Chanel

There is something wonderful about how comprehensively Mlle Chanel informed the way women dress. Clothes have changed greatly since she changed everything, but no one person has been behind it all, and it has never been so sudden or so definitive as was her contribution.

It came from a practicality, and a simple conception of how the form actually was. Any "look", fundamentally, is just a different comment on the form, but her comment seems so irrefutable. This is the form as we see it today.

This is a quick watercolour that I did, copying a photograph I saw in a book. It is from the 1960 Autumn/Winter collection, but in the shot, which was styled in 2004 by Karl Lagerfeld, it looks as striking and modern as anything else I have seen.

The Budget

This budget is going to be quite something. A lot of things will change.

The Frontal Lobe and Ettore Sottsass

I had a lecture on neurobiology yesterday, and of course Phineas Gage came up. I suppose that everyone who has ever studied any neuroscience has heard of Gage's frontal lobe, and a few too many times. If you haven't studied it, it is not worth too much reading: Gage was a railroad worker who was unlucky enough to have an iron rod driven through the front of his skull and when, remarkably, he survived, he had sustained injuries to his frontal lobe that lead to behavioural changes. He ended up a perfect illustration of simple - if not everyday - neurology, and the perfect way to fill out the first thirty minutes of the first neurology lecture in every medical school on Earth.

Because he has the same illustrative power, but in a much more pleasant way, I am sure that everyone who has studied design has studied Ettore Sottsass. His Olivetti typewriters were childish and beautiful, and his post-modernist Memphis work was clever and with a sort of sprezzatura that disguised all the decisions behind it. His work after Memphis always showed his interest in India, and the way that objects there seemed charged with emotion and ritualistic value. He tried to design without first principles to make objects that displayed this "sacrality", that were affective rather than rational and machinistic.

What has always impressed me about design is that it can be about decisions like that. Innumerable decisions, even those that seem remote from plastic considerations, mould physical objects.

Every object around us was shaped by thousands of human decisions, from the highest inspiration to the lowest detail. Perhaps Sottsass would choose to make a panel on a chair how-ever-many centimetres by just-a-few-more centimetres than you expected. Or maybe he would choose crimson for any one of a thousand reasons, with any number of influences, conscious and subconscious. And perhaps he would choose to conform to or depart from your expectations about how an object should line up with other objects of the same type.

At the highest level, he would in much of his later work try to convey an object that, in its Gestalt impression, was emotionally-charged or that felt like it that ritualistic value, the sacrality of India. But, while he made a critique of the mass-produced design to which he was a great contributor, and put all his efforts into designing to subvert it, I wonder if he ever felt that he had in a way already won. Even in the bland sheen on the mass-produced object, there is the intense humanism of thoughts, decisions, brains, frontal lobes.

Christophe Lemaire's Hermès Collection

I was pretty thrilled by what I have seen on the Internet of Christophe Lemaire's first collection for Hermès, particularly the first photograph of it in The Sartorialist. What I have always liked about Hermès is the French Colonial Empire aesthetic that it sometimes touches: it seems more pied-noir than Faubourg St-Honoré at times, and those are the times when it is most striking.

One piece in particular, the one I have illustrated here, Indian ink with watercolour tint, really evokes that. It makes me think of an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry character downed in an other-worldly desert, and of airmen stealing a drink of cognac in the cockpit over Algiers.

Apart from this, the show was full of stark cuts and vibrant colours accenting stable and strong neurals.

Three Sinister Carnations, My Room

When I was younger, and I spent days at my grandmother's house, I remember her picking flowers from her garden in the morning. By the afternoon, the stems were flaccid and the leaves circled the vase like wedding confetti. But I bought £1 plastic-looking posies from Tesco last week.  They had a fourteen-day guarantee on them and they lasted fourteen days exactly. I couldn't believe it, and I really wonder how they came to last so long. There was something sinister about it.

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams has long fascinated me. I recently read a poem of his called Libertad! Igualdad! Fraternidad! that talked about dreams: "it is dreams that have destroyed us...dreams are not a bad thing".

It reminds me of something I read from the Iliad: καὶ γάρ τ' ὄναρ ἐκ Διός ἐστιν, "Dreams, too, come from Zeus".  I know very little about Greek, but I think that is the meaning. In any case, Williams would have been fairly contemptuous of any Classical allusion. That is a line that has always stayed with me since I read it, although I don't know if I have the idiom or the meaning when I think about it. Nevertheless, I think about the words as they appear to me, and in different ways.

First, I think of our aspirations and inspirations as being special, and high in value, a power of which we should be appreciative. We should not waste our sparks of thought or long-held wishes, rather we should value them and structure our lives around them.  Perhaps that is fairy-cake nonsense: that is certainly a risk when you talk about dreams.

In another and less saccharine sense, our dreams and hopes seem part of a shared greater experience that is a degree separated from us and the worldly. It is not just because they are dreams or hopes and not reality that they are different from reality. Nightmares of the Real Real and visions of true happiness are perfect only because they are remote from possibility while at the same time seeming possible because we can imagine them: we can have our consuming horror or consuming pleasure and not be consumed by it; we can have our cake and not be eaten by it, too.

In another way, the phrase feels like a kindly smile on hopeless hope, a benediction on the unattainable dream. That may be the simplest sense, but in a way also the most difficult. Is there not something sickening about false hope but also something uplifting? Is it not grimily ignoble while also being noble?

