The lovely Donisha Prendergast and me

Here I am with the lovely Donisha Prendergast , who just happens to be the eldest grandchild of Bob Marley, a responsibility she takes very seriously. “What it means to be a Marley is that you must push on,” says Prendergast. “you have to continue that legacy.”

Prendergast’s contribution won’t be another reggae album, but a documentary film called Rasta: A Soul’s Journey she has just spent the last eight years traveling the world (India, South Africa, Ethiopia, Israel) shooting with Jamaican Canadian filmmaker Patrica  Scarlett that will have its premiere at the Royal Ontario Museum here in Toronto in February 2012. The film is intended to spread the word of  Marley’s faith of Rastafarianism, to continue, what Prendergast describes as her grandfather’s “legacy, not as a muisical artist, but a man.”

“I’m a child of reggae,” says Prendergast. “I’m doing good with ‘One Love’ as my mission.”

To that I say, Irie.

Stone and sea

Just back from a magical, if lightning-quick trip to the Amalfi coast, which was blissfully sunny and warm for October. Our white-coated waiter told us we were enjoying the warmest October they’d seen in 150 years. Off season, it felt like we were travellers in another, quieter, more elegant era–a feeling made more acute in the wonderfully ’50s Italian vibe of Amalfi.

Ridiculous beauty

The setting is so absurdly picturesque, you can’t help feeling you are inside a vintage postcard.

Room with a view

This, I kid you not, was the view from our room–the interior of which, was also fetchingly turquoise and white.

Tree and sea

One afternoon we drove up the mountain road to Ravello, where we wandered into the Villa Rufalo and admired the old stones.

Cool vault

And then, of course, we went for another gorgeous lunch overlooking the sea. And walked the old streets looking at storefronts.

Compelling signage

One evening, we survived (barely) a harrowing drive into Positano, only to discover a vintage Fiat 500 rally in the streets.

A red one

They were all gorgeous–and in much cuter colours than the new 500s come in. Many had their own novel accessories.

Alpine Fiat

This one, for instance, had its own set of wooden skis.

And of course everywhere you look, everything is in the classic Vietri painted ceramics.

Vietri fixture

On our way to the airport in Naples we made a quick stop at Pompeii.

These feet in ancient times

Pompeii pillar

Pompeii, or Etruscan Red

It was strangely complete. I was surprised to find the ruins more like an evacuated urban centre than an archeological site.

And then some relics seemed, in retrospect, to be like warnings of an imminent disaster, like this fountain head:

A sign, in stone

Jewelry designer Jane Apor lives to layer

Fall is greeted with enthusiasm by fashion types not only because the stores and magazines are thick with fabulous new clothes, but because the arrival of cooler weather means that you get to pile them on in layers. Judging from store mannequins the logic seems to be, why wear just one blouse, when you can layer a t-shirt, tissue weight sweater, cropped jacket, a tangle of chains and a wound-up scarf underneath and over it?

This season in particular, this more-is-more look appears to have taken over the fashion agenda, as boutiques and high street chains from the new Intermix to Club Monaco are lush with pieces such as fine-gauge cotton tank tops, sheer chiffon blouses and furry vests that are specifically designed to be worn piled on top of each other: on their own, each would underwhelm, together, it becomes an artful (if potentially exhausting, not to mention expensive) symphony of juxtaposed weights and textures. Men too, it should be noted, with the resurgence of three-piece suits, the additions of Euro-style scarves and jewelry, and hats and coats in trapper-styled shearling are far from exempt. The newest edge of this layered look however is happening in accessories.  Boots, bags and shoes are wrapped with contrasting skins and are themselves accessorised with rhinestones, fur and feathers. While necklaces and bracelets, taking a cue from the street style of young fashion artisans, come in different weights so that they can be worn in layers: fine chains with small charms next to the skin, bigger and chunkier on top.

Toronto jewelry designer Jane Apor, whose own line, J.Rox Originals, embraces this trend, is an early adopter. When we meet, Jane is wearing: a fine-weight, off-the-shoulder sweater over a long-sleeved t-shirt over a tank top and a pair of fitted cargo pants. Around her neck are three super-fine, Elsa Peretti ‘By-the-yard’ diamond chains and a Tiffany charm necklace, which she has topped with a bold stone lariat of her own design. On one wrist is an Hermes enamel bracelet, an evil eye chain she bought in Greece, another Elsa Peretti  platinum-and-diamond chain, a Pura Vida cuff from Costa Rica, and a stack of 20 leather bracelets knotted with jewels and stones from her own line.  Oh, and her handbag is tied with charms and baubles.  And she has feather extensions in her blonde hair.

“Wearing one thing is boring,” says Jane. “Layering your pieces shows individuality. Anyone can wear an Hermes bracelet, but layering it with leather bracelets and a mix of other pieces I’ve picked up on my travels,  I’ve curated my own wrist.”

Ah, the wonders of the “curated” look. Interesting that this is what fashion’s new emphasis on a hard-to-achieve mix has come to be called: a sensibility so refined, with cross-cultural references so complex and sophisticated, it could find a home in a personal collection at an art gallery or museum.

As someone who has to rip off any accessories I have been woman enough to wear all day the minute I walk into my front door, I feel compelled ask her if she ever finds all this layering overwhelming. “The point is to layer until you feel comfortable,” says Jane, who admits that she comes from what she calls “a layering household”. “My mother dresses like this,” laughs Jane. “And you should see the beds in my house. There are pillows in front of pillows, and duvets piled with blankets.”

Still the old-fashioned rule, as Jane reminds me, is that when you are all dressed and fully accessorised, “you should always take a good look in the mirror before heading out the door and take off one thing.”

“ I know you won’t believe me, “ adds Jane, with a glittering toss of the stack of bracelets on her wrist, and a quiver of the feather in her long blonde hair, “but I did that this morning.”

Sir Winston Churchill park, despoiled

In Beijing, people start their day with aerobics, tai chi or ballroom dancing in the public gardens of the Temple of Heaven. In London, they enjoy an invigorating morning stroll under the green elms of Hyde Park. In the public parks of Paris, or New York, school children sail pretty little wooden boats on ponds, artists stage inventive, caravan-style puppet shows and everyone takes in the scene from elegant, wrought-iron benches and chairs. These are the benefits of green spaces in the world’s great cities: the grandeur of well-planned and maintained urban landscape design on a monumental scale for all to enjoy. In my neighbourhood public space, Sir Winston Churchill park in Toronto, however, the whole grand idealistic enterprise has gone to the dogs.

Sir Winston Churchill park sits at the crest of a hill on St. Clair Avenue with a charming view of both Casa Loma and the CN Tower below. A sort of man-made plateau, with a steeply descending south face, it serves as a part of the city’s reservoir system–a feature which is made plain by the park’s unique physical architecture, as well as its’ lovely old stone and copper service buildings reminiscent of the lovely R.C. Harris Filtration Plant in the Beaches, which date from the bygone era when public works were a matter of civic pride.

Unfortunately this unique architecture, which used to set a crisp, almost graphic relief against the sky when properly mowed, has been encouraged to go to seed. The pretty neo-Georgian out-buildings now sit amongst waist-high weeds, and the original form of the park’s steep southern slope is nearly obscured by the kind of untamed vegetation one encounters in an abandoned field or along a country roadside. To add insult to this injury, a dumb timber fence—comically incongruous in the urban setting and just plain wrong in the context of the park’s original style—has been installed around the slope’s base, making it look like a pioneer farm or perhaps, a children’s petting zoo.

According to our former city councillor, Michael Walker, who was manning the ship during the park’s unsightly transformation, the effort was intended to restore the city’s “green canopy”.  A noble effort to be sure, and yet we in the neighbourhood always understood this politico speak as eco-spin for saving on the cost of mowing and maintaining the park’s slope, while limiting the city’s liability. The park’s slope used to be a famously thrilling toboggan run in winter. Now park visitors are greeted with ugly signs that read “sledding strictly prohibited”, and the even more welcoming “No Ball Playing Allowed”. (I ask you, what are public parks for now? Shooting up? Standing around and smoking?).

It angers me each and every time I go for a morning stroll there, that the crisp green hill, which used to be such a charming public feature, is now an untended “back-to-nature” tangle. It would be an absurdity to call this a forest or woodland—it is quite simply a mess. Equally irksome is that the grace of the park’s original design has been so swiftly erased under the pretense of it benefiting all. (Other city parks with similar architecture such as Christie Pits, and Rosehill reservoir, I note, are still somehow mowed and maintained with their original green lawn slopes).

But I am particularly annoyed with another bad move on the part of the planners at Parks and Rec: the decision to place a fenced-in dog run on the park’s southern promontory behind the tennis courts. Yes, a lot of neighbourhood dog owners make use of it (as they still do, thank goodness, of the public tennis courts). But now this dog run takes up the better part of the park’s best viewpoint, while people who gather in the park to say, folk dance (as I saw a group do there, Beijing-style, the other night) are forced to do so facing the traffic along St. Clair. When my kids were small, we used to love tossing around, gasp, a ball, or just hanging out at that remarkable city viewpoint. Now it’s virtually unusable, but for a dusty little running track amidst the weeds on the hillside’s edge.

The state of a city’s parks, I would argue, is a reflection of the commitment we have to the quality of public life. How we use–or abuse–our public spaces is a measure of our ideals and our aspirations. Not only has the whole look and feel of my city park gone to the dogs, the dogs have taken the view.

