a day in pictures (17.02.10)

yesterday

schoolgirl chic

spring is coming


work


flat white

eggs florentine



@ Flat White


cool top hat


amerena ice cream at Amorino


eating ice cream on Old Compton St with lovely L


boy I accosted on the street (I loved his hair!)


messing about with new hat


party time!


changed into McQueen for PV


safety pin neck-line detail of dress


at the Barbican

(not so)lonely hearts club

Friday:

After the not-so-goodness that was Thursday, me and The Kitten decided to take matters into our own hands. When I was in my first year at Uni, I took a creative writing course. In that course, I wrote a story about two girls who sneak back stage at a rock concert by tricking the security guard. It was a shit story, but it was probably better than if I tried to write up what actually happened on Friday. The Kitten suggested we head to the Fanfarlo gig even though it was sold out, so after a sneaky pit stop at the Three Kings along to ULU we went. No scalpers were in sight so we sneakily joined the guest list queue and rattled off a few possible possibilities for blagging our way in. The people in front of us had tickets but they still seemed to be arguing about being on the guest list - we never quite figured out what was going down. They left in a huff after giving their tickets back to the guest-list lady. We decided that honesty was the best policy and so looked at the lady with the list as if we were in desperate need of some entertainment - which we were - and when she asked us if we were on the guest list, we said no and that we didn't have tickets and that we knew it was sold out, but what were those tickets the people in front of us had just given back and could we, like, maybe prettypleasewithacherryontop have them. Amazingly, the lovely lady gave us the tickets and we scampered downstairs like two girls who just won the lottery! The gig was great: lovely band - a sort of Beirut-lite - lovely vibe, lovely night.

Saturday:

After my usual Saturday morning ritual of the Ambassador + FT, I thought I'd head to the Tate Modern. I don't know why I keep going back to the Tate Modern. I'm beginning to think I'm a glutton for artistic punishment. The last show I saw at the Tate that I rated as a few degrees warmer than acceptable was the Cildo Meireles show last January. Thank god for the Level 2 gallery, though, as this seems to be the only place open to interesting contemporary work by people who are still alive. The Jill Magid show last fall was excellent and Michael Rakowitz' show, The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one's own, was the only thing that saved this visit from total irrelevance.

I suppose I shouldn't be so harsh. Everyone's experience of art is different and one of our lovely interns went to visit the exhibition when it first opened and was totally taken with the multi-disciplinary van Doesburg. Having said that, you're reading my blog so you probably don't care what our lovely intern thought...and I thought the exhibition was tedious and boring. If you're into Mondrian and Kandinsky, chances are you'll like van Doesburg, but I don't like Kandinsky and I'm not very into Mondrian and I certainly won't invest in an art movement that reduces all of life's complexities down to straight lines and primary colours.

But because I don't want anyone to accuse me of being an art nazi, I'll tell you what you should do. Skip the van Doesburg on level 5 and head straight to the level 2 gallery, which most people seem to skip for some reason even though it's free!! As my friends will attest, I typically hate anything to do with science fiction, but Rakowitz' combination of Star Wars and Saddam Hussein was provocative, hilarious, and strangely insightful. I'm not really a Star Wards fan, but I laughed out loud when I turned the corner into the last room - the set up and delivery of the central premise of the exhibition is absolutely delightful, yet so other and so creepy. Because I study ancient Rome and do a lot of reception, I always come across the comparison of Mussolini and imperial Rome, but to find that Hussein used the helmet of Darth Vadar as a model for paramilitary helmets is quite something else altogether. All the findings are presented by Rakowitz as half social history/half art and it all feels like peering through some kind of window into another world. Really wonderful stuff.

Sunday:

Part one - super hungover brunch (eggs florentine on brioche with gallons of earl grey tea) at what used to be the Patisserie Valerie on Brompton Road, but which is now something else even though it looks exactly like the old Valerie and seems to offer the exact same menu. Weird.

Part two - post brunch, The Designer and I headed to the V&A for our anti-Valentine's Day digital extravaganza to check out the Decode exhibition. Apparently most of the child-bearing population of London had the same idea and the place was rammed full of kids. Interactive exhibitions are a lot less fun when they're full of children. You have to wait politely for the midget drunks to finish so you can have some fun too, but the thing about midget drunks is that they have no conception of sharing and never realise that someone else would like to play too. And you can't really say anything to the kid like - dude, you've played long enough, piss off - as the parents look at you like you're a child molester.

