Pierre et Gilles

Along with Gilbert and George Pierre et Gilles are my favorite gay couple/ photography team. Like a number of other contemporary photographers, including Jeff Wall, the AES+F Group, Daikichi Amano, Gregory Crewdson, Anne Hardy, Anthony Goicolea, and Sarah Hobbs, Pierre et Gilles produce highly stylized, posed, and manipulated tableaux, rejecting, along with much of the prominent physiography community, the found imagery so long associated with the medium. And the works produced are sublime. Part kitsch, devotional, and gay erotica, the duo has created, in my estimation, some of the most progressive and engaging photo work of the last fifty years.

A. O. Scott's Catechism for Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest is among my favorite novels. I have read it at least four times and have no intention of stopping, despite the soul wilting and spirit crushing. I have written a number of short, self indulgent essays on it, and draw on it extensively in my aloof, pretension papers written for disillusioned high school teachers and excited, destitute college professors However, upon reading A.O Scott's 1999 article The Panic of Influence, which in reality is not directly concerned with Infinite Jest, my love for the book has only grown. I have struggled with Wallace's particular brand of irony and meta-fiction since I first encounter his work along with that of Barth, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Gaddis. However, Scott's article, published in the New York Review of Books when I was in kindergarten, illuminates the elegance of Wallace's subversion of the artifice of his literary predecessors, and reveals a poignant humanism in his work which, taken at face value, embraces the sneering cynicism of the R&D line. Through meta-irony, the hideous cyclical progression of meta-fiction as well as human life, Wallace established a post-ironic literary movement with none of the saccharin, cringing, indulgence of other literary figures in their attempts to escape from the toxicity of postmodernism. Rather than reject and move backwards, back to comfortable narrative, and naive illusion, Wallace reestablishes the notions set forth by Pynchon and Barth (my favorites) which in the sixties served as mordant social critique or even a revolutionary upheaval in the zeitgeist, a form so long lost to the ages, and brings it to bear at the very center of the self. Endlessly self-conscious  of his self-consciousness, Wallace establishes a new humanism, built around the problematic disillusionment of modernism and postmodernism, without ever once denying it or turning a blind eye. Link to Scott's Article. 

Mikio Sakabe

One of my all time favorite fashion designer, Mikio Sakabe is an avant-garde design genius. One of thew most eclectic designers I have seen, his work runs the gamut from the chicest outerwear, to eastern inspired evening wear, to pieces with classic and beautiful silhouettes inspired by western men's wear.

Exquisite Object #3: The Waterman Butterfly Projection

I know map arrangements aren't the most popular topic, generally people have bigger things on their mind, like doing squat thrusts or trying on pants, but the Waterman butterfly is just too beautiful to ignore. I myself, often occupied with squat thrusts and pants, have not studied the projection thoroughly, however I do know that it is an unfolded globe that has been treated as an octohedron, arising from a spherical extraction constructed from cubic closest-packed spheres into a convex hull. 

Lotte Laserstein

I came across Laserstein's work this summer while in and around Germany and fell in love. I had never heard the name before and, but I was struck by Evening Over Postdam (1930), though only pursued it recently. I will admit, I have a soft spot for Neue Sachlichkeit, so I suppose my fondness is hardly surprising, however she does have a sort of Freud-y painterly technique a tad peculiar for New Objectivity which gives one pause, but also sets her work apart. After some cursory research I found her later work to be unbeaqribly saccrine, more domestic portraiture than Dix's brutal realism, still I would place her earlier works among the greatest to have been produced by the movement that I hold so dear.

Black Pus

This is my first music related post... so this is exciting. Anyway, I don't have much to say, I just bought Lightning Bolt's album Earthly Delights on vinyl, but seeing as I prefer Chippendale on his own I figured I would encourage any and all of those who enjoy noise and Providence's trademark hit-by-a-car look to listen and enjoy. I might call Black Pus (Chippendale's solo project) "introductory level" noise, but he is a good start.

Future Babies

I've decided to add a new segment: Future Babies. Future babies is concerned with my goal to raise the chicest children in the world. Anyway here are some examples of childhood sartorial excellence which I have every intention of replicating if and when I get a hold of a few babies.