To dos and to do not's. (lists)

To dos:
Keep drawing for submissions for an illustration book
Get into work without having to march like a nazi on speed
Drink more green tea
Use the wardrobe instead of the floor
Work out how to go about repaying my student loan
Watch Fantastic Mr.Fox
Dig my camera out again before I forget how to use it



To do nots:
Feel like a twat at my first proper 'office christmas party'
Keep whining about how the cold makes my shoulder seize up
Get a creative block
Get lazy just because it gets dark at 4pm
Watch that Saatchi program again (although in reality I probably will, to make myself feel better while I eat alone on my couch)
Forget to put away the washing I just did (kitchen&clothes)
Accidentally listen to George Lamb
Heroin
Compromise

Still going

Getting there, rather slowly.

Teaching you a lesson.

I'm in reactionary blogging mode. I know this isn't the best time to sit and analyse something properly but I'm not sure I'll ever get the time/feel strongly enough about it again.

I've just watched 'School of Saatchi' and my instant reaction was something approaching horror. I don't know why I wasn't expecting it to be what it was, but I wasn't; which is a complicated way of saying I went into it a little naïve.

The show (in case you haven't seen it) is essentially an 'Apprentice' or 'X-factor' for new artists and almost an absolute replica of the recent product design focused 'Design for Life' featuring one of my heroes Phillipe Starck. In an interview Starck gave after the airing of 'Design for Life' he complained of the direction of the program being taken out of his hands and it essentially just using him as bait to entice people to watch the show. Though I pretty much agree with his viewpoint on how the show was handled it was at least entertaining,

this was due mostly to Starck's personality and occasional threats relating to killing the contestants and covering the walls with their blood.

Anyway I was expecting 'School of Saatchi' to deliver something maybe a little more philosophical and interesting. I was hugely mistaken. It started off with 4 judges (standard) Tracy Emin, Matthew Collings, Kate Bush and Frank Cohen but it turns out these four were essentially only there to judge the literally shit from the not so shit. Which in my opinion they didn't do a great job of.

What they ended up with was a final 12 who then were tasked with doing some life drawing, while this was going on we had a brief interlude in which the nation was informed that life drawing no longer happens in British art education. Bit of a sweeping statement that. I've had a British art education and I did do life drawing, a whole excruciating and utterly hilarious week of it. I stared at and drew a nude lady for a whole fucking week. Non-stop. I also had the option at university too.

Back to the point, I'm not entirely sure of the purpose of this exercise. They said it was to do with skills that could be deduced from looking at the fruits of this life-drawing class. Contemporary fine artists are not all skilled painters and mark-makers preferring instead to explore a wide variety of media to find a way of expressing themselves and basicly finding a medium through which to convey their ideas. So predictably some of the drawings were pretty bad. The crap drawings looked even worse when placed next to some of the artists whose work was sculptural and good.

The way this sequence was shot was fairly rubbish as it only contained little segments about those people who eventually made the final six. It was at this point it really started to bug me, the final 6 were pretty predictable and the show just fell apart. All 12 were called to defend their work in front of the judges but you just didn't see much of a couple of them. The others all pretty much had the back-stories to provide the meat for something that's becoming a horrible device for shows like this, the 'journey' of the contestant.

Well anyway.

A girl called Eugenie especially infuriated me, she used a tactic I know all too well; the 'bullshit' defense. I know it because I was very good at it, it's primarily deployed when there is very little substance to a piece of work. To use it you have to be pretty quick mentally and you also have to be fairly good at answering back as sincerely as you can. What you say doesn't really matter because at this point you will have been put through the art school jargon mill to the point that the words will just come naturally tumbling from your mouth. It's essentially an exercise in saying nothing with as much feeling and sincerity as you can muster. Not easy but effective. I was surprised then when Tracy Emin was the one who called for her to be put through, I thought that Tracy of all of them would recognise this trick when she saw it. She should have. She's bloody excellent at it.

They essentially put through the eye-candy. I did think two deserved to go through although I disagreed with their reasons about one guy. He was the only one who'd never been to art school and was a commercial artist who did his own work on the side. The piece he showed had never been seen before and was beautiful, it was also a testament to how personal his work was. The reason they put him through was because he'd never been to art school and as such he was a 'normal guy'.

The BBC have a history of making some fairly decent programs surrounding the subject of new artists, even shows about art that have had a competitive edge to them (the celebrity filled 'Art School'). These shows have been fairly enlightened and have pretty much explained the bones of an art education in layman's terms. This is an approach that does well when talking about something as self-involved as the art world with all its in-jokes and reliance on academic criticism. The producers of 'School of Saatchi' on the other hand seem to have abandoned this approach and gone for one which celebrates the worst attributes of modern art.

It's the focus on celebrity that really gets under the sking though, especially that of Saatchi himself. It's so very disconnected Saatchi just wasn't even in the fucking thing he was just off-handedly alluded to. Like he was to busy trying to force feed another billion pounds down the throat of some 'next big thing' that we won't have heard of because we aren't art dealers. They referred to him the whole time as the 'Reclusive Charles Saatchi'. They also referred to him as a 'king-maker' at least three times. The reverence with which they spoke of their lord and master was humbling and reminiscent of the way people talk publicly about the guy that signs their paycheques. The whole program was rammed so far up Saatchi's arse there's no way he could have been in it without some weird yoga lessons first.

Good luck to the winner. I'm sure you'll get the respect you deserve.

Surfer Blood - Astrocoast

Work at the minute chiefly consists of me getting one brain-melter of a design brief per day and having to work out a way of completing it in between all of the other boring ones. As such I'm currently flying through the BBC's radio comedy output and new music at a rate of knots.

I saw the name Surfer Blood somewhere (might have been Kitsune) and though I might as well look them up instead of considering listening to office banter about sales targets. I'm listening to lots at the minute but I really like this album, it's got a No Age/Wavves feel to it but it's not particularly lo-fi in that you can actually here stuff. It's got some pretty good choruses in too.

I'm trying to work out where I'd pitch them, they have a great bit of Dinosaur Jr in the guitar and they've certainly got a bit of Beach Boy's in there somewhere, maybe a bit of My Morning Jacket too. 'Swim' easily comes in as a favourite and I think it may be a single but as far as I can see they don't have any vids about yet, I've sifted through them so you don't have to and here's the best vid I could find:

3d sucks.

Ray Ban, Fabris Lane and Sainsbury's. My collection is complete apart from say some welding goggles?

Holla for da Dolla.

Came into some money finally so I decided to treat myself a bit, got these amazing etnies mid-tops which may be the most comfortable shoes I've ever owned.

I also had a good shop around and ended up being completely amazed at Zara's new menswear stuff, I've not been in for a while and it seems to have re-positioned itself as more of a H&M for slightly older people. They've dropped their prices and their output is just better! Ended up buying a pair of really dark navy waxed jeans, they've got a lovely light denim on the inside so when you turn them up they look amazing! I also bought a really nice plaid shirt with the killer touch of having elbow patches, been waiting ages to see a shirt with them on. Got it quite large though so it goes better with skinny jeans and just so it looks a little different to EVERY other lad who's wearing a plaid shirt at the minute. That's almost all lads everywhere.

projekkk

More sneaky sneaks from my new work, i'm pretty buzzing over this. It's mint to finally stop planning it and actually get some stuff down. Can't wait for it to start coming together!

The beginning.

This is the beginning of my new project, probably won't finish it till sometime next year. Really excited to finally start doing some of my own stuff!

Note to self: Tidy room, put Topman Design coat on ebay, relax?

Sneaky peek at some new stuff I'm working on...

On the case of Lagerfeld vs. Fat Mummies.

Another season, another incredibly small uproar. Size zero to be exact. And the fashion heavyweight to stick his oar in this time? Kaiser Karl, of course. I should probably apologise to him already for branding him a fashion heavyweight, as this will no doubt require a strict no-carbs diet to rid him of such flabby character aspersions.

Yes, hard to believe but the cartoonish, undead, creative director of Chanel has once again flung his weight (again sorry for the pun) into the championing of the size zero model.

The Kount has hit out at those critics of the current trend for gaunt young catwalk models, commenting that "These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly". In an interview with Focus magazine and reacting to the news that Germany's most popular magazine Brigitte had made the decision to use what it called "ordinary, realistic" women in its future photo shoots, he proposed the theory that the world of fashion dealt, "with dreams and illusions, and no one wants to see round women".

