and his wife tending the shoppe selling the famed Bellagio carvings of the olive wood, as the Tacchi family has been doing here since 1855.

Back in Como, the amusements a walk will surf you to range from graffiti talking across the ages on the walls of splendid churches, commemorations of saints popped unto walls in forgotten benedictions to civic pride shout-outs to trade guilds or the pairing of a huge graphic trompe l’oeil next to Rubens.

Un-purchasable color is Como’s politely ordained 5 color range of hot salmon pink, saffron yellow, tan, palest ice blue or bone white for buildings while its red and yellow speedboats and bold signage at the dock speak to the graphic harshness that pulses behind Villa doors, windows and curtains. The unseen Stendhal of that for me is an Opera of Helmut Newton’s women adjusting their garters in Villa d’este gardens, Clooney’s smirking Martini commercials, operatic bel canto singing mixed with Madonna’s Fever, tousled and rustling crispy Renaissance silk garments to the mysterious Versace villa built upon his silken Dolce Vita.

Displayed with equal passion of careful lovers, shop windows in Bellagio are shaded by heavy curtains in symphony with the sun’s changes during the day…

behind which we found chocolate diamonds laid out like candy at Bellagio’s The Corner Shop …

or rainbow colored and striped pasta of every shape to remind us of Italy’s most revered sensual pleasures of food and wine.

Even a pre-dinner and calories steam of eucalyptus and lavender in CastaDiva’s red, white, pink, blue and maroon tiny Missoni-like mosaic steam room cocoon temple to design will remind you that while design is fine, it’s the Nature in Italy that whispers the loudest to soothe…

Beyond the Italian philosophy of Slow Food which has spread globally now, the 5-star visually supreme and garden-orgy of food designed by Paolo Casagrande, the chef at Castadiva declares a new genre, “Sexy Soft Food” for the satiated experience. One standout was absolute supreme aria of softness, the sweetness and saltiness – Drowned egg, raw ham, pine nuts in a green pea soup –a little world on your plate.

On my return trip back to the States, a seat mix-up put me next to Francesco Baravalle, of Cascina Bruciata vineyards, in the US to market his wines. His best friend, Guido Martinetti, whose Slow Food, organic Grom gelato can be found in the lake town of Lecco as well as Paris, New York and Tokyo, is invested in the farm itself supplying his own fruits from the company owned farm called mura mura.

Over time the temporary worldly decrees of Church or State patronage may frame the desires and devotions of the Interpreter of The Senses and determine the language we fashion from rocks from the mountains, shapes or silk from seed pods and transformational cocoons or other dances…

…and the town walls may watch and record the human parade of dances, dreams, bodies and dramas.  As we open to and determine the design of our thoughts and actions first to connect and soothe, in places such as this underground grotto with glass floor floating over the fishes at the CastaDiva Spa, we invite the conversation with that which is ancient and at the same time a brand new frontier.

In the lake towns of Como, the forces of Beauty and Nature have teased and weaved with the folly of humans, expanding what is possible for over 10 centuries. Pliny, Bellini and Stendhal to Versace, Madonna and Cooney, poets and farmers, waiters, cooks and artisans have breathed, played and loved here, inviting the deep breath and saturation into the deep silence at early night and morning…when flowers begin to talk to Dreamers and Lovers.

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(most images by Paul Clemence, flower photo by Carlos Rueda, Museo di Garibaldi by Gary Kinsman, written by Jade Dressler)

Filed under: ARCHITECTURE, ART, ITALY   |  2 Comments
Tags: 2015 Milan Fair, Alberto Rimoldi, aMAZElab, Bellagio, Bellini, Carlos Rueda, Casa de Fascio di Giuseppe Terragni, Cascina Bruciata, CastaDiva, CastaDiva Resort, Como silk scarves, Cooney, Daniela Fedi, Energy for Life., Erasmo Fignin, Erio Matteri, Fragrance Resources, Francesco Baravalle, Gabriele Zerbi, Gary Kinsman, George Cooney, Gian Carlo Porcu, Giuditta Pasta, Grom, Grom gelato, Guido Martinetti, Helmut Newton, jade dressler, La Tessitura, Lake Como, Lake Como Italy, Madonna, Mantero, Moresi cashmere, mosaics, mura mura, Paolo Casagrande, Paul Clemence, Piazza San Fedele, Pink Himalayan Sea Salt, Pliny, Pucci, Riva speedboat, Slow Food, Stendhal, Stendhal syndrome, The Corner Shop, Universal Exposition: Feeding the Planet, Versace, Viktor & Rolf, Villa d’este

Suddenly, Feminique Mystique

10May10

Meet Your Feminique Mystique. The Sit-Arounds, The Hystericals, The Conjurors, The Teasers, The Milkers, The Androgyne Fruits, The Dissolvers, The Absorbers, The Voyeurs, The Duality Erasers and The Procurer of Animals, Meat and Bodies.

True Story: I learned almost everything about the human body anyone could ever want to know, as a child, every morning as our 4 person family, naked and sqwooshed, prepared for the day sharing 4 foot square space of 1970’s faux white marble patterned linoleum clad Chambre du Bain. Its octagonal, bubble glass shower cabinet, white shag carpet and steam and powder and perfume and crackly radio pop songs were the stage for my father ruling the roost and his bustling (literally) 3 person-feminique family harem behind the newspaper on the throne. 1970’s Bathroom as classroom. Closeness is Hostess to The Mostess.

Even though there were 2 other bathrooms in the house, where everyone was welcome to do their thing, in private and scheduled intervals, my father, mother and sister and I naked and incomprehensively and happily chose to share that one small space set to hyperspeed, no holds barred and everything bared.

No wonder I covet my solitary bath ritual today carefully tending to candles, running the perfect water temperature and whispering the mantra my Father endlessly repeated to my excitable Aries self from childhood thru teens…” slow down, slow down, slow down…”

Quirky, messy and tousled family covens and rituals can be the source of extreme disfunction or catapulting, emphatic myths made into new maps. I am happily seeing men and women choosing and living by Old/New Feminique qualities such as close families, shared “covens,” womanly energy of close confidents, secret societies, rituals, cycles and becoming their own oracles, seers and muses and enjoying the reward of tight and tough friendships and the Earth Mysteries alike. Photographer, Michael Buhler-Rose’s boudoir photo above, at Humble Arts, captures for me this new shared feminine vibe and literally, how much more pleasant things can be for everyone beyond bra burning. (we like bras)

Women’s Liberation and Crunchy Goddess-y Proclamations aside…here are some suddenly feminine mystique archetypes appearing as artists, corporations, designers, thinkers and doers, friends and oracles conjure a siren song to both males and females to play with their own brand of Feminique Mystique. Meet The Sit-Arounds, The Hystericals, The Conjurors, The Teasers, The Milkers, The Androgyne Fruits, The Dissolvers, The Absorbers, The Voyeurs, The Duality Erasers and The Procurer of Animals, Meat and Bodies.

ONE: The Slow Down Slow Down Slow Down Sit Down Sit Down Sit Down Sit-Arounds.

Women Know How To Wait. Slowed down and Listening is very Feminine Mystique. There is nothing as slowed down as artist oracle Marina Abramovic in her Museum of Modern Art ritual in New York City until the end of May 2010.

Pre-Marina True Story: Many moons ago, when I was part of the central hub of a yoga community, we catapulted a certain shy, bespeckled chanting singer by the name of Krishna Das, from a small New York State ashram with audiences of about 20 to the start of his world-touring reputation of Kirtan God with top billing. Krishna Das earned his Hindu stripes hanging in India with Ram Dass and the famous crew of Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg sitting and seeking enlightenment at the feet of my own Guru, Maharaji. (They also tried to feed him LSD, but that’s a story for another day)

There is a snippet in one of Krishna Das’s songs of Indian holy men chanting and I always thought they were saying “Sit Around, Sit Around, Sit Around.” Actually they were chanting “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram,”the earthly names of Krishna and his consort, The Goddess, Lalita.  Whatever they were saying, as an International Director of Marketing for a music company juggling five countries, ten staff people and a challenging personal relationship, just sitting around chanting and meditating definitely helped my stressed feminine mystique.

Marina Abramovic sits around, sits around. The exhibition at MOMA is entitled, “The Artist is Present” and I love that it is a Woman who is making perhaps one of the most powerful creative statements I have ever seen in The Hallowed Halls of Art. Earnestness. Meditation as a sport, Marina is sitting for 8 hours a day, inviting anyone to sit opposite her in silence, reverence and EverythingNothingness. First time I saw meditators under klieg lights surrounded by spectators as if it was a boxing match. The simplicity  and seeming lack of stimulus brings up emotions just like sitting to meditate. A table between 2 people. Red dress. Forced scenarios.

Tiny stories from her abusive childhood typed out on writing paper are like the universal psychic circus paraded out sacrificially for us from a Slowed Down, Sit Around Gal.  On my third visit the table is removed and Marina sits in a white dress. A friend who has seen Marina five times, says at the end of a day, when all the crowds dispersed, he watched as she bowed her head and tears flowed endlessly from her eyes. Slowing Down, Sitting Down, in the middle of New York’s cacophonous jungle to the noisy Nepal village sprung up around Buddha Boy, sitting for months in meditation, modern Buddhas Are Us… sitting and dreaming us.

Marina’s dream spreads around her in the Museum, with powerful imagery, films, performances and encounters. You cannot miss the Enlightenment.

TWO: The Hystericals.

True Story: He screamed a diatribe of expletives at the top of his lungs right into my face as I stepped out of the subway car unto the platform and I woke up the next day, my 50th birthday,with a 90 degree hot lava feeling in my throat and a pounding head+ body. As softly meditative I can be at times, the 7 ft tall, obviously mentally disturbed man’s surprise verbal attack into my face easily prompted a screamed back expletive and he dutifully responded same as the subway doors closed on him. As I came up to the street, my nerves instantly calmed as I recalled Marina’s work at Moma, that I had just seen with a friend. Screaming heads, recipricol slapping, mouth to mouth breathing and shamanic endurance tests were the portals to body-less and buddah-full more states of being…the stuff of high art for Marina.

Speaking of working out self loathing out loud, men too, are not exempt.  If you are loathing you better shout it out. Toxic bodies exist because of toxic minds. A woman’s anger, in the form of earthquakes, tidal waves, tornados and volcanic eruptions are in full force these days forcing us to birth from anger to love. Get thee to a treadmill, a drumming circle with other men in headbands, play squash or crab soccer or wail kirtan, but please, Mad Men and Mad Women, would you stop holding it in and taking it out on the rest of humanity?

THREE: The Conjurors.

Conjuring the snake. The tempter of transitions, the force and power of creative energy, Kundalini coiled in potential and ready to strike….in a business meeting or that sacred Hindu chakra hot spot. If you don’t know, ask somebody.

The horned one is the man shaman crowning himself with creative powers. Coiled rising snakes and animal horns represent the horns of cows and certainly the fallopian tubes surrounding a womb. Georgia O’Keefe saw it. Celtic stoneworkers lived it. The symbol of Jesus on a cross or Marina’s woman on a bicycle seat on a lit wall in the MOMA or us embracing our lives or a friend with outstretched arms, live it. This is the heart extended.

Luminosity (a must see piece and video) is a Marina performance piece where a woman or man is perched five feet off the ground for 700 hours as a Christ-like sacrifical body on a bicycle seat. Conjuring correctly does require sacrifice, strength and vulnerability. Knowing this is halfway there.

FOUR: The Teasers.

The 48 Laws of Power cites endlessly how people are captivated by what they think they are missing. If we ALL seek Love, The Groove and the Tease is in the Delight of the eternally unseen Heart, although it might just show up first as exposed body parts.

Censored images of women in film from days gone by seem silly but no less provocative. Knowing when to hold back and when to let it go is the tease that both men and women are cultivating. The Play is the Thing.

FIVE: The Milkers.

True Story: My mother swung between being a Saturday night 70’s glamourous Halloween party hostess in her swirling, blue and green chiffon and satin Age of Aquarious gown, White Russian cocktail in hand, among a household of groovy guests to a Sunday morning-after common laborer look with baggy grungy shorts, thick copper metal cateye bifocals, water spritz bottle and ironing board tackling the huge pile of wrinkled clothes while watching old movies on the television set under the watchful gaze of this Women’s Lib era poster she emphatically hung on our Laundry room door one day.

The female body is a machine. The word for Mother, Mater, becomes Material, the sweat, hair, nails, plants, steam. A laborious economy of drapery and flesh folds endlessly mopping up, washing fabric, negotiating skirts and emotions.

A co-curated exhibition of artists from Tel-Aviv, by my friend Maia Morgensztern, entitled JaffaCakes TLV recently shown in London, featured artist Mika Rottenberg, whom I first saw at the 2008 Whitney Biennial with her “Still from Cheese.” Mika envisions the female body as a rag-tag primitive, a science fair contraption-machine dialouging with fleshy, folky, earthy body processes and modern beautifying rituals.  “These tropical devices exploit more than simply women’s labor, but also use of all that the body exfoliates, grows, and removes.” Coolhunting’s video on Mika’s own process is the evolution of peoples’ idea of “women’s art” beginning and ending with niceties such as Judy Chicago’s Dinner party, thank God.

Tapasya is a Sanscrit word meaning friction, repeated movement, generation of heat and energy. It applies to devotion in any form. On this Earthly plane of duality, we strive for balance beyond the 1,2 energy of computers, sex, repeated pleasures and the duality or our minds. Can this all this churning, friction and heat give rise to balance to catapult us beyond this plane or at the very least can we figure out how to live in balance here?

SIX: The Androgyne Fruit.

Love the drag queens, Bowie, Klaus Nomie, Numero hotties and the gang at Vlada’s but the girls really do androgyne better. It’s uncomical, where identity is neither gender or its definitions or poses, because feminine mystique looks better petite.

This is mastery, what we all hold within and must ultimately express. Outward cues are cute, inward core is more. In fact, the taste of this feeling is like the best fruit. For sure, it was Eve who plucked the fleshy, delicious fruit of fun first and shared it with man. No blame kids, taste of this plucky fruit is directly osmosis with the cosmos!  We are surrounded by the androdynous and it is a delicious list from Priscilla of The Desert, Amanda Lepore’s pout, Hillary Swank, to even Tyler Perry to Catherine Opie at Gladstone Gallery‘s beautiful boy-girl black and white photographs.

 

 

SEVEN: The Dissolvers.

No Body Does Dissolution Better than a Babe. Girls are change itself. Through the cycles of Life’s Movie running every month to Closets of personas, pain and pleasure, the feminine mystique can destroy a story, puzzle it back together anew minute to minute and lifetime to lifetime.

 

True Story. The night before my Father died, I had a dream that the contents of our entire house growing up were floating in a flood that took up the whole lower underground part of the house.  The night he died, that flood of emotions created a dream where my car went to the end of a dead end street blocked by a huge moving truck. I got out to meet a wealthy man who pointed to a pyramid of steps going up and then down, covered in sand.  Each one had a central circle footprint with a red figure eight in it. These were made he said to protect from the taunts of children. He held a cat in his arms and said, “She was a kitten before and now she is a relaxed cat.”

The phone rang and awoke me from this dream with a voice telling me of his entrance to the hospital where he would pass the next morning. After my father died I couldn’t meditate or do yoga. His childhood mantra to me of “Slow down, slow down, slow down,” was not to be found through typical spiritual practice, but a step by step approach to life.

I grew up as an Art Groupie to Duchamp’s readymades and his Nude Descending a Staircase in The Philadephia Museum of Art. I recently saw Jack Robinson’s SCANNOGRAMS at my friend Sebastien’s New York Gallery Nine 5, where a body meets scanner repeatedly until the parts make up a new whole. Much like Marina Abramowitz metaphorically repeatedly slamming herself into a wall, the feminine cyclical way of ritually tearing apart and building up again can be a sooth to the soul knowing and respecting the process.

