28 December, 2008
16 June, 2008
29 May, 2008
28 May, 2008
lecture given in 1992
"There is a tempering that needs to go on, an acknowledgment of our vulnerability and all the things that we don't know. The simultaneity of our wisdom and our foolishness. This is "The Clearly Enlightened Person Falls into a Well" koan. You can actually have a very deep understanding of the spiritual world and still do something stupid and still have areas of your life that are inferior and that you're not very good at, kind of stupid at, and that doesn't make you a less spiritual person. But noticing it makes you a more spiritual person. Being prepared to have the shame of it and the disappointment of it, because it's very hard on your grandiosity, somehow that allows the spirit to come through in this purer way. Then something real can happen. Real teaching can happen. Real love can happen and the beauty of the world is the beauty of the Buddha's path just there before us then. But it's not if we're not prepared to accept our own stupidity, not in a complacent way, but in a way that's engaged. We notice what we're not very good at. We notice our pain when we're in it and allow it to be there. We have to allow the darkness in the world in order to experience the light. Our first move, you see, in spirit is always to transcend. We always want to go straight to the light. My own experience was of going up and then down and then not knowing which way was which after a while, I suppose. We have to let in, in some way hold, the opposites, hold the very small parts of who we are along with the rather grand, eternal parts of who we are and not let one take over. When one takes over we become less than human."
- John Tarrant
Soul in Zen
a lecture given in 1992
- John Tarrant
Soul in Zen
a lecture given in 1992
20 May, 2008
01 May, 2008
May SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
-William Shakespeare
30 April, 2008
Ling Ling R.I.P.
Japan's only giant panda, Ling Ling, died of old age today at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo. Ling Ling was 22 years and seven months old. Mourners said a prayer for Ling Ling and placed flowers at a makeshift altar near his enclosure. Ling Ling was removed from public viewing two days ago, because he was suffering from heart and kidney failure.
Ling Ling was the only giant panda owned by Japan. There's 8 giant pandas in Japan, but they are all being leased by China.
Luvin' it!
For her second solo show in New York, Kim Fisher will present eight new large-scale abstract paintings inspired by the phases - the waxing and waning - of the moon. Fisher’s paintings begin as collage studies that incorporate a diverse range of printed paper elements. These studies are then translated into layered, complex, and sometimes photorealistic oil paintings made through rigorous systems of paint application. Her practice is highly formal, her use of subject matter and technique are both innovative and remarkably unexpected.
25 April, 2008
transparent things
"Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me.
"Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.
"But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.
"Hullo, person! What's the matter, don't pull me. I'm not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo, person . . . (last time, in a very small voice).
"When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!"
*Nabokov
"Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.
"But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.
"Hullo, person! What's the matter, don't pull me. I'm not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo, person . . . (last time, in a very small voice).
"When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!"
*Nabokov
19 April, 2008
En route....
A 'U.S.A Leather' motorcycle jacket. Shoulders 19, Sleeve along side 25, Waist 40, Chest 40, Jacket has 3 pockets with zippers and one on a button. And also a belt with 5 holes. There are no holes in the jacket or any tears / rips. The leather is 5lb 13oz. Quality. Feels like its bulletproof. The main zipper is how ever is missing 3 chains and a flash metal part. And right button near the zipper is broken is broken.But you can have this fixed up for few bucks. Or just let it be like that. Dose not change the look at all.
If you would like more pictures email me and I will give you the links.
Cady Noland
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART
cady noland
Michèle Cone: Practically every piece I have seen of yours in group shows or in your one-person shows projects a sense of violence, via signs of confinement — enclosures, gates, boxes, or the aftermath of accident, murder, fighting, boxing, or as in your recent cut-out and pop-up pieces — bullet holes.
Cady Noland: Violence used to be part of life in America and had a positive reputation. Apparently, at least according to Lewis Coser who was writing about the transition of sociology in relation to violence, at a certain point violence used to describe sociology in a very positive way. There was a kind of righteousness about violence — the break with England, fighting for our rights, the Boston Tea Party. Now, in our culture as it is, there is one official social norm — and acts of violence, expressions of dissatisfaction are framed in an atomized view as being "abnormal."
