Susan Muncey, blogger, trend forecaster and founder-curator of the magnificent online curiosity shop, ShopCurious.com, is the latest columnist to join the ranks of The Dabbler.
Her exclusive style column - RetroProgessive - will appear every Saturday.
This is Style, Dabbler-style. Expect the beautiful, the strange and, above all, the unexpected...
Something for the Trend Hunter
Any mention of the word ‘Rohan’ conjures up images of boringly functional outdoorsy menswear. But Rohan Chhabra is ex-winner of the Avant Garde Collection Award at Delhi’s Pearl Academy of Fashion, and has just completed an MA in Industrial Design at Central St Martins in London.
Rohan aims to ‘question ethics, create dilemma, provoke debate, raise awareness and allow design to deal with more complex human emotions and value’ with his ‘Embodying Ethics’ collection. This consists of pieces that ‘replace the values of consumption and destruction with reflection and appreciation.’
Designs include a ‘socially responsive’ Hunter Jacket that magically transforms into a ram’s head wall mount, along with a handy Sheep Organ Bag.
But it’s the Cow Leg Trouser that makes me wonder if new designers can sometimes be a little too creative - and what they’ll eventually end up doing with their curiously innovative minds.
For more Susan and for style, fashion, gifts and other curiosities, visit Shopcurious.com
This is a bit gimmicky but some are very effective. On the odd occasion, Berlin and its bullet-holed buildings can feel a bit like this anyway. There are a few other cities featured too.
Rupert Murdoch has his paywall, but how does the average impoverished scribbler eke some cash out of the internet? A Paypal button to solicit donations is all very well, but it doesn't exactly tug at the heartstrings, does it? What is needed is a good old-fashioned hard luck letter, in stirring prose, posted at the top of your webpage or blog. Something like this:
"I am in great distress and know not my future. My failure is in Buffalo. I have been here so long because I have no money to move away. I have been evicted and have lost all my clothes and goods, am destitute, a stranger in a strange land, friendless, helpless and hopeless; have not had a full meal for a month, am dirty, ragged and in tatters; precisely in the condition that Joshua might be expected to be in, and do not know at all what is to become of me – all seems dark. I am aged, have grown infirm, and badly ruptured with always a swimming in my head. Walk about the streets ready to fall, inclined to think my mission in life has ended, and that this is my last letter... People at home have been secretly working against me. I am too honest to steal, too proud to beg, too old to work, and have no trade at my hands."
(Quoted in Eccentric Lives And Peculiar Notions by John Michell, Thames & Hudson 1984)
Thus Edward Hine (1825-1891), the brains behind the British Israelite movement, a group dedicated to the idea that the British are the blood descendants of one of the original ten tribes of Israel and need to move en masse to Palestine to usher in the Second Coming. (Unlike contemporaneous groups with similar ends, Hine did not consider it a requirement that all Jews had to convert to the Anglican church.) He wrote his letter when stuck in North America following an unsuccessful speaking tour. It worked – he was sent a ticket enabling him to return home to England, where he died three years later.
I am emboldened by this, and am in no doubt whatsoever that if I complain of a swimming in the head over at Hooting Yard, the loot will come pouring in!
Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire was bought from the agents of Henry VIII by a clothier named Mr Stumpe and converted into a woolen mill. When the antiquary John Aubrey visited in the 1660s the Norman nave still clattered with looms, and Mr Stumpe's great-grandson - Mr Stumpe, Esquire - plugged the beer-barrels in his cellar with wads of illuminated manuscripts. 'The manuscripts flew about like butterflies,' wrote Aubrey in a plangent vanitas. 'All musick bookes, account bookes, copie bookes &c. were covered with old manuscripts... and the glovers of Malmesbury made great havoc of them. Before the late warrs a world of rare manuscripts perished hereabout.'
Presumably the manuscripts were made from vellum. Medieval illuminated calfskin gloves? Quite an accessory and not something you're going to find at Bicester Village.
From In Ruins by Christopher Woodward, which I'm re-reading. I never used to re-read. Is it something that happens when you hit your 40s?
The blockbuster Banksy vs Bristol exhibition (the opening day of which I reviewed here), was largely the business of walking round Bristol Museum going “Yes, heh heh, very smart, but is it art, dammit, is it art?” It was striking therefore to find a Banksy-vandalised Damien Hirst (about whom the Is It Art? question is also often asked) on display next to Karl Weschke’s painting Leda and The Swan.
