The Pigeon and the Pencil: J. Herbin Inks

Pencils at my desk.

Every now and then on the blog, there will be a feature called 'The Pigeon and the Pencil,' my ode to the everyday item. I call it 'The Pigeon and the Pencil' for a few reasons: I love pigeons and I love pencils, and I believe that these seemingly dull and often maligned objects are due for some much-needed appreciation.  These posts will be about recognizing the beauty in humble, everyday items.

Did you know that a pigeon is actually a dove?  Pigeons are Rock Doves, and both pigeons and doves belong to the Columbidae family. The pigeon is a beauty queen disguised as Cinderella. Pigeon parents both produce milk to feed their young.  Pigeons mate for life.  One famous pigeon, Cher Ami, was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for her work as a homing pigeon, carrying messages during World War I. Cher Ami served in World War I by dispatching messages from a wounded and depleted battalion stuck behind enemy lines.  She was shot at, lost at leg, yet managed to carry a message around her wounded leg to help save the lives of over 190 soldiers.

Pencils may not have saved lives but they were considered a staple in the kit of any Civil War soldier.  Pencils are reliable and inexpensive. The pencil is an ordinary tool, incredibly useful, no matter now stubby and tooth-marked. If you were to measure the distance a pencil could write, it would measure 35 miles, or approximately 45, 000 words.  Everyone uses pencils, from schoolchildren to architects, artists, and composers.  Can you imagine people writing pieces of music with ballpoint pens instead?  I recently read a great interview in the Wall Street Journal with Count Anton Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, the head of the venerable pencil company. Faber-Castell was founded in 1761 by cabinetmaker Kaspar Faber. When journalist Cynthia Kling asked Count von Faber-Castell to say something about the pencil, he summed it up this way: " When you are young, you put a pencil in a drawer. Then when you get to be very, very old, 100, and you want to give something of yours to your great, great grandchild, you pull that pencil out and it still writes. Can a pen do that?"  He is right.  That gorgeous fountain pen probably will no longer write, the insides caked with dried-out ink.   

I cannot choose between the pencil and pen because I appreciate them both for how different they are. This month's "The Pigeon and the Pencil" entry is about ink cartridges, the kind used in fountain pens. I have used every kind of ink cartridge over the years, from Parker to Sheaffer to Lamy. My favorite ink cartridges are made by French ink maker, J. Herbin, who have been producing inks since 1670.   J. Herbin is the oldest ink maker in the world.  The company even makes scented ink as well as invisible ink! The inks I like best are the ones made for fountain pens.  You can purchase the ink in bottles or in cartridges, as I prefer, because by the time I finish a cartridge in one color, I am ready to try a new shade. There are six cartridges in each small metal canister, with the name and the color of the ink on the lid.  The names of the inks are poetic: there is no navy, but instead "Bleu Nuit" (Midnight Blue). Not pink, but "Rose Cyclamene" (Cyclamen Pink)  or "Rose Pensee" (Pensive Pink).  What about "Larme de Cassis," (Tears of Blackcurrant) or "Diabolo Menthe" (Peppermint Soda), named for a popular French drink for all ages made of mint syrup and soda water?  You would be hard-pressed to pick only one shade.  Read the website for extensive, evocative descriptions for each of the colors.   I think the range of greens is especially beautiful.  You may not be someone who writes letters anymore but using colored ink in your pen is a great way to liven up your daily scribblings, doodles, or notes.  The J. Herbin cartridges are considered universal, standard-sized and will fit most fountain pens. I get my cartridges here ($5.50 for six). 

Pigeons, pencils, and ink. All items which are more complicated and have more depth than you would imagine.   Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare Dance" also has hidden depths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yExwkQYcp0  It sounds simple at first, using only piano, bass, snare drum, hands clapping and fingers snapping, but the song's breezy informality belies how complicated a piece it actually is. In an unscripted ending, you can hear the musician's laughter at the end of the track, when Brubeck includes the famous riff, "Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits."  The more you listen to it, the more the piece reveals; "Unsquare Dance" is set in 7/4 time, which is an amazingly complex time signature.  This piece sounds as fresh today as it did in 1951, something you can return to again and again. Maybe now you will give your own much-used and under-appreciated pencil a second glance, and you might be kinder to the next pigeon you see on the street. 

More Than A Three Minute Heroine

The Selecter. Photo courtesy of Neol Davies.

It was the summer of 1979 and I was thirteen.  Marc, a friend of my brother's, had been to England for the summer and brought back a cassette from a band called The Selecter on the 2-Tone label. I had recently discovered 2 Tone and was working my way though their catalog as my summer project.  My first 2-Tone single was "The Prince" by Madness, an homage to Prince Buster, the Jamaican musician of 50's fame.  I had found my people.  Not only did I listen to Marc's cassette, but I "borrowed" it and somehow conveniently forgot to return it (sorry, Marc).  I listened to The Selecter cassette so much that none of the songs could be played properly by the end of that summer. 

2-Tone was an important record label founded in the late 1970s in Coventry, England. The two "tones" were black and white musicians who were influenced by Jamaican dancehall, ska, and punk  music. Jerry Dammers, keyboardist for The Specials, invented the term.  2-Tone bands included The Specials, The English Beat, The Bodysnatchers, The Special AKA, and even Elvis Costello and The Attractions. 

The Selecter's lead singer was Pauline Black. I knew who she was before I saw her photo staring out from the cover page of an issue of England's New Musical Express (NME). The music papers all talked about her as a "mixed race singer." Black was wearing a man's fedora and the classic 2-Tone outfit: men's slacks, white polo neck shirt, black loafers, and a seriously aloof yet menacing scowl. Most thrilling of all was her skin tone: she was brown like me. More specifically, biracial.  A biracial woman fronting a 2-Tone band? I was giddy.  I would save my allowance to buy issues of the seminal music/design magazine The Face and would wait weeks for outdated issues of NME to appear at my local magazine shop in downtown Montreal, yellowed from age, but I didn't care. I tried desperately to keep up with the endless wave of music pouring out of England at the time.

I took all of the 2-Tone songs to heart, taking on the causes of unemployment-rife 1970's England as my own: naively, I actually believed that racist National Front skinheads would somehow make their way from the Brixton race riots to my safe Montreal neighborhood and I would have to be ready to take them on single-handedly, armed with little more than my familiarity with every single Specials lyric.

Music was my comforter. I felt I had found a spiritual big sister in Pauline Black, someone I didn't know but who I could look up to, a young woman who was living my values: she was making music and fronting a band, she was a strong feminist, and she seemed completely fearless.  I was a biracial teenaged girl living in a mostly white, privileged Montreal neighborhood. As a daughter of white mother and a black father, I never felt as if I belonged to any community.  Black became my role model: a strong, confident, beautiful, fearless woman, unafraid to express anger and grief and joy and elation in the space of a three minute song.  She was awe-inspiring and a bit terrifying to me, with her expressive eyes, her rocking stance, and her total confidence.  She was everything I wanted to be. 

The world of ska and punk music was where I gained my strength; the words and tunes bolstered my own belief that I would be able to get through adolescence, even when sometimes I felt it would never be possible.  I wasn't any different from any other teenager; musicians were my saints and their music my daily prayers, played over and over on my Walkman as I took the Metro daily to and from school.  Don't all teenagers feel like aliens? 

You have to listen to the harshly beautiful and lesser-known "Celebrate The Bullet," (1981) to get a feel for the depth, melancholy, and sheer loveliness of Black's voice and the accompanying music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLZtTvxgyGE
The deep bass (Norman Watt-Roy of Ian Dury and the Blockheads) and echoing horns (Barry Jones) are like boxers mimicking shadow play with imaginary punches, surrounded by hovering rhythm guitar.  Black's voice dances in and out of the dark and light, creating a song that is tragic and haunting.  This song highlights the range of her voice in a way not heard on the earlier recordings.  It is easy to see how so many of us fell in love with Pauline Black, including Gwen Stefani, who cites her as a major influence.

Black has a fascinating life story as child born of a white Jewish mother and a black Nigerian father in England in the 1950's. She was adopted by a white family in Essex and in her recent much-lauded autobiography, Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir, Black talks openly about always feeling like an outsider. As an adult she decided to look for her birth mother and trace her family roots. Not only had she become the lead singer of one of the most influential ska bands, she also became an actress and writer, and has received recognition for her writing as well as her acting. She continues to tour with The Selecter and her voice is still as powerful and mesmerizing as it always was.  Her message is still strong and relevant.  

Sources:
www.paulineblack.com
http://www.theselecter.net/
http://www.neoldavies.net
http://2-tone.info/index.html
Read an excerpt of Pauline Black's Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir courtesy of NPR: http://tinyurl.com/baaymmv

The grammar of perfume

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, illustrated by Maira Kalman.

