Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

22nd Jun 17 | Entertainment News

A record breaking Irish independent film starring Ardal O Hanlon and Pat Shortt

For a country that loves the cinema so much, the Irish have a lot of trouble capturing the essence of what makes us so unique on the big screen. Director Tom Ryan is set to buck this trend with his sophomore outing; Twice Shy.

The coming-of-age drama centres around a young, unmarried couple (played by Shane Murray-Corcoran and Iseult Casey) as they make the journey from rural Ireland to London to deal with an unplanned pregnancy. The film flashes back to chronicle their relationship and turbulent lives that led them to the situation, with growing up, parental distresses and inabilities to communicate throwing up roadblocks in their fairy tale romance.

Twice Shy has no hesitations about latching on to the zeitgeist of modern Ireland, hitting many hot-topic buttons like the 'Repeal the 8th' movement, and the inadequate provisions for those suffering from depression. It's refreshing to see a take on Ireland that doesn't feel like a Hollywood imitation, but a more candid outlook on our lives.

Bringing together the impressive newcomers and TV veterans in Pat Shortt and Ardal O'Hanlon, coupled with a soundtrack filled with familiar Irish stars, director Ryan delivers a confident follow up sure to appeal to the Irish audience it is made for.

Twice Shy is in selected cinemas Friday 23rd June.

Richard Waters (@RichMWaters)

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Twice Shy Brings The Irish To The Big Screen - TV3 Xpos - TV3.ie

Attuned to the emerging alternative galleries and performance spaces in downtown Manhattan, the journal, published out of Ms. DeAks SoHo loft, turned the spotlight on art at the margins: performance art, video art, conceptual art and outsider art. She had a special affection for street art, which she once called information from the middle of the night.

Ms. DeAks critical style was personal, quirky and inventive, with adjectives like nuancical popping up unexpectedly.

You couldnt tell if it was a Joycean toying with the language or a problem of translation, Mr. Robinson said in an interview. She was a poet.

The prose was a calculated affront to the rarefied theorizing that surrounded minimalism and dominated the slick art journals.

Theres something rotten about a structure that produces terminological pollution and calls it theory, like a mob-controlled waste disposal company, Ms. DeAk once wrote. The goal was to destroy the criticship of critics, she was quoted as saying in an unpublished article for Artforum magazine in 1974.

It was also to get there first, even if that meant writing about art still in the studio. As a part-time assistant at the alternative gallery Artists Space, Ms. DeAk organized a series in 1974 devoted to video, performance art and readings that included Laurie Anderson, Kathy Acker, Adrian Piper and Jack Smith. She was later among the first critics to notice Jean-Michel Basquiat, before he began showing in galleries.

She continued to beat the bushes in the early 1980s as a contributing writer for Artforum, where she and her fellow critic Rene Ricard covered the downtown scene like a zeitgeist tag team. Ms. DeAk later wrote an occasional column for Interview magazine. Called The New According to Edit DeAk, the column was based on her Polaroid pictures of gallery openings and parties.

The critic William Zimmer, in The SoHo Weekly News, summed her up succinctly: DeAk has been everywhere before anybody.

Edit Deak was born on Sept. 16, 1948, in Budapest, to Bela Deak and the former Vira Csatkai, a teacher. Little is known about her early life.

At 18 she married Peter Grosz, an artist, who later changed his surname to Grass. Soon after, the couple, traveling separately in the trunks of two cars, crossed the border from Hungary into Yugoslavia and, after a stay in Italy, made a beeline for Manhattan, determined to plunge into the New York art world.

Ms. DeAk also changed how she rendered her last name; capitalizing the a, she seemed to think, made it seem more American. She used a lowercase d at the beginning of her career and an uppercase d later.

Her marriage to Mr. Grass ended in divorce. Her survivors include a sister, Eva.

Ms. DeAk earned an art history degree from Columbia in 1972. In her senior year, she took a seminar on art criticism given by Brian ODoherty, the editor in chief of Art in America. Also in attendance were Mr. Robinson and Mr. Cohn, who became her fellow conspirators in the creation of Art-Rite.

The magazine, published irregularly until expiring in 1978, envisioned the alternative art scene as a social collective and itself as an enabler. It invited Dorothea Rockburne, Pat Steir, William Wegman and others to design its covers, and made space in its pages for artists to write or show their work.

In 1976, Ms. DeAk, with Mr. Robinson, Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard, helped found Printed Matter, a publisher and distributor of artists books.

When Ingrid Sischy, the director of Printed Matter, took over as editor of Artforum in 1979, she saw a kindred spirit in Ms. DeAk, who had contributed gallery reviews to the magazine for several years someone who blurred the boundaries between art, fashion and night life and practiced art criticism as theater.

Ms. DeAk, in return, delivered prescient articles on the Italian Neo-Expressionist painters and the post-Conceptual artist Joseph Nechvatal.

Poor health and heavy drug use sidelined Ms. deAk for the last two decades of her life. The scene she covered so vividly retreated into distant memory, but traces of her presence lingered.

In 2007, as developers converted a loft at 151 Wooster Street in SoHo into a luxury condo, they uncovered a wall decorated with graffiti by Mr. Basquiat (then using the tag SAMO), Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000, seminal figures in the graffiti art movement.

It turned out to be Ms. DeAks old apartment.

A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2017, on Page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: Edit DeAk, a Champion of Artists Outside the Mainstream, Dies at 68.

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Edit DeAk, a Champion of Outsider Artists, Dies at 68 - New York Times

The signs appeared quietly. In isolated blips at first, and then with increasing frequency, till they could no longer be ignored. In 2014, it was the single visual identifier of Wes Andersons The Grand Budapest Hotel. In 2015, Drake championed it in his Hotline Bling video, inspired by legendary light-and-space artist James Turrell. In 2016, the ubiquity of a particular dusty blush hue led to its christening as millennial pink by New York magazine, and with that, its takeover of the cultural zeitgeist was complete.

