Sunday Cinema: Jack Smith's "Normal Love"

The radical departure of life through art; it is what an audience must submit to while viewing a film by Jack Smith, especially his 1963 masterpiece "Normal Love". Before there was Fellini or Warhol, there was Jack Smith working out of his Hyperbole Photo Studio in the West Village, radically stepping outside of the McCarthy mess that was the 1950's. Oh yes, the McCarthy era: a period in which, to put it mildly, artistic tendencies of questioning the world around us were wholly rejected and looked upon with utter suspicion thanks to the practice of basing "disloyalty" on social criticism. Out of these post-WWII moments of social conformity, Smith came at the heart and soul of sweeping conservatism and banality with the most unbelievably lavish, erotic and fantastic displays of sensuality, love and the performative joys of life. 

I also love Jack Smith because he made Andy Warhol look like a fool (as his predecessor, it's only natural, but still). I loves me some Warhol, but he couldn't have done anything without Jack Smith's influence.

 According to Judith Jerome's book on Smith's life and work, Normal Love had been screened on and off  in its birth year of 1963, but it was only made available to the public once again after being reassembled in 1997. That's thirty years of it being relatively out of public sight, thanks to rising social expulsion and mistrust of "the other" in his films. It was his first color film, following his other 1963 film Flaming Creatures, which, although shot in black & white, has these intense performative moments that are so much like a Freudian head case that the scenes and "creatures" on the screen hit your brain in some frequency of metaphorical color. Normal Love is a more "commercial" follow-up from the orgies and scenes of nudity that would make audiences faint when Creatures was first shown. The increasing climate of censorship, as Jerome described it, pushed Smith to create these incredible scenes of lavish, colorful party-goers, dressed in satin and glittering makeup and headdresses. You have Mario Montez in a bathing cap and pearls, swimming in a milky liquid, you have Alice in Wonderland-meets-Ali Baba-meets-Weinmar-era Cabaret; everything presented in this film makes no goddamn sense and yet all the sense in the world as you just give in to the viewing pleasure of visual syrupy candy.

Jack Smith has had a profound effect on the way in which I try to see the world through art. It's been said that Smith would walk down the street in New York City and rearrange the trash on the curb to make it more aesthetically pleasing, and that sort of stuff just gives me goosebumps from how profound the sense of potential for beauty he had was. It's something I've tried to always emulate in the way I dress, in the way I perform my life and the way I try to give a double take towards things I don't fully understand. I like to think that life should be felt at all costs, especially the ugly and horrible shit, and Jack Smith is definitely a hero of mine for laying down the foundation for filming all the glitter, filth and beauty the world has to offer.

Letters Between Yoshie Tominaga and Patti Smith

Aren't these beautiful?

This look into the correspondences between photographer Yoshie Tominaga and Patti Smith has been thoughtfully documented in Tominaga's book The Shepherd. There is a lot I could say about why I love these scans; for one thing, the book as a whole chronicles the photographer's early documentation of designer Jun Takahashi's career with Under Cover along with snippets of her own life, and the photographs between Patti and Yoshie are just as quietly profound as the letters that they accompany on their pages. In these letters, there are moments of sadness- Yoshie starts some with apologies, Patti falls ill, Yoshie finds herself emotional after one of Patti's poetry readings, but all in all, there is the assurance that there will be a letter in the mail, some correspondence from a missed friend, a little compassion felt within and around their handwriting. 

Both artists are no strangers to heartbreak, loss and a commingling with the darker recesses of life. Some live in perpetual desaturation, and gathering entire universes onto a page through a poem, a  stanza, a drawing, it puts your world in front of you. These letters, accompanied by both the friends' photographs, indeed seem melancholy, but their truthfulness and warmth still come through as fragments of the other side.

Don't you find that both their handwriting looks similar too? I can't help but love that, it's kind of charming and reflects that they have a lot in common intellectually. I'm working on writing letters again since I've made a few friends overseas, I did it more as a kid, and now I'm even asking frineds in Brooklyn if I can write letters to them. Facebook and social media in general have made me lazy, rendering my friendships to simply occupy my computer and phone from time to time. The presence of someone's voice and thoughts coming through their personal handwriting is a really powerful experience, and I think we tend to forget that, especially when now it's more often confined to a card and not an actual letter, as letter-writing has become somewhat obsolete. I get it, I really do, but why not engage in such an act now that it has become a truly special ritual?

Via 

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Sunday Cinema: Fantastic Planet/La Planète Sauvage

My parents took me to see this movie when I was really little- like, so little I had a hard time keeping up with the subtitles. We went to the IFC theater in downtown Manhattan, a theater that still shows absolutely lovely 35mm screenings of older films, and this was one hell of a trip for a middle schooler. To be honest, it scared the living crap out of me, I left that theater clutching my mom's hand tightly, terrified and in need of a giant pretzel.

 It took a revisiting of the film when I was 12 or so for me to really get it. This is juuuuuust when I started learning about surrealism 1. because I was wading in the adolescent soup of that teenage precursor to true self-discovery and 2. because I was too afraid to actually try drugs and get it over with. I've counted Roland Topor, who designed this film, as one of my favorite filmmakers since that intial rediscovery because, if anthing, this film just proves his genius.

Here's an incredibly roughly hewn summary of the film: The story takes place in another world, a world where humans are vastly subservient to humanoid alien beings called Traags. On the Traag planet (which is crawling with fabulous plant and animal life á la Hieronymus Bosch), humans or "oms" are treated as pets or vermin by the Traags, depending on which have been domesticated. The film follows Terr (a play on the French word Terre, meaning "earth"), a human who is raised as a pet by a well-to-do Traag child. As the film goes on, Terr breaks with his domesticated life and returns to his "roots" as a human being after becoming educated through a Traag learning device.

Two sensory things about this movie kick my ass:

1. It was HAND DRAWN. Damn film took 5 years to make, although that also had to do with the filmmaking process getting interrupted by the then-Sovet-occupied Czech government.

2. The music is absolutely incredible. Composed by Alain Goraguer, it's spooky and sexy in all the right ways: a jazz take on sci-fi. I bought the soundtrack on vinyl a few months ago and I play it when I want my environment to feel kinda syrupy and mysterious, like I'm unaware that something is hiding behind a corner.

Planet is one of those films where you need to sit down in a dark room and just let it happen, so go:

Sunday Cinema: Jan Svankmajer's Alice

   

I had a gruesome realization the other day: I have kept my various obsessions outside of Fashion totally hidden from my blog, and I really couldn't tell you why exactly. Perhaps it's been out of fear that I would end up writing hefty posts into the night, rendering myself into an sleepless, obsessive stupor. Maybe it's because I haven't known where to begin, or maybe, just maybe, I've just been too afraid that nobody would care. Well, at this point, I'd rather be writing about shit I actually care about rather than just walking in front of a camera all the time wearing stuff. So, I'm thinking from now on, I'll be showing you guys some of my favorite foreign, classic and independent films with a side of info every Sunday, because there is almost nothing I love more than watching and talking about films and my favorite filmmakers.

For my first installment, De Lune Presents: Alice

Jan Svankmajer is hands-down my favorite animator and short film director. To give a sense of his style, all I might have to tell you is that he is from Prague, because man, does he embody the dark, mysterious beauty of that city like nothing else. Like Franz Kafka, another Czech genius to come out of Prague, Svankmajer uses his craft to produce cerebral moments of dark humor with playful execution and, at times, troubling imagery of bodily assemblage. He uses toys, puppets, clay and other bits of ephemera to create totally surreal situations with absolutely insane precision. His stuff is aggressive, but all the while, he maintains a child's perspective, which is important when understanding his totally twisted sense of humor. Although Svankmajer presents his audiences with these totally cerebral and kind of disturbing images, it's all in an effort to marry our insecurities with a sense of curiosity and fantasy.

For  some "appetizer" films, check out his shorts Jabberwocky, Punch and Judy and Dimensions of Dialogue. All of these use stop-motion animation to explore some really weird situations with effortless humor and this sort of weird pseudo-Edwardian dark imagery. Gotta love it.

Now, Alice, also known as Něco z Alenky, or "Something From Alice" is loosely based on Alice in Wonderland in that the storyline follows Alice through her discovery and relationships with the characters she meets within her dreamworld, but everything is slightly askew in that this feels infinitely more Edwardian in its weirdness than any other incarnation of Alice in Wonderland that you're ever likely to see. This movie isn't the "cute" Disney or Hallmark version you saw at home, rather it's the darker version of Carroll's story that needs to exist in order to really get a full understanding of how truly insane the imagination can be. 

So, without further ado,

Enjoy, guys, lemme know what you thought.

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Edwardian Street Style: The Work of Edward Linley Sambourne

Are you kidding me with these?

Do I even need to regurgitate all the reasons as to why these are amazing?

❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧❦ ❧

These have been in circulation and written about since last year, but I had to explain and explore myself. Edward Linley Sambourne was the chief cartoonist for Punch, a weekly British magazine of satire from the 1880's, but as an artist of true voracious caliber, he started to turn his attention to photography in the mid-1890's. Sambourne was clearly bewitched by women, his early cyanotypes were borderline-erotic portraits of ladies in various states of undress, and this should come as no surprise given the outrageous social customs of Edwardian England which made everyone nuts and sexually repressed (here is an exhaustive overview of examples of etiquette). But what's great about those portraits, and what would prove to be amazing about all of his portraits, is that great, painstaking attention to detail of clothing is almost always present. And because Sambourne was a cartoonist, he often took portraits of women and men in ridiculous poses so that he could reference them for drawings (see here).