Having said that, we still managed to have a laugh and we got to play with all the toys in the end. I think my favourite of all the displays was a bed of electronic reeds - you know, like reeds that grown on the sides of river banks - they had light and noise sensors in them so when you brushed the reeds with your hands or walked through them, they lit up and sang. There's also an interactive version of Radiohead's House of Cards video - you can use your fingers on the screen to move Thom Yorke's head all over the place.

Probably the most fun we had all afternoon was playing with a video camera. There's a screen set up that's divided into 25 smaller screens. In front of the screen is a monitor and a camera. You stand in front of the camera, push one of the squares on the monitor which then activates the camera which records a one-second video clip. The video clip is then speeded up and repeated endlessly in its section of the screen. I don't know if it was because we were hungover or if there's something about being in front of a camera that brings out the bonehead in people, but I could have played with that thing all day. Playing is the best! I think I laughed more yesterday than I have in ages. Though that may have also had something to do with the woman outside the V&A who looked at me like I was a crack whore when I said something to The Designer about how much I missed being able to open the door wearing nothing but a trench coat and saying, 'take me now!' Your lady turned around and gave me the death stare at which point my friend and I dissolved into hysterics.

Good weekend. Good friends. Good times.

Alexander McQueen

I love fashion - I always have - but part of me has always found it difficult to reconcile the frivolous, bitchy, consume, consume, consume aspects of the business with the artistry of form that I find so attractive. Since luxury fashion is such a high-money industry, it's hardly surprising that designers are increasingly under pressure to push the boundaries, commercially as well as creatively. Hence the era of fashion as lifestyle and not as craft, i.e. it's better if the high street shopper buys a bag and not a dress because of higher profit margins.



Plenty of important people have lived and died in my lifetime and while I've found myself reflecting on the lives of a few, I've never experienced these deaths as a significant loss. My reaction to the news of Alexander McQueen's death yesterday surprised me. I wouldn't say that I felt a profound loss - I'm not sure I could feel so strongly about someone I never knew personally - but it brought me way down. Here was a man, actually in the business, who seemed to embody my own love/hate dichotomy concerning the amazing potential versus the inherent superficialities within the fashion industry.



With McQueen, I always got the sense that it wasn't about the business: the bags, sunglasses, perfume - no side shows here; McQueen was all about the spectacle. Fashion wasn't just about what you wore on any given day, nor about the bag you carried, instead it revolved around an almost Platonic ideal - what clothes could be if you raised the bar as high as possible - fashion not for this world, but for an imagined alter-reality. Not that you couldn't wear his clothes. One of my favourite dresses is a McQueen - it's my Pocahontas dress - butter-soft flesh toned leather, edged neck and hem in tiny safety pins. It's beautifully constructed, whimsical, and tons of fun to wear. Apart from the fact that I look warily at anyone within a five-foot radius carrying a glass of red wine when I wear it...

While Lagerfeld was making runways into giant carousels and Versace was covering them with mirror, McQueen was dragging catwalk shows by the hair into the 21st-century. Robotic arms spray painting dresses on the runway, hologramed models opening shows, breaking all the rules of fashion exclusivity by streaming a show live on the internet using cameras on tracks on either side of the runway - this was true innovation in every sense of the word. Not to mention the clothes. Consistently bizarre and often vicious, brutally constrained or beautiful and loose, I might not always have found his clothes beautiful, but I never found them dull.

To think that there will never be another McQueen dress is sad enough, but to know that there will never be another McQueen show is worse. It sometimes felt like all that was keeping the various fashion weeks from falling off the cliff of their own self-righteousness was the utter insanity and joyous ridiculousness of McQueen's show. To say that his death leaves a gaping hole in the biz is an understatement indeed.

ways of seeing

I keep seeing the new French Connection ads everywhere - it's hard not to notice them - they are striking images: clean, with strong lines, and a heavy emphasis on traditional gender stereotypes.

I went to a rather uninspiring event on neuromarketing last night (more on that in a later post), but as I was running out the door I pulled John Berger's Ways of Seeing off my bookshelf and threw it in my bag for on-the-way-there reading. The bit of Berger's book I managed to read on the bus on my way to Hoxton [there's a lesson here: never go to an 'intellectual' event in Hoxton...] turned out to be the most stimulating material I encountered last night.

