Lug Von Siga F/W collection. Photo by Ayten Alpun, via Cool Hunting.
In 2008, Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk published a novel called The Museum of Innocence, about a man who creates a shrine to a doomed love affair with a much younger woman who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings.
On April 28, Pamuk will open an actual museum called The Museum of Innocence, a physical tribute to the shrine and the novel. I don’t think anything like this exists in any other city, and in fact I had a hard time both conceiving of what the museum actually is and writing the sentence that precedes this one. I’m really sad that I missed this while I was there, just for the chance to wrap my brain around the idea of a museum centered around the characters in a work of fiction.
Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence, under construction. Photo via The End Of Collection
Meanwhile, the look book for Turkish fashion designer Gül Agiș‘ Fall/Winter 2013 collection centers around some of the same themes, exploring forced marriages between young women and much older men in rural Turkey.
This is my actual record player spinning my very first record post toddler-hood. Photo by Sara Clarke.
I took the plunge and bought a record player. I’ve been wanting one since sometime last year.
I have four records so far:
I guess this image is courtesy Columbia Records? The album itself says "Cover Photo By Machine". Not sure if that's a groovy sixties nickname or if they mean, like, a photo booth of some kind? Aren't all photos "by machine"?
#1 “Songs of Leonard Cohen” – I bought this at The Colony, the record store on the ground floor of the Brill Building, where I work. They have a pretty small selection, and it’s overpriced. But I needed a record to play on my new turntable, so I forked over the $35 for a re-issue that’s easy to find in any other shop for $20. It’s not even my favorite Leonard Cohen album. Then again, one of the things I like best about vinyl is the fact that your collection depends on what’s actually available to you at any given time.
Photo by Tom Wilkes.
#2 “Pearl” by Janis Joplin – This one was in one of those obligatory crates I mentioned above, at a stoop sale in my neighborhood. The sleeve is in horrible condition, but the record itself is pristine. For some reason the guy only wanted $2 for it. It turns out this is one of my mom’s favorite albums from when she was a teenager.
Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe.
#3 “Easter” by Patti Smith – come on, you knew I was going to get a Patti Smith record right away. It could have been worse, I could have picked Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding”, which Smith reminisces about Robert Mapplethorpe giving her in Just Kids. That would be way dorkier, no?
Photo by Michael Carney.
#4 “El Camino” by The Black Keys – I figured I needed something that wasn’t pompous folk/classic rock*, and this one came with a free download of the album. Which is cool, because I hadn’t gotten around to buying “El Camino” yet. I like the idea of supporting bands by getting new albums on vinyl, and the download codes make it a no-brainer.
Because this entry has nothing to do with the place-based side of my nonexistent Mission Statement, I hereby give you this kickass video that my roommate worked on (she’s the hippo at the end!), which is maybe about Brooklyn stoop sales.
*By the way, DID YOU KNOW that Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, and Patti Smith all hung out at the Chelsea Hotel kind of around the same time? Just Kids mentions that Smith knew Joplin, and Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” is basically a brag that he slept with Joplin there.
In the audience at the Festival Au Desert in northern Mali. Photo by Alfred Weidinger, via Flickr.
Rock stars of the eighties cared a lot about Africa. There was “Heal The World”, “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, and “I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City”. There were also more aesthetic influences, for example Paul Simon’s album Graceland.
And then there was Toto. Created neither to raise awareness for the plight of the oppressed nor to celebrate a rich cultural heritage, Toto’s song Africa managed to jump on the eighties sub-Saharan bandwagon with a vague global outlook and paternalistically nonsensical lyrics. I could break out all the reasons this song is abhorrent, but I’ll let Steve Almond do it instead, in this hilarious reading from Tin House Magazine‘s tenth anniversary celebration a few years ago:
Even if your pop music tribute to Africa was a little more well-meaning — or at least well-crafted — than Toto’s ode to Mount Kilimanjaro rising over the Serengeti (by the way, it doesn’t), there was a strong chance that it was performed by white people, or at the very least by people who had never actually been to or lived in Africa.
It’s perverse that for Americans to get behind African social causes and artistic contributions, it had to be done under the guise of whitebread normalcy. As opposed to, I don’t know, making Fela Kuti the international megastar he deserved to be.
It’s good that Paul Simon shared some of the credit with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and I think this weird intermediate period in American and British pop ultimately led to the more diverse musical landscape of today. But how many singles did “Do They Know It’s Christmas” sell compared to anything ever released by Miriam Makeba or Ali Farka Toure?
Sidenote: before I die, I’m going to the Festival Au Desert in Essakane, Mali. It’s a three-day music festival celebrating peace through music. Bono made a surprise visit this year, which I suppose means it’s officially jumped the shark. But I don’t care, I still want to go. Maybe 2013 is my year…
Screenshot diptych from Pollock. Via Design*Sponge.
Design*Sponge did a Living In post on Pollock. I remember disliking this movie when I first saw it, but damn, it really gets the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic right. I think the main reason I wish I were an artist is the idea of having a ramshackle old studio-slash-house out somewhere nobody else wants to live. In the 50’s that was eastern Long Island. Which is funny because now the Hamptons is the land of spray-tan and appletinis, a place the least imaginative people in the world want to be. I think now you’d have to be in Detroit or a ghost town in the rust belt. Will those places be the hot vacation spots of 2062?
Image courtesy Huffington Post.
The Film On The Rocks Yao Noi Festival — curated by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tilda Swinton — created a floating island cinema for screenings.
This picture of Clarissa Darling wearing a Keith Haring t-shirt brought to you by the fact that I can't get any good MTV Art Break video clips to embed properly. Image blatantly stolen from Flavorwire.
Remember how yesterday I mentioned that Keith Haring did stuff for MTV in the 80’s? Well it turns out MTV is bringing back the Art Break. Too bad nobody cool watches MTV anymore. Also, too bad I suck at embedding video. Click the link, I guess.
Robert Mapplethorpe has nothing to do with Portland. I just love this photograph more than everything in the world. Photo by Mapplethorpe, of course, via the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
I’ve had a crush on Portland for a long time. Thanks to its use as the setting for the Ramona books, it wouldn’t be hyperbolizing to say I’ve always wanted to go to Portland. After reading this Cool Hunting feature on Ampersand Gallery, Portland is back at the top of my list not just because it’s the dream of the nineties, but also as a place to look at art.
Ampersand Gallery, Portland, OR. Image yanked from coolhunting.com.
Sorry, guys. I have to post this. It’s a credit to Carrie Brownstein that this song is not just funny and true, but actually good:
In other art and video news, I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about art collectors lately. Who even knew there were multiple docs about art collectors?
The classic choice is Herb & Dorothy, the story of a postal worker and a librarian who became major collectors of minimalist art in the 60’s. In addition to the powerful narrative, there are interviews with art world megastars like Donald Judd and Chuck Close.
And then, suddenly, Netflix was recommending arts documentaries right and left. Due to my obsession with Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the downtown scenes of New York in the 1970’s, I had to watch Black White + Gray, a doc biography of Sam Wagstaff, who was an important photography collector and Mapplethorpe’s lover. In addition to scratching my Just Kids itch, I was fascinated by the way that people from different parts of Wagstaff’s life had such oppositional views of who he was. There were homophobic Society types, art historians who thought Mapplethorpe was a total gold digger, and Patti Smith being her usual awesome self. It’s rare that docs about relatively uncontroversial figures like Wagstaff convey conflict that way, so I thought that was an interesting approach.
Both of the above films — and many more arts documentaries! — are available streaming on Netflix.
Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg do not want. Photo blatantly stolen from Awesome People Hanging Out Together. Unfortunately I was not able to figure out who took the photograph.
There’s a trailer for the On The Road movie.
I… just. Look. I don’t want to be one of those jerks. I stayed up till three in the morning watching episodes of Game of Thrones, despite loving the Song of Ice and Fire novels. I even like some pretty high-falutin’ books adapted into movies, like The Motorcycle Diaries (oh, man, I’m going to have to do a post on that one day), True Grit, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. And yet.
I feel like there’s an invisible line we all know is there, a creative equator, if you will. On The Road is on the other side of that equator. It’s sacred territory. You can’t do it justice in a movie.
Am I going to see it? Probably on opening night. I hope it’s every bit the abomination I say it’s going to be.
M.I.A. makes me want to run wild. There’s an immediacy to her music, a whisper of an undertone murmuring, NEVER GROW UP. NEVER GET BORING. QUIT YOUR JOB. DRIVE FAST. LAUGH TILL YOU PEE YOURSELF. RUN!
If you take that whisper and combine it with her global outlook, it’s not surprising that setting images to her music makes me Want To Go To There. Even when “there” is a the roof of a train speeding across the Indian countryside or an Arabian desert seemingly empty except for a few beat-up cars.
Also, the fact that M.I.A. dances like a seven year old standing in front of a mirror singing into her hairbrush makes me endlessly happy. Terrible dancers unite!
Here’s some footage of the Saudi car stunt trend — called Hagwalah — featured in “Bad Girls”. While there are some cool moments in the first minute or so (check out the 360-degree spin through traffic past a schoolbus full of kids!), if you fast-forward to the two minute mark you get a good stretch with some rad middle eastern background music. Around 5:40 you get the in-vehicle perspective, complete with bitchin’ Arab pop soundtrack.
Travels With Gloria 