This is the City, and this is the music. Out of the little black boxes an unending
river of romance in which the crocodiles weep.
Henry Miller, Black Spring
With the State of TV New Jersey opening up it's trench coat and exposing itself as the real-life Fellini movie it always was, I thought more about that Italia-Judiaica-Caligula State into which I was born and the drama-laced, life-as-a-movie diet spoon-fed to us from toddler size. How did the once-sacred ritual pleasures...morals, life, power, mirrored everything, coffee, tobacco and sex... become so profane in this Pocket of Purgatory aka The Garden State? And with all this Noise...how can we find Modern Love? Sultry jazz music...up!
Mid-New Jersey circa 1972:
At breakfast, my sister and I were served OJ between the parental, coffee-gulping run-down of the previous night’s antics. Served up was stuff such as,”Can you believe Kathleen, the “They-Must-Be-Mafia neighbor’s wife, a former Miss New Jersey and fashion model” straddled an intruder and shot him in the nether parts?” Or for dinner, with along with Gentle Giant peas and Chicken of The Sea salmon croquettes, “Hey, looks like Bubby, (aka a friend’s father turned felon on the run) had to leave the neighborhood and take another name in Europe!”
The regular chorus between headline stories, of warbling rampant adulterers, swingers, lesbian wife to wife swappers and a father (not mine) whose day job was that of a pin-striped pimp raiding the shopping malls for fresh Jersey girls, were animated characters lined up regularly onto the stage sets of mirrored and plastic everything. Gold spray-painted decor accents of dead nature were in abundance, wealth trophies like bear rugs with plastic, black, glinty eyes and sleepy, dusty flower arrangements whose very garish being-ness itself seemed somehow directly responsible for the tragedies surrounding my young sensitivities.
Jersey Giant Mirrors
Sense of Place begets Art begets Morals and Ritual. Now the whole world knows this about New Jersey from TV. Just to place this rant in real-time, here is the home of Loretta Abrams, mother of my best friend growing up, nowadays living in LA and a Youtube star, (of course, because her daughter became Barbara Streisand’s personal assistant…) Just to give you a taste, Come. Take The Tour. (pronounced “Too-Oar”)
Not Just Nucky in The Good Ole Summertime…
From about age 14, we took our summer fun in Atlantic City, gambling and gamboling under, over and through the boardwalk and thus my smirk over James Wolcott’s October Vanity Fair article title, “Barbarians at The Shore,” referring to the latest Jersey Giant TV star-to-be, Steve Buscemi’s Nucky, of the new HBO series, Boardwalk Empire, set in Atlantic City. After my parents’ divorce, my father became an Atlantic City blackjack dealer who even played a bit role as himself in the film “Donny Brasco,” so for me, the Nucky’s, Snooki’s, Tony’s and Barbarini’s are the legendary Les Belles et Les Bad Boys of My Past. Their names ring musically for me like fellow Aries and my favorite author, Henry Miller’s famous litany of his childhood friends, icons of his Brooklyn youth sung to in his novel “Black Spring.”
“I am a patriot–of the Fourteenth Ward, Brooklyn, where I was raised. The rest of the United States doesn’t exist for me, except as idea, or history, or literature. But I was born in the street and raised in the street. ‘The post-mechanical open street where the most beautiful and hallucinating iron vegetation,’… “Born under the sign of Aries which gives a fiery, active, energetic and somewhat restless body. With Mars in the ninth house!”
Myself an energetic, restless Patriot of Reality of a Place called New Jersey, always shadowing yet hugging Mythical Manhattan, I am grateful Life is really lived through our dreams and perspectives. Thankfully my own street of dreams has always been radar attuned and expanded beyond the vacuous NJ cheerleaders and practitioners of loosely-understood bohemian principles and resulting profanities that surrounded.
From a young age I was self-soothing against the drama of Jersey by dreaming and living in a Timeless Place where rituals of art, delicate beauty, love and honor in the lives of Artists, Designers, Inventers, Humanitarian Visionaries and Wandering Bohemes prevailed. My dramas were friends comforting each other with parades of the beautiful, gritty and funny through real rituals of cafe, coffee, cigarettes of Life deeply inhaled, propelled by The Grandest Dreams.
September Fashion Week Parade, Spring 2011, New York City
I once read in Joan DeJean‘s book, “The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour,” that Louis the 14th invented street lamps which rendered the city’s night streets safe from hoodlums and drama which then in turn beget cafe society, nightclubs, boites, champagne and new mysterious hours to indulge in the Dionysian rites of imbibed stimulants and intoxicants to an amped up level. This month seemed to seal my borderless purveyance over a well-lit global street of dreams, with the 24-hour darting in and out of cabs and crosswalks, with our clients in New York City for Fashion Week, hailing from Italy, France, Brazil and Miami (a country just like NJ…thank you!)
Les belles and le bad boys, coffee, cigarettes, parades of beautiful clothes on the stages of Lincoln Center. The characters included glamour from Milan, Dedi and daughter Francesca, fashion shows with our stylist and blogger client, Dame Lori, and Sasha, The Madonna Pop Princess of Russia. Les Bad Boys…smoking tons of cigarettes…included clients Claude Serieux, Parisian DJ and Sound Producer and coffees with Greg Melvin, visionary of Babalu Miami and Emmanuel Rengade of Brazil. Together it felt like the layered time and place vignettes of a Jarmusch film weaving together.
Not just vacuous La Belle, but La Belle as in The Queen, The Beautiful and not just Bad Boy, like gangster or P. Diddy but Bad Boy like Mr. Big, The Good Daddy, The Powerful and Most Magnanimous to the best and brightest possibilities of creative wealth.
End of month, all of them having all gone back, I immersed my resulting cold and flu in the intoxicating drug of matzo-ball soup deliveries and re-watching old favorite movies, such as “Breathless” and “Fellini’s City Of Women” and “Coffee and Cigarettes.”
Come, Take the Tour.
Golden Rule of Lions
If Le Bad boy Louis 14, the Sun King of Paris, was the inventor of larger mirrors than hand held in which to see his glory, surely the Sun Queen of NYC is DVF, Diane von Furstenberg, even her invite suggested so, as the collection was called Goddess. The show was a parade of essential Summer bright prints floating fabrics on lithe bods for endless Days into Nights on yachts at Cap Ferrat, Brazilian beaches and infinity pools on Spanish Islands, such as the August-drenched Holy daze my visiting friends just shook off. (Atlantic City???)
The European gift of mirrors to African kings is said to have begun the slave trade and one week spent inside Fashion Week’s new “Tents” at Lincoln Center, one sees well the power of mirrors to seduce or mislead. La Belle Sarah Jessica Parker and Le Bad Boy Anderson Cooper buss kissed in front of us in the front row as we chatted with Michael Fink, formerly of the women’s buyer at Saks, formerly front row, now the Dean of the School of Fashion Design of Savannah College of Art and Design, happy as us to be there, even way in the back row. No matter, back row and backstage can sometimes be glorious, as it was a few years ago when I sat in on Timothy Greenfield Sanders photo shoot for his book, LOOK. Backstage, this year, at Diane, The Goddess of Sunshine and Fashion Presided.
We were invited to the DVF show by Alex de Betak, the producer of the show, friend of Claude Serieux, our DJ and Sound Producer client. Here beams Diane and model, Elisa Sednaoui, backstage, one stop on Elisa’s backstage photo tour of Fashion Week, for New York magazine.
…and while they had their cigarette tete-a-tete in the rain after the show…I waited, checked the mobile and contemplated a favorite image of my Dad as a young Turk in my memory…as vivid as Belmondo in Breathless…while models, security, food service people and fashion heavies scurried to find umbrellas and cabs to get to the next shows on stages and in restos.
…and I wished for the sunshine days of DVF’s electric patterned “playsuits,” invented by Diane and her new Boy, Yvan with whom she designed the collection. As she wrote in the program, “It all started when we took our first walk together through Paris to see the Isadora Duncan show…” Even in a pouring rain storm, in the klieg-lit backstage bustle…I felt the heat, the tick of the tiny stones of Paris parks and yes, the flowing inspirations and scarves of that historic walk.
and I thought that Diane is The Goddess Heir to the Hall of Mirrors that Louis the 14th built…way before any NJ Housewife Went Wild with a Mirror…her wrap dresses and playsuits liberate through simple solutions in excessive patterns versus being excessive in semi-liberated patternings. There is a difference.
In a funny way Diane reigns and reminds me of The Sun King, life lived in super Technicolor and Mr. Big, Barry Diller style…another Belle and Bad Boy combo floating through my head.
By night, we perched like Golden Lion Kings on the balcony of NYC’s latest haute restaurant, invited by The Waverly Inn God Himself, Chef and Co-Owner, John de Lucie, over his wateringhole lined with Basquiats, the Warholas and the drama outtakes from The Daily News archives, both in photos on the walls and the Bold-Faced names among and below us and those creeping into the private party door by our table. I had the divine lobster pot pie and beet salad between satisfying “Aha”, moments at the chummy convergence of our client Dame Lori, a “Soul Stylist” and a cross between Marilyn Monroe, Chaka Khan and Dr. Ruth, as she flirted with Claude, who, like all Frenchmen…know how to charm a lady. I myself surrrrrendered to this huge David La Chappelle image in the lady’s powder room in the private dining area…God and Goddess both help the man who dines here with me and some champagne, after I trot back to the table.
Coffee Cultura
Invited to a street fair in the rain only works effortlessly with the host being Nespresso, The Elegant Italian Kings of Coffee Contained. White tents of Coffee and Champagne in multiple recipe incarnations and combinations were flowing where a wide awake eye of Nespresso photographer Sylvere Azoulai presided over the mini-tubs of brain-gold-rush.
BySylvere and Corinne Tapia
Look at this BeSpeckled, BeLovely Belle and Bad Boy combo! Like the Starship Enterprise it is, Nespresso branded food, ladies in matched silvery dresses and choreography proffered the Mayan elixir goods, the goody bags, the food inside and in tents outside…everything was cranked up like an Eighties party. The ball was packed with belles such as Corinne Tapia, owner of Sous les Etoiles gallery, Leslie Morrison Faerstein, Executive Director of Musicians On Call and the rust silk-swathed PR Goddess in charge, who went wild online purchasing gifts and ecstatically telling us about it, at Babalu Miami, the shop owned by my client and friend Greg Melvin. It’s a super-fun luxury convenience store in 1111 Lincoln Road, the new, buzzed-about, retro-fitted parking lot Herzog & de Meuron building. Greg and I spoke with Real Game, Mr. Big Boys such as the very elegant President of Nespresso North America, Frederic Levy and Dr. Friedrich W. von Tucher, COO of LucaLuca, while models presided over the stations of food, drink everything made with coffee.
