Warwick Saint: Photographer

Most people have come to experience photographer Warwick Saint's work through his collaboration with Lady Gaga. But long before the tea cup yielding/parma ham wearing diva got her mitts on him,  Warwick  had already carved himself a reputation as an iconic image maestro.

Unlike uber photographer  David La Chapelle who creates fantastical images filled with crazy-arsed props and people, Warwick places huge emphasis on believability in his photographs, but not at the neglect of beauty.

"It’s got to be believable and it’s got to be beautiful,” he says.

Although Saint jokes that the key to being a good photographer is "to rock a shaved head", his incredible eye for beauty, detail and colour coupled with his talent for making people look extraordinarily beautiful, makes him one of the most popular photographers amongst models and actresses, who all crammer to get in front of his lens.

His swimsuit and sports illustrated photographs are particularly iconic, as is his Ink series of tattooed women.

Originally from South Africa, he left to come to London. In 1999, his break came courtesy of  Dutch magazine, which commissioned him to  shoot 'Elephant Boy.'

Sailor Dog

And as you can see, the bottle comes in old sailor dog tattoos.

“Sweden’s first vodka in PET bottle. It’s also one of the first vodka made of organically grown, Swedish barley. The new Swedish eco-vodka is distilled four times and has a clean, fruity nose with some spicy aftertaste and released in a Swedish-made PET packaging for minimal environmental impact."

And if things get messy in the kitchen, you could always mop it up with sailor tattoos kitchen towel, on the left.

Ricardo Cavolo is an illustrator living in Madrid. Much of his work is inspired by the 1932 film Freaks. His art reflects his interests in the circus, the American heartland, Russia, gypsy culture and music. Some highlights from latest exhibit are  featured below:

Season Fantasy Cities

Spring ....... is for spending time in  London hanging out in Cafe Kick on Exmouth Market after work or up in roof tops in Shoreditch.  Spring in London is about The FIRSTS:  sipping your first Pimms, attending your first barbecue, spotting your first spring flowers, showing off your pedicure. And if all else fails, driving to  the countryside  to check out the bluebell fields.

Summer .... is for Sydney, although technically it would be our winter. Sun-filled days on Copper Wharf at Aki's restaurant  or flirting with Chris Isaak at the Blue Hotel (we did!). Yes Chris stays at the blue hotel when he's in Sydney, which his quite funny considering the song. Shopping for vintage finds at Bondi Markets after a sunbathing session on the north bondi rocks  and heading down to  the Icebergs restaurant for rock oysters as the sun sets.

Autumn ....is for Paris, because the light is gorgeous,  the sky is still blue and the air is crisp. Paris has an exotic urban day spa called  Sultane de Saba, where you can get a rassoul scrub and rose oil massage, and feel like you are in Marrakesh. Paris has a great kinky side too, so I love heading down to Pigalle to stock up on Cuban-heeled seamed stockings and Italian erotic comic books 

Every visit to Paris must be finished off with a night at the Crazy Horse Cabaret......Trained in ballet, all the dancers are perfectly integrated into the full choreography of the piece, creating the most stunning possible nude visual effect through their movement and bodies.... and they wear Louboutins too.

Winter ..... is for Venice. How I love that place in the winter... Venice is another world, an enchanted place  where sea becomes land, cars are boats, streets are canals, and reality and fantasy blur.  But winter makes it even more romantic, as  the mist fills the streets and the icy waters flood the cobbled street  at night, so much so, that the hunky locals offer to carry you across to your doorstep. Venice is about bagging yourself a gorgeous apartment with its own private staircase leading to the canal. Very Gothic, very unforgettable.... When I was 17, my friend and I stayed in such an apartment, and I still remember how otherworldly that staircase leading to a basement filled with water appeared. 

And of course, nothing beats  walking across the Piazza San Marco to  the Codognato-run jewellery boutique window to spot Your Memento Mori. This tiny shop full of baroque opulence, established  back in 1866,  always appears to be closed and actually lets very few people in.... pieces in here - most of which look like they should be in a museum -  are at mind-boggling prices.

And let us not forget SEPTEMBER, as this is a season within itself....September is for enjoying the Maritime Alps on the Italian French border. 

There is a small  apartment I rent out in the quaint medieval village perched on a mountain, called Apricale. You get the best of both worlds, as you combine mountain living in a medieval ambiance, with La Dolce Vita style living by driving down to the coast for long lunches in San Remo. 

At Xmas, the town of Apricale lights a bonfire which they have to keep going until St Nicholas.

Film of the Week: The Man Who Would Be King

I have always liked Michael Cain and have never come across anyone who doesn't appreciate him as an actor, although I have heard that he is a bugger to work with, not necessarily on set but more in terms of business.

