Snip snip

Earlier this week, I realized I had been in London for three months already. More specifically, I realized that I had been in London for three months already and it was definitely, urgently, unquestionably time for a haircut. My bangs had grown past my eyebrows and then past my eyes weeks ago, and I'd adopted a swept to the side style that I hoped looked deliberate or even just passable, rather than like a feeble attempt to conceal my ill-kept locks. Previously, I'd attempted to trim my own bangs, but it didn't go well. Soon after I'd tried it I was told at a dinner party that I looked a bit like John Bunyan, so I decided not to try it again. Plus, much as I love Tom, I wasn't about to ask him to trim my bangs, so I decided to find a hairdresser.

In most aspects of my life I'm not superstitious or religious, but I am, I suppose, a bit religious about who cuts my hair. I figure that hair is one accessory worth investing in: you wear it every day, and it has the potential to make things look better, rather than worse, so why not? Plus I've been growing out my hair, and I wanted to find someone who'd restore order without chopping off too much length. I'm growing it out in part because I really want to have long hair again, and haven't since I was very young, and in part because my hair is finally longer than Tom's, and I'm not about to give up that hard-won victory just yet. It was cool to have hair shorter than his, and maybe I'll go back to it sometime, but not just yet.

So, I started looking around for a place. Everything in London is expensive to begin with, so I couldn't go straight to the place where Tilda Swinton gets her hair done. Mind you, I was sorely tempted, especially as it's called Tommy Guns. But instead I settled on Hair and Jerome in Spitalfields, in East London. I didn't know anyone who'd been there, but I thought, well, it's worth a try. It's run by ex-Parisians, and the walls are an amazing shade of dark yellow, with contrasting black trim. Everything is perfectly done, and the barber chairs are antiques. When I walked in, I thought, these are all signs of a place that will be too cool for school, not to mention for me. I was wrong, though: it was very unpretentious.

Anyhow, I was reminded of how the experience of going to someone new for a haircut requires complete trust. You have to cede faith to the scissors. It's been a while since I've had to do this, and there were a few moments when I found my heart in my throat, as Ismarie, the lady in question, cut off huge pieces of my hair. I kept thinking, wait, I thought we were going to keep it long, and here there are these four-inch-long pieces falling to the floor. But it turned out very well in the end, and I have to say, I dig it. Ismarie herself was amazing, and could have been right out of a Garance Dore blog post. She had effortless elegance, and was surprisingly hilarious. Telling me about going to a friend's house, but being warned that the friend's mother didn't like French people, she said to me, "I don't understand! It's not like I showed up all like this!" -- and she shoved her hand between the buttons of her shirt, Napoleon-style. Awesome.

The Holidays

In the past, I would not have described myself as particularly gung-ho when it comes to the holidays. I love the small family rituals we have, like putting the fat, old-style colored lights up on the tree, the sort that I'm not sure are even made any more, or eating lots and lots of stollen on Christmas morning, sometimes in combination with pannetone, or battling Dad about whether it's ok to have Mannheim Steamroller providing the soundtrack. I'm a naysayer on the last issue, just for the record. But in general, aside from my enthusiasm about seeing family and friends, and having a generally expansive excuse to eat, drink, and make merry -- plus an occasion to bake new kinds of cookies, like ones you shape in spoons -- I'm not usually holiday-crazy. You'd never find me wearing a headband with reindeer antlers (which I spotted at the airport a few years ago), nor a flashing necklace. I don't carol, and my interest in nativity scenes tends more towards stories about how churches have had to start installing GPS tracking devices in baby Jesus to prevent theft than towards strict scriptural interpretation.

Now, I'm not wearing an appliqued santa sweatshirt while writing this, but I have to say that living in England has made me much more keen about holidays. Usually Thanksgiving passes without too much fuss, but this year, when we had a Thanksgiving here with my parents and Tom's grandmother, one of Tom's brothers, and Kristian, I felt the full onset of holiday enthusiasm. I suppose I associate Thanksgiving and Christmas with the States, and so having a Thanksgiving meal with all the fixings is a way to feel as if I'm not so far from home. Cranberry sauce turns out to be much more important when you're in England: somehow it makes the States seem less far away. I'm not quite to the place of saying, admiringly, like a group of tourists I saw a few weeks ago, "Now that's an American car!" when a gigantic stretch Navigator rolled by -- that doesn't make me feel at home! -- but I am feeling especially keen about the holidays this year. But I'll keep it under control, I promise. And if I cave and get the headband, I'll be sure to wear it while singing carols out of the sunroof of a SUV limo.

