T A B L E_.T A L K

Why do Americans hate the press? Speculate on the source of our discontent in the Media area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Hearsay rules
By David Corn
Matt Drudge's no-standards journalism invades the networks
(06/19/98)

L.A.'s battle of the books
By Dwight Garner
Is the Los Angeles Times Book Review the second coming of the New York Review -- or an elitist section that doesn't serve its readers?
(06/18/98)

Hamburger Hades
By Jon Carroll
Robin Cook's "Toxin" is a tale told by a hack, full of E. coli, signifying that the beef industry is the tool of Satan. Yum!
(06/16/98)

Content's star shortage
By Harry Jaffe
Media watchdog Steve Brill tried -- and failed -- to get big-name media talent on his masthead
(06/12/98)

Source for Kathleen Willey story sues Newsweek's Michael Isikoff
By Joe Conason
Julie Steele claims reporter violated explicit agreement that their conversations were off the record
(06/12/98)

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Our tchotchkes, ourselves

________________________IS THE UNEXAMINED LIVING
____________ROOM WORTH LIVING IN?

BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK

When's the last time you bought a piece of art? Think, now. Two or three years ago, there was that gallery opening, right? You were trying to impress your date and those cheese puffs weren't quite enough to soak up all that free merlot ... well, you woke up with a fuzzy tongue and a square foot of dog hair glued to a canvas. Otherwise -- does that Kandinsky poster you haven't gotten around to framing count?

The trick to this question is that you probably bought a piece of art the last time you bought anything: a Walkman, a desk organizer, a 100-count bottle of Motrin. That is, you bought a constructed object consciously designed to elicit an objective-correlative response (e.g., "I bet this stuff'll take care of my cramps"). You're cradling a computer mouse that borrows curves from nature to look futuristic but friendly; you're sitting in a house that draws on psychological principles to welcome guests -- or maybe an office building that uses the same subtle codes to intimidate them. Own art? You're soaking in it.

That we devote so little deep thought to the tchotchkes that make up our world might be partly because so much popular design and decor writing also fails to do so. Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, Metropolitan Home, etc. -- our glossy little bibles of envy -- are mostly happy to be personal shopping assistants for a clientele with the urge to splurge. These are magazines of ideas, all right -- "ideas" as in, "that sage green would look marvy in the living room."

If Architectural Digest is the most disappointing in this regard, it's only because it's probably the strongest of the bunch -- in theory. Its contributors' page bristles with Pulitzer Prize winners and architecture experts (the magazine is still channeling posthumous articles from Brendan Gill). But what we get out of these stars, mostly, are tasteful, courtier-like tributes to the renovation projects of Manhattan übercouples establishing their fourth or fifth summer beachheads in picturesque towns; profiles whose main value seems to be casing which rooms to plunder and which decorative fixtures would be most useful for garroting the owners when the revolution comes. (That 19th-century ship's-prow figurehead, perhaps?)

That in fact might explain the nervous tradition of anonymity among AD profile subjects, identified variously as "the wife," "the husband," "the owner," "the client." (Why not just pick apt pseudonyms? "As Thurston and Lovey guided us across the flagstone courtyard ...") These auteurs d'argent thus are reduced to creepy international-symbol stick figures. It's like reading some heavy-handed '60s New Fiction parable about the dehumanizing effects of, you know, society: "It was essential to The Wife that the house have a formal dining room."

This anonymity device captures the blend of exposure and concealment that is the essence of an AD profile. We see everything -- the great rooms, the fixtures, the antiques are laid bare in that trademark bright, lucid photographic style. We see nothing -- instead of architecture criticism, we get lists of big-ticket furnishings, we learn only surface details about our hosts' actual lives, and mind you don't track dirt on the sisal carpeting. The reader is held at bay like a suspect party crasher; those cautious "The Wifes" and "The Husbands" are quiet, pointed reminders of class uneasiness, the muffled clunk of the automatic locks on an Acura rolling into a seedy neighborhood.

