TRASHTALK

travel: zürich

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 19:48:17 +0100

15 minutes before 2009 died in my timezone (after a December 31st almost entirely slept through), I decided that some sort of revelry was in order. In any case, I had been reluctant to let go of 2009, you see, as it proved a relatively stellar year in a library of formidably traumatizing ones - but, after all, no good year deserves to be sent off in a vegetative state without at least halfway decent drink in hand. So, still jet lagged from the second of two transatlantic cattle wagon treks in two weeks, Niccolò and I stumbled from home into an empty and far-from-hopping “Frog Bar” on a back street in Zona Tortona. Two brusque Japanese bar girls (who my always PC Italian friend insisted on calling “mean geishas”) whipped up two very bad drinks, and the merrymaking was quickly underway. At the stroke of midnight, with cheap (free!) champagne in hand, I welcomed oh-ten in with a yawn.

But the morning brought a treat - my first trip to Zürich! It’s long been one of the priorities on my mental list of slightly-off-the-radar dream cities to visit and, happily, one of the many I’ve had the luck of getting to over the past few years. Zürich’s quality of life is supposedly ahead of all other cities in the world, and its design, art and music scene reportedly attracts some of the best talent in the world. Not a bad way to start off 2010.
It’s immediately clear that Zürich is a universe away from Milan, just a couple hours away by train - the differences are so massive, they don’t even merit explanation. It’s also very different from its way-too-pretentious French-speaking sibling, Geneva. Yes, it’s beautiful, but all of Geneva feels like the inside of a stuffy watch boutique, where you’re always on edge because the ever-present clerk won’t stop staring down his nose at you. The streets are silently boring at night, and there really is only so much raclette (read: melted cheese) one can tolerate on the menu of every restaurant. Zürich’s more German approachability just makes it seem friendlier - like a blend of Munich and a picturesque mountain village where nobody locks their door.
The SBB train through the north of Italy and over the Swiss border was nicely uncrowded and passed through the sweepingly beautiful countryside and lakes around Lucerne. It was refreshingly nice to be on a non-high speed train that wasn’t a broken down jalopy like the nasty non-Frecciarossa trains in Italy.
The theme was continued into our arrival - although the city has no metro, its tram system is unbelievably efficient and fast, with stops every few hundred meters and lines that go virtually everywhere, including the periphery and suburbs. Despite a horribly complicated ticket purchasing machine, I was genuinely impressed by how effortlessly they tied the city together, while Niccolò marveled at the fact that their seats were actually upholstered AND intact (neither of which would ever happen in Italy - or in the States, for that matter).

As usual, we used the Wallpaper guide as a rough template to finding the the art, the food and the hangouts. Unfortunately we missed going into the Kunstmuseum (the big public art museum of the city), because it was pricy and was headlined by an exhibition of Seurat (1. which I saw at the d’Orsay in Paris and 2. which mildly sucked). We did, however visit the Museum für Gestaltung (the national Swiss design museum), which is inside a beautiful 1920s functionalist brick of a building. The exhibitions inside, however, did nothing short of mildly suck. Headlining was an exhibition of Michel Comte, who I had been familiar with through his clichéd fashion photography, but was interested in getting to know better nonetheless. Turns out, besides clichéd fashion photography, he recently armed himself with a Leica M and traveled the Middle East and South America - undoubtedly while staying in 5 star hotels along his supposedly tortured path - photographed some impoverished people, and is now trying to pass it on as an expression of legitimate social commentary. Thankfully, the space was horribly lit, with fluorescent tubes and open windows bouncing light every which way and obscuring parts of every photo. At the end, there were some naked photos of his wife, who looks suspiciously like a young and idealized Yoko Ono. Seriously, the dude needs to get over himself. He almost makes Karl Lagerfeld seem modest. Besides the badly-lit ego trip, there was a conceptually interesting exhibit of “formless furniture” which basically amounted to a bunch of haphazardly cobbled together chairs which lacked traditional form, mostly by virtue of the designers lack of creativity. Maybe the premise was just misleading, but besides the archetype 1960’s original bean bag “Sacco” chair and a few others with interesting uses of material, the exhibit mostly failed to have any point. One chair appeared to be a rusty old box spring with a dusty Persian rug dropped on top. I expected a bit more from the official institute devoted to the public perception of Swiss design, but, basically the place made me take back the mean things I said about the Milan Triennale, which, as it turns out, isn’t that bad of a design museum after all.
Last up, we visited the Migros, which is a collection of galleries inside a part of the old Lowenbrau brewery, but arrived only with enough time to see the main exhibit, by an artist named Tatiana Trouvé which mused on about energy interdependence and its invisible power to unite and divide. Several of the galleries were closed since we were there at an odd time during the year. Bummer, since they looked to contain some interesting pieces.

Mildly sucky museums aside, the food is tasty and varied even though it’s waaaaaay expensive thanks to the Swiss Franc, which now equals the dollar for all intents and purposes. The Vorderer Sternen grill in Bellevue, nevertheless, sells an amazing - seriously, AMAZING - combination of sausage+bread+horseradish mustard for 6 francs that MUST be tried by anyone who visits the city. The sausage isn’t put into the bread hot dog style, so the flavors are kept apart and the bread is available as a sort of extinguisher for when you burn your tongue on the awesomely hot mustard. The cheap light beer they sell alongside it goes perfectly well, too. At another place we had potato lemongrass soup and a paper-thin crust pizza that were both reasonably good (and even got free coffee because we waited so long for service), and had fun deciphering and ordering in German at both a Thai and pan-Asian place where nobody spoke French or English or Italian. Starbucks is on every corner, a welcome/tedious difference from the no-coffee-shop policy of Italy.
Tons of bars remain to be discovered, but we did happened upon a nice performance by a soul/R&B group from New York called The Healers in the old part of the city. Attached to an art house cinema, also, is Riff Raff bar, which had a stylish and very laid back atmosphere and served good local brews. An old man, fresh from either a fight or a car accident with blood all down his face sat down for a pint right next to us at one point - cheers!
We spent the last afternoon of our stay on the shore of Zürichsee (the city’s lake waterfront), where several construction projects are refurbishing a block of midcentury bathing facilities (in-lake pool, changing rooms, bleachers for sunbathing, water slide). I hope they’re mostly kept intact, though, because they’re way cool and no helpless midcentury mushroom umbrella deserves the axe! The view from the shore is gorgeous, with immaculate lakeside houses spanning one end and the crystalline peaks of the alps peaking out from behind the other.
The last house build by Le Corbusier’s is also on these shores, in the middle of a public park. Some kids had run their toy boat ashore on the ice in the mini pond (moat?) in front and were throwing blocks of ice towards the house to free it up, as if it were just a house! I guess growing up in a city where a Le Corbusier house is just a primary-colored, everyday occurrence would make you indifferent to the whole thing, but I pretty much wanted to dip those kids in the ice.
Anyway, the whole scene looked like an ad for some idealized and out of reach city: happy children, dogs running, old and young side by side, snowcapped mountains behind a row of mansions beyond a beautiful lake, and y’know, the odd Le Corbusier house just sitting there...

No big deal.

Once back on the ominous keep-the-hand-sanitzer-handy metro of Milan, it feels nice to be home. I like my cities with extra grit, thanks.

freitag tower. every bit as novel and ingenious as its bags.

view of railyard, kreis 5 and city center beyond as seen through a gap in two stacked containers of the freitag tower.

stacks above half-abandoned lowenbrau brewery, now half-occupied by art spaces.

gorgeous in-lake swimming pool. not heated. and, unsurprisingly, empty.

1960s public changing rooms for swimming area on the lake, under reconstruction.

niccolò in front of le corbusier’s last house, in a park on lake zurich.

written from: milan, italy
i’m currently: taking a detour in my GRE study
reading: “design as art” by bruno munari
listening to: bell orchestre

design: a saab story

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:36:00 +0100

I’ve never owned one. I’ve only driven a couple. But, my heart aches for Saab as it now sits on financial death row. This is not intended as a eulogy, but is a look at an exceptional company on the brink of possible extinction.
Once great brands with fantastic potential die either because they become totally irrelevant (Oldsmobile, Autobianchi), fall victim to poor management (American Motors, Pontiac) or just come about at the wrong time (Packard, Hudson, Saturn). Others were pure crap to begin with (Plymouth, Edsel, Yugo). Some still clinging to life support should be towed immediately to the big junkyard in the sky (Mercury, Dodge, Lancia, Chrysler, Hummer, GMC).
On the other hand, if you consider Alfa Romeo, BMW, Cadillac and Citroën among others, whose brands are so strong and so defined that even major missteps from them are forgiven, you can understand the advantage of being a cult icon. Despite its own myriad problems, Saab is undoubtedly among those somehow transcendent brands who walk to the beat of a different drum. Consider that its aura is still relatively intact even after twenty years of suffocation under the fat ass of GM ineptitude, and you begin to see the power of Saab as a brand. It’s a cult, really. Generally, years and millions are invested in building a company’s soul, but as with the aforementioned four, there are occasional great exceptions when a product is simply a standout all on its own. More than almost any other, Saab’s character permeates and causes either extreme love or complete antipathy. Like a good stinky Camembert, nothing but a Saab can be mistaken for a Saab, and legions of people love them for just that reason.
In any case, despite the profuse love the brand has garnered from its loyal followers it is quite literally in the shitter, at least as far as its business health is concerned. The company’s handicap stems from that it has never had the investment or wherewithal in its direction to evolve into more more than just a small blip on the radar, and many of its inherent strengths go entirely unexploited.
For those unfamiliar with its situation, Saab is a Swedish carmaker fully owned by General Motors (see my entry from the day GM filed for bankruptcy) and is one of several brands the company promised to rid itself of in order to zoom-in on making its post-bankruptcy core business stronger (Pontiac and Saturn were taken out back and shot earlier this year).
A deal had been reached to sell the relatively small subsidiary to an even smaller Swedish supercar maker called Koenigsegg, the prospect of which made car freaks rejoice because for the first time in memory a vulnerable smaller carmaker was not going to be made the sacrificial lamb to a ruthless and soulless larger company. Saab was instead going to find a home within another company which not only shared with it a nationality famous for small miracles in design and business, but whose number one job was to make cars that compete with Ferraris and McLarens. It was to be a triumph of the small, the clever, and the enthusiast.
As luck would have it, the deal is off as of this week because Koenigsegg couldn’t secure adequate investment despite loan guarantees from the Swedish government and financial backing from a large Chinese automaker. Now, rumors are swirling that GM will pull and Old Yeller on Saab, too.

In my humble opinion, this tiny Swedish carmaker is one of the coolest on the planet. Quirky and unpretentious to a fault, it has produced several funky and extremely capable cars. Its trademark silhouettes, feisty turbocharged engies and ignition-on-the-floor have gone a long way in sustaining its originality despite it long ago falling victim to a carmaker consolidation fever. General Motors plucked it cheaply off the auction block in the early 90’s and mostly allowed it to languish for years without significant attention or investment. New products came mostly as afterthoughts and tacked on badge-engineered, brand inappropriate trash. (9-7x, 9-2x)
Of late, Saab’s cars have long lifespans--meaning they’re normally replaced with new models in cycles in which their competitors are replaced two or three times--not because they’re particularly salient or somehow eternal, but because every development dollar is wrung out of them due to development budgets too small to foot the bill of complete redesigns in industry normal time periods. Fortunately the clever engineers in Sweden working apart from other GM divisions have wrought small miracles out of otherwise standard General Motors hardware to make for some nonetheless highly competitive cars--a sort of wine from water parallel.
Despite their not always being the technological tours de force of their best German, Japanese and ironically American competition, Saabs have nevertheless been more than the sum of their parts and there is something inextricably cool and nonconformist about them. If an Audi is beautiful in the way an Apple computer is beautiful, a stunning blend of form and function that nonetheless places a premium on form, a Saab is beautiful in the way an old Leica is beautiful, gorgeous in its utilitarianism and formed entirely for function. Not to mention, even without a hybrid in its lineup, Saab has long held a wide environmentalist appeal and is probably the automaker with the longest-standing interest and exploration of alternative fuels, especially biofuels and fuel cells. Saabs look like they should always have bike and ski racks and kayaks perched on their roofs and look at home in the mountains, at the beach and in the city.
The idea behind Saab as a small and dynamic company with a well defined and cooly iconoclastic product line is not just the the kind of car company this century needs, it’s the kind of company this century needs (and should cherish) in order to keep its unique brand of creativity alive. Consider the recent massive cultural reaction to the news that Polaroid film was going the way of the dodo: perhaps not singlehandedly, the news was nonetheless was a veritable Viagra for renewed interest in analog instant film. And now, with some imaginative business moves, a group of enthusiasts is bringing its production back to life--at last, the triumph of the small, the clever and the enthusiast!

Saab is to cars what today Polaroid is to photography and should be protected with the same vigor. It’s not a stretch to think that with a little creativity, a business case that doesn’t include a Chinese company or sketchy investment firm dismantling it can be made to work for it. Understanding that there is always a sizable market for gourmet stinky cheese, although it’s quite the turn-off for the masses, could go a long way towards understanding how Saab can be made to work. Nonconformism in business paradoxically means standing squarely outside the mainstream while still turning a profit. Challenging, yes. But it can be done.

