The Gap Year

I got this from Nicole's Facebook page. :-) Awesome stuff. 

Work Schedule, 1932-1933

-Henry Miller Miscellanea

 

COMMANDMENTS

 

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring". [Black Spring is Miller's second published novel]

3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can't create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it -but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Yes, it's true. The thinnest people I know are gay, mostly because they watch what they eat, and work out like mad. While Simon Doonan isn't exactly the most politically correct of all writers, don't you just love how he generalizes for laughs? We don't have to take ourselves seriously all the time. 

Simon Doonan via Fashionista

For the unintiated, Simon Doonan is a British window dresser who has since moved to the US to to work as the creative director of Barneys New York. Witty, irreverent, and crazy-funny, he also writes a column on style in Slate Magazine, similar to his column before in The New York Observer. I have two of his books: Eccentric Glamour (which talked about glamorous eccentrics like Tilda Swinton, Dita von Teese, Lucy Liu, Chloe Sevigny, Iman, and my favorite eccentric Isabella Blow) and Wacky Chicks (where he profiles actress Amy Sedaris, Warhol muse Brigid Berlin, the woman who taught Madonna how to vogue: Susanne Bartsch, and so on).

He was on ANTM cycle 2,3, and 5, where he taught models how to style themselves, on Gossip Girl 5, and there was even a comedy based on his life (from his memoir Beautiful People) by BBC.

Out on the streets of New York via NYT

Plus, he's the husband of fashion designer (now dabbling in interior and furniture design) Jonathan Adler! 

Jonathan Adler via Apartment Therapy

In any case, the book will be out on Thursday, so I don't have a copy of this yet. :-) Here are some interesting tidbits from the book and from his interview with the New York Times. 

1. You must be wary of the panini, there's an enormous amount of meat and cheese there.

2. "Gay chips are baked, straight chips are fried."

3. If you want to lose weight, try to eat like a gay man. 

4. The world's culinary options can be reduced to either gay or straight food. A balance of both (bisexual eating LOL) will give you the best of both worlds.

5. Straight food tends to be leaden, full of protein, and thick with fat.

6. Gay food is lighter and brighter, feels art-directed, with attention to aesthetic and dietary detail.

7. "Lesbian" food refers to earthy, healthful foods, mostly of the organic sort.

8. Mexican food is straight, Japanese food is gay.

9. Caesar salad is straight (because of the egg).

10. "I can't believe any red-blooded straight guy can even walk into a macaron shop. If you wanted to ruin a politician's career, just publish a picture of him shopping for macarons."

 

SIMON DOONAN - GAY MEN DON'T GET FAT from Benjamin Morsberger on Vimeo.

I won't be writing a long farewell letter to 2011 because I haven't got the time to dawdle--the party's already starting outside. See you all in 2012!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

I'm in the middle of doing three things at the same time--all of which require full and undivided attention. Then again, I'm just about ready to give up on one (an architectural discourse on aesthetics) mostly because the deadline has been missed, but I'm rather excited for the two things I'm doing alternately: a longform story on muses, and the design for a store, both of which are due tomorrow. 

As you may have noticed, it's hard for me to just do one thing, because I tend to become so focused when I'm working that I don't eat, I don't go out of the house, and I don't wash my hair (yuck). So it helps me when I'm working on two things at the same time, mostly because I get to rush myself into making a draft or a scheme, and then just work around to perfecting it. 

[Right now, I need to rest my eyes and my brain, without falling asleep. Right now, there are two dinner drinking parties I should have attended, but can't, given the fact that I'm in deadly deadline danger. Right now, I wish I could split myself up and work on these three things without feeling fatigued.] 

To alleviate my pain, I decided to look at pretty things, like this library I found in a design blog:

Via Apartment 412

I'm looking at books because I read through 5 of them just this week. I'm on a reading ban now, until I finish all these things I have to do. 

I've been working on a new project recently so I'm currently obsessed with French interior designer Andrée Putman. Much of my life has been inspired by creative yet very eccentric women (like Coco Chanel, Diana Vreeland, Simone de Beauvoir, Isabella Blow, etc) but Andrée has been a recent discovery--I just chanced upon her work when I was looking through images of the Madeleine Vionnet exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris a few years back. 

Very chic lola: Andrée Putman

(checkyourparis.wordpress.com)

Love her style! (toocutemagazine.com)

In any case, it's hard for me to separate creative work from biography--I've always seen traces in the biography that aid in understanding work, so much so that sometimes, artists and designers act out in real life when they're working on a creative project. (I have a tendency of doing this method-creation as well, like how I'd pretend to be a bride-to-be when I'm working on a wedding gown story, or that time with A, when I pretended to be a foreign exchange student from China as we were taking illegal photographs of the Peninsula.) 

