Two Weeks of The Weeklings

Two weeks ago six other writers and I launched The Weeklings. The whole idea is an essay a day, every day. We each get a set day, and I am Saturdays. (My character? Saturnina). I'm joined by the illustrious, the comic, the serious and witty. My cohorts include Vanity Fair's Elissa Schappell, Granta's former editor Alex Clark, Details' former book editor Janet Steen, smart-alec and self-loathing YA-author (also near Danielle-Steel-killer) Sean Beaudoin, smarty-pants and novelist Diana Spechler and LA-Times bestselling author Greg Olear, my co-editor who just optioned his first novel to Bret Easton Ellis. Phew. 

Now two weeks of Weeklings later and I've written my first couple essays on art. One on Thomas Kinkade and how he's, yes, a conceptual artist. Which got tweeted and repeated, shout-outs from an OpEd writer at the New York Times, Alison Arieff. Then, on our own Weeklings FB page (please "Like" us), someone asked if we even knew anything about conceptual art. You can judge for yourself here where the answer came in Week 2 when I catch Ennial Fever and review the Bi and Triennials at the Whitney and New Museum.

The Weeklings – Come Save The Day With Us!

London Calling – Craig Taylor and Londoners

THIS THE YEAR of Jubilees (diamond), Olympics (gilded) and a mayoral election between two nearly comiccharacters (that's you Boris and Red Ken, who only wears beige suits despite his "red-ness"), Craig Taylor's insanely dazzling book Londoners is all the more apt.

Craig is a master interviewer and a great storyteller. I interviewed him for The Rumpus. You can read the whole thing there or here below:

I’ve often thought writing takes equal parts alienation and ego, one to see things and the other to think your vision warrants recording. But, after reading Craig Taylor’s Londoners, I think it’s just alienation. He writes utterly without ego and creates this great soaring book on London. He moved there and was miserable, and that got him to look around and wonder about all the people who’d apparently cracked the city. He went to work for the Guardian, had to leave (and got to return) after losing his visa, wrote a book about a village in the English countryside and wrote a book based on his Guardian columns, the ravishing One Million Tiny Plays About Britain. And, still he was curious – still wondering who these people were and how they managed. Londoners was his answer.

When I lived there, I was miserable. I was one of the leavers (a distinct category in the book. Its subhead is “The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It”). I’d drag my homesickness to Buckingham Palace to hear an American accent. My journey is nearly the mirror opposite of Taylor’s, going from the city to a rural village in Upstate NY, while he went from a rural Canadian fishing village to London. Now that I don’t live there, I love it – and his book – not because it’s about London but for what it says about the city and how it says it – as well as who says it. Most of the time it’s not Taylor at all. It’s anyone, everyone but him.

The book is “oral history.” Yes, that clunky awkward thing, but in his hands the results are transfixing. The voices are hypnotic, turned into solos where people tell their stories, and each is unexpected. They defy the clichés of a London book, you know those by Peter Ackroyd with his histories and novels and historic novels or more recently William Boyd and John Lanchester’s novels that feel saddled with London types. Here, Taylor tells a greater story, and more than that it’s a lesson in interviewing.

In the New York Times Book Review Sarah Lyall called it a masterclass: “The material he elicits proves his skill not only in asking questions that find the eloquence even in the naturally taciturn, but also in knowing the value of keeping offstage…. In an age of celebrity interviewers and bombastic, self-loving television hosts, Taylor is the rare specimen who appears genuinely to believe that other people’s words are more interesting than his own.”

The book is far from a Q&A, but I thought interviewing him might yield some answers about interviews and people and stories. Unlike Taylor and his interviews in the book, we spoke on the phone, from the sticks to his office at Hamish Hamilton in London.

***

The Rumpus: How did you get started on Londoners?

Craig Taylor: It sort of emerged when I moved here. I didn’t have a great time, and I was always wondering who these people were around me who’d seemed to figure out the city. I started working on the Guardian and interviewed a lot of people in London, and I was curious about them. I thought it would be good to use the city as an excuse to talk to people I wouldn’t have a reason to otherwise. I think any book is an excuse and this just provided me with a really good one.

Rumpus: When I moved to London I felt like looking for a flat was this advanced form of tourism. I was looking in Brixton – far off the tourist track – and felt like it gave me a picture of people’s real lives being in their homes, kind of like interviewing people about their place in the city.