(We learn a lot about the hired help, though. The most fun way to read an AD profile is to parse the architects' and designers' quotes for diplomatically worded cutdowns of their vulgarian patrons. The Husband isn't a domineering control freak, for instance: "He likes to know what's going on all day." The Wife isn't a flighty dilettante, either: rather, "Trying to combine [their] cutting horses, Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau was very interesting. ... Part of the joy was watching her taste evolve, then trying to facilitate it." You could cut a diamond with that "very interesting.")

AD does do its real-estate-agent-between-covers bit awfully well, as in the June issue's spread on the templelike farmhouse compound of Allen and Lynn Turner in rural Michigan, photographed at various times of day to show how the surreal cluster -- it looks like something out of "Myst" -- admits and plays with natural light. (And bully for these honest Chicagoans that they gave their real names! Comrades, I beseech you -- spare the good Turners whilst you hoist the bloody heads of their neighbors atop the lampposts of Michigan Avenue!) I love salivating over one of these unattainable house-poems as much as anyone -- I read the crap out of Metropolitan Home, pathetically, while I was moving into my apartment -- it's just that these mags shortchange their subject when they treat themselves as mere catalogs for urban-cum-rural elites.

Undoubtedly they believe their readers would be bored stiff by anything more analytical or cultural-minded, and given the longtime ghettoization of design writing it's hard to blame them: The dull architecture columns deep within newspaper arts sections have done as much as "The Fountainhead" to typecast it as the province of grim Ellsworth Tooheys.

And yet much of the best critical writing I've read lately -- not just on art but on our culture in general -- has been in small design mags. The May ID, for instance, includes a feature on the business of designing prescription pills (vivid colors promote brand identification and send subtle messages about the drug's strength) and a cover story on the state-of-the-art (and stunning) prostheses biomechanically designed for track star and below-the-knee amputee Aimee Mullins; either piece could easily have run in a wide-circ general-interest magazine.

The best and most accessible example is Metropolis, probably one of the top five magazines you've never heard of. The poster-sized glossy has been around for years but last year began a project to raise its newsstand profile, expanding its distribution, jazzing up its covers and adding departments on the relation of design to contemporary culture. Its features dissect the way quotidian objects and design choices reflect and shape our priorities; a column in the July issue, for example, looks at the elaborate lengths people go to to hide one of the most essential fixtures in the home -- the TV set. (The mag also thankfully turned over its massive back page to the cartoonist Ben Katchor, of "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer" fame, whose oddball insights on urban detritus are in perfect sync with it.)

In her column "Design This!" in the April issue, Barbara Flanagan takes apart the modern suburban house's entryway, noting that, in a strange contradiction, the trend is toward ever more grand formal entrance foyers while the walkway connecting the entrance to the street has disappeared. The result: houses with huge maws designed to impress and intimidate strangers, while close friends shamble in through the garage ("The streets, dark and without sidewalks, are empty of everyone but drivers rushing home to their own baronial light fixtures" -- try finding an ace read like that in House & Garden).

Metropolis is still largely an insider's magazine, true, and some of its pieces are a stretch for the layman; Michael Sorkin's recent column on the competition to design an addition to the MOMA is, for all I know, brilliant, but it may just have been all the "mock-Meisians" and "mock-Deleuzians" that scared me into thinking so. But even much of the design-biz coverage nicely elucidates for the average reader the thinking behind everyday design. In an interview earlier this year, industrial designer Richard Sapper (the man responsible for the Tizio lamp and the IBM Thinkpad's butterfly keyboard) grouchily dismissed the marketing-driven trend toward making technological products "softer and friendlier": "Why should IBM products look friendly? It's people who should be friendly. All cars now look like boom boxes. That's not progress -- it's horrendous."

Reading Elle Decor after the Sapper interview, I came across a sleek two-page ad for the Mercedes CLK320 -- and in fact it does look like you could pop the coupe's hood and slide in a CD. The second thing that grabbed my attention was the ad copy: "You could spend more for an equally beautiful piece of art. But Rembrandts have lousy pickup."

Even to Mercedes, in other words, suggesting that one of its cars is an artwork is just a facile punch line. The brilliance of Metropolis is that it treats the creations of Mercedes, IBM, suburban-home builders and computer-game designers like serious works deserving of careful critical thought. That could be just what product designers are afraid of.
SALON | June 24, 1998