Ms en Mr ...

This song by duo MS MR has been stuck on repeat here for some weeks now. It's one of those bands that doesn't release any photos or information on themselves to try to make themselves more intriguing and mysterious. Right.. *sigh* The video doesn't give away anything either. So all I know they're from New York and that this song is ace.

 

Download the song here, or  if the link is expired fill in your email address and get it here.

The video reminded me of the vid my friend Anita Sharma made for Bart Constant back in April (and in my opinion it fits the song much better than the MS MR one). This song is ace too.

Bill Cunningham New York

Earlier this week I watched a lovely documentary on fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. Bill is 83 years old and has been photographing New York City street style for the last few decades. You see this kind of photography all over the place now, in magazines and fashion blogs, but Mr. Cunningham is its true godfather. Hardly anything was known about his personal life up until this documentary and it took the makers 10 years to make this movie, from which 8 were spend on trying to convince Bill to cooperate! In the end he gave in and the result is an amazing film about an amazing man; it didn't cease to amaze me!

Like, the man is the biggest workaholic ever. Every day, rain or shine, he cycles through NYC to capture the city's birds of paradise. During the day he snaps the extraordinary ordinary people on the street and at night he photographs the he rich and famous at charity events and galas for his weekly columns On the Street and Evening Hours in The New York Times. Uptown and downtown he goes and uptown again. He can't stop, he even takes pictures during his own award ceremony/party.

And like, the man has a backbone. He doesn't take money for his photographs, because "if you don't take money they can't tell you what to do". He doesn't care if the person in front of his lens is a celebrity or not; if he or she isn't wearing anything interesting he will not press the shutter. He will not tolerate that his photographs are being you used to ridicule people, to judge them and label them 'hot' or 'not'.

It's also remarkable that, as much as he loves beautiful, extravagant clothes, Mr. Cunningham looks rather inconspicuously. Always wearing  a very practical, janitor-like blue overcoat. He doesn't care for food (more than once we see him eating at Maccy D's), nor comfort - he has lived in a tiny apartment above Carnegie Hall for 60 years. His flat is filled with filing cabinets, containing his photos and film. Somewhere in between lies his bed (a mattress raised on magazines!) and there is no bathroom. Really, his life is his work (Bill: "it's not work; it's pleasure!"). He has his reasons for his lifestyle, and you get a hint of why at the end of the movie...

I won't spoil anymore of the peculiarities that this movie reveals on Bill Cunningham. Because you should watch it. It doesn't matter if you're into beautiful clothes or beautiful pictures or not, because that's not what this film is about. It really is "deeply moving and visually stunning".

∧ A few spreads from Bill's column On The Street in The New York Times. Bill also gives a weekly digest of what's going on fashion-wise on the streets of New York through an audio commentary and a slide show on the NY Times website. They are a joy!

Bill Cunningham New York is now screening in UK cinemas and is available on DVD.  Watch the trailer:

It's off to Brooklyn

It's off! To Brooklyn! My submission for The Sketchbook Project. I suffered from the 'blank canvas syndrome' for a long time, but when I had finally decided what to do with my theme ("the grey side of life") I did enjoy it a lot, experimenting with different techniques and just making silly portraits. Instead of using the ultrathin paper of the sketchbook I used paper made from recycled elephant poo (!!), which I then hand bound together using a saddle stitch. I'm not super pleased with it and next year I'm going to do everything differently  (of course :-), but it definitely got the creative juices flowing. And I guess that's what it's all about. Here are some sneak peeks..

The sketchbooks will go on an exhibition tour in April, starting in New York. Then my sketchbook will travel, along with a staggering 5000 other books, to Chicago, Portland OR, Vancouver, LA, San Fransisco, Boston, Portland ME, Toronto, Philly, Atlanta, Austin, Melbourne and last stop London.

The Bill Cosby Sweater legacy

Last Saturday I went to a dinner party for a friend's birthday. The fact that he was the birthday boy wasn't the only thing that made him the focal point of the evening, his knitted cardigan made him the centre of attention as well! Opinions varied on his - what I would classify as a - Cosby sweater.

It's pretty amazing what an enormous influence Bill Cosby's sweaters have had; I mean, there's a whole type of garment named after it. And they still prove to be a source of inspiration to artists and designers today, even after a 30 odd years. Now I only recently found out that the guy who designed the sweaters is Dutch! His name is Koos van den Akker and he left fashionless Holland for New York in the early sixties. Vice interviewed him recently in his NY studio (watch it here - highly recommended!). Koos hits the nail on the head when he looks at the sweaters and says, with a very cute Dutch accent: 

"This is a very thin line between absolutely awful and something of genius. Somebody can look at this and say 'What the fuck is this? This is the most horrible thing I've ever seen' and you know, somebody else says.. 'it's inspiration'".

  

Inspired by this (pizza??) sweater, pictured above, Andrew Salomone created this jumper on a HACKED electronic knitting machine from the 1980s (God, I wish I was so nerdy as to be able to hack a knitting machine!! Watch the tutorial here on the Craft site). Bill on the sweater is wearing the sweater, so there's a nice Droste-effect!

 

Another Cosby sweater inspired project is The Cosby Sweater Project. Kelly Tucker makes drawings of patterns of all the knits worn on the show. Maybe it was the outrageous 80s, but everybody in the Cosby show seemed to wearing awesome sweaters!

