The Tears of Things

The Mysterious, Elusive, and Invisible Phoenix Wearable Art Auction 2005, Brought To You By Artlink

by The Tears of Things

Speaking of fashion . . .

Where did everybody go?

On Saturday, October 22nd, The Paper Heart, a Grand Avenue gallery, presumably presented the 2005 Wearable Art Auction, sponsored by Artlink, and for the financial benefit of the same. Here's the blurb, from azcentral.com:

How many ways can one create art? When it comes to clothing --a lot. And that's what Artlink's Wearable Art Auction is all about. Think paint, fabric, found objects and more. The event features dozens of original clothing and accessories created by local artists. The pieces will be presented in true artful style by way of a runway show. Also on the bill are jazz musicians, a comedy troupe, a DJ and a silent auction of jewelry, spa packages and more.

Supposublee, anyway. A word coined by a dimwit landlord. Speaking of dimwit landlords --Scott Sanders, look at your calendars. Nothing posted for October 22nd. Nada, as of 10 PM on Thursday, October 27, 2005. Nothing happened that night, according to your own calendar --not even the tangoes you had previously scheduled as well. No photos posted later of the big event, with all the artists proudly posing with their dozens of model-worn creations.

As of this same time, the website for Artlink, artlinkphoenix.com, has been down for two solid days.

Before that time, if anyone checked on the Artlink forum, the last entry was for October 13th. There was no heads up about the fashion auction in the days leading up to it, though Artlink touted the event on its front page. No artist left a little note saying, Hey, Randy Slack here, check out my banana slacks at WAA 2005. Or Sue Chenoweth, with a straitjacket made out of post-it notes, or Grant Wiggins's lab coat of bleached coffee filters, or Carrie Bloomston's 100% pink Pima cotton yogawear --oh, don't get us started-- oops, too late. Did Kathy Cone auction off one of her lace tent dresses? (Hey, wait, isn't that a round tablecloth?) Did Beatrice Moore leap out of one her three-tiered cakes clad only in a tie-dyed bodystocking? Well, that tears it --we're done now.

After the auction, if it even happened --what, you think we attended? Get real: we're at the opera, while the self-loathing slummers hang out with the other losers-- nothing has appeared anywhere, on any blog or MSM outlet. Nothing in Phoenix New Times. Nothing in the Arizona Republic. Maybe it was cancelled. Who knows? Even before the Artlink, Inc. link went on the blink, they posted nothing anywhere on the forum after the event, though they had several days to do so: no comment thread, no photos (!), no nothing nowhere about the Wearable Art Auction 2005, Phoenix. Jerome checked every day, because he wanted to compare the artists' contributions to Catherine's creations. Nada, nada, nada.

We both checked out tomorrow's Yes section in the Arizona Republic, which covers local fashion. Nothing anywhere about Wearable Art Auction 2005, sponsored by the lame-ass Artlink, led by Shari Bombeck and Michael The Magic Number and some other knuckle-dragging chuckleheads.

Back in April, Labelhorde was yakking about co-sponsoring the event this year with Artlink. But they seemed to have had a parting of the ways. Boo-hoo. Now the words "Wearable Art Auction" will be found nowhere near Labelhorde's discussion forum or its website. Did the principals have a falling out? Don't ask us. We're just on the outside of all these loops, pointing out facts as they arise, and speculating where logic leads us.

Why does Artlink have no accountability or responsibility? Because they're volunteers? Perhaps they should volunteer their energies elsewhere, something more befitting their level of engagement and enthusiasm with reality --working in nursing homes, perhaps, or --the next step-- funeral parlors. They seem to have one foot in the grave already.

They just supposublee hosted a major fundraising event for themselves --but there is no public evidence that it ever happened. Why not? Weren't they proud of it? Why don't they have a picture of every damned garment? How much money did they raise? What was the high bid, and for what outfit? How many people showed up? Who was there? Usually, when you go to their forum, they have lame little photos of art openings and the Governor going gaga at eyelounge. Nada, nada, nada now. And no electronic note about why the site is down. How difficult could it be to devise that message, Artlink webguru, whatever your dumbass pseudonym is?

Imagine being one of their sponsors, one of their benefactors. We'd be embarrassed, but Artlink has no shame, only their hand held constantly out. They'll keep stumbling and fumbling along --remember the big bust in August? didn't phase 'em a bit, did it? So they have a few meetings and try to read city codes . . . dum-de-dum, dum-de-dum-de-dum . . .

Can't you hardly wait for Art Detour? That oughta be a whangdoodle. But you'd best mark your calendars now, because Artlink may not mention it much before, during, or after that wonderful weekend, whenever the hell it is.

Word of caution: Never forget the low caliber of people you're dealing with down there, and keep your expectations on the same level.

No Writer's Block Here

by Jerome du Bois, with Catherine King

Tomorrow: two more installments of La Pionera And The New Mango.