Queasy and inexplicably menacing; Ah, now this is art, then. Why is the myth inverted, with Leda the predator and the swan seemingly trapped in a prison-like environment? Bansky’s gags can be explained in a sentence. Weschke’s bleak paintings defy words. We can give it a go, however. An obituary in The Times describes his style thus:
Weschke’s skies can look like stainless steel, his rocks like iron, and his seas can seem murky, viscous, and ominously placid. Bathers, their backs against the rocks, appear isolated, hemmed in, and vulnerable. Corpses float face down in the dark waters or lie rigid on deserted beaches, and dogs, teeth bared, defend bloody carrion.
Karl Weschke’s biography is as interesting and unsettling as his art. Born in 1925 in Gera, Germany, he was abandoned by his mother at the age of two, sent to a home and then reclaimed by her five years later. He was just one of her three illegitimate children, all by different fathers.
Weschke found the security he craved in the shape of the Hitler Youth. He joined the Luftwaffe in 1942 and was brought to England as a prisoner-of-war in 1945. So convinced a Nazi was Weschke that for some weeks after the end of WWII he refused to believe that Germany had surrendered. His ‘re-education’ resulted in a nervous breakdown and when released in 1948 he had found painting but lost all desire to return to his homeland. He later discovered that his father, a political anarchist whom he had met only briefly at the age of 11, had been murdered at Auschwitz.
Moving to Cornwall in 1955, Weschke exhibited and flogged a few paintings here and there but was largely ignored until the1990s, when the Tate bought some of his pictures and documentaries about him were screened on British and German telly. Thus he gained a reputation late in life, and was given the freedom of Gera in 2001, just four years before his death.
Weschke bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Picasso and had no trouble attracting the ladies. He married three times and fathered five children, happy to raise them alone when relationships broke down. Supplementing his income by teaching and diving for lobsters, he devoted his day to his offspring and painted by night, having no patience for the bleeding heart argument that it was impossible to bring up children and be an artist.
Indeed, although he lived in close proximity to the St Ives School (and counted writers John le Carre and WS Graham amongst his friends), he was cynical about artistic circles, often criticising their snobbery and preciousness. Asked once whether he chose to live in Cornwall because of the beautiful light, he answered, "Cornish light? I've got a 60-watt light-bulb and I keep the curtains closed."
I don't know about you, but I'd only ever thought of 'Louis Vuitton' as a logo on rather vulgar baggage knocked off in Chinese sweatshops for the delectation of the chavocracy (of whom I've been seeing rather a lot lately, on my frequent train journeys on the Chiltern Line - they're all headed for something called Bicester Village, whence they return lugging vast numbers of conspicuously branded carrier bags). So, I was startled to discover today that Louis Vuitton was in fact a real person, and that he was born on this day in... Go on, have a guess, you'll never get it... Give up?... 1821! Young Louis walked the 250 miles from his home in the Jura to Paris, became an apprentice layetier (bag/luggage maker), caught the eye of Napoleon III, set up his own business - and the rest is history, surprisingly long history. What next? Will I discover that Signori Dolce and Gabbana were ornaments of the Neapolitan court, that Van Dutch was a pal of Vermeer's? The world becomes ever stranger.
...venues devoted to the outpourings of alternative comedians since Ben Elton first performed at the fringe in the boom years of the early 1980s are increasingly making room for singing acts, burlesque artists and magicians.
There's even talk of the spirit of music hall being revived. However, whilst music hall proper - performed in dedicated theatrical venues and encompassing a bafflingly wide array of entertainments - died out in the '60s, its spirit never entirely left us (and I'm not referring to the historical reenactment that was the The Good Old Days, which staggered into the '80s).
Music hall's absurd fustian, foppish outfits, rococo styling and stock characters have been variously drawn on by a number of entertainers, some of them - perhaps surprisingly - fashionable and even innovative: pop groups such as The Small Faces, The Beatles, Chas and Dave and Madness; comics Monty Python, Vic Reeves and Harry Hill; and West End musicals Oliver! and My Fair Lady.
To take just a handful of elements borrowed from music hall, directly or indirectly: Madness's Nutty Dance can be traced back through Humphrey Ocean's capering for Kilburn and the High Roads (Ian Dury's first group) to the Egyptian Sand Dance (right); John Cleese's Ministry for Silly Walks included some moves lifted directly from Max Wall's routine (bottom [anda real treat]); the characters of My Fair Lady, despite its Pygmalion origins, are almost all to be found as music hall types.
