SEAGULL SALON NYC Beauty & Culture Blog

Rock Jetty Deli & Food Corp. by Lillian Gerson

Nobody really expected Hurricane Sandy to do much damage to NYC, but it ended up being one of the most costliest hurricanes in US history (second only to Hurricane Katrina). The reality is that it caused a lot of destruction and upset many lives. 

Artist and Rockaway, Queens resident Lillian Gerson witnessed the storm from their apartment on the beach. As day turned to night and the storm intensified, Gerson witnessed the sea levels rise, washing away parked vehicles and the beach boardwalk, and damaging homes. When the sun came up and the storm was over, Gerson and other Rockaway residents emerged from their homes to find their neighborhood ruined. Public transportation was out of order. Food was scarce. (Gerson helped make soups in their kitchen and delivered it by bike to others in need around the peninsula.) Electricity was out for months. But somehow the community strengthened and came together in light of their situation.

Rock Jetty Deli & Food Corp. is Gerson's latest installation, on view at A.I.R. Gallery, the first artists-run gallery for women in the US. Rock Jetty Deli is a deli storefront installation that conveys life after the storm, showing the condition of the Rockaways and how it bonded a community shocked by natural disaster. 

Gerson constructed Rock Jetty Deli using scavenged materials and other handmade objects. In Gerson's typical playful fasion, cardboard is used to create pieces like a gas tank and generators to bring light to a seemingly dark situation:

Within the deli, abstracted footage of the sea and Sandy destruction are projected out onto the floodline-marked walls. Audio recordings of sea sounds and construction fill the gallery space.

For the opening party of Rock Jetty Deli, Gerson even provided coffee and peanut butter and jelly to add realism to this post-Sandy Rockaway scene.

Gerson's show ends next weekend. The closing reception is June 23rd, 4-6PM at A.I.R. Gallery. Check it out soon!

xo
craig hunter 

Punk at the Met

I had a lot of feelings when I first learned there was going to be a punk exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the fashion side of me was super excited to see a punk fashion exhibit; the punk side questioned if displaying expensive clothes made for rich people in a museum was actually punk. 

When I think of the word "punk" or when I think of punk music, I think of no wave, which, through experimentation in sound and performance, deconstructed punk music. And I think of riot grrrl, which among other things, questioned male dominance in the punk scene. These facets of punk music have always been more interesting and exciting to me than, say, The Sex Pistols... 

But whatever my thoughts are about punk, the exhibit has some really great pieces. 

The Margiela pieces were my favorite, but I'm biased because that's my favorite design house. I love Margiela couture shows because they rework trash and discarded materials into art, and it's totally the most refreshing thing to see when fashion companies show their couture collections.

There's a nice little nugget of Comme des Garcons dresses that are fun to look at. I always wonder what they're going to do next at CDG. 

Of course this cool dress by Rodarte was there, which you could've seen if you'd visited Bergdorf Goodman a few years ago: 

Which reminds me of a nice Junya Watanabe sweater on view:

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Elizabeth Hurley dress by Versace. (How many dresses have their own Wikipedia entry?)

So, for fashion enthusiasts, this exhibit is pretty great. You'll have fun, but it felt short. I wanted to see more. I felt like we got a survey of punk fashion, and BAM! Hey, here's our gift shop. Wanna buy a skateboard that says PUNK? (This is an actual thing on sale in the gift shop, mind you.)

I think the show should have reworked the theme because, while the clothes are amazing, us punks are rolling our eyes. 

xo
craig hunter 

Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Style Icon

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the musician Lizzy Mercier Descloux. Maybe it's the spring weather that's putting me in a good mood. Or maybe it's the cool womens short haircuts I see here at Seagull all the time that remind me of Lizzy's hair. Whatever the case, I've been playing her album "Press Color" the past few days and fell in love with her, the music, and her style all over again. 

