Sunday, August 31, 2014

Is this the Kate Mossiest Vogue cover of all time

Is this the Kate Mossiest Vogue cover of all time?

Starring Kate Moss, this Vogue cover is styled by Kate Moss wearing clothes designed by Kate Moss for Topshop

Posted by

Hannah Marriott

Wednesday 2 April 2014 13.30 BST

Kate Moss on the cover of Vogue. Photograph: Craig McDean

Is this the Kate Mossiest cover of all time? It stars Kate Moss, was styled by Kate Moss, who is now a contributing fashion editor at Vogue, and Kate Moss is wearing an outfit designed by Kate Moss. The clothes – from Moss's upcoming Topshop collection – are incredibly Mossy, too, all vintage-influenced tassles and stars. Kate Moss' name does not appear on the cover, probably because if you're not sure who she is given the breadth of Kate Moss signifiers here you are not part of Vogue's target audience.

Freja Beha Erichsen, styled by Kate Moss for Vogue. Photograph: Craig McDean

Inside, Moss has also styled model Freja Beha Erichsen as Kate Moss, with leather rock'n'roll shorts and a 1970s-influenced chiffon top and hair that could be described as "just been pulled out of a mosh pit". Photographed by Craig McDean, the full shoot will be in the May issue of Vogue, out on Monday 7 April.

THE GUARDIAN

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Ian McEwan / I'm only 66

Ian McEwan:
'I'm only 66 – my notebook is still full of ideas'

In Ian McEwan's book The Children Act, a high court judge must decide whether a teenage boy lives or dies. In his own life, the novelist feels mortality pressing in – but, he says, he's enjoying himself far too much to slow down just yet

by Robert McCrum
The Observer, Sunday 31 August 2014

‘Privileged existence’: Ian McEwan photographed by Karen Robinson for the Observer New Review earli

‘Writing is a delightful, privileged existence – assuming you can live by it’: Ian McEwan photographed by Karen Robinson for the Observer

Ian McEwan was in a reflective, autumnal mood when we met recently to talk about his new novel, The Children Act. It's a mood that echoes the dominant note of this short book. McEwan's prose has always been pared down but the full foliage of, say, Atonement, has now become the thinning leaf of The Children Act, whose title refers to the landmark legislation of 1989 governing the welfare of minors.

This sombre tale of barely 55,000 words is a study in grey, a characteristically haunting examination of unarticulated love, of an old marriage in crisis, and a mature woman at the end of her tether. "I wanted," says McEwan, in his forensic, slightly nasal but commanding drawl, "to get inside the mind of a woman who is professionally totally engaged, but with turmoil in her life, who comes into a situation in which all kinds of buried feelings are stirred up…"

Fiona Maye is a high court judge who presides in the family division. She's flinty, cerebral and childless. Her legal judgments exhibit a crisp and even-handed prose that's "almost ironic, almost warm". Like McEwan, she loves classical music, especially Bach. Unlike him, she can also perform it as an amateur, especially the second Partita. This makes her sound horribly over-accomplished but McEwan says he did not want her to be "a goody two-shoes". Still, with her "godly distance", she may be colder to the reader than he realises.

Meet the author

Esther Freud: 'I realised the book I'd been writing for 18 months was awful'

The author of Hideous Kinky on her childhood memories of watching her father, Lucian Freud, paint, and how abandoning one novel led to another, about the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Interview by Alice O'Keeffe

The Observer, Sunday 31 August 2014

Esther Freud at Edinburgh's international book festival earlier this month Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Esther Freud was born in London in 1963. Her first novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. After publishing her second, Peerless Flats (1993), she was named one of Granta's best young British novelists. She has since written six novels, including Love Falls and Lucky Break, and teaches creative writing at the Faber Academy.

Your new novel, Mr Mac and Me, is about Charles Rennie Mackintosh's stay in Walberswick, Suffolk, during the great war, which ended in disaster when locals mistook him for a spy. What drew you to this material?

Someone told me about Mackintosh in Suffolk about 10 years ago, saying it was a good story. I thought it was a good story, but that it wasn't my story. In the end, I slowly found my way into it in the process of writing another book. There came a moment – one of life's worst, and best, moments – when I realised that everything I had been working on for the last year and a half was awful. It was a horrible realisation at the time, but it ended up leading me to this book.

