“Etiquette has re-entered the zeitgeist.” Well, really?

Etiquette was worth knowing once upon a time, when no one was sarcastic about wanting God to save the Queen and all aspired to speak her English. One could feel comfortable in any situation, relaxed in the knowledge of how to hold one’s cutlery and alight from a car without revealing one’s not-very-saucy knickers. James Bond even rumbles an imposter in From Russia With Love because he orders red wine with his fish; any gentleman worth his Harris Tweed would never have made such a blunder. Such was the importance of etiquette. Then came the naughty 1960s and the desire for a classless, more relaxed society corroded these elaborately set traps.

Lady Troubridge, author of the dusty book I found at my grandmother’s house, advises on how to dump one’s fiancé in an elegantly-worded letter, on what to give the butler for Christmas and on the correct order for milk, tea and sugar to enter a cup. By contrast, the modern guide seems hopelessly vague now that so much of the old rigour of etiquette has gone.

Looking through the advice proffered, it seems to flail around for relevance. Most is repackaged common sense, or just silly. The chapter about beach behaviour advises: “preying Adonises may be admired with as much indiscretion as you dare. Keep sunglasses on to avoid detection”. Checking people out behind your sunglasses is the oldest trick in the book and, let’s be honest, ruefully unsubtle. If you’re going to be sleazy, being sneaky only makes it worse.

Despite the effort to include modern scenarios, some of it still sounds amusingly out of touch. In the “Gig-Going” section, “all ladies must try to earn their rock credentials by getting along within the lawlessness of a gig”. What-ho and chucks away ladies! Even one-night stands are included now, but again, don’t we know that “any dark alley gropery on the way home is just not ladylike”? Whether you choose to let that stop you is another matter.

One is advised, in the section on “Festival Chic”, that “an amnesty has been called on fairy wings and cowboy hats”. If you need to be told not to wear fairy wings when you’re not at a fancy dress party, or cowboy hats when you’re not a tweenage Miley Cyrus fan, you probably need something more than a book to assist you. On flirting, the modern girl has a “checklist of risks”, which includes “Is there a girlfriend? Is she here?”. Unless you’re in the mood for a hair-tugging showdown, you’ve surely checked. It’s all so obvious that it suggests there is little meaningful etiquette left. There’s also the unsettling implication here that if the girlfriend is not around, you can go for it. Is that what 21st century politeness means – having the courtesy not to kiss a girl’s boyfriend in front of her?

Olivia Williams

Gambling to reach your goals

The stakes have been set and bets are rolling in. Nearly £2 million is at risk. With over 32,000 people involved worldwide, who’ll cash in?

Welcome to the latest stateside phenomenon: online gambling to achieve personal success. Setting a financial incentive against yourself may be all you need to reach that goal you keep putting off until tomorrow. President Barack Obama’s budget director is a recent convert—he loves it.

The premise is simple: Users in online communities enter into legally-binding contracts stipulating that, should they miss their target, money will be deducted from their bank account and paid to an anti-charity of their choice. On-going challenges force users to check in weekly, while one-shot aspirations require just a single day of reckoning by a set deadline.

Fear of losing capital to an anti-charity, an organisation at odds with one’s beliefs, is proving a great motivator.

Online gamblers are reporting an 85 percent success-rate. As for the other failing 15 percent—the George W. Bush Library and National Rifle Organization in the US have seen a recent jump in contributions.

StickK.com, the brainchild of Yale University professors Dean Karlan, Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff and graduate student Jordan Goldberg, is leading the craze. Karlan and Ayres studied the effects of contractual agreements on smokers and applied their theories to dieting. With the help of Nalebuff and Goldberg, their research branched out into an online scheme. They decided on the web domain StickK.com because the letter K is the legal shorthand for contract.

The creators claim the site’s success is based on two assumptions: We don’t always stick to our promises, and incentives get people moving.

“The website changes the price of your behaviour,” says Karlan. “It makes your vices more expensive and your virtues cheaper. If chocolate costs more, we eat less of it. And this is making chocolate cost more.”

