magazine : glitch

enaissance electronique is reinventing itself withartists such as la roux and lady gaga fast be-coming internationallyrenowned superstarsso why is this old school style so popular?

For fans

of elec-tronic mu-

sic, this should be a triumphant

moment. Eight years on from electroclash, that

psychic rift in the club-music continuum, its aesthetic and ide-

ology finally seem to have crossed over. Little Boots is jamming on her Teno-

ri-on with Bill Turnbull on BBC Breakfast, while La Roux hovers, stubbornly, in the upper reach-

es of the charts. DIY electro is coming home. Rule Brit-ronica!

While

they m

ay hav

e the

look of

a vang

uard, L

ittle Bo

ots, La

Roux, F

rankmu

zik and

the m

uch-tou

ted, De

lphic (b

asically

, Coldpl

ay

with syn

ths), a

re not f

orging

opening

s for st

ranger

, more

in-

terestin

g music

. This y

ear ha

s alrea

dy bee

n a vin

tage o

ne

for gen

uinely i

nnovat

ive elec

tro pop

, but, in

mainst

ream

media t

erms, y

ou wou

ldn’t kn

ow it. Des

pite th

is sud-

den ap

petite

for syn

th pop

over

landfill i

ndie, no

th-

ing has

chang

ed. Saf

e, salea

ble, un

challen

ging

music g

ets the

hype

and su

pport,

while ce

-

rebral,

waywar

d pop

(the kin

d of st

uff

that w

ould ha

ve got

a hea

r-

ing in t

he muc

h-roman

ti-

cised 8

0s) is

left to

moulder

in the

margins

.

Lets hear

itfor YorkNew

it occured to me, as I was standing in line waiting for my sinfully boring small (a.k.a. tall( drip coffee, that there(s a bunch of reasons why Starbucks is every(where, not the least of which is that they cater to any increasingly engagist society. We(ve all heard about how Starbucks broke the mold on the location of their stores (( they decided to put themselves smack dab in the middle of where people were al(ready buying coffee. Not so radical, but then they(d put two or three or four stores in that same area within blocks of each other. The conventional wisdom is that the stores should have burned each other out. But they didn(t. They ALL thrived.

We(ve heard, too, of the fact that Starbucks works hard on its brand and image (( wherever you go in the world, you know when you(re in a Starbucks. A triple caramel macchiato looks and tastes the same whether you(re in DC or New Zealand (I know, I(ve checked(.

While it seems like there is a Starbucks on just about every corner in America today, that was not always the case. There was a time when they were just another neighborhood coffee shop that was trying to stay alive. The company was pretty much made up of a few coffee shops in Seattle for about (( years before a revelation occurred that would change this company and how people thought about coffee for many years to come.While on vacation, Howard Schultz started to take particular note of how the caf(s were run in Italy. He fell in love with the concept and set ups and brought new and old ideas alike back to Seattle with him. Old in that they were from Italy and new in that nobody was making use of these ideas in the United States. It is unlikely that he ever dreamed how successful these ideas would make his company.Over the next decade, Starbucks continued to grow as more and more people fell in love with the different twists that Starbucks was introducing people to and the various blends that they served. It almost seemed as though every person that went to Seattle told a story to everyone once they got back home about this incredible cup of coffee that they had or some new and interesting coffee drink that they had just tried. This buzz made it quite obvious that the next prudent move was to start opening up Starbucks across the United States.The last (( or so years have been quite a ride as Starbucks has gone from a local coffee shop to a publicly traded company. For most people, there are two choices of coffee in the morning if they are not making it themselves( Dunkin( Donuts or Starbucks. Starbucks has taken coffee to a totally different level and turns traditional non(coffee lovers into addicts with some of its other creations such as the Frappuccino.While some may consider Starbucks a Yuppie style shop, there is little doubt that they do coffee right. Forget all of the fancy variations, their regular blends always offer you a great and fresh cup of coffee at any time of the day. Starbucks is here to stay and coffee will never be the same.