Andrée's signature monochrome graphics at Morgans Hotel (www.wallpaper.com)

Anyway, this girl is really cool. She began work in the 1960s as a journalist for design magazine L'oeil and had a brief career as a marketing consultant in fashion for . But before that, her mother wanted her to become a concert pianist, until her professor told her it would take them ten years to know whether she'll be a great composer. Growing up in a very artistic family, she married the art critic and publisher Jacques Putman, and was known to have been influenced by artist friends like Pierre Alechinsky, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Alberto Giacommetti. 

She also contributed to street furniture design, as seen in this Elephant bench designed in the 1980s (www.wallpaper.com)

She first worked for private residences and boutiques of friends like Karl Lagerfeld and Thierry Mugler, before putting up Écart, a store selling one-of-a-kind and rare objects as well as prototypes featuring under the radar designers like Eileen Gray, Mallet-Stevens, Pierre Chareau, Mariano Fortuny, Rene Herbst, and Jean-Michel Frank. 

 

As her studio grew, she moved on designing shops for Azzedine Alaia, Cartier, Ebel, Guerlain, mannequins for Barneys, interiors for the Concorde of Air France, and even the early boutique hotels--The Morgan in New York, Wasserturm in Cologne, and Pershing Hall Hotel in Paris. 

Guerlain boutique in Paris  (www.wallpaper.com)

Azzedine Alaia boutique in Paris (www.designboom.com and www.aestheteblog.com)

Interiors of the Concorde (www.wallpaper.com)

Pershing Hall Hotel in Paris www.parisdailyphoto.com)">(www.parisdailyphoto.com)

Morgans Hotel in New York (www.aestheteblog.com)

She also tried her hand at designing film sets, like that of Peter Greenaway's movie The Pillow Book, as well as the Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art.

Set design for Peter Greenway's The Pillow Book starring Ewan McGregor and Vivian Wu (justunderthesurface.wordpress.com)

I love how she mixes the different influences--the arts, fashion, interior design, and product design--to create a different design narrative that seems to have transcended time. Anyway, if you want to know more about her, she has a book published by Assouline. 

 

I'm in Beijing and we don't have twitter or Facebook access. How horrible! I feel so out in the loop, but at the same time, I'm enjoying the disjoint. It turns out that it's easier to hear your thoughts when it's very very quiet. :-)

My editor who just arrived from Paris lent me her Vogue Paris Collections FW 2012 book, and the experience changed my perception of new EIC Emmanuelle Alt completely. I always thought her presence in Vogue was just a means for continuity, that she was there to just continue what Carine's legacy but at the same time conform to what publishers felt was appropriate for the growing title. I felt that she wasn't a strong enough editor unlike Carine Roitfeld (who was a fantastic stylist) or Alexandra Shulman (whose strength wasn't in fashion but was a great curator and overall manager) or Anna Wintour (who had great influence and taste) until I read her editor's letter. I always liked how Carine's style mixed sex and femininity, but reading Emmanuelle's made me respect her as an editor. 

Here's a sample of Carine's letter:

C'est la robe en capitales. Éphémère et éternelle. Celle que l'on ne prote qu'un journ, et pour toujours inoubliable. Blanche mais pas forcément, longue mais pas fatalement, romantique éviderment, et pourquoi pas excentrique, décalée, transparente, théâtrale, audacieuse, voire insolente. 

(This is the dress in [the forefront]. Ephemeral and eternal. [One we travel with], and forever memorable. But not necessariy while, not fatally long, and evidently romantic. So why not [have one that's] eccentric, transparent, theatrical, audacious, or insolent?) --Do forgive my French, all I have is a Larousse dictionary and a bit of knowledge on construction and grammar. 

 From the Vogue Paris wedding issue

Photography: NY Mag

And Carine's goodbye letter:

 From @LiveFashionWeek

--

Anyhow, here's what Emmanuelle had to say in this issue of Vogue collections:

Quand i fait froid, on se couvre. Du bon sens? Oui, et que la majorité des cráteurs semble avoir pris au mot tant il est vra que le climat général des nouvelles collections se veut protecteur, symbolisé en particulier par une fronde de fourrure--vrai ou fausse--prête à repousser les assauts de l'hiver, ou encoue par la cape, nouvelle star de la garde-robe. pour autant, et c'est là le paradoxe, pas question d'atmosphère particuliérement chaleureuse: rigoureuse, pudique, teintée les plus souvent de nuances sombres, l'allure joue les armures, rythmée par un masculin-féminin souvent strict, attachée à ne rien dévoiler ou presque, à part ça et là un bras ou une jambe. Après les excès d'éclat et autres flous fluos de l'eté, la raison du plus fou laisse donc de nouveau place à la raison du plus fort. Ce qui, concrètenement, se traduit par une silhouette nette, une démarche directe, assurée, un espirt tailleur dont le pouvoir de conviction est au moins aussi évident que celui de séduction. Reste que la monde, aussi austère soit-elle, tient quant même et toujours à se faire remarquer, et y parvient cette fois par de jeux et effets de surfaces, déployant à loisir toute la gamme de apparences, de plus mates et feutrées aux plus vernies, chatoyantes, brillantes. En l'occurence, textures en touchers, atteignent des sommets de subtilité et de reflects. Une autre manière d'attirer la lumière. Et l'attention. 

When the weather turns cold, dress up warmly. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Of course it does, and on the whole designers seem to have done just that this season, for the overall feel of the latest collections is about protecting the wearer from the elements. Nowehre is this more apparent than in the use of fur--both fake and genuine--at the ready to fend off the freezing winter onslaught; and capes, which are the rising star in every woman's must-have wardrobe. And yet, oddly enough, the general mood isn't that cosy. Silhouettes are uncluttered and prim, largely in a colour palette of sombre shads. Looks play the armour game, taking turns with a strictly-tailored masculine-feminine aesthetic for the most part, the idea being to reveal nothing or very little, apart from an arm or a leg here and there. In contrast to last summer's abundance of neons and pizzazz, the bring-is-right credto has given way to a more of a "might-is-right" approach. The result is a sleek, rigorous line, with a a self-confident stride, and a preference for suits, whose powers of persuasion are ascetic, is matched only by their powers of sedution. That said, fashion, even at its most ascetic, is always about getting noticed, and the way to get noticed this season is by mixing myriad finishes and effects to run the gamut of styles, from matt and soft, to a glossier, more iridescent shimmer. For Autumn/Winter 2011-12, the texture and feel of the materials have reached new heights of refinement and subtle lustre. Which is a different way of attracting light... and attention.

 From stockholmstreetstyle.feber.se

 From garbagelapsap.wordpress.com

 ©2009 Condé Nast. All Rights Reserved. 

 --

She's spot on with her summary of how the A/W clothes are! And how collection change from season to season, year to year, yet they all seem to look the same. The fur+texture+ascetism has been a combo I've been trying to use all season, I like mixing fabrics especially the furry ones. On one end, I'm also very much attracted to the Louis Vuitton S&M aesthetic, but in a rock chick sense instead of erotic as it suggests. 

Well, bye for now! Back to writing my trend reports.

Out of all my social media sites, it's Twitter that gets the most love. Check out what I'm doing there. 

 

 

It can get pretty gruesome when we're writing a piece, and it just doesn't want to be written, so it helps to know that even the most brilliant writers can get bad days like this. Dorothy Parker could have blogged or tweeted this telegram to her editor: 

THIS IS INSTEAD OF TELEPHONING BECAUSE I CANT LOOK YOU IN THE VOICE. I SIMPLY CANNOT GET THAT THING DONE YET NEVER HAVE DONE SUCH HARD NIGHT AND DAY WORK NEVER HAVE SO WANTED ANYTHING TO BE GOOD AND ALL I HAVE IS A PILE OF PAPER COVERED WITH WRONG WORDS. CAN ONLY KEEP AT IT AND HOPE TO HEAVEN TO GET IT DONE. DONT KNOW WHY IT IS SO TERRIBLY DIFFICULT OR I SO TERRIBLY INCOMPETANT=

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2011/07/1945-dorothy-parker-tele...

I get moments like that as well, sometimes it's so hard to finish (or in my case, nailing that lead is essential to the whole structure of the story so it takes me ages to decide), and often we fall out of love (with the piece) in the middle of writing it. Very few get the chance to work on piece that can sustain them (financially and emotionally) for weeks or months. This is probably why I've always preffered being part of the editorial staff--so I can pursue stories that are meaningful for me, or even go right at it using a voice that I can call my own. Well, it's not always the case, as you might have seen, since part of the job requires the occasional press release lifestyle churnalism we all abhor, but at this point in my career, I try real hard not to be that person who writes about a place I haven't seen, about a product I've never tried, or even a person I've never seen in my life. [Which is probably why I'm having a lot of trouble writing fiction.]