Stairs and a step by step process are logical answers to dissolution, death and transition. No one does this better than a woman or man who knows how to retreat, re-piece and re-invent themselves as a salve to the natural cycle of destruction and creation.

 

 

 

EIGHT: The Absorber, The Voyeur and The Duality Eraser.

No matter it is the Earth Itself or the female in a group, she is the weaver, the forager, the duality juggler. No wonder we can’t keep our eyes off of Her.

The artistic seer calls the shots in Kim In Sook‘s staged voyeurisms, Naama Tsabar‘s cloth,music and performance saturations blurring boundaries and the multi-Louboutin clad armies of Vanessa Beecroft.  On a more personal level, master symbolist Avia Venefica explains signs and symbols to hungry googlers awakened by a dream or a persistent sighting, her symbolic weavings on What’s Your Sign? are hugely popular, almost reaching the frenetic globally-growing cult that surrounds Susan Miller’s Astrology Zone. Pillars are in place in the Delphi Temple of TV and Media from Oprah’s explorations-in-feelings to Maureen Dowd‘s diatribes on the Church tribe to Michelle O, Martha S…maybe we can be rewoven in time.

Calling themselves, invisible heroes, male artists Ados and Comenius, played with the humble realness of Princess Diana, making art of her childhood eraser and their purchase of it at auction, a wry comment on a woman who was a foil to her Kingly husband’s transgressions. So many stalwart or silent women standing by their man and the public apology of men from all public spectrums lately. Honesty. Transparency. Just another good policy ala Mother Earth and strong woman vibes. Glad to see some men are trying it on for size.

 

NINE: The Procurer of Animals, Meat and Bodies.

It’s The Same Stuff Swimming Through Us.

Props to male artists seen recently, Botero at Marlborough Gallery and Mark Ryden at Paul Kasmin Gallery, they do know how to work their female. Botero places women with animals where they suddenly attain much more power aligned and Ryden’s wide-eyed, Fragonard style doll females cavorting with Lincoln, Jesus and cold-cuts make harsh critiques on societal concepts of freedom and gender roles, such as his “Incarnation” piece shown here.

In the 1959 movie, “Suddenly Last Summer,” Elizabeth Taylor, in a white see-through bathing suit as the attention-lure, procures for Sebastien, her closeted male cousin, the sexual favors of native boys who ultimately cause his destruction in a siren-worthy carnivorous clash of tinny instruments.  The age-old play of female allure which leads to a man’s downfall and freedom from his body is played yet again from ancient Gods like Set, Osiris,Dionysis,Odin and even girls like Echo, who were torn apart to find freedom through reincarnation just to underscore the point for all Earth plane-dwelling persons.  As Katherine Hepburn carefully tended to the carniverous Venus Fly-traps in Sebastian’s exotic garden, it’s clear we all have to find a way to play with our desires, beauty and creativity on the personal and grand scale of aligning and respectfully re-formulating a Planet and her feminine mystique itself, lest it destroy us first.

Filed under: ART, WOMEN   |  4 Comments
Tags: Ados and Comenius, Amanda Lepore, androgyne, Astrology Zone, Avia Venefica, Botero, Buddha Boy, Catherine Opie, elizabeth taylor, elizabeth taylor madness, elizabeth taylor movies, feminine mystique, Gallery Nine 5, Georgia O'Keefe Skull, Hillary Swank, Humble Arts, Invisible heroes, Jack Robinson's SCANNOGRAMS, Jaffa Cakes, Kim In Sook, Klaus Nomie, lil kim in a burka, Luminosity, Marina Abrmovitz, Marina at Moma, Marina's Luminosity, Mark Ryden, Maya Morgensztern, Michael Buhler-Rose, Mika Rottenberg, Naama Tsabar, Nude Descending a Staircase, Numero hotties, Princess Diana, Priscilla of The Desert, Suddenly Last Summer, suddenly last summer movie, Susan Miller, Tapasya, the conjuror, the hysterical, the milkers, Tyler Perry, Vanessa Beecroft, voyears

COMMiti ego: 9 non-robotic, adaptive re-use design for Moguls

04Apr10

Adaptive Re-use and Augmented Reality.

Watched a Boomtown, herky jerky camera shot video this Sunday morning with Kara Swisher interviewing Thomas Goetz, Wired magazine editor and author of “The Decision Tree,” advocating that we act as enthusiastic sheep, embedding medical sensors under our flesh as a novel, fun and informative way to monitor our biological functionings for medical data mining.  What Futurama movie didn’t they see?  These are the same Earthlings who reject and scold their natural beauty and inject mold poison into their faces to insure permanent fembot smiles. (OK, we agree…Botox could be considered adaptive re-use and augmented reality at it’s finest.) We suppose when 2012 hits these same bots will be beamed up through their implanted sensors leaving the rest of us to smell flowers, enjoy communicating with our precious bodies and friends and live silly and respectful on Planet Rock…wired to digital by choice and freedom. We say less data and a deeper more intuitive tapping into the rich library of body and Earth wisdom.

COMMiti ego is a collective design house envisioning and implementing Adaptive Re-use and Augmented Reality as new blueprints for how we hardwire digitally and creatively with real, pre-industrial soothing softwired remedies for Living. We shake our Avatar-like dreadlocks in a shower of Stars over blinding and binding acceptance of positioned “New Tools,” designed to separate us from our own intuition and self-empowerment or the greatest technology ever invented…Biology and the Web of Life.

Future Vision Holds that Adaptive Re-Users are Survivors and basically are having more fun.  Like a Parkour leaper over the constructs and debris of consumer culture, we adapt making beautiful from the solid “waste” into minimal impact, high-end design for Life as we decide to dance with Druids and imbibe elixir tonics made from Mayan heritage seeds.

Here, we forage and augment reality with Adaptive Re-use, add in some art, design and sensory delights for a luxurious mash-up from our network of friends and resources designed especially for 9 friends and mogul clients such as Barack Obama, Tom Ford, Martha Stewart, Len Burnett, Lady Gaga, Aby Rosen and Ian Schrager…some who don’t know they need us yet, but soon will;-)

ONE. Even More Color and Fun in The White House for July Fourth

Lush edible organic gardens, Malia and Sasha cavorting in bright frocks and Slow Food White House lawn picnic parties…we all saw this in our dreams and it is Real! Westweek 2010 Urban Design Award winner, Sean Knibb creates sculptural masterpieces for outdoor living for international celebrities and the urban gardens of Los Angeles. His ingenious bright straw bale chair idea is great for the Obama kids and pals while the “Prescendential” parents and friends discuss, laugh and eat at his indoor outdoor dining table made from reclaimed wood. A community comes together and celebrates and dines on a nurturing, oxygen filled meal prepared fresh from the edible garden.

Initially envisioned and prompted to Obama by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse for the White House lawn, the edible garden has become a lifestyle, if not a requirement, for those who want an impressive and available food source, while returning to the agronomic roots of our predecessors.  A Slow Food, slow soothing of the collective soul of humans and earth, it is a bio-high, to feel fit and hear friends and family chewing, ooohing and ahhhing while feeling the enzymatic rush and security in knowing exactly where and what you are eating really came from.

Sean Knibb’s Centranthus collection crosses indoor outdoor specification boundaries, realized through an environmentally low impact production process. Powder coated and polished angle irons of forged steel and polished aluminum create a part vessel part frame for the re-purposed soul of the living, grandfathered wood through a process of organic re-construction. Sean’s furniture is available from Abbott Kinney bungalow store in Los Angeles or here on his website.

Instead of fireworks, COMMiti ego recommends an orchestrated plaid light installation by artist, Vicki da Silva, a co-collaborative and symbolic art experience made by everyone at the picnic for a real Rainbow Child meets The White House reality.

The best ideas always come from colorful dinners, in fact, one half of COMMitti ego chewed on this very blog post at designer, Holly Hunt’s hosted Westweek 2010 dinner at chef Mark Peel’s Campanile, as a guest of interior designer Bret Witke.  Tom Ford, Julianne Moore, Bruce Cohen and Dean Factor, to name several, are fans of Bret’s designs for homes and restaurants. Holly Hunt‘s showroom is a soothing temple for designers who mandate clean lines and luxury.  Campanile itself is adaptive re-use, as the 1929 building is considered a historic landmark designed by 1929 by architect Roy Sheldon Price for Hollywood legend, Charlie Chaplin and adaptively re-used as the original home and creative love child of Nancy Silverton’s artisan bakery, La Brea Bakery.

TWO. “Martha, how ’bout some adaptive re-use and high-tech design flava to  your Connecticut kitchen…”

Martha’s clean and perfect vibe could use some sky, earthy dust and some Busta. Kevin Busta, that is. The other half of COMMiti ego saw him at recent The New York Times, Architectural Digest Show in New York City and really loved his pitchfork chair. Kevin re-purposes the remnants of his hometown Cleveland’s utilitarian rustbelt past. The shopping cart chaise could hold kitchen guests and was a past collaboration with partner, Doug Meyer. Kevin’s art, made from factory blueprints, was recently spotted by Joyce Wadler, writer of the Currents column in The New York Times, and the birds on a wire, Nature meets Man’s Plans, seems just perfect for Media Mogul Martha.  For years we made cards and wrapping paper from a mother-lode of old factory blueprints we found and we love their dusty color and feeling the earnestness and industriousness inherent in the paper.

For inspirational cooking, we love Murphlab’s A History of The Sky, a time lapse photography project of the sky for a whole year by Ken Murphy. It’s another collaborative artwork like Vicki’s, here on Kickstarter you can actually “own” a piece of this art and other similar projects, a new example we love, of art, community and tech interwoven into our lives…the philosophy of COMMiti ego.

Luxury combined with patina is the best prod for our minds to evolve into a compassionate and real soft place, one that integrates all facets of life for true seeing. Crafty Martha would be the perfect guide to The Middle Earthlings of our United States to adapt the beauty of sustainable living beyond just dutifully bringing a grocery tote to the shopping market to fill the modern kitchen.

THREE. The Only Home Possible for Lady Gaga

Freaky, famous adaptive re-user of imagery that is a bit uncomfortable and brash, oh what does your home look like?  COMMiti ego would orchestrate a COMMissioned design back-up group that will match your delicious culture mining stilet-toe to stilet-toe.  Your COMMiti ego girl group of artisans are Eren Yorelmazer, Michael Schmidt, Gary Gibson and Pamela Sunday for starters.

First, meet Eren Yorulmazer from Istanbul, our chosen interior designer for his scouting of visionary and salivation-worthy spaces. We hear your music loud and imagine him turning you on with his bold and crazy way with a bolt of velvet, his new European guiltless love of gilt and loud antiques and custom swathing of vistas, fabric and combo innocent nouveau riche boyyyeeee and big eeeeeEGO gestures.

Next we visit our pal, Michael Schmidt, already a designer of Gaga goodies, such as her crystal crutches in the Paparazzi video and bubble appliques for her Rolling Stone cover, and everything in between for girls like Madonna, Cher, Tina, Grace,Dita, Courtney, Bjork and boys like the Rolling Stones, Elton, Iggy, Karl, Marilyn and Lenny K.  We would commission Michael to create furnishings, specifically, hardware to open doors based on belt buckles or brass knuckle rings in adaptive re-use Gaga style. We’d also place an order for some intricate laser cut walls in combo with Michael’s famous chain-link fabrications utlilizing industrial cast-off materials.

For the element of quirk we would roll up to our friend, Gary Gibson, the artist,interior designer at his Los Angeles gallery retail store reflecting ersatz items with an intention to inspire and embrace letting one’s freak flag fly. Gary sets a precedent for those who function outside the confines of traditional design or traditional offerings, creating spaces that invite, excite and envelop the user.
Earthen bowls with bumps and lumps would work well against the Gagaluxe and we suggest they be filled with champagne and golden Swarovski-iced Sippy straws for effect and served up with some dirty cherry pie ice cream. Some lumpen furnishings or stellary thrift shop relics will nestle into Gaga’s home perfectly.  One of our favorite effects is a wall top to bottom of portraits, an edited crew spanning time, century and technique and we’d be sure to include this ink on wood adaptive re-use portrait from Gary’s inspired cache.  And we would love to see what Michael Koch, the designer of this woolly felt tote found at Gary Gibson, would do with pillows or emerald green, silk-lined dressing gowns for Gaga household guests.

We also recommend Pamela Sunday‘s sea creature ceramics and think her bio-physicist buttoned-up manners and way would quite suit Lady Gaga. (We shared the biggest laugh recently with Pamela, and we hardly knew each other, so we suspect subversive humor under Pamela’s frock) We are sure a Q and James Bond relationship will result in COMMiti ego’s COMMissioned earthy ceramic toys of all sizes and shapes to fit the Gaga universe of body, home and garden.

FOUR.  The Show Must Go On…from Coney Island To Urban Gardens

As Gaga nods to feathered birds before her, we honor Bette Midler, the original showgirl turned urban garden pioneer.  After a show or tirelessly campaigning for urban gardens, we see Bette in her home or personal garden walking, talking, resting and contemplating on a Douglas Thayer bench, exquisitely made from planks of Coney Island boardwalk. The sensibility and zen-ish output arises from Doug’s quiet workshops in the bucolic hills of Massachusetts, a co-reality with Bette and her New York Restoration Project busy reclaiming, restoring and revitalizing open spaces throughout NYC and providing environmental education programs. Hundreds of South Bronx residents and families gathered to celebrate this just completed Target Bronx Garden in the South Bronx, pictured here. Delores Delago, we adores ya. Have a seat, rest your green thumbs and  take a load off from feathering New York City with your green wand!

FIVE. A Little Fishy Ruffage for Tom Ford and Other Single Men

See we like sleek like anyone else, but sleek and slick as in Salmon? These fishes have endurance, faithfulness and will swim upstream to the death. All the things a single man needs. It’s the roughness we see could adding a spot of further chic to TF’s burgeoning moguldom beyond fashion and film. White salmon skin leather would be a luxe repurposing worthy of Tom Ford and ES, the Patagonian company fashioning a waste by-product of the salmon industry into a tough new texture for manly chic. Ain’t nothin’ more manly and recycling-sexy than a massive mountain spewing snow water rapids and feverish, glistening sleek salmon leaping upstream towards it. Or is there? (hint to men: invite and catch more women upstream and upstairs with these kinda Natura Sexa images instead of mere etchings…)

 

 

SIX. Adapting The Soul Train Vibe To The New Green for Len Burnett equals

The Sea and Reclaimed Sunken Treasures.

Dear Len, now that you reclaimed the Soul Train and Vibe brand, penned your “Black is The New Green” book, the island beach house is minutes away.  I know you are passionate about green living, fine art and islands, so, COMMiti ego would like to make some design suggestions for your abode.

First: The Sea Sense Surround. We recently visited Stephan Crasneanscki (that’s his sea photo above) to listen to his company, Soundwalk’s excerpt of The Ulysses Syndrome, an immersive sound journey following the route of Ulysses along the Mediterranean Sea. Capturing hundreds of millions of soundwaves flying over the surface of the waters surrounding Turkey, from boat radio waves to storms and creatures, the result is an opera of randomness that soothes in a fractal fashion. Len, as the media mogul at the head of Uptown and now two of the famous music media brands ever…preceeding your own…hey, it’s Your Ocean.