Greg and I had a blast, clearly separated at birth, with similar childhoods full of Drama. Our stories were only topped by the 10 foot tall seafood (very NJ and Miami) 4 level tiered extravaganzas at Balthazar where we went to settle all the coffee and champagne we absorbed at Nespresso with food actually not made with coffee.
We closed Balthazar and even the streets were gleaming like Nespresso cups…just what do they put in there!? Did I mention my caffeine-feuled revelation that the soundtrack to Breathless was the parent of Sex and The City theme…and then…what about that hilarious Women’s Liberation Goddess Convention and scene where the girl techno-disco-harpies were car-chasing Snaporaz in Fellini’s “City of Women?” I always dream of that huge light bridge that was in the movie, is it morphic resonance? …or did I just have way too much coffee?
“City of Women,” is the perfect movie for Fashion Week. A hilarious, plotless Dream Journey from every angle, the rituals and drama of women and the men who desire them makes mince meat of our foibles and fears. The film’s Mr. Big, Dr. Xavier Katzone and his Party-Girl wife (who lures objects such as coins and pearls into her vagina with telepathy) is both antidote and metaphor for New York’s Fashion Week stages and the world of suburban marriages featuring Desperate Housewives both. And their Decor.
Cynthia Rowley: Les Belles NYC Heiress in line after Claire McCardell, Norma Kamali and DVF
Cynthia Rowley, Queen of Her Own New York, ie: cool surfer Mom Boheme, socialite version of Martha Stewart, did bubble dots for her collection in the manner of breastplates, armor and soft vulnerability as only a woman can design. With this collection, she began to touch on the esoteric beyond just applied design, which to me represented an evolution for her which I appreciated and put her in a linage beyond this current moment. I always like sheer fabrics and playing with flirting with what is and what is not, true drama being much more subtle.
Ode and Odyssey to Brazil
More dots and bubbles. At the end of a dark Apocalyptic Chelsea street, down a metal plank at the way bottom of a rusty ship called The Frying Pan, past the midget and giant tattoo’d doormen, girls trapezed like seahorses while bubble blowers cavorted. A John Cage-ish digital concerto called Ulysses’ Syndrome, 24 hours of random soundwaves picked up from a long-range antenna recording human, ocean and otherwise frequencies from the Mediterranean Sea composed by our friend Stephan Crasneanscki at Soundwalk was a deep dive into the drama of Transportation of Time and Space.
The Odyssey to this very event all began at a cocktail brunch party in Paris three years ago. Mingling among omelettes, heirs to champagne fortunes and child advocates from UNESCO was myself and one Emmanuel Rengade, who recently left the world of finance to open a small unplugged and organic resort called Picinguaba in a national forest in Brazil. I was fascinated then by Emmanuel’s vision encompassing art, the land and the exquisiteness of experience. When he recently called us to introduce him to media, artist, tastemakers and developers in New York for his newly acquired 15,000 acre former coffee plantation called Fazenda Catucaba, miles from the beachside property…we leapt at the chance…and had to have him experience Soundwalk.
Emmanuel’s Fazenda is about an hour from Sao Paulo, Brazil, a major producer for coffee, the cultivation of which has been a source of semi-feudal oppression of Mayans but in-part built Brazil into the culture it is today. Thankfully the renewed respect for the land rise of philosophical and practical movements such as Slow Food, described by Bruce Sterling in a Metropolis magazine article, “Revenge of The Slow,” locates value in the simple, beautiful and in-touch with Nature’s wealth. He writes, “…obscure piece(s) of rural heritage (are) cunningly reengineered as a curated service/ product” and served back up as “valuable goods and services that rich people very much want to buy.” Flatlined, Mr. Big gone wrong, patriarchal economic system globalization and Reality TV be damned!
During a hailstorm, safe in the green jungle of Gramercy Park Hotel’s rooftop, I introduced the performance artist Pasha to Emmanuel because of his “Trans-Space” field-work projects originating in Brazil’s little explored Amazon region of Pa’Ra. He conducted a series of on-site performances and videos encompassed by his piece called entitled Pa’Ra – Vast Ocean and it was uncanny that both men adventured in this same region that is so unexplored. Not to mention Emmanuel’s dream of red houses in the landscape, without ever seeing Pasha’s work, and my chance meeting of both Emmanuel in Paris years ago and Pasha just the week before at a party proved once again a Greater Pattern and Design woven around our lives.
While the day turned dark and the hail hit the roof, we watched Pasha’s Odyssey in the Amazon, on his lap top, his film of running through the jungle as night arrived…talk about drama. As someone herself, who was forced marched in the Costa Rican jungle by her biologist boyfriend as night descended, howler monkey roars increased and the smell of panthers walked us out of the jungle…I bow to my Brazilian Brave Bad Boys.
Emmanuel conquered NYC’s Concrete Jungle with meetings we set up with editors and journalists from magazines such as Departures, Delta Sky, Robb Report, and of course, my current passion, for Domespace passive solar homes that rotate with the sun, which brought my friend Veronique Vencat in for audience with Emmanuel.
The Brazilian Coffee Stops Here, Bucky, Nucky…what did you say your name was Kid?
Like many New Yorkers, my nights have often ended at Coffee Shop on Union Square, open 24 hours and a fixture of the City for 20 years. Whether it was a morning stop after the hip hop club next door or more recently, business meetings…Coffee Shop’s Brazilian fare and music have been intertwined.
Mixing Claude’s arcane music vision with Sasha, The Madonna of Russia’s belle cantos is brewing some kind of NY love to come. Stay tuned…meanwhile, crazy sacred talk of Kabbala rituals of red string, holidays and chickens with Danny of Estrada Entertainment and Kristen Paladino, of Paladino Casting and partner in PLANT., our rep firm, and fellow Kabbalists, added another dramatic chapter to the week and my legend of Coffee Shop. (Sasha made some Fashion Week legends herself with June Ambrose and Mary J. Blige shot by Adrian Grenier.)
If coffee is supposed to have been discovered by an Ethiopian holy man whose goats had eaten the berries, allowing them to frisk all night long…well. We did.
Time for Timo’s Brooklyn Dreams To Set Sail for Bigger Seas
Years ago, Fate bumper car-ed me into Timo Weiland co-designer, Alan Eckstein bussing and playing with my soon-to-be dear friend, John Favreau at a fashion event. Between Alan’s bespeckled and earnest enthusiasm and John’s Comme des Garcons jacket and both their freshness I knew I found friends. Timo Weiland’s tableau for Spring 2011 positioned characters in a still life while movies of people jumping on rooftops flashed above their heads like doll dreams while editors, friends and buyers scurried around, grounded like ants hurrying to get at The Queen of the ant hill.
Les Belles were badder than Les Boys in this collection. Although I certainly have been known to love several Mr. Big’s that came in a small, nerdy package via specs, wearing tight girls clothes and a poetic heart on their sleeve. The girls cast lust-laden, “You! Get-Me-Outa-Here” looks which somehow enhanced the clothes, which were very smart, sexy tight and coquettish at the same time. These girls looked like they needed a Belmondo type over a Baltic, Nordic boy the collection was inspired by. Even though I liked the men’s Little Lord Fauntleroy meets Chelsea boy on his way to sailing…it needed some Bad Boy sexiness in the end. Something androgynous, however, was hinted at here, which could be the line’s calling card among the hip. Kudos for a brave and beautiful showing reflecting talent, promise and Big Vision.
Small Ensembles in Big Ensembles Assemble
Spending a week with a sound archivist and music guru such as Claude unearthed obscure club anthems, thrilling avant-remixes on MusiqueApproximative.net and revealed a shared love of Gilles Scott Heron. A surprise introduction to Leon Ware, an artist that even moi, a girl who literally grew up with Philly Soul as a friend of Debbie Huff, aka the daughter of Leon Huff aka half of the famed Gamble and Huff… and a proud card carrying member of the Black Culture Club in her high school, did not know about…Claude’s inspirations have me on Novaplanet.com, where right now, White Pony is followed by a ska version of Shaft….Ok by me!
The purveyance territory of dreams…whatever imagined drug or not gets you there…whether it be old ballads of Love via Belle of The Disco Ball or The Belle of Sex and Soul Style and The City or Philly Soul is the fuel that pumps our viens.
Another favorite book of mine, “Food of The Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution” by Terence McKenna explains how we got from mystical soma to Bimbo botox. More time with The Dame and Claude pondering big issues like Desire or just hustling to get some coffee between the shows and food for sustenance alone, our small ensembles dreaming bigger step by step. (Oh my God…I am ramblin’ agin…it’s the Black Gold)
I Confess, I Never Loved Sex and The City
I loved the circular, intuitive pacing but the fairy tale, un-nuanced and incessant focus on love and sex was a turn-off. In fact, at the New York pink-carpet premiere of the movie, I was only crying because my companion, a tearful fashion personality, gripped tissues and my hand at every “music-up” love-laced moment like it was the last pair of Manolos in her size on sale at Bergdorfs.
Fate and Destiny can be described as the way people end up living The Myths of their place of birth, lineage and I always hoped that would mean for me my real roots to Europe and a kind of Royal Bohemia. It may be Fate then that the incessant chorus in my head this September of MC Solaar’s Le Belle and Le Bad Boy was found most poignantly on Youtube through a Russian fan’s send-up of Sex and The City, Part Deux, which I had never seen before.
Circling back all the way to mythical meet-ups to my own Mother’s “La Belle” history in a frilly ballerina skirt as the Snow Princess in a Macy’s Parade (see the photo below, she’s right behind Pinocchio), my own love of tulle mushroom ballerina skirts, from Dior runways to ironic Japan kawaii cute Princess decoration style…ya know? Sometimes it does all culminate in the simple…Jewish matzo-ball soup plus comforting old movies resounding over old dramas and restyling new dreams.
Perhaps in the end it really is just that…Kid.
Boy Meets Girl…Girl Meets Boy and says “Take Me Home.”
