SEAGULL SALON NYC Beauty & Culture Blog

The new issue of APOLOGY features (at least) two SEAGULL VIPs!

Eileen Myles and Laurie Weeks have pieces in the new issue of APOLOGY and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.I recommend tracking one down ASAP as the first issue sold out fast! Or order one here.

Here's the genius Dr. Laurie Weeks (author of ZIPPER MOUTH) with Shaun. They're holding our autographed bathroom head shot of Kathleen Hanna (this was the cover of the INDEX magazine for which Laurie and Kathleen had a beautiful conversation a number of years ago). 

And speaking of autographed bathroom head shots, you'll recognized our signature gold stucco-effect wall behind this framed picture of SEAGULL poet laureate Eileen:

Do you have a head shot for us? Don't be intimidated by the bathroom pantheon, all of our clients are SEAGULL VIPs.

Love, Johanna

 

An Update from Johanna, Author and President of Seagull

People often ask what I'm up to when not busy ruling over this beauty parlor. In a word: writing. There's my ongoing, mysterious (even to me) Andrea Dworkin thing (detailed here in conversation with author and Seagull VIP Emily Gould) and then there are a few things I recently had published around town:

1. I recall Le Tigre's early days abhoring Giuliani and making electronic music in the RBMA daily note here ("The mayor was the perfect nemesis, an arrogant fucker who enraged us not only with his cruel policies and despicable cronyism, but also with every snide word and smug gesture"). Or here with embedded videos!

2. I talk about my Riot Grrrl, pre-Le Tigre days in Lisa Darms's new book The Riot Grrrl Collection ("As a teen, it astounded me to discover that girls were organizing to fight their exclusion and silencing, and that they were doing it with intoxicating subcultural style"). You can read my essay on the Paper Magazine site, but to read my weird zine about Artaud and any number of incendiary feminist punk documents from the 1990s you are just going to have to get this great book. Oh, and there's a conversation with Lisa, Kathleen Hanna, Sheila Heti, and me here on the Bookforum site.

3. I wrote about a show at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens called "Spectacle: the Music Video" for Artforum ("Women constitute a lot of the spectacle but get very few directors' credits.) I don't think it's online but you can always read AF at the salon! 

And I think that's all for now. Love, Johanna

SEAGULL CLIENT OF THE WEEK: EMILY GOULD

We scarcely know where to begin in introducing Seagull Client of the Week Emily Gould, as her impossibly prolific output encompasses so many of our hot-button issues: Feminism. Boundaries. Writing. Finance.  Literary criticism. The ups and downs of living in NYC. Entrepreneurship. Storytelling. Twitter. Tumblr. Fleetwood Mac. 

recent tweet from a day in NYC that was full of weird dry thunder

Waaaay back in the late aughts, Emily transitioned from working at a publishing house to becoming a standout voice in a ballooning blogosphere that had recently, seemingly instantaneously supplanted print media as everyone's preferred mode of reading. Her writing on her own blog Emily Magazine, and subsequent stint editing and majorly enlivening Gawker, led to her forever influencing how we think and write, on and about, The Internet. Under crushing scrutiny, she publicly negotiated privacy and boundary issues as a writer before most had ever debated whether or not to use real names on Twitter. 

 

She went on to write a must-read book and to create an original business model with Emily Books, an online independent bookstore specializing in e-book selections, curated with literary insider's taste and boundless enthusiasm by Emily and her equally book-obsessed BFF/business partner. To browse the Emily Books website or Tumblr is to stumble into a million fractals containing not only books a person can feel tempted to buy, but countless essays and excerpts and new authors to check out and other mysterious literary Tumblrs to get sucked into. Likewise Emily's own Tumblr, full of hilariously astute observations about writing, food, smashing the patriarchy, cats, and braving the totebag capital of the world.

Earlier in the year we realized Emily and Seagull shared an undeniable connection via the far-reaching, veil-thinning filaments of Twitter, when three out of five of her Five Random People I Follow On Twitter post on The Awl were two Seagull friends and one Seagull owner.

 So we were psyched when she finally visited the salon IRL this week, and even more psyched on this major color she got with our creative color expert Carly, who gave her a gorgeous barely blush-pink allover platinum blonde. It definitely looks every bit as good in real life as it does on the internet.

xo,

Molly,

SEAGULL SALON

A non-hair-related post. But very seagull-related.

Years ago I was on Galveston Island, Texas, visiting my father. We were taking a walk on the beach---which is pretty much what you do in Galveston---and came across this flock of seagulls. 

They were flying around wildly, so I took out my camera and started snapping away. Luckily I got a shot of this one seagull, who looks like he's shouting at the other birds. 

He seemed like a cool bird, like a Johnathan Livingston Seagull, really tired of his flock and ready to fly out on his own. 

Let's hope he did just that.

xxx
craig 

GIRLS TO THE FRONT

Johanna wrote a full-page review of Sara Marcus's new book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution for the latest issue of Bookforum. It's an insightful, contextual and lovely (p)review of what looks to be an epic account of the movement/era that so many are reexamining today. Check it out.

xo,

Molly,

SEAGULL

The Wild Wild East Book Launch @Pace

Next Tuesday, June 1st at Pace Gallery, Seagull VIP client and preeminent Chinese art journalist Barbara Pollack will launch her new book The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic's Adventures in China, an insider's look at the forces driving the contemporary art explosion in China:

    "Just as New York became the world art capital in the 1960s, is China primed to stage a take-over of the international art market in the 21st century?   What has caused Chinese art to break all records, selling for multi-million dollar figures?  These are some of the questions addressed by The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic's Adventures in China, the first book to take a hard look at China's art scene, based on first hand accounts with that country's leading taste-makers. Over the past five years, author Barbara Pollack interviewed dozens of Chinese artists, collectors, curators, art dealers and auction specialists to discover the answers to questions such as:  What has motivated China to build over a thousand museums?  How has Beijing become a thriving hub of contemporary art with hundreds of powerful galleries?  Who are the players in this booming art market and can they be trusted?"

The book promises tons of behind-the-scenes goss about the intrigue, insider trading and personalities driving the Chinese art boom, and looks like a must-read for those interested in the world art market or anyone who wants to better understand how China's voracious economy translates into the arena of world culture. 

Barbara will be signing books this Tuesday June 1st at Pace Gallery, 545 W. 22nd Street, 6-8pm.

RSVP: rsvp@thepacegallery.com

xo,

Molly,

Seagull

Seagull Client of the Week: Melissa Febos

Writer, teacher and former dominatrix Melissa Febos's new book Whip Smart comes out today on St. Martin's Press. It's a memoir recounting her four years as a professional dominatrix in New York. It's also the story of how, in between dispensing custom-tailored floggings and humiliation to grateful businessmen, Febos managed to graduate from school with honors, kick a drug problem, and carve out a life on her own terms in NYC. We peeked beneath the cover and it totally looks to be the kind of juicy and jaw-dropping yet literary read that you can't put down 'til you're finished. Read NY Mag's Daily Intel blog interview with Melissa--in which she declares that no other salon but Seagull will do when it comes to her hair--here.

Melissa Febos will read from Whip Smart tomorrow, Wednesday, March 3 at the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series at Joe's Pub.

Photo: Caitlin Delohery