Next: Sit and Ground. Definitely listen to this while chillin’ in a encompassing chair done up in a sea blue dyed, recycled European linen tablecloth from Beyond France, while your toes enjoy the history and emotion in reclaimed wood floors. Not just any wood, but thoughtful planks of deep Earthly thanks, made from 150 to 1500 year old virgin growth sunken treasures, The Cornerstone Floor Group uses Heart Pine and Cypress logs from the Mississippi river and Louisiana swamps and bayous. Floated down major rivers during the timber rush of the late 1800 and early 1900’s, many sunk before they reached their milling destination during the timber rush in the early 1900’s. Anaerobic deep waters filled with minerals are infused into these recovered timbers creating colors, tones and emotions of the highest grade. We are sure your artistic and sensory mogulness will appreciate, if it’s good enough for Lenny Kravitz, it’s good enough for you.  Cheers! COMMiti ego

SEVEN. Steve Jobs: A Little more Thank you, Please in The Apple store

Love the Apple stores, but we beg for a bit more organic and community interactivity beyond speeches or concerts given the brand’s vital value exists due to creative and passionate users.  Time to augment reality with some charity and clarity and connection…and fruit.

Fruit is the essence of giving. Apples are knowledge. Knowledge is giving and many businesses are finding ways to incorporate this into their brand. For example, our most loved Merci Merci store in Paris, created by the owners of Bonpoint, and pictured above, mixes books and nooks to read in, a cafe and a huge helping of profits which go to build schools in Madagascar or Droog, New York where the immersive design not only offers “things for sale” but stimulates the imagination like a gallery or playground.

What about green island pods of apple trees in the Apple store?  In Milan, for example, a living ‘orchard’ designed by Dutch architect Ton Matton, was grown in Garibaldi Railway Station during the week of the recent, Salone del Mobile, Salone 2010 (14th-19th April.)  aMAZElab presented the eighth edition of the GREEN ISLAND event, dedicated to urban green spaces and biodiversity with dozens of fruit trees planted in coloured pots, maintained with a special self-feeding system. A little fully-functioning urban orchard (the fruit could be picked by passengers) metaphorically enhanced the idea of the Station as an ‘agora’, a space of sharing, meeting, exchange and cultural ‘nourishment’.

If our Capitals of Consumer Culture, such as The Palace of The Apple, and the biggest brands act, many more will follow.

and if it’s possible for a brand…how about a city?

EIGHT. Aby Rosen and Ian Schrager: Adapt, Re-Use and Augment The Reality of Hotel as “Mini-Citi”

Depression needs Solace. Desert needs Las Vegas. Recession City Detroit needs developer Aby Rosen, visionary hotelier Ian Schrager and COMMiti ego.  We see a destination Detroit hotel to make an All-American city into a Las Vegas-style brave new world sensation, an energy cycling Mini-Citi for modern design industry to stimulate a new economy there. A Mini-Citi interacting with the environment and businesses will contribute much more than tourist traffic…we see mini industries and brave new worlds.

For our COMMissioned COMMiti ego Mini-Citi Design Team, we choose vertical farmer Dickson Despommier, glass artist Alison Berger, Soundwalk’s Stephan Crasneanscki, Mass’s Stephan Valter and for inspiration, artist Gerald Edwards lll and his surfing buddies, the Goons, who have developed sustainable surfboard manufacturing materials, treehouses, and Bollywood style dance party beach cleanups…Fun.

The image at the opening of this post and this hotel photo is from Gerald Edwards lll. We really like his conceptions of Augmented Reality and our vision is to team him with Stephan of Soundwalk and Stephan of Mass, designer of programmable, interactive wall scenes, for visual thrills and sounds around a core lush bedroom atrium by our pal, Eren.  Surrounded completely by windows, guests are offered a choice of programming or visions into the real worlds outward and an actual vertical working farm for the inner view…Wow.

Kind of like Ikea maximizing space for dorm dwellers and newlyweds, cubic space maximization for skyscrapers and cities have Dickson Despommier, Prophet of the Vertical Farm, espousing for four times as much space usage, convertable water, methane energy back to the grid from compost.  Kind of Nordic Nerdy and Scientifically Sexy to have this futuristic organic farm in a circular atrium tended by lab-coated scientists and farmers. Multiple custom soundtrack options as well, because Detroit Techno is the Grandparent and who knows what seed music industries can conjure in this New City?

After the visual feast, hotel guests can retreat to their bath, we envision a new kind of spa with immersive rituals in a hand blown glass, organic shaped, luxury sized healing pool filled with mineral and herbal waters complete with individual vessels for subconscious thought distilling. With Alison Berger, who has designed for Hermes and Frank Gehry, we are in good hands.

Alison’s glasswork reflects her childhood love of fireflies, Victorian apothecary medicine bottles and her stories etched into glass. Recently Detroit has become a birthplace of new artisan studios up from industrial ashes, and can we order up some gorgeous glass with our car windscreens? We see Master artisans like Alison supplying the hotel and an industry to manufacture American design in a new arts and crafts movement.

Utilizing the factories in Detroit, other mini design industries could be extend from the hotel design. Pryor Callaway already creates sculptural seating from old car bumpers and Kevin Busta’s lamps made of car mufflers could be positioned as new design classics, and go into micro into mass production for jobs and profit.

We imagine participatory guidebooks as souvenirs of the experience can be printed on demand on flax paper, grown in the urban gardens of Detroit as a sub industry. Gerald‘s “Field Guide to the International Survivalist” is the perfect prototype for Adaptive Re-Users imagining new worlds as they push natural boundaries and participate in the revitalization of an American city while they vacation.

…and since food is the best osmotic, non-robotic experience that reflects our state of composition and connection, the Eastern half of COMMiti ego nominates a Detroit version of Williamsburg’s Pies n Thighs for this Americana Monument.  As a guest of the family Geldzahler, Kayte specifically, we recently brainstormed and loosened our belts in honor of chefs Sarah Buck, Carolyn Bane, and Erika Geldzahler serving up Southern comfort to the Williamsburg masses.

Vegetarian is next, but One Giant Step for Peoplekind at a time, Moguls! In the meantime, just say No to Bo Toxins and yes, to New COMMitis of egos, in concert for A New Reality.

NINE. YOU. YES YOU. MOGUL OF THE MOMENT.

What Ya’ll Gonna Do?

Post by Jade Dressler and Kelly Lebwith who are COMMiti ego.

COMMiti ego’s collective concepts have realized intention full-filled, intuitive, imaginative and solution-focused visions that embrace a common sensual denominator as our balanced beings throw down branding in the mediums of textiles, clothing and accessories for living, interiors and expanded experiences through TV show concepts to live public events.

The phone rang… we answered the call and have been asked to imagine for and have enjoyed some serious play time with Mogul Originals from Snoop Dogg, Oprah Winfrey to Icons such as Disney to Dogtown Zboyz and Designer Luminaries such as The Bill Blass and The Oscar de la Renta to Visionaries Diana Vreeland, Steven Sprouse and Paul Smith.

Our design manifestos have spun micro-luxury details such as earthy pod sculptures for Aveda stores and spawned branded, personal accessories for Frances Ford Neibaum -Coppola’s private reserve gift list.  We have envisioned macro-concepts from top to bottom design renovations of adobe homes in New Mexico collaborating with solar energy experts to Macy’s department stores’ concept and identity environment upgrades to introducing travel experts to the first new hotel in Lake Como in 100 years to [hush hush] applied strategy, focused Feng Shui consultations for state government offices.

Conceptualized and activated visions for full-spectrum campaigns and events for brands and clients span virtually from A to Z, from work with American Express to Louis Vuitton to VH1 and XXL, the hip-hop magazine.

We have orchestrated elements for events from a benefit fashion show adaptively re-using a former railway station for a pioneering, hand-made organic cotton clothing collection for 700 guests to international brand launches for Speedo’s highest tech swim gear with International Olympic gold medal winning athletes including Michael Phelps.

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Give Me No Title, Give Me an Aura

11Mar10

On the evolution of An Aura. From shimmering biology effervessence to object fetishes. To artists and art to the powers of super heroes and super heroines. And to our own multiplying-like-rabbits doors of perception. This week, everyone was talking about Aura, from the art and language of contemporary art at the recent Armory, Scope and Volta shows to the Rubin Museum’s Brainwave in New York City exploring what ecstasy smells like.

Aura, because the artist is there pulsating and making us drool before the offering. Aura, because it captures unseen being and becoming…the Past or Future Major. Aura because it is study in portraiture via the senses whether the components are scent molocules, digital pixels and in situ transmission of art and its “Aura.”  Aura as it happens and you are there.

Womb with a View: Giants, Google maps and Migraine Fortress Visions.

Way pre-google maps, when I was way smaller than I am now, I was captivated by the ending of a cartoon show hosted by a Giant, who was only seen via his hands. After all the cartoons ran, his Giant hand fingers lovingly nudged tiny chairs, rockers and puffy chairs back into place around a cozy fireplace, since, one assumed, the invisible and excitable tiny kids messed them all up watching the cartoons.  Ever since then, miniature people and miniature household items hold a special fascination for me. I so fetish-eyes them, they are all over my house feeding my Giant ego:-)

Feel big and then the even bigger universe on Little-people.blogspot.com, by Slinkachu. It has long been a favorite, you can easily wile away at least 20 minutes peeping his series of wee folks left on the street to fend for themselves and their own devices. Their adventures in the Big World, which gets bigger with every step back of the Giant photographer, are amusing, sweet and pathetic. (see? a better prettier world view than morning papers, same conclusions…)

“…left in London to fend for themselves” is the artist’s Giant drop and run tactic.

The scope of our worlds changing in a moment is the promise of art, the senses, drugs and religion among other things. Having experienced in one week both the shows of the latest in contemporary art and a profound discourse on the world of scent, plus a never-before experience of a spontaneous mind-bending, headache-less, ocular migraine, shared with the likes of Leonardo d Vinci, Georges de Chirico and Lewis Carroll, with its glowing and growing rainbow laser light triangular “fortifications,” “fortress” and “Auras” which supplant normal vision…I can indeed say my scope of the world has been altered.

As Modern Citizens, we traipse from sensation to sensation, biological to digital to aura-bending experiences, readiness to the moment is the only anchor and answer. These are the Artists of Aura who made me slow down this week.

*********

Thomas Doyle‘s little people at Witzenhausen Gallery are frozen in their landscapes via bell jars of memory for our meditation.

“I studied painting and printmaking, but ended up feeling limited by those media. After time, I realized I should just be making what made me the happiest, and I started the miniature work. I often say that if the nine-year-old me traveled forward to meet the current me, he’d probably give me a huge high five – and maybe demand to stay.”

From a tiny inner spark of universal memory, it’s either our google-enabled future Giant vision or our nostalgic busy-box brains looking for a “force-me-to-slow-down” primal need in which a play on scale offers solace and perspective to our sometimes sodden bodily reference points.  The visual patterning of macro cosmic painterly aerial views of civilization may reorganize our cellular makeup, the way the view from a plane in the air reminds us that rivers are like our veins, towns are like our computer brains and mountains and the earth is our body.

The comfort of encylopedic style imagery and a nostalgic trend for childrens books that began with Todd Oldham‘s ode to 1960’s and 70’s illustrator, Charley Harper, was all over the art shows. Whatever it is, the delight is worth the price of admission that yes, we are tiny creatures in a very big world. It is thankfully not all about us.

Floor to ceiling canvases dry brushed painted with tiny towns and encyclopedic details and goings on in Christopher Daniels paintings at Number 35 Gallery were hardly visible for the packed crowds around them. Naive, calming, intriguing, you can feel that people are compelled to play Giant as the world perspective is demanding our continued shift from egocentric focus to community and connection, whether held up microscopically, through a telescope or a google map.

Another street artist I have followed, Jan Vormann, fills in the spaces of decay at once with earnest Lego block cheery hope. The mind hops between synapses at these legos in buildings where it all began in Berlin, and now in New York City. This nostalgia for toys, figurines, comic book figures and language and play was everywhere. There was not so much of this at the Whitney Biennial uptown, draw your own conclusions.  These tiny kids and kid games may be a scaling back from Murakami and Koons’ big comic bravado and now in our more introspective times, random street art and tiny meditations on toys fit our back-to-the-beginning urges.

Yet Another Lichtenstein Comic.

It’s the juxtapostion people!  The debate, such as on deezen.com, about these Jessica Lichtenstein at Gallery Nine 5, figures rages on in the blogspace about the source, the usage and intent.  Probably the same fire around Warhol soup can or Picasso and his steal from Africa or even Lichtenstein’s comics?  Murakami did it better? The gesture, emotion and fluids of anime charactors whose power is super human is more his statement, Lichenstein’s women are more self-posessed or beseeching the viewer as objects in an earthy and fully doll way, with none of the Aura of Anime as much as they are hipper Barbie dolls contemplating themselves and their plastic beauty.

Yet More Plastic Fetish Flowing.

The opposite of humans pumping themselves with plastic and botox for altercation into Barbie and Ken dolls, in Nick Ervinck‘s work…here the Plastic seeks and meets biology and air. The only thing exhibited by Antwerp’s Koraalberg Gallery at Volta was a film moving like fluid fast through yellow amporphic cell structures, an experience like the birth canal movies I remember seeing at about age 13. The largesse of Nick’s gestures reminded me of the volume and Aura of Alber Elbaz of Lanvin’s billowing tunics as they floated the models on the Paris runway.

Daughter-types for Dauguerreotypes, Lampshades for Hats and Wigs for Handbags.

Subject and Object collide when gallery guests end up as the art. At Volta, Heather Cantrell of Kinkhead, sat surrounded by a jungle of plastic and live plants and a flurry of photo gear fumbling with her Poloroid camera and I scrambled over to sit with her. And that is exactly her art. Portrait sittings impromtu for $200. Large scale Poloroids 7 feet by 10. A Study in Portraiture was Heather’s documentation of the documenters, capturing personalities from London’s art world as subjects.  This impromptu art-on-site at the Volta show, with artists on site exhibiting, made for very exciting palpitations.

Put Large Lampshade on head for Fun and Enlightenment.

Tronie Portraits of The Daughter. Hendrik Kerstens at Witzenhausen Gallery of NYC and Amsterdam showed Paula Pictures, a modern girl rendered timeless by light and a technique of Dutch portrait painters of the 17th century (called tronies) and removed from context by the non-identifiable “clothing and hats” attached to her by her father, Hendrik. From the gallery: “Kerstens is conscious of the fact that people are the same, no matter who they are or what age they live in. Any association with a certain age is determined by the way we are depicted: the clothes and make up we wear, accessories and lighting.” Thus the Aura of a modern girl references and the destruction of references and adding on the Aura of a timeless day.

Outre Aura-Worldly shots of In Crowd.

Station Independent Projects at Scope presented Sway, a photographic collection of how individuals influence each other with their behavior, dress and culture. Curator, Leah Oates chose a diverse selection and the photos by Miles Ladin, a society, celeb and events photographer who has shot for Harper’s Bazaar, Fortune, Vibe, Der Spiegel, Morgunbladid, W, The New York TImes Style section and Tatler. They struck me the most for their unintended candids, what do we remember about the faces in our midst, especially the Aura of The Famous?

Racial and Sexual Profiling.

Begin with Dr. Suess’s mash-ups of biology and throw in mixed gender, orifices and racial facials staring blankly.  Keep staring and Lewis Carroll’s satiric wit and social farce pushes through primal history with a goofy simple innocence, like Harold and his purple crayon. Boris Hoppek, with Helium Cowboy, spray paints, lassos latex on lasses and appliques fake fur genitals on real people for portraits while his Basic Bimbo appears in all sizes on streets, galleries, in boats en masse and videos. When a face looks like a light socket, you just have to love it.

