Fashion Citation

Am I the only one facing Bad 80s Fashion Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? I found this great item - the Fashion Citation Pad - at Nifty Nick Knacks in Venice, FL and I think I will have to order them by the dozen so I can take the L Train each day and face the horror head on. Do I have the cojones to bring a camera and upload the images GLAMOUR Don'ts Style? (I was working at a fashionista-haven Museum when an actually extremely fabulous colleague was inexplicably featured in the GLAMOUR Don't and this is a hideous fate) Can I be as brazen as the Fug girls and just upload them WITHOUT the black bars across the eyes? Let me paint a picture of horror in words for now:

L Train, last week:
Klaus Nomi-esque dyed black hair, shaved to the skull just above the neckline. Massive Old Legally Blind Old Floridian Retiree type glasses, black leggings (naturally), beige cowboy boots, and a BLACK LEATHER SHORT PUFFY SLEEVED WRAP DRESS. This is a diabolical cross between a Diane Von Furstenberg circa 1973 and a Butcher's apron, discotheque meets abbatoir, Bataille would have written a book. Not pretty.

L Train also last week:
Mullet, bubblegum pink and white pin-striped (last time I saw this pattern, it was on a Candy Striper at a Hospital) silky poly button-down blouse WITH SHOULDER PADS, skin tight red jeans, black and red creepers, a huge cuff with an insect encased in a vinyl circle. All this look needed was a fanny pack, but fortunately, the offender refrained from signing her own Fashion Death Sentence.

Posh Spice - All the time.
The asymmetrical severe bob, I did this in 1985.
The bubble skirt, again, did this sometime in 1984.

All of Williamsburg, 90% of the L Train and apparently most NYC co-eds:
Leggings.
Again, I confess that I did this in the 1980s, like a lot of other things I did in that period, it is best forgotten. This is unhealthy, enough said.

Finally, the slouchy ankle boot.
If, like most NY women, you need to get emergency feeding through a nose tube (as does Allegra Versace) this look actually makes your ankle look fat, is that what you want? Maybe there is some trend I am too old to know about, that leads women to wish to pretend they have either gout or elephantatitis?

Felix Gonzalez-Torres?

Many people are asking themselves how the marble reflecting pools in front of the US Pavilion in Venice can be attributed to Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Nancy Spector is extremely knowlegable on his work and worked with him on his retrospective. Surely she presents compelling arguments and documents in the catalogue. But on the visual evidence alone, I found the work antithetical to what I associate with his oeuvre. The marble reflecting pools: static, monumental, funereal, luxurious, precious, recalling old-fashioned mausoleums and evoking luxury, fly in the face of the mutability, ephemerality, and mechanically-reproduced aesthetics of many of his works. They clashed with the bulbs outside, and the stacks, licorice candies, and xeroxes inside. Much more moving and evocative are his doomed-to-run-outofsynch generic office clocks. I found "my" Felix Gonzalez-Torres perfect lovers on an anonymous clothesline, where someone had hung two pairs of underpants to dry in the sun and wind....

Collecting Schlock

The other day I was wondering, why is it so cool and fabulous to decorate our homes with Chinese Cultural Revolution tchotchkes and as I write this I am looking at my red felt Mao piggy bank (of course, what could be a more succinct visual metaphor for current day China?), but it isn't cool to collect objects from other bloody dictatorships? And BTW the Chinese tchotchkes are faux, so popular is the stuff that it's knocked off. Let's just say that it killed my aesthetic buzz when I started thinking of the millions of people who died thanks to Mao, to say the least. I read an article about a man who was unable to auction a portrait of Stalin, that was beyond the pale. apparently. Until he got Damien Hirst to paint a red clown nose on the portrait. (which sold for 140,000 pounds - see http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2010187,00.html)

People who write about less-popular dictators, for example, Franco, must content themselves to seek his mass cultural products and propaganda items like horny perverts seeking old pornographic postcards. Yet Mao killed millions and Franco hundreds of thousands.

US Pavilion Venice Biennial 2007

Granted, curating anything in the US pavilion is a thankless task. How do you make anything look good in a space that resembles a highway rest stop in Virginia? And anyone who has driving up 75 from the south going through VA knows what I mean, the rest stops are designed in a quaint neo-US-Colonial (not to be confused with the contemporary neo-US-Colonial in places like Puerto Rico, by which I mean Spanish Colonial architecture lovingly restored to Disney-like splendor, so that it may house a local branch of HOOTERS for the US tourists visiting Old San Juan on cruiseships) architectural style, to prepare visitors for Mount Vernon? But the lightbulb piece here made the pavilion look like a small town faux Colonial McMansion decked out at X-Mas time.

To the first-timer the Giardini is a lot like EPCOT

To the first-timer, the Biennial Giradini are a lot like EPCOT Center. Do you want to go Venezuela and eat typical chocolates? Great: this year's exhibition was a ranchito version of relational aesthetics meets 1970s trade fair, with Bolivarian Revolutionary cadres helpfully stirring in native dark chocolate powder into an acrid bitter paste? Just like EPCOT, you get to eat the typical foods!! (I always loved the mousse at "France" with its diminute Eiffel Tower) Or, do you want to wait in a line for 1 hour to see the German Pavilion, or wait 45 minutes in the Panini and Illy Latte line instead? (Mom! I am tired of "Mexico" I want to eat hot dogs at LIbby's Tomorrowland instead!)

Photo: Hapless and hungry artworld elites cue for paninnis and lukewarm lattes. This was akin to food ration cues in Eastern Bloc countries, what are they serving? I don't care, I am getting in line.