Originality and Reinvention are really joined at the hip!

December 19, 2013 By Kanchan Char 8 Comments

Andy Warhol Coke Bottles Art Deco 20's art

I recently came across a woman on one of my fortnightly visits into town, and we got chatting at one of these cafes that scream “Chrome and Glass”, and serve your drinks in hand-crafted, asymmetrical mugs! She swore to me that she would not be caught dead in one of those, independant, All-English-Oldly-Worldly styled Tea shops that were mushrooming everywhere, serving Cream Teas and “Home-Made”, like that was the Chef’s Special for the day! (Everyone talks to everyone in Norfolk! Just to clear the air about why I have so many random conversations with people I don’t personally know! We are neighbourly in this part of the world! :P) Did I mention that the diatribe was in response to me mentioning that given a chance, I’d patronise an independant coffee shop, not a chain – just in the interests of local economies, because we’re just those sort of people who care about those sort of things, not to mention my sister had an independant small business and got eaten alive by the big, corporatised chains….but, no agenda at all, really, just a coffee in an a nice coffee shop !! The lady liked to keep it progressive, no nostalgia, no emotional ornamentation! In her 40’s she swore by PSP’s, Hobbs and duo-zoned dishwashers! Traditional English Tea Rooms? Pffft, such Kitsch!!

Art deco streamlined moderne kitchen interiors, Bauhaus inspired

Pardon me if this post seems very stream-of-consciousness!

Started me thinking that You are Never Too Removed from the Good Old Days ; not even if you swear by your iPhone, have your earbuds ergonomically nestled in your ears, or sport a quadri-tiled image in Photoshopped contrasting saturation as your social networking avatar! Certainly haven’t escaped if you secretly covet a bob or drool over Little Black Dresses!! You have been touched by the past – by Bauhaus, Warhol and Chanel! For all of us who sat on modular furniture in the 80’s and early 90’s and thought that ours was the age of light-framed modernism, it really originated in the ’20’s with Marcel Breuer ! Consider his B33 chair, hardly a design any of us have skipped in it’s lesser known reproductions , think clinics, government offices, and all the poor teachers who couldn’t ever put their legs up for fear of buckling over!! And that’s speaking from experience!! What made this iconic is its cantilevered seat, designed to specifically not be a showpiece (imagine this in an age that worshipped chintz and wadding), but to emphasise what metal could do, well used. It wasn’t ornamented or filigreed, but chromed to emphasize that it was metal, rather than wood. What a far cry from fake wood-grain panels on 1970’s station wagons! Whoever fell for that?!

Another malady of your early years being spent in the 80’s, is you thinking this is the ultra-modern home that spelled sophistication. And we claimed it as our own! To have and hold. The ’80’s ruled Black, Red and White!

Thinking back, we were only harking back to the 1930’s when this colour palette was considered bang en trend; being heatedly discussed at some of the biggest design establishments in the world!

Well, I think I’m on safe ground assuming that Apple touches all our little urban lives, either concretely or aspirationally! After Steve Jobs’ death, when the world and it’s wife spoke about the Apple phenomenon for months, I remember hearing designers talk about how the vision of the company was integrated – rather chip-on-motherboard’edly on honesty, integrity of materials, with design innovations rooted in problem solving! Couldn’t help be reminded of Mies van der Rohe and his own aesthetic approach a 100 years before that. I hardly stand here insinuating that one of the greatest innovators of our time was really a copycat; but that often, the Visionary and his vision cannot be wholly extricated from it’s inspiration! Jobs was indeed, massively influenced by the Bauhaus school of thought!

Going back to when I first recognized my own interest in design, it seems to point to when I was reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead . I was 17 and reading it to my father, who loved that and Atlas shrugged, but was too ill to read it himself. I had a good reading voice, he said! What stayed with me amidst all her capitalistic manifesto, was the protagonist Howard Roark deriding the Parthenon to his Dean at the Stanton Institute of Technology. “The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”

Is originality in itself a myth? Probably – since everything we are is a result of the intertextuality of our lives! A constant amalgam of nature and nurture and every single sense perception since our existence. Strange that we still continue to quest for individuality and most so as we come of age, and contraintuitively move in herds that wear the same names, hear the same sounds, pierce the same parts!

I think that paragraph, in part, gave me sanction to go out and embrace the fact that I was different, and live the small part of me that needed peer affiliation with dignity! Our lives, our aspirations are just the rebottled versions of the past; old is not gold but really where we full-circle to in one area or the other, whether consciously or not! For if I am destined to finally become my mother, and since high-rise hair and velvet bootcuts have made a comeback on the catwalk, there really must be some stock in Warhol’s everyone/everything having it’s 15 minutes of fame! 🙂

Abba or Wham? You know who to blame!

December 9, 2013 By Kanchan Char 10 Comments

I was recently at John Lewis, a British home & family store, when a chat with a young girl there got me thinking! She was sorting out insoles to cushion my daughter’s high instep when Frank Sinatra began singing “Hello Dolly”! It’s a song I remember well enough from my first winter here in the UK many moons ago! It followed me everywhere. Armstrong’s voice then, with it’s rich, gravelly texture had made me want to dance – shoulder rolling, sideways shuffling and all that Jazz! The lovely girl, about 19, said she loved that song too, Michael Bublé was it?! She loved him! He was her Christmas/Winter voice! Though she’d only recently heard it, she felt she knew it all her life. I smiled and acknowledged it with a ”Yes, Michael Bublé has a lovely voice, if a completely vile temper! 🙂 ” I left, inwardly thinking that she probably heard it first as a child, and made very happy memories to it! So did Bublé, presumably!

We’ve all probably stopped short when we’ve heard a particular artist/song play at a restaurant, doing the dishes with the radio on, whilst driving – and gone back to a particular time in our lives. Perhaps to a perfect boy you met when you were 15 and found true love – the sort that doesn’t even re-al-ly exist, but you had managed to find it! He had the right eyes, the perfect hobbies. He played the guitar, listened to Pink Floyd; knew all the songs on Side B of The Dark Side of the Moon! You both had bemoaned the breakup of Wham! Ah, the beauty of youth – financial disaster meant nothing more than your dad’s accountant and a bad hairday. Well, if you haven’t felt the power of musical nostalgia in one or it’s many avatars, I think I might’ve actually found Kara !

Abba disco ball bauble — By Kanchan Char

Researchers say that music has an enduring effect on us and that it is in fact potent enough to even restore brain function, improve immunity and considerably reduce stress. And that you can still sing even if you can’t talk again! Simply put, language functions are located in the left brain, but music appreciation is processed in the right. So, when one suffers damage to the left brain, your can be rewire your brain to move those functions to the other side by associating music with language. Since all our long-term memory is stored in the right brain, this is the precise reason we associate so much of our emotional landscape with music. We’ve transcribed our memories in Quavers, Crotchets and Breves!

Here’s what gets me – while it’s expected that we’re moved by music that saw us come of age, musical nostalgia seems to transcend that narrow period of susceptibility into a multigenerational phenomena. Not only do we react and respond to music that’s celebrated important periods in our own lives, but seemingly, also that which lined the lives of our parents. (Of course, this adds an layer of intrigue to those who grew up in bilingual homes and where the musical apple, so to speak, fell rather far from the tree!) It stands clarified in my own life, why I Alto to every song that Soprano’ed and the converse! I was only answering the call of Simon & Garfunkel from my subconscious! And believe you me, I did that for years!! The sins of our parents…

Apparently, we gravitate to musical genres from the Dopamine Effect, the chemical reactions we have in our brain when we feel calm, happy and soothed. The feel good neurotransmitter! It’s why we still, for most part continue to turn to music. Apart from the odd time one has to socially suffer Brahms’ Fifth Symphony at a friend’s uber-posh family dinner. Classical music is all well and good, but it does nothing other than remind me of how utterly satisfied I am with the crumbs that fell onto my own educational platter! We’ve all still remained friends, fortunately 😛 !

Some of our earliest childhood memories were probably made to music that our parents enjoyed, a lasting impression and the direction your own music choices would take, (and lest we forget, here is also a remnant of their biases and where our musical hair-raising moments have their roots!)! My generation, the late 1970’s born (the last of the ones born-free, might I add) – enjoyed the benefits of when parents didn’t think twice about introducing children to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Elvis singing about Jailhouse experiences! We didn’t focus half as much as we should have on the psychology of Freud or Piaget and Erikson has ostensibly remained just a memory of bad mobile handsets! Then again, I was partly raised in Socialist India! ‘Nuf said! (Shudders at the thought of countless Russian magazine subscriptions!)

My children’s first tryst with rythm was colic-preventing Navajo music ! Falcons and flutes and eagle-bone whistles. I didn’t stop to investigate if there were any more reliable rappers on the baby scene since Jordy! I often think of the absurdity of flipping that image and seeing the Navajo calm their teething brood to the sounds of N’Sync or 98 Degrees! Ostracism from the tribe at best, I suppose! After all, there is a fine line that separates music from mere noise, and the one to make that call is the culture that’s listening to it.