Then this morning a colleague picked up a copy of Shortlist coming out of the tube and it had the French Connection ads all over the front and back covers. I immediately thought, ah ha!, someone at Fallon's been reading Berger - or at least conforming to gender stereotypes concerning gaze and thus helping to prove Berger's thesis. The beginning of Berger's chapter 3 is worth printing here in full, but it's a bit long, so I won't. I will say that if you haven't read it, you should, as it's really fascinating stuff. If you've ever read anything on film theory, you're bound to have come across the idea of 'the gaze', but Berger is interested in the idea of 'seeing' primarily as a function of fine art, though the FC ads demonstrate how easily this all translates into popular culture.

Berger's argument is essentially that men act and women appear. His elaboration is brutal but reveals some interesting 'truths' about the nature of gender roles in Western society: men are defined by how they survey, while women are defined by how they are surveyed.

According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presences is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and creditable his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretense is always towards a power which he exercises on others.

By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surrounding, tastes – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or small or aura.

The thing that gets me about the Fallon French Connection ads is that they totally, absolutely, and completely subscribe to Berger's way of seeing (though there's also more than a nod to Jorgen Leth's glorious 1967 Det perfekte menneske). Even if there's a post-ironic smirk lurking just beneath the surface - what with the bunny ears on the manly man and the sardonic expression of boredom on the woman - there's still a glorification of this idea that man is man because of what he sees and woman is woman because she is looked at. Even though I'm not entirely comfortable with Berger's gender-bending division between acting and appearing, I recognise as well as Fallon and co. that it's nevertheless an unavoidable aspect of human nature.

a conversation with ourselves

The last sentence of a recently-read article on the NYT Science pages reads:

"In fact, Dear Reader, you could consider this new study to be firm scientific evidence of your own awesomeness. And if you want to share that feeling with anyone, you know what to do next."

Indeed I do know what to do next, which is do what I always do and share.

Basically, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania compiled an awful lot of data regarding the habits of the NYT's readers (in how they pass on and share articles they read on the NYT) and found that people like to share:

a) good news: "Isn't this story about former teenage drug addicts turned urban gardeners uplifting?"
b) things that make them look awesome: “Perhaps this will amuse, although of course it’s a superficial treatment. Why can’t they use Schrödinger’s full equation?”
c) long articles on intellectually challenging topics: see b above
and nicest of all
d) articles that inspired awe: "doesn't this amazing story about, like, the total vastness of the cosmos just make you feel part of some crazy, wicked, out there universe, dude?"

Anyway, it's an interesting story about how and why we share information online. Check it out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html?ref=science

monsieur, you are a rake, and you shall get nowhere with me

Read an interesting little pop-sci piece this morning on new research in language and the brain. The general swing of the thing was that the more we learn about the brain, the more a strict adherence to localisation of function looks obsolete. I was reading about the argument posited by Friedemann Pulvermuller at Cambridge that certain functions - in this instance language processing - are far more complex and that simply reducing responsibility to the infamous Broca and Wernicke areas provides an incomplete picture. Indeed, Pulvermuller suggests that around two thirds of the brain is involved in language processing. The idea of language being a whole brain experience means that we also understand language in a sensory capacity: when we think of words that have to do with the mouth - licking or eating or kissing - we're also activating areas of our brain that are involved with controlling our mouths, not just our language. Reading the following sentence stopped me in my tracks: we don't just understand words, we feel them. It's so obvious, of course, but having such a clear-cut explanation connects all the dots. Feeling words, not just understanding them - I think this has long been the assumption underpinning my entire view of aesthetics - but I'm not sure whether I consciously realised it until this morning.

What I actually wanted to write about - The ROH production of The Rake's Progress I saw on Wednesday evening - ties perfectly into this idea of feeling words, not just understanding them. I love most genres of music and I especially love going to see live music, but there are few musical experiences where I actually feel moved by the words, moved by the music, as I do with opera. It's not a given and nothing that you can take for granted - not all operas have this unique power though, or at least not for me - but I always find it amusing when my friends say they don't like opera. It's like saying you don't like music, for there are as many different kinds of opera as there are other kinds of music.

I'm still finding out what I like in opera. I love Mozart and Handel, of course, though I'm not such a big fan of the bel canto composers and I didn't really think I was into the German composers, but both Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Wagner's Der fliegende Hollander rocked my world last year, hence the still figuring it out. My general attitude, though, is to see everything that comes to town, so off I went to The Rake's Progress, mind open.

