Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1990s, as if, fashion, film, future gutter status, headspace, rage against the machine, rags, rnc 2008
The last few weeks have been kind of strange, kind of characterised by a weird pre-apocalyptic silence (that has nothing to do with election hyperventilation). Sleeping every three days, and when I do sleep, missing whole days. I have been semi-repulsed by fashion over the last near-year or so yet I find my self drawn to it and everything visually embodiable lately. And maybe mostly, the 1990s and the films, and fashion that went with it (and I suspect there’s so so much I’m missing).
Things I remember like plaids around the waist and docs and small-print florals and dungarees and neon sneakers and dark lipstick on coffee cups (I’m becoming my mother) and really really wanting to be a riot grrrl. And things I don’t like the ubersleek gorgeously clean minimalism of the early side of the decade. Of course it’s retrospective nostalgia, but didn’t things seem mad fun? Like this Amy Grant video (the hat!), and remembered slushies, astroturf, pink bougainvillea and little-kid fashion shows in somebody’s Jumeirah back garden. I really miss Dubai right now, or at least its more-is-more excesses, maybe it’s the same thing.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, ☭☭☭, banksy, cctv, china, civil liberties, film, FISA, free speech?, privacy?, spy bill, street art, surveillance society, western freedoms
[photo by view-askew]
So everyone’s all up about their western freedoms and civil liberties, post-Sweden. The FISA affair can only mean another little Democratic heartbreak, though perhaps nothing will top the ‘Public Finance? Eh, No Thanks’. Chris Dodd remains a kind of baller though, or as much as once can be while still plugged into recementing electoral politics? While they’re busy buttressing up the telecoms anyway, some more cctv related stuffs, including a Manchester band that filmed a video entirely on CCTV, for want of cash. Is this what post-lofi looks like?In Montreal, even the fashion police are in on the act, using it both to track suspected criminals and, ridiculously, monitor the brand spreading of corporate logos. I wonder if it would make people start dressing more consciously - a kind of Hearst/ Condé Nast elevator effect? Hopefully those ridiculous Louis Vuitton and Gucci monogrammed prints will be the first to come under fire?
Above is a sweet stencil found in Marseilles by Tai Bright. It’s a little scary how similar they are in shape. I guess photography can be kind of violent though, with all the shooting terminology?
Filed under: diy, film, rags | Tags: die fetten jahre sind vorbei, diy, every heart is a revolutionary cell, film, sds, the edukators, the fat years are over
aka The Edukators, a film I’ve been itching to see after coming across a quote “every heart is a revolutionary cell. Cue a painted hoodie (how did I never realise I had gold paint before?)/ drawing (to be redone).
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1187/545065282_d7a7d9a3f7.jpg?v=0
so a lot of stuff has gone down lately. on the plus side, a lot of writing, both zine (and finally! headway!) and bookwise.
london was a fascinating insight into rah and poshtoff type culture, as well as brilliant fun seeing peopel again. now however, I’m in phoenix and climbing walls until I can get out. more on that later or perhaps even not.
I spent much of today watching paris, je t’aime shorts. wow. I’d love to do something similar eventually, or maybe even this summer. another one for the evergrowing lists of incompletions? dubai, ana ahabak? yeah it seems more like a masculine city somehow. but to love dubai is more than the ostentatious ultraglam of the various burj’s and equally the neverending human rights fodder to fuel radical indignancies. it’s something in between, the empty construction site echoes and the lovely vacuousness of the epty desert beyond. maptimes and naptimes ahoy. perhaps i can at least get my area done over the next few weeks.
dubai and film mmm i need to knwo more. it was the intl film festival (the second, probably) and their palestine shorts that really made me - tombé amoreuse seems to express it better in french than in english somehow, or maybe that’s jsut my of francophilic pretensions - with the moving image and no, film in general. from what I have seen - I love this mini series that just about begins to flake the underside of dubai (but I want sometihng that’s mother of sandy nacrelike positivity and contained possibility)
“WHAT IF I WAKE UP TO FIND / THAT DICTIONARIES HAVE BEEN REVISED
AND THAT MEXICO’S ONLY A THOUGHT IN WHAT I THINK IS MY HEAD”
I miss hawas and all the songs that never happened. perhaps I’ll make egypt one day. looking through old stuff -
nihilism in a teacup / when irony becomes ironic /floral upholstery and metal brocade /i think it might help me get laid
post coital empathy bollocks / everything that you see on tv / welcome to the summer of apathy
learn to stay at home / with four walls and a pack of cards / household vignettes in a cocktail dress / does wearing holy panties still make you a slut?
8 kilos of lipstick ingested / a gut stained sedentary / welcome to the summer of apathy
— (oh, the days when every song had that circa 1993 ska break!) —
post coital empathy bollocks / everytihng you see on tv / welcome to the summer of apathy
that was probably last summer and the ep that never got recorded (like so many others). and summer of apathy, dust and sprikler system manicures it was. this one will be different. I’m almost getting that pre-emptive gut-sparkle. maybe it’s just the sudden sunflood here - 90 something degrees today (and I hate that I’m already starting to adjust my emptional barometer to farenheit) but that TING! it’s summer! creeping glow feels like it’s almost here. the point where all the fashion magazines suddenly start cooing over new summer silhouettes (what an elegant word, that) and how to get that perfect glow.
I like how even this subtly changes from year to year, from the poker-matte faced late 90s to the wetlook ultrashine of the early 2000s and, oh shit it’s nearing the end of the first decade of the millenium now. what a petit mindfuck. I remember one young day thinking how very yum it was that people who lived circa 1900 could live in two centuries, before giddily realising that I was going to myself cross two millenia in ust a couple of years. of course, I didn’t party like it was 1999- I think it involved watching some bollywood razzleglitzathon dansedance stageshow on tv then trotting from house to house after my parents.
party like I’m turning 19 in two weeks though? ouf! I dislike birthdays. and the period of intense selfscrutiny and shoulderslumpign that precedes them. wanting the day to be magically fabulous - a dickvandyke marching band, tapdacing penguins and technicolour carousels please. and not extending but regressing and feeling irritable and like as not crossly trying to sonicimprint said displeasure by playing some song of week on repeat (then never listeing to it again). yeah, this year will be different too? maybe, probably not. oh but jeff lewis the next or day-afterthat though and hearing chelsea hotel would make me veryvery happy.
hey, this is long. I always forget I like blogging until I do it. perhaps I should ake a habit of it, it’s always interesting to look back on in retrospect. I’m itching to send letters, I now have the cheapo but cheerful stationary to boot. ad I miss zines, what a reminder punch i the face. first news of the exciting anarchist bookfair in april, barnard’s very sexy zine library, and then reading about fran’s, all i one day ouf. so much of stuff I want to do, so many midterms left to not fail. I would like to promise myself that I will not go to DC on saturday and write these papers instead. but I know I’d just wake up at 2 instead and get nothing done. So (hey! autocapitalisation, que pasa??) back to mulvey, rear window and castration anxiety, then.