Hotness

Ladies and gentlemen:The best fashion photographer of the time or....
my strongest visual aesthetic direction influence for the past 2 years.

Jil Sander: Sprachpanscher

Admiring the latest Jil Sander Collection I decided to find out more about the status of affairs of the bussines this fantastic creative gave life to. I found some good stuff (wikipedia).
"In 1999 Prada Group bought a 75% share in JIL SANDER company. Ms. Sander, remained creative designer and became chairwoman in the new joint venture. Six months later, in January 2000, Ms. Sander unexpectedly left after confrontations with Prada CEO Patrizio Bertelli, a quick-tempered Italian businessman. She, an uncompromising perfectionist, refused in using cheaper materials and at bringing the traditionally slim fits in line with standard sizes. Mr. Bertelli had demanded of Jil, some very drastic cost cuts and a more affordable mainstream approach. Bertelli also insisted on giving up the contributary workshops in Germany in favor of the shops in Italy owned by Prada. Thus, for the first time in many years, Ms. Sander was able to indulge in extensive travelling, sailing, going to the opera and taking care of her gardens after her resignation but the fashion house, not surprisingly, plummeted without the designer who defined it.

Milan Vukmirovic, a former buyer from Colette and Gucci team designer, had been installed as Ms. Sander’s successor by Bertelli. He unsuccessfully tried to follow in her footsteps. Pressured by Prada to cater to a wider audience, Vukmirovic came up with mediocre but commercially viable sportswear collections in 2002 and 2003 that drove away longstanding Jil Sander patrons and failed to attract new customers. The company had been in the red since 2001. It was said that with rapidly sinking sales Prada Group had to go to huge expenses just to keep the house of Jil Sander going.
[edit]

Comeback and Abandonment

To everyone’s surprise Ms. Sander, whose heart was probably bleeding when she looked at what Prada had made of her fashion house, returned to the company she had founded more than 30 years before as head designer and partner in May 2003, after her noncompete clause had expired. Supposedly, Bertelli had begged her to come back. Her sensational comeback was celebrated unanimously and with much fanfare by the international press. Her designs, bearing the unmistakable Jil Sander signature with a more feminine look, were loved by customers and critics alike. She re-invented herself. She designed two collections that were both shown in Milan, she altered Vukmirovic’s existing sketches for the men’s collection, she redesigned some of her boutiques and even sat down to go through the books herself. Everyone was certain that with the spirit of the company back in the house things would get well again. But in November 2004, Ms. Sander agreed to terminate cooperation with Prada and resigned from her post again after insurmountable differences with Mr. Bertelli.

It is rumored that it had been Bertelli’s turn to financially support the company, after Ms. Sander herself had made heavy investments, so that Jil Sander AG could be sold from Prada Group, already heavily indebted itself as the result of Mr. Bertelli's management. But apparently the banks refused Bertelli the necessary loans. Subsequently, the glamorous Jil Sander showroom in Hamburg was closed, production was entirely moved to Italy and of more than 300 jobs only about 50 remained. All that was left in Germany in early 2006 was an office for press, distribution and marketing personnel, the staff at the boutiques as well as the Hamburg atelier for the women’s collection. The corporation was supposed be transformed into a holding company with the Italian subsidiaries taking over administrative and business duties. Prada Group still held a 98% stake in the company which generated losses of €10 million after taxes in the first half-year of 2005. The losses in 2004 had been almost €30 million.

For the time after Ms. Sander’s departure an in-house design team was formed to take care of the collections. The slim fits, so typical of Jil Sander, had meanwhile been adjusted to mainstream sizes.


Designers at JIL SANDER

In May 2005, it was announced that Raf Simons, a Belgian industrial designer who also has his own men’s label (Link) and is a professor at Vienna's University of Applied Arts, had become creative director for the women’s and men’s collection."
" * Ms. Sander was known for both her shy appearances in public and her power mania trying to bring everything under her control behind the scenes. She would rarely give interviews and not talk about her private life, a trait that only cultivated the myth about her person, and at the same time she would buy the rights to pictures about her in order to be able to control her public image and meticulously plan all the steps in her company where she was used to being the boss.