The website invites users to sign a Commitment Contract and opt to have their penalty money sent to either a charity selected by the site, an anti-charity of their choosing, or—through the “Friend or Foe” option—to a designated bank account. The latter option is effective for users with a competitive spirit who sign up with friends.

After selecting a goal from a drop-down menu (including: losing weight, exercising regularly, quitting smoking, running a marathon, or setting a custom goal), you can set your stakes (min. £3), designate a referee to monitor your progress, and finally add a list of friends to form your support network. Weekly e-mails are sent to your friend list should you fail to reach your target—so, “support network” is used loosely here. Humiliation club sounds fitting.

Goals range from the obvious New Year’s resolutions to the far-fetched. Karlan sees a lot of contracts involving dating and relationships such as: “I will not date anymore losers,” or “I won’t call him for a month.” But he likes the realistic ones: “One of my favourites is my favourite for that reason alone. It said: ‘I will not smoke weed anymore,’ but it also said, ‘…only between Monday through Friday.’ The person knew the weekends might proving too challenging and set the goal accordingly.”

Karlan is no stranger to betting against himself. He once risked up to $50,000 with a friend to lose weight. They shed a combined total of 40 pounds, without losing a cent. “At the end of the day, losing weight wasn’t sufficient as an incentive,” says Karlan, “The money influenced me a lot more.”

Slimming is the primary goal of choice, with 42 percent of StickK users betting for weight loss. Other betting websites encourage cyber rivalry with forums in place specifically for dieters who want to challenge one another. Fatbet.net and Makemoneylosingweight.com allow users to track their weight and others’ publicly. All bets are handled offsite.

Regardless to which gambling tribe you subscribe, these sites work because it’s assuring to know that there are other people in similar situations ready to join a weekly community and cheer you on.

I’m still sceptical: could a website really make me the master my own fitter, more ab-firming destiny?

I put myself on a New Commitment Contract with StickK. Two weeks on and I’m hooked. It’s cold outside, I’ve got too much work—excuses, excuses no more! I log-on to say if I’ve run at least twice since my last report. How self-gratifying! Facebook is so yesterday.

StickK ticks all the necessary boxes for my unbridled competitive spirit and the narcissist in me. As a Manchester United fan, I’ve selected the Chelsea Fan Club as my anti-charity preference. An hour before my weekly deadline, if I haven’t managed to get my butt in gear and hit the pavement, I do it. No way, I’m losing a single penny!

The jury’s out on continuing success rates after contracts have ended. And the glaringly obvious question is if online betting communities are more about reaching goals or keeping your cash.

Does it really matter, though? At the end of the day, your jeans are either looser or your purse strings tighter. I’m already thinking about committing to another contract. Wait a second. Is that an early sign of a gambling addiction? Perhaps just one more bet.

Alanna Glassman

New Power Dressing

As we head into 2010, the nation’s rekindled love of shoulder pads doesn’t look to be dying out. Until recently, this 80’s throw-back would have spelt fashion suicide for women. Now, it’s quite a different story: all the ‘right’ people (Kate Moss and Agyness Deyn included) are sporting them, and John Lewis is selling out of DIY shoulder pads as the fashion-conscience raid their haberdashery shelves en masse. All trends have a life cycle, but what’s the reason for the latest come-back of the androgynous look for women, dubbed the New Power Dressing?

While 2010’s take on the shoulder pad trend is more Thunderbirds than Dynasty – all pointed sleeves and nipped-in waists – there is something undeniably masculine about the look. Obviously, powerful women were around before the shoulder pad, but there does seem to be an uncanny correlation between women feeling the need to assert themselves, and the widths of their shoulders.

The 1940’s and 1980’s are, by no coincidence, the two periods in fashion history with which masculine tailoring for women is most strongly associated. After World War II, during which women took on traditionally male jobs for the first time, shoulders in fashion became noticeably more boxy as part of the capable ‘can do’ attitude. It’s no surprise then, that Margaret Thatcher – the Iron Lady herself – was one of the forerunners of the 1980’s vogue for the power silhouette. In a decade characterised by female desire to conquer the corporate world, the shoulder pad was the successful women’s armoury.

