Monday 30 January 2012

Lessons from the European Figure Skating Championships...

Right, confession time. Back before I owned a passport, this is how I spent most of my time...


Given such photographic evidence, it should come as no surprise that the 2012 European Figure Skating Championships, held in Sheffield last weekend, proved too much for me to resist. Indeed, I have been planning to attend them since last summer. While I could go on (and on, and on) about the skating, I shall spare you the technical details (such as my outrage regarding a certain C. Kostner's pathetic jump content) and share instead cultural observations of a somewhat more general nature...

Outer London looks like Poland - or anywhere else in Northern/Central Europe.
A somewhat facile observation to be starting with, but nonetheless true. Seriously - look at it:


I took this photo in Enfield, aka outer Mongolia, whilst waiting for a lift from my friend and fellow FS (that's figure skating to insiders, one of which you can now pretend to be) aficionado. If the generic US landscape is punctuated by Wal-mart and Home Depot, then surely this is the Northern European equivalent - garden centres, tons of signs for little stall-type shops with disparate fonts, etc. I would have photographed the collection of gazebos/mini-chatas across the street, but I dropped my hat in the mud and became preoccupied with cleaning it before I got the chance. Oh well, if I don't know what Monty's does/sells, at least I know where I can go to acquire a reptile, should one ever be required.

National stereotypes are alive and well in Europe. Any Euro-skeptics bemoaning the culturally homogenizing effects of the European Union are clearly not watching enough figure skating, where kitschy nods to one's homeland apparently constitute an attempt at artistry. The Italian and French skaters seem particularly invested in reductive expressions of nationality. They appear to have conflated their styles into a single entity I shall call mediterranean-sexy, which can be further broken down into sub-types a) vintage (Breton tops, suspenders, accordian music - see Samuel Contesti) and b) Pigalle (jazzy music, revealing costumes - see Valentina Marchei and Mae Berenice Meite). On the other end of the spectrum (apart from the unfortunate, Marilyn Monroe-channeling Ksenia Makarova), are the Dramatic Russian Skaters (black costume, moody music - see Artur Gachinski and Polina Koreybinikova). Nordic Snow Princess is another clearly demarcated category, the apotheosis of which must surely be Swedish champion Viktoria Helgesson's fur-cuffed long programme dress. More disturbing manifestations of ethno-packaging include Yretha Silete's jungle-themed program, the problematic nature of which nearly merits its own post.

English audiences are a bit rubbish, really... at least when it comes to watching female athletes. Any time an attractive woman who appeared to have reached the age of consent took to the ice, she was greeted with wolf-whistling and other caveman-esque accolades. Classy, gents. I shudder to think what's going to happen at the London Olympics. Perhaps all female gymnasts should be issued earplugs.

Celebrity culture has infiltrated women's skating. This is in no way an apologia for the hooting men of Sheffield, who, to be fair, may not all have been English, but I can't help but query the decision to present oneself for athletic competition decked out like a showgirl. The International Skating Union attempted to deal with this issue in the 1980s, when Katarina Witt showed up in this outfit, the first version of which was sans feathers and cut high up the hips, Las Vegas style. A new rule was introduced, dictating that all clothing must be "modest, appropriate and suitable for athletic competition" (this also ruled out tights on men, by the way). Perhaps many of the Euro-ladies spent the off-season reading Catherine Hakim and are consciously attempting to invoke their erotic capital in pursuit of sports glory. I'm not convinced though. What child dreams of ascending to Olympic heights dressed as Marilyn Monroe? That said, as I type this, it occurs to me that perhaps I shall one day look back on KM's Monroe-themed program with nostalgia as someone attempts to land a triple-triple combination dressed as Kim Kardashian. Too horrifying to contemplate! Quick, here's something else to look at:

Eventual winner, Carolina Kostner of Italy, left, with Makarova-as-Marilyn, right, in pink. See? Not so bad...

