Slim Shady | Bernhard Willhelm Aviators - The Moment Blog - NYTimes.comPhoto courtesy of Mykita
New in stores are these blindingly bright sunglasses created by Germany’s oddball design savant Bernhard Willhelm, together with the five-year-old Berlin-based optical collective Mykita. The three mirrored aviator styles were inspired by the 1976 Olympic skiers at Innsbruck and are handmade using cut sheet metal and screwless hinges, a process that gives them great flexibility and a snug fit. Although the flashy eye poppers are intended for the winter slopes, we’ll be rocking them on the summer shores. $475 at Opening Ceremony and Seven in New York, and at American Rag in Los Angeles.
July 18, 2009
Slim Shady | Bernhard Willhelm Aviators - The Moment Blog - NYTimes.com
MICHAEL JACKSON IS A PIMP! Lisa Marie Presley Bares Her Baby Bump - Go Ahead and Look! People.com
Lisa Marie Presley Bares Her Baby Bump - Lisa Marie Presley : People.com
Lisa Marie Presley announced she's expecting twins – and now she's baring her baby bump in a new photo spread in the September issue of Marie Claire.
The reason for exposing herself in this spread? Presley says she's firing back against people who, early in her pregnancy, posted unflattering photos of her and just accused her of having a large, unhealthy appetite.
"They want me to be him," she tells the magazine, referring to her father, Elvis Presley. "It's like they can't wait."
Presley claims "the tabloids were going so far as to alter photos. I could never figure out why they went to all that trouble to make me look fat.
"There are at least six other famous women pregnant right now who aren't getting picked on," she says in the interview. "But they're all over me. It's like there is a campaign to demean me."Go Ahead and Look!
Says Presley: "You know what I think when I see those fat photos? I am not going to let them control me. I just let it all hang out. You want to look at me? Go ahead and look."
The singer, who is expected to give birth in the fall, has two teenage children, Riley, 19, and Benjamin, 15, with ex Danny Keough. The twins are the first children for Presley and husband Michael Lockwood.
But Presley remains defiant when it comes to the fat-talk. "I am 5' 3," she says. "If I gain five pounds it shows."
"I am trying to grow another human being," she adds. "Besides, I'm 40! I'm lucky to even be able to do this."
Taking stock of her life – and her pregnancy – Presley tells Marie Claire in the issue out Aug. 12 that she's growing emotionally as well. "We're all going to screw up," Presley says. "The important thing is, do you learn from it and not do it again? Can you make it better in the future? Can you change?
"I am in a happy place now," she says. "But it took a lot to get here. I wasn't always who I am now."
Cartier Foundation | Off the Wall - The Moment Blog - NYTimes.com
The Cartier Foundation in Paris is the kind of gallery that offers continuous surprises, so whenever I am in town I try to find time to visit. You may happen upon an American artist Sarah Sze showing massive installations made from all sorts of detritus or a Brazilian photographer named Alair Gomes who captures Ipanema beach in all its beefcake glory; or you may discover a talent aside from the obvious ones in multifaceted artists like David Lynch and Patti Smith. It was here at the Cartier Foundation that I first encountered Takashi Murakami’s boyish pop world and the magic of contemporary African art.
I’m also always impressed by ability of the foundation director Herve Chandes and his staff to adapt Jean Nouvel’s beautiful but impractical glass building (with Patrick Blanc’s hanging garden on the facade, no less) to different artists’ demands — creating temporary walls, obscuring the transparent rooms, bringing in massive objects like Marc Newson’s prototype “Kelvin 40” airplane for one show.
So I wasn’t completely surprised when I recently went to preview the show “Born in the Streets: Graffiti” (July 7 to Nov. 29) and found the building looking more like a construction site. For a minute, I even thought that I had the wrong address or that my memory was playing tricks with me. When I finally found the entrance, I noticed that the part of the gallery not obscured with black curtains had free-standing temporary walls still unpainted, like sets for a coming attraction on Broadway.
For a graffiti show in Paris in 2009 I expected rooms filled with archival photographs of the New York underground scene in the 1970s and ’80s, with the predictable mix of high and low pop culture players: rappers, club kids, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. However, there was none of that.
Chandes explained that the last thing they had wanted was a graffiti retrospective. Though the show does include some historical references and recreates some famous graffiti from New York, the focus here has more to do with gesturing and language, the tradition of wall painting and the performative aspect of street art. Chandes explained that contemporary graffiti art went way beyond the spray can medium and quizzed me on the two most important graffiti capitals in the world. New York and Johannesburg? I guessed. No! São Paulo and Santiago, Chile.
The temporary walls were for showcasing artists, who were chosen for the singularity of their work. Boris Tellegen from the Netherlands had already destroyed his wall and was using his background in industrial design to build a three-dimensional work. The Swedish artist Nug showed a video of the process of making graffiti while the writer Evan Roth used a computer program to analyze and classify graffiti writing. The building’s exterior walls were already covered with some strange text, spray painted by JonOne, while two young artists were using Bic lighters to burn the walls over the reception area and create a visual labyrinth.
The influences for graffiti are wide-ranging, for sure. The São Paulo-based artist Vitche draws from his Brazilian roots as well from Indian and Aztec traditions; Basco Vazko, a Chilean tagger, takes his from tattoo art, punk culture and the work of Joan Miro; the San Franciscan Barry McGee borrows from advertising and pop art, and so on.
In a gallery next door a film, co-produced by the Cartier Foundation, on the Brazilian “Pixacao” movement, where abandoned buildings are dangerously scaled and covered in letters, was being shown. Downstairs, in the basement galleries, the smell of spray paint was still very strong as a few more artists were working on the reproduction of some major graffiti, first done in New York by P.H.A.S.E.2 and others. Here they will also show seminal films like “Style Wars” and “Stations of the Elevated” and photographs by Jon Naar, Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper.
The opening was only few days away, but somehow I felt the best was yet to come and I agonized to miss such a happening. These days I prefer art that you have to experience first person, and this would have been an ideal place — as long as my own clothes would not be tagged.
Stefano Tonchi is the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine
Cartier Foundation | Off the Wall - The Moment Blog - NYTimes.com
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