LIFE AQUATIC

the romance of the sea never gets old! nor do the rugged, bearded men in cable knit sweaters and yellow rain coats that forever tries to tame the waves. imagine how dreadfully dull our wardrobes would be without nautical stripes, wool pea coats and beanies to keep our ears snug and warm. now to find me self a hunky captain to rock the boat with like aaliyah.


photo: style.com

JACK CHAMBERS

it's been ages since i went to the AGO (art gallery of ontario fyi). the last time i went was a couple of years ago for the re-opening after frank ghery pimped out the joint and made the once non-descript building one of the architectural wonders of toronto.
it does cut quite a dashing figure. all those wooden beams soaring up to the sky, over a path almost a whole city block wide, curved like a sail. i reckon its quite hard to paint a picture of it in your head. even if you google image search it, it doesn't quite capture the scope and magnitude of the structure. anyways, the last time i went i came purely to look at the building, didn't even look at any art because i've seen all of it countless of times.
a couple of weeks ago i thought it would be a brilliant idea to take some of my staff to the AGO to bond and hopefully be inspired (i dare say they were). we went on a wednesday because its free after five on wednesdays and they would be much more inclined to go when no dollars are involved. i didn't really have any expectations because although its been a few years since i had last gone, there were no major exhibits going on. so in my head seeing all those works of art that i've seen countless times would just be like seeing your neighbour you see on the lift every morning on your way to work.
i was wrong.
when you walk in, the first gallery you pass through is rather a long one. unchanged even after the ghery addition. it was still long and quite narrow, but it was exactly the same. raoul duffy's "yellow violin" hung where it always had been. pretty much right across the emil bernard, right around the corner from the o'keefe which is directly across the miro. seeing them for the first time in years, i felt a sudden, unexpected rush of nostalgia. like how you would feel when you randomly flick the remote and it lands on a channel playing one of the saturday morning cartoons you used to watch when you were little.
i was by no means little when i saw those paintings, but it was, to risk sounding incredibly corny, like running into an old, dear friend.
i used to go with my art class in highschool to the AGO every wednesday without fail. then walking over to china town at this little restaurant called champion house for some grub and sitting there for hours having a good laugh. those were some of the most memorable days of my highschool life.
but i digress. as we went from room to room, seeing all those works of art that i was once so familiar with, to my surprise, i felt the same way i felt when i saw them for the very first time. they remain unchanged, still beautiful, still as powerful as it ever was and the only thing that's different was my age.
in the canadian wing of the gallery hung jack chambers's "highway 401 towards london no.1". it is massive! situated on one of those free standing walls that divides the room and acts like a barrier to persuade you towards a certain direction. when you're standing in front of it, you literally feel like you're flying over the highway and that is your view.
to be honest, i've seen that painting so many times and this is the first time i've ever remembered his name. it also helped that the gallery held a special retrospective of his work so most of his important pieces were housed together in one room.
i never really paid that much attention to canadian art. mainly because i've always associated it with the group of seven and i'm not really keen on their work, nor do those landscapes have any affinity with my connection to anything canadian. so i knew nothing about jack chambers. didn't have a clue that he was once canada's highest paid living artist before he passed away from leukemia in 1978. but there was something in chamber's work that was especially familiar. i connected with it. the view outside the window on his domestic paintings looked like the view out of my parents' window from the house i grew up in. huge suburban backyards knee deep in snow with towering pine trees. i used to play and make snow angels in that exact same backyard when i was a kid.
that day, i felt like a child. i felt the same way i felt every time i visit the philippines. i left as a child and came back as an adult. time and experience has given you a new perspective, but your eyes see everything through memory.

RUINS

the result of a five year collaboration between photographers yves marchand and romain meffre, "the ruins of detroit" is a fascinating study of a once great city slowly crumbling into dust. once the heart of american industrialization, detroit was a beacon for forward thinking ideas. it is the spiritual home of the automobile and the birth place of motown. can you even imagine a world without cars or how different the music we listen to today would sound like? detroit is now but a shadow of it's golden past but the cultural impact this city has had is immeasurable.
looking at these images, with their grand interiors of towering arches and intricate plaster work falling into decay, it gives off an almost eerie impression of looking at helenic ruins such as the parthenon. a micro example of what our civilization would eventually look like if it ever were to collapse. greece was the center of the western world for a thousand years, egypt even longer than that. and what we have left of their great civilizations asides from their intellectual inheritance, are, let's face facts, dilapidated monuments. but to see it happen in our modern age makes me wonder about the mortality of our way of life. quite a heavy thing to propose to my thoughts, but it is works like this that affirms that brilliant ideas that provoke will always be the engine that drives us forward. even though some, including cities, become casualties of progress.

PARK LIFE

toronto winters are excrutiatingly long and painful. everything becomes a mission of epic proportions. even just stepping out to the corner shop to buy a pack of fags is like an olympic level sporting event. first you thrown on about three layers of clothes, and then a parka, plus your scarf, beenie and gloves and then hype yourself up to take the first step outside your door and make like usain bolt and run as fast as you can to the store. all the while avoiding sheets of ice that's carpeted the pavement. so when lady summer comes around batting her sunshine eyelashes, the whole entire city goes mental.
by mental i mean five times more drinking than most of the year. four packs of cigarettes more each week. an extra hundred dollar spent on the weekend. too many nights you can't remember. a little bit of slutting around. bands galore. gallery openings with open bar to "look at art". and bringing a proper large picnic blanket to the park so you and your mates have something to lie on and watch the sun go up. a perfect way to end an amazing night. until a few hours later when you wake with the most horrendous hang-over of your life. so then you go back to the park and drink some more cause in your head it's much better to be drunk than to feel hung-over. but that's not how i spent my summer at all. just kidding.

RIFAT OZBEK

with fashion month slowly approaching and dozens of young desigerns set to be heralded as "next big thing" by the fashion press, i however have been pre-occupied going back to "the next big thing" from two decades ago. yes gaultier and marc jacobs still are able to pack a wallop, but with galliano's unfortunate fall from grace i've gotten bit with a case of hopeless nostalgia.
also, having been let down by fashion for the past few seasons i really haven't got any other alternative to get my fashion fix but to go back to past, when designers were still concerned with radical ideas and not the opinion of their financial backers and board of directors. a time when fashion was still able to juggle commerce and creativity. not to say that there aren't a handfull designers at present capable of doing so, what i'm refering to are ideas that were so forward thinking then that have become so prolific now.
case in point, rifat ozbek. once the torch bearer of east meets west fashion, his legacy has now been passed on to highly influential designers such as dries van noten. who, like ozbek in the eighties and early nineties, manages to introduce ethnic references with a jolt of youthful, contemporary energy giving it a relevance that is at once timeless and completely modern.
born in turkey and raised in england, ozbek took the multi-cultural collision from the streets of london and his own turkish background and brought it to the world of high fashion. coming out around the same time as lacroix's bourgeois excess of poof skirts and lavish embellishments, the youthful, kinetic energy of ozbek's designs provided a much needed contrast to the almost unattainable vision of french fashion.
his concerns were more of what was happening now. referencing traditional ideas and adapting it with a much more youthful sensibility heavily influenced by london's riotous club culture of the time. where english dandyism met africal tribal motifs but without the overt romanticism of other designers who borrowed from other cultures like saint laurent.
with the world getting much smaller and more obessed with youth than ever before and cultures and traditions melting into one big giant flavourless pot, i think an ozbek come-back is well long over due to add some spice to the stew.