IRENE KAORU

Om Nom Nom Books: 2009

January 3rd, 2010

I read these books in 2009. Changing commute times meant more time for sleep, less time for reading. I was proud of myself for reading more in 2008, looks like I slacked a bit, though I did a lot less re-reading. Better next year!!

What was your favorite read of the year?

JANUARY
Offbeat Bride – Ariel Meadow Stallings
Intimate Weddings – C. Friedrichson
Jo Garten’s Weddings – J. Garten
The Graphic Design Reader – S. Heller
Sword and Citadel (Book of the New Sun 3 and 4) – G. Wolfe
Opening Up – T. Taormino
The Player of Games – Iain Banks
Beautiful Botanicals – B. King

FEBRUARY
After Dark – Haruki Murakami
Watchmen – Alan Moore
The Boleyn Inheritance – P. Gregory
Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Your Vintage Wedding – Nancy Eaton
Things Fall Apart – C. Achebe

MARCH
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Conscious Bride – Sheryl Paul
A Widow For One Year – John Irving

APRIL
The Winds of War – H. Wouk
The Eight – Katherine Neville
The Omnivore’s Dilemma – M. Pollan

MAY
The Robber Bridegroom – Eudora Welty
Delta Wedding – Eudora Welty
The Ponder Heart – Eudora Welty
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
Summer – Edith Wharton
The Lime Works – Thomas Bernhard

JUNE
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – H. Murakami
The Logogryph – Thomas Wharton
House of Leaves – Mark Danielewski
The Necklace and Other Tales – Guy de Maupassant

JULY
Spook Country – W. Gibson
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddin
Veronica – N. Christopher
Vile Bodies – E. Waugh

AUGUST
Kakfa on the Shore – H. Murakami

SEPTEMBER
Love & Money – Opdyke
Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson – Helperin
The Constant Princess – P. Gregory

OCTOBER
The Man in the Iron Mask – A. Dumas
War and Remembrance – H. Wouk

NOVEMBER
A Room With A View – E. M. Forster
I’m So Happy For You – Lucinda Rosenfeld
The Michael Jackson Tapes – Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Remainder – Tom McCarthy

DECEMBER
One Michael Jackson – Margo Jefferson

The Way You Make Me Feel

December 11th, 2009

If you weren’t paying close attention, you might think of “The Way You Make Me Feel” as one of Michael Jackson’s weaker, less interesting music video films.  However, this video has always interested me much more than the song alone. Everything Michael Jackson did as an adult came back to an exploration of himself, of course, as a symbol for many concepts–celebrity, masculinity, gender, race, beauty–and this video is dear to me for all of that.

Beyond Michael’s personal mirror, I see the film and its choreography as a hymn to gender fluidity and a melodramatic reenactment of traditional masculinity as a performance and the chasing/conquest of women by men as performance for other people rather than for the actual pleasure of the man or woman involved in the chase. His seduction is really a show-off to the admiring dudes watching in awe.

This is complicated by his appearance and, for that matter, Tatiana Thumbtzen’s appearance. The song appeared on Bad, which means the year was 1987. The 80s could be called the decade of the Supermodel. Who were the icons of feminine beauty back then? Elle Macpherson, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, Christie Brinkley, Helena Christensen, Cindy Crawford. Compared to the constantly changing almost faceless cast of female fashion models today, those women were icons, superstars, and compared to the bony, starved, androgynous body type preferred by the industry today, those women were buxom, curvy, sensuously fleshy. Compared to those women, the late 80s standard of the feminine, Tatiana Thumbtzen is downright hard, sinewy, broad-shouldered, boyish…in a word, androgynous.

twymmftatiana

Sublimated gender and androgyny are some of Michael Jackson’s most consistently explored topics and this video is a nine and a half minute visual dissertation on them. Michael is the protagonist in the video and is clearly the least traditionally masculine in appearance, surrounded by loud, posturing men, some fat, some big and imposing, some tattooed and sporting unkempt facial hair, swaggering and engaging in ghetto male rituals of playacting violence with one another. The older man advises Michael to stop trying so hard to act like that kind of man, to admit that he doesn’t want to be that kind of man, that kind of person, and to “just be himself.” The group of hoodlums teases Michael, saying he doesn’t know anything about women (implying: he knows nothing about being a man; implying: being a man is being an aggressive hoodlum), and then we get our first close shot of Michael’s face.

