Rare book of words and so many of their meanings, Samuel Johnson, 1766: owned by jewelry artist Aurora Lopez Mejia.
(All text, photos, and video by Susan M. Kirschbaum)
Close your eyes and hear the words. LOVE. HARMONY. PROVOKE. ALIVE. POSITIVE. REAL. ABSOLUTE. TOUCHING. PRESSING. AFFECTION. NEAR. SECRET. MAGICAL. Whatever hits your core, you should be wearing next to your skin, at least if you are Aurora Lopez Mejia, jewelry craftswoman and interpreter of the soul.
She reads antique dictionaries for fun. Been doing it since she was small, when she strung alphabet beads into bracelets in her native Gutelehara, Mexico. By way of happy accidents, she first landed in Los Angeles as a graphic artist and befriended folks in film and music. She went round back toward Mexico; started working with textiles and eventually silver and gold; making rings with secret messages and pendants with words a talismans.
“My work is about finding a word and meaning in its deepest form.” She tells me, her wide easy smile promising a zen covenant should I give her a phrase to set for all eternity in silver, bronze or gold. (To note: a pendant in silver can cost as little as $36 -$300 but some of the gold pieces run up to $17,000 and more.)
I sip the delicate china cup of verbena tea she hands me in her Soho NYC atelier filled with calm faced black and white photos of monks by her pal Nicholas Vreeland. The photographer grandson of the late great Vogue editor Diana Vreeland — as a young man and apprentice to photographer Richard Avedon — was assigned to shoot the Dalai Lama. He never looked back, now a Rato monk himself who did a fundraiser last year at Mejia’s wonderous salon.
Before I even set eyes on the circular life rings with metal cast around rocks, or bracelets with poetry inscribed inside and out, the minimal square wooden chairs and rectangular table in the front room beckon like a stark provocative kitchen in an Igmar Bergman movie. Turns out the slab of wood hails from Denmark, by Hans Wegner, with wooden shelves behind it filled with blown glass, akin to chemistry sets by Alison Berger; and that Mejia collects furniture, sometimes creates her own. And she makes room to showcase the work of other artists whom she refers to as “her tribe,” like textile designer Madeline Weinrib.
If other members of the tribe include celebrities, Mejia’s list reads like a who’s who: Madonna (who designed special pendants for her “Raising Malawi” charity), Michelle Pfeiffer, Hugh Jackman, Keith Richards, Kate Capshaw, and Brad Pitt, who arrived with Angela Jolie to discuss the words for his inscribed bracelets. Mejia will not reveal the private phrases chosen by her clients, but I did notice something on my own.
Mejia always wear a gold phrase around her wrist, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” By Nietzsche. Just so happens that Jolie has this tatooed on her back, as I had seen when meeting her at a movie premiere a few years back.
It’s funny how all the world gasps at celebrity, but famous people who start as artists always reach back to that core place.
Therein lies the word, the expression, the beginning of all things.
Link: AuroraLopezMejia
Joseph Arthur sings “Black Lexus” at City Winery, NYC
While mass market musicians paraded in the bustle and pootie peep show for the Grammy red carpet last night, one real musician — possibly a poet troubadour genius — rested his mind and body before hitting the road again for shows in Texas and the South. Joseph Arthur, discovered by Peter Gabriel over a decade ago, had just finished a show at LA’s Troubadour with Ben Harper and sold out the City Winery before the weekend.
Jo’s a poet, songwriter, guitarist, composer, painter, and a friend. He’s the type of guy, who when sitting with him, you can smell his brain burn. It never stops. Then, you feel lazy. (Note: He also plays harmonica, just like Bob Dylan.) These days, he’s painting murals on stage in between song sets and personally selling them post show to benefit Haitian refugees.
Since I’ve dedicated this site to poetry, artistry, and style, I’ll add that Jo rocks a mean zoot suit often, which brings me back round to the Grammy nonsense. Given a myriad of press releases this morning, I got to see Britney Spears wearing a tushy tugging body suit, Snooki from MTV’s ”Jersey Shore” in purple sausage wrap, and Rihanna in a bustle dress. Who knew that mass pop performers were riding a rope between porn star and auditioning for the cast of Oklahoma? At least Lady Gaga works her trannie panache in some fantastical creations. She’s a fashion character, completely orchestrated and proof that even the oddest looking of dames can reinvent herself. (If uncomfortable in one’s own skin, a girl or guy can pull a Gaga, as I’ll term it. But most people don’t have the balls to do that. Thus, they worship Gaga.)