Though Lizzy started out in the no wave scene, I like to think of her as transcending the bunch. There's a softness to her music I don't usually associate with no wave. Her approach to guitar is intuitive and minimal---and often noisy and funky. It's an approach that's way more interesting to me than a guitar solo. And it's something that obviously influenced future musicians. (If Erase Errata were a baby, they'd have Lizzy's eyes.) But you can hear in Lizzy's voice a youthfulness and excitement that's a refreshing sound in no wave music.

It also doesn't hurt her that she had good style:

With Lydia Lunch: 

With Patti Smith:



She comes from another time and perhaps another realm, and I feel like I can't learn enough about her. There's not a ton of information online at least... (Lizzy passed away in the early 2000s.) But the mystery is probably part of the appeal of her music. And she's definitely one of my style icons. 

xo
craig hunter 

Space Age 90s

While it was official before, it's now officially official that the 90s are back in style thanks to Hedi Slimane making Kim Gordon, Courtney Love, and Marilyn Manson the faces of YSL. (Sorry, I just can't call it Saint Laurent yet.) The images are lovely and were effective in putting Marilyn Manson back in my brain. I listened to a lot of Hole and Sonic Youth in high school, but I also can't deny the influence Manson had on me, too. I'd consider his music a major part of my upbringing. So, this past couple weeks I've been revisiting his albums Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals, which are his best. 

The albums are great, and they've aged well. But while I was listening to Mechanical Animals I was reminded of a lot of different kind of imagery and style that was popular in the 90s that isn't the grunge look most people associate with the decade: I'm talking about the space age, futuristic feel of a lot of music in the late 90s, moving into the early 2000s. 

This is Manson in the late 90s.

It's supposed to tie in with the story behind the concept album that is Mechanical Animals, but it's actually a style that was popular with a lot of other bands at the time. 

There was that (kinda forgettable) band Orgy.

They covered that song "Blue Monday", remember? They always had a futuristic thing going on.

But TLC and Missy Elliott also went there. TLC's FanMail album has a space age-y thing going on, especially the "No Scrubs" video. Missy's "She's a Bitch" video and the album artwork for Miss E... So Addictive are also very much looking ahead into the future. 

A part of me wants to say the video for "Little Trouble Girl" by Sonic Youth fits in here, but that might be a bit of a stretch. "Little Trouble Girl" was released a couple years earlier than the time I'm referring to.

The late 90s were a pretty strange time. (Remember Y2K?) There is a lot of newness and uncertainty when you say goodbye to the last 1000 years and say hello to a new 1000 years. 

It makes me wonder when fashion designers will start picking up on this part of the 90s. Unless they've already started...

xo
craig hunter 

 

Ombre Classified - Teen Vogue

Seagull V.I.P. Kimy S. of Tan Camera was featured in Teen Vogue yesterday. The ongoing collaberation between Kimi and Seagull Lead Stylist Shaun SureThing caught the EYES of beauty editors at Vogue. Her coral peach color that fades into an acidy yellow ombre has gone viral on many occasion culminating in this grand, editorial noteriety. 

We are all thirlled that Teen Vogue recognizes Tan Camera and Seagull Salon as trend setters and style mavens living on the cutting edge of NYC street style worthy of magazine style praise.

Read more on Teen Vogue HERE. 

xo Shaun SureThing for Seagull. 

The Scissor Girls

When Seagull VIP Kelly Kuvo presented us with a signed press photo of her former band the Scissor Girls, a Chicago-based band active in the '90s, she took our bathroom hall of fame to a whole new level. The Scissor Girls were art-punk heros to my riot grrrl set, but I didn't manage to meet Kelly until maybe '97, when she moved to New York, into the apartment across the hall from where Shaun and I were living in Williamsburg. We had some insane adventures together over the next couple of years. Ask Shaun to elaborate during your next hair cut as most of it is not suitable for a family blog. 

