large prime numbers

Mr. Apol: How Space Girl Met Rocket Boy

Mr. Apol — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 03:12:33 -0700

Foreword: I've got a bit of explaining to do here. This is the full, edited version of "How Space Girl Met Rocket Boy", a story that was loosely told through two previous posts on this site. This is the full version, as it stands today. There are significant differences in the first two parts presented here compared to the original posts. Either way, it's been literally years since the original posts.

How Space Girl Met Rocket Boy
a love story in three acts

I used to think that it went to the center of the planet,” Johnny Taragon explained.

“Really?” the girl asked.

She was only vaguely interested in his story, lounging in the cloth deck chair with her legs straight up in the air. She had a toy ray gun that she was pointing at the ceiling. She’d squeeze the trigger and it’d whirl up, making little sparks inside as the mechanism within the gun squealed horribly.

“Have you ever read about the Shaver Mystery?” she asked.

“Sort of.”

“Well basically this guy, Richard Sharpe Shaver, believed that deep underground there was this race of evil creatures called Dero that kidnapped people and did nasty things to them. The Dero were created by aliens or something and were left down there before humans even existed. They’d been in the dark so long that they went nuts.”

“Sounds like your family,” he joked.

“What if I really am a Dero?”

“You probably are.”

She laughed.

“So, about this pipe to the underworld? Did you ever find out what was at the bottom?” she asked.

“No, I never saw the bottom of it. It was just so weird — this metal pipe in the middle of the woods stuck straight into the ground with nothing else around it, completely out of context.”

“There’s a name for those things. I forget the name now, but they’re like the crystal skulls and the Baghdad Battery. Out-of-place and out-of-time objects.”

“Well, those objects are anachronistic, you know? This was just a hole.”

She put the ray gun down on the floor and went to the window. The sun was setting and dust floated through the beams of light streaming in. The room was orange and hot enough to make them sweat — Johnny’s uncle didn’t get a chance to put an air conditioner in this room before he died. She had only known Johnny a few months. They had met at a local rock show in May and Johnny had taken an instant interest in her. She wasn’t much interested in Johnny, but he threw nice parties and had a big house. She lit up a black cigarette and turned to face the boy, her face backlit by the setting sun and just barely visible from the cigarette’s glow.

“Did you ever try dropping anything down it?” she asked.

“No, actually.”

“Why?”

“This may sound weird, but it felt cruel to do that to something. I had this crazy idea that maybe the hole didn’t have a bottom; that it kept going down forever and ever. Whatever I dropped down that hole would never end up somewhere. It would just keep falling. It scared the hell out of me.”

She laughed again.

“So you’re afraid of the infinite?” she asked.

“I guess you could say that. Infinity does creep me out. When I think about the universe and how it never ends and just keeps going and gets colder and colder I get freaked out. It makes me feel so small and insignificant in the face of it all, you know?”

“Wow, like totally deep, man.”

“Shut up.”

“Don’t be an ass, I’m serious!”

“Well, it’s true. You know that whole saying about staring into the abyss and how it stares back? Maybe that’s why I never tried to see if that hole had a bottom. I didn’t want to look, because I was scared it would look back.”

The girl suddenly turned and squinted her eyes, holding her hand up to her forehead to block the light. It looked like she saw something outside the window in the distance, but Johnny couldn’t make out what. After a second, she turned to look at the boy again.

“So whatever happened to this hole? Is it still there? Maybe we can go find out how deep it is. It could be a learning experience.”

The creaking ceiling fan mixed the smoke with the oxygen and the nitrogen in the room. Johnny was silent and looked away for a moment.

“No, actually. It’s gone. It’s weird. One day it was there and the next it wasn’t. I’m sure I came back to the same spot. I’m sure of it,” he finally replied.

She turned back to the window. The cigarette was still burning and it made the boy’s nostrils itch but he didn’t really care. Her tank top was bunched up and Johnny could barely make out the naked skin on the small of her back.

“Are you coming to my party on Saturday?” he asked.

The girl didn’t answer. She picked the ray gun up, pointed it at him and pulled the trigger.

“Zap. You’re dead!” she exclaimed.

* * * * *

She was working at the juice bar on Rosewood St. and 32nd on Saturday and chewing on a pen when a man the girl didn’t know walked up to her and smiled. She thought he probably had the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. The girl always loved a man with green eyes. He was a bit too tall for her tastes, but he was built like a brick house and walked like a jaguar. The girl thought something was odd about him, though. He was too out of place, too perfect. His clothes were out of style, maybe.

“Can I help you?” the girl asked.

“Yes, can you make me an orange smoothie?” the tall man replied.

“Sure.”

At least that’s what she heard in her head. What really came out was more of a worried mumble.
She turned around and started gathering the ingredients and prayed silently: “God, if there’s one thing in my life that you let me do absolutely perfectly, let me make the platonic ideal of a orange smoothie.”

The girl put milk, vanilla, and sugar into the blender without incident. But when she grabbed an orange to juice, it did the strangest thing: The orange fell apart and slipped through her fingers. The broken orange hit the floor and shattered into even more pieces, like they were made of glass.

Speechless, she grabbed another orange. The same thing happened. The girl tried to catch the pieces as they tumbled to the ground but they slipped right through her hands like soap in the shower. She watched as the pieces of crystallized orange on the floor evaporated like summer rain on asphalt. She grabbed more oranges from under the cabinet, but these fell apart as well.

The gorgeous man in front of the counter seemed confused, but kept smiling. For a brief moment she thought his teeth looked like fangs, glinting in the orange and red afternoon half-light.

“I’m sorry, but the oranges keep falling apart,” she apologized.

“Well, I suppose that can’t be helped, can it?”

There was an uneasy silence between the two.

“No, I suppose not,” she says, embarrassed at her failure.

“Does this happen often on your world?”

“No, not usually,” she said, confused by his choice of words. The girl immediately rationalized this by believing the man was foreign and his English slipped. After all, she had noticed that he had a barely noticeable, but unfamiliar accent.

“Well, what would you suggest I have instead?” he asked.

“How about a banana smoothie?”

“Banana.”

“Yes, banana.”

“What is a banana? If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”

She looked at him like he was crazy, but he seemed completely genuine. Maybe they didn’t have bananas where he came from.

“Bananas are a fruit too, like an orange. They are yellow and long and you have to peel them.”

“Like an orange, but they are not round?”

“Well, they’re different in that they’re soft and mushy when you eat them, not all juicy and fleshy like an orange.”

“But this is a juice bar, is it not? Why would you serve a fruit that is not juicy?”

This actually made quite a lot of sense to the girl. He smiled again.

“Sure, I’ll have a banana smoothie,” he told her.

To the girl’s relief, none of the bananas fell apart and the smoothie came out perfectly. In fact, the girl was sure that this was the best banana smoothie in human history. She seemed relieved and the incident with the oranges was already fading from her mind. Though, she was now very curious about his accent and the fact that he didn’t know what a banana was.

