STYLE BUBBLE: De Haviland's High Platforms & Sakabe's Mind-Warping Prints

By Susie Bubble

writing from London . . .

Feeding the Power
Something happened. I have somehow crossed into the category of people who can handle the high platform shoes with aplomb. No more intrepid stumbling around. No more looking like an awkward child wearing mother's shoes. No more carrying flats around in my bag. Yes, the higher, the bigger, the chunkier the better.


Wearing my Sergio Rossi humongous wedges, I skipped (around Bloomsbury Square), hopped (doing an impression of my friend who arrived at my flat mate having lost one shoe) and ran (for the bus) all day and night without so much as a wince of pain. Is it like when you suddenly discovering you can't wear a 'training bra' anymore? As it just suddenly happened that my feet are now void of feeling the pain from super high, super chunky footwear.


So seeing as I'm never going to conquer the spindly stiletto, I shall now have to invest in the ultimate homage to the high high platform to really flaunt my new found ability. Seeing these alluring shots of Terry de Havilland shoes, now sold in girly girly boutique Sera in a designated Venus Palace area, they get a big googly-eyed yes from me. Havilland has said he designed shoes whilst on acid, dope and mescalin and I can't comment on his present substance intake but there is definitely something of the wacky with his shoes that is perfect for doing all my skipping, hopping and running. After all, the feet no longer hurt!

Look what you get when you fantasise...


I always wished I was one of those people who had the imagination to become out of touch with reality. When Mikio Sakabe showed his graduate collection at the Royal Academy in Antwerp last year, which I went to, I was sort of fixated by his vision of cityscapes and jealous that he saw that kind of beauty in such bleak buildings. Shining colours, bright lights, windows flickering at night on skyscrapers are all present again in Sakabe's AW07-8 collection. Entitled 'Resort Mood', Sakabe has wishfully imagined refined European ladies visiting Asia on holiday and wearing something languously decadent and luxurious yet also mysterious just as for the Western world, in a cliched way, Asia still piques curiosity.





It's silk all the way with silk linen, silk jersey, silk velvet and silk cotton. Where fashion is becoming almost seasonless with the weather playing havoc, Sakabe has taken full advantage of that and given us clothes to promenade slowly under the sun whilst perhaps carrying an antique parasol. It sounds strange to say but both formal and relaxed elements are there. I particularly love the jewel encrusted shirt because there's a lot of 'meat' on it, 'meat' being lots of chunkyness going on with the gems.




Ultimately though, it is all about escaping into those mind-warping prints and yes whilst being jealous, such images don't formulate when I'm staring at grey cityscapes, I'm glad Sakabe takes me to the softly glowing colourful city with his vision.

FILM: Being Stanley Kubrick

Malkovich on the make



Color Me Kubrick
Directed by Brian W. Cook


As Stanley Kubrick’s assistant and his longtime assistant director, respectively, screenwriter Anthony Frewin and director Brian W. Cook must naturally have been curious about the strange case of the aptly named Alan Conway, a con man who sloppily impersonated Kubrick during the last years of the famed filmmaker’s life.

Color Me Kubrick is their account of Conway’s exploits, and it’s as cold and confidently improvisational as, apparently, Conway himself. In that role, John Malkovich at once draws on and plays off his Being John Malkovich insider/outsider enigma status, his Dangerous Liaisons seductive mystique, and the tasteful-criminal afterglow of his Mr. Ripley and his Jake in Object of Beauty. He depicts the thoroughbred bar- and bed-hopping bilker with a pushy hamminess. But it seems possible, even likely, that the approach, in this case, is a sort of meta method acting, as appropriate an attack on the part as any. Who knows, really? Conway’s hideous papier mâché of accents pasted over an in-your-face swishy sexuality doesn’t seem to have a core. Even when he is groveling and confessing before a young stud he picked up in Marseille—in the guise of Kubrick, of course—Malkovich’s Conway looks up at the fellow in a quick but definitive appraisal of the performance’s effect. Was the real Conway, if there could hermeneutically be such a thing, ever any more real?

Conway mucks up the lives of sexual and monetary conquests, and takes shameful if picaresque advantage of a hotel-circuit singer-comedian. But eventually, a run-in with the New York Times columnist Frank Rich, of all people, ends the charade, and Conway gets the notoriety as Conway that he so long craved and cashed in on as Kubrick. The narrative reflex, of course, is to see this as the ironic comeuppance, since it seems to push him over the edge. Aha—be careful what you wish for, we think. Fame's not all it's cracked up to be. But, aha—be careful of moviegoer voyeuristic smugness, too, because Conway's cons aren’t over even if the Kubrick bit has played out.