This is a quick drawing, Indian ink with watercolour tint, that I did of William Carlos Williams from a picture of him that I saw on the Internet.

Waiting for my man

It would be nice if the psychiatrist's office were oak panelled, with a bust of Freud. But it is usually just bad NHS furniture on bare desks, with phones from the 1980s and hard plastic chairs. Last year, I drew this ballpoint sketch of the consulting room where I was waiting for the psychiatrist who was supervising my attachment to his department.

In Psychiatry, there is a lot of waiting.

Thomas Reid

Thomas Reid, the philosopher of the Scottish School of Common Sense, was renowned for the clarity and illustrativeness of his writing.  In his time, his work was better-regarded than Hume's.  But as well as holding academic positions, including being Adam Smith's successor as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, he was a Church of Scotland minister.  That allowed his talent at philosophy to collide with his greatest ineptitude.  Apparently, he could not give an appealing public speech.  As a lecturer away from the pulpit, he was similarly bad.

It is odd that seemingly similar types of work - writing a treatise and writing a speech - were not the same to Reid.  Perhaps it was stage fright and perhaps it was something else.  We all seem to have small niggles that arrest our development in some area, while leaving the other untouched.

When I was nine, I was in the school choir and we were rehearsing a song for our first performance since I had joined.  I enjoyed the two or three weeks I had been going to the lessons, but we sang a song with a line about a grandmother.  I knew that mine would be in the audience when we sang it, and I was seized by a preposterous embarassment at the thought of singing any line referring to a grandmother.  A strange little boy, I left the choir.  I really cannot sing at all, and I wonder if I would now be able to sing had I not left the class for a nonsense embarassment.

In the painting here, I tried to make Reid a gormless incapable, but with wisdom behind his eyes.  That he was bad in public but good inside his own head seems slightly incongrous with his philosophical position.  The painting is not very faithful to his actual appearance, which may be due to lack of skill.  I think that the headgear he is wearing is a chaperon.

Margaret Thatcher

This is a consideration of Margaret Thatcher as a reptilian character, ink with watercolour tint.  It is perhaps unfair.  It exploits the way that Thatcher is seen as unfeeling and inhuman, a steeled machine that slept five hours a night and didn't flinch when her bathroom was bombed.   It exploits the perception of her as a cold creature, emptied of a soul, who sacked the North, Scotland, and Wales, let Irishmen die, and wrecked everyone except "Our People".  But this ability to be an extremist, to be clear-headed to the point of cruelty, all the while feeling that one is a bearer of painful virtue, has nothing to do with monsters.  It is a truly human trait.

She wore that trait with glee, and her ability to wear things was evident, the aura that gave her allure. She wore her hair and her clothes with sterness and perfection that must have made her feel like she had mastered her appearance.  It was chilling and self-confident, its effect on us coming from watching her eyes tell us that she was wallowing with joy in the mastery she had made of things.  Equally, she revelled in her extremism.  The sanctimony of the Sermon on the Mound, the obstinacy of her dealing with miners: these were her powerful aesthetic.  There is a great humanity in wearing a trait or dressing in a stark opinion.

Michel Deverne

Michel Deverne is a French sculptor whose work has always dealt with the relationship between art and architecture in the city.  During the post-war reconstruction of France, a proportion of the budget for new government buildings was devoted by law to commission art.  His sculptures appear in many of France's prominent government buildings as a result.  Perhaps this profligacy is impossible here and now, or perhaps as we develop a higher aesthetic demand in other areas of our life we will come to demand more from our environment.

This sketch of him, in Indian ink with watercolour tint, is from a picture of him in Wallpaper magazine, Jan 2011

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Half Rhyme

 

I have always preferred half-rhymes.  They seem more inventive, and they avoid the cringe of the rhyme.  Perhaps the impact of a rhyme is in its cringe, of course: the cringe seems integral, as anyone who has accidentally rhymed in conversation knows.

A couple of weekends ago, the Met started staging a revival of John Adams' 1987 opera Nixon in China.  It was broadcast to the DCA in Dundee, but I missed it because I was too busy, which is regrettable, because it is one of my favourite operas.

It has one of my favourite half-rhymes.

No, not De Gaulle,
I would not file him in that pigeon-hole.

I did a bad Fauvist watercolour of General de Gaulle a few months ago.

James Jesus Angleton

To anyone who knows it, the name James Jesus Angleton means counter-intelligence, and a scurrying mistrustfulness that comes close to diagnosable paranoia.  It means red lines through type-written lists of names because of no more than a whispered doubt.  This was a man who thought that Harold Wilson was a Soviet spy, who even was suspicious of Henry Kissinger.  I am intrigued by him because he was a resolute man, a flawed man who rose and fell because of his flaw. 

It is hard to know if he was even an anti-Communist: he was perhaps not a zealot, but a man who enjoyed the feeling of zeal.  That is his appeal to me.  He was so mistrustful that people were mistrustful of him, and the outcome of that was obviously that he was ousted from the CIA in disgrace.  I wonder if he knew that that was coming; I wonder if he saw the inevitability of it all.  Perhaps that made him resolute and defiant.

But that is not the only reason he appeals to me.  Angleton was a modernist poet.  At Yale in the 1930s, he edited Furioso, which published poems by Pound, Williams and Cummings, and he had an extensive correspondence with them, and with Eliot.  I get the image of free verse forming in his mind as he interrogates someone through files and reports - the double agent, the triple agent - thinking do I trust him, must I trust him, when was he turned?

This is a sketch I drew from a photograph of him.