Cone: There are clear references to extreme cases of violence in the United States, Lincoln and Booth, Kennedy and Oswald, Patricia Hearst, etc. . . .
Noland: In the United States at present we don't have a "language of dissension." You might say people visit their frustrations on other individuals and that acts as a type of "safety valve" to "have steam let off." People may complain about "all of the violence there is today," but if there weren't these more individual forms of venting, there would more likely be rioters or committees expressing dissatisfaction in a more collective way. Violence has always been around. The seeming randomness of it now actually indicates the lack of political organization representing different interests. "Inalienable rights" become something so inane that they break down into men believing that they have the right to be superior to women (there's someone lower on the ladder than they) so if a woman won't dare them any more they have a right to murder them. It's called the peace in the feud. In this fashion, hostility and envy are vented without threatening the structures of society. MC: In some of your pieces — like Celebrity Trash — which spill over the floor, the violence is implied in the "trashing" gesture, whereas in your two-dimensional works, the violence is connoted by the title or the historic reference or simply by a word like "Texas."
Noland: When I was making Celebrity Trash I was reading The Globe and The Star and saw that what is done is that you consume all of these celebrities each week, then you turn them into trash. This trashing helps to dampen people's anger over their situation or their own place in the hierarchy of importance. The word "Texas" has a kind of cultural capital. It is shorthand for Kennedy's assassination and for a certain time in the 1960s. Speaking on a financial level, it's interesting how once a certain amount of capital has been invested in a rock group, for example, certain recordings can be dressed up or recontextualized opportunistically to take advantage of a new "trend" or something new it can be attached to. It can be squeezed like a lemon, but it becomes almost an organic thing and it gets revived and squeezed again. I read in a trashy novel once something which implied that the deaths of certain rock stars might have meant more capital for record company and that there are speculations that a few deaths might have been "arranged.
Cone: In the Lincoln pieces with images and writings on sheets of metal, the text you chose, the photographs of Lincoln's clothes, the deathbed without Lincoln in it, muffle the violent subject matter. Your violence is muted. It is not as expressionistic and loud.
Noland: It does not threaten anyone. There is a method in my work which has taken a pathological trend. From the point at which I was making work out of objects I became interested in how, actually, under which circumstances people treat other people like objects. I became interested in psychopaths in particular, because they objectify people in order to manipulate them. By extension they represent the extreme embodiment of a culture's proclivities; so psychopathic behavior provides useful highlighted models to use in search of cultural norms. As does celebrity . . . I remember reading several interviews with Paul Newman where he talks about being treated like an object. Strangers want to walk up to him and prod him, vent feelings on him and knock on his surface to find out "who's home." When I think about celebrity that way I often think about Allan McCollum's surrogates, particularly the black and white plaster pictures.
Cone: How do you tie together psychopathic behavior with the way you work?
Noland: The way I put my work together is a type of inventiveness that is almost the kind of hostile throwaway you encounter often in horror films. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, those people who do meatpacking in some backwater ingrown town, they murder, slaughter and butcher people the way they would animals. They take the body of a person and whack him onto a meat hook on the wall, and somebody else they fold into a square and smash him into a freezer. It's an extreme case of treating people like objects, and it has this throwaway inventiveness.
Cone: Like a gag?
Noland: An adolescent walks down the street with a couple of friends eating an ice cream cone and suddenly smashes it into the coin return slot of a pay phone. It's a nihilistic, negative, gratuitous thing, not functional. It does not facilitate anything, yet it's a pleasure to make the thing function in this other way. I like using objects in the original sense, letting objects be what they are.
Cone: But you are attracted to objects which have a lot of cultural meaning packed in them?
Noland: Yes, but I also like anonymous kinds of things. To treat objects like objects is to do something to them — which is not to say necessarily to transform them — which implies a kind of ascendancy or positive motion forward. This would be a modern movement. What I'm describing is not postmodern either, though. That implies a kind of faith in various styles.
