alphabetical

m/m silkscreen posters available now ...

sorry

apologies to you -- i haven't been putting anything (textually) substantial in here for a while. i've been preoccupied a bit and haven't been feeling like talking a lot lately, but i'll be sure to be back with some new thoughts soon.

i miss

I have known terror dizzy spells
Finding out the secrets words won't tell
Whatever it is it can't be named
There's a part of my world that's fading away

If I ever feel better
Remind me to spend some good time with you
You can give me your number
When it's all over I'll let you know

more from amsterdam

Top to bottom: sweet bike near prinsengracht, that dive bar, mies van der rohe barcelona chair-like street benches, droog design

more from amsterdam ii

Top to bottom: the stairs, droog, eames and wegner and ... , incredible overwelming bookstore, pixel-tile art, tord boontje and the attack rats, the button shop with button blade sign.

guy, oh guy

guy bourdin

beautiful, just beautiful.

Guy Bourdin presented fashion as the luxurious embellishment rather than the subject of his photographs. He magnified to centre stage dark fantasies, of lust, consumption and desire.

The fundamental significance of his photographs lies in Bourdin’s knowledge that it is not fashion but its image that seduces and fascinates us.

l'hiver d'amour

centraal museum

a-v h

Like the 1920s couturier Madame Vionnet, she makes all her clothes in miniature sizes and then converts them into adult sizes. But unlike Vionnet, Hash has her own human doll, the girl Lou. "I chose a little girl to help me create my collections, since children are less conscious of their attitude. This gave more spontaneity to my style, " she says. " At first, it was a game, then it became a creation, and now it appears to be a fashion." (via and via)

a little self-inquiry

j. nichols

Hello Jean.

Hi there. How are you?

Good. And yourself?

... mmm. I'm in ambiguous states. As usual, eh? I'm not sure what I'm doing here at all.

What do you mean?

It's that -- I feel confused about lots of things. Um, I don't have faith in a lot of things. Things like love and god. And progress. Things like that ... The idea of faithlessness doesn't scare me, but it makes me feel like a real nihilist.

I can see why you might feel that way. But, isn't there something that gives meaning to your life?

I wish I could give you a concrete answer ... learning about the world, making things that are perhaps frivolous. I like things like that -- stuff that reminds me of being a child. No, I don't mean remind; um, I mean stuff that actually changes the way I think. It's going back to a time without pretense. I hate habit and regularity that creeps up on you without knowing it just because it is part of accepting the system in which we exist. I want to think in a way that is utterly free of this.

Well, don't you think this is absolutely possible?

Yes, but it doesn't take much to knock me down sometimes ... I guess I've lead a life with too much Black and White. It's made me very afraid of being hurt, afraid of risk. Internally, I am very high strung, I think, because of this tension. It creates rigor, but an excessive, harmful kind of rigor. Like, I am always evaluating actions, consequences, memes. I'd like to slip into a more relaxed mode. I'd like to be independent, but as fearless as a child. My mom and dad always told me to stop thinking so much.

You should.

amsterdam links

simon merces at miauw
i got two!

unfortunately, i wasn't able to gather a ton of sites from the shops and art spaces at which i stopped (many of the best don't have a web presence) but here are a few, and they are still among the best stores in the city, in my humble opinion!

miauw ever-changing boutique by analik
SPRMRKT cannot-miss sweet minimalist space with everything i would ever want (i think!)

frozen fountain (the newsletter)
droog arguably the foremost art - design venue - collective
lambiek for comics
72nd for sweet design

bebob for all the best of international design
mendo black-walled art space
gameover for hella old school games you never thought you'd see again
quarantine for art

de appel for art, as well
mads norgaard dutch knitwear
acne jeans pretty fucking hot basics
burfitt easy wear

9 straatjes and rozengracht

there is a lot of fun on the little 9 streets bordered by rozengracht at the north: lines of vintage stores, dusty bookstores in dutch english french maybe a little russian, galleries, and handsome design from the mid century (and late century). if i were living there, i could go to the Noordermarkt and get some sweet secondhand verner panton or arne jacobsen for a few euros. ahh.

(yes, roger noticed in the top photo it is pages out of Exactitudes by Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek of Rotterdam that are posted onto the circular window! this is at the wonderful Athenaeum bookstore where i could get copies of purple fashion, frame, and self service.)

graphics at 11

yesss.

there was no michael mayer in amsterdam on friday night; however, there was el guapo.

amsterdam to come

I will be in amsterdam from 11/23 to 11/28. (Holing up with V&R, of course). Holla if you're there or have any humorous suggestions. Pleeease

cute book on the dandy

The New English Dandy by Alice Cicolini

"Dandyism is the last vestige of a sartorial spirituality. It is a secular monastery, but with essential accessories."

