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21.12.24 / 02 / rail symbol 2
When the effective renationalisation of the railways was floated in 2021, it was said that the logo of the new organisation would be a modified version of the British Rail double arrow. This was welcome but the mention of revisions was concerning, given the untouchable elegance of the original. I needn’t have worried. The update is a very subtle re-proportioning by Nick Job that makes the symbol more usable and less prone to bad executions. This is a heartening tale of an enthusiast who makes a difference. Job was concerned by the frequent errors in the drafting and use of the symbol, even in official documents and signage, and approached Network Rail with a proposal for respecifying it. This was well-received and Job got his dream job. Now he really needs to update his websites...
The manual revives the old elegance of the British Rail Corporate Identity. Amusingly, Section 1.7 Incorrect Usage carefully forbids all of the non-standard uses that actually happened under British Rail, even the ones that had official permission!
The name change - Rail Symbol 2 - is significant. It was the logo of a particular organisation. When that organisation disappeared, it did not vanish as expected. It had become a symbol for railways and stations due to its use on signage. Nobody could think of anything better to replace it that would just mean ‘railway’, and it would cost too much to replace all the signs anyway. So it remained everywhere, as a kind of ghost of its parent organisation, neither living nor dead, with no certain future. Now calling it Rail Symbol acknowledges what it has become, not a logo but the symbol of railways in Britain, regardless of organisation or ownership.
21.12.24 / 01 / rail alphabet 2
A random update to an old blog entry. The new Network Rail signage by Spaceagency and Kubel/Calvert as flagged here is being installed across the network with surprising rapidity, as the renationalisation of the railways proceeds. Bristol Parkway was done in 2023 but I’m always in too much of a hurry to snap the new stuff until now.
Margaret Calvert’s Rail Alphabet 2 comes up good with its outstanding clarity. The new sign formats improve on the sometimes cluttered British Rail plank system - our understanding has advanced in 60 years, even though the original was radical in 1965. We don’t need an arrow for every line, just group things in the same direction under one arrow - I think there’s a maximum number of four per arrow. In the second picture the offending non-standard Arial is still hiding underneath!
20.12.24 / 01 / a kind-faced christ
Back in July I was photographing churches in the City of London, including St Andrew by the Wardrobe. I found it open unexpectedly, so I was too busy getting my shots before somebody came and got in the way / threw me out, to pay much attention to the content of the icons. Later, reviewing my photos, I was surprised by the kind face of the Christ.
Ordinarily this ‘Christ enthroned’ image shows him as a stern majestic figure. In the Byzantine tradition icons tend to an imperial feel - these people are bigger, holier, sterner than we are. They don't smile. But the Coptic tradition is more humane, especially in its current neo-Coptic form - almost cartoon-like with its abstraction and big eyes. The big eyes are an authentic and very ancient Egyptian tradition - notably in the funerary portraits of Roman times which are a major root of Coptic iconography. One could almost call it naive, but I also think of the big-eyes tradition of manga. Which shades into kawaii - are these icons a little bit kawaii? Is that a bad thing?
The icons are by Fadi Mikhail, an Egyptian/English painter. He seems to be the current master of neo-Coptic art. His icons are quite a contrast to his personal Post-Impressionist work. His Essex accent is not what you’d expect! One feels that an iconographer should have a deep, grave voice with a Middle Eastern accent.
14.12.24 / 01 / advent
The New Testament starts with hope, like Star Wars [Episode IV A New Hope]. It tips us straight into Christmas, all babies and angels. The Herod thing seems like a momentary interruption of the wonder-filled narrative. The light has come into the world.
But for most of humanity the 400 years of silence between the Testaments was ongoing. No word from God, no angels, no star, no light. The only people of consequence who noticed that something had happened were the Magi, and their well-meaning attention nearly screwed the whole thing and cost many innocent lives. The silence wasn’t broken for another 30 years.
