Seen In The Steam

Silly me, they do it for the money. I was puzzling why the adult editors of the London based Wallpaper* magazine would chose to present themselves to the world as arrogant, adolescent idiots. But they’re hucksters, selling a snake oil product to a vulnerable audience, the chronically adolescently insecure. I guess they figured, and rightly I might add, that sadistic contempt sells, it actually can be reassuring, when you’re aiming at a frightened and bewildered audience.

I’ve seldom seen a magazine so aptly named as Wallpaper*. Needless to say everything in it is of no interest and can be safely ignored. The content is completely ephemeral. You can’t tell the ads from the copy. This is the high school magazine that would be written by all the cool kids. It is really depressing to think so many young middle class people worldwide are still so pathetically obsessed with what other people think of them. Because that’s what being cool is all about, appearing cool to others. It makes the working class obsession with People and Celebrity look like a positive first step on a spiritual quest, while these middle class wanna-be-riche are still wallowing in an idolization of things, and the false sense of superiority for the inferiority-complex-impaired that things, like teddy bears, impart.

There is a corbis ad, double page, full bleed, in the front of the April 2004 issue. It shows five birds on a perch, only the center bird faces away from the camera. The text reads: Keyword Rebel Search. Well you wouldn’t find any matches in Wallpaper*. Rebellion is the last thing on these readers mind. It is strict conformity all around. Buy this. Wear that. Go Here. Don’t ever buck the latest fashion tread. Or somebody might think you’re not cool. It seemed appropriate that the one “rebel” bird facing the wrong way was lost in the center fold. You know there is something about “being cool” that is ultimately authoritarian.

Don’t the readers get that this is all about some one else sucking their money anyway from them for over priced goods. Branding is frequently just an advertising scam to get you to pay more for less. The editors treat their readers like slavish fools, who can’t think for themselves. There is a editorial Fashion spread taken on their “seasonal trip to the private island in the Philippines.” I don’t know what they were on, but they obviously forgot what they were suppose to be about. The biggest insult and howler is the swimming suit picture in which the model is in the water up to her neck, one fuzzy inch of strap showing. The editors have the gall to have text detailing the cost and maker of the suit. I’ve never seen a magazine before where the editors openly show such masses of contempt for their audience.

I’m sure the editors would tell me it’s not about a particular suit. That’s true in a branding ad. But this was suppose to be editorial copy where information is imparted. Why even mentioned an item not shown? Or was the trip paid for by the fashion houses who expected, required, a plug? Just how stupid do you think your readers are? Maybe it’s not the magazine that’s wallpaper that can be ignored, maybe the editors think the readers are their own personal wallpaper.

BAD DESIGN MAKES GOOD! One of the most uncomfortable chairs in the history of people has become an icon of Modern design. The Le Corbusier Lounger should always be labeled: SCULPTURE. Please Do Not Sit. The piece is useless as a chair, unless you are a thalidomide survivor. That is not a misguided joke, but a fact. The chair has no support for your arms, either you hug them across your chest like you’re caught in a cold draft, or you let them hang to the floor like a fallen sweater on either side of the chair. IT knows I’ve tried just about every domestic activity on this piece of furniture, but it’s without use, without function. You can’t read in it. There are no chair arms to support your arms AND the weight of your book. You can’t even just sit in it for any extended period of time to do anything like watch TV for the same reason, unless you like to sit with your hands dragging down beside you like you’re passed out, or, you like to give yourself extended hugs. The Lounger exemplifies the real Modernist obsession with appearance over content, and the true smug fascist nature of the twentieth century avant garde: ”We know better, we’re the avant-garde, we know what’s good for the masses better than the masses do.” It’s this smug I-Know-Better attitude that leads to an inability for modernist to see the essential unattractiveness of their program. If you know better, than every one else is stupider, so why should you listen to them. People have valid complaints not only about the coldness of modern design but also, and even more, about the real form follows ego attitude towards the design process which disregards any requirement that interferes with the sleek, shiny fashions of Modernism. Things don’t actually have to function in the end. Too bad there are no random blind tests to determine the actual effectiveness of modern designs. It is an irony of Modernism that out of the dictum “Form follows function.” should arise the idealization of functionless forms. Have any doubts about this? See celebrity designer Karim Rashid’s defense of his own functionless forms in I.D. Magazine March/April 2004.

