Photographe Paul Galipeau Ottawa Canada | lechampiondumonde.com

Art and Fashion happenings in Ottawa

October was indeed Rocktober with a slew of musical happenings I couldn’t even keep up with. November changes channels but not the tempo. Two items of business here.

First…November 13 – 23 is the Electric Fields festival which describes itself as “a biennial festival dedicated to the presentation of new and significant performance and installation works created at the crossroads of art, science and technology.”

The program is pretty packed over the 10 days and you can check out the whole schedule at electricfields.ca. Hats off to Ryan Stec at artengine for pulling this together.

I’m most excited about the Electric Evangelicals night on Friday, November 14 at St. Brigid’s (ex-church, now cultural centre). Some cool musicians and performers will be present on this night. If yr into DIY electronics and circuit-bending and generally bizarre things, this might be for you! Anyway, I’ll be covering this event so if you see me, come say hello!

Also, on Saturday, November 22, the closing party has a pretty solid line up of DJs and performers including Radio Radio, this sort of funny acadien/francophone electro/hiphop outfit from Moncton/Montréal and some other places perhaps…

Good festival. Oh…most of this festival is FREE too. Unbelievable.

Second item on the agenda…Capital Fashion Week!

I’m happy that people are getting together in Ottawa to work on this. It’ll be very exciting to see where things progress from here. There are a lot of pretty interesting lines being shown on November 21 & 22. None from Ottawa but all Canadian nonetheless.

Also, Ottawa Fashion Week is happening November 13-15! This is their second time doing this and while I’m not sure if there is a friendly rivalry between CFW and OFW, I say, the more the merrier! Does lead to a bit of confusion though. There seems to be at least two designers being shown as part of OFW that use fur in their creations. Maybe people think this is OK since we’re in Canada and it gets cold but in my view, unless you’re camping on the outskirts of Iqaluit in March, no this is not OK.

Overall, it’s also too bad that very little seems geared towards men but I can’t blame them…there isn’t really much going on here in that department. I am actually quite interested in jewelry, however. Victoire, represent! Magpie too!

Competing with the Electric Fields closing party and also the Redbull Shoot To Thrill/Top of the World video premiere on November 22 is Capital Fashion Week’s own closing party. Basically, it’s going to be a rave like it’s 1997 again. Except, it’s in a legit venue and we already know where it is and you don’t have to take a 40-minute shuttle bus to a remote location to get there. OK…not really like a rave. Long story short, Guns n Bombs from Los Angeles are going to be performing with Ottawa’s Jokers of the Scene and some others. It’s going to be bananas.

PS: Images from my Active Absence series will be up at Wurm Gallery this December.  Some stuff people have already seen. Other things that haven’t been shown yet. More news later about this. Stay tuned…

Hairy t-shirts – plagiarism or coincidence?

There’s a cool band from the UK called Part Chimp who, in 2006, came out with a t-shirt design featuring a really hairy face on it as a means of promoting their album “I am come.”

Next, last spring, I saw that this clothing label called Brown Sound released a t-shirt called “Uncle Kyle” featuring an equally impressive amount of hair as a moustache/mouth/beard combo.

Now, I just found on Threadless, a t-shirt entitled “Lions Are Smarter Than I Am” designed by a dude named Keith Carter featuring a glasses-wearing lion with some serious mane action.

To me, there are neat similarities between these three but maybe you disagree. Kind of neat anyway.

Part Chimp “I am come” 2006.

Brown Sound “Uncle Kyle” 2008.

Keith Carter “Lions Are Smarter Than I Am” 2008.

Someone buy this for me.

I haven’t read the DaVinci (or seen the movie) but I like the (idea of the) Golden Ratio. The shirt is a cotton-polyester-rayon blend too. I bet it’s super soft.

Get it at Brooklyn Industries. I didn’t really get excited about most of their other designs but I do like this anchor.

Found on t-critic.

HOW TO be creative.

Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com wrote a list of ways to be creative that can be applied to nearly all “artforms”. It doesn’t pretend to have all the answers but it is a great list to start with and if you want more, he goes into detail further into the article.

PS: I found it on another Ottawa photographer’s blog.

African skinhead fashion

Using a roundup of mostly Ben Sherman, Fred Perry, Lonsdale and African accessories, Clayton Cubitt, a photographer from New York City, by way of New Orleans, created a series called Lagos Calling drawing from a number of influences in order to create a sort of alternate universe where Nigeria was a Mecca for black skinheads in the 70s.

I don’t know Clayton and tonnes of people are already talking about this series but I was drawn to the concept as it is both somewhat simple but also quite heavy. Also cool that, as indicated in Metro.pop magazine #31, where a partial set of the photos are printed, there were about 14 people involved in the whole project. Definite respect goes to the retouching work done by Gloss for the series. It’s rare that I buy magazines but when I saw Lagos Calling on the cover, I decided to treat myself. In the end, even if the overall writing, while serving a function, isn’t very interesting, the photos in the magazine kept me busy during my travel to Tel Aviv, where I currently find myself.

Scandinavian cell technology gives Palestine a new ghetto blaster

Like in Canada, Palestine scarves (Keffiyeh) as fashion before politics are sort of a big deal. Like jeans though, these don’t appeal so much to the 20-something set but rather kids from high school. Who is to really say what these people know about the political situation and where they stand? Who is to really say anything about the two guys in the photos above?

Now, about two weeks ago, while walking home, a group of kids came to me like they have nearly every day. They started dancing and for some reason I took my phone out. It may be something you do countless times a day without thinking but a few seconds later, this guy ran up behind me and yanked my phone from my hand! This led into a pretty good foot chase that ended when he jumped off a second-storey balcony but not before saying but two words to me: Fuck you. Quickly, this other guy (passer-by/accomplice/kid-in-the-know?) said that he could help me get my phone back. “Great!” Shortly after, he declares that this can only be done for a fee. Protesting a little, what choice did I have? I offered him 100 kroner (about $20). Not enough. I insist that this is the most I can give but he continues to ask that I offer more. “How much more?” He shrugs. Finally, he says “300 kroner” (about $60). Fine. And I got my phone back about 5 minutes later.

With a November 9 release date in the UK and speculations that Canadians will have to wait until Q1 2008, it should go without saying that there are no iPhones in Scandinavia yet. Inquiring minds willing to drop about $700 might want to know that some online stores are starting to sell unlocked ones that should work on most North American GSM providers, however. Still, iPhone or not, with Ericsson being a Swedish firm and Nokia being Finnish, this area is fairly well covered. What’s more, as cell phones are increasingly becoming the site of technological consolidation, it comes as no surprise to hear that on top of doing telephony things, my phone can take photos, record and edit video, record audio, play radio, play mp3s, (badly) surf the internet, wake me up with Rhianna’s help every morning, store 4GB of media and Bluetooth my life away.

All this but still, I practically always travel with my iPod which does some of the things my phone does but really only does one thing well and that is play mp3s. Not everyone feels the need to carry two devices though and who can blame them? What we can blame them for is forgetting headphones or the headphone adapter and riding the bus while listening to the latest (post-humous) Tupac single. Evidently, using cell phones as a bus ride boombox had once become such a serious problem that the city of Århus even put notices at every stop instructing passengers not to do this.

These are the sounds of a generation though and really, not much can or should be done to squash it. Truly, what I find most funny about this whole thing is how these speakers seem to only cater to one style of music. For example, once, I naively put Louisville band Lords on my phone, hoping that I could jam out on some sick riffage. Well, It turns out that the guy who designed the speaker on my phone favours Atlanta hiphop to Louisville hardcore.

Dance Tonight, Denim Tomorrow

This label is stuck to a pair of jeans made by French denim label April 77. Do they know that their slogan for Spring/Summer 2007 is the name of Orchid’s sweet 10″ from 2001?

Scandinavian street fashion is pretty interesting in comparison to what hip kids wear in north America. For example, while brands like Nudie or Cheap Monday or whatever else might be labels that certain people covet and whose products only a few people actually own, here, every other person in their late-teens or early 20s seems to be wearing Nudies or $400 Evisu jeans with cool selvage and terrible graphics. In a place like this where everyone is rocking what I’ve come to know to be next-level shit, it’s a little hard to tell what are the latest fashions in this country and exactly who is raising the bar. Then again, it doesn’t really matter.

What is most interesting though is how insignificant brands are. Besides H&M (which permeate this city in a serious way), it’s hard to find a pair of jeans anywhere for under $100 but Evisu jeans are still sold in what you might consider to be a Danish equivalent to Foot Locker. Also, the same person you’ll see wearing this fancy denim will also be seen wearing the same sneakers that your mom would probably wear if she was Danish. What seems to be the top selling sneakers here are not glow in the dark Nike Dunks or whatever (though people still rock these and Adidas) but this terribly made Kawasaki shoe that seems like a bad version of Chuck Taylors or something. You can find this sneak on bargain tables outside nearly clothing store and everyone buys them.

So, my dear North American comrades, next time you think about dropping $150 on a pair of European jeans, remember that if you were actually here, you’d probably be dressing like the half the 15 year olds on the bus.

On that note, I love the Cheap Mondays I was able to get for 200dkk (about $40 – no tax).