No Sex Please, We're British - Part 2

Remember the London Review of Books Personal Ads?

The best thing about them is that there are more new ones every week. These are the ones that got me laughing::

Rather beautiful 34-year old hysteric seeks man who has written more books than her analyst. Her own attempts have stalled at page 96.
email: Porlock6@hotmail.com

Celebrate National Nurses Week with me! Man, 82.
box no. 05/03

I subvert all the expectations built up in this column like a goat in space subverts gravy. Space-goat-esque gravy-subverting pervert (M, 51).
box no. 05/04

For all you ladies keeping a vigil for my return to this column after an absence of 2 years, God has answered your prayers by forcing the LRB, after much petitioning, to lift almost all of their unreasonable restrictions on the content of my adverts. I am a man. I am 46.
box no. 05/06

Bathsheba of Brighton (49) divorced Gabriel Oak (and his boring flute). Now seeks urban pleasures with entertaining man, 40-60.
box no. 04/05

Yes, my advert is poorly constructed, but it’s a miracle I can do anything at all with my crippling addictions to chine sandwiches, supermarket own-brand cider and internet pornography. F, 94, Market Rasen.
box no. 04/07

And my personal favourite this week:

By applying Baer and Rinzel's Continuum Model to our love-making I will show you how the pedicles and laminae forming the vertebral arch of the spine is the only true erogenous zone. I will require travel expenses (I live within Zone 4 of the London Underground network – further details will follow), a beverage allowance, and a willingness on your part to undergo just 45 minutes of drug-free anaesthesia.
box no. 05/07

song of the day

If my life (at the moment) was a song, it would be this one:

Ray Lamontagne is one of those artists who sounds great live and a bit meh on his inevitably overproduced albums. He has this amazing voice: half mountain man, half Tom Waits, with a little bit of an old school blues man thrown in for good measure. I guess I'm just a sucker for the whole tortured artist thing.

So song of the day/week/moment is Ray Lamontagne's cover of Garls Barkley's 'Crazy'. I love it.

In other randomness, my flatmate sent me this picture this morning. It took a second for me to figure out what the hell I was looking at - Eve and Wall-E. Hilarious! I seriously loved that film. I saw it on the plane coming back from America and thought it was absolutely sublime. I think kids have it so much better. We have to watch serious, depressing, grown-up art-house cinema and the kids get to watch Wall-E and Ratatouille. I'm being semi facetious, of course, for I do love my melancholic foreign films and other intellectual indy gems, but sometimes you just want to have a laugh. And I love how, especially Disney (Cf. Fantasia, i.e. one of the best films ever!), much as they went slightly off the deep end with Disney Stores and HSM 1, 2, and 3, can make films that work on an adult and child level. If you haven't seen Wall-E yet, you absolutely should. It's a gem.

how to cover up a stain

Or how not to.

Why would you want to with these interesting teacups designed to improve through use. The product blurb talks about how the teacups challenge the assumption that use is damaging to a product, which is an interesting idea: the supposed devaluation of a product which begins immediately post purchase. But in actuality these cups become more beautiful the more they are used: the interior surface of the cup is treated so that it stains more in those treated areas. I like it.

I also liked the idea of these secretive teacups because this week has been quite strange indeed. There have been too many secrets floating around my office lately, many of which are only now being revealed. We all keep secrets from one another, and this is perhaps nowhere more true than at work, but when those around you begin acting secretively and strangely, you start feeling as if people can see straight through you. Even if you have nothing (or at least little) to hide, why is it that other people's suspicious behaviour makes you feel so uneasy? I've just found out that one of my colleagues is pregnant, one is applying for a new job, and yet another has just lost his job. Everyone has their secrets I suppose.

Don't ask me what mine is.

I'm not telling.

Abercrombie & Fitch on both sides of the Atlantic

American companies kick the crap out of their British counterparts when it comes to brand marketing and management - especially in the transference of these brands out of the domestic market and into foreign waters.