The beauty of sadness

As of last Wednesday, more than half a million people–many of whom waited in lines of up to two hours, and some who returned for a second visit—will have taken in the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum’s blockbuster “Savage Beauty” show of the work of the late British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. So popular has the show proved with museum visitors that it’s run has been extended twice– an amazing turn of events considering the show is essentially a presentation of clothes on mannequins not entirely unlike what one might see in the windows of a store. As the show wraps up this weekend with extended hours until midnight, it is worth asking: what exactly did people see in it that proved so compelling?

Hard as it is to examine the artistic output of a suicide without peering at it through a veil of melancholy, in the case of McQueen it is that much harder. His twisted High Victorian tailoring and strangely rent and shredded hems and bodices always seemed like mourning clothes even when he was alive. The man loved black lace, jet beads, fringe, skulls, crosses and bones–all from a design perspective almost evocations of death, loss, fragility and sadness. Wildly inventive and, in retrospect, stunningly directional (his 1992 graduate collection from Central St Martins, which was immediately purchased by the influential stylist Isabella Blow, featured the innovative, sculptural tailoring and raw selvedge hems now familia on trendy boutique racks everywhere), McQueen embodied in every respect the tortured artist obsessed with the romantic drama of that role.

With the staging of Savage Beauty, the Metropolitan’s Costume Institute has played this to the hilt. An overblown full length cape of black taffeta was further blown by a hidden wind machine as a recording of wolves baying to the moon played in the near pitch-dark background. A barn board floor supporting McQueen’s “Highland Rape” tartans was splintered, as if by a maniac wielding an axe as a punk version of “God Saves the Queen” screeched and howled.

“I don’t really get inspired by specific women”, McQueen is quoted in one display. “It’s more in the minds of the women in the past like Catherine the Great or Marie Antoinette, people who were doomed.” Or, “I find beauty in the grotesque…like most artists I have to force people to look at things.” In his hands, pain itself is an aesthetic: a classic French damask bleeds into drips of blood, a neckline of a dress is savagely ripped open.

Seeing them on display in a museum it is inarguable that McQueen’s clothes are sculpture and that fashion can be art (and, clearly, that this art form can appeal to a lot of people). What is interesting is how much of what we see as art has to do with pain and sadness. And how much we have romanticised the artist who self-destructively brings about his or her own death. Since the days of the Romantic poets, maybe even the death-obsessed Hamlet, gloom and doom has been an enduringly attractive leitmotif. So much so that it is hard to imagine revering the work of anyone who paints candy-box sunny skies or is relentlessly upbeat.

Is it possible that we require our artists to adopt a style of being tortured and miserable in order to be taken seriously? Or that art that doesn’t appear to require its’ creator to tear themselves to shreds to produce it we don’t see as worthwhile?

The week that I managed to see the McQueen show happened by chance to be the very same week that poor doomed Amy Winehouse—the self-destructive train wreck that everybody watched die on youtube—was found dead at 27. One couldn’t help thinking of all the young, brilliantly gifted and very sad artists who died well before their time just like Alexander McQueen did while admiring his beautifully melancholy and tortured clothes.

Pingyao in the morning

After three weeks in China, my visual in-box is full!  Here’s some of my impressions of this funky and fabulous land in no particular order.

Gilded cage, complete with porcelain vase

In the bird market in Hong Kong, people bring their birds out in the fresh air to sing with each other from their elegant cages.

Shanghai's Bund, at night

The red star shines at night in smoggy mysterious Shanghai.

Street calligraphy

Don’t know if this says “parking space for rent” but isn’t it lovely?

Lacquer over lagoon

A red lacquer  bench in a classical Chinese garden bends gracefully over the water.

China club place setting

The little red star logo that looks like an egg in a cup kills me.

Lily pad boat

Cocoon cabinet

At a silk factory outside Beijing, the source is displayed as a Victorian curiosity.

Bamboo BBQ

In Longsheng, we had rice roasted in bamboo over a fire for dinner.

Mirror image

A portrait on glass hanging on the wall of in an Imperial apartment.

The new blank G&T

Check out my story on Grand  Toy’s mysterious re-imagination in today’s Toronto

Star: http://www.thestar.com/living/shopping/article/1001452–von-hahn-image-is-everything-so-grand-toy-sells-nothing

Plastic fantastic

Love these completely customisable futuristic booties from Italian designer Gaetano Pesce for the Brazilian footwear manufacturer Melissa. They slip on like a bendable pair of stiff socks. All you need to customise them to your liking is a pair of scissors–although I would take them as is, thank you. Talk about a step into the future.

Bangin' Bungalow

Just had to pen an ode to my favourite neighbourhood in town, now the perfect place to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon:

http://www.thestar.com/living/shopping/article/993526–von-hahn-old-school-is-new-again-in-kensington-market

Disney comes to town

Check out my story in the Star about the questionable taste of the new nouveau riches:

http://www.thestar.com/article/985765–von-hahn-there-s-no-accounting-for-taste-in-forest-hill