Another amusing quote: "Neo Modernists are 'citizens of the world' united by a passion for music that has consistently defined Modernists' pared down razorsharp style in the past." (from)

No one really knows who he is ... not even the Times.

stephane tartelin

stephane tartelin

nice!

$10 t-shirt sale at threadless.com!!

MVRDV's Mirador apartment building in Madrid

When I was in high school, my fantasy of university was always sitting in a dim room around a circular table with a number of friends (or non-friends) in discussion. no coffee, no smoking, just talking all night.

I had a delicious piece of this, this weekend. Sitting in a room somewhere between 125th St and Riverside Park with an invisible view out the window of the Hudson in the dark. We talked about Spinoza and Deleuze, Emella Romana and Superstudio, the adult writings of Roald Dahl, Jeff Kipnis + Eisenman on the subway - Descartes + God = sudden reversals in careers, Olivo Barbieri's photographs of Shanghai become model-izations, drumming, Maya bought out by Autodesk, Beyond War, Lakoff, Lugu Lake -- home of one of the last remaining matriarchal societies, men like to wear mesh tank tops in Moscow, riding a bicycle in circles the top of a walled village, how we love fascist architecture (shh), the religion of science, working for MVRDV in Rotterdam, a new house on a commercial lot in Oregon, theatre turned parking lot in Detroit, scoping out collaborators in grad school, two-storey walls of books -- my library of course, panoply in Brownsville, on and on. So much on and on, it was lovely. (Okay, maybe a coffee was involved this time!)

Or a tall glass of fizzy tap water.

strings

josef astor

i think i am ... in ----


!

?

in / out

Guy Bourdin

"...a bewildering assault on the senses. They are lined with buildings positioned according to no obvious spatial pattern and with so complete an absence of visual coherence that one begins to suspect the presence of an underlying order based on systematic disorder. Zoning in the European sense simply does not exist--petrol stations and love hotels jostle with fashionable restaurants and luxury shops.

Facades are awash with shimmering neon by night and almost invisible by day behind the tangle of cables that festoons them.Yet these banal buildings frequently hide interiors designed with a sophistication and craftsmanship unmatched anywhere else in the world, as if it were the role of the interior designer to create a sense of identity within this chaotic context....

In the hunt for the next novelty, ideas are seized on, exploited and plagiarized with breathless haste before finally being discarded as outmoded. In such an environment, the way an object is presented has become as important as what it is. Hence the design of a shop interior has attained the status of a minor art form." (from)

twilight hilarity

i had this dream last night. i was at the airport, waving good bye to my dad and little sister as they boarded their leer jet. i walked back through the tiny terminal, and i stopped in front of a small glass exhibition case (you know those exhibits they have at the airport). inside it was a british brushed stainless steel pair of glasses (rhombus-shaped) from the 1920s or 40s. they looked sort of bauhaus/deco. before i could really study the antique, a crowd of japanese businessmen dressed to the 9's in their prada suits strutted past me, each of them doing their rendition of a mocking chicken dance. (evidently, they were making fun of the stodgy british and their 'high design' glasses). i laughed, and i guess i was laughing out loud, too.

right now, it doesn't seem very funny, but it sure seemed hilarious when i was sleeping. this was probably the first time i laughed in my sleep in many, many years.

yes, architecture

i had a great talk with my boss today about the profession and new york (after, of course, he scolded me for coming in late to work all the time -- my punishment being i have to come in everyday at 8:00 am now). he had gone to sci-arc for his master's, worked at some prestigious firms, lived in nyc for 15 years, before moving out to the oceanside here. i mentioned that recent poll in the UK that rated architects as the sexiest male professional. he talked about: why architecture is so prestigious in the public consciousness (movies -- like "the inferno," "hannah and her sisters"), why architecture is romantic (it's accessible, and the idealist's sacrifice), why architects get paid so little (90% of architecture is crap, corporate pushes out competition, and no one does ego projects anymore, just quick profit projects, good design takes so much time and people love to compromise for money -- developers), why so many clients think they know more than you do ("i know how to work a pencil"), and the only kind of firm to work for is the kind that chooses its clients (not the other way around), the early days of sci-arc when students voted what happened to the school ... among other things.

alas. the reasons why we love architecture and hate it, all in 30 minutes.