In the meantime --we write a lot, Catherine and I. We craft a lot of sentences, and then we have to move on. We don't often reread our own writing after it's published, but we edit nearly every sentence at least a dozen times, every sentence that doesn't arrive entire like an angel's sceptre, or a curious wheel, or a gleam of genius laid in your lap like a sword --which has nothing to do with oneself. But it isn't only those moments a writer lives for . . . Beside, before, and beyond these gifts from The Great Concourse, we labor to produce sentences which respect the ticking moments of unrecoverable time of those who read them. We wrestle with words and meaning, always. Every red moment swells, as it must, as the green fuse feeds it, until it sways into the swollen inevitable, and falls. We labor to produce future.

I just checked the sitemeter, and someone hit our piece called "Inside The Writers' Bloc Clubhouse." I'm not here right now to reslam these tepid weenies. I just reread the piece, and the end, I realize, is worth repeating here, so here it is, without further comment or ado:

Why do I write? Why does Catherine? We can't help it. We have to. Partly because of the way we're made, constantly wanting to make sense of the world, and partly because of the ways we've been bent, broken, and had to bootstrap ourselves back to reality, we know we're on our own; we know we have to grab every day by the biceps and wrestle it down.

Every Word Flesh.

We say it.

FOUR FLAGS WITH PEARLS

Styling and Sewing by Catherine King. Photography by Jerome du Bois. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce in any form.

For background on this T-shirt, go to Introducing The House Of Not For Sale: Three Flags.

The House Of Not For Sale Presents The Psychedelic Leprechaun

[All images copyright Catherine King and Jerome du Bois. Do not reproduce in any form.]

by Catherine King

A few years ago, I bought a fantastic billowing, floor-length 1960's dressing gown from a now-defunct vintage clothing store here in Phoenix. I didn't want a dressing gown. It was all that fabric that I was in love with. . .

The colors of the flocked, dotted, satin shadow-striped voile are indigo, emerald green, fuschia, chartreuse, tangerine orange and white. I especially love indigo and emerald green! This was the most compelling fabric for a fabric-lover, and the inspiration for my custom made flamenco dress-- The Psychedelic Leprechaun.

The Psychedelic Leprechaun is the name I call both the printed fabric and the dress I eventually made from it. I didn't save the label when I deconstucted the dressing gown and I don't remember where in the USA it was made, by whom, or its chemical composition.

The pattern is so enchanting: a pop art field of chunky rainbows, puffy daisies, sunny, funny fried eggs, spotted mushroom caps, pimento-stuffed olives, moons eclipsing moons, rolling hills, crystal waterfalls, verdant bouncing balls and lozenges, even. And sprinkled over meadows of posies are different-colored fuzzy snowflakes. Hence, obviously, "The Psychedelic Leprechaun."

But the leprechaun's playground was too unstructured. Those chunky rainbows had long rainbow stripes flowing down from their graphic arcs. Somehow I knew that the verticality in the pattern must be emphasized, and that the wonderfull craziness of it all would be more powerfull, paradoxically, if I cut it into pieces.

We were living in the Haunted Apartment then. In spite of its cheerfull appearance, The Psychedelic Leprechaun was conceived and mostly constructed in a dark, creepy, haunted old apartment. Jerome and I made some of our finest work there, though. A LOT of our finest work.

I don't remember why I decided to make a flamenco-style dress. Probably because the fabric has plenty of polka-dots all over it. What is it about flamenco dresses and polka-dots? The linkage is so mysterious. It could be that Spanish dancing gypsies made dots out of the circular mirrors that Indian dancing gypsies used to embroider to their skirts to ward off the evil eye. The mirror was an eye reflecting it right back at you.

The Psychedelic Leprechaun is binary. It is made from circles and lines, dots and dashes, 0's and 1's. The lines- well, you can see those, can't you? The whole top part of the dress is made of straight lines. Circles? Well, those are the flounce.

See the flounce at the bottom of the dress? For those who do not know, flounce is not to be confused with ruffles. Ruffles are a single straight strip of fabric, gathered and attached at the top edge of the strip and hanging free at the bottom.

Flounce, however, is a complicated composite. Each one of the many elements of flounce is like a doughnut. Flounce is fun and challenging, and maybe I decided on a flamenco dress because I wanted to try my hands at some flounce. (I don't remember. I was haunted at the time. Probably still am.) But I do recommend making flounce for those who like to use their hands to achieve creative effects.

Picture this: You cut a bunch of perfect circles out of your desired fabric. (I would recommend no smaller than 4" diameter). Then you cut another perfect circle out of the center of that. You are making cloth doughnuts! For more fun, I made my flounce doughnuts for The Psychedelic Leprechaun of different sizes-- different sized doughnuts with different sized holes.

That was the fun part. The challenging part is: you cut a little radius opening up each doughnut. Now your doughnut has changed from a big "O" to a "C" when you stretch it open. Okay now attach your C's to each other end to end. . . Keep them spiraling in from the same direction.