It feels like finding an old Disney cartoon from 1930 that is eerily familiar and disturbing and funny, depending which point on a time and space line and what Aura mantle you put yourself in as viewer. And although his work around women’s bodies and sex are the most amusing, it says something of our culture that race is OK to dialogue about and portray, if tentatively, but women’s bodies may still be taboo beyond basic fetishizing. (For the weak of heart or easily excited, I’ve opted to include the “taboo.” )

…and thankfully the discourse and portrayal in the art world is getting more non-white and non-male everyday.

The Eyes of Deana Lawson.

The reviews say she plays with the “sacred and profane” two other words I heard much of these past few weeks. I believe I am a bit tired of these words being held up as opposites. This is a photographer who spends much time with her subjects until the relationship deepens and it shows in the images. It is just sacred. Deana’s work was shown as part of Station Independent Projects and you can see more of Deana and the other photographers from Sway here on artmostfierce.blogspot.com.

Deana is much like performance artist, Kalup Linzy, who stages soap operas twisting voice and character plays, distorting speed up or down through voices and tempo or  blandness to make the viewer question reality.  Both untether us from convention or even the madcap pace of our lives and perversions.

Mass Fetish.

“Fetishizing the object is mistake and at the same time, mass production on the net is an aura annililator.” says Holly Block, Director of Bronx Museum, “There is a whole segment of the population that has no access to technology.”  She spoke about projecting video on the face of the museum and that museums should be free. Where is the reflection opening for kids not exposed to the possibility of that transcendence language?  Exactly where it is, in the mass culture itself.

At Scope, Anonymous gallery featured Kostas Seremetis, a fetishizer and mash-up machine of of pulp iconography.  My favorite piece of his is “Trilogy” film, taking the left third of Star Wars, the middle third of Empire Strikes Back and the right third of Return of the Jedi, synchronizing moments and not.

Skylar Fein‘s turn table on cultural ephemera and slogans at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery were a tour de force, complete with Manifesto literature and two major pieces, Gun Rack and Black Flag (Marcuse), which were purchased by major private collections for $20,000 and $40,000 respectively, according to Volta’s press release. Not bad for collecting stray wood around New Orleans and making new signs of the old, some of which hawked bargain deals all for under $10.

Sacred Public Space

Nato Thompson, Chief Curator of Creative Time which conducts art in the public realm, declares, “Public space has gone from profane to sacred. Spatial experiences are more novel due to the amount of time we spend in virtual space.”

The videos in the elevators at Volta by Trong Gia Nguyen of Humanitarians Not Heroes, were a novel profane place to show art. I once heard that the funny nervous and uncomfortable atmosphere in elevators comes from too many auras crammed into a small space. I couldn’t focus on the videos at the time due to this Aura blending effect but truly enjoyed later at home. Perhaps better in a bathroom, I know the ladies room is always serious sacred space, especially in front of the mirror. Talk about art most fierce…

At a Volta panel called “Framing Art in The 21st Century,” Art Heads pondered digitization, market shifts, how and where visual art will be disseminated, sold, and exhibited in the coming decades. With Nato, Holly, Amy Cappellazzo (Int’l Co-Head of Postwar and Contemporary Art,Christie’s), Manon Slome, Founder and Curator of No Longer Empty, which exhibits art in vacant space, Sara Reisman, Director, Percent for Art, and Dan Cameron, Founder and Curator of the New Orleans Biennial Prospect, the gospel and testaments to art in the public realm and out of the museums were let loose.

Moderated by art market journalist, Lindsay Pollack, all agreed that decentralized centers of art, the dissolving of hierarchy in collecting and critique and public accessibility are the democratization of art and my favorite conclusion was: “Art defines what public space is.”

I would also add my gospel that shared new sensory art has enormous power to change the Aura of the Planet.

To Wit: Precious Encounters of The New Temporal and Olfactory Kind.

Tino Sehgal stages temporary public interactives in museums and is a brilliant Luddite with a gospel of no cell phone, no airplanes and no paper legal contracts or documentation in the selling of his work.  He’s got the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York Times reviews, shows in the Guggenheim and his pieces sell for millions. What a Luddite.

“For the last two to three hundred years in human society, we have been very focused on the earth. We have been transforming the materials of the earth, and the museum has developed as a temple of objects made from the earth. I’m the guy who comes in and says: ‘I’m bored with that. I don’t think it’s that interesting, and its not sustainable.’ Inside this temple of objects, I re-focus attention to human relations.”

Amy Cappellazzo at Christie’s is lit up by this idea. Just a digital piece with enormous value is intriguing. She’d like to see a million people pay $1 to own a piece of art versus one piece going to one collector for a million dollars. The world of precious object or experience with Aura plus the repeated Aura of digital experience is a full spectrum.

Even much more radical and potentially ecstatic than a digital revolution of art is the Scent Revolution offered by perfumer Christophe Laudamiel and Neurobiologist, Stuart Firestein, who together with an audience doused in scent strips, attempted to touch the mystery of the smell of ecstasy at Brainwave at Rubin Museum of Art. I was invited by the sensitive, vibrant and inquisitive expert at the pioneer of scent auras, Lucy Raubertas of the beautifully intriguing blog, Indie Perfumes.

Christophe Laudamiel is the creator of last year’s Green Aria, a scent opera at the Guggenheim using scent as a composer utilizes notes, a painter uses color or an architect uses building materials. Christophe created for Thierry Mugler Le Parfum Coffret, the suite of perfumes for the movie based on Patrick Süskind’s Book Perfume. Paris 1738 is the “signature scent” complete with the Aura of Paris at that time…full of fetid decay, decomposition, musty, and animal like the streets.  I actually liked it.

Why is the frontier of scent so alluring and ripe for art-making?   Although smells can affect us and feel drug-like, the difference is that we smell and then can analyze and decide, our smelling sense and resulting actions are not like a drug where our powers of reasoning are altered. What we see sold in stores as perfume is only thirty-percent of what can be done with scent. Fascinating that not much research is available and yet we know that scent is actually molocules consumed by the body versus waves of color and light or vibrations like music and there are hundreds of scent brain receptors versus the handful for visual or aural stimulants. Olfactory stem cells are the only nuerons that replicate into a new set of nuerons every day (a robust phenom) and information is delivered quicker to the inner brain than ocular synapses.

It is no surprise that there is actually a Buddha dedicated to the sense of smell in the direction of the South, an important sense to have in one’s ecstasy quest toolbox towards enlightenment beyond form. If art is meant to bring us together, it also carries the spiritual quest to bring us higher by it’s snarky invitation to love it but be unattached at the same time.  The temporality and permanence through memory and time of Scent is a smart and intriguing ingredient and I hope to smell more of it in art.

Mathius Kessler‘s Nowhere To Be Found human skull with live coral growing on it at Volta was perhaps the best art statement, quickly dispensing of art labels and chatterings such as “Aura,” “Sacred” and “Profane.” Since my own father’s recent passing, a particular gorgeous scent comes to me in moments of truth, one I have never smelled before in my life. I know this is a communication from worlds beyond what my profane (?) brain can currently comprehend and yet it is a most precious Art of Communication, spurring me on to expand my Aura into Non-linear Love and a World ever expanding.

Visionary Migraine indeed. Buddhist quest of non-attachment indeed.

Thankfully… All is Full of Love and The One Aura…Unavoidable.

“Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. … I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been.”  Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception

(note: Bjork video is on permanent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.)

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Tags: a study in portraiture, aldous huxley, all is full of love, amy cappellazzo, anonymous gallery, Armory show, artmostfierce, aura, bjork, boris hoppek, bronx museum, charlie harper, children's book illustrations, christopher daniels, creative time, dan cameron, deana lawson, doors of perception, framing art in the 21st century, Gallery Nine 5, georges de chirico, Giants, heather cantrell, helium cowboy, hendrik kerstens, Holly Block, jade dressler, jan vormann, jessica lichtenstein, jonathan ferrara gallery, kalup linzy, koraalberg gallery, kostas seremetis, Lanvin dress, leah oates, legos art, leonardo da vinci, lewis carroll, lindsay pollack, little people blogspot, Lucy Raubertas, manon slome, marian goodman, mathias kessler, Migraine, migraine visions, miles ladin, murakami figures, nato thompson, new orleans biennial, nick ervinck, no longer empty, Number 35 Gallery, ocular migraine, paula pictures, prospect, roy lichtenstein, Rubin Museum, Rubin Museum Brainwave, sara reisman, Scope art show, skylar fein, slinkachu, station independent projects, sway, thomas doyle, tino sehgal, todd oldham, trong gia nguyen, tronie portrait, Volta art show, warhol, Whitney Biennial, witsenhausen, [icasso

The Art and Noise of Proclamation Nation

07Mar10

“Wan.” says a bored Blake Gopnik. “Fun.” enthuses Kelly Crow. “Budget.” proclaims Holland Cotter. “Looks more like us than we care to admit.” politics David Weiner. “…a giant burst of happiness for the infinite creativity of America.” gushes Jerry Saltz.

“Shopping in the “Ambienelle.” intones a fashionable Todd Eberle. “When will there be a Shaquille O’iennial?” quips a commenter on a blog.

“Are We There Yet?”, asks and answers Elena Brower.

“I Proclaim!”  The Whitney Biennial is consistent for the response of “Let’s Always Be Critical of It” and yet it in the end it proclaims the state of contemporary art emphatically anyway.  Although I have been more excited by past Biennials with art and conclusions from my own proclivities, for example, “Handmade Everything!” “Visionary Drawing!” “We’re Morphing into Animals, Animals are us!”…I aimed for a decidely 2010 experience of the exhibition in honor of the title and orientation: the democratic Friday night “Pay What You Wish” line at The Whitney.

Waiting. The March night sky is light at 5:30 pm, the air carries a crisp spring anticipation of sweetness and sound. We chat on the line with strangers before and after us, getting to know each other briefly. In the courtyard below a wooden box structure is moaning like Tibetan monks. I am stamping my Jimmy Choos in anticipation like horse hooves as it still cold.

The first and second floors were a “seen it before” tapas plate featuring war and pretension and loud “theatre” voices, studies in cacophony or a serving up of our mindless cultural fare. I was impatient and bored.  The much-talked about Nina Berman photographs of a dismembered and disfigured war veteran registered a strong sensation but we have all endured this kind of visual shock and then we walk over to the next piece, like shopping. I recalled the recent Virginia Heffernan New York Times article on the sound in movies celebrating a new level of films that “revisit and rethink the sounds of breath and breathlessness.” It is this kind of outer experience and inner penetration of art and sensation I am seeking.

Home.

Stimulus-saturation and art puffery made me choose not to stand and watch the movie on the screen of the most touted piece in the show.  I knew without reading any reviews before I went that this was “the piece”, whether from the energy of the room or the “art show” quality of The Bruce High Quality Foundation‘s “We Like America and America Likes Us.” A Ghostbusters white ambulance with mesmerizing TV, film and online visual edits projected on the windshield sat in a dark room emitting light and sound like Oz. The installation was influenced by Joseph Beuys’ 1974 Action piece in which the artist/shaman went from plane to ambulance to a gallery space, where, swathed in grey felt, he spent 3 days with a coyote. His feet never touched the ground and returned to the airport, he jetted to Europe.

Michael Jackson photographs paired with Charles Baudelaire lined the walls and all I could feel was a desire to cover the whole room with gobs of grey felt for a stronger statement about art and feeling. My favorite take-away was actually a small girl, in a tartan dress and apron standing in the headlight of the ambulance like lawn sculpture while the crowd transfixed stood around the room helpless and searching for meaning with “art-stare” eyes.

Later at home, I watched the video.

My “impatient American” choice to experience this video alone instead of a gallery, was so reflective of the subject and identity of the piece.  In the film, America is portrayed as a witness, a lover, a participant and an intimate friend or family member with changing age, gender or race addressed by a smug, self-absorbed, TV commercial-like woman’s voice.  After watching this mesmerizing collective history, like the film of one’s monkey mind before it slags with a light bulb pop onto the meditative state, I was silent. I looked at my notes.  Like a transfixed therapy patient, I had written down three phrases, which perfectly encapsulated my childhood experience brought into my adult ego consciousness that I had never paired before. The effect was stunning and life-shifting.

Our synthesis of individual and collective experience is at the crossroads and as this piece, and so many reviews of the show, ends with a question of “Waiting?” This may be “The Message” of the Biennial as seen by its curators. That I brought the show home with me and realized we were sleeping together and sharing neurons is the satisfaction we seek. The job of the artists and curators is complete. Although I paid the budget fare, I was a satisfied consumer of American art and culture. Thank you, Whitney.

…and so I moved on.

The third floor elevator opens to the literal gasp of Pae White‘s 40 foot tapestry of smoke and it is thankfully, one of the show’s most visceral moments. From the corner of your eye you can see a video of men in a vast gym performing rote 19th century German chastity exercises on mat islands. As a counterpoint that speaks of the robotic self undoing of smoking and our mice-like obedience to life productivity missives contrasted with the sexy smoke snarl like a snake to a flute, Jesse Aron Green‘s video “Arztliche Zimmergymnastik,” reminded me of the show’s playful spirit that will always engender a lively debate.

Watership Down Utopia.

My notes are simple and wishful as artist Roland Flexner‘s methods.  “Movements within a plane. Sumi ink paper. Ink, breath.” The wall cards said this about us as potential human viewers on these Avatarish landscapes, that we have a “…tendency to project landscapes from ambiguity.” The black and white scenarios are reminiscent of 1930’s mystical stage and screen sets which feels strangely appropriate for today’s mood. The tool of breath upon the work feels like the ambiguous lover and creator America in the Bruce High Quality Foundation piece. This watcher pose of much of the art, is the waiting, and like a wizened old Guru staring back at a seeker’s gaze, the answer is the question.

Charles Ray‘s ink flowers were made in his spare time like doodles.  The curators filled a whole room with these simple and naive repetitive obsessions reminding me of flowers I drew on my school notebooks in the 70’s. Like bland but hopeful smile faces it is served up like a remedy, no artistic distance, perspective or contemplation other than itself, like a Rothko, but more frustrating for our evolved complexities and expectations. However…ok…this is a happiness pill I can swallow and a powerful statement in the end. Thank you, Whitney.

The Box Lunch thankfully, comes with Video.

Video is always my favorite part of the Biennial. Kate Gilmore‘s “Standing Here” opens with a view into a box and for its prescence and metaphor speaks to the macho-heavy Whitney’s first real significant inclusion of women artists. (It is 2010 after all and the 75th anniversary of the show, so thank you Whitney.) The red polka dot dress is the first shot of color infiltrating the box, shoes follow kicking the way outside-in thru a four foot enclosure seen from above, its scale unknown until she begins breaking through.  On the Whitney’s site, the video experience began with the exciting peek into Kate’s World, as she explains the piece on a shopping excursion for shoes to wear during the piece, only to end on a dropped note, with a pair she likes to wear everyday and a standing on line…waiting…as if the filmmakers ran out of funds.  See the video here and tell me if this is an artistic statement or…?

Rashaad Newsome‘s video of solitary Voguers silently posturing and popping in a similar all white room just opposite Kate Gilmore, affectedly anesthetizes a vibrant art.  The commentary says this effect, without music or sound, is to equalize the art with contemporary dance forms. OK, thank you, because dance has borrowed from this art before Michael Jackson, but without music, for me it is 10,000 times removed. Both videos easily metaphors for the pervasive culture that boxes both in, keeps the appropriators in and understanding out.

Invited into the room-size box created by Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher promising an immersive video and environment, lured mostly by the text about a Sun Ra and Kennedy connection, I suddenly was back on floor two, feeling hoaxed by hodge podge art for art’s sake. The craftiness of the message had no humor which only came off pretentious to me like a 1980’s hedge fund lifestyle. The description on the wall said it was “visual poem” which I had read as “visual porn” and maybe my hopes were too high, but this was not even a a good 80’s redux, it was just ridic.