But pinks road to reinvention hasnt been easy. Though it only came to be associated with femininity fairly recently (after the end of World War II, canny advertisers began directing pastel pink appliances and upholstery towards women largely as an antidote to the military-inspired fashions and textile rationing of wartime, according to Bloomberg), the tag has proven to be nearly impossible to shake off. Thanks, however, to an uptick in dialogue about gender fluidity, spurred by television shows such as Transparent and Orange Is The New Black, and a more vocal, visible fight for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) rights, the global lexicon began to slowly stretch beyond reductive gender-binary terms. And pink has emerged as the surprising symbol of this blurring of lines. To be specific, it is the aforementioned millennial pink, a colour that was everywhere you looked last summeron sneakers, sofas, social media feeds.

According to the New York magazine feature: Its been reported that at least 50 percent of millennials believe that gender runs on a spectrumthis pink is their genderless mascot. And somewhere along the way in its journey to post-gender, pink also became post-pretty. Heck, pink became cool. Free of its gender-normative shackles, it finally had the leeway to have personality, layers, subjectivity.

Reading the global tea leaves, Pantone, a company that sets industry standards for colour, picked, in an unprecedented move, the blending of two shades for its 2016 Colour of the Year: Rose Quartz (a warm rose) and Serenity (a cool blue). In many parts of the world, we are experiencing a gender blur as it relates to fashion, which has impacted colour trends throughout all other areas of design, explained Pantone Color Institute executive director Leatrice Eiseman in a press release.

This year, although it was a yellowish shade of green that got top billing, Pantone included two shades of pink at opposite ends of the spectrum in its Spring 2017 colour report: Pale Dogwood, a soft blush, and Pink Yarrow, a deep fuchsia. But why should Pantones choices matter to us?

Because Every December for the last 26 years, Pantone predictsand consequently helps influencethe single hue that the design world will go nuts about for the next year, according to business magazine Fast Companys design offshoot Co. Design.

And go nuts it does. In 2017, pink has gone rogue, proclaimed a recent piece in The Guardian. Spring/Summer 2017 runways saw pink displaying its full potential: from powdery at Sanchita, Huemn (both from India) and Givenchy to bright at Cline and Balenciaga, to bold at Haider Ackermann and Valentino. The SS17 menswear shows, too, got their dose of pink, courtesy Gucci, Topshop and Ackermann (again). Raf Simons sold-out collaboration with adidas includes a pastel-pink version of the iconic Stan Smith shoe, and Nikes newest Air Force 1 Jewel Swoosh sneaker for men comes in Pearl Pink.

Guccis Alessandro Michele, whose love for the colour is well-documented, told The New York Times at his Resort 2018 show in Florence last month: Pink is very powerful. It makes you feel sweet and sexy, also if you are a man. A recent piece for Esquire answered the question, Should you wear pink?, with a resounding, Hell yes, you should. Vogue.com ran a piece last year titled Why Pink Is The Most Radical Colour In The Rainbow Right Now, with the writer stating: Its tough to think of a single hue with which to fly your freak flag and subvert gender norms better than pink.

In other words, pink now sends out a message loaded with a subtext. Its impossible to discuss the politicization of this colour, and indeed its projection as a signifier of strength rather than frailty, without mentioning the Gulabi Gang, Indias fuchsia sari-wearing group of female vigilantes. The groups leader, Sampat Pal Devi, explained this sartorial choice to Vice magazine back in 2008. In rallies and protests outside our villages, especially in crowded cities, our members used to get lost in the rush. We decided to dress in a single colour, which would be easy to identify. We didnt want to be associated with other colours as they had associations with political or religious groups. We settled on pink, the colour of life. Its good. It makes the administration wary of us.

A movement that harnessed the power of pink early on was the 2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign, in response to right-wing group Sri Ram Senes attack on young women at a bar in Mangaluru. Nisha Susan, one of the organizers, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian: It amused us to send pretty packages of intimate garments to men who say they hate us.

Then, in a blend of attempted feminism and right-wing nationalism, the RSS womens wing, Rashtra Sevika Samiti, recently held a summer training camp for young girlsoutfitted in pink-border salwar kameezesto teach them how to protect themselves and also guard (their) country, its traditions, its sanskriti and its languages, as the Samitis Chandrakantha, chief guest at the camp event, put it.

Pink may have started rubbing shoulders with politics, but sports is an arena its long been shut out of. Serena Williams pink-pleated tennis outfits at last years US Open, which the athlete described to the US Vogue with obvious delight, made headlines because it embraced the eye-catching colour. The candy-colour shade has been Williams favourite since girlhood, and regularly creeps into her beauty routine, tooa petal lip here or cotton candy nail polish there, reports the piece. I always try to wear it, Williams said. Yesterday, I had a rose-colour eyelid, which was fun. Closer home, in a surprising move not likely influenced by the global trend, Force Indias new Formula One cars for the 2017 season were unveiled in an arresting Pepto-Bismol hue.

But nothing made as loud and as globally resonant a statement as the Womens March in January, when pink-knit pussy hats flooded the streets of Washington, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne and beyond in support of womens rights, LGBTQ rights and racial equality, as well as, of course, in staunch defiance of then freshly inaugurated US President Donald Trumps blatant misogyny and sexism. The pink pussy hat later found its way on to the head of every model at Missonis autumn/winter show in Milan this spring, and temporarily atop the Fearless Girl statue in New Yorks financial district, boldly facing down the Wall Street bull.

Los Angeles-based screenwriter Krista Suh, whose brainchild, The Pussyhat Project, led to the viral sartorial movement, told The Atlantic: Femininity, whether its in a man or a woman, is really disrespected in our society. What were trying to do with this project is embrace pink, embrace the name pussyhat, and not run away from that.

And so it was that pink came to be a symbol of power, of resistance, of revolution, while still holding on to its notions of womanhood. It is everything all at onceboth a reclaiming of femininity and a disavowal of it.

First Published: Fri, Jun 23 2017. 11 47 AM IST

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The politicization of the colour pink - Livemint

I was truly shocked when a slim majority voted for Brexit a year ago, on June 23. It was to be the first shock caused by an election outcome in 2016 in which populists whipped up popular resentment and won. The question troubling me since: When is it going to stop? When's the world coming to its senses?

When you haven't got the benefit of hindsight it's hard to tell major bumps along the way, a cluster of exceptional incidents, from real historical trends. Is history running its course or is the zeitgeist drunk at the wheel but could still come to its senses before crashing into the wall?

