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And so there we are. Him and me.
Me and him.
Me and NOT MR.

He met me outside the restaurant, pulled me straight out the taxi cab. He had kind of rough hands. He doesn’t moisturise. MR moisturises, his hands smell of pears. D&G smells of…that night, not D&G, something different. He has a kind of musky masculine scent on, but with a hint of fruit. I just wanted to bury my head in his shoulder, but I smiled sweetly and let him help me out the cab. It’s killing me. I want to know what it is. But for some reason at first I was unable to speak.

We took the elevator ride up to the Oxo Restaurant. It didn’t feel awkward. It felt, gentle, a short journey during which we smile at each other. He comments on my shoes. We both know we’ve never really spoken. Platitudes and comments about the weather (which as we all know is an English national past-time) have passed at work. Flirtation has been minimal. Conversations by SMS have been brief and never explored deep annals of greater meaning.

He has grey eyes.

I realised I was staring because the concept had dawned on me that I really didn’t know this man at all. I was working off pheromones here, fake pheromones, manufactured in a bottle and doused all over his impeccably tailored sweaters.

So when we exited the elevator I was about ready to make an excuse and leave, but I’d built no escape route, I hadn’t my cell, only one person knew where I was and that was because she spent 30 minutes attacking my nethers with wax and drinking my bubbly. And as far as she was concerned this was an anniversary diner for MR and I.

D&G took my coat and handed it to the server. That was it. Escape route erased. I was going to have to talk to him, flirt no doubt, say clever things, be funny and witty and all those things I am renowned for. But I kept thinking of MR, memories of our stupid fight, flashes of Claire and him, probably lying naked on each other. In my head she is snaffling popcorn and coke out of his crotch or reading something deftly intellectual like Nitche as she adjusts her expensive spex and they wax lyrical about the state of modern literature.

Fuck.

I smiled. All teeth and anxiety.

This was no way to start the show.

WHAT DO YOU THINK…?

I had a virtual fight.  Unfortunately not of the Street Fighter kind. I got K.Oed by mac mail.

Mr Right and I had an argument last night, via email. My heart is breaking. Being away from each other so much is difficult. He down there. Me up here, under there, in out in out shake it round about…

It’s hard to share those ins and outs of the day to day. I spend so much of the day talking the last thing I want to do in the evening is gas about it, and so long at whatido that when I finally get through to the other side of the day I can’t talk about it, not about work, not about play, not about doing what I want to do. Saying what I want to say becomes the last thing I have to achieve and the first thing I forget to do. Too many people to see, too little time to see them. Living how I want to live is hard on the people I claim to Love (he says, hence the fact I have had MC Hammer in my head since last night). That was what started it. Not MC Hammer. He said, “Living how I want to live is hard on the people I claim to Love”

He think’s I’m condescending. I’m not. It’s all in his head. He’s just…hummm…I don’t know, jealous? MR isn’t what people would call confident, or sociable. He doesn’t like company (typical writer) except of the people he stakes a claim on. He won’t propose, and I don’t want him to, but he has staked a claim on me, planted a flag between my butt cheeks for me to wave at him as I pass by. HAILTHECONQUORINGHERO. When he’s here, with me, he is my world, every last gorgeous bit of him. Truth is though that I have to be shared. I have to see other people. I might have a burning brand saying ‘property of Mr Right’ on my soul but my work forces me to be pleasant and sociable, flirtatious, to make friends and influence people. I don’t talk about MR with them because I need to seem attainable.

I know I’m the one in the wrong here. I know I am. I’m not a nice person. I should be with him more often. I shouldn’t flirt. I should tell the world I am in love because I am. My beautiful Mr Right, who I love and adore and who …

Love List entry #6) wrote a love note and got PA to deliver it me on Monday in amongst the morning mail. (the PA is interesting, will tell you all about HIM asap.)

So we had a fight. I said things. He said things. I may have mentioned I was toying with the idea of fucking a professional clown…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As far as nails in the coffin of an argument go, admitting to crushes on children’s entertainers who smell of sex and make your knees tremble is sort of a period point. Especially given that it turns out MR has an irrational fear of clowns. Who knew. It’s called Coulrophobia.

 

And so I made a decision. Love be damned.

I called D&G. Friday, dinner at a prominent London restaurant. Clowning is paying (if all the desperate housewives knew what he was spending his money on). Should be interesting.

Remember in 7th grade, when cats would just shower in Drakkar and pick up mad chicks? Shiiiiit…that stuff is one step from Stetson. While I will swear by my D&G classic ’til the day I die, they released a new cologne, The One (wtf?), with only minorly racist marketing copy: “spicey, oriental perfume” (r.i.p. E. Said).