Colombians wary as former Escobar hitman gets ready to walk free from prison

Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, better known as “Popeye,” in 2013. / CARLOS ORTEGA (AFP)

Colombians wary as former Escobar hitman gets ready to walk free from prison

“Popeye” has served 23 years after killing hundreds under reign of Medellín cartel chief

ELIZABETH REYES L. Bogotá 26 AGO 2014 - 16:45 CEST

Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, the sole survivor of a group of hitmen who fought the Colombian state alongside drug lord Pablo Escobar, is about to walk free after 23 years in prison.

Popeye, as he is better known in the underworld, was 29 when he was sent to jail. Now 52, he is spending his last hours at Cómbita penitentiary, two hours away from Bogotá, where he has served the last 12 years of his conviction. The gang member benefited from term reductions through work and study schemes, and is reported to have paid $4,500 for access to parole.

His release, scheduled for Tuesday afternoon local time, comes amid heavy security measures. Popeye has confessed to scores of murders during Escobar’s reign of violence. While behind bars, he cooperated with authorities to help clear up some of the most painful events of the 1980s and 1990s.

Colombians are not indifferent to the release of a man who once headed the group of hired killers at the service of the world’s most powerful drug kingpin. Popeye has coldly admitted that he ordered 3,000 people killed when his boss, the head of the Medellín cartel, was fighting the government to avoid extradition.

Popeye will be under surveillance for good conduct for four years

That particular war cost the lives of hundreds of police officers, journalists, judges, lawyers and politicians. Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán.

Top hitman for drug lord Pablo Escobar released after 23 years in prison

“Popeye,” who killed over 300 for the Medellín cartel, is freed after serving three-fifths of his sentence

By Elizabeth Reyes L.

Translation: Dyane Jean François

Bogotá, 27 de agosto de 2014

“Popeye” holding up a book about cartel chief Pablo Escobar. / AP

Jhon Jairo “Popeye” Velásquez Vásquez, Pablo Escobar’s chief assassin, has been released from prison after serving 23 years. Four days prior to his release, a Colombian judge expedited the proceedings for his probation status. At 9pm on Tuesday night, the 52-year-old convict stepped out into the streets in the company of Public Defender officials, shielded by a motorcade of armor-plated vehicles. Popeye had sent a handwritten request to officials that morning to ask for protection.

The former convict has admitted to killing more than 300 people and ordering the death of over 3,000 others during a period of heavy cartel violence from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. Yet the former assassin – who entered the criminal underworld at the height of the cartel’s reign, when he was just 18 – is afraid of freedom. He knows there is a price on his head and that he has made a lot of enemies given the crimes he committed, and the fact that he was a key witness in several trials – including the one related to liberal presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento’s murder in 1989. Alberto Santofimio Botero, a fellow politician, was convicted for his part in the murder.

Popeye’s release was scheduled for Monday, but was delayed until Tuesday night so that officials could make sure he did not have any pending charges. Meanwhile, victims were trying to understand how a drug trafficker who terrorized the nation two decades ago could be leaving prison after serving just three-fifths of his sentence.

He studied 14 diplomas while in prison and earned a degree in environmental sciences

The operation for Popeye’s release became the mystery of the day. As time passed, photojournalists crowded in front of the gates of the maximum security prison with their cameras ready to capture his departure. The facility is in Cómbita, two hours outside of Bogotá.

Pierre Klossowski and Jean-Paul Reti / Works

Diane et Actéon, 1990

Pierre klossowski and Jean-Paul Reti

WORKS

Diane et Actéon, 1991-92

John Taylor / Reading Pierre Klossowski

Pierre Klossowski

Reading Pierre Klossowski

by John Taylor

Context N°14

Let’s take Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) at his word, and read him with his favorite word. He claimed to “fabricate simulacra.” What exactly did the French writer mean? The word “simulacrum” is restricted by English usage to “a representation of something (image, effigy),” to “something having the form but not the substance of a material object (imitation, sham),” and to “a superficial likeness (appearance, semblance).” Contemporary French understands the term similarly, while maintaining traces of more concrete Latin meanings: “statue (of a pagan god),” even “phantom.” Interestingly, French adds “a simulated act” to these semantic possibilities, as in Raymond Queneau’s amusing description in Zazie in the Metro: “He took his head in his hands and performed the futile simulacrum (fit le futile simulacre) of tearing it off.” For Roman writers, a simulacrum could also be “a material representation of ideas” (and not just that of a deity), as well as “a moral portrait.”