Hannah O’Sullivan, stylist to many of the country’s top female executives, makes the connection between today’s hard-edged glamour and power explicit: ‘I advise women to pop shoulder pads in for meetings, to compete with the physical presence of men’. It might not sit comfortably that women, in 2010, are being instructed to masculinise in order to be taken seriously, but, in today’s shrunken job market, Bob’s-your-uncle, the shoulder pad is back.

Claire Johnstone

ISIS HT10: THE CONTROL ISSUE

ONLINE only at Issuu
Enjoy!

Ayesis Naysis

After an unbearable delay, here are the winners from the last dance.EVOLVE

Ayesis: Peacocks are Darwin in feathers. There was once a principled bird who decided that what counted was being good not looking flash so he painted all his feathers grey. He quickly died out because none of the lady birds noticed him.
Naysis: Pouting makes you look not-hard and undoes the aforementioned good work.

Ayesis: Being really tall. It makes you be to a normal person what that Lucozade water is to normal water.
Naysis: Standing right next to the camera to try to trick everyone into thinking that you’re really tall too. We’ve moved on from the Bayeux Tapestry and cottoned on to perspective.

Ayesis: A wrinkled brow: no self-respecting gent of Spring ‘10 should be without one.
Naysis: Thumbs. Taking inspiration from the ugly sisters, self-respecting gents should saw them off. Only the vulgar need them for those practical tasks they do insist on doing.

Remember, if your picture gets on the website after a dance. EVOLVE night, you get free entry next time it’s on. Send an email to editor@isismagazine.org.uk if you’re featured here, and we’ll bung you on a special people list for Friday of 7th week.

Taking It Slow

You shouldn’t rush a revolution if you want to enjoy it. The Slow Movement has its roots in a 1986 protest against the opening of a McDonalds near the Spanish Steps in Rome and has since continued to challenge authority – be it fast food or uninspired, unsympathetic city life. Slow Travel has been one of the more successful offshoots inspired by the protest, its objective being to change the way travellers appreciate the world without, in the words of travel blogger Ed Gillespie who travelled around the world without flying and using as many different means of transport as possible “fucking up the only planet we have”.

Since his trip, Ed has become something of a spokesman for Slow Travel. His blog www.lowcarbontravel.com came seventh in Tripbase’s survey of top low carbon travel blogs in 2009 and consistently confronts the status quo of the travel industry. Speaking with Ed, it becomes clear that he aims to encourage “intelligent substitution”; there’s no reason why we cannot seek the “same pleasures in a sustainable way”. For Ed, “transition is the word of the moment”, and this is what modern travel has lost by “twanging ourselves across half the world in an aluminium sausage”. Travel should be an organic experience, unrestrained by profiteering package companies, adaptable and fluid.

When gently accused of snobbery, Ed sighs and explains that the cheap flight revolution

hasn’t been the great leveller it’s so often lauded to be. Only half of the UK population fly at all and half again fly only once or twice a year. What is needed, therefore, is a change in the way we all approach travel, being independent and deciding for ourselves what we want to do rather than being led by the hand, even if it’s just a walk to a local suburb you haven’t visited before or a boat ride up the Thames. Slow is a state of mind.

Slow Travel allows us to better enjoy the history and culture of the places through which we journey. Nicky Garnder and Susanne Kries of Hidden Europe magazine describe Slow Travel as “about our relationship with the world around us, and our relationship with ourselves”. The historic sites we enjoy were never intended to be gazed at by tourists; they deserve more than a disinterested glance, and they tell us about a place’s history and culture in a manner more accessible than a clichéd guidebook.

Hidden Europe’s manifesto for Slow Travel (available at www.slowtravel.eu) particularly emphasises how we perceive the time we allot to our travel experiences. Speed shouldn’t be associated with success – the journey itself should be lingered over and time should be a “commodity of abundance not of scarcity”. Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini claims our problem is that “we believe we can add meaning to life by making things go faster… but life is long. The problem is we don’t know how to spend our time wisely”.

