Gotterdammerung

Several weeks ago Jack White was in town for a two night engagement at The Shrine Auditorium, which is located near the USC campus. A friend of ours was handling wardrobe duties in his crew so we managed to get backstage. It was a pretty weird situation.

Jack White’s show is divided in two parts, the first being his back-up band being all female and the second half his back-up band is all male. While his intention may have been liberal there was something sexist about that concept, but that’s the least of my concerns.

Not only did both bands have to conform to a dress code – Forties vintage pin-up girl dresses for the gals and suits for the guys – but the light and sound techs also had to conform to this stringent Sunday churchgoer look. There was no choice in colors, either, as White mandated that everyone dress in the color blue. This was his witty way of vanquishing the red and whites that his previous persona in The White Stripes had to adhere by on stage. His eccentricity achieved Batman villain proportions when the light gels that hit the stage also had to be the color blue at all times.

This would be fine and dandy if Mr. White (dig the irony) adhered to his own dress code but he didn’t. He was boringly swathed in a black bowling shirt and black slob pants. How much does it suck to be ordered to dress like Napoleon Dynamite with the corduroy suit when the boss doesn’t even follow his own rules? And I thought the bossy Board of Supervisors sucked ass.

By the way, the music was the dirgiest hippie shit I’ve ever heard.

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Further proof that people have lost their minds can be found on lamp pole banners strewn across Los Angeles courtesy of the Annenberg Space for Photography, currently exhibiting rock and roll photographs of the past fifty decades, entitled “Who Shot Rock & Roll?”

The banners are ridiculously offensive and tasteless, as images of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, both handgun fatalities, are posted next to the title, “Who Shot Rock & Roll?”

Would it really pain the Annenberg if they chose non-gun victims like Prince, Bob Marley, Pete Townshend or Janis Joplin, to name a few, next to the sensational title? It would probably sell the show a lot better and prove that art people might be almost as intelligent as they think they are.

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It’s always fun to discover a new writer you’ve never read before. In the past few years I’ve discovered John Dos Passos, Sebastien Japrisot, and Joe R. Lansdale, among others. My latest find is Robert Cormier, known for writing “The Chocolate War” but also the author of many other great YA (Young Adult) titles. I recently finished “Tenderness” and “Heroes”, and they’re some of the darkest teen novels ever written. I recommend all of them highly.

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Things that I’ve designed lately:
1. A striped lurex dress for Rebecca (long sleeved)
2. A faux Custo Barcelona velvet top for Rebecca
3. A leather tote bag, influenced by Dior Homme
4. Two large leather travel bags influenced by All Saints

I’ve laid off making tops and jeans for now and see myself hovering more towards designing accessories (mostly bags) because they’re quicker to make and quicker to sell, too. Pictured below is a partial shot of the bag sitting in front of my new Kenneth Cole New York Fashion Guide shoes. What a pair of beauties! I may die tomorrow but let me die in style, baby!

By the way, if you are interested in seeing some of my accessories on sale, you can visit the Funny Crow store at Etsy. Here is the link:
FunnyCrow Shop on Etsy
More items will be added in the weeks to come, and yes, I do take requests.

Masters of Illusion: Jewish Magicians

The Skirball Cultural Center is a museum located far up the Santa Monica Mountains, so high up it’s located beyond Bel Air and The Getty Museum. The museum is located in an area is so remote it defies credibility but there is nothing so incredible as the world of magic, which is why I went there. The Skirball hosted an exhibit on Jewish magicians of the early 20th century titled “Masters of Illusion”. I thought it was a wonderful show.

In addition to beautiful show posters for magicians as diverse as Kellar, Jean-Eugene Robert Houdin, Goldin and the great Houdini there were props from the original acts, including magic wands, trick cards and balls, restraints and the inevitable strait-jacket. Magic as a form of popular entertainment was at its peak around the late 19th-early 20th century thanks to Vaudeville, Music Halls and Carnivals. Their greatest rival was this new thing called movies, which eventually signed up Harry Houdini who starred in several mystery-sci fi serials, which were screened at The Skirball that afternoon.

A lot of pieces were on loan from Ricky Jay, a great magician who’s worked in millions of movies like “House of Games” and “The Grifters”, the ultimate sleight-of-hand movies you need to catch up on. Others were loaned out from The Magic Castle, an invitation-only club that exclusively showcases magic acts.

Many anecdotes on Houdini were posted at the exhibit, but my favorite was the one about Houdini’s attendance at a séance at writer Arthur Conan Doyle’s home. Doyle’s wife was a big fan of the occult and conducted a séance where Houdini’s mother supposedly contacted him from the grave. Houdini was skeptical of the ceremony and patiently sat through the whole bogus affair. Needless to say, the ceremony reached a new pitch of outrage when after the séance Mrs. Doyle handed him a letter “written” by his mother from the great beyond. It was in English; strike one, Houdini’s mother only spoke to him in Hungarian, their native language. It also had a crucifix scrawled on it; strike two, Houdini was a rabbi’s son, so he came from an orthodox Jewish home. Houdini exposed Mrs. Doyle as a fraud and doubled his efforts at exposing fraudulent séances, many at the time targeted at bilking rich widowers of their money, as fictionalized in the great movie “Nightmare Alley”.

I don’t think magic will ever leave us as a major entertainment form. We still have conjurers like Penn & Teller and that weird TV goth guy whose name escapes me still doing the sleight of hand, and some people are dumb enough to believe Harry Potter’s a real magician, so the art of magic still lurks among us.

Another exhibition recently attended was the “Beauty Culture” show at the Annenberg Photography Space in Century City.  I thought the Annenberg was a gorgeous space to view photography. On display were diverse images from the past century with icons either represented by movie stars, i.e. Marilyn, Bardot, Harlow, Audrey, etc. or supermodels, i.e. Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Lauren Hutton, Heidi Klum, etc.  I enjoyed discovering photographers I was previously unaware of, like Horst P. Horst and the amazing Marvin Sokolsky = check out his floating balloon series, absolutely amazing. And as I said there was diversity in images of beauty, whether it was photos of tribal beauties, mid-century models still working into their seventies and plus-sized beauties, to name a few. The show runs through November, admission is free, and is highly recommended.