Nick Wooster recently announced his departure from his latest venture at Atrium, on his own terms this time – we’ve known him to be ousted from stately department stores for perhaps choosing the wrong words, and gone from a more wide-reaching store for being a bit too fashion – so it’s refreshing to hear this menswear hero will be making his own career choices now. The recently crowned Vogue Fashion Fund winners are as eager to watch Nick, and vice versa, as we.

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If you missed Part 1, can you find it here.

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I don’t have any personal life so it was not complicated, everything is public and all my work is available to everybody. I show all aspects of myself—fragile, strange, dramatic, kitschy, whatever. And I think being vulnerable, the public can also project their own vulnerability into my persona, which makes them closer to me and I’m closer to them.

And as her most personal work to date, Robert Wilson’s viscerally and visually stunning The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (now onstage at the Park Avenue Armory), re-imagines her remarkable life—from the tortured Yugoslavian childhood of her past and her decades of work as a performance artist to her love affairs and what the future will inevitably bring. Starring Abramović as both herself and her mother, she performs alongside an incredibly athletic Willem Dafoe and bellowing Antony Hegarty. Amalgamating music, theater, sound, design, physical performance, and visual art, the “quasi-opera” encompasses all facets of performance, bringing the audience on a fragmented and abstract immersion into the emotional and psychological landscape of the artist’s extraordinary life.

From the early beginnings of her career, Abramović has used her body as a vehicle for expression—and Wilson’s show, in which she gave him complete freedom to tell her story, is no exception. With her art, she creates a unique dialogue between herself and audience, asking the public to watch as she tests the mental and physical limitations of the human body. She solicits the viewer to participate in the experience, creating a conversation and critique of social norms and boundaries of everyday actions and interactions. Having been raised in former Yugoslavia to militant parents, her childhood was imbued with an incredible sense of discipline and structure which has fueled her abilities as an artist, but also created an extreme emotional distance that has created a deep yearning to love and be loved. And in that great expression of physicality in her work, she manipulates our conception of time, slowing down the clock to embody the notion of time’s illusion to inhabit an eternal moment.

And if there’s any other artist whose work echoes that temporal element, it’s avant-garde electronic composer and master of brilliant sound William Basinski—who collaborated with Wilson, Abramović, and Hegarty to create the powerful music forThe Life and Death of Marina Abramović. As one of the most fascinating composers in the world, he too has been perfecting his craft for decades now. After being greatly inspired by Brian Eno’s melancholic Music for Airports and the work of Steve Reich, Basinski began experimenting, investigating just how far he could go with the tape loops that have now gone on to garner him both the acclaim and following that has been slowly building for over twenty years. His immersive soundscapes drone on and on, shifting your consciousness—stripping bare the artifice of time and allowing you to inhabit that eternal moment. From his early work to The Disintegration Loops and now his work with Abramović, his music lives in an ineffable realm that’s as delicate as it is harrowing and extremely powerful in its absolute beauty—especially heard here upon the stage.

“In the concerts, I usually do one long set because the whole point is to try and get out of this body and this worry and this nonsense and just take a little vacation, fall in. And forty minutes can go by and it feels like five, so that’s the ideal situation. It’s like meditation, you have some relief, you sort of go back into the womb,” he once told me. And although having never met previously to the collaborative experience of the show, Abramović have fallen into a natural simpatico, both in their work and personally.

Now one of the most revered and legendary artists—with a show that immortalizes her career— Abramović took some time while getting her stage makeup done to talk to her dear friend Basinski to discuss the physical and mental limits of expression, inhabiting an eternal moment, and the state of the art world today through their seasoned eyes.

Enjoy Part I,  Part II, and Part III.

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And here, just on the cusp of their stardom, we see the wonderful sisters in conversation, as Olivia interviews Remy on her experience on “A Dream of Flying” and the fabulousness and pitfalls of fame.

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This week’s guest is film producer and self-proclaimed movie nerd Fred Berger. This week, the two discuss David O. Russell’s latest ensemble piece American Hustle. With a heavy-hitting cast of Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, and Bradley Cooper, the 1970’s set film is loosely based on the FBI ABSCAM operation and tells the story of two con artists who find themselves working for the FBI to set up a sting operation on corrupt politicians.

Sponsored by Audible.

