adrien de bontin, photographer

adrien de bontin, my dear friend, photog, and aesthetic illuminator, has a new website. adi, as we fondly call him, is a global citizen currently situated in buenos aires. like most talented creative minds, he's always on the go. follow his camera lens around the world at adriendebontin.tumblr.com. and, enjoy some tastes of his eyes:
 

Posted by Madame Lamb on Wednesday, June 29, 2011 at 10:10 AM 0 comments

ironic traps

 artists jeff greenspan and hunter fine installed a series of "hipster traps" (see above) throughout new york city. the bait includes sunglasses, a yellow bicycle chain, a holga camera, a can of PBR and a pack of american spirits. fyi, greenspan is the same artist who pulled last summer's “tourist lane” prank. i like this guy.   next up, "bridge and tunnel traps" (see below).

Posted by Madame Lamb on Friday, April 1, 2011 at 10:52 AM 0 comments

nathan davis and natural acoustics

at the opening of the Tully Scope festival, new york composer Nathan Davis (who likens cellphones to bells or reminders of time), encouraged audience members to use their cell phones. for his performance of "Bells", Davis provided audience members with unique numbers to dial that called up various sounds. can't find a video of the performance, but hop over to Davis' website to geek out over his didactic statement: Bells by Nathan Davis.

Posted by Madame Lamb on Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 10:13 PM 1 comments

pythagorean tree

when i asked my friend charley, the engineer, to comment on the dropper's* "Pythagorean Tree" piece below he recalled how the disco ball's pattern reflects the infinite systems of our universe: "how long is the coastline of tahiti? it has a definite length, but if you break it down into smaller and smaller curves the coastline goes on forever."

*in the early 1960s, an artistic movement called "drop art" emerged after artists clark richert and gene bernofsky dropped painted rocks onto the street from their dorm window. richert and bernofsky were intrigued by the "happenings" their art spawned. as their artistic ideologies propagated, the "droppers" purchased six acres of artistic space/pasture in southwest colorado. inspired by the work of buckminster fuller, the droppers erected geodesic domes throughout the artistic commune (pictured above). the domes, mostly constructed from metal scraps, served as centers for the droppers to live, work, sleep and (plausibly) drop acid inside.

Posted by Madame Lamb on Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 9:10 PM 1 comments

patti smith's "just kids"

i finally read patti smith's memoir titled "just kids" that recounts her romantic symbiotic relationship with the late photographer robert mapplethorpe. smith sprinkles her memoir with anecdotes about mapplethorpe, peggy guggenheim, and warhol's factory go-ers. her tone is clever and honest providing an unjaded view of that "glamorous" new york scene. i highly recommend the book, particularly if you're interested in the factory/hotel chelsea scene. plus, it's a quick read.

here are some photographs mapplethorpe took of smith:

 

Posted by Madame Lamb on Friday, December 17, 2010 at 8:25 AM 1 comments

leah meltzer

join friends of ML on monday, december 10th for a performance by leah meltzer at 55 washington sq. south. the performance will playfully explore the universal human desire for an amorous object.

Posted by Madame Lamb on Tuesday, December 7, 2010 at 7:05 PM 1 comments

lichtenstein > warhol (as specified by fame)

oooh, alright > another campbell soup can
$4.26x10^7 >$2.48x10^7

Posted by Madame Lamb on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 11:29 PM 0 comments

adrien de bontin shoots scott and garance

photog Adrien de Bontin, amherst coll classmate/friend of ML, recently spent a couple of days with Scott Schuman (the sartorialist), Garance Doré (visual artist), and a lovely argentinian fashion writer named Carolina in Buenos Aires. here are Adrien's photos from the encounter. i especially enjoy seeing the photos of garance behind-the-lens.

adi writes:

My involvement with the [scott and garance] was thanks to a wonderful local Argentine writer, Carolina, who was interviewing him for La Nacion (the national newspaper here in Argentina) and for a fashion magazine called 90+10.  She knew that I had been following the Sartorialist and Garance Dore for a few years, and therefore asked if I might be interested in acompanying her on her interviews as her photographer. 

Scott and Garance were in town for roughly about three days, and I was lucky enough to be able to chat and spend some time with them throughout their stay.  Their first day was mainly spent doing interviews in what happens to be my favorite French restaurant in Buenos Aires, Brasserie Petanque.

The next day was the fashion show where Scott was the guest of honor and there was a quick runway show consisting of 5 different designers.  After the show Carolina and I had a chance to chat with them again where they invited us to spend the day walking around the city and taking pictures the next morning.  Naturally we said yes.  