And it’s a strikingly delicate, pretty face, with smooth, light, even skin, eyeshadow and eyeliner. A tendril of wavy hair fallen in front of one eye. It’s almost viscerally shocking, how much more “feminine” he looks compared to the group of tough guys we were just watching, how much prettier he is than the girl he’s supposed to be pursuing, how much more delicate and frail he looks than her, strutting by with her wide shoulders and bare, well-formed arms. She passes him and we linger on his face as he takes a deep breath, his chest heaving like a woman in a Victorian novel. Something builds in him. Just past the three minute mark, it escapes in a yell, teeth bared like an animal: “Hey!”

twymmf3

When he turns, he has swapped gender cues again, he’s a man, he’s going to show you that he’s a man, baring his teeth, curling his lip like Elvis, emphasizing his jaw. His pivot is not womanly, it’s stiff and tense, like a gunslinger at dawn after ten paces, deeply reminiscent of scenes from Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon A Time in the West” and other such classics. To reinforce that old Western movie image, we get a quick cut to Michael’s hand as though he might pull out a weapon but it’s just a trick; his fingers explode in the vague shape of a gun. We smile; don’t we?

Only after all this does the song actually start. There’s no need to analyze in depth the choreography that we know so intimately by now, but the one important thing about it in this case is how crudely sexual it is, in diametric opposition to the lyrics he’s singing. Take, for instance, the sequence just before the five minute mark, where he exhorts the woman to “kiss me baby and tell me twice that you’re the one for me.” These lyrics seem sweet and childlike in their simplicity, something the boy next door would say–yet he grimaces through them at the head of a menacing crowd of men, while pantomiming a vigorous grinding with his hands and thrusting hips. The woman, momentarily disgusted, shakes her head and runs away. The action seems designed to obtain this result from nearly any woman, but the actions are not for the woman–they never are. The acts are for the benefit of the men watching, who had fallen into step with Michael and become satisfied that he is a real man.

He pulls away from the crowd to chase her and again the lyrics and dance moves flip, opposing each other. He catches up with her and proceeds to shuffle, hop and point in some cross between Bob Fosse, hiphop and ballet styles of dance, showing off his precise, elegant, dare I say feminine, moves, occasionally thrusting his pelvis to remind us of his cock, while singing that he’ll work all day to buy her things (like a man should, right?). Around 6:15 he breaks into a hip-jutting runway model walk. This sequence is like putting gender in a blender. And in the end, he gets the girl.

No, it’s not his biggest budget number, it doesn’t have the best story or the coolest costumes and graphics. It’s not the technological achievement that “Scream” or “Black or White” was, nor the smash hit that “Thriller” was. But taken in the context of the artists’ life and oeuvre, it is a fascinating music video, that’s for damned sure.

Gaga for the 80s

December 10th, 2009

When “Poker Face” first came out, it was “featured” on last.fm so I watched it. I thought it was really well-produced with a great video, but found the music itself totally bland and lacking any personality or redeeming value. Now, I’ve watched Lady Gaga reach impressive heights of adulation and ubiquity in a very short amount of time and accidentally read about her in publications from Rolling Stone to the New Yorker and been subjected to the ill-advised semi-nudity of many imitators in bubble costumes this Halloween. After the continuous unrelenting all-media onslaught of promotion I have broken down and am listening to her entire album. I’m giving it a good try, three or four spins. And damned if it still does not sound like well-produced but essentially soulless, pointless and often melodyless eastern european 80s pop.

gaga
Lady Gaga: The formula seems to be Lite Fetish + Thierry Mugler + Sunglasses – Pants

I do love some of her outfits, I like her videos, I guess her dancing is ok. But it’s not like she designed the outfits, did she? Her fashion is fun but still not as creative or unexpected as Bjork in her heyday. Her videos don’t really go with her songs and I’m sorry to beat a dead horse but the degree to which the dance routine in the “Bad Romance” video rips off and does not pull off the “Thriller” zombie dance is just….. well.

bjork
Bjork: Still awesome over the decades.