I remember when Krispy Kreme first branched out into the UK and you could only buy them in Harrods or Selfridges. Talk about manipulating the image. In the States, Krispy Kreme is ubiquitous - you can buy your original glazed boxes of sickly sweet sticky doom in MacDonald's style drive-through. But when glamorous women in Louboutin heels come strutting out of Harrod's with their doughnuts in a frosted plastic bag, it sends out a whole different message. The aura conferred by these women and the expensive bazaars which stocked KK meant that eventually the brand could branch out into high street: they are now sold in some high street Tesco's or stand alone shops.

But the best example of a brand purchasing a much bigger status over the pond is Abercrombie and Fitch. Walking down Burlington Gardens last Friday afternoon, on my way to get some Laduree macarons, I walked past Abercrombie and Fitch. The location of the shop in between Saville Row and Old Bond Street on Burlington Gardens tells you pretty much everything you need to know about A&F's aspirations in the UK.

This is what most of the Abercrombie stores look like in America:

This is what the Abercrombie store looks like in London:

This is a brand better known for its 'sexy' soft-porn ads that wind up the parents of the kids who buy the clothes. The style is a sort of over-priced Gap: boring, yet still managing to encourage a slightly slutty jeans and t-shirt look. They aren't prep enough to be J. Crew or J.Press but they're expensive enough to be cool in that just out of reach way for most American teenagers.

Funny then that Jack Wills wearing Sloaneys are totally buying into the A&F look. Actually, a lot of people I know got (and still are) really excited when the A&F shop opened in London. A girl I used to work with received an A&F hoody for her birthday and she was jumping up and down clutching the thing like a winning lottery ticket. It was a plain, pink hoody, with A&F plastered across it in big letters, which cost around £70. I just don't get it.

The funniest thing though was when I finally got to Lauduree, three kids (two guys and a girl) came into the shop behind me who had just been to Abercrombie. The were talking about all the different outfits they had purchased and what they would wear on their impending trip to San Francisco. They bought a wardrobe full of chavvy American clothes to wear on their holiday to America! It's absolutely brilliant - the triumph of pretending to be an exclusive brand when you export it around the world. I was so tempted to turn around and shatter the illusion these poor kids had created of Abercrombie and Fitch - I think they actually thought it was the US equivalent of a 5th Avenue brand. Or maybe they were more clever than I gave them credit for and they actually wanted to look like young, sheep-herded American teenagers. And anyway, even if I did explain to them what A&F or KK meant in America, it would still be like telling a chav that Burberry plaid isn't cool anymore.

tired

Today am I tired. Very tired. I don't think I slept poorly last night and can think of no rational explanation for said tiredness.

Half brain dead at work, I went to google and typed in 'tired'.

Did you know there was a site called tired? Neither did I.

Frankly, I think it's creepy...

Bon Vivant, Raconteur, and All Around Good Fellow

Went to a Lenten themed choral performance this evening with The Philosopher. Listened to Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Dvorak's original version of Stabat Mater. The Dvorak and one of the Bruckner motets were lovely, but the other two were only so-so: choral music in German is a bit hard to swallow.

Sitting in that church listening to the singers I started thinking, perhaps strangely, about the men in my life. If you must know, I was thinking about relationships and marriage - the closeness that develops between friends compared to that which develops in relationships - but I kept coming back to this phrase: 'the finest man I know.' It sounds like the sort of drivel one finds scripted in romantic comedies, but it still set me thinking - surely this is not an epithet to be taken lightly.

After spending at least the better part of the fourth and fifth movements of Stabat Mater thinking about the matter, it struck me that the finest man I know is now the finest man I knew - my grandfather on my mother's side who died a little over three years ago. I couldn't possibly go into all the details of why this is so - it would take too long and be far too revealing - the best I can do is repeat one of his business cards for your reading pleasure. This will give you an idea of what kind of man my grandpapa was.