Chug on, little car company that could.

The iconic and still brilliant-looking 900.

Killer 2008 Turbo X AWD.

1959 Saab 95.

The ancient but still contemporary 2009 Saab 9-5 - in production for a whopping 11 years.

2008 Saab 9-3 Convertible.

Two new models, a completely new 9-65 (pictured, which actually went into production this week) and a new crossover were/are set to make their for sale debuts soon.

Tag Christof, Florence ///

on the iPod: Patsy Cline, “Real Estate” Real Estate, “What Will Be Will Be” Devendra Banhart

fashion: alfonso & emma

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:08:50 +0200

When did everyday elegance keel over? As fashion choices have boiled over in the past few decades, people today paradoxically look trashier than at any time since at least the invention of photographic processes. It could be that the inescapable polyester and one-piece jumpsuits of the 70s suffocated taste. If not, we killed any traces of hope that might have remained with the trade in of quality for spandex, massive logos and total looks of the 80s and the noncommittal blandness of the 90s.
Today’s circus of talentless lowbrow celebs and their hideously asinine outfits that somehow pass for fashion - with Gaga and Paris reigning as their unfortunate ringleaders - continue to attract legions of voracious lowbrow celebrity worshippers. Never mind the endless parade of eQueens, who light up the blogosphere with spangles, Gossip Girl worship and other miscellaneous tack. With mantras like hot mess! still burning holes in my ears, I’m extremely glad to generally always miss the boat to the realm of trendy.
The paradoxical flourishing of design and art enthusiasm/literacy we’ve recently witnessed clashes profoundly with the vomit popular culture and popular fashion is making a habit of spitting out. And, sadly, although we all know that the people who do nothing more than shock and disgust in order to gain notoriety are royal twats, the appetite for the rubbish that supports them seems to be insatiable. 2009

The cherry on top of the poop sundae: Miley Cyrus has been at the top of the iTunes downloads chart for weeks. Basically, we’re fucked.

Anyway, as a voracious consumer of [what I like to think of as mostly good] images myself, I was recently ecstatic to find these few snapshot gems of my great-grandparents Alfonso and Emma, taken between the 1940s and the 1960s. Even today, although well into their 80s, they are two of the most elegant people I know. Through the formal photos they have on display in their immaculate yet humble home, I had always seen their pasts conjured up as stiffly posed special occasions. These snapshots, however, are much more telling. While never wealthy, the two of them nonetheless have cultivated fantastically understated wardrobes. Moreover, it seems that in their younger days no occasion was too small to look nice for: even just doing household chores and playing with the kids = hair just so, outfit always perfectly complimented.
Alfonso and Emma still keep the class alive today. He taught me to half-Windsor my tie and pour concrete, and she taught me to make traditional bread and still visits her favorite ‘beauty shop’ every week.

I thought that for once, someone whose style is worth mentioning should be talked about.

Emma, circa 1945

Square snapshots from an old “brownie” camera, late 1950s and early 1960s.
Top left - nobody has ever looked this good while hanging laundry. Top right - presumably dressed for a special occasion, gloriously minimalist and Jil Sander-esque.
Bottom left - hot mom. seriously. Bottom right - this is exactly how stripes should be done.

Alfonso, circa 1965

New Year’s bash, nineteen-sixty-something

Annabella, Emma, Francine, circa 1970
Clockwise from left: my grandmother Annabella in a fantastic bronze print dress,
great-grandmother Emma once again looking fantastically minimalist,
and my poor mother trapped in unfortunate 70s kiddy attire (probably made of flammable polyester).

And then the seventies hit (but they navigate the waters nearly unscathed)!

travel: milan, take 1

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:01:36 +0200

There is no syrup on the surface. Avenues walled in by rows of menacing postwar edifices destroy the cherub infested rococo prescription image most of us have of Italy. It’s hard, stark and unabashedly Modernist. If it were a color, Milan would be nothing other than the gamut of grey. My kind of beautiful, definitely.
First impressions were promising. While not daunting enough to scare New York nor elegant enough to mime Paris, behind the grimacing façade it is positively dripping with the best of the best Italianate grace. As a relatively major city, it unlike Florence is filled with many of the creature comforts I’ve yearned for since I moved to the country (an underground! good asian food! hooray!). And, even though I didn’t spot one yet, I’m sure that the elusive coffee house is hiding here somewhere. Public transport is shockingly inexpensive, with an unlimited day pass costing only 3€ (individual rides will set you back €1, which is still less than half the cost in London, Copenhagen, Paris and a number of others), and even on this weekend immediately preceding a major fashion week, the underground was almost always uncrowded and quick. In addition to the metro, gorgeously squeaky 1970s electric street cars and clean modern biodiesel and electric buses make up a sprawling and comprehensive network by which to access the city.
Our first breakfast was in a place called “American Doughnut” - calling it a restaurant would be too kind - that Niccolò just HAD to take me to, because besides the fact that they served pancakes, he thought I would just go wild for the lopsided eagles and patriotic American slogans stenciled on the walls. Despite the decor, I gorged myself on gloriously gas station-esque filter coffee chugged from a stars and stripes mug and savored the rare delicacy of “real” pancakes. We spent that morning in Achille Castiglioni’s design studio on a semi-private tour, Niccolò’s in Italian and mine with two photographers from Barcelona in English and Spanish. While there I had the extreme fortune of spending an hour chatting with Castiglioni’s fascinating and charming daughter, Giovanna, who gave us fun gifts of paper rolls stuffed with scrolls of an image timeline of Castiglioni’s most important designs.
Good ol’ American food and one degree of separation from an all-time design deity = an extremely fine morning, indeed.
Afterwards, we visited the imposing Torre Velasca, an icon of mid 20th century Italian architecture, which to my sensibilities is fascinating and beautiful in its brutalism (photos below). We lunched in Brera, visited the Duomo (gorgeous, majestic 19th century cathedral), Via Montenapoleone (lux shopping and lined with fantastic tree planters in the shape of the Fiat 500), Piazza Babila and spent the rainy afternoon fascinated by everything inside 10 Corso Como’s boutique and gallery (currently housing a excellent exhibition of Yousuf Karsh portraits).
Sunday, after exploring Zona Tortona by daylight, was visited the unimpressive Milan Triennale, a design museum in serious need of a new raison d’étre. It was mostly full of yawn again, been there, done that objects that were mostly so iconic and ubiquitous that we wondered why anyone would bother elevating them to the status of curated museum piece. At least the espresso in its beautifully minimalist cafe was excellent. We thought we’d try to climb the adjacent Torre Branca as a last visit before leaving, but were were chased from the grounds of the unlocked yard surrounding it by a red-faced guard who yelled at us in Italian to go away because “how could [we] not know it was closed!?” We yelled back, flipped some birds, and then enjoyed some tasty panini in the adjacent park before one last stop for pictures outside the Pirelli Tower.

In all, an excellent first taste.

I’ve never heard anyone, whether inside Italy or abroad, say anything pleasant or encouraging about Milan or the Milanese. So far, I’m sold despite the naysayers.

Torre Velasca from directly beneath.

Torre Velasca, front view from street.

After breakfast at Cafe Savona in the fantastically dynamic Zona Tortona.

An imposing icon of Modernist architecture, the Pirelli Tower.

Niccolò and I in the mostly abandoned piazza below Torre Velasca.

Indecipherable street number in Zona Tortona.

Gorgeous early postwar building, mostly abandoned but still gleaming yellow. Adjacent to Piazza Babila.

Happy holdup, Zona Tortona.

written from: florence
i’m currently: planning planning for a final project
reading: the photograph as contemporary art by wallis
listening to: my backlog of a few weeks worth of skipped TED podcasts

fashion: collezione eleonora niccolai

Wed, 5 Aug 2009 17:04:13 +0200

Venezuelan photo pro Maria Fernanda Monsalvo and I shot Italian designer Eleonora Niccolai’s 2010 collection inside a 40C+ Florentine terra cotta oven. Almost literally. Time for the lookbook shoot was short and the scenery at our disposal for the last-minute shoot was less than breathtaking, but both models resisted spontaneous combustion and brought the line to life.
I can only describe Eleonora’s vision as vaguely industrial, a sort of melted and surrealist constructivism devoid of internal structure. Yes, pure paradox. Resistant of definable shape yet edgy, deliberately devoid of soft notions of ‘pretty’ yet striking and somehow provocative, chaotic yet remarkably well thought-out. The non-linear silhouettes rendered in high-contrast and harsh, desaturated tones suggest a hard urbanism and contrasts nicely with the its actual construction in soft, wearable fabrics.
The collection was first shown at Effetto Viareggio to critical acclaim, and is on sale at boutiques in Berlin, Florence and London.

www.eleonoraniccolai.com

written from: florence, italy & a united airlines flight from washington DC to denver
i’m currently: oh so very, very much in love
reading: the language of fashion by roland barthes.
listening to: rural alberta advantage “hometowns”

fashion: i-D, made in (insert country here)

Tue, 4 Aug 2009 01:03:38 +0200

The following is a crash course attempt at a full editorial spread (writing + layout + photography) for a fashion journalism seminar this month with Piers Atkinson, a London based fashion editor who designs a line of cult-icon hats. I was (probably wrongly) insulted when he suggested that my oddly formalistic writing style offbeat and subject matter was best suited for National Geographic and its serious audience (as opposed to Maxim and its nitwits?).

In any case, I love i-D because it’s often gritty, isn’t averse to substance and is less a glossy-vapid-anorexifest than its more run-of-the-mill counterparts.

The result is something I’m not entirely happy with, but which definitely budged me incrementally in the right direction. A good chunk of my own language was edited out (I cursed like a pirate and used sentences that were so wordy they were “worthy of a Victorian”).

Legible-sized text below the image of the spread. :)

MADE IN MISHMASH - i-D dives into your wardrobe’s seedy places of origin.
Text and Photography Tag Christof

THE ”MADE IN” LABEL stashed inside your sexy underwear contains a Pandora’s box worth of issues. Behind the nebulous declaration of country of origin and its myriad vague connotations lie sobering truths about environmental destruction and human ethics nightmares. A global economy’s inherent diversity of production could even theoretically be highly beneficial to humanity. Still, fashion is just as much an industrial affair as is making cars—in this way, although we have a tendency to attach romanticism or apathy in varying degrees to any given Made In label, is it really fair to do so?

I had the odd opportunity to visit a few Chinese factories while on assignment in Hunan province just over a year ago. One was a small modular bathroom factory, filled with huge buzzing machines, ghastly fumes and a comically tacky, flimsy end product. Another was an office furniture factory, where upon catching a glimpse of a group of roving non-Chinese, a foreman scurried several children out of their work areas, leaving a silent and motionless expanse littered with half-screwed together office chairs and overturned particleboard desks. The last was an apparel workshop where sombre workers of all ages sewed single pieces together and pulled levers on big machines in ceaseless repetition, all while labouring expressionlessly and wrapped in antiseptic plastic jackets. All worked under massive propagandistic banners that threatened “PRODUCTIVITY!” at them in ominous, screaming red characters. Photography was expressly forbidden in all three factories.
Our Chinese hosts—the proud self-proclaimed “capitalists” in charge of the operations—were beamingly proud of their companies’ accomplishments and were eager to continuously point out how miraculously productive their businesses were, as if our occidental sensibilities would appreciate nothing more than some talk of big numbers. Never mind that they were ravaging poor labour and their ocal environments with avarice in order to turn out an endless stream of rubbish destined only to clog the world’s landfills in no time flat.
Hunan is dotted with new factories that continue to mushroom up as a result of its nation’s dizzying growth, and even though rural in comparison to the eastern economic powerhouse provinces, ambient economic powerhouse provinces, ambient contamination blackens its skies on most summer mornings. Its largest city, Changsha, is crossed by the terrifyingly polluted river Xiang, which provides nourishment to the many residents who continue to struggle to extract its surviving (probably mutant) fish, crayfish and turtles.
None of this is to imply that China is the only (or even the worst) offender, but it’s certainly world industry’s ethical and environmental whipping boy, if for nothing more than its manufacturing sector’s unprecedented scale and colossal waste and pollution production. In any case (and fortunately for humanity), the notion that growth be sustained at-any-cost has become laughably obsolete over the past several years as blithe social consciousness has at last ripped open the hearts of an increasing number of consumers the world over.
Nonetheless, in a world where cost is paramount, many fashion labels have no choice but to send their orders off to lands of cheap labour and lax environmental laws. Most consumers don’t notice (or can’t afford to care). Convention tells us that Made In China is bad, evil, and unavoidable. Still, most of us haven’t the slightest notion of why production in the first world might be any better and just why, for instance, Fabriqué en France or even Hecho en Mexico should be more desirable.
Among the many Western nations who battle cost in order to maintain a competitive fashion manufacturing sector, Italy in particular invests massively in promoting the idea that goods made within its borders are somehow intrinsically special. Laudably its fashion houses have, for the most part, continued to produce products that strut its native labels inside the country and even produces tons of goods for non-Italian luxury labels such as sunglasses, bags, jeans and shoes.
Made in Italy is supposed to be a sort of silver bullet, maintaining Italian manufacturing jobs in the face of a killer Euro and sustaining en masse a carefully cultivated tradition of finely made goods. Fiercely guarded as almost sacred and evoked as a sort of anti Made in China, one can’t help but wonder if there’s any substance behind it. After all, Savile Row suit shops and Paris ateliers aside, the overwhelming majority of our fashion is stitched together in factories. And even though pretty Italy would like you to imagine an idyllic grandfather Gucci hammering away at your handbag’s hardware in a countryside barn, we all know implicitly or not, that this isn’t the case.
Factories in Italy are, well, factories. They’re usually grey, rendered in brutalist architecture and certainly don’t come across pleasant or rustic or anything else that blips the radar as Italian. On first glance, there isn’t much to set them apart from Chinese ones. Except, perhaps, that you can’t see them shamelessly belching black smoke from miles away. They’re noisy, hot and depending on what they make can emanate a whole range of less-than-pleasant stenches. In short, they’re factories with all of the problems inherent in factories. Repetitive manual labour can’t be separated from mass production, and is in any incarnation one of the many dehumanizing prerequisites for a thriving and wealthy world. Similarities aside, the real differences are staggering.
One never has to worry about a malnourished seven-year-old being rushed away from his work when visitors pop in, for one. In fact, the workers are not only adults who have chosen to make it their workplace, but they have retirement plans, good healthcare, holidays, forty-hour work weeks, labour laws aplenty and exponentially fatter salaries than their eastern brethren. Moreover, in many cases even the machine workers seem to take an active part in the process they’re involved in. They troubleshoot their machines and laugh with one another, and a common sense of pride about the products their companies churn out is real.
While a massive part of the costs these factories incur is absorbed by the high prices of their luxury end products, they manage to exist within an extremely expensive market without cutting corners. Raw materials are generally of an extremely high quality and very little is wasted. Relatively environmentally sound processes are used even if they happen to be more time-consuming and expensive. Towns around them have occasionally suffered minor pollution problems, but lately they’ve mostly been the residual results of past mistakes and become less prevalent as time passes.
A particular leather factory in Tuscany, which produces ultra high-quality hides for companies as diverse as Alfa Romeo and Chanel, had comic strips and lusty centrefold girls in screaming red heels coaxing them into productivity.

