Posts Tagged ‘Mae West’
“In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up”*…
Back when I first studied gift exchange, I dismissed its economic importance—after all, it reflects only a tiny portion of all our transactions. Perhaps it might interest an anthropologist, but only as a kind of curiosity item, a refreshing but impractical alternative to the real substance of economic life. But as I see it now, the gift economy is much larger than I realized—in fact, it’s almost as large as the transaction-based economy. For a start, I’ve seen its predominance in my own life. My wife and I don’t charge my children for their meals or the hours of service we provide them. My friends dealing with elder care or community service or church activities operate off-the-grid, so to speak—at least from a conventional economic perspective. These are gift exchanges, pure and simple, and they are everywhere you look, even in a modern capitalist society.
But I’m concerned here with a different class of activities, ones that straddle these two spheres—and are hard to classify for that very reason. Artistic or creative pursuits, endeavors that are typically pursued for the intrinsic joy of sharing one’s gifts, are also frequently commoditized and placed on the market. Are they part of the gift economy or the transaction economy?…
The estimable Ted Gioia explores: “Gratuity: Who Gets Paid When Art Is Free.”
[image above: source]
* Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
###
As we share and share alike, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that Mae West was sentenced to 10 days in a workhouse on Roosevelt Island (known then as “Welfare Island”) and fined $500 for obscenity for her play Sex… despite the fact that the play had run over a year before the police raided, and had been seen by 325,000 people– including members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and seven members of the district attorney’s staff.
In the event, she served eight days of her sentence, receiving two days off of time for “good behavior”– and the resulting publicity did great things for Ms. West’s notoriety nationwide.
“The truth is far more frightening – nobody is in control”*…
It’s the conspiracy theory to dwarf all conspiracy theories. A smorgasbord of every other intrigue under the sun, the Illuminati are the supposed overlords controlling the world’s affairs, operating secretly as they seek to establish a New World Order.
But this far-fetched paranoia all started with a playful work of fiction in the 1960s. What does this tell us about our readiness to believe what we read and hear – and what can the Illuminati myth reveal about the fake news and stories we continue to be influenced by today?…
What the myth reveals about how fake stories spread today and about the psychology of their fiercest proponents: get illuminated at “The accidental invention of the Illuminati conspiracy.”
* Alan Moore
###
As we believe that the truth is out there, we might send sultry birthday greetings to Mary Jane “Mae” West; the actress, singer, playwright, screenwriter, comedian, and sex symbol was born on this date in 1893. Known over her seven-decade career for her lighthearted double entendre and breezy sexual independence, she has been named 15th among the greatest female stars of classic American cinema by the American Film Institute.
Among her memorable mots:
Too much of a good thing is wonderful.
When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I’ve never tried before.
To err is human, but it feels divine.
Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.
Faux Logo…
Luis Gispert was photographing car interiors when he stumbled upon a kitschy white Cadillac Escalade, its seats upholstered in fake material from Takashi Murakami’s 2009 collaboration with Louis Vuitton. While the owner showed off his pimped-out ride, the wheels turned in Gispert’s head. “I figured there had to be so many cars with counterfeit interiors”…
This inspired a two-year “obsessive quest” to document a subculture of people crafting custom designs from counterfeit materials. Gispert attended car shows across the country and captured interiors bedazzled with logos, from a Burberry-upholstered BMW to a Gucci-themed Mercedes. Honing in on the culture itself brought Gispert to more-intimate spaces, like the home of a Florida-based drug dealer, whose bedroom was decorated with Versace’s signature Greek Key motif. Gispert’s photographic journey is the subject of an upcoming solo exhibition, Decepcion, at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York [open now]…
He spent a year capturing cars before turning his lens on the owners themselves—many of whom had closets filled with backpacks, sneakers, and jackets custom-made from fake designer materials. Gispert’s project evolved to incorporate portraits of men and women modeling counterfeit fashion, such as a DJ clad in a pleather MCM jumpsuit…
Designer customization was born in the early 1980s, when a haberdasher named Dapper Dan began selling one-of-a-kind Louis Vuitton boots and $8,000 custom Gucci jackets out of his boutique in Harlem. “He was likely cutting up actual Gucci bags and using the materials to make jackets and luxury car interiors,” said Gispert. Dapper Dan’s clientele consisted of drug dealers—until LL Cool J and Mike Tyson took the street trend mainstream…
Unlike Canal Street vendors, Gispert’s subjects aren’t trying to pass off their creations as authentic. “These people are appropriating the material, the actual logos and fabrics, but they’re not trying to mimic high fashion,” he explained. One photograph from the series features a woman wearing a Louis Vuitton dress that Gispert described as “some kind of nightgown, flamenco hybrid.” It looks nothing like Louis Vuitton couture, yet it’s splattered with the designer’s cult logo. “In a way these people are hijacking signs of wealth, bastardizing logos and turning them into something completely unique.”
Read the entire tale at The Daily Beast, and see a selection of Gispert’s arresting photos on his site.
As we reckon with the collision of High and Low, we might wish a fashionable Happy Birthday to Coco Chanel’s greatest rival, Elsa Schiaparelli; she was born in Rome on this date in 1890. Schiaparelli, who collaborated with artists including Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti to dress socialites (like Daisy Fellowes) and celebrities (like Mae West) was frequently dismissed by Chanel as “that Italian artist who makes clothes.” While Schiaparelli is not as well remembered as Chanel, Schiaparelli made lasting contributions to fashion: she created wraparound dresses decades before Diane von Furstenberg and crumpled up rayon 50 years before Issey Miyake’s pleats and crinkles; she created the first evening-dress with a jacket and the first clothes with visible zippers. But her most fundamental contribution to couture was surely the sense of fun– of playfulness and “anything goes”– that she shared with her Dadaist and Surrealist friends.
Something so good, transmuted into something so bad…
Last November Rowan Somerville was awarded the Literary Review‘s 18th annual Bad Sex Award…
The prize was awarded for passages from his second novel, The Shape of Her. He was presented with the award by Michael Winner on Monday 29 November at a ceremony in St James’s Square. ‘There is nothing more English than bad sex,’ said Somerville, whose first novel, The End of Sleep, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. ‘So on behalf of the nation, I thank you.’ The judges’ minds were made up by sentences such as: ‘Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.’
The other nominees were:
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (4th Estate)
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Atlantic Books)
The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon (Atlantic Books)
Maya by Alastair Campbell (Hutchinson)
A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee (Constable & Robinson)
Heartbreak by Craig Raine (Atlantic Books)
Mr Peanut by Adam Ross (Jonathan Cape)
OK, so mainstream novelists sometimes reach embarrassingly as they try to bottle bliss… But what of those writers who pursue passion as a matter of course? Now, with the help of Bad Romance Novels (“Bad excerpts from bad Romance Novels”), one can harvest the purple pearls that lurk within bodice-rippers (and also, occasionally, the scribblings of more “traditional” writers like Paulo Coelho or Thomas Pynchon)… A couple of examples (chosen from those relatively more suitable for work):
He kissed her long and deep, and it was as if someone had just pressed a button marked “sizzle”…
The Billionaire Bodyguard – Sharon KendrickTheir lips fit together with a perfection he had never known with another woman and she tasted as sweet as a Christmas divinity.
The Greek’s Christmas Baby – Lucy Monroe
UPDATE: A watchful Twitterer (@jkmyrna, to whom, thanks) has alerted your correspondent to the fact that the “Bad Romance Novels” Tumbler linked above has been shuttered– for plagarizing its content, mostly from Uncle Walter’s Bad Romance Novel Quotes. Interested readers should hie themselves thither.
As we reaffirm the wisdom of keeping some things to ourselves, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that Mae West was sentenced to 10 days in a workhouse on Roosevelt Island (known then as “Welfare Island”) and fined $500 for obscenity for her play Sex… despite the fact that the play had run over a year before the police raided, and had been seen by 325,000 people– including members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and seven members of the district attorney’s staff. Still, the resulting publicity did great things for Ms. West’s notoriety nationwide.
You must be logged in to post a comment.