Cone: Still, even anonymous kinds of things are made of certain materials with definite associations. Like the metal of your walkers connotes coldness, even coldbloodedness, when it its thought about in the context of violence that your work deals with.
Noland: About the metal: the use of it is sometimes hierarchical — to use chrome one place and galvanized aluminum in another is to describe relative relationships to it. The coolness might infer dissociation, but the mirror effect in some places is to draw you back in after the dissociation.
Cone: So in effect you do not agree with Alain Robbe-Grillet, saying "Now the world is neither meaningful nor absurd, it just is," nor with Baudrillard's apocalyptic nihilism. You'd rather say the world is full of signs whose meanings are transient, changing and relative?
Noland: The co-option of Baudrillard into art lingo seems so lame. If you have to ask, "emptied of meaning" for whom? What happened to the notion of relativity? This refracted concept of a society was what Emile Durkheim first traced as a model and which Weber later disputed and redirected by addressing relativity: Even if there is one set of goals within a society deemed desirable to obtain — there is certain to be differentiated access to it for different groups within that society; and where one group may be positively directed with institutionally and constitutionally easy access to those goals, another group may have to try to attain those goals through other channels, in ways which are actually "against the law." To dream up a society in which all things have been emptied of meaning is to aver in the end that there exist no class distinctions in that class — an irresponsible representation.
Text: © Copyright, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. and the authors.
cady noland
Michèle Cone: Practically every piece I have seen of yours in group shows or in your one-person shows projects a sense of violence, via signs of confinement — enclosures, gates, boxes, or the aftermath of accident, murder, fighting, boxing, or as in your recent cut-out and pop-up pieces — bullet holes.
Cady Noland: Violence used to be part of life in America and had a positive reputation. Apparently, at least according to Lewis Coser who was writing about the transition of sociology in relation to violence, at a certain point violence used to describe sociology in a very positive way. There was a kind of righteousness about violence — the break with England, fighting for our rights, the Boston Tea Party. Now, in our culture as it is, there is one official social norm — and acts of violence, expressions of dissatisfaction are framed in an atomized view as being "abnormal."
Cone: There are clear references to extreme cases of violence in the United States, Lincoln and Booth, Kennedy and Oswald, Patricia Hearst, etc. . . .
Noland: In the United States at present we don't have a "language of dissension." You might say people visit their frustrations on other individuals and that acts as a type of "safety valve" to "have steam let off." People may complain about "all of the violence there is today," but if there weren't these more individual forms of venting, there would more likely be rioters or committees expressing dissatisfaction in a more collective way. Violence has always been around. The seeming randomness of it now actually indicates the lack of political organization representing different interests. "Inalienable rights" become something so inane that they break down into men believing that they have the right to be superior to women (there's someone lower on the ladder than they) so if a woman won't dare them any more they have a right to murder them. It's called the peace in the feud. In this fashion, hostility and envy are vented without threatening the structures of society. MC: In some of your pieces — like Celebrity Trash — which spill over the floor, the violence is implied in the "trashing" gesture, whereas in your two-dimensional works, the violence is connoted by the title or the historic reference or simply by a word like "Texas."
Noland: When I was making Celebrity Trash I was reading The Globe and The Star and saw that what is done is that you consume all of these celebrities each week, then you turn them into trash. This trashing helps to dampen people's anger over their situation or their own place in the hierarchy of importance. The word "Texas" has a kind of cultural capital. It is shorthand for Kennedy's assassination and for a certain time in the 1960s. Speaking on a financial level, it's interesting how once a certain amount of capital has been invested in a rock group, for example, certain recordings can be dressed up or recontextualized opportunistically to take advantage of a new "trend" or something new it can be attached to. It can be squeezed like a lemon, but it becomes almost an organic thing and it gets revived and squeezed again. I read in a trashy novel once something which implied that the deaths of certain rock stars might have meant more capital for record company and that there are speculations that a few deaths might have been "arranged.
Cone: In the Lincoln pieces with images and writings on sheets of metal, the text you chose, the photographs of Lincoln's clothes, the deathbed without Lincoln in it, muffle the violent subject matter. Your violence is muted. It is not as expressionistic and loud.