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More important than any of these things, however, was the scabrous novel by Irvine Welsh, a boiling cauldron of fury and outrage leavened by the antic, madcap exploits of a group of pals desperate to find their next fix. The idea of a literary “event,” seems almost quaint today, but the 1993 publication of Trainspotting—really a series of short, interconnected stories—was a seminal moment that connected to the kind of readers not typically courted by the publishing industry. The fact that is was just voted Scotland’s favorite novel of the last 50 years illustrates how lasting its impact has been even if the novel’s principle concern—Scotland’s chronic drug culture and the epidemic of AIDS it spawned—is less resonant than it once was.

Welsh did not rest on his laurels—seven novels and four collections of short stories have followed, including Filth, a picaresque tale of a misanthropic, coke-snorting psychopathic Scottish detective. Despite being described by Welsh as “unfilmable,” a movie version has just been released in the U.K. to raves, particularly for James McAvoy’s performance in the central role, and it will be a lasting shame if it doesn’t find the audience it deserves. And as Trainspotting drew power from the propulsive techno of Underworld’s seminal track, “Born Slippy,” so Filth is elevated by the sepulchral beauty of composer Clint Mansell’s score.

Best-known for his long working relationship with Darren Aronofsky, Mansell grew up in the U.K. at a time when the attitude and spirit of punk was rousing a generation of frustrated teens. For Welsh, the call-to-arms was The Sex Pistols; for Mansell it was The Ramones. Both men would channel that spirit into their work. As lead singer and guitarist for Brit rock band, Pop Will Eat Itself (aka The Poppies), Mansell enjoyed modest success, cracking the U.K.’s top ten with the 1993 single, “Get The Girl! Kill The Baddies,” and later befriending Trent Reznor (Mansell plays backing vocals on NIN’s The Fragile).

The break up of The Poppies in 1996 might have been the end of Mansell’s career in music but for a random encounter with Aronofsy who was looking for a composer for his debut movie, Pi. The two bonded over their mutual despair at the state of filmmaking in general, and film-composing in particular. Requiem for a Dream—arguably Mansell’s best-known score—followed, and the commissions have come thick and fast ever since. “I’m not very analytical really; everything I do is based on gut feelings,” Mansell told BlackBook earlier this year. “My job is to embellish the universe that the filmmaker is trying to create with this story and images and performance; everything I do has to be true to that world.”

BlackBook invited Welsh and Mansell to chat about the art of story telling, the power of punk, and what it means to help articulate a cultural moment.

(See PART I on their conversation HERE)

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The thickest-ply cashmeres and couture-level glass medical tubing-cum bead work are beautiful as they catch the light and envelope the body. How the clothes interact with their environment and the context in which the pieces are worn is something Lewis considered. The feel of the clothes was important as well. But beneath the beautiful tailoring, sculptural layering, and painstaking beading lie troves of thoughts on gender conventions and domesticity (a reclaimed smock or apron), Jungian concepts (Jung’s enantidromia is clear in the delicate glasswork that acquires strength in its repetition), and the importance of intellect. Her clothes, as her website says, are “for women who think.”

 In an earlier interview Abigail tells me:

“The woman I design for is deeply complex and embodies an array of contradictions. I am interested in her life and opinions apart from fashion. She uses style to draw people inward, but her mind quickly overpowers physical beauty. She is at peace with the strength required of fragility.”

In other words: the clothes offer protection, comfort, and vestments in which to live your life, but she’ll let you speak for yourself.

Photography courtesy of Abigail Daphne Lewis, in collaboration with Paul Jung.

Watch Emerging Designer Karolyn Pho. 

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So far, though, Allen’s biggest hit is her collaboration with Zedd on the club hit, “Clarity,” which reached number 1 on the Billboard Dance Club Chart in November, scored a performance on Letterman, and clocked a Grammy nomination. Wentz himself got to work with Allen earlier this year when she contributed guest vocals to “Just One Yesterday” on Fall Out Boy’s fifth album, Save Rock and Roll (in the video for the song, Wentz spews up snakes, vomits blood, and terrifies a young girl in a tutu; Foxes is a whole lot easier on the eyes, but not as innocent as she first seems).

The two found time to catch up and talk web etiquette, music influences, and tattoos.

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