Roberte, ce soir

by Pierre Klossowski

Pierre Klossowski and Has Bellmer

Pierre Klossowski

and Hans Bellmer

by David Markus

WHITECHAPEL GALLERY, LONDON | SEPTEMBER 20 - NOVEMBER 19, 2006

Pierre Klossowski, “La caverne (Roberte chez les troglodytes) The Cave (Roberte at the Troglodytes Home)” (1975). Colour pencils on paper. Collection Edouard Taÿ-Pamart, Paris.

Pierre Klossowski and Hans Bellmer are two twentieth century figures whose controversial artistic production has limited their acceptance by the general public especially when compared with the international reputations of their immediate contemporaries. Paradoxically, Klossowski (1905-2001) was the consummate “insider.” His brother was the painter Balthus, his early mentors included Rilke and Andre Gide, and his philosophical writings and erotic fiction would eventually influence such intellectual supermen as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. However, Klossowski’s unusual sexual predilections and radical individualism have more or less confined him to the realm of esoterica. Bellmer (1902-1975), for his part, operated on the margins of major movements like the New Objectivity and Surrealism. His work was not exhibited in the United States until 1975, and as late as the mid-nineties, prior to the publication of Peter Webb’s definitive exposé, he had yet to receive major notice outside of France and Germany. In the past ten years there has been a surge of interest in both of these artists. Their double billing at Whitechapel Art Gallery this past November—the first major retrospective for either one—presented an incomparable feast for the Sadean imagination.

Why Venezuela’s hospitals are in need of intensive care

Growing shortage of basic medical supplies could send healthcare back to pre-modern era

EWALD SCHARFENBERG Caracas 22 AGO 2014 - 16:54 CEST

The emergency room at the Caracas Medical Center. / ARIANA CUBILLOS (AP)

Venezuela’s private healthcare system appears to be under siege. For a week now, one of the most expensive and reputable clinics in Caracas has been unable to take blood tests because of a shortage of sample tubes.

Just as it is doing with other sectors of the economy, the state is depriving healthcare professionals of the necessary currency and import authorizations to purchase items such as gauze, surgical sutures, disposable diapers, catheters and pumps that administer drips.

Over at another medical facility, anesthetics are running low and are being reserved for emergency procedures only. In some places, the ambulance service has been discontinued and operating rooms have shut down altogether.

Meanwhile, around 350,000 Venezuelans are waiting for the necessary material to arrive so they can undergo their programmed surgeries.

Book Review: Alternative Movie Posters

By Adrian Curry on July 29, 2014

Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground
By Matthew Chojnacki
Schiffer Publishing Ltd., $34.99

Billed as “the first book to document the spectacular art of underground film posters,” Matthew Chojnacki’s Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground is a fairly comprehensive snapshot (or let’s say family album) of a convergent moment in cinephilia and graphic design. Born out of the gig poster phenomenon of the past decade, and cross-pollinated with the surge of fan-produced fake Criterion covers that sprang up all over the Internet, the alternative movie poster scene has flourished in the past few years, producing a parallel universe of cult-film art, much of which Chojnacki has collected here.

Though comprised of both online fan art and limited-edition screen prints by accomplished artists, the book’s examples are not so much movie posters as they are souvenirs of movies. They were never created expressly to introduce a film to the public consciousness and sell it to the widest audience (though plenty of them would have done a better job than the original studio-sanctioned designs). Instead, for the most part, these works commemorate and re-imagine films that have already entered some sort of canon or garnered a following.

Alamo Drafthouse’s collectible art boutique Mondo has of course spearheaded and legitimized (and monetized) the movement, and when a number of Mondo posters recently popped up in a Christie’s auction of “Vintage Movie Posters,” it marked a watershed moment of respectability.

One thing the phenomenon of alternative movie posters has done is give a high-profile outlet to illustrators, at a time when illustration had started to seem like a doomed profession, and it is heartening to see the wealth of talent that is out there. Once nearly the sole medium for movie advertising, illustration has been little used in movie posters since the 1960s (with a brief airbrushed resurgence in the ’80s). Photoshop killed the movie-poster star for sure, but then again it is digital tools that have given rise to this rebirth of hand-drawn art.

