Friday, March 28, 2014
FLASHBACK FRIDAYS!!!!!
Here's a flashback track from my "Another World" and "Kitchen Club" days, circa 1990.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Memorable vocalists
Diamanda Galás is an American avant-garde composer, vocalist, pianist, organist, performance artist, and painter. Galás has been described as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror", with her three and a half octave vocal range. Her works largely concentrate on the topics of AIDS, mental illness, despair, injustice, condemnation, and loss of dignity.
Yma Sumac (September 13, 1922 – November 1, 2008) was a Peruvian soprano. In the 1950s, she was one of the most famous proponents of exotica music.
She became an international success based on her extreme vocal range, which was said to be "well over four octaves" and was sometimes claimed to span even five octaves at her peak. Yma Sumac recorded an extraordinarily wide vocal range of slightly over four octaves from B2 to C♯7 (approximately 123 to 2270 Hz). She was able to sing notes in the low baritone register as well as notes above the range of an ordinary soprano. Both low and high extremes can be heard in the song Chuncho (The Forest Creatures) (1953). She was also apparently able to sing in an eerie "double voice".
COVER THIS
While controversial, much more appropriate than the other magazine's cover. Ms. Piggy and Kermie are actual talented established celebrities. The other two people on that other magazine cover, may be relevant right now, but now for any achievements brought about by their own talents.
Either way, this is indeed the cover "Vogue" should print.
Friday, March 21, 2014
EIKO ISHIOKA - Timeless, Original, Revolutionary
Eiko Ishioka, a designer who brought an eerie, sensual surrealism to film and theater, album covers, the Olympics and Cirque du Soleil, in the process earning an Oscar, a Grammy and a string of other honors.
Trained as a graphic designer, Ms. Ishioka was for decades considered the foremost art director in Japan; she later came to be known as one of the foremost in the world.
Ms. Ishioka won an Academy Award for costume design in 1992 for “Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’ ” directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Her outfits for the film included a suit of full body armor for the title character (played by Gary Oldman), whose glistening red color and all-over corrugation made it look like exposed musculature, and a voluminous wedding dress worn by the actress Sadie Frost, with a stiff, round, aggressive lace collar inspired by the ruffs of frill-necked lizards.
These typified Ms. Ishioka’s aesthetic. A deliberate marriage of East and West — she had lived in Manhattan for many years — it simultaneously embraced the gothic, the otherworldly, the dramatic and the unsettling and was suffused with a powerful, dark eroticism. Her work, whose outsize stylization dazzled some critics and discomforted others, was provocative in every possible sense of the word, and it was meant to be. Ms. Ishioka was closely associated with the director Tarsem Singh, for whom she designed costumes for four films. In the first, “The Cell” (2000), she encased Jennifer Lopez, who plays a psychologist trapped by a serial killer, in a headpiece that resembled a cross between a rigid neck brace and a forbidding bird cage.“Jennifer asked me if I could make it more comfortable,” Ms. Ishioka told The Ottawa Citizen in 2000, “but I said, ‘No, you’re supposed to be tortured.’ ”
For Mr. Singh, she also costumed “The Fall” (2006), an adventure fantasy, and “Immortals,” a violent tale of ancient Greece released last year. Their fourth collaboration, “Mirror Mirror,” an adaptation of “Snow White,” is set for release in March.
Ms. Ishioka’s other film work includes the production design of “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” Paul Schrader’s 1985 film about the doomed writer Yukio Mishima. That year the Cannes Film Festival jury awarded her — along with the film’s cinematographer, John Bailey, and its composer, Philip Glass — a special prize for “artistic contribution.”
For the Broadway stage, Ms. Ishioka designed sets and costumes for David Henry Hwang’s 1988 drama “M. Butterfly,” for which she earned two Tony nominations, and, most recently, costumes for the musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”
She won a Grammy Award in 1986 for her design of Miles Davis’s album “Tutu,” whose cover is dominated by an Irving Penn photograph of Mr. Davis, shot in extreme close-up and starkly lighted.
Eiko Ishioka was born in Tokyo on July 12, 1938. Her artistic pursuits were encouraged by her parents: her father was a graphic designer, her mother a homemaker who, in accordance with the social norms of the day, had forsaken literary ambitions to marry and raise children.
