…casts a spell on ABC’s new primetime drama Eastwick

By: Laura Prudom

From fabulous fashionista to winsome witch, Lindsay Price’s credits read like a checklist of every girl’s dreams come true. Born in Arcadia, California to a Korean mother and German-Irish father, Price began acting at the tender age of five and never looked back.

It wasn’t until 2008, however, until Price was finally given the opportunity to anchor a show in a leading role. As fashion designer Victory Ford on the short-lived Lipstick Jungle, Price considered herself to be “the best dressed girl on television,” noting that she received her fashion education on the show, since “clothes were coming straight off the runways and into our fitting rooms.”

And far from being discouraged when Lipstick Jungle was cancelled after only two seasons, Price rolled straight into another enviable role: that of wallflower journalist Joanna Frankel, who discovers she has the power to hypnotize men, on ABC’s new drama, Eastwick. The show is based on the iconic book, The Witches of Eastwick, and the 1987 film of the same name.

“We had to start fresh with a new take on it; it’s very dangerous to try and copy something exactly because then the comparisons are made,” Price reasons. “So this way, with a new start and new characters, you can really invest in these people and their lives and their relationships without the burden of Cher and Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfieffer - those are big shoes to fill.”

Eastwick is a show that seems very focused on female empowerment in one form or another, and Price is quick to agree. “We all possess certain talents and certain charms and certain feminine wiles that a lot of times we repress or keep down; if we just focused in on [those gifts] and confidently used them in our lives, it would be amazing the things that we could achieve. These women are realizing these gifts that they’ve been given and they’re not hiding from them, and they’re not apologizing for them - much.”

Eastwick premieres Wednesday September 23 at 10 p.m. on ABC.

 

New York artist provocateur Marilyn Minter hits the West Coast

Marylin Minter is no stranger to controversy, with previous works (from a career spanning two decades) often uncomfortably straddling the line between glamour and the grotesque. While still a student at the University of Florida, some of Minter’s earliest work focused on the artist’s own mother, bedridden and haggard from a life of substance abuse. The startling photographs depicting Minter’s mother - clad only in a nightgown as she tried on wigs and applied makeup to mask her aged appearance - made everyone who saw them so uncomfortable that Minter did not show the images again publically for the next three decades.

Recent collections have been concerned with the illusion of beauty, often with unabashedly pornographic undertones. In 2006 and 2007, Minter focused on the lush but tarnished imagery of eyes embellished with heavy glitter makeup and plush lips wrapped around strings of pearls or dripping with slimy egg yolk. Feet adorned with Christian Dior pumps caked with mud and running through puddles created a scandal among fashionistas who cried sacrilege at the grimy glamour Minter was presenting, but the artist remains unrepentant, reasoning, “The perfection doesn’t exist. Those models start sweating after a while, and the makeup runs, and everybody does get a hem torn – this is life. No one makes an image of that.”  Around the same time, Minter used Pamela Anderson as her muse for a series of hazy photographs, revealing the vulnerability behind the often plastic perception of a centerfold. Having developed a unique method of painting enamel on metal using photographs Minter takes herself as reference, the artist’s work has a glossy lustre that is beautiful to behold regardless of the sometimes repulsive subject matter.

Minter’s latest work builds on her previous fixations, using the decadent imagery of plump-lipped, long-tongued models licking and sucking cake decorations from a sheet of glass. Inspired by the concept of “painting with my tongue,” the oft-obscene but undoubtedly provocative idea was captured on high definition video using macro lenses, and forms the basis of Minter’s first short film, titled “Pink Green Caviar.” The film has been shown on billboards in Times Square as part of a three person video exhibition curated by Minter for Creative Time, and is coming to Los Angeles as a public art project to compliment the artist’s exhibition of collected works at Regen Projects, opening October 24^th. The screens will be located on Sunset Boulevard in association with ForYourArt, which has also connected Marilyn with Intermix. The New York-based artist will create an original tote bag featuring a still from Green Pink Caviar that will sell exclusively at Intermix stores throughout the month of October to benefit Bright Pink for breast and ovarian cancer awareness.