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.

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, � 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.

Ode on an English Poet

Some time ago I wrote a piece about the relationship between artists and critics. The piece went something like this: a lady journalist for the Guardian said that critics shouldn't write about their artist friends. I said she was full of shit, though to be fair, I wasn't quite so rude at the time. Here's an example why I think she's wrong.

Enter stage left, Ross Sutherland. Okay, so I wouldn't exactly call Ross a friend in the friendly sense of the word, but he's not quite an acquaintance either. We haven't had a drink together, but he performed at one of my SALON nights, I've got his number in my phone, and we're 'friends' on facebook. According to the laws of 21st century relations, that probably constitutes friendship.

The reason I so vehemently disagree with the lovely lady journalist is because sometimes your artist-type friends are really good at stuff and just because you're a critic doesn't mean you can't be objective about your own friends. Not only that, but you shouldn't be afraid of telling people how good stuff is, even is said stuff is penned and performed by people you have less than objective relations with. Obviously you want to support these people, but you also want to help the viewing public - to introduce them to something new and amazing.

I had a conversation with another friend at lunch last week about modernism and the decline of close-knit cultural circles. Even though neither of us are that keen on modernist philosophies, we agreed that it was a great time to be an artist: with your Peggy Guggenheims and your Gertrude Steins - your Eliots and Picassos and Hemingways and Pounds - this sort of cultural community that sometimes feels like it doesn't exist anymore. And if lady journo had her way, there wouldn't be any cultural community at all - for how can such a thing exist if critics and patrons are encouraged not to patronise (can you use this word in this sense anymore?) the people whose work they admire and respect.

But one glittering bonus that came out of putting on the SALON exhibition is that I saw a whole different side of London's artistic community. There are people making things happen - this man is a very good example - and making cross connections and doing and supporting and having a jolly good time. Ross is very much a part of this and his show reminded me that I shouldn't be so sourpussed about the golden ages of cultural history past - we're doing pretty fine with what we've got.

So. The kid's got talent. I've seen him read his poetry before - from this book - and he's great: most of his poetry is inordinately clever, and narrative driven, but rather surprisingly steeped in formalist technique. Like the best rules and restrictions always do, though, formalism frees Ross up to do all kinds of crazy stuff. His take on univocalism has me in stitches every time I hear it (though it isn't in the current show) and his N+7 (where you replace every noun/verb with the one seven places below it in the dictionary) reworking of the little red riding hood story turns out the hilariously inspired 'the liverish red-blooded riffraff hoo-ha'. But apart from the fact that Ross' poetry is more than good enough to stand on its own, the framing device offered by this show turns it into something altogether more poignant and provocative. What surprised me most of all is how moving the show is - not something I often experience at more straight-up poetry readings.

Ross does what many of the best artists do - in one of my creative writing courses at Uni, the instructor was always shouting at us to, 'write what you know!'* - and has taken episodes from his own sort of annus horribilis and turned them into a lesson for us all: our future is of our own making. Thankfully, he never bludgeons the lesson into his audience but allows it to creep neatly in via his artful time-capsule. One of my favourite bits of the show was when Ross explained how Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' inspired the creation of the time capsule - he managed to make Keats totally and hilariously relevant to an audience full of people who I'm pretty sure had never read any Keats in their life, let alone his ode to an urn. Any man who can do that is all right by me.

The point is critics should write about their artist friends because sometimes their artist friends are great. So go see The Three Stigmata of Pacman not because Ross is my friend, but because his show is great.

* funnily enough he sounded exactly like Wallace Shawn. There's a whole other story there, but I'll save that for another time

in all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty

Am currently loving Nietzsche. He's a bit nuts and surprisingly funny. I'm reading Beyond Good and Evil and even I'm taken aback at the number of times I laugh out loud while reading. I've turned down plenty of page corners and underlined juicy morsels - my intention is to write a proper, meaty Nietzsche post at some point in the future, but for today this excerpt must suffice. I find his insights into those who purport to practice "high culture" to be particularly interesting, his observations are as true now as they did over 100 years ago. Having said that, the next chapter ends with the statement, "we men wish that women should not go on compromising herself through enlightenment..." Ouch. Still arranging my opinions on the great philologist.

Anyway, the excerpt:

In late ages that may be proud of their humanity, so much fear remains, so much superstitious fear of the "savage cruel beast" whose conquest is the very pride of these more humane ages, that even palpable truths remain unspoken for centuries, as if by some agreement, because they look as if they might reanimate that savage beast one has finally "mortified." Perhaps I dare something when I let one of these truths slip out: let others catch it again and give it "milk of the pious ways of thinking" to drink until it lies still and forgotten in its old corner.

We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes. We should at long last learn impatience lest such immodest fat errors keep on strutting about virtuously and saucily, as have been fostered about tragedy, for example, by philosophers both ancient and modern. Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition. That "savage animal" had not really been "mortified"; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become - divine.

[and here's the crux!] What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity, and at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty. What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at an auto-da-fe or bullfight, the Japanese of today when he flocks to tragedies, the labourer in a Parisian suburb who feels a nostalgia for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne [note the feminine!!] who "submits to" Tristan and Isolde, her will suspended - what all of them enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardour are the spicy potions of the great Circe, "cruelty."

To see this we must, of course, chase away the clumsy psychology of bygone times which had nothing to teach about cruelty except that it came into being at the sight of the sufferings of others. There is also an abundant, over-abundant enjoyment at one's own suffering, at making oneself suffer - and wherever man allows himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation, as among Phoenicians and ascetics, or altogether to desensualization, decarnalization, contrition, Puritanical spasms of penitence, vivisection of the conscience, and sacrifizio dell'intelletto a la Pascal, he is secretly lured and pushed forward by his cruelty, by those dangerous thrills of cruelty turned against oneself.

Finally consider that even the seeker after knowledge forces his spirit to recognize things against the inclination of the spirit, and often enough also against the wishes of his heart - by way of saying No where he would like to say Yes, love, and adore - and thus acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty. Indeed, any insistence on profundity and thoroughness is a violation, a desire to hurt the basic will of the spirit which unceasingly strives for the apparent and superficial - in all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty.