Sunday, September 15, 2013

Warning!!! 'er indoors thinks this is one of my more zany and off the wall offerings!! Put in this blog, as the main event actually happened here in the hamlet, but I guess it could have equally well gone in The Creative Urge Blog! Make your own mind up!


An advert from a glossy magazine rode into the hamlet last week!

I was in the kitchen when I was aware they had arrived, riding bicycles up the road from the gîte, obviously having come in the back way, but their sturdy town bicycles were obviously up for it, even if they didn’t seem particularly prepared for a little cross country cycling.

When I looked out of the window I was greeted by one of those strange, obviously highly staged, glossy magazine adverts that often leave you fumbling around for what is actually being advertised.  Now I should explain here, that I am not an avid reader of such magazines, a cover price of £4-00 or more is enough of a reason to leave them on the shelf.  But, I am going to name drop here, as some months ago, some visitors wanting something to read and pass the time on the ferry had purchased two magazines (Red and Harper’s Bazaar) for a bargain price considerable less than the £8-10 it would have cost them if they had selected them individually.  The disadvantage was that as they were being sold as a multi pack they were tightly sealed in a plastic bag, which I’m sure has a more technical or proper name when used to wrap such high brow tomes!  Well, a quick glance and you find adverts for Louis Vuitton, Dior, Giorgio Armani, Gucci, Chanel and many more maybe even including a devil wearing Prada, which simply consist of pictures (and no I haven’t forgotten the one outside the kitchen, I’ll be back there eventually!) and few prices or even product information.  Not mixing in such circles, there are some adverts that I actually couldn’t tell you what they are advertising – notably one that could be clothes (his or hers), perfume (his or hers) or a high class house of ill repute in New York!

Taking one of the magazines there are 37 pages of these adverts before the Contents page, then another 6 pages of adverts, before the second part of the contents, 7 more pages of adverts before part 3 of the Contents, 18 pages of adverts before a half page of publishing credits, 11 pages of adverts before a second half page of publishing credits.  Now, I could apologise here for going on, but I won’t, as it continues, and just to recap so far – 80 pages of adverts to 4 ½ of admin pages!  So out of sheer curiosity, and yes I hear you saying that I must have too much time on my hands, but I have been working hard today landscaping the garden, mending the caravan, putting in a window frame and more, so I need some relaxation time particularly as the nights are beginning to close in.  But, thinking about it I’m not sure if getting so worked up about a scandalous waste of paper, is that relaxing, but as they say – I’ve started so I’ll finish – 12 before 2 pages of editors letter, 4 before 2 pages telling you about Contributors, 8 before a couple of pages telling you what they are contributing, 12 before the first 2 page contribution and maybe things are looking up, only 1 before the next contribution of 1 page.  Sadly I’m not half way through yet so I’m going to précis – in the remainder of the magazine there are 164 pages of adverts and fashion pictures to 74 pages of “articles” many of which are actually glorified adverts for must have accessories such as a handbag at £2,655, a coat for about (!) £1,780, a pair of shoes at £935 and a mid length leather skirt for £709, you get the drift.

A final tally, before I step off my soap box from which I feel a little like Russell Brand last week, when making an acceptance speech for the GQ “oracle award” and making some typically outrageous joke, he said “I could feel the room dividing as I spoke.  I could hear the laughter of some and louder still silence of others!!  So, the adverts have it:

281 ½ to 87 ½ (roughly!)

Wow, can that be value for money as well as environmentally friendly?  But don’t worry, I’m not about to peruse the other magazine in the same scintillating way, even though the cover tantalisingly tells me that somewhere amongst the adverts is an article entitled: Your NEW SEASON IN 50 ... shoes from £45 ... bags from £38 ... jewellery from £12 (plus, the no-agony shoes you won’t want to take off)!

But, enough, back outside my kitchen window, one sunny afternoon last week!  There were three models, sorry cyclists, who having come up the hill from the gîte were confronted with two routes: straight on through the farm yard or left onto the road at the top of the hamlet.  So, they slipped off their solid Parisian town bikes, in sober colours with wicker handlebar baskets with leather accessories, into a choreographed random pose, the man off his saddle, both feet on the ground astride his machine, facing his older teenage son (he had the same angular, expressionless, bland and possibly powdered face as the man, so I’m only guessing they were related) preferring to stay sitting on the saddle with one foot on the ground and the bike at a jaunty angle to the road and the other younger teenage child, of similar bland features and indeterminate sex, jumping off completely and holding the handle bars and front wheel at an acute angle to the rest of the bike!

