The way your perfume makes you stink
John Sutcliffe was a fascinating, creative person suffering from a lifetime obsession with leather. His natural flair for odd design led him to change profession from being an aircraft engineer to a self-taught designer in leather, rubber and vinyl fetish wear. Trying to normalize something previous regarded as shameful by the mainstream culture of 1970s England, he started AtomAge magazine which would also work as a catalogue for his creations. The magazine ran for 32 issues and was a great achievement for him. Despite its success, AtomAge remained an underground phenomenon. It was ultimately destroyed by the prudish nature of the times. “Dressing For Pleasure: The Best of AtomAge 1972-1980” by Jonny Trunk offers a peek into the world of a pioneering pervert whose work has become an important influence on the current fetish scene as on modern high fashion.
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http://www.fuel-design.com/index.php?menu=3&pic=284&detail=1
There is a woman pie in here
Opening the gig for Grinderman at Falconer Theater, Copenhagen last week was a young lady, with the hair slicked back, wearing a short silk blouse, black stiletto heels and all red lipstick. Starting the set with a tranquil guitar intro, she wasn’t to be taken seriously by the skeptical male audience but as the devastating guitar work gradually grew in intensity, complemented by the haunting and beautifully soaring vocals of hers, she drew delighted cheers from the crowd. No wonder why Nick Cave chose London upstart Anna Calvi for his European tour as her music is romantic, mysterious and dark, fitting perfectly in with Grinderman’s universe. Definitely one to watch!
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The world’s not meant for lonely people
Disappointment, loneliness and inability to communicate are consistent traits of the adult world in “En kärlekshistoria” (A Swedish Love Story) by Roy Andersson. The film depicts two innocent and yet unspoiled teenagers’ tentative steps towards adulthood. As their heedless love grows, they manage to rise above the clouds of despair created by their parents who are lost in the everyday routine failing to take the young couple seriously. In their difficulties to express their feelings in words, we truly get to see that cinema is about capturing what words cannot describe.
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Confusion in her eyes that says it all
The passageway of adolescene to adulthood and the difficulty of forming one’s identity are seen via women, in their teens, staring into the camera with a mixture of heightened self-awareness and awkwardness in Rineke Dijkstra’s “The Buzzclub (1996-1997)”, shot at the Buzzclub in urban Liverpool, England.
Posed against a minimal white background and exposed both to the camera and to the peers at the club, the adolescents are dressed up for a night out as they try on the masks of sex, seduction, adulthood, and cool. Despite trying very hard not to reveal their vulnerable outward appearance, most of them look silly in their desire to be attractive and exhibit lack of confidence and shyness, embodied in their tilted head and half-smile postures and in their attempts at imitating fashion models in clothing that does not quite fit the body.
This artwork shows individuals being exposed to influences of advertising, popular culture and their obsessive desire to search for identity through identification with an exterior element such as clothing instead of searching for inner qualities. There is no obvious agenda in these photographs. Dijkstra’s tendency to create portraits of awkward teens, however, is caused by her fascination of transition, vulnerability and purity, what she thinks are essential from human beings.
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http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/rineke-dijkstra/
The stars ain’t never gonna leave us
“Act Da Fool”, which was premiered last week, is a short film by Harmony Korine for promoting the fall campaign for fashion company Proenza Schouler. According to Korine this Super-8mm short is a religious film about ‘Girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire. It’s about the great things in life. The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor’, rather than about fashion design.
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http://www.nowness.com/day/2010/8/9/proenza-schouler-x-harmony-korine
Hitch my cheeks and do my lips
“The Hardcore Collection” puts together an anthology of Richard Kern’s experimental short films from the 1980’s and early 1990’s that includes “You Killed Me First” starring the always lovely Lung Leg as the rebellious teen from hell with Karen Finley and David Wojnarowicz as equally hellish parents.
Considering this country is a shithole of a place to buy anything from, I’ll have to be content with purchasing the DVD online.
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Never get out of bed before noon
I haven’t bothered updating for a while, but now I’m back cos I bought some interesting piece of reading material I want to show off. Found this June ’74 issue of Playboy Magazine at GADABOUT. It’s not an expensive thing to buy, but they overpriced it for $25 while people sell it for much smaller amounts on eBay. Who cares, here are some scans from the “Playmate of the Year” pictorial with Cyndi Wood.
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http://www.playboyarchive.com/
All I wanna do is drink beer for breakfast
Some guy put up a gallery of his record collection on Flickr – lots of rad stuff.
Born in the USA
“Wildwood, NJ” is a 1994 documentary by Carol Weaks/Cassidy and Ruth Leitman about the life of the working class girls and women in this small seaside carnival town, known for its confederate flags and overall trashiness and for not being quite the America many have in mind, where tough-talking, fatherless pre-teens and drawn-on-eyebrow women spent their summers on the boardwalk telling stories about family dramas, fist fights, and first sexual experiences in overlapping conversations. This documentary captures the cultural moment of the Jersey Shore in the late 80s/early 90s, when fashion was all-around classy and the girls were rocking big hair, giant plastic earrings, shoulderless shirts and cut off shorts made from high-waisted mom jeans.
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DOWN WITH PRINCE 
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