Used Land - Good Scotch - Horse Pucky - Racing Forms
Flyswatters - Old Cars - Fast Women

Dr. Willard P. Riddles
Bon Vivant, Raconteur, and All Around Good Fellow

Wars Fought - Virgins Chastised - Bars Emptied
Bridges Burned - Feet Massaged - Salesman Slain
Munitions Supplied - Ballads Sung - Skulduggery Illuminated
Grandkids Sillified - Turkeys Carved - Dogs Fed
Hearts Mended - Uprisings Quelled - Stories Embellished
Politicians Bamboozled - Anarchists Organized
Birds Cursed - Pots Stirred - Heads Knocked
Revolutions Cheered - Fences Mended
Assassinations Plotted - Books Cooked
Ignoramuses Enlightened- Lawyers Humiliated
Light Bulbs Changed - Cats Herded

the brain that changes itself

I got into an argument with The Boy a few days ago about 'super-stringy' calf fibres (his terminology, not mine - I think they're actually called fast or slow twitch fibre compositions). While I'm all for interdisciplinarity, my entire academic career testifies to this claim, attempting to overlay anthropological theories onto neuroscience just doesn't work for me. Basically he was trying to argue that nature presided regally over nurture.

Being, as I am, mildly obsessed with neuroscience (I'm already planning a career change at 37) I know that most neuroscientists, but especially those with a particular interest in neuroplasticity would say that the nature/nurture debate is largely irrelevant as the two are completely inter-related.

Not only with sports, but with your ability to play a musical instrument, or to paint or compute complex mathematical equations - natural talent or genetics can only take a person so far. So yes, perhaps Michael Phelps is 'built' with the 'perfect' frame for swimming (whatever that means), but if he was more motivated to study theoretical physics and became one of our greatest physicists, no one would say 'he was built' for theoretical physics. Likewise, while proponents of the nature theory might argue that Lance Armstrong is a great cyclist because he has one of the greatest V02 max readings ever seen (an individual's maximal rate of oxygen consumption), the same genes that are so often attributed for his success also contributed to the development of his nonseminomatous testicular cancer.

I'm coming at the elite athletics side of this from a strictly laymen position, but after a little bit of reading, I found something interesting about the natural gap between V02 max readings between men and women. Sports physiologists supposedly claim that genetics play a major role in a person's VO2 max and that heredity can account for up to 25-50% of the variance seen between individuals, thus leading us to believe that nature triumphs over nurture and that plastic change is impossible. Where this becomes interesting is in a comparison between untrained girls and women, who typically have a maximal oxygen uptake 20-25% lower than untrained men. However, when comparing elite athletes, the gap tends to close to about 10% and if V02 max is adjusted to account for fat free mass in elite male and female athletes, in some studies the differences disappear. So something else is going on here besides just genetics. Training, nutrition, psychology, etc., must account for the ability for our bodies (and brains) to major changes.

It's always in running - especially sprinting - where people tend to say that speed is without doubt the result of genetically determined factors meeting training effects. Common belief is that if you took a random sample of children from West Africa and another from a western European country, on average, the West Africans will be faster in a sprint race. Explanations for this can not be precise, but tend to centre around natural ability and physiological determination.

Now to get to the whole point of this post. I recently purchased a very interesting book by psychoanalyst Norman Doidge called The Brain That Changes Itself. By some brilliant coincidence The Philosopher discovered that Dr. Doidge was giving a talk at LSE last night. We went, we listened, we were entertained. It was interesting - he wasn't as lucid in person as in his book (which I thoroughly recommend if you have any interest how your brain is profoundly affected by your everyday environment - you'll never look at porn websites again!), but still it was good fun.

