subgroups

A seriously interesting article on the 'Sociology of the Hipster'. The article breaks down the hipster hierarchy into three distinct socioeconomic groups: liberal arts college grad hipster, trust fund hipster and my personal favourite the couch-surfing, old-clothes wearing hipster. No one wants to be called a hipster, but I love reading pseudo-intellectual NYT articles about hipsters, I don't know what that makes me; let's not talk about it.

'Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-­surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious — the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be “superior”: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.'

Read more.
Also, some recommended listening.

'Flat areas of colour'

Katinka Lampe.
I love the flatness of this combined with the luminosity in her eyes.

Note: I thought Katinka was just a name they make up on Zoolander, apparently it's a real name. Katinka Inka Nabovina Nah-Nah?
Via.

youth

The staggering amount of queer homeless youth living on the streets is a problem, not only in LA but in our city too.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/12/local/la-me-gay-homeless-20101212

Frankie

Just started watching Lip Service tonight, already hooked. Why is Frankie so hot?
Also secondly and hilariously, I changed my Facebook status to 'is watching Lip Service on the day of the birth of Christ. Thank you Jesus!' and all my mom's Christian friends 'liked' it, so awkward, I guess they don't know it's a show about gasp! Lesbians! Oh the irony.

Lindsay Lohan

Had a rather exciting sex dream about Lindsay Lohan last night, probably because I watched this clip before I went to bed.
Is it wrong I find her coked out mannerisms rather enticing and likable?

*It's clip #4 on the link, although I recommend you watch them all, they are all highly enjoyable.

i could be sweeter

She & Him - Home.
You're the nicest, nicest boy girl I've ever met
And then I think about you, then I think about you again and again
Why don't we just sit and stare and do nothing?
Nothing at all for a while, I like the way you smile

I could be your state and I could be your nation
It doesn't get better than home, now does it?
Doesn't get better than home, now does it?
I could be your welcome, I could be your greeter
I could be sweet and I could be sweeter
I want to be where your heart is home

La Touche

Gaston La Touche. A Maiden in Contemplation, 1893.
Via.

new eyes

Though it should read 'when I move back'.
Via.

Baudelaire

“A painting by Franz Kupka, a Czech avant-garde painter living in Paris. The painting is a mixture of realism and abstraction. Called The Yellow Scale, it depicts a portrait, but the painting technique consists of a feast of violent slashes of yellow impasto. This was a work of the transitional stage of Kupka’s oeuvre when he moved from an impressionistic style to the world of abstraction. In the painting we see a supremely bored male individual, staring at us with a stern expression on his green-tinted face, a wisp of black hair sweeping across a wide brow, lounging back in a yellow dressing gown, his head resting against a large soft pillow in an oriental cane armchair. There is a self-rolled cigarette in the semi-salute of his upraised left hand, whilst his right hand’s first finger rests in the opening of a yellow-covered Charpentier paperback on his lap. Who is this lounger? It is no other than Charles Baudelaire, the French decadent poet, based on one of Nadar’s daguerreotype photographs.” 

Via. 

Westwood

Kate Moss and Namoi Campbell in the 90's, Vivienne Westwood glory days.

haze

The Smiths - Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now.
'I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour.'

the luxury of being touched.

'You can go for weeks without touching another human being. Sure, there’s the occasional brush of the shoulder on a city street, or the brief jolt of an elbow at a crowded show. Those are accidents. But actively being touched, or actively touching somebody else: this is not a regular occurrence. Go without for long enough, and you might forget you’re missing anything. Of course, you feel an inexplicable, mild loneliness—but you can’t put your finger on its cause (pun intended).

Occasionally you’ll find somebody who reminds you that perhaps it’s worth it to risk your shelled safety. You’ll allow yourself the luxury of being touched, and the happiness of touching. Here I refer not to the sexual, but to the sweet and gentle: a kiss, the light scent of someone else’s skin. And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, it’ll be gone, and you’ll have to learn to forget.'

Via.

ghosts

1. Betty Goodwin. Vest Two, 1970.
2. Betty Goodwin. Vest No. 1, 1969, soft-ground etching on wove paper.

If you haven't already, go see AT WORK: Eva Hesse - Studiowork, Betty Goodwin - Work Notes, Agnes Martin - Work Ethics at the AGO, it changed my whole perspective, I really recommend it.
Hurry, it ends January 2nd, 2011.

mise-en-place

Bought some new supplies today, going to try linocut printmaking tonight.
Kurt Vonnegut says practicing any art is a way to make your soul grow, so tonight, I hope to make my soul grow, it needs it.

real talk

Mom: Call dad to help you with the chairs, you won't be able to do it yourself.
Me: What? I already got the chairs. Here, see, you don't need a man.

