imomus | Beauty aggregated

Beauty aggregated

Sometimes all you want to do on the internet is look at nice photos of nice people, nicely presented. Today I want to share with you some sites which represent new and slightly different ways to do just that.

4U Beauty Image Bookmarking is a Japanese site that aggregates glamour and gravure images (you can chose nude or non-nude settings) from other sites. It's mostly notable for mixing Asian and Western models, for its clean and elegant interface, and for the frequency of its updates (there are almost 2000 pages so far). 4U also offers an Amazon-like "if you like this, you'll also like..." feature, though none of the girls suggested worked for me. Human beauty is more difficult to cluster and bunch than book tastes, it seems.

Another photo-aggregating site with an interesting interface is RePhoto, also Japan-based. Rephoto scans for the most popular images on photo-hosting sites, and innovates by providing, under each featured photo, a strip-swatch showing the colours used in the chosen image. You can then click on a colour to see other photos using predominantly the same shade. Warning: clicking on flesh-shades will bring a cascade of naked flesh to your screen.

The next two sites dazzle less by their technology than their subject matter; they're street style sites, but focusing on unusual age groups. French kids' fashion magazine MilK has a feature on its website called Look de Rue which features casual snaps of toddlers on the street and arch captions which suggest they're completely in control of their own style: "This detached young man has opted for a resolutely vintage style," says the caption under the current photo on Look de Rue, "associating colours symbolic of the 1970s -- orange and brown -- with unexpected cherries with eyes printed on them (you read that right). Thumbs up, then, for this successful melange of the retro and pop spirits". You know, as if all this ran through a five year-old boy's head!

Advanced Style risks a similar patronising tone when it heaps praise (a little too much, perhaps) on its septuagenarian subjects. "Proof from the wizened and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age," is the blog's motto. What isn't emphasized (and we can always recognize a subject deemed vulnerable by the absence of even a whisper of negativity) is that some of Advanced Style's subjects look cranky, borderline schizo, or seem to be attention-whoring their way across New York City. But all is redeemed by a subject like 93 year-old Mimi Weddell, a grand dame truly as "inspirational" as the blurb claims.

Where's the suggestions widget that'll bring up twenty more Mimis if we lose her?

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Damn, I thought we'd get your erudite thoughts on Echo & The Bunnymen today. I've nothing against you perving at teenage jap girls in synthesis, but I find it the most boring part of your blog. Like having to listen to someone telling you about the dream they had last night or something.

Well, sometimes I'm Mojo, sometimes I'm Nuts.

(Also, Mimi Weddell thanks you for calling her a "teenager". From the bottom of her 93-year-old heart.)

Yeah, but you just added the geriatric stuff for "balance", didn't you? You've more or less told us that chez Momus it's all teenage bukkake girls, all the time!

Actually, it was the toddlers who were brought in to balance Mimi. And if your thoughts strayed from these images to bukkake, I suggest you cuff yourself now and take the first bus to the Morality Police.

4U Beauty is kinda hit and miss. There's lots of boring smut, and lots of boring generic fashiony shots, then occasionally you'll stumble across trashysmut-meets-pretentiousfashion and those are the best shots on there.

Hmmm. Click Opera has been boring lately.

Well, flag and aggregate us up some more interesting blogs, please!

I dunno. "Middle-aged man blogs about which websites he jerks off to" - I find that kind of fascinating, in an admittedly rubberneck kinda way. That's the bit of Click Opera I've always liked!

I actually haven't tried jerking off to any of these websites, do you think I should?

You'll be telling us you only use the non-nude setting next!

Nick, you should take a month off blogging once in a while, it'll stop you going stale.

-Sarah

Well, you'll notice I'm giving you alternative places to go!

You're unflappable, aren't you, Momus? There is nothing that could ever shake that implacable confidence you have in what you do and who you are. Maybe it's the public school upbringing. There's no hint of self-doubt in anything you do, I think that's one thing I don't like about you as an artist. If art is about risk, then it must be about doubt as well. Your "experimentation" is so safe, though, so much about signifying experimentation rather than about actually doing it. Your whole paradigm about what is experimentation, all the woozy computer distortion etc, it's as much a convention as anything else these days, you think it's 1977 and you're Eno or something.

I tell stories, mate. I signpost things and people that interest me AND IF ANYONE ELSE LIKES THEM IT'S A BONUS, INNIT?

Personally, I think a photo aggregator that analyses photos for colour, or street style pages featuring very old and very young people are very interesting. If you don't, though, please don't feel you have to launch broadsides against my entire aesthetic. I'm told there's some interesting content on Boing Boing today.

Ha ha puny troll, not only have you missed the entire point as usual,

"Shahrazad had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of by gone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred."

but this remark - "You're unflappable, aren't you, Momus? There is nothing that could ever shake that implacable confidence you have in what you do and who you are" proves you haven't even been paying attention (http://imomus.livejournal.com/415407.html). Please go away... you have no right to be here :( (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1NAwlepnSs&feature=related)

No mention of Joemus on ILX. I thought that was your manor?

Maybe if we pretended it was a new Mountain Goats album?

If anyone needed a "sites I like" page, it would be Mr Momus.

I have encountered too many cool sites here only to forget to subscribe to them.

wow...this post really incited anger in alot of readers, ha ha....well I didn't mind the post today, you were able to use 'septuagenarian' in a sentence and I learned a new word, that makes up for anything the post is lacking for me

Beauty is inherently enraging, I find.

Speaking of enraging beauty - do you know the name of the Rielke poem you refer to in Philosophy of Momus, "beauty is just the first glimpse of the terror we're just about able to bear"? I'd love to read it, but it's kind of hard to find. Thanks in advance!

That's from the very beginning of the very first elegy in Rilke's Duino Elegies:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginningof terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

You can download the whole poem here (http://www.tonykline.co.uk/klineasrilke.htm).

Oh, even with a link - thanks so much!
I'm a bit ashamed I spelled him with an extra E.

Baudelicious

Nick, you've probably totally forgotten this by now, but you gave me that exact quote when I was discussing my MA thesis with you two years ago. Can't remember if I ever told you, but I ended up putting it in my paper to make myself sound smart and well-read. Hope you're still around when I get cracking on my dissertation because I might ask you to pull more random but perfectly appropriate quotations out of your ass!

E

Mimi's a gem. Mister Mort cuts quite a dash, too.

The youth cult casualty in the dayglo makes me wince, though.

This, (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_g2d0BBy0dII/SN5_xowJgdI/AAAAAAAAARI/DusRiTSTJ2o/s1600-h/2500742791_8d490858fc.jpg) however, may be the best shot in the journal.

Thanks for the links, though they're not for me. I think the layer of reblogging just before this one is that elusive locus of curation, multivariate feed consumption, and authorless wikification that is individualized yet consistent enough to allow for my own smoothly efficient, selective art appreciation per my own preferences. Some wordless place between Flickr and Tumblr, I suppose. That magical space that the 'e' ran off to.

That magical space that the 'e' ran off to.

The Perecisphere, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void) no doubt.

Have you seen this Momus?
Apparently there's a documentary about Mimi:
http://go.webvideoplayer.com/view/Tfx3krRISCswPAWGYKic16570

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