My Mom as The Snow Princess in the Macy’s Day Parade circa, 1950’s ish
Today a little Progress and Invention keep me company as I march towards the mountain top. Tomorrow, every world city will fall. Tomorrow every civilized being on earth will die of poison and steel. But, today you can still bathe me in God’s wonderful love lyrics. Today it is still chamber music, dream, hallucination. The last five minutes! …This is the city and this is the music.
Henry Miller, Black Spring
images: Jade Dressler, style.com, Ellen von Unwerth
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Filed under: FASHION, LOVERS, MEN, NEW YORK, WOMEN | 1 Comment
Tags: Alan Eckstein, Alex de Betak, Alexander de Betak, Anderson Cooper, Atlantic City, Atlantic City TV, babalu Miami, Baltazar, Baltazar images, Balthazar, beautiful actresses, beautiful boys with cigarettes, Black Spring, Boardwalk Atlantic City, Breathless, Bruce Sterling, BySylvere, Cap Ferrat, Carrie and Mr. Big in paris, Carrie in Paris, Cherry Hill, City of Women, Claire McCardell, claude serieux, Coffee and Cigarettes, Corinne Tapia, Cynthia Rowley, Dame Lori, Danny Estrada, david lachappelle, Debbie Huff, Dedi Salmeri, Diane von Furstenberg, Domespace, Dr. Friedrich W von Tucher, Dr. Xavier Katzone, DVF, DVF Spring 2011, Elisa Sednaoui, Ellen von Unwerth, Emmanuel Rengade, Estrada Entertainment, Fashion Week, Fashion Week New York, Fazenda Catucaba, Fellini, Fellini City of Women, Food of the gods, Francesca Salmeri, Frederic Levy, Gamble and Huff, Greg Melvin, hallucinating iron vegetation, handsome men with cigarettes, Henry Miller, jade dressler, Jean Paul Belmundo, Jean Seberg, JOhn de Lucie, John Favreau, Kristin Paladino, Leon Ware, Les Belles et Les Bad Boys, Leslie Morrison Faerstein, look, Loretta Abrams, Louis the 14th culture, Louis the 14th fashion, Luca Luca, MC Solaar, Michael Fink, mirrors African kings, Mr. Big, Musicians on Call, MusiqueApproximative.net, Nespresso, Nespresso photography, Nespresso Soho, New Jersey 1970, New Jersey reality shows, New York magazine, NovaPlanet.com, Nucky, NY Fashion designers 2011 Spring, NY Fashion Spring 2011, NYC Fashion Week, Paladino Casting, Pasha Radetski, PicinGuaba, Plant, president of Nespresso, revenge of the slow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sasha singer, Sex and The City, Sex and The City Part Deux, sexy men with cigarettes, Slow Food, Snaporaz, Snooki, Soundwalk, Sous Les Etoiles, Spring 2011, Stephan Crasneanscki, The Frying Pan, The Garden State TV, The Lion in NYC, The Lion restaurant, Timo Weiland, Timothy Greenfield Sanders, Ulysses' Syndrome, Veronique Vencat, Waverly Inn, women, Yvan Mispelaere
Your image in the dictionary
This life is more than ordinary
Can I get 2 maybe even 3 of these
Come from space to teach you of the Pleiades
Can’t stop the spirits when they need you
This life is more than just a read through
(thx…Can’t Stop by Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Chinese astrology says I am a wood rat and my genes say I am Romanian, of dark, fortune telling gypsy blood. Like a rat I am scrappy and fit, always on the move, finding and creating solutions every time. From a young age I would often run away, hit the road to get back on track with a dive into the unknown. A clairvoyant rat in a bandana headscarf, who climbs the rafters for the bigger, pulpier read. My scrappy, ratty survival tendencies are always operating in bespoke or illuminated sense surround to help others in times of need, transcending situations via my vivid dreams which often portend the future, or thriving via my lust for freedom, passion and shiny bits put together as life boats.
Like proverbial lovers on their quest, running through starry fields towards each other in a Rorshach test, our surfing and searching networked culture’s physical boundaries are being scrapped, stripped and re-made whole.
We are now all migratory Global nomads on roam looking for a home, refugees from earthquakes, divorces, corporate cages, Eating and Praying Lovers or Stars of our own Holy Grail search for self and sanity. They can be seen as divine comedies, starring all of us, modern cartoon Ulysses, ala my favorite Coen Brother’s movie, O Brother Wherefore Art Thou?
“O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story…”
“Roam, if you want to, roam around the world, the trip begins with you.” (B 52’s)
Here, one Summer weekend, adventure, the streets, the subways and the rooftops of NYC called. New places and faces I’ve never seen just like that before, some one block from my home. Flower Girls, Head busters and Beatniks. Juxtapositions of stone, bone, plant, woman and man. From downtown halfway-house experiments like The Highline to the rooftop of The Met to cafes and Farmers Markets…Home is in the heart. Every step marks our pilgrimage for truth and love…be it fantastical leaps or exhausted shuffles…we will get there because there is no there.
We’re here. Like Crazy, Man.
To be filled, one’s everything must be empty on a walk, taken apart like Osiris and planted in that black fertile field of deeply felt space, as the strides gradually take over the brainwaves, stimuli rushes in and eventually re-orders all to a new poetic pulse.
Street Find, Head Busters #1, was the above Baby Basquiat painting by a nameless child artist hanging in an impromptu grade school class’s outdoor art show to beautify a construction site. I saw it as a universal head like a constellation soup of stars and airplanes. I like the painter’s palette this blockhead seems to have in hand and in honor of any journey’s serendipitous gifts, here is what happens when your camera goes on the fritz (which mine did at the end of this journey, and so timelessly, like a confounding gypsy, I put the end at the beginning.)
But before it did…”Come with me thru word and sound” to the words of the unstoppable Anthony Keidis’s song and a little house track to take you Home:
The Leon Levinstein street photographs I saw in my pilgrimage to The Metropolitan Museum of Art on this day seemed to bestow a mantle of YES on my own street snapping. The fact that this flowered damsel marked the transition for me back unto the “civilized: street” from my hybrid city/field trip to the Highline, one of New York’s green Utopias, and seemed to be the modern version of Leon’s photo, taken before ever seeing the exhibit…I felt beyond Sartorialized and Sanctified.
Can’t stop the spirits when they need you
Mop tops are happy when they feed you
The world I love, the trains I hop To be part of the wave can’t stop
The world I love, the trains I hop To be part of the wave can’t stop
J. Butterfly is in the treetop
Birds that blow the meaning into bebop
Next Stop…The Highline, a former railway line turned into a park, that mystically floats us mid-belly of the beast of Gotham and mid-brain between our linear Manhattan minds and our wildflower libertine Souls.
White heat is screaming in the jungle
Complete the motion if you stumble
Go ask the dust for any answers
The dust on this day included peeking at treasures of the Past in the Met on the way up to the roof for my pilgrimage to the Starn brothers’ Big Bambu installation. On the way, I passed Salome’s seductive smile as painted by Henri Regnault in the late 1800’s, considered a masterpiece of contemporary art in its day. Interesting that the notes that say he painted from an African woman and then changed the skin tone, indicative of the Orientalism fascination of the time, as “darker” immigrants from Europe and African descendants migrated and integrated. Here, from the same time, George Bellow’s “Roumanian Girl.” I began to realize that the art my instinct drew me to affirmed my wandering gypsy ways as a kind of dance, symbolically taking off my head (mind), as Salome did with the head of John the Baptist…and wandering all the way out into Space.
Kick start the golden generator
Sweet talk but don’t intimidate her
Can’t stop the Gods from engineering
Feel no need for any interfering
Come back strong with 50 belly dancers.
Rita Hayworth’s Mata Hari-ish strip tease in “Gilda” among other key Screen Siren acts projected large woke me up at The Costume Institute’s American Women exhibit. It was much more engaging than the rote artfully preserved garments in idealized painted settings on faceless people so small and so white it’s spooky. Although I admire curator Andrew Bolton’s romping feel via the categories I confess I am always bored when “The Chosen People” are just reflective of the gilded lily upper crust, “The Heiress”, “The Bohemian” “The Flapper” or “The Screen Star,” not ever reflecting on the influence of every day street culture which we know to be equally shifting culturally, if not the very root of the change itself.
Flappers? Bohemians? In our Great Gatsby fantasies they originated at art salon parties however I am quite sure the ladies of Harlem jazz boites and Prohibition secret places shimmied way before an heiress did. Perhaps the abrupt ending of the exhibition in the 30’s and 40’s signifies just when these color and class style boundaries began to come crashing down. Thank you for Josephine Baker and Grace Jones in the montage of many real woman in the end to represent what could easily be a whole other exhibit. The Anna May Wong inclusion was much appreciated in the screen stars section, however the Thud of the invisible sign at the exhibit’s end, “No Coloreds Allowed” left me with a funny taste.
I am grateful to curators such as Valerie Steele at FIT who present costume in a scholarly but non-sterile, even thrilling way (think flying Ralph Rucci gowns.) In her book, The Black Dress, the designers of classic black head to toe gowns are venerated, such as Hayworth’s Gilda gown and Anna May Wong’s golden dragon dress worn in the films, which actually did give me chills to see on display in the Bolton survey.
Upon leaving the anti-climax antechamber filled with all the style-influencers not shown, I decided not to wait for the costume exhibit I always see in my visions and vowed then and there to produce it.
A sensory stew of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Perseus and Sekmet, the Lioness Egyptian Goddess of War and Hunting on the way up to the roof to see the Starn boys exhibit confirmed my vows. Nothing like a journey to instill inspiration for new paths beyond the caves and dusty corners in our minds.
Can’t stop addicted to the shindig
Chop top he says, “I’m gonna win big “
Choose not a life of imitation
Distant cousin to the reservation
Defunk the pistol that you pay for
This punk the feeling that you stay for
In time I want to be your best friend
East side love is living on the westend
“The word Bohem-ian is also an Egyptian word. The verb-stem of this word is Bohem/Bahm, which means to be/make obscure or dark/black/mysterious/mystical. Bohem-ian will thus mean mystical, which describes the mystical nature of the Hispanic Romany religious practices.” Bahm is a A Balm.