“So, where are you from?” she asked while ringing his order up, attempting to sound flirtatious as she did so.

“Another planet,” he replied, looking her dead in the eyes.

The girl stared at him and chewed her pen for a second.

“Well, in that case meet me tonight, nine-thirty, 1774 Camellia St. There’s a party you should be at,” she said.

He smiled at her again and put on a dark pair of sunglasses. They stared at each other for a moment and her heart thumped like an engine.

“I’ll consider it,” he said.

The man turned and walked out the glass door into the humid summer air. The girl watched him walk away down Rosewood Street until he was completely out of view.

She switched on the store radio and “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads had just started playing. Outside, people walked in single file past the windows, casting odd shadows in the store. The muted television hanging above one of the tables was running the six o’clock news. The female news anchor mouthed the words to the camera, silently trapped in a vacuum tube. A breaking news story about a candle factory that caught on fire outside of Denver was airing. The fire had spread uncontrollably and was now heading towards a residential area. Helicopter footage showed flames creeping up on mansions and swimming pools.

There was an explosion outside the juice bar and the windows shattered. Light glittered and refracted through the pieces scattered on the floor. Car alarms for miles around all went off at once in an impromptu concert in the streets. People outside were screaming and running away from the flames. There was a man lying on the pavement with his right forearm missing. He was writhing on his back, pushing himself along the concrete with the soles of his shoes. He was screaming too, but like the lady in the television (Edwards pleads guilty/grisly murder in the suburbs/details at nine) he was inaudible due to the chaos. The girl could still hear the words to the song even through the ringing in her ears. The song was all she could hear at that moment, it ran directly into her brain.

“People on their way to work. Baby what did you expect? Gonna burst into flame!” crooned the radio.

She stood there chewing on her pen and watching the ragged man crawl away from the wreckage. The scene with the odd man from another planet played itself out over and over again in her head; in slow motion at first and then quickly and she wondered what dress she should wear to Johnny Taragon’s party later that night.

“Some things sure can sweep me off my feet,” she mouthed.

* * * * *

She arrived at Johnny Taragon’s party at nine-thirty sharp. Several people were already there, milling about with drinks in hand.

“So you came after all. I figured you wouldn’t show,” Johnny said as he greeted her.

“I’m supposed to be meeting someone here. I invited him earlier today. I hope you don’t mind,” she replied.

“A guy?” asked Johnny.

“Yeah, what’s it to you?”

“Nothing. Good, introduce me to him when he gets here.”

She wouldn’t. The last thing she needed was Johnny cock-blocking her. Of course, she didn’t know if the man from the juice bar would even show up. He didn’t make any promises, after all.

“Well, can I make you something to drink?” Johnny asked.

“Sure. Can you make me a gin and tonic?”

“Yeah, coming right up,” he replied as he left for the kitchen.

Johnny came back shortly with the gin and tonic. It was surprisingly well made and refreshing considering the stifling heat. The girl took her drink and waited on the back porch. She smoked a cigarette and fiddled with the slice of lime Johnny had put on the edge of the glass. More people started showing up and before long the house was packed with people she didn’t recognize. She hadn’t made many friends in this town since moving here last September and she figured associating with someone popular like Johnny would be a good way to meet people. Every now and then she walked back into the house and looked around, tiptoeing and craning her neck to see if the man from the juice bar had showed up yet.

It was half past midnight when he finally showed up. He walked in wearing the same sunglasses he had on at the juice bar, even though it was cloudy outside and there was no moon out. She wondered how he could see with those things on. He caught her eyes from across the room and made his way over to her. She hoped that she picked the right dress. The right dress can make all the difference. She glanced over and found Johnny talking to some blonde by the windows.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she said.

“I decided to show up.”

“So I see. Want a drink?”

“What would you suggest?”

“Oh no, not this again,” she laughed. “I’ll surprise you.”

She ran back to the kitchen, almost tripping over her own feet. Johnny was prepared for this party and there was a cornucopia of liquor bottles and mixers lining the counters. Even though the party had been going on for hours, not half of them were empty. She found a bottle of whisky and mixed it with ginger ale. She didn’t know if he’d like it, him being from another planet and all.

When she got back to the living room he was staring at a large print of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights hung on the wall. Johnny had eclectic taste in home décor. Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” came on the stereo and some people started dancing to it. She walked over to him and handed him the drink.

“What’s in this?” he asked as he sniffed the glass. He might as well have thought it was poison.

“Just taste it,” she reassured him.

He took a small sip, then a longer one.

“This isn’t bad,” he admitted.

He might as well have asked her to marry him. She couldn’t have been happier.

“Would you like to take a walk with me?” she asked him.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Down the street, anywhere. Man, I just want to get some fresh air..”

“Why are you so certain I’m a man?”

“Oh shut up, let’s go.”

They walked down the street for quite a while before stopping in front of a wooded area a few blocks from Johnny’s deceased uncle’s house. She could barely hear the music emanating from the party. For a moment she was worried that Johnny saw her leave, but then she realized she didn’t care. She wondered where she was taking him and she began to get a little nervous about this whole thing. But then again, he was gorgeous and this was sort of exciting. She decided to see it through. The man stared at the woods, but the girl couldn’t see what at; all she saw were trees. Off in the distance lightning flashed in the clouds. It would probably be raining soon.

“So how long have you been on planet Earth?” she finally asked.

He turned and looked at her for a second, then grabbed her and kissed her. The suddenness of it startled her, but she gave in and kissed back. He pulled away after a moment and looked at her.

“You’ve intrigued me,” he said.

“You’re telling me!”

He smiled and she smiled back.

“So what planet are you from anyway, Rocket Boy?” she asked.

“Lanulos. It’s located in what your people call the Horsehead Nebula, thought it doesn’t really look like a horse’s head anymore and it’s not exactly a nebula these days. I cannot blame light for traveling so slowly, though.”

She laughed at this.

“You’re such a weirdo,” she said.

He ignored her statement.

“Truth is, this world won’t exist much longer,” he said as he looked at the lightning in the distance.
“I’d like you to come with me. I’m leaving tonight.”

“Where to? Back to Lanulos?”

“Of course not, just somewhere far from here.”

“And you want me to come with you? Sure, why not?”

“You’ll never be able to come back.”

“Good, this place stinks anyway.”

“Then it’s settled. We leave tonight.”

“Wait, I don’t even know your name!”

“And I don’t know yours. Maybe names are not so important. Where we’re going we don’t need names. Where we’re going we can be anyone we want to be.”

She looked at the sky for a while. The cloud cover had lifted and she could see the stars glittering like broken glass in an alley.

“Le's all slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me,” she said, and grinned.