I, for one, would rather not be buy from the “capitalists” and their screaming red characters.

image: maria

Mon, 6 Jul 2009 02:48:42 +0200

Some people exude a fantastic amount of energy without being outspoken or even boisterous. They have the power to draw in and entice the world around them, while quietly reflecting and taking everything in. I became friends with Maria earlier this year - she’s a Dane from Copenhagen living in Florence - and have been fascinated with her thoughtful, graceful elegance ever since. She is an intellectual observer of the world, a writer with profound reflections, has a stellar eye for aesthetic and is an eternally fantastic dresser.

This is the first of many more ‘photo mornings’ - journeys by foot around Florence with coffee and conversation in search of perfect light.

written from: casa della creatività in florence, italy
i’m currently: sitting through a class i pretty much couldn’t care less about.
reading: shit talking notes mafe is passing me from across our table.
listening to: the dronings on of a teacher who couldn’t possibly be less organized

design: general motors

Sun, 31 May 2009 17:58:47 +0200

In what is perhaps an overdue karmic ass-kicking, General Motors declares bankruptcy today. The hulking corporate giant once considered invincible has an illustrious history riddled with scandals and a mostly deserved reputation for mediocre product and ethical indifference. As a pillar of American industry, the company was integral in nursing our addiction to the car and by extension, was one of the single largest contributors to the disastrously wasteful consumerist American lifestyle the rest of the world is currently trying so hard to emulate.
Now saddled with a degree of structural bureaucracy that made the USSR look efficient, along with a number of extremely poor executive choices and decades of terribly inferior product means that in a strictly Darwinian sense, General Motors deserves to fail. My compassionate liberal Keynsian heart notwithstanding, any company as blithely unaware and badly prepared as GM has been to deal with its industry’s circumstances should be taken out back and shot.

But I don’t want GM to die. Buried deep below the disaster lies one of the biggest design juggernauts that has ever existed. From the earliest days of the car, through the postwar boom and through the space age and design boom of the 1960s, General Motors easily made the most innovative cars of any mainstream automaker. Its American concurrents Ford and Chrysler have in the past and present made nothing but sinfully ugly rides, and with the exception of a few bespoke luxury companies such as Aston Martin and smaller marques like Alfa Romeo, GM cars were for a very long time the most beautiful on the road. Beginning with Harley Earl’s organic and balanced shapes, they pioneered car design as an art form. In the 1950s, they continued to break new ground with expressive chrome and tail fins to embody space-age optimism, and achieved gorgeous minimalism and perfect proportion in their best 1960s designs.

From left to right: 1938 Buick Y-Job concept, 2010 Buick Invicta

Unfortunately, years of product neglect starting in the early 1970s resulted in a stream of boring and redundant cars shared across multiple brands without many palpable differences between them. Choked by a fuel crisis and blindsided by the infiltration of Japanese and German competition, GM’s cars devolved from consistently beautiful pieces of high design into bloated and shapeless appliances. By the 1980s, the beancounters in power had completely choked out any trace of leadership in design and the resultantly disastrous product lineup helped GM hemorrhage money, market share and prestige. The serial “badge-engineering” cycle that the company dove headfirst into in the 1970s (essentially sticking different chrome and hood ornaments onto identical cars) meant that for an alarmingly long time, its biggest competitor was none other than itself (see below).

In order from left to right: mid 1980s Pontiac, Buick, Chevrolet and Oldsmobile

Through the 90s and into the early 00’s, GM’s product only got progressively worse in the face of its competition as Toyota’s bland but excellently engineered products killed the appeal of its mainstream brands and Cadillac’s bloated old junkers lost the luxury war to BMW and others. In an effort to make itself relevant once again, GM braved several wrongheaded forays back into contention. First, it established the Saturn brand to be hip and conquest young customers who had been buying Hondas and Toyotas, but ultimately failed spectacularly by giving the brand miserably made, horrendous looking plastic-bodied cars that were nowhere near as good as their Japanese targets. Then, in an attempt to build some Euro luxury credibility, GM acquired the Swedish brand Saab - still one of the quirkiest, coolest car brands that has ever existed - and predictably left its Scandinavian design heritage to languish in obscurity with old, outdated designs as people snapped up gorgeous Bauhaus Audis instead. Lastly, and perhaps most disturbingly short-sighted, they purchased the previously military brand Hummer and let loose a slew of hideous behemoths that suburbanites scooped up with gusto for about a year until gas prices skyrocketed and green became mandatory.
Fast forward to 2009, and the world is a drastically changed place. The world auto industry has collapsed under its own weight and GM is desperately trying to rid itself of all three of its tacked on divisions and has even killed the classic Pontiac brand entirely in order to ease the financial pain as it publicly falls flat on its face. Its longtime CEO has been ousted, and its reputation severely tarnished by grueling government bailouts and the killing of hundreds of local car dealerships. Today they finally file for bankruptcy.

In sad irony, however, this comes at a time when GM has recently launched several jaw-dropping, world-beating cars. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the company has effectuated a full-on design renaissance. Sales had picked up drastically for the newly gorgeous models just before the collapse, and GM’s brand cachet was on the rise for the first time in my lifetime. Then, crash. Burn.

From left to right: 2011 Cadillac CTS Coupe, 2009 Saturn Sky, 2009 Opel Insignia

The design rebirth may be a classic case of too-little, too-late, but compounded with good engineering, it shows unequivocally the power of good design in changing perceptions. Especially in the States, where people maintain an emotional connection to GM, there are many who want to like American cars, but have been given little choice when competing products have been so blatantly superior for so long. This brief period of truly desirable cars from the company says that the potential for GM to put itself back on the map as a design tour de force should be a priority
Moreover, GM is making some serious strides towards bringing to market a groundbreaking evolution of the hybrid car - one of the most socially relevant initiatives the company has embarked on in recent memory. The powertrain can run as a pure electric car, but has a gas generator for when the battery charge dies so is not limited by distance as is an electric but is still far more efficient than any current hybrid car and may be rated at upwards of 100MPG (42km/l). It will ostensibly be put to use in two cars - one relatively populist, one luxury (see below) - that both look a helluva lot nicer than any Toyota Prius I’ve ever seen. While it may not be a silver bullet, it could work wonders for image and credibility if executed well.

From left to right: 2011 Chevrolet Volt, 2012 Cadillac Converj

I wish GM the stars. We know they’re capable of design excellence and ingenuity - let’s just hope they can keep it up.

Some of my favorite past GM concept designs:

1967 Corvette Astro I

1956 Oldsmobile Golden Rocket

2007 Saab Aero X

1986 Oldsmobile Aerotech

1954 Buick WIldcat

2002 Cadillac Cien

2008 Buick Riviera

written from: firenze, italy
i’m currently: shaggy
reading: so much fashion junk for school that i can’t remember what anything is called.
listening to: “white session” by le loup and “manners” by passion pit

fashion: a new radical diversity

Tue, 26 May 2009 14:57:59 +0200

London based, Florence bred Radical Diversity makes some seriously cool clothes. Distinctly urban in the vain of the best and freshest Scandinavian labels, it is nevertheless in need of a serious image revamp. While many separate elements are attractive on their own, there is an utter lack of consistency among them - two logos, neither one particularly salient in regards to the label’s name, compete for dominance on their website and other marketing materials, and catchy names for collections seem at odds with the main thrust of the image building, not to mention that any notions of “diversity” are conspicuously absent altogether. I’m taking on a project to help refocus and reposition the label, my aim ostensibly being to bring the visual and marketing elements into cohesion. The clothes themselves are solid - with some attention the image may grow to be just as good.
Below is a glimpse at my first-impressions, scrawled down after reviewing some press kits and the label’s website but before meeting the creators and getting additional context. More to come as the project progresses throughout the year -

RD’s principal logo. Headliner text for their F/W 2009 collection.

Vaguely anarchical, post-industrial imagery and a ‘crackdown’ on money? With the gloom and doom of the current economic crisis impossible to ignore, attitudes towards money are in a nosedive. Still, I’m left scratching my head about what a ‘crackdown’ on money is, exactly. Is it an attack on the bigwigs abstractly representing ‘money’ who are perceived as responsible for the fiasco? Is it a call to abandon dependence on money and barter instead? Are the clothes free?
Money is a complex and liquid abstraction - and while a fashionable crusade against it might sound romantic and progressive, the ‘Cracking Down On Money’ screamed in a serious typeface from the cover of the brand’s press kit and elsewhere really doesn’t seem to hold much water. Grouping 1929 and 2009 in its press materials further strengthens the idea that this line is a reaction to economic strife with no germane effect. Black is the line’s predominant color, apparently as an allusion to today’s relentless race for oil. All these things in tandem do little to form a message beyond a sad reflection on today. Yes, fashion is a barometer of its time, but it should arguably not trap you in a depressing self flagellation. A tie-in with the always edgy Peaches works well with the look of the clothes, but still doesn’t do much to clarify what Radical Diversity really stands for. Muddying the water even more, cheeky skulls seemingly ripped straight from the back of a pair of Cheap Mondays, then blinded with some dollar signs are used as particularly confusing brand symbols on press materials and on the company’s Myspace page.

Nice website visuals are let down by arbitrary typefaces and no reinforcement elsewhere on the site. Promotional shoot with Peaches.

So, RD’s marketing formula in a nutshell: money is bad + Peaches is cool + the world is going down the toilet + stolen cartoon skulls = ...huh?

In any case, while the post-technology ultra badass that RD’s marketing tries to paint lacks focus and foundation, behind the misguided sheen lies a line of very attractive clothes. The definite post-punk aesthetic and a screaming 1980s color palate dominated by black do nothing to break new ground, but are solid indications that the line is not for mainstream tastes.
The baggy and organic silhouettes, however, are excellent and contemporary. Billowy but solid forms rendered in advanced synthetic materials work extremely well and evoke movement on both the men’s and women’s lines. Zippers and asymmetrical cut lines break up dynamic tension and go a long way towards making the collection look relatively unique. While catchy graphics are ubiquitous on creative bespoke labels, the strong graphic design on many of the pieces adds an extra degree of originality especially when combined with the animate silhouettes.
The clothes actually look quite wearable and therefore might have a fighting chance of gaining some street cred if they can just break free from the bewildering image tacked to them.

To see the current collection, visit http://www.radicaldiversity.com.

travel: pinholes from venezia

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:41:24 +0200

Venice is a writhing, decaying and gorgeous disaster of a city. It’s not just flanked by but exists in water and is clotted with crooked and derelict walkways and soggy, sagging buildings. Its inhabitants jog unapologetically through herds of guidebook toting tourists, slinking by and ignoring them with aplomb. Navigation requires the discovery of secret passageways. Grainy recordings of Vivaldi blast from obscure churches and the smell of seafood mixes with saltwater, Chinese food, Italian pastries and wet dog to evoke a world that smells like a pirate-ship that has just looted Hong Kong. Tables punctuated with glasses of brilliant orange spritz line canal side restaurants where German and Hungarian and Italian and English are yelled from all corners in cacophony.

