City of Angels

I finally got around to completing the novel Lolita some time last month, coursing through the pages in the afternoons with a flurried, barely contained sense of excitement, intervals of held breaths; indulging in extravagant pauses to let myself immortalize the porcelain-delicate portraiture of nymphage, the demonic, rich and sweet description of Humbert's landscape of erotica, and sad American scenery; eventually emerging from the experience utterly moved and crushed. There were shards of kaleidoscopes between the layers of words and meaning, smithereens of Humbert's visions, the sharp tang of his desire. But throughout I couldn't help but be disappointed at how Lo was simply out of my reach. Her reflection seemed only perceptible through the gleam and curvature of the bell-jar of Humbert's narrative -and the careless public eye seems only to subsist on the occasional lucid glimpses of a thigh, an arm or lower-lip. This of course did not dent the fable one bit -in fact the bubble of hyper-reality through which we came to be acquainted with Lolita, part Humbertian mythology, part plain Dolores- was what made it, as Vanity Fair had put it, "the only convincing love story of our century"; nevertheless it got into the way of my internalizing of characters, how I'd always try to hunt for an opening, like a tree hollow, and climb into them.

But a review of Lolita is not the focus of this post today; much had been said about it, and much more will be said in the future, and for now I'm satisfied with the small clipping of dialogue I had just inserted into the literary discourse in the blogosphere. There is something I wish to share about my analysis of Lo though, the singular flecks of color that radiate hotly beneath the foam of Humbertian tale-spinning, the details that give you an idea of who plain Dolores, Dolores in slacks, is, the life she may have led if she had never stumbled into the periphery of her European stepfather. What I feared most was not that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood -of the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead. And all the while it was Lo with the lurid movie magazines, the star-studded tennis racket, the grit of her lipstick, her quiet navigation towards the valley of stars. It was this thread of personage that delighted me, the clench of teeth as I scoured underneath the lines for signs of its endurance, and the possibilities. 

The process of uncovering a mythology is almost a spiritual experience -it falls short of the metaphysical only because of its intrinsic aesthetic nature. Aesthetic, because it combines theory, which is inherently romantic, with harmony of the senses, and this synchronicity helps to create what Leo Tolstoy calls the complete illusion of beauty. It is the urban legend that lures me at the moment; if there is to be a single tableau, sculpture, installation that is most authentic to humanity I would attribute it to be the urban landscape -for it is arguably the only true instance of collaborative, and progressive creation of our kind, for its physical shell mimics the mortal frame, and what informs its clockwork is both the subconsciousness of the individual and the consciousness of society- and underlying all this is our most frank discourse with geography yet, making the city a living archive of this precarious dialogue. Though I did not know it at that point, the patchwork of Dolores' identity gave me a vantage point for exploring Los Angeles, and the supernova of memories and dreams that constitute its Milky Way, stellar explosions that have continually defined and re-invented its myths.

The preliminary sketch provided by Lolita saw a build up in conceptualization when I read Pink Smog: Becoming Weetzie Bat, by Francesca Lia Block. From the eyes of 13-year old Weetzie, we see plastic, visual snippets of 1980s Los Angeles -dives into the Sunset Strip, a bird's eye view from the Hollywood sign, a visit to Marilyn Monroe's resting place. But it was the less symbolic stopovers to which I had latched onto with a supernatural nostalgia. I had this city and I decided that I had better fall in love with her again because she wasn't going anywhere and neither was I. The black pavement, dark to hide the dirt, sparkled with diamond chips in the burning sun. Poisonous but gorgeous flowers bloomed in white, coral, magenta, and red. The sunsets in L.A. were pink with smog. At night the lethal freeways became the Milky Way. I adored how the descriptions of Los Angeles were suffused with a kind of seductive poison on the inside, and whitewashed with a Jetsons' style aesthetic on the outside. He nodded and moved closer. He smelled like sand and tar and wind, gasoline and sawdust and oranges. He smelled like Los Angeles. 

