Celebrate your end of 2009 sausage party with this special maxi-EP from Kid606 and his innovative electronica buddies. In true Tigerbeat6 fashion this release is all over the map musically but high quality throughout. Aside from the dark and atmospheric 808 groove of “Samhain Atlanta”, the new Kid606 tracks are of his more mashup/dancefloor style,with the funky Ska meets aggressive Soca Anthem “Another One Bites the Dubstep” being the standout. Cex Delivers an epic eight minute remix of “Underwear Everywhere” in his ambient Bataille Royale style, while dDamage goes the opposite direction, making their remix of “Baltimorrow’s Parties” sound like early Jesus and Mary Chain or a lost b-side from Ministry’s “Land of Rape and Honey” Sessions. The C.L.A.W.S and Eats Tapes remixes prove minimal funky techno can still be abstract and interesting. True UK hardcore rave innovator Michael Forshaw brings the ruckus with his speaker shattering version of “Hello Serotonin, My Old Friend”, sounding like an updated soundclash between AFX and the Prodigy at their most mentalist. (via Tigerbeat6)

Lil B — I’m God (Permanent Marks)

Life (1993)

Artavazd Ashoti Peleshyan (born November 22, 1938, Leninakan) is an Armenian director of film-essays, a documentarian in the history of film art and a film theorist. However his work unlike Maya Deren’s is not avant-garde nor tries to explore the absurd, is not really art for the art’s sake like Stan Brakhage’s but should be rather acknowledged as a poetic view on life embedded on film. In the words of the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, his is “one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema”. Renowned Master of the Armenian SSR arts title (1979).

He is renowned for developing a style of cinematographic perspective known as distance montage, combining perception of depth with oncoming entities, such as running packs of antelope or hordes of humans. Characteristic to him is also the use of archive footage alongside with his own shots and, especially, fast intercutting between these two. Telephoto lens are often used to get “candid camera” shots of people engaging in mundane tasks.

His films are on the border between documentary and feature, rather reminding of the work of such avant-garde filmmakers as Bruce Connor than of any kind of conventional documentaries. Most of his films are short, the longest being 60 minutes and the shortest 6 minutes long. His films feature no dialogue; however, music and sound effects play nearly as important a role in his films as the visual images in contributing towards the artistic whole. Nearly all of his films were shot in black and white.

Already his student films he made while he was studying at VGIK were awarded several prizes. As for now, 12 films by Peleshyan are known to exist. The Beginning (Skizbe) (1967) is a cinematographical essay about the October Revolution of 1917. One of the unique visual effects used in this film is achieved by holding snippets of film still on one frame, then advancing only for a second or two until again pausing on another, resulting in a stuttering visual effect. Other important films by him are We (Menq) (1967, a poetically told history of Armenia and its people and Inhabitant (Obitateli) (1970), a reflection on the relationship between wildlife and humans. Artavazd Peleshian’s most brilliant film is “The Seasons” (1975), exquisitely cinematographed by another great Armenian documentarian Mikhail Vartanov (Vardanov) – it is an outstanding look at the contradiction and harmony between the humans and nature. http://www.parajanov.com/seasons.html

Peleshyan is also the author of a range of theoretical works, such as his 1988 book Moyo kino (My Cinema).

Being from a country far away from internationally significant cinema circles, Peleshyan’s efforts were never been properly recognized by world cinema until very recently. After the fall of Soviet Union, he has been able to make two more short films, Life (1993) and The End (1994). He is now living in Moscow. His most recent film was edited at the ZKM | Karlsruhe Film Institute in 2005-2006 and has not yet been released.(source wiki)

The complete Artavazd Peleshian’s filmography can be seen on UbuWeb.

The Drums, LA, November 2009. Photography by Hedi Slimane.

Rick Owens (born 1962) is an American fashion designer hailing from California, celebrated for his avant-garde and subversive eye.

“I had always lived on Southern California. I grew up in Porterville, which is next to Bakersfield. I went to LA to go to college at Parsons, but I didn’t graduate; I was an art school drop-out. I studied fine arts there for two years, but it was too expensive and I didn’t really see a real job ahead. So I went to a two-year program at a trade college learning how to pattern-make with all these Korean ladies – not glamorous. I didn’t grow up in the industry, like Marc Jacobs at Halston and I ended up working for knock-off companies in L.A. I just knocked off patterns for years.”

Rick Owens by Nick Night for Arena Homme Plus.