Tourist snapshots cannot do justice here. Perfect color and antiseptic lines are not Venice. The inherently erratic light and tentative, strangely seductive hues of pinhole images work much better. These are from my first visit to the island over this past weekend in the good company of my family.

written from: venezia and firenze, italy
i’m currently: sunburned
reading: ‘pattern recognition’ by william gibson
listening to: “the lemon of pink,” by the books, “dark was the night” by various artists

travel: it’s the little things

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:36:37 +0200

The internal battle I had waged against my better judgment about whether to leave Italy or to stay has finally reached a cease-fire. Actually, it’s reached a pretty much unconditional peace and love agreement in which all logic says I’d have to be ludicrous to run away. Only two months in, the going still isn’t turbulence-free and my Italian continues to be pure merda (mostly because I’m a lazy mofo), but I’m at last downright happy not just to physically be here, but to have been given the chance to change paths so drastically from just a few months ago.
My course of study at IED is proving fruitful and interesting - if slightly overwhelming in its workload - and is truly the first time I can remember ever wholly enjoying school. I love the majority of my classmates, all of them fascinating people from many corners of the world. And, while the tiny size of the Florence branch of the school makes the environment less dynamic than I’d hoped - we’re less than fifteen students total at the moment, all in the same program - the professors and range of classes are dead excellent. It seems like every young person in the city is studying architecture or fashion or something equally creative, and I’m meeting fascinating new people all the time. As a wholly unexpected and very nice treat, I was even thrown a surprise birthday party by my new friends here last month.

Surprise!

Va bene? Indeed.

Still, it’s the more nuanced, less obvious things that make a place special.
I’m learning that Italy is quite the seductress. She’ll only dance with you if you step at her speed, though - niiiiiiiice and slow. Flash and instant gratification aren’t her favorite games, and she’s more a fan of the last few centuries than of the current, but her beauty is unparalleled. The seaside is never more than a couple hours away by train, and from politics to dinnertime conversation a massive emphasis is placed on the inherent importance of aesthetics. Beauty here is not merely a peripheral concern - Italy is aesthetics, for better or for worse.
In Firenze, there are virtually no big-box stores to suffocate the small local ones and so tons of magnificent tiny restaurants, shops and bars are tucked away just beyond sight to be found for the right occasion. Aperitivo, a gorgeous social invention that unfortunately doesn’t seem to have migrated elsewhere, is my new favorite pastime - with the purchase of a drink, you get all the free finger food you want. It makes for the perfect occasion to stuff your face while taking in the atmosphere of a trendy bars and their fashionable clientele with your friends.
A few weeks ago, just after my first Italian scooter ride (the way the suckers make the roads their own feels way Grand Theft Auto), I sat down in a restaurant opposite one of my Florentine friends who gingerly pulled the cap off my head and in the politest way possible told me that I was tacky and rude to even think about eating with it on. In a time so relentlessly devoid of formality, something about even tiny gestures of that sort feels so thoroughly classy. I can’t wait to tell my friends outside Italy that they’re pretty much all hicks.
On that note, the baci - the cheek kisses Italians give in greeting - are gorgeously elegant and so much more genuine than the brusque hello wave+handshake things we in less Latin parts of the world hurl at one another in hello. My technique - lack thereof, rather - has yet to move from amateur to baci master: 1) I still can’t seem to remember which cheek we start on here, 2) I’m not sure how loud the kissy sound is supposed to be (loud old lady “mmmmmmmmmchth!” or staccato “chth”?) and 3) I’ve bumped heads more than once.
I’ve found that drinking anything less than Italian espresso is a crime, as well - the stuff really is fantastic. And, if the Italians know their espresso, they definitely know their clothes. Whereas in many other pulsating fashion centers (LA and London to name a couple) the fashionistæ shout their presence with bold, sometimes discordant looks. Among the fashionable here, there isn’t much ostentation: cuts are traditional, colors are quiet, only people carrying fakes brandish logos. But, wow, do they wear their clothes well - tailored, well maintained, balanced.

New friends. A New Mexican, a real Mexican and two Swedes.

In any case, no matter how you slice it, Italy has been left in some serious 21st century dust. Public transport is flat terrible - the metro in Rome is easily the worst in the world that I’ve ever used, and as I mentioned last time the bus system in Florence just doesn’t work. Including previous trips here, I’ve taken the Italian train maybe a total of eight times and have been late to my destination all but once. It turns out that my previous gripe about there being no free and democratic wifi as elsewhere is a result of a strange “anti-terrorism” law that requires everyone who accesses the internet in Italy to provide hard identification - a copy of your passport is mandatory. While I’m sure that me checking my Facebook is a legitimate threat to Italian national security, who are they kidding?! The law smacks of censorship and surveillance that I imagine even a crazy right-wing neocon in the States would complain about. Why haven’t the Italians? Neither the design school I’m attending (which is, apparently on the cutting edge in Italy) nor any other that I’ve found has even heard mention of the incredibly helpful online academic databases like ARTstor, which is maddening when quality research is important for a project.
It’s hard to tell whether the reluctance to embrace newness is because of a passionate attachment to the incredible accomplishments of the peninsula's past or just because Italian society at large remains palpably conservative - probably because the Catholic church still maintains a huge cultural influence here. Consider: when in 2009 the pope is condemning the use of condoms while Spain allows gay marriage, something is terribly wrong. As in the States just a year ago, everyone literate seems to ridicule the president, a man so obviously and thoroughly corrupt that he probably wouldn’t be given a job in the post office in most other European countries.
Globalization’s impact on the Italian business landscape, which produces products whose intrinsic value comes primarily from their provenance in Italy, is interesting. Of course the products in and of themselves are thoroughly desirable, but who would buy 500€ Tod’s shoes made in Romania or Taiwan? Would you excuse your 250,000€ Ferrari’s breakdown two months after purchase if it was made in Japan and not Italy? With seemingly every western nation outsourcing labor to wherever it is cheap and plentiful, Italy has managed to continue making a large amount of goods (luxury and otherwise) in cost-effective ways within its borders. Bravo - French, British and American politicians would probably kill to say they pulled off such a feat of gravity-defying economic acrobatics.
As a micro illustration of the full picture, however, consider that adjacent to Florence (itself one of the luxury goods capitals of the world) is the small industrial city of Prato, which is home to the factories of several well-known luxury and fashion companies. It’s also the largest Chinese community in Italy. Hmmm - lots of Chinese people + lots of factories + lots of work to be done... I suppose it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on. And while I assume the majority of the workers are here legitimately (yet obviously paid less to work more than their occidental counterparts - why else would they be here?), I’ve heard from more than one source that some police raids on the factories have turned up tons of anonymous illegals. By extension, if you’re illegal, local labor laws don’t apply to you and you’re probably working seventy hour weeks for pennies. So, through slick maneuvering and only slightly under-the-table dealings, the Italian prestige conglomerates can continue to crank out goods carrying the all important Made In Italy tags attached securely to them, and as a silver lining, politicians keep voters happy by not sending Italian jobs overseas. Got it? Me neither.

Depressing post-geographic labor ethics discussions aside, Italy is a gorgeous place to live. It’s true that the nation is a patchwork of festering problems - I remember a cover of The Economist from a few years ago with a bold headline reading, “The Italian Patient,” next to a cheeky animation of the boot bandaged up and leaning on crutches labeled “European Union” - but as long as I get my oily and rich shot of espresso piping hot, what do I have to complain about? I’m a hedonist living in an indescribably beautiful country filled with beautiful things. And besides, if I can be happy in country without good Asian food and a dearth of technology, it speaks volumes about the real quality of the place and its people. Ti amo, Italia.

written from: casteldefellls, catalonia, spain / campo di marte, florence, italy
i’m currently: excited about moving into a new place.
reading: ‘pattern recognition’ by william gibson
listening to: the decemberists “the hazards of love,” john egenes “up for air”

fashion: some dropkicking and hedi

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:28:28 +0200

Left out in the cold for the better part of its life, (mostly) because I’m a lazy mofo, I’m making it a priority to dropkick the newly redesigned, newly refocused EUROTRASH and its TRASHTALK blog into shape. Although ostensibly always “design focused,” the design part has without exception taken a backseat to photography, various personal travel stories and random rants. So, in an effort to dropkick myself into shape, I’m toning down the amorphous ‘design’ moniker for the blog and will instead refocus on fashion along with the travel stories. Lest you think I’ve lost my mind, this isn’t to be a tween girl “OMG LET’S GO TO THE MALL” finger-down-the-throat fest, but will hopefully evolve into a an irreverent + academic glimpse into trends and looks through commentary, photos and observations from wherever in the world I should find myself.
Fashion has been forever hammered with a bad rap as something tangential and wasteful, and while its Paris HIlton pop culture incarnation is loathsome, I wholeheartedly disagree. As truly one of the most basic forms of self-expression, fashion distills the look, energy and importance of a time and place and when looked upon retrospectively is incredibly revealing. Society’s ebbs and flows are captured in our clothes, and as a social phenomenon fashion is a fascinating window into our tendencies as humans. What’s more, the interplays between ourselves and our clothes and our clothes and the world are tremendous ones, even for those among us who consciously “reject” the idea of fashion altogether. No matter your opinion on it, our clothes speak both to and for us, loudly proclaiming to the world exactly who we are.

Recently moved to one of the three Italian fashion capitals and studying at a powerhouse of a design school, I’ve got what looks to be a good vantage. In the coming weeks, I’m teaming up with one of my friends here in Florence, a talented young photographer from Venezuela, to do a few conceptual photo shoots and have several other projects in the works for the next year.

So kids, from your far-off corners of the world, subscribe to the RSS feed, send interesting photos and links (especially to your own sites, if you happen to have one), give feedback, challenge me (arguments are my favorite). Give me a reason not to let the TRASHTALK starve to death yet again.

TAG /

As a sort of inauguration, I’m sharing the slideshow for a short presentation I just did for a ‘semiotics of fashion’ seminar on one of my favorite fashion designers/photographers, the notorious/glorious Hedi Slimane.

The evocative, jarring and (yes this word has been beaten to death but I’m going to use it anyway) edgy atmosphere he created for Dior Homme while he was there between 2001 and 2007 gave men’s high fashion probably the biggest shakeup since at least the death of the power suit.
What’s important to keep in mind while considering the line is that not only was Slimane the lead designer he was also the photographer, doing impromptu shoots of dressings and runway shows as well as studio shoots that would eventually become Dior advertisements. In effect, he was gifted with a double-edged creative sword with which to sculpt out his vision: he not only created the clothes and gave the models their souls, he built the universe within which both exist.

The single most important element of the line is its distinctive and minimalist silhouette - it’s always super slim with an emphasis on the linearity of the thin, lithe bodies underneath. The emphasis on line is symbolically reinforced, moreover, through an almost exclusive use of black and white which pronounces the spare and architectural feel of the pieces.

The images themselves are always in extremely sharp focus and are structured, as is the clothing, primarily through strong lines and high contrast. There is constantly an interplay of dark and light bisected by sharp lines which makes for a sort of constant polarity. Like the line, the images are almost always in black and white; in the rare instances he does utilize color it’s done seemingly only to highlight black and white elsewhere in the image.
The models poses are almost never embellished, which is particularly interesting for fashion photography: although the environments are clearly created, there are undertones of a snapshot aesthetic

Sexual ambiguity abounds in the images both overtly through the dress and styling of the model and more subtly through gesture and posture. Slimane seems to be exploring the modularity of sexual identity and metrosexuality, and is also making symbolic reference to the likes of David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Jim Morrison thereby implicity linking the look to rock culture.

As in Minor White’s art photography, men are quite often represented as passive objects of sexual desire and not as active subjects of sexuality as per traditional imagery. Flesh is suggestively exposed, lips and hands are emphasized and quite often the models are placed in provocatively vulnerable poses.

Although his frequent use of androgyny creates an oblique reference to rock culture, he also makes direct reference to it in several ways. HIs use of Pete Doherty as a symbol, as well as his insistence on ultra-skinny models makes a strong indexical reference to drug culture, rock subculture and even the fashion world itself

While I’d pretty much kill to look like the “Dior guy” Slimane invented, it was universally hated by my classmates. And, although some appreciated the technical aspects of the photography, nobody liked the images when compared transversally to those of Meisel, for example, who often treats women exactly as Slimane treats men. In a word, he objectifies them.
As far as the clothes is concerned, I’m drawn specifically to the unconventionality and the sparing, architectural, reduced-to-the-absolute-minimum of the look. The irreverent beauty of the photos is the icing on the cake. What I wouldn’t give to be a well-dressed, postmodern badass...

Opinions?

written from: rome / barcelona / florence
i’m currently: stoked to have a new ipod.
reading: italian fast! (this @£$% language has to be learned one way or another)
listening to: animal collective “merriweather post pavilion” - best new album in ages.

travel: love/hate begins and a goodbye to gallileo

Sun, 1 Mar 2009 15:04:09 +0100

I’m still a truckload of paperwork, bureaucracy and hassle away from being an legitimate Italian resident, but i’m already making myself quite at home. I have a mobile, an address, a bus pass and a codice fiscale--if only I spoke Italian and wore my sunglasses at night and inside, I’d totally be native.