My vote goes to the men, a couple pix featured here, of Green Day and Elvis Costello. As the gals appear trampier by the minute, the guys really class it out. Sorry, ladies. Mass trash and vaudeville.
To view the Bustle and Pootie Peep Show, check out these pix: NYPOSTGRAMMYFASHION
To understand more of Jo Arthur, click here: JosephArthur
Ain’t nothing like a sharp dressed man. Elvis Costello; Green Day.
Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, soul mates and “just kids”
Just the other evening, I meandered into the Union Square branch of Barnes and Noble. Just so happened that this coincided with the launch of Patti Smith’s book, “Just Kids,” her memoir of her history with first husband/soul mate Robert Mapplethorpe. The place was packed with people, girls draped in black pea coats and capes; guys in leather jackets, women of middle age or older who still retained a certain been there done that grit. These were Patti’s minions, the late ones wandering in like me, didn’t even get close to the fourth floor where she graced a mere thousand people with a staged interview on the book.
I just wanted to graze through a copy, already en route to my home. Even this was difficult to obtain. But securing one in a secret corner and ducking the store help, I noticed that Patti started the tome by remembering the first time she saw a swan, on a river with her mother.
She was transfixed, describing it (now) as: “The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.”
She takes our hand in a way that only Patti can. Each word evokes an image, spurs a membrane, ignites the seed of a star or a ripe misery, just about to be buried deep. Whatever, the case, her words tie us to a universe of happenings, stirrings. This is her magic. And I believe, even though I have yet to finish “Just Kids,” that she started with a swan, because Mapplethorpe was her swan, her mate for life, in a creative ethereal sense. But who am I to speak for Patti Smith? She does that well enough on her own.
A little over a year ago, well before I met Patti again at the Robert Miller Gallery and at dinner last week, I worried that she had perhaps lost her soul a little, as evident from the post I ran at the end of fashion week (Sept 2008), when someone invited me to a Patti Smith fashion party. The dialogue– part of what I wrote then, copied here — went like this:
“You going to the Patti Smith Costume National party?” A stylist friend asked me this evening. Apparently Patti — our generation’s female Bob Dylan — is hosting tonight’s fete at the Italian label’s store and my pal craved a nut of integrity to motivate her after a week of fluff and frills. “I just don’t see the connection.” She told me.
Yeah, okay `the Godmother of Punk’ does rock Costume National and Ann Demeulemeester sleek black ensembles. She’s an individualist of style with a studied eye. But also, she lives to create, each day. She told New York Magazine that she needs to finish something, an image, some verse, before she retires to sleep each night.
Her one bit of advice, when she and I discussed writing fiction. “Keep working.”
Lest my fans think this will become the Patti Smith dedication page, fear not. But, I’m reprising this video for her. Since on the eve of her fashion fete, I was up in a room with a few scrappy musicians and spontaneous poets, watching the sun come up, playing with verse and Arlo Guthrie, living in the moment. The tribes that we seek (whether in verse, art, fashion, music) remain hidden in corners. But, in this age of celebutards, it’s worth the excavation, away from the crap.
Gwyneth Paltrow, by photographer Thomas Dozol
The loo may be the last bastion of privacy as we know it. Yes, the bloody bathroom. Since folks have taken to chronicling every motion of life– tweeting details of the day, posting intimacies on internet social networks, and home grown porno — the porcelain john remains the one place where we can let it all go. No one walks into a bathroom self conscious, even if butt naked. We could all (pardon the pun) give a shit!
That’s what makes photographer Thomas Dozol’s photography show, “In the Mirror” so much fun.We get to play “peeping Tom” to the last private chamber on earth. To Dozol’s credit, despite lucid superb lighting, his subjects — including personal pals like actress Gwyneth Paltrow, above, and Michael Stipe — don’t even seem to notice his lens! Perhaps, because many of the muses perform professionally they can tune the photographer out. It’s also a testimony to the comfort Dozol shares with these people, which results in images, while minimal and often stark naked, generate a warm familiarity.
“Look! It’s Wolfgang Tillmans.” artist/performer Casey Spooner tells me and points to the image below. “And his enormous balls!” Tillmans — known to capture rough cuts of people on streets and in clubs, as well as unique angles of still lifes and wilderness shots — counts as one of my fave photographers. I’ve even got a print of his “Holding Cock” in my apartment, with a girl holding her date by the cockles. But, I’ve never quite seen Tillmans in this light.
