Transformed by magazines
Jul. 29th, 2006 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIn Germany, when you rent a flat what you tend to get is a pristine white shell with floors of wood or laminate and walls covered in white-painted Rauhfasertapete, the ugly woodchip wallpaper seen by landlords, decorators and rental agencies as "neutral" (in fact, it's nothing of the kind). If you want to live in a space with any character at all, one of the first things you have to do is strip or cover the Rauhfaser.
In keeping with my decision to make give my new Neukolln apartment the look of a "dense information environment", I've been sticking up copies of my favourite magazine to get that cluttered, Japanese look. Here's what just two copies of Studio Voice look like, turned into wallpaper. (They're both Art Book specials, three years apart. I actually prefer the design of the 2003 magazine to the 2006 one, but they still have in common that dense, small-pictured "cultural goods" look of the Japanese "mook", a sort of magazine-catalogue-book hybrid.)
Now that my flat has been transformed by magazines, why not play a track by Magazine, a band who transformed my life when I was a student? Here's Napoleon Bambi himself, Howard Devoto, performing a song called
Cut-Out Shapes from Magazine's second album, "Secondhand Daylight". Don't you just love the deranged, dramatic prog-punk megalomania of it all?
In keeping with my decision to make give my new Neukolln apartment the look of a "dense information environment", I've been sticking up copies of my favourite magazine to get that cluttered, Japanese look. Here's what just two copies of Studio Voice look like, turned into wallpaper. (They're both Art Book specials, three years apart. I actually prefer the design of the 2003 magazine to the 2006 one, but they still have in common that dense, small-pictured "cultural goods" look of the Japanese "mook", a sort of magazine-catalogue-book hybrid.)
Now that my flat has been transformed by magazines, why not play a track by Magazine, a band who transformed my life when I was a student? Here's Napoleon Bambi himself, Howard Devoto, performing a song called Cut-Out Shapes from Magazine's second album, "Secondhand Daylight". Don't you just love the deranged, dramatic prog-punk megalomania of it all?
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 11:36 am (UTC)Love the wall. Takes me back to when I covered a whole wall of my bedroom in a collage of black and white pictures cut out of music papers. I think you were in there, doing your Tender Pervert devil horn pose, possibly overlapping Nick Cave and Tracey Tracey. There's a thought.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 12:01 pm (UTC)Shot by both sides!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 12:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 12:38 pm (UTC)small apartments
Date: 2006-07-29 01:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 02:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 02:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 03:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 03:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 03:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 03:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 03:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 03:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 04:04 pm (UTC)i recently found out about this wall graphic company, Blik (http://www.whatisblik.com/), who make customizable text (http://www.whatisblik.com/prose.html) as well as clouds and birds and things.
V & I are getting giant blueprints made for 2 of our walls. i found a beautiful lighting fixture that resembles a concentric circle paper chandelier yesterday as well. we've been living here a month+ now and still have piles of clothes & books about though....perhaps we should take a trip to ikea today and try that box trick.
white walls
Date: 2006-07-29 05:43 pm (UTC)"In a daring revisionist history of modern architecture, Mark Wigley opens up a new understanding of the historical avant-garde. He explores the most obvious, but least discussed, feature of modern architecture: white walls. Although the white wall exemplifies the stripping away of the decorative masquerade costumes worn by nineteenth-century buildings, Wigley argues that modern buildings are not naked. The white wall is itself a form of clothing -- the newly athletic body of the building, like that of its occupants, wears a new kind of garment and these garments are meant to match. Not only did almost all modern architects literally design dresses, Wigley points out, their arguments for a modern architecture were taken from the logic of clothing reform. Architecture was understood as a form of dress design."
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=8529
I guess your "machine for living" is in Japanese drag now--how louche.
-B.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 05:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 06:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 06:48 pm (UTC)place bets
Date: 2006-07-29 06:51 pm (UTC)Re: place bets
Date: 2006-07-29 06:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 07:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 07:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 08:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 09:27 pm (UTC)Re Magazine: strange to think that John McGeoch passed away more than ywo years ago now...
Eamonn
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-29 09:50 pm (UTC)postpunk reminiscence
http://niddrie-edge.livejournal.com/12852.html
just don't mention Pink Industry