Decadence

As much as it had been ignored at the box office during the time of its release, I think one of the most powerful soliloquies amongst all the period movies I have been climbing into in the past few weeks was delivered in Foxes (1980). Powerful, because I think no script had ever been able to provide such succinct, lucid and spot-on commentary on the big and usually nebulous and elusive ideas that lurk behind time periods, in this case the late 1970s. In a remote corner of Los Angeles, 15-year old Jeanie (portrayed by Jodie Foster) tells Brad (portrayed by Scott Baio) about how the people of her generation had lost touch with the notion of pain by dismissing it as an illusion. "Like it isn't even real" -these words were a mirror to the society I saw through the lens of the film, where family units disintegrated due to failed parenthood, parents who couldn't escape their internal labyrinths of pain, where youth had only the pedestal of vice to kneel at, and everyone's existence ebbed away in the numbing soundscape of rock and roll. The danger of anesthesia was encapsulated in the climax of the movie, where Annie (played by Cherie Currie) crashed headlong into her own death after letting drugs take over the helm of her life for too long a time. Her death shook her friends' world up a little, and was perhaps the driving force behind their acting upon the pain radiating underneath the wounds inflicted on their young lives -but even at the end of the film I still sensed the dust of illusion, dust which might have obliterated those wounds from sight and from sensation if no one had interrupted their descent. 

For a long time now I have found myself revisiting vintage America -exploring the various ideals and philosophies that underlay certain time periods, as well as the glorious and decaying aesthetic empires that these past eras have left behind for the folks of the 21st century. The more prominent of these musings, which will be featured further down in this post, included The Great American Road Trip, or it seemed so, which took Route 66 by storm; old Las Vegas, with its delightful crass and neon haven; obsolete boomtowns, subjects of urban decay theory, also of a certain Bob Dylan song. Part of the reason for my fascination with the above memorabilia stems from how they form a part of that delicate history that existed just before the onset of the digital and globalized age. Delicate for two reasons: if everything everybody is saying about how digital archives will soon see the nature of history altered and fade nostalgia to an irrelevant blur is true, that period of history will be the last time humanity can participate in a single consciousness as a collective whole to create ideals, aesthetics, whatever. At the same time this period of history is special because it stands just behind the present day and age, and hence possesses a form of invincibility, because our inability to consume it whole has in turn spawned a diverse array of culture cults (which I hope everybody finds something worth celebrating in itself!). If you've stuck with me for this long, I hope you'd enjoy cruising through the New World as much as I did, and that my 21st century voice would find a balance between romanticization, satire, and pure enjoyment of great ages past.

1. The Great American Road Trip

Credits of images go to http://www.pbase.com/ronhrl and http://www.stuckincustoms.com/

In their historical context, the growth of what we have come to identify as the staple accessories of the American road trip -road-side establishments of motels, gas stations, 24-hour diners and bars- was in fact a not-so-extraordinary, complementary developmental feature of the advent of the automobile and the highway. As ownership of automobiles became more widespread and the density of transportation networks increased, these establishments eventually came to colonize the road side in order to take advantage of the economic opportunities the popularization of road trips had brought about. But it seems as though this supposed secondary landscape to the road trip had been rendered into the big picture -and most of the time they stand in the foreground of Americana portraits. After all it is them which form the bulk of what we term "Americana kitsch". The immense flow of traffic that was the source of life of the American road trip -for can we imagine how many individual stories and exchanges were transpired along the way?- is not so often the memento that we hold close to our hearts than the abandoned road-side diner or discolored motel sign. The enduring backdrop -the diner menu which stayed original throughout the years, the unfaltering neon lights and the barmen and receptionists whom have seen it all- against which some of the most dazzling of automobile history unfolded and continues to unfold seems to me to have a firmer presence in both the individual and public imagination. 

2. Vegas

Images the courtesy of inoldlasvegas.com

Images the courtesy of www.neonmuseum.org

If aesthetic judgement carried equal weight as to that of its moral counterpart, I would think it may be possible to exempt Las Vegas from condemnation for its celebration of vice based on the grounds of aesthetic redemption. Or perhaps its graphic neon playground that has become the face of vice itself is the ultimate crime the city has committed. The title of today's post was inspired by a gallery that featured photography of what the Neon Museum of Las Vegas terms its Neon Boneyard -basically a wasteland for the now dysfunctional neon signs that once illuminated the vulgar glory of the city. The immortality of mirages and a symbolic neon grave -you can always count on the city of vice for a fancy visual style.