I feared Brexit, further propelled by voting Trump into office, might not have been a freak phenomenon but a historical turning point that could usher in an age of reactionary politics, and even sustained decline. The West really might be well past its heyday, once and for all.

Strangely enough, it's almost always the people shouting to want to make this, that or the other great again who will very likely achieve the exact opposite. How great will Britain really be after Brexit? How great will America be after Trump's reign of angry incompetence has run its course?

The West had shaped the last few centuries on a global scale - not always for the better, but surely to its advantage. Now it showed serious signs of self-combustion. Looking for historical parallels, I thought, we might be witnessing times that the late Romans witnessed before us.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Particularly from a liberal German perspective, the world turned a darker shade last year. Brexit in June and Trump in November shook many Germans' belief and trust in two long-time allies and important role models.

Most historically aware Germans very much appreciate what the United Kingdom and the United States did after the Second World War: Rebuild Germany from the rubble after a terrible war ignited by her own doing. That's what I call true greatness.

The Western Allies fostered reconciliation, even though the reflex to punish Germany for her systematic and large-scale misdeeds must have been formidable. Without the foresight of the liberal minded leaders of those two Anglo-Saxon countries West Germany, and therefore today's reunited Germany, would not have become a post-war democratic power in its own right.

After the First World War, the Entente powers chose to fiercely punish Germany, eventually resulting in another world war. After the Second World War, a broadminded approach towards Germany under the leadership of the UK and the US fostered a period of peace and prosperity never seen before in European history.

You could argue that America and Britain also had their own interests at stake: An economically dependent and politically unstable Germany would not have made for a good buffer state against the Soviets, who quickly turned from a wartime ally into a Cold War foe.

After Brexit and Trump, it looked like populism and anti-internationalism might not just discredit two longstanding role models, but could spread further: Marine Le Pen in France, Norbert Hofer in Austria, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Lech Kaczyski in Poland, Viktor Orbn in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Germany's homegrown populist movement, Alternative fr Deutschland (AfD), were all vying for or already in power.

Beginning with the Brexit referendum in June 2016, the below chart depicts some of the outcomes of votes which pitched populist candidates or ideas against more moderate or liberal candidates and ideas. Each vote had its very particular national setting, so this overview is also food for thought if those votes can and should be thrown into the same basket.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Some of the votes were close calls, like the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election, or the Turkish referendum that granted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sweeping new powers. Other votes that observers thought might be tighter races were clearer cut, like the presidential election in France, in which right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron battled it out.

For now, it looks like the populist movements have lost some momentum, probably because people realise that the world order really is in a fragile state - one more kick and the whole thing might come tumbling down. Therefore, the underlying question might be, if those voting for populists are really convinced of those policies or if they are more concerned with throwing a wrench in the works, to send a message.

Germany is voting for a new Bundestag in a general election in late September 2017. This will also be a vote on the liberal-leaning policies of incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel. The broad sentiments that underpin the success of populist movements are still simmering. The jury is still out on whether we have reached peak populism yet...

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A Year After The Brexit Vote: Have We Reached Peak Populism Yet? - HuffPost UK

Just because students leave for vacation doesnt mean Maines colleges and universities shut down. All summer long, they still provide cool cultural programming for the rest of us. Here are four dont-miss events happening this month. Will Grunewald

No need to sign up for Netflix and plant yourself on the couch. If you have the itch to do some serious binge-watching, USM has arranged for an edifying one-day alternative, with 10 hours of fun, family-friendly, enlightening entertainment shown on its planetariums dome screen. Youll travel from outer space to the ocean floor, from the dawn of time to the present day all from the comfort of a reclining seat.

July 1. 10 a.m. $10 adults; $8 under-18. Southworth Planetarium, 70 Falmouth St., Portland. 207-780-4249.

Sure, you know the story of Muhammad Ali. But have you ever seen it told through dance? As part of the Bates Dance Festival, the INSPIRITperformance troupe led by Middlebury College dance professor Christal Brown uses movement, narration (The Greatest provided plenty of quotable quotes), and period-specific projections to evoke issues of race, social activism, and freedom. And what better venue than Lewiston, site of the famous AliListon phantom punch?

July 8. 7:30 p.m. $20. Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St., Lewiston. 207-786-6381.

The third Thursday of every month, Bowdoins Harriet Beecher Stowe House where the famous writer penned Uncle Toms Cabin hosts an afternoon tea and discussion about the so-called little woman who made the great war. This months topic: the history and local color that inspired The Pearl of Orrs Island, Stowes novel set just down the way in Harpswell, written 10 years after shed moved away.

July 20. 1 p.m. Free (reservations required). Harriet Beecher Stowe House, 63 Federal St., Brunswick. 207-725-3155.

Summer is T-shirt season, and no one understands the subtleties of short-sleeved style better than New York photographer Susan Barnett, who traveled the country taking photographs of the shirts on strangers backs. Her aim is to investigate the zeitgeist through the silkscreened words and images full of political, personal, religious, and cultural meaning that we wear around every day.

Through September 2. Free. University of Maine Museum of Art, 40 Harlow St., Bangor. 207-581-3300.http://umma.maine.edu

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School's (Not) Out for Summer - Down East

