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Politics, the political and design
Design, mostly, is a service industry, serving the status quo. It serves to replicate the given reality of our existence in which a ‘politics of the same’ — the only formal politics we have — is enacted. Obviously, this doesn’t happen in consciously overt ways, but rather through the inherent ontologically designing nature of design’s politically unexamined practices and the directional consequences of all that design brings into being. Or, put another way, ‘everything we design goes on designing’. What we are saying here then is that this designing is ever ideological, and this understanding of design, i.e., revealing the designed as continual process rather than just as realised product, is ever political.
It follows that if we want another kind of future than the one offered by the unsustainable status quo, then we all have to change direction, redirect our practices and all that they bring into being — this so we may become another way. Such change can only happen if design is not just acknowledged as political but also becomes politically engaged as an ethically redirective domain of human endeavour.
We cannot go back. While the overt political ideologies of the past have good and bad lessons to teach, they lack the conceptual and intellectual means to deliver sustainable futures. Likewise, democracy as we now know it — as just another marketed commodity choice based upon appeals to self interest rather than the collective good — is not going to deliver such futures. The massive changes needed to secure sustainable futures — such as major reductions in the negative impacts of economic activity, limits on resource utilisation and the initiation of socially just levels of equity — are not the kind of things that politicians are going to put in front of voters.
Just a few years ago, preservationists worried that the town's collection of modernist houses, one of Connecticut's historical treasures, was in danger of destruction.
The houses' very design - smaller, one-story structures built with natural materials that flow into the landscape - put them at risk of being torn down to make way for the larger McMansions that have become so popular.
But the death in 2005 of Philip Johnson, one of the most famous of the modernist architects, and the opening earlier this year of his world-famous Glass House in New Canaan for public tours, seems to be turning the tide in favor of the town's notable modernist homes, according to local history experts and preservationists.
"People are coming looking for these houses, so the tear-downs have slowed down," said Janet Lindstrom, executive director of the New Canaan Historical Society. "They seem to be much more respected. Many of them are in the process of being refurbished and it could be that maybe five years ago, they would have been torn down and lost to us forever."
But her focus remains on how a business that once catered to the wealthy elite has gone mass-market and the effects that democratization has had on the way ordinary people shop today, as conspicuous consumption and wretched excess have spread around the world. Labels, once discreetly stitched into couture clothes, have become logos adorning everything from baseball hats to supersized gold chains. Perfumes, once dreamed up by designers with an idea about a particular scent, are now concocted from briefs written by marketing executives brandishing polls and surveys and sales figures.
With globalization, Paris and New York are no longer exclusive luxury meccas. Ms. Thomas notes that a gigantic 690,000-square-foot luxury mall called Crocus City (featuring 180 boutiques, including Armani, Pucci and Versace) is flourishing outside Moscow, and that a group of high-end boutiques will be part of a luxury complex called Legation Quarter, scheduled to open in Tiananmen Square later this year.
“Approximately 40 percent of all Japanese own a Vuitton product” today, she says, and one recent poll showed that by 2004 the average American woman was buying more than four handbags a year. With more people visiting Caesars Palace’s glitzy Forum Shops each year than Disney World, Las Vegas has made shopping synonymous with gambling and entertainment, even as outlet malls have brought designer clothing and accessories within the reach (and budget) of many suburbanites.
High-profile luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Cartier were founded in the 18th or 19th centuries by artisans dedicated to creating beautiful, finely made wares for the royal court in France and later, with the fall of the monarchy, for European aristocrats and prominent American families. Luxury remained, writes Ms. Thomas, “a domain of the wealthy and the famous” until “the Youthquake of the 1960s” pulled down social barriers and overthrew elitism. It would remain out of style “until a new and financially powerful demographic — the unmarried female executive — emerged in the 1980s.”
the portland pullman (just needs paint)
via erin/steve
Sinatra, Streisand, Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett — even Fred Astaire — have all recorded their songs: The husband-and-wife team of Marilyn and Alan Bergman has been writing irresistible tunes together for 50 years.
Their songs include "Nice & Easy," "In the Heat of the Night" (recorded by Ray Charles), "That Face," "You Must Believe in Spring," "The Way We Were" and "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?"; they've written the lyrics for music featured in films as diverse as Tootsie and the original Thomas Crown Affair.
Alan Bergman has recorded an album of their songs with the Berlin Radio Orchestra; it's called Lyrically.
warhol japanese tdk ad
Braniff Airways "End of The Plain Plane"
Orchestra of Our Time, Theatre Mobile for Satie's "Socrate"
Calder Le Cirque
interesting kuspit essay on youth culture but ultimately begs the point and terminally implodes in the final paragraphs :
I am arguing, along with theorists who view creativity in terms of evolution, that there is no significant creativity without a foundation in tradition, which symbolizes all that is memorable, mature, and of demonstrable value in a society, implying that tradition can never lose meaning and will always reward reflection; and iconoclasm that questions the finality and values of tradition and challenges traditional modes of understanding, but that remains valueless unless it achieves its own finality by becoming part of and holding its own in tradition, thus gaining lasting meaning and proving its continuing value to society.
I happen to think that avant-garde art has not unequivocally done so, however representative it is of modern society, with its cult of youth, indeed, its fetishization of youth, and can never convincingly do so, because to be avant-garde means to be incorrigibly adolescent in attitude and thus unable to relate to and respect tradition, which does not mean to blindly conform to it. Adolescence can express itself but not reflect on itself, which is why avant-garde art cannot become seriously traditional, that is, a civilizing force.
rip queen of mean
I feel enough time has passed that I can make a rather shocking confession. Who it would shock I am not sure. I've been living a Beware of the Blog lie for the past several months. Back on April 29th I posted the most elaborate item ever written about the psychedelic hippie (or hippy) flick You Are What You Eat (1968). If you missed it, you can still read it here. Now despite having given the history of this weird and often headache-inducing film, offering my opinions about its best and worst parts (and its absolutely fantastic soundtrack LP that you can listen to here), I need to come clean.