So I went back to the box where it began to get another look…this time from the inside…of Theaster Gates‘ “Monastic Residency” piece in the courtyard overlooked by the temporary cafe.  A simple stage set which will host artists, historians and street musicians during the course of the show and showing the hand of the makers, it felt much more 2010.

I opted for barbacue chips in the pop-up cafe, “Sandwiched”, pretending I had a hidden camera focused on the emphatic mouth and conversational arm movements of the patrons of a Friday night in an art cafe which amused us more than anything I had seen in the actual show. There was not much “delight” or “humor” in this show contrary to other years, which is a shame as humor can enlighten much more than earnest artist statements that end up being “wan” or leaving one “waiting.” However, with a very full performance schedule, the show invites return and re-experiencing, a smart engagement for the 75th anniversary. Jeffrey Inaba’s architecture collective INABA and C-Lab designed the cafe space with huge and funny lanterns, a bold comment on quick bites and our search for big illumination that summed up the show for me.

Popped out onto the sidewalk exiting, there was still a long line and a masked girl with layered sweaters and frocks blessing glittery gold rocks in her hands which she had lined up to spell the word “C R E A T I V I T Y” on the sidewalk, while the night air still had a young feel and the crowd waiting to get in went around the block.

As I made bold and suddenly cold steps to walk up Madison Avenue towards my home, I thought of my yoga teacher, Elena’s Brower’s message of “Home” and how it will always be the answer to end our “Waiting” for something outside of ourselves to offer transcendance or expansion or a message.

“The only definite is that expansion is always occurring. Gratitude is the most expansive attitude we can claim: when we are thankful, we invite levity, more space, more abundance. With thankfulness, we imprint receptivity on our bodies- we can take in more. With every incident of focused gratitude, we return home to our expanding hearts.” Elena Brower

With gratitude to the curators, guest curator Francesco Bonami and co-curator Gary Carrion-Murayari, for they encapsulated a paired down, watered down, back-to-basics, climbing out of boxes and hopeful Spring, a year and some after Obama and the most challenged year many of us ever had.

“We need not find our way back home to our divine beginnings; we need only appreciate that wherever we wander in Consciousness we are already where we need to be in order to be fulfilled.” Dr. Douglas Brooks

Tell that to reviewers, America’s lovers and the spirit of a culture that relishes art and freedom. This is Home.

Filed under: ART, NEW YORK Art   |  5 Comments
Tags: 2010 art highlights, 2010 new art, 2010 Whitney Biennial, Armory, art in NYC, best new art in 2010, Biennial, Biennial reviews, Blake Gopnik, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Central Park Coyote, Charles Ray, contemporary art, coyote, coyote symbolism, David Weiner, Dr. Douglas Brooks, Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, Elena Brower, highlights of nyc art 2010, Holland Cotter, INABA and C-Lab, jade dressler, Jeffrey Inaba, Jerry Saltz, Jesse Aron Green, Joseph Beuys, Kate Gilmore, Kelly Crow, man meets coyote, new art in NYC, New York art, Nina Berman, NY contemporary art, Raashad Newsome, Roland Flexner, Sandwiched, shaman, Spring art in NYC, The Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum, Theaster Gates, Todd Eberle, Virginia Heffernan, We Like America and America Likes Us, Whitney Biennial

Sacred Clowns. McQueen’s Ariadne and Bacchus Armor

25Feb10

My father was my Heyoka. Amidst my chaotic teenage into adult years, if he knew I was sad, thinking too much or existing on an ego island of my own, he would stand at my doorway and just drop his trousers to his boxers and stand there with a dumb look on his face until I laughed. When people spoke to him from their misguided psyche or they prattled on about a subject he correctly deemed utter nonsense, he would stare straight at them and either blink his eyes repeatedly and hard and say nothing or just promptly fall asleep.  Heyoka is a Lakota Native American concept akin to the fool, a sacred clown whose purpose was to ride the horse backwards, wear the clothes inside out, play with gender roles and do anything to shift a person or a tribe’s momentary myth.

With Alexander McQueen’s death we lose a Heyoka and a Modern Mythmaker.  This one, for us, was unafraid to pierce reality and offer the Mirror and the Power to Play all Roles, both human and beyond. For himself, unfortunately, this gift ran out. No other fashion designer comes close to this blatant offering, except perhaps Martin Margiela, a nihlist to McQueen’s effusion. The guantlet has been laid down…McQueen is beyond The Masters, beyond Chanel, beyond YSL, beyond.

In the end humor is always the best armor and amour.

To explore the armour of our perceptions and psyche and give us new skin is the role of the Heyoka,the Fool. Rituals of art, architecture or design can be initiations to pierce, puncture, to move the constructs of skin and the labyrinth of the individual psyche into the collective.  For me, the heyokas of the heart are everywhere.  With my own father’s recent death and McQueen’s suicide, seemingly influenced in part due to the death of his mother, a dive into the roots of creativity, healing and humor revealed the magic of the Sacred Clown, the humor of the Universe and the cycles of Spring.  As we keep softening to the possibilities of our experience offering all kinds of Avatars of Amour in our midst, everything from spontaneous kindness, the painful suicide of a master or for me lately, even looking again and again at images of inspiring shifting forms such as the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron.  The trousers are dropped and life is staring at us waiting for us to Feel The Love.

Although these Heyoka Ariadnes are deft with aiding us conquering demons, like the Minotaur, by leading us out of puzzles with simple things like brilliant paradox, rare beauty, a new fierce pair of boots changing the way we walk and understand our place on the earth, joking or balls of red thread, there is no total immunity from the pains of life, as we are reminded by McQueen’s suicide and Ariadne’s story.

The mythical Ariadne is abandoned on an island by her lover after helping him out of the labyrinth…

Her name is traced to its Minoan roots is “All Holy One” from the Greek and the Cretan-Greek form for arihagne, “Utterly Pure” and the word “àgni”, in turn which goes back in time translated as  “Holy Pure Fire” in Sanskrit.  Agni is one of the most important of the Vedic gods, as the god of fire and the acceptor of sacrifices. He is ever-young and immortal because his fire is re-lit every day.  Ariadne is already a Heyoka because she is based on the primal idea of a man’s energy even while being in the throes of playing the part of a very emotional woman who only wants to retreat to her cave due to being abandoned by her lover.

She is also the goddess of snakes and vegetation and lest her emotions drown her dreams as in this floating bed by artist Vincent Olinet, it takes a dream of Bacchus and a Spring-like re-awakening of pleasure and heat to remind her that her name is fire and that where there is loss, pleasure must arise again. This Heyoka’s fire could also be the serpent-like spiraling life and fire force of kundalini.

Bacchus, the God of Wine and Revelry, whose name means also means “To Shout”, appears to her in a dream and tells her to remain on the island because he was coming to marry her even as her lover Theseus, whose name means “To Set, to Order or to Dispose,” deserted her.

Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’s opera within an opera, conveys the myth’s mirror image of pain and joy perfectly. The opera takes place in a rich man’s house where due to constraints of time, a drama must be performed at the same time as a comedy. The height of an aria which melts armoured skin is crowned by a rolling in of the comedy troupe…thus the tale of abandonment is always played along the receiving of the new.  The union of Ariadne and Bacchus is said to be the constellation Corona Borealis, a half-circle of stars, a celestial crown made by the supreme goldsmith, Hephaestus, at his abode underwater, suggesting the depth of this emotional rescue.

Just as the Opera’s many windowed stage set by Frank Gehry heightens the theme of humans ultimately playing all roles, the Prima Donna and the burlesque dancer, the Composer and the Patron, the Nymphs and the Clowns, the Opera has its own ways of playing with convention. The charactor of the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos embodies the opera’s own Heyoka invention of the “trouser role”, a young man’s role played by a woman or a “skirt role,” where a man often plays an older woman. Traced to its beginnings, it was always a novelty first to spark ticket sales and a musical choice second.

“Principally, the Heyókȟa functions both as a mirror and a teacher, using extreme behaviors to mirror others, thereby forcing them to examine their own doubts, fears, hatreds, and weaknesses. Heyókȟas also have the power to heal emotional pain; such power comes from the experience of shame–they sing of shameful events in their lives, beg for food, and live as clowns. They provoke laughter in distressing situations of despair and provoke fear and chaos when people feel complacent and overly secure, to keep them from taking themselves too seriously or believing they are more powerful than they are.”—John Fire Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

A famous line at the end of Ariadne auf Naxos is meant to convey the whim of the heart of a woman, yet it can easily speak to our never ending desires and quest for sensation.  It is perhaps this relentless desire that is either our undoing or our salvation, depending upon your mood, religious proclivities or chemicals in your brain.

“With each new god, I surrendered without a word!”

1111 Lincoln Road by Paul Clemence

Alexander McQueen is quoted, “From heaven to hell and back again, life is a funny thing. Beauty can come from the most strangest of places even the most disgusting places.”  It takes an open heart and brave eyes to consistently present ugliness to us and have it transform into beauty. What we loved about this man was his magic to do this with mere clothing and somehow in the process transform our vision of our souls as humans.

Buildings, like clothing, can be mythical in their playfulness of forms and perform their role as sacred clowns. Much like the stark white Gehry stage waiting to be animated by charactors or even Margiela’s all white store, few things are as soulless and hollow as a parking garage.  My new heroes, Herzog & de Meuron unviel 1111 Lincoln Road, a shopping and residential epiphany at the end of the famous shopping street, as a crowning touch of Heyoka structure and symbol of empty consumerism and auto culture, laid bare for pause amidst the 24 hour party that is Miami.

What once was a symbol of ghostliness is open and now inviting, guileless, without armor or protection, an exaltation of “non structure.” I imagine the new luxury and sensation, Post McQueen, will be more of this type of space.  Like a cave or a meditation, our experience in spaces like this are allowed to roam more and be a vital part of the invention and living character. A Slow Luxury.

Where current fashion trends and logos are an armor that previously proclaimed a tribal identity, at this point in our expression, they are meaningless for protection or belonging to anything but a mindless buying club.  Artist, Tetsuya Noguchi and designer, Margiela capture this sacred clown taunt perfectly with Heyokas in the gallery and on the runway, encouraging new paths. Who will be crowned the New McQueen?

Hiroko Masuike for the New York Times

So we have lost a God with McQueen’s death.  With loss is a withdrawal and a re-orientation.  Where to place and express our desires post-recession, post-consumer culture myth and post McQueen to build a new Spring-like, Bacchus-rockin, Earth-lovin Heart amidst so much collective sleeping, despair and so much destruction of our biology and systems?  Transparency of our emotions and experience with each other is key. It is the Bacchus coming to rescue us. Herewith, a modern Bacchus and Ariadne offering, places playing with us and pushing us into reinvention and renewal.

A Drunken Bacchus Champagne Toast in a Glass Slipper To A Drunken Building With Much Sense.

One Jackson Square. New York City.

Like Margiela’s or Cinderella’s glass slipper, desire and danger, two primal experiences of emotional loss of control, are mixed for the sense overload that catapults us into “hyper-reality,” a term a friend used to accurately describe where we go in our psyche when someone close to us dies or we lose what we love most. Between the impact of the deaths of Isabella Blow and his mother, our idea of the public McQueen perhaps could not exist or create in that fragile bubble of pain, transparency, truth and endure the rigors of the identity shift space for himself, as much as he invited it for the rest of the world.

Where there is passionate emotion and life force in every fiber of McQueen, there is distance and transparency in Margiela, so I often thought of them as two sides of coin.  Margiela’s clothes are purposely zen and soul-less. I recently attended the launch of never-worn Margiela collected by private collector, Marcia Berger with a party put on by Michael Bruno’s 1stdibs.com, the elegantly lushest collection of objets online. (including astute couture curating and commentary by Clair Watson and Adriana Caras.) The party was held in three suites designed with 1stdibs goods at One Jackson Square, the new, very soulful and stunning green building of “ribbons of woven glass in the wind” topped by lush gardens and designed by William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox. Cocoons of glass, uneven curvy spaces dis-orienting and yet so solid. Bascially as beautiful inside as out…transparent, enlightened. A Good Drunk.

A building of woven glass ribbons in the wind is as drunk sensibly as a pair of McQueen’s shoes. McQueen was an accomplished scuba enthusiast, and it influenced his 2000 Leagues Under The Sea collection, a passion shared by James Cameron who was influenced by undersea life for much of Avatar’s imagery. If water is pure emotion, it is a symbol that we are diving deep into the Earth’s emotion, beauty and the power it holds for us as popular culture to share this cathartic collective dream.

and now…A New Island Cave For Ariadne.

After my own father died in December, I spent many wintry hours in the 65 cafe of the new Alice Tully Hall, where the experience offered both sensation and space, like being in a cave that is completely transparent. Like the open mouth of a shark emerging from the depths, the shape is funny and jarring yet inside is all about safe and nestled with a view point not often experienced in the city. I also spent time at the ballet this winter and this piercing quality was echoed in the classic Sleeping Beauty story, another story of loss, love, a woman in retreat and despair but dreaming and hearing of Spring and New Love while she slept.  Ariadne would like this cave. I often think if we can just tap into the stage where we are moment to moment of the natural cycle from death and dust to seed to germination to sprout to shoot to plant to flower to death to dust… it is a savior from our linear despair. The best spaces operate as sacred clowns offering both angles and curves to jostle us with humor and grace.

How Ariadne and Bacchus Meet and Engender Stars.

How essential on an emotional level is this integration of biology in our psyche even in our cities. For me it is the arrival of Bacchus. I call it “wild-cycling” expressed in the other notable project by Alice Tully Hall’s designers, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, The Highline. This green space moved abandonment into community and created a stage set for a tight-rope sacred space for balancing and also, like Alice Tully Hall, offering a mid level ribbon weaving through buildings, a brand new urban viewpoint. The soothing “non architecture” or the integration of the wild into urban through re-purposed railway tracks is like weaving and welcoming back a new lover, that of nature, a place to pause from concrete and breathe biology back into every fiber of our lives.  Our demand for this soft process from communal emotional support to pure foods to sacred secular experiences is absolutely the New Luxury.

My other favorite, Jardins du Ruisseau, a surprise on the way to the Marches aux Puces in Paris at Porte de Clignancort, is one of the best hidden gardens of Paris. A long stretch of a former rail line, it’s presence is even more compelling than the Highline for its random completeness, true spontaneous birth and cultivation by neighbors who live in along side cultivating their food, vineyards and flowers, instead of being a design of city planners and architects.

…and so this is the awakening of Ariadne, sleeping in the depths of the earth and woken by the arrival of Bacchus and new wines to be intoxicated by.  The natural counterpoint to one of McQueen’s last statements, his impossible, celestial, alien glittery, only-for-those-who-have-their-sea-legs shoe boots are Margiela’s classic statement, his grounded cloven Pan boots, a kind of earthen shoe good for another 1000 years of evolution. Come back to Earth fantasy.

“When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm… you have noticed that truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering…”

…and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping… as lightning illuminates the dark, for it is the power of lightning that heyokas have.”  Black Elk, quoted in Neihardt (1959)

Yinka Shonibare Aliens

Wild-cycling as a new luxury can help insure we are not carrying earth just as a nostalgic memory through culturally patterned cloths to decorate our life-support armor as we are forced explore new worlds. Instead, as smartly armored Avatars, we can carry integral seeds of our emotional and sensory emphatic experience here on Earth, with each other and the living breathing fiber of organic earth. We stand the luxury of enjoying life through the precious gift of our own pure bodies and moment to moment Heyoka Guruship vs. manufactured Hallmark moments selling a Paradise that has been paved over into a parking lot.

