fashion fresh from china.

let's all take a moment to appreciate the following images.






images courtesy of the Huffington Post. more can be seen here.

curvy.

Italian Vogue has a new feature on its website called Vogue Curvy. its goal is to showcase plus sized models and famous ladies who have even more famous lady parts. i like this in theory because, frankly, women should look like women, not little boys like so many models these days. but why does there need to be a special section put aside to accommodate all the lovely curvy women out there? i suppose the same point could be made about them having a section called Vogue Black as well (it's all rather crazy, isn't it?). that's the nature of the industry i guess. sad, but better that there be a section devoted to curvy than there be no curvy at all.

matzoh how to.

in honor of Passover beginning tonight, check out this helpful video about how to best break your unleavened bread:

arrested development, in production.

according to IMDB, there's an Arrested Development movie in production. it's apparently scheduled for 2011.

i'm skeptical. they've been talking about making a movie since the show was cancelled in 2006. any more information about the possibility of this happening would be very much appreciated.

until then you can watch episodes on Hulu, and catch it in repeats on IFC.

food party.

i just discovered that a show called Food Party exists of IFC. it's insane!

check out this clip and see for yourself:



i have always had a soft spot for anthropomorphic food.

babies can rule with iron fists.

Nina Maria Kleivan dressed her baby up like famous dictators and then photographed the results. admittedly, this can at first seem shocking and wrong. but i think on closer inspection that she has a point. Hitler was a baby once too. who knows who all the newborn children of the world will grow up to become? they're all just babies in the beginning.

you can read an interview with Kleivan here, as well as see a slide show of her infamous photos.

rebecca bird.

i love this woman's work. it's a beautiful contrast between the "ugly" subject matter and the dreamy watercolor. see more here!

whitney biennial 2010.

this past week i made it down to nyc in part to check out the whitney biennial. i had heard quite a bit about it, mostly because of how many women were included this year.

my impression of the show had very little to do with the amount of women (although it is exciting to see so many ladies represented), but more to do with the amount of video. i have nothing against video art, but i find it rather exhausting. and when you have almost an entire floor of video installations in the whitney it gets a little overwhelming. i felt that the amount of videos detracted from the overall show. too many videos start to take away from each other. chances are most people are skipping most of those dark rooms in favor of something they can look at in their own time (the light helps too).

my favorites from the show are as follows:

James Casebere, whose large scale photos of handcrafted communities were at once beautiful, and a reminder of things that are wrong with our society (overdevelopment, foreclosures, gentrification, etc). bonus points for the subject matter being based in Dutchess County, NY.

i also loved Tam Tran's photographs of her precocious nephew. the composition paired with subject matter was spot on, and she took something that could be very boring to photograph and made it interesting.

Nina Berman's documentation of a severely disfigured veteran made me extremely uncomfortable and for that i commend her. her shots feel voyeuristic because they are so personal. the heartache that is felt by the two people she photographed is startlingly clear. the portrait studio wedding picture is especially moving.


my last pick for best in show is Hannah Greely. her recreation of a typical dive bar booth is comforting in its familiarity and simultaneously confusing because of its intentionally fabricated nature. details look right from far away, but up close things seem slightly amiss. the handcrafted pay phone attached to the back of the bar is especially good.

so most of my favorites were photographers, and i might be a bit biased in choosing them as the standouts, but that's what blogging is all about after all.

now here are some of the artists i was least impressed with:
Maureen Gallace
Jesse Aron Green
Rashaad Newsome
Charles Ray


i think the biennial is also worth a look, but overall i wasn't that impressed this year. maybe next year they can have both women and excitement.

tim burton and skin fruit

this past week i made it into nyc to see a few museum exhibitions. aside from the whitney biennial, which i'll get to later, i visited moma and the new museum.

it's been a little while since the tim burton retrospective went up at moma, and i'm glad i held off on seeing it. if the crowds last wednesday were any indication, it must have been an absolute madhouse when it was brand new. i'm not really the biggest tim burton fan to begin with, but i wasn't all that impressed with the show. for me it was just a bit too crowded. it seemed like they went out of their way to fill all the space available to them. all that did was to make the whole scene overwhelming. it would have made more of an impact to include less and let each piece have its own space.

moma also had marina abromovic performing "the artist is present." i'm also not a huge fan of performance art in general, but abromovic is pretty impressive. some of the things she puts herself though in the name of her art are very intense and to be admired. this piece is no exception.

before this trip i had never been to the new museum. my first impression is that i really like their bathrooms and elevators (lime green!). the show they have up now, skin fruit, is curated by jeff koons. and as someone who aspires to be a curator one day, my sensibilities were offended. i think koons should stick to making art and let other people organize it. the show wasn't cohesive and it wasn't interesting. mostly it seemed like koons picked a bunch of pieces that he really liked for whatever reason and tried to throw in as much nudity and overt sexuality as possible. which isn't necessarily a bad thing- except that in this case it was. and there were a few pieces that i really loved (specifically the janine antoni piece, kara walker, tim noble and sue webster's black narcissus,
and a few others), but altogether it really didn't work for me.