A civil war may be defined as a violent clash within the boundaries of a particular country initiated by radicals who are unwilling to accept the governance of anyone not chosen by them. The goal of the radical element is to regain power to the ends that abolish, by any means necessary, the existing government policies. An integral part of any civil war is the undermining of the party du jour, i.e., spreading scurrilous and false information to the people without naming any sources. This insures that the population would have no way to challenge the information. Once this operation has placed a seed of discontent and suspicion against the ruling party, the radicals then move to phase two: Visual displays that graphically depict the party in power as vile racists and xenophobes? The modern day radical has the same modus operandi, but it is more refined. I digress. The question is: What drove these modern day radicals to such extreme measures? Simple answer: Donald J. Trump. And who is to blame for the flame out of the Democrat party? Well, lets see. How about Hillary? I would quote Camille Paglia who said, With her supercilious, Marie Antoinette-style entitlement persona, who was a disastrously wrong candidate to begin with, and secured the nomination only through overt chicanery by the Democratic National Committee, assisted by a corrupt national media who, for over a year, imposed a virtual blackout on potential primary rivals. The most fervid Hillary acolytes (especially among young and middle aged women, show biz types, and denizens of the unisex movement) were so obtusely indifferent to Hillarys incompetence as Secretary of State, they failed to recognize that the only accomplishments of note (but those only deserve a Bronx cheer) by Hillary was her piling up air miles, lying to the family of the Ben Gazi victims, and the destabilization of North Africa. After Hillarys loss, her dazed and confused sycophantic pant-suit gang expected some sort of salvivic sermon of regret, or in the least a mild crimination, but no. Hillary went hiding into the woods and just recently (to receive a big fat check for a speech) emerged. Subsequently, after the retirement of Harry Reid as Democratic Leader, the disingenuous Chuck Schumer, who had neither a care nor concern for moral authority, ascended to the leadership role. There were no statesman-like words of caution and restraint from either Reid or Schumer. Thus, there was none. The crazies among the radicals took the gloves off. One hack comedian published on national social media the (beheaded) bloody head of President Trump; a theatre troupe in New York put on a play ostensibly about Julius Caesar, when in actuality it graphically showed the assassination of President Trump and his wife; Madonna expressed her desire to blow up the White House (I suppose with the President in it). Now for the denouement by the crazy left. Some hayseed Trump hater from Illinois moved bag and baggage into his van, put sheets over the windows, and drove on down to Alexandria, Virginia to be near Congressional goings on. After his shower at the YMCA, he produced an assault rifle and began to fire indiscriminately at a baseball practice squad consisting of a bunch of republicans. A left wing radicals dream. Edward Gibbon said in his Magnus Opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some convenient difference in age, character, or station, to justify the distinction.This was the prevailing zeitgeist in 476 A.D. at the fall of the Roman Empire. Does it have a familiar ring in 2017 A.D?

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Blue State, Red State - Fayette Newspapers

Will who designed a watch become more important than who made it? It seems a ridiculous idea, when the most sought-after watches are still those made by individual watchmakers, whether working under their own names or for larger brands the more complicated watches from the top maisons are almost always made by a single watchmaker.

However, two forces at play are changing the picture. The first is that, for most watches, more of the actual watchmaking than ever before is done by machine, a direction of travel that improving technology and a tougher business environment is propelling more surely than ever. The result is that the difference between one watch and another is owed more to the engineering design than the skill of the watchmakers doing the assembly its who designed the system that made the watch rather than who made it.

The second is that the watch industrys traditional approach to design is simply out of date. In a design-literate world in which we know who designed everything from our chairs to our shirts, to accept that our watches simply come from this brand or that maison no longer makes sense. The watch industry takes its own good time to adjust, but design is now part of the conversation in ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier decades.

Ceramica by Rado, 1,705. rado.com

The watchmaking world was actually relatively quick to adopt the idea of brands in the modern sense Longines, in 1889, was one of the first to register a trademark and the winged hourglass is the oldest extant registration at WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organisation). At a time when precision and quality were much more variable than today, brands focused their marketing on those qualities almost to the exclusion of everything else. For most of the 20th century, only a few brands had a consistent look across their collections and the design of a watch might owe as much to external suppliers (of cases, dials and hands) as to any directed aesthetic. Instead, the priorities were functional both in terms of the retail product offered and the manufacturing process. Jack Heuer, himself an acknowledged devotee of mid-century architects such as Oscar Niemayer, revealed that the 1963 Carrera owed its most identifiable feature (an angled inner flange on which the tachymetre scale was printed) to a new method for fixing the crystal in place. From almost the same period came what is generally accepted as the finest watch design of all, the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, for which there seems to be no evidence at all as to who designed it.

There were exceptions of course: Louis Cartier, whose Tank is a century old this year, clearly had a strong vision for the watches he designed. Similarly, Hans Wilsdorf of Rolex and Henri Stern of Patek Philippe were detail obsessives that allowed nothing to pass without their approval. Nevertheless, the actual business of producing final designs was left to draughtsmen working to order and, as Jaeger-LeCoultres Reverso or even early Panerais demonstrate, having anonymous designers didnt mean poor design.

Edge by Movado, 800. movado.com

Nevertheless, the post-war rise of the designer was inevitably going to reach the watch world. That it did so first in the United States probably shouldnt be a surprise. Movados Museum Watch, with its dial being defined by a solitary dot at 12 to symbolise the sun at high noon, was designed in 1947 by the Bauhaus-influenced artist Nathan George Horwitt. (NB: it was first made by Vacheron & Constantin-LeCoultre Watches Inc, and only later produced by Movado.) The Museum Watch might have been an anomaly, or at least a rarity (Warhol also designed a watch for Movado) had Hamilton not followed suit a decade later.

The company had been experimenting with a new electronic movement since 1946 and wanted the watch to have a suitably futuristic design when it was finally ready in 1957 it turned to Richard Arbib, an industrial designer with a reputation for ideas that captured the space-age zeitgeist. The result was the Ventura, a watch unlike anything before, though its fame owes as much to Elvis Presley wearing one as its futuristic lines.

TYPE 3 B in titanium/black matt pvd by Ressence, 33,500. ressencewatches.com

Matthew Beedle

If the next decades most famous watches were, effectively, unsigned, it was a jobbing watch designer, Grald Genta, that would change the terms of engagement with a string of highly recognisable and still sought-after designs for Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe and others. And while it was only once collectors began to value his work that his name escaped the industry and he achieved recognition in his own right, it was his reputation in the industry that allowed him the creative freedom to make sure it was his ideas that saw the light of day.

Gentas path was followed in relatively quick succession by Jorg Hysek who designed the 222 for Vacheron Constantin (from which the contemporary Overseas is derived) and went on to produce key designs for Breguet, Seiko, TAG Heuer and Tiffany & Co. By 2005, when Dior planned the launch of a new mens collection it was unthinkable that the watch would be designed without the houses then artistic director, Hedi Slimane, being closelyinvolved.