The life of a writer is wrought by a lot of heartache and hard labor, so it pains me to no end to realize how writers are marginalized in the industry. I don't want to get started on something so negative towards the end of the week--I meant to write this entry because I this week was quite unnerving for me, what with the combination of deadlines, closing, while at the same time, it's all about moving forward with the next issue. It may just be July, but we're now thinking of September, even October, so we kinda lose out on the excitement each new month brings. That should be the subject of another entry--how it's exciting (yet horrible) to be thinking too much into the future--but today it's just totally random on how even the best of us have days like this, plus how its up to editors to give leeway and a bit more understanding when writers go through similar dilemnas. 

 

I told everyone I'll be going through a book ban (to counter all the books I keep buying), but I just couldn't stop myself when I saw these beauties in the used bookstore downstairs. I try to read at least 2 books a week (plus required reading for my thesis) but some books are meant to be skimmed, read, re-read, and thoroughly enjoyed throughout the years.

I'm actually a sucker for anthologies, so when I found this Norton Anthology of Nonfiction Prose (P165), I just had to get it for myself. Reprinted in 2000, this version includes 211 essays, including works by Alice Walker, Joan Didion, E.B. White, Woody Allen, Tom Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Charles Lamb, Malcolm Gladwell, Pico Iyer, Gloria Steinem, Anna Quidlen, Michiko Kakutani, Adrienne Rich, Eudora Welty, Susan Sontag, Robert Graves, Annie Dillard, Langston Hughes, and Jessica Mitford. As you might have guessed, these are some of my favorite writers (writing all of them down would take me forever!)

The next book is a reminder of why I studied Physics in the first place (I was a theoretical physics major before I shifted to architecture)--because studying physics helps you understand how the world works. Seriously, it's not THAT geeky if you read Richard Feynman or Carl Sagan. All it takes is some patience and focus (someday I'll try to do a layman's version of quantum physics and time travel for this blog). Anyhow, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light by Leonard Shlain (P250) was first printed in 1993, but this one's updated in 2001 (they updated it again in 2007). It covers art from the classic Greek sculptors to Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Monet, Cèzanne, Dali, and even Rauschenberg. 

What a find! The Indigo Girls: Rites of Passage songbook (P130) contains lyrics, tabs, and sheet music for all the songs, including some of my favorite Indigo Girls songs like Galileo, Ghost, and Love Will Come to You. 

I also found another copy of Paris Vogue's anniversary issue (the super super thick version) for P110! This is actually one of my favorite issues, so I have three other copies in my possession: the first one came all the way from Germany care of Bianca, and I have the magazine both in digital magazine form in my Zinio reader, and I bought the €5.99 iPad version with videos and exclusive interviews. 

Next on my list is the Wallpaper* October 2009 (P195) strip tease cover of guest editor Karl Lagerfeld. For this issue, he put together 27 pages of images alluding to Ancient Rome, 18th century Versailles, 1950s Paris, and so on, using his muse Baptiste Giabiconi (that nekkid guy on the cover). "I am a vampire--open to everything and attached to nothing," says Karl. 

Karl's not the only one who gets to edit this issue, Philippe Starck likewise lends his design aesthetic to the fashion+design+art+culture magazine. Both their covers attempt to show the dynamics of fashion's evolution (fully-clothed to birthday suit) or in Philippe's case--the evolution of an idea. All in all, I love it when designers edit magazines, it gives it another dimension altogether. 

Finally, here are some books sent over my way to review: 

100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know by Cindi Leive and the Editors of Glamour

Secrets of Stylists by Sasha Charnin Morrison

Lauren Conrad Style

So there, a full week ahead, and lots of books to read. Tell me, what are you currently reading? 

You Who Never Arrived by Rainier Maria Rilke

You who never arrived  in my arms, Beloved, who were lost  from the start,  I don't even know what songs  would please you. I have given up trying  to recognize you in the surging wave of  the next moment. All the immense  images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt  landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and  unsuspected turns in the path,  and those powerful lands that were once  pulsing with the life of the gods--  all rise within me to mean  you, who forever elude me.  You, Beloved, who are all  the gardens I have ever gazed at,  longing. An open window  in a country house-- , and you almost  stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,--  you had just walked down them and vanished.  And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors  were still dizzy with your presence and,  startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same  bird echoed through both of us  yesterday, separate, in the evening...