After my father’s death, the reuccurring image for me was a roadside sight I saw years ago from inside our passing car, that of a dead tree struck by lightening alone in a field surrounded a lush green grove of trees.  When I was able to suddenly shift to seeing the tree from the perspective of the grove, I knew I was perched at the edge of the cave, after a long sleep, opening my eyes as the sun rose for a new morning.

Goodnight Sweet Prince.

Thank you for Your Dreams.

“We have trusted and we have been betrayed, and when the the protesting and the howling has ceased, we have followed that wound through the labyrinth, and it has taken us to the very bottom. And the bottom falls away, and the never-ending beginning lies in the palm of our hand.”  Rick Jarow

written by Jade Dressler

Filed under: ARCHITECTURE, ART, FASHION, FLOWERS, NEW GREEN, NEW YORK, STYLE, TRENDS   |  10 Comments
Tags: 1st dibs, Alexander McQueen, Alice Tully Hall, ariadne and bacchus, ariadne and theseus, ariadne auf naxos, armor clothing, bacchus, buddhist, carravagio, chanel, Chanel logo, clothing as armor, coco chanel, Corona Borealis, death of a close one, diller scofidio+renfro, Frank Gehry stage set, glass slipper, God of Wine, Herzog de Meuron, herzong and de meuron, Heyoka, hidden gardens of paris, highline, Hiroko Masuike, jade dressler, jardins de ruisseau, JOhn Fire Lame Deer, Kohn Pederson Fox, kundalini, lightening, Marcia Berger, Margiela glass slipper, margiela tabi boots, martin margiela, McQueen quote, McQueens suicide, Michael Bruno, new luxury, new york city parks, nyc urban gardens, One Jackson square, pan, paris urban gardens, Paul Clemence, post McQueen, rails into gardens, rails to trails, Richard Strauss, Rick Jarow, sacred clown, Sleeping Beauty, Spring renewal, Spring wine, Tetsuya Noguchi, The Fool, the highline, the new luxury, trouser role, urban farming, urban gardens, urban railway lines, Vincent Olinet, why did mcqueen commit suicide, wild cycling, wild into urban, William Pedersson, Yinka Shonibare, YSL, zen

Gimme Love! Gimme 11 Red V-Day Presents!

11Feb10

Gimme Love! Gimme 11 Red V-Day Presents!  I will serve faithfully the lover who treats me (and us) to this menu of 11 red perfections I desire for V-Day or anyday.

Come alive St. Valentine!  I always confuse you with the Earl of Sandwich so I had to look up your story.

Just another saint put to death by Roman Empire’s Claudius ll by stoning?  No one really knows why he inspires such love festing. Like our nameless lusting,hurts, fears, desires and awe over Love, the source will always be a mystery.  St. Valentine doesn’t even have a Hallmarkable Avatar the way St.Nick has Santa Claus and St.Patrick has his green leprechaun.  OK maybe we made Cupid his Avatar and Psyche his holy grail to rescue from the Underground.  St. Valentine himself did leave us his skull crowned with flowers.

No wonder we throw ourselves into gifting and loving on this day! We want our own love story, we want much more than mandible-less skull relics peeping through the portholes of Time!  It’s been cold outside and we want some hot lovin’!

A search for the pagan roots sometimes helps with hot lovin’ inspiration, our unfathomable mythical connections and general bookishness.  Here’s a Wikipedia gem, apparently Valentine’s Day is based on the pagan holiday Lupercalia, and one can find references to Spring cleaning and new life ala the wolf Lupa who suckled the infant twins Romulus and Remus…but this!   “At this time many of the noble youths and magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs.” Lashes from these animal skin whips were to said to increase fertility.

That is a Caligula-worthy porn movie or music video begging to be made.  Here are 11 steps to real red things I prefer my lover to give me:

Step 1. the gift. lash blinkings and sexy trinkets.

Bat your boy eyelashes sweetly at me, brush my hair and adorn me with jewels. Betony Vernon jewels, please.

Her roots may be dirty blond and she may be a coalminer’s daughter, but the sex-full and simultaneously purposeful jewelry of Betony Vernon beckons more than gold, sporting real bedhead or the 17 year old thrill of wearing the football star’s hickeys. And she herself brilliantly mixes a soft 40’s minx look with an Appalachian porn vibe, melikes it, quite stunning.

Step 2…red wine, red velvet, red monkeys

Let’s soak in a robust Red and gurgle beneath the fez’d monkey at New York City’s The Jane Hotel bar.

Did they open the big room yet?  Can we slip the bartender a crisp $1000. and play inside?

Step 3. gift me your mind…wine tipsy, fluttery red art repartee

Have you seen the art shanties they make in Minneapolis’ Medicine Lake?

no! but look at this old, esoteric, really red media cover, isn’t it the best new media you’ve seen lately?

um, is it a fallen angel Avatar for a multi-platformed, multi-channeled whatever?

well no.  It’s just old.  which somehow feels fresher. captivating…creation of Fleur Cowles…born unremarkable made herself into an icon and became friends with Presidents, Ctzars and Parlimentary Persons of every ilk. She published Flair for a year and lived it her whole life.

This picture may or may not be her but it comes up in a google search and damn…a red hat at the pool?

Step 4…hungry. Vlada. Russian Samovar.

Why? Why? New York History Baby. Russian Passion. Russian vodka. It’s the haunt of Carrie Bradshaw (“It’s very…red” she observed.) and the former creation of Jilly, Sinatra’s bodyguard who welcomed the Rat Pack to it’s cushy red banquets… owned by our new friend, the bold, the blond Vlada and ballet boy Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Step 5. baby, can you feel my red shoes under the table?

these exact Christian Louboutin shoes, that you are   ***f e e l i n g***  right now are in a lineage of men memories fueled from red leather me-wrinkled ankle boots at 6 on a swing with my Dad to my red peep toe Charles Jourdans in the eighties when we first met in the club that was a church, you grabbed me to Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and we did until “Take Me Home”…I love that you are the man who buys my shoes, protects my feet and unabashedly buys my heart.

Step 6.  prodigal son and the siren.  ballet.

our shoes journey syncopated steps making diagonal leagues in the icy February air across Lincoln Center’s vast plain towards the ballet. I am gasping over Diaghilev’s siren in Prodigal Sun…this red and white deco sketch, this is a Superheroine, a visionary anime from the 1920’s. The ghoulish crew, the melodrama and the Balanchine timeless modern force gets you. the lovers’ body puzzles! when she wraps herself in the endless infinite red scarf! the leathered, tethered and pleading son’s slide down the Father’s body…whoa.

Step 7. after ballet dessert cool down with pichet at spot.

My sweet friend Pichet Ong p’onged from The Spice Market to P’ong to Spot. talk to the tart. the yuzu Oreo-crusted ice cream sandwich and with macerated strawberries, passionfruit foam and crumbly chocolate soil has us in Marilyn Minter sugar overdoes overdose.

Step 8. at your sacred feet. gimme men’s feet, expensive shoes, no socks.

my X-ray specs mind-spy and feel your ankles and see my just desserts. (blogger note: there are no photos of sexy men’s feet online…do even gay men ignore the feet?)

Step 9.  seduction finale. love chamber essentials, bring these please:

swagger, stagger, protect, expose, circle, unwind, grasp, conquer, surrender, shake, shore up, possess, release, smile, eyes close, surprise.

here am I deep like earth eyes, to protect, to feed the twins you are, all of it there’s more than all of it here. enough chair, red cloth, milk, space, poetry.

hindu hop skotch. the red is for Shakti Female and the white is for Shiva Male and Pink is the…Pleasure.  gotcha Volupta, child of Cupid and Psyche. I am feeling your Holy Name of Bliss:-)))))))

Step 10.  thankfully, you know exactly my bathroom essentials…

dry brush, scrubs, scented oils, white marble, gigantic proportions, big mirrors, fresh flowers, art, huge white linen bedsheets or towels…I love when things get used for something other than what God intended.

Step 11.   and I will soothe your morning with my hangover cure. just promise me you will bring me your hunger…always.

it may be manhattan, but the mourning dove is sweeting us from sleep, let me sweet you with some coconut kefir to sooth the hangover, open that lovely mouth for some buttery biscuits while listening to sweet Telepopmusik to send you on your way…into another day…

Lyrics to Breathe :
I brought you some something close to me
And left with something new
I can see through your head
You haunt my dreams
But theres nothing to do but believe
Just believe
Just breathe
Another day
Just believe
Another day
Just breathe
Another day
Just believe
Another day
Just breathe
I’m used to it by now
Another day
Just believe
Just breathe
Just believe
Just breathe
Lying in my bed
Staring at the ceiling
Just breathe
Another day
Another day
Just believe
Another day
I’m used to it by now
I’m used to it by now
Just breathe
Just believe
Just breathe
Just believe
Just breathe
Just believe
Just believe
Just breathe
Just believe
Another day
Just believe
Another day
Just believe
Another day
Just breathe
Another day

Just breathe

I do believe
Another day
Another day
Another day

Filed under: ART, LIVES, LOVE, LOVERS, THE TOP 11   |  2 Comments
Tags: art lovers, art shanties, Balanchine, ballet lovers, bathroom decor ideas, Betony Vernon, coco chanel, Cupid, cupid and psyche, dessert in NYC, Diaghilev, Eggleson, Famous Lovers, flair magazine, Fleur Cowles, French lovers, hangover cures, images of lovers, jade dressler, Jilly, just breathe, LOVERS, lovers images, lovers in nyc, lovers photos, Lupercalia, Marilyn Minter, medicine lake, Pichet Ong, prodigal son and siren, prodigal son ballet, Rat pack, red lovers, red perfections, red shoes, russian samovar, russian smaovar, sexy men's feet, Shiva Yantra, shri yantra, Spot, Spot desserts, telepopmusik, The Jane Hotel, timeless lovers, Valentine's Day lovers, valentine's day presents, Vanessa Beecroft, vlada

ELEVEN Lucid Diamonds in The Rough Voluptuous Sky.

29Nov09

ELEVEN Lucid Diamonds in The Rough Voluptuous Sky.

Tell Persephone, for a good time don’t call my Iphone, silence in the cave and underground realms is woo’ing me with diamonds now. And if you are a Party or Person calling…this better be GOOD.

The cave of deep dark cold, the long night, the winter solstice is coming. For direction, desire and comfort…the voluptuous night sky. For knowing…the deep quiet inside.  For events…transforming only please.

Diamonds in the Rough from inky black coal are Stars in my Sky and here are 11 of them ranging from “under-privileged kids” to Pop Stars such as Damien Hirst and Karl Lagerfeld.  Go below, go under and go into and get into it to find treasures where most don’t look.

ONE. THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH. NEWARK, NEW JERSEY.

Picture this. I had a cold. It was an unseasonably cold night in October. I had commitments. To Kids. To Art. To an Evening out in NYC for Causes + Fundraising, I had to accept my fuzzy brain and altered perception of Body, enter the magical forest glens of Midtown Tourists and West of Eighth Avenue Hinterlands and Rock on.

And so…to Rockefeller Center, our first stop for a cocktail party to benefit the Links School in Newark, held in a verdant cave of palms against the night sky of deep dark blue and cool steel.

My partner Michelle Barge and I met up at the invite of Ellen Cohen of Lazard Freres and her beloved cause, The Link School, which serves low income urban students from Newark with exceptional and rigorous education.  The result is students who excel with an 80% college enrollment. This year resulted in an astounding 2 million dollars in scholarship funding. Kudos to the Principal, Maria Pilar Paradiso J.D., who was positively inspiring and supporter, Veronika Sonsev of Jumptap, the mobile advertising agency, with whom I shared lively conversation about the arts, education and the digital frontier.

I was born in Newark and care passionately about this city rising from the ashes of racism and poverty to be a center of the Arts and Industry.  Thank you Mayor Cory Booker (and our friend Desiree Peterkin Bell) Ashton Kutcher, Forest Whitaker and Conan O’Brien…public faces waking up America to the potential versus the hopelessness in our inner cities.  I proudly step away from my red Camaro in my Uggs and push back my feathered bangs and salute you. I am actually a proud Jersey girl. (I mean, Newark girl…ouch!…not ALL of NJ!)

TWO. “HIGHBROW” AND LOWBROW…ALWAYS THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.

The next stop that night, WAY on the other side of town, almost in the River to an unmarked warehouse loft, the site for the Pointe Suite Art Ball Studio 450 Penthouse. A place where no one in their right mind should sojourn. Whizzing cars entering the Lincoln Tunnel make it feel as though one was in New Jersey already, a frightening prospect for NY’ers. “This better be good, “ I thought.  Annika Conner, artist and social butterfly and my friend, artist Nick Papadakis were raising funds to create a book of new artists and for the trek, I wanted excitement.

The wintery and tree girl paintings at the top of this post are by Nick.  I showed his work many years ago when I ran the MUD party at Baktun in the Meatpacking when it still was an actual Meatpacking place and parties there were shining because of the contrast.  We are talking The Cooler, Baktun and Florent. It was magic.  Looming buildings, dark streets and unmarked doors when you arrived at about 12 am along with that pervasive smell of meat. At 4 am, tumbling out into 14th street to the roar of tractor trailers, white clad meat men and slivers of glimpses at the swinging cow carcasses in the coolers. Imagine us at 4 am, silhouetted figures against truck headlights, Manolo and liquor challenged, with our diagonal, cobble stoned treks home past steaming street vents with drum and bass still pumping in our blood as meat workers arrived for a day’s work. This was visceral Art without price tags, entitlement and the crowds.

If an art event is going to sparkle diamonds in NYC it better have some feel like this…no matter how highbrow the rollers.

Once inside the warehouse, I searched the crowd vainly for something to turn me on. Annika and her father’s regalia unfortunately were the highlight I enjoyed, mostly because they reminded me of artist Richard Saja’s embroidered toile (above)… without the irony though.

Here are Annick’s paintings.

I love the saturated colors.  As a contrast, here is a painting of me done by  Florian Heinke from a photo taken at APT, another old favorite place in the Meatpacking.

I have read that Annick loves dancing, and although there was none at her party, we seem to share this.

Nick’s work is now sold at Sotheby’s.   I was nostalgic and touched to hear how he has moved from nightclub party exhibitions to the world’s stage.  I guess dancing does indeed lead to other things.

Our photographer, Kaitlyn Barlow and I wished the artists to be featured in the book were more prominent at this event, even the slide show was tucked away in a corner. Beside a hilarious drunken girl with dress and shoes falling off, who was running around sketching everyone, you had to search for the art or to feel immersed in creativity. Without an immersive experience of art, music, film, atmosphere,the whole party was not as exciting as it could be, as most charity balls tend to be. Kudos to Annick and Nick, I admire your art and efforts, but this party made me want to hustle my heels home…vaguely unsatisfied.

Sometimes, the lucidity comes in knowing when to get to the leaving.

(See further in the post for a truly stellar “Art” party, Performa’s Opening Party.)

THREE. HOW TO CIRCLE FROM HYPER NATION TO HIBER NATION.

Sanskrit language tutorial. OM begets HOME. OM begets WOMB. OM begets ROOM. A room with no view is an instant high. Home is where the heels kick off into the sculptural pile of clothes shed and skin and gratefulness spin a cocoon via a linen down comforter.

How planned it would be to cuddle first in this tufted leather over metal cocoon for the Night’s Requiem before the bed?

Blackman Cruz is the pointed collection of stellar furniture to behold Life and Drama in. Blackman Cruz stores are in LA or SF.  This Tufted Pod Chair requires $20,500. in exchange for plenty of Good Dreams.