3. North Country Blues

Images the courtesy of www.urbanghostsmedia.com

North Country Blues, Bob Dylan

Come gather 'round friends
And I'll tell you a tale
Of when the red iron pits ran empty
But the cardboard filled windows
And old men on the benches
Tell you now that the whole town is empty.

In the north end of town
My own children are grown
But I was raised on the other
In the wee hours of youth
May mother took sick
And I was brought up by my brother.

The iron ore it poured
As the years passed the door
The drag lines an' the shovels they was a-hummin'
'Til one day my brother
Failed to come home
The same as my father before him.

Well a long winter's wait
From the window I watched
My friends they couldn't have been kinder
And my schooling was cut
As I quit in the spring
To marry John Thomas, a miner.

Oh the years passed again
And the givin' was good
With the lunch bucket filled every season
What with three babies born
The work was cut down
To a half a day's shift with no reason.
Then the shaft was soon shut
And more work was cut
And the fire in the air, it felt frozen

Singling out Chloride, a ghost town found in Arizona, presents as skewed a perception as choosing Shanghai or Beijing to represent the quintessential Chinese city. The repercussions of the gold and silver rushes that ushered waves of frenzy into the American continent run far deeper and more insidiously than what we are led to perceive and believe -and folk singer Bob Dylan reminds us of the very real suffering experienced by victims of short-sighted developmental schemes. Though urban decay and illusion exist side-by-side on a fine line, I still think it's fair to let the fable of gold rushes live on, and to not underestimate the value art, such as the 'Chloride Murals' (depicted above, the work of hippie artist Roy Purcell) can bring to boomtowns -towns which have only have a physical shell, and a localized existence that is more transient than life is itself. 

Violence in creativity

I'd have to apologize for my temporary death online. I've whizzed back and forth the Asian continent in the last 6 days for one of the most intense competition experiences I've ever had, only to bumble into a new school term and looming examinations and confront the icy realism of having to deal with matters of practical consequences alongside matters-in-the-cloud, and a generally very lousy aesthetic environment with worldly negativity floating around like it's nobody's business. And of course I turn to the alternate continuum with alternate people and an alternate energy balance that is the Internet, and for now I've decided that the best way to combat the dreary, almost vulgar lull of it all is to explore the concept of violence in creativity, through a medium that is very close to my heart: fashion. And of course this form of ammunition is not sustainable, because that is the nature of violence, and society is constructed around gravitational spheres such that even the strongest missiles will bend under sheer pressure when met with them. 


I guess I would start with the anti-artist of today's theme. 

And of course there isn't a need to put a face to the name, because, he is after all the wizard, fiction and omnipresence of the fashion industry. What I'd like to bring into focus today is that it is not very difficult to find out what lurks beneath the man himself, the man as an artist, the man's creative identity -because like all brands he unwittingly conforms to certain standards, and as a result his creations lack the luster of violence which characterizes the core and spirit of creation. Where Pablo P. was able to actualize his inner visions with a precision of a shotgun and a provocation that hinged upon the intensity of sexual energy, Karl's rifle, though loaded, remains silent. 

To illustrate my point I have chosen to include a range of sketches that Karl did up in a collaboration with Hogan. Not my favorite of his sketches, but I wanted to see a cohesive collection of sketches -no matter that the strand of cohesion was not strung through his own artistic outlook but was instead secondary to it, the consciousness and ugly awareness that the designs were slated for eventual marketing and sales with another brand with its own set of rules on top of everything. 