Here Lagerfeld is toeing the usual lofty line that fashion is a world apart, a universe untouched and unconcerned by day to day things like walking to the bus and having to step over a dog shit in the street. That in itself is nothing new. The "dreams and illusions" schtick is something that gives a lot of value to the purpose and point of fashion design, these illusions filter down into everyday life and whether knowingly or not we all come into contact with this.

My main problem is his cast iron opinion on what makes an attractive woman, one for instance that he would use in a show. Lagerfeld's view of an attractive woman has passed through two degrees of subjective seperation from that of your average male. Firstly, as a fashion designer Lagerfeld must view the model he is using objectively and judge their suitability for their purpose around what will best show off his creation; effectively reducing the woman in this scenario to a walking clothes hanger. Secondly and crucially, he is gay and as such does not feel attraction to women in the same way a heterosexual man does; thereby his opinion on what makes an attractive woman becomes something non-sexual.

This de-sexualised view on what makes a woman attractive is a strange one to me. As a heterosexual 'bloke' it is difficult within this context to try and see things from his point of view. As the creative director of the house of Chanel, Lagerfeld wields extraordinary power over the general direction of trends and therefore over the fashion world as a whole. Not only that but the fashion world is bleeding directly into mainstream popular culture as never before; due in no small part to the patronage of celebrities and all of the gossip mag inches that come with it.

Recently the use and involvement of celebrities within this environment has reached epidemic proportions as hordes of celebrities try and re-ignite the rose-tinted heights of glamour epitomised by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, aiming to transcend the smutty upskirt shots of red-top scandal and emerging from amongst their contemporaries as the icon of the decade. The fashion world on the other hand is attempting to court and ride this wave of mainstream interest and gossip in an attempt to keep a high profile and keep the industry relevant and profitable.

Recently it has started to get a bit much, even by fashion's overblown standards. Hadley Freeman in her guardian column commented that:

"Things have reached such proportions that Prince was pointlessly at the Chanel show last week while Lily Allen danced in a barn on the catwalk. Now, while I like Chanel, I am no fan of Coco. Even so, it was hard not to sense her rightful disapproval of the whole pathetic business"

Now criticising The High Collared One's choices in his role as creative director is difficult as he has enjoyed undeniable success, but the image he has created for Chanel is a strange one. The last show included a threesome in a mound of hay, with the majority of the focus resting on male models. Although I'm not saying that the fashion house should never change, it seems that the Chanel of today is at a completely different position from the values it held when it was founded. Those being the promotion of the female essence as an independant and fashionable being. The house of Chanel was created for women and retains a huge female following. Lagerfeld's imposition of his sexuality upon the public face of Chanel (that sounds hilariously dirty doesn't it?) seems to be setting the agenda for the tone of their collections.

I'd like to point out that I'm not attacking Lagerfeld's persuasion as there is no reason for doing so, and nor am I stating that a homosexual male designer cannot design for a woman as that is completely untrue. What riles me is that Lagerfeld & Co's opinion of what makes an attractive model could not be shared by those who appreciate femininity. What seems to constitute an attractive woman for Karl is a woman with next to no physical traits that mark her out as being female. Doesn't that strike you as odd? I can't understand his reason for opposing Brigitte's decision to use "realistic" women when it is quite reasonable to assume that Coco would have entirely backed this idea.

Despite looking like a biker cowboy straight from a fucking twilight novel, Lagerfeld has a huge say in the direction of the fashion world and what is essentially just his opinion is taken as gospel. This has left us with emaciated waifs who, to paraphrase Dylan Moran 'weigh as much as a picture of themselves'. The models of today are the polar opposite of the models of Rodin's day and there is something to be said for the cyclical nature of fashion which points to models in the future becoming more curvy. This from a 'blokes' point of view means that I'll be able to stop wanting to feed these girls a good square meal and get back to shouting such retro remarks as 'PHWOAR!' and 'AREET DARLIN'!'. Can't bloody wait...

Battles

I know I'm a late comer to this but I adore Battles, the textures and layers and math rock time signatures are just amazing. Obvious comparisons would be to Panda Bear but I think they have a sort of underlying menace in place of Noah Lennox' side project wistfulness.

Artwork for New Clouds by White Rainbow

This artwork for New Clouds by White Rainbow is amazing. Don't know who the artist is as yet, anyone help me out there?