108: \"a pistol pointed at mount everest\"

108 — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:09:59 -0700

My old friend made a new friend. I recognized my old friend’s new friend as a psychopath the first time I met him. My friend went to lots of bars and clubs in the city and all-night DJ events out in the sticks with this guy. They hit on lots of girls. They picked up girls every once in a while. The new guy was an attractive, young guy; he surfed, on the weekends (in the summer). He was about as tanned as a cheap coffee table. He wasn’t even thirty and he wore a tennis bracelet and carried a Louis Vuitton clutch. The guy was a sleaze, to be sure.

He gestured a lot. He could not stop and ask a girl directions to the nearest convenient store without touching his gold watch and then placing his hand on the small of her back. My friend wasn't convinced that the guy was also a psychopath. He kept telling me the guy was a nice guy: the evidence was that he had a real job at a bank and he made a lot of money. This meant that somebody with money at a place that dealt with money trusted this guy enough to pay him lots of money.

"I don't see why you don't like him," my friend said, after he'd first introduced us and I'd dismissed him as a psychopath, or at least a carrier of a psychopath learner's permit. "He likes Dragon Quest as much as you do. He's played every one of them -- beaten all of the optional dungeons, gotten every character in every game up to level ninety-nine."

"Then he's a psychopath and a video-kleptomaniac, then."

"Come on -- he killed God in Dragon Quest VII. I thought you respected people who have killed God in Dragon Quest VII. It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours of slow grinding to prepare to kill God in Dragon Quest VII."

"Why would I respect that?"

Some months passed between my meeting this psycho and my friend telling me the following story.

One night my friend was out at a club with this guy. My friend saw a girl he liked. His type was the porcelain-faced lipstick-wet-lipped princess type. My friend bought this girl a drink. They talked a bit. He was really into her. She was maybe girlfriend material, he said. My friend had already gotten the girl's number and pretty much secured a date. Then this psychopath friend slid up and said something like "Long time no see". My friend realized his new friend knew this princess girl. The girl went all cold. Like, she transformed into a completely different person, one who happened to look exactly the same. Days later, my friend was texting the girl at work. He was on his lunch break; she was on her lunch break. She told him that he shouldn't hang out with that guy.

“He’s not right”, she said.

Many months ago, this alleged psycho had taken her out on a date at a fancy restaurant. He asked if he could take her picture right before she dug into her dinner. He saved it to a folder on his phone. They had some sex that night. She didn’t tell my friend how it was, or else he didn’t tell me how she said it was. I wonder how that would have worked: she sitting in her chair at work, furiously texting about a sexual experience with a man she had come to hate completely three days later, maybe with cheap wooden chopsticks sticking out of a smoking Styrofoam bowl of sweat-smelling ramen on top of her desk; my friend sitting in his office chair thumbing down through her texts, maybe with a mouthful of rice and a hard steel can of green tea in the other hand. Three days after the psycho and the princess had sex, the princess told my friend, the psycho sent her a text explaining that he was in a business meeting; some old guy was droning on about numbers and numbers. The princess replied, probably offering her sympathies. The guy’s next text had a small phone-camera photograph attached. The photograph showed a white-faced princess-like girl sitting before the same table of the same restaurant where he had taken her three days earlier. On the table before her, a similar glass of red wine. "What do you think of this girl? Is she cute?" The girl replied: "I guess." The guy replied immediately: "I fucked her the night before I fucked you." She didn't reply. Two tens of minutes passed. The guy texted again: his text included yet another picture of yet another girl, also in the same restaurant, also with a glass of red wine. It was the same table and the same camera angle. "What do you think of this girl? Is she pretty?" The girl didn't reply. He gave her ten minutes. "Hello? Anyone home?" She still didn't reply. He texted again: "Well, i fucked this girl, too." Minutes later, during another lull in the supposed meeting, another text, with another photo of another girl, in the same restaurant, the same table, the same camera angle, the same glass of red wine. "How about her?"

“I can tell you don't even know him as well as I know him. I don’t think you should be friends with this guy,” the girl told my friend. “What kind of person would do things like that? He’s unhinged.”

My friend eventually met this girl, in person, for dinner. They talked about their lives; they talked about what they had studied in college. They talked about the kinds of jobs they had had, and the stupid things their bosses had said or done, drunk at a company party. They were in a bar after dinner. She ordered a glass of red wine. He remembered the story she’d told him in texts the week before. “You know, that guy’s not really my friend. We met at a club. He said he thought we had similar goals -- you know, to meet chicks. I can’t say for certain I was, like, looking for a wife or anything, though I never ruled out the possibility. Maybe I just liked being around people.” (My friend told me that, really, he might have, just then, been telling the girl what he thought she had wanted to hear.) I imagine the girl looked into her wine: “I think maybe we shouldn’t talk about him.”

Six glasses of wine transpired. They talked about him. She showed my friend all the texts and photos the man had sent her in the past few months. He had sent dozens upon dozens. She kept them all saved. “It’s been almost a year since we met and went out. He still sends me photos of every girl he sleeps with.”

"Maybe it's his idea of a joke?" my friend said. The girl might have bitten her lip.

"Immediately after saying that, I knew it wasn't his idea of a joke," my friend told me, later.

“Do you ever reply to him?” my friend asked the girl that night.

“I don’t,” she said. “He must know I’m looking,” she said.

My friend then asked her, “Why don’t you block him?”

The girl thought the question over a bit. Maybe she swirled her wineglass around. Her final answer was: “I don’t really know. I kind of don’t want to think about it.”

My friend said this was when he realized his new friend was, in fact, a psychopath, as I had said. I'd first noticed it by the way he couldn't decide between looking me in the forehead or looking me in the chin; ten minutes into the dinner party he’d invited my friend to, which my friend had in turn invited me to (at his new friend’s request), I realized that no one had actually invited my friend’s new friend; by bringing two other people, he’d effectively invited himself. My friend never had sex with the girl, and never went out with her more than the once. He didn't really think about the reason. He told me all of the above story one night at my house in Koenji, on my sofa, while I rubbed my thumb over my silken steel acoustic guitar strings with the window open as a wet breeze complained quietly in the middle of the night. He started his story by saying, “You know that guy you said was a psychopath? I think he might actually be a psychopath.” Then he told me what the girl had told him. I listened to it all. He ended his story by saying, "The guy is definitely a psychopath." When he was done, we were quiet.

After a brief hesitation, I asked him if he'd considered that the guy must have been doing to every girl in those photos what he had been doing to that one girl. He blinked a couple of times. I don't think he had considered the possibility until just that moment. No: he definitely hadn't. I guess that makes my friend a more genuine person than I am. When I thought about how he might have not had thought about it, it made me feel sick and sad for a little while.

