During a recent visit to Los Angeles I picked up the video compilation BLESS: Celebrating 10 Years of Themelessness at Ooga Booga. When I asked Wendy, the shop owner, about the dvd I was told “It’s not for people new to Bless. You won’t learn more anything about them. It’s for the true Bless fan.” For a moment I considered whether or not I was a true Bless fan and decided that I was.

Bless is a conceptual fashion house based in Paris and Berlin started by Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag in 1996. They release products designed to “make the near future worth living for.” They make thoughtful garments,  jewelry for electronic cables, hanging wardrobe mobiles, and other items intended to be used, lived with, and sometimes discarded.

BLESS: Celebrating 10 Years of Themelessness, released by Bureau des Videos, collects 15 short videos from the Bless archive. Many of the pieces are documentation from the public presentations of their varied collections. In N^o25, Uniseasoners, as people enter the dining area of a restaurant they are seated by servers wearing Bless clothing. The servers take orders, bring wine, and later bring food. Everything is normal, maybe even boring, except for occasional pauses to highlight elements of the clothing. A scarf turns into a hooded sweater. In another video, N^o13 Basics, a narrator lets me know that we’re in an apartment in Paris where several friends have spent the day together “wearing sweaters, bodysuits, trousers and customized Levi’s jeans” as if they were their own.

There is nothing precious about Bless. Bless is a project that presents ideas about living. There is no lifestyle to buy, you must bring your own. As their modest iWeb page says, FITS EVERY STYLE.

Hope everyone is having a great Halloween and in the spirit of dressing up as things you are not here is the latest movie trailer by Spike Jonze “Where the Dirty Hipsters Are” the sequel to the smash hit “Where the Wild Things Are”. Have fun!

Food, Inc., by director Robert Kenner, made me feel stupid. It reminded me of every reason why I loved  Our Daily Bread, of 2006. Our Daily Bread exercised subtly and restraint, with very still, bleak vignettes of the monstrous places that produce the food we eat around the world. It does this without commentary, just offering a view of what is. Food, Inc. practices neither restraint nor subtlety. Each segment of the film is broken into segments that are announced with a title. As if we couldn’t catch on that hey, now we’re going to learn about corn.

If you have every seen more than one PETA video, or thought about the fact that high fructose corn syrup is in most processed foods, then this film will basically be a refresher for you. I picked up a few good conversation starters, like, if a cow were allowed to graze on grass for (I don’t remember it exactly…) a whole bunch of E. Coli would be naturally eliminated from its gut. However, instead of letting cows graze, we prefer to wash the processed hamburger meat with chlorine, which also kills the virus. The breakdown of who owns what we eat was also interesting, as well as the fact that there are only three or four commercial slaughterhouses left in the entire United States.

The graphics were too cutesy and glossy for me as well. You would think a film that is focus on questioning how “natural” our food is would have more organic and basic feeling fonts and graphics, instead of super processed looking titles and animation. A lot of it felt very Disney-fied. Or maybe thats just me.

The “experts” were entertaining and knew what they were talking about. However, the selection was seriously limited. There was the bad corporation, the good farmer, the victimized small business owners, the granola hippie who went corporate, the sob story.

In general, the film was well researched, and would be great to show in an elementary or middle school. The issues are important and should definitely be given the space to be discussed. But, just a tip, if you doze off during the entire film, the directors conveniently end the film with a few minutes of bullet points of what you should have picked up during the course of the film. To summarize: buy locally, buy organically, eat seasonally, and try not to get E.Coli.

If you want to check out the trailer, you can see it here. But, if you haven’t already, definitely check out its classier counterpart, Our Daily Bread.

First there was Hevetica, the documentary about the font and typography in general. It was all the rage in art circles for a week and now comes the spiritual sequel Objectified which promises to do the same for industrial design.

Check out the trailer below.

About a month ago I was able to catch a showing of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In after much nagging from my film buff sister. Adapted from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 best selling novel Låt den rätte komma in, the film centers on the relationship that forms between Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and the undead Eli(Lina Leandersson).

Oskar a 12-year old who spends his days being bullied at school and his nights imagining revenge. He meets Eli another outcast who has recently moved next door to Oskar. Set in the suburbs of Stockholm in the mid 80’s, the frozen landscape becomes the perfect setting for the sudden rash of murders. The film is remarkably beautiful but also is playful with its use of vampire folklore. Finally we see in a film what happens when a vampire enters a room uninvited. Hands down the best contemporary vampire film I have seen.

*Note: I rewatched the film this weekend after I picked up a copy at Target. I thought I had seen some subtle changes in the conversations but didn’t think much of it. The consumerist yesterday posted an article about the dumbing down of the subtitles. Hopefully they will release a copy with the original subtitles soon.

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