Thursday 26 January 2012

That whole, "well, you're American..."  (or anything; insert what you will) thing...it's not clever, in fact, but profoundly reductive and arrogant, predicated on the fact that you, the individual evoking this explanation for whatever I've just said, indeed possess the upper hand, that I must be, obviously, deeply conflicted, apologetic, even. So much so that your rapid assessment buys my silence. Neat, though intellectually lazy (and you pride yourself on your intellect), it's you who's defined by borders, not I.

Occasionally a prose poem is required. This was one of those occasions. Long live the mezinárodní  člověk, kdekoli on(a) se narodil.

Wednesday 25 January 2012

Peas, sir (and ma'am)...would you like some more?


Dearest readers, I am pleased to present my first article for Peasoup Magazine!



While I must confess a long-standing dislike of pea soup the foodstuff, Peasoup the magazine is rather fabulous. Each month, Peasoup aim to cut through the fog surrounding a different issue of importance to Londoners, sans celebrity gossip and general rubbishness, but with plenty of wit and responsible journalism. Do visit and enjoy the many excellent articles. I am very excited about this new venture as it means that I get to write about clothes from a socio-political perspective. If you like what you see, make it official via Facebook.

Thursday 19 January 2012

Ode to the Humble School Bus

With the mayoral election and Olympics looming, it seems that everyone has an idea for improving life in London. Catchily-named cures for various social ills are the new black. The Evening Standard seems particularly into this, with its Get London Reading Campaign and Fund for the Dispossessed - speaking of which, does anyone else find that a highly problematic title? Dispossessed by whom, as a result of what? The branding seems perfectly engineered to avoid any suggestion of causality - social inequality just exists, sui generis. Ah, the guilt-avoiding merits of the passive tense, beloved of responsible politicians the world over, including a certain George W. Be careful, my friends...this bodes not well.

Despite my skepticism (this is one North American spelling I shall never abandon, by the way), I thought I'd get into the spirit by offering my own suggestion for improving Londoners' quality of life. I am under no illusions that it is in any way profound - I'm not even going to come up with a catchy, alliterative and subtly manipulative title - but here it is, one thing that would undoubtedly make me a happier person:


Ah, the humble school bus! Willing conveyor of the hordes of school children who are currently storming London's bus system and exploding commuters' eardrums with a vitally important continuation of some playground catastrophe. I've never had much time for London buses, but since moving up north, I've discovered a few pleasant routes. There is the W7, possibly the most obscenely chichi bus in London, which shuttles back and forth between Muswell Hill and Finsbury Park. There is the W5, which winds its way from Crouch End to Archway through a leafy "hail and ride" section, during which you can flag it down like a taxi. Finally, there is the 91, which snakes its way to Trafalgar Square via the British Library and UCL. The 91 pleases me for reasons both practical (less carrying of book- and laptop-laden bags) and esoteric (its route seems designed to confirm North London's reputation as the historic home of the intelligentsia) and all would be well between us but for the influx of school children that are wont to invade, like swarms of identically-clad locusts, at any point between 3 and 6pm. I try to avoid travelling at these times, leaving the BL a bit early or delaying my departure to an evening seminar for as long as possible, yet there's nearly always a group (or more) to contend with.

A school bus network would render such encounters a thing of the past and provide London school children with valuable life experiences. I can't imagine my school years without buses. There was the eagerly-awaited annual bus evacuation drill, during which we interrupted our studies for half an hour to clamber onto a bus, learn the location of the first aid kit and crow bar, and then evacuacte by jumping (in an orderly manner!!!) out the back while a disinterested PE teacher looked on. What 12-16 year old doesn't live for such diversions?

Admittedly, I have phrased the problem (and my solution) in such flippant tones that it can scarcely be taken seriously. There's also the argument that large cities rarely have school buses, that it would be expensive to set up such a network and that complainers like yours truly should just get on the tube and be done with it. All that makes perfectly good sense, but a school bus network in London might be more achievable then one thinks:


Surely there are quite a few of these knocking around at the moment? In these tight economic times, it would be a shame to let them go to waste...

