Editorial | The Blogazine - Contemporary Lifestyle Magazine

13/06/2012

The Editorial: Pretence. Plastic.

It’s likely that we’ve all sat in a Louis Ghost chair. Every fighetto and fighetta in Milan has one or two ironically hanging around their “design” apartment. For me, the first time was a few years back at a beach house in Tuscany adorned with iridescent shells and pastel pictures of boats that seemed to exist only to forcibly remind everyone inside that “you’re on holiday, AT THE BEACH, goddamnit”. Two Louis Ghost chairs sat, noses upturned, at either end of a long table flanked by another six, less stately (but also clear plastic) Kartell chairs. “This place is POSH, goddamnit,” they said, hollowly.

For a piece of iconic “design” (an irksome classification, since everything man-made is designed, and is therefore design), the Louis Chair is incredibly derivative. It is an old, established form rendered in new material. It is invisible, yet its symbolic intentions are crystal clear. It was the perfect companion to the literal gaudiness of shells and pastel boats, as it is the perfect companion to a kitschy nail salon decorated with tropical plants and smelling of acetone, as it is the perfect companion to the generic posters and bad brochures of a second-rate travel agency. The Ghost chair is pretence in plastic. Nothing more.

And although the chair has lost must of the ooh-aah, genius gee-whiz novelty it once had, it has unequivocally become an instantly recognisable classic. An icon not only for Kartell and Starck, but for the 2000s and for contemporary Italian design. And it will be the first ugly thing your kids sell for 50¢ at a garage sale when you die.

So, to honour this extraordinary object, artist Simon Martin this week opened an exhibition at Collective Gallery in Edinburgh focusing squarely on it. And while Scotland may not be the design powerhouse Italy is (was?), its artists are positively on fire. Plus, a hearty mix of whisky and bluntness might be just what the doctor ordered to knock some sense back into Italian design.

The exhibition is brilliantly critical. Although we’ve all probably given the Ghost at least some thought –certainly most designers have– but what an enigma it is! Deliberate, shamelessly appropriated, trapped in the present and yet thoroughly a relic of the past. Ugly. Stunningly gorgeous. Packed with history. Meaningless. In a short documentary, Martin juxtaposes the Ghost with plastic (ceramic?) lawn gnomes and their accompanying tree-trunk tables, African headrests, and a work by Donald Judd. Plastic wood. Wooden box. Box as symbol. Symbol as chair. And what it all does is call into question the very reasons for which we’d value such an object in the first place. It is the purest, clearest expression of our obsessive yet unthinking attachment to symbol. Perhaps ever. Why this objectively ugly chair has any value at all is pure sociological, anthropological, psychological magic.

While he may be a massive sellout (good businessman?), Philippe Starck is nothing if not an excellent designer. A designer who is extremely easy to hate for unleashing loads of ugly things on the world, but a very, very clever one, indeed. Maybe his snarky materialism–his oft-repeated mantra, after all, is “everything I make is absolutely unnecessary”–has actually been about coming to grips with the ills of materialism. Just maybe.

Tag Christof

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06/06/2012

The Editorial: (Your Words Here)

It’s always seemed quaint to me that Oxford and Webster still go through the trouble to formally ‘admit’ new words into the English language every year. Web words, buzzwords, passing neologisms, schoolyard slang… and all of a sudden, “ginormous” makes it! It’s a real word! And at long last, you can officially use “retweet” in a game of Scrabble. But it all seems like a tireless quest to contain something that generally can’t be contained, like in the Academie Française’s futile attempt a decade or so ago to replace the word “email” in the French language with the anodyne “courriel.” Language grows as it goes, bitches.

Now, for posterity’s sake it’s probably a good thing that someone bothers to put these buzzwords du jour down on a printed page, lest we forget them forever within a few years time. I’m just old enough to remember a few volumes worth of Encyclopaedia Britannica hanging around dustily on a living room shelf… remember when they were the one-stop-shop for science and animals and history and faraway Iplaces? But just a few short spins around the sun and those stolid, proud-looking books are aaaaaaaaancient. Like, prehistoric. Like, dead and gone. Like, completely and utterly useless.

But thankfully for us, there’s the Internet. Our swirling, at-the-edge-of-chaos, superconnected source for everything good and evil. The conduit for our culture and the most supremely dynamic platform ever devised for the sharing of human knowledge. And just like language itself, it invents and subverts and redefines itself like a force of nature. So, it seems like old misters Oxford and Webster best just leave the wordsmithing to the great collective brain. Open-source Urbandictionary and Wikipedia and their more specialised online cousins, afterall, are the source of all that we know nowadays. (And I mean that only half jokingly.)