I never saw the movie.
As I stated in the original piece, You Are What You Eat is rather obscure - and nearly impossible to find. I owned the great soundtrack featuring The Electric Flag, Tiny Tim, Peter Yarrow, Rosko, The Band, and of course John Simon's My Name Is Jack, and had always wondered about the movie. I figured many other WFMU listeners did too.
I confess this now because my local Cinematheque had a (bootleg DVD) screening of the picture this past week. I was one of only five people in the audience - and the soundtrack remains superior. If you follow the link to that old article it has now been revised - as you might expect. I wonder if anyone noticed I was talking out of my ass back in April? It also makes me wonder how many film critics out there review movies without even bothering to watch them (Leonard Maltin - a measly two stars for Taxi Driver!?).
Can you ever trust me again?
#232 - The Tijuana Brass Sound (Box Set) (mp3s)
The day is titled "The Tijuana Brass Sound", with an emphasis on "sound". Some of the songs may be direct covers or adaptations of Herb Alpert and the TB Sound and others just have that T-Brass magic.
I believe all of the songs featured are out of print but I could be wrong in some cases. I left out notable songs by Bob Moore, Henry Mancini, Herb's early cuts as Dore Albert and Perrey & Kingsley (because the music is available on CD), and a whole ton of boring copycat versions of Herb and the Brass' hits. Tracks by Johnny Mandel, Claude Bolling, Killer Watts and The Unocal Song came from sites online, but I'm not sure where (I completely forget), so thanks to the site/blog owners for sharing these songs, they helped to make this collection to share with others. Thanks to Pea Hix for Optiganally Yours and Derrick Bostrom for The Going Thing.
The majority of cuts are from vinyl I've picked up in various thrifts, shops and gutters over the years. Listen to that Tijuana Brass Pop, Crackle and Hiss! Embrace it. And then there are songs I have no clue how they landed at my pad, and why, and from whom, and at this point... I just stop questioning and keep listening as drowning ones self in hours upon hours of that brass sound, well, I'm not going nuts if that's what you are thinking. I'm actually loving it and I find myself extremely happy listening to this music.
There are so many songs out there that a 20+ CD box set could be compiled. Here my friends are 100 tracks to burn on 4 discs to play at your next social gathering.
Le Corbusier: Art and Architecture
A Life of Creativity
Mori Art Museum
Tokyo, Japan
Architectural giant, the founder of modernism, the greatest architect of the 20th Century - just some of the accolades that have been attached to Swiss born Frenchman Le Corbusier (1887-1965). It is little known that Le Corbusier devoted his mornings to painting and sculpture; architecture only started in the afternoons when he went to his office.
vinalhaven in the news
john schwarz after calder mobile no.5
It may strike many as strange that fashion design is not already covered by copyright law. Many creative industries argue, quite persuasively, that their success requires a certain level of intellectual property protection. Without it, innovation would grind to a halt; creators will not engage in creation if they fear others will steal their work.
But fashion designs never have been protected by intellectual property law and, as it turns out, for good reason. Unlike in the music, film, or publishing industries, copying of fashion designs has never emerged as a threat to the survival of the fashion industry. Indeed, growth and creativity in the fashion industry depend on copying
im just thinking that nows the time to change /Schwarz to a subscription (pay to play) page.
so starting next week...
philippe rahm
doesnt seem to add up to interesting art though. looks marsscape orange. how alienating
more light and ion therapy
giant pumpkin seeds
In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil’s most important city, São Paulo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known on one hand for being the country’s slick commercial capital and on the other for its extreme gang violence and crushing poverty, São Paulo’s “Lei Cidade Limpa” or Clean City Law was an unexpected success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab.
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One Brazilian city has cleansed its streets of all advertising and billboards. Should we [UK] do the same or would an ad-free future leave us cold?
Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of São Paulo, passed a law last year banning all advertising from the Brazilian city. The place is now being held up by activists worldwide as an example to us all: an image of an anti-Orwellian future, where The Man is no longer in control of our day to day choices. But does the planet's first "clean city" really live up to the hype? Stripped of its flyposters and neon signs, São Paulo now resembles a war zone, with empty hoardings and rusting frames replacing the soft drink adverts and the blown-up faces of Brazilian actors.
Tony de Marco, a photographer and typographer, has put up a series of images of today's São Paulo on Flickr. To me it looks like Stanley Kubrick's vision of Saigon shot in a deserted London Docklands in the 80s.
"If you want to be apocalyptic," Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas writes in "Al Manakh," a new study of Persian Gulf cities and their beanstalk towers, "you could construe Dubai as evidence of the-end-of-architecture-and-the-city-as-we-know-them."
To be apocalyptic, you will probably not be surprised to hear, is precisely what Mike Davis wants. His own views on Dubai are included in "Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism," a timely if uneven collection he edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk, and they possess all the razor-sharp pessimism he's spent a career perfecting.
Davis' view of Dubai -- one of the seven city-states that make up the United Arab Emirates, and for the last decade the biggest construction site this side of Shanghai -- is marked by stories of greed, exploitation and enough conspicuous consumption to make a hedge fund manager blush. In classically over-the-top fashion, he characterizes Dubai as "the ultimate Green Zone," a fantasyland built on the backs of overworked and underpaid foreign workers who are violently brought into line every time they try to organize. It's a place, Davis says, that "earns its living from fear," with a skyline that is "a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly."