The Return of Red

So it's been a long long time, and for a while it seemed like .Big Hair, Small Hips. might have come to an end. But I think what I really needed was a long breather. Before my hiatus I had been blogging almost everyday for over a year. It didn't feel like I was out of ideas per se, but more like my ideas needed to fester in my mind for a few months before finally being unleashed. So I think their good and ready now.

In mid-October I had the pleasure of visiting London for the fifth time, but instead of roaming the streets like a clueless tourist I got an insider's look into the Big Smoke. My host was none other than ex-Tracer Phoebe Lovatt, a born and bred Londoner and in many ways a long lost sister. With her superpowers at my disposal my tour of London was unlike any of my previous visits. I saw the real London: a community of vibrant, creative, impassioned individuals from every background imaginable. I realized that New York City really is a city of foreigners, a city where everyone is clawing their way to the top. Londoners are just as ambitious as New Yorkers, but have a different connection to the city since it's more often than not their hometown. All that to say as an antsy New Yorker, walking the streets of London felt like a traipse through Candyland. Not one person exuded that anxious, go-go-go undercurrent that is felt in New York. It was as if I had stepped into a parallel dimension where impatience had been replaced with spirited understanding. And I liked it, a lot.

Now with that inspiration in mind, it's time to get my creative juices flowing once again.

The Golden Era

So much focus is placed on Germany's dark history, but what is often ignored are the astonishing cultural and intellectual feats that were made just years before Hitler's rise to power. This time period, called the Weimar Republic, lasted from the end of World War I to around 1933 when Hitler gained power. Weimar culture was vibrant, daring, and unnervingly modern. Artists who were scarred by what they had seen during the Great War, used their medium as a way of dealing with their pain, and in doing so they unleashed a type of realism that is rarely seen even to this day. My favorite works emerged during this short but productive time, and artists like Otto Dix and Christian Schad (works pictured above) were part of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, whose work was gritty, dark, and purposefully ugly. Thankfully I don't have to travel all the way to Germany or Austria to see these pieces in person, as my favorite New York City museum, the Neue Galerie, exclusively caters to my obsession. From now through August 30th, the Galerie is exhibiting a collection of Otto Dix's work, the first such collection ever held in North America. Now put down your bratwurst, and get yourself over to the Neue for a taste of some real German culture.

The Man Of The Century

Imagine living to see your 100th birthday. Then imagine that during that lifetime you produced some of the most important anthropological work of the 20th Century. What a life that would have been right? Claude Levi-Strauss, French anthropologist and the “father of structuralism,” lived that life. Levi-Strauss’ approach to anthropology was so far removed from other thinkers of his time, because he looked at different cultures through a unique lens – instead of trying to pinpoint all of their differences, he “argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.” By analyzing myth and culture, Levi-Strauss challenged many theories which reduced tribal behavior and society as primitive, and solely based on tradition. The NYTimes ran a great article about his life and work today, and what struck me the most about the article was Levi-Strauss’ interpretations of modern living: “With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, [Strauss] also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.” For a man who devoted his life to exploring humanity, and who at one point taught in a local high school in Paris where fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was incredibly in touch with the realities of the world.