The next morning we met up in San Telmo again, where we spent a few hours walking around the city, enjoying a lemonade at the Feria de San Telmo, and basically just hanging out.  I think Scott felt comfortable speaking to someone with an American accent and coincidentally from the midwest as well, and Garance, of course, happy to have someone to speak French to.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that despite all the attention thrown at them in the fashion world, and their non-stop world traveling schedule (and therefore the amount of people theyre always meeting and saying goodbye to), that they are genuinely nice and that they are enamored with what they do.  And I can only hope that the pictures show this a little bit.

if you speak spanish, jump over to Carolina's editorial piece "Una Chica Como Yo " and her fashion blog called Coco Chronicles.

Posted by Madame Lamb at 6:17 AM 3 comments

sneak peak at the muppets movie

december 2011 will bring the release of a new The Muppets movie. the troupe behind the movie includes nicholas stoller (writer, Forgetting Sarah Marshall), jason segel (whose puppet performance in Forgetting Sarah Marshall i'd call breakthrough), and james bobin (director, Flight of the Conchords). the film is rumored to have myriad celebrity cameos, and loads of good ole' fashion muppetry (see scanned entertainment weekly spread below). loving the stuff coming off the (newly rehabbed?) sesame street.

related: style inspiration - jim henson

Posted by Madame Lamb on Monday, November 8, 2010 at 7:22 AM 3 comments

love a good chart

Posted by Madame Lamb on Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 9:12 AM 2 comments

paris vs nyc

paris versus new york, a blog: bright visual juxtapositions between two western meccas. (via jason kottke)

Posted by Madame Lamb on Saturday, October 30, 2010 at 11:19 PM 1 comments

david jones' adland

i recently met david t. jones, cool dude/creator of adweek's weekly cartoon series called "adland". jones' cartoons offer a  clever take on the crazy consumer-driven world of advertising with a nice larry david-woody allen undertone.
 

Posted by Madame Lamb on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 9:40 AM 0 comments

banksy's simpsons intro

a new episode of the Simpsons features elements directed by Banksy (rats and all). what starts off as a benign Banksy-tagged alt intro sequence quickly develops into a dark commentary on american consumer culture reminiscent of a new yorker cartoon i remember seeing a while back (above).

Posted by Madame Lamb on Monday, October 11, 2010 at 9:21 AM 0 comments

pierrot le fou is flat

the party scene in jean-luc godard's pop art film "pierrot le fou" is fascinatingly boring and full of phonies*. the monochromatic color scheme and dialogue speak directly to the self-aware materialism of the pop art movement. these stills are all too reminiscent of lichtenstein's work, but it was very interesting to see how godard flattened out this film.

*as holden caulfield might say

Posted by Madame Lamb on Monday, September 13, 2010 at 5:34 AM 10 comments

i gotta basketball jones

in 1973, cheech and chong released a song parodying the soul ballad "love jones" called "basketball jones". the song chronicles the basketball jones of a young lad named "tyrone shoelaces" (phonetically: tie-your-own shoelaces). to add to thewacktitud, the track features george harrison, billy preston, tom scott, carol king, and michelle phillips (of the mamas and the papas) on vocals as a cheerleader. the album version allegedly opens with an interview with tyrone's basketball coach, a character named "umgwana kickbooti" (phonteically: i'm gonna kickbooty), but i can't find the full version online.


here's a cartoon* by paul gruwell that accompanied the album's release in the states. stay tuned for the closing chorus for all sorts of cooky cameos.




*the cartoon was featured on the 1979 film "being there", which is how i discovered it.

Posted by Madame Lamb on Wednesday, August 4, 2010 at 10:58 PM 3 comments

slave to the traffic light

Ross McBride's Digital Dalí clock is a subtle reminder of the relative importance of time reminiscent of Dali's iconic work "The Persistence of Memory". available at RossMcBride

since we're on the topic of time, take a look Jim Henson's short film called "Time Piece" that premiered at MoMA in 1965. the surrealist film provides a visual and aural commentary on the relentless passage of time. Henson employs montage and disjointed rhythms to manipulate the linear passage of time. the result is a film that transports the viewer to a dimension where time has no bearing. and my, does time look silly from this fourth dimension...

Jim Henson's Time Piece

Posted by Madame Lamb on Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:29 AM 0 comments

a collection of first images

jason kottke found this collection of the world's first images. included: world's first color photo, first photo taken from space, first photo of a complete molecule (taken in 2009), etc.

here's first image of the surface of another planet taken from a soviet probe in 1975. aah to have experienced the suspense this generated... *cue 2001 a space odyssey score*

Posted by Madame Lamb on Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 11:50 AM 1 comments

megan fox by craig mcdean

megan fox converses with zach galifianakis and sits for craig mcdean in the june/july issue of interview magazine. an excerpt of the interview can be found here. as one would expect, galifianakis proves much more engaging on paper, whilst fox proves more visually bewitching in some homoerotic photos:

see more here.

Posted by Madame Lamb on Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 10:11 AM 6 comments