Noland: It does not threaten anyone. There is a method in my work which has taken a pathological trend. From the point at which I was making work out of objects I became interested in how, actually, under which circumstances people treat other people like objects. I became interested in psychopaths in particular, because they objectify people in order to manipulate them. By extension they represent the extreme embodiment of a culture's proclivities; so psychopathic behavior provides useful highlighted models to use in search of cultural norms. As does celebrity . . . I remember reading several interviews with Paul Newman where he talks about being treated like an object. Strangers want to walk up to him and prod him, vent feelings on him and knock on his surface to find out "who's home." When I think about celebrity that way I often think about Allan McCollum's surrogates, particularly the black and white plaster pictures.
Cone: How do you tie together psychopathic behavior with the way you work?
Noland: The way I put my work together is a type of inventiveness that is almost the kind of hostile throwaway you encounter often in horror films. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, those people who do meatpacking in some backwater ingrown town, they murder, slaughter and butcher people the way they would animals. They take the body of a person and whack him onto a meat hook on the wall, and somebody else they fold into a square and smash him into a freezer. It's an extreme case of treating people like objects, and it has this throwaway inventiveness.
Cone: Like a gag?
Noland: An adolescent walks down the street with a couple of friends eating an ice cream cone and suddenly smashes it into the coin return slot of a pay phone. It's a nihilistic, negative, gratuitous thing, not functional. It does not facilitate anything, yet it's a pleasure to make the thing function in this other way. I like using objects in the original sense, letting objects be what they are.
Cone: But you are attracted to objects which have a lot of cultural meaning packed in them?
Noland: Yes, but I also like anonymous kinds of things. To treat objects like objects is to do something to them — which is not to say necessarily to transform them — which implies a kind of ascendancy or positive motion forward. This would be a modern movement. What I'm describing is not postmodern either, though. That implies a kind of faith in various styles.
Cone: Still, even anonymous kinds of things are made of certain materials with definite associations. Like the metal of your walkers connotes coldness, even coldbloodedness, when it its thought about in the context of violence that your work deals with.
Noland: About the metal: the use of it is sometimes hierarchical — to use chrome one place and galvanized aluminum in another is to describe relative relationships to it. The coolness might infer dissociation, but the mirror effect in some places is to draw you back in after the dissociation.
Cone: So in effect you do not agree with Alain Robbe-Grillet, saying "Now the world is neither meaningful nor absurd, it just is," nor with Baudrillard's apocalyptic nihilism. You'd rather say the world is full of signs whose meanings are transient, changing and relative?
Noland: The co-option of Baudrillard into art lingo seems so lame. If you have to ask, "emptied of meaning" for whom? What happened to the notion of relativity? This refracted concept of a society was what Emile Durkheim first traced as a model and which Weber later disputed and redirected by addressing relativity: Even if there is one set of goals within a society deemed desirable to obtain — there is certain to be differentiated access to it for different groups within that society; and where one group may be positively directed with institutionally and constitutionally easy access to those goals, another group may have to try to attain those goals through other channels, in ways which are actually "against the law." To dream up a society in which all things have been emptied of meaning is to aver in the end that there exist no class distinctions in that class — an irresponsible representation.
Text: © Copyright, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. and the authors.
16 April, 2008
15 April, 2008
13 April, 2008
I will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
Will I complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
And set my teeth in the silver of the moon
-E.E Cummings
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
Will I complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
And set my teeth in the silver of the moon
-E.E Cummings
11 April, 2008
Marie Laurencin
Born on October 31, 1883 in Paris, the young Marie Laurencin was sent to Sèvres by her mother in 1901, where she got familiar with porcelain painting. Her education continued at a school in Paris, followed by the Humbert academy, where Marie Laurencin got acquainted with Georges Braque. She soon met Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, who supported her from this time on and integrated her in discussions about art theory, which soon lead to Cubism. The artist's own creative work, however, remained untouched by such theoretical demands; it shows mainly lyrical motifs like graceful, dreamy young girls in pastel coloring and soft shading. This color-sensitive inventiveness leads to a variation of repetitions of form and motifs. The influence of Persian miniature painting and Rococo art are undeniable in Laurencin's works.
