In Which We Recline In A Zebra-Striped Bathtub

Science Is Over

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

At the dawn of the 1980s, no one’s wardrobe was complete without a pair of Fiorucci jeans. Preferably you would have seven of the skin-tight pairs — one in every color of the rainbow, to be worn with your gold Fiorucci cowboy boots. When he turned 15, Marc Jacobs "saved and saved" for his first pair. Miuccia Prada has claimed to have only ever owned one pair of jeans; they were from Fiorucci. Diana Ross, Jackie Onassis, and Lauren Bacall were fans, as was every 13-year-old girl with a Seventeen magazine subscription.

Elio Fiorucci opened his first shop in Milan in 1967 not with couture in mind, but with the idea of bringing the London street trends of the Youthquake movement to Italy. The Fiorucci line debuted shortly after in 1970. However, Elio was a marketing whiz with a taste for the outré, not a designer. The clothing reflected this; much of the line consisted of basics like polo shirts, denim jackets, and tote bags emblazoned with Fiorucci’s winged putti logo.

To Elio’s credit, before Fiorucci, designer denim was unheard of. The company was also one of the first to embrace a global aesthetic, importing not just English looks, but also drawing inspiration from traditional prints and fashions of India and Brazil, with Fiorucci sending young trendspotters around the world (or downtown) to scout for unique local styles to be reproduced by the label. "What he had done was to capture a kind of international ideal of teenage promise and bottle it," said Eve Babitz, author of Fiorucci: The Book.

While the garish fashions of Fiorucci may have rarely made the pages of Women’s Wear Daily, the stores’ parties did. The opening of the Beverly Hills store was famously shut down by the Los Angeles fire department. A year later, Blondie held a post-concert party in the same store to celebrate their album Parallel Lines going platinum. Attendees Wilt Chamberlain, James Woods, and Karen Black watched as Debbie Harry arrived in a World War II tank. Today one can revisit the scene by watching Xanadu, which features Olivia Newton-John and Michael Beck dancing to ELO’s "All Over the World" while Gene Kelly shops for a new suit.

The fluorescence of the Beverly Hills shop may have been permanently archived on celluloid, but the real epicenter of Fiorucci’s cool was its New York store at 125 East 59th Street. Opening in the spring of 1976, it soon became a destination for all those young and weird. The press compared its atmosphere of debauchery to that of Studio 54. In 1977, New York magazine would declare: "All it took this year to achieve instant chic, day or night, at the slickest New York party or the trashiest was a pair of $110 gold cowboy boots from Fiorucci."

Much of the store’s cachet was due to its eccentric staff. Klaus Nomi, drag performer Joey Arias, designer and filmmaker Maripol, and Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone all worked for Fiorucci during its heyday. The store was one of the first places to sell Betsey Johnson’s clothing and exhibit Keith Haring’s artwork. Fiorucci’s knack for youth-driven pop-art consumerism also attracted the likes of Andy Warhol. Surrounded by a coterie that included Truman Capote, Warhol launched Interview magazine with an in-store party. Douglas Coupland was inspired to quit studying physics after visiting the store.

"There was this absolute density of color and imagery," Coupland recalled. "I just thought it was the most perfect place I had ever been to." He brought back a postcard (the only thing he could afford). “It was on my desk. I looked at it and thought, 'Science is over.' I stopped caring about school. I had been a straight-A student and I started getting D’s. It felt like the best drug ever, and I thought, 'If this is what a bad grade feels like, this is great!'"

The store was a playground of glitter and spandex. Wide-eyed squares in their drab trench coats regularly gathered in front of the legendary window displays to see fashion at its most fun and subversive. It was Shangri-la for freaks and the conservative world couldn’t get enough. A People article from 1981 describes one memorable display: “Wearing a Merry Widow corset, bikini bottoms, fishnet stockings, and spiked heels, the Barbie Doll model reclined in a zebra-striped bathtub that had been placed in the window of Fiorucci's Manhattan store. For the next six hours she read smutty paperbacks, ate bananas, and blew bubbles — to the delight of a street crowd pressing 20 deep against the window.”

By way of explaining Fiorucci’s aesthetic, the article quotes Elio as calling haute couture “pathetic.” He embraced a certain trashiness in dress — lamé, peek-a-boo plastic, animal prints — literally incarnated when the store gave away miniature garbage-pail backpacks covered in brand-name stickers to customers who spent over $150.

Despite its popularity, the New York store wasn’t necessarily profitable. In the beginning, Fiorucci bet on the store’s ability to establish the brand’s image within the United States and, in turn, entice retailers around the country to sell Fiorucci merchandise, increasing the company’s wholesale business. At first the gamble paid off, and profits quadrupled the year following the store’s opening.

However, the label was built around the fickle tastes of the youth market and success was short-lived. Soon after Fiorucci jeans hit the market, Calvin Klein signed a jeanswear deal and his brand would emerge as the new must-have designer denim, bringing along with it his beige-on-beige minimalism as the look du jour. The Manhattan Fiorucci shuttered in 1988. The brand was further hindered by a series of ineffective business deals and relaunches that flopped.