Octo 41 mm by Bulgari, 5,800. bulgari.com

Matthew Beedle

Now its simply a matter of strategic choice, there are brands that emphasise design and brands with other stories to tell. For Patek Philippe, the maisons identity must come first, second and third, but no one at Patek pretends that design is irrelevant (you might even hear a whisper to the effect that Mme Christine Stern likes to keep a watchful eye on proceedings). Similarly, the house styles of both Panerai and A. Lange & Shne are so central to their brand identities that it is, effectively, the brand that signs the watches. Rado, meanwhile, has long made design a priority, regularly working with outside designers such as Konstantin Grcic.

Smaller independents are naturally somewhat freer to produce designs that challenge and with several having come into existence from the wider design world rather than watchmaking, its been no surprise to see some fairly radical takes on the basic form of a wristwatch. Of the more successful, Benot Mintiens Ressence project and Martin Frei, the co-founder of Urwerk stand out for having introduced designs that have come to be seen as almost natural. Pushing hardest at the envelope of the past 20 years has been Maximilian Bsser. Firstly through the Opus series that he created for Harry Winston and then through his MB&F project, Bsser has encouraged designers, watchmakers and, crucially, collectors to embrace a much more liberal approach to design. Theres a fine line between the intriguing and the ridiculous though, which is why Bsser (a) is clear about his intentions and (b) works so closely with Eric Giroud, the industrys go-to designer.

HM8 CAN-AM in wg by MB&F, 78,000. mbandf.com

Matthew Beedle

Even for maisons where it is the brand that takes centre stage, theres been a much greater acknowledgement of design as part of a brands identity. Jaeger-LeCoultre is a serious watchmaking Grande Maison first and foremost, but have long given equal billing to Janek Deleskiewicz, the brands artistic director for the past three decades. More recently, Bulgari has elevated the director of its Watches Design Centre, Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani, to a starring role in the development of its products. Meanwhile, Deleskiewiczs former boss was Jrme Lambert, has moved to Montblanc where hes appointed Davide Cerrato to give life to the vision that Lambert has for the brand. The critical and commercial success that Montblanc has achieved owes much to the partnership Lamberts created, pointing to the critical role that the CEO plays.

So should you now care more about the designer than the watchmaker or the brand? On occasion yes, but it isnt a binary question. Design matters, even in the most horological of spheres Vacheron Constantins 57260, the most complicated watch ever made, certainly tested the watchmakers and engineers, but Vacheron were right to emphasise the achievement of the maisons design team in making visual sense of such a dense package of indications and dials.

Styling by Grace Gilfeather

This was first published in GQ magazine. Subscribe now to get 6 issues of GQ for only 15, including free access to the interactive iPad and iPhone editions. Alternatively, choose from one of our fantastic digital-only offers, available across all devices.

The GQ watch guide 2017

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Does it matter who designed your watch? - GQ.com

JUNE 17, 2017

THE MASSACHUSETTS-BASED writer, teacher, and composer Jan Swafford is famed for his biographies of Beethoven, Brahms, and Charles Ives, as well as his beloved Vintage Guide to Classical Music. Basic Books has just published Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music, a clear and lively book that does exactly what it promises, in a series of chapters built on historical periods and individual composers.

The following interview was conducted over email, shortly after Language of the Spirit was released.

SCOTT TIMBERG: There have been, over the decades, numerous tomes on classical music. What kind of gap does yours fill?

JAN SWAFFORD: My old Vintage Guide was aimed at adult music lovers or potential ones, and also at schools. Language of the Spirit is mainly aimed at schools, secondly at adults. I imagine there have always been books for music classes the old Joseph Machlis book, The Enjoyment of Music, went through several editions and, modified by other hands, is still around. Aaron Copland did his bit with What to Listen for in Music. I wanted to write a similarkind of thing in a more lively, humanistic, and entertaining way. At the same time, the book is written by a practicing musician and composer who looks at the profession from the inside. My basic assumption is that this music is not some grand abstraction, not an adjunct to a lifestyle, but a special and profound kind of communication among people; its main impact is not intellectual but emotional. If the book has a central message, I suppose thats it.

Decades ago, books, courses, and television programs on serious music, visual art, and the like were plentiful Leonard Bernsteins Young Peoples Concerts, Kenneth Clarks Civilisation, and so on. Has that approach dropped out of the mainstream in a world of postmodern niches, the demotion of high culture, and constant digital connection?

Ill reply with a story. My mother was a high school English teacher much involved with poetry and literature. When I was cleaning out the house after she died, I found stacks of articles on major literary figures Eliot, Frost, et al that were mostly torn out of Life and Time magazines, which, at the time, were enormously popular, omnipresent. Every week Time had a classical music piece. People like Hemingway and Eliot were regularly on the cover. Whats on the coverof magazines in print and online these days? Rock stars and movie stars. TV began in the 50s with vastly ambitious ideas about public education featuring people like Bernstein on the networks, before public television. Clark was later, on the BBC and PBS, but PBS doesnt really do things of that scope anymore. The reasons are obvious, all having to do with money.

So yeah, theres been a gigantic dumbing-down of the culture. In the United States, its moving toward the point where pop culture may be the only culture left, with everything else having to suck up to it. I think thats a bad situation, obviously. On the other side of the coin, orchestras still exist, even if they arent exactly thriving (partly because the players are getting paid better). But theyre still there. Mozart still sells out Boston Symphony Hall, there are hundreds of chamber concerts, and millions are listening to classical music on Spotify and YouTube, in unpredictable ways. Classical music is a lousy profession, but it always has been. And it has always needed some kind of subsidy to exist just like railroads.

Can you tell us about a composer who demonstrated not just a long, but a protean, multichaptered career, on the order of a Miles Davis or Bob Dylan? What personal talents and social conditions made that possible?

Somebody who had a long, strongcareer, from beginning to end Certainly Ives was multichaptered and protean, but he was largely felled by illness in his 40s. Saint-Sans was a prodigy who had a gigantic career born in 1835 and died in 1921 and I think he wrote books on science, but he was basically a brilliant second-rater. I guess the best answer is Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who both got started early, were prolific through long lives, and went through significant evolutions within them. And they both wrote first-rate stuff into old age. But maybe the champ was Bach, brilliant from his teens, writing lasting work from his early 20s, and ending with his most profound music the B-minor Mass and Art of Fugue.