Images the courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

The above serves as visual evidence of how Karl's creative process is like an almost jarring composition of frozen music. The dominant melody is one which rings with an almost eerie note of finality -yet staccatos of thought and consideration, the more abstract and less certain bits of an artist's creative process, puncture the piece at odd intervals, the messy script amongst the coordinated color scheme and shades of shadow and background meant to complete. The music which trickles out of the sketches appears almost engineered, as if the designer himself had stopped short right before bursting into a passion of violent improvisation, depriving the piece of its defining characteristics and hence its name. In the same vein, but in a significantly more eloquent and well-written piece by (favorite) fashion journalist Robin Givhan:

For a historian who takes the long view of fashion, Patricia Mears, deputy director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, has little interest in Lagerfeld’s work—even though the Couture Council, which financially supports the museum, honored him in 2010. “It’s not really fashion forward. It’s very derivative. It’s a mishmash of trends ... He draws what he thinks is interesting. There’so no continuum. It can be kind of scattershot,” she says.

The lack of the spirit of a continuum perhaps best sums up why there is a stark void of violence in Karl's work, and the man himself, or at least the public projection and perception of him. Then again, there may not even be a line between those two. Head to the above article to read Givhan's viewpoint, and decide for yourself.


On to the artists whose creations I feel embody the brave, violent soul of creation. 

Meadham Kirchhoff 

Images the courtesy of style.com

This collection was presented with the violent flourish that usually accompanies works of the theatrical tradition. Works of theatre are one of the few that champion the delicate balance between the immediacy of artistic creation and experience -the splinter or creative fraction of a second during which the artist gains the impetus for creation and formulates his artistic vision, as well as the instantaneous and often subconscious response ignited within an audience when introduced to a piece of art- and the maintenance of a continuum of creation, the anchoring of a piece of art, the quality that gave birth to timelessness and variety in interpretation. The collection did just that -as the warrior princesses storm down the runway, the various visual motifs and individuality of the characters seem to shift continuously, bristling with a life fueled by both the artist's and the audience's imagination. 

Vivienne Westwood

Images the courtesy of style.com

While the continuum -the source of violence, originality and truth- of Kirchhoff's collection was the evolution of the unscripted play enacted on the stage of their inner theatres, the quality of it all being that of an unpolished diamond, Westwood managed to retain this excruciating violence in the impeccable, Japanese culture and Baroque era inspired faces of her jewels, and if we were to connect her collection to the aesthetic vibes of a certain physical space it would be that of a performance museum.

Female protagonists

I figure I should set the pen in motion again, this time not only just to avert a fungi attack on my mental faculties, but also an internal pandemic of unhealthy perfectionism. In other words, I have to loosen the braid of the rope which governs the creation of each blog post (coming up with this statement alone had cost me a span of five minutes, during which I held an internal debate, oscillating between decisions to use a pot of stew or a rope as a metaphor for what I wish to express. I decided on the latter) in order for myself to remain accountable to this blog, and the beings on Earth and galaxies beyond which may be interested in it. And in simpler, more unrefined terms yet, I have to stop being a chicken when it comes to creation, both for myself and for other people -and I'm only working in prose now, no visuals. So it's supposed to be a breeze, so I'm supposed to be able to make peace with the plain text I'm offering to you. Which today would begin with...

The Life and Times of Female Protagonists in Film and Literature

Or, the lace-shrouded, bonbon-wrapped interactions they have had with the author-in-question, including conversations held over cold English tea and Madeleines, in between recitations of French poetry and Valentine's Day cards, garlanding of flowers and making sculptures of scented wax; how she identifies and empathizes with them, marvels at the antics of teenage girlhood in different eras and places all around the globe, and muses about her own reactions had she been clothed in corsets and late Victorian-era dress and sent to a certain mystical geographical landmark or had she a wealthy benefactress to fund her education and enrich her travel experiences, like some of the characters have. 

1. Isabel Archer, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

She will have no pictorial representation, because not a single one (covers of various editions of the novel, portrayals in movies, interpretations done up by artists scattered around the Internet) to be found fulfills my vision of her; and if I can venture further to make the selfish assertion, does sufficient justice to her portraiture. It is a selfish declaration, one that is tipped with the poison of literary hypocrisy as deadly as belladonna, because I'm giving myself a deliberate break from my personal policy, and probably also the policy held by most if not all the people who have literary indulgences, which holds that there is no set interpretation of any piece of art, because the character-in-question stares out from the novel at me with a conviction and definite quality that can only be conveyed through ones reflection in the surface of a lake, or a piece of self-portraiture, or one done by someone who loves you, who seeks to comprehend you. I have overstepped my authority as a reader, because not only have I kidnapped the character-in-question on the pretext of a laughably commonplace occurrence of having established an immediate connection with her upon our acquaintance, I am also attempting to dictate other readers' response towards her -a crime as a literary student, a double penalty as one who respects, at the utmost, the liberty of an artist. 