The White Ribbon, or when the movies won't let you off easy

I don't know if Michael Haneke's film, The White Ribbon, is out in the States yet, so if it isn't, ignore this. It won Cannes and has generally been getting a lot of attention, I think -- there was an article about Haneke in The New Yorker (here's a snippet) and the BFI has organized a festival to celebrate Haneke's life and work. He's definitely made his mark: this recent film has been called his best, and it clearly develops the only other film of his I've seen -- Cache -- presenting an even more pared-down and relentless meditation on violence so systematic that it appears sourceless. In Cache, a French family keeps on receiving footage of themselves that has been filmed without their knowledge, and menacing things happen to their son. The basic conceit -- surveillance without a clearly-identified source, cruelty of and to children, and a preponderance of violence -- carries over to The White Ribbon. In other words, Haneke seems to have a basic form he's working with, and he keeps telling the same sort of story in different historical settings.

The White Ribbon is set in the Germany of 1913-14, as no viewer can fail to notice. The assassination of Ferdinand is important towards the end of the film, and while the first World War doesn't make a direct appearance per se, it's clear that Haneke is connecting the terrible things happening in a small village, dominated by a baron and populated by workers who staff the baron's estate and work the surrounding fields, to the way that WWI and WWII wreaked such havoc across Europe. It's clear, in other words, that the trauma of the twentieth century is something that Haneke feels we still need to process. The link that many have wanted to draw, having seen this film, is between the group of children at the center of the film's events, and the fact that they will be adults on the eve of WWII. The connection, in other words, is one between the (apparently unreasonable) cruelty of children and the (obviously unreasonable) cruelty of Fascism. But more than that, Haneke is trying, I think, to take an almost allegorical approach to the history of the twentieth century by presenting the viewer with a series of events that happen in one village to a handful of people. He suggests that these events -- which are unsolved crimes -- are paradigmatic of the rise of Fascism, but more importantly, he shows the problem with thinking about it this way, and suggests that it is necessary to harness responsibility for atrocities to human actors, rather than blaming larger systems or ideologies.

One thing I've found to be true of both Cache and The White Ribbon is that violence in each film appears paratactic. This is Haneke's way, I think, of representing the difficulty of understanding the points of contact between individual human intention or agency and events that are much larger than the work of one particular person. The gang of children who uncoincidentally show up at the door of the houses where injured victims of unsolved crimes are convalescing want to see "if they can do anything." They aren't there just out of curiosity, nor just out of atonement. It's hard to tell why they're there, and Haneke deliberately leaves it unresolved. But this atomizes the sense of responsibility such that characters seem to be harmed by things (a wire stretched across a field that trips a horse; a rotten floor in a sawmill) and seem to take their revenge on things (a field of cabbage). You as a viewer feel terribly unsatisfied with leaving the cinema not knowing who did what, and one way of making sense of this is to say that Haneke's films are polemics against not believing that humans have to be held responsible for harm to other humans that they have caused; that the idea of accident or contingency is unsatisfactory, especially in the context of a mass atrocity which was facilitated by active as well as passive participation.

I lay awake for a long time the night I saw The White Ribbon. In part, I was frustrated because I didn't think there was a reason for all the violence Haneke used, nor did I think that he deployed it sensitively, despite what the program notes suggested. But I suppose it made me think about the claim Adorno makes about the impossibility of lyric (i.e. a kind of poetry of beauty) after the Holocaust. I tend to be very resistant to Adorno, because I frequently find him a pompous ass and think he's subject to the worse sort of hypocrisy, living this hugely decadent lifestyle while decrying the fall of civilization and the bankruptcy of modern morality. But watching Haneke's film, which is beautiful but also horrible -- you can't take one without the other -- made me think that maybe, strangely, that claim about committed art and the impossibility of beauty as such after 1939: maybe that's right. There's another observation Adorno makes -- this time in the company of Horkheimer -- about cartoons being a kind of cathected humor which just makes you laugh at the brutality you're subject to. Haneke isn't cartoonish or antic, but he lures you in by giving you something beautiful and then showing it to be terribly destructive. This is, perhaps, the same kind of move, and regardless of how The White Ribbon fares, I think it's part of the longer conversation about how aesthetic possibilities are directly shaped by certain large and irreversible events in history.