“It’s funny, Rick always just wanted to have a modest company, and to be independent and comfortable. He just wanted to keep doing what he thought was right. But it would be disingenuous if I said he wasn’t ambitious. In the beginning, I remember him seeking out the best stores he could find while protecting his identity. He didn’t do many fashion spreads. So he worked with just one store in LA, Charles Gallay. He doesn’t do clothes anymore, but he was a fashion pioneer back then. He was the first to carry Versace, Montana, Mugler—all the really extreme stuff. He was the biggest buyer in the world of Margiela’s first season. Rick showed his clothes to him first. Gallay bought them. And he prepaid.”

“I was operating on a real fringe back then. In those days, I was a part of the wicked Hollywood Boulevard hustler bar world. I hung around people like Goddess Bunny, a dwarf friend of mine, and Mr. Beanbag in super sleazy, crystal, tranny hustler bars just off Hollywood Boulevard, a couple of blocks from my studio. Some were involved in the arts and the punk rock scene, people like Glenda. He now has a Born-Again Christian country band, but he does songs like “Hot, Born-Again and Horny.” It’s all really sexual Christian stuff. It’s really funny. He’s a total pervert, one of the most extreme people I know. Then there’s Vaginal Davis. She was around every once in a while. They all fit into my aesthetic of broken idealism. That was my milieu, they were my friends. I call them my ‘baroque pearls’.”

Lft: Rick Owens with Goddess Bunny (& Computerized Twin). Rt: Goddess Bunny. John Lee, 1988.

“Michèle Lamy and I met through my boyfriend – one of her best friends. So it’s true that I’m bisexual. It’s supposed to be the other way around, isn’t it? People are against bisexuality. It’s either shit or get off the pot. It would be great if things were that black and white, but life is all about ambiguities, and sometimes you have to make up the rules as you go along. I was introduced to her so I could get a job as a patternmaker. She had a sportswear company. I worked for her for two years, but I could never really understand her because she has a really thick French accent. Then it just kind of happened and I really can’t imagine having a relationship with anyone else. It’s been almost fifteen years. God, who knows what that would be in fag years?”

“And soon she became the restaurateur that people know her as. That’s probably why we have a comfortable relationship: because I need a lot of alone time, but she’s super gregarious. It was perfect because she basically had a party every night and was very consumed by it, while I had privacy. In a way, Michèle and I had the perfect life. Money was tight, but we had a great lifestyle. We had a decent car, had enough to go away on the weekends, and ate the most glamorous dinners every night. And then the Italians contacted me.”

Fall 2005 womenswear collection. Photography by Sonny Vandevelde.

“You know Rick, he’s always been pretty point-blanc about not being conceptual. He says instead that his main concept is that the conceptual is unnecessary, and never a replacement for the minimal and the straight-forward. When explaining it, he compares a William-Adolphe Bouguereau painting with a Brancusi sculpture. Rick Owens is the Brancusi sculpture, you know: just a slab of metal on a hunk of wood, but I guess it’s about the right piece of metal and the perfect gesture.”

“I try to make clothes the way Lou Reed does music – with minimal chord changes,” Owens writes. “It’s about a worn, softened feeling. It’s about an elegance tinged with the barbaric, the sloppiness of something dragging and the luxury of not caring.”

Summer 2010 womenswear collection.

“People are always surprised, you know, as we responded to a global recession with relentless expansion. It just worked out that way. Believe me, there was no master plan but once we saw how well the Paris store was working, we got into a retail fever. For a lot of designers their reward is the walk down the runway, but for me it’s about selling. I’m not that extroverted and I have a very ascetic life now. I like the idea of the line being in stores. I’m more pragmatic. It’s not about the glory for me. Also, I know that my stuff is not very flamboyant or fashiony. It’s almost monotonous. I see fashion as something more permanent, like art or architecture. Designers used to be like that, but not anymore. That’s what I try to do.”

“Every season is an opportunity to refresh and perfect, even if I have the same aesthetic touchstones across all of my work: the main influence is Brancusi and the other is Le Corbusier, so always lot of curves but also a lot of geometry. I’m always trying to find classically graceful lines but in a primitive way. But, of course, I can’t very well propose the same thing no matter how satisfied I am with it. There has got to be a little moment of madness! And in Paris risk-taking is practically enforced.”

Summer 2010 menswear collection. Photography by Jak & Jil.

Summer 2010 menswear collection. Photography by Jak & Jil.

Text collaged from various sources.