Sunday, June 29, 2008

Prospect .1 New Orleans



"On November 1, 2008, Prospect.1 New Orleans, the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States, will open to the public in museums, historic buildings, and found sites throughout New Orleans. Prospect.1 New Orleans has been conceived in the tradition of the great international biennials, and will showcase new artistic practices as well as an array of programs benefiting the local community. Over the course of its eleven-week run, Prospect.1 New Orleans plans to draw international media attention, creative energy, and new economic activity to the city of New Orleans."

more

[graphic from Prospect.1 New Orleans Web site.]

Saturday, June 28, 2008

The New York City Waterfalls


[Reprinted in full from the New York Times.]

June 27, 2008
Art Review
Cascades, Sing the City Energetic
By Roberta Smith


When Walt Whitman crossed the East River on the Brooklyn Ferry, the sheer ecstasy of the trip made him see the future. It was us, the coming generations of urban dwellers who would draw the same energy he did from his wonderful town and its waterways.

Whitman imagined an essence of city life that is still palpable — and intoxicating — no matter how many changes we lament. But I doubt he could have conjured one thing that we can see for the next three and a half months: the waterfalls in our midst.

Four of them, to be exact. Together they form a mammoth work of shoreline land art called “The New York City Waterfalls.” It is the brainchild of the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson working with the tireless Public Art Fund and a host of public and private organizations and donors. Between 90 and a 120 feet high and up to 80 feet across, they cascade into Whitman’s beloved East River from four dense, plumbed scaffolding structures on or just off the coasts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Governors Island, making some of New York’s most thrilling waterside vistas more so.

Sometimes Mr. Eliasson’s falls are almost miragelike, especially after dark, when unobtrusive lighting makes them shimmer white against the muffled cityscape. It is at night that you have the greatest chance of hearing them from a distance, otherwise the rush of water is drowned out by the city. But their quiet heightens their strangeness, day or night. It is as if they were in their own movie, a silent one. And in a way they are. They could almost fool King Kong into thinking he is back home. They are the remnants of a primordial Eden, beautiful, uncanny signs of a natural nonurban past that the city never had.

Sometimes when the wind is brisk, and the steel scaffolding is especially visible, the falls inspire more nuts-and-bolts associations. They can send the mind to the Cyclone of Coney Island and those towers from which daredevil riders and their hapless steeds used to jump, or to old Times Square with its ambitious billboards. If you get really close to them, you’ll see that the water is carried upward by what are essentially common New York apartment-building plumbing risers (18 inches in diameter, and occurring every 10 feet across).

The waterfalls run every day, from morning until 10 at night. Which is to say that they can be turned off, unlike the city that never sleeps. (They do turn off automatically if the wind is too strong.) Unlike real waterfalls, they continuously recirculate river water, meaning that they are, technically speaking, fountains. In the same vein the work’s very title is an oxymoron. After all, it was the relative dearth of real waterfalls that fostered New York’s nearly instant success and glamour as a port city.

But “The New York City Waterfalls” is also one of the largest works of art, public or otherwise, of our modern era. (Let’s not get in a shouting match with ancient civilizations, where autocratic rule made all sorts of things possible.) The piece is an heir to the monumental site-specific artworks whose most spectacular examples were made (and in some cases still are being made) in the distant reaches of the Nevada and Utah deserts starting in the late 1960s and the ’70s by earth artists like Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, James Turrell and Michael Heizer. Ever since, younger, less isolationist artists have figured out ways to do something similar in the urban environment, within reach of a large public. In this they have followed the example of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose 2005 “Gates” ostentatiously swathed Central Park in orange.

The waterfalls are an astounding feat of engineering, municipal coordination and fund-raising (given their $15 million price tag). But they are also actually relatively unobtrusive and brilliantly insidious. They go against the grain of the often spectacular nature of quite a bit of the best-known public art, including some made by Mr. Eliasson himself.