Maybe we should start The New Testament immediately after Malachi, with 400 years of empires and atrocities. Kester Brewin suggested that we should put blank pages into our Bibles, so that we feel the weight of the waiting and longing that one day there will be another prophet, or even a Messiah.
And when the thing does happen, let it be as a footnote to the continuing blank pages, just small print, very hard to read. Simeon and Anna had turned the blank pages of their lives to the end before the footnote was written on them.
And put in too the blank pages representing the missing years of Jesus’ life before his public ministry, the long years of other Herods and other Caesars.
Let us understand that Christ was born in a world like ours, where hope is hard to find and risky to express, and doesn’t get fulfilled for decades, and then only in an apparently disastrous way that seems to lead nowhere.
And even when the flame springs up again it will be centuries and many deaths before it becomes established history that can make out it was inevitable all along.
So the context of Advent is the dark night of the world. The light shines in the darkness, and doesn’t seem to make any difference. The word comes to the people, and the people don’t want to listen. But the light and the word will endure.
03.11.24 / 01 / retrospective blogging again
I've been filling in the blog from late 2016 through 2018 - at last some entries for 2017. This was the post-Facebook hole where I had abandoned Facebook but hadn't picked up the blog again. There are still thin patches but at least the blog feels continuous again. It seems strange now that I ever let it drop.
29.10.24 / 01 / workplace curators
Implicit in notes on sustainability is the idea that workplaces need curators, as part of their sustainability framework.
The task of the curator (among other things) is to blend new and retained items in a way that supports the narrative of how the organisation is evolving. There is a sustainability narrative, how we reuse, repair and remodel old things, but there is also a cultural narrative, how a workplace and organisation evolve continually, balancing the old and the new, rather than freezing for ten years and then needing radical change to catch up.
Facilities management has tended to focus on maintenance and functional change, within what currently exists - the new copier or task chairs, the workgroup moves and changes. Curator is a cultural job, beyond the utilitarian.
It asks:
- Who are we and where are we going?
- How do we move that way with what we’ve got?
- When we replace, do we do like-for-like or something different?
- What new things do we need, and how will they evolve in turn beyond answering one need?
- What makes a workplace culture readable and ownable?
- How do we evolve ‘tradition’ so that people feel grounded during the process of change?
- How do we reduce the need for disorientating 'great leaps forward', or at least bring everyone to that point together and prepared?
28.10.24 / 02 / great disasters
The great disasters happen when every point of failure in the system fails. If only one point had held it wouldn’t have happened, or the loss of life would have been far less.
In that sense every great disaster is actually unique. It will never happen that way again, that precise combination of incompetence, misfortune and circumstance. That is why the great disasters fascinate us, because we have a sense of horrified wonderment at their unfolding, stranger than fiction. They often end up as plays and movies after a (barely) decent period for grieving, because they have compelling plots and action (just insert young lovers in peril).
Disasters bring in their wake huge rafts of legislation and practice, driven by politicians who must be seen to do something. To "make sure that such a terrible thing can never happen again". But it probably won’t anyway. Something else unforeseen will happen. The iceberg never strikes twice. And if it does, the ship won’t sink. Or the rescue ship will arrive in time. And so on.
In a way, the real value of the post-disaster legislation is to prevent the lesser disasters which happen repeatedly. The systemic changes catch a lot of things that in themselves are too small and uninteresting to break political inertia, the ‘shit happens’ kind of things.
28.10.24 / 01 / SI AW
A couple of Situationist quotes with obvious relevance to alt worship:
As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader, the principle of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the revolutionary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it, Leaders betray it.
Raoul Vaneigem, 'The Revolution of Everyday Life' ch. 6
The most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with heroes, so as to draw them into activity by provoking their capacities to revolutionize their own lives. The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing 'public' must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, 'livers', must steadily increase.