Today a Williams-Sonoma occupies the 59th Street address and the Fiorucci name doesn't hold the same prestige it once did, but its impact remains. The boy who once spent his summers hanging out in the store, Marc Jacobs, has said his Marc line is influenced by the label. And the cheap plastic key chains and makeup compacts of his accessories boutique are certainly a nod to the tourist-friendly knickknacks Fiorucci used to carry. Any store that has hired a DJ and tried to turn retail into a party experience (ahem, Fashion’s Night Out) is indebted to the Italian label, as is anyone who has tried bring a little sex and trash into fashion.  

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and here. She last wrote in these pages about Device 6.

The Best of Helen Schumacher on This Recording Is Yours

Her time at recess & LHOTP

Which of the following images do you think represents this game?

The career of June Mathis

It was all a means of divination

Falling victim to the gory seductions of Clouzot

The life and death of Veronica Geng

Joy Williams oozes a milky substance

"The Key" - Hercules & Love Affair ft. Rouge Mary (mp3)

"I Try To Talk To You" - Hercules & Love Affair ft. John Grant (mp3)

In Which Anna Finds Herself In A Labyrinth

Before the Clue

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Device 6
creators Simon Flesser & Magnus Gardebäck

It opens with Anna waking to find herself in a castle tower with no recollection of how she got there. She begins to wander through the structure’s stone corridors searching for a clue that will explain the where and why of her predicament. But before there can be a clue, there must be a labyrinth; any proper labyrinth must have its island. And so, like the puzzle-based video games before it and like those still to come, Device 6 — an iOS app by the Swedish game developer Simogo — has set Anna in a labyrinth on an island to gather clues and solve the game’s brainteasers.

While the game may be rooted in the Greek mythology of Minos, its posture is more le Carré-ian. As the plot moves forward, the player comes to learn that the labyrinth and its puzzles are an obstacle course for new recruits to join the HAT organization, an intelligence agency dedicated to experiments into free will. HAT is seemingly run by a character with a bowler hat fetish and penchant for turning children’s toys into weaponry — a demented version of James Bond’s Q. Device 6 has fun with espionage tropes. Between levels, players are asked to answer reading-comprehension and pseudo personality-test questions (“Try to picture someone looking at you from a window. Who is it? a) A friend, b) A stranger, c) Yourself”). It’s a cute trick that enriches the player’s experience of being vetted for an elite corps of spies while also spoofing the genre.

The air of exclusivity the game cultivates via self-aware spy jokes is enhanced by the player’s accomplishment of solving a toilsome puzzle and by the exceedingly slick design. It is here that the game sets itself apart. The labyrinth of Device 6 is one built from text. Like a work of concrete poetry. The text narrates Anna’s progress while also serving as a wall, a bridge, a spiral staircase for the player’s movements. The writing itself is far from the gin-soaked prose of Dashiell Hammett, but serves its purpose with no detriment to the player’s enjoyment as it leads them through the game and its six levels. The poetry is in the programming rather than the text.

Eschewing 3D renderings and a Skittles-inspired palette, Device 6 boasts its sophistication with a dusky color scheme of slate gray, deep carmine, and glaucous blue. Instead of animation, the screenscape is peppered with flickering photos. Sound rises and fades as the player scrolls, past classical statues that weep, animatronic monkeys that speak with French accents, and an echo that is stuck in a wishing well. The opening credits unroll like the title sequence to a Steven Soderbergh movie, which is to say with a heavy Saul Bass influence of geometrically choreographed silhouettes. 

Device 6 is not groundbreaking in concept. It seems invented for childhood fans of Myst who’ve grown-up and now work in design. Like Myst, the player must recognize the game’s riddles then deduce its rules before solving. The puzzles perplex, but are hardly incomprehensible, especially as play progresses. The final steps of the game are too easy, too quick. Beating Device 6 brings no epiphanic climax, but wandering through its maze is really fun. The six levels can easily be conquered in a week and the satisfaction that comes from solving each puzzle only comes once — an inevitable limitation. Indeed, the game’s primary drawback is its lack of ad infinitum playability. However, once Device 6 has been conquered, know that Myst and its sequel Riven are now available as apps, for those who finish with an urgent need to return to a mysterious island.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and here. She last wrote in these pages about Harry Smith.

"Out of the Black" - Neneh Cherry ft. Robyn (mp3)

"Weightless" - Neneh Cherry (mp3)

In Which We Speak In The Parlance Of The Times

Children of the Damned

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Homeland
creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa

As the premiere of the third season of Homeland approached, Showtime released a trailer that left me fretting over not only the ratio of Nick Brody to Carrie Mathison airtime but also how much more fun than her he looked to be having (jungle shootouts beat being handcuffed to a hospital bed every time). Thankfully Abu Nazir’s Sherif Meshad’s shadowy network stepped in and leaked the first episode, because piracy funds terrorism, and it’s Brody-free! Here are some minor spoilers.

As the season begins, it’s approximately two months following the bombing at Langley and there’s no place like home — where Carrie’s assembling more wall-sized collages, Dana Brody is returning from an inpatient treatment program, and Saul Berenson, now the acting head of the CIA, is overseeing the planning of an Oz-codenamed mission that has Peter Quinn in Caracas building bombs for the season’s opening scene.

Our first look at Carrie is as she is beginning her testimony before a Senate committee investigating the attack that wants to know why Congressman Brody had been given immunity (and what from) by the CIA in exchange for information and to account for her whereabouts the 14 hours after the bombing that she was missing. Because of Carrie’s track record for respecting authority, we know this is going to go pleasantly. Also the committee’s chairman, a Senator Andrew Lockhart, is like Arlen Specter hell-bent on character assassination, but more smug about it. Carrie, who no longer fears the skepticism of her superiors after last season’s validation, really gives the committee something to tut-tut over when she tells them that she thinks Brody is innocent.

Between her testimony and erratic notes (which look exactly like the ones I take for writing these recaps), the agency lawyer decides Carrie should plead the Fifth. Her dad is worried too; she’s off her lithium and boozing hard. The station chief appointment Carrie was given at the end of last season apparently never materialized, and her current role at the CIA is ambiguous. Unfortunately it’s looking like the role might be that of scapegoat, as leaks from inside the agency threaten to out her as the disgraced congressman’s mentally unstable lover and hold her culpable in the attack.

Is it worth pointing out that Carrie’s constant “I missed something” self-flagellation is seen as a sign of her mental instability while at the same time everyone in the government is champing at the bit to blame her for not preventing the bombing? She’s crazy to hold herself accountable for the actions of terrorists, but it’s not crazy for those in charge to do the same.

Meanwhile, the only other person who believes in Brody’s innocence, his daughter Dana, is completing her last day of therapy after attempting suicide. And even though the Brody family is still hounded by the press and receiving death threats, she seems like any other moody and horny teen who experiments with sexting, instead of one whose father is America’s most wanted and who was an accomplice to vehicular manslaughter.

As the season progresses we’ll see whether or not tensions at home will derail Dana’s recovery. With the family’s military paycheck and benefits revoked, Jessica considers dusting off the accounting degree to provide financially for the family and get time away from her mother, who has moved in (apparently devoted “uncle” Mike Faber is no longer so devoted). 

With Carrie running around D.C. in a frenetic search for Brody, last year’s black ops supervisor Dar Adal has cozied up to Saul, advising him on how to repair the CIA’s reputation. Catering to Capitol Hill politics has never been his forte (but it is why he’s so likable!) and the pressure of it has paralyzed Saul’s decision-making abilities as it comes time for him to move forward on an operation that, if successful, would wipe out the six individuals (minus Brody) responsible for planning and executing the Langley attacks for professional terrorist Majid Javadi, or the Magician, as he’s known in espionage parlance.

At home, bringing the same gravitas to drinking whiskey as he does to eating peanut butter, Saul gets drunk and mulls over the decision while his estranged wife Mira, returned from Mumbai, puts him to bed. For the second time in the episode we hear a character talk about “taking it one day at a time” in the wake of the bombing. Here it’s Saul and Mira’s strategy for reconciling their marriage; earlier it was Dana in group therapy discussing how to cope once she returns home. 

The next day, Saul authorizes the mission (which neither Carrie nor agent Danny Galvez, who we’re assuming died at Vice President Walden’s funeral with director Estes last season, are involved in) and for 20 minutes the fate of America’s clandestine service depends on whether or not Peter Quinn can assassinate his target, codenamed Tin Man. During the operation, Quinn accidentally shoots the Tin Man’s son, a boy who looks like Brody’s surrogate one, Issa. I hope this is a passing coincidence and not the show setting us up for some message about civilian deaths in drone versus on-the-ground strikes. Also, terrorists, stop having kids! Things wrap up with Saul’s turn in the Senate committee hotseat.

The episode made good use of the show’s talented cast by focusing on how the characters grappled with the consequences of the Langley attack and the void left by Brody’s disappearance. It has me especially anticipating how the dynamic of Carrie and Saul’s relationship, which has always been more interesting than the relationship between her and Brody, shifts.

While my investment in the Brody family is modest, Dana’s maturing sense of self and intimacy could make for an engaging comparison to the adult relationships in the show. In my idealized version of Homeland, this season provokes thoughtful discussion of the idea that one “hysterical” woman’s sexuality could endanger an entire nation. But I’ll settle for suspenseful, plausible cloak-and-dagger drama.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the opal ring.

"Man Down" - Kalax (mp3)

"Midnight Rage" - Kalax (mp3)

The new ep from Kalax is entitled Journey and you can find his soundcloud here.