Chojnacki has selected from work by over 100 artists from 20 different countries to present more than 200 posters (out of 10,000 he looked at). Some were created especially for the book, which presents each poster next to a brief bio and interview with the artist. Though a number of the major players are missing—towering talents like Tyler Stout, Tom Whalen, Olly Moss, Akiko Stehrenberger, and Laurent Durieux—the book includes several superb artists that I was already familiar with (such as Jay Shaw, Jason Munn, Heath Killen, Viktor Hertz, and Matt Needle), and it was a treat to discover others I hadn’t seen before.

Many of the featured designers (perhaps too many) tend to worship at the twin temples of Saul Bass and Drew Struzan, the minimalist and maximalist gods of 20th-century poster design. The Bass homages in particular are far too plentiful. Another problem, common in the fan-art phenomenon generally, is its limited frame of reference. More than half of the films featured in the book were made since the mid-1980s, and probably only about 20 date from before the ’70s. There are very few foreign films (I counted just Le Corbeau, 8 1/2, Léon: The Professional, The Artist, and two films by Dario Argento), and the same directors tend to crop up repeatedly, namely, the Coen Brothers, John Carpenter, David Lynch, Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, and Wes Anderson.

That being said, the book contains a treasure trove of witty, inventive, and beautifully executed designs, all expressing a geeked-out love for their subjects. Some of my personal favorites are these below.

Irish artist Peter Strain’s pared-down compositions of nearly monochrome images and hand-lettered text...

Lovely geometric color wheels from British artist Simon C. Page...

(click to enlarge)

This Cinefamily commission for a rare pre-1960s film in the book (a 1916 Jules Verne adaptation) by Los Angeles’s Dimitri Simakis...

Minimalist classics from Jason Munn, better known as gig poster genius The Small Stakes...

(click to enlarge)

This richly illustrated John Waters homage from Milwaukee’s Little Friends of Printmaking...

Nouveau-retro monster posters from British artist James Gilleard...

(click to enlarge)

Maryland artist Joshua Budich’s Struzan-esque poster for a director who has inspired more fan art than any other...

And, for the Wes Anderson film that may have generated the most fan art of all, this gem from Wales-based Matt Needle…

Cult ’80s movies as cereal boxes, by New Jersey’s Ian Glaubinger...

(click to enlarge)

Italian artist Ale Giorgini’s crowded geometric cartoons...

(click to enlarge)

And finally, an old favorite by Sweden’s Viktor Hertz, one of the best to come out of the minimalist movie poster craze...

Adrian Curry writes the Graphic Detail column in FILM COMMENT and is the design director for Zeitgeist Films.

FILMCOMMENT

Monday, August 25, 2014

David Ehrestein / Bodies at Work

Queen Margot

Bodies at Work

Patrice Chéreau’s cinema of the physical

By David Ehrenstein

Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective of Chéreau's work, Patrice Chéreau: The Love That Dares, runs from February 28-March 5, 2014

Nothing if not protean, Patrice Chéreau’s four-decades-plus career has encompassed opera and theater as well as film. His works in different media are not merely complementary but inextricably intertwined. The demands Chéreau makes on spectators are high—not because his films are “difficult” or “obscure” in the usual sense, but because they are infused with an emotional force unprecedented in its physical intensity—so much so that the viewer is sometimes left exhausted.

Queen Margot

Luchino Visconti comes to mind as an obvious predecessor to this 64-year-old director’s multiform auteur profile, except that Visconti didn’t link the three mediums quite so decisively. Nor did he appear on screen as Chéreau has, having acted in Andrzej Wajda’sDanton, Youssef Chahine’s Adieu Bonaparte, Claude Berri’s Lucie Aubrac, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf, and Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, among others. While this may make him sound like France’s answer to Sydney Pollack, Chéreau took these roles mainly for the experience and considers himself not as a workaday actor but as a physical object at the disposal of other filmmakers.