So in an infinite stroke of genius, Felix Heyes and Ben West, two students at Kingston University, took to Google to create their very own version of the dictionary. (Hey, why not? We’re all authors of our culture, now.) For every word in the existing dictionary, the two used an algorithm to take the most prominent finding in an image search to make for a visual record of, well, us. And without throwing around the old ‘picture is worth a thousand words’ adage too much, this exercise in culture mining is far, far more indicative of the state of human language and society than any dictionary that almost arbitrarily lets “gaydar” and “grrrrrl” onto its pages. Several thousand images of porn, gore, and plastic celebrities later, it’s a look into an all-seeing mirror. And just like the day after an all night rager, you might not much like what you see staring back at you… but it’s real!

And since my Webster-backed computer spell check has just claimed that “rager” isn’t a word, my work here is clearly done.

Tag Christof – Images courtesy of Ben West

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09/05/2012

The Editorial: C’est Maintenant?

As I flew into Place de La Bastille this weekend on a clunky Velib’, the entire square burst into jubilant cheers. Red flares. French and African and Latin American flags waved happily. The leftist candidate had won! And it always feels pretty great when the candidate who stands up unabashedly for the little guy wins. Plus Monsieur Hollande is a welcome change from the eminently smug, snarky Sarkozy and looks like a wholesome, kindly grandad.

As the odd political pundit and Socialist party member shuffled on and off stage, each giving short speeches about the momentous victory, familiar refrains were oft repeated with slight variations: “Banks will no longer order, they will obey!” “We’ll show Europe that exit from the crisis will come through growth, not austerity!” But as the night’s planned entertainment descended into a bewildering lineup of C and D grade non-sequiturs, parts of the crowd broke into feel-good chants of ”Sarkozy, en prison!” under Holland’s omnipresent slogan “C’est maintenant!” (“It’s now!”). And for at least one evening, France had found some swagger.

But surely enough, markets were down on Monday. A national leader can’t exactly rally against banks and expect them to rally around him. So, while a change of energy and a change of face was much needed, Europe this week is finding itself in a seriously precarious position. While Spain and Italy and even France itself face mounting problems of unemployment, increasing poverty and still uncontrolled levels of debt, one of Europe’s biggest economies will now be taking on (and advocating) even larger loads than before.

Political cartoonists and much of the blogosphere have been declaring the death of the love affair of economic restraint between Germany and France’s leaders, cutely dubbed “Merkozy” by many. So, what does the divorce mean for Europe? What kind of example does killing austerity set for Greece? Can the Euro survive it all?

France is already being crushed under the weight of its colossal bureaucracy. And as one of the two de facto titan stewards of Europe’s future, it also stands to be crushed by the weight of its own responsibility in the wider world. So here’s to you, Hollande: we like you, but you need all the luck you can get.

Tag Christof – Images courtesy of Henri Cartier-Bresson

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02/05/2012

The Editorial: Work Well!

This week, much of the western world is observing some version of a worker’s day. While not a usually a cause for festivity, it usually means a much-needed day off to sleep late and give thanks to the world’s workers. And, what a sorry state those poor workers are in today. Wages are in the gutter and not getting any better. In the name of cost cutting, employers and governments are cutting jobs and slashing the pay and benefits of those who get to stick around. All while executives take home salaries thousands of times greater than their struggling dependents. From FIAT’s plans to gut its workforce and shuffle its factory infrastructure as it consolidates itself with its recently bankrupt lovechild, Chrysler, to evil, evil, evil Wal-Mart’s active quashing of unions (and any trace of worker rights along with them).

Anyone with half a mind for business understands the arguments profit-seeking corporations must make to justify their actions. They are legally accountable to their shareholders, afterall. (A hell of a vicious cycle!) But it takes neither a bleeding heart Keynesian activists nor Hans Rosling infographics to make it clear that workers the world over are being progressively made worse off by a system in which the health of institutions is prioritized over the health of the individuals they ostensibly exist to serve. And it’s a point driven home by the American Supreme Court’s terrifying decision to allow corporations to contribute unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, as well as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s infamous remark about corporations being people. They’re really not, Mitt. But regular Joes – from young college graduates to life-long factory workers – are getting smacked repeatedly in the face by the short end of a very hard stick.