People's psychoses are such weird labyrinths! We (people like us) have a lot of him (that guy) in us, and I suppose he has a lot of us in him. I wonder how people like us and people like him got as far apart or as close together as we are. Every one of us is cousins or brothers or sisters of a serial killer, rapist, genocider, or jaywalker. I watched my friend think about the exact nature of the man’s problem -- which is, in a way, the problem with all of us humans who wear clothes and cook our food (only amplified). I knew from the wrinkle in his brow and the way he adjusted his bottom lip via spasms of an index finger that the girl had been something special to him, and that he couldn’t help having been believing that she had also been something special to everyone else -- or at least to that one other man he knew who had known her, briefly, better than he had known her. I could see he was irreparably worried about some percentage of anything and everything from that point on, and maybe will be, for the rest of his life. I had made him one more molecule closer to myself. In the end, I had been and was correct about everything. That certainly didn't make me feel better about anything. And so we continue to stand, atop a hill in full view of Mount Everest, empty pistol-hammer clicking like a defective animal-throat: we've forgotten to bring bullets to our impossible mission; the ticks and tacks of metal on metal fly at super-eagle-speed, causing avalanches the size of human hearts on the sides of, eventually, every mountain in the dark, cold universe.

I suppose this is the point in our story where the psychiatrist puts the cap back on the pen.

--an excerpt from my new novel an incident involving a human body

eden: Martinis at 4PM in a Dark Parisian Street

eden — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:30:50 -0700

Many times I’ve asked myself “is Stefano Pilati the right designer for Yves Saint Laurent?” and I’m still not sure- I wonder what he’d produce without the weight of YSL sitting behind him like Jabba the Hutt. Nonetheless, his collection for YSL this year is one of the season’s best (if not the best). Even mistakes the mistakes are masterful.

The best pieces are simple and work upon you like a Hemingway short story. They appear to be hardly anything at all upon first glance- a well-cut black dress with a mysterious gold necklace hanging from it, a cloak seeming to reference both the Japanese avant garde in the early 80s and cloistered nuns. Yet they somehow worm themselves into my consciousness- I keep coming back and looking at them, and wondering why I keep coming back.

On some level I’m reminded of a chic Parisian. Not the one who inhabits plenty of other collections (Chanel, Givenchy, Sonia Rykiel…), but a woman who makes herself a martini at 4pm and lives in a penthouse where one of the elevators doesn’t work. This woman is from a darker side of Paris. The vocabulary in fashion has become so tired and worn for capturing “Paris” as of late (or the last 20 years)- just look at Karl Lagerfeld’s latest piñata themed Chanel collection- and I’m struck by how Pilati makes it all so new. This isn’t the Paris of socialites and chic dinners, but the small, dank and squalid Paris- the equivalent of a painting like “Whistler’s Mother.”

There’s something both familiar and distant about most of the clothes here, like a forbidden object from childhood one may not touch but nevertheless sees. Call it “The Black Telephone”, if you like: A old-fashioned black telephone, sleek as a polished Jaguar and with one of the round dials that make a click-click-click noise when turned, sits atop of a carved mahogany stand. It’s forbidden to be touched by your red-lipstick-wearing mother, and yet you pass by it every day (it looming over you like a malevolent devil). That’s the essence of this collection.

Pilati does occasionally veer into that gaudy neon showgirl territory Saint Laurent’s so well known for (his Ballet Russes collection, for instance). The thing with Saint Laurent’s more gaudy clothes is that they don’t hold up in the glaring spotlight of modern times. They just look really tacky- no matter how much they were hailed as a Flawless Work of Genius when they were first released. In this collection the archetypal example is a cape in what looks like satin (or some sort of silk). Yes, it’s a familiar object too- but it strikes me as a relic from the 70s re-imagined as what a relic from the 70s would look like today. Those sort of familiar objects aren’t particularly interesting, and they’re more distant in the sense that I want them far, far away from me.

What’s so great about this collection is that it’s pure, messy emotion. There’s not even the question of “how did he do that?” or any of the other technical questions we ask when we see a collection that we think is impressive (see: the last Comme des Garcons collection). I suspect a lot of us- me, anyway- ask this question because the collection itself has no emotional impact on us whatsoever. It’s like saying “wow-ee, this video-game has graphics made from moon rocks found on Mars and you can see every single pore of sweat on the faces of the clichéd characters as they run around!” Who the hell cares? If the product itself- whether it be clothes or a video game or a movie- is making you ask those questions first and foremost, it’s probably a dud. In her essay “Trash, Art and the Movies”, Pauline Kael compares talking about technique in movie-making to talking about technique in commercials (and often the technique in commercials are better). It’s a hollow, meaningless thing. Compare it to clothes: a Ralph Rucci collection is very well produced and the “technique” is impeccable- but in terms of sheer emotional value it’s the fashion equivalent of a premature ejaculation*. Or in Pauline’s terms, it’s commercial-making.

There’s a lot of mystery to this collection. The golden chains and the black clothing seem almost religious. Pilati denies that this was intentional. But it’s implied anyway, whether intentional or not, and how we perceive a lot of the collection is accompanied by the drumbeat of our own experiences with religion, chains, gold, and people. We ask ourselves why they’re there, but it doesn’t matter why- it’s the mystery surrounding it.

If I were to award “best” collections, I would award this collection to be the best of the season. Perhaps that says more about this season of mediocre clothes and fruitlessness than anything else. I’d jump up down upon this collection with the energy of an ADD speed-fuelled child with tourettes if it weren’t for those gaudy pieces. The influence of YSL isn’t a wholly positive one, and with Pilati it’s a bit like having a Bob Dylan addict who likes doggerel like, say, “Shot Of Love” in charge of rating Dylan’s work. Pilati’s clearly a big fan of Saint Laurent’s work, but I’m a bigger fan of Pilati. Other critics wish he’d just get in line and follow the pattern Karl Lagerfeld established- present variations on house themes season by season, which age rapidly. Pilati is greater designer than that.

*And the thing with Rucci is that I genuinely want to like the guy’s clothes- he works outside of the Anna Wintour-endorsed, creepy sexual predator-endorsing (ie. Terry Richardson) “Vogue” world. But lately his stuff just isn’t doing it for me- it looks like the type of clothes tasteful New York socialites might wear (the older sort, who don’t shop at Opening Ceremony and those other “hip” boutiques that sell not-very-interesting t-shirts and too-expensive skinny jeans.)

108: \"don\'t stop till you get too much\"

108 — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:11:26 -0700

Large Prime Numbers the rock and roll band experience is doing pretty well these days! We are rocking pretty hard. I'm going to post these two videos here. You might like them! You can view them in full-screen HD, if that's your thing.

The first one is a Real Song -- and one called "Don't Stop Till You Get Too Much". The second one is just us joking around during the sound check.

I recommend watching them both, if you have the time. The joking around one is pretty fun!

