About staples

A fun interview with the Pet Shop Boys, focusing on the visual aspects of their work, in which Neil Tennant is egged into saying “Gesamtkunstwerk” as if it’s a big, dirty swear. He also muses on which magazines have survived the protracted Death Of Print, and which have withered: 

The New Yorker. The Spectator. The Atlantic. The stapled magazine opens invitingly, whereas the instinct of a perfect bound magazine is to close.

I love the idea of a magazine having an instinct. But could it also be that a perfect bound magazine (essentially, one with a spine), more closely resembles that most toxic of things, a book?

About books, again

Following on from the Thatcher Wine horrorshow, I was in Waterstones in Gower Street yesterday and saw, on a tabletop laden with books as slim and pretty as a posse of wannabe fashion models, this sign:

Which annoyed me a bit. Of course, it could be justified as a bit of stealth marketing, selling books to non-bookish people on an aesthetic basis, and, hey, maybe a few of them may absent-mindedly pick them up and read them. But would such people be in a bookshop – specifically a bookshop in the heart of the University of London – in the first place?

I calmed down a little when I turned 90 degrees to face the delectable wall of orange and cream below, all the Evelyn Waughs and Angus Wilsons you can eat at a fiver a pop. (The pale blue Pelicans were round the corner.) But then I noticed that these are being marketed not as second-hand books, but as “Vintage” Penguins and I’ve got a horrible feeling they’re also being shifted as design accessories first, books second. And yes, I accept that anything that helps to keep proper walk-in bookshops viable has to be a good thing. And yes, I’ve lost count of the books I own that I’ll probably never get round to reading. (The Japanese word for this is “tsundoku”) And yes, by taking a photo of the old Penguins like a bloody tourist, I’m further enabling the fetishisation of design and appearance over content.

But it’s my blog and I’ll whine if I want to. And now my degree’s over I can get back to reading what I bloody well want, so I bought a remaindered copy of the most recent edition of Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, the book proper of which is just 168 pages long, but has enough notes and discographies and indexes and similar geeky stuff to take the whole package well past the 400 mark. Will it make my bookshelf look good though?

About prorogation

Jamie Reid’s 1977 image of the Queen has gone from iconoclastic to iconic and back again; inevitably for the work of an old Situationist, it’s been détourned and/or recuperated more times than I’ve had hot safety pins. Here’s this morning’s edition of Spanish paper ABC:

To be honest, I don’t know what the classic punk and/or Situationist position on Brexit would have been; probably squatting in the middle, lobbing paving slabs at both sides. John(ny) Rotten/Lydon has reinvented himself as a Faragiste but apparently hasn’t always been that way inclined. And this article by Padraig Reidy (which also hijacks the essence of that 1977 image) points out how the “potential H-bomb” has been reclaimed as an emblem of hope against Brexit by her mortal foes, the liberal chattering classes. It’s another flavour of détournement, I suppose, but a polite one.

Also, not big, not clever from Mark Thomas, but funny:

I know we have to coordinate and organise to fight a no deal Brexit but it can’t hurt to pray for a well timed intervention in the form of an autoerotic accident.

— Mark Thomas (@markthomasinfo) August 29, 2019

PS: Coincidentally, someone has catalogued a letter I wrote to Select magazine (gulp) a quarter of a century ago.

About Thatcher Wine

I was directed by Clair, who used to be The Urban Woo in the days when people spoke of a blogosphere without sniggering, to an article about one Thatcher Wine, who is responsible for Gwyneth Paltrow’s books. No, he doesn’t write them; he curates them. A brief snippet to give a flavour of what he does:

My invention for the book jacket means that someone can have the complete works of Jane Austen, but in a certain Pantone chip color that matches the rest of the room or with a custom image. People have invested in how their home looks: They chose the cabinets, the carpets, the paint, and the window coverings. Why settle for books that a publisher designed? Books can have as much style as anything else in the room.

Which does make me yearn just a tiny bit for the glory days of actresses who actually read stuff.

PS: And in a similar vein, this is doing the rounds...

About John Hamilton

John Hamilton, the art director at the publishing company Penguin Random House, has died. Someone whose work is known to more people than his name, one would think, and whose demise wouldn’t cause a major stir beyond his friends and family and the worlds of publishing and design. But, wait, what’s this in the Mirror?

Now Jamie [Oliver] has had more bad news with the loss of his friend John Hamilton...

And in Hello!

...the celebrity chef paid a heartfelt tribute to John Hamilton, who was his art director at Penguin books...

And what’s this in Woman & Home?

...Jamie was struck by tragedy again, when he learned that John Hamilton...

We’re supposedly a less hierarchical, less deferential society these days but it seems that we’ve just built a whole new hierarchy, where a death can only be acknowledged if it makes a celebrity sad, and he says so on Instagram.

Swastikas over Asia (and the royal baby, obviously)

A few months ago, walking down Sathorn Road, one of the poshest thoroughfares in Bangkok, I passed a young Thai man wearing a t-shirt. It bore a swastika, the name and image of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder and leader of the American Nazi Party, and the slogan “WHITE POWER”.

Of course, it’s very easy to read too much into such things. In Thailand and beyond I’ve often seen people sporting texts that they clearly don’t understand; my favourite was a septuagenarian lady whose shirt was emblazoned with a Pepsi logo tweaked to say “PENIS”. But that sort of occurrence prompts nothing more than sniggering condescension on the part of farang, aka gweilo, gaijin, etc; the same westerners, incidentally, who will happily (albeit ignorantly) acquire a Chinese tattoo that proclaims their own intellectual limitations. They’re less relaxed when they see a young Asian decked out in the imagery of the Third Reich. And sometimes they voice their disapproval. In recent years, various levels of brouhaha have been provoked by a school in northern Thailand staging a Nazi-themed parade; a billboard featuring Hitler at a graduation ceremony in Bangkok; Nazi cosplay in Japan and elsewhere; and restaurants in India, Korea, Thailand and most recently Indonesia appropriating a Nazi aesthetic to promote their wares.

So is Asia a time-bomb of neo-Nazi sympathies? No, but it’s not quite as simple as that. Certainly there are widely held and openly aired attitudes to racial difference that would make many good western liberals feel slightly nauseous; and in Muslim-majority countries such as Malaysia, anti-Jewish polemic is accepted as part of the political discourse. Moreover, the historical perspective on World War II and its outcomes is different from that generally held in Europe or North America. Countries such as Britain and France were colonial occupiers and the Indian independence campaigner Subhas Chandra Bose was certainly not the only one to favour a pragmatic alliance with the Axis powers as a means of securing self-determination. The concept of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which would supposedly have replaced the economic infrastuctures of the western empires had Japan prevailed, must have looked like an attractive alternative to being ordered around by some whey-faced product of Eton and Oxbridge.

But for the majority of people who wear swastika t-shirts or carry cuddly Hitler dolls or perform Nazi salutes at inopportune moments, it’s nothing to do with wresting the historical narrative away from its Eurocentric perspective. It’s pure, honest-to-goodness ignorance, with a side-order of not giving a shit. When Sid Vicious or Siouxsie Sioux wore the hakenkreuz, it was a conscious decision to provoke and outrage. But Asian teens today know as little about der Führer as their counterparts in London or New York know of Chairman Mao, General Tojo or Pandit Nehru. Adolf’s just this funny-looking guy from the olden days who did this wacky thing with his arm and had a bad hipster haircut. And in some ways that’s even more disconcerting to a westerner than the thought that the kids might have absorbed his ideology.

Which leads – no, bear with me for a moment – to the as-yet unnamed offspring of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Now, I wish the child no particular ill; but I’m already thoroughly sick of the media’s obsession with his gestation, birth and now his existence. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the likes of the Mail and Telegraph have gone batshit for this, but I couldn’t find any respite from the coverage on Radio 4. The next time someone bleats about the left-wing bias of the BBC, ask them why they couldn’t dredge up a single republican voice to counter the sentimental wittering. Not that I’m a particularly trenchant anti-monarchist; to me, it’s just another manifestation of tacky celebrity culture, which other people are more than welcome to enjoy but I get annoyed if it impinges on my own consciousness too much and too often. However, even the expression of this state of disgruntled apathy is too much for some of the starry-eyed supplicants; “If you really don’t care, why are you going on about it so much?” seems to be a consistent refrain on social media when commentators such as Brian Reade and Andrew Collins articulate the extent of their apathy. Well, why shouldn’t they? Why does it perturb you so? Possibly because you know that the British monarchy will never succumb to the threat of pitchforks and guillotines because that’s not the way we do things; but not caring one way or another is a psychological weapon with its own special potency.

PS: The last word on media coverage.

PPS: This is quite good as well.

In which I turn into The Great Gatsby

For some time now, the first site to come up when you Google “The Great Gatsby” has been the one heralding the much-delayed movie version rather than anything directly related to Fitzgerald’s novel per se. It’s easy enough to be sniffy about this, but at the same time it’s almost certain that Baz Luhrmann’s version of the book will prompt many people to read it for the first time; and the experience may well nudge some previously reluctant readers into a better appreciation of the written word overall. As such, there’s a new paperback edition available, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and the other stars on the cover; but at the same time, a version with the original cover art is also selling very well. As the New York Times reports, there’s a neat socio-economic divide when it comes to which version is stocked where: indie stores in SoHo only stock the old style; WalMart restricts itself to the Leonardo variant; Barnes & Noble has both. Reaction to the new cover has been a little vociferous; as one bookseller squawks:

It’s just God-awful... ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a pillar of American literature, and people don’t want it messed with. We’re selling the classic cover and have no intention of selling the new one.

Well, that told us, although I think his definition of “people” could do with a little examination. And remember that the original cover (the disembodied face of which, I’ve long maintained, is a nod to Aubrey Beardsley’s hovering Oscar Wilde caricature in The Platonic Lament, but maybe I overthink this stuff) divided opinion when it appeared in 1925; Hemingway hated it, for one. But the tension does remind us that, Kindles notwithstanding, buying a book is often about far more than a simple desire to peruse the text within. Some people will be nervous about even purchasing The Great Gatsby and the appearance of DiCaprio et al reassures them that, yes, this is the book of the film you saw and enjoyed at the weekend. Others of course want to make it quite clear that their choice of reading matter has absolutely nothing to do with Hollywood and they were aware of Gatsby’s centrality to the American literary canon well before the movie was even contemplated; although if they know this, shouldn’t they be sporting the battered, scribbled-upon copy they’ve been reading and re-reading for the past 15 years, rather than some spanking new simulacrum of the first edition? Nevertheless, both purchasers may want to use their respective covers to communicate their choices and feelings to others; and to demonstrate the fact that, whatever their differences, they both feel superior to desperate journalists who think that one of the most melancholy tomes of the past 100 years is just an excuse for a party or a way to sell hair care products. Hey, whatever the cover looks like, at least the words inside are the same. Unless you pick up this version by mistake.

I don’t have a dog in the fight, if there needs to be a fight. I’ve said for some time that I came to Gatsby relatively late in the day, as its literary significance wasn’t so crucial in the rather Eurocentric environment in which I was educated. But is that really the case? A browse of this blog’s archive reveals that at the end of 2007 I was shouting about having read it for the first time that year, although I was aware how tardy I’d been. And yet, a mere six months before that I’d written:

For some reason, I’d convinced myself that I’d never actually read The Great Gatsby. So I picked up a second-hand copy and, of course, the point at which I realised that I had actually read it was the sentence that made me think “wow” the first time round.