The point about running and the difference between Africans and Europeans reminds me of a great anecdote in Doidge's book. In 2003, researchers from Sweden's Lund University did some research with the Moken sea gypsies who live in the archipelago of Burma and along the West Cost of Thailand. When you dive underwater and open your eyes, everything appears slightly blurry. Focusing depends on the curvature of the lens and the difference between the index of refection of the eye and the surrounding medium. Air has an index of refraction of 1, the cornea 1.376 and the aqueous humor 1.336. The index of refraction of water is about 1.33. Because of the small difference in the index of refraction of water and the eye, the lens must become very curved to focus light on the retina. Living on land, there was no evolutionary need for the lens to become this curved, so objects are out of focus when we open our eyes under water.

Unlike most of the rest of us, the sea gypsies maximally constrict the pupil to see accurately underwater - this is not a genetic attribute - rather it has developed over time through repeated exercise and use. Moreover, there are studies which have demonstrated that European children can learn to demonstrate this same pupil constriction with practice. This is a great and easy to understand example of plasticity and the 'use it or lose it' theory of the brain: we're talking about use-dependent cortical reorganisation here. This isn't saying that if you believe in something enough you can do it or master it, but that if you create an environment where you are constantly having to exercise a particular function in order to improve, then surprising things are achievable.

If I can be asked, I'll write up a part two sometime soonish. There are some very interesting connections between behaviour and environment (remember the porn?) that will seriously get you thinking about the habits which form your day to day existence. We may not have the inclination to be world-class athletes, but surely we'd all like to be a little bit better at something.

Like Doidge says, use your brain or lose it. And with new(ish and admittedly slightly hysterical) studies showing that age-related cognitive decline beings as early as 27, I'm pretty sure that means all of us could stand to do a bit of brain spring cleaning...

PS If you are really a glutton for punishment and want to know more - V.S. Ramachandran, a brilliant neuroscientist, gave the BBC Reith Lectures in 2003 which are very stimulating yet quite approachable.

I love Paris

This is a lazy photo post of this weekend's Paris and Versailles trip. Will write something altogether more thoughtful tomorrow after tonight's Norman Doidge (he's a psychiatrist who writes on neuroplasticity and I'm a big fan) lecture at LSE.

how long must i wait?

Three hours, thirty seven minutes, twenty one seconds.

With this lovely, yet completely ridiculous, device you can now find out exactly how long it took your missive d'amour to get from London to Paris and your lover's waiting arms.

Cute, but creepy.

Wonder if HM Postal Officers might deliver things more quickly if they knew we knew exactly how long it was taking.

the man without a head

I bought the European Short 16 DVD http://www.cinema16.org/dvd.php?dvd=2 about a month ago. I still haven't watched all the films. For some reason the first film I watched was by Juan Solanas called l'homme sans tête. It's an animated short and I didn't think I'd like it, so I don't know why I watched it first, but I'm immensely glad I did.

This is one of the most brilliant films I've seen in a long time. It's so beautifully put together and it's one of the most original and intriguing worlds I've ever seen on screen. I also loved that I thought I knew exactly where it was going and then constantly had my expectations flipped upside down - that's such a rarity. And I also love how this film manages to make a statement about allowing yourself to be who you truly are without resorting to gratuitous emotional manipulation.

I found this video of it but it doesn't have subtitles (I'm not even sure if it has sound at all as I'm at work and can't hear anything on my computer), but you don't really even need to understand what's being said to get the jist of what's going on. It's a bit long (about 15 minutes in all), but seriously well worth it.

Solanas - L'homme sans tête
Uploaded by Morpheus51100

hard times ahead?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/arts/07grad.html?_r=1&em

This article is depressing, given that I'm a year away from completing my PhD.

I suppose I'm luckier than a lot of other doctoral students in that I have my fingers in a few other pies outside of academia. I also figured out rather quickly that getting bogged down in teaching undergrad classes (i.e. serving as cheap departmental labour) and organising seminars doesn't get you hired and competes with your primary goal: research and publication.

Getting something published during your doctoral years (at least in the Humanities) is what will set you apart from other applicants - not how many teaching hours you did or conferences you organised. Getting out there, meeting other academics, and making good connections is a good idea as well. For if you know other academics and they know you, they might be better placed to help you out when it comes time to job hunt.