So when my friend offered me a  ticket to  attend the MICHAEL CAIN IN CONVERSATION event  at the British Film Institute tonight,  I immediately headed down  to the South Bank.

Don't you just love the South Bank by the way... last week, as I crossed Waterloo Bridge after attending the London Fashion Weekend event at Somerset House,  I managed to catch a glimpse of a midnight  tango show that was taking place on the terrace overlooking the river , in which the tango dancers were dancing  in between mini  fire torches - it was pure sex.

Anyway, back to Caine - Michael is very entertaining and engaging and nearly everything he said was met with raucous laughter from the packed auditorium. Sometimes the audience was just too keen to laugh, if you know what I mean.

 His lovable, no-nonsense cockney accent (although he comes from South London) sounds exactly the same as it does on film, and he looks exactly the same too -- although he is surprisingly tall. Journalist and presenter Francine Stock did the honours in terms of navigating the hour-long conversation. Apparently, Francine is one of the most sought after film star interviewers because of her knack for asking intelligent questions about their work.

As Michael amused the audience with his anecdotes, I tried hard to memorise the juicy bits:       

• Michael has worked with Elizabeth Taylor and said that she was very nice, although she would hate you forever if you called her Liz.Her nickname for him is Mickey.
•  
• He once had Hitchcock knock on his trailer door to ask him if he wanted to play the psycho in Frenzy, but declined the role because he didn't want to play a woman killer (he has a wife and two daughters).
• He noted that Hitchcock eats steak everyday for lunch and never spoke to him again after he declined the part
• Chis Nolan (director of Batman Begins) is super secretive about his scripts  and has code names for his movie projects, on of which was Oliver's Girlfriend.
• Caine will be playing the butler again in Batman and will start shooting in May 2011.

After the talk was finished, my friend and I bought his new biography The Elephant To Hollywood, and queued up to get it signed, which gave me the opportunity to observe the book publicist at work. As a publicist myself, I always like watching others at work.

When it came to him signing the introduction of the book,  he was quite unceremonious about the whole thing, and only managed to raise his eyes briefly to meet mine to say hi, although it was nice hi.  I got him to dedicate it to my dad.

In between the book signing and the screening, my friend managed to spot Caine getting ambushed by eager fans whilst he entered the gents. Ah, the life of a movie star.

After the whole book signing thing wrapped up, we  took our seats  to watch a screening of 1975 classic The Man Who Would Be King - starring Caine and Sean Connery as two lovable rogues in John Huston’s late career masterpiece.Again, Caine took to the mic to introduce the film.

Kipling's story was a favourite of Huston's from childhood, and he dreamed of adapting it for most of his career, originally imagining Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart as the two ex-soldiers on a quest for glory and riches somewhere beyond civilisation. Finally made in 1975 with Caine and Connery perfectly cast as the ambitious rogue imperialists, the long-nurtured project proved worth the wait, the grandly entertaining tale becoming a late career masterpiece.

The film features some of the best exotic market scenes I have ever seen - really delightfully captured, as well as some really authentic looking tribal scenes. The Freemason references are really interesting and subtle. The plot goes something like this:

Danny Dravot (Sean Connery) and Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) travel to a very remote region in Afghanistan and slowly build an army from successively defeated natives. After Danny miraculously survives an arrow to the chest, the people decide that he is a God and treat him accordingly. Both of the British men are keen to get back home but not without the vast horde of gold and treasure that the locals have. Unfortunately for Danny, his mortality is revealed, and the natives turn on them

Shangri-La

 

Back in the summer,  a temporary magical city was set up in Blighty called Shangri-La. This city left a lasting impression on all those who dared to venture and experience it's full post-apocalyptic graphic novel world.

Think Blade Runner streets, shop windows "selling" all kinds of weird and wonderful things, a bar called FISH AND TITS and a nightclub called the SNAKEPIT, where  bouncers would only let you in if you had a tattoo. My kind of place, you know.

The natives of this city wondered around at the stroke of midnight looking like this:

Surreal street art gave the place a really weird and wonderful movie set feel. There was even an estate agency set up selling fake slums. Most amusing.

Here are some of the photographic highlights:

 Crazy street art - very much on the non-naive side.

           Shop windows selling dried up dreams and un-programmed memories

Michele Lamy

Despite nearly two months of blog posting absentia, London Girl still managed to attract a high volume of traffic thanks to one person and one post I wrote back in January 2010, titled: Michele Lamy Rick Owens in which I go on and on about how fascinating this women is.

This women, is of course, the one and the only: Michele Lamy.
It was actually the director of Mark Fast who first alerted me to her existence when she recounted to me how she saw her make an entrance in a Parisian  Cafe during the Paris SS09 shows.