Guy Debord ‘Report on the construction of situations’ 1957
19.10.24 / 02 / packing
I’m always bemused by those speeded-up luggage-packing movies on luggage-selling websites where a load of nice things wriggle around and all pack nicely into a nice messenger bag/suitcase/wallet.
Finisterre Freitag Freitag (note the packs of eggs)
How come it isn’t like that for me? My things don’t fit, they make unsightly bulges. Where in the movies are the large and awkwardly shaped British plugs and chargers? The cables associated with all the gadgets? The Apple USB dongle? The bottle of handcream or disinfectant gel? The large headphones in their case? The shopping bags? The cutlery set? (You have a stainless steel cutlery set so no more disposable cutlery, right?) The movie stylist must have spent days finding all the right things for that exact fit.
Packing cubes - somehow I’ve managed to get through life without them. But the thing the packing movies almost never show is the empty bag that you will put dirty clothes in.
19.10.24 / 01 / simulacrum
I was in a record shop in Greenwich a few weeks back. What I found was that a lot of the vinyl that looked ‘original’ was a reissue, but you would only find out by examining very carefully. The ‘reissues’ that weren't quite like the original album (dodgy dance remix track, compromised graphics) were actually from the 80s/90s so were older than the ‘originals’. And then there were originals that really were original, which tended to be too worn to be tempting, and worth least of all.
So I thought, what happens when everything in the record shop, and the shop itself (and maybe the staff), is a simulacrum? And since we’re dealing with mass-produced objects does it matter? Especially when the new ‘original’ is remastered from the original studio recordings and on better vinyl?
Still I'm haunted by the possibility that the future will be exactly like the past, only more so.
04.08.24 / 03 / leading from the back
extrovert
starts at front of room
talks loudly
figures it out as they go
grabs leadership first then delegates later
introvert
starts at back of room
says very little
until they have understood everything
follows at first but gradually takes control
I've always been the latter, it's always been a problem. People think "Who is this guy? Why is he here?" But later they will all obey me.
04.08.24 / 02 / good plus good plus good equals good
At the time we opened, natural wine, Japanese food, and a so-called audiophile sound system didn’t really sound like a very put-together concept, but we just thought good plus good plus good equals good. We concentrated on the stuff that we enjoyed, and what we believed in, and put it together in a way that we felt made sense.
04.08.24 / 01 / listening room
So Jonny beat me to it. Devun Turnbull's Listening Room as church. It even has its own incense burner. Of course churches should do this, at least as a component of the offering. Creating an ambience at all times, intensified as the sole focus of specific listening sessions, doing the music for other kinds of worship.
It isn't necessary to go as far as hand-made equipment. Turnbull himself is easy about this in interviews, not a purist, learn how to get the best out of what you have. Churches have their own unique acoustics, get the right speakers in the right places, play with volume and reverb. Find the music that works, even if it doesn't sound like it 'ought' to do.
This also links in to something I've been thinking about for years, about churches as ambient drop-in spaces for rest and meditation. Churches as a focus for the vinyl renaissance. Get a sound system in and someone to curate the music.
Having a membership for 180 Studios is really paying for itself here - I can drop into the Listening Room at will for an hour or so.
21.06.24 / 01 / burolandschaft
Just to illustrate the crazy freedom of 1960s-70s burolandschaft (see the first image here).
The apparent chaos was tuned for efficient communication and workflow. Desks were turned so that workers did not face one another (no monitors to hide behind in those days). Obvious hierarchies were abolished, even managers sat in the open office (maybe with a meeting table and more screens). Sight lines were restricted by screens and plants to avoid the sense of being adrift in a huge space.
One innovation was the constantly available teapoint and breakout space. It now seems odd that such a thing had to be invented, but previously refreshments had been delivered to desks on trolleys (easier when everything was in straight lines) or workers went to a canteen at set break times. The inventors of burolandschaft recognised that informal breaks enhanced productivity.