If you're going to be in Tokyo anytime soon, just email me and I will let you know when we're playing.

eden: The Same America You\'ve Seen Plenty Of Times Before

eden — Tue, 04 May 2010 02:30:26 -0700

Hussein Chalayan has created some fantastic collections in the past- clothes that become an envelope, clothes that perform a metamorphosis, clothes made from furniture. He’s one of the few real auteurs in fashion. So it’s with a mixture of confusion and disappointment I’ve viewed his last few collections. They’re thoroughly commercial and the clothes are good, but they don’t seem to be from the same place as his earlier collections. Looking at style.com, the last collection from him that I really loved was in March 2008- a collection that represented speed in the construction of the clothes themselves. The 3 collections after that seem to mark a change in direction, towards “sophistication”, some would say. It’s only considered sophisticated because designers like Yves Saint Laurent, Bill Blass, Edith Head et al made it sophisticated- it’s not sophisticated thinking, but looks sophisticated because those designers are a typical point of reference for That Sort Of Thing; the sophistication in our collective consciousness. The little black dress and Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking and a porkpie hat and trenchcoat- visions of sophistication most westerners are familiar with.
It’s actually far less sophisticated than previous collections of Chalayan, because then he was doing something only he could do- these were (and are!) the collections of an auteur. Sometimes when people say “auteur” they mean “everything of theirs is recognizable”, and hacks can do the same thing by repeating themselves over and over. But Chalayan’s collections, up until the last 3, never repeated. They weren’t only fantastic because they’re unique to Chalayan- they also had a lot of thinking behind them, and interesting ways of presenting that thinking. Often the thinking was what seems like the most direct route. Experimenting with decay for his graduate collection, he actually buried clothes and dug them up later. In these last 3 collections, the thinking is less evident (is it evident at all?). More than a handful of people could make these collections. The coats in his recent “American” inspired collection are flawless, but that- and the memory of elegance, god bless it, is all the collection has. The concept of the collection was a road-trip through America, so we cycle through clothing inspired by various parts of it. It’s a cute concept. But when each piece is examined without this knowledge it looks exactly like a piece of clothing (and nothing more).

This isn’t all that far away from contemporary art practices. Often a work offers no clues to its “artistic” value or anything like that. I saw an exhibition last year where clear sheets of paper where taped to the wall- until you looked closely, and noticed tiny specks of dust on them. Oh, great Moses! This surely is Art with a capital A. Perhaps this artwork would’ve been interesting with context- why the artist created it, what other works the artist had created, etc, but we were provided with very little context. And so it was dust on paper.
What I’m wondering is how much “context” can someone get away with, when it’s not expressed in the work inherently? Or rather: if the work seems to have no value inherent in it, what are we supposed to think? Are we expected to ascribe our own, well, everything to the work? Sure- why not! But this work- Chalayan’s “America” collection, tells us exactly what it’s supposed to be about. It tells us in a fairly heavy handed manner, like a nun schoolmistress with a cane behind her desk. The way the show was presented- in sequence (LA, NY, etc- one after the other), and with a soundtrack of an ever-changing radio dial to accompany it. And the clothes themselves are as American as Marilyn Monroe making love to the Hollywood sign. It’s an American road trip, full stop. Here the artist/designer/creator isn’t asking the audience to come up with their own meaning, it’s already there in capital letters. Or rather, we’re told what it’s SUPPOSED to be, but the clothes themselves don’t stand up what they’re supposedly about. They’re just clothes. The collection fails under its own terms.

Granted, it’s a risky concept to try and pull off, with masterpieces like “On The Road” and Robert Frank’s “The Americans” in the same vague category. I think Chalayan made a mistake in going for the most obvious solution here- a painfully literal interpretation of “American Roadtrip”. It’s cringingly obvious, and it results in typically American clothing. That sort of thing’s been done recently by Marc Jacobs, Alexander Wang (not very well, but he’s done it), oh- and just about any other designer you care to name. Chalayan’s America is no different to previous incarnations of it- it lacks the paranoid warp of Pynchon’s America, “That Weird Old America” of Dylan’s- it lacks anything to distinguish itself from the America of dozens of Disney movies and 1940s B-movies. His clothes are American without saying anything about America. I’m not expecting witty social commentary (the collection has binoculars done in sherling to go with a sherling coat- that’s funny at least), or a thesis about The State Of America Today. It’d be good enough just to see something new. The keyword here is “see”. William Eggleston’s work isn’t particularly statement-heavy (at all), but it shows things in a new way. Here it’s hard to tell the difference between a Chalayan coat and a coat bought at Neiman Marcus. It is the exact same view (sans sherling binoculars, but those are a gimmick) as can be found elsewhere.

The two collections before “America” are so leaden with the elegance of collective memory that it’s hard to remember exactly what they were like. Sharply cut jackets, clean lines, generous dollops of white and navy. Reading through a review by Sarah Mower, she quotes Chalayan as feeling a need to go back to minimalism of his early career, saying it’s harder to subtract than to keep adding. That sort of sentiment reminds me of the videogame designer Fumito Ueda’s approach to his games- a philosophy of subtraction. Yet there’s a danger of taking away so much that nothing’s left. Ueda’s been very successful with his approach, partly because paring back conventional game design results in a kind of freedom. The landscapes he employs are often barren, and his use of light is very particular – it’s reminiscent of Nan Goldin. It’s the same freedom the eye has when watching “No Country For Old Men” or parts of “Paris, Texas.”
But Chalayan is working in the medium of clothing, and doesn’t have the luxury of barren landscapes and haunting soundtracks. His minimalism has to be accomplished differently. It’s no good just taking a button away here, a pocket away there, and making sure the line of the clothing is clean the whole way through. That’s a misconception about minimalism in fashion- it’s more than just that. Helmut Lang created garments with minimal detailing, with clean lines- the usual things that define minimalism in fashion. He also created latex dresses that somehow looked elegant. His minimalism wasn’t just in the clean lines, it was what he used the lines as a platform for- in this case, the latex (and the implications of that). Alber Elbaz at Lanvin wouldn’t be considered a minimalist designer by most, yet he’s consistently worked with a very strict, very minimal vocabulary, sometimes using a procedure over and over for the entirety of a collection. That’s as minimalist as anything by Helmut Lang. Chalayan’s recent minimalism doesn’t work because it’s only the surface- the clothes hold the same level of depth and interest as a t-shirt. What he really seems to be in pursuit of is timeless clothes. That’s the same target as Phobe Philo, too (minimalism be damned- she’s not a minimalist designer, despite everybody saying she is. She’s a designer practicing a form of minimalism that’s far, far away from the territory of Helmut Lang and Jil Sander. Worlds away.)

But what’s Hussien Chalayan doing making “timeless” clothes? His mechanical dresses- aren’t they timeless? And the table-skirts and envelope-clothes- aren’t they timeless, too? Like “elegance”, timeless is a concept with so many historical dust bunnies under the bed that to the modern person, it means things like “peacoat” and “Chanel suit”. It’s almost a marketing concept: buy this Louis Vuitton bag and you’ll own something “timeless”. See, here’s a picture of Keith Richards with a guitar to prove it’s as timeless as the old bugger himself! So it’s very dangerous of me to ascribe this concept of “timeless” as something that Chalayan’s aiming for, yet that’s what his last three collections seem to say, loud and clear. “Timeless” and “elegant” in this overworked, clichéd fashion that fashion loves to recycle every season. Chalayan’s clothes are among the best of that trope (so are Philo’s, for that matter), but he’s capable of far more. He’s now making clothes that’re already timeless, rather than making his own clothes that could be timeless. In other words: he’s swimming in the safe, shallow end of the pool. Not enough risks, my dear Mozart.