A new generation of performers tapping into this heritage will certainly have a lot to work with. David Kynaston's Family Britain provides a sample of music hall acts from the early-'50s (previously quoted over at my place):
...the magician Ali Bongo ('The Shriek of Araby'), the illusionist Cingallee, the pigeon act Hamilton Conrad, the animal and bird impersonator Percy ('I Travel the Road') Edwards, the drag act Ford and Sheen, the mind-reader The Amazing Fogel, the lady whistler Eva Kane, the male impersonator Hetty King, the foot spinner and raconteur Tex McLeod, the yodelling accordionist Billy Moore, the human spider Valantyne Napier, the mental telepathists The Piddingtons, the novelty xylophonist Reggie Redcliffe, the speciality dancer Bunty St Clair, the pianist Semprini, the aereliste Olga Varona, and many, many others - inhabitants of a lost world.
What a rich ecology that is!
The auguries for a full-blown revival - music hall proper rather than music hall as influence - are as promising as they've ever been. Variety is once again drawing big TV audiences through shows like Britain's Got Talent and The X-Factor. And our appetite for live performance - paradoxically or inevitably? - appears to grow the more we consume the rest of our entertainment in digital form.
But I do have concerns that the phenomenon detected up in Edinburgh isn't really inspired by music hall, despite its being name-checked in the piece. Most of what's happening there is actually its rather pretentious and standoffish sister, cabaret. A concern with 'radical, transgressive chic' sounds dangerously like the sort of tiresome and self-consciously didactic stuff that I don't need mental telepathists The Piddingtons to tell me isn't going to entertain the people.
And without popularity music hall can't really be music hall. True, it's always had a strong strain of the bizarre and transgressive. But above all it has to be demotic, raucous, accessible and involving.
I suspect that what's playing in front of the arty and mostly bourgeois Edinburgh crowds isn't going to go down too well with the descendants of music hall's original (and notoriously unforgiving) audiences in those Halls, Empires, Hippodromes, Alhambras and Grands that were dotted around Britain's large industrial cities. But perhaps there's an impresario out there right now - the new music hall's Simon Cowell, God help us - who's experimenting with a formula that will once again lay on a truly popular Big Night Out.
(By the way, if you're interested to learn more about the history of music hall, I stumbled across this excellent site.)
At Touching From a Distance (now incorporated into The Spectator), guest poster Prof David McMenemy offers various arguments for the importance of public libraries. At least, he talks a lot about ‘learning spaces’ and ‘vital cogs in the wheels of societal development’ and says things like "in a digital world where publishers can put up paywalls at the click of a mouse, our collective ability to facilitate access to knowledge for our fellow citizens has become even more important." In the comments, Simon suggests that the gap can be plugged by dishing out iPads, which is very 21st Century I suppose.
All of which theorising fails to address the reality of what public libraries are for. Have you had this discussion? Do you find that nearly everyone you know thinks they’re outmoded now that we have Wikipedia and Amazon selling great books for 1p?
Me too, but then I discovered the startling fact that in Britain more books are borrowed from public libraries every year than are sold in all shops.
The top ten authors are here, and their identities tell you all you need to know about how the above startling fact can be. Public libraries are used enormously, but almost entirely by OAPs and parents of young children, two of the least fashionable and most blog-ignored groups in society.
I suggest that the debate about public libraries should therefore start by looking at the needs of these actual library users, rather than with academic theories about learning spaces or the potential of the latest Apple products.
“I threw up a little in my mouth when I realized I would have to read that ugly font throughout the film,” says one blogger of 'Papyrus', the font used by James Cameron for the subtitles in Avatar. Thus proving once again that there is no area of life so trivial that someone can’t get very angry about it on the internet. I mean, Papyrus,
Possibly it is, yes. Meanwhile, this is an entire website devoted to the abolition of Comic Sans, a typeface which the wonderfully snarky blogger LMNOP describes as “the AOL of fonts; the very accessibility that made it popular and novel in the 1990s became its downfall. These days, just like an e-mail from an "@ aol.com" address has a distinct lack of credibility, an e-mail written in this font makes the sender seem ridiculous and out of touch.” (She goes on to similarly demolish users of Curlz MT - "Curlz MT is not a font; it's a cry for help" – and Vivaldi – "Because everything you write should look like a wedding invitation").
