Showing posts with label Slimane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Slimane. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

I remember, Geordie's birthday is today



to me, was born 29 April
in the Santa Ynez valley,
not far from the seaside
town where I summered as
a boy. Geordie helped me
to raise Robbie and Whit,
and then there was a gap
before Thorny. The first
such gap, between Geor-
die's whelping and join-
ing me on Russian Hill,
expired on Bastille Day,
serving notice of Cham-
pagne's continuing elo-
quence, while acquaint-
ing me with a maxim to
which I've ever since
gladly adhered: never
inflict a great vintage
upon a great occasion,
for nothing could be 
more symmetrically su-
perfluous.






   For those of us who find it useful
   to make periodic audits of our lives,
   it is probably common ground that we
   soon discover that for the exercise
   to be challenging does not necessarily
   require it to be morbid; we also learn
   that while there is real value in ask-
   ing the question, 'Why am I doing this?'
   there is not always a neat and comfor-
   table answer; I don't think that matters.

   Let no one think I am laying claim to
   have done anything important. I am un-
   wavering in my belief that [mine] is
   essentially an ephemeral affair; frivol-
   ous, even. That for me is part of its at-
   traction and its romance .. closely bound
   up with pleasure; both the giving and the
   taking of pleasure.




rmbl, a project I do not think of as a blog, is a manifestation of a taste for the lark, which Jo-han Huizinga had the wit to historicise in Homo Ludens (1938), not the ideal year for promulgating the primacy of the spirit of play in culture. The lark is never afforded an inter-val, however; its char-acter is to interrupt.




I observe a timely interval
of comparative silence this
May, not that it's any more
possible to restrain Huizin-
ga's antic herald, than it
is to enhance his song with
Champagne. In his silence I
still don't doubt his trill.



















Hugh Cavendish
A Time to Plant
  Life and Gardening
 at Holker
op. cit.

ii  Photo Hedi Slimane











Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Two for the biathlon, please



Not being the sort to turn one's back on demand, for a civil morning satire on any seasonal festival of sport, I found myself shut out at the Zermatt ticket window, the Swiss having decided that it's all very well to fleece the world for a priceless glimpse of glossy slopes, but never too many of us for very long. Hence to the Finland station and its well-traveled path to a Winter just as incontestable, and just as meticulously exclusive. A well run Winter is no accident; but then, a distinct sentimentality invades the responses of us all to the sparkling season; and I have to confess how my own take a turn to marksmanship. 





I caught this bug at the movies, 
through the masterful process 
photography of one of Mr Hitch-
cock's benchmark British flicks, 
in an opening scene of very nif-
ty shooting at some soigné Swiss 
establishment which, along with 
celluloid itself, has doubtless 
gone the way of all good things 
in hands that never knew, it was 
not about the money. Like you, I
am only sorry that the inventor
of the Kalashnikov expired this
past year, on the eve of mother
Russia's gaudiest exhibition, un-
der a regime so steeped in its
virtues as to make its knowing
too much as chilling as the sea-
son. But we are all men of the
world (if you'll excuse the 
phrase), as we turn to sport.


I keep repeating the mantra, Security is Good for Me, but I must admit, I've always traveled to get away from it. This, too, inspires a jaunt to Russia, where even an undesirable stands an even chance of being ignored. If I wanted the joys of soccer mommying, I could have stayed at home on the telephone, and let our morbid little police state keep its beady nasty pinpoint on my person. Can you imagine, what elation and relief there must be, in the sophisticated, indifferent presumption of guilt? The load off one's shoulders, the curiosity lifted from one's purchase of a coffee? But I stray. 


I don't admire the enrich-ment a hypocrisy toward our presumption of inno-cence brings, to a new totality in the state's invasion of our existence. With the reversal of that presumption we see an inordinate obsession for evidence of every kind, magnifying the enormity of intrusion with de Sade's zealotry for trivia. I am not interested in the excuses our ostensible Conservatives have for this seduction of the republic. With them, it has always been about the money, and fear is a dandy diversion. But now we know, this is beyond the Putinesque, this sodden puttanesca.























Alfred Hitchcock
  director
Charles Bennett,
  Ivor Montagu and
  Emlyn Williams
  screenplay
Curt Courant
  cinematography
The Man Who Knew 
  Too Much
Gaumont, 1934©

John Russell Taylor
Hitch
  The Life and Times of
  Alfred Hitchcock
Pantheon, 1978©

Donatien-Alphonse-François,
  Marquis de Sade
Philosophy in the Boudoir
  or, The Immoral Mentors
Joachim Neugroschel
  translation
Francine du Plessix Gray
  introduction
Penguin, 2006©

v  Photo Hedi Slimane






Tuesday, May 28, 2013

And it is always friendly fire





Forgive me.

I would have done the same thing.
French or German .. duty is duty.

Are you in pain?

I would not have believed a bullet in the stomach could hurt so much.




I was aiming at your leg ..

More than fifty yards away, very bad light .. And then I was running ..

Please, no excuses! 

Of us two, it isn't I who should complain the most. I, I'll be finished soon, but you .. haven't finished ..

Not finished dragging out a useless existence.

For a man of the people, it's terrible to die in war. For you and me, it was a good solution.

I have missed it.






























Jean Renoir, director
Jean Renoir and
  Charles Spaak, screenplay
La grande illusion
Réalisations d'Art
  Cinématographique, 1937©
Marianne Alexandre and
  Andrew Sinclair, translation
Lorrimer Publishing, Ltd., 1968©

ii  Photo Hedi Slimane




Monday, April 11, 2011

Meeting Monday half way




                           scent of fresh
balsam on a pair 
                         of supple loafers





Thursday, November 25, 2010

Reading Homer with Nicholas Ray



TPF


Headlock. Body slam. Hands that do not reach back. Low dust.
Stormed by Chylabborak, driven-in by Abassee
The light above his circle hatched with spears
Odysseus to Sheepgrove:


"Get lord Idomeneo from the ridge."


Then prays:




"Brainchild Athena, Holy Girl,
As one you made
As calm and cool as water in a well.
I know that you have cares enough Other than those of me and mine.
Yet, Daughter of God, without your help
We cannot last."









Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly



Emptying her blood-red mouth set in her ice-white face


Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:


  "Kill! Kill for me!
  Better to die than to live
  without killing!" 
























Christopher Logue
All Day Permanent Red:
  The First Battle Scenes
  of Homer's Iliad, Rewritten
FS&G, 2003©

Hedi Slimane, Taner & Anna

Nicholas Ray
Rebel Without a Cause
Warner Bros, 1955©

The Flaming Lips
Fight Test
Warner Bros, 2002©


Wednesday, November 24, 2010

The drug war, the fear wars, to say nothing of the war on equity





have taken Bermuda, 
Cozumel and St Croix 
out of quick commute
for Thanksgiving.


The rational mind
objects to this
wasting of blonds.


The aesthete swoons,
but is too chaste to
bring it up.



Tresses tarnish
now, untumbled
by the tides. 



Maybe we can get
Fox News to fret
the fall in rentals.




Just a thought.
Worth a try.
























Stay out super-late tonight
picking apples, making pies

put a little something in our lemonade 
  and take it with us
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

   



Bruce Weber, i
Hedi Slimane, iii & vi


The National
Fake Empire
Boxer
Beggars Banquet, 2007©





Thursday, November 4, 2010

Homer, you well remember, showed


















You can do a great deal

of damage to these things






if you can get in above the clavicle.





























Javelin, Hedi Slimane



Thursday, September 16, 2010

Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio





E a parlare 
mi sforza d'amore


Un desio ch'io 
non posso spiegar






E, se non ho chi m'oda,
Parlo d'amor con me.








Lorenzo da Ponte after Beaumarchais
Photograph Hedi Slimane

Friday, August 13, 2010

I do not wish to be taken with you



I wish you to stay.





Scan of correspondence in crayon on paper by Laurent;
Photographic suite by Hedi Slimane, revised,
excerpts of Diary entry for July 29, 2010.