Yes, the emissary from the galactic universe of good taste, wife and muse of Rick Owens, and overall mythical figure from the fashion underworld,  seems to have attracted the attention from the fashion public a couple of weeks ago, thanks to an unforgettable entrance she made at one of the fashion shows in September.

And it all started when bloggers jak and jil posted these shots.... which the masses used to project all kinds of fashion fantasies and speculations.

Of course, the Owen's are too cool to  ever want to aspire to  become fashion fodder. This Mad Max power couple reportedly couldn't give a flying about celebrity endorsements, advertising in Vogue  or shitty perfume launches. 

I have always loved the fact that Michele doesn't seem too bothered with nail polish, preferring to ink her hands and nails into the desired colour. What a classy lady. This is of course very edgy in the fashion world, but very traditional in the tribal world, where henna stained tips are still used by women. 

When in doubt, follow the girl in the Barbour jacket!

The British countryside is renown the world over for its rolling hills, green pastures and long country walks to the pub. This weekend saw me spending  a glorious Sancere and Bollinger fueled weekend nestled in the comforting bosom of Wiltshire, at my old school friend's family stud farm. Very posh!

Ever the domestic goddess -  our party which consisted of the creme de la creme from the music and film world, and er, me  - were treated to a succession of food-porn esque culinary treats, straight from the arga and the outdoor BBQ.

Paddocks surrounded the estate, with millions of pounds worth of gorgeous thorough-bred horses. So beautiful are these creatures that they make us humans look like a failed galactic experiment.

Spending time in the country is usually characterised by  talking about the future whilst drinking red wine, and the past whilst drinking white wine, gathered around a fire place playing rude boy scrabble.

In between meals, you sleep, keep saying how you need to move out of London, play with the numerous dogs, and catch up on reading.

But the fire place is where you close off for the evening  whilst listening to New Orleans jazz records from the 30's... that is what we did anyway.

Talking of fire places..... we almost died from smoke inhalation because a city dweller took the reigns on lighting the fire without checking if the chimney vent was actually open. More bizarrely was the fact that despite the drawing room being filled with dense black smoke straight from the set of Lost, we were beckoned to come and sit by the fire, with the reassuring words  it will all  "be OK if we kept low."

By this, they meant keeping away from the heavy stratosphere of smoke which loomed on top of our heads.  Like sheep, we rolled down like military men oblivious to the fact that we were sitting by an indoor bonfire with no ventilation, whilst paintings and grandfather clocks were covered in a layer of black smoke. Ludicrous, I know, but all the country air can really make you oblivious to danger.

The common-sense survival gene soon returned and we realised that something was most definitely rotten in Wiltshire, as I was the first to break away from the madness and head to the door for fresh air, whilst reminding everyone how easier it was to actually breath oxygen.

As panic struck across the board and  we realised how monumentally oblivious and thick we had just been, the room was finally allowed to breath  and frantic poking of chimney vent took place.

Despite this, smokers were still make to smoke outside. Oh the irony.

 Anyway, back to the idyllic side, taking long walks across ancient woodlands and rolling hills, is what its all about. Characterised by its high downland and wide valleys, this part of the world is a true English rose.

My Summer Secret

There is a secret magical place  located in the south of France, deep in Cathar country.... not far from Carcassone, where my mates hold some legendary parties over the summer and live a wonderfully bohemian, TV-free lifestyle for the rest of the year. Some of them are from the circus scene, others  hail from the literary and  photography circles. All are fascinating, original, interesting and, more importantly, interested.

The women are tough, fresh faced and make-up free, and the men have toned tanned torsos from all the hard labour.

A group of them  have pulled their efforts together to restore a 200 year old derelict manor house,and turn it into an artist commune for themselves and  also provide a nurturing space for fellow free spirits.  I popped over to hang out with them over the summer  and came back with some wonderful memories that will warm me cockles through the winter months.

This is a shot of the heart of all the action ..... the surprisingly well-equipped semi-open air kitchen. Everyday, we would sit on a long old table in the shade having extended 2 hour lunches eating, drinking and "discussing" like only the French know how.

The track leading to the project, as they like to call it,  is full-on scary complete with bendy narrow roads with mountainous drops, but when you finally get there - via a 20 minute footpath through fern blanketed woodland, you  truly feel like you have stepped into another place and time.


Some people find derelict buildings eery, but  I love the juxtaposition of the crumbling slate manor played out against a backdrop of blue skies and lush green foliage.

This is where we set up the all important fire for all the food cooking. Talk about open-air living.

It's not all sweetness and chasing clouds.... Someone casually mentioned that they had found a mutilated pony in the forest a few weeks before I arrived. I almost fell of my chair, as we are all sleeping in tents set up by the entrance of the forest and I have watched horror films which start off in a similar vain. I am not naive! These people don't watch tv or  films, so they have no idea of how freaked out we are by mutiliated shit happening in the forest, it means three things: Psycho on the loose, wild beast in need of his shreddies OR......