It’s disappointing. It doesn’t make me feel good about fashion when one of its best designers is making clothes that could be on a rack at H&M. It gives me a feeling of nausea, and eventually boredom. No doubt he’ll work himself out of this rut- I have both faith and buckets of hope that he will, because a world where Chalayan is playing it safe is like a world where Warner Herzog is in a retirement home.

108: large prime numbers a-live, in the dark, in high-definition: this will happen again

108 — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:03:45 -0700

see this right here? we're going to do this again on may 1st, only we're going to do it much, much harder, and with a much more thorough sound check.

rsvp asap via email to tim108 (at!) gmail (dot! com!)

(click here to see the videos on the youtube page (720p HD available).)

/center>

eden: The Birdhouse

eden — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:11:57 -0800

"The Birdhouse", on the edge of a cliff overlooking the town, is constructed of several rectangular blocks of white and glass stacked like children's playthings.
It's a place for socialites and their hangers-on - people who want to be something in this godforsaken place. Mrs. O'Leary walks into The Birdhouse, her hair permed and purple, her tired flapper gown her date. She wants to be accepted into the "upper class" of the town. Her family came here only 60 years ago!
Mrs. Von Mott, however, is the leader of the fur coat brigade. Her family has been her for over 200 years. She's old money. The Birdhouse is her house.

The Birdhouse is a curiosity, something of a tourist attraction, for those passing through the town. It sits like a great white wonder preaching to the town in a geometrical fashion- out of reach for most townfolk. "PRIVATE PROPERTY", the sign declares. There's no need for anyhing more, everybody knows it anyway. Mrs. Von Mott is not nouveau riche. She is tasteful.

Several nights later at the bottom of the dusty dirt road we see the chewed "PRIVATE PROPERTY" sign. A car is beckoned to by an elderly woman with a flashlight, and we move through a hallway of white and glass and rails where the paint was chipping off.
"Oh, hello Tom. I'm Mrs. Von Mott," Mrs. Von Mott says to a dapper looking man. She's dressed in a very Italian way, looking younger than her name suggests but older than my mother.
Usual small talk muttered. We begin to hear squarks and chirps- a symphony of scratched blackbirds, blackboards. Mrs. Von Mott keeps a couple of birds.

SQUARKKK. The bird noises get louder as we leave Mrs. Von Mott and move into the bigger room. Again it's white and glass. There are bird droppings on the floor- a few of them- mostly it's the smell. A putrid and bitter rotting smell. The only lighting in this room is a few portable lights, a flashlight or two hanging down from the ceiling. The great and good and fabulously wealthy are mingling here: Plum has a diamond on her finger that looks like it's about to tip her over. Stein is talking to Harold Truman- "How would you fancy a martini later?"
"Oh, Gertrude, that'd be divine" he says, tiny pig-eyes behind his hopelessly outmoded surgeon's steel glasses.
There are no amenties. No toilets, no kitchen. There's no tables or chairs. Just what appears to be a gaggle of people with drinks that've materialized out of nowhere.

There's a couple of rooms off the main room: We move into the left one first, shuffling through people making vague small talk- "good, yeah, good". The left room has no lighting and contains several parrots. They're not the type that speak. SQUARKKK.

The right room- more shuffling, more small talk- contains supermarket petshop budgies. The floor's filthy. Most of the people are leaving.
Birds are moving out from the rooms, and there is bread placed on the floors in crumbs. The lighting's mostly gone, save for a lone flashlight- "ENERGIZER" written on it. SQUARKKK.

Mrs. Von Mott is nowhere to be seen. Behind the departing guests there's a cachaphony of birds sounding like bitches in heat sped up in a recording studio. The Birdhouse is cold and dark and it is- SQUARKKK.

108: see large prime numbers live in koenji any weekend

108 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:42:41 -0800

hey! i have been busy making $$$ and all that stuff, so have neglected this blog for what seems to be a little over a year. you may have noticed that i have a website called Action Button Dot Net, and have had said website for several years, only i have never once pimped it here (aside from putting that lovely button on the left sidebar). i write stuff there, sometimes (expect a big final fantasy xiii review next week). i also write monthly columns at Kotaku.com, the latest of which (an of-the-decade roundup) is here. i also have a twitter thing here. i promised a novel last time i posted (a year ago), and hey! it's nearly done. it's all terse and to-the-point and shit. it's a greatest-hits compilation encompassing this entire blog, plus a 40,000-words-or-so update on what has been happening with me in the last two years. the back-of-book text would be something like "a chronicle of the long wait between terrible things and a boring life". i had asked people to email me if they wanted to read it when it was done, and now i kindly ask you to do that again: 108 (at) actionbutton (dot net).

anyway, our band is doing great, and that's what i want to talk about today. last week we started a set with this vintage-final-fantasy-battle-music-inspired improvisation:

if you are in tokyo and would like to see us live (or if you are in osaka and have a dozen friends wanting to see us live (we need an excuse to travel)), you are hereby invited to email me at the above address. after doing so, you will be given the (not-so-)SECRET INFO regarding our next show in koenji DOM. it will be either "this coming saturday night" or "sunday afternoon". nothing like a bit of noise on a sunday afternoon, i always say! actually -- i never say that! i just said it for the first time right now! i bet i just totally baked your noodle like the oracle bakes neo's noodle in the matrix. anyway, the reason i / we want you to email is because, you know. DOM is actually a (photogenic) sound studio, and the laws of physics don't permit us to fit more than a dozen people inside. so consider your email an RSVP to an exclusive event.

we (and i) hope to see you soon! and i can't wait to post info about our upcoming super-hot t-shirt, with the NEW large prime numbers logo, drawn by a super amazing legendary japanese artist who is actually a huge fan of the bullshit we call "music". (should be early february. (the shirts are going to be all v-neck, by the way. fuck crew neck. the 2010s will the decade where all band shirts go v-neck, the decade where men stop hiding their collarbones once and for all.))

eden: Kawakubo Can Dance

eden — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 03:10:57 -0800

Rei Kawakubo, for once, has delivered a collection under the Comme des Garcons mainline that is commercial.
I hesitated writing about this specific collection for a while- was there anything to write about it? What was there to say? What was Kawakubo saying, if anything? The collection didn't as much baffle me as leave me stricken of words.

