End of the Year Cabinet

I love end of the year resolutions... although I find it hard to put a definite list of all the things I loved this year.
But still, here it goes:

My favorite song, the one I can listen to all day in repeat on my iPod, is definitely "someone great" by LCD SOUNDSYSTEM:


My favorite movie, although hasn't been shown here, is PTA's "There will be blood"


And last, my favorite book, the one I got from Eran as a birthday gift (and unfortunately is out of stock) is "Living Well is the Best Revenge" (a new year's resolution for us all). New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins re-creates the world of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American originals who found themselves at the center of a charmed circle of artists and expatriate writers in France in the 1920s. Their home in Antibes, Villa America, served as a gathering place for Picasso and Léger as well as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who used the glamorous couple as models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night.

"Person after person - English, French, American, everybody - met them and came away saying that these people really are masters in the art of living".

And on that note, happy new year.

Happy New Year Cabinet

To all my friends...

New York Cabinet

Just for Xmas: a New (York) Year Resolution!
New York Magazine reminds us all why we love the city that never sleeps.Read More

Cabinet of Drugs

Berlin Cabinet

Weimar Berlin is celebrated for its outpouring of creativity, and the Expressionism pioneered here continues to influence artists today. Architects, too, found themselves confronted with tradition's breakdown in the face of war and revolution, with groups such as Bauhaus and The Ring seeking to align a new theory and practice of building with 20th-century realities. As a painter, film designer, and architect, Hans Poelzig was at the center of this creative storm.

A new show at the Academy of German Art takes a look at Hans Poelzig. Poelzig was a painter, film designer, and architect. His Weimar-era projects in Berlin contributed to the city's early reputation as an oasis of modern architecture, and those still standing offer a glimpse of the modernist city before its wartime destruction.

Black Cabinet

She keeps going back to it, and we are going back to black. Keep the good work, Amy.

What Would Jesus Buy Cabinet

Dutch architects Merkx + Girod have won the Lensvelt de Architect Interior Prize 2007 for their Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht - a bookstore inside a former Dominican church. At last the world is ready to confess that shopping is holy.
Hallelujah.

Art Cabinet

Mark Wallinger Wins 2007 Turner Prize. He is famous for his film Sleeper, 2005, 154 minutes of footage of the artist wandering around a deserted German gallery disguised as a bear.

"What are we allowed to dream? The past rises up with all its vivid detail to mock our progress at every turn. The long past of our own fear. Inside the bear’s head I am aware of my own breathing. Looking out of the jaws at my narrow view, my progress from stimulus to distraction gains some kind of animal momentum – to watch and be watched as a foreign, alien, strange, endearing, imprisoned animal."
Read More

Happy Birthday to Me Cabinet

New York Cabinet

Jean Nouvel has high hopes for New York. 75-story tower hope, to be precise. According to the New York Times, the new building, which will be built next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown and it "promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation".

New York Cabinet

I love the building on Perry Street. Richard Meier designed a glass house that reflects everything we hate (or love) about rich people: the problems with the neighbours, the constructions flaws, the arrogant tenants, and last, as I read in the New York Times, the transparency issue.

Movies

The New York Times Sunday magazine goes west, following Daniel Day-Lewis and the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie he stars in, “There Will be Blood”.
Read the article

White Cabinet

Curiosities

Tracey Emin, Is Legal Sex Anal?, is shown at the Barbican's "Seduced", the much talked about exhibition which explores the representation of sex in art through the ages. Fuck that.

Curiosities

Another Marc's crap, only this time in video, shot by Jurgen Teller. The blue hair designer has a new video for his new fragrance, Daisy.

Cabinet of Books

Mario Testino has a new book, "Let Me In", another behind-the-scenes photos of celebrities, for those who can't get enough of US Weekly and In Touch material. For the rest of us, 2 pictures will do:

Trends

I love the Brain Bag that Jun Takashi designed. Available at Someday.

TV cabinet

Guess what schizophrenic patients like to watch the most...

According to the story in the New Yorker, it's Lary David's “Curb Your Enthusiasm". David Roberts, a second-year clinical-psychology student at the University of North Carolina, discovered, while teaching social skills to a group of schizophrenic patients, that change had come over his patients when they watch TV:

"So Roberts began showing TV clips during therapy sessions. Soon he had narrowed his selections down to one show: television’s purest expression of social dysfunction, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Roberts considers Larry David to be the perfect proxy for a schizophrenic person".

When asked about it, David said: "A lot of the time, it’s just me expressing myself freely. I knew that my own mental health was problematic, but should I be worried?"

Hmm, yeah. Read "We Are All Larry David" in the New Yorker.

Halloween Cabinet

In celebration of Halloween (today) and Dia De Los Muertos (tomorrow), here is a little reminder of the business of death:

Cabinet of Books

I never heard about Félix Fénéon, but the title of his book "Novels in Three Lines" caught my attention. Fénéon (1861-1944) was an intellectual anarchist, and he worked on the backstage of literature. He translated, published and even discovered many of the authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Proust, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Seurat, Gide, Joyce - but rarely affixed his own to any work.

In 1906 Fénéon began producing three-line items for the Parisian daily Le Matin, which now have been translated into English. Take a moment, and taste it:

"There is no longer a God even for drunkards. Kersilie, of St.-Germain, who had mistaken the window for the door, is dead."

Trends Cabinet

I don't know why (is it a post guilt-trip after eating the amazing pork belly dish at the trendy Momfuko Noodle bar in New York?) but the image of this sleeping pig captures my mind. I think it's beautiful, and I hope we"ll see a lot of it. Bon appetit.

Ugh Cabinet

Some people never get tired of themselves. Take Tom Ford, for instance. After founding his new fashion house, launching his new perfume, and being photographed with nude Hollywood darlings on the cover of Vanity Fair, he still had some time to show his ass for the upcoming Out Magazine's Terry Richardson shoot.

Curiosities

I love architecture, and although I lack sense of humor, I like when I see serious matters treated in a whimsical style. Look, for example, at the "Sharp Centre for Design"(part of Ontario College of Art & Design), designed by architect Will Alsop, of Alsop Architects.
Read more from the New Yorker about Alsop.

Curiosities

How appropriate: A collaboration between David lynch and shoe designer Christian Louboutin. The two made a series of images, using Louboutin's shoes, with the lynch touch of imagery. At least now you don't have to sit 3 long hours in order to see another weird masterpiece from the beloved filmmaker, and somehow it seems the right format for him, with the enigmatic images, the frozen narrative, and the fetish sexy objects that tell the right story.
See more images

Shelter

Malibu is so hot right now, maybe a little too hot. That's why Jennifer Aniston, Sting, Bill Murray, Nick Nolte, Robin Wright Penn, Mel Brooks, Tatum O'Neal, Rob Reiner, Goldie Hawn, Linda Ronstadt, Jeff Bridges, David Arquette and Courteney Cox, David Geffen,Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, are all on fire watch due to a huge fire...
Read more on TMZ

Design Cabinet

New York Magazine has a special design issue, and although the theme is not new,I never get tired of reading about Martha ("it's a good thing") Stewart, and about many other prominent figures in New York design world. A rare opportunity is the interview with Massimo and Lella Vignelli, who designed the New York Subway map and signs.

Clostes

New Butt is out today (‘late autumn/early winter’) and since I need to wait till someone gets it for me, here is the beautiful cover.

History Cabinet

20 years to October 18, 1977 - Gerhard Richter
Fifteen paintings compose October 18, 1977 -a series of paintings that are based on photographs of moments in the lives and deaths of four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German left-wing terrorist group that perpetrated a number of kidnappings and killings throughout the 1970s. On this date the bodies of three principal RAF members were found in the cells of the German prison where they were incarcerated. Although the deaths were officially deemed suicides, there was widespread suspicion that the prisoners had been murdered by the German state police.
Read more about Baader Meinhof

Closets

Such a bad joke, and still so funny... Jack is back, and I love him.

Fitting Cabinet

For those of you who need assistance with the right fit, Details magazine helps you with that.
Click for help.

