Gimme, Gimme, Gimme: Pendleton Camp Blanket

Reminiscent of cool evening at the lake, these durable blankets are the kind of thing you want rolled up in the back of your Land Rover or thrown carelessly across the back of a club chair. Available here, these camp blankets should make an evocative addition to any well considered home.

Origins: Philippe Starck

Having never attended art school, and so having skipped indoctrination into the prevailing homogeneity of thought associated with such institutions, I have traveled an understandably crooked path to my aesthetic such as it is. Those persons, ideas, or events, that I now recognize as formative, often perplexed or bored me when I first experienced them. Among such unsuspected opportunities was a visit to the Centre Pompidou in Paris made many years ago.

Having only recently glimpsed the rudiments of the slipstream operating around me, I approached the trip as someone bound to miss the point and carry as my companion the cloth and pinhole often used to view foreign landscapes. I can't even recall how I would up at the Centre Pompidou as I was more interested in complaining about my aching feet than experiencing a retrospective of a man I knew only for his hair shape and orange juicer.

These many years later, I recall fondly what to my younger self felt like a prank and a cheat, when drawing back a heavy velvet curtain I found not rows of objects orderly arranged, but a dark circular room the size of a gymnasium with small groups of seating focused on doric columns topped with busts, featureless save the then iconic haircut, whose surfaces danced with the projected images of Starck's own face as he presented the works on the more traditional screen behind them.

I don't recall staying long and I don't think the experience stood out in the years immediately following the trips, but as experience pared away the excess memories, this one was left as essential to my memory of Paris and indeed my perspective on design.

To me, Starck represents the big truth of design, that it is inherently a farce and dependent on conceits far beyond its reach to achieve relevance and often walks a tightrope suspended perilously over a chattering crowd of non-participants jeering it toward the loss of balance. To say that Starck has a healthy sense of humor about himself and his work is entirely insufficient to understand his work. He's remarking so much on the emperor's particular nudity, but in our foolish belief in clothing.

Is there a distinction to be made between products based on the perceived intent of the designer? In other words, if I design a toothbrush that looks like a candy bar, is it freighted with anymore irony than one sold in the same store as candy bars? Than one sold at all? Than modern hygiene proper? It's not so much an issue of definitively answering such a question, but understanding our context in a way that recognizes its dimensionality beyond our understanding.

The best illustration of this concept I've ever come across is a cartoon where two young goldfish are talking to one another and an old goldfish swims along and asks, "How's the water?" and swims away. Having been thoroughly perplexed, one young goldfish asks the other, "What the fuck is water?"

Starck, to my mind, understands the water the way very few people do. It's one thing to tune out, and one thing to rebel, but to operate with a fuller understanding in familiar arenas alongside those animated only by their immediate influences is another thing altogether and can generate some of the most interesting work we may be capable of.

Starck has taught me that design is most fundamentally about seeing rather than creating. Creation is small and flawed and fleeting. It is balanced against oceans of perception and cognition that bears directly on the product but is rarely considered in tandem with the product.

In short, Starck has taught me lens management.

Is This Anything: Ritter Sport with Cornflakes

Where Rice Krispies simply lie there and make you do all the work, cornflakes are ready and willing to engage the palate with a sharp crunch that survives being folded into 100 grams of the most sumptuous chocolate ever made specifically for athletes.

VERDICT: Something.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme: l'Uomo / Vogue Fashion Guide

Know Fashion Guide, Know Peace. No Fashion Guide, No Peace.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme: Tintin Figurine

Available here.

Origins: Frasier

To truly understand how I've gotten to this point, you have to follow me back in time and place to Seattle in 1993. A Boston psychiatrist had just returned home after the break-up of his marriage to begin hosting a radio call-in show. So please pull up a chair in Café Nervosa and allow me to order you a latté with just a whisper of cinnamon.

Coming from a family that is more Martin than Niles, this half-hour sitcom was my first, and arguably most potent, window into fanciness and has shaped my personality as much as any other single influence. It probably has to do with the tender way in which it portrays the habits and predilections of Frasier and Niles that make it unique from nearly all other American television. Generally, the Fancy character is flat and fleeting, there to act as foil for some more traditional character. Even on Cheers, where Kelsey Grammer's character first appeared, he was often giving the Fancy perspective more than participating in major plot developments.

So the fact that Frasier's point of view is so unapologetically Pro-Fancy, and that it flourished for over a decade is absolutely stunning. Plots found the brothers Crane fighting over chairmanships of wine tasting clubs and the garishness of show-business, sitting in sensory depravation chambers, name dropping furniture designers, and sporting the finest double-breasted suits the decade had to offer. The show was even divided into acts, each with a clever title to welcome the scene.

Aside from the general mis en scene, there are a few specific scenes, that without even re-watching, I call to mind as pivotal in my understanding of the world around me.

1. Niles Crane keeps his cellular phone in the breast pocket of his jacket: As cellular phones were just beginning to infiltrate society, Niles was at the vanguard of the new etiquette.

2. Niles Crane referring to a hatch-back as a hunch-back: the conceit being his total isolation from "real life," we're treated to the view that what we may take as merely mundane could be even worse than we suspect. Niles later refers to a "Mini - Van," which, when awkwardly pronounced, leads us to believe that Niles is also unaware of another segment of vehicle outside the luxury sedan.

3. Frasier name-drops Ray & Charles Eames: toward the end of a passionate argument, Frasier appeals to a female character, "You think I don't want to throw you onto that Eames lounge chair and prove to you that it's the finest made chair in the world!?" I couldn't have been out of my early teens and this sparked my first realization that some chairs are different from other chairs, and that some things are better than other things. Prior to that things were stuff. After that, things were objects. This could take up a thread on its own, but you get the idea.

4. It was ok to be Fancy: the show assumed Frasier & Niles' tastes were never portrayed as anything more eccentric than an excited Yankees fan. The comedy was lovingly wrought from situations that happened to be fancy, but didn't require it. As mentioned, the fight over chairmanship of the wine tasting club never conceded that it was a foolish thing to argue over, but that it was foolish for brothers to argue in general. Blood was thicker than bordeaux, so to speak.

5. Through the looking glass: just as TUWFs (Those Unconcerned With Fanciness) puzzle at our ability to remain nonplussed about college basketball and Tom Clancy "novels", Frasier showed our equal, if not greater, measure of bewilderment at someone who doesn't care about the weight of fabrics, the age of scotch, or the number of complications in a timepiece.

As I undertake a grand re-watching, I'm sure other tid-bits will come to light, but sufficed to say I am who I am partially because of the things I saw on Frasier. I welcome any Frasier related anecdotes that may have inspired you.

Will this blog last?

Probably not. None have, so far. It's both embarrassing and time consuming to publish a blog and none (save the Monstorialist which continues to go strong) have really worked up a head of steam.

Time will tell...