This is what required of the slow traveller – a willingness to challenge the status quo of the travel world by simply thinking differently. The travel writer Théophile Gautier bemoaned the speed and stress of travel in 1843’s Voyage en Espagne with the quip: “you might as well stay at home”. Journeys must be reclaimed; we should reassert a sense of pleasure in travel for its own sake as well as out of responsibility to the planet and those cultures which

inhabit it. The Slow revolution may be a very gentle one, but it’s probably one of history’s most enjoyable. It also may be its most necessary if we are to combat an unsustainable way of living and replace it with an existence altogether more leisurely, more pleasure-filled and above all – Slower.

Sam Kennedy

Isis Inside London Fashion Week

And so it was time for New York to pass Blighty the baton, and for London to do what it does best – innovate, risk and surprise. From militant woodland creatures at Unique, to crucifix wielding yhettis at le Mindu, it’s fair to say that we didn’t disappoint. Below is an attempt at plucking a few key trends from what was, as always, a mind-boggling array of colours, structures and textures.

Sheer

Sheer fabrics formed part of almost every collection this season, whether in the form of mesh leggings at Bora Aksu, voluminous blouses at Paul Costelloe or potentially life-threatening head bags at Richard Nicoll. Palettes dominated in the translucent navies and blacks, giving skin that sought-after eerie fragility. Of particular note were Jonathan Saunders’ futuristic circuit-board inspired skirts, and Jasper Conran’s ability to make near-nakedness both chic and acceptable with the help of strategically placed paneling.

Prints

Prints are big in 2010. Not to be taken literally however, with designs ranging from the impressionistic, through the ethnic, animal print and even the tye-dye. Unapologetically upbeat were Issa London’s fuschia and tangerine block graphics, whilst softer pallets of teal adorned silk shifts at Emilio De La Morena and BODYAMR. Dainty designs ruled at Erdem, whose infinitesimally intricate prints spanned an autumnal palette of brown, ocher, teal, rust, and tan. A welcome contrast was to be found in Sass & Bide’s monochrome tribal print collection, featuring feathered neck pieces and galactic mohair shoulder armour.

Textured Blacks

Head-to-toe black appeared to be a favourite of not only the designers, but of those gracing their front rows – the trick is all in the layering. Staple textures included leather (in the form of bondage-esque restraints at Paul Costelloe), ruffles, fur and lace. The message is clear – the more you can incorporate the better. Of note were Charlie Le Mindu’s PVC-clad beings, proving that it’s hot to have hair in all the right places.

Cut-Outs

Exposure was most certainly on the cards for a number of designers this season. From spider-web knitwear at Mark Fast, to bold graphic cut-outs at PPQ, it appears that skin is the new black. Such was certainly the case at Ann-Sofie Back, where frail strips of silk connected to form jumpsuits leaving you entirely at the mercy of the slightest gust of wind – but indecency’s a small price to pay.

Julia Fitzpatrick

TOMORROW

In JCR’s everywhere: The Control Issue

“Pif! What language is this?”

The professor said, ‘Pif! What language is this? / Degenerate slang isn’t standard English! / We at the top must establish limits’ / I said ‘Prof! Language is the people that live it. / Get loose, give it some vision and foresight / and juice; we can throw the dictionary door wide.’

Dizraeli, winner of Radio 4’s Poetry Slam and Brighton-based hip hop artist, makes a convincing case in his rap ’21st Century Flux’, recorded in Oxford for Macmillan’s new online Open Dictionary. His performance – barefoot dancing and all – is as infectious as the English language he talks of as a “disease”, but should there really be no frameworks of control when it comes to what’s ‘in’ and what’s ‘out’ of the dictionary?

Sitting on the studio floor, surrounded by a sea of paper and tucking into a veggie spring roll, Dizraeli is still when I arrive learning the rap he finished the day before. He clearly isn’t worried that he hasn’t memorised the tongue-twisting line, “Shampoo juggernaut moolah hullabaloo” among others, and neither are the Macmillan team, led by Michael Rundell and represented today by Laine Cole. Nor should they be. His no-frills performance oozes energy as soon as the camera begins to roll, and the rhythmic flow of his voice more than makes up for the lack of backing music. He genuinely does “flood your sub conscious with a drum roll” as his track ‘Bomb Tesco’ threatens. Always on his feet, Dizraeli doesn’t like to stay still. As the camera guy tells him where he’s in and out of the shot, it seems a shame to contain him at all. He looks most at home running starkers through a supermarket car-park in his ‘Bomb Tesco’ video.

