2 posts from February 2008

The fashion set has named this sea green clutch “Oscar the Grouch”. How apropos! Too much fun to see a few of my favorite things—Christian Louboutin and vintage Sesame Street—converge in faddism. Anyone who recalls the classic Sesame Street segment and song “Me and my llama” (about a Manhattan girl who takes her pet llama for a dental cleaning) can concur how alluringly absurd this alpaca bag is. It’s so deliciously unbeautiful. It’s so wrong its right. And with a little wear and tear it will most assuredly become classically tacky and look more like a Yip Yip than Oscar the Grouch.

Fashion will always be enthralled with the unconventional and I particularly adore items that have a distinctive harmony and charm. Look closely and you’ll see the double mini heel clasp. Clever! Objects like this beg for a semiology of the ugly. The Lithuanian linguist Algirdas Julius Greimas (a buddy of Roland Barthes) contributed to the theory of semiotics. He introduced the “semiotic square” as a means of mapping the key semantic oppositions in a text or practice.

Visual semiotician Daniel Chandler offers an apt description of Greimas’ semiotic square that can be applied to jolie laide moments in fashion. If we begin by drawing horizontal lines pairing the terms “beautiful” and “ugly”, we can turn this into a “semiotic square” by designating the lower corners of the square “not ugly” and “not beautiful”. Hence, according to Chandler (as he understands Greimas), the semiotic square reminds us that this is not simply a binary opposition because something which is not beautiful is not necessarily ugly and something which is not ugly is not necessarily beautiful. Whew. Maybe I’ll teach a class on that someday.

Arguably the best high school musicians and composers of their time, the Kashmere Stage Band, from the mid 1960s through the 70s, set the bar for student music groups across the country. Kashmere High School is located in Kashmere Gardens, a predominantly black neighborhood in the north end of Houston, Texas. In an effort to sustain his music program and create opportunities for his students, bandleader and Professor Conrad O. Johnson sought to build not just the best high school stage band in Texas, but the best high school stage band in the world. The rhythmic sophistication and earthy quality of KSB’s music is evident in the reproach of the arrangements written by Johnson and his band members. Grooving onstage in platforms and crushed velvet suits to popular audiences, between 1968 and 1978 KSB recorded eight studio albums of original funk fused with jazz accompaniment. And, despite a changing roster of students, KSB came to be considered one of the best funk bands ever. I’ve always been drawn to the jazzy atmospheric chic characteristic of 1960s and 70s film scores. KSB’s music anchors the breeziness that I prefer with complex soul influences to produce smoother rhythms that transcend the party beats with which popular funk is primarily associated. The band’s unique funk idiom remains impossible to imitate and the group’s peerless sound is popular among producers and deejays today.