St Louis, host of the 1904 World Fair, created an impressive collection of architecture to capture the heart of the world and the spirit of America a century ago. One example is the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, the world's largest mosaic covering 83,000 square feet with 41.5 million pieces of glass tesserae. The mosaic was finished in 1988 and employs multiple artistic styles, the signature of a modern cathedral.
This is a Gotham-esque steel factory in Granite City, Illinois.
The difficult-to-find Ford GT, a re-do of Ford's legendary 60's racer, is on exhibit at Suntrup Ford in St Louis. It's $222K, or 22 $10K pickups.
If you haven't already seen this, check out this over-the-top-feel-good trailer remake of Kubrick's The Shining.
Spring 2006 Ready-to-Wear
Junya Watanabe - Runway
See Watanabe's whole spring collection here.
It's about time designers started thinking more formally (meaning, relating to or involving outward form or structure) about clothing. One of the identifiers of late 20th century clothing design is its absolute adherence to the silhouette. Gone are the days of artificial definition: of the bustle, the train, poofed sleeves, stove-pipe hats, jodhpurs, and the like. For too long, we've been mired in a color-in-the-lines mentality with clothing, the outline of the human form the ultimate dictator of the structure and design of its coverings.
I'm ready for a change, ready to start seeing a postmodern pastiche of shocking and elegant form, combined with modern function. Our world is past the age of restrictive elegance: no one can afford to live a life bound up by the fetters of a beauty that's content to sit life out. But with the cornucopia of modern materials, and the creativity of well-trained and experimental designers, perhaps we can find a balance of formal innovation and costumes that allow us to live, work, and breathe with ease and style.
Spring 2006 Ready-to-Wear
Yohji Yamamoto - Runway
See Yamamoto's whole spring collection here.
In the early 90s, my family lived down the street from St. Mark's School of Texas, an elite private school for boys. The boys of St. Marks were smart, rich, nerdy and off-beat. They drove vintage, bumper-stickered Beemers and listened to Belle and Sebastian. They affected Monty Pythonesque British accents. They wore Dockers and Polos, but refused to tuck their shirts in or brush their hair. Let me tell you: they were the boys the girls of Dallas secretly dreamed about while dating the "yes ma'am" boys on the basketball team at the local high school.
It just so happens that St. Marks is where the Wilson brothers, Owen and Luke, went to high school. Owen was expelled in the 10th grade; Luke ran track and still holds the record in the 400m and the 800m. Wes Anderson went to a similar all-boys school in Houston, and the film Rushmore is loosely based on those two schools.
St. Marks had a pirate radio station with a very weak signal. In fact, KRSM first broadcast on the local PA system at the school. Late at night, when they should have been home doing homework like the rest of us, those mysteriously sad-eyed and worldly, rebellious boys of St. Marks would send songs into the dark, tree-lined neighborhoods of Preston Hollow. Brian Eno. Frank Zappa. Stereolab. The Beastie Boys. Nirvana. Slowdive. Spiritualized. Joy Division. And late at night, I would curl up in my windowseat in my house on Orchid Lane, my tinfoil wrapped antenna pointed toward the brick and ivy fortress down the street and that boy-DJ who was out past curfew, my ear to the speaker.
Related: The History of Dallas/Ft. Worth FM Radio; the quintessential Dallas neighborhood at night.
If you're interested in good, challenging theater in Los Angeles, then you should know about The Next Arena, a year-old non-profit theater company run by some friends of ours. This Thursday, they are putting on a fundraiser to send a one-man show to the New York Fringe Festival.
The Next Arena presents a Fundraising Benefit Performance of the Award-Winning Play
Not Dead Yet
Winner! - "Best One Act Playwriting" at 26th Annual LA Weekly Theater Awards
Thursday July 7th, 2005
6:30pm - Light Refreshments and Silent Auction (including signed Sofia Coppola dvds)
8:00pm - Performance
Salter Family Theater @ Beverly Hills High School - 241 Moreno Dr., Beverly Hills 90212
(Free Parking on campus across from the Theater)
* All Ticket are $20 DONATION *
To reserve your tickets, Call 323-660-4189
This is a one-night only performance. Don't miss the last chance to see the show that is headed to the NY Fringe Festival!!
*All proceeds go towards The Next Arena's upcoming 2006 season*
A while back Ms. Jen handed me the music meme baton, here's a quick look at my musical hard drive.
Total volume of music files on my computer:: 2754 songs, 7.3 days, 10.14 GB
Last CD I bought: we get most of our music on iTunes these days. Last import: M. Ward, Transistor Radio
Song playing right now: Bad Attitude, Lisa Germano, Happiness
"You've had all your treats and its only 8:30 am that's am you would/ Give anything to change back/ To when/ The waves/ Were smaller/ And you could jump/ Over/ Change back/ To when you laughed/ Easy/ And all your moves/ Were childlike"
Summertime Blues, Mark Bolan & T.Rex, 20th Century Boy (line-up thanks to Party Shuffle)
Five songs I listen to a lot these days:
This is the Day, The The, Soul Mining: the ultimate anthem of change.
Variation One, Stereolab, Moog Soundtrack: this song will rock you out of any bad attitude.
This is Not a Love Song, Nouvelle Vague, Nouvelle Vague-EP, bossa nova cover of the Crispin Glover industrial dance hit.
Chicago People, Sam Prekop, Who's Your New Professor?, an artist and a rocker — livin' the fantasy.
Floe, Phillip Glass, Glassworks, classic Glass.
And now I pass the baton to:
John, David Seruyange, and Micah.