Nigel Slater loves you

Make this. It shall not disappoint. It's from The Kitchen Diaries, Nigel Slater's fantastic chronicle of a year of cooking.

Onion Soup Without Tears

onions - 4 medium
butter - 40 g
a glass of white wine
vegetable stock - 1.5 litres
a small French loaf
grated Gruyere, Emmental or other good melting cheese - 150 g

Set the oven at 200°C. Peel the onions and cut them in half from tip to root, then lay them in a roasting tin and add the butter, salt, and some pepper. Roast until they are tender and soft, and toasted dark brown here and there. You might have to turn them now and again.
Cut the onions into thick segments. Put them in a saucepan with the wine and bring to the boil. Let the wine bubble until it almost disappears (you just want the flavour, not the alcohol), then pour in the stock. Bring to the boil and simmer for about twenty minutes.
Just before you want to serve the soup, make the cheese croûtes. Cut the loaf into thin slices and toast lightly on one side under a hot grill. Turn them over and sprinkle with the grated cheese. Get the soup hot, ladle it into bowls and float the cheese croûtes on top. Place the bowls under a hot grill and leave until the cheese melts. Eat immediately, whilst the cheese is still stringy and molten.

Enough for 4.

The art crowd

Don't worry, I haven't disappeared under a great big stack of books in the British Library. (Do you remember that story in the NYT several years ago about the man who had so many books in his apartment that when a few stacks fell over, he couldn't leave the place? Well, it's nothing like that here.) Tom and I have just returned from a few days in Paris: it was Tom's reading week, which meant that he didn't have to teach, and I was happy to take a few days away from work, so we hopped on the train and headed for the land of stinky cheese. It was a great visit: we went to this spice shop where there was a "bar du sniffing" -- a place where you could smell all these different kinds of spices -- and to more bakeries than I'd care to admit. As I have probably said to many of you, if I had to be a type of food, I'd definitely choose to be a carbohydrate. And if I could have a pain au chocolat for breakfast and lunch most days, I would. Then I'd start to look like the ladies in the Reubens room in the Louvre...

Speaking of the Louvre, I have to say that visiting that museum is completely exhausting. You feel a bit like all the masterpieces are just dominating each other and dominating you. The way they're arranged, in these colossal long halls, sometimes hung one above the other, makes it impossible to focus on one. Instead, the composite effect is like seeing all of these postcards of masterpieces pasted up on the wall. The thing is, though, they aren't postcards; they're the real thing, but you're so overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of them that it's hard to believe that each and every painting is the real deal, an original. You see a whole run of David and the first two or three take your breath away, but pretty soon nothing seems impressive because everything is. Paul Valery has this little essay on museums, which I read at Tom's urging -- and though in general I'm staunchly pro-museum, in this case I think Valery's exactly right. Here he is, from "The Problem of Museums" (1923):

"Only a civilization neither voluptuous nor rational could have constructed this house of incoherence. I don't know what to make of the insane result of this neighborhood of dead visions. They are jealous of, and argue over, the attention which gives them their existence. They call from all sides for my undivided attention. They throw into panic the living force which carries with it all the machinery of the body towards that which entices it.

"The ear won't support hearing ten orchestras at once. The spirit could never follow, never drive several distinct operations, and there aren't any simultaneous reasonings. But the eye, in the opening of its mobile angle and in the instant of its perception finds itself obliged to admit a portrait and a seascape, a kitchen and a 'triumph,' of people in the most varied states and dimensions; and, much more, it must greet with the same look harmonies and modes of painting incomparable with each other.

"Just as the sense of vision finds itself violated by this abuse of space which constitutes a collection, so the intelligence is no less offended by a close reunion of important works. The more beautiful they are, the more they are exceptional results of human ambition, the more they need to be distinct. They are rare objects, and their creators would certainly have wanted them to remain unique. This tableau, one sometimes says, kills all the others around it."