In any case, Henry James, in his characteristic florid writing style which spares no detail and deals with things from under wraps, rolled out each shade and gradient of color of Isabel's character with majesty. (He writes of the highly 'original' beauty who, at the core of her remarkable worldview, values her independence over everything else, "She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world.") But this post isn't a review of James' writing style, and I guess I should try and provide a decoding of why the bells of resonation were struck so audibly when I met Isabel. Perhaps to tell you that both her overt actions and internal landscape, others outward perception and inward sentiment towards her completely correspond with that of my own is my best explanation. But because one doesn't usually claim a "beautiful, intelligent and independent" (as quoted from the blurb) female protagonist to be ones alter ego (and because I know for a fact that I fall short of Isabel of her many traits, most notably her sharpness when interacting with others), I only have the capacity to assert that her "lava of existence" (refer to my first post) is not dissimilar to my own. 

For that reason, she remains faceless in this blog post, only unveiling herself to me and her creator, Henry James.

The following characters do have faces though:

2. Victoria Winters (played by Bella Heathcote♥) and Carolyn Stoddard (played by Chloe Moretz♥), Dark Shadows by Tim Burton

Film stills

My attraction to Victoria Winters began the very instant she was introduced in the film; the alacrity and quiet smile with which she pronounced her newly assembled name, the flame of mystery she spoked in the hippie van from which she hitched a ride and her trek towards the monumental dwelling of the Collins in her neat and quaint uniform rustling vaguely of the 70's. Her slightly airy, ethereal quality was rekindled and intensified at certain points of the film -where we witness her interactions with the ghost of Josette du Pres, for instance -the context of her very beginning was also reminiscent of another proclaimed novel of Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, which too speaks of a governess, except that Winters was better able to accommodate the vast, ornamented interior of the Gothic architectural fixture she was situated in, as compared to the governess in Henry James' tale who internalized her bewilderingly romantic situation and haunting beauty of her surroundings and companions to the point where her sanity was threatened. 

I think Carolyn is really a more intense version of anyone who is thick in the teenage girlhood experience, in the sense she is so brutally honest about it -and she is probably also an encapsulation of all the brooding and angst that bleeds out of our hearts during this phase. I mean, how many of us have not built a fortress out of our room in defense of everything else that lies outside, drenched it with references to popular culture, and danced to ourselves against a backdrop of strange, hypnotic music blaring out of a gramophone? But what gives her poignant Riot Girl character an individualized edge is the juxtaposition of her external landscape with her internal. The enemy she is pitted against is of a literally much more daunting scale than compared to ours -the four walls keeping her from eloping to New York and with Alice Cooper are those belonging to the Gothic tradition, her room is her defense mechanism against and escapade from a surrounding steeped in excessive aesthetics and tradition but one which is fertile ground for romantic adventures. Then again, this would all feel very familiar to a teenager trapped in suburbia -it shows that the rebellion unique to teenage girlhood can resist even Goth architecture, and that the werewolf Carolyn turns out to be lives within all of us.

3. Miranda St Clare (played by Anne Louise Lambert), Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir

Film still

"I know that Miranda is a Botticelli angel." 

