We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. 

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete…

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Just a few days after my birthday, Malcolm McClaren passed away, after a long battle with cancer. He wasn’t that old, just in his  early 60′s, no age at all. I was deeply shocked. Malcolm had always been so full of life, verve, vitality and having such a sheer abundance of energy, that the idea of his being no more was hard to grasp.

Also, Malcolm and what he represented was an intrinsic part of youth. I was 15 in 1977. I was a punk, I saw virtually every punk band of note (and some less so) and spend a good deal of my teenage years and my twenties haunting the Kings Road, particularly when I was a design student. I coveted though could not afford the wonderful clothes on sale in Sex and Seditionaries, and how much are they worth now?

Suffice to say, that though Malcolm didn’t invent ‘punk’ (as many claim), he certainly was a major force in it’s character, look and direction along with his partner of the time, Vivienne Westwood.

It also got me thinking about all the events, changes, inventions and new technologies I have seen come and go in my lifetime. So, off the top of my head, here are some of the most notable events, happenings, to which I was either witness or involved in.

These are not necessarily in chronological order.

• The Cuban missile crisis.
• Nelson Mandella was imprisoned.
• John Kennedy’s assassination.
• The War in Vietnam.
• The first heart transplant took place
• Martin Luther King was assassinated.
• Mini skirts.
• Mods and Rockers.
• Mary Quant and the Quant Cut.
• The Beatles
• Woodstock
• The Internet was created by the military.
• Men went into space and Niel Armstrong walking on the Moon (I watched on my Grandparents television as we didn’t have one).” That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
• Our own telephone. We were the first family in our street to have one.
• Strikes in the UK and the introduction of the three day week.
• Disco music and Saturday Night Fever
• Star Wars
• Huge flared trousers.
• Punk and New Wave.
• The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, The Jam, Blondie, XTC, Joy Division, Siouxie and the Banshees, Elvis Costello,  etc. (saw them all and more, more more).
• New Romantics.
• The invention of the silicon chip, and subsequently; calculators, digital watches etc.
• Colour television was introduced.
• Greenpeace was formed.
• The Golden Jubiliee.
• The hippy movement died out.
• The troubles in Ireland, the IRA and the bombing campaign.
• Brezhnev died.
• IBM introduced the first personal computer.
• Ronald Regan became President.
• Women started a protest at Greenham Common (I joined a huge protest there).
• The first ‘Test Tube Baby’ and IVF.
• We learned about AIDS (I watched Panorama report with fellow student friends, not really understanding what it meant).
• Famine in Ethiopia and Live Aid.
• VHS and Betamax.
• The introduction of CDs and the fall of vinyl.
• Rap and Hip Hop
• The creation of Perestroika in Russia and a new era.
• The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR (I watched the first people come through the gate on television, we drank beer and cheered).
• Nelson Mandella is freed and the end of Apartheid in South Africa (again, watched with friends and celebrated).
• The terrible wars in Eastern Europe
• The introduction of the mobile phone.
• Solid State Logic and the 48 Track (worked in a recording studio in the West End).
• The World Wide Web, which changed life for ever.
• 9/11 and the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York.
• The wars in the Far East.

There are lots more I know, these are the events I can easily recall to mind as having happened in my lifetime…and it’s a lot.

RIP Malcolm. You helped make my teenage years a more colourful experience.

Malcolm McLaren

Portraiture and Botox
When I went to art school many years ago, well before the advance of digital media, a popular medium for life drawing and portraiture was the use of pencil and charcoal. Pencil work, particularly involving very fine detail became a speciality for me, and I developed a sort of ‘photographic’ style. Not loved by my tutors I hasten to add, as a more bold, dynamic and more contemporary approach was generally favoured at the time. I didn’t care.

Anyway, though I don’t do so much of it now, particularly life drawing and nude studies (too much of it at art school made me hate it), I had been asked recently by someone if I would be interested in a portrait commision, using pencil in a detailed and fine art style. However, when I said I might be, and that I may need to do some studies first and take some photos etc, my subject then said, to my amazement, that she may want to have some Botox filling in done. I thought initially that she was joking, and to my dismay, she wasn’t.

I tried to point out why this was not a good idea. My argument was such. Botox carries with it a recognisable signature. It distorts and interferes with the dynamic of the face, and also changes the texture and patina of the skin. I myself can spot even a skillfully Botoxed face a mile away. This may be due to being an artist and because for so many years, study of physiognamy was very important to me, and still is.

She wasn’t convinced, and I realised that what she wanted was not in fact a portrait in the traditional sense that would capture an impression of self, but a photographic representation (why she didn’t just get a photographic portrait done I don’t know). I then told her that I could do a piece digitally using a photograph of her face, and do a ‘paint over’ with my Wacom (tablet and stylus), and that she needn’t go to the extreme of having her face injected. She said she would ‘think it over’.

I thought a lot about this. I know in Hollywood there is a backlash against the use of Botox as it intereferes with an actors ability to deliver facial ‘nuance’. But, it also bothered me that this woman felt the need to undergo what in my opinion is still a pretty radical and untested (in the sense that there is as yet no evidence of potential side effects from long term use, as it it still so new) procedure just because she wanted to look good for a drawing!!!

Strange world!