In 1907 Marie Laurencin gave her debut at the "Salon des Indépendants," followed by a large exhibition at Barbazanges' in 1912 and at P. Rosenberg's in 1920. From 1924 Laurencin also worked on designing stage sets. She produced stage design for Diaghilev's "Ballets russe" and the set for the "Comédie Francaise" in 1928. She also illustrated books, such as André Gide's "La Tentative Amoureuse" and Lewis Caroll's "Alice in Wonderland."
In 1907 Marie Laurencin gave her debut at the "Salon des Indépendants," followed by a large exhibition at Barbazanges' in 1912 and at P. Rosenberg's in 1920. From 1924 Laurencin also worked on designing stage sets. She produced stage design for Diaghilev's "Ballets russe" and the set for the "Comédie Francaise" in 1928. She also illustrated books, such as André Gide's "La Tentative Amoureuse" and Lewis Caroll's "Alice in Wonderland."
10 April, 2008
Serra
My work is really very hard to hurt. I mean people sit on it, write on it, piss on it, you really can't hurt it, I mean you can graffiti the f*** out of it, there's not much you can do to it hurt it.
R.Serra
R.Serra
09 April, 2008
Mister Lonely
FRIDAY, 11 APRIL
6 – 8pm
agnès b. and ANP Quarterly host the opening of Brent Stewart’s Mister Lonely Portraits, photographed on the set of Harmony Korine’s new film.
100 N. Robertson Blvd. Los Angeles, 90048
6 – 8pm
agnès b. and ANP Quarterly host the opening of Brent Stewart’s Mister Lonely Portraits, photographed on the set of Harmony Korine’s new film.
100 N. Robertson Blvd. Los Angeles, 90048
08 April, 2008
05 April, 2008
03 April, 2008
02 April, 2008
01 April, 2008
A.P.E.
A.P.C. designer Jean Touitou opens a new Paris preschool.
Spend a few minutes at Ateliers de la Petite Enfance, a new nursery school two blocks from Paris’s Luxembourg Garden, and you might not initially notice anything out of the ordinary. In one corner, a two-year-old boy slathers orange fingerpaint on just about everything except the blank sheet of paper he’s been given, while at a nearby table, another boy kneads a block of clay into an amorphous blob that he triumphantly declares is a birthday cake. Gradually, however, a discerning eye will spot a few unmistakable signs of pre-K fabulousness. The blue cotton smocks, with their tiny front pockets, look very A.P.C., the label known for low-key Parisian cool; the kiddie-size chairs are by Alvar Aalto. The school’s logo is a multicolored tree created by fashion designer Jessica Ogden, who also serves as a part-time art teacher.
Welcome to Paris’s hippest private preschool, open since January in the heart of the 6th arrondissement. The school’s name—A.P.E. for short—draws a clear connection to its cofounder, A.P.C. owner and designer Jean Touitou. But for Touitou, a former Trotskyite who made his name creating rigorously untrendy, logo-free pieces inspired by proletarian workwear, issues of style are often inseparable from questions of politics and philosophy. And A.P.E. is his attempt to offer a creative alternative to France’s by-the-book state schools, which have stuck with the same rigid teaching system for decades. As for the Aalto chairs and the chic gray cotton-cashmere blankets that are handed out at nap time, Touitou believes that a child is never too young to develop an appreciation for quality goods. “Even if you grow up to be an accountant, it’s better to be surrounded by beautiful furniture than by ugly furniture,” he says.
A.P.E. began taking shape last summer, when Touitou and his wife, Judith, were looking for a school for their daughter Lily, now three. State-run French preschools, with their 30-to-1 student-teacher ratios, were out; Judith lobbied for a private Catholic school in their Left Bank neighborhood, but Jean, who was raised in Tunisia by Jewish parents, has, as he puts it, “a big philosophical problem with monotheism.” Ultimately he and Judith teamed with Géraldine Lefebvre (the director of Lily’s day care center at the time) and two other associates to launch A.P.E. in a space that Jean had been renting on rue Cassette. Several kids followed Lefebvre from the day care center to the new school, whose 25 slots have been filled.
