Archive for the 'fashion' Category
Devendra Banhart – “Foolin’” (Official Video)
cant see the video? click here.
“Foolin” By Devendra Banhart from the album What Will We Be
Starring Devendra Banhart & Joel Virgil
I appreciate fruit from collaborative efforts of Director Isaiah Seret, along with Trevor Jones, Arthur Jafa. I like Devendra Banhart, I like Joel Virgil. Both characters project a kind of magical mastery over their ideo. You see in their eyes what they want you to. Nothing more, nothing less.
Devendrabanhart.com
wearethemasses.com
Die Antwoord
can’t see the video? click here.
“But Christos, I’ve already seen this video”. For those of you who haven’t; February 5th Friday night was Die Antwoord’s first gig since they exploded on computer screens around the planet. In the matter of a few days they went from being Waddy Jones and Yolandi Visser’s weird, barely understood Cape gangster hip hop project to a global pop phenomenon. There’s no arguing with over a million hits on Youtube. Die Antwoord’s cheesy rave beats, rof ska rhymes and zef so fresh has catapulted them to international fame, if not yet fortune. But it’s surely coming. And in retrospect it’s easy to see why. DJ Hi-Tek’s “next level beats” that Ninja frequently praises are essentially a post-ironic take on techno rave sounds. They seem to reference early 90s dance cheese like C+C Music Factory and Technotronic. It’s the same kind of electronic pop schlock that gets parties started from Warsaw to San Francisco – but the approach is a little sardonic.
Add to that Yolandi’s school girl sexuality, bowl cut fringe and trashy Afrikaans accented gutter mouth and you’ve got the ultimate hook. Then add a Ninja with Zef flows. Occupying the damaged persona of a bullied kid who grew up tough in the ghetto and came out on top. Riding his talent like a snake on those zef beats. “All up in here on the interwebs”. It’s an intoxicating mix. Say what you like about Waddy Jones but the man has presence, a eye magnet. He varies between being overly self-consciousness and then flips it with instinct. He’s a natural on the mic. It’s not a question of whether he believes in the persona. He is Ninja. Just like he says: “Ninja is poes cool, But don’t fuck with my game, boy or I’ll poes you”. and later: “This is not a game, boy Don’t play with me”. I love that everthing is “poes”, Afrikaans for “pussy”. I love the raunchy sexy stylings and i love the flows, it feels good, it’s a lot of fun.
It’s all there in that song, “Enter the Ninja” the anthemic track that pushes the whole crowd over the edge. It’s a track that has people going mental from Chiba, Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina and the white boys in the front row are screaming every lyric straight back at the man as he delivers it. Those dudes are living proof of the viral seduction, they’ve literally sat with that song on repeat, playing it over and over until they know every one of those rapid fire rhymes by heart. It’s a moment that crystalises things. Maybe it’s just me but certain songs, at certain times, have a way of overwhelming, sweeping you along in their revolution. I know it won’t last, but right now, this is the shit on everyone’s high rotation.
And it’s almost like he’s addressing all the petty South African media hipsters who’ve made it a sport to diss Waddy’s projects.
“Fuck, this is like the coolest song I ever heard in my whole life
Fuck all of you who said I wouldn’t make it
Who said I was a loser
Said I was a no-one
Said I was a fuckin’ psycho
But look at me now
All up on the interweb
World-wide, 2009. futuristig”
That last line is almost prescient in it’s accuracy. And regardless what you think of the music, you got to give them kudos for their creation blowing up like this. Ad agencies spend millions of dollars each year trying to achieve the same kind of viral response as Die Antwoord, and fail. But even with all that recognition and the terrabytes of data flowing through the undersea cables that connect our electronic economy, the venue they ended up play brought a crowd of only 250, fifty short of full capacity.
But really it wasn’t about all the middle age hipsters, the guy tweeting on his iphone, the other dude emailing his story from the bonnet of the car parked out front, or the cool guy with the Canon 5D filming from the hip while bopping his head in the front row. This this is about drunk Afrikaans girls who get so loose they started throwing bottles at each other in the mosh pit, causing a fight, stumbling into cigarettes and spilling people’s drinks. It’s about the whole crowd coming together to catch Ninja as he launched himself headlong into a stage dive, and like some rof gam deity, they held him aloft and set him back down so he could continue the show. It’s about the grit in your eye and a dream on a wing. It’s about Yolandi and I, sitting on a branch over a lake, smoking a spliff. Did I just type that.
