Hideous Man

Hideous Man. Directed by John Malkovich, costumes designed by Bella Freud. AW 2002. Running Time – 22:40

Hideous Man is written and directed by John Malkovich and produced by Bella Freud. It is their third short film collaboration and is shot on 35mm black and white film. It tells the story of a group of beatnik girls rehearsing their work in preparation for a performance for their alter ego – the Hideous Man. Starring Peaches, Saffron Burrows, Anita Pallenberg, Shaznay Lewis, Camilla Rutherford, Skin, Arielle Dombasle and Emilia Fox.

To watch the short film, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style’s Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228?ref=hl

Feb 8

Attracted to Bebop

“I never know how to describe my work. It’s not always the same thing. It’s like asking Miles, ‘How does your horn sound?’”
Jean Michel Basquiat

Portrait of Miles Davis, date unknown

Discography II, 1983

What attracted Basquiat to bebop is the way it used repetition, reproduction, and improvisation to transform, or “artistically other”, the shape and meaning of somebody else’s originals, and to do so in the name of black protest against the restrictive social structures of American Racism. For LeRoi Jones, what most characterized bebop was its “antiassimilationist sound”, its rapid improvisations, its jagged time shifts, its wild solo flights, its embrace of melodic and rhythmic dissonance-its willfully harsh resistance to being swallowed up into the unisonance of American harmony. Bebop musicians understood the importance of communicating their racial difference from the American mainstream through their music.

While bebop was the music Basquiat inherited from the radical past, it was the radical present of hip-hop that he was born into. Basquiat was coming up as a painter and graffiti tagger on the streets and subways of New York City just as the music culture of hip-hop was being born on the very same streets and on the very same subways. In many ways Basquiat was hip-hop’s first galley artist, the first audiovisual hip-hopper to be legitimized, popularized, and substantively supported by the official New York art world.

Oct 31

Monsters and Marilyns

“CS Lewis once said “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been”. This was the primary thought behind the series Monsters and Marilyns. Throughout history Fascists, Communists, Marxists, and Socialists have murdered and oppressed those who were under their rule, yet popular culture and propaganda have tried to make these monsters into heros and icons. Twisting peoples memories and brainwashing them into an Orwellian nightmare.

Andy Warhol’s silkscreen painting of Marilyn Monroe is one of the most iconic painting of the Pop Art Movement. Not many people know that the painting was meant to show the mask of popularity that a celebrity wears. On the outside there were different shades of happiness, but under all the paint and smiles there was something darker: depression, drug use, and suicide. I took this idea and reinterpreted it to speak truth into our popular culture. The hair and make-up from the Marilyn Monroe painting is placed on politicians, dictators, public officials, as well as old horror movie monsters that are liars, murderers, and tyrants. By doing this the statement is made that no matter how much popular culture or the mass media tries to dress up and beautify these people, they are still monsters. Saddam Hussein, Barack Obama, Frankenstein, Dracula, Stalin, Lenin, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Bill Clinton, Pin Head, Leather Face, Barney Frank, Mao Zedong, the Bride of Frankenstein, Hitler, Hannibal Lecter, Jack (the character from Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining), and Jesse Jackson are only some of the people that I have Marilynized.

My goal is to force people to look past the media hype and celebrity masks of these people and see them for who they really are. Much like in George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984, people are too willing to give up their freedom and liberty to be taken care of and protected by the Government. They will believe anything that they are told to believe even if they know its a lie because they do not want to know the truth. As a society, we want to be lied to, we want to think that everything is normal even when it is crashing down around us. We want to believe in people even though they give us empty promises and lies every time they open their mouths. We need to wake up and realize that lying to ourselves does not change reality. We must recognize and accept truth. The truth will set you free, but it will not make you sleep easy at night.

Therefore, by linking monsters to the mask-wearing Marilyn Monroe that Andy Warhol portrayed, I demonstrate that things are not what they seem. They are a mask, a lie, a perversion of the truth to allow people to lie to themselves in order to feel secure.”

Jesse Lenz

Series by Jesse Lenz, 2009

Aug 3

On a Sad Sunday

“On a sad Sunday with a hundred white flowers,
I was waiting for you, my dear, with a church prayer,
That dream-chasing Sunday morning,
The chariot of my sadness returned without you.

Ever since then, Sundays are always sad,
tears are my drink, and sorrow is my bread…
Sad Sunday.

Last Sunday, my dear, please come along,
There will even be priest, coffin, catafalque, hearse-cloth.
Even then flowers will be awaiting you, flowers and coffin.
Under blossoming (flowering in Hungarian) trees my journey shall be the last.

My eyes will be open, so that I can see you one more time,
Do not be afraid of my eyes as I am blessing you even in my death…
Last Sunday.”

Translation of László Jávor’s lyrics

Bjork performs Gloomy Sunday at at memorial service for Alexander McQueen. Björk emerged from behind the heavy swagged cathedral curtains, resplendent in a fragile, winged silver and grey McQueen stage costume, the like of which St Paul’s has surely never seen before, even in half a millennium. It gave her the appearance of a butterfly who had got halfway through emerging from a chrysalis and then changed her mind.

Gloomy Sunday, also known as the Hungarian Suicide Song, is a song composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress and published in 1933.The original lyrics were titled Vége a világnak (The world is ending) and were a set of lyrics about despair caused by war, and ending in a quiet prayer about the people’s sins. Poet László Jávor wrote his own lyrics to the song, titled Szomorú vasárnap (Sad Sunday), in which the protagonist wants to commit suicide following his lover’s death. The latter lyrics ended up becoming more popular while the former were essentially forgotten. The song was first recorded in Hungarian by Pál Kalmár in 1935.