Knock out but boy you better come to
Don’t die, you know the truth is some do
Go write your message on the pavement
Burnin’ so bright, I wonder what the wave meant
“…Eventually a cresting wave…,” is the Starn Twins explanation of their Met rooftop installation, “Big Bambu,” in the interview you can listen to via the digits 212.457.8727 on your mobile. This colossal monument to the temporary, the play on the brand of rolling papers and Cheech and Chong’s 1972 pothead album, little fluffy cloud orbs, headbuster Sean Lennon’s “Spaceship”” on the Ipod…and un-winded people winding in and out of the bamboo maze…all fit my wood rat on the rafters sensibilities to a “T.”
and now my eyes have opened
I watch the stars glow
The sky is like an ocean
The world I love, the tears I drop
To be part of the wave can’t stop
Ever wonder if it’s all for you
The world I love, the trains I hop
To be part of the wave can’t stop
Here is where the Starn wood rats do their thing in Beacon NY.
Come and tell me when it’s time to
Yea, though I walked through the valleys and peaks of art…I had enough of the dust of the museum, the flowers, sky and stars, it was time for being a beatnik and cafe hanging. I headed for my favorite simple, luxe spot with arcane but snappy Euro fare, Cafe Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie, where Otto Dix’s portraits of the Weimar cafe society were on exhibit. Here I could sit, fixate on food, coffee and the people parade before me.
I’ll get you into penetration
The gender of a generation
The birth of every other nation
Worth your weight the gold of meditation
This chapter’s going to be a close one
Smoke rings, I know your going to blow one
All on a spaceship persevering
Use my hands for everything but steering
Meanwhile, back on Earth, after a simple delicious meal and esoteric chain smoking, I spyed Sevag Mazakian, Manager of Cafe Sabarsky, with his back to some of NYC’s best desserts as he became suddenly fixated by something out the window.
After I showed him the picture, he said “It’s not so penetrating”, he said he was actually just stalking “The Better Sweets Outside Sabarsky” aka, the new Ice Cream Truck and its Vendor that replaced the one from last week. (see what happens when you sit in one place too long? The body, the details take on weight.)
Sweetheart is bleeding in the snowcone
So smart she’s leading me to ozone
Music the great communicator
Use two sticks to make it in the nature
Popsicles on a stick are one summertime street buzz and the real high green buzz of NYC is all about Green Markets with fresh farm organic vegetables and fruits…astral-bodybuilding gold indeed. After my meal at Sabarsky, I finally made it to the one 3 blocks up from me and for $23. I brought a stash that lasted a week and a half of color and bursting dirt flavor on my plates. The week before, at the Union Square market, a took home a Vietnamese cilantro plant and herb advice galore from devoted shoppers for my indoor herb garden I am building as my headboard for my bed.
I’ll get you into penetration
The gender of a generation
The birth of every other nation
Worth your weight the gold of meditation
So just why is NYC so damn sexy in the Summer? Let me put my own Beatnik poet hat on and venture that all the metal mental power of the Phallus rockets are a bit chop-topped, soothed by Miss Green, rounding out edges of steel and slicing sunshine. Buildings look a little more strip teasing, we are a little more belly-dancing in the Beast somehow when the green is pumping in our veins. The heat shimmer shakes the City and Planet, pulsing like a spaceship quivering, knowing the journey is a joke, and caring even more because of it.
This chapter’s going to be a close one
Smoke rings, I know you’re going to blow one
All on a spaceship persevering
Use my hands for everything but steering
The world I love, the tears I drop
To be part of the wave can’t stop
Ever wonder if it’s all for you
The world I love
Come and tell me when it’s time to
Can’t stop the spirits when they need you
This life is more than just a read through
written by Jade Dressler
“Star House Episode 01” House mix from Claude Serieux (listen loud on the phones)
image of Black Sea swimmers from Romanian photojournalist, Petrut Calinescu, on a journey documenting the people and cultures around The Black Sea
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Filed under: NEW YORK | 5 Comments
Tags: Andrew Bolton, Anna May Wong, Anthony Keidis, Balm, beatnik photos, Big Bambu, Bohemian, Cafe Sabarsky, cheech and chong, chinese astrology, claude serieux, Coen brothers journey, costume institute, Egypt Lion Goddess, Egyptian dancers, Egyptian Goddess, flower woman, flowers girls, George Bellow, Gilda, Grace Jones, gypsies, gypsy Egyptian, Henri Regnault, how to seduce, J. Butterfly, jade dressler, Josephine Baker, Leon Levinstein, little fluffy clouds, Mata hari, Metropolitan Museum roof, mop tops, new york city subway photos, NYC farmers markets, NYC green markets, O brother wherefore art thou, orientalism, Otto Dix, Perseus, Petrut Calinescu, Pleiades, Pliades, pulp fiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rita Hayworth, Salome image, Salome painting, Sean Lennon, seducing woman, seductress, SEkmet, Sevag Mazakian, seven sisters star, sexy NYC, Spaceship, Starn brothers, tempter woman, The Black Dress, the flapper, the highline, The Met roof, Ulysses, Valerie Steele, wood rat
…the spicy and sugary scent, filled with lives and steeped in ideas yet unknown, reached around the world to pull me instantly into a Stendhal syndrome, as I sat bathed in the blue glow of my Mac, midday, middle of Manhattan. Filling slowly my nose and reaching deep into me, it soothed and surprised me as it returned again and again for weeks, rising and melting within me like an immersion into a warm bath. As there was never a literal perceivable physical source for the scent, I eventually realized it always came as I deeply relaxed or felt a truth resonate.
“Pittaspora!” claimed Alberto, the preternaturally handsome Direttore of Fragrance Resources, identifying the heady scent coming from the bushes lining Lake Como, Italy. We stepped into a heavenly cloud of the scent as we disembarked from our 1968-vintage, restored, zero-emissions Riva speedboat after a Prosecco-infused thrill ride around the lake unto the boat dock at the new CastaDiva Resort, via the expert arrangements by the dashing Giancarlo Porcu, Tango dancer and GM of the newest 5-star resort in Lake Como in 100 years.
Driven to sensorial overload by the sexy curves of the Riva, the cool lake spray and the dashing speedboat driver Erio Matteri, (who, of course, is De Niro and Brangelina’s private captain) my boat mates were the CastaDiva interior designer, Erasmo Figini, the CEO of CastaDiva, Gabriele Zerbi, all three in the front waving to their “I Heart The Lake” friends at their Villas as they passed and Alberto Rimoldi and Daniela Fedi, Il Giornale’s fashion editor and her daschund, who all sat enthralled next to me. The scent that visited me in Manhattan was here lushly covering the hillsides, a most powerful and seductive top note to the ecstasy that is Lake Como. (And Villas, Villas, Villas are definitely the Real Thrillas)
The next day, I abandoned myself further on a leather lounger in the pink Himalayan sea salt room senses soothed to Opera music at the spa in CastaDiva, where Stendhal himself stayed and clearly invented his syndrome. The Resort is is built around a legendary gem, the restored Villa of Giuditta Pasta, Soprano muse to Bellini, which she modeled after La Scala where she found her fame and she employed many of the same famed artisans for the stone, wood and Florentine floral sgraffito designs. As the Pittaspora scent came through the salt walls carried on the moisture from the lake, as it is designed specifically to do…Time and Place became Pure Beauty.
Welcome to Lake Como, welcome to the “beyond” magic that is Italy. Where a flower perhaps designs its scent to pull you towards it like a hungry lover and a spa is designed to converse with the moisture of a Lake.
A steeping in the senses of the earth and the passions of those that have walked it for centuries inspire Italian living. It can’t help itself to breathe “design” intertwined with every moment when such beauty permeates.
From that first synchronized moment of bright afternoon in literal and logical New York City while the sun at dusk shimmered and stirred Lake Como’s James Bond-like adventures and stirred the Pittaspora to release its Secret Life of Plants-style persuasion pulling me to Italy…to my Sommelier seatmate on the return trip back to the States, Francesco Baravalle, of the family-owned Cascina Bruciata vineyards, who told me of his passion weaving of sky, rain, dirt and fruit into wines…Italy really got me good this time!
Speeding around the Lake and the lake towns of Como and Bellagio with my photojournalist, author and supreme architectural observer friend, Paul Clemence, we could not stop our heavy breathing over the sense saturations. We revered it all, from medieval bricks and stones to the neat bones Fascist architecture as in the Casa de Fascio di Giuseppe Terragni in Como, a landmark for architecture students from around the world. The arts, streets and wares of Lake Como and Bellagio, a resort since the 1st century, speak to this sacred marriage of beyond time and space biology, ancient history and modern imposition which in concert satiate the senses. Here is just one breath of what we saw, gasped and almost fainted over.
In Italy, green botany welcomingly winds into human habitation and buildings everywhere you look from the terraced gardens of the city buildings to the recent fruit orchard installed at Milan’s Garibaldi station built during the Salon by the artists with amazelab and to the upcoming 2015 Milan fair, entitled, “Universal Exposition: Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.”
Even a Fascist landmark will frame the hills begrudgingly and even delicately.
The lake towns of Como and Bellagio satiate the senses as they are nestled like precious eggs by what most people would call mountains and locals call “hills,” the lushest green forests holding the Lake, which all agree, changes colors and moods like a live painting.
…A look through a fence can reveal a surprise kitsch kitchen garden in Bellagio to…
…a palm tree at the end of an alley…
…to a hillside that looks back at you like an animal, unquestioning in it’s natural yet artful and perfect state…
In the towns smooth round stones are laid patterned for the leather soles of humans to tred and absorb the multiple of objects fashioned from the flora and fauna surrounding. Walls might be made of millions of tiny moss trees, replicating the hills and flowers or follies, Medieval graffiti or trompe l’oeil and every turn of a corner unveils surprise Italian style from a wall’s lichen colony to a “I’m liken that silk/cashmere/diamond thingy-thing on me.”
In Como’s heart, Piazza San Fedele was, until the 19th century, the grain market and the same echo of voices in the square pulse through the tiny rooms of these sweet saintly relics made of herringbone patterned stone and timbered framing, now housing Ubik, the slick art bookshop tucked between more modern era buildings. In the center, where once sheaves of grain mountains lay stacked, a proud student display of architecture or designs for Como silk scarves underscores the timeless lineage of design.
As bikes and mopeds doggedly curve around the corners of quirky examples of the 12th to 21st century architecture of the square, graffiti talks across the ages on the walls of the splendid church of S. Fedele with its elegant 12th century apse, and then unfolds Musee Civico and Museo Garibaldi, while one heads on via Vittoria on the way back towards the Duomo.
…a passageway can lead to a garden, an art exhibit or a high tech warehouse and cafe devoted to Como’s famous silk manufacture.
…Mulberry tree ripening berries actually look like the silk worm cocoons, growing on the Lake’s “hillsides” for centuries.