How else can one respond to a film which revolves around a geographical presence symbolizing the epitome of Nature's mystery -its elixir of life, with a flock of girls in their budding teenage years donned in the delicate fabric and elaborate silhouettes of late Victorian-era dress under the guardianship of an isolated educational institution as its main players, and a yet stronger soundscape simmering with the excitement of a St. Valentine's celebration, sexual repression and flute-playing, other than to be shaken thoroughly to ones hearts core at the end of it, trembling with the terrifying beauty of it all? Relenting myself to the annoying tendency of a 21st century viewer to re-imagine the movie in the light of contemporary times, I would have liked the same Victorian dresses -corsets intact, but this time knee-length. But in the modern Digital and Information Age, I think it would be close to impossible to re-enact the effect which the girls' disappearance gripped the local neighborhood and their school -the effect which was like the permeation of slow poison and the viscosity of honey, the suspense accentuated by the sensual pace with which everything unraveled. 

4. Cecelia Lisbon (played by Hanna R. Hall), The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola

Film Stills of Cecelia's room

Cecelia was the youngest of the Lisbon sisters -the sister who documented her life in a rainbow-emblazoned journal, the sister who an had exceptional Virgin Mary presence in her life, the sister who was the first to go.

We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Meditation

I don't have much to offer at the moment, so I figure I'd let you look at the clockworks of my brain, which means you would have to bear the self-centered and sentimental nature of the following. It still primarily deals with fashion. I hope it opens up an artery for an interesting conversation though; let me hear your thoughts. 


1. Phases I, II, III, IV and ongoing

I. I remember when I first started out I wanted all the visuals. I wanted fashion as architecture on a monumental scale. I had a very fierce and strict onus for the designers who rolled their collections out on style.com. They had to shock and please, thrill and delight and overstimulate my senses. I don't think I cared so much about structure in what inspired me as to momentum -I relished the heart-throbbing rhythm that is the core of fashion in its truest sense. This was probably something borne out of my entry into Tumblr, where stream of consciousness is key. The many things that appealed to my seven senses went straight from the point of excitement with my neurons to my online weblog. Amidst the color and lightning, it was the phase where I became sensitive to beauty. Sensitivity breeds adrenaline, dependency and tears -soon it was second nature for me to recognize beauty, to want to tear beauty out of all those editorials and faces and fabrics and preserve it in amber. It also awakened a need in me to have that beauty in my life, and it is here my first carefully-considered outfit makes its awkward debut (which I remember vividly and fondly): a pair of white shorts with a multicolored bohemia scarf used as a casual belt with a black long-sleeved DKNY top, a brown handbag borrowed from my mom and Converses which were 2 sizes too large for me, but I wore them anyway.

II. Some time around here, I became attuned to standards. The classical hierarchies and pecking orders of Tumblr blogs, editorials, brands, names. I unwittingly sifted out a number of inspirations which were my previous darlings from my Tumblr, my conversations with friends, and eventually my mind entirely -because they were "low" on the list. Suddenly that energy was channeled towards advancement -of what sort I have not figured out as of now. 

III. Henri Cartier Bresson: Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. Do not look at them.

Ira Glass: All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, 

is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. 

Spurring the realization of an artistic potential within oneself is usually good taste, that sensitivity to beauty. That is why you end up despising your own creative handiwork, because it does not live up to your good taste. It is at that peak of displeasure that I find myself attempting to consolidate personal style and seek taste in my relationship with fashion. It is difficult, this period of absolute uncertainty and ginger treading. 

IV.  There is now an alarming need to streamline my choices pertaining to style. It has to be perfectly in tune, pitch and all, with my personal philosophies, my mood, myself as a character in its entirety. I need to identify with myself, to fully comprehend and take charge of my interaction with fashion. I want to exert absolute control over it, for it to dance to my own unique tune and no other. I want to be as powerful as the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I want to manipulate fashion, to extort everything I want from fashion in the way I want it.

