Transcendence (NEW ADDRESS!)

VIRTA, H. (2022) 'THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO St. MICHAEL'. 

Hello dear readers, old and new. It has dawned upon me there might still be someone here who might enjoy my fresher content and would therefore like to inform all you loyal friends that I will be retiring the KATKETTU blog site. But fear not, for my Pandora's box of thoughts and words is nowhere near empty but, just as we all are, it's in constant flux.

I started this blog back in 9th grade, aged 15... holy hell, that's nearly ten years ago! As I've grown up, which I've most luckily done, I've started refining my words and the visuals I put in this world. Naturally, having graduated from uni a couple of years ago and having now fully immersed myself in the workforce, my blog pieces have evolved accordingly, toward more thought-out analysis rather than the flow of thought I am glad I started with over here.

As my thoughts and words have evolved, so has their context and surroundings. I've got a portfolio site for my creative work and it seemed only natural to immigrate the blog side of things over to the same web realm. KATKETTU will remain a dear footnote (and my social media handle) as we finally transition to the next incarnation of whatever this blog can be called... maybe just a blog.

You are most warmly welcomed to visit www.kaisakettunen.art for food for thought or maybe even get in touch with me concerning a creative project. Any case, I'd love to hear from you! (email is usually the best, you can reach me at kaisa.kettu@gmail.com)

Best,

Kaisa

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Smoking in long leather coats 101

— or — 

a journey through the fashion student trope, the industry and realisation.

A friend once told me that chef apprentices eat macaroni for dinner. During my time in London College of Fashion I too developed a somewhat of a phobia towards glossy fashion magazines, the fashion week, retail and much more! And for a good reason too: glossies promote very problematic ideals, the fashion week promotes fast cycles of new designs and retail is its very own chapter I wont delve in right now. While focussing on the apocalypse that is the fashion industry, I got so angry and spiteful and bitter I pretty much expelled all things frivolous and sartorial from my head, my home and my habitus.

What once was exciting and cool and wonderful became a massive weight on my shoulders. And not only on mine, but once I started chatting about my new-found hatred towards the industry I quickly learned I wasn’t alone.<br>

On our first year we spent hours on extravagant make-up looks, which brought us closer to paintings, clearly differentiating us from everyone else on the tube. We spent even more hours in avant-garde book stores and industrial cafés playing with Photoshop blending modes. We wore long leather coats and colourful berets outside the campus on High Holborn. We went on a field trip to Paris and only smoked there. And then it all went away, lecture by lecture, once we started realising how messed up all this was. It wasn’t the stuff we found joy in, per se, but the industry behind it all, behind the idea, the image that we subscribed to.

I have come to understand that university is the prime time for developing criticism, skepticism and — most of all — cynicism. Not that we all suddenly started reading Nietzsche obsessively but we might as well have. And this was instantly reflected in our styles. Ironic, I know.

Very soon I ditched Blair Waldorf altogether and transformed by wardrobe into a collection of uniforms consisting of jeans, t-shirts and crew-neck jumpers. Personal styles evolve, some might argue, and they most certainly do. Only here the change was highly conscious.

This is when I came to understand the core, the essence of any art student: the world is bloody awful when you stare at its flaws through a magnifying glass for three years straight. Therefore one must limit exposure to said flaws to the extent one possibly can. Only one cannot stop thinking about all those awful things so in the door walk bitterness. My attempt to save myself was to drop the ‘of fashion’ off the end of my degree title whenever I had the chance and come up with a scheme to enable me to draw forest animals for the entirety of my final year. 

During that final year I had a very poignant conversation with one of my course leaders in which I vividly recall declaring my disgust for anything commercial promoting material goods and to which my lecturer answered: “Well that’s too bad because we live in a capitalist world. Who are you going to work for then?” Or something along those lines. It left me thinking for a long time. Who am I going to work for if not the devil promoting goods?

Somehow my dissertation got written and my final major project got completed and I found myself holding a degree certificate on an airplane on my way back home to Finland.

Six months later I bought my first fashion magazine in three years. They’re still problematic but I’d like to think I am a responsible reader these days. I am excited to design and make my own clothes now. I even bought something frilly bordering-on-frivolous. My degree and having had study all the things that are wrong have made me a more conscious consumer.