Buildings designed for burolandschaft had very deep plans with minimal obstructions, uniform carpets and uniform lighting, so that anything could be anywhere in any arrangement and moved any time. This had downsides. People spent all day deep in artificial light and artificial air, barely able to see outside. The combination of chaotic layout and uniform background was disorientating. Circulation routes were vague and shifting. Without stable and defined primary circulation, how to sign and light fire escape routes? How to sign where workgroups and departments are?
Reactions varied. In Germany workers' councils rejected the open office in favour of cellular workgroup rooms. In the US the Action Office furniture system was intended to enable a version of burolandschaft, but was perverted into the horrors of the cube farm. In Britain there was a reaction towards shallower plans which gave occupants views out, and more architectural articulation to break the monotony and discipline the work groups. This was soon overtaken by a demand for deep open offices for financial services, with densely packed rows of desks tied to underfloor power and data grids. The plants and irregularity went and have only recently returned.
11.06.24 / 01 / workplace evolution
The points under 'simplicity' in notes on sustainability below led to some drawings. It's interesting how workplace layouts are moving towards the freedom of 50 years ago as we uncouple from the underfloor power and data grid and the tyranny of the desk.
05.06.24 / 01 / rediscovered records
I found some records in a wardrobe at my mother's house, hidden under a heap of scarves. I thought they were lost long ago. I must have left them behind when I left home in 1984, they got put in the cupboard... and somehow not noticed for 40 years! It's good to have them back. Of course it's unnecessary to actually play them nowadays...
'This Year's Model' is the first UK edition with the 'manufacturing error' sleeve, which sadly was 'corrected' for all subsequent issues. 'Get Happy!!', also a first issue, has the track listings the wrong way round on the rear sleeve, and a poster. All the Costellos have the original picture inner sleeves. The genius of Barney Bubbles. More images here.
Ultravox 'Vienna', oddly, is a Swedish pressing with an inner sleeve advertising Swedish records (not ABBA!).
02.06.24 / 01 / a personal manifesto from 2002
While digging through obscurely named files on a backup drive I found a personal manifesto from early 2002 detailing what I wanted to achieve in 'church futures'. I was seeking funding to do the projects as full-time employment - I thought that I could make a significant impact in about five years if so. Unfortunately no money was forthcoming so these things had to remain as spare-time occupations, and consequently be difficult to do and take much longer. In particular my involvement with Ship of Fools had to end - travelling the country reporting on alt worship and co-hosting a discussion board into the small hours every night were not compatible with a long-hours job in architecture.
I see that I knew what I wanted to do from the start. Some of it has been achieved, some things died, some things remain to be done (like turning this site into a book!).
27.05.24 / 01 / notes on sustainability
During Clerkenwell Design Week I was a talking head on a Spacestor webinar about sustainability and longevity. Here are my preliminary notes gathering my thoughts on various aspects.
longevity and love:
if you love something you will keep it, care for it and repair it
do you love your desk?
if your employer says tomorrow we get rid of all the furniture and install new, do you cheer or say, please can i keep item x, item y, take it home?
[this also shows if people identify with the office culture expressed by the furniture]
love promotes longevity
give people stuff that they will love for a long time
acceptance of the worn and tired
knowing how to curate and refresh it
taking a pride in having old things - as a positive social value
longevity beats recycling
recycling is last option - wastes embodied carbon
simplicity:
a forty year technological revolution covered everything with CPU boxes, cables, monitors, keyboards, mice, desk phones, and more paper than ever before
furniture became complicated to cope
now that tide has receded
after a technological revolution
we can return to archetypes of table, chair
with the least adaptations to current use, to enable longevity
the simpler the better
not beholden to fixes for current issues
not requiring other parts of the same system to work
[manufacturers like you to buy into a system]
sourcing and manufacture:
sustainable means we can do something indefinitely without negative impacts
non-extractive - what we take out, we put back
new stuff:
circularity
localness - short chains (raw materials, manufacture, delivery)
quality - build-quality and aesthetic quality (which is not the same as luxury , glamour or fashion!!)