(Via Acquire)

Today was my fourth day in Basel and my last day on the fair. The day was completely filled with meetings with jewelry manufacturars and we ended the day with the finalization of the packaging of the Ace Watch (for updates, keep track of www.aceblog.info). Before we started in Hall 2.0, we did a quick round in Hall 5.0 to see what is happening in the Fashion sector of the watch industry. In this post I will show some pictures of the booths (maybe fun to see if you never have visited BaselWorld) and in the second part some fashion watches (we wrote an article about what watches should or shouldn’t be labeled as fashion: “Couture Watches vs. Fashion Watches“. In this post I name the watches that are designed by fashion houses and produced for the price range that people should wear them as fashion accessories (buy a new one every year), fashion watches.

1. Fashion Booths in Hall 5.0:

In my opinion the most successful stand in Basel is the one of Patek Philippe, but if we look at the stands of fashion watches, the stand of D&G won by far (in my opinion):

D&G: One moment the stand is completely blue-ish…

The next moment the complete stand is red!

Guess believes sex sells…

And Breil doesn’t (anymore… Remember the commercials?!)

Dior thinks: J’adore Montres!

Hermes is understated elegance.

Ferregamo started making watches too…

… And, Moschino finds itself “Cheap & Chic”!

2. Fashion watches presented in Hall 5.0:

Storm

Yema

Sector: Is it a fashion brand?! (Sorry for the bad picture & reflection).

Valentino: Like Gucci made a complete black watch for ladies!

Tomorrow I am off to Geneva to visit the SIHH. Stay tuned for a report of all the Richemont brands plus AP, GP and Parmigiani.

So, I finished reading Organs without Bodies yesterday, or, more precisely, I finished reading what I chose to read from it – not very scholarly or me, eh? Anyway, I am ambivalent about Žižek’s move to interrogate Deleuze (and Guattari, in spite of Žižek’s antagonism towards him) with the help of psychoanalysis. This move appears throughout the book, e.g., when Žižek discusses D&G’s view of fascism (187-92). I can’t decide if it’s a fair thing to do. Firstly, D&G reject psychoanalysis outright – see the common subtitle of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus which serves as a common thread – because of the negativity that psychoanalysis induces and of its complicity with capitalism in subjugating desire and hindering the lines of flight and the creation of bodies without organs (simplistically put). So, is it fair to try and verify Deleuze’s claims by introducing a parameter that he had discarded as problematic? Secondly, is this interrogation valid because it should serve as a verification of Deleuze and Guattari’s theses? In other words, even if they throw it out, can psychoanalysis still be a tool in validating their own schizoanalysis?

If I’m not making sense, it’s probably because I’m confused myself. So please disregard. I think Žižek is somehow trying to reconcile Deleuze and Guattari with psychoanalysis, which, again, seems futile, given their rejection of it. If Žižek succeeds in this project, it means that their whole project doesn’t stand. Or does it? As Heather would say, I’m probably splitting hairs right now, and consequently wasting time (mine and yours). Moving on: Žižek offers a critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, arguing that “Today’s global capitalism can no longer be combined with democratic representation: the key economic decisions of bodies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Trade Organization (WTO) are not legitimized by any democratic process, and this lack of democratic representation is structural, not empirical” (195). In other words, Žižek faults Hardt and Negri with coming up with an idealist solution, one that is both inapplicable and too vague (or inapplicable because too vague and idealistic). Žižek remarks that “Their wager is to repeat Marx. For Marx, highly organized corporate capitalism was already a form of socialism within capitalism (a kind of socialization of capitalism, with the absent owners becoming superfluous) [a citation/footnote would have been greatly appreciated here], so that one need only cut the nominal head off and we get socialism. In an identical fashion, Hardt and Negri see the same potential in the emerging emerging hegemonic role of immaterial labor. Today, immaterial labor is ‘hegemonic’ in the precise sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in nineteenth-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic as the specific color giving its tone to the totality – not quantitatively but playing the key, emblematic, structural role. This, then, far from posing a mortal threat to democracy (as conservative cultural critics want us to believe), opens a unique chance of ‘absolute democracy’ – why?” (196).Thank you, sir! Basically, Hardt and Negri’s ingrained Marxism renders them irreconcilable with D&G’s immanence, in spite of their efforts… and Žižek has put it so much more eloquently than I ever could.

Ultimately, Žižek becomes Deleuzian in spite of himself, as he asks “What would the ‘multitude in power’ look like” (198), and starts to exemplify this impossibility by imagining the possibilities of the Zapatistas’ rhetoric of identification with any subaltern from around the world, in the case of their gaining power. The same rhetoric that serves a rebel group would be construed as the harshest of totalitarian demagogy. Thus Žižek does away (or suggests, at least) with the possibility of organized resistance, with the old Marxist panacea of the revolution of the proletariat. As Žižek asks in a dramatic end to the book: “How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing? Perhaps, this is the question today” (213).