Hermès and Apple
The Apple watch is not elegant. Hermès leather is elegant. Together, they look stupid. Why a maker of high-end handmade saddles would join forces with a manufacturer of consumer-focused factory-made products for the masses is a riddle. The only answer can be greed. Given the prices Hermès charges for every tiny bauble and spritz of cologne, it looks more than unchic to dance with the devil. You want an Hermès watch, buy one. You want an Apple computer (pick your size), buy one. (The computer will cost less.) But don’t marry them.
Photo: Apple
Saving Postmodernism
You can’t believe how happy I was that there was serious talk of tearing down the Michael Graves building in Portland. Everything got spent decorating the cake on the outside, and the interior was unkind, to say the least. But now all kinds of people want to get nostalgic about an architecture that was so Reaganesque. Let’s go back to Marie Antoinette when architecture was for just a few of us. And while we are at it, why don’t we make fun of you. I once heard Michael Graves speak at the Monterey Design Conference about why he loved working in Egypt. They had good brick workers for ten dollars a day. That is the spirit of postmodernism. I can’t wait for it to die. It’s no wonder that Philip Johnson embraced it: it didn’t mean much more than exclusion.
Philip Johnson at age 95 in his office, Seagram Building, Manhattan with his model of a sculpture. Photo credit: B. Pietro Filardo via Wikimedia Commons license
Calling Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn Socialists
Had to slip a political one in. “Socialist” is a word used to scare people. All politicians are socialists. The right, like Reagan and the Bushes, taxed the poor and middle class and redistributed government subsidies to the rich. Hopefully, Sanders and Corbyn will tax the rich (as they once were) and redistribute the wealth to those who have been hurt by the rich, in other words, the poor and middle class. The one percent shape the rightwing narrative into racist lies to scare the rest of us. And that’s just wrong!
Photo credit: Michael Vadon via Flickr creative commons license