* For her notorious (and sometimes ridiculous) habit of mixing German and English words into gibberish sentences when being interviewed in German in the 1990s she was awarded the title of Sprachpanscher ( Sprache = language, panschen = to adulterate) by the Association of German Language (Verein Deutsche Sprache) in 1997."

Ojibwe words

AUDIO open with REAL PLAYER

C'etait Un Rendezvous

C'était un rendez-vous (It was an appointment) is a short film made in 1976 by Claude Lelouch, showing an eight-minute drive through Paris at 5:30 AM. Despite (or due to) the limited availability of video tapes, it gained cult status over the years among motoring enthusiasts who admired the experience of speed and the reckless style of driving. Due to the increasing popularity and the lack of original tapes, the film has recently been re-mastered from the 35 mm negative and released on DVD, as well as being published on the Internet. This example of a cinéma vérité film was made in a single take with no editing, using a camera attached to the bumper of a Mercedes. The length of the film thus was limited by the capacity of the camera reel which lasted under 10 minutes. Source.

The spirit of the beehive

Reviewed by Noel Murray
September 20th, 2006

Though it's still relatively obscure, Víctor Erice's 1973 cinema-poem The Spirit Of The Beehive often lands on lists of the greatest movies ever made, because those who see it even once have a hard time forgetting its dreamy imagery and subtle symbolism. Ana Torrent and Isabel Telleriá play preteen sisters whose scientist father and moody mother have moved the whole family to a remote Castilian plain to escape the Spanish Civil War. After the girls see a traveling screening of Frankenstein, Torrent becomes obsessed with finding her own "monster" to befriend, and her search brings her closer to understanding the world of adults, and what "death" means. The Spirit Of The Beehive was written by Ángel Fernández Santos and directed by Erice during the regime of Francisco Franco—the instigator of a lot of the history referenced in the movie—and some have called Beehive a complex metaphor for the death of individualism under fascism.

But understanding modern Spanish history isn't essential to understanding what The Spirit Of Beehive meant to some Spaniards in 1973. Sometimes art inspires people just by giving them a deeper feeling for beauty during a time of pervasiveness ugliness. In the case of Erice's film, the extended meditation of what animates us becomes cumulatively moving. Torrent and Telleriá drift through their days in a sparsely populated village, getting instruction on human anatomy, classifying poison mushrooms, and finding clues to their parents' interior lives. Then the girls start to experiment. Telleriá jumps through bonfires and strangles the family cat, testing the limits of when pain begins and life starts to end. Meanwhile, Torrent considers ways she might kill herself, and stares at her fractured reflection in a moonlit pond.

The onion

For many Americans the Onion is a printed media common place: a pinch of dark humor on mundane life, highlighting what otherwise will be totally uneventful. As a foreigner I had to find the taste for this type of humor through prolonged exposure, specially when coming from a land where uncertainty, fatality and craziness are the mundane.

Milk & Honey (Nick Drake)

Monday morning,
cold wind, bright sun.
-song by Nick Drake,
intrepreted by Jackson
C Frank-













Gold and silver is the autumn, Soft and tender are her skies, Yes and no are the answers, Written in my true love's eyes, Autumn's leaving and winter is coming, I think that I'll be moving along, I've got to leave her and find another, I've got to sing my heart's true song, Round and round the burning circle, All the seasons, one, two and three Autumn leaves, and then the winter Spring is born and wanders free Gold and silver bounds my heart on, All too soon they fade and die, And then I'd know There'd be no others,
Milk and honey Where they lie

...mais

transformation

origen

NYC Brit Architecture

project: Hearst Tower, New York City client: Hearst Corporation architect: Foster and Partners, London—Norman Foster (chairman, founder); Brandon Haw (lead architect); Michael Wurzel (project architect); Peter Han (associate architect); Mike Jelliffe (team member) associate architect: Adamson Associates development manager: Tishman Speyer Properties engineers: Cantor Seinuk Group (structural); Flack & Kurtz (M/E/P); VDA (vertical transportation) lighting: George Sexton
"In a nod to the fashion industry promoted by Hearst magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Seventeen, elevator panels are lined in Italian purple silk laminated between layers of glass. Compared with the sculptural and considerably smaller LVMH Building housing the Louis Vuitton headquarters across town on East 57th Street, designed by Christian de Portzamparc in 1999, a certain je ne sais quoi is decidedly absent here. Hearst’s seat of power is muscular, while the latter is refined; beyond an obvious issue of scale, it’s a matter of rhetoric versus understanding, and posturing versus the execution of a tailored fit. "

Pretty in flash

animated paper and the sports shoe

A controversial woman

Oriana Fallaci lost her protracted battle with breast cancer on September 15, 2006.

Oriana Fallaci (June 29, 1929 – September 15, 2006) was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. A former antifascist partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. She died in her native Florence, Italy. She was 77 years old and had been suffering from breast cancer for some 15 years.

She was called "our most celebrated female writer" by Ferruccio De Bortoli, former director of the newspaper Corriere della Sera.^[1] Decades ago, the Los Angeles Times described her as "the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no."

Her books

Skinny girls as terrorists

State of emergency, or the current state of global paranoia is the new concept behind the latest Italian Vogue's fashion editorial. Models look so devoid of life that is it feels flat to see such action in dummies...but that is the limitation of the fashion editorials, the nature of mannequins!

Last days of sun

Social beings and TV

Sublime images - STEVE McCURRY

L.A.M.B.

The S 2007 collection from LAMB is one of my
favorite this time.

The Brown Bunny (2003)

It's the story of one man's tragic loss of the love of his life. He is Bud Clay. And he races motorcycles. He rides in the 250cc Formula II class of road racing. Round and round he goes, repeating laps over and over until the race is over. The story begins with Bud racing in New Hampshire. Bud's next race is in California in five Days. And so his journey begins across America. And everyday Bud is haunted by the same memories of the last time he saw his true love. Bud will do anything to make those memories disappear. And every day he tries to find a new love. Making outrageous requests of women to come with him on his trip and then leaving them behind after they've agreed. He can't replace Daisy, the only girl he's ever loved and the only girl he will ever love. But every day he tries.

Vincent Gallo shocked the 2003 Cannes Film Festival with this highly personal film that he wrote, directed, produced, edited, photographed, and stars in. Gallo plays Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer on his way from New Hampshire to California in a van. The cross-country trip includes stops at a gas station, where Clay meets and falls for a gas station attendant named Violet (Anna Vareschi); a roadside food stand, where he meets the sadly beautiful Lilly (Cheryl Tiegs, making her feature-film debut); and the Las Vegas strip, where he picks up local prostitute Rose (Elizabeth Blake). As he comes into contact with these women, he can't let go of his past, which centers around Daisy (Chloe Sevigny), whom he hopes to find when he returns home to Los Angeles.

Nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, THE BROWN BUNNY is a poignant, emotional drama that features long scenes with little or no dialogue, as Gallo uses natural sound and lighting, jazz and folk music, and long, lingering shots of the open road, raindrops on a windshield, and the scraggly-haired protagonist to create a nearly suffocating atmosphere of loss and loneliness. Winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 2003 Viennale "for its bold exploration of yearning and grief and for its radical departure from dominant tendencies in current American filmmaking," THE BROWN BUNNY is sure to cause a stir because of its infamous and shocking X-rated sex scene near the end of the picture, although it is a tender, soft, and powerfully subtle film.

