12/20/00 12:13am
Overalls: don't.
Ladies and Gentlemen, We have a new boss.
After spending four hours in the air over the American west I realized that using one's cellphone as their only watch (the pocket watch needs a new battery) is not such a geat idea. I felt very guilty turning my phone on at 27,000 feet, and when we hit turbulence I couldn't help but think-- if even for just a second-- that it was somehow caused by my fateful button press. Enough of that.
Gift for the person who has everything: Walker Bags, because everything needs to be kept somewhere. I picked up a bright orange bag that holds my minidisc perfectly (and even contrasts well with its blue metal finish).
The east coast was about eating. Eating, cold weather, and trains. Eating, cold weather, trains, and projects. The December 2000 Lobster Tour commenced in DC at New Heights with a delicious whole lobster served on a bed of butter orzo. White truffle oil (what appears to be the trend of the season) added a nice touch. Mediocre shellfish filled pastries at XO were more than compensated for by the excellent company of Jeff and Jenn. The lobster gnocchi was excellent also.
New York's Canteen is a Newsom designed basement restaurant on Mercer with a promising menu. Arriving for a late afternoon lunch probably wasn't the best timing, so things were a little lack luster, but the interior is great; worth it just for the chairs. Perhaps I'm behind the times, but I think Mercer Kitchen still wins out for best casual lunch.
In the food theme: the entryway, bar, and lounge area at Twenty Manning make the experience. Oh, good food helps too, even if star anise mashed sweet potatoes is too trendy. The desserts, and especially the fuji apple & pear upside down cake, are fabulous. So good I went twice.
Previous Philadelphia standout Fork needs to change it's name to Fail, because it really doesn't live up to its reputation. Maybe the new chef needs some time to ramp up, either way I'll be very hesitant to go back there.
Stephen Starr's Tangerine is every bit as good as you may or may not have heard. The bar is scary and very LA, so it seems a little off-putting when you walk in, but once you get into the heart of the restaurant everything becomes much more welcoming. The lighting, in particular, is inventive and varied. The food is served family style, which I usually don't like, but the chef takes time to style each plate so that presentation is not lost. Bonus points. Unfortunately, dessert isn't worth your time at Tangerine.
Oh, and one last note about food and then I promise I'll stop: Beau Monde makes such good crepes.
The best way to wake up in Boston is to wake up with snow falling. Especially light snow. So light that the flakes dont even crush each other under their collective weight. The coverage grows and grows with such speed to enormous volume that you cant help but smile, to go outside, to want to keep it forever. It's even easy to forget the temperature under such conditions.
What else? Planes over Arlington, busses in Philadelphia, the smell of the subway in new york, wind so strong in Providence.
In the tradition of unrelated interruptions: What Volkswagon needs to do is make a CD with the music from all of their commercials on it. The only way to get the CD is to buy a car. A special version of the CD will be made for each car so that the overall tone matches that of the branding and advertising campaign for that specific model. The first song you will hear is the song in the commercial that made you want to own the vehicle in the first place.
Products are out, lifestyle is in. Get used to hearing this from me. Promoting, hyping, selling, and extending brands-- and the lifestyles that they promise-- is the strategy. I should note here that of course products still matter. No one would buy a VW if they stopped running after the first week. duh. Nevertheless, companies like VW have so effectively weilded their advertising budgets that with a series of commercials for each one of their vehicles they have created a set of very definite unique lifestyle images. Buy a beetle if you're a hipster teen; buy a jetta if you're still cool; and that Passat sure will compliment your pottery barn furniture nicely, won't it?
I would love to see stats from amazon both before and after VW or the Gap used a catchy song in one of their commercials, I guarantee there's an increase in sales afterwards. Nick Drake's Pink Moon has been rereleased complete with "as featured in the VW commercial" stickers thanks to one very sucessful Cabrio ad.
So you've bought that cool car you saw in the commercials, you hop in to drive it off the lot, and the first song that starts up is the same song in the commercial where you were first introduced to the very object of desire that you're now steering down the highway. As long as the car doesnt turn out to be a lemon, VW has just created a loyal customer. They've transformed you from Joe Customer to that well dressed, fair skinned model on television-- if only for the duration of one song. The camera cranes up as your content-consumer-self drives off into the sunset and the cold night of defeat falls on the other dealerships down the street.
Lifestyle infiltration can be seen across the board. Even cookbooks are now lifestyle delivery devices. No longer is it enough to instruct one on how to prepare food, we must now be told how, when, and to whom to serve it. Exhibits A and B: I flipped through these books at a local bookstore tonight and noticed that every page was a mixture of pictorial and textual instructions or commandments. This food goes best with Ikea glasses and a multi-cultural mix of friends.
The same visual techniques we see applied to the food photographs here can also be found in the television and print commercials-- even websites-- of the big Lifetsyle brands: light and airy layouts, mixtures of bright and pastel colors, extensive use of depth of field, and varied cultural influences. What conclusions can we derive from this incipient coherent aesthetic, and more specifically from the seemingly limitless penetration of Lifestyle hawking?
I'm inclined to think that it ties into a general malaise or apathy setting in amongst us. Perhaps the vast differences between high fashion and the reality of our lackluster-by-comparison selves is too great to bear; the population has capitulated to a made up superior, an invented image which is now the arbiter of taste. Has our TV culture brought us to the point that objects and ideas can only be appreciated if presented in a hyper-realistic manner? Would you buy clothes displayed on a slightly pudgy, slightly homely mannequin? Would you be inspired to cook a recipe if the picture looked like a pile of cafeteria mystery meat? This all seems very trite to me, though, and I am thus inclined to think that there's another answer out there somewhere.
One definite side effect of the Lifestyle movement (if we can call it that) is the near death of the magazine. Time magazine did a cover story on "design" this summer, Wired has just dedicated an entire issue to it, Target is pouring massive dollars into their Graves line, and Design is becoming America's favorite trendy topic. Cool. Now we'll all have beautiful pot holders and easy to use potato peelers (side note: oxo is the standard, but Stelton is the better). Now all the magazines are talking about the latest neat thing Starck designed or that cool packaging that Rashid just completed. More and more products are highlighted in magazine articles because there is an emerging fetish. This sort of fascination is nothing new, the same thing happened mid-century when the Eames ruled the day.
When our media becomes inundated with products it's a natural extension that information about the products displayed will be offered up. Prices and buying locations thusly make their way into the content delivery devices we call magazines. Sony and Ikea have rather well known magalogs which are pretty unabashedly sales devices, but now tons of magazines are taking steps towards being catalogs. Vogue uses a sidebar in their feature on hotels to sell bath soaps, Nest advertises the sofas that are highlighted in the issue, Wallpaper may have never been anything but a glossy catalog. As mentioned above, Wired and even Time-- about as boring and unfashionable as you get-- are also joining in to fetishize design objects and well designed products.
So here's your warning: when you see a Harpers issue dedicated to design fetish run for the hills!
I'd also like to remember this for a second. It was a good summer no matter how I look at it.
Sometimes I feel like my travels are little pilgrimages to undetermined deities. The enlightenment of escapism? Will you tell me where to go? Will you tell me which seat to sit in?
--Posted 12/20/00 12:13PM