existing stuff:
how can we reuse it? (honouring the embodied carbon and original intentions for long life)
what are the challenges - condition, repair, aesthetic, operational?
what MUST we get rid of?
responsible disposal:
as complete items to other users
as raw materials for reuse or recycling
do an audit of the existing resources before starting design
treating it as the raw material for our work
how little do we have to change or add
not assuming a blank canvas that we can add some retained pieces to afterwards
fashion:
separate parts that are from parts that aren’t
maximise the parts that aren’t
make the parts that are, low environmental impact
resist false narratives of fashion that drive consumption
fashion robs things of their social value before their use value is exhausted
since it is social value that is being robbed we can choose differently
accept the dated
see the time specific nature of design as a positive quality
narratives:
The long-term part of sustainability comes after the design team have left
the client has to take the intentions forward, do the looking after, the change management, etc.
The narrative and policies have to be embedded in the culture of the client, not just as concerns of a few people who might leave.
Users need to understand and own the narrative
what has been provided and how to look after it to ensure that sustainability objectives are met
what behaviours are needed
Does the client have their own narrative?
What can we add to that?
What stories can we tell, that have worked for others, can we show them a path forward?
Does the client have in-house forums, or people with specific interests/expertise?
Does the client have existing policies that are widely understood?
How does the workforce take ownership?
So that it’s not just the business of a few technical people.
It becomes a normal system (as recycling waste has become normal).
A set of protocols that everyone understands.
No longer a novelty or challenge to how we do things.
07.05.24 / 02 / harry baker at the royal albert hall
So, the Poets' Revival at the Royal Albert Hall. The cream of the current generation of poets, not least Kae Tempest. And also Harry Baker.
Tempest a force of nature in performance as usual. They were incendiary a couple of years ago on the Greenbelt mainstage, and when the crowd roared for an encore they came out again and said:
"I don't do encores because I think they are manipulative. But I didn't want you to go away disappointed, so I came out to say thankyou."
And with that they had our hearts.
But Tempest was located mid-show. Harry closed it, after 500 years of hard-hitting Black history from George the Poet. So Harry had to lift the audience, but also honour the weight of all those who had spoken before. And he did. He landed his jokes and his serious moments. He had the audience from the start, he owned the room (what a room). I was deeply moved.
Of course he's a seasoned performer now, but we had worried about the venue and the occasion getting to him. No need. We need never worry about Harry and an audience again. Vegas beckons...
Above: The stage was in the round; Harry on it; L-R Kae Tempest, Toby Campion, Sophia Thakur, Lionheart, Momtaza Mehri, Theresa Lola, Suli Breaks, Harry Baker, George the Poet; the happy Baker family.
07.05.24 / 01 / enzo mari
I didn’t have high hopes for the Enzo Mari exhibition at the Design Museum, but it turns out to be very thought-provoking. Mari was an Italian designer who had a fairly typical career trajectory for his generation - start in the 1950s as an artist, become a product designer, become a theoretician and teacher. But Mari was a committed Marxist and worked with a sharper critique and social conscience than most of his contemporaries.
His art phase is intriguing - programmatic, which is to say that the art is algorithmic and could be produced by a computer, except such was not accessible to him at the time. It’s the visual equivalent of early electronic music.
His books, toys and pictures for children, often developed with his first wife Iela, are his most familiar works. His ‘egg and chicken’ book in which a chicken makes an egg, and the egg makes a chicken etc, was rejected by a publisher as pornographic because it implied that chickens mated, even though Mari had intentionally omitted that part!
His furniture designs of the 60s tried to be basic and simple, for ordinary people, in contrast to the ’supersensualism’ of his Italian contemporaries. This often didn’t work out in commercial terms - he found that people preferred ‘aspirational’ designs to ‘functional’ ones.
The Glifo modular bookcase had an integral joint system along the edges of the panels, requiring no additional pieces or tools for self-assembly. However, the joints collected dirt that was almost uncleanable. There was also the problem of yellowing plastic which afflicts all the plastic items of this era. Items that could last indefinitely were soon thrown out as they became unsightly. They are all still out there somewhere.
The sad thing is that the designers meant well. They were trying to create low-cost long-life items for everyone, all the ordinary people who hadn’t had access to stylish and durable goods before, and injection plastics seemed a good way to do it. And then it went yellow, or surfaces became marked and dirty in ways that couldn’t be cleaned or repaired.
In a sense, Autoprogettazione (‘Self-design’) was the critical response to these problems. Autoprogettazione was a set of mail-order instructions for making your own furniture using simple carpentry techniques. No furniture was sold, not even as self-assembly kits. You had to buy your own materials and Do It Yourself.
Mari’s primary intention was to reduce alienation, in the Marxist sense, by changing people’s relationships to their goods. People have a different relationship to things they have made themselves. They become artisans rather than consumers. The ‘rustic’ aesthetic, though appealing, was not at all the point. One could after all paint or modify the furniture - it’s up to you, you have become a person who can make things!
Autoprogettazione enabled Mari to escape the trap of the anti-design movement (1968 onwards, Sottsass, Colombo, Mendini et al). The intention of anti-design was to critique or reject consumerism, but as a movement of Italian designers it always resulted in yet more chic consumer objects - it ended up as Memphis. Capitalism could not be critiqued by the production of objects, however provocative - it knows how to sell rebellion back to you.
Mari could assume in 1973 that ordinary people knew simple carpentry (sawing, drilling, screwing, nailing) and had some space to do it. At this time my father was making shelves and bookcases, my generation had woodwork lessons at school, and there were many articles in books and magazines showing how to make furniture. I doubt that this general knowledge still exists, in the age of Ikea. This really is alienation, when the things you could make are sold to you as consumer objects, so that you can no longer imagine making them or have the skills to do so, but can only buy what you are offered.
Some of the later stuff in the exhibition steps into alt.worship territory. People wonder where we get our ideas… or rather, it’s reinforcement and techniques.
15.04.24 / 02 / goodbye landline
I just ended my landline contract. It was a waste of money. Nobody uses it any more (except for nuisance callers). But ending it feels scary. This is incomprehensible to younger people. A landline was a necessity and a mobile was an expensive unreliable luxury. Now they cost the same, but the mobile does far, far more for the money. The landline only does one thing, and that use has evaporated.
I regret buying a new landline handset a year ago, for the sake of my mother, with an answering machine - another quaintness (if only it had an actual tape cassette!). But I'd rather she phoned my mobile so I could take it immediately. You could see the way things were going by the fundamentally outdated design of the handsets - my 'new' one works like a mobile phone of the 00s, fixed keypad, tiny screen. I struggle with it after 15 years of touchscreens. The market for landline sets is now the elderly, and another decade will see the end of it.
So this is another moment when a technology that seemed eternal vanishes from my life, like TVs or tape recorders. The funny thing is the alteration to my sense of home. Home was where the phone was, tethered to a socket. You had to have a fixed address to house it, so you could be contacted.
15.04.24 / 01 / coffee at 4pm
I wish coffee shops weren't in the habit of closing at 4pm, or even 5. For me, late afternoon is coffee time. I've done whatever I'm doing in the morning and afternoon, and it's time for a break. Time to get out of the office or home for a while, time to take stock, to consider what to do next. Not yet the close of day, but the break before the one last thing that will run to 7 or 8pm. The coffee gets me through my circadian late-afternoon low point.
But good, independent coffee shops, most of them, see their role as serving the morning rush and lunchtime. The chains stay open later - not always much later. It's been worse since the pandemic, when many shops reopened with reduced hours and have got comfortable with that. There are a couple with longer hours, but my choice is restricted. I go searching in different streets, and they have all just closed.
