Fear: An overwhelming awe towards the divine; the dread we feel in our everyday existence; an experience of the unexpected that leads to panic.
This powerful emotion has long been immortalised in art and poetry. And now, for its 29th issue, Dapper Dan explores the important relationship we have with the cult of fear today. Continue reading “Dapper Dan 29 is out!”
For its 28th issue, DAPPER DAN embarks on a journey to The Invisible City—a fictitious metropolis without borders, tied together by shared beliefs, memories and chance. A tribute to the communities, friends and neighbourhoods we encounter within the fertile terrains of the magazine. Continue reading “Dapper Dan 28 is out!”
There’s something unsettling about obsession.
It’s an energy that powers action from the depths of the deepest blue and drives us to create, interpret or worship without explanation.
When inspiration strikes, obsession drives us on.
This issue of Dapper Dan is an homage to sources of rapture and joy, to the people, places and objects that keep us enthralled.
Dapper Dan 19 looks at how we—as artists, writers, thinkers—carve out time and space in a world that bombards us constantly, keeping us ever-notified. In the pages of our magazine, we build new rules. We champion those who move against this mechanism, embracing iconoclasm in an Instagram age. We question Raven Smith’s content and commentary, Samuel Ross’s garments and products, and Andrew Bolton’s curation and exhibitions. We showcase duo FAKA’s radical singularity and the structures in tailor Daniel Haworth’s craft. We shoot Celine SS19 and capture Zegna’s collection, placing garments alongside objects to reveal both the inanimate and the human.
Menswear and philosophy are mined. Ideas are distilled. Dapper Dan 19 explores the intimacies of alienation, a new individualism.
We can, of course, date the first pornographic representations back to the Venus of Hohle Fels—in other words, 35,000 before the present day. She nevertheless retains signs specific to fertility, despite the obscenity of the sexual parts. Ancient Greece then, in turn, consecrated the concept of erotic scenes, whose sole justification was the pleasure of observing fellow human beings giving themselves pleasure. Pornography has no other aim than to reduce divine urges to the principles of flesh and lowly humanity. Continue reading “Pornolepsia”
The Kostis Enigma
Rebetiko, plural rebetika (Greek: ρεμπέτικο, ρεμπέτικα respectively), is a term used today to refer to originally disparate kinds of urban Greek folk music which have come to be grouped together since the so-called rebetika revival, which started in the 1960s and developed further from the early 1970s onwards. The word rebetiko is an adjectival form derived from the Greek word rebetis (Greek: ρεμπέτης), a word nowadays construed to signify a person who embodies aspects of character, dress, behaviour, morals and ethics associated with a particular Greek subculture. It is closely related, but not identical in meaning, to the words mangas (Greek: μάγκας) and mortis (Greek: μόρτης) but its etymology remains the subject of dispute and uncertainty. Rebetika, an often raw and uncompromising music, was simply not allowed into Greek recording studios in its genuine forms until about 1931. Continue reading “Kostis Bezos, a Greek Chameleon”
Psychogeography is a critical tool encouraging the study of the effects of a particular urban environment on the emotions, cognitive responses and behaviour of individuals. The term, first defined by French political theorist Guy Debord in his essay Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, encompassed the “study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” At the core of this method of urban data gathering was the dérive, a form of walking or drifting. For Debord, a dérive was “the practice of a passional journey out of the ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiances.” Initially, the dérive was a tool to increase individual awareness of urban surroundings and its alienating effects. Unlike the flâneur of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, Debord was less interested in interpreting the space and more in the personal experience while observing a drift. At stake was the exact investigation of the effect of the geographic, architectural space on individuals’ emotions and consciousness. Continue reading “Psychogeography: A New Paradigm?”
If language, and its representational or coding function, makes up the world, or if, as Wittgenstein said beautifully in his Tractatus, ‘Reality is the shadow of grammar,’ what kind of world would we have if we spoke a language that allowed of little or no abstraction, generalization, descriptions of the past or the future? A view of reality that is ‘intensely and only immediate’ seems puzzling and impractical. Yet there are Amazon tribes, notably the Piraha, who speak of and view their experience in just this way. If a man goes around a bend in the river, no observations about him can obtain except for xibipio—he has gone out of experience.’ They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers—the light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ Continue reading “Abstractless Codes: Non-generalised Speech and the Upending of Contemporary Linguistics”