The desires, despairs and triumphs of any generation are represented in the music it created. Therefore, it occasionally leaves me feeling grim that the music we seem to be leaving our grandchildren finds itself in the myopic territory of making sure every man has a ‘Beauty and a Beat! I really do try to like Justin Bieber! J

So whether you are the “Birkenstock-wearing, celebrating the birth of Granola and Indie/Folk” type of person or a “Can’t do without a power-ballad” one- you’ve been subtly influenced by the sounds you first heard and associated well-being with ! Finally, you now have someone to concretely blame for getting it all so horribly wrong! 😀

I’m still wading through my turbid unconscious to find what made me fall in love with Matia Bazar, an Italian experimental pop group that made it big in the late ‘70’s! Or why I feel an unsurmountable urge to face my suck-it-up-and-get-on-with-it moments with Abba’s Lay all your love on me!

All aboard the Petits Filous Express!

November 29, 2013 By Kanchan Char 9 Comments

stained glass childhood painting kite comic

I’m hardly ever taken in by, or even mildly impressed with people who wish they were children again- kicking in the dirt, running through fields! Certainly, they must come face to face with modern childrearing once a year, and view it as a perma-beaming, icecream-eating , Mary Poppins’ish stroll through existence!

Kanchan Char eating apples — By Daniel Simm

For us, the “you’re-in-it-for-the-next-20-years” parents, the reality of growing children up is something else! Playdates and school projects, swimming lessons and dance performances! Baby Yoga and carve-your-own Babybels!

Sigh! Wipes Brow. Drinks Tea! If you’ve made it unscathed past your own ickle-years, that’s where you should stay. Period! I’m not saying that I totally buy into the clichéd viral posts that go around social networking, harking back to the past, polishing the halos of those who grew up with no Health & Safety and no constant surveillance by any Big Brother. High on glucose, watching Tele simply for the sheer joy of entertainment! But – thinking back, those were days we weren’t meant to learn a thing from TV, apart from how to get away from a determined cat, who failed for most part, but whose strength lay in his sheer grit! TED tells me that that is the true recipe for success! Grit – the strength to persevere, something our time-poor, technologically savvy children are in desperate want of!

Ours were truly perilous times, I’m told!! I’m often reminded of L.P Hartley and his ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ from the book The Go-Between! Worth mentioning here are the nondescript pervs who hung around school gates unmonitored, and ornate Victorian Gothic fencing around grassy schoolyards that ripped up a chubby arm sooner than one could say Jack Robinson! Whatever your stance, whether you be one of the oldies-were-goldies brigade or one who delights over the proficiency their toddler displays operating their newest Nintendo; you’d have to agree that childhood is a changing social phenomenon, and one of equally repeated enchantment and alarm!

I recently got into a conversation with my neighbour, newly moved in from the US and very homesick for Ziplock bags, Twinkies, family-sized refrigerators and PBS; who said that she felt obliged, in the spirit of good parenting (the type that settles for vegetable stamps over plastic, made-from-scratch over shop-bought) to watch Boomerang , one of our imported, prime-time children’s channels, in a bid to pre-empt the evils of advertising.

I’m probably a bit of a softie here, having worked in advertising myself, I’m just that little bit impervious to it’s insidiousness! Of course I know that the power of marketing means that purchasing behavior moves from the realms of choice into coercion! Pfft, I know that, but however else would I know how to differentiate between toys that are worth the next spend and those that are truly naff?!

Speedily, I thought that I must — if only for the true and just sake of keeping up with the Joneses, watch Boomerang with my own children! Wasn’t all a waste, almost every advert was about loans, insurance or finance. My children now know the jingles to Debtbusters Loans, Ocean Finance and Sheila’s Wheels, (hitting the spot with pretty ladies in pink, who also have the good sense of insuring their cars. A life lesson there!!) Ultimately, the worst being the AXA-Sunlife over 50’s plan (that’s a life insurance company, for those of you who’re spared British Television!!) So, there!

Our parents- my parents, had it different, their goalposts were different, so were their victories! Their foibles, no less upsetting than ours! Studies show that the term “ experience teaches us” also means that our neural pathways repeatedly choose the choices we made that gave us our raisins, Penguin bars or whatever else we deemed rewards. And that 30% of it has become instinctual, not always the most reiable, if you ask me :P. Given a choice, we would look back to what we knew, had and enjoyed. It is the only tangibility we truly know! Would I want to go back to it and watch two sets of cartoons twice a week? Probably not. Do I remember it as a pretty, if palavering picture, drenched in honey – well, I’d have to if I was a normative, well adjusted adult!!

The children we now raise are probably the most victimized by our constant comparing and assessing. We must choose for them in accordance with their framework, and know that we run the risk – as did our parents before us, to go that little bit too far! I know I would’ve crossed that line when I add Oboe lessons to our growing pile!!! 😀 For now, I shall load up our car with Ballet shoes and Tap shoes, Orange juice –with the goodness of pips, all to the sound of Edith Piaf singing in rising crescendo about having no regrets!

We survived our childhood, I’ll let them survive theirs, bruised knees and scratched tablets! Given one possible intervention- I’d probably choose reinstating Pluto!!

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