Getting by has gotten a bit easier over the past week, as I’ve been forced to swallow chunks of my pride and either ask for what I need in English or just to do my very best in my very bad Italian. Turns out, understanding directions and buying things isn’t difficult at all, and most people are very good about speaking clearly when they can tell you’re straining to catch any words you understand. Still, years of music study, Italian food eating and being a French and Spanish speaker are all nice shortcuts that have given me an encouraging yet deceptively huge vocabulary--I’ve already shoved my foot in my mouth a few times after asking too-sophisticated questions that I either 1) couldn’t understand the answers to or 2) couldn’t follow through on because I only knew how to ask the initial question.
The language situation isn’t helped by the fact that American tourists run rampant in the streets--we’re talking the polo-shirt-wearing, never-left-the-suburbs-before kind that travel in ungainly packs and make savvy American tourists have to hide their passports and try really, really hard not to look American. The infestation in Firenze city center is worse than in Rome or Paris, and invariably the more suburbanite Americans you unite abroad, the more gratingly annoying they exponentially become. Among the population of the younger Anglophone students here, most seem to completely disregard the opportunity they have to learn another language and unabashedly demand everything in English (even when dealing with those who clearly don’s speak it), which certainly doesn’t seem to have endeared the Florentine shopkeepers to young English speakers. This all means, in turn, that in the interests of eventually integrating, I have to work overtime to distance myself from those Americanos. By the looks of me I can’t pass for Italian either (no shit?), which is adding to my struggle for language legitimacy in this environment in which it seems one is assumed a tourist until proven Italian.
I am glad to report that in my house, at least, English generally isn’t spoken. Unfortunately neither is Italian--I’m rooming with two others, a very sweet German girl who is working at the EU archives in Florence and a Nicaraguan guy (or is he Guatemalan? I don’t remember!) who is a cook at a restaurant outside the city. While the Nicaraguan speaks Italian, neither of the other two of us do, so him and I speak in Spanish and he and the German don’t speak at all since they have no language in common. The German and I speak French with one another, because her French is apparently better than her English and she works in French all day and finds it easier just to stay in the same mode at home. So, it’s a partial communication disaster, in which nobody really seems to say much at all when we’re all in the same room--speaking in Spanish excludes one person, speaking in French or English excludes another, and speaking in Italian would mean the Nicaraguan would just be talking to himself. At least we have Italian TV and blog writing to keep us company.

View from bedroom terrace.

So far, I’m enjoying the idea of school and am looking forward to some ambitious projects, but am far from sold on the city. Sure, it’s gorgeous, apparently filled with hordes of creatives (who I’ve yet to come across), and lined with gleaming shops and good food, but there is something elementally rustic about the entire place that frustrates me to no end.
On arrival I lived in a hostel bunk bed for nine days, which meant that in order to eat I had to either sit alone in a restaurant or hunt down a supermarket to find something simple to throw together in my room. I found several excellent restaurants easily enough, but beyond a handful of tiny, strangely stocked Chinese-run supermarkets, there is nothing resembling a modern food store in the city center. Last Sunday, I did make it to the excellent central food market, which is stuffed with an amazing array of artisan meats, produce, cheeses and confections, most of which made me drool, but are all highly perishable, expensive and most definitely not suitable for posh haute hostel cuisine (ha). Last night with navigation help from the Nicaraguan, I at last stumbled onto a nice supermarket that is thankfully only about a 15 block walk from my house. I walked in, almost forgetting to breathe I was so happy, and then I took two hours to buy a basket full of junk, savoring every second of it.
As in Rome, the bus system is slow, badly planned and runs busses so infrequently that even little old ladies have to fight for their places onboard before the doors shut on them. For such a wealthy and compact city (I’d guess a two-hour walk would get you from end to end) with such a bustling tourism sector, I really can’t understand why the public transport is so poor.
Romantic cafés and trattorias are literally on every block, a few streets have high concentrations of posh bars and every big haute couture or otherwise prestigious apparel/accessory/luggage label is to be found somewhere in in the city. There’s even an American Apparel, and vintage shops are in bloom all around, suggesting the presence of at least a small minority of wired and savvy hipsters. But (and this is a huge but), there isn’t a decent coffee shop to found. I don’t mean that Firenze is lacking in espresso (I mentioned in my last blog that you can even get good espresso in Chinese restaurants), but the coffee shop space in every other Western country has come to be the place where young, wired people with work to do or people to write congregate to drink caffeine and send emails around the world. Not in Florence. The Italian caffè, the closest substitute, always has damn good espresso and sells food, but is almost always surveilled by its geriatric proprietor who eyes you if you loiter longer than your drink lasts, and is frequented not by groups of hip and wired, but by Nonna and her bridge group. Restaurants/trattorias/cafés are not places you go to alone, either, which makes them impossible places to make random friends. But, most importantly, maybe partially because the hip coffee shop is conspicuously absent, WiFi is most definitely not spread around freely and democratically as it is elsewhere. Virtually nowhere has a hotspot, and when you happen upon one you won’t pay less than 3€ for a half-hour of painfully slow connection. To all you Albuquerqueans out there, I would KILL for a Flying Star right about now.

So, with all there is to do and see, I’m going a bit stir crazy. I’ve done the tourist things--the Uffizi, the Palazzo Pitti, the Ponte Vecchio, the Duomo, the Boboli Gardens, Santo Spirito--which were enriching and beautiful, and am still looking forward to a nice weather weekend when I can strike out on bicycle to see the Tuscan countryside. Nevertheless, for the young international student lifestyle, this place leaves a helluva lot to be desired. I know, I know. I fucking live in the capital of Tuscany, and would have to be a sniveling sonofabitch to complain. So I’m not complaining, just observing. :-)
In time I’m sure I’ll acclimate--I’ll buy a bike to avoid the bus, I’ll find more supermarkets--but the lack of net cafés and convenient stores (although idyllic and harking back to a simpler time) reflects an underlying social structure that is so foreign to me that I think I may have a tougher time adapting than I thought. All the Northern Europeans I’m in school with feel exactly the same way.

(Right) Piazza Santa Croce

* * *

As a bit of an aside, I feel that I must pay tribute to my recently deceased iPod. I received it as a gift a couple years ago, and although it was beaten up and bruised it managed never to give me any problems. In any case, all iPods eventually croak and this particular one (I called him Galileo) had a quick and painless death.
Late night starving-in-a-hostel blues set in one evening late last week, so I pulled myself out of bed around midnight, rounded up all the pocket change I could find and walked until I found an open restaurant, which of course at that hour would be none other than McDonalds. I had thrown the iPod on to keep me company with tunes on my walk and threw it on the tray and pulled out my computer to get some writing done after taking a seat. Somewhere in the midst of scarfing down a salad and chicken sandwich, I stopped paying attention to the tray and got lost in my work. Without warning, a miniature janitor guy scooped up my tray and chucked everything on it into the garbage can next to my chair, then pulled the bag out, tied it up and went on his merry way. It took a few seconds for my brain synapses to remind me that the iPod had been on the tray, but by the time I realized what had happened, the garbage bag was tied up tightly. I pled with the mini janitor guy and tried to get him to let me get into the bag, shouting ‘Il mio iPod! Il mio iPod!’ while everyone in the restaurant looked on at the crazy foreign kid trying to dive into the trash.
He clearly didn’t understand me and in fact looked quite bewildered that I would go trash diving for my discarded Coke cup and plastic salad bowl. Looking as if he felt he was saving me from making a stupid decision, he slung the bag authoritatively over his shoulder and vanished with it.

Peace Gallileo.

written from: campo di marte, firenze
i’m currently: slacking on my application for my permesso di soggiorno
reading: ‘managing fashion and luxury companies’ by erica corbellini & stefania saviolo
listening to: cocoon “all my friends died in a plane crash” and the best of nickel creek

travel: firenze, first transmission

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:10:39 +0100

Post-university blues have been rough. I graduated with a Bachelor of Worthlessness eight months ago, and have essentially been wandering aimlessly in an impassive search for an illustrious “next big thing” ever since. Months of suffering through the worst robotic cubicle bank job ever (which, once I realized I couldn’t deal with, I promptly walked out on without notice), followed by a re-enrollment in school to get my mind (and finances) in order, proved fruitless. I taught some university French classes to beginners, starting out wide-eyed and enthusiastic, but ultimately ended up dismayed and reassured that I definitely don’t have a career future as a French teacher. Add to this a crippling breakup, the likes of which I couldn’t wish upon Ann Coulter (the devil), an ominous and traumatic run-in with the absurd and illegitimately over-reaching arm of the law, and a string of other minor disasters (including an annoyingly complicated visa process), and my last half-year has been pretty much nothing short of an enfer sur terre (read: shitty).

So, in a paradoxically cowardly and courageous move, I have fled for greener (or at least wholly different) pastures. I’m hoping that the recent traumas are advance payment to the universe of some debts, which hopefully means that I’m now due some luck and good karma. I shaved off my unruly mop in London en route as sort of a symbolic gesture of renaissance and renewal; as I start over, so does my hair. Good things are coming.

And so it is. I have finally arrived in Firenze, the magnificent Renaissance capital in which my recently derelict life is ostensibly to begin anew. This isn’t, of course, my first foray from the easy cradle of home turf--my move to France marked the first, followed by a stint at a New York design school--but it is certainly the first in which I have no definite return plans. I have a long-term visa and plan to play it by ear from here on out. I may (with the help of my best Norwegian) weasel my way into Norway after I’m done in Italy. I may beg for a Canadian work permit in order to find a job in Montréal. I may flee to a beachside shack in Mexico. I may beg my grandparents to let me grow crops in their greenhouses. Maybe I’ll marry an Italian and stay here. I have no fucking idea--which is at once exhilarating and terrifying. Indeed, this year has massive implications for my future.

In any case, I am set to begin studies leading to a master at the Istituto Europeo di Design here in Florence as of Monday. The school is in the city center, literally within a sixty second walk from the spectacular Duomo, a Renaissance masterpiece and Firenze’s most famous and visible monument. It is housed inside an old palazzo adjacent to the small Santa Maria Maggiore church. The building has recently been converted from a derelict church palace into a gleaming and modern creative complex called La Casa della Creatività (The House of Creativity), and the place reeks of chic. On my first visit today, smartly dressed roamed like cockroaches in Brooklyn and the café inside served the best shot of espresso I’ve ever had for less than 1€.
My experience in Italy heretofore had been limited to the three weeks I spent living in a convent in Rome a few years ago, a trip on which I did every touristy thing possible and spent most days of the sweltering heat longing for a coke overflowing with ice cubes and stumbling into every baroque church in sight just to cool down. Not that my Roman adventure was a disaster, but this time around should prove a bit more invigorating. First, no convent living (sorry, Mother Superior): at the moment I’m staying in a fantastic hostel that 1) is way hipper than any convent I’ve ever seen, 2) has a pool, 3) has a bar (although the convent had a vending machine that sold beer...), 4) is centrally located. The weather here, at least now in February, is thankfully a much more forgiving, which should lend itself nicely not only to sightseeing but also to not having to seek shelter in old buildings.
The city itself (at least what I’ve seen of it so far) is stunning. Earthy yellow dominates the architecture and lends a feeling of warmth I badly missed after a month in England and Ireland. I lunched at a cheap Chinese restaurant today that served only fancy bottled water and espresso that was actually good. Tourists abound, which I’d usually classify as a bad thing, but here it just seems to make for an easily accessible environment in which most customer service people are multilingual--good for someone like me who knows how to conjugate about two present tense verbs in Italian (I’m trying!). In what seems to be an uniquely Italian forte, the omnipresent graffiti seems not to diminish the city’s beauty but rather to emphasize its authenticity, making the place feel vibrant and alive with clever cries for political justice, sports and national pride, and not just pointless gang banter. Although some fashions I’ve scoped out on the street definitely infringe on tacky territory, it is refreshing to see so many people put forth such effort into their appearances--the English and Americans certainly don’t do it, and even the French are much less audacious about it.

In any case, as of March 1, I will have an official residence--a room with a terrace in a three-bedroom modern house northwest of the city center. I can’t wait to put up posters and get houseplants and throw parties with the roomies.

To those back home, I’m homesick for you. Send good vibes my way and/or come visit.

Read back soon.