In the last ten years of his life, Sambourne decided to leave the portrait studio and start working outside. These photos were taken between 1906-1908, and they span between family vacations, London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Paris. Most of us folk of the future have absolutely zero capacity to understand what an undertaking medium and large-format photography is, or what it even meant to take a Daguerrotype or cyanotype- especially since our use of film has become more of a thing of nostalgia and craft. Let me tell you what this whole enterprise involved: what Sambourne had to do was take this view camera, which was essentially a larger-than-hand box with bellows and a lens, set the damn thing up in the street with the ambient light and then shoot the photos while the camera was concealed by a bit of cloth or something. Your grandparents probably have a similar camera around their house somewhere, go ask. Oh, and from the looks of the women in these photos, this guy managed to do all this shit discreetly, although there are some photos of some women walking in the same location wearing the same thing, so he might have asked some women to just model for him and look mad casual, a practice, evidently, that continues today. 

Some of the women are a little out of focus due to, y'know, walking, but most of them are quite clear and lovely, captured during an entire stride with details of their dresses and skirts moving.

Dave Walker has chronicled a good chunk of Sambourne's work, and he points out why the photographer manages to get these amazing portraits of women in the street at a time when photography was nowhere near as prevalent as it is now, especially during a time when being discreet and orderly was of the upmost importance:

"...the concept of privacy with regard to photographs taken in the street was underdeveloped in Sambourne’s time. It’s probably true that as an upper middle class man he thought that his right to pursue his art outweighed any violation of his subjects’ privacy. " (via)

Insanely remarkable and fascinating to say the least.

Indeed, what makes these photographs remarkable to me is that they are able to capture the everyday from a period whence portraiture involved meticulous placement and staging. These are (mostly upper-middle class) women wearing what they donned everyday or on holiday. Look at the insane amount of layers and lengths, look at the frills and laces. It's astounding to see such mind-blowing attention to detail walking casually down a street when it's so rare to see anything dubbed as "casual" from the Edwardian era. I love the portrait of the woman in the white dress holding a book, you can see a small street dog scrounging for a scrap of food or something in the background- amazing!

I adore this man and his work, I love these women and their glorious getups, and I want to drown in the exceptional glory that is street style before street style. Eat your heart out, street bloggers.

POSTSCRIPT STUFF:

halle-friggin'-lujah I'm almost done with finals (one day to go and they're OVER!!).
With that said, I really need to knuckle down and start posting more often, so starting this week, I'll be trying to post every day, or at least every two days with something of interest: a shoot, some studio visits here and there, or y'know, one of my narcissistic personal style posts that I love to shoot but can't get over with how self-centered the whole phenomenon can be.
Anyways, hope I don't bore y'all. I'm off to work on my last paper and then procrastinate actual writing by concocting future post ideas❦ ❧

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A Studio Visit With Bande Des Quatres

God, I love the internet, because after an intro via Instagram, I was able to meet Erin Wahed, the endlessly inspiring mind behind Bande Des Quatres.

I found myself in Erin's wonderfully colorful East Village apartment earlier this week to discuss her design process and get to know how Bande Des Quatres gets its signature look of fine art studio-meets-contemporary fashion jewelry. Erin wears mostly black and white, preferring to wear her amazing, streamlined peroxide blonde hair combed back. She explained that while she enjoys wearing mostly netural colors and graphic lines, she also prefers to surround herself with beatiful colors and textures, a preference that stems out of her roots in the visual realm of photography.

While romping through the velvet boxes containging Erin's entire collections of rings, bracelets and earrings inspired by artists and designers that get her goat, Erin gave me the scoop as to why she's been very selective in how she presents the brand and keeps it from getting too far from its studio roots- a preference that doesn't stray too far from home (A Montreal native, Erin's mom  is none other than renowned jewelry designer Janis Kerman, who has exhibited her works as both jewelry and fine art since the 70's). Working with beautiful precious metals and stones (like tiny rough-cut black diamonds set into gold and silver), Erin has based her nearly surreal and illusionary designs off of artists and designers she loves, like architect Van der Rohe or the students of the Bauhaus like Kandinsky or Paul Klee. Her rings appear to "float" or move through someone's stream of fingers, while her double-backed earrings peek through hair and play off the joys of asymmetry. Erin's work captivates because it ignites an onlooker's sense of curiosity with beautiful simplicity and just the right amount of technical proficiency and craftsmanship.

I could've looked through those boxes foreveverever, and it totally would've been possible for the sheer fact that every piece works beautifully together in layers. Erin says her next collection is going to cover necklaces, but she's still tinkering with her inspirational concepts. It was then, as she listed her possible ideas for what's next that I realized, donned in the BDQ pieces I had been playing with, that I would not mind being covered head-to-toe in anything that came out of Erin's head.

Find BDQ online or at Oak 

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