Guess you learn something every day.
Thomas Dozol, ”Entre Temps,” (formerly called “I’ll Be Your Mirror”) until February 14, 2009, Envoy Gallery, 151 Chrystie Street, Envoyenterprises
Wolfgang TIllmans?/by Thomas Dozol
Both lovely, Casey Spooner and Thomas Dozol
Painting of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, care of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, now on display at Robert Miller Gallery (photographed by Susan M. Kirschbaum)
“I ain’t nothing but a scrappy poet.” Says punk rock songstress/poet/photographer/painter Patti Smith, in Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Steven Sebring’s documentary that aired on PBS just last week. In last night’s collaborative installation, both Smith and Sebring, exhibited paintings, photos, computer videos, personal memorabilia, and even a “live cast” of poet (and painter) William Blake’s head, notably taken by forming plaster on the live Blake as opposed to his carcass.
Musician/artist R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe– who started writing songs after hearing Smith’s album Horses– explained to me the Blake head. (It’s not even a bust, just head.) “You know why he’s scowling?” Stipe asked. “They stuck straws up his nose and the plaster started to drip.” Blake’s stark skull in the middle of this quite personal exhibit of Patti’s life story — from her favorite childhood dress; what resembles a photo of a medieval jousting mask that her son Jackson models in Sebring’s film; her first husband, late artist Robert Mapplethorpe’s monogrammed slippers; abstract paintings and black and white photos of Parisian landmarks — only testifies her first true loves. William Blake. Arthur Rimbaud. Words. Then, words that spark images and verse that gives breath to song. Of William Burroughs who often sat front row at Smith’s punk shows at CBGB’s, Smith says. “It was an honor to have him there. He would just nod.”
Stipe kept saying of the exhibit. “This is so modern.” And even though the pieces ran back to Smith’s childhood and in some cases, possibly Rimbaud’s dreams, it did feel as though we had stumbled into her backstage and private wardrobe. She and Sebring could blow up vintage objects in photos and place books, like a Joan of Arc tome next to an old black typewriter and make us covet them more than an IPhone. Real to the touch and expanding to the mind, we could walk around and see as she does.
Sebring found his muse. He spent twelve years with “the godmother of punk” (as she is known), filming her as a mother, musician, glutton of phrase, scribbler, painter, pack rat, drifter. In between personal arts, she reveals her feelings about family, from first husband, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her brother Todd, who passed the same year as guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, the father of Patti’s son and daughter Jesse. Even Patti’s parents, still living in Deptford, New Jersey, open their home on film and cook up some burgers.
Last night, several paid homage. A few of us, including Sebring, Smith, and writer Bob Morris, headed to dinner uptown at the home of Betsy Wittenborn Miller. One Miller son, Chris, who once worked at his father’s gallery (and threw some wonderful intimate soirees among budding artists before the term “hipster” was coined), rustled up a feast. Call it a debut of sorts for his new catering business, with beef stew, roasted swiss chard, carrots, green beans, a salad with figs, and a massive vat of chocolate mousse and raspberries on a long dining buffet table. Given my recollections of the younger Miller in party hats with vodka bottles, I suppose we’re all grown up now.
But there was Smith, wearing big black combat boots and chatting with pals in corners as some guests practically bowed down before her. She still knew how to keep her private sanctuary at a festive supper. Didn’t matter that we had just gotten the “Cliff’s Notes” to her life story.
Her friend and photo assistant for the evening, Adam Whitney Nichols, a Southern boy in a bow tie and nifty tweed jacket, stood close by. He carried a vintage Polaroid box camera that he loaded with fresh Polaroid film Smith had hoarded and saved. She found him at a train station as they passed each other, both reading classic literature. I can’t remember the authors’ names as Nichols told me after too much wine, but one sounded German, the other Russian. Smith was intrigued. So she talked to him. He’s now working on a memoir of his family, including a grandfather who served in World War II and a dad in Vietnam.
Perhaps, Patti Smith is a reincarnation of Rimbaud or Blake himself. I would not be surprised.
(Exhibit: Patti Smith and Steven Sebring: Objects of Life, January 6th — February 6, 2010, Robert Miller Gallery, 524 West 26th Street) Bonus track:**GLORIA 01 Gloria
Michael Stipe, Patti Smith, and Adam Whitney Nichols (with box camera!)/photo: Susan M. Kirschbaum
William Blake’s head/Shot by Michael Stipe, for Susan Kirschbaum
