Lux Lotus

LL Top 10 04

I started Lux Lotus last spring (with this post) and intended it to be a microsite where I could post things that caught my eye and experiment with different kinds of writing as well as document my travels and adventures.

I've been rather bad about keeping up with that last bit: trips to Big Sur & The Monterey Peninsula, San Francisco, Martha's Vineyard, Connecticut, Boston, Ithaca, Washington DC, St. Michael's, various locations in France and Switzerland and more were scarcely mentioned. [One of my resolutions for next year is to start taking more photographs, posted here of course, and also to try my hand at some of the descriptive prose imagery Ruskin espoused. Recently read, and highly recommended: The Art of Travel by Alain Botton.]

Instead I've tried to focus on an evolving exploration of art and commerce, history, design, and culture, and to keep my core readership of friends and family up-to-date on the news in my life.

In the spirit of year-end reflection, here are a few of my favorites from the dusty old attic:
it's psychedelic, baby
he prefers organic tobacco
collecting desire
i'm no foodie, but
snapshot
outside looking in and outside looking in, continued
cruella deglitter
de stijl
pop, pow, now, pucci

The wonderful feedback and fabulous new people I've met as a result of this site have far surpassed my wildest expectations. Thank you for reading, and for all your lovely comments and letters. I have a few significant work matters to attend to in the next couple of days, but several new posts should be up over the holiday weekend. Happy New Year, and best wishes for joy and success in 2005!

One For The Style File

Last time I came to visit her, my mother gave me a first edition of Harper's Bazaar: 100 Years of the American Female: The Sumptuous, The Expensive, The Precious, The Moneyed, The Luxe, The Tasteful, The Opulent and The Amusing Woman From Bazaar, a suitably weighty tome created in the '60s for the magazine's centennial.

I'm sure I will come back to it again and again, as it includes selections of the best of the magazine's photography, literature, fashion, essays, interviews, observations and criticism collected over a century.

I couldn't haul it back to New York with me at the time, and so it was a thrill to come across it this morning as I was looking for something to read. My selection for contemplation today is from an essay entitled, "Individuality in Dress: The Secret of the Well-Dressed Woman," by Paul Poiret:

I cannot help feeling a vague contempt for those who ask at the beginning of the season, "What is to be the favorite color?" Choose the color that suits you, madame, and if some one tells you that red is to be worn, dare to wear violet and consider only what is suitable to you, because there is only one single rule for the well-dressed woman, and the old Romans expressed it in one word - decorum - which means, "that which is suitable." That which is suitable! ...

... Choose whatever is most in harmony for your character, for a dress can be the expression of a state of mind if you but try to make it. There are dresses that sing of joy of life, dresses that weep, dresses that threaten. There are gay dresses, mysterious dresses, pleasing dresses, and tearful dresses.

It's such a gloriously strident essay, and - even though he could never have predicted the rise of such fashionable disasters as Sex and the City and The Meatpacking District - Poiret's words ring just as true today.

Conversation Pieces, Indeed

Currently reading, recently received: Conversation Pieces, by Grant H. Kester.  Noted:

Some of the most innovative art of the past decade has been created far outside conventional galleries and museums. In a parking garage in Oakland, California; on a pleasure boat on the Lake of Zurich in Switzerland; at a public market in Chiang Mai, Thailand--artists operating at the intersection of art and cultural activism have been developing new forms of collaboration with diverse audiences and communities. Their projects have addressed such issues as political conflict in Northern Ireland, gang violence on Chicago's West Side, and the problems of sex workers in Switzerland. Provocative, accessible, and engaging, this book, one of the first full-length studies on the topic, situates these socially conscious projects historically, relates them to key issues in contemporary art and art theory, and offers a unique critical framework for understanding them.

More on that, definitely. Further details on the book can be found here.

Also, while we're on the topic of the kind of highly-charged, culturally provocative and purposeful work that I tend to adore -- a handful of gems from the Lux Lotus archives: Outlaw Representation, Scarlet-Starlet, Wien, Bad Culture, No Ladies, Exile Art Down Under, The Charms of Small Collections, and The Beautiful and Sublime Science.

