Petronia

Went to the terracotta warriors exhibit preview with ukefied (after trying to organize a get-together for months - universal truth being that the moment two Internet people say "Hey, we've lived in the same city all these years, why don't we meet up for a coffee," roadblocks and unforeseen delays will rain down from the sky). It was pretty awesome! Also, I am now the Mayor of the MMFA on Foursquare after two check-ins.

* If these were mass-produced, were the original molds done by one person? The soldiers honestly give off the sense of a single creative mind (the horses might have been someone different; the entertainers certainly were). The Buonarrotti of the Qin. Why didn't the names come down to Sima Qian, I wonder?

* So while watching Little Big Soldier I was like, no way did anyone at that period run about armed with a miniature red-lacquered crossbow, not even a prince of the realm! That is so an anachronism! Er, well, I guess I was wrong.

* We are not too mature to snigger at anatomically correct funerary statues and bronze strap-on dildos. The original molds for those were high craftsmanship too, is all I'm saying.

* I demand a city-size mausoleum with a river of amorphia mercury in the D&D game (either G's or Bob's, not fussed).

The next day I dropped by Montreal Fashion Week for the Style & Conscience cocktail and somehow scored a ticket for the Denis Gagnon A/W2011 fashion show (thanks Aleece). Don't think I've ever attended a runway show before, and it was a good one: sort of a cyberpunk flapper vibe. Metropolis with fluo pink tights.

The xx: what one would expect I guess! There were the usual ushers and such but it was relaxed, sit-down kids well-behaved with plastic beer cups in the concert hall, talk never loud enough to interfere with the music. I'd have said it's a generational thing, that everyone is used to all venues being mixed-purpose and mixed-audience, but I'm told by out-of-towners it's a Montreal thing, too... The most jarring aspect of the gig was actually hearing all this intentional mega-reverb in a space designed to eliminate the effect. But the light show was v. good and the xx nicely served by a cool, dark, spacious, and well-designed environment to suit their cool, dark, spacious, and well-designed music, so score one for the Pop Montreal peeps there.

The crowd really seemed to love the band (it's their third time playing here, successively larger venues). Musically it was pretty much like the album, nothing left-field, except the two vocalists have become much more self-assured and learnt to convey sexiness without sounding desperately depressed XD which bodes well for a sophomore effort. That and I think they plan on using their Mercury $$ to build a studio. Was too tired for the after party but was told that there was a lot of awesome old-school garage and two-step, and all of four ppl on the dancefloor.

Didn't arrive in time for Zola Jesus but Warpaint was all right - dark with multiple moments of sonic loveliness, needed punchier song structure. You can get fairly far with a band of three attractive young women and a dude guitarist.

Mount Kimbie: bumped into Sach from Passion of the Weiss (the only music blogger I know from the weird non-Internet place) and mutual friends, then (apparently, according to him) everyone he knew ever; some crossover space of local dubstep DJs and hip-hop heads and techno types and indie film studies dudes having been activated or delineated by the band... granted the same could probably be said of Four Tet. It was one of those gigs where one didn't know how the live act would come off but would be OK with holding up the wall with arms crossed, if it came to that - though it didn't. They were unfortunately insistent on playing their songs qua discrete songs, that is to say not as tracks and not as instrumental jams (even when the one slung on a guitar for "texture"), at the end of each of which they stopped and said "thank you", so the music was guaranteed to cut off just as one was getting one's groove on. XD; But a very successful night out, otherwise.

Puces Pop: was it always this expensive? I suppose so. /weepz Got a flower necklace made of felt, a cardigan brooch, a black skirt and gray t-shirt (late autumn is the best time of year for minimal post-post-modern Cayce Pollard-ian utilitarianism). I also have new glasses I'm rather pleased with: they're black lacquer-ish Chinoiserie lotus cutouts on the outside and translucent deep red lucite on the inside. From a distance they look bog-normal but with these two slashes of lipstick red, like tail lights on a black car.

The Runaways: sub_divided has a proper review of it here, which I'm linking because I agree and am lazy XD (also my comments are in the thread). Will add that I thought Sandy West was played winningly in the movie - she had a presence, if not a backstory, and a couple of sexy/hilarious scenes with Joan. Lita Ford basically existed in the script to throw strops. XD;; ( Cut for mild spoilers, hilarity, analysis. )


Naomi Novik, Victory of Eagles: damn, Laurence angsts. XD; I mean he was always one for noble suffering but this book was like the full Basch fon Ronsenburg. I read it quickly and my memories of the last half are iffy (falling asleep - due to tiredness, not because the book was boring). Brought it to Philly intending a re-read but obviously that didn't happen.