FOUR. VISIT YOUR DARK LADY.

Remedios Varos is the artist for pod chairs.

FIVE. FIND PERSONALITY BEGINS WHERE COMPARISON ENDS.

…and then there is I Pod hair.  Dusty Springfield, The Woodabe and the artist JillZ, aka Moi;-)

The artist relates:  “After reading recently again the biography of David Geffen I tuned the Pandora to Laura Nyro radio and was transported by other pop icons of the 60’s and 70’s such as Dusty Springfield and even Carole King and became a bit obsessed by their guru-like words and untouchable, mysterious goddess status and personalities. When I saw this photo of Dusty above, it really hit me and I suddenly wondered what she was thinking and feeling in that puffy beehive during this photo shoot.  The only way I could really know was to try to assume her un-natural pose and quixotic smile so I started playing around in Photobooth.”

“The result is a series of images, stepping stones towards a vision of mash-up, old formal portraits which I have been desiring to do for a very long time but in such a way to be completely timeless, genderless and culturally undefined.”

“The root of that desire is my obsession with any transformative ritual.  The Fulani tribesmen of the Woodabe from Africa shown here with their exaggerated expressions and full-on preening line-ups like showgirls is so opposite our culture’s man-dance of solitary ego parading. I always wondered how they felt too. So I went there too and decided to become their Luv-Child.”

“Perhaps contrasted with Dusty’s cool, stiff and almost transsexual vibe, the window between these two worlds beckoned me in and the plan is to bring more people and personalities with me.  We have just begun the mining process for these diamonds.”

(You can see what gets churned up from pod-chair dreaming and cold nights between parties.)

SIX. PRACTICE DARK ARTS.

From the entrance, with its giant big blue inflatable lightbulb with evil eyes and scars signaling brilliant ideas ahead, to the intricate charted details of Martian and ghoul anatomy, Burton’s vision is our modern antidote to everything Dark and Fearful.  With one eyeball set on Western culture, following Edward Gorey’s mock Victorian and the other eyeball on Eastern culture’s best 1960’s monster and Argonaut movies and futuristic anime, the man has created a compound eye based on a childhood touchpoint of enjoying being “misfit” vs. “normal” and seeing the world from inside his head.

I desired the corpse bride’s popping eyeballs to see over the crowds oogling precious drawings of my favorites, Stain Boy, Mr. Oogie Boogie, with his independently moving bulges in his cushy body and Large Marge.  Burton’s renderings of ourselves and the people we know with their innards flailing about in a way that we realize we truly perceive them. An early film he made of himself sleeping and dreaming in his bed with upside down nerd glasses says it all.

Thank you to my friend Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, one of the organizers of the exhibition. My favorite memory of Raj is his glow-in-the-Dark, very Burtonesque and hilarious mad ghost dancing on the beach in a sheet at our Halloween bonfire during the Hamptons Film Festival.  Big hugs to Monique Baron, my friend just moving from Corporate to Creative, for suggesting we go to the exhibit.

The Tim Burton exhibition is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art until late April.

SEVEN. A BRILLIANT SKULL ONLY NEEDS SISYPHUS’ PAINTBRUSH.

Damien, we hardly know ye.

“No Love Lost, Blue Paintings,” the Damien Hirst painting exhibition, opened this month in London at the Wallace Collection to disparaging criticism. I actually love the paintings and it made for a Hirst womb coupled with my visit to Other Criteria, Damien Hirst’s underground gallery at the Gagosian uptown store, which opened in September in New York City, with the perfect companion, Shelley Lewis, an elegant, humorous and smart Brit with a Bohemian spirit.

A brilliant white cave with wallpaper of pills, butterflies and flowers proffered up the tidy output of the Artist for Conceptual Consumption.  Close ups of the solid multi-colored dots surrounded by field of gold glitter revealed a precision and perfection around simplicity that is as meditative as a Rothko or a mandala.

The paintings feel like a pared down schematic of the momentary void from which Hirst’s lit symbolic tools, such as his skull, flowers, thought lines, dots and shark jaws, converge for a moment.  Less solid and a childlike effort begging for the technique and critique to be dropped, I truly admire these for their rawness and almost naivite.

The Guru is painting for fun.

EIGHT. MEN IN BLACK.

Karl Lagerfeld is the one who said, “Personality begins where comparison ends.”

Compare and Contrast are THE jumping off points, for new ideas, humor, conveying a seductive advertising message and even to the stark black and white uniform Western culture adopts to award and celebrate.

Both were shining last week for the Ad Council’s annual black tie event at the Waldorf Astoria. I was struck how the sea of men in the rigor and elegance of black tie dress always levels the comparison factor for males (much like the Fulani line-up) and allows the personality of the men shine on top of a white arrow in a black field through their faces, hands, shoes and characters.

Similarly, The Ad Council uses contrast and the improbable to convey messages from the American Heart Association’s “hands can do incredible things” for Hands-only CPR to brilliant pieces on Gay rights. Where would we be without these creative minds devoting time, energy and money to creatively pushing the needle of compassion and engagement for the masses?

Huffington Post has many of this year’s commercials here.

And Kudos to Karl for re-inventing the language of black and white uniforms via Chanel and his own wardrobe as a frame for personality read from the articulation of details.  The signs and symbols sensed like animals.

NINE. PERFORMA. NOW THIS IS AN ART EVENT.

Attuned to digital experience and expectations, almost in a sexual way, public events must equally touch the primal and the disorienting to engage us.  We are now the impulsed creators of our immediate experience in front of our Ipods and computers…so to replicate this seduction face to face, nothing about our surroundings must be less than peak experience.

Imagine exploring vast spaces with freshly uprooted apple trees saying “Pick me”, a sea of glasses inviting you to “Drink me”, a table of 2000 pounds of pork ribs rained upon by honey ooze dripping from the ceiling saying “This is messy”and Jeff Koons chocolate bunnies with hammers saying “Break me off”… with all of it based on the book of Genesis?  Now you are talking an event worth braving the cold for!

Performa, the bienniel roster of performance artists from around the world opened recently in New York City with an Opening Night Dinner Benefit at X Initiative, designed by Jennifer Rubell, the daughter of art collectors and niece of Studio 54 impresario Steve Rubell.

This event raised the bar…thankfully. (still getting honey outa my dress)

TEN. SOUND IN THE DARK BEGINS THE WORLD.

Pomp and circumstance reigns at the Park Avenue Armory from its historic army days to “PA” a performance by resident Marian Rosenfeld, one of the closing events of Performa 09.

While waiting to be let into the Armory’s drill hall where the performance was to be, I and others explored the dark rooms filled with taxidermy, including owls, a bobcat, a moose and others, among intricate black wrought iron chandeliers and military portraits.  The rooms are begging for a fashion shoot (especially given the Armory’s rep as hosting the “Silk Stocking Regiment”)  The heavy, ornate rooms were surprisingly designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany along with Stanford White (whose story of young mistresses and murder is intriguing New York history.)  The rooms are intricate example of the American aesthetic movement’s use of exotic materials in lush combinations, a cult of beauty and sensuousness that is considered to have been pronounced dead upon the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

The Veteran’s room’s chocolate brown wood carved ceiling with silver inlaid arabesques made me gasp. In the library, the silver work on urns, commemorative plates and ephemera mixed ornate animal forms and horns with heraldry is salivating and desires an indie model’s hand on them. Gold stenciled, Indian block-print inspired flowers on blue wallpaper and ceiling made me think of Hirst’s flower wallpaper, can you imagine that being commissioned today for an army headquarters?

The incongruity continued as we poured into the cavernous dark of the drill hall punctuated only with a few spots of light on PA speakers or a cellist and the monstrous scaffold ceiling. Machinery and recording bits lay all around. Following first a female voice’s personal love cooing coming out of the big PA speakers turning around and around in a vast searchlight way made me feel Nazi-Germanish. Tick tock tick tock, the crowd became attuned to the utterances of The Machine. Another spot is lit where a cello player plays with electronic feedback and the crowd drifts there.  Lights or sudden switches took people to one tableau or another or just sitting in the middle of nowhere to soak it all in.  Once the soundscape became more and more of the same thing, it made me wonder about the tone of pure love emanating from within and without, like the sound of OM or the universe existing whether we tune in or not…and how we are subject to sound’s pull and push.

The crowd’s long applause at the end was most thrilling, due to it’s shared staccato and crowdsourced birth.  Another surprising and life-shifting night in New York City.

The following image, Bejing’s National Stadium by architects Herzog and de Mueron, just came into my life because of a potential client’s new space in their upcoming project in Miami.  It is the perfect modern aesthetic fusing sensuousness and contemplation and strangely conveys the same feeling of being in Marina Rosenfeld’s drill room pulsating with light and sound.

ELEVEN. STARCHILD…This better be GOOD.

I’ve been doing yoga since I was 16, a teenage starchild, flipping into headstands against my bedroom door where hung this Lisbon nightclub poster with groovy Hebrew writing advertising a nightclub called “Tiffany’s.”  Today, while doing a headstand, (which is great for spilling out the stars in your head), I saw the poster on my wall where it now hangs today and thought about the images we have as lodestars in our lives.

This enigmatic black-pod-hatted man will always intrigue me on to keep believing in that black field of all possibility so I remember to cultivate the stars in myself and others to pop the moment.

Here are Jamiroquai’s lyrics to Starchild, an old song, but one that feels right for the time and coming cold. It is kind of Christian mythical but a good reminder that we all are actually the Starchild and we are capable of fully inhabiting and making good the black wholes filled with stars that we are…

I’ve never seen the sky so angry

Starchild

You’ve got to do something about these

Mind crimes

The shuffling feet and sad expressions

They don’t go, they don’t go

I thought you came down from heaven

To save souls

These angry men are into making

Bad seeds

The only thing we had they’re taking

Now love needs

Needs a little, needs a little

Five thousand million people

To spread joy, spread a little joy

I thought you came down from heaven to save us

I thought you came but you just don’t take us

Chorus:

Somewhere in the world tonight

There’s a fire blazing bright

Keeping warm the superman

Sent to us to save the land

Somewhere in the world today

A hungry one will kneel to pray

Wishing all the while to see

Starchild

I’ve seen the preachers on the TV

In white suits

With precious stones they’re studded into

Their boots

Can you take the money, can you take their money?

I don’t know who to believe

Is it them or you?

I thought you came down from heaven to save us

I thought you came but you just don’t take us

[Chorus]

Starchild

Got to see him now

When you gonna come, when you gonna come

You’ve got to save us from what we’ve begun

From what we’ve begun

So long coming down

Starchild

Chorus

Somewhere in the world tonight

In the world tonight

Somewhere in the world tonight

In the world tonight

You know that somewhere in the world tonight

There’s a superman

There’s a superman and he’s coming down to see you, baby

There’s a superman coming

There’s a superman coming

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Tags: American Aesthetic Movement, Annika Conner, APT, Aston Kutcher, Baktun, Bejing's National Stadium, Blackman Cruz, Blue Paintings, Celeste Bartos Chief of Film, Conan O'Brien, Cory Booker, Damien Hirst, Desiree Peterkin Bell, Dusty Springfield, Ellen Cohen, florent, Florian Heinke, Forest Whitaker, Fulani, Gagosian, Herzog and de Mueron, jade dressler, Jamiroquai, Jennifer Rubell, Jenny Rubell, Jersey girl, Jumptap, Kaitlyn Barlow, Karl Lagerfeld hands, Link School, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Maria Pilar Paradiso, Marina Rosenfeld, Meatpacking, Michelle Barge, Mr. Oogie Boogie, Newark, Newark Links School, Nick Papadakis, No Love Lost, old Meatpacking clubs, old Meatpacking parties, Other Criteria, PA Marina Rosenfeld, Park Avenue Armory, Performa, Performa 09, Performa Opening Night Dinner, Performa X Initiative, Point Suite Ball, Pointe Suite Art Ball, Rajendra Roy, Remedios Varos, Richard Saja, Rockefeller Center, Sanford White, Shelley Lewis, Silk Stocking Regiment, Stain Boy, Starchild, The Ad Council, The Cooler, The Link School, Tim Burton, Tim Burton exhibit, Veronika Sonsev, Woodabe

Bon Vivants: Positions Available This Very Moment

24Sep09

“Bon Vivants: 11 Stories and Habits of Highly Effective BVs.”

Written by a well-published and widely read Bon Vivant author. Me.

#1  “Join the bon-vivant!  You can too! It’s never about pedigree, and always about wit, drama, intrigue, good and stylish outfits and bohemian silliness…”

(and taking the summer off from blogging!)

We admit it.  We were more taken by Bon Vivant Country weekends than blogging…but we’re back.

Here’s the first story. Sweaty summer kids, we were invited one particular weekend by our country gentleman friend, John Favreau, to his Little Lake in Warren, Connecticut, where “How to Join the Bon Vivant Life” was encapsulated at every turn.   little marvin and I donned our best wigs, packed some BBQ chicken wings and Gatorade and set on our journey.   Above is tall little marvin on the right in the conked long straight wig and you can guess little me from the coiffed frizz, proudly rockin the hair of my people. Thankfully, the right white coif is de riguer for the country set!

Tumbling stylishly off the train, and strutting over runway-style in the bright sunshine to John, who picked us up in his white convertible Mercedes, we hopped in and drove sportily across the rolling hillettes, directly into the pedigreed land of Connecticut estates. (hold on to those chicken wings and wigs Kidz!)

Pointing out the estates of the rich and powerful, John said sportily, as an aside, that you don’t necessarily need good genes or a pedigree to hang with the “Manor born.” John’s own Vanity Fair-worthy story of Philadelphia society in the 80’s got us thinking if this were true.  In my own home town of Brotherly Love, John played house-boy host to this century’s most notable Bon Vivants from Nancy Brewster Grace, Henry McIlhenny to Lady Sarah Churchill, to Hope Montgomery Scott, the woman who inspired the Oscar-winning film, The Philadelphia Story andwhomVanity Fair once called “the unofficial queen of Philadelphia‘s WASP oligarchy.”  John traveled the world with notable Salonist and photographer of the whole scene, Gloria Bragiotti Etting.  I recalled my favorite W. Somerset Maugham quote, ” It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”

Could it be that anybody can charm the charmed society?  Armed only with grand vision, a sense of generosity about oneself and others and seeking the best of the best?  I was inspired to explore the subject.  I am neither a Self-Help Author or Fashion Journalist but these Eleven Stories, Quotes, Anecdotes and Habits from Eleven Real Bon Vivants, from Dame Vivienne Westwood to Francine du Plessix Gray, can set you on your path to better living!

#2  Wake People up like Showy, Strutting Roosters!

We’ve arrived! Are you not happy?  Be and Welcome showy guests such as Pamela Anderson, Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler and fun is immediately assured.  John does. He routinely hosts guests ranging a house full of photo shoot producers and models from Gradient magazine to a lively, costumed crowd at a pirate themed party attended by neighbors including Richard and John of Lambertson & Truex and Privet, their haute shop; trend spotter and paper-doll designer, David Wolfe: Author, Amanda Hallay and Painter, Pierre Hale and of course…us.

#3 “Survival of The Fittest! Nature and Society eats whatever is

boring, injured, useless or dumb.” so says John.

John Favreau is a most elegant country gentleman, one who owns lots of bucolic land, cans his own home-made jam and can be equally consumed with the foxes on Wall Street or the foxes attempting to get into his home-made chicken roost.  Clearly you either eat or get eaten, and the facts of life are somehow more raw when they float just beneath a postcard pretty scene.  Nature’s thorns and thistles of life are abundant and we have the choice to corral our survival tendencies into Fear or equal ourselves to elements of Nature and moment to moment seek how to live the good life by being useful.

