Posted in Art, Film, Literature, tagged running, Tate Britain, Work No 850, Haruki Murakami, Rachel Whiteread, Martin Creed, Turner Prize, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner on November 7, 2008 | No Comments »
Martin Creed owes me kicks. My twelve-year-old Green Flash have finally expired, and the cheeky conceptual bulb-botherer’s to blame. (Martin, if you’re reading, as I have no doubt you are, these superfeet are just the right side of revolting. C’mon. Make a poor Blonde smile.)
Let me explain. Having failed to give much of a shit [...]
Posted in Art, Dance, Fashion, Theatre, tagged tate modern, caroline trentini, rothko, simon russell beale, kenneth branagh, galileo, ivanov on October 20, 2008 | No Comments »
One of the defining features of reality is weight. Fantasies have all the gravity-defying pleasure of an oxygen deprived high, but trying to recreate them in life evokes the spine-shrinkingly horrible sensation of throwing a piece of paper as hard as you can. Maybe it’s why fashion models are parchment light, as epitomised in Arthur [...]
Posted in Art, Fashion, tagged Loewe, Stephanie Seymour, Keira Knightley, Arthur Elgort, Steven Klein, fashion photography, horses on September 4, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Animals in fashion shoots are the consummate couture quick win.
I may be an advertising-savvy cynic, but throw a load of big fierce creatures at some trembling sylphs in pretty threads, pour on a savannah-load of symbolism involving freedom, danger, dirt, sex and more sex, and my brain fuses into one big consumption-happy erogenous zone. I’d [...]
Posted in Architecture, Art, Fashion, Film, Literature, tagged palaces, stately homes, Versaillles on August 19, 2008 | No Comments »
I have a love/hate affair with what Virginia Woolf called ‘those comfortable padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.’ Surely even those without a mother prone to riff on the earnest, sweaty idealism of her days in the SWP must feel the chill fingers of the little match girl [...]
Posted in Art, tagged Paris, Musee d'Orsay, impressionists, Caillebotte, Zola, The Floor Planers on July 15, 2008 | 2 Comments »
There are few things more satisfying than a finely exectued bit of contempt; it can be highly reassuring to be firmly put in your place. If you spend your life rattling around the lonely marble halls of intellectual and aesthetic superiority, finding yourself suddenly squashed into the warm little cupboard of contempt is as disgustingly [...]
Posted in Art, Fashion, tagged credit crunch, In Memory of the Late Mr and Mrs Comfort, Paris couture, Richard Avedon on July 7, 2008 | No Comments »
In publishing the first English reproduction of Richard Avedon’s In Memory of the Late Mr and Mrs Comfort this weekend - a spectacular, spectral death-and-the-maiden photoshoot starring Nadja Auermann and a saucy sartorial skeleton - The Sunday Times Magazine seems carrion-ripe in its timing. With conspicuous consumption as passe as leggings and smocks, and shops [...]
Posted in Art, Film, Music, tagged Indiana Jones, film score, film soundtrack, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer, shape of song on June 3, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Brief Encounter has a lot to answer for; the appropriation of much-loved music for a film score can feel intrusive and often belittling. There is an irrevolcable loss of innocence when a tender, treasured tune that has companionably quivered and nibbled at your earlobes for years is suddenly gang-raped into a hard little whorish soundbite [...]
Posted in Art, Fashion, Literature, Music, tagged asparagus, bank holiday, blind boys of alabama, C J Sansom, cans festival, Delilo, junipero, thomas hope on May 2, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A Bank Holiday alone: a shimmering, cerulean depot of dreams. Plans are afoot.
Tonight I will spray an HB tag on Lambeth Tunnel at the Cans Festival, Banksy’s international street art gathering; on Saturday I will wander round Thomas Hope: Regency Designer at the V&A, drawing lissom little sketches in my Moleskine, before getting folked with [...]
Posted in Art, Fashion, Film, Theatre, tagged Annie Leibovitz, glamour, hitchcock, Molly Ringwald, Paul Scofield, Vanity Fair on March 25, 2008 | 4 Comments »
If glamour is the ability to cast a sexual spell, Annie Leibovitz’s photographs have all the magic of a mute glove-puppet panda with a middle-aged man’s hand stuffed up it’s arse. Her famous photographic tableaux of the blue-blooded and the beautiful, now showing at the National Portrait Gallery and featured in a commemorative online Vanity [...]
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