The Viewfinder x Koi Suru crossover short: as kindly provided by two_if_by_sea. I've always liked the Koi Suru series best - it's touchingly well-adjusted, if that makes sense. The crossover divides the consciousness as in this worldview Takaba is a sort of cheerful, competent, worldly, ever-so-slightly mysterious sempai/oniisan. Who is too pretty for his own good, even still.


Doctor Who S5E02: ( my comment to naanima, expanded upon. )


The Five Doctors: I can't let this one go by without commenting on ( this outfit, which would have given Chloe Sevigny pause )

The City of Death: oshi brb writing 1,000,000 essays on Baudelarian flânerie/dandyism/the Chanel-Beauvoir garçonne WITH FOOTNOTES

The September Issue: ( spent much of this thinking how amazing Anna Wintour's eyes are )

More the adaptation of a non-existent Colette novel than the type of movie that, yanno, has the main character cut up a bedsheet and turn it into an amazing dress in a 30-second musical montage. There's some of that, but not in that way. Mostly you watch her looking at other people's clothes with gears ticking behind her eyes, and realize it'll come out the other end in ten years, twenty years, thirty, even though she didn't know it herself. It's all first act, is the thing: if Coco had been a man she'd've made herself in business like Boy Capel did, and if she'd been a different kind of woman she'd've gone down in fashion history as a trend-setting demi-mondaine muse or the like, but she couldn't have a sense of destiny - to want to be what she became - because it didn't exist. You get two minutes of the future Mademoiselle Chanel* toward the end, and it's like OK that was A to G, where's the other movie that takes us from H to Z.** For most of the running time she's half awkward, half cold-eyed street hustle, and proto-everything; farouche (this doesn't have a good English equivalent). She's not even well-dressed, more like snapshotted at the deliberately ugly refus global stage of the iconoclast who's just grossed out beyond belief at what everyone else is doing. To be fair if I were gazing on my rich boyfriends' perfect menswear every day I'd feel ripped off with the pink crepe de chine roses that were my lot as well.*** Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When it works one experiences a sort of aesthetics dissonance (as opposed to values dissonance) verging on anachronism, where everyone else is dressed normally for a Belle Epoque historical biopic, and Coco Chanel is the only woman in France wearing Chanel.

It's also good to be reminded that Mademoiselle was down on frilly crap given the collections Lagerfeld's been sending down the runway recently. XD; Not that I don't dig the rock'n'roll lolita Marie Antoinette stylings - kinda classic KL boutade in response to the economic crisis - but they do skirt the edge of saccharine, and one suspects Chanel would've judged them horribly vulgar. She'd've liked the Cruise 09/10 collection, though, maybe? The whole thing is up here****, I didn't realize there were so many looks. It rather feels like he designed the regular collections for the Alexa Chungs and Lily Allens, but the Cruise collection is where the clothes for grownups are at.



* The scariest woman of the 20th century. Of course you would dress like she told you to; it'd be easier to disobey Queen Victoria. There's one long shot which is basically model-POV as they file past and her eyes flicker up and down, up and down...

** If they'd carried this characterization forward in time the Nazi thing would've been easily understandable if not sympathetic, because she was all about the survivorship hustle. Like, she clearly didn't have that kind of morals. XD;

*** I'm a fan, obviously. The thing about the Chanel suit or the original LBD (which is this sort of long-sleeved H-line thing in wool jersey that nowadays would probably be described as a "Donna Karan work dress" rather than a LBD) is that they're more comfortable than most of what people have come up with afterward while looking 1,000,000 times more put-together. In the course of this blog I've probably typed and deleted half a dozen screeds against the myth of jeans as "comfortable", because I'd be depressed to discover it was just me, but I really felt cheated by society when I realized they were more restrictive than skirts and dresses, not less.

**** The House of Chanel should podcast DJ mixes that are like electro electro electro *sampled Karl Lagerfeld quote* electro electro. Hilarant.

( Final tally - today's keywords are MAROON and PLAID )

( Other recent-ish acquisitions )

For the record, everything listed in this post cost me a grand total of ~$150. Canadian.

...By the way, guys, did you all just... forget to tell me there was a Mugen no Juunin anime... carry on then!

DJ sets by main dude out of Hercules and Love Affair and secondary dude out of LCD Soundsystem. Loving the revivalist disco off and on since '06 but have never actually danced to a set of it live, for whatever reason. Sounded sweet, could've been all vintage finds or all new productions for all I knew. Lots and lots of polyrhythmic bongos. Very mixed-age crowd (low tic price brought in the kiddies), styles ranged from bobo street chic to Haute Scissor Sister. Swarming with club photographers. I've never been snapped before but last night was like five times in a row. J probably a factor here as photogs would rather get two Asian hipster girls for the price of one IMO.