U.S. public broadcasting won a reprieve Thursday as the House of Representatives voted to restore $100 million US in proposed funding cuts.Last week the House Appropriations Committee had recommended a 25-per-cent budget cut for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a group responsible for distributing federal funds to PBS, National Public Radio and hundreds of smaller public radio and TV broadcasters across the country.
The House voted 284 to 140 to return the $100 million to the corporation's 2006 budget. [complete article]
Yesterday we met friends in Venice for afternoon tea at Jin Patisserie, an Asian teahouse and speciality chocolatier recently touted in the food section of the L.A. Times. The whole gestalt of Jin Patisserie — from the walk-up to the display cases to the food design to the take-out containers to the tastes and smells and sights — is carefully crafted aesthetic experience in perfect pitch.
We had Pu Er Imperial tea, a tobacco flavor reminiscent of Yerba Mate. The lychee-flavored hand-crafted marshmallows, tuna tart, real Devonshire clotted cream, the dark chocolate squares coated with Earl Grey tea leaves — each flavor matches and challenges the others in concert. Take off the afternoon and treat yourself to another world.
Additional photos of Jin Patisserie at Protosheigh.
Bill T. Jones has collaborated with everyone who is anyone in his long career as an influential dancer and choreographer. I've always wanted to see him and got two chances last week: in Arizona as he was preparing to use ASU's "intelligent stage" motion capture system, and in Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
Mr. Jones excels arranging one to three performers, with brilliant entrances and exits, and is ambitiously interested in heart issues. However, he fails to understand space — choreographing more than three people — in the three works we saw. His overly symmetrical approaches, and an over-reliance on repetition, can't keep up with with other post-modern and post-post-modern groups such as The Wooster Group, Dumb Type and Pina Bausch. Approaching his theme of sexual and racial identity and tension with this lack of formal sensitivity and creativity is striking.
Although somewhat apples and oranges, Dance for Camera (2003) is an excellent example of how to negotiate the deep waters of conceptual dance as an art form. Add it to your Netflix queue, Mr Jones.
Today is the 200th anniversary of Hans Christian Andersen's birth. Find out about the Fairy Tale Weekend in Denmark here.
As always, media casting directors create an elaborate system of stereotypes. The hero always looks a certain way, as does the villain, fool, corrupt, intelligent, etc. This advanced visual language has profoundly entered the psychology of the culture. Wouldn't it be dangerous if individuals in society--non actors--subconsciously altered their personality to correspond to how they perceived their appearance casted by the media?
You can be anybody you want to be.
Secondly, why all the emphasis on villains in the media? I suppose it's easier to have a clear goal. Stop the bad guys. No need to negotiate politics, religion, race, economics or any other potentially upsetting issue. Everyone can agree on this.
This also enters the psychology of the culture.
Today marked the start of proposal/grant writing season for us. Ah yes. Makes me think of THX-1138. It's classic sci-fi that ages extremely well and has superb sound. It's Lucas' first film--he had to create his own sound studio to make it (which would inherit the movie's name THX). Fits well between 2001 and Blade Runner, a bit more off the path yet entertaining. I mean come on. A scifi film starring Robert Duvall?! Like another scifi classic, Brazil, don't let the name or the box cover fool you.
Our two weeks in Texas was mostly time with family, but we also worked in trips to galleries and the Dallas Museum of Art, the Meadows Museum of Art, and we toured lofts (for kicks) in the happening newly re(re)vitalized Deep Ellum and Fair Park areas in Dallas.
How hard is living in America? Am I really "stressed out?" If you're like me, you hear that phrase (or one just like it) often. This seems a myth. Is paranoia a necessary symptom of capitalism? I love and respect our great country, however, there is respect and there are exaggerations. Is my hair safe? Is my neighborhood smooth? How many tons can my truck pull? I was thinking about the latter while passing a pick-up that made my pick-up feel a little insufficient today.
But I've never needed to pull anything.
Pick-ups, even small pick-ups are pure joy. Once you convert there is no turning back. Adding a lot of bumper-stickers, strong jumper cables, rope, a $2000 moving blanket and a straw hat behind the driver's seat empowers anything. The $2000 moving blanket is a story for another time.
Upon seeing this slide,
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1485-86
a girl in my art history class yesterday said, just loudly enough for me to hear her:
"Hey! That's the girl from Illustrator!"
Back in April, when we were in Texas working on People, 29 Burdens — exhausted, trying to put the whole thing together from scratch in just one week, and with a family wedding to attend to boot! — I started a little silly linguistic game with myself. We were in Denton, land of the extreme Texas accent, and I started listening, really listening, not just to people's words, but to their cadence as well.
Murray and I grew up in Dallas, and both of us lived south of LBJ freeway, meaning, close enough to downtown to be surrounded by relatively worldly and accent-less people. If you live north of LBJ, you're pretty much guarenteed to sound like J.R. Ewing. We had our yalls and said "hay" instead of "hey" or even "hi," but mostly, we sounded like all the other teenagers in the United States.
This month has been full and fun; just last weekend, as Murray already blogged about, we saw Lyle Lovett at the Hollywood Bowl, and we also hit the opening night of the L.A. County Fair with another group of pals.
We saw the famous Furthur bus, from "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. We saw cute bunnies and piglets and some darling tiny goats. We also broke our month-long sugar fast and had the better-than-Ben&Jerry's Dr. Bob's Handcrafted Ice Cream. We're back on the wagon again.
We also had what had to be one of the most cinematic moments of our life. By cinematic, I'm referring to something along the lines of Jean Luc-Godard-meets-West Side Story.
Barney's New York store window, 2003
"All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores."
-Andy Warhol
