Prada

Browsing through my archive issues of Another Man, my eyes landed on this campaign from Prada. I remember when I first got a glimpse of the shirts in this and I knew I had to have it. Click on the image to enlarge and see how beautiful that shirt really is.

Currently Playing - Let Your Fingers Do The Walking - Sort Sol

Approaches To What?

Approaches To What? by Georges Perec.

From Another Man SS08 where the text was taken from - Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec

  What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. 52 weekends a year, 52 casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep on going up! Behind the event there has to be a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or historical upheavals, social unrest, political scandals.

  In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coalmines. “Social problems” aren’t “a matter of concern” when there’s a strike, they are intolerable 24 hours out of 24, 365 days a year.

  Tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, tower-blocks that collapse, forest fires, tunnels that cave in, the Drugstore des ChampsElysees burns down. Awful! Terrible! Monstrous! Scandalous! But where’s the scandal? The true scandal? Has the newspaper told us anything except: not to worry, as you can see life exists, with its ups and its downs, things happen. 

  The daily papers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask. 

  What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?

  To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither the questions nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space? 

  How are we to speak of these “common things”, how to track them down rather, flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are. 

  What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic any more, but the endotic.

 

  To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For that astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us. 

  What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? 

  Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. 

  Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out. 

  Question your tea spoons. 

  What is there under your wallpaper? How many movements does it take to dial a phone number? 

  Why? 

  It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth. 

Paul Smith

I recently read an interview of Another Man with Paul Smith and there was one question and his reply for it that I liked a lot. So let me share that with you. 

A.M-What accessory could you not live without? 

P.S- Personally, I am very old fashioned so I use a pencil and paper a lot. I always have a notepad in my pocket. I enjoy a pencil and notebook a lot more than a computer because with a pencil you can very easily make a mistake and often through a mistake you can be set off on a different path. That's what I find exciting.

Are You An Artist If Your Surrounded By Art?

Another beautiful editorial from Another man (SS 08). Stylist - Nicola Formichetti, Photograher - William Selden. 

Nasir Mazhar

How much talent do you need to make something this beautiful? How much imagination do you need to take a pair of shoes and make a mask? Let me introduce you to Nasir Mazhar who transformed a pair of Reebok Classics into masks for this editorial for Another Man SS 07, styled by none other than Nicola Formichetti and photographed by Horst Diekgerdes. I seriously want one of theses although I doubt I would ever go out in public with these on. I could make one - the one on top maybe but for that I would have to buy a pair of trainers (biggest size available i think), cut the soles out and attach the laces on both shoes together, but since I am suffering from lack of funds I don't think its gonna be possible anytime soon haha. Also I'm puzzled by the construction of the mask in the second photo. And don't be shy to drop by a comment. Its always nice to hear from people that visit this blog. 

Remember To Forget

Remember To Forget by Sam Taylor (novelist)

From Another Man Autumn Winter 2007 issue.

  We all wish we could remember: that person’s name; some elusive incident buried deep in our childhood; what exactly it was we went into the room intending to do. Memory, for most of us, is, in the words of Pliny, the Roman author of the Naturalis Historia, “fickle and slippery”, an ungraspable, ever-mutating chaos of images and ideas. It tricks us, deceives us, lets us down when we most need it, and is generally an unreliable narrator of the story of our life.

  Yet for a very small elite of people – between 50 and 100 individuals at any given time in history, scientists believe – memory is not like this at all. For these people, almost invariably men and labelled either as autistic savants or mnemonists, memory is as clear and absolute as the magazine you are holding in your hands. They can “read” the past as easily and accurately as you are reading these words. How would it feel to relive entirely the images, sounds, smells and emotions of your fifth birthday party, say, or to read a novel once and then recite it, all 100,000 words of it, without making a single mistake? Aren’t you envious? Well, you shouldn’t be. 

  Perhaps the most famous of all literary mnemonists is the young Uruguayan man described in Borges’s story, “Funes the Memorious”. Funes, we are told, is able to tell the exact time without even glancing at the sky. Unlikely, you may think, but that is nothing compared to his abilities after he is thrown from a horse and knocked unconscious. When he comes to, Funes finds he has lost the use of his legs, but that, in recompense, he is able to remember everything: “The present was so rich, so clear, that it was almost unbearable, as were his oldest and even his most trivial memories.” 

  This tale, of course, is fiction. It has the feel of a fable, an exaggerated fantasy. And yet, whether he knew it or not, Borges was describing an actual condition. The ability to always know precisely what time it is, is a common gift among autistic savants. Take the case of Orlando Serrell, a perfectly ordinary American boy until the day in August 1979, when, aged 10, he was hit by a baseball on the left side of his head. He can recall the weather, where he was and what he was doing, for every single day since that accident. 

  Take Daniel Tammet, author of bestselling memoir Born on a Blue Day, who, like the fictional Funes, is able to learn a new language (and to speak it fluently) in just a few days. Take Derek Paravicini, the blind, autistic piano prodigy who, having heard a song once, is able not only to memorise it but to reproduce it exactly on the keyboard.

 

  Above all, take Solomon V Shereshevskii, the subject of Russian psychologist AR Luria’s classic case study, The Mind of a Mnemonist. Subtitled “A Little Book About a Vast Memory”, this slim volume tells the story of “S”, who was working as a journalist when his editor sent him to the scientist to be studied. His editor was fascinated (and somewhat disturbed) by his employee’s ability to memorise, without notes, everything said in the morning editorial meeting. S, was baffled that anyone should find this extraordinary. Over the course of nearly 30 years, Luria ran tests on S, only to admit that he could find “no distinct limits” to his patient’s memory. Not only could he memorise a table of 50 random numbers, but he could recall them with equal accuracy 10 or 15 years later. How was this possible? 

  S, it was discovered, had synesthesia (as does Tammet), meaning that if he heard somebody’s voice, he would also simultaneously taste it on his tongue, feel it on his skin, and see it as a very specific pattern of coloured lights. This made it easier for him to remember all that had happened to him, but also made life extremely complicated. For example, S complained that he had a poor memory for faces because they “are constantly changing”. He could not eat and read at the same time because “the taste of the food drowns out the sense (of the words)”. 

  Worst of all, he could not forget. In later years, he worked as a professional mnemonist, and had to remember vast series of random numbers or meaningless words every night. The problem was that he could not get them out of his head afterwards. Even writing them down and burning the pieces of paper made no difference. It took years for S to come up with a solution to this problem, though in the end it was ludicrously simple: when he consciously wished that he would forget something, he could. “At that moment, I felt I was free,” he recalled. “I felt simply wonderful.” 

  The moral, surely, is clear. Forget trying to remember everything, and be grateful that, by this time next week, you will have only the dimmest recollection of this article. 

Let The Pictures Do The Talking