The trouble with fonts is that once you start looking for them you can’t see anything else. Little wonder, then, that people have started suffering from Font Paralysis, a very 21st century disease whereby writers are unable to start their great novels, poems or CVs because they can’t settle on the ‘right’ font.
...Chapter One. I mean, Chapter One. No that’s too 1950s newspaperman. Perhaps I mean Chapter One. Oh God, will Verdana subtly dilute the carefully-crafted ambience of my potential short story? ...
The Canadian blogger Phronk argues that Font Snobs are buffoons and plonkers. Phronk thinks fonts don’t matter and he’s drawn a clever flow chart to illustrate this. “A font's job is to display words” he insists, correctly. Unfortunately he adds: “So sure, that means being neutral and getting out of the words' way”, which is precisely the point being made by the Ban Comic Sans movement.
Fonts only matter if they’re visible. Like Wimbledon ballboys or manservants, the best ones - Ariel, Times, Georgia – are the ones you don’t notice at all.
[We try to offend only when we mean to here at The Dabbler so I should warn you that this post contains some bad language. It's at the end. There'll be something else along soon enough if you don't fancy it.]
I like reading American political history and I love reading about it through a decent political biography. What appeals is seeing how the individual personality, with its quirks and ticks, is exposed and transformed in such a vast and pressured arena. I'm currently enjoying Race of a Lifetime, an account by a couple of journalists of the 2010 presidential race. Whilst not a biography, it comprises roughly two-year sections from the lives of the rather motley group of contenders told in parallel.
American politics is played out on an imperial stage - and I'm not referring to the US's foreign involvements. The US itself has characteristics of empire: a diversity of cities, states and regions spread across a continent-sized landmass; it's a federation of different ethnicities, cultures, geographies, and economies. Any politician who seeks the American presidency has to come to terms with the lot of them, at least to some degree. He or she must play up to half-a-world's worth of particularities: Hollywood stars and Silicon Valley techies, Iowan farmers and Chicagoan retailers, Wall Street financiers and New Hampshire fishermen, Texan oilmen and Nevadan hoteliers, Boston brahmins and New Mexican ex-Mexicans. And these sprawling, multi-million dollar efforts are all relayed to the American public via the American media, by turns unwieldy, faddish, ignorant, lavish, punctilious, obsessive, dogged, lazy, sycophantic, malicious and frenzied.
It's epic and complicated. And an awful lot of political calculation - and luck and timing - is required to master such a vast theatre of action and ideas.
The fun comes when this outsize challenge is attempted by politicians whose continental-scale egos tell them the prize is within reach, but whose fate it is to see it move beyond their grasp - or, at least, it is for all but one of them. The book conveys very well the excitement of this situation, even if the language can be a bit exuberantly journalistic: it's billed as the story of 'the meat-grinder, flash-incinerator race to be the 44th President of the United States'. But don't let that put you off (perhaps it wouldn't anyway - you may enjoy your races recounted racily).
However, for me, the most striking thing about the book is the number of crazily dysfunctional marriages on display. Put it this way - Hilary and Bill's is the second-most harmonious (the Obamas' marriage comes out top, probably not coincidentally).
What's peculiar about these screwed-up partnerships is how profound mutual dependence is so often combined with a reckless level of abuse. In Rudy Giuliani's case, his wife 'called him constantly when he was travelling without her, no matter where he was or what he was doing...'
"Hello, dear," he said when she interrupted him while he was onstage addressing the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association. "I'm talking to the members of the NRA right now. Would you like to say hello?"
His staff concluded that he had no choice but to answer Judith's calls, because ignoring her risked dire consequences - more dire than wrecking some speech. To the NRA members, Rudy apologised, but added, "It's a lot better that way."
Even at long-distance the American political wife is more than a match for a hall full of gun-toting voters.
Another daunting spouse is Elizabeth Edwards, who, admittedly, had reason to feel aggrieved when the story of her husband's affair with a staffer appeared in the National Enquirer. In the course of his denial, John Edwards praised her as 'an extraordinary human being, warm, loving, beautiful, sexy and as good a person as I've ever known'. His staff went into 'damage-control mode, going into overdrive to dissuade the mainstream media from picking up the story.' And, 'Their efforts at constraining the fallout were remarkably successful.'