Curiosities

The Unicorn in Captivity, 1495–1505
South Netherlandish
can be found at the Cloisters

Trends Cabinet

OMG. A new trend is threatening the future: Vegansexuality.
"Vegansexuals are people who do not eat any meat or animal products, and who choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals."
Hearing about it, all I want to do is putting a fur coat, ordering Double Big Mac and to have sex with Bin Laden.
Read more about Vegansexuals

Curiosities

I'm reading two articles this weekend, and for some reason I felt they have something in common. The First, following the opening of his latest movie - "Rescue Dawn", is an interview with its director Werner Herzog. The film (which I still haven't seen) seems to be another chapter in the director's long journey into human wildernesses, and among other things, he also mentions a funny incident in which he got shot. Watch the video below:

The second, a fascinating article about the "Mannahatta Project" in The New Yorker, tells the story of Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist who is trying to determine exactly how Manhattan would have appeared to its first explorers in 1609, and to depict the island as it was, just before it came under what is known today as Manhattan. Look at the amazing digital aerial view of Manhattan as it might have looked in 1609, juxtaposed with the outline of Manhattan today.Read here.

And that remind me of this book I heard about, with the interesting title: "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. Let's imagine what happens when we are not around here, anymore. Click here to see what...

Curiosities

Adam Helms's "4 Untitled Portraits"

Read more aboute Helms

Movies Cabinet

Just saw Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited" and it's such a gem.
Don't miss this train!

And as usual, don't forget to pay attention to the wonderful soundtrack. It can be played in the official site.

Trends Cabinet

It might be the biological war that worries him, but Marc Jacobs Louis Vuitton's Spring 2008 show was another crazy showoff of the legendary designer.
Wanna see more? click here

Trends Cabinet

I haven't decided if it's cool or not, but knowing the smell of a big trend makes me believe that Tom's shoes are the new Crocs. Before I say anything bad, these shoes have good cause, and every pair you buy, the company will match another pair for a child in need.

Read, buy, walk

Fonts Cabinet

My beloved fonts got a documentary, and till we see the DVD, here is an homage:
To read more about the film click here

Movies Cabinet

Film Forum is screening Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 "La Chinoise”, and there is never a better time than this, between the War on Terror and the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games.

Curiosities

Zaha Hadid won't rest... her new spaceship is called "The Mobile Art container" and it's a collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld.
Read more
And read more about the Channel hand bag inspired UFO here

Movies Cabinet

Todd Haynes new movie gets a NYTimes Sunday magazine cover + photos inside.read more about the film

Curiosities

Ron Mueck's "In Bed".How appropriate.

SNL - Iran

SNL had a great song about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to NYC. Don't miss the Gyllenhaal refernce ("Mahmoud, I remember when it started... You ain’t wrong to me, so strong to me, you belong to me, Like a very hairy Jake Gyllenhaal to me"):

Cabinet of Piracy

Copying is so cool! From the New Yorker's Style issue, wonderful news: copying designs is good for business: "... a recent paper by the law professors Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman suggests that weak intellectual-property rules, far from hurting the fashion industry, have instead been integral to its success. The professors call this effect “the piracy paradox".

The paradox stems from the basic dilemma that underpins the economics of fashion: for the industry to keep growing, customers must like this year’s designs, but they must also become dissatisfied with them, so that they’ll buy next year’s. Many other consumer businesses face a similar problem, but fashion—unlike, say, the technology industry—can’t rely on improvements in power and performance to make old products obsolete. Raustiala and Sprigman argue persuasively that, in fashion, it’s copying that serves this function, bringing about what they call “induced obsolescence.” Copying enables designs and styles to move quickly from early adopters to the masses. And since no one cool wants to keep wearing something after everybody else is wearing it, the copying of designs helps fuel the incessant demand for something new."

read more about the the piracy paradox

TV cabinet

Viva la Palestine. There is a Palestinian guy in the new season of Project Runway:
http://www.bravotv.com/Project_Runway/season/4/bios/Rami.php

Images of Curiosities

August Sander's "Young Farmers" (1914)

Cabinet of Books

"Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me."

From the much-talked-about book "Tree of Smoke: A Novel

The 50 Most Stylish Men of the Past 50 Years

GQ just published their 50 most stylish men list... worth checking.
click here for the complete list

The Scavenger

They say Clooney is like a Chanel dress, because he is never gonna go out of fashion, but what about Coco's apartment? I guess it will always be in style:
http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2007/09/coco_chanels_ap.php