As much as I appreciate all the hardening knowledge gained during university I am much more at ease now that I’ve gotten some distance — both mental and physical — to the epicentre of fashion that is London, and be able to enjoy fashion with the lower case ‘f’ that my lectures always talked about.

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One nostalgia, please

With life so very restricted these days, what to resort to in these desperate times?

Sometimes simplicity resides at your pier.

It says a lot when you’re looking forward to your dentist appointment — then again it is the only bloody social event in your calendar. I doubt life as a recent graduate is easy for anyone at any given time, but oh boy has this year been a nerve-wrecking rollercoaster of anticipation, disappointments and anticipation for disappointments. Haha… ? My life has diminished to writing job applications and desperately trying to come up with new hobbies around the house. The other day I managed to squeeze in a random weep-session-bordering-on- a-meltdown. Yay!

Life does not suck for me nearly as much as it easily could — as it no doubt does for many. However, now that Finland goes into another ‘lock-down’ (which is still very little compared to the ones London has seen) I face real unemployment as middle schools will move to remote learning. The brief joy of vaccines making all this go away was — well, brief indeed. Every time there is a glimpse of an end in sight it gets thrown out the back window. It’s been a year now and we’re dying for a break.

I find remedy in old vines that I was too lame to know about back in the day. They provide me the much needed entertainment and distraction being some of the only things that make me laugh out loud these days. Scrolling through the comment section one can sense kinship: person after another declares they are here, watching in 2021 reminiscent of a more ‘simple time’. Yes, me too.

By no means was the world let alone society any easier or better back then. Sure, we had no super killer virus but neither did we have equal marriage laws, or Taylor Swift’s Folklore. Jokes aside, it’s still very easy to miss those ‘simpler times’, to find comfort in reliving parts of the past. Nostalgia is a big thing among my generation, I read, and I completely agree. It is also very wonderful to be able to call oneself a 90’s kid, although technically I only managed to witness three years of that golden decade. Still I and the majority of my friends identify strongly with the turn of the millennia alongside the Nokia bricks, Friends et cetera — even more so now the present has frozen in time and all we have to live by proxy of is the past. So all hail the ingenious vines, family photo albums starring red overalls, and the billionth reruns of the one with that group of friends I wish I was a part of. Bye.

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Lost direction

I have done a bit of a one-eighty. This is merely a result of a year full of existential questions: 

who am I, what do I like, what do I believe in?

Looking for that direction I lost.

I am in my last year of my uni degree now and I find myself asking the same question all the time: what do I actually want to do? According to my casual research — aka conversations with trusted friends — this is fairly common among final year students and especially common within final year creative students.

I started university with a set goal, a bunch of ambition and a great lack of experience. Cue the experience and everything else got turned upside down. For a good while I thought I had lost all that ambition I had as an 18-year-old college student stuck in a little town, dreaming about a grand future in a metropolitan city. Now that I have lived in London for almost two and a half years I, ironically, miss the little suburban town back in Finland. I miss the trees and I miss the scarcity of people. There’s way too many here (and the Christmas tourist wave has not helped a bit!).

My degree and life in London in general have shifted my goals to a whole new perspective. I no longer want to do any of the things I was longing for just a few years ago. In fact, I have no clue of what I would like to do. I might just take that piece of advise and apply to everything and see who takes me — and then figure it out from there by eliminating all I can’t stand.

Reflecting on 2019 I complained way too much. I still complain way too much but I am starting to try to accommodate to my situation and see all the good in it rather than pining over something I had in the past. Truth to be told, I would not want to repeat all of college even though I am very reminiscent of that time. I probably wouldn’t want to move back to that little town because finding a job there was absolute hell. So I am starting to appreciate London in a more realistic manner than when I first moved here in awe of a lamppost.

Some of that ambition is being gained back and, consequently, goals are starting to form from the fog I have been staring for the past twelve months. Next week I am going back home to deliver a presentation at my old college. Building the presentation has been a great push to reflect on my time here. I don’t want to discourage anyone from coming to study here but rather to provide a disclaimer to think twice rather than jumping into something this big like I did.

I am hoping this is all just part of actually growing up (I am starting to genuinely see the appeal of a Monday to Friday office job). It is hard changing as a person. Appreciating completely different things and feeling alienated from your past self puts you on thin ice.