If you’re in a philosophical mood, you might appreciate the parallels and contrasts between Conway and Kubrick, both strong-willed, determined, highly idiosyncratic craftsmen who simultaneously abhorred and skillfully gamed their respective systems—gullible hangers on in one case, and the entertainment industry in the other. Such associations are encouraged by musical and visual quotes from Kubrick's movies, particularly 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. A Thus Spake Zarathustra moment in the laundromat is actually quite poignant, perhaps because it highlights the grand, bittersweet weirdness of the everyday, as encapsulated in Malkovich's full embrace of an empty character.

But the artist/con-artist comparisons aren't, ultimately, too enlightening, since Kubrick was an inspired, compulsive control freak and Conway, at least as suggested here, an uninspired, reckless drunken pleasure seeker in control of nothing, and lucky, moreover, that he wasn’t beaten to death by the more thuggish of his vengeful dupes.

From baseline affected fey Englishman, Malkovich’s accents range from an all-American baritone, something like Jim Carrey in underjaw-thrusting put-on mode, to an iffy Brooklyn whine. Conway’s pickup lines are as awful as his accents. “I used to handle myself,” he says riffing on having an agent as he seduces a gullible designer, “but now I prefer letting someone else do it.” And that lad, typical of Conway’s companions, isn’t much more subtle: “They do say in Hollywood the only way to the top is through the bottom.” Stunningly, Conway isn’t even particularly knowledgeable about Kubrick, to whom he attributes Judgment at Nuremberg when trying to woo a guy in a pool hall who, alas, knows his Stanley Kramer films.

Add to that Conway’s outrageous outfits by costumer Victoria Russell—a haphazard Cage Aux Droll—and it’s all as sad as it is provocative. “I’m not Stanley Kubrick,” a deflated Conway wails to the young buck from Marseille. “I’m Alan Conway, one of life’s great failures.”

But you can’t quite shrug the story off, either, because Conway's such a consistent success as a failure. There are some tantalizing hints of worlds within worlds in Malkovich’s take. To a pharmacist and his wife (the pharmacist apparently also manages a rock band; everyone we meet here is on the make in one way or another), Conway, pretending to be Kubrick under the assumed identity of Conway and living in a dive above an adult bookstore, explains:

I suppose at times I grow quite disgusted with the razzle-dazzle noise and glitz of showbiz. And at times I must concentrate on what is truly important in my life—my work. And I must be undisturbed. This is my hide-away, my space for inner tranquility.

It’s a weirdly compelling moment, because it describes a full-time con man’s work as well as it might a movie mogul’s. That and the brief flights of elation among the poor sods Conway exploits when they think they’re in the presence of greatness hint at the manic-depressive quality of society’s star swooning. "I'm not the man you think I am," sings Bryan Adams in what amounts to the film's theme song, "but I'm the man for you."

Still, the smatterings of insight are undermined by the picture’s self-satisfied insidery ribbing. For instance, Malkovich, as Conway, talks about casting Malkovich in a film (3001: A Space Odyssey). Moreover, while Conway says that he only wishes to escape himself, that's in his speech to the Marseille conquest and evidently just ruse too, and nowhere in the film do we spy a true self from which Conway might bust out.

The story’s profundity is perhaps lodged in this film somewhere. But it’s trapped and helpless, raising the question what a director as inventive as Kubrick himself might have done to extract it.

-A.C.K.

VIDEO: 5th-Graders Rap on the Patriot Act

MUSIC VIDEOS: Smirnoff and Weird Al, Keepin' It Real ...

VIDEO: Reverse Sand-Castle Explosions

FILM: Allegra con Groppo

Reaser and Mol


Puccini for Beginners
Written and directed by Maria Maggenti

“There are two kinds of people in the world—those who feel with their hearts and those who feel with their heads. I was the head-feeling kind. That’s how I got into this mess.”

So explains Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser), the novelist protagonist at the start of Maria Maggenti’s Puccini for Beginners. Allegra is explaining how she came to be dating both halves of a couple on the rocks—the Columbia philosophy professor Philip (Justin Kirk) and the investment banker Grace (Gretchen Mol).

But despite its appealing female principals (Kirk, on the other hand, is a bit smarmy) and cozy Manhattan nooks, this dramedy about various forms of sexual and romantic ambivalence falls flat. For all its semi-intellectual chatter, while we get to know Allegra’s bed, we never get a good sense of her heart or her head. She claims, by the end of the tale, to have grown—and we believe her in as much as we believe in her at all—but we don’t know enough about the context and nature of that change to celebrate with her.

