At the centre of it all

I had not thought death had undone so many

TS Eliot, The Wasteland (1922) (from Dante, The Inferno)

All the cool kids at the tail end of the 1970s and early 1980s loved David Bowie – the ones I wanted to impress: schoolfriends’ older sisters, nightclubbers, “raincoated lovers’ gloomy brothers”; and the boy I loved. It wasn't hard to see and hear why: there was a fascinating, unique blend of androgyny, hypersexuality and music enough to draw in anyone who was confused, fascinated, excited about music, becoming an adult, learning the skills. In 1980 I stood in the hallway of a large Edinburgh flat shyly eavesdropping on the impossibly cool teenagers in the kitchen who were listening to Remain In Light and Scary Monsters over and over again. In 1983 we went to the Edinburgh premiere of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (I thought Bowie’s hair was too perfectly blonde and this was its only flaw). In 1984 Callum gave me his treasured Thin White Duke badge (a much adored boyfriend subsequently lost it – thanks Stuart). When the “Let’s Dance” craze raged and suddenly Bowie was an even bigger commercial success than ever, I affected superiority because I preferred his earlier work (plus ca change). I got into Iggy Pop and Lou Reed as a direct result of my interest in Bowie but I drifted away from his music in the 1990s. Then in 2005 Peter sent me “Everyone Says Hi” and although I looked askance at first I began to discover the music Bowie had continued to make during the time I lost faith.

Probably at least partly inspired by the impossibly cool kids, my sister Claire and I bought Scary Monsters in 1981 and for me it will always remain the favourite: the sounds and the ideas often so alien, so other; guitars barking like dogs on the title track, muscular bass lines, gnomic lyrics, much of it at the time almost incomprehensible to me but in the end burned into my brain forever.

Waiting at the lights - know what I mean? 

No, David - I don't know what you mean. But I want to know.

I know when to go out

I know when to stay in

And get things done

(“Modern Love”, 1983)

Although the span of his work is of course majestic – the swagger of “Ziggy Stardust”, the pathos of “Five Years”, the sheer exhilaration of “Up the Hill Backwards”; the brash confidence of “Modern Love”; even during the maligned Tin Machine years he was producing songs of the quality of “Goodbye Mr Ed” - his two most recent releases have had a melancholy energy all of their own. It’s amazing to think that Bowie, knowing he was dying, could produce such an incredible last post as “Blackstar”. What a triumph to create this work which would be his own elegy, unknown to almost everyone: Bowie remaining mysterious to the end.

Lyrically Bowie was a magpie, picking up fragments from different places much the same way as masters of their genre such as TS Eliot. But Eliot is not the only poet who springs to mind; there’s W.H. Auden ('he disappeared in the dead of winter…. The day of his death was a dark cold day… Earth receive an honoured guest”) and surely “Dollar Days” from Blackstar is Bowie’s “If I should die, think only this of me/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England”:

If I never see the English Evergreens I’m running to

It’s nothing to me

There’s nothing to see

Bowie’s sense of humour, and how comfortable he seemed to be with taking the piss out of himself,  was another thing I really loved about him. Here was someone who genuinely didn’t care what anyone else thought of him. From “The Laughing Gnome” to a bizarre 1982 duet with Bing Crosby which Bowie played nearly straight, to his non-plussed-seeming appearance in the audience for a highly mawkish performance of “Tie A Yellow Ribbon…”, to his willing guest show turns where he always seemed to be laughing both at himself and at his usually witless interviewer, to his appearance in “Extras” as himself with added vitriol, he never seemed to be worried about his image; for someone who in other ways so carefully crafted their image this is a peculiar, and loveable, trait.

My boyfriend at university, John, said to me “one day you’ll meet someone who loves music as much as you do”. I did, and of course he is a Bowie fan, having been so even through the darkest days of (unfairly) critically-panned Tin Machine, subsequent drum’n’bass experiments, and Outside. In our house Bowie was always playing. We agreed upon Bowie’s genius so many times on listening to so many different songs. We were excited by his mysterious reappearance with “The Next Day” and the wonderful and mournful “Where Are We now?” with its accompanying low-key but undeniably moving video. We were incredibly excited about Blackstar and watched the weird, compulsive, addictive video for the title track many times. The words of that song (the title of this post) have been going around my head in the last few days. I awoke thinking of them and feeling sad.

Bowie’s other incredible skill was to make the apparently nonsensical or banal meaningful just by the way he sang it: there are countless examples but one that springs to mind is from “Goodbye Mr Ed”, where Bowie sings kindly “Tolerance of violence/By the fellows with no heads”. There is always the feeling that Bowie knows more than he’s saying, or in any event, so much more than me. And  he goes on to sing “Some things are so big, they make no sense”. Which pretty much sums up how I feel about his death.