  

Photos: Kneale Culbreath

You know how there are some books that you pick up and re-read each year? If you love to read and write, if you appreciate great language, or if you would like to learn something new about how to be a better writer, then please go and find The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, a small book about the construction and the beauty of simple and clear writing.  It is a book I return to over and over. I have a few copies that are dog-eared and worn with use because I can always learn how to improve my writing. The edition mentioned above is extra-special as it is illustrated by artist Maira Kalman, whose drawings are  elegant and full of humor- the images are well-suited to Strunk and White's text.


I was thinking about Strunk and White's book in relation to the nonsensical language used in perfume ads.  Just read a few perfume ads and after a while, the descriptions all sound the same, vague and ephemeral.  Take Lancome's La Vie est Belle: "La vie est belle or life is beautiful—the expression of a new era." Or Prada's Candy: "...instantly seductive—pure pleasure wrapped in impulsive charm." Are certain flowers representative of a new era and others are charming? The problem with talking about perfume is too often the language of rich, flowery prose is used to describe scents rather than using plain English.  Overly elaborate, gussied-up language will sell hundreds of thousands of bottles of perfume. I want the advertisers to tell me what the perfume smells like, and not who I will be when wearing the perfume- I can do that myself, thank you very much.  We consumers are smarter than this.  We understand that advertisers will sell us stories- we like them, they are fantasies. But we scent-wearers need a Strunk and White for talking about perfume.

Describing perfume accurately is something different altogether. Perfumers need useful adjectives to describe scents. Perfumer Mandy Aftel of Aftelier Perfumes created the Natural Perfume Wheel in order to clarify how we talk about perfume. The chart lists most essential oils and the groupings or "scent families" into which the oils fall. The palette is one of the tools I use daily when perfuming. Each oil is described using a general category and then a more specific adjective. For example, Sandalwood falls under the "Woody/Sweet" category, while Bois de Rose, while it is in the same "Woody" category, is labeled "Floral." I do not know if one day perfume houses and advertisers will suddenly start using plainer language to talk about perfume, but this chart is a useful and thoughtful guide. I think of the Aftelier palette as something writers Strunk and White would appreciate for its simplicity and clarity.

I think Strunk,White, and Aftel would all appreciate Elvis Costello, someone who always chooses his words with care.

Music: "Lipstick Vogue," by Elvis Costello and the Atttractions. A peerless performance from 1978. Sharp, short, direct, and perfectly concise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dip-FtbsD8E 

England's Newest Hitmaker: Corinne Day, in memoriam

A young Kate Moss photographed by Corinne Day for The Face

This belated blog post is dedicated to the memory of photographer Corinne Day, who died on August 28, 2010, following a battle with brain cancer. I had just thought of her about a month ago, wondering about her latest work, and I was terribly sad to learn of her death. Her work will always inspire me.
I will remember Day for being the photographer who introduced me to Kate Moss in the summer of 1990- not in person of course, but through The Face, my favorite magazine. I picked up the issue with a girl on the cover who looked like a typical English girl, with freckles and slightly crooked teeth, and she wore a child's paper headdress. I remember thinking at the time, 'These are important pictures, they so different from anything else.' I was thrilled to see the photographer was a woman named Corinne Day. I expected to see the name of a well-known male photographer like Anton Corbijn, Paolo Roversi or Bruce Weber- all photographers whose work I liked very much. I thought Day was brave to shoot images of a regular girl, smiling, slouching and hanging out on a sunny beach, without makeup or fuss of any kind. There is one photo which really struck me, in which Kate Moss has her eyes closed- not in a dramatic, sultry way, but as if the sun was in her eyes. I thought this decision to include the shot was incredibly daring. The image feels both casual but deliberate.

Day's pictures were not the fashion shots I was used to seeing. I admired Day's ability to reveal her sitter's personality without artifice. Her pictures of Kate Moss reminded me of pictures that close friends take of each other. Our guard comes down when we are with our best friends, and Day's photos have an intimate and relaxed quality to them that is still relevant and influential twenty years later. I continue to be inspired by her work. Examples of her work are here: www.corinneday.co.uk/exhibitions.php

I was thinking of the most English song I could think of that captured both Kate Moss and Corinne Day.  Paul Weller and Steve Craddock play an acoustic version of The Jam's "Liza Radley" that fits here beautifully: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0haQp1eAg8