I stopped social media and writing my blog almost two years ago. Back then it was a conscious choice to retain my mental health to a somewhat sane level. Over time new reasons emerged and I started to pay attention to the culture and behaviour on and around social media. Why do I take all these images and post them online for everyone to see when I don’t really care about other people’s pictures of their breakfasts? Why do I need to share my thoughts on a platform like my blog? I don’t really remember why I started doing it. Most likely someone else I knew had a blog and it seemed like a fun thing to do.

There’s just so much online. There’s so much I am in constant battle trying to avoid it and enjoy something real, outside urls and hashtags. Yet here I am again. Because reading back, looking at the images from the past communicate that clarity that I yearn for now. I could just write in my diary but writing for myself doesn’t require such structure and curation as publishing online does.

I cannot really justify hating social media and writing here. It does make me a hypocrite. Being this lost demands some action, though. In the past this blog earned me an internship and help me develop my writing as well as other communication skills. That’s my reason to write again: to give me something productive (ish) to do and hopefully gives me some direction. If having a blog helps me to get a job, I’ll do it anytime.

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Farm Girl Café on Portobello Road

Where: Portobello Road, Notting Hill // When: Mon to Fri 8:30am to 4:30pm, Sat to Sun 9am to 6pm

What's there: cafés, boutiques, cute houses // How much: coffee about £4, cakes about £5

How to get there: central, circle or district line: Notting Hill Gate

Sister Jane is open Mon to Sat 10am to 6:30pm and Sun 12pm to 6pm

Portobello Road is just so lovely on a quiet Wednesday afternoon! Indeed, the same road Julia Roberts walked down in Notting Hill gets rather crowded time to time so make sure you go on a weekday rather than weekend or high-season. 

The crowds are not here for nothing, though. Listed as a Wes Anderson destination in London's Time-Out magazine, this is probably one of the cutest neighbourhoods you'll come across. Pastel-coloured walls and doors are so incredibly photogenic it would be a shame to forget your camera. Opt for a cute outfit to match with your surroundings.

Once you need a break form this mini-semi-professional photoshoot head down the road once you spot a tall white house with Sister Jane's logo on the wall. Walk through the courtyard to find yourself in an adorable café. Farm Girl's waiters will welcome you immediately and seat you while you mesmerise this aqua-tiled vision. 

Take your time with the menu and experience the multiple wait what?!-s. The place has probably the most hipster-y coffee menu. No wonder the place is founded by an Aussie. Unfortunately, I cannot vouch for the drinks since I had already had way too much caffeine that morning, but my lovely friend Katy ordered a chai latte and seemed to enjoy it very much. 

Foodwise Farm Girl serves wonderful-looking lunch that is relatively pricy. Most of it is vegan, or at least gluten or dairy free. Personally, I opted for a rose cupcake. I paid £4.50 that sort of hurt but, man, was it good! I also have to give tons of points for presentation. The china was as lovely as the dog head created with pink sugar. You'd think this much pink would get too Umbridgy but no, we're fine.

A good way to rate places, at least in my opinion, is by their bathrooms. Again, Farm Girl scores high. It's almost as walking in to a Glossier pop-up shop: pink, red, big mirrors and neon lights. The poor waiter got very confused when in the end I started praising their lovely loos. Still, a good bathroom is like a cherry on the top. If it's done poorly it can ruin the whole experience.

Overall, the place is a tad bit pricy but I would go there again. The atmosphere is relaxed, the environment instagrammable and the service very friendly. A friend of mine refers this as convenience cost.

The main reason I ever go to Portobello Road is Sister Jane's flagship shop. Cute, cute, cute! It's right upstairs from Farm Girl (very convenient!) in a two-level attic space. I first discovered Sister Jane in Cannes, France a few years ago and fell completely in love. The clothes are about £60 and very good design. I own quite a few pieces and can definitely vouch for their quality. The best thing is that they organise sample sales once a season. Last time I walked out with six pieces that cost me £30 together. What a bargain! The shop is definitely worth checking out even if there isn't a sample sale. It's like another kind of wonderland.

What to bring: a Wes Anderson outfit, to match with the doors // camera, preferably polaroid

Matching background for my outfit!

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