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Cultural Differences Part Four - Its a Generational Thing.................

......For all my life I have been surrounded by stuff - cultural stuff ; cultural artifacts in the form of books , newspapers , albums ( ah, vinyl and the feel of an album cover ) , CDs , videos  ( and later on , DVDs ) , catalogues , prints , drawings , paints - and for me , most importantly in my line of work, a drawing board.

I like stuff - apart from the obvious storage problem ( last time we moved I had 46 boxes of books ) most stuff is easy to access , doesn't require ( at least in the case of books or pictures ) a power source , is easy to layout in groups for comparisons , easy to cross reference between two , three or more sources at the same time ; and because you can lay it out in groups then the 'stuff ' can form its own relationships - books , pictures laid out at random can generate connections that you were not previously aware of. I suppose the most extreme form of 'stuff ' for me is something like Francis Bacons studio which I discussed at length in my posting ' On Reflection ' dated 23 / 10 / 2010 : you get this very visceral feel of the creative process through the accumulation of visual references with which he surrounded himself in his working process.

.....And now I understand that ' stuff ' is disappearing from our lives ....all I need now is a laptop / kindle / ipod / iphone , some apps for streaming / Flickr / Skype / Netflix etc and a credit card..............everything is reduced to streams of digital information.

This worries me - the further we become divorced from the tactile process, the further we become estranged from reality . As soon as money started moving from a purely cash transaction to an exchange of information we started to loose a sense of value , partly at least fueling the credit boom and the subsequent crash . Lets take an example - there are a couple of books I want , one costing £5.00 , the second one costing £50.00 . I go into a bookshop - remember those ? - and hand over £5.00 for the first one. Handing over £50.00 for the second one I am immediately aware how much more valuable it is - ten times the worth of the first one - so I wonder is it worth it ? and do I really want it / need it ?  Ok , now lets look at Amazon - I can buy the books on line ; great ............but the transaction is now exactly the same - just a click of the mouse . There is no differentiation in the process , no sense of added value between the purchases.

Lets stay with books for a moment and their replacement by the Kindle and downloads - just a click away. Well, maybe not ; one of my most treasured books is ' Fra Angelico at San Marco ' by William Hood , a detailed analysis of the fresco cycle at the monastery of San Marco in Florence . Superbly illustrated , a double page spread when the book is opened comes in at 290mm high by 500mm wide. This doesn't even fit on my laptop screen , and to reduce it to suit reduces the size of the images and - more importantly - the font size ; maybe at the reduced size I can't even read it..............yes, downloading six books onto a Kindle is by far the easiest way of taking a good read on holiday , agreed , so maybe we have to be selective here.

The sense of touch is one of our five senses and we are rapidly loosing it , literally ; all tactile awareness is now reduced to an interface with a keyboard - everything is a click away. We are moving from a state of active participation to a passive state - art students don't even know the feel of paper on pencil anymore as design programmes become more and more sophisticated : for ' artisan / craftsman ' read technician.

The phrase ' to loose touch ' means to loose contact.........maybe it IS a generational thing, but I don't want to loose touch with stuff just yet, please.

..JE SUIS UN ROCK STAR....

Cultural Differences Part Three.......................Having spent my formative years growing up in the late Fifties and on through the Sixties, it was perhaps inevitable that the sound track to my life should be pretty much based on blues and rock.............folk rock , country rock , country blues , urban blues , Dylan , Springsteen , The Stones , Neil Young ,Van Morrison , together with  the more obscure corners of Americana and of course jazz - Armstrong , Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges , Miles Davis , Chet Baker , Billie Holliday and Sinatra .....oh, and The Clash .

Walk into any record shop ( record shop ? ) in the UK - well, ok,  if you can still find one ( it's still difficult to come to terms with the fact that one of the most enduring images of my life , the album cover and the vinyl album , had a life span of less than fifty years  ..... " what are these , Grandad ? They're LPs , James....Oh  - what are they ?  what's a ' record ' ? ) .......walk into pretty much any record shop and most of the floor space was given over to rock, pop , metal , punk.......and with most artists the usual suspects , all very familiar.

Walk into a music department in France and you are lost at sea , a completely alien culture alive and flourishing , names I've never heard of - Mylene Farmer ? The artistes , the musicians that I know from Abba to Zappa are located over in the corner somewhere, filed under ' International ' , and allocated about the same amount of space as ' world ' music or ' independent '. By far the biggest allocation of space is given over to French artistes , most of whom are completely unfamiliar to me. My perception of American blues based music as the fountain-head, the source from which all other music flows , is gone with the wind . Jazz has a solid presence , given its wholesale adoption by the French as part of the zeitgeist of bohemian Paris in the Fifties, but other than that its a different world...........and Mylene Farmer is no local somebody - sales of over 25 million and ten number ones' in France - this is a major artist by any one's standards, an icon in France , probably as big there as Madonna.

Whether it's because that for most of my life - I am of the baby boomer generation - the UK has been firmly looking westwards to the US of A for guidance , culture , aspirations and defence.......a bias that has almost totally effected my entire life........the more time I now spend in France the more I come to perceive the UK as a small and isolated ( indeed, insular ) off-shore island on the edge of a Europe that could quite happily manage - and does - without it.

vive la difference ??

....GIMME A PIG'S FOOT AND A BOTTLE OF BEER...............

Cultural Differences Part Two....................Spending a lot of time in south-west France the different attitudes to food to that in the UK become apparent very quickly. France is still very much an agricultural society ; most of the food is regionally biased and you get the feeling that pretty much most things, particularly the salad and vegetable sections , don't travel far to market...............

.......and there is a much greater acceptance of the odd, the miss-shapen - none of this visual conformity to an arbitrary ' perfect ' standardisation - it just needs to taste good. Even our local fish counter , in Orthez, wouldn't disgrace Harrods and the fish market down at St-Jean-de-Luz, on the coast is a visual delight.

Charcuterie , both in France and Spain , is elevated to a fine art - the Pata Negra , the jambon Iberico - is to die for. Pretty much all of the pig is used , and whilst you won't get every cut you get in the UK, such as belly-pork , the sheer variety makes up for any loss ;  terrines , pates', rillettes, saucisson , brawn all feature regularly on a cold plate at lunchtime. Pigs trotters appear regularly on menus , both at our local restaurant in Bayonne and up in the brasseries in Paris, so being an enthusiastic - if weekend - cook this got me thinking , and in the run up to Christmas I asked our local butcher Rob out at Chelford, who is excellent , if he could get me some pigs trotters and ears...........................

" Oh ", he said, " No problem , we usually throw all those away - do you want a head as well ? "

Vive la Difference.