Now someone needs to go out there and make MUGEN characters out of Yolandi, Waddy ad Hi-Tek. Guilty Gears Style.
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Download: Die Antwoord – Fish Paste
Torrent: Search Die Antwoord on TPB
check out the beautiful website.
DieAntwoord.Com
Friday the 15th: “Crash” the Art of Bethany Shorb and Cyberoptix Tielab 2010
Here’s to a lady who multi-faceted talent and dedication have inspired me to re-create myself several times over. Her works an exhibition of grace in the realms of business and pleasure. Come celebrate the success and bask in the fellowship of Bethany Shorb and birthday bud Michael Doyle on this wonderful evening.
Are you fucking dumb get a map
ps check out these beauties:
sexy photo
hex tie
Don’t forget to buy something, you ought to to look this good.
Original Article:
Bethany Shorb’s Cyberoptix Tielab 2010 Preview and Photography Exhibition:
Special Musical Performance by Justin Carver from “Something Cold” and Deth Lab
Friday Jan, 15th 2010 6pm @ 323East in Royal Oak, MI.
These are not your father’s ties – let’s make that clear first. Cyberoptix? Right – and with a fresh bottle of Old Spice wrapped up with it. Knot quite.
These are the works of an imaginative artist and photographer named Bethany Shorb who took the mundane reality of neckwear and proceeded to give it a twist or two in new directions – with bold color, bolder materials, and the novel idea that a traditional symbol of subservience could be transformed into “a subversive object of desire.”
Reaching that goal was aided immeasurably by Shorb’s other talents; besides photography, she is trained in sculpture, costume design, and prop construction. And THOSE accomplishments, we hasten to add, are complemented nicely by her brutally direct understanding of what see sees or what she wants us to see. Shorb has tackled a variety of subjects and (as evidenced by a recent exhibit inspired by J.G. Ballard’s novel CRASH) her “eye” is not a blinking one by any stretch. Something is heated to an almost unbearable degree in her works. And if you can’t stand the heat … well, best you seek out an environment where the climate is more controlled.
But you don’t want to do that. What you want to do is to see the latest creations by this intriguing talent – the ones that 323 East will unveil on January 15. The cravats are cool. The pix are pulsating. Nice way to make a knot in our opinion.
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Schooled in both sculpture and photography, Bethany Shorb creates elaborate prop, costume and set constructions that blur the line between both editorial fashion photography and performance art documentation. Her recent Crash series refers to J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name with scenes titled by the lyrics of The Normal’s song of similar influence, “Warm Leatherette.” Technology, celebrity, sex, and death are perversely glamorized and fetishised in unison in a single explosion of red Swarovski crystals and inflated black latex rubber. Models, wardrobe and set decoration all retain the same visual and emotional weight, a hyper-saturated amalgamation exploring the interstitial space between the alluring and repulsive; hedonism and restraint; the seductive speed of expressways and the still finality of Last Rights.
Bethany Shorb was born in Boston, MA in 1976. She received her Masters of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture, with an elective in Photography, from Cranbrook Academy of Art and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Boston University with minors in Art History and Photography. Her photography and product design work have been widely published in the United States and abroad; her visual art and product work has been exhibited throughout the United States and is included in numerous private collections. This past summer she taught several printing workshops in her Detroit studio and was recently reviewed in the New York Times and Wired. Her dj alter-ego has performed as half of “Dethlab” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Shorb also founded The Cyberoptix Tie Lab in 2006. As a designer of witty hand printed neckwear, she has applied her experience as a sculptor, couture, costume and graphic designer to transform a much maligned business necessity into a subversive object of desire. Cyberoptix ties and scarves are represented by more than 150 stores in a dozen countries: from Fred Segal in Los Angeles to Libertine in Western Australia. A paradox for the times, Cyberoptix Tie Lab operates one of the largest eco-friendly, solvent-free print shops in the country in Downtown Detroit, while providing a seditious, punky fashion statement for executives bound to the neck noose, and a sharply styled alternative for those who don’t need to wear a tie, but choose to do so.
cyberoptix.com
toybreaker.etsy.com
trunkt.org/cyberoptix
toybreaker.net/blog
dethlab.net
myspace.com/teamdethlab
323East.com
Original Metrotimes article via Facebook
