Plans are all about company. The place, the activity & the company come as a package - one of them gone bad, and you sully the deal. In light of this, in the interest of keeping spectacular company...we are shelving Beat!'s awesome 2nd anniversary because Shisha Shaun is finally back, and is in the mood for Velvet. Geez. Welcome home, mah'fucker.

Alain Fleischer opens today! Having done all I was (not) paid to do - and then some - I was graciously given the day off. Somewhere in the karmic universe my previous negative energy w.r.t. having to beg for Bangkok Break Time must have found its way to her emotional consciousness. She sent me packing at 5:30AM (yes, I was at SAM since 4 in the morning. Welcome to my life.) after I had triple-checked the humidifiers in all three galleries, with three cheek kisses (bumps) from Monsieur Fleischer himself and an invitation for two to the Exposures party. Tempting? Not...quite...yet. I'm saving do's like this for when I'm 30. Tonight I am still very much 20, with the very best accessories to boot - my re-discovered birthday Casio from my brother (who is henceforth no longer angry at me for, um, misplacing aforementioned watch) and a boy in CDG with a goatee. Haha, I kill me, once again. 

I have been thinking hard about layering - there's all this interreferentiality going on in the documentation of works, articles about works, works themselves. What sparks the discourse that sparks the thought processes that make a 21st century Y.Klein? Is it the reference to the man himself? His work? A work that referenced either of those two? Or is a 21st century Y.Klein not even possible, simply because it will never be a new, non-Yves, Yves? In all gestures and motions, there is a throwback to the person who did it first - and with panache, mind you. 

"What's shakin', kid?"

The dancefloor at Velvet, once we're done with it.

I nauseate myself sometimes.

xx

I WANT, I WANT, I WANT.

Itchy fingers, itchy insides.

Do you see like a bug does? I tried - all I got was three triangles, and a lot of...general blurriness.

What I want to know is, WHO TOOK THE GLO STIX FROM THE GLO STIX JAR

xx

I am in the store room surrounded by Matthew Nguis. Projectors, that strange optical-illusion spliced chair, the '07 pipe installation work, the several mixed media pieces. Me, my Matthew Nguis, and a little tub of tossed rigatoni from Dome downstairs. I like it that they required a human body guard for his work. Restores my faith in the system w.r.t. treatment of local vs foreign artists, etc, etc. Hence my nonchalance at having to spend lunch hour in a temperature controlled box checking the humidity dial at 10 minute intervals.

Dreams in stop-motion, and four days off that I had to borrow, steal - short of beg for.

It's a good thing I like my work.

And a good thing that I have money in the bank to make our little getaway happen.
It's Monday, the week's started but my week officially starts Friday. A night of ground-shattering as a send-off, and, oh, lookie, we're going...going...gone

"We are ready, we are ready for the floor"

HOT CHIP FOR YOU?

xx

LOVE FOR HOME, LOVE FOR G

This is where I issue a heartfelt written retraction. I am completely mortified after my conversation with Ginette - that's right, G-I-N-E-T-T-E, Friday night. Mortified at finding out I spelt Ginette, Jeanette. Hon, I don't know if I should be humiliated at being completely oblivious to my heinous spelling crime w.r.t. your name all these years, or delighted you actually read this ol' rag. 

So, um, this is a big, ho-fficial hola to Ginette. This is also a shameless plug. Fools, if you need a dose of fist-pumping, Gi Chi is the way to go. Chow with Chittick on Beat! Nights, be damned if I have to tell you where. Or, if you're stealth/lucky enough, stalk her amongst the crowd at P_ _ t_r_. Aaah, I shoot me.

And speaking of Beat!, and shooting...this week, I also owe Gi & Co. a big thank you for mixing it up once in awhile, throwing in a little mainstream once in awhile, throwing me off my high horse a little. Yesterday, all the usual (awesome) CSS, Crystal Castles, Hot Chip, The Ting Tings, etc. were in good company with the (not-so) wild card of the night - Muse. Muse never really did it for me, I was always a little...lukewarm towards any given track. They were surprisingly in sync, though, Friday night, slotted in in between Spinto and Hot Chip. I think it is safe to say I lost myself punching, I think Joel was feeling it too. Big ups to G, right song, right place, right time. It has been awhile, since I have been so stirred - not shaken.

I like how it went down at Wembley. A remix of Wembley/Lisbon would be trippy...just a thought. Check it, cop it, CLAP IT, lordy, please clap it. With compliments.

Beat! turns 2 this Friday. I'd say, you'd be a fool to miss it...but then that would just be churlish of me, now wouldn't it?

xx

Read 'em and weep

A tomcat on the turnpike

A warrior on the wayside

I have held you before

Yes, I am sure of it.

BURNING THE CANDLE AT BOTH ENDS, BALLS

xx, Shu

New beginnings are usually sign-posted - 

I feel a big, big beginning on the horizon for them - and, for me.

"The reciprocal relationship between memory, forgetting, and history, questions and reveals how remembering and forgetting alters our perception of historical experience and the production of social discourse."

I am very, very excited. 

It is nice to re-visit - only once in a long, long, while - places that you left rationality and responsibility at the doorstep of, long before they became over-hyped and undercut. Going to Beat! last night was a little like that. May and I felt oddly seasoned and wizened staring out at a writhing floor of over-zealous scene kids doing a watered-down version of our 'hop. And then, um, she shrugged I shrugged and we dove into the fray, front spot. I raised a (still-sparky) finger and May raised a jug of crapshitenonsenseliquid to Jeanette (whose mixes will never, never be watered-down, note this) - and we kicked it old-style. Old, pre-renovation, pre-sleeking-down-smarming-up, pre-hype Home style. 

I don't remember very much. Kudos to Max and some rather sketch AKs. All I remember is jumping up on the console to give Jeanette a slobber-kiss and her screaming in my ear,  "welcome Home"

Also, the best dance to the ever-tired/over-played Oh Mandy that I've had in awhile. Credits: Joel.

Welcome Home, indeed. 

Now we just have to stay away from the goddamn pseudo kool-kid infested nesting hole for another year and three months, or so. 

xx

I was asked, twice, once by Has, once by Ngak, one of the many Essential questions of our over-emotional - or should I say, emotionally indulgent - generation.

"Have I been set afloat, or did I cut the rope?" Everyone is asking themselves, asking me, asking he, she.

I dispensed two arbitrary answers. Noncommittal, these will still keep me up tonight, as another of our Essential worries (Have I sent a friend wayward?) leaves me rubbing my feet together under the sheets as I do on fitful nights. 

Of my own substantial time spent floating arbitrary channels/water bodies, I cannot say it stemmed from being set afloat. The sole instance The Question in question has bothered me, I was not alone in the act of severing - but I sawed my fair share. I put my back into it, the scythe was in my hand. What of written tragedies where one is left ashore while the other drifts? Fiction. There were two rafts. There were two sharp, efficient cutting edges. Which was necessary. Rope is easily thickened by the weaving of but a year; one blade could not possibly have chewed the twine of a whopping four.

I love as fiercely as I did years back when I did not yet have as much brick in my gut and grit under my fingernails.

I love as fiercely because pills and fast cars, and the Bottle have done/can do little to dull the shine of your halo.

Fallen angels do not exist if throned ones do not - but do we exist if both don't?

Here, I don't mean to go all horizontal and tangential. But, to grasp what it means to exist, we need to grasp the fact that we might not exist.

Thus far I have not needed you to re-materialize because your existence defined mine in its possibility of nonexistence.

Now that physical presence is a possibility, there is still no need to completely solidify. Do feel free to drift, in and out of tangibility - the best future meetings, I daresay, will take place as the first did, over a table strewn with blue capsules amidst one misconduct too many. Clarity is non-essential.

Existentialism. Waiting for Godot. Vladimir or Estragon? I'd take V any day.

Has/Ngak: It would do you good to each ask me, again. I might be the wiser after a night's sleep. Advice is crisper in the mornings. For now, my two cents stands: don't do anything I wouldn't do.

xx

Yves Saint Laurent died in his bed in Paris yesterday. 

Kawakubo, Lagerfeld, Slimane, Halston, Helmut Lang, Yohji, Miucca, McCardell, are a lonelier lot with a large gap to collectively fill, without him.

Like the Sart, "I was too young to live the original YSL experience but...it must have been very exciting, sexy, dangerous, innovative, and beautifully crafted - everything that fashion (at its very best) is supposed to be about"

How do we archive the iconic in our emotional and intellectual memory?

YSL, I file under having blurred the lines of fashion, culture and personal empowerment.

And, under "Le Smoking" :

 

Au Revoir, Monsieur Saint Laurent.