Keith says "RESIST!"

"In 1988 Keith created the logo for an organization called Refuse & Resist! R&R! opposed censorship, war and police brutality. The organization dissolved in 2006 but this image still resonates very strongly today & is one of the most widely shared Haring images on the internet."
--The Keith Haring Foundation

https://www.haring.com/

"Toughen Up"

At a private fundraiser, President Obama gave a speech that expresses what many of us are thinking and feeling right now. As today is Good Trouble Day in honor of Rep. John Lewis on the fifth anniversary of his death with protests around the country (I will be attending one!), please read on...

Original MSNBC post on IG: https://www.instagram.com/p/DMGhdeVSVPw
President Obama: https://barackobama.com/
Democratic Party: https://democrats.org/

Here We Are Again

Hello, readers. I have started to write this post several times already, approaching it from different angles each time: talking about resisting, talking about disappoinment, using humorous images to address looming dystopia, posting a list of rules on How To Survive An Authoritarian Regime, but none of it seemed right. None of it captured the entirety of the swirl of conflicting thoughts and emotions I am sure all of us are feeling. So I just want to say two things:

I still believe in everything I did before last night, with even more conviction. For whatever the next administration has in store for us, I intend to be a grain of sand in the eye of heaven, which will manifest itself against them in many ways.

Just like the last time we did this, living well is the best revenge. I re-dedicate myself to beauty in all its forms. The arts are a healing balm and they come to our aid in distressing times. I pledge to continue to live my life, and turn the volume up a bit. They don't get my liberal tears...they get my liberal self.

We are not going away.

VOTE 2024!

"American history is a record of small groups of people who keep remaking this country over and over, and who reveal to us all that the perpetual remaking is the greatest statement of fidelity to our creed and our national purpose, which is not to be like Russia, white and stagnant and oligarchic, or like China, monoethnic and authoritarian and centralized, but to be more like America, hybrid and dynamic and democratic and free to be remade."
--Author and activist Eric Liu

And please, for the love of democracy and our country itself,
VOTE DEMOCRAT!

Who Are You And What Will You Do?

"Life is so short you can’t waste even a day subscribing to what someone thinks you can do versus knowing what you can do."
--Virgil Abloh

"You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
--James Baldwin

"Your life’s a nanosecond; if you have a contribution to make, then make it. Don’t bitch about it, just do it."
--Richard Serra

This Is The Question

Glass project by artist Chloe Bass
https://www.instagram.com/p/CiXu-uBrgBs/

"Dame Vivienne Westwood - the godmother of punk"

The BBC has published a lovely obit article about Dame Vivienne Westwood following her death yesterday.


Dame Vivienne Westwood - the godmother of punk

Photo by Francois Durand

She was the anarchic idealist who stormed the battlements of the status quo and transformed Britain.

She was a would-be revolutionary, fired by a hatred of corruption and global injustice, who despaired at the indolent passivity of youth.

Vivienne Westwood gave birth to punk, conquered high-fashion and built a global empire. She invented New Romantics, sent Naomi Campbell down the catwalk wearing a traffic cone and turned up to meet the Queen having left her underwear behind.

For Westwood, fashion was a weapon. Of course, she thought, clothes made people sexy. But the point was to shake things up, to destroy miserable conformity and make a better world.

Vivienne Isabel Swire was born on 8 April 1941 in the Derbyshire village of Tintwistle, the oldest of three children.

Her working class parents were good with their hands. They encouraged her to make things, which she did with enthusiasm. But they were deeply puzzled by their daughter's addiction to reading, once paying her to destroy her library card.

She had an enviable self-confidence, believing herself an exceptional craftswoman. At grammar school in Glossop, she saw herself as "a kind of champion". "Honestly", she later said, "at the age of five, I could have made a pair of shoes".

The family moved to North London in 1958. Vivienne dabbled in silversmithing at the local school of art but quit after a single term. Self-confident she may have been, but she failed to see how a working-class girl could make a living like that.

She qualified as a primary school teacher, then married Derek Westwood - handsome Hoover factory apprentice by day and flamboyant Mod by night. Westwood made her own wedding dress and jewellery. A year later, she gave birth to their son.

Then, a chance meeting changed everything. Her brother, Gordon, brought a 19-year-old, fellow art student round to her flat in Harrow. He had red hair and a face whitened with talcum powder. His name was Malcolm McLaren: self-declared genius and godfather of punk.

So began one of Britain's great creative partnerships. They moved into a tiny flat in Clapham, had a child and launched a cultural revolution that shook, and sometimes frightened, the world.

McLaren was impossible. His mother was a sex worker and he had been brought up by his eccentric grandmother, who lived by the motto "to be bad is to be good and to be good is just boring".

He was a peacock: intent on blinding small people with his brilliance, affronting an older generation he detested and belittling everyone but himself - especially Vivienne.

He took six days to visit her in hospital after the birth of their son, refused to be called 'Dad' and threatened to cart the child to Barnardo's when asked to pitch in. Westwood retreated to a caravan in Wales; hunting for wild vegetables while he ran riot in London and married another art student.

But attraction overcame everything. Her childhood had been happy, but a cultural desert. Creatively, McLaren was an awakening; introducing her to art, music and helping her transform "from dolly bird into a chic, confident dresser". Westwood rekindled the partnership, blossomed artistically and simply ignored the abuse.

Then came the Sex Pistols, snarling at the 1970s. McLaren embraced them as an angry pot-shot at the hippy movement he hated. Westwood opened a shop on the King's Road, conjuring the look the Pistols made famous. A bewildered world gasped and named it Punk.

She called the shop, 'Let It Rock', then changed the name to 'Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die'. Finally, it was re-branded simply as 'SEX' - the huge pink sign above the door meant only the brave went in.

Inside, the staff were intimidating. There was Chrissie Hyde, Toyah Wilcox and, most terrifying of all, 'Jordan': a woman who actually received an Arts Council grant to be her indomitable self.

The clothes, of course, were like nothing else. They were radical and individualistic, sticking two-fingers up at rival street-fashions like flower-power, Teddy Boy and Mod.

It was as much anthropology as style. Bondage trousers and swastika jackets were, she explained, "sex translated into fashion becoming fetish". It was, she declared, "the very embodiment of youth's assumption of immortality".

Westwood's parents hated Malcolm and were deeply shocked; but they gave her the money to get started and loyally offered practical help while "our Vivienne" filled the racks with studs, chains and nipple zips.

Westwood's rubber negligee, spiky hair, stilettos and pornographic T-shirt literally stopped traffic. She was having a ball, feeling like a "princess from another planet."

Later, McLaren would boast he was a "con man", a Svengali who twisted popular culture into nothing more than a convenient marketing gimmick. For Westwood, the movement was more profound; seeing it as as counter-cultural youth insurgency against the corruption of the old world order.

Punk, she earnestly believed, was more than fashion. The movement was political; the aim was revolution. When the young showed no inclination to stop spitting and build barricades, Westwood was bitterly disappointed.

She fell out with the Sex Pistols' lead singer Johnny Rotten: both claiming to have inspired the idea and title of Anarchy In The UK. But what frustrated her was that the spiky-haired musician had missed the message.

The clothes and music were supposed to channel rage and bring about change. But the young simply ignored global injustice, stuck safety-pins in their nose and moshed to the music. While Westwood and McLaren were full of revolution, it never happened. Westwood felt let-down, became disillusioned and, eventually, drifted on.

Instead, she took her subversive ideas and stormed the catwalks of London and Paris. Working alone on a little sewing-machine in her front room, Westwood put the pieces together using her own body as a template.

Intellectually inspired by a Canadian art historian, Gary Ness, she researched the history of fashion, reworked it with vengeance and dared the world of haute-couture to reject her. She put models in Harris Tweed, fine knitting, 'mini-crinis' and corsets that pushed their busts almost up to the chin.

The public sniggered. Westwood threatened to walk out of one BBC interview when the audience kept laughing. It didn't help that Russell Harty, a fellow guest, described one girl as a "walking chip shop." The Pistols sneered too, accusing her of abandoning punk and making "posh frocks for Ascot".

It wasn't easy; at times she came close to bankruptcy but the fashion world came to love her. Alongside McLaren, she put on legendary collections with names like Pirate, Savages and Nostalgia of Mud. And when he pushed off, she continued solo: kick-starting New Romanticism with designs that parodied the establishment. The establishment lapped it up.

In the end, she made a fortune. One show in Paris was over in the time it takes to hard boil an egg, but featured clothes worth more than one million pounds. When Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw wanted a wedding dress, she turned to Westwood. The woman who ran a shop on the King's Road had become a major global brand.

In 1989, the hugely influential Women's Wear Daily magazine rated her one of the six best designers of the twentieth century; the only woman, alongside Armani, Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent. "As far as I was concerned," she said, "it was a statement of fact." When Naomi Campbell fell off her nine-inch purple platforms on the catwalk, the shoes simply flew off the shelves.

Westwood's success did not mean she had given up on revolution. Deeply political, her art had a purpose. She dressed models as punked-up debutantes, thumbing her nose at the ruling classes. Her clothes subverted the fashions that had historically subjected woman. She made T-shirts emblazoned with profane political slogans, selling them at a price.

Westwood loathed Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher with a passion and threw herself into a life-long crusade to promote individual liberty, rid the world of nuclear weapons and combat the threat of climate change.

She supported Aids Research, PETA and Oxfam, gave hundreds of thousands to the Green Party and became a regular visitor to Julian Assange during his seven-year stint in the Ecuadorian embassy. She even parked a white tank outside David Cameron's house in a protest against fracking.

Given an OBE in 1992, Westwood turned up without any knickers on, giving photographers the shock of their lives as she gave a twirl. If Her Majesty was not amused, she didn't show it and Westwood was back at the Palace a few years later when the legendary rebel became a Dame.

In 1992, Westwood married again, this time to an Austrian fashion student half her age. Andreas Kronthaler was calm and supportive: indeed everything that McLaren was not. The pair formed a new creative partnership, for years still working from Westwood's Spartan, ex-council flat.

Westwood said her favourite quotation was from Aldous Huxley, although it has been attributed to Bertrand Russell. "Orthodoxy", he said, "is the grave of intelligence". The shop she opened on the King's Road still operates. It's now called World's End, selling archive designs and slogan T-shirts, in memory of an icon determined to wage war against conformity.

The godmother of punk, empress of global fashion and Dame of the British Empire certainly did that.


Link to original article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-44683514

R.I.P. Dame Vivienne Westwood

Dame Vivienne Westwood (previously here) has died today at the age of 81. It is reported that she died peacefully at home, surrounded by her family.

She was a genius who lived, worked, and protested on her own terms, always. In his 1989 book CHIC SAVAGES, Women's Wear Daily editor John Fairchild said Westwood was one of the six most influential designers of the 20th century, along with Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Giorgio Armani, Christian Lacroix and Emanuel Ungaro.

In a 2017 post, here, about her FW '17-'18 collection, I noted "I'm so glad there is a Dame Vivienne Westwood in the world. She makes me happy and her creations brighten up the landscape quite a bit."

She, her talent, and creations will be greatly missed.

The house will continue with her husband and collaborator Andreas Kronthaler at the helm.

https://www.viviennewestwood.com/

VOTE 2022!

"American history is a record of small groups of people who keep remaking this country over and over, and who reveal to us all that the perpetual remaking is the greatest statement of fidelity to our creed and our national purpose, which is not to be like Russia, white and stagnant and oligarchic, or like China, monoethnic and authoritarian and centralized, but to be more like America, hybrid and dynamic and democratic and free to be remade."
--Author and activist Eric Liu

And please, for the love of democracy and our country itself,
VOTE DEMOCRAT!

LGBT History Month 2020: George Edgerly Harris III

"On October 21, 1967, around 35,000 anti-war marchers rallied to the Pentagon. The protestors were confronted by hundreds of soldiers with their bayonets pointing towards the crowd.

A young hippie gay man stepped out of the crowd with a bunch of carnations in his left hand. As he walked towards the soldiers, the situation grew even tenser. He walked along the file of soldiers and began placing the flowers into the barrels of their gun with his right hand.

'The turtleneck sweater-wearing protester came out of nowhere and it took me years to find out who he was … his name was Harris.' — Bernie Boston, the photographer

The Pulitzer prize-winning photo of this incident, taken by Bernie Boston, is actually of George Edgerly Harris III better known by his stage name Hibiscus.

Hibiscus was a member of the San Francisco based gay liberation theatre troupe the Cockettes.

How history forgot George Edgerly Harris III

It is interesting to see how another gay man was written out of history. Thanks to Pepsi’s advertisement where the iconic ‘Flower Power’ moment was reenacted with a celebrity so many times that we always misremember the person in the photo as being a woman.

‘Flower power’ became a peace slogan during the years of passive resistance towards the Vietnam war. The movement spread nation-wide and the use of props like flowers was meant to reduce the fear, anger, and threat of these protests.

Later life and death

Hibiscus belonged to an acting family and had performed in NY downtown theaters. After founding the Cockettes, he moved to San Francisco and embraced the drag lifestyle.

Hibiscus always wanted the Cockettes performances to be free and there was another faction in the group who wanted to get paid for the work. Following differences, Hibiscus separated from the group, and the final show before the group disbanded happened in 1972.

Hibiscus died of AIDS in 1982 — at that time, AIDS was still referred to as GRID which stood for Gay-Related Immuno-Deficiency. Perhaps the greatest legacy Hibiscus left behind was that of peace, love, and a free-spirited gypsy."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibiscus_(entertainer)

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/how-history-forgot-another-gay-hero-f3ceb06c15ec

"Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist"

Seeing as fashion season just ended, and hot on the heels of the Alexander McQueen documentary, "Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist" is a documentary study of the life and extraordinary work of Dame Vivienne Westwood I'd love to see.

Directed by Lorna Tucker, the film's press release says:
"With exclusive, unprecedented access, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist is the first film to encompass the remarkable story of Vivienne’s life, her fashion, her personality, her activism and her cultural importance.

Since igniting the punk movement with ex-partner and Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren, Dame Vivienne Westwood has been redefining British fashion for over 40 years, and is responsible for creating many of the most distinctive looks of our time. The film blends archive, beautifully crafted reconstruction, and insightful interviews with Vivienne’s fascinating network of collaborators, guiding us on her journey from a childhood in postwar Derbyshire to the runways of Paris and Milan. This is an intimate and poignant homage to one of the true cultural icons of our time, as she fights to maintain her brand’s integrity, her principles and her legacy in a business driven by consumerism, profit and global expansion."

The film is currently in limited release in theaters.

https://www.viviennewestwoodfilm.com/