The soft arts are spun from Lake Como’s silk worm cocoons and while the inhabitants of the cocoons never make it into actual butterflies, for the inhabitants of Como it is a serious business and for wearers of silk worldwide, butterfly status is assured as they flit about in the color and lightness loved by couture designers, the likes of Pucci and Viktor & Rolf. The most intriguing manufacturer is Mantero with their concept store and cafe, La Tessitura. Housed in a restored 1887 textile mill, with original glass ceilings, wooden beams and cast iron columns, the building highlights the re-purposed materials and sustainable designs.
Today the raw silk is mostly imported from China, but the finishing dying, weaving, designing and printing is still done in Como.
Another Como-only find is Moresi cashmere, on Via Vittorio Emanuelle, very chic, simple but intriguingly shaped dresses and tops…a sure sign of exclusivity when their website doesn’t even let you see the styles. If the visible is giving one Stendhal-like palpitations, surely it is the “Exclusive Stories” those happenings inside the Villas, the custom-made, the bespoke lives, the layered history and goings on that stir imaginings to make the head spin.
Back in the boat to Bellagio…
Bellagio’s surprises are more of the postcard variety, the town is swarming with tourists, but the real pleasures are underground or up in the hills where the olive groves and century old churches can be found.
in Bellagio, just under a grove of olive trees…we found “Gepetto” and his wife tending the shoppe selling the famed Bellagio carvings of the olive wood, as the Tacchi family has been doing here since 1855.
Back in Como, the amusements a walk will surf you to range from graffiti talking across the ages on the walls of splendid churches, commemorations of saints popped unto walls in forgotten benedictions to civic pride shout-outs to trade guilds or the pairing of a huge graphic trompe l’oeil next to Rubens.
Un-purchasable color is Como’s politely ordained 5 color range of hot salmon pink, saffron yellow, tan, palest ice blue or bone white for buildings while its red and yellow speedboats and bold signage at the dock speak to the graphic harshness that pulses behind Villa doors, windows and curtains. The unseen Stendhal of that for me is an Opera of Helmut Newton’s women adjusting their garters in Villa d’este gardens, Clooney’s smirking Martini commercials, operatic bel canto singing mixed with Madonna’s Fever, tousled and rustling crispy Renaissance silk garments to the mysterious Versace villa built upon his silken Dolce Vita.
Displayed with equal passion of careful lovers, shop windows in Bellagio are shaded by heavy curtains in symphony with the sun’s changes during the day…
behind which we found chocolate diamonds laid out like candy at Bellagio’s The Corner Shop …
or rainbow colored and striped pasta of every shape to remind us of Italy’s most revered sensual pleasures of food and wine.
Even a pre-dinner and calories steam of eucalyptus and lavender in CastaDiva’s red, white, pink, blue and maroon tiny Missoni-like mosaic steam room cocoon temple to design will remind you that while design is fine, it’s the Nature in Italy that whispers the loudest to soothe…
Beyond the Italian philosophy of Slow Food which has spread globally now, the 5-star visually supreme and garden-orgy of food designed by Paolo Casagrande, the chef at Castadiva declares a new genre, “Sexy Soft Food” for the satiated experience. One standout was absolute supreme aria of softness, the sweetness and saltiness – Drowned egg, raw ham, pine nuts in a green pea soup –a little world on your plate.
On my return trip back to the States, a seat mix-up put me next to Francesco Baravalle, of Cascina Bruciata vineyards, in the US to market his wines. His best friend, Guido Martinetti, whose Slow Food, organic Grom gelato can be found in the lake town of Lecco as well as Paris, New York and Tokyo, is invested in the farm itself supplying his own fruits from the company owned farm called mura mura.
Over time the temporary worldly decrees of Church or State patronage may frame the desires and devotions of the Interpreter of The Senses and determine the language we fashion from rocks from the mountains, shapes or silk from seed pods and transformational cocoons or other dances…
…and the town walls may watch and record the human parade of dances, dreams, bodies and dramas. As we open to and determine the design of our thoughts and actions first to connect and soothe, in places such as this underground grotto with glass floor floating over the fishes at the CastaDiva Spa, we invite the conversation with that which is ancient and at the same time a brand new frontier.
In the lake towns of Como, the forces of Beauty and Nature have teased and weaved with the folly of humans, expanding what is possible for over 10 centuries. Pliny, Bellini and Stendhal to Versace, Madonna and Cooney, poets and farmers, waiters, cooks and artisans have breathed, played and loved here, inviting the deep breath and saturation into the deep silence at early night and morning…when flowers begin to talk to Dreamers and Lovers.
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(most images by Paul Clemence, flower photo by Carlos Rueda, Museo di Garibaldi by Gary Kinsman, written by Jade Dressler)
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Tags: 2015 Milan Fair, Alberto Rimoldi, aMAZElab, Bellagio, Bellini, Carlos Rueda, Casa de Fascio di Giuseppe Terragni, Cascina Bruciata, CastaDiva, CastaDiva Resort, Como silk scarves, Cooney, Daniela Fedi, Energy for Life., Erasmo Fignin, Erio Matteri, Fragrance Resources, Francesco Baravalle, Gabriele Zerbi, Gary Kinsman, George Cooney, Gian Carlo Porcu, Giuditta Pasta, Grom, Grom gelato, Guido Martinetti, Helmut Newton, jade dressler, La Tessitura, Lake Como, Lake Como Italy, Madonna, Mantero, Moresi cashmere, mosaics, mura mura, Paolo Casagrande, Paul Clemence, Piazza San Fedele, Pink Himalayan Sea Salt, Pliny, Pucci, Riva speedboat, Slow Food, Stendhal, Stendhal syndrome, The Corner Shop, Universal Exposition: Feeding the Planet, Versace, Viktor & Rolf, Villa d’este
Suddenly, Feminique Mystique
Meet Your Feminique Mystique. The Sit-Arounds, The Hystericals, The Conjurors, The Teasers, The Milkers, The Androgyne Fruits, The Dissolvers, The Absorbers, The Voyeurs, The Duality Erasers and The Procurer of Animals, Meat and Bodies.
True Story: I learned almost everything about the human body anyone could ever want to know, as a child, every morning as our 4 person family, naked and sqwooshed, prepared for the day sharing 4 foot square space of 1970’s faux white marble patterned linoleum clad Chambre du Bain. Its octagonal, bubble glass shower cabinet, white shag carpet and steam and powder and perfume and crackly radio pop songs were the stage for my father ruling the roost and his bustling (literally) 3 person-feminique family harem behind the newspaper on the throne. 1970’s Bathroom as classroom. Closeness is Hostess to The Mostess.
Even though there were 2 other bathrooms in the house, where everyone was welcome to do their thing, in private and scheduled intervals, my father, mother and sister and I naked and incomprehensively and happily chose to share that one small space set to hyperspeed, no holds barred and everything bared.
No wonder I covet my solitary bath ritual today carefully tending to candles, running the perfect water temperature and whispering the mantra my Father endlessly repeated to my excitable Aries self from childhood thru teens…” slow down, slow down, slow down…”
Quirky, messy and tousled family covens and rituals can be the source of extreme disfunction or catapulting, emphatic myths made into new maps. I am happily seeing men and women choosing and living by Old/New Feminique qualities such as close families, shared “covens,” womanly energy of close confidents, secret societies, rituals, cycles and becoming their own oracles, seers and muses and enjoying the reward of tight and tough friendships and the Earth Mysteries alike. Photographer, Michael Buhler-Rose’s boudoir photo above, at Humble Arts, captures for me this new shared feminine vibe and literally, how much more pleasant things can be for everyone beyond bra burning. (we like bras)
Women’s Liberation and Crunchy Goddess-y Proclamations aside…here are some suddenly feminine mystique archetypes appearing as artists, corporations, designers, thinkers and doers, friends and oracles conjure a siren song to both males and females to play with their own brand of Feminique Mystique. Meet The Sit-Arounds, The Hystericals, The Conjurors, The Teasers, The Milkers, The Androgyne Fruits, The Dissolvers, The Absorbers, The Voyeurs, The Duality Erasers and The Procurer of Animals, Meat and Bodies.
ONE: The Slow Down Slow Down Slow Down Sit Down Sit Down Sit Down Sit-Arounds.
Women Know How To Wait. Slowed down and Listening is very Feminine Mystique. There is nothing as slowed down as artist oracle Marina Abramovic in her Museum of Modern Art ritual in New York City until the end of May 2010.
Pre-Marina True Story: Many moons ago, when I was part of the central hub of a yoga community, we catapulted a certain shy, bespeckled chanting singer by the name of Krishna Das, from a small New York State ashram with audiences of about 20 to the start of his world-touring reputation of Kirtan God with top billing. Krishna Das earned his Hindu stripes hanging in India with Ram Dass and the famous crew of Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg sitting and seeking enlightenment at the feet of my own Guru, Maharaji. (They also tried to feed him LSD, but that’s a story for another day)
There is a snippet in one of Krishna Das’s songs of Indian holy men chanting and I always thought they were saying “Sit Around, Sit Around, Sit Around.” Actually they were chanting “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram,”the earthly names of Krishna and his consort, The Goddess, Lalita. Whatever they were saying, as an International Director of Marketing for a music company juggling five countries, ten staff people and a challenging personal relationship, just sitting around chanting and meditating definitely helped my stressed feminine mystique.
Marina Abramovic sits around, sits around. The exhibition at MOMA is entitled, “The Artist is Present” and I love that it is a Woman who is making perhaps one of the most powerful creative statements I have ever seen in The Hallowed Halls of Art. Earnestness. Meditation as a sport, Marina is sitting for 8 hours a day, inviting anyone to sit opposite her in silence, reverence and EverythingNothingness. First time I saw meditators under klieg lights surrounded by spectators as if it was a boxing match. The simplicity and seeming lack of stimulus brings up emotions just like sitting to meditate. A table between 2 people. Red dress. Forced scenarios.
Tiny stories from her abusive childhood typed out on writing paper are like the universal psychic circus paraded out sacrificially for us from a Slowed Down, Sit Around Gal. On my third visit the table is removed and Marina sits in a white dress. A friend who has seen Marina five times, says at the end of a day, when all the crowds dispersed, he watched as she bowed her head and tears flowed endlessly from her eyes. Slowing Down, Sitting Down, in the middle of New York’s cacophonous jungle to the noisy Nepal village sprung up around Buddha Boy, sitting for months in meditation, modern Buddhas Are Us… sitting and dreaming us.