Monday 16 January 2012


I take a lot of flak for my love of Starbucks. I've never really understood why the humble Seattle coffee house-gone-global inspires such profound hatred. Its product is no more environmentally damaging than Costa's or Cafe Nero's (neither of which I particularly enjoy) and if you want to hate an American multinational for the sheer hell of it, then surely McDonald's or KFC would be better choices? If in-store signage is to be believed, the beans are reasonably fair trade. Then there's the love to the employees. Admittedly this is a US-specific issue, but one really must commend a company that provides health insurance to its part-time employees.

I've also never really understood the argument that Starbucks hurts local coffee shops. As a terrible caffeine addict, I interact with the sacred bean and its purveyors in a number of different contexts in a given day. If I want to have a meeting in a coffee house, I will almost never chose Starbucks, opting instead for one of the quiet, quirkily-decorated, fully-staffed coffee shops that abound in my neighbourhood. Likewise, I will not dash manically into a quiet cafe en route to the bus stop and demand my daily fix to go. This is the role of Starbucks: efficient, reliable coffee on the run. There is nothing more frustrating for the time-strapped, under-caffeinated commuter than a barista's close (and painstakingly slow) attention to the design possibilities presented by the subtle interplay of foamed milk and chocolate flakes. The morning coffee is like petrol - fill 'er up, as quickly as possible. Starbucks understands this. Their outlet in Victoria Station is beautiful to behold - a perfectly calibrated machine.

Despite Starbucks' many virtues, I may need to reassess my on-going patronage as a result of the horror I encountered upon venturing in today for my morning latte. The old menu board had been replaced by a new one, which included the caloric value of everything on offer. I hate this practice, which I first encountered on a December afternoon in Manhattan. On that occasion I wandered haphazardly, lost, between various branches of Pret-a-Manger and Au Bon Pain, unable to actually order anything. It's not that the calorie information generally changes my order - I figure that if I've been eating/drinking it for months/years (and I do have quite extreme loyalties where convenience food is concerned) without weight gain, full knowledge of the nutritional information is unlikely to alter matters. What bothers me is the breaking of the sacred bond between customer and restaurant, the refusal of the suspension of disbelief that accompanies dining out of one's home. Twice in December, I had occasion to eat exquisite French meals, including glorious desserts. How horrifying to have had these experiences accompanied by nutritional information. Who, in the act of dining out, even for something as minor as coffee, cares? Calorie-counting is for the home, or the grocery store, when debating between breakfast cereals or fresh soups. It is most certainly not for coffee. Do we really need to be told that an Americano is much better for us than a chocolate frappucino with whipped cream and caramel sauce?

I have no objection to the information being made available for those dedicated, for reasons of vanity or health, to extreme calorie counting; Starbucks publishes a brochure with this information and I'm reliably told that there is an app for that. Surely this can suffice? At least until I've had my morning coffee...

Wednesday 11 January 2012

Stalinist Bloomsbury...or the manifestations of unrealized wanderlust.



Last week, I submitted a visa application to UK Borders which involved surrendering my passport. The passport and I have never been parted for more then about 72 hours and I am not, to put it mildly, enjoying our estrangement. Even if I have no tickets booked, I love the possibility of travel, the sense that movement may be immanent. This in part explains my affection for central Europe, where you can train rapidly around Germany, Austria and Czech Republic at a moment's notice and the destination board at your local train station includes places like Moscow, Bucharest, Sarajevo...Sans passport and stranded on this island for the foreseeable future, I've developed a passing melancholia that seems to involve burning candles, drinking red wine, listening to endless Leonard Cohen (thank you, Spotify) and thinking dreamily about my former cities. It was in just such a mood that I noticed the following similarity.

This is the Palace of Culture, Warsaw:


And this, is Senate House Library at the University of London...