Though it was designed by architect Laurent Deroo, the man behind A.P.C.’s edgily minimalist boutiques, the space is packed with primary colors and makes all the appropriate concessions to its function. “This is a nursery school, so you can’t just put in a concrete floor because it looks good,” says Touitou, a wry and soft-spoken 56-year-old who delivers most of his comments with a world-weary half smile. Deroo installed several multi-function built-ins, such as plywood closet doors that double as climbing walls, to encourage the kids to use objects in innovative ways. A satellite space, opening around the corner this spring, will serve as the school’s arts workshop, with a mini stage for concerts and plays.
Another big problem, he feels, is overindulgent parents who believe their kids can do no wrong. “You hear about the stereotypical Jewish mother, but since the Sixties, all mothers have become like that,” says Touitou. “Even the fathers have become Jewish mothers. It’s awful.” Still, he thinks that plenty of children have talents that go unnoticed and regrets that his own parents weren’t more attuned to his inner rock star. A late bloomer on the music front, Touitou built a recording studio at the A.P.C. headquarters in 1998 after launching his own record label; his crowd of friends includes many style-setting music and film types, such as Jarvis Cocker and Roman Coppola.
A.P.E. is expensive by French standards: One year’s tuition runs about $16,000, while state-run preschools are free. Touitou feels a little guilty about this, but he points out that A.P.E. employs only top-tier teachers (one for every five to eight students), and that the real-estate costs are high. He eventually hopes to open additional branches in more diverse neighborhoods. (Touitou, who has two older children from a previous marriage, is the kind of dad who drags his teenagers on vacation to India to demonstrate that not everyone is lucky enough to grow up in a large apartment near Saint-Sulpice.)
Those who know Touitou view the school as one of his characteristically savvy, forward-looking ventures—a project that others will someday try to copy. (“Jean is like a good chess player who’s always a few moves ahead,” says Augustyniak.) Touitou says he sees it as a way to “build something solid that might last longer than fashion.” When describing his overall outlook on life, he uses the French word désespéré, which means something between “despairing” and “hopeless.” Given the current state of the world, he says, “I think it’s only by attempting to create something beautiful that you manage to have a bearable existence.” Whether it’s with his clothing designs, his music projects or the new preschool, he says, “I’m trying to do that.”
By Christopher Bagley
Spend a few minutes at Ateliers de la Petite Enfance, a new nursery school two blocks from Paris’s Luxembourg Garden, and you might not initially notice anything out of the ordinary. In one corner, a two-year-old boy slathers orange fingerpaint on just about everything except the blank sheet of paper he’s been given, while at a nearby table, another boy kneads a block of clay into an amorphous blob that he triumphantly declares is a birthday cake. Gradually, however, a discerning eye will spot a few unmistakable signs of pre-K fabulousness. The blue cotton smocks, with their tiny front pockets, look very A.P.C., the label known for low-key Parisian cool; the kiddie-size chairs are by Alvar Aalto. The school’s logo is a multicolored tree created by fashion designer Jessica Ogden, who also serves as a part-time art teacher.
Welcome to Paris’s hippest private preschool, open since January in the heart of the 6th arrondissement. The school’s name—A.P.E. for short—draws a clear connection to its cofounder, A.P.C. owner and designer Jean Touitou. But for Touitou, a former Trotskyite who made his name creating rigorously untrendy, logo-free pieces inspired by proletarian workwear, issues of style are often inseparable from questions of politics and philosophy. And A.P.E. is his attempt to offer a creative alternative to France’s by-the-book state schools, which have stuck with the same rigid teaching system for decades. As for the Aalto chairs and the chic gray cotton-cashmere blankets that are handed out at nap time, Touitou believes that a child is never too young to develop an appreciation for quality goods. “Even if you grow up to be an accountant, it’s better to be surrounded by beautiful furniture than by ugly furniture,” he says.