Mr. Eliasson likes to think big about ways to enhance the experience of light, space, scale, nature and community. His best known work is the 2003 “Weather Project,” an immense installation of the jaw-dropping kind. Using bright yellow fluorescent lights behind a scrim and a mirrored ceiling, it created an immense glowing sun on the end wall of Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall, while also mechanically adding bits of mist and fog to the view.

For months Londoners basked in the work’s artificial glow, often while stretched out on the ground gazing up at their tiny reflections. Sometimes they collaborated on performance pieces visible to everyone, arranging their prone bodies in words of greeting or protest or in abstract designs. Some people hated the work, seeing it as a dwarfing spectacle with fascist overtones; others complained that it turned the museum into a giant playpen.

Here Mr. Eliasson takes a more subtle tack. The falls don’t bowl you over or dwarf you until you get close to them, and even then not always. Mostly they accumulate in a way art purists may welcome with buzzwords like “de-centering” and “discursive.” Despite its size, the work has to be assembled and reassembled by individual viewers who will see its parts from hundreds of different vantage points along the river.

Even when you go to one of the places where all four waterfalls are visible at once, the spectacular character of the piece builds slowly. From the top level of the Pier 17 building in the South Street Seaport, for example, the widest fall, spouting from beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and veiling the Brooklyn-side pylon in sheets of white water, is easy enough to spot. The others , smaller and more distant, must be picked out one by one. To the right, the second Brooklyn falls, on the Brooklyn Piers, can almost get lost in the jumble of buildings. Up river a bit the Manhattan falls stand out on the short Pier 35 yet seem a little dwarfed, like a water slide without its slide. To the far right, the falls on Governors Island are especially beautiful. Rising above the relatively low-lying profile like a tropical vision, they seem to waiting for the jungle to grow up around them.

The experience of Mr. Eliasson’s artful addition to the urban landscape depends on everything around it — the city’s changing pace, light and (real) weather. And on you. The falls can be looked at from near or far, alone or in groups, on foot or bike, from boats and bridges, in snatched glimpses on the move or staying-in-place contemplation. They fake natural history with basic plumbing, making little rips in the urban fabric through which you glimpse hints of lost paradise and get a sharpened sense of Whitman’s, the one you already inhabit.

[photo from NYT "New York City Waterfalls: Reader Photos" site. Caption: “Taken on 6/19/08″(Photograph by Kevin Bain)"]

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Bruce Conner at the Fab Mab


Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2625 Durant Avenue #2250
Berkeley, CA 94720-2250

Bruce Conner: Mabuhay Gardens

June 4, 2008 - August 3, 2008

"If rock ’n’ roll rose out of a culture of opposition, then the mid-seventies was a bad patch for rock ’n’ roll. Corporate rock smothered the airwaves, while beat-heavy disco swept through the club scene, leaving platform shoes and polyester in its wake. In the midst of this malaise, punk, that dark, rousing outburst, was finding its first expression in a marginalized scene that embodied the ardent anarchy indigenous to youth culture. Not a ready commodity, punk was anti-music flung at the mawkish mainstream.

In San Francisco, a failing Filipino supper club, the Mabuhay Gardens, became the unlikely haven for the punk scene. The thatched booths and tiki lamps bordered a stage where angst-ridden anthems ricocheted off the dilapidated walls. Into this demimonde of three-chord chaos came artist Bruce Conner, a proto-punk provocateur who scavenged cultural waste to construct his assemblages and found-footage films. Drawn to the unvarnished kineticism of this dusky scene, Conner became a habitué of the Fab Mab, as it came to be known."

more

[notes by BAM|PFA Video Curator Steve Seid]

[Photo from BAM|PFA Web site. Caption: "Bruce Conner: Will Shatter: Negative Trend, January 29, 1978; black-and-white photograph; 9 7/8 x 13 1/8 in.; museum purchase: bequest of Thérèse Bonney, Class of 1916, by exchange; photo courtesy of the artist."]