Now think about all those connected circumferences of the inner doughnut holes. You are lining up all the inner circumference edges of all those flounce pieces. For every big circle of flounce you cut, you may only add 2" or 3" lateral inches of flounce. So to get your thick, accumulated ring of flounce circles, you must cut, piece and sew together very much more fabric than it takes to span around your hem.

When I ran out of doughnuts, I had six layers of flounce for the Psychedelic Leprehaun. After I sewed my doughnuts end to end, I would say my strip of flounce was almost thirty feet long. I wound my strip of flounce around a big cork bulletin board, like you buy trimming wrapped around a card at the fabric store, only ten times bigger.

I have photographs taken in the old Haunted Apartment of my Psychedelic Leprechaun in progress; distinct, luminous orbs shooting past the big, flounce-wrapped bulletin board, or floating in front of the ribbon-wrought bodice and skirt. Perhaps I'll go through my old archive and show you the pictures sometime.

It should be obvious why I chose to define the outer edges of all my flounce with ribbon piping-- the piping defines and enhances all the undulating edges. Now can't you see that THREE rows of differently colored ribbon edging lines would further define the luxury of the flounce with triple emphasis and generousity?

But why the pompoms? Well, they echo the polka dots in the fabric. They provide a carnival of movement when I wear The Psychedelic Leprechaun. And they remind me of the orbs. Actually, I think it was the orbs who gave me the fairly crazy idea of the pompoms.

Just look at the dress! It was all worth it-- every bit of the work. I don't know how many pompoms are on The Psychedelic Leprechaun. I got packages of three sizes of pompoms. Notice the micro poms? And some of them are even day-glo-- the leprechaun especially loves that! Using different colors of embroidery floss, Jerome and I strung all the pompoms on loops. I hung them on my first, top edging ribbon, then sewed down the looped poms by applying the second and third rows of ribbon edging over them.

As you can imagine, putting the flounce together got extremely complicated and confusing. Complicated and confusing, but not chaotic. There was a method to all that madness. When working with flounce-- even yards and layers of different sized, triple-trimmed and pompomed flounce-- you just stay on track and follow the spiral. Don't become disheartened. You'll make it okay.

Now my flounce was done. Onto the body of the dress. I took the remaining fabric of The Psychedelic Leprechaun and cut it into vertical strips, just 2" or 3" wide. In order to extend my fabric laterally, I decided to intersperse the strips with differently colored ribbons. I was inspired to use ribbon by a hippie seamstress I remember, who was in turn inspired by Native American fancy dance shirts.

I started the body of the dress with the bright saffron ribbon you see in the middle of the front. Working out in both directions from the center I zigzagged fabric strips next to my ribbons. Then for more complexity, I sewed contrasting ribbons on top of ribbons. All the stitchwork in The Psychedelic Leprechaun, whether by hand or machine, is both functional and decorative. So I used contrasting thread all over to show the work. Mostly I used a glorious Spring Grass Green-- just about our favorite color (the leprechaun and I).

I kept sewing ribbons and fabric strips together, side by side, until the reconstructed cloth was wide enough to wrap around me. In the middle of the back I joined the ends together with another saffron ribbon, for symmetry. Underneath that ribbon I put in a virgin vintage 21" chartreuse metal zipper that had been in my family since the 60's.

Okay, now I had a Psychedelic Tube. I angled off the shoulders and opened up armholes. Can you figure out how I tapered the Psychedelic Leprechaun to fit me so well? I couldn't contour the ribbons, so all the fitting had to be done on the fabric strips. I nipped and tucked the soft voile wherever necessary, using french seams to suit the sheer material.

But the Psychedelic Leprechaun not only had to look amazing, it had to be functional. I needed to really move, to tango in it. So in the back, above the knees, I cut and set in four godets, two on each side.

Then I cut in a perfect neckline and finished off the armholes, rolling and sewing over the edges like the borders of a scarf. Finally, the body of the Psychedelic Leprechaun was ready to be joined to the ring of flounce!

But wait. Some of the edges of the heavier grosgrain ribbon needed to be tacked down so that they laid perfectly flat. Using the glorious Spring Grass Green thread, I made ladder stiches by hand up one side of the ribbons and down the other.

I really liked the way the green ladder stiches looked --so busy, like little green fuses. I knew it would be worth the effort to do the same all over the dress. So I took another week to sprinkle green fuses over the entire worked surface of the Psychedelic Leprechaun. My excitement grew with each stitch. It just looked better and better!

Now, at last, it was time to join the two parts of the Psychedelic Leprechaun. I wore the dress while Jerome measured the hem to be exactly level to the floor. This part was really important to give the dress its extreme verticality. The flounce must be set precisely perpendicular to the ribbons. I safety pinned the heavy flounce so that the ring fit the bottom of the dress, then hand sewed them together, over and over and over.