Dizraeli only gets involved with projects he’s passionate about. His concept-play, the rap musical Rebel Cell; his ‘tole-rants’ project on You Tube; and ‘Bomb Tesco’ – “a big fuck you” to the corporate giant – are all intensely personal. He certainly has a passion for language, which chimes in with Macmillan’s mPulse venture. Theirs is a campaign to “widen the canvas” dictionary-wise, inviting anyone to contribute “your English” to their Open Dictionary. Dizraeli was an obvious choice for Rundell, who would “love to get as many rapper/poets/wordsmiths involved with the project as possible”, because, as he puts it, “language is their …er … paintbrush?”

’21st Century Flux’ is wonderfully inventive, drawing (albeit, Dizraeli says, unintentionally) on centuries-old traditions of alliteration and internal rhyme, with a postmodern multicultural linguistic playfulness. Despite having a degree from Sheffield in English literature, he doesn’t want to “spit bars his mates won’t understand”. His sophisticated language, peppered with urban colloquialisms, is unpretentious and makes the presentation of his philosophy highly accessible, not to mention engaging. His work proves the linguistic potential of non-standard English to create poetry. While his performance has undeniable swagger, he avoids the worst excesses of gangster rap jargon. ‘Gangsta Way’ (part of Rebel Cell) incisively parodies the characteristic macho posturing of rap artists as Dizraeli takes on the voice of a man who “didn’t like rap that emancipated”, and suggests “I’d like it more if you talked about merking my crew”.

“It’s up to language users – not lexicographers – whether a word or phrase catches on and ‘sticks’ in the language long-term”

For Dizraeli, “knowledge is power”, and the more forms of language – “tongues on a jostle” – we have to draw on for expression, the better: “English isn’t English; it’s an elastic patchwork [where] every single idiom is intermingling stream-like.” With the rapper’s attraction to linguistic shock, Dizraeli welcomes the ability of English both to accommodate and to “whore itself out”. It’s a “rag-tag scrabble bag”, he raps, shaken up by global youth. When I ask him how we can ever hope to capture these streams, he says that a printed dictionary, while being a “useful tool”, lacks the internet’s ability to reflect the “wild twists and mutations which are happening every second a language is used”. Rundell agrees, claiming, “It’s the only future for dictionaries.”

Even time-hallowed dictionaries like the OED have even been online since 2000; they however only make fairly token gestures towards ‘slang’, which has been treated in separate dictionaries. ‘The Urban Dictionary’ is a particularly popular example: a web-based glossary of slang words boasting over 4million definitions by the end of 2009, it has a live feed showing that words are added by users at a rate of knots. Macmillan’s Open Dictionary, although admittedly lacking the street cred of its American counterpart (set up by a US freshman for a bit of a laugh), is also a proactive effort to stay on the pulse. Freely accessible to anyone, and fuelled by user participation, it is a complete contrast to OED Online, which asks you to pay for the privilege to read it and certainly doesn’t seek outside contributions. While one could think that recording sub-cultural phenomena is little more than trainspotting, slang is more than a fad. Language is in a constant state of reinvention, and it’s not impossible that the Queen’s English could be dethroned. In fact, Rundell points out that it’s almost entirely out of the hands of Dizraeli’s ‘Prof’ when it comes to what’s ‘in’ and what’s ‘out’: “It’s up to language users – not lexicographers – whether a word or phrase catches on and ‘sticks’ in the language long-term”. Macmillan’s Open Dictionary is basically an effort to see what’s “on the market”, its looser structure providing a kind of limbo for slang words.