Clearly Bowie was aging but it seemed impossible that someone so vital, so creative, so full of humour and passion, could ever die; and really I think I thought that he never would (as one of my friends said, “he’s humankind’s best candidate for immortality yet”). So it felt like a huge, personal loss when I heard about his death – while lying in the bath, as it happens.

I’m not ashamed to say that I have cried a few times over the last few days just thinking about how much his music has meant to me – at the milestones of my life, and with me from the beginning or so it seems - and feeling genuinely sad about a loss I hadn’t been expecting.

Bowie is bound up for me with so many things that it’s impossible to articulate them all, but here are a few: growing up, feeling like an outsider, moving a long way away from home, love, death, birth and change. So many fundamental things it’s no wonder that when  I read this aloud to myself earlier this week I could hardly get the words out:

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer. 

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922)

Waxing lyrical

When I lived in Hong Kong I had a long-standing relationship with a woman from Beijing called Sarah, to whom I entirely handed all responsibility for care of my eyebrows, as well as the waxing of my legs (if you are ill-acquainted with what this actually means, I won't offend delicate sensibilities by describing it; just imagine the sounds RRRIIPPPP and OUCH). I went to see Sarah once every six weeks or so over a period of 5 or 6 years; she came via recommendation from a colleague and was in turn recommended by me to countless friends. She worked in a rather odd beauty salon on the 9^th floor of a commercial block in Central that had seen better days.

Considering its glossy rivals the salon itself was less than glamorous, with browning wallpaper decorated with random swatches of pot pourri, dinky ornaments strewn around the place and ancient peeling posters advertising long-unfashionable beauty treatments, owned by an eccentric  woman who took an uncomfortably prurient interest in the treatments, often barging in to talk to and inspect the work of her staff when, by complete coincidence, their clients were in various states of undress and/or arrayed in the awkward postures required by the waxing process. The unprepossessing surroundings and nosy owner were the price to be paid for being looked after by Sarah, a lovely, happy person who always seemed pleased to see her clients and chattered away in an endearing mix of English and Chinese. We developed a friendship and it was always a pleasure to see her. I used to advise her that if she collected all the hair she’d taken from my body over the years (and I probably went to see her at least 40 times), she would be able to make herself a little coat with it. (This is a truly revolting image, I know, but how we laughed!)

Since moving to Australia I’ve made some half-hearted attempts to find myself a new Sarah. It is a surprisingly intimate relationship however, and I’ve never felt comfortable with anyone else. Care of my eyebrows and the rest has, unfortunately, now passed to me and I look infinitely more shabby as a result.

Stop on red

Lest anyone think that the experience of having a baby has caused all thoughts of the shallow to fly clean out of my head, may I present to you a long overdue visit to style dreamland, in the shape of the following:

Bag, Alexander McQueen; Dress, Michael Kors; Shoes, Christian Louboutin, all at Net-a-Porter

Claire de lune

My sister Claire and I went to see the Éric Rohmer film Les nuits de la pleine lune ("Full Moon in Paris") in Edinburgh in 1984, when it came out. I was very impressed by the quirky glamour of Pascale Ogier, the star, and her skinny chic, left bank, all-in-black style. Pascale was 10 years older than me and was immediately elevated to the category of impossible beauties whose apparenty effortless life I'd have loved to emulate (see also Béatrice Dalle). Not long after the film was released, Pascale died at the age of 25 of a heart attack caused by a drug overdose. I heard about it at the time, but so successfully did I translate this into a more romantic cause of death (a brain hemorrhage, of course) that only when I was looking for information about her this year did I rediscover the grubby truth.

I'm not sure why she came to mind but when Claire recently visited us in Melbourne we discussed this film again. Sadly, I remember very little about the plot or anyone else in it. The main thing that springs to mind when I think of the film, and of poor Pascale, is that it has gifted me with the steadfast conviction that the French can't dance. In my defence, I present the following:

Box of tricks

At the end of this year I will have lived away from the UK for 10 years. In that time, a new tradition has developed whereby my Mum and my sister send me, for birthdays and Christmas, a magnificent parcel filled with individually wrapped items that can only be bought in the UK or, more specifically, in Scotland. These have in the past consisted of, in no particular order (and without suggesting that I don't want surprises next time):

1. Scottish Blend teabags
"Specially blended for Scottish water", and with an accompanying sarcastic advert alluding to the fact that it never stops raining in Scotland: these possibly fraudulent (will they only work with Scottish water?), but nonetheless excellent teabags have frequently been smuggled through customs in Australia for me. They really do taste better than any other teabag. Even with (previously) inferior Hong Kong and (now) Australian water.

2. Shortbread House of Edinburgh shortbread
I first encountered this peerless brand when I was working in Morningside in a wholefood shop called Cornucopia. Rich, buttery, and absolutely irresistible. The website offers all sorts of perversions of the original idea (cinnamon and demerara? "Christmas"?), but in this I am a puritan: it has to be plain. And it's not just me who says so; Shortbread House's original recipe has won nine of the prestigious Gold Great Taste Awards.

3. Protect and Perfect
Boots the Chemist is probably the best chainstore in the UK, a fact you don't really appreciate until you leave and find yourself searching the dispiriting recesses of inferior pharmacies in vain for the sheer variety of products available in even the meanest, tiniest Boots. Boots' own brand is pretty reliable. When Boots launched Protect and Perfect a BBC science programme (clearly a peer-reviewed reliable source) declared that it actually reduced wrinkles. From my personal experience, this may not be true, and the stuff does smell strongly chemical; but my skin feels quite silky afterwards, and you can't ask for much more than that. P&P gets a kicking from some sources (click here to see all your favourite products mercilessly critiqued, except for, oh, products created by the site's founder).

4. Thorntons Brazil Nut Special Toffee   
No more needs to be said.
 
5. Soap & Glory: The Scrub of Your Life
Soap & Glory products are packaged in retro pink, with graphic imagery and concepts (rotten puns) which are possibly shamelessly stolen from Benefit, but it's true what it says on the tube: this is a near perfect scrub which smells great and leaves the skin feeling very, very soft.

6. Bio-Oil
This is a relative newcomer which I started using when I was pregnant and have been using ever since, not only on my distorted stomach (before and after) but also on my face. It smells faintly but not powerfully plasticky (repellent though that may sound, it's pleasant; it reminds me of the smell of new dolls) and is as slick as you like. It's supposedly good for scars. Like all similar products I think the benefits of regular massage may have more to do with it, but I've been using it just for the sheer pleasure of application.

Believe it or not I'm regularly approached (via email) by PR people asking if I'll promote something on one of my blogs (a fashion designer, a restaurant, a jewellery range). I always say no: if I'm asked to promote something in some sort of quid pro quo arrangement, I can't be neutral, and unless I genuinely like something without being asked to, I couldn't promote it. This is the closest I'd ever get to promoting anything, and that's only because this is what arrives in my magic box.

Computer love

I first played what could be identified as a computer game in the 1980s. It was Pong, which made a distinct "bop" sound when the ball hit the paddle. I was a bit contemptuous of it, but not long after that I played a few dungeons-and-dragons style games, using the C-prompt, where you could choose one of several outcomes. I remember standing helplessly watching someone trying to resolve a problem where the computer wasn't responding, and wondering whether I would ever understand how these things worked.

The first game I got really excited about was Wolfenstein 3D. In the early 1990s I played a lot of Wolfenstein, although the crude graphics had the effect of making me travel sick (run down a corridor, look left, look right, shoot a Nazi guard, go into a room, turn 360°, extract a symbol hidden behind a brick, run down a corridor... I lasted about 5 minutes before I started feeling queasy). My next obsession was Lemmings on an early Apple Mac, followed by SimCity (which is still a pretty damn good game, especially the version where you can make city transport decisions such as deciding where the bus stops go, and building ferry ports and subway systems with real-time data on how many Sims are using the system). After that, I played Shadows of the Empire on the N64: the first truly inspiring game I'd ever experienced (I loved the attention to detail and continuity; the way that, walking along a treacherous cliff-edge path to accomplish one task, I could see the moving parts of the next challenge, already engaging far below; and the experience of running round a junkyard with the droid IG-88 in clattering, menacing pursuit was genuinely terrifying).

I'm still playing, but I'm very particular: despite an early attachment to Wolfenstein, a lot of the first person shooter games never really appealed to me; despite the fact that graphics are a lot more smooth and sophisticated than they were when I first started playing, it's the format most likely to make me feel sick: run down a corridor, look left, look right..., and more than that, unless very well done it can be repetitive and dull. I have an abiding dislike of games set on spaceships, "boss" fights (engaging in pointless battle with a large, relentless foe armed with tentacles/fire/thorns/stingers, who has a tiny Achilles heel that you have to die numerous times to discover), fights with robots, and post-apocalyptic landscapes. I don't like my characters to be as thick as mince, and sadly a lot of them are. My favourite weapon is the sniper rifle, followed closely by the shotgun. I like to be behind my character rather then looking through his/her eyes (third-person shooter) and prefer my opponents to be human, or almost human (I don't mind engaging with the undead). I want a proper story in a believable, if exotic, setting: essentially, Resident Evil and Uncharted are perfect games for me. Both even have credible female characters who aren't afraid to wield a gun and never get their kit off. On that last point, it seems pretty clear that most games are designed for men; games specifically aimed at women have tended to be pretty contemptible (with an emphasis on romance, pets, or shopping). I'm perfectly happy to shoot people (hence the tag for this post, "I know how this makes me look"). I know it's not real. And I don't need to be patronised.

This rough magic

A clutch made from Japanese kimono material by Hong Kong based designer Mischa. And an even more beautiful dress by William Tempest. His name sounds like a nom de plume; Shakespeare's first name and his best play.


ARIEL: All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.
The Tempest, Act I, Scene I

Working wardrobe

Promenade in green: RM by Roland Mouret


Fade to grey: the deceitfully named Cheap'N' Chic by Moschino


Drapes of wrath: Diane von Furstenburg

Three very different dresses (all from Net-a-Porter) which could conceivably be worn to work. And all you need now is a great pair of shoes.
Come to heel: Rupert Sanderson from Browns Fashion

And finally a dress that could never be worn to work (but which would go nicely with the shoes; for people who like everything to match, of whom I'm not sure I'm one, that's the kind of match they like):


Hips, lips, power: William Tempest from Browns Fashion

Showstoppers

Joanna Vanderpuije, a Central St Martin's graduate, has just produced her first collection and it's beautiful.


Perhaps it's the spare, elegant aesthetic of the photographs that contributes to the impact: these are clothes you'd be proud and excited to wear.


As Alber Elbaz says in a recent interview (and it's worth reading: he's such a likeable character, with his insecurity about his weight and his preference for sandwiches over avant garde cuisine): "A good shoe or a good dress does something to you. It's not just about fashion victims. It really does do something for all women".

All photos ©2009 Jaime de Almeida.

Stirred

Lychee martini
3 ounces of premium vodka
1 ounce of lychee liqueur
1 lychee, peeled and pitted
ice

Shake together the vodka, liqueur and ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with the peeled lychee and serve.



Recipe from the admirable Lychees Online; side elevation of freshly delivered martini, Aqua, Hong Kong, Friday January 16, 2009.

Which is like love, which is like everything

The Arnolfini Wedding, Jan Van Eyck (1431), National Gallery, London.

The soft bed of luxury

One of the above dresses costs US$2400. The other, a third of that. Can you guess which? And then the real challenge: can you guess why?

A clue: one of them is by Bottega Veneta which seem to have successfully established itself as a premium luxury brand (it was rated the world's top luxury brand in the 2008 Luxury Brand Status Index (LBSI) survey from the ludicrously named New York City-based Luxury Institute, which canvassed the idle rich to find out their opinions; apparently "wealthy women are highly discerning, almost to a fault"); partly by virtue, apparently, of superior craftsmanship, and partly, it seems to me, and this is one of the tricks of the luxury trade, by charging shedloads of money for their product. It works in Hong Kong - and if you look at their site, the roll-call of locations is quite illuminating.

Dresses by Bottega Veneta and Lanvin; shoes by Azzedine Alaia and Balenciaga, all from Browns.

Modern neon

Walking along behind this woman in Central today - all in black except for her neon satin shoes - I was suddenly pierced by the strongest memories of the early 1980s. Neon colours do that to me, perhaps because they are so clearly associated with that era, just when I was coming alive to colour and texture and the allure, elusiveness and changeability of fashion, and have never really been worn since - until now, apparently.

More specifically, I'm in Miss Selfridge in Hanover Street in Edinburgh, with The Church of the Poison Mind (which even at the time I derided as puerile) on the shop's stereo and spectacularly bad-tempered Shirley Manson serving behind the counter. I'm picking up a blue and white striped ra ra skirt and contemplating a neon yellow bangle or belt to go with it.

When I was 14, Miss Selfridge was the key to being the person I wanted to be: happy, confident, popular, wearing my stripy skirt, neon dangling from my ears as I skipped along Princes Street.
I think perhaps cynicism began to set in not long afterwards, and I favoured black (and dyed my hair to prove it); I never wore neon again and probably never will. It was strange to be skewered today by the sight of someone's shoes.

All bets are off

I was in Las Vegas in 2001, at an excruciating sales conference. In my jaundiced view, not helped by the event I was attending nor by the ludicrous hotel we were staying in (“New York New York”), it was a profoundly depressing place, and even from the absurdly privileged vantage point of a high-rolling banker’s free suite at the top of the Bellagio, with a glass of Dom Perignon in my hand, it seemed as hollow as it looks. The worst aspect, and sadly this accounts for the majority of the revenue generated by Las Vegas, was the slot machines: people dressed in extremely casual, almost pyjama-level clothing, each handing over their dollars for a big bucket of dimes which they then proceeded to feed into the slot machines for hours on end, as if participating in a giant metaphor for futility.

Melbourne has a super-casino too, by the river, flanked by strange, huge, sculptural towers spouting gouts of flame every minutes or so; but inside it has exactly the same feel as anywhere in Las Vegas: an ersatz environment, entirely focused on parting fools with their money. Adam Smith could have been thinking of super-casinos, had they existed in the 18th century, when he said: "A lottery is a tax on all the fools in creation".

Macau's casinos, 40 minutes by ferry from Hong Kong, have now overtaken Las Vegas in terms of revenue. In Macau, the interesting thing is that the revenue streams are reversed: 80% of Macau's revenue comes from the tables. This is, not surprisingly, attributed to the fact that the Chinese like people to know how much they are spending; it's a face issue (see below under Maybach, Napoleon wrasse, and Louis Vuitton). No miserable solitude at the slots for them.

Now Macau has become a replica of Las Vegas (which is itself a poor, hotel theme park replica of all the interesting places in the world) it's even less likely I will ever go there again, even if you can get the best Portuguese egg tarts in the kingdom at Lord Stow's Bakery in Coloane.

Is not elegance being able to completely forget what you are wearing?

Yves St Laurent, 1936-2008.

Kicks like a mule

I was emailing my friend D today about Malaysia, in a wide-ranging discussion about religion, cultural mores, Schapelle Corby, the death penalty for drug-trafficking, and bribery, prompted by a story in today's paper about a Malaysian government official's proposal to require all young Malaysian women leaving the country to carry letters of authorisation, Middle-East chaperone style, to prevent them from becoming drug mules - which they would all otherwise obviously do - and was reminded of my favourite loony cult, the Teapot Cult of Malaysia (see this unreliable source for a contemporaneous report). What I didn't tell him about, but should have, was my other favourite Malaysian story (at least, of those which don't involve me, of which more some other time): the carjacking gang who were wont to force drivers of luxury cars out of the driver's seat at gunpoint at the traffic lights. On encountering the immobiliser in a Mercedes which needed a fingerprint to start it, they cut out the middle man by chopping off the owner's finger and taking it with them.

Wicked, I know, but I have this irresistible image of the scene back at the carjack gang's hideout shack:

"Anyone got the key to the SLK?"
"Hang on a minute -" (rummages in jar of formaldehyde, before triumphantly holding finger aloft) "Here it is!"

On a more serious note: clearly this measure is an attempt to curb women's freedom by the back door and is to be deplored.

Sugar rush

My friend E brought me back a little green box of Laduree macarons from Paris. The ones shown above are the best: it's a crisp shell filled with an extraordinary burnt caramel flavoured ganache, and the sensation of biting in to a melting toffee morsel is indescribable ... I don't have much of a sweet tooth (give me a cheese and onion pasty any day of the week), but the macarons are a little piece of heaven. I like Laduree's aesthetic too; even the website is decked out in tasteful shades of green (the green of the walls of shuttered apartments) and pink (the delicate pink of satin ballet shoes). I usually like the idea of cakes more than the reality, but this time I was completely won over. Perfectly matched with a cup of tea and feet up on the sofa watching true crime.

But then

there are shoes like these, by Celine.

Tecasan

http://www.tecasan.com/

Sadly the one area where ethical fashion often seems to fall down is shoes. But Tecasan, who feature Natalie Portman modelling a lovely pair of cherry-red heels on their website, seem somehow to have crafted vegan shoes that look just like leather - not like cornish pasties, but like real, desirable shoes you'd want to wear.

Poppy pewter faux-calf shoe, above.

Fashion Conscience

http://www.fashion-conscience.com/

Attractive bamboo knickers and interesting dresses (although in some cases frustratingly poorly photographed, for example the sequinned kimono dress: what happened to see before you buy?). Best for jewellery ("organic, vintage, recycled and any materials that can be legitimately deemed certifiably sustainable": nouveau vintage dragonfly cuff, above)