Corduroy and Ryan McGinley's new cool art thing (question mark)

I find this annoying, yet the maker's acclamation profoundly fascinating. Here is the link to a short thing I wrote about it a few weeks ago in Corduroy:

The grass always looks greener in the other photo reportage: the example of Hobo Magazine

The Palais de Tokyo bookstore has probably one of the best selection of magazines to discover in the city. Yesterday I was going through the latest edition of Hobo Magazine. It's a very glossy, quite fancy yet hipsterièsque multidisciplinary magazine covering stardom, art, travel, etc. This month two photographic stories were strikingly comparable: one of everyday scenes in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris and another somewhere on the Californian Coast with dashing sunlight and seascapes.

In my opinion none of the two were particularly remarkable in originality, both reflecting the current style of naïve Vice reportage meets a 70s photographic medium. However what was interesting is the instinctual reaction both my friend (living in the 19th) and I had to the Parisian photos - utterly uninteresting, rather banal and definitely not capturing the parc's people, space and overall identity within the makeup of the city. But without that power of critic we just absorbed the Californian images as truth - the sun looks amazing, the cliffs breath-taking, etc... and without the power to fathom how much we were missing and how much was constructed we simply cruised through the pages.

Why New York can sing it's the center of world openly, and how other cities do the same thing differently

Praising New York, "a concrete jungle where dreams come true," Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind is a hit beyond the Big Apple. Yesterday in the tight department of Les Galeries Lafayette in Paris, hesitating between white woolen tights and apple green cotton ones, I listened attentively to the lyrics. The structure is catchy - an emotional chorus, concise and pleasing beats and builds that are hard to stay cold to. In addition to this steady recipe for success, Mr.J sings about the endless golden possibilities nyc offer whoever you started out to be (himself included) through a variety analogies including the Virgin Mary, Eve and Jesus, sports teams, neighborhoods, the World Trade Center, diversity in music, Robert De Niro and Bob Marley. A glorified rehashing of the american dream.

As I paid attention to the video and words, I wondered how other cities had been sung about by its own. I looked into the cities I've lived in - Paris, London and Montreal - and this is the palmares I came up with: 

For Paris, Teki Latex who embodies the Parisians' love to hate themselves and hence inability to sing about Paris in any other way than by using ambiguous irony; the Montrealers, Malajube, who with a DIY creative approach dilute their love for a provincial town into an endearing glass roof effect situation seen from within a fridge; and Blur for London - because even without a video - their sounds captures the terrible wit with which Londonders talk about the grayness of a city most would never want to leave because it's the only place where museums are free, beers are cheeper than water and Indian food better than in India.

Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys for Empire State of Mind (2010):

Teki Latex feat. Lio for Les Matins de Paris (2007):


Malajube for Montréal -40 (2006):


Blur for London Love (1994):

L'américain in Paris

I've been in Paris for 24 hours and there's a shocking quota of Americans (and perhaps, but honestly not so sure, anglo peeps) that can't switch their thank yous for mercis. Come on everyone knows merci. Maybe it's particular to the Marais and les Halles but come on, even the daftest of Frenchies is able to switch his native semiotic reflexes for a thanks when in an English speaking country.

I'm not a puritan but I'm all about integration - so if you loved all that Hemmingway and Shakespeare and co. give more than the muted buildings a chance. merci.

The nonsensical advertisements before a Dicaprio Blockbuster and French McDonalds is said to have Macaroons

I saw Inception last night at the MK2 Odéon. The plot-line - a dream within a dream within another dream - was a genius marketing move broadening the range of the flick's target audience exponentially (from Matrix lovers to chick flick freaks) and the characters were as flat (a wannabe James Bond stud and a miserable Japanese version of the evil turn good guy) as much as their relations improbable (Juno as therapist?).

If that could have been expected, if not calculated, it's actually the advertisement and preview period before the movie that was the best and most disconcerting experience of my time in front of the screen. It reminded me I was paying to be sold things, and gave me the shitty feeling that either I should have downloaded it or that I was suppose to be a sexually open-minded 13 year old geek with a love for green-conscious fast food.

Demonstration:

Targeted towards teens, preferably geeks, the first ads are by SFR and promote their phones' games with animated Princess Peach and her other forgotten gameboy friends. Check here. I might be totally out of the loop but what in the world is it promoting? good friendships? SFR's lack of cool? Nostalgia for Mario World? Not sure? Me neither. After seeing three versions of that same concept, McDonalds kicked in with their new bio friendly image: lush tomatoes collected meticulously by a McDo employer and brought in every morning fresh in a wooden box merged with happy meal boxes entering a miserable city filled with miserable black puffy things who, by the mere presence of happy meals, change into colorful dancing puffy things:  



What's going on? Is it really that straightforward: buy a happy meal and you will be happy? Is it for parents? Rare McDo eaters? Rare to never McDo eaters (I didn't leave convinced)? Kids? Sad people? After that and my neighbor telling me McDo menus have now salads, biological yogurts and also macaroons (which by shape is just like a hamburger), this soft porn artsy indie Mexican preview played. If most likely American censors would have banned it from the eyes of any adult under 21, what is weirder is that someone must have thought that placing it after Princess Peach animations selling games on cellphones and happy meals' happiness was a good move.


 
and then bam Dicap was in a dream.

The Summer at the Cottage

Why Jenny Holzer hates war at the DHC/ART

Since opening in 2006 the DHC/ART Foundation has been offering some of the best art experiences (free of charge) in Montreal: the Sophie Calle or Christian Marclay solo shows were memorable and their sporadic education programs, with talks - like by awesome Guido Van der Werve- and performances, offer great platforms for challenging debates. But the present retrospective on artist Jenny Holzer known for her political text based LED projections and installations is a frustrating disappointment with little, if any, depth. Co-organised with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the main idea is that war and violence are bad things.