Surely I'm not the only person working this kind of rhythm? It feels quite natural to me, given the way our working hours extend into early evening in London. A lot of people cling to the desperate hope that they'll go home on time if they can just power through without a break. I've tried that, but it's just a recipe for total exhaustion by the time you actually get home.
10.04.24 / 02 / clearing the bicycle racks
They’ve cleared the bicycle racks outside my flat again. They being the estate management I suppose. The sudden void is shocking. There are two left.
In a block of flats people buy used bicycles and then don’t use them. The bike is locked to the racks, rusting. The owners move and abandon the bike, still locked. They get bikes for their children, who break them or tire of them. These are left on the grass or path. Some people hoard bikes, two or three chained together, none used or maintained. When the management tie notices of removal to them these are promptly torn off but the bikes still don’t move or get looked after. Eventually as yesterday the management cut the whole lot off and remove them. There was a beautiful 1980s Peugeot, white saddle and trim, silver and stripes. The hoarder let it rust at the bottom of his hoard. I would have loved to have had it, when it was in good condition. What a waste.
I wonder if the ubiquity of hire bikes is affecting the hoarding. They get dumped around but they also get ridden away again.
10.04.24 / 01 / Grace movies 2007-09
Over Easter I updated the Grace services archive with photos for 2007, 2008 and the first service of 2009. This period also includes movies of the services, starting with Nine in December 2007 and ending with Journeying in January 2009.
The first movies - Nine, Elijah - are low resolution, probably shot on my new Sony Eriksson Cybershot phone which had a good-for-the-time camera in the back. It was the first phone camera I had that was worth using, even so it struggled with the low light of Grace services. The quality improved considerably for Lunch not included, Wounded in all the right places, and Contamination - I was now using a real camera.
Biggest regret - no footage of Ed smashing the piñata in Clean. Not even a still photo from anybody! I found myself in the balcony lowering the piñata with Adam, and maybe I left my camera below, but there are no photos from me for the rest of the service so I must have forgotten to bring it.
25.03.24 / 01 / a metaphorical landscape
In recent years there have been a number of furniture ranges aimed at the ‘agile working’ market. Draggable, pushable, modular. Writable screens that you can tuck under your arm and put up on easels. Desks with wheels. Carts and screens with wheels. Everything with wheels. It’s all good, functionally speaking. Assemble it to suit your work-group needs. Drag it somewhere else tomorrow.
But the design language of these ranges tends to be utilitarian. Just doing the job. Tubes and castors and laminate and boxes. I don’t find much pleasure, not even the pleasure of the truly utilitarian, the industrial or artisanal.
I want a metaphorical language. Something that makes a place, that speaks to the imagination and the emotions. I’ve only been thinking about this recently in explicit terms, but looking back all my stuff has worked like this. I’ve always been influenced by Ettore Sottsass and Archizoom, the speculative environments of Italian anti-design designers around 1970. Chairs as grass or baseball mitts, beds as tombs, offices as deserts or jungles.
Above, Archizoom 'No-Stop City' 1971, Ettore Sottsass 'Grey furniture' 1970, Archizoom 'Dream Beds' 1967, Ettore Sottsass 'If I were rich I would confront all my complexes' 1976.
We live by narratives. The narrative of 00s furniture was, we are corporate, global, technological. Once this was refreshing! An escape from the provincial and small. The narrative of the 10s was, we are hipsters in a startup. This was more fun, but it was mostly a lie. Both these narratives were totalitarian. Everyone has to play.
I don’t know if a poetic approach is any free-er, but can it allow for more ways of being? A diversity, to use the currently fashionable term? I’m not sure how much organisations like this.
24.03.24 / 01 / goodbye monotype
Since 2015 I've had a subscription to Monotype via fonts.com, primarily to enable webfonts on my sites. Grace is of course Helvetica, and smallfire.org and smallritual.org were Neue Haas Unica which is an 'improved' Helvetica - a font geek font for those who can tell the difference. I hoped that webfonts would make a slightly more professional experience and deal with some of the crudity of Windows font rendering.