After three or four hours in the Louvre, you can get to thinking that all the masterpieces jostling for your attention do fail to be unique: they fail because they do not monopolize your attention, do not take your eyes away from all the other pieces. Ultimately it's hard to know what the effect of so much luxury is, whether you might as well stop looking around after you've seen three or four paintings, because you do stop seeing them. At first I found it frustrating that there were crowds of visitors photographing the works rather than looking at them, but then I got to thinking that perhaps that was a better strategy than trying to take them in all at once. The Louvre is like a gigantic catalogue of famous works, and producing your own index of photographs is one way to put all the works on even footing.


But I also understood why Thomas Struth took those pictures of visitors looking at paintings in the Louvre (the image immediately above is by Struth). It's a place where you can't help but find yourself amidst big crowds, and the experience is about seeing the art from within a crowd and seeing the art as itself a crowd. Even though the eye first wants to edit all the viewers from Struth's images, to see a Louvre empty of people, he's right to insist that there's no getting away from the crowd. The paintings themselves are a bustling, jostling crowd, each clamoring for your attention.

The necessities

Exciting development on the house front: we finally got around to building the frame for the futon, which practically doubles the amount of furniture we have. We would have built it earlier, but first the floor was being redone (wood in place of very bad blue carpet [VBBC]) and then a seriously fierce crew of electricians were fixing almost every wire in the place. A few weeks ago, Tom turned on the bathroom faucet and got a big electric shock. Thinking that he must have been imagining the shock, he tried again, and lo and behold, it happened again. This meant that the faucet was live, which should never ever happen, because things like faucets (and showers and pipes and the like) are supposed to be grounded. Needless to say, ours weren't. This is when we called the electricians, who came in and fixed everything, and put in a new fuse box, so our wiring isn't Edwardian anymore.

God bless the electricians, I say. Halfway into my first English fall, it also seems fitting to give shout-outs to:
1) my trench coat, which I've worn nearly every day since arriving, and which is perfect for weather that's alternately gray and sunny, damp, occasionally windy, chilly but not properly cold
2) the tradition of roast Sunday dinner, especially roast potatoes, which are basically the best thing ever
3) the museums in London, which continue to impress. Just yesterday I went to see this exhibit of medical wax-works at the Wellcome Collection, and it was peculiar but good.

At Liberty

Last night I went to an evening event at one of London's more remarkable department stores. Imagine a gigantic tudor house five stories tall, done up in different period styles, with a gorgeous central atrium and lots of nooks and crannies full of vintage furniture, velvet and satin sheets, expensive dresses, stunning shoes, antique mirrors, pillows with the founders' images on them, and huge handbags. Half museum and half store, Liberty is a visual feast, and last night they were serving up wine and Chambord martinis in an attempt to capitalize on everyone's amazement at the sheer abundance of goods on offer. It's the fashion equivalent, I think, of being shown piles of diamonds and gold in someone's well-appointed cave. I didn't forget myself and walk away with Miu Miu anything, and I kept my covetousness of the Marc Jacobs navy coat I saw thoroughly in check, but the designs and displays were so wonderful that even the experience of just walking around was thoroughly satisfying. I don't know who does the windows -- according to Emma, who invited me along, someone new has just started to do the displays, but there's a wunderkammer sensibility to it all. I didn't take any pictures last night, unfortunately, but when I went there last summer, this is what I saw in a small window. The entire store is full of these kinds of arrangements.


The main piece in the atrium was a huge, mobile-style creation made from Liberty-print scarves. It was halfway between kite and chandelier, and moved a bit in the breeze created by the crowds of people making their way up and down the stairs. There was also a zebra head decorated with bright scarves: apparently the zebra head is a Liberty staple, and moves around the store to go with various displays. Chic kitsch, I suppose, is how best to describe it. But really, the shoes were swoon-worthy, and I saw more impressive fake eyelashes than I ever have before, at the Shu Uemura counter. Do you think I could wear them to our housewarming party?

Fashion seems magical right now, between the reports of fashion weeks I've been reading (by far my favorite is Garance Dore on the Chanel show) and my experience last night. I'm still showing up at the library in my uniform of jeans and gray sweaters and shirts, mind you, but a girl can dream.