Gallo Brutal

Vincent Gallo is selling his body and part of his soul (many precious things) while making many prerogatives... Maybe to bring attention to his ego. I like the dude, but from the distance we have I have enough of his very full self. His raw attitude borders total brutality. Brutality as lifestyle?...Maybe a weekend. Knowing this he decides to sell his "company" for an evening or a weekend. This is a description of his escort service:

"I, Vincent Gallo, star of such classics as Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny have decided to make myself available to all women. All women who can afford me, that is. For the modest fee of $50,000 plus expenses, I can fulfill the wish, dream, or fantasy of any naturally born female. The fee covers one evening with Vincent Gallo. For those who wish to enjoy my company for a weekend, the fee is increased to a mere $100,000. Heavy set, older, red heads and even black chicks can have me if they can pay the bill. No real female will be refused. However, I highly frown upon any male having even the slightest momentary thought or wish that they could ever become my client. No way Jose. However, female couples of the lesbian persuasion can enjoy a Vincent Gallo evening together for $100,000. $200,000 buys the lesbos a weekend. A weekend that will have them second-guessing.".

He keeps going on making multiple sided offensive comments that I don't want to disseminate here. I ask my self, what is the purpose of publicizing such humor? Art? He says artists have a purpose when communicating and that he is not an artist. Flamboyant egotism at its best: amusing yet kind of toxic...

Graphic melody

Mentors and paisans: aesthetic apparatus.

Mysterious

The work by Julia Fullerton-Batten has many magical elements precisely by omitting some elements: the magic of engagement. One of my favorite photographers.

Relaxed collection

Vena Cava's S2007 collection was presented in an unusual way: a picnic in a school for girls. I really liked this to shots for the frogs and the snake. Click the images to go to the coverage and complete collection.

Side effects

A campaign for beauty products that uses some very funny and hot guys. My favorite side effect is firefighter opening champagne with an axe...hot.

Cult cinema

A trailer of a cult film "they call her one eye". Tarantino obviously took many elements of this sort of movie for his Kill Bill series. Pretty funny and totally twisted.
100% pulpfiction material.
Also at MySpace.

moving editorial

click on the image

Deconstructing China

Amazing photo work by Michael Wolf: old China, new China, beautiful images of an ancient land that is changing rapidly. A really extensive study of a nation, of its people, from multiple angles.

Baloon I: Latex for fun

Baloon II: Lamp

Lovely

I loved the way this collection was presented in a very casual and romantic setting. The collection has the same sensibilities, very romantic. "Jovovich and Hawk said they were trying to create a "Sunday afternoon feeling" with their collection, and they achieved it with pieces like a caftan banded and belted in bordeaux, as well as a shirred-front and ruffled halter gown."

Sabyasachi: Dorky and girly

From the NYC Spring 2007 collections, Sabyasachi has been one collection I've found interesting so far. It exudes sophistication keeping elements of innocence. It feels like a travel to a different land without making it totally folk dressing. It would be what a very well travel librarian in her 20's would assemble when feeling playful.

Royal Portarits

The African continent is often the theatre of such contrasts, where parallel worlds overlap in permanence, making it difficult for an outsider to analyze.

There are still several hundred monarchs on this continent. While some amongst them have been relegated to the level of touristic curiousities, others still maintain significant traditional and spiritual power. Born of dynasties which marked the history of Africa until the twentieth century, these kings are the source of underground power with which "modern governments" have to exist.
Contrary to the Indian Maharajas, they have survived the upheavals of history, and evolve in a parallel world but which is very real.

" Since information and ethnological research on African monarchs was rare, I started to investigate haphazardly, then went to meet the kings, beyond the cities often at the end of very bad roads.

In order to photograph them I had to submit almost always to complex protocols. I put in a lot of time, obstination and sometimes money. I was helped many times by intermediaries who were well known in the court. Without them, negitiations would have been impossible.

In three years, between 1988 and 1991, I undertook a dozen voyages which enabled me to spend almost twelve months in Africa. And yet I still didn't have time to go see the king of the Shiluks, a descendant of the black dynasties who reigned over Egypt, civil war in Sudan made the trip too complicated. During the same period, I went five times to Oyo( Nigeria ), without meeting the Alafin, whose Yoruba Kingdom dominated the south of Nigeria during several centuries." Photographs by Daniel LAINÉ

Disabled or chillin'?