Edwards felt he owed 'the small coterie of aides who had corralled the story':
"It's John," he began in a voicemail to one of them. "I just wanted to call and thank you for everything you've done in the last few days. It hasn't been easy. I know that, and I want you to know how grateful I am for everything you've done. We'll get through this together. Don't worry, man"
The next voice mail in the staffer's queue was from Elizabeth, who vented her fury that the story had appeared in any form, suspicious that the very aides who had kept the matter from mushrooming had somehow enabled the affair.
"You're to have nothing more to do with this!" Elizabeth hissed. "Nothing more! You stay away from our family! You're poison! You're dead to us!"
Ok-aay.
I wonder, do American politicians tend to attract crazy wives or do they send them that way after a while? I'll leave you with John McCain (his wife, Cindy, is pictured below):
The 1p Book Review will be another regular feature on The Dabbler. The strange ways of internet commerce have meant that countless secondhand books can be bought online for £0.01 plus postage. The Dabbler will be recommending some of the out-of-print, forgotten or neglected gems that can be yours, at the time of writing, for a penny.
Nick Hornby has called Tyler 'the best line-and-length novelist in the world' (this, I should explain for American readers, is a cricketing term which applies to bowlers who reliably land the ball close to the batsman and in line with the stumps) - and she does indeed have the solid, reliable virtues that so many of today's novelists woefully lack. All those virtues are evident in The Amateur Marriage.
Her characters come alive in a way few writers manage - yes, they are drawn from a repertory company that gets replayed with variations, but each of them is someone you would know if you met them on the street. In the old phrase, they 'walk off the page'. Her psychological insights are often startlingly acute. She creates, with minimal fuss, an entirely credible world around her characters and deftly manages a narrative that is essentially driven by who they are. The Amateur Marriage works by particularly clever and subtle manipulation of point of view, across a series of vignettes that cover six decades. Tyler is, as John Updike once said, 'not just good, but wickedly good'.
Her masterpiece, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is surely up there with the greats, but she is probably underrated because her subject matter is too close to 'ordinary' people's experience, her books are too popular, and she works in a disciplined way on a narrow canvas (but so did Jane Austen). Oh and she does write rather too much - but The Amateur Marriage is not one to be missed.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is also available for 1p here. If you would like to recommend any books (fiction or non) that can be bought for 1p (or 1 cent?), send your nomination and justification to editorial@thedabbler.co.uk
Lazy Sunday Afternoon is going to be a weekly feature here at The Dabbler: a bit of musical accompaniment to not doing very much at all. Given its name is taken from a Small Faces song we'll start with them and with that very song (along with a couple of others).
Not many people know that the Small Faces got their name because they were literally small ('face' was Mod slang for a cool customer). Tiny they were. But Steve Marriott (right) sang big - his was one of this country's great soul voices.
'Was' as he died in rather sad circumstances nearly twenty years ago (blame the usual ongoing DDH*). But he remains worshipped by some. Google him - he has probably the longest and most detailed Wikipedia entry I've ever come across, longer even than Napoleon's. Best Marriott Wiki-fact: he acted in the original 1960 production of Lionel Bart's 'Oliver' and sang the Artful Dodger's part on the album of the show.
But if he was still around I'm not sure he'd thank us for drawing attention to Lazy Sunday Afternoon. The band thought its jokiness led to their not being taken as seriously as some of their po-faced contemporaries. They were probably right - but there's nothing wrong with pop in the vein of Madness as I'm sure we music lovers living in a more mature age would agree. Indeed, they were doing something rather interesting in carrying on the spirit of old time music hall, for that was surely a strong influence.
Here it is, followed by two personal faves, Song of the Baker Man and Tin Soldier (all but the last from the splendidly eccentric Ogden's Nut Gone Flake):
* A useful acronym when talking about pop stars, Hollywood actors, that bloke who you see down the corner shop sometimes: Drink and Drugs Hell.
Susan Muncey, blogger, trend forecaster and founder-curator of the magnificent online curiosity shop, ShopCurious.com, is the latest columnist to join the ranks of The Dabbler.
Any mention of the word ‘Rohan’ conjures up images of boringly functional outdoorsy menswear. But Rohan Chhabra is ex-winner of the Avant Garde Collection Award at Delhi’s Pearl Academy of Fashion, and has just completed an MA in Industrial Design at Central St Martins in London.