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 49

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

by Anita Loos (1925)

A guilty pleasure it may be, but it is impossible to overlook the enduring influence of a tale that helped to define the jazz age

Robert McCrum

Monday 25 August 2014

nita Loos, a screenwriting Hollywood wunderkind, says she began to draft Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a jazz age classic, on the American railroad, as she crossed from New York to LA in the early 1920s. Travelling on the celebrated Santa Fe Chief with the movie star Douglas Fairbanks and his brainless leading lady, the young Loos became exasperated that a woman so stupid could "so far outdistance me in feminine allure". Could this girl's secret, Loos wondered, possibly be rooted in her hair? "She was a natural blonde and I was a brunette."

Lorelei Lee (aka Mabel Minnow from Little Rock, Arkansas) was born in that nano-second of female rivalry. Whipping out her yellow pad, Loos began drafting The Illuminating (originally Intimate) Diary of a Professional Lady, teasing fact and fantasy into an intoxicating depiction of "the lowest possible mentality" in prohibition America, a gold-digging blonde who is not – surprise, surprise – quite as dumb as she looks. No wonder that the part burst into life when Marilyn Monroe starred in the 1953 film version.

Later, Loos joked that the plot of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was "almost as gloomy" as a Dostoevsky novel. Indeed, without Lorelei's faux-naif interior monologue, her tale is replete with hints of rape, actual murder, seduction, gangsterism, and courtesanship, spun into airy nothing. When her diary begins, Lorelei is "under the protection" of the millionaire Gus Eisman, a Chicago button manufacturer, but in danger of falling in love with an impecunious British writer who wants to divorce his wife and marry the woman he believes to be his true love.

When Eisman gets wind of this, he sends his mistress on a European tour with her hard-boiled friend Dorothy. Quickly bored with London, despite a dance with the Prince of Wales, they head for Paris ("devine") and its romantic attractions, especially "the Eyeful Tower". Yet the longer Lorelei's sentimental education continues, the more she recognises the truth: continental men are no match for Americans. "I really think," she writes, "that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very, very good but a diamond-and-safire [sic] bracelet lasts for ever."

Marilyn Monroe

This novella (it is barely 150 pages in my battered Penguin edition) falls into the category of "guilty pleasure", but I think it earns its place on this list, if only for the roll call of its distinguished contemporary fans, its lasting influence, and intensely quotable lines. Long before Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones, Loos hit on a young woman's diary as the perfect medium for satirical romance. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, serialised in Harper's Bazaar, became cult reading. Edith Wharton, probably tongue in cheek, hailed it as "the great American novel". Loos, an unreliable witness, claimed that James Joyce, who was losing his sight, saved his reading for Lorelei Lee. Who knows? It's a little book with a broad smile, and a deceptively big heart.

A note on the text

In her prime, in the 1920s, Anita Loos was "the Soubrette of Satire"and also boasted that her first screen credit was for an adaptation of Macbeth in which her billing followed immediately after Shakespeare's.

The roaring success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes owes an important debt to the celebrated critic and columnist, HL Mencken, a friend of Loos's. "Menck", as she called him, had just left the editorship of The Smart Set for The American Mercury, and correctly saw that "making fun of sex" was the kind of risque novelty that would work better in a popular middlebrow publication like Harper's Bazaar. So Loos took her Lorelei material to the Harper's editor, Henry Sell, who encouraged Loos to extract maximum advantage from Lorelei's European trip. In just a few months, Gentleman Prefer Blondes became a magazine sensation. Newsstand sales of Harper's doubled, tripled and quadrupled.

Then the publishers Boni and Liveright came calling, and made a contract for a slim hardback, illustrated by Ralph Barton. Blondes sold out at once as a runaway bestseller, becoming the second highest-selling book of 1926, and helping to define the jazz age for ever. A second edition of 60,000 copies was exhausted almost as quickly. Some 45 editions later (in the end, 80-plus), the book had passed into classic status. It would be translated into 14 languages, including Chinese. Eventually, Lorelei's most memorable obiter dicta found their way into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The idea that "diamonds are a girl's best friend" passed into popular culture, and is now repeated without irony too often to be diverting. Loos herself lived long enough (she died in 1981) to describe her book as a "period piece" for the grandchildren of its first fans. "May they be diverted by the adventures of Lorelei Lee", she wrote, "and take courage from the words of her favourite philosopher: 'Smile, smile, smile.'"