ABCDE Arts&Style sunday, june 13, 2010
ROBIN GIVHAN It was a very
good year Despite the recession, fashion industry had a year to celebrate. E3
BLOGS AND CHATS
washingtonpost.com/style Chaplin in Arlington “A Thief Catcher” will be shown at a comedic silent films festival. E7 Carolyn Hax Single and careerless? Don’t let the time go to waste. E9
Ask Amy, E10 Celebrations, E9 Movie Guide, E7 Horoscope, E10 Lively Arts Guide, E4 ONLOVE
2nd chance After their first encounter, he disappeared from her life. Years later they reunited. E6
TV PREVIEW
A “fur” jacket, from the “Artisanal” line of Belgian designer Martin Margiela, is in fact made from the plastic stalks used to attach price tags to garments. It is one of the more aggressively
thoughtful objects in the fourth Cooper-Hewitt design triennial.
MARINA FAUST E AX FN FS LF PW DC BD PG AA FD HO MN MS SM
JOHN P. JOHNSON/HBO
CHARMED, I’M SURE: Psychic waitress Sookie (Anna Paquin) and vampire sheriff Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) look deep, deeeep into each other’s eyes.
In praise of vampires who aren’t drips
‘True Blood’ adds a power struggle and more new characters than you can shake a stake at
by Hank Stuever Designs
Contemplating those charges put her in a quandary: Her new field was all about promoting a culture of buying. The designs Waxman submitted for her senior-year class tried to lock horns with the problem. She made a cast-ceramic wallet that asks you to consider “the things that you’re consuming in the act of being a purchaser.” Its strange heft in your pocket, its fragility, the unease in its use (you have to pull off a rubber strap to get at your money) makes
too good to waste H
The new guard shapes an eco-friendly, conscientious ethos that rejects consumerism by Blake Gopnik
ere is a hard truth about 21st-century Americans: “You have no culture. All you guys do is buy things.” At least that was the constant complaint that Sa-
rah Waxman, a design student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, heard during her junior year abroad.
the act of buying feel vexed. She created a strange cast-ceramic bowl: It looks just like the industrial molds that ceramic house- wares are cast in, complete with seams and registration “keys.” The 22-year-old explains that the pieces in her line “are saying that everything you’re taking in is manufactured.” Waxman, like few of her peers, is selling a radical new credo for design: That an object built on truly novel, conscientious principles ought to reject the old consumerist ones. It can’t look like the high-design objects we’ve been scarfing up for years. In fact, ambitious designers may need to come up with objects that convince us that not buying them might be the best thing we could do.
design continued on E2 SARAH WAXMAN
A cup from the “Momento Comburo (Reminder of Consumption)” series by Sarah Waxman, a new graduate in industrial design from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She wants her ceramic vessels to evoke the industrial molds used to make clay housewares, hinting that industry is more present in our lives than most designs let on.
FUSEPROJECT
A prototype computer for the “One Laptop Per Child” project, from the Cooper-Hewitt design triennial. It aims to bring computing to disadvantaged children, but carries with it the high-modern stylings — and thinking — of First World consumption.
The hanging candelabrum by Mary Wallis, a 28-year-old Australian who lives in New York, is made of broken wine glasses and silver chain. It doesn’t try to camouflage its origins: “I’m interested in reconstructing the broken, and almost making it more valuable than it was originally,” Wallis says.
WILLIAM WALLIS
At the rate we’re going, you’ll soon be able to get your PhD in vampire semiotics. What metaphors and meanings don’t the immortal bloodsuckers offer? What themes can’t they represent? And why are they everywhere now? Some 35 years after Anne Rice introduced the idea of the chaste vampire with the tortured soul, the mythical creatures have been brought back from Hal- loween-aisle exile to practice a curious form of absti- nence. America’s teenage girls swoon for a surplus of far-too-pretty vampires who are barely up to the task; these baby Dracs go to high school in the light of day and text love poems more than they actually feed. To- day’s vampires are too anguished to enjoy a sang-wich. Which is only one of the reasons Alan Ball’s “True
Blood,” the ridiculously melodramatic HBO series about vampires in the dirty, muggy South, is such a complete and total turn-on. “True Blood” is whatever “Twilight” isn’t — violent, scary, funny, screamingly gross, obscene, sexy and yet subliminally ethical. Based on the novels of Charlaine Harris, “True Blood” is built by and for the culture wars, offering comment on racial, ethnic, sexual, religious and class divisions. It’s all just a sendup of modern America. With its relentless forward momentum and rapidly
detonated subplots, “True Blood” is everything grown- ups want from their cable box and everything people without cable desire in a remedial Netflix catch-up. It’s also every sordid thing moral guardians fear most, which should be endorsement enough. In its first two seasons, “True Blood” spun enough
concurrent storylines to seroconvert a legion of rabid fans who devour each gory installment. But in its third season, which begins Sunday night, “True Blood” seems dangerously close to peaking, as it introduces nearly a dozen new characters into a saga that is al- ready too engorged. A lot of these new characters are werewolves. What
law demands that all vampire franchises must recruit other iconic monsters to the saga? If it’s not witches (a la “True Blood’s” detour last summer into the “mae- nad” orgy-mama storyline; boy, did she get tiresome), then it’s werewolves. It’s “Groovie Ghoulies” syn- drome, I guess — and I’ll gladly share my Count Choc- ula with anybody who gets that reference.
tv preview continued on E6
Tom Petty: Finding ‘Mojo’ in the blues. C4
by Chris Richards
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