For this to happen, I need to come to terms with myself

Three o' clock blues

This post has nothing to do with B.B. King's song, except for the fact that the color spectrum for this post would be blue, because it is inspired by the blue sea and some other blueish antics. But before I jump headlong into the sapphire mess I'd like to share a revelation (or rather, a self-revelation, because more than half of humanity had probably already came to the conclusion during the Jurassic Ages, made a little post-it of it and moved on) that I have come to while reading the Americana series of Archie comics, "Best of the Sixties". As the blurb put it, the book encourages its readers to "encounter mod fashions fresh off the racks! Rev up your engines for drag racing fun and laugh again at the antics of America's #1 teenagers!"And I was doing just that, except that one disturbing thought remained plastered in my head- in fact its been circling it like a housefly for quite some time and wouldn't go away. I was bothered by the conflict between time -or compartments of time as we like to label them "past", "present", "future" or the decades and centuries, whichever- and fashion, as well as more broadly, personal identity or identity of teenagers as a whole. (Teenagers, because as much as I'd used to persevere in my belief of what one might call the "ageless youth" and the everlasting adaptability and l'overture d'esprit of the older generation, I've come to believe that teenagers have in fact been the ambassadors and societal catalysts for things good and bad throughout history, and are the cornerstones of the age they live in. Like in a certain Bob Dylan song.) 


I realize I did up a reflection on the fashion aspect a month back, and I wrote: 

Somehow in fashion there's an especial stigma that clings onto anything too old and too new; if one wishes to pay tribute to the past, present or future one must be aware of the inter-relationship it shares with the other two and just about everything in between. And anything done in a vacuum or out of a continuum is perceived to have been off-tangent, and one gets the sense that something is wrong. Also, there seems to be some inexplicable code of rule in fashion which says that the works and its medium of presentation has to reflect what goes on in contemporary times, whether the world at large or within oneself, an agent of modern times (Anna Wintour stressed in the David Letterman show that fashion does its part as a documentation and commentary of contemporary times, referring to how the runway was dominated by military themes when wars were raging on in the world.)

And because I am an avid Rookie fan (as you may have already begun to gather from how I always give it permission to sneak into my posts), and because the tone of Rookie echoes the past, and at the same time is tailored to teenage girls and speaks about seemingly universal qualities of girlhood experience, below that wonderful fuzzy feeling of being identified with and being inspired (which I think is a very important thing, and applaud Tavi and her gang for making so many beautiful connections to girls around the world), I begun to feel dismayed, just a little bit, at how there is a cap to the human condition and experience. No matter how history books have managed to characterize each era there is a cyclical pattern to all of them, even among the teen-led revolutions, which always seem to bring in gusts of freshness to whenever and wherever they were held. Suddenly that ... human nature? (O boring Shakespearean term)... which interprets humanity's experience seemed to me to have limited the color of the human experience, and led people like Aaron Rose to declare with fervor that:

The early 21st Century has not been allowed to develop a unique aesthetic because we are too busy bowing down to eras past. I think it’s time to kill our idols and change that.

And then I realized that I was being as stupid as the fashion critics, and fallen prey to that "stigma" I talked about in my earlier reflection -where every time-related reference had to be singled out and accounted for and not being 24/7 conscious of the interplay between the time compartments (for lack of a better term) was a terrible sin, an artistic crime. There may be the same intangible guidelines which are wired into humans' psyche and drive the course of history as we know it but art, that thing which somehow always leads back to a beauty of some sort, the additional layer of interpretation which so often yields so varied and diverse modes of expression, is what I should celebrate. My literature teacher told me that in every generation, the teenagers always assert that their's would be the first to remain as teenagers forever or the last to grow old -but they found different ways to express that. And that natural outgrowth of emotion we call art should be what I'm concerned about. 


But this isn't the point of my post today, and I feel the conclusion doesn't hold much potential for discussion and had probably been exhausted by many other confused teenagers long ago. So without further ado here's my list of blue inspirations: 


1. A shakespearean introduction

Artwork by John William Waterhouse

The excerpt is from Shakespeare's The Tempest- and this is probably one of the only instances where I have found his work interesting, and have bothered to poke and turn around in my head during dinner time. I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what kind of font would do justice to the piece of poetry, and I think I've made the picture look like it popped out of some illustrated series of Shakespearean tales for children, which I guess isn't exactly that bad but it didn't fulfill my aesthetic vision of it. 

