Missed In Advance

 
 

I Miss You is a song by Björk and Howie Bernstein, the sixth and final single release from her 1995 album Post. The lyrics describe Björk already knowing who her perfect lover will be, even though she hasn’t yet met him. The music video for I Miss You was animated and directed by John Kricfalusi of Spümcø, best known for the Ren & Stimpy cartoons, which Björk admired. The video has a surreal and humorous quality with some sexual imagery.

Andy Warhol’s Christmas Cards

Naomi Sims and Andy Warhol, Interview Magazine Gala Christmas Issue, December 1972

 
 

Interview Magazine Christmas Card, c.1980. Issued by Interview Magazine’s publishers in the 1980s, the card features the artist playfully posing as Santa Claus, with a white beard drawn on by Richard Bernstein, who designed the card. The inside of the card is signed “love Andy Warhol” by the artist himself

 
 

Since Andy Warhol arrived in Manhattan, his fey sketches had blurred the line between commercial design and fine art. And he had become, among other things, the new king of Christmas. In 1956, in addition to all the work he was getting drawing shoes and bags, he was commissioned to design Christmas cards for the Fifth Avenue temple of Tiffany & Co. Warhol’s cards were subsequently published by Tiffany’s every Christmas up to 1962, the year he started to show his paintings of soup cans.

Picture a can of Campbell’s soup – eating it by yourself. Then contrast this mental picture with Warhol’s 1962 Tiffany’s Christmas card depicting a star constructed of fruit and holly – a picture of the good life, hearty and shared. Food is a constant theme of his Christmas cards. He drew a Christmas tree made of fruit, a reindeer centrepiece for the table, a basket stuffed with food and wine. Then there are the gifts, wrapped or opened, and arranged around the fireplace – a doll, a rocking horse, a striped candy cane with a pink bow: Andy Warhol’s vision of the perfect Christmas.

More recently, Warhol’s Christmas cards have been republished, and there’s even a little book of them. You might dismiss this as the extreme, ephemeral end of Warhol rediscoveries; he himself never claimed that his early graphic output was a significant part of his oeuvre. And yet, when you look at Warhol’s Christmas cards alongside his greatest paintings of the 1960s – the suicide, the car wrecks and so on – they become oddly telling. Set them beside his electric chair and their optimism about a warm and kind American community suddenly looks desperately fragile and consciously artificial. Then you realise why he needed to give up designing Christmas cards.

 
 

Let Them Be Naked

The Beatles (1968). Artwork by Richard Bernstein

 
 

Photography: Ethan Russel

 
 

Let It Be… Naked (2003) is a remixed and remastered version of their 1970 album Let It Be. The project was overseen by Paul McCartney, who felt that Phil Spector‘s production did not accurately represent the group’s “stripped-down” intentions for the original album. Let It Be… Naked presents the songs “naked”—without Spector’s overdubs and without the incidental studio chatter featured between most cuts of the original album. McCartney in particular was always dissatisfied with the “Wall of Sound” production style of the Phil Spector remixes, especially for his song The Long and Winding Road, which he believed was ruined by the process. George Harrison gave his approval for the Naked project before he died.