Monday, June 23, 2008

La Nostalgia

The LAB
2948 16th Street @ Capp Street
San Francisco, California

La Nostalgia Re-mix
(Best hits and outtakes for an imaginary bar)

by Guillermo Gomez-Pena and James Luna

Performance: Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 8PM
$10-20 sliding scale admission at the door

"Since the early 90's, Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Native American conceptual artist James Luna have worked in an ongoing project titled The Shame-man meets El Mexican't, in which they challenge stereotypes, assumptions, and lazy thinking about race and culture with a strong dose of melancholic humor and sharp-edged conceptualism.

Last in the series is La Nostalgia, a new collaboration that promises to build on both artists' provocative legacies of performance and installation art. The project researches the cultural, symbolic, and iconographic dimensions of nostalgia both in the Native American "reservation" and the Chicano "barrio," through a series of live performances, writings, photo-shoots and videos.

Gomez-Pena and Luna's current collaboration, La Nostalgia, deals with varying notions of nostalgia and how the term can be used as a mechanism of cultural defense, as a stylistic device, and also as a way of revising the artist's careers in a series of re-enactments. The project was launched last year in San Francisco with two performances. First, the artists staged their own ritual deaths inside coffins and then they engaged in a poetic dialogue at the Headlands Center for the Arts, while Luna cooked an Indian stew and Gomez-Pena played roulette."

[photo from Lab press release.]

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Democracy Now | CAE

[With thanks to EC in Buffalo for the tip, below a link to an interview with Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble on Amy Goodman's brilliant Democracy Now]
Art in a Time of Terror: Acclaimed Art Professor Steve Kurtz on How He Became a “Bioterrorism” Suspect After His Wife Died in Her Sleep

"In his first broadcast interview, Steve Kurtz discusses the bizarre case of how he became the focus of an FBI bioterrorism investigation. On May 11, 2004, his wife Hope Kurtz tragically died in her sleep. When he called 911 for help, a nightmare that would last for the next four years began to unfold. The police became suspicious of his art supplies and harmless bacteria cultures that he was using for an antiwar project about the public health impact of germ warfare programs. His home was raided by the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and Homeland Security. His belongings, his cat, and even his wife’s body were seized."

watch | listen


earlier, related posts

[graphic from Democracy Now Web site.]

Monday, June 16, 2008

Iowa is for People

[News from home: below a link to a feature story on NPR. Heartfelt thanks to Mark N. and all the 'Hawkeyes' participating in the recovery efforts.]

Rare Manuscripts Saved From Rising Floodwater

"A brigade of rescuers formed a human chain to protect a cache of rare manuscripts from rising waters at the University of Iowa. Film material used for cinema classes were also saved by the group. NPR's Andrea Seabrook talked with Nancy Baker, the university's director of libraries, who organized the rescue. According to Baker, hundreds of community volunteers showed up to help with the three-day effort."

listen

[Photo from a slide show on The Daily Iowan Web site.]

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Tourists and Travelers Advisory

Eyebeam
540 W. 21st St. New York, NY

Tourists and Travelers: New commissioned works by Taeyoon Choi and Joseph DeLappe

June 21 - July 19, 2008
Opening reception: 6pm, June 21

"As many New Yorkers ready for the annual ritual of summer travel, Eyebeam presents Tourists and Travelers, an art exhibition resulting from Taeyoon Choi and Joseph DeLappe's 2007-08 residencies at Eyebeam. The show features an unlikely pair of projects that reflect the artists' interests in journeys across real and virtual spaces: a Second Life avatar modeled on Mahatma Gandhi and a tourist-chasing, robotic duck. Choi, from Seoul , Korea , and DeLappe, from Reno , Nevada , both traveled to New York City for their residencies as recipients of Eyebeam's inaugural Commission for Resident Artists.

Taeyoon Choi's electro-mechanical bird Camerautomata Charlie: Image Digesting Robotic Duck is unleashed in tourist-heavy habitats, such as New York City 's Central Park , to roam and snap-and then defecate-photos of its own. Born of a hacked digital camera, printer and vacuum cleaner, Camerautomata Charlie and its flock will be on display at Eyebeam alongside digital prints, drawings, and video documentation of interventions in public spaces.