The Ultimate Bon Vivant is Nature herself, laughing at our Sisyphean tasks within her wilds, such as my task to be fascinated with Bon Vivants, perhaps as dumb to Nature as Fitzcarraldo’s Opera House in the Amazon and even the making of such as recently described in Werner Herzog’s obscene jungle love in Conquest of the Useless.

I pondered on this given my reading for the trip, Black Elk, The Sacred Ways of A Lakota, on the simple, multi-universe lives of Black Elk and his channupa pipe. Part of my attempt to try to be all Thoreau-like in the country hence, resulting in my best Man vs. Nature BV habit advice which is to Join The Cult of The Appreciative No Matter What or Where You Are and:

#4  When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

#5  Give Good Story.  “The ability to be a raconteur is key,” says John.

Good Stories told by fine Dandies. Purrrr.  Everyone knows I love Dandies. Dandies are prime Bon Vivants and they notably have a story at the ready for everything. “Oh, this…?…” or “You’ll never guess what happened on my way to…”  Next to my blogger, San Francisan love, Mr. Peacock, (picture above) whence comes John.  His creature comforts all have fascinating stories behind them, ranging from his custom designed crocodile bikers bag to the huge sea turtle shell in his living room that was caught off the coast of Cuba by his Grandfather. Even little marvin and I got in the persuasive story act, trying to coo and comfort John’s caged and scared feral cats housed in his barn, where they were  being “encultured”,  ie: tamed to stay put and catch mice. (We told them about the rose of The Little Prince, the steady diet of plump mouses and John’s dandy hospitality. )

Love and the stories we tell each other do create intricate weavings of relationship! Clearly, it’s far better to be the storyteller.

Being a dandy  is a good, harmless and enriching storytelling habit for anyone, here are 3 tips to get started:

• Be a handsome, well-groomed, gallant or flamboyant person
• Be obsessive about refined language, facts and obscure, wearying hobbies (especially those requiring lads, Dads or gladhands to assist)
• Be a self-made person, live a magnified style of life regardless of background

Aha! That’s so me.  I add only one perfect complimentary diamond-like habit to dandyism…an unmitigated lack of pretension.

#6    Lose The Youth.  Hang with Elders, the wise and cultured.

Spending leisurely time with older creative people topped by white frothy hair was another Little Lake theme (thank God we were properly topped!) Connecticut hamlets have borne famous artists and characters such as Katherine Hepburn, Bill Blass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The greenish hills and curvy streams wind around Warren properties hiding iconic treasures such as author, Philip Roth, who lives next door, Denis and Ann Leary up the road who are hilarious pals, How’d You Get So Rich?…Joan Rivers who cackles just around the hill and the Kissingers, who are always helicoptering in and out.

Warren characters and the interweaving of our lives were in my thoughts all weekend. Even my “elders” and their connections to this Land made me ponder lineage, personal and public history. My Dad was a Connecticut boy, my mother grew up next door to Philip Roth in Newark and I’ve designed runway jewelry for several collections of the legendary Bill Blass. Just around the corner from John, lives a woman who has always inspired me as an artist among the bon vivants,Francine du Plessix Gray. Given that both John and my friend, Kelly Lebwith, have both enjoyed her company and rhubarb pies I have named her a Bon Vivant of Warren and I love her quote. (of course, John makes his own home-grown rhubarb pies, thank you!)

#7 Claim intriguing genes!

“My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan,” which gave her “…both the aristocratic pedigree and the freedom to be a barbarian.” said Francine du Plessix Gray.

My Good Bon Vivant Story Number 2: I grew up in a simple, suburban bedroom community in South New Jersey.  It does not get more plebian than that.  “Alex”, a good friend, was a tall, striking young person, who, from the 6th grade clearly saw their destiny as a high society coutourier and decorator. Frequently claiming residence on the tony Main Line of Philadelphia versus the flatlands of South Jersey and parentage by vague, world travelers who were never were around my friend’s small trailer size home, who could argue? (Maybe that was just a South Jersey crash pad for the kids…) Although no one quite believed it, my friend amazingly went on to work for a top couturier, became a designer dressing high society and First Ladies, collecting rare antiques and designing the homes of A-list celebrities. Clearly an example that the best way to predict the future is to imagine it. Bravo!

Francine du Plessix Gray of good encultured genes made her way in the world similarly to Philip Roth, spilling all the secrets of her cafe society parents and soap opera background into her book “Them.” Her mother, Tatiana’s story is complete drama, at 19 she was a refugee from Russia, her love affair with poet Vladimir Mayakovsky resulted in his suicide after she left and her marriage to high society bon vivant Bertrand du Plessix, left her a widow when he died right after Francine’s birth. Again a refugee, her mother fled occupied France to New York with Francine and Alexander Liberman, whom she married in 1942.

Alex was a noted artist and later the longtime editorial director of Vogue magazine and then of Condé Nast Publications. The Libermans were pure party people in media, art and fashion circles.  His BV advice was to preserve one’s personal life, to identify one’s instinct, and never to carry packages for people. Francine came to Connecticut when she married the painter Cleve Gray. Content to keep the drama of suffering to her biographies of the Marquis de Sade and Simone Weil, as the New York Times said, she turned her back on the high life and instead made some great pies.

#8 ” Travel the world and pack well with the right jeans, luggage or trunks”, says Me.

The Third BV Story. While studying architecture and design in Paris one summer with Parsons, at the Louvre’s Musee de les Arts Decoratif, I was taught that furniture was invented from alterations to the trunks which stored a family’s world possessions.  As a family became more encultured, trunks became chests, armoires, beds and tables. Likewise, John knows the value of being Trunk Savvy.  His property grows tree trunks galore and he enacts a Man vs. Nature scenario for errant beavers chewing his tree trunks. Vilbrequin swim trunks are de-riguer for his easy Jude Law-in-Como dives into his own lake filled with bass, catfish, frogs and snapping turtles and the man has more Goyard trunks than Barney’s. Travel and Pack Well Indeed.

“Living proof that charm and experience will always matter more than Money.”

Thus ran the headline of David Patrick Columbia’s piece for Quest magazine on Philadelphia socialite Gloria Etting.

John Favreau earned his pedigree as a cook, party planner, entertainer and travel companion for art-world esthetes, Gloria Braggiotti Etting and her artist husband Emlen. He cut his teeth as Nancy Brewster-Grace’s house boy and then went on to plan parties and travel with Gloria.  Nancy entertained Red Grooms, Henry Mcilhenney, his sister Bonnie Winterstein, Peggy and George Cheston, artists, architects, designers and literary types (Sir Stephen Spender, Arthur Clarke, Robert Venturi, etc.)  Gloria’s Italian-Boston theatrical family background featured growing up with the Cushing sisters who became Babe Paley, Betsey Roosevelt and Minnie Astor by way of marriage, and her fashion editor position at The New York Post were only part of her pedigree as per The Philadelphia Museum of Art as the consumate salon hostess. Gloria’s bohemian and aristocratic past made her noted for antics like putting anatomically correct ancient Etruscan statuettes on the dining table for shock and conversation value.  (John notes, ” On the same vein,it was Hope Scott who had a medieval chastity belt, which used to make Walter Annenberg laugh riotously!!)

She voraciously traveled and photographed her friends, Henry Mcllhenny, Claudette Colbert, Truman Capote, Perry Rathbone, Isamu Noguchi, Isek Dineson, Jacques Tati, Tennessee Williams, Buckminster Fuller, Alexander Calder, Elizabeth Taylor, George Balanchine, Salvatore Dali and Gala, Picasso, Jackie O, Maxime de la Falaise and Martha Graham. The Philadelphia press wrote of Gloria after her passing, that she was one “who gathered friends with the kind of passion others have for collecting stamps, art or butterflies.”

John. Write this book!

#9  Utilize costumes!

“Don’t come as you are, but as you want to be,”

proclaims famed Philadelphia jeweler, party thrower, Henri David.

The Other Philadelphia Story #4. On the other side of the tracks in Philadelphia, while the pedigreed enjoyed antiquity porn, my mother was attending her friend, gay jeweler,Henri David’s annual Halloween parties, which have drawn people from every strata and fauna of society for over 30 years.  John relates that he once went to one of Henri David’s parties as a highway, all in black with a white stripe down the middle and matchbox cars sewn up and down the sides of the road, and a strategically placed Yield sign.

In honor of John’s costume and crossing the tracks and highways of social boundaries, the rest of these tips are shallowly slave to how mere fashion and affectations can deliver one to the right circles.

#10  “Own, Display and Wear Tribal Symbols Brightly and Irreverently…never, ever wear them in tribes though,” says Me, “Pick a country or street club trademark…

like Plaids, Tartans, Monograms or Gang Bandanas…just rock it smartly and incessantly!”                                                                                                                            

little marvin, Jade and John sartorially Cavort in Connecticut

My room at John’s was the perfect mix of “Tribal Symbols.” Both the Call of the Wild and the Call of the Cultured surrounded me, from the lush sand colored kangaroo skin bedspread to the Pierre Hale hand-painted ceiling border with Nina Simone lyrics running the circumference…”It’s a new dawn, It’s a new day. It’s a new life, for me, And I’m feeling good.”

On an elegant side table was a signed copy of Gloria’s sleek little photography book of high society and artists from the 1970 and 80’s on top of a signed copy of a huge coffee table book for the color and history addicted fashion slaves called “Tartan, Romancing The Plaid.”

Tartans, whale print pants and feather boas, Medieval chastity belts and flowing fine wine …tribes, tribal symbols and people are always best mixed.

If you want expert advice on how to wear tartan, see Mr. Peacock’s recent post here.

They say the word “tartan” comes from the French word, “tirer” translating “to pull”, but I hear the etymology of tartan in the word “tantra” in Sanskrit, which means “to weave.” Most people associate the word tantra just with sexual practices, in which weaving certainly is required, however it actually refers to a universal weaving of desire, energies, elements and people.  Perhaps this is a key root to the symbolism of tartan and its visual tribal metaphor for “belonging” whether it is society or a rejection of society.  It always reads passion and a rich expression.

Jeffrey Banks, the author of Tartan, Romancing The Plaid, writes, “But tartan is more than a design, it is a sign; and while it signifies kinship (real or imagined), country, and celebration of the Scots, its subtext is dignity, distinctiveness and a sense of belonging- qualities that possess universal appeal.”

Philadelphia Number Story #5. Reading Jeffrey’s book, I recalled my own first odd meeting of tartan and world views at my Jewish father’s children’s clothing store, where he would outfit the Catholic parochial school children in their tartan uniforms. I watched them as if they were wild animals from afar in my chic Petit Bateau T and Dittos hipster jeans. The tiny Catholic children had the odd mixed face of trying to look excited about their new unsightly uniform while pain and confusion darted beneath their eyes.  I suppose this memory did much to cement my ideas of personal style, religion and the passion for the bon vivant life.

#10  When it Rains, it Pours! When life gets grey, boring and stale,

the bon vivants invent!

The tartan book’s forward is by Rose Marie Bravo, who saw gold in the plaid lining of another of my favorite timeless icons of The Bon Vivant, trench coats and raincoats when she re-mastered the dowdy English brand, Burberry.  From this famous plaid conquering the world, the expression,“Doing a Burberry”, stands for turning and re-birthing the traditional into a trend and icon status.

Years ago, John lent me another fascinating book, The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour. Did you know that umbrellas were invented by Louis XVI, whose Midas-focused eyes were in hot pursuit of the 24-7 bon vivant life and as a result gave us full-length mirrors, cafe lighting, champagne and gourmet cuisine?

Gaultier and Rhianna are two modern icons who can also suddenly wake you up with plaid and unexpected style and vision.

#11 “Re: The Total Look? Claim one color for hair and body wear like icons, Westwood, Shiaparelli, Christo or Vreeland or wear a tribal symbol like a bandana…all the damn time.”

Dame Vivienne Westwood gives good arrivals and is one of the best examples of a Bon Vivant.  Westwood orange follows Vreeland red follows Shiparelli pink. Her husband, Andreas Kronthaler follows gang bandanas, follows Malcolm McLaren and they all follow tribal mash-ups to supreme effect.

#11 A.  Reference Nature and Eastern Mysticism Often.   

Madonna, The Beatles, Rasputin, Marquis de Sade, Mata Hari, James Bond, Sarah Palin, Madame Blavatsky, all Bon Vivant seducers whose sultry mix of the sacred and profane references hit the spot.  Try these Bon Vivant requirements on for size courtesy of the above characters, a quirky historic account of the mysterious Madame Blavatsky, Robert Greene’s book, The Art of Seduction and my own inventions.

• Escape, claim or disdain your royal, exotic or mundane roots
• Walk with Royal carriage or at least employ car service
• Use make-up or facial expressions to make Eyes like Helena Blavatsky, who had ” large, luminous blue eyes whose strange spiritual expression fascinated all who came within her influence”
• Reference immortal experience to create an age uncertain
• Utter prophetic and seductive visions at uncanny times
• Gather a curious mixed set of literary and artistic friends, Bohemians, visionaries, cranks and an occasional practical thinker from Wall street or the colleges
• Be a conversationalist of rare magnetic power
• Like Helena, be “an accomplished linguist, as most Russians are, “she spoke French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hindostanee and several Arabic dialects with east and fluency”
• Display a deep knowledge of the ancient and modern literature and philosophy of many lands
• Enjoy robust dinners washed down by good wine
• Cultivate odd, disarming wee habits, so as to humanize and have others feel superior over you, such as feigned incongruous insecurities or smoking Turkish cigarettes of a peculiar and excellent quality
• Never be a Bore

Upon being myself, a self-proclaimed well-known Author, I am a student of Mysteries, Tibetan Tantric Black Hat Sect Feng Shui and Eastern Sciences since the tender age of 16, I offer my spiritual bon mots, enthusiastic wine drinking and enjoyment of fine foods to the Hosts and Hostesses of the World.  As proof of my powers, I offer this image of Neith, Egyptian Goddess of Weaving, Water and War. It’s so very Me…right?

Here is the reading from the I Ching, The Chinese Book of Changes, I pulled before we set sail for Little Lake…it will astonish and seduce you to its ancient Nature-based wisdom.

Today in I Ching Astrology, the Lake trigram rules the roost. Sometimes known as the Lake, this Star is called the 7 Lake Star and is owned by the fun loving and courteous Youngest Daughter in the I Ching family. Today her chi will pervade all the Stars differently during this 8 Mountain month.

One of the best activities today is to chill out! Also to reflect. Take time to meditate quietly about the week ahead for you. No real action, simply enjoy and take it easy.

This Star also belongs to the west. Here when the image of sunset comes into play it can mean to party, be with friends and family and let your hair down. The youngest daughter has few responsibilities in the family and she knows how to entertain. (from Jon Sandifer’s blog )

Kind of apt that this actually rules September 2009 as well.

…and finally, the last words on The Bon Vivant Life, Nature, the Sunset of Summer Weekends, and The Curious Sisyphan task of Blogging?  Go Nina Simone…with the best advice yet.

Birds flying high you know how I feel
Sun in the sky you know how I feel
Reeds driftin on by you know how I feel

(refrain:)
It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life
For me
And I’m feeling good

Fish in the sea you know how I feel
River running free you know how I feel
Blossom in the tree you know how I feel

(refrain)

Dragonfly out in the sun you know what I mean, don’t you know
Butterflies all havin’ fun you know what I mean
Sleep in peace when day is done
That’s what I mean

And this old world is a new world
And a bold world
For me

Stars when you shine you know how I feel
Scent of the pine you know how I feel
Oh freedom is mine
And I know how I feel

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