But when Eiko, as an undergraduate at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, announced that she planned to be a graphic artist, even her father warned that she would have a much easier life designing things like shoes or dolls. Graphic design in Japan, with its close connection to the sharp-elbowed world of advertising, was every inch a man’s game then.
The young Ms. Ishioka persevered, graduating in 1961 and joining the advertising division of the cosmetics giant Shiseido. She opened her own design concern in the early 1970s; among her chief clients was Parco, a chain of boutique shopping complexes for which she created advertising and promotional materials for more than a decade.
Ms. Ishioka’s work for Parco, which embodied an eclectic, avant-garde internationalism rarely seen in Japanese advertisements of the period, helped cement her reputation. Her print ads, for instance, sometimes showed models who were naked or nearly so, a rarity in Japanese advertising then.
“You’ve seen a kimono: they’re not big into full-on nudes,” Maggie Kinser Hohle, a writer on Japanese design, said this month in an interview for this obituary. (As Maggie Kinser Saiki, she is the author of “12 Japanese Masters,” a book about design that features Ms. Ishioka.) “That’s extremely shocking. And yet she did it in a way that made you drawn to the beauty of it, and then you realize you’re looking at nipples.”
Perhaps the most striking thing about Ms. Ishioka’s ads was that they rarely depicted any actual item sold at Parco. For Japanese television, she created a Parco commercial in which, over the course of a minute and a half, the actress Faye Dunaway, black-clad against a black background, slowly and wordlessly peels and eats a hard-boiled egg.
In other work, Ms. Ishioka designed uniforms and outerwear for selected members of the Swiss, Canadian, Japanese and Spanish teams at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. She was also the director of costume design for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
In other work, Ms. Ishioka designed uniforms and outerwear for selected members of the Swiss, Canadian, Japanese and Spanish teams at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. She was also the director of costume design for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
Ms. Ishioka’s portfolio extended to the circus and a magic show. She designed costumes for Cirque du Soleil’s “Varekai” (2002) and was the visual artistic director of the illusionist David Copperfield’s 1996 Broadway show, “Dreams and Nightmares.”
She also designed costumes for the singer Grace Jones’s “Hurricane” tour in 2009 (they were noteworthy even by Ms. Jones’s lofty standards for the outré) and directed Bjork’s music video “Cocoon.” Her books include “Eiko by Eiko” (1983) and “Eiko on Stage” (2000), both available in English.
Ms. Ishioka is survived by her husband, Nicholas Soultanakis, whom she married last year; her mother, Mitsuko Saegusa Ishioka; two brothers, Koichiro and Jun Ishioka; and a sister, Ryoko Ishioka.
Though she was known in particular for the form of her designs, Ms. Ishioka did not neglect function. For some athletes at the 2002 Winter Games, she created what she called the Concentration Coat, a full-length cocoon of foamlike fabric into which wearers could withdraw from the press scrum around them, podlike studies in portable solitude.
See her other works below in the movie, The Fall, and most recently Immortals.
Atelier Versace Couture - Printemps/ Ete 2014 featuring Lady GaGa:
Check out the runway show below:
http://www.fashiontv.com/fashionweek/paris-couture-spring-2014
http://www.fashiontv.com/fashionweek/paris-couture-spring-2014
Nuit Demonia 2014
Night Dèmonia
Saturday, June 14, 2014
from 20h to 7h
The Crayères Montquartiers of
5, chemin des Montquartiers
92130 - Issy-les-Moulineaux
With a prestigious program and a friendly atmosphere, NIGHT Demonia has become an unmissable event for the international fetish scene. People attend from Japan, the United States, Canada, and all lovers of fetish, vinyl, leather and latex in France.
The event brings together over 2,000 people every year, all dressed in mandatory vinyl, latex or leather. The event also hosts various fashion shows, SM performances, and performance art.
Theme of the Year: FETISH FUTURE
This theme will inspire both the photo studio, the decor of the evening and the artists who perform there. The public is not obliged to comply with this theme but it can make for better conditions to respect the dress code, that is. We can not stress enough: vinyl, latex or leather!
You can, for example, add LEDs to your outfit to give you a futuristic touch...... We rely on the most inspired public with their most original ideas!
#nuitdemonia, #nightdemonia, #fetish, #leather, #costumes, #fiercefetish, #otherworldlyfetish
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)