The song was published as sheet music in late 1933, with lyrics by poet László Jávor, who was inspired by a recent break-up with his fiancée. According to most sources, Jávor rewrote the lyrics after the song’s first publication, although he is sometimes described as the original writer of its words. His lyrics contained no political sentiments, but rather were a lament for the death of a beloved and a pledge to meet with the lover again in the afterlife. This version of the song became the best known, and most later rewritings are based around the idea of lost love.

Gloomy Sunday was first recorded in English by Hal Kemp in 1936, with lyrics by Sam M. Lewis, and was recorded the same year by Paul Robeson, with lyrics by Desmond Carter. It became well-known throughout much of the English-speaking world after the release of a version by Billie Holiday in 1941. Lewis’s lyrics referred to suicide, and the record label described it as the Hungarian Suicide Song. There is a recurring urban legend which claims that many people committed suicide while listening to this song.

Feb 22

Photo Essays in Black and White

Self-portrait, 1959

Bruce Davidson Bruce Davidson was born on born September 5, 1933 in Oak Park, Illinois. At age 10, his mother built him a darkroom in their basement and Davidson began taking photographs. Soon after, he approached a local photographer who taught him the technical nuances of photography, in addition to lighting and printing skills. His artistic influences included Robert Frank, Eugene Smith, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

At 16, Davidson won his first major photography award, the Kodak National High School snapshot contest, with a picture of an owl at a nature preserve. After he graduated from high school, Davidson attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, where one of his teachers was artist Josef Albers. Davidson showed Albers a box of prints of alcoholics on Skid Row; Albers told him to throw out his “sentimental” work and join his class in drawing and color. For his college thesis, Davidson created a photo essay that was published in LIFE in 1955, documenting the emotions of football players behind the scenes of the game.

Following college, Davidson was drafted into the US Army, where he served in the Signal Corps at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, attached to the post’s photo pool. Initially, he was given routine photo assignments. Undaunted, Davidson created out of seemingly mundane material unique photo studies. An editor of the post’s newspaper, recognizing his unique talents, asked that he be permanently assigned to the post newspaper. There, given a certain degree of autonomy, he was allowed to further hone his talents. Later, stationed in Paris, he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, a later colleague with the Magnum photo agency, sharing his portfolio and receiving advice from Cartier-Bresson. While in France, Davidson produced a photo essay on the Widow of Montmartre, an old Parisian woman who was married with an impressionist painter.

Widow of Montmartre, Paris, 1956

The Dwarf, 1958

Couple necking on pole at basement party while girl looks on, from Brooklyn Gang, 1957

Brooklyn Gang and the American writer Norman Mailer, 1959

Brooklyn Gang. Bengie and friends at Bay Twenty-two, Coney Island. Clockwise from left: Bengie, Junior, Bryan, Lefty, 1959

Brooklyn Gang, 1959

A group of civil rights demonstrators led by Martin Luther King Jr. marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., during the civil rights movement

Martin Luther King Jr. at a press conference declaring the Freedom Rides will continue. John Lewis (left) was beaten by KKK earlier in Montgomery, Alabama, 1961

A Freedom Rider sits in the bus during a rain storm, with National Guardsmen outside, 1961

National Guardsmen protect the Freedom Riders during their ride from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi.

The Feedom Rides – from Selma to Montgomery. Here a rider and a National Guardsman asleep on the bus, 1961

Diana Ross and another member of the Supremes catch some rest in bunks at the Apollo Theater in New York City in 1965.

This photo is taken from Davidson’s series East 100th Street, the result of his spending two years documenting the people inhabiting the East Harlem street, 1966

A couple enjoys a day out in New York City’s Central Park. During the 1990s, Davidson spent four years exploring and documenting the grandeur of the city’s treasured preserve.

Jan 10

The Tree of Life

Page from Darwin’s notebooks around July 1837 showing his first sketch of an evolutionary tree

Interpretation of handwriting: “I think case must be that one generation should have as many living as now. To do this and to have as many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction . Thus between A + B the immense gap of relation. C + B the finest gradation. B+D rather greater distinction. Thus genera would be formed. Bearing relation” (next page begins) “to ancient types with several extinct forms”

The tree of life is a metaphor describing the relationship of all life on Earth in an evolutionary context. Charles Darwin talks about envisioning evolution as a “tangled bank” in On the Origin of Species; however, the book’s sole illustration is of a branched diagram that is very tree-like.

“From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these fallen branches of various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only in a fossil state. As we here and there see a thin, straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus (Platypus) or Lepidosiren (South American lungfish), which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.”

Charles Darwin,

On the Origin of Species

17th-century depiction of the Tree of Life in Palace of Shaki Khans, Azerbaijan

The concept of a tree of life has been used in science, religion, philosophy, and mythology. A tree of life is a common motif in various world theologies, mythologies, and philosophies. It alludes to the interconnection of all life on our planet and serves as a metaphor for common descent in the evolutionary sense. The term tree of life may also be used as a synonym for sacred tree.

Depiction of the Norse Yggdrasil as described in the Icelandic Prose Edda by Oluf Olufsen Bagge, 1847

In George Herbert‘s poem The Sacrifice (part of The Temple, 1633), the Tree of Life is the rood on which Jesus Christ was crucified

Scenes from the Life of Christ– 19. Crucifixion, Giotto di Bondone, 1304-06

In C. S. Lewis‘ Chronicles of Narnia, the Tree of Life plays a role, especially in the sixth published book (the first in the in-world chronology) The Magician’s Nephew

Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film The Fountain (as well as the 2005 graphic novel based on the screenplay) centers on immortality given by the Tree of Life.