Marina’s dream spreads around her in the Museum, with powerful imagery, films, performances and encounters. You cannot miss the Enlightenment.
TWO: The Hystericals.
True Story: He screamed a diatribe of expletives at the top of his lungs right into my face as I stepped out of the subway car unto the platform and I woke up the next day, my 50th birthday,with a 90 degree hot lava feeling in my throat and a pounding head+ body. As softly meditative I can be at times, the 7 ft tall, obviously mentally disturbed man’s surprise verbal attack into my face easily prompted a screamed back expletive and he dutifully responded same as the subway doors closed on him. As I came up to the street, my nerves instantly calmed as I recalled Marina’s work at Moma, that I had just seen with a friend. Screaming heads, recipricol slapping, mouth to mouth breathing and shamanic endurance tests were the portals to body-less and buddah-full more states of being…the stuff of high art for Marina.
Speaking of working out self loathing out loud, men too, are not exempt. If you are loathing you better shout it out. Toxic bodies exist because of toxic minds. A woman’s anger, in the form of earthquakes, tidal waves, tornados and volcanic eruptions are in full force these days forcing us to birth from anger to love. Get thee to a treadmill, a drumming circle with other men in headbands, play squash or crab soccer or wail kirtan, but please, Mad Men and Mad Women, would you stop holding it in and taking it out on the rest of humanity?
THREE: The Conjurors.
Conjuring the snake. The tempter of transitions, the force and power of creative energy, Kundalini coiled in potential and ready to strike….in a business meeting or that sacred Hindu chakra hot spot. If you don’t know, ask somebody.
The horned one is the man shaman crowning himself with creative powers. Coiled rising snakes and animal horns represent the horns of cows and certainly the fallopian tubes surrounding a womb. Georgia O’Keefe saw it. Celtic stoneworkers lived it. The symbol of Jesus on a cross or Marina’s woman on a bicycle seat on a lit wall in the MOMA or us embracing our lives or a friend with outstretched arms, live it. This is the heart extended.
Luminosity (a must see piece and video) is a Marina performance piece where a woman or man is perched five feet off the ground for 700 hours as a Christ-like sacrifical body on a bicycle seat. Conjuring correctly does require sacrifice, strength and vulnerability. Knowing this is halfway there.
FOUR: The Teasers.
The 48 Laws of Power cites endlessly how people are captivated by what they think they are missing. If we ALL seek Love, The Groove and the Tease is in the Delight of the eternally unseen Heart, although it might just show up first as exposed body parts.
Censored images of women in film from days gone by seem silly but no less provocative. Knowing when to hold back and when to let it go is the tease that both men and women are cultivating. The Play is the Thing.
FIVE: The Milkers.
True Story: My mother swung between being a Saturday night 70’s glamourous Halloween party hostess in her swirling, blue and green chiffon and satin Age of Aquarious gown, White Russian cocktail in hand, among a household of groovy guests to a Sunday morning-after common laborer look with baggy grungy shorts, thick copper metal cateye bifocals, water spritz bottle and ironing board tackling the huge pile of wrinkled clothes while watching old movies on the television set under the watchful gaze of this Women’s Lib era poster she emphatically hung on our Laundry room door one day.
The female body is a machine. The word for Mother, Mater, becomes Material, the sweat, hair, nails, plants, steam. A laborious economy of drapery and flesh folds endlessly mopping up, washing fabric, negotiating skirts and emotions.
A co-curated exhibition of artists from Tel-Aviv, by my friend Maia Morgensztern, entitled JaffaCakes TLV recently shown in London, featured artist Mika Rottenberg, whom I first saw at the 2008 Whitney Biennial with her “Still from Cheese.” Mika envisions the female body as a rag-tag primitive, a science fair contraption-machine dialouging with fleshy, folky, earthy body processes and modern beautifying rituals. “These tropical devices exploit more than simply women’s labor, but also use of all that the body exfoliates, grows, and removes.” Coolhunting’s video on Mika’s own process is the evolution of peoples’ idea of “women’s art” beginning and ending with niceties such as Judy Chicago’s Dinner party, thank God.
Tapasya is a Sanscrit word meaning friction, repeated movement, generation of heat and energy. It applies to devotion in any form. On this Earthly plane of duality, we strive for balance beyond the 1,2 energy of computers, sex, repeated pleasures and the duality or our minds. Can this all this churning, friction and heat give rise to balance to catapult us beyond this plane or at the very least can we figure out how to live in balance here?
SIX: The Androgyne Fruit.
Love the drag queens, Bowie, Klaus Nomie, Numero hotties and the gang at Vlada’s but the girls really do androgyne better. It’s uncomical, where identity is neither gender or its definitions or poses, because feminine mystique looks better petite.
This is mastery, what we all hold within and must ultimately express. Outward cues are cute, inward core is more. In fact, the taste of this feeling is like the best fruit. For sure, it was Eve who plucked the fleshy, delicious fruit of fun first and shared it with man. No blame kids, taste of this plucky fruit is directly osmosis with the cosmos! We are surrounded by the androdynous and it is a delicious list from Priscilla of The Desert, Amanda Lepore’s pout, Hillary Swank, to even Tyler Perry to Catherine Opie at Gladstone Gallery‘s beautiful boy-girl black and white photographs.
SEVEN: The Dissolvers.
No Body Does Dissolution Better than a Babe. Girls are change itself. Through the cycles of Life’s Movie running every month to Closets of personas, pain and pleasure, the feminine mystique can destroy a story, puzzle it back together anew minute to minute and lifetime to lifetime.
True Story. The night before my Father died, I had a dream that the contents of our entire house growing up were floating in a flood that took up the whole lower underground part of the house. The night he died, that flood of emotions created a dream where my car went to the end of a dead end street blocked by a huge moving truck. I got out to meet a wealthy man who pointed to a pyramid of steps going up and then down, covered in sand. Each one had a central circle footprint with a red figure eight in it. These were made he said to protect from the taunts of children. He held a cat in his arms and said, “She was a kitten before and now she is a relaxed cat.”
The phone rang and awoke me from this dream with a voice telling me of his entrance to the hospital where he would pass the next morning. After my father died I couldn’t meditate or do yoga. His childhood mantra to me of “Slow down, slow down, slow down,” was not to be found through typical spiritual practice, but a step by step approach to life.
I grew up as an Art Groupie to Duchamp’s readymades and his Nude Descending a Staircase in The Philadephia Museum of Art. I recently saw Jack Robinson’s SCANNOGRAMS at my friend Sebastien’s New York Gallery Nine 5, where a body meets scanner repeatedly until the parts make up a new whole. Much like Marina Abramowitz metaphorically repeatedly slamming herself into a wall, the feminine cyclical way of ritually tearing apart and building up again can be a sooth to the soul knowing and respecting the process.
Stairs and a step by step process are logical answers to dissolution, death and transition. No one does this better than a woman or man who knows how to retreat, re-piece and re-invent themselves as a salve to the natural cycle of destruction and creation.
EIGHT: The Absorber, The Voyeur and The Duality Eraser.
No matter it is the Earth Itself or the female in a group, she is the weaver, the forager, the duality juggler. No wonder we can’t keep our eyes off of Her.
The artistic seer calls the shots in Kim In Sook‘s staged voyeurisms, Naama Tsabar‘s cloth,music and performance saturations blurring boundaries and the multi-Louboutin clad armies of Vanessa Beecroft. On a more personal level, master symbolist Avia Venefica explains signs and symbols to hungry googlers awakened by a dream or a persistent sighting, her symbolic weavings on What’s Your Sign? are hugely popular, almost reaching the frenetic globally-growing cult that surrounds Susan Miller’s Astrology Zone. Pillars are in place in the Delphi Temple of TV and Media from Oprah’s explorations-in-feelings to Maureen Dowd‘s diatribes on the Church tribe to Michelle O, Martha S…maybe we can be rewoven in time.
Calling themselves, invisible heroes, male artists Ados and Comenius, played with the humble realness of Princess Diana, making art of her childhood eraser and their purchase of it at auction, a wry comment on a woman who was a foil to her Kingly husband’s transgressions. So many stalwart or silent women standing by their man and the public apology of men from all public spectrums lately. Honesty. Transparency. Just another good policy ala Mother Earth and strong woman vibes. Glad to see some men are trying it on for size.
NINE: The Procurer of Animals, Meat and Bodies.
It’s The Same Stuff Swimming Through Us.
Props to male artists seen recently, Botero at Marlborough Gallery and Mark Ryden at Paul Kasmin Gallery, they do know how to work their female. Botero places women with animals where they suddenly attain much more power aligned and Ryden’s wide-eyed, Fragonard style doll females cavorting with Lincoln, Jesus and cold-cuts make harsh critiques on societal concepts of freedom and gender roles, such as his “Incarnation” piece shown here.
In the 1959 movie, “Suddenly Last Summer,” Elizabeth Taylor, in a white see-through bathing suit as the attention-lure, procures for Sebastien, her closeted male cousin, the sexual favors of native boys who ultimately cause his destruction in a siren-worthy carnivorous clash of tinny instruments. The age-old play of female allure which leads to a man’s downfall and freedom from his body is played yet again from ancient Gods like Set, Osiris,Dionysis,Odin and even girls like Echo, who were torn apart to find freedom through reincarnation just to underscore the point for all Earth plane-dwelling persons. As Katherine Hepburn carefully tended to the carniverous Venus Fly-traps in Sebastian’s exotic garden, it’s clear we all have to find a way to play with our desires, beauty and creativity on the personal and grand scale of aligning and respectfully re-formulating a Planet and her feminine mystique itself, lest it destroy us first.
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Adaptive Re-use and Augmented Reality.
Watched a Boomtown, herky jerky camera shot video this Sunday morning with Kara Swisher interviewing Thomas Goetz, Wired magazine editor and author of “The Decision Tree,” advocating that we act as enthusiastic sheep, embedding medical sensors under our flesh as a novel, fun and informative way to monitor our biological functionings for medical data mining. What Futurama movie didn’t they see? These are the same Earthlings who reject and scold their natural beauty and inject mold poison into their faces to insure permanent fembot smiles. (OK, we agree…Botox could be considered adaptive re-use and augmented reality at it’s finest.) We suppose when 2012 hits these same bots will be beamed up through their implanted sensors leaving the rest of us to smell flowers, enjoy communicating with our precious bodies and friends and live silly and respectful on Planet Rock…wired to digital by choice and freedom. We say less data and a deeper more intuitive tapping into the rich library of body and Earth wisdom.