Apparently I did read it at some point (the earlier post makes a couple of references to the age of 19, so maybe that’s it) but forgot the fact, then remembered, then forgot again within a matter of months. Or maybe one of those states – the having-read or the not-having-read, I genuinely don’t know any more – began as a lie, an affectation, that I somehow came to believe in. Maybe, like Gatsby, I’ve invented a whole identity for myself, although I’ve gone one further and started to think it was all true, getting lost in my own creation. Remind me never to pretend to be driving; talking of believing your own stories, do you think the Huhnes ever read Gatsby? That may not make any sense to you, of course; you’ll just have to read the book. One of them, at least.

Destroying Orwell

What’s A Creative, exactly? I’ve heard the noun being kicked around in advertising circles (“This is Miles, he’s The Creative who’ll be working on the account.” “We’ll punt it over to The Creatives, see what they can do with it.”) where it seems to exist as an implied rebuke to everyone else in the organisation. How, after all, do you describe someone who isn’t A Creative? An Uncreative? A Destructive?

And while we’re on the subject, is it these Creatives who are expected to read the magazine called Creative Review? Or has it become something akin to The Economist; I wonder how many readers of that publication define themselves as economists. I only ask because a recent feature (in CR, not The Economist) dealt with David Pearson’s cover designs for Penguin’s new editions of George Orwell’s major works. The one that has attracted most attention is for 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the title and author’s name are obscured by black foil, and only visible in the right light because the characters are debossed. It’s a bold step, entirely in tune with the theme of Orwell’s novel, but it clearly carries with it certain commercial risks; what if the casual bookshop browser (if they still exist) can’t identify the book? And such concerns are presumably what prompted the following deliciously Gradgrindian comment, from one Graham:

I hate designers that get so keen to impress that they just do something completely impractical like block out all the type. Bottom line: Its a tossy response to a decent brief. The sort of idea a first year graphics student does before realising that they've made something pathetic instead of clever. We can all come up with witty rational for impractical design. The clever thing is when the man on the street can understand the concept and it connects in a genius way. If I was Penguin I'd want my money back. Bollocks to 'covered up'. Start again.

One wonders whether Graham is a Creative, albeit one of a distinctly practical bent. Or is he more likely a bitter Destructive, taking a furtive peek in the Creatives’ magazine and venting all his hatred and resentment on the cool kids down the corridor?

Komickino

Long overcoats have gloomed their disapproval at news of Disney bringing out a t-shirt that squeezes the cover image of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album into the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. True, it’s a bit tacky, but I’m not sure that we should make the patronising assumption that those responsible don’t appreciate the bleak resonance of Peter Saville’s original design. It’s simply an act of recuperation, the absorption and appropriation of something that was once radical and challenging into the big, comforting womb of consumer capitalism. As such, it’s a) been going on for decades and b) a belated act of revenge for all the indignities that have been inflicted on the blameless rodent in the past in the name of détournement, recuperation’s persistent mirror – a process that increasingly feels like scrabbling for the crumbs that fall from capitalism’s table then waiting until capitalism has gone to the toilet and putting the crumbs back on the table in an amusing pattern.

PS: And now... Public Image Limited in Primark!

The sound behind our cornflakes

I’m not sure that this needs any further comment. Borrowed from Include Me Out.

For the typography spods among you

By Tom Gabor.

Betamax blogging

I've decided not to close the year with a Best-of-2008 list because, quite frankly, I haven't read/heard/seen enough genuinely new stuff to fill 10 slots, let alone 10 things that have filled me with such enthusiasm and/or loathing that I can stack them in any particular order. Instead, I've been having one of those tedious internal debates about whether to herald 2009 with a bells-and-whistles redesign for Cultural Snow. I've barely done anything to the default design I picked when I started blogging three (!) years ago, leaving it, as Cath Elliott puts it, looking "too much like a Penguin Classic". I do sometimes feel a bit inadequate when I see the lovely pictures and clever squiggly bits with which the rest of you decorate your sites. I haven't even bothered to add on one of those doodads that tells me when the rest of you have updated. (I did try it, but it made a horrible mess all over my dashboard.) I've just bunged a few widgets down the right-hand margin, and if the spacing goes a bit wonky I just go off and make another cup of tea and hope the Blog Fairy will sort it all out.