so my recent art adventure was kind of a bust. but i did get some pants that fit and i finally got to eat shake shack. and yes, it is all its cracked up to be!

hot beef balls.

i generally don't like hot pockets. this commercial makes me sure that i don't.

whoopi goldberg has a problem

have you seen this? it is perhaps one of the best commercials i have ever seen. absurd advertising at its finest.



you can find individual commercials for each of whoopi's alternate personas on youtube as well.

what's going on here is uncomfortability.

successful seduction.

the Found Footage Festival is a treasure trove of amazing and odd video clips. it's like Found Magazine, but for video! incidentally, Found Magazine is pretty fantastic. also fantastic: their collection of found Polaroids.

anyway, here's a highly informative clip from FFF. with this information you will never fail at seducing anyone again.




i especially relate to the girl with the freckles. and, no, i don't want to talk about it.

academy award winning movie trailer

this is pretty great. as much as i like to think i'm insightful because i can usually guess who will win oscars, it really is fairly predictable. these guys have distilled the formula pretty perfectly in just under 4 minutes.

telephone

a while back i posted about lady gaga and beyonce's collaborations. well here is the visual product of one of those collaborations:



CRAZY.

and i generally hate gratuitous product placement, but in the case of Polaroid i have to let it slide.

"and as they were out was when the calamity went down. . ."

watching court room proceedings on television can really give you a lot to think about. take the following case for example. what does the absurdity of their situation say about our culture at large?



it's pretty funny stuff.

**be sure to check out the affiliated music projects as well. Narwhalz is pretty terrible, but worth listening to for a second because of how mind blowingly bad it is.

Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой

i'm about to blow your mind.






and here's this for good measure:

budweiser golden wheat

i just saw this commercial on tv and decided it was just weird enough that i needed to share it.



i don't know about you, but i don't like thinking about my beer macking on wheat, or anything else for that matter.

82oscars.

thankfully, Avatar was mostly shut out on last night's oscars (except for visual effects categories, of course). this means that i will be able to continue my yearly tradition of watching the telecast and shouting my predictions at the screen as the nominees are announced.

last night's show was actually pretty good. good for you, kathryn bigelow! NPH's musical number was pretty great and steve martin and alec baldwin's hosting was funny and generally unobtrusive. and i especially liked tina fey and robert downey jr. presenting best original screenplay. funny stuff! and kathy ireland hosting the red carpet preshow was a glorious mess. however, the ass kissing for best actor/actress segment is brutal. they need to stop that. it's awkward and boring as hell.

now here are my picks for best and worst dressed!
BEST:


WORST:

eureka!

why is it so hard to curate your own artwork?

i am currently preparing to exhibit some of my photography at a local gallery, and i have complete control over what i choose to show and how i choose to show it. it's an amazing opportunity. but through my brainstorming i realized that it is not going to be as easy as i thought it would be. the familiarity i have with my work is great in terms of being able to easily recall everything that i have at my disposal. however, because it's all so personal i'm having trouble seeing the forest for the trees, so to speak. after much deliberation i think i may have finally had an ah-ha moment. but who knows if tonight's eureka will mean anything tomorrow.

burberry.

i've never been all that into Burberry. i always found it a bit stifled and boring. so much khaki and so many trench coats. well this season, despite still have quite a lot of khaki and trench coats, i think Burberry's collection is pretty fantastic.

new york magazine has a good slideshow of the looks, which is worth checking out despite the near constant advertising interruptions.

the whole collection seems basically very wearable. there might have been one too many of the gauzy, bandage style wrap skirts and dresses, but overall i really liked their look. plus, it's nice that this fashion seems at least moderately accessible (even if still not affordable).

and emma watson makes a pretty good spokesmodel. she's got the whole young, british thing going for her. and while Burberry has always been quintessentially british, until recently they didn't come across as very young.

for some background on Burberry fashion director Christopher Bailey check out this article from last fall.

stinky. stinky. stinky.

recently, Hefty brand garbage bags has been pushing their "odor block" technology. to raise awareness for their product they created this gem of a commercial:



i hate this commercial. here's why:

i know that advertising is supposed to manipulate us. we're supposed to see a commercial or a billboard or a print ad and be swayed to want to partake in whatever that ad happens to be selling. in this case though, the ad is completely misleading in the way it is presenting itself. it's not really selling you a garbage bag so much as it's selling you on the acceptability and normality of an unsustainable way of life. you are supposed to be convinced that yes, your garbage is stinky, and yes, wouldn't it be wonderful if it wasn't? however, most of the "stinky" things they show being swallowed by the almighty Hefty bag shouldn't be thrown into the garbage at all. most of what they are showing is either compostable or recyclable. if these people with the stinky garbage just disposed of their waste responsibly they wouldn't need fancy odor-blocking trash bags.

how about this: instead of rethinking our trash bags, let's rethink our trash.

“Ballets Russes, Italian Style — Coming Soon.”

i know, i know. enough with lady gaga. but i do love her and this clip has so many fantastic things happening in under 3 minutes.

check it.

konichiwa bitches.

although this song is several years old now, this video is still one of my all time favorites.

check it out, it's pretty great: