Cultural Cartography

The beauty business: an evolution or a revolution?

Confession time: I consider myself a normal well balanced individual. I don't obsess about my weight or my appearance but at the moment due to some very pleasant personal circumstances (I'm getting married in a couple of months), I've started to think about my appearance and in particular my weight. I even found myself saying the immortal words "But I want to look thin and beautiful", to which my partner replied "you are already beautiful and anyway thin and beautiful are not the same thing." (I know, he's great, isn't he? and I haven't even trained him.) So this entry is not just an observation, it's very apposite for me personally.

I know there has been lots of comment on Dove and their Campaign for Real Beauty. I was always a bit cynical, although having met Olivia Johnson the Ogilvy planner and some of the Unilever team at a workshop a while ago, I started to have more of a sense for the true passion that lies behind this thinking. This film on YouTube makes me even more convinced that Dove is serious. I only hope that this is not an evolution but truly a revolution in the way that women are perceived but also perceive themselves.

Lost building

I'm currently reading Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography (well in all honesty I've been reading it for quite a while now as it's huge and far too big to take on planes). It's amazing and reflects a lot of my feelings for London. I agree wholeheartedly with what was said here. Ackroyd makes the way that the city has grown organically his central tenet and somewhere he talks about using buildings to navigate our way around the city becuase the original landmarks of hills and rivers are now gone or covered over (like the Fleet).

Well anyway, recently whilst travelling on my favorite bus (Route 19), I was shocked to notice that coming up Sloane Street towards Harvey Nicks, you can actually see Hyde Park now. The huge horrible building that used to be there has been ripped down. It completely changed my perspective on where I was and what is more interesting it completely changed my perspective on the building next to it on the right which was now shown in radically different light. It's the Mandarin Oriental London. I know see that it was a much more graceful and well thought through building than I ever realised.

It has an arch between the back and front:

And if you look at this image (which I got here), then you can see how demolishing what is outlined in green would completely change the whole area.

Just another way in which the things that are around us and how we perceive create structures of meaning. What will that corner of Knightsbridge "mean" when it looks like this:

rather than this:

The true use for Post-Its

Telling it like it is!!

It's just plain wrong

I know it's not just me (see here) but the misuse of It's or Its does seem to be getting worse. For a while it would just pop up in occasional e-mails, but now I'm seeing it everywhere: PPT presentations, even one lot of proof read copy which I had to send back.

And the worst thing that happened recently is that I got an e-mail from someone as a draft e-mail to go out to lots of people. I corrected the misuse of "it's" in the mail, added in some other thoughts and then it went out a few minutes later to the fifty people on the list with guess what? Yes, all the wrong "It's" put back in. I felt humiliated and as if I had been publicly outed as someone who didn't know the rules of punctuation.

I mean come on it's not that difficult is it? If you want a simple explanation of the grammar and its application go here

OK but beyond my rant (which does mean I am get seriously old) there might be a very interesting thing going on here in the way the language is developing. If everyone sees "it's" all over the place and it's ratified by being in print or on a poster or even god forbid at some point in a newspaper, then society will start to take it on and make it culturally meaningful. "It's" will start to mean "Its".

This phenomenon is an interesting combination of semantic and grammatical drift at the same time. I am a firm believer in the fact that languages should develop and change and that words can and should change their meaning but on the other hand this isn't due to any great cultural shift or even the appropriation of a word by a particular group. Instead it seems to be communal laziness.

Any thoughts?   

Another shop window in Berlin

This was the window done by Vanity Fair in Berlin at KaDeWe (Kaufhof des Westen). Very topical, very American and quite charming I think.

Not here

Or are there? Doesn't talking about culture and how we navigate it demand a conversation about the role of women, the role of ethics, and the fact that we are helping sell things. Possibly.. all I know is that I like the sign. (Thanks to Creative Review)

Memorials

I've always loved memorials as they always tell a really interesting story. Particularly now we are so bad at dealing with death, it's interesting to see the dignity that is summed up in a memorial like this:

It's at Baker Street Station, London, UK. The dignity might not be epitomised in the actual memorial itself- after all, a lion destroying a snake is hardly the most restrained of images, but in the location. It's just on a wall as you go down on to the platform. It's not in a church, not outside with a huge space around it. It's just there, with thousands of people walking past every day and not stopping to look. Underneath it, if I remember rightly there is also a rather strange memorial which is like a bullet, but the picture I took of it was so phallic that I deleted it.

Further and more academicky thinking on memorials here: Download cc-thoughtpiece1-diffperspv3.doc

Internet bookmark??

I wonder if anyone can help me. I'm looking for a tool which basically marks webpages I'm looking at but haven't got time to read properly and then bookmarks them, not only the whole site but that page. So that when I open up my browser again, they are there and just waiting to be read. Exactly like a bookmark works in a book. Most of us readers don't decide I'm going to read and then go and browse the shelves, deciding what am I going to read in today? So starting from scratch each time. Instead we go the book we have next to the bed and open it up where we left off. I know (before you tell me) that the web is not like a book, but if there is this tool out there, I'd be really interested to know. Thanks

PS. My Mum is brilliant, she just ignores this whole changing technology thing. She continues to write me letters as a way to communicate information and she has recently started a bookmark collection. Good on you, Mum

Fly-aways

An interesting post on an interesting site about ephemera, which is the perfect name for old paper too. Little Lord Fauntleroy.

It reminds me of when I worked in the Special Collections cataloguing department of JHU in Baltimore. It was my job to work in the Cage (and yes that is what they called  it) to go through the old uncatalogued books and try and work out where they would go in the catalogue. I always felt it was  hug privilege to open these books which no-one else had looked at for decades in some cases. I had to wear special white cotton gloves which were always completely dirty and dusty when I finished.

I also worked here: John Work Garrett Library where I really felt like I was an adventurer in paper. It's hard to describe the thrill of taking down a book and a leaf or something fell out. In one case it was a piece of velvet ribbon, which was just utterly charming.

Winter wedding

On my travels in London, I saw this couple outside Westminster Abbey. Getting married is really interesting semiotically because try as you might (and I'm speaking personally) you can't escape the semiotic significance of the various elements such as a white dress and a veil. It's like so much of semiotics: because it's there and it has prescribed the meaning, you have to either go with it or realise that in not going with it, you are making a cultural comment. Even if it's winter and it's freezing.