I won't say that I don't like Stravinsky, but the score was far from music to my ears. And a libretto written by Auden?! While I've written before about how I feel Auden lacks aurality - after my early-morning reading maybe what I really meant is that his words don't make me feel the way I want poetry to make me feel. Auden's words are just words: sometimes they're words that make me laugh or words that make me think, but they are rarely words that move me. Auden's lack of power combined with Stravinsky's 'difficult' music results in exactly the sort of thing I don't want from an opera. Having said that, I can see why Stravinsky and Auden work well together - if you're into that whole atonal, unresolved, jarring sort of modernist music. Personally, I'm not. At least not at the opera, when it's not what I expect - don't get me wrong, though: a bit of well-timed Steve Reich is glorious stuff.

Maybe the performance could have been rescued by a super-human cast, but I thought - apart from Kyle Ketelsen's lovely baritone Nick Shadow - that everyone was horrendously weak. I was surprised that these people were singing on stage at the ROH - no dynamism, no power, poor projection - ouch. That said, the staging was witty and the production was surprisingly funny, but whether this is the right attitude or not, I go to the opera to be moved, to experience those sublime overwhelming sensations that only come from this bizarre combination of human voice and orchestral accompaniment, and for me the music should come first. Unfortunately, visual trickery can disguise neither shoddy performances nor a general lack of feeling.

baby don't go in no corners

I've been a PhD student for two and a half years and only gave my first departmental paper on Tuesday evening. I've given papers before and it's actually something I quite enjoy, but giving a paper to your entire faculty is something else altogether. It went very well, thankfully, and a moment of extreme smugness ensued when one of the professors asked me where I lived in France (a lot of my paper is in French). I've never lived in France, I'm just pretty good with languages.

While the experience was less painful than expected, it also reinforced what I wrote about a few days ago. I don't want to know everything about an extremely limited field, à la academia: I want to know everything about everything. I am inquisitive and curious - insatiably so. I clip interesting looking places/books/shows/etc out of newspapers or magazines and then I actually go there/read them/see them. Cf. latest wonderful discovery - the Alice-in-Wonderlandesque cocktail bar 69 Colebrooke Row - thanks to an article in the FT weekend magazine.

Apart from my game of cultural russian roulette - which for me seems to work better with books than music and has brought me GK Chesterton's Napoleon of Notting Hill, Norman Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself, JK Donlevy's Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B as well as Ronan Bennett's The Catastrophist and Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing - I keep my eyes peeled and my ears open.

If I hear a song in a shop or a cafe and I have no idea who it is, I'll write down a few of the lyrics and track down the song later when I get home. This doesn't seem to yield the same kind of results that I get with random book buying, but I've come to The Cribs, The Young Knives, and the Hot 8 Brass Band this way.

One of the best books I've ever read - James Salter's Light Years - was discovered by snooping through the contents of the desk of a very cute boy sitting next to me in the London Library. I wondered what he was reading and when he vacated his desk for a moment, I took the opportunity to rifle through the books on his desk (like I said, insatiably curious). The book at the top of the pile was Light Years, which I'd never heard of, so I went out and bought a copy and then spent the next day on the terrace at Somerset House savouring it. Such a marvellous book! And one which I might never have come to know had I not been up to my silly tricks.

When I was in Edinburgh over the Christmas holidays I headed to Armchair Books [Armchair served as the inspiration for Dylan Moran's Black Books bookshop - tis an Edinburgh institution] to pick up a few gifts and look for something new for me. I found what I was looking for giftwise and then asked the [totally and hilariously random] bookseller if he might recommend something good. As it happened, he was just about to put a book on the 'staff recommendation' shelf with a handwritten note blue tacked to the front which read: 'This book is astoundingly good. And I have excellent taste.' I finally got around to reading the book on Tuesday, but your man was right. I don't know if it's astoundingly good, but it is a good book [it's Russell Hoban's Amaryllis Night and Day]. But the thing that really gets me is that it's so perfect for what's been going on in my head lately - about the nature of creative people - and how they think and where they take inspiration from. A reminder that it's not a bad thing to be a girl who loves eighteenth-century French literature and Latin epic and neuroplasticity and architecture and opera (though not Stravinsky, as I learned last night) and dance punk and London and Edinburgh and dressing up and grunging out - why limit possibilities for the sake of a good old-fashioned academic career.

Nobody is going to put this baby in a corner.