Siberian Fashion

With somewhat more than a million inhabitants, Omsk is the second most populous city in the region of Siberia, which includes 77 % of the territory of the Russian federation – and is the coldest part of the country too. It was there that the writer Fiódor Dostoiévski had a bitter four years of forced labor (and today the city shelters a museum in his tribute). Focus of anticommunist resistance in the first years that followed to the Bolshevist Revolution (1917), Omsk is today an unsuspected pole of Russian fashion. The site “English Russia” brings a column, “Hipsters from Omsk”, a sort of local “Sartorialist”, what is tries of that. And the best of the site there are the photos of the city citizen’s of the third age (image above). “His clothes are a sort of reflection on the sublime mystery of the existence and on the elevated tragedy of the human life”, the site philosophizes

New discovery – Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey, 25, is the new sensation half pop, half underground that is going to make you cry with very sad and decadent songs. She refutes comparisons with Nancy Sinatra – in spite of the vocal similarity – and her appearance has one that of rapper and of Jessica Rabbit, with very long nails and voluptuous lips. In her own words, the sound that she does is “Hollywood Sadcore“, but it is necessary to hear (and to see her singing) to understand this invented tag.

The artistic name is inspired in the actress Lana Turner and in Ford Del Rey, who was produced only in Brazil during the 80′s. According to the singer (whose real name is Elizabeth Grant), it was chosen by her manager and it should evoke the Hollywood glamour with a certain retro charm – which goes together with her voice. “I think that first the music came, then the name, then a bunch of hair and make-up”, she tells in interview to Tim Noakes (publisher of music of “Dazed and Confused”).

Her most famous song, “Video games“ (more than 600 thousand accesses in the YouTube), talks about a love that gives right, but the sad melody and the faltering voice of the singer give the impression of which there is something of missed. Well to the style of the tragic heroin of movies noir.

She already had a disc launched in the iTunes, in December from the last year and a little time then taken away of the air, without bigger explanations. In this first disc, the arrangements were remembering productions “lounge” from the 90′s and 2000, a little in the line of Thievery Corporation and Ilya. From that time, singles from a new disc they went out already – between them, “Video games“ – with a more perverse and gloomy footprint. The new album, which Lana finds his first, must reach the shops in January of 2012.

The clip of the music is a pearl, directed by the singer herself, with the stages in which she appears passages of stolen videos of the Web and filming of the 50 years. Great David Lynch. Of so perfect the packet-persona, musicians, video – there is the one who says that Lana is a frame.

Enjoy this wonderful piece of musical art:

Le Parisien

What’s elegance? Since a long time ago “arbiters” and “specialists“ on the subject try to define, to explain and to categorize what is that. “A sort of harmony, which, in certain way, remembers the beauty”, was theorizing Geneviève d’Ariaux in his “Book of the Elegance” (Record, 1965), called by many The Bible of style. “But with the difference of which the beauty is more frequently a gift of nature, while elegance is a result of the art”.

The most recent title to be bent on this “art” is “The Parisian” (Intrinsic, 2011), it drives of style of Inès de la Fressange (written with the “collaboration” of the journalist Sophie Gachet). The woman of Paris, quite good, is taken here like the biggest refinement example, at his power of the rules of the elegance, but especially for his capacity of infringing them with grace.

Inès is an icon of the fashion from the 80 years, when there was made the first model to sign a contract of exclusiveness with the mark Chanel, and became an eternal muse of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who up to today resorts to his hunches.

As Inès, Geneviève was also connected to fashion. He was for years the right arm of the French fashion designer (born in Italy) Nina Ricci, and director of the house of the same name. His book, among other things, talks to the “Parisian” about an elegance that is also, basically, the urbane French elegance of the haute couture of the 50 years, in the tradition of Jacques Fath – impossible to be more Parisian than that.

In spite that France remains (and the French woman) an example of sophistication, it is impossible not to notice a basic difference in approach. “The Parisian” of Inès is content with lists of “what to make / without doing” and a shops itinerary where he will buy pieces to emulate a style (though she always affirms that it is the creativity what guarantees the chiquê of the Parisian). Geneviève – still what under the weight of some concepts today frankly obsolete – considers the “elegance” as the result of a civilization process, and has to say more about time characters, wings of the fashion, culture and style in them.

Inès does not seem interested in voicing her opinions on style, which might be explanatory, as soon as she is a muse and “counselor“of one of the most important fashion designers of the present. She is restricted to a somewhat schematic text, which slide for the surface of the surface and it does not answer, at last, what does from the style of the woman of Paris – his protagonist – anything that wants to be imitated.

Darling stand by me :)

Sad Kid is Sad

The boy and the nails

Once upon a time there was a boy who had a very explosive temperament.
One day, his father gave him a bag full of nails and a wooden plank. His father told him that whenever he was losing his patience with someone he should hammer a nail into the plank.

In the first day the boy hammered 37 nails into the plank. In the following days, while he was learning to control the wrath, the number of hammered nails lessened gradually.

He was discovering that took less work to control his wrath than it took to hammer the many nails into the plank.

Finally there was the day in wich he didn’t lost his patience even once.
He spoke with his father about his success and the fact that he was feeling alot better than before when he used to lose is pacience all the time
The father suggested that he should remove all the nails from the plank.
The boy so did so and then took the plank, already without the nails, and handed it over to his father. His father then told him:

- Congratulations, my son! Now notice the holes that the nails left in the plank. It will never be like it was before. When you speak with rage, your words leave marks as these. You can put a knife in someone and then withdraw it, but it does not matter all the times you apologize, the scar will still be there.

A verbal aggression is as violent as a physical aggression.

One of the famous quotes and sayings of Louis L’amour goes as this:

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before – it takes something from him.

Golden Oldie

This is my first blog post

… and it’s grand!