COMMiti ego is a collective design house envisioning and implementing Adaptive Re-use and Augmented Reality as new blueprints for how we hardwire digitally and creatively with real, pre-industrial soothing softwired remedies for Living. We shake our Avatar-like dreadlocks in a shower of Stars over blinding and binding acceptance of positioned “New Tools,” designed to separate us from our own intuition and self-empowerment or the greatest technology ever invented…Biology and the Web of Life.
Future Vision Holds that Adaptive Re-Users are Survivors and basically are having more fun. Like a Parkour leaper over the constructs and debris of consumer culture, we adapt making beautiful from the solid “waste” into minimal impact, high-end design for Life as we decide to dance with Druids and imbibe elixir tonics made from Mayan heritage seeds.
Here, we forage and augment reality with Adaptive Re-use, add in some art, design and sensory delights for a luxurious mash-up from our network of friends and resources designed especially for 9 friends and mogul clients such as Barack Obama, Tom Ford, Martha Stewart, Len Burnett, Lady Gaga, Aby Rosen and Ian Schrager…some who don’t know they need us yet, but soon will;-)
ONE. Even More Color and Fun in The White House for July Fourth
Lush edible organic gardens, Malia and Sasha cavorting in bright frocks and Slow Food White House lawn picnic parties…we all saw this in our dreams and it is Real! Westweek 2010 Urban Design Award winner, Sean Knibb creates sculptural masterpieces for outdoor living for international celebrities and the urban gardens of Los Angeles. His ingenious bright straw bale chair idea is great for the Obama kids and pals while the “Prescendential” parents and friends discuss, laugh and eat at his indoor outdoor dining table made from reclaimed wood. A community comes together and celebrates and dines on a nurturing, oxygen filled meal prepared fresh from the edible garden.
Initially envisioned and prompted to Obama by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse for the White House lawn, the edible garden has become a lifestyle, if not a requirement, for those who want an impressive and available food source, while returning to the agronomic roots of our predecessors. A Slow Food, slow soothing of the collective soul of humans and earth, it is a bio-high, to feel fit and hear friends and family chewing, ooohing and ahhhing while feeling the enzymatic rush and security in knowing exactly where and what you are eating really came from.
Sean Knibb’s Centranthus collection crosses indoor outdoor specification boundaries, realized through an environmentally low impact production process. Powder coated and polished angle irons of forged steel and polished aluminum create a part vessel part frame for the re-purposed soul of the living, grandfathered wood through a process of organic re-construction. Sean’s furniture is available from Abbott Kinney bungalow store in Los Angeles or here on his website.
Instead of fireworks, COMMiti ego recommends an orchestrated plaid light installation by artist, Vicki da Silva, a co-collaborative and symbolic art experience made by everyone at the picnic for a real Rainbow Child meets The White House reality.
The best ideas always come from colorful dinners, in fact, one half of COMMitti ego chewed on this very blog post at designer, Holly Hunt’s hosted Westweek 2010 dinner at chef Mark Peel’s Campanile, as a guest of interior designer Bret Witke. Tom Ford, Julianne Moore, Bruce Cohen and Dean Factor, to name several, are fans of Bret’s designs for homes and restaurants. Holly Hunt‘s showroom is a soothing temple for designers who mandate clean lines and luxury. Campanile itself is adaptive re-use, as the 1929 building is considered a historic landmark designed by 1929 by architect Roy Sheldon Price for Hollywood legend, Charlie Chaplin and adaptively re-used as the original home and creative love child of Nancy Silverton’s artisan bakery, La Brea Bakery.
TWO. “Martha, how ’bout some adaptive re-use and high-tech design flava to your Connecticut kitchen…”
Martha’s clean and perfect vibe could use some sky, earthy dust and some Busta. Kevin Busta, that is. The other half of COMMiti ego saw him at recent The New York Times, Architectural Digest Show in New York City and really loved his pitchfork chair. Kevin re-purposes the remnants of his hometown Cleveland’s utilitarian rustbelt past. The shopping cart chaise could hold kitchen guests and was a past collaboration with partner, Doug Meyer. Kevin’s art, made from factory blueprints, was recently spotted by Joyce Wadler, writer of the Currents column in The New York Times, and the birds on a wire, Nature meets Man’s Plans, seems just perfect for Media Mogul Martha. For years we made cards and wrapping paper from a mother-lode of old factory blueprints we found and we love their dusty color and feeling the earnestness and industriousness inherent in the paper.
For inspirational cooking, we love Murphlab’s A History of The Sky, a time lapse photography project of the sky for a whole year by Ken Murphy. It’s another collaborative artwork like Vicki’s, here on Kickstarter you can actually “own” a piece of this art and other similar projects, a new example we love, of art, community and tech interwoven into our lives…the philosophy of COMMiti ego.
Luxury combined with patina is the best prod for our minds to evolve into a compassionate and real soft place, one that integrates all facets of life for true seeing. Crafty Martha would be the perfect guide to The Middle Earthlings of our United States to adapt the beauty of sustainable living beyond just dutifully bringing a grocery tote to the shopping market to fill the modern kitchen.
THREE. The Only Home Possible for Lady Gaga
Freaky, famous adaptive re-user of imagery that is a bit uncomfortable and brash, oh what does your home look like? COMMiti ego would orchestrate a COMMissioned design back-up group that will match your delicious culture mining stilet-toe to stilet-toe. Your COMMiti ego girl group of artisans are Eren Yorelmazer, Michael Schmidt, Gary Gibson and Pamela Sunday for starters.
First, meet Eren Yorulmazer from Istanbul, our chosen interior designer for his scouting of visionary and salivation-worthy spaces. We hear your music loud and imagine him turning you on with his bold and crazy way with a bolt of velvet, his new European guiltless love of gilt and loud antiques and custom swathing of vistas, fabric and combo innocent nouveau riche boyyyeeee and big eeeeeEGO gestures.
Next we visit our pal, Michael Schmidt, already a designer of Gaga goodies, such as her crystal crutches in the Paparazzi video and bubble appliques for her Rolling Stone cover, and everything in between for girls like Madonna, Cher, Tina, Grace,Dita, Courtney, Bjork and boys like the Rolling Stones, Elton, Iggy, Karl, Marilyn and Lenny K. We would commission Michael to create furnishings, specifically, hardware to open doors based on belt buckles or brass knuckle rings in adaptive re-use Gaga style. We’d also place an order for some intricate laser cut walls in combo with Michael’s famous chain-link fabrications utlilizing industrial cast-off materials.
For the element of quirk we would roll up to our friend, Gary Gibson, the artist,interior designer at his Los Angeles gallery retail store reflecting ersatz items with an intention to inspire and embrace letting one’s freak flag fly. Gary sets a precedent for those who function outside the confines of traditional design or traditional offerings, creating spaces that invite, excite and envelop the user.
Earthen bowls with bumps and lumps would work well against the Gagaluxe and we suggest they be filled with champagne and golden Swarovski-iced Sippy straws for effect and served up with some dirty cherry pie ice cream. Some lumpen furnishings or stellary thrift shop relics will nestle into Gaga’s home perfectly. One of our favorite effects is a wall top to bottom of portraits, an edited crew spanning time, century and technique and we’d be sure to include this ink on wood adaptive re-use portrait from Gary’s inspired cache. And we would love to see what Michael Koch, the designer of this woolly felt tote found at Gary Gibson, would do with pillows or emerald green, silk-lined dressing gowns for Gaga household guests.
We also recommend Pamela Sunday‘s sea creature ceramics and think her bio-physicist buttoned-up manners and way would quite suit Lady Gaga. (We shared the biggest laugh recently with Pamela, and we hardly knew each other, so we suspect subversive humor under Pamela’s frock) We are sure a Q and James Bond relationship will result in COMMiti ego’s COMMissioned earthy ceramic toys of all sizes and shapes to fit the Gaga universe of body, home and garden.
FOUR. The Show Must Go On…from Coney Island To Urban Gardens
As Gaga nods to feathered birds before her, we honor Bette Midler, the original showgirl turned urban garden pioneer. After a show or tirelessly campaigning for urban gardens, we see Bette in her home or personal garden walking, talking, resting and contemplating on a Douglas Thayer bench, exquisitely made from planks of Coney Island boardwalk. The sensibility and zen-ish output arises from Doug’s quiet workshops in the bucolic hills of Massachusetts, a co-reality with Bette and her New York Restoration Project busy reclaiming, restoring and revitalizing open spaces throughout NYC and providing environmental education programs. Hundreds of South Bronx residents and families gathered to celebrate this just completed Target Bronx Garden in the South Bronx, pictured here. Delores Delago, we adores ya. Have a seat, rest your green thumbs and take a load off from feathering New York City with your green wand!
FIVE. A Little Fishy Ruffage for Tom Ford and Other Single Men
See we like sleek like anyone else, but sleek and slick as in Salmon? These fishes have endurance, faithfulness and will swim upstream to the death. All the things a single man needs. It’s the roughness we see could adding a spot of further chic to TF’s burgeoning moguldom beyond fashion and film. White salmon skin leather would be a luxe repurposing worthy of Tom Ford and ES, the Patagonian company fashioning a waste by-product of the salmon industry into a tough new texture for manly chic. Ain’t nothin’ more manly and recycling-sexy than a massive mountain spewing snow water rapids and feverish, glistening sleek salmon leaping upstream towards it. Or is there? (hint to men: invite and catch more women upstream and upstairs with these kinda Natura Sexa images instead of mere etchings…)
SIX. Adapting The Soul Train Vibe To The New Green for Len Burnett equals
The Sea and Reclaimed Sunken Treasures.
Dear Len, now that you reclaimed the Soul Train and Vibe brand, penned your “Black is The New Green” book, the island beach house is minutes away. I know you are passionate about green living, fine art and islands, so, COMMiti ego would like to make some design suggestions for your abode.
First: The Sea Sense Surround. We recently visited Stephan Crasneanscki (that’s his sea photo above) to listen to his company, Soundwalk’s excerpt of The Ulysses Syndrome, an immersive sound journey following the route of Ulysses along the Mediterranean Sea. Capturing hundreds of millions of soundwaves flying over the surface of the waters surrounding Turkey, from boat radio waves to storms and creatures, the result is an opera of randomness that soothes in a fractal fashion. Len, as the media mogul at the head of Uptown and now two of the famous music media brands ever…preceeding your own…hey, it’s Your Ocean.
