Soliloquy Of Chaos

Today I'm introducing a new series at Pacific Standard wherein on days when my life is nearing TOTAL CHAOS I will post a series of completely random images from the vault. Pacific Standard is nothing if not image collectors, and over the years a hard drive and ten big sketchbooks have been filled to near maximum capacity with stuff I've found or scanned for photo and graphic inspiration, or for no reason than that they somehow grab me. Might as well start sharing them.

I don't know where this is from—I've had it since high school. I think it might be a still from Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, but I'm really not sure. For some reason I love this image and have held on to it. When I was in college a friend of mine started a band called Mental Bullring based on this image on my wall.

This is an ad that I grabbed from the extraordinary selection of images available online through the British Library archives.

This is a record that Keith Haring designed for some Princess who had a party and wanted to sing the invitation. I think I clipped this out of one of my mom's magazines in the early '80s. Wish I could find the record, I've never seen it.

This is from a photo shoot for the July 1968 issue of American Vogue. Diana Vreeland sent Veruschka along with stylist/designer Giorgio di Sant'Angelo and photographer Franco Rubartelli to the middle of the desert in Arizona with a bunch of fabric and told them to make a fashion story out of it.

The Vogue story has influenced a ton of subsequent stories (like this one from Pop magazine several years ago, photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott) and ad campaigns by Missoni, Calvin Klein, and others. It's interesting to see images from the sixties and track how they've been re-discovered and recycled. I don't mind it as long as the new thing is good enough to justify itself.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent a lot of time in the library at Parsons when I went back to school there. I always came back to this book. The book itself is boring as hell but there's something about the check-out card that I really love—"The search for the robots" typed out on this beautiful antiquated, analog thing. I don't know, I don't have time to explain it right now but I think it's cool. I scanned it and printed it out really big.

This is from another book I got at a library sale—Bill Brand't London Boy.

This is a picture I got of a cardinal in our backyard (there are actually two—if you click to enlarge you can see the other one at the lower right).

I can't remember where this came from but I think we can all agree it's pretty kick-ass.

And finally, this week's theme song:
Gang Starr Soliloquy Of Chaos MP3