Maybe it's because I'm optimistic by nature, but I refuse to believe that there won't be any jobs out there when I finish or that I'll have a problem finding one, if academia is indeed where I decide to stay. Why on Earth would anyone put themselves through a PhD otherwise?

a day in pictures

Out the door in mis-matched prints

Porridge (at work) for breakfast

At work

Writing in a cafe

Lucan in French, Latin, and English (plus the Spectator for fun)

Say hello to the sheep on my way home

Making fancy coffee

Making potato salad for lunch and happy to see evidence that the EU deregulation of veggie perfectness is working

Potato salad

More working (can you tell how much I like orange?)

Still working + dinner (a celeriac, beetroot, and horseradish remoulade - delicious!)

saving Clerkenwell and slow dancing

I like my job. Or rather, I still like my job. I've worked for the AJ for a record seven months now (yes, this is the longest amount of time I've ever had a 'proper' job) and while it was a bit harry coming back after Christmas, it's settled down a bit now and things are happier again. Already today, two interesting things have happened which exemplify why I like being here. I got a package in the post from the Press Officer at the City of London. Apparently the Planning and Transportation Committee is developing a 'Chancery Lane Area Enhancement Scheme' which is indicative of the fact that they must not have anything better to do or that they've been heavily leaned on by some fantastically effective lobbyists for the folks who work in the Royal Courts. A few things made me chuckle about the information they sent over. Firstly, I live in the Chancery Lane Area, and apart from constant building works, I can't really see that there's any seriously urgent need to 'improve' the area. The primary point that the CLAES publicity seems to be making is that they want Chancery Lance et environs to become pedestrianised. Again I don't really have any complaints to make about this proposal, and I do think Chancery Lane, and especially the streets around Lincoln's Inn Fields, would be much lovelier were they not filled with black cabs and delivery trucks, but again, surely the C of L has better things to spend its time and money on. When all's said and done however, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and I'll happily be nodding along with the proposers at the launch party for the public consultation next week in the Old Hall of Lincoln's Inn.

Another thing I can sometimes do a lot of is picture research for articles being published in print or online. It's not the most stimulating of tasks, but good things often come of it. This morning I was searching for an image of the new Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Centre in New York City. I'm not a big fan of the AT Hall - it looks like a shark's gaping jaws jutting up above the sea to swallow a gargantuan mouthful of sardines (yeah, I may have been watching some David Attenborough last night...). But while I was looking for these pics, I found a cool image of three dancers projected onto the side of Lincoln Centre.

What is this interesting looking thing, thought I and a few google searches later, I knew all I needed to know. It was a piece of installation art created by David Michalek where dancers perform about 5 seconds of movement which is then digitally slowed into a 10 minute film. The piece premiered at the Lincoln Centre Festival in July, projected on a triptych of 50-foot screens mounted outside the theatre - as shown in the picture above.

I've written about the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge before, specifically in relation to Cy Twombly and his wonderful painting Treatise on the Veil, but whereas Muybridge was limited by the constraints of early photographic technology, and used a sequence of less than 30 images to provide a comprehensive idea of motion, Michalek is able to use a special high-speed HD camera (typically used by the military for ballistic analysis) to record his dancers at a staggering 1,000 frames per second. The dancers Michalek records perform almost the opposite of Muybridge's galloping horses, in that he captures thousands of sequential images to slow his dancers down, not speed them up.

This is one of Michalek's videos, it's of Herman Cornejo - a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre.

The videos are almost excruciating to watch. In our go bigger, go faster culture the attention required to watch such a still-moving object for an entire 10 minutes is surprisingly difficult. But the movements are fascinating - especially when Cornejo performs a jump or a turn, suspended in air for an eternity - and the amount of perceptible detail is simply astonishing - to see literally every muscle movement - well, that's quite something. As I dancer myself, I appreciate how strange it must have been for the dancers, used to perfecting movements in mirrors, to see their technique exposed so clearly. Though I find the videos stunning [you can see more at Michalek's website http://www.slowdancingfilms.com/media.html], I also find myself in agreement with a reviewer from the NYT: 'True, pinned butterflies are easier to study. But study is no substitute for seeing them move through the world.'