By contrast, is there a major composer with a very brief heyday not someone who died young like Schubert, but someone whose genius seemed to come and go quite quickly? What happened to him?

I wonder whether the answer here isnt Mendelssohn, who wrote some of his best music in his teens and, from that point, gradually ran out of inspiration until his death, mostly from overwork, at 38.

From your perch amid the ancient forests and verdant river valleys of New England, how vital does the classical music in Southern California and on the West Coast seem in the 21st century?

Dont know much about the SoCal scene, except that I had a gig with the LA Phil last year and they sounded splendid. I dont actually, as it were, like Disney Hall, or any other Gehry, but the Halls acoustics are fabulous. And there were good crowds for the all-Beethoven series. Besides that, Disney Hall began a massive upscaling of the neighborhood around it, which Im told was a dump but now has museums, schools, restaurants, et cetera.

Your writing is known for the parallels you draw between classical music and other fields, especially art, architecture, and intellectual history. Why do you find these metaphors useful?

Theyre not metaphors to me theyre direct connections. I believe theres such a thing as a zeitgeist, which is a matter of something in the air that affects everybody, and artists in whatever discipline are part of the zeitgeist. Im not particularly mystical about it, but a time has a character. Freud influenced everything, helped create the Austro-German fin-de-sicle zeitgeist, even for the people who never read him. I think Faulkner was influenced by Einsteinian relativity, though he could not have read Einstein, and by Freud, though he never read Freud.

In my early 20s, I imagined a choral piece based on vowels and their connection to the names of gods which came to pass, not in a piece of mine but in Karlheinz Stockhausens Stimmung, which Id never heard. It was an idea in the air. So again, the connections between the arts and intellectual and political and religious history are real, not metaphorical. Art comes from life and returns to life, and music is no exception.

In your teaching and dealing with civilians, does there seem to be a composer or historical period that serves as a gateway drug to the larger world of classical music?

No. I tend to pick out irresistible works from any period and play those everything from Carissimis Jephte to Bachs Sheep May Safely Graze to Mozarts Elvira Madigan slow movement to Mussorgskys Great Gate of Kiev to The Rite of Spring to Ivess Psalm 67.

What writers on music, or on the arts in general, do you admire and suspect may have shaped your style and approach?

When I was first doing music journalism I primed myself with G. B. Shaws music criticism, which is the best inspiration I know. Hes the main reason I cant call myself the best music writer in English. (There are other reasons.) At the moment I cant think of much else. And when Id developed a voice as a writer, I didnt need to read Shaw anymore.

I read a lot of James Agees film criticism, too, which helped: The picture deserves, like four out of five other movies, to walk alone, tinkle a little bell, and cry Unclean, Unclean. Agee showed me the value of a zinger line. Likewise, Anthony Lane. The best zinger I know is from Thoreau: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. That line went through some eight drafts, all of which said the same thing, but only of them said it for the ages.

Is there a composer or piece that, rather than growing stale or familiar over the decades, retains and deepens its fascination?

My first choice is Bachs B-minor Mass, because, for about 50 years, Ive found it incomparable from beginning to end. Meanwhile, as these things do, its changed for me as Ive changed. Also the Beethoven Missa solemnis, which I first got to know in high school (maybe the first score I ever owned), and is enormously complex and multifaceted, hard to take in at first, but sublime when youve managed to get a handle on it. Ivess Fourth Symphony fascinated me from the beginning and has only grown since (while Ive burned out on some other Ives pieces).

Lets start where it all began, with the origins of music: What does it tell us that every human society, past and present, East and West, has some kind of music? (And most, I think, use something resembling the pentatonic scale.) Do you have any hunches as to why this practice, which has no clear evolutionary or territorial benefit, would arise and persist?

As Ive said in print, I think humans are innately musical, and that music evolved with us, alongside language and at first there may have been little difference between music and words and religion. But as I also write, single-celled animals respond to sound, so the idea that sound in itself is meaningful begins at the cellular level, and, from there, goes up to the highest brain functions. And also heart and soul functions. Its built into us.

If Susanne Langer is right, symbolic responses are built into us too, so we innately respond to all sound, including music, as if it were a symbol of something. That means, among other things, that instrumental music, without words, is the most intimate and personal kind of symbol, because what you bring to it is what you, in particular, are. Thats true of all art, but I think more so of abstract music, which we dont perceive as abstract at all.

Scott Timberg is the editor of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles and author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

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The Most Intimate Symbol: Jan Swafford on Classical Music - lareviewofbooks

It was a wipeout. Failing to win a single contest in 1,004 local elections in Italy on Sunday (11 June), Beppe Grillos 5 Star Movement was quickly assigned to the list of declining populist parties that began with Geert Wilders defeat in Marchs Dutch poll.

Said to be inspired by the Trump Effect, Italian voters gave their votes to the centre-right and centre-left, going so far as to post a Lega Nord/Forza Italia coalition victory in Grillos hometown, Genoa, a traditionally left-wing city.

The one-time comedian was quick to write off the defeat as a symptom of growing pains.

The M5S was the most present political force in this electoral round. The other parties camouflaged themselves, above all the PD which presented itself in around half the constituencies the M5S did, he told Ansa. The results are a sign of slow but inexorable growth.

Grillo might be right. 5 Star is no ordinary populist party. Indeed, calling it populist is itself something of a stretch, though the M5S leader has done little to dampen the comparison, given his embrace of Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and, umm, Donald Trump.

More importantly, 5 Star has managed to fill a void in Italian politics that was opened up by the collapse of the countrys left, particularly that created by the fragmentation of the Communist Party in the early 1990s, of which Grillo was once a member.

Adding a healthy dose of environmentalism and anarchism, and a typically American embrace of the democratic possibilities opened up by the Internet, made the 5 Star Movement an especially distinct beast, with little ideologically in common with other populist parties such as Germanys far-right Alternative fr Deutschland.

The tone of the partys politics has always been counter-cultural, albeit hippie-like, sans the labour emphasis of the older Italian left. Given that Grillo and party co-founder Gianroberto Casaleggio were both baby boomers, it made sense.

They were, in fact, ageing hippies, who, in classic 1960s fashion, had held onto most of the contrarian ideologies of their generation.