You can’t make someone love you, even on Valentine’s Day, no matter what Hallmark, Godiva and FTD may say. But how much do we really know about how love works? What is it that attracts a particular man to a particular woman and (with any luck) vice versa? To see what light science could shed on the subject, I called Professor Martha Mc-Clintock at the University of Chicago. McClintock is an expert on odor and behavior who published a

famous study in the early 1970s that showed that the menstrual cycles of college women living in dorms became synchronized through exposure to one another’s pheromones, those

faint chemical signals released from the skin that control the mating rituals of much of the animal kingdom. McClintock has a new study, published in the February issue of Nature Genetics, that makes an even more

provocative link between sex and odor--specifically, the odor of a T shirt worn by a man on two con-

secutive days.The experiment was simple. The T

shirts were carefully prepared (no cologne, no cigarettes, no sex) and then placed in boxes where they

could be smelled but not seen. Forty-nine unmarried women

were asked to sniff the boxes and choose which box they

would prefer “if they had to smell it all the time.”

Read more: http://www.

time.com/time/maga-

zine/arti-

The results would have made Sigmund Freud proud. The women were attracted to the smell of a man who was genetically similar--but not too similar--to their dads. McClintock thinks there’s an evolutionary explanation. “Mating with some-

one too similar might lead to inbreeding,” she says. Mating with someone too different “leads to the loss of desirable gene combinations.”

McClintock isn’t suggesting you can attract a mate by smell alone, but that hasn’t discouraged companies like Erox from bottling pheromones and stopping just short of calling them

aphrodisiacs. Marketing websites feature links to scientific papers on the power of pheromones. I spoke to Dr. David Berliner, CEO of Pherin Pharmaceu-

ticals, who did some of the initial research. While working at the University of Utah with natural compounds produced by

human skin, he noticed a surprising change in the behavior of his male and female colleagues.

“They developed an increased level of camaraderie that was hard to explain,”

he says. There were smiles, eye contact and increased approachability until the skin extracts were removed, at

which point the group reverted to normal behavior.

But even Berliner balks at categorizing pheromones

as aphrodisiacs. “I’ve been looking for an aphrodisiac for 11

years, and I’m convinced that

there is no such thing,”

he says. The

Food and

Platform shoes could be the eighth architectural wonder. They are remarkable exam-ples of design but, like most of the seven fabled monu-ments of the ancient world, surely these extravagant pil-lars of footwear cannot last.

However exhilarating the shoe’s concept, those wear-ers who equate height with power must finally acknowl-edge the obvious: Platform defies function.

At the recent Paris fash-ion shows, towering soles topped out at 18cm, with designers such as Christian Lacroix and John Gal-liano showing all manner of sparkles, tassels and lacings up top. At such heights, the

There are only a few things in life that are sure. Some would say death and taxes, but those who are immersed in the fashion world would say that trends are even more

dependable. No matter which era of fashion you identify with the most, all you have to do is wait around long enough and you are almost guaranteed to see elements of that

trend emerge in current fashion once again. Bell bottoms are one example, and another is platform heels. If you are seeking a way to bring a little funk back into your wardrobe

and your life, there can be no quicker way that scooping up a pair of platform boots.

If you’ve never heard of platform shoes before, you should know that they first emerged toward the end of the 1960’s and the beginning of the 1970’s. They were simply shoes

that have very thick soles, usually under the toe, but sometimes also under the heel. These thick soles are the feature that eventually gave them their name, platform shoes,

because it was almost as if you were walking around on your own personal platform. Once the platform trend caught on by 1975, it was considered essential that they would have at least two inch thick soles and five inch high heels in order to be considered hip

at all.

Something that may surprise you about platform shoes is that women were not the only ones wearing them. Men that identified with the fast paced, sexy disco scene were also known to be spotted wearing platforms, however, there’s usually didn’t feature the five

inch high heels. If you weren’t alive in the 1970’s you should know that it was most certainly a time of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Those who had escaped the era of the

hippie were looking for a shoe with a little more edge to it, and platform shoes were what they discovered.

Soon the genres of fashion and popular art began to merge and swirl together. The result was platforms that became so ostentatious that they were pieces of art in themselves.

Psychedelic colors and patterns were the norm for those that wore the most fashionable platform shoes.