Joseph DeLappe will present documentation, artifacts and new works derived from The Salt Satyagraha Online-Gandhi's Salt March in Second Life, his 240-mile reenactment of the walk in real life and in cyberspace. Over the course of 26 days in the spring of 2008, DeLappe walked the entire distance on a customized treadmill at Eyebeam, which was programmed to control his online Gandhi avatar in Second Life. A centerpiece of the Tourist and Travelers exhibition is a monumental cardboard replica-the same height, in fact, as Michelangelo's sculpture of David-created from a 3-D model of the Gandhi avatar. Large format prints, stop-action animations, and video from the performance piece will also be on view."

Eyebeam

[graphic from Eyebeam press release]

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Ray Charles September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004

[To mark the fourth anniversary of the death of music giant Ray Charles, we feature a YouTube video of Mr. Charles performing "America The Beautiful."]

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Mac Rennack and New Orleans

[reprinted in full from the New York Times.]

June 7, 2008
He Still Loves New Orleans, and Now He’s Mad
By Jon Pareles

NEW ORLEANS — Mac Rebennack, the 67-year-old New Orleans pianist, guitarist and songwriter better known as Dr. John, carries the city’s lore in his fingers, his scratchy voice and his memory. He has lived in New York City and on Long Island since the 1980s, but when he revisits his birthplace it’s as if he never left. New Orleans culture, he said in his ever-surprising vocabulary, has “wacknosity” — things only New Orleanians do.

In late April he was back in his old hometown, revisiting his past and present. He performed during the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, introducing some of the songs on the angry new album he released this week, “City That Care Forgot” (429 Records). (Dr. John is to perform in New York City on June 17 at the Highline Ballroom.)

Three days later he was at the Ponderosa Stomp, which had persuaded him to revive songs he wrote back in the 1950s. Most were written for other people (like Ronnie and the Delinquents’ “Bad Neighborhood”), and he hadn’t performed them since. In the afternoons Dr. John was at the Music Shed, a recording studio in the Garden District, singing Randy Newman’s theme song for “The Princess and the Frog,” a Disney movie about old New Orleans due to be released next year.

“They wanted his voice, which is not a bad idea if you’re going to do New Orleans,” said Mr. Newman, who was at the sessions. “He’s the real thing in every kind of way.”

Mr. Newman has known Mr. Rebennack since the 1960s, when both men worked as Los Angeles studio musicians. “You don’t have to tell him much about music,” Mr. Newman said. “He knows where he is, wherever he is.”

Through the years, Dr. John has carried New Orleans style worldwide: in his two-fisted barrelhouse piano, in his syncopated drawl, in the second-line funk rhythms of songs like his 1973 hit “Right Place Wrong Time” and in the psychedelic voodoo character he created when he became Dr. John the Night Tripper in the late 1960s.

Before the recording sessions, Dr. John told some tales. On early tours, he said, the Night Tripper’s troupe included a nude dancer and a geek who bit the heads off chickens, drank their blood and tossed their bodies to his black snake. In one town the geek was charged with cruelty to animals. Defending himself in court, he declared, “Arrest Colonel Sanders!”

Dr. John also had, it seemed, a story for every street corner in his hometown. He recalled the one where Gypsies ran a bujo scam, promising to cleanse supposedly cursed money and filching it instead. There was the saloon where the booze wiped off the bar was collected in a galvanized tin, dumped into milk bottles and sold to down-and-out drunks. There was the Circle Food Market, where, decades ago, Sister Gertrude Morgan, a gospel evangelist shaking six tambourines — on her hands, her feet and her dress — used to sing like James Brown to redeem sinners. The front yard of her home in the Ninth Ward, Dr. John recalled, was all four-leaf clovers.

The streets he showed a visitor were less vibrant. They’re the New Orleans he sings about on “City That Care Forgot,” still deeply scarred nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina.

“There’s hardly any part of this city that you’re not going to see something that’s still whacked,” he said. The van, driven by his road manager, rolled past a tent city of the homeless that has spread under the long overpass of Interstate 10. Crossing the Industrial Canal, Dr. John said, “As far as your eyes can see on this bridge, and the next bridge and the next bridge and the next bridge, you can see masses of destruction slid in between masses of not-so-destruction.”

“How many of those people are scattered and splattered around the United States to this minute?” he asked. “How many people got back and had no way to rebuild?”

As the van moved through the wreckage of the Lower Ninth Ward, he said: “I knew a million people here, and they got wiped. The first time I come out here, I couldn’t even find where blocks ended and started. There were 5 and 10 houses smashed together. You could smell dead people in them.”

He released a mournful seven-song EP, “Sippiana Hericane” (429 Records), less than three months after Katrina. But he kept hearing more grim stories. “The more people I would talk to — everybody had an epic movie saga,” he said. “One guy got his grandma out of her house and came out and saw his grandfather’s body hanging from a tree. I’d be walking on Canal Street and I’d hear the stories. And I got to the point where I got to be scared of saying to someone, ‘How’d you do?’ I had to do something to get past that.”

Gradually, sorrow turned to resentment and rage. “City That Care Forgot” flings indictments both local and global. “Short version is, we gettin’ mad,” Dr. John sings in “We Gettin’ There,” which gripes about contractors and insurance companies and goes on to tabulate greater costs: “Ask anybody if they know a friend that died from suicide/They gonna say ‘Yeah for a fact.’ ” In the title song, a steadfast slow groove with jabs of bluesy guitar from Eric Clapton, Dr. John sings, “Better get used to that fonky smell/Toxic mold under the fresh paint.” And in the gospel-flavored “Promises, Promises,” on which he shares vocals with Willie Nelson, he sings, “The road to the White House is paved with lies.”

In New Orleans style, the bad news arrives with a backbeat. Dr. John and his band of New Orleans musicians, the Lower 911, come up with easy-rolling grooves: funk, blues, gospel, even a tinge of zydeco.

Dr. John wrote five of the album’s 13 songs with Bobby Charles, the elusive South Louisiana figure who wrote “Walking to New Orleans” and “See You Later, Alligator” and whose hometown, Abbeville, La., was smashed by Hurricane Rita. Most of the album was recorded in a studio in Maurice, La., Dr. John said, “sitting on one of the most polluted bayous in the state of Louisiana.”

Dr. John and his band made two albums in the same sessions: “City That Care Forgot” and a set of Mr. Charles’s songs sung by Shannon McNally. “Some cuts on me, some cuts on her — it kept the band from getting complacent,” he said. “It would shift the gears of the conversation.”

One collaboration by Dr. John and Mr. Charles was “Black Gold,” which links oil greed to global warming and the war in Iraq. “Bobby hits your nerves good,” Dr. John said. “That’s one of his fortes: he can go straight for the jugular. I could give Bobby some words or a thought, and within an hour it’s finished.”

When the van got back to the studio, Dr. John resumed his longtime role as an ambassador of New Orleans. The Jazz and Heritage Foundation, which runs the festival’s nonprofit cultural programs — and the state of Louisiana, in a project called Sync Up, had invited a delegation of film music supervisors to promote Louisiana music — songs, musicians and recording studios — to Hollywood. Dr. John posed for photos with them: the bearded potentate, carrying a carved staff and wearing amulets and Mardi Gras colors, paired with the sleek but clearly starstruck Californians.

“Anything helps,” he said. “Everybody here is scuffling.”

[photo of Mac Rebennack from Beat the Devil Web site|blog]

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Seized at Hallwalls

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

June 7 - July 18, 2008

Critical Art Ensemble | Institute for Applied Autonomy
SEIZED


Following the four year long ordeal of CAE founding member and University at Buffalo Art Professor Steve Kurtz—accused by the Justice Department of "bio-terrorism" and later indicted on charges of mail fraud for procuring harmless bacterial cultures for use in an educational art project—SEIZED presents the artworks behind this case which has attracted worldwide attention and propelled an international arts community to rally to Kurtz's support and on behalf of freedom of expression.