That cultural mix is what made 5 Star such a potent and appealing, Zeitgeist-like force, particularly in the context of the economic crisis created by the decadence of Silvio Berlusconis disastrous four terms in office, during which the party was born.

5 Star didnt have to offer much in the way of a concrete political programme. It just had to emphasise the anti-establishment values associated with Italys declining left, and the culture of its post-war heyday.

The problem with this, and the one which makes it less than competitive with Italys right, is its anti-immigration stance, one that Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi resurrected this week, calling for a moratorium on migration to the capital.

A former advocate of Romes profound diversity, the scandal-ridden Raggi could not help but sound a bit insincere, smarting, as 5 Star was, from its electoral performance on Sunday.

Hence the significance of the electoral resurgence of the Lega Nord and Berlusconis Forza Italia. Both took an estimated 13% in Sundays vote, in no small part due to the consistency of their historic antipathy towards immigration.

Decidedly nationalist parties, and also avowedly pro-business, the Lega Nord and Forza Italia are also less ideologically contradictory than 5 Star.

Their return to prominence, at 5 Stars expense, helps highlight the ideological inconsistencies of Grillos party, and why immigration is a core weakness.

Hating Roma, for example, is not normally associated with environmentalism. Even in Italy, where fascism always indulged a mix of left and right.

If 5 Star continues to haemorrhage voters to its competitors, it will be impossible to ignore why.

Appoint a queer premier. The Serbian government has come under fire once again after the Nelt Group announced that its facilities in downtown Belgrade had been illegally razed.EURACTV.rs reports.

Democratic deficit. France is mulling the introduction of proportional representation for its next legislative election. It could take inspiration from its European neighbours, all of which bar the United Kingdom use a version of PR.

Hungary is such a drag. Budapests new NGO law is discriminatory and restricts the free movement of capital. This could affect other kinds of economic activity, former Commission official Heather Grabbe toldEURACTIV Germany.

Refugee crisis 1.0. Almost a decade before Lampedusa became a symbol of todays refugee crisis, the Canary Islands another southern European border faced a similar challenge, reports EURACTIV media partner EFE.

Cold War still hot. Ion Iliescu and 13 other officials have been ordered to stand trial on charges of crimes against humanity in connection with the crackdown on a Bucharest protest in 1990, the Romanian prosecutors office said on Tuesday.

No taxes, no peace. The growing trend of distributing vouchers to employees to avoid taxes has raised eyebrows in the Greek government, which has moved to crack down on unprecedented levels of tax evasion in the cash-strapped country.

Refugees matter. The EU launched legal action on Tuesday against Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic for refusing to take in their share of refugees under a controversial solidarity plan.

Go West. Macedonias new leaders showed fresh resolve to revive the countrys stalled bid for membership of the EU and NATO on Monday by vowing to mend relations with estranged EU neighbours Greece and Bulgaria and implement long-delayed reforms.

Hippies are better at farming. Italys anti-system 5-Star Movement looked set to suffer a severe setback in local elections on Sunday, failing to make the run-off vote in almost all the main cities up for grabs.

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Trans-Europe Express: 5 Star fails on immigration - EURACTIV

(Random House) US: Jun 2017

For much of the 21st centurylike the decades preceding itidealism has seemed in short supply in America. As the country lurches from dubious democracy to outright oligarchy, and the fledgling achievements of the Civil Rights era are back-pedaled into barely veiled disenfranchisement and targeted violence against black Americans and other minorities, idealism has seemed the scarcest resource in a country where hope itself has inexorably dwindled. Even the countrys dissenters those pundits and politicians who challenge whatever status quo holds sway in the halls of Washington and board rooms of Wall Streetseem more intent on proving the legitimacy of their own voices than proving the legitimacy of any high ideals.

However, suggests Jeremy McCarter, the spirit of radicalism and idealism may be returning to America. As his book went to print in early 2017 he witnessed the march of a nation against the president it found itself saddled with; a president who seemed to embody all of the countrys most terrible qualities.

Perhaps hes right, and something is awakening in the American soul. Perhaps it requires great struggle against the most formidable and despicable of foes to break through the collective cynicism of a country disillusioned with its ideals; to quicken a peoples heart and enable them to believe in the potential for progress once again.

Driven in part by the hope this might be the case, McCarter looks back to a former century for inspiration. Young Radicals might appear on the surface to be a group biography, but its subject is actually the spirit of an age. McCarter explores the progressive-minded radical idealism of the 1910s, an era which produced some of the centurys greatest hopes and greatest horrors. In America: socialism and suffrage. Internationally: world war and the Russian Revolution.

Behind the fury of events and ideas were vibrant, living people, and McCarter weaves his narrative primarily around the stories and struggles of five of them. Walter Lippmann starts off the tale as an employee of the newly elected Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York; he quickly grows disgusted with the municipal administrations failure to implement serious socialism and embarks on his own career as a writer and journalist, helping to found The New Republic magazine and eventually serving as advisor to presidents.

Alice Paul: the Quaker who learned militant resistance from the suffragettes in Britain and brought it back to America where she fought for womens right to vote, and broader equality, until her death in 1977. John Reed, swashbuckling journalist, poet, and playwright who produced the most famous chronicle of the Russian Revolution, tried to kickstart communism in America, and died as a member of the fledgling Soviet government in 1920, the only American to be honoured with burial at the Kremlin. Max Eastman, editor of the radical journal The Masses. And Randolph Bourne, radical writer and essayist whose refusal to commit himself to any ideological stricture was no doubt aided in part by his tragically early death.

The five core characters, and the many others who came into their orbits, were united by more than just their radical organizations, journals, and Greenwich Village roots. There was a spirit in the air. America was idealistic. People believed they could identify the countrys problems, and by thinking about them, solve them. There was a deep-seated faith that the answers were out there; a faith that coincided with the birth or maturing of doctrines that would go on to play an important role in 20th century history: feminism, socialism, communism, internationalism, transnationalism. There was a concomitant belief in the power of art to change the worldnon-commercial; radical; political artart for and by artists, not for or by corporate profit or state-sponsored regimes.

There was a purity to the struggle and idealism of the era, or at least McCarter helps it to appear that way in hindsight.