You could almost hear the camera shutter as the photographer spun around them getting the various countrified backdrops, rustic open fronted, large beamed woodstore, rusty corrugated iron open fronted hanger with old green and red tractor, of a vintage that makes it attractive in a shabby chic sort of way, brown shuttered farm house or own attractive cottage with our smart troène couleur (privet coloured) shutters and now with a pair of new English five barred gates, a new freshly painted front wall with simple, but chic posts connected with a twisted rope.  Quite a dilemma for the photographer, who if thinking about some of the previously mentioned adverts, might actually have preferred our previous bent, twisted and broken green plastic coated fence of small squares held together by a multitude of bits of wire with bent nails and rusty staples holding it to posts of various sizes and shapes, uniform if only in the bright green, a more vivid shape of British Racing Green than that used by Stirling Moss and his ilk, that was badly painted over everything including the walls and the road!  This run down, downright dilapidated background might have been just what he was looking for to show of the plain and rather bland models he had before him in a tableau of sophistication!

Then, there were the clothes, hanging somewhat limply from the waist less stick like models, the rather dull “brightly” coloured hooped tops, hard to describe but one was a sort of yucky green, like the edges of a bright green paint pot where a dirty brush with a vestiges of grey and dirty yellow had been mixed in, with off white, gone off cream colour for the other stripes.  I remember thinking that jumpers on such a warm sunny day really weren’t needed, but for the sake of art, or should that be profit, needs must; and they were useful in covering over the waists of the earthy coloured trousers, that clung to the narrow legs of the wearers.   I have already mentioned that the wearers were rather waist less, so the jumpers probably also covered up the large safety pins or pieces of cord needed to stop the trousers from simply sliding down over where the hips should have been.

The shoes, or rather low slip on boots with large elasticated sides, as by now I’m sure you will be imagining, were totally unsuitable, polished brown leather, of various shades with pointy toes, certain to catch the odd rock when doing all terrain cycling.  But then again a pair of tatty trainers, or indeed state of the art cycling shoes just wouldn’t have done it! 

Cycle helmets were nowhere apparent, but then the sort of clients that this advert would have been aimed at, would no doubt be too concerned about the helmet flattening the carefully coiffured hair, which here resembled the thatch on a old-fashioned hayrick, long, lank and lifeless over the eaves, or in this case the ears!  Finished off by a long brushed over fringe, dangerously at least for cycling, obscuring at least half of one eye, and miraculously still in place after the last mile of bumpy farm track!  Perhaps I’d failed to see the mobile makeup unit parked behind the gîte, which had just applied the half can of hair lacquer needed for such a permanent hold, as well as drying off any perspiration or should that be glow, for such refined personages, before applying the powder to make the already expressionless and bland faces, pale and unhealthy looking, despite the bicycles seemingly pointing towards an active, hale and hearty lifestyle.

The tableau froze like this for a few moments, not a word appearing to be said about the dilemma of which way to go, and as quickly as they came they left.  Surprisingly without the trailing entourage of makeup unit, cameraman, minder, fixer and whatever else models for such exclusive goods  (bikes, clothes, shoes, wicker baskets, makeup, underwear [perhaps one corner of a jumper had cunningly risen up to reveal a monogrammed waistband], celebrity barber, or maybe I’d missed the designer watch, fashionable but functional for the outdoor sort – able to compute speed, distance travelled, distance left, gradient, time for fluid intake and with new improved, at plenty of extra cost, function where the carefully crafted watch face flips open to reveal a small fan, for emergency use should you break into a sweat and the makeup start running – who knows), might have a use for!    

For a fleetingly brief glossy moment, a little culture and a little of how the other half live fluttered through the hamlet, before it returned to its quiet, sleepy, peaceful, tranquil, wonderful norm!  The glitzy catwalks, crowded trains, stately homes, litter strewn back alleys or deserted windswept station platforms of New York, Paris and Rome thankfully a million miles away.  Give me my long baggy shorts, sweaty out of shape tee shirt, floppy straw hat and down at heel espadrilles any day, but don’t tell the ad men from Dolce & Gabbana or Tommy Hilfiger, I’m not looking for another career, and the neighbours probably wouldn’t like all the fuss!!    

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