SEIZED will center itself upon the works and materials seized by federal authorities, in particular the multi-media project Marching Plague, which was commissioned by the UK-based art-science initiative, The Arts Catalyst, and produced in consultation with scientists from the Harvard-Sussex Program on Chemical and Biological Weapons Armament and Arms Limitation. The project is comprised of an installation, performance, film, and book dedicated to demystifying issues surrounding germ warfare programs and the cost of their development to global public health.

more

press: Buffalo News 1 | Buffalo News 2


[photograph from Hallwalls Web site.]

Friday, June 06, 2008

CAE update to update

[Update to last month's post regarding developmentss in the judicial proceedings of the Critical Art Ensemble. Additional: click on comments to read a press release issued by the Critical Art Ensemble Defense fund on June 11.]


more | CAE Defense Fund

[screengrab from CAE Defense Fund Web site.]

Thursday, June 05, 2008

RFK Memorial Forum Remix

Helena Keeffe
RFK Memorial Forum Remix


Performance: Saturday June 7th,
1p.m.-3p.m.,
St. James Park
FREE

[part of 01SJ]

"With the Vivace Youth Concert Choir, the San Jose Symphonic Choir, Dale Victorine, the Moonlighters, DJ Tommy Aguilar, and an ongoing invitation to participate.

In 1968, Robert F Kennedy spoke in San José on his campaign trail a couple of months before he was assassinated in Los Angeles. This occasion is marked by the Robert F Kennedy Memorial Forum, a concrete monument in the form of a speaker’s podium located in St. James Park. This concrete stage in the corner of the park is mostly neglected and forgotten, yet it calls out with great untapped potential.

According to the San José Historic Landmark Commission, The RFK Memorial Forum was intended to be used rather than admired from a distance like most traditional monuments. Keefe will be putting the RFK Forum to use by staging a live event there from 1pm - 3:00pm on Saturday June 7th (to coincide with the Zero1 festival. These events will bring a variety of performances to the stage including musicians from St. James Senior Center, local DJs remixing RFK speeches and a choral composition created by local composer Dale Victorine using the quote found on the memorial’s placard. The choral composition will be performed by a mixed choir of adults and youth from Vivace Youth Chorus of San José and others."

more

O1SJ: a global festival of art on the edge. June 4-8, 2008. San Jose

[photo from 01sj web site.]

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Defending Democracy

Station Museum of Contemporary Art - June 7th - September 14th, 2008

Defending Democracy
"featuring the political art of Emory Douglas, ASARO from Oaxaca and Otabenga Jones & Associates from Houston. The title of the exhibit is self explanatory; each collective is expressing through their art a commitment to participatory democracy."


[graphic from Station Museum press release.]

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Bo Diddley | 12.30.28 - 6.2.08



Bo Diddley

[video posted to YouTube by 'fredvs' 08/17/2007]

Monday, June 02, 2008

Yves Saint Laurent

[article below reprinted in full from Agence France Press]

French fashion icon Yves Saint Laurent dies at 71

PARIS (AFP) — French fashion icon Yves Saint Laurent, widely hailed as one of the greatest designers of the 20th century, died Sunday in Paris. He was 71.

"Yves Saint Laurent died Sunday at 11:10 pm," announced his foundation, the Pierre-Berge-Saint Laurent Foundation.

The reclusive French maestro, who had retired from haute couture in 2002 after four decades at the top of his trade, had been ill for some time.

Saint Laurent's longtime business partner Pierre Berge, hailed him as a fashion revolutionary.

"He knew perfectly well that he had revolutionised haute couture, the important place he occupied in the second half of the 20th century," Berge said on LCI television.

"Yves Saint Laurent knew perfectly well that he had transformed the world and fashion, that all the women of the world owed a debt to him in a certain way."

With Saint Laurent's death "one of the greatest names of fashion has disappeared, the first to elevate haute couture to the rank of art and that gave him global influence," said French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

"Yves Saint Laurent infused his label with his creative genius, elegant and refined personality, discrete and distinguished, during a half century of work, in both luxury and ready-to-wear, because he was convinced that beauty was a necessary luxury for all men and all women," Sarkozy said in a statement.