English “lives as it’s spoken, and it mirrors the truth / And there isn’t any owner but you”. Dizraeli’s lyrics reflect the unspoken dictum of the Urban Dictionary where words are added and defined by anyone, on a site edited by…anyone. Democracy reigns as definitions are shunted ‘up’ or ‘down’ according to site users’ votes. However, by refusing to enforce centralised control (which Macmillan’s only actually partially ‘open’ alternative maintains), it has ended up sowing the seeds of its own destruction; its most popular definition for ‘urban dictionary’ reads, “A place formerly used to find out about slang, and now a place that teens who have no life use as a burn book to whine about celebrities, their friends, etc., let out their sexual frustrations, show off their racist/sexist/homophobic/anti-religion opinions, troll, and babble about things they know nothing about.” While Macmillan’s alternative promises not to post suggestions which are “obscene, racist, or otherwise offensive”, the often juvenile Urban Dictionary is about as far away from PC as you can get (does anyone really want to know what a ‘Penis Fly Trap’ is?)

Dizraeli observes that while there will “always be attempts to limit growth and evolution of language,” but even the Academie Francaise in France (where he lived for some years) has “very little effect on how people in the street express themselves.” Whatever barriers are put up in attempts to uphold ‘standard English’, language is as free as its speakers. The dictionary, as symbol, still holds a certain degree of cultural capital – generally taken as gospel for defining standards of ‘acceptability’ – but Dizraeli points out that it’s just a glorified index at the end of the day. He breaks into freestyle on the busy train where we’re talking. When it comes to the streams of language flooding into England, he raps, “No matter if dams and channels are established / they are irrelevant.”

Macmillan’s Open Dictionary
Dizraeli’s website

Claire Johnstone

The Shakira Delusion

In From Russia With Love, there is a scene in which an almond-eyed, belly-dancing nymphet mesmerizes James Bond with her undulating honey hips and serpentine stretching. It was this memory that flashed up in my mind when I agreed to a belly-dancing class with two friends last week. I daydreamed of warm Saharan wind caressing my taught stomach, the tinkling of my coin belt, swarthy handsome men reclining on floor cushions, my path lit by candlelight as I hypnotised my way through the captivated audience.

Back in deepest darkest Cowley, reality was unkind. The draughty classroom decorated by alphabet posters and papier mache monsters was not providing the sensual Arabian Nights scenario of my dreams and neither were my unruly hips and limbs. Everything was moving a-rhythmically in every conceivable direction and I seemed wholly unable to reign myself in. The classroom was a jumble of staccato, off-beat thrusting. As my friend delicately whispered while we were mid-flow, her arse was vibrating so vigorously she thought it might break away from the rest of her and hit the wall. Sadly I could sympathise. Looking around at the selection of fellow mal-coordinates, at least we were in good company. The strip lighting, paucity of alcohol in the bloodstream and the absence of James Bond-alikes to cast appreciative glances were really not helping to set the mood. It was all very English: a lot of nervous laughter, a lot of eye-contact avoidance, and a whole lot of winter layers staying firmly on.

The most horrendous moment was the improvised section. If any word strikes fear into the heart, it must be ‘improvisation’. Everyone was casting around for inspiration and unsubtly copying one another. The result was a wobbling circle of women gyrating apologetically.

If we carried on for a few weeks, we conceivably could have improved. If you’re a good dancer then you might pull this off straight away. To others I would offer a stern warning. You’ve seen Beyonce do it, you’ve seen Shakira do it, but have you seen yourself do it? Have a little go in the mirror and you’ll probably see what I mean. I was a little disappointed because I had a hunch that I might be rather good. Sadly it enters the cluttered drawer marked ‘extra-curricular cul-de-sacs’.

A wise man, Dylan Moran, once explained that your potential is like your bank balance, in that there’s always far less lying in store for you than you think. I have always adhered to this principle in tutorials, leaving my ‘potential’ well alone and I think it is time I extended it to non-academic endeavours. In my mind I had the potential to be an Arabian style temptress; I tried it and proved this wasn’t the case. What next I wonder; the class in which I discover I can’t pole-dance, tightrope walk or snake-charm either? My advice is not to have lessons, without them you’ll remain in the uninhibited delusion that you can give Shakira a run for her money, which is exactly where you should be. Don’t give it too much thought. As Lady Gaga, another great thinker of our time says, ‘just dance’.

Olivia Williams