I completed the Psychedelic Leprechaun just one day before Jerome and I went to the opera Carmen. I couldn't have been more pleased with my custom-made Outsider Haute Couture dress, and now I'm sharing it with you.

But just wait until you see the Psychedelic Leprechaun with my dark green embellished Escada bolero jacket, which looks like it was made just for my dress. Pretty soon, Jerome will take a picture of me in that ensemble and you'll be able to check it out as the new icon at the top of our Fashion sidebar.

Coming next from The House Of Not For Sale: My Gaultiqueen, wherein a Gaultier kilt and a McQueen pencil skirt get hitched.

TO MARKET, TO MARKET . . .

Styling by Catherine King. Photography by Jerome du Bois. All clothes and accessories provided by the model. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce in any form.

Dedicated to Eugene and Marie von Bruenchenhein.

Nobody Owns Green

by Jerome du Bois

If I object to the crescent on an Islamic flag because it reminds me of a bloodthirsty scimitar, and how much Muslims love to kill and kill and kill with this knife, where do I register my objection?

Right here on this blog.

Every time I see that deadly curve I think of Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg and Fabrizio Quattrocchi, the baker / security guard who leapt from his knees to his feet before the cowardly Muslim thugs who would kill him, tearing at his hood and shouting, ”VI FACCIO VEDERE COME SA MORIRE UN ITALIANO!”

I think of Theo van Gogh, murdered in the coldest blood on recent record while begging for reason, slaughtered by another "devout" Muslim coward with two knives after being brought down by the bastard's bullets.

I think of over one million Armenians murdered by Muslim Turks, who are now, barely a century later and barely improved in their behavior, knocking on the borderless European Union's door.

I think of pervasive and ongoing Islamic fratricide and sororicide, and the mutilation of their young.

But I can't do anything about that crescent image, on green flag after green flag after green flag, and the horrors it both reminds me of and precurses (because it isn't over, and won't be for years). I just have to live with it, and slam Islam with the abundant, dolorous, bloody facts, whenever I can stomach it.

Mark Steyn writes that British dhimmitude is beyond parody because of the recent pig-image ban in a British Council office for the sake of a single Muslim, and because they're actually debating about St.George's Cross on the British Flag (Crusades, y'know).

Islamic arrogance is not only beyond parody, it is beyond belief. They don't think they have to live with it. They think others have to change for their sake, even when Muslims are guests in foreign lands. In Kristiansand (think what it means), Norway, teacher Inge Telhaug has been forbidden to wear his Star of David because it might offend Muslim students. (He is not Jewish.) Robert Spencer's Dhimmi Watch quotes Aftenposten:

"I see it as the oldest religious symbol we have in our culture, because without Judaism there would be no Christianity," said Telhaug.

"The Star of David would be a symbol for one side in what is perhaps the world's most inflamed conflict at the moment. Many have a traumatic past that they have escaped and then we feel that if they are going to learn Norwegian then they can't sit and at the same time be reminded of the things they have traveled from," Gislefoss said.

Boo-hoo. Muslims, especially Palestinian Muslims, have got victimization down cold. They are the most sly and vicious operators of all. Does this mean if some little Muslim brat is walking down the street and here comes someone with a T-shirt with a big blue Star of David on it, he's going to curl up into a fetal ball and start to wail on and on about being oppressed? Yes, probably, with civil suits following.

Muslims want to make the world the ummah, where they control everything, down to the color green. It's not going to happen, of course, but I predict their demands will just grow louder.

Here in metro Phoenix we now have another Muslim K-12 school, with the taqiyya-toned name Arizona Cultures Academy. There is only one culture at this school: Islam. For a mere $6000 per year, traditional and affluent Valley Muslims can make sure their children are sheltered from the United States while in school.

They're in for a rude awakening when they graduate. And if they start to whine and moan that life ain't like high school --well, welcome to adulthood. And if they think they're going to bend the laws their way, towards sharia, I think they'll be meeting the tidal wave that is only a groundswell now.

No dhimmis here. Ever. No sharia in the USA. Ever. Nobody owns green.

Some Local Pathologies

[UPDATED 10/16: For the record, labelhorde is now back online.]

[UPDATED 11:30 AM 10/15: Last update on this, but note that labelhorde's site is still down. Note also that Angela Johnson's site, and Rhonda Zayas's site, are still up and running; so that it's only the members of labelhorde who are offline (and losing their investment) now, not the teacher of fashion marketing nor the public relations guru. Just so the lines are clear here.]

[UPDATED 7 PM 10/13: Curiously, three days after Catherine called attention to irresponsible management at labelhorde, when you click on their site right now, what do you get? (http://macdonald.genwebhost.com/suspended.page/) and the chilling phrases "This Acccount Has Been Suspended" and "Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible." We didn't do anything but witness. How can they not afford to pay their internet bill?]

by Jerome du Bois

Bulletin from the blog some love to hate:

This sure is an unhealthy, even poisonous town.