Next: Sit and Ground. Definitely listen to this while chillin’ in a encompassing chair done up in a sea blue dyed, recycled European linen tablecloth from Beyond France, while your toes enjoy the history and emotion in reclaimed wood floors. Not just any wood, but thoughtful planks of deep Earthly thanks, made from 150 to 1500 year old virgin growth sunken treasures, The Cornerstone Floor Group uses Heart Pine and Cypress logs from the Mississippi river and Louisiana swamps and bayous. Floated down major rivers during the timber rush of the late 1800 and early 1900’s, many sunk before they reached their milling destination during the timber rush in the early 1900’s. Anaerobic deep waters filled with minerals are infused into these recovered timbers creating colors, tones and emotions of the highest grade. We are sure your artistic and sensory mogulness will appreciate, if it’s good enough for Lenny Kravitz, it’s good enough for you. Cheers! COMMiti ego
SEVEN. Steve Jobs: A Little more Thank you, Please in The Apple store
Love the Apple stores, but we beg for a bit more organic and community interactivity beyond speeches or concerts given the brand’s vital value exists due to creative and passionate users. Time to augment reality with some charity and clarity and connection…and fruit.
Fruit is the essence of giving. Apples are knowledge. Knowledge is giving and many businesses are finding ways to incorporate this into their brand. For example, our most loved Merci Merci store in Paris, created by the owners of Bonpoint, and pictured above, mixes books and nooks to read in, a cafe and a huge helping of profits which go to build schools in Madagascar or Droog, New York where the immersive design not only offers “things for sale” but stimulates the imagination like a gallery or playground.
What about green island pods of apple trees in the Apple store? In Milan, for example, a living ‘orchard’ designed by Dutch architect Ton Matton, was grown in Garibaldi Railway Station during the week of the recent, Salone del Mobile, Salone 2010 (14th-19th April.) aMAZElab presented the eighth edition of the GREEN ISLAND event, dedicated to urban green spaces and biodiversity with dozens of fruit trees planted in coloured pots, maintained with a special self-feeding system. A little fully-functioning urban orchard (the fruit could be picked by passengers) metaphorically enhanced the idea of the Station as an ‘agora’, a space of sharing, meeting, exchange and cultural ‘nourishment’.
If our Capitals of Consumer Culture, such as The Palace of The Apple, and the biggest brands act, many more will follow.
and if it’s possible for a brand…how about a city?
EIGHT. Aby Rosen and Ian Schrager: Adapt, Re-Use and Augment The Reality of Hotel as “Mini-Citi”
Depression needs Solace. Desert needs Las Vegas. Recession City Detroit needs developer Aby Rosen, visionary hotelier Ian Schrager and COMMiti ego. We see a destination Detroit hotel to make an All-American city into a Las Vegas-style brave new world sensation, an energy cycling Mini-Citi for modern design industry to stimulate a new economy there. A Mini-Citi interacting with the environment and businesses will contribute much more than tourist traffic…we see mini industries and brave new worlds.
For our COMMissioned COMMiti ego Mini-Citi Design Team, we choose vertical farmer Dickson Despommier, glass artist Alison Berger, Soundwalk’s Stephan Crasneanscki, Mass’s Stephan Valter and for inspiration, artist Gerald Edwards lll and his surfing buddies, the Goons, who have developed sustainable surfboard manufacturing materials, treehouses, and Bollywood style dance party beach cleanups…Fun.
The image at the opening of this post and this hotel photo is from Gerald Edwards lll. We really like his conceptions of Augmented Reality and our vision is to team him with Stephan of Soundwalk and Stephan of Mass, designer of programmable, interactive wall scenes, for visual thrills and sounds around a core lush bedroom atrium by our pal, Eren. Surrounded completely by windows, guests are offered a choice of programming or visions into the real worlds outward and an actual vertical working farm for the inner view…Wow.
Kind of like Ikea maximizing space for dorm dwellers and newlyweds, cubic space maximization for skyscrapers and cities have Dickson Despommier, Prophet of the Vertical Farm, espousing for four times as much space usage, convertable water, methane energy back to the grid from compost. Kind of Nordic Nerdy and Scientifically Sexy to have this futuristic organic farm in a circular atrium tended by lab-coated scientists and farmers. Multiple custom soundtrack options as well, because Detroit Techno is the Grandparent and who knows what seed music industries can conjure in this New City?
After the visual feast, hotel guests can retreat to their bath, we envision a new kind of spa with immersive rituals in a hand blown glass, organic shaped, luxury sized healing pool filled with mineral and herbal waters complete with individual vessels for subconscious thought distilling. With Alison Berger, who has designed for Hermes and Frank Gehry, we are in good hands.
Alison’s glasswork reflects her childhood love of fireflies, Victorian apothecary medicine bottles and her stories etched into glass. Recently Detroit has become a birthplace of new artisan studios up from industrial ashes, and can we order up some gorgeous glass with our car windscreens? We see Master artisans like Alison supplying the hotel and an industry to manufacture American design in a new arts and crafts movement.
Utilizing the factories in Detroit, other mini design industries could be extend from the hotel design. Pryor Callaway already creates sculptural seating from old car bumpers and Kevin Busta’s lamps made of car mufflers could be positioned as new design classics, and go into micro into mass production for jobs and profit.
We imagine participatory guidebooks as souvenirs of the experience can be printed on demand on flax paper, grown in the urban gardens of Detroit as a sub industry. Gerald‘s “Field Guide to the International Survivalist” is the perfect prototype for Adaptive Re-Users imagining new worlds as they push natural boundaries and participate in the revitalization of an American city while they vacation.
…and since food is the best osmotic, non-robotic experience that reflects our state of composition and connection, the Eastern half of COMMiti ego nominates a Detroit version of Williamsburg’s Pies n Thighs for this Americana Monument. As a guest of the family Geldzahler, Kayte specifically, we recently brainstormed and loosened our belts in honor of chefs Sarah Buck, Carolyn Bane, and Erika Geldzahler serving up Southern comfort to the Williamsburg masses.
Vegetarian is next, but One Giant Step for Peoplekind at a time, Moguls! In the meantime, just say No to Bo Toxins and yes, to New COMMitis of egos, in concert for A New Reality.
NINE. YOU. YES YOU. MOGUL OF THE MOMENT.
What Ya’ll Gonna Do?
Post by Jade Dressler and Kelly Lebwith who are COMMiti ego.
COMMiti ego’s collective concepts have realized intention full-filled, intuitive, imaginative and solution-focused visions that embrace a common sensual denominator as our balanced beings throw down branding in the mediums of textiles, clothing and accessories for living, interiors and expanded experiences through TV show concepts to live public events.
The phone rang… we answered the call and have been asked to imagine for and have enjoyed some serious play time with Mogul Originals from Snoop Dogg, Oprah Winfrey to Icons such as Disney to Dogtown Zboyz and Designer Luminaries such as The Bill Blass and The Oscar de la Renta to Visionaries Diana Vreeland, Steven Sprouse and Paul Smith.
Our design manifestos have spun micro-luxury details such as earthy pod sculptures for Aveda stores and spawned branded, personal accessories for Frances Ford Neibaum -Coppola’s private reserve gift list. We have envisioned macro-concepts from top to bottom design renovations of adobe homes in New Mexico collaborating with solar energy experts to Macy’s department stores’ concept and identity environment upgrades to introducing travel experts to the first new hotel in Lake Como in 100 years to [hush hush] applied strategy, focused Feng Shui consultations for state government offices.
Conceptualized and activated visions for full-spectrum campaigns and events for brands and clients span virtually from A to Z, from work with American Express to Louis Vuitton to VH1 and XXL, the hip-hop magazine.
We have orchestrated elements for events from a benefit fashion show adaptively re-using a former railway station for a pioneering, hand-made organic cotton clothing collection for 700 guests to international brand launches for Speedo’s highest tech swim gear with International Olympic gold medal winning athletes including Michael Phelps.
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Tags: A Single Man, Aby Rosen, adaptive re-use, adaptive reuse furniture, Alice Waters, Alice Waters Chez Panisse, Alison Berger glass, aMAZElab, Apple stores, augmented reality, Barack Obama, Bette Midler, Beyond France, Bonpoint owners, Bret Witke, Campanile, carolyn bane, celebrity eco homes, celebrity green homes, celebrity homes, chez panisse, Chez Panisse restaurant, COMMiti ego, design with nature, Doug Booher, doug meyer, Douglas Thayer, earth day new green design, eco home, eco spaces, edible gardens, Eren Yorulmazer, ES, farm in Garibaldi Railway Station, fembots, Gary Gibson, Gerald Edwards lll, green business, green design, green homes, green hotel design, green hotels, green interior design, green interior designers, green spaces, green visionary designers, Holly Hunt, Ian Schrager, Ian Schrager style, inside celebrity homes, Joyce Wadler, kara swisher, kayte geldzahler, Kelly Lebwith, Ken Murphy, Kevin Busta, Kickstarter, LA interior designers, Lady Gaga, Lady Gaga home, Lady Gaga house, Lady Gaga where does she live, Lady Gaga's home, Lady Gaga's house, Len Burnett, lenny kravitz, Malia and Sasha, Mark Peel, Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart decor, Martha Stewart green, Martha Stewart's house, Martha Stewart's kitchen, Merci Merci, Michael Koch, Michael Schmidt, mini city, Murphlab, Nancy Silverton bakery, new green design, new green interior design, New York City Gardens, New York Restoration Project, Obama decor, Obama garden, Obama picnic, Obama style, Obama's house, over the top design, Pamela Sunday, Pies and Thighs, pies n thighs, pryor callaway, recycled European linens, recycled furniture, roy sheldon price, salmon skin leather, Salone de Mobile, sarah buck, Sean Knibb, single man decor, single man interior design, Single men, SK1 Furniture, soul train, Soul train brand, Soul Train show, Soundwalk, Stephan Crasneanscki, stephan valter, Stephan Valter Mass, Steve Jobs Apple, sustainable furniture, sustainable wood, Target South Bronx Garden, The Cornerstone Floor Group, The Floor Group, The New York Times Architectural Digest show, Thomas Goetz, Tom Ford, Tom Ford's house, Tom Ford's interior, Tom Matton, Uptown magazine, urban gardens, Vibe brand, Vicki da Silva, Westweek 2010, Westweek Urban Design Award