Even musicians have been inspired by the sweater: a quick research shows the garment gets a mention in songs by Ghostface Killah, MF Doom and Yelawolf. In 2008 Oh Snap!! released The Cosby Sweater EP. This remix by Hostage is a proper banger, with a nice Miami Bass-y intro. "... the elbow's leather and there's pink and green and o and blue..." hahaha.

Oh Snap! - Bill Cosby Sweater (Hostage Remix). Download it here.

For the Graca Da Silva's

Two of my good friends are moving to Bali next week (guess what my next holiday destination is going to be!) and we had a farewell party in their honor last Friday *snif*. The couple had asked me to supply them with some music for the night, which I happily did. She is Indonesian, he is half English/half Portuguese and they both have traveled the world extensively, which is reflected in their musical tastes.

Of course I played Dara Paspita for her (read about this Indonesian girl group here), and for him I selected some oldskool hip hop (as requested):

 

Eric B. and Rakim - I Know You Got Soul. MC/DJ combo hailing from Long Island, New York. Download it here.

and some contemporary dance music from Senegal:

 

Alif (Liberate Attack of the Feminist Infantry) - Douta Mbaye. All female hip hop group from Dakar. Download it here. Buy it from out|here Records.

and something Portuguese:

 

Batida - Yumbala. Lisbon's DJ Mpula mixes "the high speed rhythms of kuduro with sweet melodic guitar samples of '60s Angolan semba music" with some fine Angolan MCs on top. Download it here. Buy it from Ghetto Bassquake.

(and Survivor's Eye of the Tiger so there could be a push up contest, which for some strange reason has become a tradition at our parties...)

Gems from the East and the West

I'm a big fan of girl groups; they make up a substantial amount of my record collection. So you might imagine the thrill when I came across the cd Let's A Go-Go! Singapore and Southeast Asian Pop Scene 1964-69 at Earwax in Brooklyn. Which is a nice little store by the way. They don't have a huge selection, but what they have is all good (lots of reissues that are dirt cheap). The 31 tracks on the cd feature not only girl groups, but also boy bands and solo female vocalists. It's a rather nice compilation of pop songs, rock 'n roll, beat, garage and surf in several languages. These are two of my favorite songs:

Betty Chung - Bang Bang (yes that's a Nancy Sinatra cover). Download it here.

I couldn't find out more about Betty Chung than she was (is??) Chinese and also an actress and played in a Bruce Lee movie.

Dara Puspita - A Go-Go. Download it here.

Dara Puspita were one of the more successful girl groups in Indonesia in the 1960s. What made them really stand out at that time was that they played all their music themselves. Their live shows are supposed to be really wild and quite a sensation! And all this in an oppressive regime, where you could be jailed for playing rock 'n roll. There is a greatest hits album out on the Sublime Frequencies label, which I desperately want to get a hold of.

I also bought the double LP West Indies Funk 2. I have no means of letting you hear anything off this record, but just to give you a taste here's a track of volume 3: a steel drum version of Hold On I'm Coming!! Also highly on my wish list as you will understand.

A blank canvas

It's not the first time I'm staring at a blank canvas. It's always a bit intimidating. Especially when you want it to be really good. But then again, the idea is to use this blog more like a sketchbook. To collect images and stories and music that I like, and to to show some stuff that doesn't really fit on my website. Like work in progress and sketches. So why not start by putting up some of the sketches I did in my inimini sketchbook while I was in New York last month. Best holiday I had in a long time: visiting family (my 93-year-old grandmother!), camping next to a remote ocean beach and the big city ♥

∧ On the plane I watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (and a sappy film about that surfer girl whose arm got bitten off by a shark).

∧ On day two my glow-in-the-dark legs were already covered with mosquito bites.

∧ My uncle George hosts poetry readings at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association on Long Island. We came along one evening and listened to a.o. Geraldine Green and M.L. Liebler.

∧ We went on a little road trip in grandma's car to Montauk, the most eastern tip of Long Island. There were some impressive waves thanks to hurricane Irene. Too impressive for me to go in, but it was a lot of fun watching the more experienced surfers!

∧ We also went camping on beautiful Fire Island. We were greeted by billions of mosquitoes (it was right after the hurricane, so it was hot and humid = ideal mosquito conditions). We needed to upgrade our repellent as soon as was possible!!

∧ Meanwhile other creatures were preying on our food...

We spent the last few days in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn. Very interesting neighborhood!

∧ And some interesting looks there... ∨

∧ We got to see some live music there (please note I was slightly intoxicated when drawing this. Plus it was dark).

∧ On our last day it rained. The whole day. Relentlessly. Everything seemed to fail: the Moma was closed, the American Folk Art museum had moved and once arrived there it turned out its collection was reduced to just a few quilts. We went to the Natural History Museum, which was fun but by this point my feet were so wet because I was wearing my suede flats. We fled into a movie theater were we ended up at a screening of a remake of Strawdogs. There was a Q&A afterwards with the director who came up with a lot of BS to defend this pointless remake. Apparently one of the actors also starred in True Blood and there was a hardcore fan there. She liked the movie. As I said, everything failed that day, even my drawing skills...