Of course, he handles his characters with passion, but also integrity. He knows they werent perfect. Alice Pauls suffrage militancy collaborates with white supremacists. John Reed and Max Eastman both wind up disillusioned after their first-hand experiences as part of the Russian revolutionary regime. Walter Lippmann becomes an apologist for Americas involvement in World War I, lured in by the prospect of influence at the highest levels of power in Washington.

But the gradual evolution of these characters is at least as instructive, and important, as the genesis of their radical idealism.

Biography of an Era

McCarters subjects at first appear to be a disparate, random grouping of intellectuals and activists, waging their own struggles and lives, linked here and there by common causes and employers. But what gradually emergesand McCarter does a consummate job in breathing it slowly into lifeis a common spirit of idealism and radicalism that animates not only this core of characters but also the movements and people around them. From the arts to politics to journalism and more, every field of endeavor seems infused by this sense of grappling with big ideas. No matter where the characters turn their energy, their projects take on a sense of fundamental radical importance.

During a summer break, John Reed, Louise Bryant and several others form what would become the famous Provincetown Players, at first just for a lark but they take it so seriously it develops a life of its own (in the process they accidentally discover and recruit Eugene ONeill, who would go on to become what many consider Americas greatest playwright). The theatre troupes constitution, drafted during an intense 24-hour writing session by Eastman, Reed, and a couple of others, deeply resembles the manifesto for their radical journal The Masses, grappling with issues of democratic and artistic control by the artists themselves, and dedicated to presenting the sorts of things capitalism would not be interested in. The two projectsand countless others during these few yearsare really one and the same.

The same radicals, pursuing the same dreams, facing the same problems: The Masses and the Provincetown Players are, at heart, twin children of the zeitgeist. Both explicitly reject the limiting, falsifying effects of commercial production. Both see a true and honest reckoning with the facts of American life as a step toward liberation. Both proceed not with doggedness, but with a light heart. There is, in both, a lively spirit of play.

The First World War is a constant backdrop to the throbbing beat of this zeitgeist, both tempering and quickening it. America watches in horror as Europeheretofore considered by many the apex of the civilized worlddescends into barbarous, self-destructive bloodshed. President Woodrow Wilson is initially determined to keep America out of the war, and public sentiment (along with the radicals) are on his side. Yet as the war drags on, so do the cries for America to do something, especially when growing numbers of American vessels and passengers wind up as unintended casualties of German U-Boats in the Atlantic.

Yet for the time being America rests atop its moral high ground, preaching peace to both sides, ready and waiting to help the world rebuild whenever the war ends. Wilsons administration sends a moralizing message to both sides: no matter who wins, the war will have been a setback for human civilization, and whatever settlement ends the war must not be grounded in vengeance but in ensuring that new systems are put in place to prevent war from ever erupting again. The government itself seems tinged with the idealism of the era. Peace without victory is the call coming from the White House; it is, perhaps, the last stand of institutionalized American idealism and morality.

When more American casualties pile up, and when the Germans not only refuse to rein in their U-Boats but are caught trying to provoke Mexico into a war with the United States, Wilsons administration finally opts for war (they werent entirely hapless victims: militarists and would-be war profiteers at high levels had been advocating for participation in the war for years). But even then, they attempt to varnish it with a moralistic sheen. Granted, war-making American administrations have always claimed they were fighting for some high ideal, but Wilson gives his vision a bit more substance: not only a war for democracy, but he suddenly injects the new vision of a League of Nations, a super-governing global body with the power to prevent future wars, into the mix. Its a fitting capstone to this radical moment that even the most institutionalized Establishment figure, the president, clings on to a radical idea as well.

In many ways, Young Radicals is an innovative history of the First World War. While it engages a broader range of subject matter than just the war, it also offers an important history of the war from the perspective of how it impacted progressive and radical socio-political movements in America. When America finally enters the war it signals a crack in American utopianism and idealism. From the dubious idealism of President Wilsons administration and its efforts to stay out of the war, to the split in the left caused by Americas eventual entry, the war impacted American progressivism just as powerfully as these young radicals impacted the war. And impact it they did, by challenging its repressive anti-sedition and anti-espionage legislation, which wound up shutting down radical papers like The Masses and eventually deporting hundreds of radicals to Russia after the war. Yet amidst these defeats, the radicals had victories, too, defending themselves from prison and worse in passionately argued court cases. Much of our popular ideals of free speech were shaped in pivotal ways during this period.

One major impact the war had on the radicals was in splitting their ranks, between those (like Lippmann) who bought the governments claim that it was fighting for democracy, peace and other high ideals; and those who saw Americas entry into the war as treachery and imperialism. These latter included not only radical socialists like Eastman and Reed but also Paul and her suffrage movement, which rightly pointed to the hypocrisy of a government that claimed it was going to war for democracy while it denied democracy to tens of millions of women voters at home.

Lippmann himself became an ideologue for the Presidents war-making, narcissistically convinced he would help craft the post-war new world order. When finally faced with the fact of both his exclusion from decision making and the failure of America to achieve the idealistic post-war treaty it sought, he seeks redemption by working to scuttle the fatally flawed treaty. Interestingly, President Wilson himself becomes almost a sixth core character, ostensibly the farthest thing from a radical (as President) yet almost helplessly sharing in the radical and idealistic spirit of the age despite himself.

Young Radicals is a beautiful book; a desperately-needed book for the present era. The prose is passionate and poetic; the narrative is fast-moving, riveting and resonates with the very idealism that its author seeks to explore. McCarter writes with passion and integrity. Its a book that renders hope real again, and reminds us that idealism and progressive radicalism are not terms of insult; they are core American values that America needs desperately to rediscover. Its only ever idealism that has driven America forward, notes McCarter in closing. In a dark era like the present, its more vital than ever to (re)discover and cling to the most audacious ideals, for they are the only bulwark against the destructive power of cynicism.

Whatever happens, we ought to be braced by the example of the young radicals: how they discovered their ideals, made a decision to fight for them, and went on fighting even when the battle turned against them. Their defeats were painful, but not final. Battles for ideals never are. Ruins stop being ruins when you build with them.

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Whatever Happened to American Idealism? - PopMatters