libre

My blog has already turned TWO years old and I have somehow failed to take notice of this until days after its birthday into the internet world! I actually began this blog after first meeting my dear friend Kime Buzzelli, who had just began her own blog not much longer before. My blog as evolved and devolved and continues to change with me and whatever suits me at a certain point. I think we can all agree though, the best thing for my blog was when I got a Livejournal. Something I fear for the day I out grow that.

On with today's post. I dream, absolutely fantasize about one day having a library. I want tons of books, and If you ever want/need/have to buy me a present I would love to receive books. Right now in my room I have a meager collection of books in comparison to what I imagine, but I have come t0 face the reality to make due with the space I have. I love my little library, don't get me wrong, but it is only just beginning.
In the recent weeks these are my top three favorite ways of displaying books:

1. The color coded bookshelves. Forget alphabetizing, going by size, or subject matter. I get so excited thinking about doing this, then I get nervous, if my books in a series have different color spines they become separated.

2. Making use of the space you have. Aside from this room being beautiful, these books are arranged to fit their space. The most realistic approach, and closest to home.
3. I'm sure people have seen this one around on other blogs. Not only is it the coolest staircase ever, it also utilizes a small space, has beautiful reading light and a place to sit while looking for that specific book.
This is all I have for today. And don't forget I love books! Art books especially, I even have a amazon wish list going. It is out of control.

Nan Goldin

Continuing in the mini series I seem to have started of photographers who influence and inspire me, I decided to feature Nan Goldin.

"Upon moving to New York City, Goldin began documentary photography of the post-punk new-wave music scene, and the city's vibrant gay subculture in the late 1970's and early 1980's. gradually being drawn in to the Bowery's hard drug subculture. These photographs, taken from 1979 to 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.The snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s due to either drug overdoses or AIDS, including close friends and often photographed subjects, Cookie Mueller and Greer Lankton. In addition to the Ballad she combined her pictures in two other series I'll Be Your Mirror and All by Myself."
"Nan Goldin's photographs, which pre-date the 'heroin chic' advertising craze of the 1990s, are forthright studies of herself and friends, engrossed in New York's East Village subculture in the early 80s."

jenny gage

When my mother's friend Bette came to visit me the other day, and look over some of my photos, she gave me a list of photographers that my work seemed to be inspired by with out me even knowing it. The first name on the list is Jenny Gage who is often linked in her work with her husband Tom Betterton. To my surprise I found out she too is from Malibu. In a interview I read about her opens up with a quote which sums up my ideology of taking photos these days:

“I ALWAYS SAY, ‘I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOU WITH YOUR CLOTHES OFF. I JUST WANT TO SEE YOU IN YOUR UNDERWEAR.’”

Gage produces photographic series, usually “set” in a single geographic location (Ventura, Jenny Gage’s photographs are like a fashion shoot gone terribly wrong (or terribly right, depending on your opinion of fashion shoots); one can discern nods toward the hyper-produced filmset photography of Gregory Crewdson (with whom she studied at Yale’s MFA program), the lewd, veneered, rec room underworlds of Larry Clark, the menaced feminist iconography of Cindy Sherman, everything laced together with suggestions of a flashier, cretin-free Diane Arbus (Gage’s subjects have all their DNA). A Gage photograph in which a woman kneels naked amongst the rushes reveals an alarming and unattributed protruberance—a breast? A third arm? A tumor? Lord knows—rolling out from beneath her armpit. Beauty turned grotesque and then back into a weary beauty—this is the gorgeously debased yet compelling Gage terrain. Looking at her work, an uncomfortable emotional and physical reckoning can occur. Repugnance, of course, is fascinating, and so are beautiful people looking ugly. This is not a petty schadenfreude, however, but a shifty poking at our own perpetual insecurities about façade-making.
California; Dolores, Colorado), and starring a “young girl” whom Gage has found (or stalked, by her own admission) in the town. These series are not meant to be factual documents of her subject’s life, nor are they entirely make-believe, but joint role-playing ventures that blend autobiography and fantasy—the fantasy of the subject, and the fantasy of the “watcher.” Gage’s oblique narratives are suggestive of sinister events about to transpire, or sinister events that have recently occurred, with the extent of the damage yet to be determined. The mood is always kinetically tense if subdued (the calm before or after the storm), and the tragedy feels fated—like participants in a Richard Yates novel, or a Greek myth, these “characters” are doomed to carry out the proclamations of some dark oracle. As is the case with many bleakly-inclined artists, Jenny Gage, in person, is a righteous hoot. She grew up in Malibu, California, but now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she and her husband Tom Betterton (both in their mid-thirties) collaborate on everything from her photographs to films to commercial photography work.

for the rest of the interview, click here

Chloe.

Icon.

New Identity

Today marks the day of the death of "Lux's Vaudeville Vinyl"
and the birth of "Orchid Killer"

the LVV was too long and complicated of a url
it gave away my identity on the streets (slaptags and such)
and although it incorporated 3 things i love..sometimes we just need a change
who knows i may even switch back...but yesterday this name dawned on me as i sadly tried to save the life of my second orchid plant.

as many of you know I have been posting on Live Journal..posting my thoughts and what is going on in my life..so maybe with this new name i will be able to post different things

so for my first post i want to thank kime for giving me the heads up about this artist..aside from her beings so talented

i want her hair style!



taking a deep breath and letting go into the new.