It’s been some time since my last Unknown Pleasures posting, but I’m delighted to be back with an absolute stonker from the phenomenon that is my great friend Anna Aalto.
You’ll see that Anna does not stride the paths of convention in her life, her loves and her passion for the things that mean a lot to her.
She has not only the greatest enthusiasm for a subject I think I’ve ever encountered (Eurovision) but also an encyclopaedic knowledge of it too. I’m talking the FINAL of Mastermind here. She could be the next Fred Housego.
But not just on this: on design systems, on Swedish culture because she’s a true Swedeophile.
She also made me sing this song at last year’s Eurovision office party (dressed as the clown Djambo) and delights in singing it as she passes my desk.
I work with Anna (she’s a top designer) and love the way her passion for things outside of the workplace are equally prevalent in her work and when you hear Anna present you realise you are in the presence of someone that’s off the scale in her commitment, talent and enthusiasm. It’s a wonder to behold.
As you read on you’ll hopefully be transported to another place where you might not be familiar but you will certainly be intrigued. One of my favourite of the 25 so far. If you’d like to contribute please let me know.,
In the meantime, welcome to the wonderful world of Anna Aalto. I’m honoured to share it.
The book I’m reading
My own work.
I’m always reading and yet I’m never reading. I’m sporadically reading. Picking up things and putting them down, taking inspiration from lines and words and nuances and imaginings. This is because I’m writing. I’m always writing.
My most beautiful pleasure is sitting in a café with a pad – early evening – with a cold schooner of indeterminate beer or a glass of freshly brewed V60. I’m an advocate for good old-fashioned handwriting. But I’m also a stickler for mistakes.
I’m writing about the Eurovision Song Contest. More specifically, I’m writing about the people behind the Eurovision Song Contest. The flag-wavers – the people who go. My non-existant, everlasting novel. It’s inspired by some of the people I’ve met and some of the people I’ve only ever met in my head. It’s ambiguous and very very ‘working’. It revolves around a series of interconnected inner stories – narratives, anecdotes and musings. I was swept unsuspectingly into the intense and underground pandemonic cult of the Eurovision fan community once. A whimsical world of sex and sexuality, music and lyrics, fleeting liaisons and fundamentally, love and friendship. And these second-lives greeted me willingly into this vibrant and unyielding reality that exists behind the masks of accountants and shop-workers and dental surgeons.
There’s also a man who eats my shoes and several incidents in a Wetherspoons. I’m sure I’ll finish it one day.
My favourite author or book and The book I wish I had written
‘Grafisk design: Henrik Nygren’. Presentation of work and memories, 1991–2013.
‘Writing’ is pushing the parameters of the question, but this is my answer. I was lucky enough to speak with Henrik – a seminal book and identity designer from Stockholm who is shamefully unrecognized outside of his native Sweden. I picked up his great behemoth of ornamental literature once in a bookstore on Åsogatan, just opposite the working window of his studio, before making a dash to the airport. I just had to buy it.
£60 later, it is an object and a vessel, rather than a book. Humble and overstated in equal measure, ‘Grafisk design: Henrik Nygren’ is a reflection of Nygren’s work – hundreds of pages long – with ribbons of life woven seamlessly throughout it like mementos in a scrapbook or kisses in a diary. Each page is faultlessly executed. The photography is simple, personal and evocative. The typographic tuning – traditional and unpretentious. It is as if Nygren has harnessed Guttenberg’s press itself.
As a designer, I appreciate and long for the ideals of quiet confidence. I wish I’d written, crafted – birthed – this extraordinary personal composure.
The book I couldn’t finish
Anything by Ian Rankin.
I became entrapped by a fascination of my own making a few years ago. As someone constantly at the whim of people and place, I started to wonder more about the place I’m currently in – the grand old city of Edinburgh. There are few writers more synonymous with the place-making of Edinburgh than Ian Rankin – Sir Ian Rankin – who is frequently exalted with capturing Edinburgh in his airport-fodder as a character in and of itself. Something of a sidekick to the clichéd and unoriginal alias of Rebus – a drunken anti-hero from the police who doesn’t play by the rules.
Rankin’s fragrant reliance on temperate dialogue and product names did nothing to evoke the romanticism and Disneyfication of the city I currently call home – for better or for worse. Caustically naming The Meadows or Cockburn Street or The Oxford Bar in the context of a dog walk didn’t present me with the kind of literary magic his numerous accolades, sales figures and knighthood all seemed to suggest was plausible. It was put down after a chapter or two.
I also couldn’t finish ‘Trainspotting’. It is linguistically unreadable, even after a Guinness or two in the departure lounge of Dublin airport. But that is part of its obscure and illicit charm.
The book I’m ashamed I haven’t read
‘Stockholm Design Lab: 1998–2019’
I’ve always been stimulated and enthralled by SDL’s powerful ability to combine the clinical and the beautiful. Poring over their intense and impressive catalogue is like sitting in the dentist’s chair or chewing on a mint.
With clients like Polestar and SAS, everything is white, and yet almost nothing is. Their flawless clarity and typographic craft is as beautiful as it is sobering, and their perpetual marriage of client and creative gives us all hope.
A few years ago, Bjorn, their synonymous creative director, released a book charting the history of this celebrated consultancy, which until recently used to hang omnipotently over Stockholm’s Slussen interchange. It’s not an easy book to find and it’s not an easy book to buy. Maybe I can borrow one?