But, I’ll throw a ray of hope out today in lieu of a real tirade: The slash and burn impetus that has sent countless jobs from union-backed, well-monitored factories in the west to contracted, hellish, anything-goes sweatshops in the east and south seems finally to be reaching a limit. A decade after backlashes against the labor practices of big brands like Nike and The Gap brought a new form of consciousness to consumers, Apple – the sterling darling of our generation – is having to answer some similarly serious questions about its own.

And we’re reacting: small-scale factories for all sorts of goods are springing up in LA, Brooklyn, Milan, Berlin… And while the jobs they create may not bring six-figure salaries, they certainly are going a long way towards creating the impression that we’ve at last had enough. Organizations like SFMade, which is seeing San Francisco become a major hub of small-scale production are setting the tone for all sorts of others that continue to crop up in major cities. The pendulum is swinging back in the right direction. Let’s keep pushing.

Tag Christof

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21/03/2012

The Editorial: Pirate Space Race!

Just this month Russians voted (however dubiously) to put Putin back in their presidency. And like we saw last week, the USA is still keen on flexing its bully muscles to show the world who’s boss. Leaving aside economically-hobbled Europe and still-teething China for a moment, the world looks poised for yet another generation of long distance provocations between two bratty superpowers. The two remain stubbornly at odds despite Russian socialism’s ostensible demise. And despite its streets now crawling with the shiniest Italian fashion and German luxury rides, Moscow’s brutal crushing of both political and civil rights protests proves the place is pretty much as Soviet as ever. And as the clashes unfold in Russia, America–always nicely stocked with right-wing crazies with no shortage of terrifyingly ill-minded policy rhetoric to spew–continues to beat its hugely hypocritical chest about freedom and liberty and all of the blah blah that any casual observer of its recent wars in the Middle East know is mostly propagandistic tripe. The whole thing feels more than just a tad Cold War.

But wait! Remember the Space Race? It was far and away the coolest conflict-driven competition in the history of mankind! It was a crucible for endless, fantastical dreams for human possibility and a source of immense pride. Sputnik versus Explorer, Luna versus Apollo. Oh, the good old future!

Sadly, the next wave of antagonism between the world’s superpowers is not likely to include plans for cosmic settlements or Mars probes, but rather skirmishes over oil pipelines, food supplies and trade agreements, all driven by fractured ideologies. America, as it tends to do when short-sighted conservatives call the shots, has divested its grand space program to the “private sector” and Russia’s has withered in neglect as resources have gone into consolidating military power. In any case, it looks like dull old terrestrial life for us little earthlings.

But there still may be life in the space race, in some form or another: in a remarkable recent twist, infamous torrent website The Pirate Bay has declared that it plans to send its servers into orbit in the near future to avoid the sorts of legal battles that had temporarily closed the site down. So while America and Russia may not go at in the cosmos anymore, it seems that the next frontier of the brewing IP and copyright war might indeed be in space. If their plan seems a bit far fetched, consider that they’ve long thrived as renegades, dodging bullets from irate media conglomerates, artists and, of course, vengeful governments.

So, just as last week, as both a consumer and producer of content, we remain on the fence about the polar core issues of “stealing” and “openness,” but are valiantly watching the battles. The ethics of torrents could surely use a good old shakedown from an ethicist, but the argument seems to be bigger than the list of grievances against them from the likes of DreamWorks, Apple, Warner Brothers, the Linotype type foundry and various Swedish institutions. Clearly, the pirates are stepping on some powerful toes and will eventually have to result to drastic measures to save themselves from the wrath of their enemies. (Wired UK even reports that they tried to buy their own micro nation in the North Sea.) We can’t imagine any Western government would be keen to see a satellite devised to undermine a chunk of its commercial underpinnings make it off the ground.

Still, the overall picture is about more than just ripped off music and software. Unlike stilted speeches from policymakers about net neutrality, this kind of radical maneuvering really indicates a huge will to maintain an unpoliced realm within the web. The ideas of free space, equal access and uninhibited sharing embodied in the contemporary Occupy and predecessor Share The Streets movements (and many before them) is captured well in the spirit of The Pirate Bay’s defiant ethic, and the time seems right for such a radical move.

And while we remain doubtful that the project can really take off–pricey satellites for free content? really?–it’s a lot of fun to imagine how this epic saga might unfold. Will the pirates manage to pull off an orbiting content coup? Will they be ruthlessly shut down? One thing is clear: it’s much more exciting to imagine the former. So, in the spirit of rebellion and the joys of conflict-driven imagination, let’s imagine a benevolent pirate flag hurdling far above the skies sometime soon.