Before and After: a Professional Job
werewolf evolution
A short interview with Rick Baker, the makeup artist behind An American Werewolf in London and Thriller, about the transformation of his art in the digital era.
Wired: Have you worried that your work can’t keep up with evolving technology?
Baker: I had that concern. I wondered whether today’s kids, who grew up on CG, would accept a guy covered in yak hair. But I actually embrace digital stuff now — I do it for fun. I was heavily involved in the digital work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I like any trick that helps me achieve what I can’t with rubber. I try to make the right choice for the circumstances of the movie.
Miss Plastic Hungary beauty pageant
. . . traces of the cad about the boy . . .
You know you’re headed somewhere when you commence to quoting yourself.
And while we’re on the subject . . .
Although The Magic Christian is by and large a very annoying film (not least on account of its many breezy ‘fag jokes’ circa 1969), there is a certain train-wreck fascination to the “Mad About the Boy” sequence featuring Yul Brynner and Roman Polanski.
Shaving Points #2
There are oils, creams, cremes, foams, soaps, and gels all containing inexplicable and engineered molecules and/or the finest available botanicals. They serve either to facilitate the enactment of the sought after good, close shave or to soothe the hurt that accompanies it. And with a scent that evokes the essence of your particular brand of masculinity.
screenshot from last night’s footage
I Am The Anonymous Model
A good, longish article on the state of the modeling industry.
This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy modeling. In point of fact, what kept me in the industry for so long was the constant contact with lovely women, smart women, talented women, hard-working women, inspiring women, women of the sort I wanted to grow up to be. (I met some nice men, too, but, in this industry, there are just fewer of them — fashion is a powerful global business that has the quirk of being thoroughly gendered.) In fact, fashion is the world’s largest employer of women; it’s an industry of women, by women, for women. I felt like I was always meeting the best of them: Foodie art directors who advised me on which East Village deli secretly sells the best $3 goat tacos East of the Mississippi. Prop stylists who went to RISD, emerged only with an ingrained loathing of the art world old boys’ club, and decided to fuck it and paint hay bales odd colors and source antique books for editorial spreads. I remember walking 20 minutes from a train station to get to a photographer’s apartment, and then talking for an hour about Tess Of The D’Urbervilles and Cindy Sherman, over tea, while she intermittently remembered to take my picture. (She drove me home, and we worked 12 hours together that weekend.) It took me a very long time to reconcile the apparent disconnect between the consistent wonderfulness of the many people I was working with, and the persistent awfulness of the position of abject and total disempowerment that I, like any non-super model, occupied — to realize that the problems of the modeling industry are not in fact personal, but structural.
(via marginal revolution)
screenshots from last night’s footage
Gold-fin-ger!
I abandoned the frosty metallic look after one final fling around 1976, when I was poking around a southern Illinois dime store and discovered a stash of circa 1967 Yardley Slicker Lip Polishes in the Good Morning and Good Night shades. Bought ‘em up and actually used ‘em on the odd occasion.
Didn’t work on me seriously in 1967. Didn’t work on me ironically in 1976.
So I don’t know what possessed me to start slapping on the gold nail polish tonight. But I wish you were here to see how really really mesmerizing it is by the light of the laptop. The camera-phone snap hints at only a fraction of the weirdness.
Dear Robert,
You’re shorter in person than I expected, exactly my height; nicer, too, and just as handsome.
We climbed the stairs and you showed me why I came to meet you in the first place: the whole of the interior was white, cake white — every picture, every inch of carpet, the folds in the drapes — as though drained by a mindless Midas.
“It’s my grandma’s house. My dad did this.”
Finger painting?
More.
Liquid Plumber: Joe’s Wardrobe Costs GOP $150K
On Friday, the Republican National Committee reported receipts amounting to nearly $150,000 for clothing, cosmetic treatments, and beef jerky allocated to McCain campaign phenomenon Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher.
McCain senior strategist and speechwriter Mark Salter dismissed the bills as “irrelevant” and “false” while insisting, “even if the story were true, and it is, Obama will raise taxes.”
According to my stylist
the opposite of highlights is lowlights. It is neither highdarks nor lowdarks.
Palin Better Qualified to Handle Fashion Crisis
RNC spokesbuyer Maria Comella refused to comment on the report’s details, although she reaffirmed the McCain campaign’s commitment to a strong, stylish America and described Ms. Palin’s look as “bitchin’.”
The GOP is clearly tapping into a societal predisposition to dress-up Barbie, although most old white male Republicans mentally undress Alaska’s popular populist governor.
Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Male
Sasha Baron Cohen was escorted from a fashion show in Milan on Friday.
After a few minutes of darkness while Baron Cohen, or Bruno, was escorted off the catwalk, the show started again. Models had kept their cool but the designer was visibly upset when she appeared at the end of the show.
Beauty Question
I keep hearing people say that Sarah Palin is good looking. Do they mean now? And compared to what–John McCain? Jesus, maybe I need new lenses, but she doesn’t do it for me. I just can’t get past thoughts of dog sleds I guess. And here’s another question: how much of the way a person is (voice, laugh, intellect, and so on) tends to interfere in a serious way with what your eyes are telling you about a person’s beauty? I have to say that sort of thing comes into play for me big time. I have a really hard time thinking, for instance, that anybody who decided to be a Republican could be beautiful. When I think of Laura Bush, for instance, I think of those standing signs with a slot that one rests one’s chin in for the purposes of picture taking….
Escalator Mishap Makes a Mess of Makeup
Forgive me for laughing at this.
Good ad, nasty beer
Victoria Beckham Here to Stay, Breasts Sent Home to Britain
Victoria Beckham (on right), shown here with soccer megastar husband David, and her breasts.
Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, wife of newly transplanted British soccer legend David Beckham, shocked fans when she announced Monday that she was sending her breasts back to the United Kingdom. The petite diva insisted that the rest of her body would remain in Los Angeles to support her husband’s efforts with the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team and to continue her search for the perfectly tan shade of shiny body lotion. Mrs. Beckham delivered a brief statement in the customer service area of the Pacific Coast Wax ‘n’ Gloss Detail Shop, where she was waiting to have her face buffed out.
Be reminded of your Spiritual self
. . . and for only $80 per bottle!
Some observations here
(via Andrew Sullivan)
Yours truly.
This is, I’ve decided, the best picture I’ve ever taken.
Credit to my co-worker, Nick Zdon, who snapped it.
Dallas Palette?
Okay, I know that a handful of Flockers either live in or have ties to Dallas, Texas — so can any of y’all (or any of y’all others) explain to me why this palette of cosmetics from Benefit is a “Dallas palette”?
Here’s what they say: It’s the Dallas look all-in-one: a palette for rich, enviable beauty.