WHEN I DIE AND GO TO HEAVEN I'LL GO TO LA MAISON CHAMPS ELYSEES

Maison Martin Margiela, the enigmatic and visionary fashion house, have expanded their aesthetic purview to the world of interiors and the lexicons of industrial and interior design are bound to become richer for it. Their newest venture has been their collaboration with the Parisian boutique hotel La Maison Champs-Élysées where in Maison Martin Margiela was commissioned to design its interiors.

“La Maison Champs Élysées aims to redefine what you may expect from a hotel and bring you a new lifestyle experience, designed with utmost simplicity and yet abundant in details. Maison Martin Margiela is creating a theatrical environment where reality and trompe-l’oeil blend into a surreal atmosphere. The result is an atypical ambience of different harmonies that coalesce into something new, innovating and simply cool.”

- La Maison Champs Élysées

FOCUS ON IT

 These are from the personal collection of Bryan Byczek, who runs a great little blog.

THROUGH THE LENS OF SHAWN BRACKBILL

NEW HAVEN MATH CLUB

Gant Rugger - New Haven Math Club from Albin Holmqvist on Vimeo.

THIS TIME LAST CENTURY

      WAS SU M  M   E    R

SURFING PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE EIGHTIES

by Jeff Divine

COPYCAT

If I every got a tatoo, I would copy Judy Nylon's ode to Man Ray and his Violon D'Ingres.

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

TEENAGE teaser from Teenage on Vimeo.

YOU HAVE THE POSSIBILITY TO GIVE LIGHT A DIMENSION IN TIME

Said Jonas Mekas.

I thank the internet for being the medium through which I discovered the work of such a profound leader in 20th Century film. Considered the midwife of avant-garde cinema in America, Jonas Mekas made it his life's work to archive, promote and produce many experimental and abstract films that would have otherwise disappeared into obscurity.

He co-founded what was to become the Anthology Film Archives,  one of the largest collections of experimental film anywhere in the world. I took great interest in his background as a Lithuanian born internment camp survivor in WWII. Uprooted from his home, made to suffer through an extraordinary circumstance and outliving the horrors of war and death, you can feel the immediacy and the urgency with which he records his experience. In April 1966 he wrote in his film column in the Village Voice,

"Let’s record the dying century and the birth of another man… Let’s surround the earth with our cameras, hand in hand, lovingly; our camera is our third eye that will lead us out and through … Nothing should be left unshown or unseen, dirty or clean: Let us see and go further, out of the swamps and into the sun"

He was very inspired by John Cassavetes' Shadows, stills of which I've posted here in the past. He himself realized that all his practice footage amounted to a enough footage to assemble a personal video diary, which he titled "Diaries, Notes and Sketches" or "Walden".  In this carefully edited video, we are aware of a dream like state that the footage induces upon each viewer, playing to Mekas' own memories, not only of New York but of his lost Lithuania. Below are some stills, and some of the footage itself.

CENTURIES