Here the Scissor Girls are dressed as crust punks, or, I don't know, maybe an LA band, in keeping with their wry humor and persistent refusal to identify with or as anything:

And here, Kelly explains what the Scissor Girls are, or rather, are not: 

But it is, predictably, in a cable access video that we can clearly see the intransigent beauty of one of the greatest bands ever. That's Kelly with the tonsure:

 

Read a book. xo Johanna for SEAGULL

Current Inspiration: Dawn Richard's "Goldenheart"

Currently I'm getting a lot of inspiration from Dawn Richard's newest album Goldenheart. It's pretty much all I can listen to at the moment. Each time I press play, I'm taken on a trip into Dawn Richard's universe. It is a perfect ultramodern R&B/pop album.  

I'd been told about Dawn Richard before her album finally dropped last month. I heard her two EPs (Armor On and Whiteout) and watched a couple of videos and appreciated it aesthetically. What's not to like? She's beautiful, and her look is amazing. 

But it wasn't until I heard Goldenheart that I became a became a true believer. The sound is totally fresh, seeming to come from a place in the near future. The songs don't seem to operate in a people-pleasing way that a lot of pop/R&B works, which is probably because the content here is very personal. This is Dawn's realm, and she wants you to feel what she is feeling. That isn't to say that she doesn't want you to dance at times. Of course she does. It's just that dance music isn't the point here. It's about taking the listener to places that are out there, places that Solange only flirted with on her lovely album Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams. Where is she taking us? Outer space? Maybe. Within? Definitely. Wherever Dawn is going, she wants you to dive deep with her into some emotional places, but you return to the surface deeply validated. It's an experience.

And Goldenheart is only the beginning, as this is the first part of a trilogy of albums Dawn Richard has planned. So, get comfortable, press play, and enjoy the ride, friends.

xo
craig hunter 

It's Our Laura in the NYT!

Don't you love these fashion week slideshows? Laura is on the right. xo SEAGULL

Peter Schmidt

"One of the functions of art is to offer a more desirable reality; a model as it were, of another style of existence with its own pace and its own cultural reference." Peter Schmidt

I've been trying to write this blog post on Artist Peter Schmidt for about three months now. More specifically his ongoing collaborative projects with Brian Eno until Schmidt's death in 1980.  It's super hard because nailing down Schmidt's art is about as easy as accurately describing a feeling provoked from one of Eno's songs on his loosely themed albums...Like trying to find a bed made of clouds to sleep on in the misty mountains of Bhutan while on a lot of milligrams of Valium.

Schmidt frequently collaborated with Eno which is the main reason I've been so attracted to his work for years, not to mention scouring Ebay for salable goods... No easy feat. 

Peter Schmidt was a German born British artist. He is known for helping pioneer multi-media art exhibitions and instalations  in the early 1960's. His paintings, lithographs and drawings were often inspired by sounds and the reverberation of sound. Emphasizing the idea that art is not something easily delineated to one or even two mediums, but rather a kind of conjured set of choices made in the moment. 

A couple of examples of this are "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" and "Before and After Science". 

Particularly in Eno's Tiger Mountain, Schmidt produced 1500 lithographs as well as Polaroids by Lorenz Zatecky of Eno… Four of the prints appear randomly for the cover in a kind of schizophrenic hidden repetition that very much matches the kind of tape looping experimentation Eno was working  with at the time. I think most notably on the eponymous song "Taking Tiger Mountain" which is a kind of wasted repetition of lyrics that ebb in and out over a whirling sound scape that evokes the feeling of breeze and a kind of sideways movement through space. 

Obviously the need to go on about Eno's process has been fully indulged my many people down though modern music history and I'm not clever enough to bother, but this blog post is trying to be about Peter Schmidt anyway.

To backtrack a little, Eno and Schmidt had collaborated before the making of Tiger Mountain. Schmidt's 1970 set of  55 wooden cards called "The Thoughts Behind The Thoughts" would eventually become Eno's and Schmidt's 1975 "Oblique Strategies"; printed cards that came in a black embossed container. The two described the cards as worthwhile dilemmas to be considered. 