Special thanks to Stephanie C. for the Italy advice and collection of books that are increasing my odds of survival as I write this.

written from: feltrinelli bookstore, firenze
i’m currently: learning to conjugate, yet again
reading: “derrida reframed: a guide for the arts student,” by k. malcolm richards
listening to: the decemberists, articolo 31, passion pit

travel: where color still segregates

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:28:09 +0100

There exists an unspoken etiquette surrounding the color of one’s passport in international airports the world over. Generally, dark blue and maroon ones are the most ubiquitous, as they respectively implicate North American or Australian and European, and in thus invariably shout “rich westerner!” A whole smattering of colors cover those of various Asian, Latin American and African passports. Some rare and prestigious scarlet ones swim around for Switzerland, for example, and army green is used for most of the Muslim nations. While the mix might seem bewildering, the truth is that one is instantly demarcated in travel situations by the color of his or her passport and less frequently by its contents: east breaks down into Japan versus everywhere else in Asia, west breaks down into European and Americanadian.
In practice the relationship is of course much more complex than just the color, and there are most definitely exceptions to the “rules” I mentioned above. Color can, as it can be determined with just a quick flash of your passport, mean a great deal to how you may be viewed and subsequently treated by anyone you might come into contact with because travelers tend to be dealt with according to the economic situation that their passport may imply. It isn’t uncommon to see lost greens struggling to find help, while hapless maroons are often accosted by pushy vendors selling duty-free junk. Dark blues detached from their less-than-svelte tour groups gravitate magnetically towards fellow blue passport bearers as if it were physical law. Altogether, it makes for a sort of neo-segregation in which national stereotypes are flung about and brandished like fancy coats.
The true jet setters among us, in any case, have resorted to a most elegant solution: the passport cover. Not only does it shield from nasty snap judgements, it can lend an air of debonair mystique. Moreover, the benefits of traveling incognito will become immediately apparent as soon as you can shrug at the duty-free peddlers and say “No English!” It’ll smell still sweeter once that roving high school tour group doesn’t plea for your help while they search for their flight home to Dallas. You’ll notice that the best-dressed people in airports never flaunt their little booklets, regardless of color, and slip nicely under the radar for it--I sat next to an extremely elegant woman in the Oslo airport who spoke unaccented French and could easily have been haute-société Parisian, but who I later found out was Peruvian. No color makes you a citizen of no single place, and thus the whole world.
Still, the choice of your cover is of utmost importance. Most high fashion marques like Kate Spade, but especially those like Louis Vuitton which have traditionally been associated with travel, always have one or more in their collections. Most any department store or luggage shop will carry generic Made In China black/brown leatherette covers, but be warned that the majority of them are ill-fitting, ugly, and boring.
Tinymeat, a small American line of wallets, also makes a changing line of vinyl passport covers with bright and cheeky graphics by different artists. Very successful in terms of design, they’re inexpensive ($16/€12/£10, I own two), reasonably durable (tough vinyl and robust stitching) and are much more fun than anything comparable. However, unlike much pricier covers from Tumi or Prada, for instance, the Tinymeat line doesn’t have a set place to stash boarding passes or baggage claim tickets. Still, any small piece of paper, as well as money and coins can easily be stashed in the flaps on either side.

tinymeat “Duck and Cover” cover with American passport, postcard and UK coins.

with EU German maroon passport.

tinymeat “People terminal” cover hiding a South African passport.

Do keep in mind that the passport cover only covers the passport; not you. Whether you roam incognito or not, to be taken seriously in airports and in any travel situation, speak well, dress well, (no jogging suits, dear friends), and don’t gawk - we all know what a big fat stereotype looks like. Don’t be him.

www.tinymeat.com
www.flight001.com
www.tumi.com

written from: london westminster
i’m currently: covetous
listening to: jack conte, the spinto band, peggy sue & the pictures
reading: “clothes” by john harvey and “the dark heart of italy” by tobias jones

travel: grand

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:43:56 +0100

Dublin air, tainted with the smog and grime inherent in any city, is special. It’s infused with earth and sea and tears and thick beer that are pure no matter where in Ireland one stands.

The country was never a place I imagined liking. By nature I’m drawn to sprawling and pulsating masses of civilization—places in which I can at once bombastically assert my individuality, my point of view, myself, and then hide with equal facility among the multitude. Ireland has nothing of the sort and as a result has nothing so much as a trace of pretense.
On first glance, even Dublin, the capital and cultural center of the country, feels small, rickety, and threadbare. Conjoined habitations stand unevenly above ponderous streets, their bright and welcoming doors sometimes the only sign of their occupation. Smiling old women in mismatched outfits march on brittle legs over uneven sidewalks lined with tiny dented cars stacked upon one another. People walk quietly, cloaked in awkward and heavy coats to escape the penetrating cold. Even the stateliest buildings are humbly unadorned. On lucky days, the sun pierces the heavy duvet of clouds and touches the soused ground for just an instant before retreating and giving way to the rain once again. Most days, though, the bright doors and smiling faces and dented cars exist only in different shades of slate underneath their mostly impenetrable blanket.
After just one day in the country, the monochrome drab melts into endearing warmth. Pubs on every corner welcome, warm and are filled with unfailingly polite and jolly barkeeps. Bursts of slainte! (cheers!) are heard from tables adorned with heavy glasses filled with amber or black liquid. Friendly arguments erupt about where in town pours the best Guinness while guitars and fiddles sing emotional old melodies from random bar tables. Even better, if you can drink a pint and take a stab at George W. and Gordon Brown, you’re as good as Irish.
The country has an unusual talent for at once embracing progress and spitting in its cold face. Stark and unimaginably beautiful landscapes traversed only by ramshackle roads lined by crooked telephone poles crisscross the island. Traveling, as a result, is a chore. For your hard work, though, you are rewarded with an absolute visceral treasure chest: landscapes draped in desolate solitude and unblemished gorgeousness. Anachronisms like sinks with separate spouts for hot and cold water evoke nostalgia despite the simultaneously burnt and frozen hands they invariably leave you with. Although the Irish language is soldiering forward only on forced life support, road signs always go to the trouble of displaying Irish before English despite its inherent impracticality.
Polish and French and Chinese echo alongside English in the streets and cafés and reflect Ireland’s paradoxical new role of, as I would call it, a quaint melting pot. Although racial/ethnic/linguistic tensions surely exist hidden beneath the surface, they are certainly not to be felt in the thrum of daily life. People are actually polite. And, although the earth and sea and tears and thick beer are part and parcel of Ireland’s gritty charm, its real beauty lies within this true warmth of its people.

I’ve taken a liking to the Irish application of the word ‘grand’. In other English usages, the word carries a vaguely antique and remote connotation, relegated mostly to set constructions like ‘Grand Canyon,’ ‘grand prize,’ ‘grand touring’ and to trashy Pontiac Grand Ams rusting away in parking lots. In Ireland, they give ‘grand’ its due, however, and use it where we’d otherwise inject another, less grand superlative:

This cider is grand! or I’m just fucking grand!

Ireland is grand. Thanks for showing me around, Peg.

written from: delta flight 177, westbound over the atlantic
i’m currently: optimistic about a new year
listening to: debout sur le zinc “les promesses”
reading: le mur by albert camus

travel: cøpenhagen

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:56:00 +0100

I confess to having a Scandinavian fetish. The place is synonymous with obsessive attention to aesthetic, simple yet purposeful modernity, and particularly beautiful people—quite the g-spot for any design-worshipping soul.
My last holiday season was spent perched high up inside a fjørd in western Norway. Despite the fact that I had broken my leg in Paris en route, the reindeer meat, gallons of jule øl (Christmas beer) and the Norwegian artists and musicians I’d met made it likely the best holiday season I’d ever spent. I’d had the Scandifetish since before then, but that trip definitely sealed the deal.

As luck would have it, I was given a ticket back to Scandinavia this year, but this time to Copenhagen. As it’s been the perennial #2 world city on my must-see wishlist after my still favorite Shanghai, the opportunity was to be a dream come true.

And, so it is. This city is, insofar as I can tell, one of the best cities I’ve ever taken a breath in. Starting off, it feels connected and important in stark contrast to the way similarly sized Dublin feels quaint and anachronistic. Design is a lifestyle here and not just a hollow and overused buzzword as it so commonly is elsewhere. 21st century architectural experiments harmoniously update edifices from centuries past. Interesting museums abound, and on seemingly every corner throughout the city, bold boutiques peddling lusty trinkets gleam out through embellished glass onto neat streets.
Everyone cycles: little petrol waste, no smog. Cooler still is the fact that nobody locks their cycles up on the streets (!) and theft rates apparently hover around zero. The Danes that fill the city, moreover, seem in general to possess an innate sixth sense for fashion, too. Pieces are adroitly fitted and perfect colors adeptly complimented in a way I couldn’t replicate with an unlimited budget and weeks to plan an outfit—I’ve crossed two bums with cooler sneakers than me, and even guys in warmups and XL sweaters look incomprehensibly stylish.
As in Germany, good beer runs from taps everywhere. As in Italy, good espresso is to be found in every café. As in the States, apparent wealth is widely obvious. As in none of these, however, virtually the entire populace is is multilingual. As a New Mexican whose childhood foreign language experience consisted of hearing pinche! and joder! yelled on the playground, I may just be in over my naïvely international head.
There does exist, despite my gleaming excitation over the place, a very dark edge to the city itself. New York can’t dream of matching Copenhagen’s neon smattering of graffiti. It’s everywhere. But that in a city this punctilious it isn’t removed en masse shows that it’s cherished as a vibrant form of self-expression. Cars with smashed windows aren’t an uncommon sight, and a different storefront every night seems to have it’s glass destroyed. Christiania, the city’s walled in hippie commune (seen by its inhabitants as non-national enclave), reeks of drug infestation and is replete with clueless roving tourists huddled in groups of safety. Despite the surplus of artistic talent evinced by the mountains of graffiti adorning its every surface, the downtrodden place no longer has the air of an enclave of hippie free-thinking, but instead seems to have fallen victim to bums.

Still, on a whole, Copenhagen is a vibrant pastiche of aesthetic lucidity, fashion forwardness and open minds.

Peg and I arrived without a place to stay. Since this was to be a budget jaunt at a time of the lame duck dollar’s worst slide in memory (long live the US’ international self-destruction at the hands of a maniac), we had scoured Couchsurfing for the cheapest accommodations money could buy: free ones. Nynne, a biology student and her roommate answered our pleas and promised us their couch for the week. Luck decided to toss us a curve ball, though, as the Couchsurfing website crashed the night before our departure due to a power outage. Having relied on a connection, we hadn’t written any critical information down and were thus stuck in Dublin with plane tickets, but no address, no phone number, and no way to find our couch.
We decided to brave it, planning to hunt for an internet café upon arrival where we would cross our fingers for an end to the power outage half-a-world away that was already stifling our journey.
After an uneventful flight, we arrived to monolingual Danish direction signs and an abysmal exchange rate. We knew nothing of where to go besides towards a vague notion of ‘city center.’ After buying metro tickets, we promptly lost ourselves while trying to decipher our trajectory. A kindly old airport helper—the type that swoops in out of nothingness anytime you look like a lost loser—shot out something in Danish and then switched effortlessly to English at the sight of our blank faces. He pointed us to the proper stop, we rode the buzzing and futuristic metro to the biggest station we found, and after a long walk and directions from someone else on the street, found the city’s sole non wifi internet café in the main railway terminal. Couchsurfing was, of course, still broken.
Our hopelessness renewed and our irritability sparked, we decided that a meal was in order since we hadn’t eaten since the day prior. One dodgy Chinese buffet lunch later, we trekked back to the net spot and—hallelujah!—the site was back up. We had ourselves a couch.
I finished up a few obligatory emails home, brushed up on some news and began to gather my things to go. My heart sank to the floor—it crushed the tiles underneath my feet, actually—as I realized that my camera was gone. It was less than a month old and had been personally attached to my eye and neck since I’d gotten it. Gone. (Serves me right for leaving it unattended on a chair, I supposed) Still, some fuck lined his pockets nicely at my expense. Pleas to the police kiosk at the station yielded nothing more than a ‘What a shame!’
It is a serious bit of bitter irony that in the city where nobody locks up their bikes and where random girls who don’t know us were about to give us the keys to their apartment, I would be a victim of theft.

To whomever was responsible: I hope you have since fallen onto some electrified train tracks.

Several hours later (after miraculously breaking in to Couchsurfing), we met Nynne at her apartment in the ethnic and funky Nørrebrod neighborhood. Despite (understandably) not being in high spirits, it was impossible not to admit that their place was brilliant: it was bright windows, gigantic posters, painting supplies, and thousands of outfits strewn around shelves and beds. They gave us the grand tour and the keys, and after we had a chance to brush our teeth, we ran out to meet a couple of good Danish friends I had met in France the year before. It turned out to be a blissful reunion, and after two bars, 200 cigarettes, 80’s Danish pop on the jukebox and several Tuborgs too many, we stumbled to the bus back home.
Certainly not a bad end to a surprisingly horrid day.

The nightmarishly high Danish prices and equally ghastly American exchange rate set in the next day, though, as our dehydrated eyes struggled to clear out the morning’s heavy hangover. As of now, $1 = 5 Danish kroner (Dkr). Sounds okay, especially since it now takes more than $1.50 to buy 1€. 1€, however, still has a kick to it. It can buy a candy bar or a medium bottle of Evian in almost any country it’s used in. In Denmark, though, the cheapest cup of coffee is 35 kroner—$7. With plates at any low-end to mainstream restaurant hovering above 100 kroner, it’s impossible to get even a bowl of spaghetti for less than about $22. Coke—as in Coca-Cola—is consistently 20 kroner for a tiny .25L bottle, translating to $4. That is, by extension, $16/liter or roughly $61/gallon. The lowest octane gasoline available is about $11/gallon, compared with about $7 in France, $9 in the UK and $3 in the States. Holy fuck.
Danish incomes must compensate, since people are obviously not badly off as a result, but as an American screwed over even more profusely because of his country’s shameful policy myopia as of late, I have yet another reason to regret having come here. We returned later that day to the dreaded train station net bar where I scanned my bank account: enough for less than 9 cups of coffee or a bit less than 3 average priced meals if I turn down the drink. Holy fuck, indeed.