During his farewell appearance seven years ago, Saint Laurent had told reporters he had "always given the highest importance of all to respect for this craft, which is not exactly an art, but which needs an artist to exist."

One of a handful of designers who dominated 20th century fashion -- on a par with Christian Dior, Coco Chanel and Paul Poiret -- Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent was born in the coastal town of Oran, Algeria, on August 1, 1936, at a time when the North African country was still considered part of France.

A shy, lonely, child, he became fascinated by clothes, and already had a solid portfolio of sketches when he first arrived in Paris in 1953, aged 17.

Vogue editor Michel de Brunoff, who was to become a key supporter, was quickly won over, and published them.

The following year Saint Laurent won three of the four categories in a design competition in Paris -- the fourth went to his contemporary Karl Lagerfeld, now at Chanel.

Discerning the young man's potential, de Brunoff advised Christian Dior to hire him and he rapidly emerged as heir apparent to the great couturier, taking over the house when Dior died suddenly three years later.

Saint Laurent would say of his mentor: "Dior fascinated me. I couldn't speak in front of him. He taught me the basis of my art. Whatever was to happen next, I never forgot the years spent at his side."

However in 1960, like many Frenchmen of his age, Saint Laurent was called up to fight in his native Algeria, where an independence war was under way.

Less than three weeks later he won an exemption on health grounds, but when he returned to Paris it was to learn that Dior had already found a replacement for him, in the person of Marc Bohan.

With his close associate and lover Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent resolved to strike out on his own, with Berge taking care of the business side.

Saint Laurent's success lay in the harmony he achieved between body and garment -- what he called "the total silence of clothing."

He was also in the right place at the right time. Having learned his trade at the house of Dior, he founded his own couture house at the start of the 1960s, at a time when the world was changing and there was a new appetite for originality.

Saint Laurent rode his luck through the rise of the youth market and pop culture fuelled by the economic boom of the 1960s, when women suddenly had more economic freedom.

His name and the familiar YSL logo became synonymous with all the latest trends, highlighted by the creation of the Rive Gauche ready-to-wear label and perfume, as well as astute licensing deals for accessories and perfumes.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he set the pace for fashion around the world, opening up the Japanese market and subsequently expanding to South Korea and Taiwan.

Among his many fans in his native France was the actress Catherine Deneuve, who was always to be seen at his shows.

But Saint Laurent's career was not without controversy. In 1971 a collection modelled on the styles of World War II Paris was slammed by some American critics, and his launch in the mid 1970s of a perfume called "Opium" brought accusations that he was condoning drug use.

For fellow-designer Christian Lacroix, the reason for Saint Laurent's success was his astonishing versatility. There had, Lacroix said, been other great designers but none with the same range.

"Chanel, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Dior all did extraordinary things. But they worked within a particular style," he explained. "Yves Saint Laurent is much more versatile, like a combination of all of them. I sometimes think he's got the form of Chanel with the opulence of Dior and the wit of Schiaparelli."

In his later years the depression that had haunted him all his life became more oppressive, and at his farewell bash in 2002 Saint Laurent admitted to having recourse to "those false friends which are tranquillisers and narcotics."

[photo with Catherine Deneuve from Cinebeats web site. Caption: "Catherine Deneuve and Yves Saint-Laurent, 1966." Note that YSL designed the fashions for Luis Bunuel's infamous Belle de Jour. Other photo from Brightstarlights: Astrology, Fashion & Celebrities Web site.]

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Miles Davis — Time After Time



With a week's delay, we salute Miles Davis on the occasion of his birthday [26 May, 1926], with two performances on YouTube: the first Time After Time, is a tune more frequently identified with Cyndi Lauper. yusuke1200mk4, who posted the video to YouTube provides the following information: "1985. Miles Davis (trumpet}, Robert Berg (sax), Robert Irving III (synthesizer), Daryl Jones (bass), John Scofield (guitar), Steve Thornton (percussion), Vince Wilburn (drums)."



The literature of Miles Davis is as vast as it is deep, so we also feature a fantastic 1958 clip of So What. Note the young saxophonist putting the jazz world on notice. John Coltrane.