Both are massive and impossible to capture in a single photograph without inducing vertigo. The more I think about this comparison, the more apt it seems. Both take an eternity to walk around - P and I once spent 20 minutes circumnavigating the PoC and taking the wrong exit from the library can easily add 10 minutes to your journey home. Both have strange internal layouts and you have to go outside to get from one part of the building to another. I've been semi-lost in both and each time I was filled with a sense of unease irreducible to mere spatial disorientation. They feel wrong. It seems entirely plausible that both could house a population of feral cats in their basements and/or contain offices full of staff who haven't been outside in years and think the Cold War is still in full swing. Finally, and really, what greater confirmation could there be, both make excellent surfaces for projections:


Palace of Culture, January 2011

Senate House Library, January 2012:

I rest my case, and cannot help but wonder what other bits of Europe I will discover while wandering passport-less about London. Watch this space, and, in the meantime, here's some Leonard Cohen.

Sunday 8 January 2012

It's Sunday in Crouch End (and most places, truth be told...). I'm feeling slightly unwell and have spent the day curled up rather decadently in bed with good coffee, a sour cherry and dark chocolate scone from Gail's and Moisés Kaufman's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

Along with the Beatles, Liam Neeson and James Joyce, Oscar Wilde was a major high school love of mine. Our relationship began when I was about fourteen and took me to a number of interesting places, including central Pennsylvania's only art cinema, where I watched Stephen Fry's portrayal in Wilde. The apotheosis of my Wilde years (combining as it did two great loves) was Liam Neeson's 1998 performance in The Judas Kiss on Broadway. My mother was my constant companion in pursuit of this obsession - as I was underage, I certainly wouldn't have gotten in to Wilde on my own - and deserves credit for her understanding and support of an artistic interest that included more exposure to adult male bodies in various states of undress than the average 15 year old girl generally encounters (particularly in central Pennsylvania).

It's been some years since I've thought about Wilde and re-reading Kaufman's play, which I saw at Open Stage of Harrisburg during the heyday of my affection, was both a reminder and affirmation. Listen to this - go on, read it out loud:

Wilde Art has a spiritual ministry. It can raise and sanctify everything it touches, and popular disapproval must not impede its progress.
Art is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament. Art is what makes the life of the whole race immortal.

Narrator 5 From The English Renaissance of Art:

Wilde The arts are the only civilizing influences in the world, and without them people are barbarians. An aesthetic education, which humanizes people, is far more important even for politicians than an economic education, which does the opposite.

(Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. London: Methuen (1998). pp 66-67.)

In recent years, I have become somewhat cynical with regards to great claims for art - and manifestos generally. Last fall, I was teaching Artaud and had a hard time not rolling my eyes, though at the same time I was incredibly happy for my deeply entranced students. But this stirs me up and feels so incredibly right that I want to frame and hang it over my desk. It also strikes me how similar Wilde and Václav Havel are in some respects - Wilde's words could serve as an indictment of neoliberalism and Klausian politics and evokes Havel's assertion that asking why humans need culture is tantamount to asking why they are human beings.

On a micro-level, reconnecting with Wilde reaffirms my affection for the beautiful, for stylish living. Occasionally, particularly in academic circles (and even in certain artistic ones), a concern for elegance, graciousness and ceremony can seem trivial, or be readily trivialized. If I ruminate too long (and how long is too long?) on the beautiful cut of a pair of trousers, or the horror of cheap faux fur, a part of me can't help thinking I'm wasting time that would be better spent reading critical theory. Certainly some lifestyle fetishes are created by the media, whipped up to make us spend money and want things we don't need. But genuinely gracious living, true devotion to Beauty is nothing to do with this. It finds the spiritual in the quotidian. It elevates us and makes us realize we can do better. It emphasizes our humanity. And today it has made me feel that what I do is not in vain, that the English in particular need foreigners possessing eccentric yet cultivated taste, self-confidence and intolerance towards small-mindedness. And that is something lovely indeed, particularly when one feels a bit under the weather.

Tuesday 3 January 2012

Stationery on a blustery day..

So, today's the first official day back at the (home) office. Rarely have I been happier at the existence of the contents of those parentheses than this morning, when it appeared to be raining horizontally. While it's stopped raining for the time being, the street lamps are still shaking somewhat worryingly outside my window. This is in marked contrast to yesterday's blue skies - the perfect day for a stroll to nearby Stoke Newington, for which I must admit a growing affection despite (or because of?) the way it reminds me of Portlandia...but I digress.