To-Do: Wardrobe Rehab

As soon as I make my fortune in the world, I am going to toss every item of clothing I own (with the possible exception of the '70s-era Zandra Rhodes dress I found in a thrift store on the Eastern Shore -- where I am headed today, natch), and replace the lot of them with seven kimono-style, silk tie-dyed dresses designed by Sophie Guyot, Lyonnaise fashion superstar.

Definitely My Kind of Cupcake

There's more than one intriguing Cupcake Series... Don't miss the online selection of provocative work by Megan Jenkins at Voltz Clarke Gallery.  Her "Cupcake Series" is a very cool meditation on Americana and pop culture (guns and babies!), that "investigates desire in surreal little sugar coated packages." Very nicely done.

Also noted: for another take on cupcakes and desire, visit Rachel Kramer Bussel's blog dedicated to "All Cupcakes, All The Time."

It's Gonna Be a Manic Monday

A partial list of shows I'd like to check out while I'm in Maryland v. briefly for the holidays:

Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985: I totally missed this one at The Whitney, despite my best intentions.

Black & White Chinese Ceramics From The 10th-14th Centuries: I love the stark contrast and bold simplicity of black and white pottery. See also Chavin de Huantar, in Peru, which Bryan has visited with his cool archeologist dad and described to me in detail. It's an important temple known for its striking black and white pottery, among other things.

Young Whistler: Early Prints And The "French Set": I fell in love with Whistler in The Peacock Room.

Fauve Painting in the [National Gallery of Art] Permanent Collection: I certainly do love me some fauves, those wicked beasts.

Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art From the Victoria and Albert Museum: The complexity and aesthetic rigor of Islamic decorative motifs intrigues me.

Turkish Delight

Madeleine Elfenbein is a 21-year old English teacher living in Izmir, Turkey. Her blog, Melfenblog: Journal of an American, a Broad, is an eclectic mix of international politics, travel diary, and reflections on her experiences there:

For example, did you know that for the past eleven weeks I taught a weekly one-and-a-half-hour course titled Issues in Business to my eighth-grade students, for which the curriculum was entirely under my control? How I ended up heading a course with this title is a long, stupid story. Anyway, when the train ran off the tracks, I decided to run with it, and I dragged all my kids with me. I ended up teaching a course that was basically all about corporate malfeasance in its many forms, from maquiladoras to DDT producers, capped by a two-week marathon viewing of The Insider.

Madeleine's clever, cosmopolitan perspective is well worth a read.

Holidaze

It's strange how everything seems to slow down a little in the second half of December. People start saying, "next year, let's talk then," and one is forced to account for the fact that nothing is going to get done anytime soon.

It seems callow to say that, but I feel like some part of me moved here for the sole purpose of fully indulging my intensely ambitious streak. I used to say I came for the culture, or the energy, or because I like to walk. When I got back from France, I once again felt that strong desire to reject everything about myself and my life that was too commercial, too consumptive, too American. A person can work 24 hours a day here and not be called a workaholic. In New York, I'm a freelancer.

I've been trying to respond to the way that the weather and the season are dictating the pace right now, but another part of my life is accelerating; the projects, the possibilities, the opportunities are endless. 2005: I'm waiting for you.

Next Stop: Taliban, USA

Today's essential reading comes from Laila Lalami, of MoorishGirl.com, who writes a pretty damning indictment of the current administration's attempts to ruin any remaining fun for those of us in this country who can still read: suppressing works in translation through the usual obliquely nefarious means.

Yes, I guess that would be "a big fucking NO"

I am so in love with this passage from SashaFrereJones.com:

Still, if the social content of punk rock is, in part, a big fucking NO to the shimmery tungsten cage of boredom that appears around us viz corporate transmutation of every border of daily life into some kind of slick product we are free to buy or not to buy, that is the (only) question, then Green Day can't really qualify, now can they?

- Felizitas (aka Joshua Clover) on The 3rd of the Five Propositions, "some thoughts on musical genre." Very enjoyable and smart; don't miss the first two.