A.P.E. began taking shape last summer, when Touitou and his wife, Judith, were looking for a school for their daughter Lily, now three. State-run French preschools, with their 30-to-1 student-teacher ratios, were out; Judith lobbied for a private Catholic school in their Left Bank neighborhood, but Jean, who was raised in Tunisia by Jewish parents, has, as he puts it, “a big philosophical problem with monotheism.” Ultimately he and Judith teamed with Géraldine Lefebvre (the director of Lily’s day care center at the time) and two other associates to launch A.P.E. in a space that Jean had been renting on rue Cassette. Several kids followed Lefebvre from the day care center to the new school, whose 25 slots have been filled.
Though it was designed by architect Laurent Deroo, the man behind A.P.C.’s edgily minimalist boutiques, the space is packed with primary colors and makes all the appropriate concessions to its function. “This is a nursery school, so you can’t just put in a concrete floor because it looks good,” says Touitou, a wry and soft-spoken 56-year-old who delivers most of his comments with a world-weary half smile. Deroo installed several multi-function built-ins, such as plywood closet doors that double as climbing walls, to encourage the kids to use objects in innovative ways. A satellite space, opening around the corner this spring, will serve as the school’s arts workshop, with a mini stage for concerts and plays.
Another big problem, he feels, is overindulgent parents who believe their kids can do no wrong. “You hear about the stereotypical Jewish mother, but since the Sixties, all mothers have become like that,” says Touitou. “Even the fathers have become Jewish mothers. It’s awful.” Still, he thinks that plenty of children have talents that go unnoticed and regrets that his own parents weren’t more attuned to his inner rock star. A late bloomer on the music front, Touitou built a recording studio at the A.P.C. headquarters in 1998 after launching his own record label; his crowd of friends includes many style-setting music and film types, such as Jarvis Cocker and Roman Coppola.
A.P.E. is expensive by French standards: One year’s tuition runs about $16,000, while state-run preschools are free. Touitou feels a little guilty about this, but he points out that A.P.E. employs only top-tier teachers (one for every five to eight students), and that the real-estate costs are high. He eventually hopes to open additional branches in more diverse neighborhoods. (Touitou, who has two older children from a previous marriage, is the kind of dad who drags his teenagers on vacation to India to demonstrate that not everyone is lucky enough to grow up in a large apartment near Saint-Sulpice.)
Those who know Touitou view the school as one of his characteristically savvy, forward-looking ventures—a project that others will someday try to copy. (“Jean is like a good chess player who’s always a few moves ahead,” says Augustyniak.) Touitou says he sees it as a way to “build something solid that might last longer than fashion.” When describing his overall outlook on life, he uses the French word désespéré, which means something between “despairing” and “hopeless.” Given the current state of the world, he says, “I think it’s only by attempting to create something beautiful that you manage to have a bearable existence.” Whether it’s with his clothing designs, his music projects or the new preschool, he says, “I’m trying to do that.”
By Christopher Bagley
27 March, 2008
23 March, 2008
21 March, 2008
20 March, 2008
Amethyst
And the sky was made of amethyst
And all the stars were just like little fish
You should learn when to go
You should learn how to say no
Might last a day
Mine is forever
Might last a day
Mine is forever
When they get what they want
They never want it again
When they get what they want
They never want it again
Go on take everything
Take everything
I want you to
Go on take everything
Take everything
I want you to
And the sky was all violet
The more it gets violet more violence
And i'm the one with no soul
One above and one below
And all the stars were just like little fish
You should learn when to go
You should learn how to say no
Might last a day
Mine is forever
Might last a day
Mine is forever
When they get what they want
They never want it again
When they get what they want
They never want it again
Go on take everything
Take everything
I want you to
Go on take everything
Take everything
I want you to
And the sky was all violet
The more it gets violet more violence
And i'm the one with no soul
One above and one below
18 March, 2008
15 March, 2008
14 March, 2008
Anxiety
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
*Nin
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