Back in Crouch End, having remained stationary for the entire morning and much of the afternoon, I took advantage of the break in the deluge to the brave the streets (full, as ever, of marauding school children - oh, how I've (not) missed you! - and ubiquitous bugaboos) to stock up on stationery at Office Dog. I don't know the provenance of this shop's name, but it pleases me. Business-based animals are always cats, aren't they? Particularly in the theatre. I like the idea of an office dog, along with other, stranger, mammals. Office chinchilla? Theatre ferret? But anyway, this is what I got:

Where pens and paper are concerned, I fully subscribe to Walter Benjamin's Fourth Writer's Technique: "Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensible." This little haul may not look like much, but it is highly specific to yours truly. For my thesis notebooks, I favour classic Rhodia, but today I was shopping for other things. The red notebook is hard-sided and will be the Spring Term volume of the dramaturgy class I'm teaching this year. Among other attributes, it lays open easily, so I can write class notes on two facing pages in advance and then hold forth in class with dignity, never (in theory) having to flip through frantically while it threatens to close. It has a cloth cover, which means I can label the spine and front cover with Sharpie for easy filing. The yellow spiral notebook is for Czech - again, it has to lay open nicely so that I can copy words into my flashcard app and is small enough that I will (theoretically) carry it with me regularly to foster the acquisition of new vocabulary courtesy of my Ceske zpravy app (note the implicit New Year's resolution to use technology to expedite language acquisition...I will update on this once I form an opinion as to its usefulness). The green pen is for marking student essays - a habit inherited from a former professor, black and blue being too quotidian, red too accusatory. The matryoshka notebook is for general journalling, an activity I haven't engaged in regularly since about 2007. I chose it because matryoshka dolls are my favourite piece of Soviet kitsch (apart from Regina Spektor's, that is). I even own an electric blue and pink matryoshka doll-emblazoned suitcase, which has admittedly earned me the odd stare, particularly when travelling in eastern Europe. It is, however, easy to spot in baggage claim.

To what pens and papers do you adhere pedantically?

Sunday 1 January 2012

Best Leg Forward...

Happy New Year!

'Tis the season for all manner of resolutions, re-evaluations and detoxification schemes. I don't promise to embark on any of the latter, moderation at all times seeming to me wiser than bursts of asceticism interrupting general debauchery, but I have resolved to try to blog more. I shall also be trying to blog less reservedly - that is, without running every thought I have through an extensive series of self-created tests designed to ensure that I give no offence to anyone, even (hypothetical) readers whose (imaginary) views I don't at all agree with (if they did, or do, exist). Not that I shall seek to be provocative for the sheer hell of it. It's more a resolution to think, write and be generally be a bit freer. All to the good, j'espère.

Now to the title of this post. Here is a photo taken of me this early this afternoon (so effectively this morning) as I returned home from my first venture into the wilds of 2012:



In addition to unwashed hair and no makeup (apart from the obligatory lipstick), I am wearing several holiday acquisitions, most notably the oversized cardigan (Whistles via P) and my new (and much loved) Chloe trousers (courtesy of me and the Harvey Nick's post-Christmas sale). I have wanted a pair of Chloe trousers for the best part of the last decade, so these represent a major acquisition. They were my last purchase of 2011 (and likely will be my last purchase for some time...), so it seemed only fitting to wear them for my first foray into 2012. Granted, that was only as far as Starbucks, but still...an auspicious start to the year, sartorially speaking. Until it began to rain, that is. Luckily, I live with a wonderful gentleman who received a very large umbrella for Christmas and is not adverse to impromptu rescue missions on behalf of his unprepared lady. Chloe and I were very grateful. After making it safely back home, it was straight back into the pjs for the laziest of New Year's Days, complete with Pirates of the Caribbean on iPlayer - tragic but lovely all the same.

Wishing you all a lovely, lazy and auspicious start to a brave new year!