Last week we celebrated StyleZeitgeist’s tenth anniversary at Flash Factory in New York City with a live concert by Cold Cave and music by .thejass., Black Asteroid, and Joseph Quartana. In lieu of the usual party shots, we invited the brilliant photographer Dusan Reljin to take some portraits. Wesley Eisold, Eugene Rabkin, Amy Lee Wesley…
Taka Ishii Gallery New York published “Land and Sea 1970” to accompany an exhibition by Tatuso Kawaguchi in September 2015. Since that time his book has consistently stood out from the other gallery publications and art books on my bookshelf as being an exceptionally good one. It manages to function not only as documentation of a specific show but, in a sense, is practically a work in its own right. In that regard, we could refer to it as an artist’s book though it was not intended as such.
The director Gus Van Sant is one of those creators synonymous with the youth culture of the 90s, when the fringes hit the mainstream. The Drugstore Cowboy (ok, it came out in ‘89, but you know what I mean) and especially My Own Private Idaho (’91) made him more than an instant cult figure. And if his later releases like Gerry, Last Days, and Paranoid Park, did not seem as impactful, perhaps it’s because the youth culture that changed and not the man.
Last week we again visited the studio of the artist Barry X Ball, whose engrossing, unsettling sculptures are at the top of our art list. See our photo essay below and read our extensive profile on the artist.
It is hard to believe that that the perennially young Japanese label UNDERCOVER turned 25 last year. As part of the anniversary, the publisher Rizzoli is releasing a 256-page book on the brand ($65). It is the first comprehensive overview of UNDERCOVER’s body of work and the first book on the brand available in the West (if you can find it, hunt down the fantastic “The Shepherd,” which documented UNDERCOVER’s first Parisian shows.)
Aaaah, the Smiths! As a late convert I cannot claim allegiance to the good old formative days when meat was murder and the queen was dead. But, the more I listen to the Smiths as of late the more their music overtakes my consciousness.
Please join us for our Black Celebration party in Paris with our guest Leon Emanuel Blanck.
I did not know that one of the most impressive modern buildings is in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, until I saw its photo in This Brutal World (Phaidon, $49.95). The jaw-dropping structure is a testament to the human aspirations and follies. If architecture, like art, should reflect our world, the still-unfinished (inside) Ryugyong Hotel is it.
One of the things we love at StyleZeitgeist is bringing interesting people from fashion and other cultural realms together, especially when these people are musicians. Bryan Black, known popularly as Black Asteroid has played at some of our events, and his heavy hitting industrial techno has kept us dancing more than once well into the night.
This week the new fashion exhibition “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It aims to challenge the notion, usually found in the popular imagination, that handwork and machine work somehow exist in the state of opposition.