Found Magazine II

Last night, we saw the publishers -- two twenty-something boys from Ann Arbor (Davy & Peter Rothbart) -- of Found Magazine. How to best sum it up? Pack together the endearing, heartbreaking, puzzling, mysterious, half-innocent, half-naughty, and near-forgotten memories of your confused adolescence and put it in book form. That's Found.

We listened to them read their best found notes, short stories, songs composed of found note lyrics (including a bad ass rendition of a found BOOTY TAPE track). I thought for a second I was going to die from the soft, sentimental croon of the singer-songwriter brother (didn't the guitar just a little too much remind you of church ... or dave matthews?) but, it was too sweet to reject. After all, we're so innocent when we pick up notes off the ground, hoping to find tiny peepholes into people's secret lives. Like spies or bystanders, but totally cool, right? Half-inside and half-outside; it's irresistably fun.

art

i want to do an entire photo shoot like this one. (what are these kinds of photos called? montage something?) for some reason, i group these kinds of images with rube goldberg's contraptions, in my mind. i guess one is hyper linear and the other is all overlap, but both are montage, where all the pieces need some space around them for 'clarity.'

something from men's ss 06

okay, i know this has been a long time coming ... but here's a selection from my favorite spring shows:


Raf Simons does a little volume, a little layer.



Kris van Assche does the dandy pleats, the popular cuffs,
... and some delicious volume. Awesome collection.



Ann D. does it AS ALWAYS. Fuck yeah!




Fresh ... Adam Kimmel out of New York, former archi-head (in the line of Raf Simons, etc etc) ... EXCELLENT collection. Check it out.


Last but not least, a cute look from V&R.

Oh boy ... I am so doing menswear ... this shit's hot.

my information glut part 2: memory

If a life was a library, and every second of experience was categorized away, each person's stacks gain complexity every minute -- thousands of new categories, tags, lost books, cross references, and mislabeled images, growing exponentially. It was a library with some key images and ideas, and at 22 years, it's a messy, gargantuan compedium. Certain stuff stays at the forefront, more or less organized, and the rest gets tossed in the back, with the nostalgic, the once-profound, once-relevant, and the things-i'd-rather-forget.

(And then you go into the corner and read the unicorn skulls ...) There's that gray place that's strangely hyperactive. We "can exist in curious states that combine aspects of both sleep and wakefulness, indicating that the two are not always mutually exclusive." (here, here)

I always wake up in REM sleep these days -- the worst part of your sleep to awaken from. So every morning I'm in a kind of liminal daze, not sure which place to go and which I'm in. It's those seconds I forget if the dream about the boy playing the piano facing the wall was real or not, or if it was evoked by touching his hand. Which one did I make up and which one was real?

my information glut part 1: maximalism

Grain Silo by Chris Jordan

I think I simply have too much information. I mean it. Maybe everyone in this era reaches this peak at some time or another and even several times a year (I assume after trying to gorge on knowledge that's too varied, too complex, and too fragmented). Has your life also turned into a forever backlog of RSS feeds that you swear you want to comb through but know it's temporally impossible? (Friends that are pieced together from shards of blogs?) Sometimes it's a greedy grab for knowledge -- as if the more you know, the more power to see things others can't see. And sometimes it's an excessive search for meaning and beauty ...

I've decided to take an information sabbatical -- or at least, cut it into a fraction of my prior daily intake -- meaning, less RSS, less news, less audio, less art, less opinions, less every sort of media. I hope this is a big step in regaining my short term memory (which is ridiculously worthless these days). I will especially (though reluctantly) need to stay away from boingboing and the like. (Aren't metafilters, especially diversionary metafilters the worst! And there are just so many of them ... )

Learning to say no at the right time is just as important as saying yes, right? (As I mentioned earlier).

There's simply too much info taken in with too little framework and clarity of intent. (There I go with the archi-jargon). If everything is fascinating, how is it differentiated? I've been struggling to even think of what to put in this personal little blog of mine, because I've been confounded with new and fascinating bits of knowledge. It's strange, though, because I've always thought I was rather good at putting up high floodgates and saying "NO" (at the expense of sounding like a big snob). But besides the terrible memory, the fragmented learning, and the contradictory goals, I've suffered from really awful writing (the biggest sign of incoherence). It's moments like these I lick my lips at the fantasy of setting my house on fire.

... and start from scratch with nothing.