2. Let them eat Chanel, let them swim in Chanel

Images courtesy of style.com, vogue.co.uk

For Spring/Summer 2012, Karl married the visual concepts of two universes -the ocean and the galaxy- and the union, I felt, achieved the same sort of effect as when one admires coral reefs, supernovas or the Milky Way, stuff about Nature which behold such an inconceivable degree of perfection that we feel the beauty has in some way been engineered. This is the man-made equivalent -and response- to those magic tricks of Nature; not because the collection aimed to emulate them, but because like les oeuvres de Nature it was a seamless outgrowth of something bigger than itself -what they like to call "the handiwork of God" in the case of Nature and in the case of Karl, the sea and outer space. It wasn't entirely "sleek chic", neither did it only carry the intricacy of the corals -one sees the creation of a parallel universe, with motifs such as the seashell and the pearl establishing another connection with the extraterrestrial on top of their relationship with the ocean.

Images courtesy of vogue.co.uk

A fellow tumblr-er expressed her thoughts on Chanel Cruise 2013 in a single statement, "victorian anime mermaid army". Add Marie Antoinette, Alice in Wonderland, Enid Blyton and Meadham Kirchhoff to the list and you'd more or less have my take on the collection. But it wasn't entirely Meadham Kirchhoff, where the pair had always given themselves free rein with their creations. Though there was a significant expansion to that sense of freedom and nowness the voice of the Original Coco still reverberated through -at times, such as the camellia jewelry corsages, the merger worked out; at others, especially edging towards the end of the show the mosaic between the Chanel tradition and the inspiration which is supposed to be rooted in the very present and in every next moment produces an odd chimera. As Edward Meadham and Benjamin Kichhoff say, "we do not to have a signature but rather a handwriting. We like to tell stories in different ways", the House of Chanel has to let loose of the signature that has kept her identity an immaculately-mowed lawn and allow the camellias to envelope it freely. As we have seen in so many of the collections Karl has presented to us, and especially so in Cruise 2013, the seeds are already there.


3. 'Washed up' exhibit at Selfridges

Image the courtesy of stopdropandvogue.tumblr

The exhibit "celebrates fashion's creative debt to the ocean". Though I'm always happy to see art being mobilized as instruments of commentary and introspection of very real and pressing issues, in this case the sustainability of the ocean, sometimes I find the combination between a primarily self-centered form of creation (art) and an objective cause inclusive of the whole of humanity ironic. And as Homer of the Simpsons said in Season nine of the series, "singing is the lowest form of communication" -I haven't quite figured out what it means, because I believe it refers to more than just, say, the lyrics/melody/visual elements glossing over the gravity of the subject matter. I think the interaction between the audience and a piece of art which carries a message of such a nature is much more complex, because I believe the medium itself is fundamentally rooted in the concept of beauty, and that in itself is a dangerous thing. 

4. Chalayan Fall/Winter 2012

Images the courtesy of style.com

Be not afeared; the isle is full of noises 

Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments 

Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, 

That if I then had waked after long sleep, 

Will make me sleep again; then in dreaming, 

The clouds methought would open, and show riches 

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again

Shakespeare, The Tempest

5. Sea of sargasso

Unknown source; a picture that reminds me of the Sea of Sargasso

Since we are on the topic of seas I figure I shall give everyone a little bit of background on the name of my blog (should have come earlier, sorry for being rude). I first came cross the Sea of Sargasso while reading 'Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them' by Donovan Hohn. A little bit of geography: the Sea of Sargasso is the only 'sea' on Earth that does not possess shores, being located in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean and 4 major current systems. Its romantic name, is derived from the seaweed Sargassum that floats en masse at the water's surface -in fact, because it is at the "eye" of all these current systems it is the calmest part of the ocean, and as a result the seaweed all end up being deposited here. 

Like all other kinds of natural landscapes with magical elements, in this case a fascinating ton of seaweed in the centre of a huge ocean, it has crept into popular culture and public imagination -depicted in literature and films as a place of mystery (the Bermudas are located on the western margin of the Sea of Sargasso, and they are another set of mysteries altogether). And I remember saying to myself "so Sargasso is where it all ends up" and it all made sense and seemed so terrifyingly beautiful to me at that time, that I made up my mind to name this blog after the sea. Like the Sargassum, this is where I hope to channel creative energy.

Bisous,

Rachel Wu