Gil Blay – Seagull (2016)
I’m not here to suggest Blay is a gifted image maker. Hardly.
However, as I’ve stated previous (and it bears repeating), like the old adage about monkeys and typewriters even crappy creatives get something right on occasion.
This probably would’ve caught my attention even if it didn’t come immediately after this image of Nicole Vaunt in Patagonia by Corwin Prescott.
My first thought was when the fuck am I going to Patagonia–got damn.
My second thought was that I would’ve really liked to have seen Vaunt in a less Den lille Havfrue and more like the above.
More often than not Tumblr is super frustrating–with the porn bots, shitty attribution striping personal aesthetic as self-definition blogs but occasionally the slap dash gumbo of seemingly randomized post aggregation results in seeing things in a completely different way.
It reminds me of David Bowie’s process–decoupage, which I found out about through the fabulous BBC series Luther, featuring the formidable (and hot as eff) Idris Elba.
Unlike most of my peer group–who are decidedly secular–I was raised in an ultra-conservative Xtian cult. Unlike my friends, my folks didn’t bestow a solid familiarity upon me with regard to the cornerstones of modern art rock. (I’ve had to blaze my own trail, in that regard.)
I began to learn about Bowie after he died–which meant discovering the allegations of rape and pedophilia that (as with most similarly aligned superstars in that day and age) never quite stuck to him because he was white, rich and male. (Jia Tolentino, who gets my vote for the best up and coming young writer and is my secret dream person to guest curate Acetylene Eyes, covered this negative legacy for Jezebel with an impressively clear-headed and thoroughly nuanced analysis.)
I’ve dipped my toe into Bowie’s oeuvre. It’s not all exactly my cup of tea–but what I like I like quite a lot.
This design by Daniel Gray turned up later and I think it fits a little bit too well here not to offer it as a summation:
Acetylene Eyes 