Corporate Fallout Detector

It looks and sounds like a Geiger counter, but the clicks this gadget emits signal the toxicity of a product maker’s environmental and ethical effects.

Tribute to Edward Said

Edward Said, the outspoken Middle Eastern intellectual and supporter of Palestinian sovereignty, died last Wednesday. His emotional involvment with the issue opened him to personal criticism from all political angles.

Rest In Peace

Elia Kazan, director of many film adaptations of popular plays, has died at the age of 94. “Gentleman’s Agreement” and “On the Waterfront” both won him Academy Awards for directing. He cooperated with Sen. McCarthy’s H.U.A.C. by admitting his and eight of his colleagues’ affiliation with the Communist Party leading to their blacklisting in Hollywood.

Rock in Peace

Robert Palmer, the eighties rock genius behind Addicted to Love and Simply Irresistible, died today of a heart attack at age 54. Palmer’s austere 1985 video for Addicted to Love features an all-female backup band of potential Patrick Nagel models, stoically swaying to the beat. It solidified his place in pop culture, but also won him the ire of humorless, political correctness mongers who labelled him a chauvanist. They failed to see how the models’ expressionless pale faces, short black dresses, slick black hair and bright red lipstick was a uniform that itself challenged chauvanism, forcing the viewer to look past their similarities in order to appreciate the subtler distinctions between individuals. Palmer’s influence can be heard on the soundtracks to films starring either Corey Haim or Corey Feldman, but not the films starring both Coreys. The metallic “Schwing!” on Simply Irresistible enjoys success as an effect for morning FM radio shock-jocks all across America.

As democratic as a Presidential election

“I myself am not a person who has been highly involved in design or fashion or any of these things. But I’m an example of the trend. I’ve become more and more interested in and more and more conscious of the aesthetics of people, places, and things as it’s become a more important part of our society and culture.”

These are the words of Virginia Postrel, author of The Substance of Style and the libertarian manifesto The Future and Its Enemies. I have not read her books, so I will restrict my comments to the substance of her interview with Atlantic Unbound, which she ends with the above pronouncement. For a self-professed non-insider she has a hyperbolic opinion of design: “‘We can enjoy the age of look and feel, using surfaces to add pleasure and meaning to the substance of our lives.’” Indeed! Does Postrel really think design can save the world or is she a delusional Fascist diletante cashing in on the next big thing?

When asked about the trend to make one’s home resemble the pages of a catalog (that includes decorating with Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel “framed art prints”) she said: “There’s no particular reason to shop at a Crate & Barrel if you don’t like it, because no one’s going to be impressed. It’s just a style that a lot of people like.” And why does she think a lot of people like it? She’s acknowledged that she is part of a trend of people becoming more interested in design, thus admitting there was no spontaneity involved on her part. If you just want a table, you go to Target, but if you’ve seen a Noguchi at at your really hip friend’s house you go to Design Within Reach and get one for yourself.

Postrel sees no loss of authenticity in the mass production of pleasingly exotic trinkets that appropriate the styles of foreign, often less industrialized cultures. I suspect she would call this trend the “democratizing of design.” Stylistic authenticity is difficult to define for sure, but when she says, “‘When we say authenticity is a value, what do we mean by that?’” it’s not hard to hear the coy, dismissing tone. Specific manufacturing methods aside, the indisputable hallmark of stylistic authenticity must be the role of the craftsman’s hands in shaping the object, and an historically socialized process guiding those hands. Otherwise an Oak Mission Style Futon with 39 Inch Arms could be as authentically “Mission” as a Gustav Stickley Settle.

As production moves further away from human hands, the less expensive and time consuming it is to make things. How deeply can these things represent our cultural identity the cheaper and easier to get they become? In the Spike Jonze directed IKEA commercial, a young woman tosses out her old, kitschy lamp for a new IKEA one. “Many of you feel bad for this lamp,” says the stoic Scandanavian narrator, “That is because you’re crazy. It has no feelings! And the new one is much better.” These words will one day soon also apply to the IKEA lamp itself, but if aesthetic pleasure can really give meaning to the substance of your life that’s a good thing.

Labels like Scandanavian Design, Arts & Crafts and Memphis help us make sense of how we got to where we are, but coherent style movements aren’t named until they’re over. As design evolves to keep up with products that arrive more quickly at wider markets will we eventually be unable to distinguish coherent movements from a steady, unceasing flow of pleasingly shaped consumables?

Work, cont’d

I forgot to mention that I sit next to the copier…

Work

This Monday I started contracting with a former employer at their new digs, the result of yet another Internet merger. As subtley as an ocean liner dropped into a duck pond, my time was displaced. An eight hour back hole sat itself in the middle of my day (as it no doubt also sits in the middle of yours), reluctantly tapering off on either side for the commute, mental preparation and decompression, food, and finally sleep. Things were going so well. I had no money, but I slept when I was tired, ate when I was hungry, and worked on my pet projects until my eyes blurred (ditto with TV, PS2 and the novels on my night stand). I had set my own schedule and my own limits. Now, monkey-like I wait at a workstation for a morsel of mind-numbingly asinine work to trickle down the management chain to my queue. Will I ever find paying work that is also satisfying? Stay tuned!

Weekly World News

Hackers Can Turn Your Computer Into a Bomb!

G-LEO takes a dive

Going out with a bang / After 8 years of research, overachieving Jupiter explorer Galileo about to meet its maker

The official story is that Galileo is being vaporized to prevent life that may exist on Jupiter’s moons from being contaminated. (Remember how The War of the Worlds ended?!) But astute sci-fi readers know its destruction is really to prevent it from coming back to Earth as a powerful and sentient childlike force called “G-LEO.” Be sure to dig the diagram with the article.

Rock in Peace: II

Dragonize bids a fond farewell to two greats of entertainment: Johnny Cash and John Ritter.