Moving on

This is a shot of some of my French Friends, discussing the existence of UFOs over a breakfast, following the previous night's  sighting of a mysterious flying object which hovered out of the forest and looked like a distant star, shot up into the sky at high speed but then flew across the sky emitting  an airplane noise. Well butter my nose and call me motel if that wasn't a UFO. But, French people don't believe in UFOs.

FACIAL REVIEW: Ling Oxygen & Ultra Sound

Pre-Baku, I decided to head down to the exclusive Beauty Works West salon in Westbourne Grove for their famous Ling Oxygen and Ultra-Sound facial, a perfect blend of beauty and science.  At £125 for 80 minutes, its more expensive than a 60 minutes Creme de la Mer facial and just £20 cheaper then Bliss's iconic Triple Oxygen Facial.

So  I had high expectations, especially after having read the marketing blurb:

This amazing facial is designed by New York’s hottest facialist Ling Chan, combining ancient techniques with state-of-the-art formulations for optimal skin health and radiance…and those Park Avenue Princesses thought they were going to keep her as their little secret? Oops… Sorry girls! The facial includes skin analysis, exfoliation, steam cleansing and extractions. You will then be treated to a massage, followed by the ultimate Oxygen Plasma and ultra-sound treatment, and to top it all off, a bespoke herbal mask to heal any remaining imperfections. This really is the ultimate facial, which produces phenomenal results... You’ll still be glowing well into next month!

What they forgot to mention is that Ling is very keen on extractions, and her practitioners are even keener. Now, I don't mind extractions because they can do a lot to revive a complexion, but what I was subjected to during this facial was torture! I think that the therapist went over every single past, present and future pore and excavated it like some fossicker on an archeological mission.

My cries of pain, help, despair were met with an un-sympathetic " you really need this" - so I continued to succumb to the extraction process hanging on to the thought that I will come out of this looking like a Park Avenue Princess.

Did I fuck...... the post-facial mirror checking was frightening more like Croydon Park on a lunch break, as my face was left with red patches everywhere and raised bumps, but I was told that it would go down.

VERDICT: I am impressed with how clear my nose is and how some parts of my skin look totally blemish free, however, I have yet to experience the post-facial  blemish-free glow.

To be fair, they do warn that you shouldn't  get this facial before a big event or wedding, as it will take 3 days for the skin to heal and for an remaining impurities to come to the surface and flake off (they give you some sample size follow up lotions to apply at home).

Either my skin is the wrong barometer from which to judge this facial or too long was spent excavating it which made the experience very uncomfortable, see painful...

One thing is for sure, I won't be coming back. If I won't glowing, I will continue to head down to Creme de la Mer, and if I want major extractions I will continue to head to Bliss, which at least leaves enough time post extractions for the calming down period.

From Baku With Love

What better way to relaunch and resurrect LONDON GIRL, then by posting from Baku in Azerbaijan.... Yes, I am in Caucuses on a work mission having hung out on roof tops filled with sleazy oil-rig americanos, drunk tea with an Ambassador who was dressed in a cashmere tracksuit, attended a trial wearing court shoes, watched a clandestine broadcasting station at work, dodged a falling piece of scaffolding and got followed around by  a black SUV at some point... I kid you not. And that  my friends, is only the tip of the iceberg....



View from my hotel room

AZERBY WHO?

A country's history is etched on the face of its inhabitants, and Azerbaijan ain't no different. People have the most remarkable faces here: a cross-road of Persian, Russians, Mongols and Turks all played out against a backdrop of carved out slavic features.

Fresh from having shaken off the shackles of communism and all the associated drama, the country seems to be heading into a new era of controlled wealth (for some) and imposed stealth for many others.

WHAT NOT TO ASK IN AZERBAIJAN

Oh, and let me share my MAJOR faux pas..... whilst putting my shoes back on after visiting an Azerbaijani family, I noticed the replica bust of a man with imposing features on top of a cabinet, which I recognised but could not quite pin-point because they had placed a silly Mexican hat on him.

So I asked the owner of the house "who is that" pointing to the life-size replica head. As soon as I asked, I felt that I should have maybe just kept my mouth shut, as he looked at me as if I was some Alien of Armenian decent as he replied in a slightly raised/irate voice " IT'S LENIN"

Oh how I died a thousand Mongolian deaths. The shame. Of course I knew who Lenin was, but that poxy hat made it really hard for me to see the top of his head. When in doubt, fuck your curiosity, you don't need to know everything just keep your mouth shout and blend in.

Back to Blighty tomorrow...