Yes my friends, surprisingly Jenny hates war and has selected a few things to demonstrate it. 

These include silkscreened 'top secret' emails between srgt XXX and capt XXX rambling about BLANK's death in Guatanomo Bay, wooden tables covered with (fake? - does it matter?) bones and LED installations with rolling military testimonies on questionable actions.

The only applaud goes to the effort put in the creation of the two huge LED installations in the second building: an impressive first yellow and floor-based work and a second purple one hanging from a wall. But their relative impact emerges more from their size and time-based colourful medium than their actual meaning or message.

Basically the exhibit has the sensationalism of a second-rate newspaper with polarized (hence simplified) notions of evil, while taking itself for a conflict studies seminar. I left with the feeling Holzer's works would be perfect for the Hedge Fund collector's wall: they would say I'm into contemporary art and I'm against war, but I'm rich and all about liberalism. 

A humungous (golden) rococo lion: the roots of Chanel?

There's something incredibly genius about brand management at Chanel.

There's the house's association to a stylist, Gabrielle Chanel who made her success out of perpetually cutting superfluous details which helped free women from their corsets in the 40s, but who also left behind a terribly unfashionable maison de couture in the 70s. And then there's self-loving Karl who, while imploding with a creative genius that has brought the house to its current success, has done this by turning Coco the stylist into Coco the icon while simultaneously creating a whole clutter of things Coco's sense of elegance would have certainly cringed at. (These objects include temporary tattoos and inadequate movies).

For this season Karl has once again materialized the easily consumable myth of Coco by building a humungous rococo golden lion representing her vodiac sign in the middle of his catwalk. Certainly the exact overt nostalgia Coco would have hated. 

So just to refresh our memory of Coco's beliefs and how weird she really was, here are her definitions of l'élégance et la mode:

"Qu'est-ce qu'il y a de plus difficile dans votre métier? Permettre aux femmes de bouger aisément. Ne pas se sentir déguiser. Ne pas changer d'attitude, de manière d'être selon la robe dans laquelle on les a fourées sont des choses très difficile."

Another way of seeing 'controversial' videos by Romain Gavras

Romain Gavras recently made a few headlines with his video of MIA's Born Free song - a 'controversial' take on race that involved red heads, evil institutionalized force and compulsory runs over mine-filled deserts. The video's temporary ban from YouTube and MIA's New York Times post-article scandal gave the French filmmaker's work more North-American exposure than his three precedent videos for Ed Banger musicians - DJ Medhi, Justice and Simian Mobile Disco.

Highly publicized, these videos' subject matter, caliber of production and trendy realism enabled him to be coined a provocative filmmaker. Provocation helps success. At 29, Gavras has done well for himself and his first feature film Notre Jour Viendra is coming out in September.

If, to his credit unlike most music video directors Gavras' works presents some of humanity's most unglamorous aspects, the filmmaker's simple concept of taking a marginalized group of people (aka those who will not consume the final product), collecting their objects, habits, faces and homes, and then enrobe the whole with self-professed underground coolness (Ed Bangar music), doesn't seem to do much more than re-appropriating uncool (read poor) people and making them look very cool to his own advantage.

Like thirsty hipsters re-appropriating red-neck icons like the plaid shirt and Paps Blue Ribbon beer a few years back, Gavras has made re-appropriating caïlleras (rascals) beating the shit out of Japanese tourists on Montmartre and the tackiness of old mining towns the main feature of his success. He wouldn't be caught dead jump dancing around a car in northern Europe but hell yes is he ready to film it. 

So his images might be beautifully cold, his characters filled with a certain charming realism and the ambivalence of the details he fills his frames with captivaing, yet there's something much more disturbing in Gavras' approach than there is provocative and controversial in his final renditions.

DJ Medhi's Signatune:


Justice's Stress:


Simian Mobile Disco's I Believe:

La Peau Douce de Truffaut and Shoes

In competition at Cannes in 1964 and at the time severely criticized as an antipoetic idea of love, François Truffaut's La Peau Douce is often neglected although the rawness of the characters, the compelling desperation of the plot and patience of the director's frames make it certainly more poetic than the often tedious romanesque of Jules and Jim. 

Either way like most Nouvelle Vague productions La Peau Douce remains a beautiful window into the everyday of a time past. Among witnessing defunct activities like smoking in airplanes, waiting for public phone-booths to be freed, dancehall restaurants and the rare times Françoise Dorléac's (Catherine Deneuve's older sister who died in a car crash at 25) character is allowed to wear jeans, there is a wonderful shot of shoes aligned in front of hotel bedrooms. If this scene is an undisclosed tribute to feet fetishists, for anthropologists in love with things it is surprising how pointy the toes and how low the heels are on 1960s shoes.

La Peau Douce - bande annonce (2005) from Julio on Vimeo.

FIT goes green and something of a paradox in fashion

Up till November 13th the FIT gallery's current exhibition is on sustainability in fashion. Entitled Eco-Fashion: Going Green, the show's goal is to bring something of a paradox together: the fast consumption and ever altering trends today's fashion is driven by and depends on, and the ecosystem and biodiversity our own survival relies on.

Invited by FIT for a talk, Mathilda Tham, visiting professor at Goldsmiths, brings up the unfortunate impact the 70s and 80s green movement trends had on contemporary ideas of sustainable fashion (think the droopy looking things - skirts, pants, dresses - made from colorful rags).