So what's stopping me from creating Cultural Snow 2.0? Well, sheer bloody indolence for one thing; as well as a distinct lack of confidence in my own technical and creative abilities, the dashboard disaster being pretty much par for the course. And I've always been a late and nervous adopter of technological innovations, although I recently discovered that I was only the third person in Bangkok to sign up to Twitter.

I briefly considered following Mr Frith's lead and putting a call out to a hip young designslinger, although that would inevitably create tensions: as well as being indolent and incompetent, I can be a bit of a control freak when I put my mind to it, a lethal combination. But I've also come to the conclusion that now everyone else has a bells-and-whistles blog, mine no longer looks primitive and creaky; it looks minimalist and a wee bit retro. And I'm also reminded a little of Aunt Percy.

Aunt Percy (real name Persimmon) was a character in one of my favourite childhood books, Clement Freud's Grimble. She lived in a tower block where the flats didn't have numbers; instead, they were all painted different colours to distinguish them. Aunt Percy's door was buff. Unfortunately, because all the doors were exposed to the elements, the paint gradually faded, until all the doors were buff. One resident suggested that they should put their names on the door, but Aunt Percy objected. She'd made the right choice of door colour to start with, so why should she have to bother with putting her name up? So all the others put their names on the doors, and underneath they put "and Aunt Percy doesn't live here".

So when Grimble goes round to Aunt Percy's flat for his dinner, because his parents have unexpectedly gone on a cruise to Peru, he knows to look for the door with nothing on it.

Not quite sure where I meant to go with that.

Anyway, in the current turbulent circumstances, the best of good wishes alone can't hope to ensure a happy new year, per se; but let's hope that 2009 will at least be interesting. Even if your front door isn't.

Sit on this

I've always had the greatest admiration for good salespeople and marketing bods, because it's something at which I'm utterly hopeless. It's a combination of my crapness with strangers, my principled loathing for shopping and consumerism of almost any kind and my utter inability to feign enthusiasm about anything whatsoever, including things I quite like. So I'll say at the outset that Sally, who works for the modern furniture retailer Regency Shop, does good sales. I'm not quite sure why a retailer specialising in modern design should be named after a period of the early 19th century, but hey, maybe that's why I'm not in marketing.

I'm also slightly befuddled as to why Sally contacted me and asked me to put a link to her Beau-Brummell-meets-the-Bauhaus emporium on my blog. To be fair, she does offer a hint:

"I realize that you have knowledge of barcelona :)... it'd be swell if you can place our barcelona chair link on your blog..."

Now I do have a cursory knowledge of Barcelona, having visited the place somewhere between once and three times; well, precisely between once and three times, as in twice, the last being more than eight years ago. It's jolly nice and I hope to go back, this time maybe for more than three days. But I don't know why this should give me any particular insight into a particular piece of furniture about which the only thing I know is that it was designed by Mies van der Rohe. And I'm not even sure how Sally knows about my limited knowledge of Barcelona; a trawl of my blog turns up one reference, in which I make a passing reference to the city in a post otherwise devoted to Cambodia.

But Sally's not done; in a final twist, she clarifies that the Barcelona chair that Regency Shop offers at the very reasonable price of $345 (plus shipping) isn't actually a Barcelona chair, presumably to avoid paying pesky royalties to the Mies van der Rohe estate:

"we call it the ibiza chair."

So Sally wants me to give a mention to this chair, because it's named after somewhere I haven't been. Or, more specifically, because I've been somewhere it's not named after. And you know what? I did!

Told you she was good.

PS: More conceptual Mies stuff here.

Flagging

In which I demand the abolition of the United Kingdom. For aesthetic reasons, you understand.