A few days later, we’re still in Copenhagen and counting down the days for our departure. We decided that, between the two of us, we have enough for one sparing meal a day until our departure. No drinks at dinner, no coffee, no snacking. No museums because we can’t afford the absurd admission prices. No drooling over the gleaming window displays, because... well, bitterness over being poor doesn’t feel so nice. We’ve sat and watched children play ice hockey, have taken in the fashions on the street, swooned over the unpronounceable blurts of Danish, and are generally passing the time bye lingering way too long in any place we don’t have to pay to get into. We write and sketch and scream into our frayed notebooks.
To be fair, besides the theft our stay has been relaxed and taking in the city has been a pleasure. But the days seem extraordinarily long when it’s far too cold to enjoy parks and monuments and far too expensive to do much else.
Our stay at Nynne’s house was unexpectedly cut short. While during the wee hours of the morning we were sleeping, her roommate came home with a special guest. Without a door or wall between her bedroom and the living room where we slept, they got busy. Very busy. For several hours. Loud and in hi-fidelity. THX wouldn’t have done it justice. I’ll leave it up to your imagination to work out the details. Afterwards, knowing fully that we were ‘sleeping’ in their living room, they broke a dish or two in the kitchen, laughed, and then retreated to the adjacent bedroom to fire up round two. Next up, a big fat joint over loud conversation.
Now, I’m very open-minded. Left of liberal. But, well, what they did was just not kosher. As soon as they fell asleep, we stuffed our things into our bags and fled like bandits.

Tonight we’ll be sleeping on the airport floor.

So, in all, this is a surefire contender for my Worst Trip Ever Award. But Copenhagen, for your Scandinavian chic and dark allure, I still have a gigantic crush on you. I’d kill to flee you on a rocket-powered sled right now, but I do hope that someday I can take you out on a hot date with more than $61, or a gallon of coke, to my name.

written from: all around copenhagen, denmark
i’m currently: lamenting my face leprosy
listening to: my growling stomach (ipod accidentally abandoned in dublin)
reading: michael heskett’s discourse on design

travel: tractors, gort and the worst place ever

Mon, 7 Jan 2008 06:57:22 +0100

Rumbling down its serpentine byways in a rickety little car is possibly the best way to get to know Europe. Still, although I’ve hitchhiked Provence, clattered down the Bavarian Autobahn in a 70s VW, and zoomed through Yorkshire in an English roadster, I had as of yet failed to fall madly in love with a place from behind mud-spattered panes of glass.
Western Ireland’s windblown, start and almost ugly brand of beauty, however, has changed that. Despite schizophrenic weather and precious few hours of daylight, my recent jaunt through Connemara into Galway and through Killary proved a poignant showcase for the brand of beauty Ireland is famous for.
Peg (who now lives in Ireland) and I set out from Dublin a few days ago in what was quite possibly the shittiest rental car since the death of the Gremlin: a diminutive and creaky five-door Hyundai Getz with one missing hubcap and a shifter that felt exactly like rowing a wooden spoon through potato salad. We named him Gort, affectionately, and took turns awkwardly acclimating ourselves to a right-hand steering wheel and living life in the left lane.

Gort with wrecked/abandoned caravan near Killary Fjørd

It turns out that in addition to a smattering of lopsided city cars, a large portion of the vehicles that traverse Irish roads regularly are tractors. Neon green tractors carrying hay or manure, beat up yellow and rusty ochre ones with busted and sad-looking headlights, and others with gruff-looking drivers on cellphones all rolling along at a plodding, chug-chug-chug pace, clogging nearly every road we encountered. Although maddening to drive behind, the sight of them on the motorways was pretty hilarious and certainly served as a caricature to Ireland’s oft-stereotyped slow pace of life and its still deeply rural culture.

A tractor chugs through heavy traffic. All in a day’s work, apparently.

We arrived first at the Cliffs of Moher in western county Clare about an hour before sunset, and thanks to an unmanned ticket kiosk, waltzed in without paying a penny. The majesty and barren magnificence of the place cannot be captured in words. The sun, as it was preparing to set, cast ethereal jets of light over the water and created the dual impression of at once being at the very edge of the Earth and someplace otherworldly. With hands frozen solid and hair blown sideways, we snapped a billion photos.

After a holy shit that was good dinner of fish & chips in Galway, we settled into our hostel where we were unfortunately trapped in an 8-person room with the loudest snorer of all time. The kid’s snoring was the. worst. thing. ever. It was as if a cow was giving birth to an even bigger cow while going through a hamburger grinder, and it was peppered with annoying phlegmy coughs and occasional murmurs of an indecipherable name. At first it was funny. The French kids sleeping in the bunk beds opposite ours chuckled with us as we tried in turn to shut him up. After several hours (around 3am), with audible pleas of “connard! arrête de ronfler!” pouring from the opposite bunks, we decided to brave the common room in our PJs and ended up usurping a chessboard from another group of French kids who had stepped out for a cigarette. The chess was just boring enough to put us to sleep despite the incessant snoring.
Refreshed, we woke Gort up the next morning from his nap underneath a late night’s snow and pushed on towards Killary and through Connemara. There, the solemn and drastic gorgeousness of Ireland is summed up in high contrast. Bent, blackened and wicked trees stand in lonely groves over brown and desolate hills cut by crookedly-painted roads, all under an at once fluorescent and ominous sky. The smell of dirt mixed with pure and freezing water fills the nose while wind whips from behind, then from the side, then straight on. The romance of the place—it’s the type of romance that makes the south of France look syrupy and overdone—is immediately apparent, and the sallow emotion, difficulty, and eccentricity so prevalent in Joyce is manifest. To anyone: Connemara must be on your to-see-before-you-croak list.

That night, after driving through to Killary “fjørd,” we arrived at our hostel just outside Leenane town. A friendly French keeper checked us in early, and the place was beyond reproach, but it was unfortunately virtually empty. No friends to be made. Later in the evening, though, after we cooked a stellar dinner in the hostel’s industrial kitchen, we met our Swiss roommate—in Ireland for a crash course in English—as well as a girl from Ontario on holiday with her Irish boyfriend. We spent the night in the hostel bar, blowing through countless cans of Bulmer’s cider while being serenaded with 1800s western saloon tunes, Scott Joplin, and ragtime on a warped old piano by the Swiss roommate. Later, we played a few songs for the group to good rounds of applause and then crashed out late in a freezing room.
In spite of our original plans to trek to the north of Ireland to see the Giant’s Causeway, I pushed for a straight trajectory towards Belfast the next day, anxious to see this epicenter of recent social conflict. Again, we piled our gear and ourselves into Gort and set off through winding roads, past millions of tractors and through brilliant scenery towards Northern Ireland (part of the U.K., not part of the Republic of Ireland). As the region has been intermittently torn apart by war over the past few decades, we weren’t sure what to expect. First impressions were promising: the roads were far more developed than in the South, the cities we passed through certainly appeared richer than some of the less-welcoming places we had happened upon before, as well, and it even felt like a novel side sojourn to England at times, as the Union Jack flew proudly (although often ripped and frayed) over some roads and houses.
Belfast itself, nevertheless, was shit. No exaggeration. The hostel we had chosen turned out to be a sort of home base for old drifters, and not the mix of diverse young backpackers to be expected in most decent places. The lobby smelled salty like eggs cooking and an alley behind a seedy Chinese restaurant, while the populace of the common room peered at us unwelcomingly over cigarette stubs. Our room, a dorm of possibly more than 30 beds, was filled with ramshackle red bunks topped with the affairs of various absent guests. It smelled strongly of flatulence and sweaty feet—I’m not sure if there actually were swarms of mites hovering around inside, but it’s impossible not to imagine them there when I think back on the place. One sickly old woman—the only other guest present in the room—who, to be fair, appeared friendly enough, stared politely and toothless at us as she fiddled with the zipper of her massive duffel. She sucked in thick mucus through her plugged nose and coughed as we unpacked our things. Although we were probably both equally revolted/terrified of the place, Peg and I chuckled to each other and set out to find a place to eat. We laughed out loud about the “tuberculosis lady” on our way out through the egg-smell-filled common room.

The Egg Hostel Hilarious N. Ireland Roadsign

Once on the street we discovered that nothing was open. Everything was obscured by imposing bars, nobody was out and about: the city was dead. Aside from an admittedly impressive city hall bordered by a big Ferris wheel, the city emitted no energy, no emotion. After several blocks of complaining, we found a generic restaurant/pub, packed with seemingly everyone in Belfast, including a drunken group of Elvis impersonating lesbians. After a pricey yet mediocre dinner, we stumbled back onto the dead Belfast streets. Again, nothing. No one. Our laughter about the horrible “Egg Hostel,” as we came to call it, resonated through the empty streets as we lamented not wanting to catch tuberculosis from our neighbor. Halfway back, after crossing tens more closed pubs and dead streets, we decided to give Belfast—quite possibly the worst place ever—the finger.
We plugged our noses one last time, snatched our things from where we had left them, hitched up old Gort, and hit the road back to Dublin, tuberculosis free and happy to get back into real Ireland.

written from: a coffee house in dublin city centre
i’m currently: anticipating my trip to denmark
listening to: of montreal “hissing fauna, are you the destroyer?”
reading: dior par dior - the autobiography of christian dior

rant: really?

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 13:24:53 +0200

Lets’s start this out frankly: I’m as much a greedy, materialistic bastard as any average American joe.

First of all, I travel by air: sixteen flights since the beginning of 2006 alone, including two trans-Pacific and six trans-Atlantic jaunts, probably the carbon equivalent of driving a 1971 diesel Volvo around the globe 5975 times. I buy and drink bottled water regularly, only recycling the containers when I’m feeling particularly vigilant. I see more than twenty pairs of shoes gleaming at me from my sardine-can-packed wardrobe, and am sure that yet another 10 or so are hanging out with the dust bunnies under my bed. My swamp cooler is pumping its guts out to keep my gigantic house cool as I write this. I leave the water on while I brush my teeth and shave. I do laundry way too often. Sometimes I drive my car just to amuse myself (that truly makes me evil, right?). I open the fridge and stare in blankly for minutes at a time whenever I feel the slightest urge to shove a carb-laden snack into my insatiable mouth. I consume and use relentlessly. Petrol. Metal. Plastic. Water. Textiles. Electricity. Food.

   Waste. Waste. Waste.

   I do suppose implicitly that feeling extremely guilty for all of this counts for something, though, right? I’m a de rigueur 21st century faux modern chic tree hugger, goddamnit! I have hippie organic farmer grandparents, I drive a compact Ultra-Low-Emissions car, ride the bus to school and buy vegan toiletries. I refuse to use styrofoam, vehemently boycott Wal-Mart, carry a designer bag made of recycled bike inner tubes, honk in approval when I happen across environmentalist protesters and have embarked upon an attempt to compel my faux tree-hugging 21st century family to recycle compulsively. Once upon a time, I even regularly donned a nerdy yellow Greenpeace poncho.
   While all well and good, my efforts to conserve (as I more clearly realize in writing them down), at least when juxtaposed with my chronic and relentless wasting, probably mean nil. Admittedly, most are pitiably inconsequential (what is my using vegan toiletries really going to do for our world?) and others are purely selfish (the vegan toiletries usually come in pretty packages and smell really, really good). And, while some of my other attempts may abstractly be of paramount benefit to mother nature and by extension, our society, I simply don’t do enough to make up for my contributions to the global warming gods and landfills of the world (my trash output still exceeds my recycling contribution by 2:1 every week).
   But, hold up. Can I really do much more than I do? In short, yes, but realistically, probably not much. The truth remains that a life within any consumeristic, wasteful society is by nature excessive, luxurious, and superfluous. Short of moving to a hippie commune in Vermont where I’d wear the same Birkenstocks until my funeral day (at which point I’d pass them on for continued use to my most cherished descendant), my earnest efforts at consuming and using responsibly are the only option my consumeristic, wasteful life affords me. If I must consume; I can at least feel hideously self-reproachful for it at all times.

   Not so for the vast majority of my fellow Americans.

   Seemingly every suburbanite exists on the vague presumption that one simply hasn’t arrived unless 1) their house takes up more real-estate than an entire city block, 2) their car outweighs Apollo 11 and contains a larger-displacement engine than that of Norway’s finest cruise ship, and 3) everything they own is always unblemished, just out of the box and always reeks of that exotically pungent fresh-out-of-the-Chinese-factory stench. Even as green has become chic and ubiquitous, wealth and status in the mainstream sense continue to be defined by waste and excess.