For the making of Tiger Mountain as well as Before and After Science, Eno would often use these cards, each of them containing an amorphism, a jumble of words that lacked definitive meaning and form. In the making of the two albums Eno frequently refered to one or more of the cards and allow them to kind of guide him in a direction that had not previously been considered. The idea was that the cards would provide a kind of "lateral thinking"  in the music/art that otherwise would not have occurred. Or in otherwords ‘not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing’. That's a good one to chew on for a bit. 

Schmidt and Eno pictured with the prints from "Before and After Science"

For the Before and after Science album, Schmidt created four offset prints that came with the album and were considered as part of the process and total package. Under the title on the back sleeve of the record says fourteen pictures - referring to the ten recorded tracks and the four prints made to go with the music. Here are two of the prints... I have only seen them once IRT. 

 

This is sort of a personal intro into Peter Schmidt's work. I've been interested in him for a long time and finally got up the gumption to try and put it into a written thought which is difficult, of course, because the work is not meant to be a tangible object as much as a fleeting thought or sense of motion. 

xoxo Shaun SureThing for Seagull Salon

Notions of Femininity and Female Bodybuilding

Recently it was revealed that bodybuilder Jelena Abbou is the new face of MAC Cosmetics, and I couldn't be happier about it! It's great to see different representations of femininity celebrated, especially when that representation questions what femininity is. 

There was a piece in the NY Times about female weight lifters in the United Arab Emirates back in October, but overall there's not much talk about women competing in this interesting sport. I mean, my younger sister has been into weightlifting for awhile, so it's been on my radar for a couple years. I never understood why she wanted to change her body like that. Why would anybody want that? I was ignorant and didn't get it.

But my interest in female bodybuilding has been going strong for about six months now. It wasn't until I saw this amazing documentary called Pumping Iron II: The Women (the sequel to Pumping Iron, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first films) that my viewpoint on the sport was really made. 

In it, you see several different women preparing for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. It's interesting to watch them prepare and lift weights that most people cannot lift. Their focus and determination really does elevate bodybuilding from sport to an art form. Their body has become a canvas. It's so impressive. I can only watch in awe. 

Even the way the documentary is made is interesting in that it's a predecessor to how reality television shows are nowadays: real/improvised dialogue but planned scenes. And there's a lot to talk about in this film because there's a much larger issue at hand: What defines femininity? 

You'll find that unlike the judging process in male bodybuilding competitions, the women aren't only judged by how much weight they can lift but also by how feminine they are.  "Feminine", rather, as what femininity means to the judges refers to how desirable the bodybuilding contestants are. Basically the judges want to see if a competitor can lift a lot of weights and at the same time be someone they'd want to have sex with. 

Bev Francis is one of the main competitors focused on in Pumping Iron II. She is the most impressive, too. 

Her image evokes a lot of feelings when you see her. Fear and admiration are the feelings that come to me when I see her. That's just me being honest. We aren't used to seeing women look so powerful. I like that it makes people uncomfortable and fearful. That's why above all I find Bev Francis to be a beautiful specimen and a work of art.

She's clearly the strongest woman in Pumping Iron II, but does she appeal to the judges in a sexual way? Is she still somebody they'd want to take care of and protect? Well, no. Bev looks like she'd do the protecting. She's not conventionally beautiful. She's not what most men would consider sexy. (In fact, I read that Bev later got cosmetic surgery in order to appeal more to judges.)

And that's why Pumping Iron II has some interesting contest results...

The film itself is out of print. Good luck finding a copy. I got a not-so-great quality version of it back in August, and even though there was an audio delay, I found myself glued to the monitor because it was just so interesting. I loved it. I loved what I was hearing and seeing and thinking. 

Find it and watch it. I highly recommend it.

xo
craig hunter