Cretins with battery acid in their veins and Clorox in their brains came crawling out snittering when I posted a photograph celebrating Catherine's completion of her astounding dress, The Psychedelic Leprechaun. The sitemeter soared. How predictable. And they did the obvious. And Angela Johnson and Rhonda Zayas left the insulting thread up, and they explicitly endorsed it by contributing to it. When they damn well felt like it, they took it down. Jerks. They have yet to send us an email of apology, which we deserve.

Try to imagine what is in the heart and mind of someone who would take the time and trouble to cut and paste and ruin a photograph which does nothing but celebrate beauty and hard work? These people cannot handle beauty and the demand for high standards; so, like angry grade-schoolers, they draw the moustache on the Mona Lisa. Only here they did a lot worse, because their souls are black. And, for reasons known only to them, they hate us. We're real weepy about it, too. All broken up.

Twits, with tiny lives.

They couldn't just look at the photograph, and then move on to another blog or entry or website or activity. No: it gnawed at them enough that they went out of their ways to destroy a perfectly innocuous celebration of a special creation and a special time.

And if they think they've slowed us down or intimidated us, they'd better start thinking.

We're going to keep on exposing the ugliness in this town, wherever we find it.

For example, yesterday we followed a sitemeter reference from a person who calls himself the klute. When the page appeared, it was a whole damn thread about me. Shudder. Remember, I never even heard of this guy until he came out of the woodwork last month with a gratuitous slap for no reason.

Catherine said, "It's exactly like those TV shows where they open the perp's closet and there's a bunch of pictures and news stories all about their one obsession. This creep has some kind of intellectual homosexual fascination with you. It reminds me of Wendy before we ran him off --Ian Wender, remember? 'I read you every morning with my morning coffee.' Yeesh. This guy is obsessed with you. What's that about? Creeps."

Couldn't have said it better myself. the klute, you should probably save yourself further embarrassment, and just tiptoe away. And stay away.

Moving on, down at The Trunk Space we have two more skanky exhibits: gay male clichés and paintings of registered sex offenders.

Edward Luce's particular deformation of psychological health focuses on hairy men, and he makes paintings of them. Say no more. He's the same guy who hung up a string of truckers' caps which mimicked the gay hanky code. If you read what those colors mean, you know why gay bars have no windows. (These proud men.) Message for Mr. Luce: study psychology, not anatomy; you might grow up. (Now some ignoramus will label me homophobic. Predictably.)

Karolina Sussland's paintings of Texas registered sex offenders are themselves pathological. Again, imagine the kind of mind that conceives of such a project, and thinks it's fine, even ironically edgy. Doesn't this woman have children of her own? Or know children? So while she's faithfully painting these evil faces, transferring feature by feature from one medium to another, does she ever think about the victims, some of whom, kept secret in these perp's heads, will be buried in untidy spots near roadsides all across this land, forever lost to their loved ones? If she does think these things, does she care?

What kind of mind conceives of paintings such as these? A pathological one, I say.

Then, as mentioned before in "The Murder Pimps," Gidget Gein has a show at Perihelion. This is the guy who used to steal objects from helpless dead persons when he was entrusted with the job of driving them from hospitals to funeral homes. Another fine example of Phoenix artistic judgment by Amy Young and Doug Grant, two more ghouls in the mix.

Finally, the Phoenix New Times once again recently featured Sue Chenoweth, who is still flogging her so-called addictions and compulsions, though now, of course, she informs us she's in recovery. But she still talks about this crap because it's her gimmick. She makes sure they come up in the interview:

Why there are no paintings made with real blood in her studio anymore: I went through this cathartic thing where I had to make more room. I threw away I don't know how many huge garbage cans. Anything with real blood or mutilation or I'd prick my finger and draw with the blood --I don't know why and I don't care. Anything that reeked of Camelback Hospital.

Catherine, a former teacher, says, "Even with the most co-dependent enablers, and the most forgiving school principal and colleagues, no whacko maintains the steady teaching career that Sue Chenoweth has. And now she'll probably cry when she reads this, and I'll get another nasty letter from her old art teacher Marlyne Jones like I did after the Arizona Biennial in 2003. Don't bother, Marlyne."

And pass the tissue, Sue; your career is going fine, even if it looks to us like aesthetic Munchausen-by-proxy.

So there you have it, people; some fine examples of local Phoenix art and culture.

And now, if you'll excuse me, Catherine is calling me to the breakfast table: leftover chateaubriand from last night, shirred eggs with fresh herbes de Provence, a little caviar on the side. On Wedgewood china. Fresh-squeezed orange juice in Baccarat crystal. Fresh, hot coffee. Damask linen. My beautiful wife beside me.

Ah, the good life --far, far, far from the abbatoir.

Label Whores

by Catherine King

I'm directing this post to the individuals and institutions that support the funky collective Labelhorde. (For other readers, background is in the last two posts.)