Save our Skins. Depopulate. Why are we so pretentious? We’re not “SAVING THE EARTH.” If we ALL died overnight, the next day the sun would rise, the birds would sing, and the squirrel would continue hiding its nuts, as we all rotted away in our beds. The earth doesn’t need us. It doesn’t need us to save it, even if we annihilated ourselves in a nuclear winter causing war. The earth could say, “Been there, done that, still evolved.” And the cockroaches would be quite happy. It’s our own selfish skins that need saving.

Of course we can take quite a few species with us when we go, not if, but when we go. The fate of all species, including us, is extinction. And you know what? Life and evolution will continue on long after we’ve licked our last ice cream cone. In fact, we are just a gloss on a footnote in the vast encyclopedic volumes of time. We are NOT the most important thing that ever happened. The ground of being is not any more or less interested in our fate then it is interested in the fate of the whole galaxy in which we are infinitesimal parasites or in the fate of that poetic blade of grass. It is childish, primitive and self-serving to think that our fate, or the fate of any group of us, or any one of us, matters, makes a difference to the ground of being.

We could aim to go out quietly with the least amount of bother for other species. It’s up to us, unless a meteor or other global disaster, not of our making, decides to provide a relatively clean slate for further evolution. But the fate of the universe in no way depends upon us either as a group or as individuals. It’s all about us saving our own skins. Stop being such puffed up, self-involved little children. Save our Skins. Depopulate.

If we don’t depopulate, the ground of being provides. It provides war, starvation, disease and pestilence. Those are the population controls provided by the ground of being. Want to take that route? Want the ground of being to provide for our grand children the way it provides for us? If not then we must depopulate. How? Educate women. Every society where women are given equal, and not separate(the U.S. proved that doesn’t work), access to education has a falling reproduction rate. Stop dropping bombs in female’s laps and start dropping books, electronic books, solar powered laptops. Books not Bombs, that’s the humane way to depopulate and save out skins.

Eat or Die. Death is not a sin. There is no humane reason to keep people alive indefinitely in long term nursing care, who can’t eat for themselves. So when are we going to make total parental nutrition, intravenous feeding solutions, controlled substances? Think it’s cruel to let people starve to death? How much crueler it is to keep people alive in a vegetative state. You worried about suffering, then every one should be entitle to morphine to ease them to their exit.? Who wouldn’t like this? The burgeoning nursing care, or should I say zombie care, industry, that makes a ton of public money keeping the almost dead half alive, ever growing the legions of 21st century undead. We can become a nation of zombies, and if you think it’s bad now wait until the baby boomers hit the beds. You really want to spent years as a plant life, sucking up the resources of your children, grand children and even great grand children. You don’t think the medical profession will be able to keep us alive that long. They will, as vegetables.

Do you want health care costs to plummet? Do you want your grand children to have a future? Do you want to go out swiftly and peacefully or agonizingly slowly? Write your representative today. Make total parental nutrition a controlled substance available only for short term hospital care or for people with medical problems like Crohn’s disease who are still otherwise functioning. Medicare should no longer cover total parental nutrition, or even peripheral parental nutrition, in any long term nursing care facility. In fact intravenous feeding should not be allowed in any long term nursing care. You shouldn’t be able to buy your way to immortality, even if it’s only vegetative. Morphine should be covered.

Where and when did the the medical profession begin to lose it way and start to think life extension was their goal. It’s not. This is the belief of the mad scientist that the brain in a vat is a life worth living, even if the brain is half dead and the vat happens to be your own body. The goal of the medical profession is to heal. If they can’t do that then they should get out of the way and let life take its usual course to death.

It’s your choice. I chose a death free of pain over the dishonor and inhumanity of being a plant life watered each day by intravenous feeding solution. People eat, plants get watered. Eat or die.