My favourite film
‘Threads’ by Barry Hines, 1984
I imagine that some people haven’t seen this. Since it’s release on a Sunday evening in 1984, it has only been shown on the BBC a handful of times. I don’t understand why it hasn’t been shown more. But at the same time, I do.
Threads is a British feature-length television docudrama. Written, commissioned and realised at a height of Cold War tensions between East and West, it explains and explores the effects of global thermonuclear war on the ordinary people of Britain.
Set in the city of Sheffield – an industrial heartland with a charted history of Labour administration and pacifism – it centres on two families, one working-class and one middle-class, whos lives are thrown together by the promise of a birth and a marriage. As the mundanity of family planning and job redundancy beckons, geopolitical tensions escalate rapidly and their environment is transformed irreversibly. In the proceeding decades, society itself is moulded around a new reality as food is scarce, disease is rife and language depletes to reflect a haunting and devastating world.
Hines’ use of unknown actors combined with the incidental static and grainy haunt of 80s Britain creates a perfect and terrifying balance of tension, despair and hopelessness in what has been one of the most seminal films of my life. It is far from an easy watch. It is an event. It is a masterpiece. Its matter-of-fact candid nature brings the fantastical narrative of Armageddon into a tangible human-level reality, which results in a sobering and at times bed-wetting effect on it’s audience. It shows horror, it shows destruction – but never in the manner of glorification. It merely shows you, tells you the effects of societal collapse, and makes it seem as mundane as collecting the milk from your doorstep.
My favourite podcast
‘Eurovision Castaways’ by Ellie Chalkley
Tapped from the classic ‘Desert Island Discs’ concept which has lasted generations, I really hope this simple and empowering concept does the same.
In each edition, Ellie invites a ‘castaway’ to the fictional but deliciously conceived ‘Ille d’Bezençon’, a place where alcohol is free and Eurovision fans are free to roam unhindered by the musical pressures of the real world. Each castaway – usually a lifelong Eurovision fan from one blog-site or another – is invited to bring eight Eurovision songs for the ‘duration of their stay’.
The conversation which ensues is a delight. As a lifelong Eurovision super-fan myself, I’m constantly fascinated and enchanted by other people’s experiences and how they have expressed, lived and understood their own lives through the medium of the contest. The choices are eclectic – from Luxembourg’s ‘Papa Penguin’ to Estonia’s failed attempt to send ‘Winny Puhh’ to Malmö – each justified in their own unique way, with every castaway having an anecdote or experience with which to summarise their relationship with the song. Hearing how a Norwegian school-teacher cried at the sight of an unknown Icelandic band was something I could empathise with all too much.
My favourite TV series
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ with Michael Palin. 1988.
This unrepeatable series made me fall in love with travel. More broadly, it made me fall in love with the world. Michael’s unlikely everyman attitude to the journey transports him from legendary python to a man for all time, taking us to places we thought we knew, through the eyes of the people who call the world ‘home’.
I used to watch this on an ancient VHS tape when I was 14 and haven’t stopped re-watching since. Even when I travel now, albeit in a slightly less grandiose and cinematic fashion, I use Michael as my inspiration. He’s never on the outside looking in, but rather seeks to sit on the inside looking out.
My favourite piece of music
‘Longplayer’ by Jem Finer and Artangel
Commissioned in 1999 to mark the forthcoming millennium, Longplayer is a piece of music filtered through an algorithm which is scheduled to play for the next 1,000 years. It has been playing now for nearly 23 years, and never repeats.
It’s atonal ambience is stunningly beautiful, if melodically void, however it’s Longplayer’s sense of statement that entices me to include it. It is a marking of humanity, rather than a marking of music – an intangible expression of longevity, future, past and aspiration.
The Last film/music/book that made me cry
Paddington II. Enough said.
The song that saved me
‘Amar Pelos Dois’ by Salvador Sobral. I honestly believe it’s the most beautiful song ever written. It was always there when I needed it.
If I could own one painting it would be
‘Sunflowers’ by Vincent Van Gogh
At first glance it might seem like an obvious answer. Basic art response. Art for the masses. However, it’s beauty and ubiquity aren’t the reasons for it making this list. Instead, it serves as the most uninterrupted window into Van Gogh’s life and mind. An extraordinary – yet super-ordinary – human being, the story of Van Gogh’s conflict with his own world and his own mind and the liminal spaces in between speak so kindly to the latent the struggles so many of us feel. Imposter syndrome? Underappreciated? Undervalued? Complex and conflicting? Yet, his ability to capture the world in such technicolour and visual song as always spoken to me.
If I could go back in time and meet Vincent, I’d pay handsomely for one of his sacred beauties. As would so many of us.
The place I feel happiest
It has to be Stockholm. The things I feel for this city are indescribable. I’ve never lived there yet I feel at home every time I touch down at Arlanda or tap into the T-Bana. It’s rich lights and bitter temperatures nurture the most complex of emotions – memories of friends and aspirations of what could be. One day. It’s the place I feel like myself.
My guiltiest cultural pleasure
Westlife
I’m having a fantasy dinner party, I’ll invite these artists and authors
Tracey Emin, Henrik Nygren, Stefan Sagmiester, Jessica Walsh and Salvador Sobral. And Mark Gorman.
A stalwart of British art, three designers from different generations and a Portuguese jazz musician. And Mark Gorman.
And I’ll put on this music
‘Music for Airports’ by Brian Eno. ABBA when we’re on the floor by the end of the night.
If you like this, try these…
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