Maybe you fund and support this group of clowns because they're "artists" and you snobby benefactors figure big, important people such as yourselves by definition dole out your cash and cachet to Art and Culture Organizations, no accountability required.

That's why Phoenix is in the pathetic cultural state it is in now. Jerome and I have written about the lack of standards in our art community ad nauseum (see our sidebar The Pride of Phoenix).

Okay, bigshot. Go look at your pet project Labelhorde right now. Witness the classiness of their big glossy website. Look how the anonymous weenies stole an image of me, in my beautiful dress that I made for myself, defaced it and posted it on their website like snot-nosed brats from grade school.

Yeah, bigshot. That's Labelhorde, another one of Phoenix's excellent cultural venues.

You know what I think I'll do? I'm going to find out exactly who's supporting these pathetic wannabe designers and shame them publicly about their poor choice. YOU ARE THE SUM OF YOUR CHOICES, bigshot. If I were you, I'd salvage my reputation and distance myself from Labelhorde right now.

You don't want people to think you are giving a pass to this kind of product from your elegant fashion collective, do you, moneybags?

[Postscript by Jerome du Bois: Angela Johnson, I must commend you for the excellent mismanagement of your discussion forum. By their fruits shall you know them. You are a weak and foolish woman.]

Beauty Summons Its Nemeses From The Seething Hive Of Envy [Updated]

The Psychedelic Leprechaun, dress by Catherine King, 2003-2005, detail of six-layered flounce. (Do you see those thin satin lines, reader? She laid each one down herself.)

by Jerome du Bois

Well, that didn't take long.

Some pseudonymous, cowardly, presumable fashon designer, who hides behind the moniker outofthered, tries to trash Catherine King and her latest dress on Angela Johnson's labelhorde discussion board, with pathetic results. Go read, and come back for further comments.

I was going to try to get that photograph off the forum website, but why? Leave it. Hell, enlarge it. I'm proud of it, and her. Go on, everybody, look at it; take as many minutes as you want, and later, when Catherine posts more about it, with photographic details, go find outofthered and see what he or she has been doing lately, creatively. Go now and compare it with anything Angela Johnson or labelhorde or anyone in the Valley has presented in the recent past.

In fact, here is the challenge to Angela Johnson and outofthered and every so-called fashion designer in the Valley who has access to this blog: send us the image of the dress that can stand up to, or beside, The Psychedelic Leprechaun.

You first, outofthered.

We're waiting, lightweights.

UPDATE (10/11): And now on that discussion board you can see the truth of my title. Apparently, outofthered is a photoshopper, not a fashion designer, otherwise he would have posted a photo of his own work instead of two photos of Catherine and her work. No chops at all; instead the lowest form of criticism, right out of third grade, which is about his intellectual and reading level. (By the way, if I'm wrong about his gender, so what?)

Again, as with the local art yokels, outofthered and Angela Johnson make the mistake of thinking we envy them, and want to join them. Why would we do that? We have made clear that it's The House Of Not For Sale. And it's Outsider Haute Couture. We don't want any part of the local fashion scene. We just outshine it, and will keep doing so.

Surprisingly to me, Susan DiStaulo, Johnson's partner, gets it:

i really liked that catherine king dress! i tought it was quite creative and interesting. as someone who does so much handwork ( so much so that my hands are in bandages now) i appreciated all the energy and handwork in that garment. looked like a labour of intense dedication and love of art.

Exactly.

Catherine at Carmen

Portrait of Catherine King in The Psychedelic Leprechaun by Jerome du Bois, October 8, 2005. All rights reserved. Do not copy in any form.

by Jerome du Bois

Exactly a year and a month ago, I published "The Fashion Designers' New Clothes," which featured the unfinished version of the dress you see finished above --The Psychedelic Leprechaun, Outsider Haute Couture created for and worn by Catherine King. (One photo detail lost in the earlier article will be made up later when Catherine herself posts about this dress, its background, its wider history, and its making. These are just my notional jottings for now.)

She wore it to the Arizona Opera's opening of Carmen Thursday night, and I couldn't have been more proud to have her on my arm. There we were, on the opening night of the cultural season in Phoenix, attending one of the half-dozen emblematic operas of the world, and she was bedecked as the essence of gypsy and flamenco, in a dress that began with a single ribbon's width --the width of life's fragility-- and never widened.

This dress was made in strips no wider than an inch-and-a-half; made of ribbons, and strips and circles from an outrageous voile dressing gown bought from a second-hand shop. And sewn together obsessively by both machine and hand. By her alone. Made with no pattern at all, and no comfortable wide swatches or bolts of cloth to begin with. And why did it take over two years to finish? I just told you: life's fragility. But we're here, all right, aren't we? bigger than life, as all of Phoenix's cultural cognoscenti saw Thursday night.

No other woman even came close. (Details not in the photo above included lace stockings and lace fingerless gloves I call "the gauntlets" and a jet-bead choker.) We know this because we promenaded back and forth on the ground floor before the performance and during both intermissions, weaving our way among the crowds, looking in vain for style, me occasionally pointing the way with my new stick, the crown of which features a woman's head, her long silver hair blowing back in the wind.

Wait until you see Catherine's outfit for The Threepenny Opera. Marlene Dietrich weeps.

Looking good at living well is the best revenge.

Ghouls and Fools

by Jerome du Bois

I follow the posts and comments at Franklin Einspruch's artblog fairly regularly, in the manner of one looking through a microscope. In the past, I'd be right in there with them. But this is a better way, at antiseptic distance; and with comments closed, no nattering, finger-waving rude jerks can bother us.

Franklin certainly has lively, frequent, and timely commenters. When he posts something, somebody's usually right there, and then the rest come in fairly promptly, staking out their positions, making their cases. Six days ago he posted about his trip to Montreal; 43 comments. Five days ago he posted about Henri Manguin; 47 comments, complete with Photoshopped examples. Four days ago he posted about more landscape painting; 98 comments and counting, intricate stuff about "experience" and "content."

Two days ago he posted enthusiastically about going to see an exhibition of plasticized actual human bodies, who may have been mainland Chinese political prisoners. Near the end of the post he wrote:

Is the exhibit art? No, it's an elaborate natural history display. Is it moral? Probably not. Am I going? Aw yeah.

Well, that stinks.

Fourteen comments. First, as usual, comes oldpro, some semi-famous artist whose name everybody is not supposed to mention. He objects, which is the right thing to do --but he's the same guy who makes a cannibalistic joke near the end of the thread. Go check it out yourself and see how only one person --China is Evil-- recognizes the truth; and note the conspicuous absence of all the other regular commenters. I guess arguing about human dignity is not as important as arguing about that "thingy" in the Manguin painting.

Everybody in mainland China is a political prisoner, no?

Yes.

Franklin Einspruch owes Asia so much, from the food he prefers to the martial arts he practices to the philosophy he espouses. Perhaps one of the "exhibits" will be in the lotus position.

But even if they weren't Asian, these are actual human bodies. I know, we live in the Rebarb, in the age when many --ghouls and fools-- enjoy the suffering of others, so this desecration hasn't stopped millions of people from filing through to see them. But it stops me. I strenuously object to this disgrace, and if I hear it's coming near Phoenix I'll see what I can do to thwart it.

Tentative Fall Schedule

by Jerome du Bois

As I noted in the last post, we'll be laying off the local art scene for most of the rest of the year. We won't be missing anything, of course. Phoenix is stuck in a Randy Slack painting.

Instead, we'll be concentrating on The New Mango, and things in the larger world which catch our attention, and Catherine will also be developing a number of continuing sidebars, to wit:

The House Of Not For Sale. This will be a sidebar of fashion design, fashion writing, and fashion photography, where Catherine displays and explains her creations. For example:

· The Psychedelic Leprechaun, a custom-made flamenco dress; images coming soon.

· My GaultiQueen, which is the fusion of a Gaultier kilt and a McQueen pencil skirt.

· The Backward Shirt; the long-sleeved white business shirt re-reinterpreted.

· In The Beginning There Was Lots Of Lace; lots of garments embellished, altered, and improved with lace.

The Reaper's Gallery. Ghost Photo Art and Slideshows, including:

· Enchanted by Day/Haunted by Night

· Tree of Everlasting Life

· Little House in the Big Graveyard (interior shots)

Close Encounters of the Bird Kind. Nature photography and slideshows of parrots, quail, and hummingbirds.

And at the end of October Catherine will post a solid, sober piece entitled Sn*ff *rt.

Suicide Is Painfull

[We don't rise to bait, certainly not rotten bait. Sometimes we receive what I call "rocket" emails, inflammatory or needling missives, entirely fictional and by anonymous authors, designed to get some kind of rise out of us, some post foaming with anger and indignation. Not long ago some bozo with a made-up name, which I'll change to Edsel Farkblather, harrumphed for a couple of padded paragraphs about my credentials as an art critic: did I spend the requisite three summers in Europe, for example? Well, I tellya, I nearly swallered my toothpick. That one was funny and pathetic, and I was tempted to have fun fisking it, but then I decided it was just elbow-jiggling designed to distract us from our larger interests, so I ignored it.

But this latest pseudonymous email cruelly exploits human death and Cuba, and it's probably by some local yokel, so I'll post about it, since we won't be writing about the local art scene for at least three months, and probably much longer. It's an appropriate sayonara.]

by Jerome du Bois

It isn't often you receive suicide emails. Never, in our experience, and that remains the case, because the one we received a couple of days ago is a crude, cruel fabrication, made more cruel since its crux is Cuba, the country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world (hat tip to Babalu). Over one hundred thousand Cubans have committed suicide on that island over the last fifty years; around 2,000 per year, though we suspect the graph describes an ascending curve, as despair overfills more souls.