LFW - The Buildings Behind the Brands

(Article published in the AJ 05.03.09)

The venues build the clothing brands as much as the models at London Fashion Week, writes Crystal Bennes

London Fashion Week, 20-25 February, various venues, London

London Fashion Week (LFW) celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, and while you may think that there’s not much of a connection between LFW and London’s architecture, you’d be mistaken. Catwalk shows in venues like the Royal Opera House, a carpark in Brewer Street and the Korean Embassy are a crucial part of the designers’ managing of their brands.

Since 2006, the home of LFW has been the Natural History Museum in Kensington, where the British Fashion Council (BFC) – the body that promotes British fashion designers – has its tent. While the white tents of LFW have not become as iconic as those of New York Fashion Week in Bryant Park, for fashion-forward Londoners they represent the glamorous lifestyle associated with the capital’s fashion industry.

Though designers don’t like to admit it, the recession has had an impact on the excesses of fashion week. This year saw only one tent on the lawns of the museum, as more and more designers are taking their pick of London’s buildings for use as runway stages. Showing outside of the BFC tent is not only more cost effective, it also allows the designer to appropriate a building to extend its brand image in a way not possible in the one-size-fits-all BFC tent.

Take two very different brands: Nicole Farhi and PPQ. Farhi has been in business for 27 years and is one of Britain’s most established designers. Her clothes are refined but playful, with an emphasis on tailoring in beautiful fabrics. PPQ on the other hand describe their look as ‘luxe pop-chic and underground London cool’ and are favoured by indie-pop stars. Neither brands showed at the BFC tent. Instead, Farhi showed at Edward Middleton Barry’s Royal Opera House, in the glass-domed Floral Hall (1860), and PPQ showed in the Samuel Ware-designed Burlington Arcade (1819).

Not only does the architectural stage serve as the backdrop for the runway spectacle, but the constraints of the space also dictate the fashion world’s strict hierarchy. At Farhi, the catwalk was arranged in a square, instead of the traditional long rectangle, with the biggest names in the fashion press on one side, buyers across from them, lesser press on the third side, with VIPs in the front row, on display as much as the models. PPQ’s venue provided its own constraints, both to the staging but also to the all-important industry hierarchy, when nearly everyone became front-row, given the arcade’s confined space.

The Farhi-Opera House partnership is a good fit as both brands identify with refinement, luxury and sophistication; it clearly works for Farhi, as she has shown there for the past four years.

PPQ-Burlington Arcade, however, is a marriage of practicality. After closing their Conduit Street store last year, the company will soon open a pop-up shop in the Burlington Arcade. While Amy Molyneaux, one of PPQ’s designers, said that a pop-up shop would allow more versatility than the fixed layout of their previous store, certainly a short-term lease in the Burlington Arcade is also less financially demanding than a four-storey Mayfair boutique.

To show or not to show: a question fashion designers may soon be asking themselves in these economically uncertain times – especially when a single catwalk show can cost up to £600,000. If these grand spaces are invisible in the catwalk snaps published in fashion magazines worldwide, why go to the trouble and expense of a major show? Buyers and editors could just as easily look at the collections online. This season, British designer Alice Temperley eschewed a costly runway show in favour of showing her latest collection via a digital installation at her shop, for example.

The numerous considerations involved in producing a show means that the decision to stage must be more about brand management than ease of use. As any fashion insider will tell you, the point of fashion week and its catwalks is spectacle. The celebrities, the unusual venues, the aura of exclusivity: if nothing else, these lavish circuses sell perfume to those who can’t afford the clothes but who still want a piece of the lifestyle associated with these fantastic spectacles. Build something grand enough and your building may serve as the backdrop for a future catwalk.