   Mr. X: Our new Lexus has 742 horsepower and thrusts to 60 quicker than George Lopez can say “taco!”
   Mrs. Y: But it only has TWELVE plasma screens?
   Mr. X: We’re installing six more this afternoon.
   Mrs. Y: My husband can’t stand having only 32 in our Jag. We’re trading up next month for the Hummer Über - we read that there are no less than 125 screens in the back seat alone! And, with all that chrome, I can see my reflection from no matter where I park at the mall!

Why?!

   Just last week, while on my way to catch a film at the local cinema, I stumbled upon this monstrosity

The fucking heap was not capable of taking up less than two spaces, even in the generously jumbo googolplex parking lot. Keep in mind that some douchebag drives this as his personal ride--he likely commutes to work in it, runs to Wal-Mart in it, certainly flaunts it and probably boasts about it at tailgate parties over Coronado wieners and Keystone Light. Interestingly, although the truck itself is probably a pseudo substitute for a clearly miniature organ on its owner’s body, no rubber testicles were affixed to the tow hitch (suggesting concomitantly that there may yet be a shred of hope for humanity).
   I fully understand that work trucks are vital to many, but this particular iteration is patently absurd. That its inconsiderate operator can live with himself while he uses it as his pleasure limousine is sickening and a frightening insight into something deeply wrong with our society’s psyche and values. I on the other hand, would probably feel compelled to lash myself, 13th century Catholic style, with a nail-studded cat-o’-nine-tails if I ever felt compelled to drive my heinous V-10 fat-ass mobile down to Circle K for some bread and milk.

Other nits I have to pick:

1. 2. 3.

1. Beyond the unnecessary girth of too many of our transportation appliances, our general propensity to favor anything huge has become extremely unhealthy. Much like the domino effect, our cities continue to sprawl out across the landscape, creating greater transportation dilemmas, and, by extension, pollution woes. Our houses are too big--on a tiny planet inhabited by more than 6 billion space-seeking anthropoids, it’s not logical to think we can all have 5 acres and 5000 square feet all to ourselves. We eat too much, too often--the world’s arable land and ocean fishing areas are being exhausted at an alarming rate because our ravenous mouths are never satisfied.
   Photo: 2lb sandwich at Lindy’s in New York City. Even though no single-stomached creature could dream of finishing this puppy off, Lindy’s strictly forbids sharing. I gave away 5/6 of mine (or 1.6 lbs, plus the fries) to a panhandler in Central Park. If it weren’t for him I would have ended up throwing away what probably was once two turkeys, half a pig and a hectare of wheat.

2. Like the proper gluttons that we are, we increase our consumption and waste knowing full-well that a vast majority, whether outside or within our Western curtain of security, make do on comparatively nothing. Children in Somalia continue to starve. Cambodian students can’t afford textbooks. Poor Americans have virtually no recourse to healthcare. And we all still feel that three cars and seven TV’s are necessary.
   Photo: A shopping cart in Chelsea, Manhattan containing the belongings of a homeless woman and her daughter. Most of what’s on the cart had just been taken from a nearby trash pick-up.

3. The US is the world’s whipping boy and reviled scapegoat for waste and pollution problems. While we certainly are public enemy numero uno in terms of consumer waste, today’s global warming and other related pollution problems are being greatly exacerbated by massive industrial irresponsibility and unrestrained growth of personal wealth in developing nations--Eastern Europe, Mexico, India, and especially the PRC are prime examples. Moreover, even the most vocal critics of the US’s much-promulgated destruction of our beloved habitat (Japan, Germany, Canada, et. al.) are all heavily implicated in the very same destruction. Keep in mind that no single nation has come close to destroying the massive amounts of ocean habitat as has Japan. Germany generates more trash than any other nation per-capita in Western Europe. The brunt of Canada’s economy is built upon the ruthless exploitation of its vast reserves of timber and minerals.
   Quite simply, the entire western world (and those countries which are now westernized or are westernizing) is to blame. This is everyone’s problem, everyone’s fault.
   Photo: A laborer in Hunan Province in China cultivates his crops using visibly polluted water under a thick cloud of factory exhaust.

   On the upside, we are living in a truly glorious age of reckoning, in which the world-at-large seems to at last be realizing that everyone’s actions collectively have a profound impact on the overall health of our planet. Although it’s taken some garish and dumbed-down gimmicks (Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is the archetype) as well as some well-informed, well-meaning celebrity attempts to help us change our ways, an attitude of environmental responsibility and accountability has almost become chic. Rejoice! We faux 21st century tree huggers are coming into our own more and more every day every day!

   Still, a tremendous amount of progress is yet to be made. There remains a considerable gap to bridge between proactive attitudes and the actions that should accompany them, but we’ve certainly made a start down the right path.

Alas, until the world hums on wind energy and fuel cells, food is portioned rationally, and Jaguars have no more than one plasma screen, I say we just harpoon the fuckers who feel the need to cruise their behemoths to Safeway.

written from: albuquerque, new mexico
i am: researching a graduate school in italy
listening to: “hard road” by the hilltop hoods
reading: the metamorphosis by kafka

travel: a line d life, lyon

Sun, 7 Jan 2007 14:59:01 +0100

I wish I had more of an occasion to sit and write while on the metro. Along with my feet, it has become one of my two most basic transportation appliances, so when not scrambling to finish my homework during my morning ride, I’m catching up on the daily news in the afternoon or trying to snag a few z’s after hours of boring lectures. While I ride Lyon’s la ligne vert (the green line), also called Line D, fully 20 or more times a week, the dizzying array of people who pour out and in at every station never ceases to be entertaining, captivating, or just plain bizarre.
   Although public transportation in the States is seen as mostly only a last resort and/or punishment for people too economically challenged to own a car, here, impoverished or millionaire, on prend le métro! Lyon’s metro (especially compared with Paris’ ancient sprawling and slow system) is particularly fast, new, clean, and very well placed, so even for a car addict like me, it isn’t in any case a death sentence to be relegated to basic common transport.
   What I love about it the most, as a result of its universal use, is that it is a veritable rolling display-case for a brilliant cross-section of the people I live amongst. Right now, for instance, I’m crammed between the window and a sneering man buried in an economics magazine. He has no noticeable physical features besides his high, long and tightly pinched nose. Behind me is a quartet of loudly gossiping, typically beautiful French women. Two lost Russian tourists across from the nose man and I are trying to decipher the train’s route by using a way-too-huge map that is obscuring them entirely except for their orange shoes. A young Arabic woman is scolding her three children for drawing on the window with her lipstick. As the stops roll by, dozens more interesting people shuffle in and trickle out. At one point, a little boy begins barking like a dog at the Russian tourists, and several minutes later I am harassed by an accordion player for change after his magnifique (read: horrible) performance of “When The Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie.” I give him 30 euro centimes to go away, and when he asks where I’m from, I tell him “the moon” in French. With a smile he lets me know that my spiky hair looks like moon-man hair and then asks if I have a moon cigarette to give him. By this point, the three Arabic children have drawn a whole purple lipstick landscape on the adjacent window. My afternoon commute is beautiful in its chaos.
   Some days though, are richer than others. On a few occasions, I’ve made unexpected friends with someone sitting near me. Other times, it suffices to catch the sight of someone unbelievably attractive or just to be caught in the middle of a heated conversation.

   The distant hope of a bizarre thing happening almost makes it exciting to step onboard at times. I once sat next to a man with a monkey on his head who asked me if I knew of a good restaurant in the city centre. I watched a woman eat a whole bag of still frozen pre-cooked chicken legs and then put the bones in her purse.
   One of the evenings immediately after I had moved into my Vaise flat, while on my way to dinner, I stepped onto an entire metro car stuffed only with people dressed like chickens. In the centre of the group was a man, the king chicken I think, who was clucking up a storm and would yell out occasional addresses to his subjects: “Mes poulets et poules!” which I assume meant something like “My hens and gentleroosters!” I never actually caught through eavesdropping what exactly they were doing, but they disembarked before I did, leaving the metro full of feathers - one chickenette even forgot her paper beak.
   Another time, because I am always compassionate of lost tourists, I offered to help three toothless and very lost-looking old Cambodians who spoke neither English nor French (nor anything else I could feign comprehending). I ended up spending an hour with them trying to convince the matron, who kept handing me an upside-down address card, that I could, indeed, help them on their way. I had imagined they were looking desperately for their long-lost daughter’s house whom they had flown 10,000km to visit, or at the very least were doing something else that sweet, toothless old people do. However, when we finally found the address, less than a block away from where we started, I realized that it was a garish, neon-sign-adorned porn theatre. The two old men clapped and bowed goodbye when they, too, caught sight of it and all three of them disappeared under the blinking sign.

I fucking love Europe.

written from: lyon, france
i am: craving thai food
reading: “relato de un naufrago” by gabriel garcía-marquez
listening to: accordion music

rant: face leprosy

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 13:35:06 +0100

It’s no big secret that I have a problem with acne. Even though I spend hours scrubbing, cleansing and otherwise catering to my much-abused skin, I still have to spend hours in Photoshop madly editing every photo of myself so that no one cringes at the sight of my image. Ever wonder why the majority of photos of me on this site are from weird angles and/or from far away? It’s not because I’m that artistic. Rather, it’s because I really, really can’t stand the sight of my face.
   In China recently, on an otherwise splendid day, I happened into an interesting looking apothecary/drugstore, staffed with a harem of trendy Chinese twentysomethings. After about 30 seconds of bewildered browsing, I was pursued around the shop by two girls wielding a nondescript tube, proposed to be a “cure” to the “ugly” that is my face. (“Ugly” and “cure” being the only pertinent English words they could eke out). I literally felt my self-esteem hit hard asphalt bottom while slinking out of the store that day.
   Earlier this year, while working Saturdays at the grower’s market in Santa Fe, I had a number of people approach me with off-the-wall “cures” for that which ails me. The first (and only) one I tried, offered to me by an eccentric-looking concert pianist, involved me consuming an entire gallon of white vinegar, undiluted, over the course of two weeks to ‘clean out the system, bro!’ Two days later, with my esophagus protesting loudly (probably because it was on the verge of being pickled), I poured the vinegar down the kitchen drain. Others involved me meditating with lemons in my mouth to balance the chemicals in my aura, scrubbing my zits with holy dirt, and even not cleaning my face at all. Ever. I’m almost desperate enough to try all of them.
   My parents and friends constantly try to convince me that my skin isn’t the first thing people notice (or worse, that “It isn’t even bad!”), but that complete strangers frequently hound me with miracle cures certainly says otherwise. Short of the supposedly dangerous Acutane, nothing my doctor or anyone else can recommend is guaranteed. I take pills, supplements and vitamins and have a whole gallery of creams. I’ve had electric needles drilled into my zits, rubbed sulfur on my face, bathed in arsenic water, and even been pathetic enough to respond to a couple late night “1-800” TV ads. My diet is predominately organic, vegetarian, full of antioxidants and low in fat. I rarely drink soda and drink tons of water. I’ve tried every high-dollar potion known to Beverly Hills (my Sephora budget is bigger than any girl’s I know).
   It’s become impossible, over the past few months, to not feel like an enormous walking zit. Now, I acknowledge, that as with any situation it could always be worse, but I’ve dealt with this for more than four years now - I deserve some bloody clear skin already!

   Roadblock: I live in France now. Although that makes no real difference, it makes one helluva psychological dent. Appearance is not nearly as central to life in the western United States as it is in western Europe, especially in France. For illustration, consider that French people on average spend more than 175% the amount Americans spend on clothes and cosmetics. Being overweight (or obese, for that matter) is drastically more rare than in the States (and therefore looked upon as extremely slovenly and unacceptable), even low-end stores sell cosmetics North Americans consider upscale (read: expensive), high-end salons and boutiques are to be found en masse even in small cities, tanning salons are gyms are ubiquitous, and anorexia and bulimia in France are just as present and strong as in California. My chimney-like French friends call their cigarettes ‘skinny sticks,’ referring to their magical power to keep fat at bay.
   Even though I don’t live in Paris, my daily trek still bombards me with Dior Homme ads showing off glossy photos of beautiful models with glass-smooth skin. Every place I enter leaves me surrounded by well-dressed, nicely groomed, and most importantly, acne-free people. Even on the métro, where people from within every echelon of society find their way to work and school, nobody beyond a few snotty 16 year-olds seems to have acne.
Everything is relative, nevertheless. I feel far less revolting in the context of the mostly average-looking people in New Mexico than I could ever imagine feeling as the badly dressed Quasimodo who has stumbled unwittingly into the pages of Vogue here in metropolitan France. Life can be one helluva trial when your quotidian experience inevitably involves the self-esteem hitting asphalt rock-bottom I felt when the Chinese women hunted me down with their cream arsenal.

   In any case, I remain hopeful that it’ll miraculously clear up in the not-too-distant future. Even if it doesn’t, a valuable life lesson remains to be learned from this: I really would do well to reconfigure my feelings about the importance of physical appearance in order to be happy (not to mention, sane), because it really shouldn’t be this important to me.

   Still, being the ugly duckling sucks.

written from: lyon, france
i am: welcoming the rain
reading: dress your family in courderoy by david sedaris
listening to: the magic numbers “b-sides”