But Monotype have been closing down fonts.com and transferring all accounts to the main Monotype site myfonts.com. At least that's what they said they were doing, so I assumed a seamless transfer. I suddenly got an email last Monday telling me that my subscription expired that day and I needed to sign up to a new plan to continue. At four times the previous cost.
Investigating online I found angry people on Reddit whose clients were struggling with massive price increases or they lose their brand font libraries. Turns out Monotype was bought by private equity who are screwing the customers and fattening it up for sale.
It was always quixotic of me to subscribe to get a better class of Helvetica - I had periodically questioned why, but it was affordable. No longer. So I didn't renew.
All my sites have reverted to basic Helvetica/Arial, with a few small adjustments. Even I can hardly tell the difference on the Grace site. smallfire.org lost the heavy and light font weights, but it's hard to tell what's changed unless you directly compare.
smallritual.org looked bad. Turned out the nice generous highlighter effect was a function of the webfont, somehow. In basic fonts the background colour shrank to the actual text and ugly gaps appeared. I almost gave up on the idea, but then tried adding a thick matching border to the link style - it worked. But I'm sore about losing Unica.
This is why every firm that rebrands now commissions its own fonts. It's cheaper to pay someone to create a font than pay exorbitant license fees indefinitely. Maybe we should commission a Grace font. Trouble is it would have to be similar to Helvetica ;-), and there have been so many new fonts in that space in recent years that I can't imagine how they create enough differences to avoid copyright issues.
12.03.24 / 01 / hearing loss
I was finding it hard to hear what Jonny and Mike were saying to me in the Jazz Cafe, even though they were next to me. This had been coming for a while, so I booked a hearing test.
The left ear - the good ear - is losing the top end due to age. If one more data point drops I will need a hearing aid. It’s actually better than I thought - just that losing the high frequencies reduces clarity of speech.
The right ear was damaged by a badly programmed drum machine at an all-nighter in Brixton Academy in 1991 - The Shamen headlined I think, but the drum machine belonged to Meat Beat Manifesto. The hi-hat was way too loud and penetrating. I felt it at the time, but my hearing collapsed a couple of days later at a church pantomime rehearsal. It was ‘Mother Goose’, and the woman playing the goose gave a loud and piercing squawk, again and again - my ear was agonisingly painful and I had to leave and seek medical help. It took five years to recover to the point of being able to be somewhere with amplified music, and then only with an earplug in my right ear.
To this day I carry earplugs with me everywhere, in case of a loud environment. I often put the other one in to protect my left ear - because once the damage is done it’s too late. The earplugs reduce the volume, but more they soak up the risky high frequencies. Many venue sound systems are amazingly harsh - I feel that I get a better experience with earplugs. I know that the sound system is really well balanced when I can take both earplugs out - no stray high frequencies.
I had no record of the early 90s hearing tests, so was curious to see what it looked like. Overall there’s less hearing loss than I imagined, but there is what they call a ‘notch’ at 2K - a big one. The hi-hat took the nerve cells out, WHAP! I didn’t want a hearing aid at this time, I’ve lived with it for 30 years. When the good ear needs a hearing aid I will try both.
Tinnitus - of course in the right ear, but it’s diminished over time (or my brain tunes it out). At first I wondered how I could cope. I remember resting my head against a gurgling fridge to get relief. Sadly the left ear now has tinnitus too. I know when a room is really silent because I hear piercing whines.
I had forewarning of all this. My hearing had been noticeably reduced by listening to acid house all day on a Walkman 1988-90, apart from clubbing. I had no regrets. My feeling is, your body will wear out anyway, so try to get the damage in cool ways (note that I ascribe the hearing loss to a drum machine not a church panto goose). Damage as a memento of doing something interesting.