While the pacing sometimes falters, the fundamental problem is the script. It’s so focused on defining the characters’ sexuality that it forgets to define much else about them, and it mistakes camera time for narrative quality time. Allegra can apply some sketchy feminist theory to Turandot, but for a novelist, much less one nominated for a major book award, she spends little time reading or writing, and a lot of time seeing old movies, shallowly yammering on about the nature of commitment, and binge eating and drinking. And what of Philip, who also seems way too busy sampling restaurants to have garnered that tasty offer from the University of Chicago? Grace, far from her banking offices, is seen working only at her avocation of glass blowing, which seems primarily an excuse for a funky scene set and some pointed entendre regarding foundry jargon.

Allegra's and Philip’s narcissism is perhaps more realistic, but no more winning. That they know they’re cliches and can recognize their own unhealthy behavior patterns doesn’t make them less cliched or predictable. In Mol, we take Grace’s uncertain plummet into her first lesbian liaison a little more to heart, but the sketchiness of the character limits even that emotional investment. Kissing Jessica Stein handled the same material with considerably more aplomb, tenderness, wit, and sexual nuance.

Then there’s the wry, imagined commentary on these goings on by incidental characters—a cafe waitress, a subway-train operator, and so on—which was cutting edge 30 years ago. When Harry Met Sally just barely got away with plundering the Annie Hall device in the late ’80s, and Sex and the City wisely abandoned it after an early season. Maggenti should have known better. Additional exegesis by peripheral characters—for instance, two sushi chefs at an eatery Allegra frequents—is also contrived and unconvincing. But their dismissive references to Allegra and her neurotic menagerie of cerebral sex adventurers does strike a chord. For Allegra's passions, on their route from head to heart, somehow ricochet clear of both regions in the viewer.

-A.C.K.

LINKS:

Q&A at Sundance with Maggenti

Trailer

You can't fight progress ...



Speed-painting w/ fries and ketchup ...



Color me beautiful ...

VIDEO: Face Dance

Tech Couture Roundup: Chalayan, McQueen, Android Beauty

from Boing Boing

By Xeni Jardin Image: An android-fluffer puts the finishing touches on a runway unit. Shot backstage at Indian designer Manish Arora's show, London Fashion Week, Feb. 12. (AP Photo). Alexander McQueen Autumn/Winter '07 show. Video here (have to dig around a bit), slideshow here at Style.com (of note: 20, 22, 46), and snip from review: First of all, there was a pentagram traced in red in a black-sand circle, with an inverted pyramid hanging over it. As the show started, a macabre film—of naked women, swarming locusts, faces decaying to skulls, and blood and fire—started to play above the models' heads. More recent video from shows in January: Video Link, Video Link 2, Video Link 3. Hussein Chalayan, whose electric/fabric hybrid designs I've blogged here before, showed off an amazing LED skirt in Paris last week. Link to Style.com show coverage, including review and slideshow. Snip: The show opened with a whirling storm roaring upward out of a central void in the podium. Then, on walked a girl in a dress that—through the magic of LED technology—lit up and played its own movie, a colorful pixelated grid inspired by a cityscape, as seen from space via Google Earth. Girl, better not wear that in Boston. Video here (but you have to hunt for it). More on SHOWstudio 1, 2, 3. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin and La Petite Claudine, photo also spotted on techyum.) Previous BoingBoing posts: Hussein Chalayan's awesome animatronic fashion Hussein Chalayan: future couture Robots on the runway: Yohji Yamamoto, Viktor and Rolf Girl to Ghost: hologram of model in fashion runway show Live nude supermodel scanning online: Naomi Campbell Reader comment: Judith Anderson says, This Link shows the "fashions" that Galliano did for Dior for the Spring/Summer 2007 collection, and they have to be the most gorgeous, sumptuous, lovely dresses I've ever seen. According to the text, Galliano spent a lot of time in Japan and captured the traditional kimono and obi, and "origamied" it. One looks like a Romulan outfit, but most of the rest are sooooo beautiful.

Living Tables, or Catering Centaurs

Boing Boing

By Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow: The "living tables" on offer at MakeUpByJulie are costumed catering servers whose bottom-half is lost beneath a table, making them into a kind of delicious, gustatory, immobile centaur. This is one of those great ideas that exactly straddles the creepy/cool line. Link (via Neatorama)