Two days after we posted one of the most powerful sections of our Cuban novel so far, we got this tacky, sophomoric, lugubrious email about one of the Cuban artists we referred to in one post of our Cuban art series over a year ago, on April 7, 2004. He was an unfortunate young man named Pedro Alvarez, who killed himself in Tempe, Arizona, by jumping from his fifth-floor hotel balcony, while his paintings stood in a solo exhibition at ASU Art Museum across the street.

Then the author of the email, "Juan Huerta," (whose sitemeter hit traces to Bern, Switzerland, go figure) announces his own impending end --to us, total strangers. Riiight. This is a high-school level psych-ops outing by (a) someone jealous of our writing, or (b) someone who is angry that when you google "Kathleen Vanesian," we're still at the top. (The whole email is reprinted at the end of this post.)

But that post was not a review of Pedro Alvarez's artwork, nor a take on his death; it was called "Over His Dead Body: Kathleen Vanesian, Neo-Colonialist," and it was about liberals' attitudes towards the embargo, using Ms. Vanesian's own words. And the dead body in the title didn't necessarily refer to Pedro Alvarez. As I put it then:

. . . the prisons fill, the people die. Did you think my title referred to Pedro Alvarez's dead body? Maybe. Or maybe I'm talking about Lorenzo Copello Castillo, or Bárbaro Sevilla García, or Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac -- all three summarily executed for the nonviolent hijacking of a ferryboat. Maybe I'm talking about each unharmful, gentle soul, misplaced inside a jail, who killed himself or was murdered and nobody knows or will know as he rolls away unrevenged.

The whole point of the Cuban Art Series itself was to show the hypocrisy of Cuban artists and those who support them; and how their actions reinforce and try to legitimize castro's regime, and how they all pocket lots of what's green and folds.

Pedro Alvarez, every moment while here, was one step from freedom as well as from death. All he had to do was go ask for asylum --and then, if he needed it, therapy. (Fifty Cuban dancers asked for asylum earlier this summer, and they already have a new gig.) He was as dryfoot as he could be. While he was here breathing the free air of America, hundreds of innocent Cubans tried to breathe the thick, stinking, fetid air of their cells, their living coffins, teeming with insects and flies. He never said a word for them, as far as I know. He never stood up for them. At least, he did not go on record doing so.

Instead, he jumped into a black hole and escaped from life and its responsibilities. And, like all suicides, he selfishly left a mess for others to clean up. Suicides always piss me off. I've lived twice as long as Pedro Alvarez has, I've scraped bottom more than once, looked lovingly into the abyss more than once. But just facing every damned day as it comes trumps every alternative, so here I am, kicking ass more than ever.

Then along comes this truly boneless, spineless gusano -- another anonymondo, weeping and moaning:

I am writing to you now because I am considering suicide myself and I am sure I am not far at all from a prompt and happy departure; however, I had to write to you before taking my own life just to tell you that you were not fair to Pedro Alvarez. You owe him one.

I already gave him one. I acknowledged his death, posted his photo, and wrote "another one done too soon." He should still be here, I made clear. Now, I had never even heard of the guy when he was alive, but my position on his hypocrisy doesn't change just because he's dead.

I wonder if the psych-ops anonymondo sent similar suicide emails to people like Kathleen Vanesian and Marilyn Zeitlin, who knew the dead man.

a prompt and happy departure

The Cubans who commit suicide do it promptly but not happily --"hanging, wrist-cutting, jumping out windows, a shot to the head"-- actually, I'm surprised at the latter: where do they get the gun, and then the bullets?-- because they can't afford pills, for example, or any kind of gas for a monoxide job. They can't lie back like Petronius in his warm-water, rose-scented marble bath, surrounded by his household gods, with a goblet of wine and a blade you can't even feel. No; they go out ugly, broken and twisted, and where?

anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

I don't care to speculate on the identity of the author of this cruel email. Too many in the Rebarb fit the profile. Hell, Catherine and I came up with list of about two dozen locals before we could finish a glass of wine. Local or wherever, such a cavalier attitude toward such a profound act reveals once again the sociopathic shallowness, the cackling laugh at sincerity, that marks the ragged end of Decadence.

But the zombie's laugh is always hollow. We work to silence it.

CODA:Here's that clown's email:

You wrote about Pedro Alvarez not too long ago and I just got disgusted with your lack of almost everything. I must say the only thing you have is a blog and a name that will pop up if you google it, which I know makes you really, really happy. I can actually picture you googling yourself several times a day just to make sure you're there.

p.s.: Yes, just Juan, because I am trying to save you time from googling me, as you always do. I am not there dude, and I won't. By the way, consider me gone.

Of course he doesn't get the last word. Just one thing. People can talk to me anytime. Email is always open. Go ahead, as the dingaling said, and quote me big chunks of Pedro Alvarez's wisdom. Catherine and I have a novel to return to.

Happy trails, anonymondo.