Anyone else noticed how slow the PCC website is at this precise moment (17:46 16.10.2009)? I wonder why that could be…

Hey everyone,

So this is really just me spreading an advert over the interweb. Yeah, yeah, I’m a shmuck. But it’ll put a smile on your face, particularly if you happen to be as enamoured of Manhattan as me and Nurse Kimber the Red.

Click here to view, the link to the vid is at the top right of the screen. It takes a while to load but it’s very clever.

And whilst we’re on the subject of New York and advertising, I thought you might like to see this picture here. I took this while strolling along the High Line with my aunt. I’d been fiddling around with my NY photos in HP Photosmart Premier (I’m waaaaay too cheap for photoshop) as some were a bit overexposed and I played around with this one too. I flatter myself (a not uncommon occurrence) to say that I think it looks like a classy 60s advert.

UPDATE: Etiquette, Cinnamon, etiquette! I, of course, should and do now tip my hat to the excellent Mister Aegir Hallmundur of the MoT.

There’s a tendency toward the Baroque in Dubrovnik and they really know how to split their pediments.

They stick three of them together, round a corner:

Not enough for you? Want four in a row, preferably topping out some engaged ionic columns? Fine.

Fancy, eh? Well – not as fancy as this. This is proper Baroque – an angel of some variety, lots of thick swirly bits, and a beautifully broken pediment:

Too much? Not keen on heavenly host? After something a little…chunkier? The good architects of Dubrovnik will provide:

That’s nice, isn’t it? That demi-split, or whatever you might call it. Not really broken but still missing. A trick so good, you might do it twice on the same façade:

Lovely.

I make no apologies for once again speaking of Mr Michael Chabon and quoting him at length. It turns out that I hadn’t actually read everything he’s written and published (although I believe I soon will have. Get me) and, whilst moseying about in The Strand bookstore I found a paperback copy of some collected essays of his. The first essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”, begins as follows:

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsickle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation.

Naturally MC goes on to debunk this and argues for a restoration of entertainment – specifically in the form of the short story – to what he sees as its hallowed place.

This morning I read an interesting piece in the Graun, following the Royal Ballet’s tour of Cuba (Carlos Acosta’s fine presence in said company playing no doubt some part in said arrangement). You should read it too, if you have an interest in ballet or Cuba (“Aw, shucks. Tap and Bolivia – that’s all I care about. What a gosh darned shame”). These sorts of pieces, I find, tend to end with some concluding thought – like Jerry Springer – and usually it’s some platitude masquerading as profundity. Not this time:

Sitting above Havana, gazing over a city slowly being rebuilt, [Edward] Watson [one of the RB's principle dancers] suggests that back in Britain the link between dance and reality has become tragically worn, that in our wealth we’ve lost the understanding of what a tour like this should mean. “Here, people come to be entertained,” he tells me. “In London, too many come to criticise, to form their opinions, but here they just come for a good time.”

To form their opinions… There’s a phrase. The challenge, then: to allow oneself to be entertained, to revel in and celebrate art; to admit and incorporate one’s ignorance; to shrink from the quick opinion; to forgo the easy lament of one’s own inadequacies and to cheer the fine, hard work of the creator and the performer and the stagehand.

Saw these guys yesterday doing this. They were brilliant.

This is what happens when I leave the country. Sheesh.

Hello fair readers both! And mainly, you’ll be thrilled to hear, I’m sunning it up in NYC – East Sixth, to be fairly precise. What a treat! Sorry about the lack of a teaser but I didn’t want to give any game away to my fair Aunt, who has just celebrated a certain milestone of agedness and whom I was surprising with my visit. Anyway, it’s lovely here, as always, and I’ve enjoyed such architectural delights as the (nearly finished) new Cooper Union building and the demi-centurian Guggenheim. Pictures will be forthcoming just as soon as I can get the camera to plug into the computer and do the transferral and such.

In the meantime, I would very much like to talk about the PM. Oh cripes, he’s dreadful. Can’t string a sentence together, can’t even think properly. No ideas that man. Heartless, uncompassionate, unfunny. He’s a walking disaster.  Clarkson has it spot on. We might as well have elected (or rather not elected) a walrus with tusk-ache. Etc. Oh, hang on…

So OK. I don’t agree with everything he says (I’m not so much a passionate advocate for global organisations) but this video goes to show that there’s more to GB than we’re getting. I don’t claim to be an expert on the matter, but I suspect that there’s a fascinating essay to be written on how this Premier came to be seen as such a rotten failure. Here we have a decent speaker, with interesting, well-presented ideas; yet what we get on our screens is a useless dullard. Where did this come from? Whilst GB can’t escape responsibility, surely we must look to the peculiarities of our media and the wider political landscape for a full explanation. But I think we also must try to understand how we’ve come to a point in our national politics where listening to this sort of speech from (arguably) the most powerful man in the land becomes far, far less important than arguing over the ex-Home Secretary’s plugs and porn movies.

Anyway, that’s today’s ranting lament over. Now I’m going to listen to Seth MacFarlane at the Proms. I could literally not have any more of my boxes ticked right now.

Much love,

RTC

The trouser, like almost the entirety of Western Civilisation as we know it, can be blamed squarely on the shoulders – or, more accurately in this case, hips – of Mr Beau Brummel. His dandyish wearing of the trouser, as opposed to the foppish breeches, was a complex challenge to the sartorial niceties of the time – a theme we shall see reappearing in this discussion. Beau (we’re on first name terms these days) was at once the best- and worst-dressed man of his age. If you were a very rich young man whose steadily increasing waistline necessitated regular visits by the tailor, whose dad was presumed to be going mad and who would one day be King, then you would have considered Beau to be the most astonishingly attired and beautiful of men. If you were that young man’s father, you would have pinned on Beau the imminent ruin of society.

Despite the connotations that the word has aquired today, the late Eighteenth Century dandy was not over-dressed or feminine. Inherent in Dandyism was a tendency toward a fine, simple, almost utilitarian way of dressing. It is true that the dandy would take great pains over his wardrobe, that hours spent dressing was a symbol of great pride for the dandy, but – compared to the wigs and powder and rouge and stockings and buckles and brockade and jewellery of the fop – the dandy was a refined and sleek gentleman. And, in challenging the Baroque opulence of his forbears, Beau was setting himself very deliberately apart from this very normal cornucopia of blazing riches whilst enjoying the hallowed attentions of the Prince of Wales and our Lord Byron. His trousers were a scandal. And an astonishing success.

The trouser, like almost the entirety of Western Civilisation as we know it, was democratised through the ingenuity of the French and the mass-production of the Americans. Everyone owns and wears jeans; their palette is astonishingly limited; their cut is fairly standard, dictated by their utilitarian form-fitting roots. Unlike the dress or the skirt, trousers – and particularly jeans – come in one basic shape and one basic colour. The fetishisation of jeans is unique in clothing history. The holy grail is to find that minute distinction of style or fit permissible within the production of jeans which encapsulates one’s personality; and as usual the businesses that produce jeans are always two steps behind. It is the man or boy in the street who personalises their jeans through rips or paint, stitches or tears, who undermines the work of the producer through paying scant regard for the established fit of his trouser. Rampant individualism powered by mass-production.

The trouser, like almost the entirety of Western Civilisation as we know it, was brutalised and degraded by an inhumane and unjust penal system. In the United States, something like one out of every forty five white adults are behind bars. Something like one out of every eleven black adults are behind bars – 9.2% of the adult African-American population. Belts, those knotchy wonders of practical self-expression, are anathema in prisons making, as they do, excellent devices for self-annihilation as well as fine offensive weapons. Trousers, then, are worn loose, come in a limited range of sizes and, where worn baggy, are usful for concealing whatever your average inmate may have reason to conceal. This enforced fashion then mutates back into free society; those who have been inside wish to make it known, as a threat; as a badge of pride; as a way of retaining a belonging to a not terribly select few. Trousers are worn loose, low and baggy as a challenge to the establishment and as a way of fitting in.

And so we come to the trouser of today: worn low to the point of glorified indecency; worn tight on skinny boys, tightish on Friday managers, loose on blacks and tight on blacks; maybe two meagre inches of fly. Held up not by belt but by cockshaft; the denim torn and worn and faded and scuffed; purple boxered buttocks exposed, fleshy or barely-there but there nonetheless. Mums and dads unite in disapproval, the elderly are sickened, the righteous ban it, young men delight in the brazen wonder of sartorial self-expression. This is trousers as weapons on the front line of cultural warfare – pick the height of your waistband and prepare for war.

Hello one and both! So as you’ll know I’ve been curiously absent of late. Well, it’s all vaguely due to having moved home. I’m now a Kemptonite/Kemptowner/Kemptownan and have regained the fine distinction of living actually in Brighton (BN2 baby! Read it and weep!)

However, it’s been a mildly arduous transition, especially the part where Pa and I tried to get the sofa in. And succeeded, I should add. It’s what dads are for, you know. Anyway, I’ve shirked the irksome telly but have yet to get a proper interweb connection (how am I doing this, I hear you ask? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions) and I’ve managed to get sidetracked by soft furnishings – to the detriment of my bank balance as well as this dear blog.

Rest assured, however, that I am due a proper commection at the end of the month, and am musing over the notion of acquiring a Proper Camera. All in all, you’re going to get some real treats soon. Just hang on in there whilst I co-ordinate my curtains.

Much love,

Cinnamon

Oh! I totally forgot to tell you the not-so-funny story to which I alluded in the blog post. It’s barely worth it now, but anyway… So the Post Office don’t believe my flat exists (I tried to get broadband from them) even though Royal Mail say that it does. How d’you like them apples?

Your Mister Cinnamon has unfortunately been busy of late, and will be back properly soon. He’s had the lack of foresight to apply for a job he won’t get and the chutzpah to ignore his reading public (both of whom he cares deeply about) and go out galavanting to see new-fangled indie bands and imbibe bowel-loosening quantities of lagerbeer.

But hark! Soon he will return with news of new and old buildings, opinion on the state of men’s trousers, something about the music of today, prattlings about photography and the rest of everything you’ve come to know and love about this blog.

Local politicians are great. Sorry, I meant to say wonderfully dull. None of them, as far as I’m aware, are able to claim for their husband’s pornography habit as part of their expenses. And some of them sensibly blog about a variety of local issues including planning applications for interesting buildings. So, oodles of free porn to Cllr Elgood for alerting me to the proposed redevelopment* of the Old Market in the Brunswick micro-region in Hove.

This is very interesting. The Old Market is vying to become a high-status performance space but (a) has a large capital debt and (b) is annoyingly (but atmospherically) tucked away and hidden from any major thoroughfares. In the words of Ira Gershwin, what to do, what to do, what to do?

Well, they want to teeter a glass and steel box atop the grade II-listed building and build two high-class flats within thus raising capital funds and the building’s stature and visibility – quite literally. If you want to look at the planning application you can do so on the worthy-of-free-porn local council’s website (search for reference BH2009/00414).

I like the Old Market building and I especially like the way it interacts with its surroundings. Basically it was built (as the name would suggest) as a fairly modest indoor market in the backstreets behind the Brunswick Square estate. Various vernacular cottages and artisan’s buildings make the area very pretty as well as a smattering of idiosyncratic small businesses. It’s really very pretty, and subsequent developments have been in keeping, or at least painted the right shade of cream.

A big glass box on top would probably be fairly obtrusive. Certainly the pictures in the architect’s pretty brochure are a little misleading; they have the glass as being practically invisible, putatively due to how it’ll just reflect the sky, which is probably nonsense – glass buildings rarely reflect what the architects envision and at most times they’re just a big grey block.

Still, I’m not dead set against the mixing of old and new, and this could be a very exciting building if it’s done well. Anyways, I’ll take some pics of the Old Market when I get a chance and give you a little more history if I can find it.

*SPLIT PEDANTRY ALERT: I do mean “redeveloped”. Most of the time when you see this written it should just be “developed”. But the Old Market has only recently completed the previous development. So there.