So I ask you why? Why is she so popular? Is it just her clothes? Are we so starved for entertainment as a culture that we’ll listen to absolutely anything if it’s forced on us enough? Is it her aesthetic closeness to a cartoon character that makes her easy to understand and mentally digest? Is there something about her actual music that I am missing? I’m bewildered.

A portrait depicting Michael Jackson on horseback, dressed in regal garb and attended by two cherubs, has been sold at auction for $175,000, a US art gallery said.

“Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II,” commissioned by the late pop star, who died on June 25, was sold to a German collector at the Art Basel show, said Kathy Grayson from New York’s Deitch Projects gallery.

The large portrait, which Jackson never saw in its finished form, measures 3.51 (11.5 feet) by 3.1 meters (10.1 feet), and is the work of New York-based artist Kehinde Wiley.

equestrian-portrait-of-king-philip-ii

Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II, Kehinde Wiley

“I was receiving messages saying Michael Jackson wants to reach you,” said Wiley of being commissioned for the work in 2008. “I ignored them because quite honestly I thought it was a prank.”

Telegraph.co.uk Article

Add Art

December 6th, 2009

I wholeheartedly love and support Add Art (the brilliant Firefox plug-in that replaces web banner ads with random art with about 99% success) but I just have one small suggestion for making it better. I would like easy to navigate access to all past sets of Add Art and the ability to create a profile, save and choose my favorite sets, maybe even uploading my own sets without having to submit them to the larger population. Because the last three or four sets have just completely sucked to the point where I would almost rather see the ads and all I want in the world is to go back to the set where every banner ad was replaced by a picture of this Koons sculpture and just stay with that for the next year or so.

koons

Jeff Koons (American, b. 1955). Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988.
Ceramic. 42 x 70 1/2 x 32 1/2 in. (106.7 x 179.1 x 82.5 cm).

I happened to mention Add Art at work in a marketing meeting where we were discussing banner ad campaigns and I was shocked to receive a bunch of confused blank looks. From a room full of marketing people! I had thought a huge percentage of people used some kind of ad blocking plug-in these days. Once again my estimation of the general population betrayed my laughable optimism. (I suppose that’s a good thing as long as my company’s banner ad campaigns continue to perform well.)

Are you running Add Art? Something different but similar? If not, why not? Do you like looking at ads? Do you just not see them anymore or find them easy to ignore?

Heroes and Sociopaths

November 23rd, 2009

Well that explains a whole to me about…myself. No, I don’t think I need to elaborate.

Behaviorally speaking, heroes and serial do-gooders have a lot in common with sociopaths, according to this paper on psychology and neuroethics: “their personality traits are very similar, with only a few features to distinguish them.”

We look at heroes and do-gooders as a special sort of breed: people who possess extraordinary traits of altruism or self-less concern for the well-being of others, even at the expense of their own existence. On the other end, sociopaths also have an extraordinary set of traits, such as extreme selfishness, lack of impulse control, no respect for rules, and no conscience.

As crazy as it sounds, there may be a closer link than than most people would think between the extreme-altruistic personality and sociopathic personality. Would it shock you to know that two people, one with the traits of extreme-altruism (X-altruism) and the other the traits of a sociopath, could be related? Even siblings? And that their personality traits are very similar, with only a few features to distinguish them? Research by Watson, Clark, and Chmielewki from the University of Iowa, “Structures of Personality and Their Relevance to Psychopathology” [pdf], present a convincing argument in which they support the growing push for a trait dimensional scheme in the new DSM-V to replace the current categorical system.