The collection has no emotional punch. I clicked through each look mutely- there wasn't anything to write home about. There was no fever holding the collection together, as with the previous "Wonderland" collection. Sometimes Kawakubo's ideas are simple, and each look is a variation on these simple but strong ideas. "Wonderland" called to mind the homeless- use of blankets as part of coats, etc- it was a raw, overpowering collection. Conversely, this latest collection seems to be a robotic, systematic and synthesized exploration of key motifs in recent Kawakubo collections. Tops were deconstructed, made out of shoulder pads, polka dots were used, hair reminist of the "Football" collection sat atop the models like insane plumes, and various prints were used in a seemingly random fashion recalling several previous collections of Kawakubo's. Yet where the motifs served a purpose in each previous collection, the motifs here seem to be the purpose. Technique equals idea, whilst eroding emotion.

Sarah Mower suggests that this is perhaps Kawakubo wryly commenting on fashion of recent seasons: the obsession with shoulders- which Kawakubo deconstructs and turns into tops (perhaps recalling a vanished ghost of fashion- Martin Margiela, who often created clothes out of unconventional materials), the fetish for military coats (see: Balmain.), and so on. In essence it's The State Of Modern Fashion According To Rei Kawakubo.
Kawakubo doesn't actually make a judgement on The State Of Modern Fashion itself. She simply synthesizes it into a sort of gross pastiche that's still no doubt sellable. Many of the pieces are fairly basic, if the complex elements are taken out- so many of the complex elements come from the styling. Belts, shoulder-accessories, the hair.

In creating a collection that's Modern Fashion, synthesized, Kawakubo creates another limit- it's actually very hard for this collection to be better than Modern Fashion itself. Most of the pieces don't transcend Modern Fashion. Looks 33-35, innocent dresses in either white or polka dot are an exception- shoulder pads are incorporated over the right breast, creating a slightly exaggerated silhouette (more than slightly exaggerated given the flat-chested, pubescent boy models who're wearing the dresses.). Yet even these dresses, though clever, don't provoke a reaction. They're clinical but not perverse. We've been bombarded with some many variations on the same look, both in the wider arena of fashion- shoulders, military etc, and in this particular collection, that this subtle wink either goes unnoticed or noticed but pushed to the side. It doesn't have any shock attached, and whatever innuendo it may carry is neutralized by the rest of the collection.

The collection's kind of pretty in an odd way. I'm reminded of fallen leaves off a tree, multicoloured, broken and delicate. It's commercial. It'll sell.

I feel kind of empty looking at it. I feel like Kawakubo shot a blank. It's her "Sally Can't Dance"- Lou Reed commented after the making of that godawful album (also his most successful at the time) that if he didn't sing at all it'd probably go to number one. Did Kawakubo even bother doing anything new here? I don't know- I don't feel so, but hell, maybe she did. It doesn't feel new because the elements she synthesizes and mixes are so new- I've already seen them a million times in a million other shows. It's clever, I'll give her that. Clever and emotionless and clinical. It's a certain type of fashion- the sort of clothes that somebody buys from a regular clothes shop- H&M or somesuch, bought to boiling point. It is the most "avant garde" of this Regular Sort Of Fashion. The most "artistic". Kawakubo's capable of more, but here it almost seems like she's completing some sort of circle- with the "PLAY" line, it's Regular Clothes at their barest level (for an obscene price), and with this collection it's Regular Clothes at their highest level. Regular Clothes don't often provoke emotion, and they don't here. They'd be better displayed on a rack in a store. That being said, it's not a bad collection by any means. It's pretty. It's commercial. It has a few standout moments. It just isn't satisfying.

eden: At the Edge of the Depraved Decadent Dessert- Dover Street Market

eden — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 04:02:06 -0700

The burnished silver stainless-steel sign at the bottom of the Dover Street Market is unerringly businesslike- the names of the brands on each floor written in businesslike, doctor’s office black. They act as pornography to certain members of the public, and in such sexless fonts too. “3F: Alber Elbaz for Lanvin, Alexis Mabile, Anne Valerie Hash…” it’s even in alphabetical order! “2F: Adam Kimmel, Arts and Science…” to the untrained eye the sign could be describing a pediatrician’s office and some fusty old, government-funded office dealing with arts and science. Yet this is the unassuming entrance to the Dover Street Market, favorite store of the avant garde and fabulously-well-to-do-starving rich.

The Dover Street Market is essentially an emporium of several floors selling goods at several times the price that they should be sold at. I encountered it early on in London- the first day I arrived on my flight, existing on a supply of adrenaline and Berocca. The building itself is situated in that part of London where all the buildings look more or less the same: old and projecting a feeling of vintage wine spread over stone tablecloth at sunrise. I’d already passed by it about twice without knowing it was The Dover Street Market, and even when we were on our way there we had to doubletake, make sure it was the right place.

Our gallery of rogues at this point consisted of myself, Tavi, and Laia- the fourth member of this troupe was to arrive the next morning- Elizabeth. We walked around the Dover Street Market (which I’m going to refer to as “DSM” from now on because it’s quite a mouthful, and I can’t be bothered typing it out in full all the time) in a half-dazed haze. Walking around the Comme des Garcons “Black” store first- a glass edifice of white polka dots and clothes that sort of represent what Comme des Garcons is about without being too specific. They’re Comme des Garcons in a very vague manner. The whole idea of “Comme des Garcons Black” is to make Comme des Garcons affordable to the “public” without making the clothes look like traditional, half-rate-discounted, thrift-store clothing for a funeral (as per Comme des Garcons H&M). It’s a pity the jacket I tried on was one thousand pounds. The jacket itself was all black and embossed with sticking-out polka dots like a fabric ream of bubble wrap. It wasn’t worth one thousand pounds, even if the salesman was incredibly nice; a rarity compared to the rest of the staff there. I recall one man, pretentiously dressed probably, informing Tavi and I that we were not allowed to take photographs inside the Dover Street Market (we’d already taken photos on another floor anyway, and the one-man-band staffing it didn’t care.)

The females at the DSM (I should mention here that the DSM is owned by Rei Kawakubo, who owns Comme des Garcons- it’s an elegant hodgepodge of labels she controls and labels she likes) all look like the previously stated Ms. Kawakubo. Their haircuts are all uniformly cut- bangs and down to their shoulder hair. If they are not Japanese they look like it. I saw exactly one smile from all of these female assistants, and the image- calculated and deliberate, no doubt, that Comme des Garcons projects of Rei Kawakubo is of someone who very rarely smiles. I imagine that this Kawakubo-clone depot is actually a perverse joke of the real Ms. Kawakubo’s. I imagine she sits in her office grinning madly at the prospect of customers going “is that Rei Kawakubo?!” whilst traveling through the DSM. (Or at least I like to think that.)

One of the Rei clones end up being fairly pleasant and un-Rei-like. She acts like a pleasant shop assistant (and not a sycophantic one):

“Did you see that girl around here? The short one-”
“I think she was trying on something! In that one over there”
“Oh, I thought so”

Rei-clone One actually said that “something” with an exclamation mark at the end. As in a Pokemon game, or a children’s television show. “I think you might find it in the neighboring town!” written out in white pixelated text on a black background. If she were an animation, she’d be smiling that smile that can only be found in an animation, where the smile can only be represented by only one line. She wasn’t Rei Kawakubo I realized with a slightly disappointed internal sigh. I don’t know what I was expecting, because I know she wasn’t Rei Kawakubo- she was too tall and elongated, for one. And yet I wanted her to act like Rei Kawakubo, in some way. It’s like going to see an Elvis impersonator and the impersonator speaking to you in a hoity-toity upper-class British accent. Of course, their job is to walk around looking stylish and occasionally sell things; not do whatever a Rei Kawakubo impersonator’s meant to do- they sure don’t sing “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Houndog.”

At one point we’re on perhaps the second floor and Tavi’s trying on something by Junya Watanabe. Trying to try it on, anyway. She ends up not knowing how to put it on, and nobody else seems to either. It’s white, twisted, and pleated. It is probably a dress of some description, though who the hell knows anyway- if anything, it’s a Pretty Object. This is what the DSM is filled with: Pretty Objects. Objects that sparkle, that glitter, that are warped and confusing yet beautiful.

Actually, it’s less of Pretty Objects and more of Pretty Dreams. On one of the floors there’s a dressing room akin to the middle part of a carousel, in another a seemingly broken door leads to another changing room. The doors strike me as being more important than the actual clothes being sold. The whole...mise en scene of the shop being more important than the clothes.

I hope I’m not sounding too negative here, because I love the Dover Street Market. I love the Dover Street Market almost as much as a loath tumblr. And I’ve really been loathing tumblr as of late, even as I continue to post images that’ll soon be forgotten by the people that “follow” me, and quotes that’ll probably be only remembered by I and my sweetheart. I’ve identified three main traits of the “tumblr” using teenage girl (which I am not, but most of the people I know who use tumblr are. I’ve yet to see a suit-wearing businessman use tumblr*). These traits are:
Number one: Posting pictures of half-naked or totally naked models in something tangentially related to fashion (I call this “fashion porn”).
Number two: Pictures of Bob Dylan.
Number three: Pictures of cute things (ie. Kittens), or quotes- generally hormonal and soppy only in the way a teenage girl who reads Sylvia Plath can be, behind a faded picture of a landscape or the sea or somesuch. For example “Don’t Leave Me” and a few trees in blossom behind the quote, the image itself having that faded look of 70s photos. These are the inverse of “LOLcats”.

I loath the uniformity of this bizarre cultural meme. I detest it, even though I love half-naked and naked models, and Bob Dylan. It’s cultural regurgitation. It’s as if all these films, people and photos are thrown into The Giant Mouth Of Culture, and somewhere, somewhere on the line the bits and pieces of culture get chopped up, and what ends up on tumblr is the end result. There’s no thought to it; it’s utterly emotion based. Actually, it’s less than that. It’s a reflex. And it’s creepy. Though really, it’s no different to how people tend to regurgitate what’s fed to them, culturally, in the Real World (see: Miley Cyrus, American Idol, Susan Boyle.)

The same “cultural reflex” pertains shops and people inside and outside the Dover Street Market. Later that day I was invited to the opening of an art exhibition- it was on a warm summer night in a gallery- I can’t remember the name- and people were everywhere getting drunk. There was a crowd on the terrace as we half-pushed/half-walked our way through. Most of them were wearing similar clothing: for the men, frames or wayfarers, half of them sporting a beard, and a flannel shirt. Their haircuts looked like what a fan of “Joy Division” would wear- as flat and slick as oil, though oddly combed. The woman- leggings, some nameless top, studs somewhere- on leggings or their blazer. One girl in particular looked like a try-hard version of the lady we went to the party with. Where one was chic, the try-hard looked like she could almost man a street corner.
The point here being that some “cultural reflex” had penetrated all these people (save us and the lady who came with us), as they were all dressed similar, all acting the same- an awkward James Dean not being James Dean very well. Most of them were getting drunk and about as far away as one could get from the art.

DSM attempts to distance itself from this cultural uniformity. For instance, I was just trying to find images of the Dover Street Market, yet none but one of the pictures I found correlates to what we saw inside the place when we were there. Whoever’s running it has an obsession with change. I can’t say I paid attention to many of the people on any of the floors, either, because there wasn’t many of them anyway. Generic fashion-looking people; as we were to encounter for the rest of our trip. Eventually you just start to phase them out and they become noise in the background. And I was phasing them out on the first day in London! I don’t know how many thousands of dark eyes I didn’t see.

At the front of the first floor there’s a couple of fossils, thousands of years old. A skull or two. It looks like a Damien Hirst exhibit. Tavi’s dad- Steve; Laia and I stand in front of the exhibit reading the little information card. “This fossil is x thousand years old”. The price is x thousands of dollars. Even museum exhibits are sold here, as in some bizarre dream of golden fashion and archeology. Just in case anybody wants to buy a x thousand-year-old skull, of course. One could always go to the natural history museum and attempt a robbery. It’d probably be cheaper.
I wonder at this point whether this is a designer skull. It must be, given the price! I imagine rows of skulls- Prada skulls, Comme des Garcons skulls, Chanel skulls. Each skull stamped with the logo of each respective house (or more accurately, brand.) It’s almost creepy, the selling of ancient skulls, almost reeking of twisted Victorian shops, selling skulls to weirdos in their tophats and peacoats. And I suppose some of that backwards Victorian feeling is deliberate: it’s called the Dover Street Market after all.

This place is a sort of Disneyland for fashion. It’s a flawed organic rustheap gimmick-laden wonderland of lust and sheer pleasure in the form of clothing. The Rei-clones are flawed, the merchandise is perfect and perfectly out of the price range of most who visit- hell, for boxers it costs thirty pounds- you can check that on the website (doverstreetmarket.com). I don’t know how to react to boxers that cost thirty pounds, but it doesn’t really matter because the Dover Street Market’s primary purpose, to people like me- who don’t have one thousand pounds lying around for a jacket (ie. Most of the world) is to be a whorehouse for the feeling up of clothes (Lanvin especially), and secondly to sell boxers for the sum of thirty pounds. I’m not buying any.

*Speaking of, I was walking behind two middle-aged businessmen who appeared to be from “The Office” the other day. I was on a quest to buy a number (n)ine jacket at a poisonous price, and these two businessmen started talking in front: “100% sales!” “profits will be converted 100%!” “the profit conversion..” What struck me, as the price of my jacket will surely do one day, was that these men sounded exactly like they were from “The Office.” They talked the exact same sort of business doubletalk that one expects from an episode of said television show. I giggled behind them, imitating them with my friend who was with me. They appeared oblivious, as you’d imagine characters from “The Office” to be.

(Images to be uploaded later, when I can be bothered resizing them.)