The Evening Standard bill outside my local shop flags up a London Fashion Week Cocaine Shock - yes, you got it, there's a shortage, boom, boom.
Fashion and coke are undemanding bedfellows and its no suprise to anyone that people in fashion, like people in pretty much every other walk of life, from farming to narcotics control, use coke. Quelle surprise.
Admittedly the particular characteristics of coke are peculiarly well-suited to the demands of the party-rich fashion circuit. Great skin-taughtening short-term side affects, you never run out of things to say and you can keep going until it all goes black (or white if you're unlucky) - what more could you want? (Well maybe something to say, some sleep and a bit of the kind of substance that sticks in your memory rather than to the baby oil that some asshole put on all the flat surfaces in the washrooms?... no waaay?) Then again, that said, those grrrreat frosty coke-characteristics suit merchant banking pretty well too.
This inevitably leads me to Bret Easton Ellis' GLAMORAMA - as good an indication as any of the dangers of hanging out with models while taking drugs.
Now admittedly Brett was never exactly Mr Sedate but in Glamorama he really was kind of Cleaning out his Closet, well, OK, Bret's closet never really gets that clean, or indeed that out but, moving swiftly on...
Despite the fact that Glamorama is, well, MENTAL, I like it and I sort of know where Bret's coming from in his reaction to the culture and indeed sub-cultures he's paraodying, though its worth saying that if he could just relax and lay off then, you know, he wouldn't wake up feeling that way... but HELL ain't it cathartic sometimes to just... well, whatever...
In this interview Bret discusses, among other things, the apparently forthcoming movie version of Glamorama by Roger Avary - unsurprisingly things aren't going TOTALLY smoothly, over to Bret:
"He's written a real spellbinding script for Glamorama. I think the problem is that it's an expensive movie to make and I think it's topic, which is Americans committing terrorism abroad, makes it not a very popular movie in development right now. "
Well it might be that but frankly its more likely to be a whole lot of other things I can think of. But still I'm pretty much looking forward to seeing how Roger copes with Bret's late night vision of Pret a Porter vs Abu Ghraib via Fassbinder.
Meanwhile the other battle in fashion's war on reality continues as H&M drops Moss over drug claims to enable non-metro suburbanites to go 'ooh, models drugs - NEVER... cos they, you know, really CARE about their BODIES 'n all...' and half the metro-elite keep writing it up like it isn't while the rest write drug books... and Everybody Gets High On Love naturally - on love.
As noone 'sez', ...keep it real!
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Glamorama is one of the most vacuous books I've ever read, gloriously so in its total lack of political understanding. And as someone who has little or no political understanding I know of what I speak. You may argue that I'm missing the point as people so often do with Easton Ellis. It's no wonder he works with Avary so often because this is the man who was famously dumped by his writing partner Tarantino as soon as possible, and rightly so. Rules of Attraction, the film, was an utter mess and totally in love with its own (half-baked) visual tricks. I quite liked the book, for the record.
Kind of curious to find out what a drugs test at an Evening Standard Christmas party might uncover.
Like the Journalists having a go at the England cricket team for going on the lash, you couldn't make it up!
Indeed and its gets worse reporting that Chanel and Burberry have now dropped Kate thecrowing Daily Mail's front page headline was Cocaine Kates Career in Tatters.
Quite apart from the hypocrisy element which Mike refers to, this a shame because the Chanel campaign is curiously lovely despite its classic layout and even if you do have to go through several double-takes to recognise Ms Moss with dark hair. On reflection maybe that's why.
Far be it from me to suggest that some of the hypocritical execs making those decisions may have at least had their noses in the trough of coke-fuelled celebrity and certainly in the trough of this celebrity - if not in the... well you can see where I'm going!
Regarding Glamorama I know what you mean Wyndham but there's something viscerally exciting about coming across that much burnt stuff from the bottom of Bret's fryed mental pan in a published novel.
That said I remember seeing som,e of the pre-publication interviews and thinking that he was one unhappy individual and really should get his sexulaity sorted out - in fact maybe just a sexuality - if you see my point.
I liked Glamorama, you know, mostly, but it went off the deep end into drugs paranoia and all kinds of craziness at the end. It was really two books and I kind of felt he should have dumped the second half, the crazy terror half. It was crap.
Roger Avary can go ahead and remark Killings Zoe - Europe, babes, drugs and babes. As an auteur it is essential to only ever make one movie. Oh yes, what did Avary work on before that? True romance? Babes, guns and drugs…
As for Kate Moss…bored already. And this is from someone who has been racking up page impressions and appearing on Sky News as a rentaquote although I could not be bothered to drag my arse to the BBC to reiterate the same crap again on Working Lunch.
Kate has stitched herself up, her image is her life, and she got careless. She was apparently done over by a junkie friend of Pete Doherty's manager. Shocker. Hang around with junkie's they will sell you out faster than you can say Grandmother.
Junkie runs to journalist end of story. Junkies, writers they're all the same. Joan Didion said it best: "There is one last thing to remember, writers are always selling somebody out."
I'm waiting for all the confessional columns of all those journalists writing those "when I took cocaine…". Yawn.
I cannot deny Glamorama has a dotty charm to it and i agree wholeheartedly with everything else that has been said here. The tabloid journalists I've met are the most depraved and hedonistic people you can imagine and treacherous from the DNA level upwards.
Post a Comment