Via BoingBoing.

Resources

November 22nd, 2009

concrete

One thing I never knew until recently was how much digital artists seem to depend on each other. Sort of like djs taking samples of each other’s music, photoshop artists put images and imagelets from every imaginable place, remixing them to new and unrecognizable shapes. Maybe it’s stupid that I never thought about this until a year or two ago, but there you go. I always liked the idea of art arising from the dusty depths of cloistered genius.  Sometimes it’s tempting to just spend days trolling the internet for, say, high res concrete textures, collecting and examining them, and then maybe never even using them. Alternatively, I have spent days photographing different parts of the ground, intending to use those image textures for “something.” I could fill hard drives infinite with little pieces of art waiting to be made. Funny enough, I never seem to get around to putting the pieces together these days. Is it time to clear my calendar, disconnect the internet and confine myself to photoshop’s company until I produce something worth keeping with all these pieces? To all of my friends, if you either don’t hear from me or receive an incomprehensible collage print for Christmas I apologise in advance.

Speaking of them, this is a really great resource: LostAndTaken.com, a blog dedicated to providing obsessive compulsives like me with high res textures and texture-related chatter.

cotton and candy

November 14th, 2009

will-cotton-candy-curls-gastronomista
Will Cotton, CANDY CURLS, 2005, oil on linen, 34×24 inches

I can NOT explain my obsession with things made out of food, especially candy. It’s a longstanding affliction I have. Via NOTCOT.

Matthew Ritchie

November 12th, 2009

Brilliant article I am rereading over at artforum about one of my favorite contemporary artists, Matthew Ritchie. I haven’t actually thought about him much since I saw his 2006 show at Andrea Rosen (which was beautiful) but I almost want to mouth idiotic things like “everything he touches is fantastic” as though he were not just a guy. I am most drawn to artworks that speak to the mythical and larger than life, and his work always does so while creating its own language and operating very strictly within its own logic.

ritchie
Matthew Ritchie in collaboration with Aranda\Lasch and Arup AGU, The Morning Line, 2008, mixed media.
Installation view, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville. Photo: Benjamin Aranda.

Somewhere amid this tangle of incomplete emancipations lies a great deal of the work that we call emergent today. A prime example is Matthew Ritchie’s current traveling—or is it self-replicating?—project, a series of structures including, most recently, The Morning Line in Seville and The Dawn Line in London (now on view in New York). An earlier, scaled-down iteration, titled The Evening Line, was presented at last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, with the larger, more expansive and centrifugal Morning Line following soon after. This trajectory itself is a sign that Ritchie’s work has found clear and unapologetic interest among architects, but, more germanely, Ritchie himself developed, resolved, and realized these structures only with the collaboration of Benjamin Aranda and Christopher Lasch, two young researchers who specialize in algorithmic design. While The Morning Line initially appears as a snarled tumbleweed of metal filigree accidentally forming both interior and exterior cavities for inhabitation, as well as the structure of transfers and arches necessary to keep it stable and upright, it quickly resolves in one’s perception as a pattern of modules that is rotated, displaced, and scaled at every level and along what appear to be determined paths. This is the moment when an underlying predisposition is sensed, which transforms one’s understanding of the work (the modules, in fact, are hand-generated cartoons that are computationally “grown”). Ritchie brought to the table a taste for medieval knowledge systems and the dream of their comprehensive resolution within a pageantry of materials and narrative characters. His interest in the figures or actors of knowledge as points of compression of historical understanding and imagination, or simply as convenient ways of presenting these to the mind, belies a profound belief that the world encodes itself in its productions and that this code represents an asset and resource that could and ought to be tapped, if only we knew how.

Systems Theory – Sanford Kwinter

Socrates: a portrait in Lego

November 10th, 2009

The Death of Socrates by minifig

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