GOD IS GAY

Kathleen Hanna is my hero.
'Rebel Girl' is my favourite song to sing on Guitar Hero, I constantly insist on singing screaming it, so much so that none of my friends will play Guitar Hero with me anymore.

love

'The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.'

Truman Capote 'Other Voices, Other Rooms'
Via Obia.

img heavy #8

img heavy: Home Away from Home, mostly chronological edition.
1. Japanese 'Handsome Guy' Tofu. That shit cost me $7CAD, but yeah, it was delicious. 2. Note: I'm still in HK, there's just a plethora of Japanese snacks here too strange not to photograph, exhibit A: White Water For Men, 'cause clear water is too feminine. 3. Vancouver Airport. 4. East Van living, thank you Amy J. for letting me stay at your awesome new digs and also for letting me use your East Van living essentials: Dr. Bronner's Castile Magic Soap and Tom's fennel toothpaste. You can't see it here but I'm also wearing a onesie. 5. Adelaide and Esther across an ocean from me after farewell dinner at Hoof Cafe. 6. Sleepovers and museum days with Lindsay, go see the Agnes Martin stuff, it blew me away. 7. Kaitlyn in a pastoral scene. We go uptown and this is what we find. 8. Pups in sweaters on the TTC.

truth

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)

Nan Goldin

1.Sharon nursing Cookie on her bed, Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA, 1989.
Like Cookie, Sharon was for many years a familiar subject in Goldin's photography. Her masculine beauty often made a perfect counterbalance to Cookie's exuberant and extremely feminine sensuality. This photograph, from the Cookie portfolio, catches these ex-lovers at a tragic time, marked by the progress of the illness that in a matter of months would cut short Cookie's life. It was Sharon who would nurse Cookie through the months when she could no longer even speak, even though the photograph on the wall testifies to Cookie's marriage to a man, after eight years as Sharon's lover.
2. Variety Booth, New York City, 1983.
3. Smoky car, New Hampshire, USA, 1979.
Inconsequential daily events, situations with no particular story behind them and the anonymity of repeated gestures (like smoking a cigarette or drinking a beer) ofter catch Goldin's eye. This shot turns on the contrasts between light and shade, interior and exterior. It shows a moment suspended in time and captures, as many of her images do, a sense of solitude and estrangement, even within a pleasure-filled situation.

intimacy

Nan Goldin. Couple in bed, Chicago, USA, 1977.
Goldin is often present at very intimate moments in the lives of her close friends. The trust they develop allows her to capture what is usually kept private and to make it public. This has always been one of her concerns - pushing the boundaries of social taboos. This image seems to express what Goldin perceives as the peculiar estrangement and alienation that often occurs after sex between men and women. Within intimacy there is often a great distance - a paradox that Goldin daringly explored in her best-know work, The Ballard of Sexual Dependency.

synthetic family

Nan Goldin. Picnic on the Esplande, Boston, USA, 1973.
This photograph, among the first Goldin made in colour, shows many of the features that made her one of the first and foremost exponents of the snapshot aesthetic. This Easter picnic by the river in Boston shows Goldin's 'family' at the time, one of the happiest periods in her life. She was living with a group of drag queens, her heroines, and had already amassed a huge body of black-and-white photographs of them. It shows her lifelong obession with social rituals an the pleasures of communal life. Over time she would lose many people in this group to AIDS and drug addiction.

Excerpt from the seriously wonderful Nan Goldin book Lindsay got me, thanks Lindsay, I think you're the best.

marwencol

Marwencol is a documentary about the fantasy world of Mark Hogancamp. After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark builds a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populates the town he dubs "Marwencol" with dolls representing his friends and family and creates life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helps Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds of the attack.

animaux

Campana Brothers chair.
Sorry I haven't been posting much, just arrived in Hong Kong a few days ago, still jetlagged and getting used to my new environment.

Réquiem

Lucas Chimello Simões, Réquiem, Des(z)retrato [unportrait], 2010, 10 fotografias cortadas e sobrepostas entre chapas de acrílico | 10 cut-out photographs and acrylic | 41x31cm