Craft and art

‘oh, I thought it would be bigger’
© barnaby barford, 2006
porcelain, enamel paint, zinc discs, glass tubes, painted wooden base

Barnaby Barford is an artist and designer based in London his work crosses and blurs the boundaries between art, craft and design. Amazing work, juxtaposing the familiar with the very personal.

Third Uncle

(brian eno- bauhaus)
There were tims - There was pork - There are legs - There are skarks -
There was John - There are cliffs -There was mother - There's a poker...
There was you
Then there was you

There are scenes - There are blues - There are boots - There are shoes -
There are Turks - There are fools -They're in lockers - They're in schools...
They're in you
Then there was you

Burn my fingers - Burn my toes - Burn my uncle - Burn his books -
Burn his shoes - Cook the leather - Put it on me...
Does it fit me
Or you
It looks tight on you

Gods and mortals

I find adoration of humans hilarious:
religions are created every day by the
many followers. The true sign of our times.
In this case Maradona has a UK temple,
a site for "a true Scottish hero"!?...It seems
that coke inhaling is one of the attributes of
modern gods...I have hope in the end to
hypocrisy...But the heavens might
say otherwise.

Dutch humor

KesselsKramer is a company dedicated to disproving the unfair myth that the Dutch have no sense of humour.If you are patient and curious you might enjoy their work. My picks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Danish talent

Duckling is a post production house for high-end commercials,
feature films, documentary and music videos.

Heavy mental:David Byrne & Bruce Mau

A mutal interview between two very talented artists:
David Byrne: Musician
Bruce Mau: Graphic Designer
BM: You mention something here that is absolutely critical in my own practice.
Namely, the idea of taking the sensibilities developed in one medium and
deploying those to advantage in another. One thing I realised about my own
work is that I am a child of the cinema – the work I do in book design could
only have happened after the invention of the jump cut, the close up, the
montage. Almost all of my work is about sequence. If you look at any individual
image or page in my work, it seems dead-pan, dry and flat. All the action is
in the movement from one moment to another. And I know that when I take the
sensibilities that I have evolved in my approach to the book as a sequential
object, an object that unfolds in time, into a practice like, say, the design of a
landscape, I do it in a fundamentally different way than the traditional approach
to landscape.
DB: This cross-referencing from one discipline to another reminds me that I tend
to jump from one medium to another, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
It’s energising and refreshing. Somewhere I got the idea that cross-fertilisation
is good, that one discipline feeds the other and that each one can be entered
into with a sense of play. Not that play isn’t serious. I’m often not aware of the
inspiration that gets carried from one area over to another, which is fine.
I wouldn’t pretend to be a great virtuoso, but there are ways to express
the heart and mind that don’t require years of apprenticeship – and sometimes
a great craftsman or skilled player forgets that the communication is not in the
virtuosity, not that it hurts – one can lose sight of what’s important.
Another thing I’m often not aware of is where things are headed. In
retrospect things look like they were following a master plan, that there was a
carefully laid out route to arrive at something or other, but more often than not it
was intuition and accidents. The grand scheme may be there in the unconscious,
subtly guiding one’s attentiveness to pay attention to these accidents and
happenstance, but I’m often unaware of it.

Flashback

personal winter thoughts before the well known
spring industry fashion attack! My fall favorites:
Dior Fall 2006, and Margiela Fall 2006.

Audry Dancing ACDC

This ad is GENIOUS.

gifs

Ok GO!

Controversial work

"Following her enormously successful series 'Monkey Portraits', which debuted in October 2004, Jill Greenberg’s new work takes a more serious turn and has already hit a national nerve . "End Times" combines beautiful, poignant imagery, impeccably executed, with both political and personal relevance. Greenberg’s subject is taboo: children in pain. She utilizes this uncomfortable image as a way to break through to the pop mainstream and begin a national dialogue. Jill Greenberg's images are sharp and saturated, stunning and quirky; her work is soaked with realism and imagination."

This is a photo series that now is being titled as pure cruelty. I think the reaction is overwhelming and in that sense the message is confusing, not for that I think is bad work...Maybe not a thing to repeat. Really interesting but kind of disconnected with the real motif behind it. I recommend reading the press release on the site.