People kept ending up onstage and couldn't figure out how, so finally I just jumped it. XD Hung around for 5min taking photos of the DJ (and not stealing champagne) before everyone was gently and graciously ushered off by a band manager-type person with a strong physical resemblance to Andie MacDowell. It turned out the smoking area was right next to the stairs up from backstage, so we all went backstage instead ahaha. Had a diet Coke and mentally fashionblogged until Andie graciously herded us all out again.

Outfit: short stretch beach dress in pink/cream peony pattern, 25-year-old grey-green lace hose, cream stack-heel t-straps. Last minute and more "Miami" than I usually go for but it got a number of kudos.

Benjamin Diamond - Inner Cycle Parts 1 & 2: this was the runway music for Dior Homme FW 2001-02 - the first Hedi Slimane collection, the one at which Yves Saint Laurent caused wank by showing up (given that he skipped the uhh Yves Saint Laurent ready-to-wear show, lulz). There's an article online where an indie band that scored a later DH show described getting a three-page email from Slimane asking them to make the music "melancholic" and "nonchalant" and oh yeah, about 17 minutes long. This may come as a surprise, but "Inner Cycle" sounds amazingly like the hypothetical result of that same email going out to the members of Stardust. XD; It is even approximately 17 minutes long.** (Though I don't know if the entire piece as-is was used in the show; part 2 is essentially a different track built on top of the same bassline. Or alternately, the same track "leaving baseline", in the chemical positivity sense. I SPEAK OF STRING EFFECTS.)

Benjamin Diamond released this as a limited edition 12" on his own label, in 2001 (titled Solitaire, same as the fashion show). And there it would have rested if Michael Mayer hadn't picked the track as the A-side of the first release from his Immer label, the mission statement of which was "to provide Michael Mayer with new copies of out-of-print records he is in danger of wearing out, and also to stop people from asking what the tracks were all the time." With the upshot that now you can download it from the Kompakt MP3 online shop, and I have just saved you one Euro. XD Somehow it makes sense that by throwing Hedi Slimane and French house in a blender, one makes a more-Kompaktian-than-Kompakt smoothie. Tim Finney's "neuromanticism" amirite. (39.5MB, download at own risk)

Hercules and Love Affair feat. Antony Hegarty - Blind: and this I first heard in Chanel AW 2008-09. It took me a while to follow up on it. XD I had a chance to see Hercules and Love Affair at Piknic this year (can't remember if it was live or a DJ set) but had stuff to do earlier on and sort of flaked out.

"Blind" is probably my favorite H&LA track. What I like about them isn't the disco cowbell and horns and diva warbling - though whoever had the brainstorm of casting Antony of the Johnsons in the latter role is a bona-fide GENIUS - but the Luomoesque time-dilation property some of their songs possess. Like listening to music stoned, except one isn't, and the track really is seven minutes long even if only three minutes ought to have passed. (9.1MB)

Gui Boratto - Haute Couture: pulsates and clatters away in the post-Oxia microtrance moment. His recent remix of Adam Freeland is more or less in the same vein, but better. (5.5MB)

( BONUS: MORRISSEY )

Meanwhile, Miley Cyrus has just shown me the underlying melodic (thematic?) similarity between "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and "Teenage Kicks". Thanks, Miley... I think. :P


** That is, the Immer release is 17 minutes long, which I imagine took some squeezing on the 12". The original single was one 12-minute track called "Inner Cycle Parts 1 & 2" and one 5.5-minute track called "Lonesome Boy". /pedantic

I have an excuse - I was writing. Let's not all get too excited. XD;;

Went to the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective at the MMFA last Wednesday evening. Will probably return with sketchbook; the first time was for the walkthrough, which took only ninety minutes even with copious gawking. Saint Laurent died just days after the exhibition opened (the guestbook is to be sent to Pierre Bergé afterward, no idea what to write) so the experience was weirdly, unexpectedly emotional. Most of the pieces were shown in the 2002 valedictory runway retrospective of the couture house, a video of which was looped on a suspended projection screen; tbh I can imagine those physically present bawling their eyes out. ^^; What the survey brought home was how much YSL was women's clothing for the past forty years - one doesn't have to be a fashionista to ID the style of each frock or pantsuit down to the half-decade, in fact a group of middle-aged ladies was occupied in doing precisely that, to much hilarity. Inevitably the outfits I really like are all from the 60s. Catherine Deneuve's black dress from Belle de jour was in there. URGE TO COMMIT MUSEUM ROBBERY RISING

The Vanity Fair Proust questionnaire should be a meme, shouldn't it? (Isn't it already?) I'd like all my flisters to answer. XD;

Today: ensconced for hours in the Mont-Royal Caffe Art Java with an iced latte and a pint each of Quebec strawberries and New Jersey blueberries. Found all of Chesterton's Father Brown stories in hardcover at a used bookstore, $15.