Women wearing platform shoes were seen in many different kinds of popular art, like magazines, photography, fashion shows and even paintings. People all over the world

were wearing platform shoes and loving the way it elevated their fashion.

I’d seen the movie DIRTY PRETTY THINGS listed on

The Independent Film Channel a number of times but I always passed

it up. When it was shown again recently I made time to sit down and watch it simply because

I wanted to see if Chiwetel Ejiofor would be as good in this movie as he was in “Serenity”. And you know what, he

sure as hell was.

Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is an illegal Ni-gerian immigrant living in London. By day he drives cab and at night he works at a really nice hotel where he supervises the Russian doorman Ivan (Zlatko Buric) and the cleaning staff, including the maids. One of them is the Turkish immigrant girl Senay (Audrey Tatou) who has fled an arraigned marriage that would have been just as good as slavery. She and Okwe have a working friendship: he cleans and cooks for her and she lets him sleep on her couch. Okwe’s boss Mr. Juan (Sergi Lopez) is kinda on the sleazy side but Okwe has no idea how really bad the man is until one night when Okwe goes up to one of the rooms to fix an overflowing toilet and finds a human heart in it. Okwe takes the heart to Mr. Juan, suggesting that somebody should call the police. Mr. Juan, knowing Okwe’s situation quite well, dials the police and holds out the receiver, daring him to report the heart.

It turns out that Mr. Juan is running a lucrative black market organ operation out of the hotel. Give up one of your kidneys and he’ll give you a passport. For the immigrant subculture of Lon-don, a passport is The Holy Grail, The Ark of The Covenant and The Sword In The Stone all in one. It means that you can escape a life of drudgery and ser-vitude, the poverty of working a below minimum wage job and go somewhere else, like New York or Los Angeles and start a new life. Senay has a cousin who lives in New York and she desperately wants to go there. Preferably with Okwe, with whom she has fallen in love with.

So should

you see DIRTY PRETTY THINGS? I’d say ab-

solutely yes. But don’t go into it expecting a straight out suspense thriller even though it’s got ele-

ments of that genre. It’s an absorbing and wonderful look at a subculture of the society that exists in ev-

ery major city in the world and one that we may not want to admit exists or acknowledge. But the

people who inhabit that world are ones we see every day of our lives and whether we

want to admit it or not, they’re human just like us and have dreams and hopes

and aspirations of a better life just

AN

D T

HEN

TH

ERE

WER

E F

LOW

ERS

The floral frenzy which has dominated the Paris prêt-à-porter season,

took an exotic turn on the Kenzo catwalk.The Sardininan designer, Antonio Marras, who is the creative director of the label, was inspired by the Amazon and Werner Herzog’s cult film, “Fitzcarraldo”.Birdsong screeched and chirped from the loudspeakers and footage of jungle birds and animals were displayed on small tv screens nestling in the foliage.It was the perfect backdrop for Marras’s exotic fantasy of flora and fauna which characterised his spring/summer 2008 Kenzo collection.Short smocks and long, maxi-dresses came in hibiscus and orchid-printed silk, lacquered to give the effect of having been showered with water.Jacquard, kimono-tunics were knitted in the same parrot-bright patterns and embellished with silver studs, while long, multi-coloured, striped cardigans were worn with bra-tops and long skirts featuring a mé-lange of floral and geometric prints, all accessorized with matching shoes and bags.Jackets in rainbow stripes of sequins were paired with full skirts, emblazoned with flowers of every hue, or ‘zoave’ trousers, caught at the ankles with beaded cuffs.Marras also showed “bird-woman” dresses, finished with elaborate plumage at the neck, and trapeze-line cocktail gowns, hand-stitched entirely from hand-painted feath-ers.Bold, bright colour was also the key feature of the collection by the Lebanese designer, Elie Saab, who is renowned for his “red carpet” gowns and has an international clientele which in-cludes Queen Rania of Jordan, Beyoncé and the actresses Dame Helen Mirren, Diane Kruger and Halle Berry.Saab showed a jewel-bright evening gowns, cut on the bias in swathes of silk, satin and chiffon to undulate around the body. In ruby-red, emerald, topaz and lapis, they featured shimmering crystal

magazine : glitch

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