I found a new muse. Gareth Pugh.

I ran a google search with “futuristic clothes”, once again. I ran into some of Pugh’s couture and was immediately blown away.

I love monochrome clothes, even though I rarely wear them myself. I’d like to, but I like bright colours too much. Ok who am I kidding, I don’t plan my clothing that carefully. Usually I just pull out whatever fits and is clean.

I wouldn’t wear these, like I might the white ones above. But I love the experimental forms and fabrics. Playing with the human form until it’s barely recognizable.

Many of his clothes aren’t very wearable, but how often haute couture is? It’s supposed to be a ready-to-wear collection, so maybe Pugh is  trying to bring more “individuality” and craziness into street fashion. Pugh has said that he’s barely sold any of his pieces, so he’s a very poor man indeed. Fashion critics praise him and love him, but he scrapes by. I admire his passion to create anything he can conjure up in his wildest dreams, even though he must know that many people won’t wear them. If they’re pricey, you’ll want to be able to move around in them and stuff, not just look good.

Many of them look like you’d probably melt underneath. It’s really sad because I’d love to wear something by Pugh. If I was richer, that is. Well, I’m happy to see that at least Beyoncé has realized how wonderful Pugh’s clothes are:

Even Beyoncé wears them when she’s performing or doing promo. I’d like something you could wear to work and look stunning and oh so cool. Imagine we lived in some weird avant-gardistic space age. My view of the future has changed from dystopia to utopia. Completely unrealistic, I know, but I like living inside my head in clean and cultivated future surroundings.

In my dreams, everyone would be walking around in Pugh’s clothes. It would be such a pleasure to go outside and watch people.

I like to talk about people. There is really no direct equivalent for it in Finnish. I often talk about ihmiset, but that isn’t quite the same semantically. In correct Finnish, you should simply use the passive voice if you want to refer to people in general.

I believe ihmiset has been borrowed into Finnish from English, just like many other terms and grammatically innovative uses. For instance, the generic use of the pronoun you sounds quite bad in Finnish (sinä), but people (ihmiset) use it more and more. In a way I understand why the language police are concerned about this phenomenon of borrowing words and usages from English, but for the most part it simply fascinates me.

Obviously it’s a consequence of the lingua franca English having a higher position of prestige than Finnish. Moreover, the history of the written English language runs much further back in time than for Finnish. Early modern English (roughly from 1500 to 1600 or 1700, depending on who’s talking) is fairly easy to understand: the writing conventions were established earlier than in Finland and they were fairly well standardized during the 17th century.  The only real difficulties lie in the different meanings of words that haven’t changed in orthographical form or grammatical function.

As for written Finnish, well, its birth process was a very conscious and determined effort of the bishop Agricola who, following the principles of the reformation, wanted the ordinary people to learn to read religious and educational texts in their own language. How many could actually read in the 16th century, I don’t know. But Finnish was basically a spoken language until it suddenly became vogue in the 19th century due to the nationalist movement. Just how random is that?

Imagine if those educated Finns never wanted to create a Finnish nation with its own, written, respectable and civilized language. Would we speak and write Swedish still? Or what if the nationalist movement only believed in “one country and one nation” and left out “one language”? To my mind, it wasn’t a logically necessary part of the movement’s ideals. I doubt anyone had such a deep love for the Finnish language that it simply had to be developed into a “proper”, respectable language. Incorporating language into nationalist policy was a tool among many, for obvious reasons since language is part of defining your identity.

Bored? No? Good, I’ll continue.

By now you will have understood how different languages English and Finnish are and how they naturally have a different position in policies and identities. I like the fact that we have Kielitoimisto, a publically funded agency which gives recommendations for correct usage of Finnish. We need normative rules in order to function as a society, but the linguist in me can’t help but cringe at the dogmatic attitude that so many people subscribe to.

If Kielitoimisto says that you should insert a comma before subordinate conjunctions, then that’s what you must do if you want your language to be “proper”. Even if it makes absolutely no sense from the point of view of the semantic structure of the sentence and the intonational pattern when the text is read aloud, you simply MUST insert the comma. Because it’s been decided that you SHOULD.

The bottom line is, I can’t bring myself to see what’s so wrong about ihmiset or the generic sinä. The Finnish language has not deteriorated, whatever that might mean, because we have actually expanded the pragmatic and semantic usage of certain words. My reading into all this nonsense of complaining about bad Finnish is that it’s eternal as a phenomenon. Read a text concerning proper language use from the 18th century and you’ll find that old people complain about the youth ruining the language and not being able to handle the correct writing and speaking norms. These things just never change.

Therein lies the idea that Obama cultivated into successful  political self-promotion. Change. We mustn’t fight it but instead embrace it. Or let it pass at the very least.

It must be that he read what modern* linguists have been saying for years and realized what a healthy attitude they’ve got. Maybe he’ll be able to bring many more along.

*A problematic term in itself but I’m not going to be (too) pedantic about the use of modern in connection with linguistics. I’ll write more on that some other time.

My mum drove me back to Tampere today. I spent the May Day holidays in Hollola, reading for exams and eating my mum’s cooking (cinnamon rolls, salmon and pizza, not together nor in that order). I also hurt my foot when jogging, so it looks like I don’t have to buy those new running shoes very soon after all.

We went to Sara Hilden’s art museum in Särkänniemi, the amusement park. It was the first visit for both of us. We’ve been to Särkänniemi several times, but we never had the energy to go see art on the same visit.

It was by lake Näsijärvi, beautiful views. The building was of concrete but with big windows and lots of space. All you need from an art museum.

They had a retrospective exhibition of Alex Katz, “An American way of seeing”. A teacher actually mentioned it to me, so it was the first thing that came to my mind. There wasn’t much else as far as art exhibitions right now in Tampere, and me and mum both wanted to see some art. So there, like a true scientist I have to give a weighted explanation to every decision I make.

We liked Alex Katz. To be honest, judging by the paintings I’d seen on posters beforehand I didn’t expect anything spectacular. I love being surprised. His colours are so bright, clear, exhilarating. Energizing. Like huge splashes of joy and happiness on walls. Large and even planes of colour, with clear lines and contours.

There was something Japanese about them, the simplicity and asceticism, the beautifully and delicately drawn blades of grass and tree branches on some of them, cropped partly out of the picture. The portraits were obviously not realistic, yet they looked very vivid and like you could recognize someone from them if you knew the person.

(Alex Katz, “One flight up”.)

His painting style is vaguely similar to pop art, but much more sophisticated. The colours don’t clash as much, and there is no obvious commentary on mass production. The subject matters were people, going about their business in nondescript surroundings.

Some paintings were on cardboard (or some thin plates whatever they were), cut out along the lines of the person in the portrait. They were really cool! In particular I liked one with a lot of heads of different people on a table, with kooky 70s hairstyle, clothes and glasses (“One flight up” above). Each person looked so fleshy and unique. Delicious.