Taylor: Yeah, it’s an excuse to go deeper than your own life, and I always worried that living here, I would get that one perspective, my perspective. This was a chance to move myself out of the picture, and I think everyone intuitively feels about a city that, wow, here are all these people walking this exact same patch of ground, but they’re seeing it differently and they’re doing things completely differently.

Rumpus: How was moving there? I felt lost, and you talked about that too in your introduction.

Taylor: I always thought it was this burst of happiness where you get here it’s almost like a drug. It can be euphoric. You’re in this incredible city, and then if you decide to say, there’s often – and there was in my case – this precipitous drop into a really bleak place where you see that there’s a veneer here that the very rich can live on, but for the rest of us it’s tough work. Then if you stick around, there’s a slow crescendo of satisfaction as you learn to manage the city.

Rumpus: Not to sound like the tourist board but what do you like and hate about London?

Taylor: It’s constantly offering up this parade of sights and sounds and people and stories and status games and all that stuff you look for as a writer. And, I love the places that I’ve made my own and I love the way it looks at dusk. But, I think it’s hard to have one constant feeling about the place. If you just hate it, well, you get out, and if you just love it, you must be making a lot of money, but for the rest of us you hate the way it pushes against you sometimes.

The book really showed me that even when people hate this place, it can be done often in a very entertaining, operatic way. I always loved what people hate about the city. They’d talk about how someone would tilt their foot out on the escalator so no one could get by. The complaining is done in a way that makes it very funny and entertaining. Londoners can be almost operatic complainers.

Rumpus: Did your feelings about the city change in the course of the book?

Taylor: They deepened. It made me really love the complexity of it all. This is such a complex city, and all you can do if you’re dealing with it honestly is embrace that. I hold all these contradictory viewpoints of the city. It’s like one of the people in the book this city planner said, you have this endlessly intimate relationship with this partner that’s constantly offering up endless possibilities and art, but it can also be mean to you. A lot of my own feelings were expressed by people in the book, and I really shied away from generalizations.

Rumpus: Yeah, and by doing that you managed to have this individuality that was rich and surprising but also incredibly specific, as if the specificity tells the bigger story of the city.

Taylor: Yeah, but he’s an expert and no one can argue that fact. If someone said, “God, all Londoners do is drink and screw at Christmas parties,” you can dispute that.

Rumpus: There’s also this humanism, I guess you’d call it in the book, with characters like Pakistani currency trader and the gay Iraqi refugee. They tell this larger story about immigration and what people want in London, but their stories are so idiosyncratic they yield up this richness, this detail.

Taylor: I think with nonfiction you’re allowed to surprise people in a way you can’t with a novel. Some of these stories here would seem impossible or just ludicrous in a novel, like they couldn’t exist. The wonderful thing about nonfiction is that those people do exist, and sometimes that’s the hard thing for novelists writing about London. They choose these archetypes, and I didn’t have to do that. I just went with the real people who are in my mind infinitely more surprising and rich in their experiences.

Rumpus: How did you find everyone? Wasn’t this insanely complex and time consuming? Yet you manage to create a real sense of a journey through the city and how you get to the city, from arriving to leaving, loving and hating it, but getting that sense of narrative must have been hard.

Taylor: Some of the best compliments I’ve had are from people who say, “Oh, that must have come easily.” “Oh, you just went out and talked to a few people and typed it up. Well done you.” That’s great, that’s what it’s supposed to feel like, but hopefully at some point they’ll see it must have taken time to get to the point where someone would say certain things.

It took a great mass of words – almost a million words – and just finding everyone….

I still have the notebooks that show all the phone calls logged and all the emails over a good five years. I spoke to something like 200 people, and sometimes the person you’ll see in the book is the result of five or six interviews with other people who are similar but couldn’t quite say the things that needed to be said or just weren’t as eloquent. It takes a long time, but you just make those calls and talk to people and listen. That’s the big thing, listening.

You can’t do it on the phone; you can’t do it quickly. You just show up, and you have to be present. You have to be with them, and you have to shut up and let them talk and you have to accept that you’re not there to be the most interesting person in the room. It’s more like the stuff you don’t do than what you do, and genuine curiosity is what makes it. At a time when so much is sped up and so much journalism is sped up, there’s no way to make this process quicker. You can’t rush into a room and say, “Okay: hopes and dreams I will need all of them and I will need them said well.”

Rumpus: I like what you said about not being the most interesting person in the room. You’ve largely absented yourself from the book. It’s not about you and that’s really interesting as a writer.

Taylor: I knew I wasn’t able to stand astride London and look at it as a great historian, but it’s weird that we’ve gotten to this place with journalism where you can pick up a magazine or newspaper and learn more about the interviewer than the interviewee. That can sometimes be incredibly interesting but for this project there was no way I was going down that path.

Rumpus: You have a clear affinity for people’s stories. What do you like in telling them?

Taylor: Real people aren’t constricted by the rules of fiction. They are infinitely weird and wonderful, with a depth that’s so unexpected. There are people in the book that I spoke to for one reason and they just veered off from that into this territory that was incredible, their lives, their struggles and what they’ve been through. You just can’t come out of doing a project like this without a sense of, I don’t know, empathy towards others. It’s hard for me to hold certain political views or certain stereotypical views of other people because of the stories I’ve heard and hearing about how people live their lives. That’s an incredibly privileged position.

Rumpus: Did anyone lie to you as you were interviewing them? Did you care?

Taylor: I was never too worried about the lying. If I tell stories about my youth, I change them. I change details; I collapse time. I change things around to gain effect. I make myself more or less sympathetic. Anyone does that when they’re talking about their life, so with that in mind, this form becomes a series of unreliable narrators in the best possible way because we all are. There were some people who were obviously deluding themselves or exaggerating or in some cases just making some stuff up, but that seemed secondary to the purpose. The way they tell and convey is what’s important.

I think it’s summed up by that Samuel Johnson quote I mention in the introduction. It was repeated back to me and mangled and paraphrased. Someone said, “When a lady’s tired of London, that lady’s gonna be tired of lots of other things.” There were people who swore they knew the wording and would be way off.  I thought that sums up this project. It’s not about getting things right. It’s about finding a way, and London for me is very much about that. Living here, you have to change the story because the real story might be too grim. I know I certainly do that. Historians have dedicated their lives to getting it right, but this book is something else entirely.

Rumpus: When I was last in London we were talking about oral history and its flaws. Just the phrase itself doesn’t fit what you’re doing. So what do you call it?

Taylor: Yeah, it has a kind of fustiness, like it’s this kind of thing people do in local history clubs where they indiscriminately interview people for the sake of it. So you’ll have all sorts of old people just talking about what it was like to live in the Thirties. Then, there’s that bias that it’s not really writing, that it only is if you put quotation marks and a “she said” and throw in a detail about where you’re sitting, that that elevates it, whereas this sort of pure voice is not writing.

The more I look at what it can do though, the more I think it’s a kind of avant-garde form. You’re able to do stuff a novel just can’t. There have been some books that have come out about the city recently. Well, there are always books coming out about London and other cities, and the novels are run by these rules where characters have to meet up or their lives have to intersect. The great thing about this book is that no one is going to ever ask me why the plumber never met the banker or why the dominatrix never showed up and talked to the ex-dockman.

This form can carry the depth of fiction, but it can do stuff that the novel just can’t. It can smash itself into these eighty, ninety different pieces and never cohere because the real city doesn’t. The person you meet on the first day, that cab driver who picks you up when you come to the city, isn’t the one who takes you to the airport on the day you leave because cities don’t cohere to that sort of thing. I think the form – this collage of voices – can be a very freeing way of telling a story. At times when the novel feels a bit stale, I love having this ability to do things differently from what a novelist would be bound to do.

Rumpus: Also there’s something about just giving over to a voice too, which is really powerful.

Taylor: All writing is judgmental, but I never had to say, “She was obviously a working class woman who did this or that.” Things come out in people’s voices. They come out in word choice and in cadence and in different attributes. They just emerge as people speak. Also, it is mysterious when this voice starts up. There’s just this narrator, and you have to piece together things. I think in the book there are some clues for each person about where they fit in the social spectrum, but I would much rather the reader figure that out rather than my telling them.

Murray's Next Act – Murray Moss Profile in Metropolis

This is probably my favorite ever all-time profile I've written. On the inimitable Murray Moss and why he closed his iconic store. It's deeply personal and was a joy to write. Largely thanks to Murray and Metropolis, who both gave and give me a lot of leeway. Yes there's still a place for long profiles (that is other than the New Yorker).

You can read it here. Or below:

Pop & Pop – Murray Moss and Franklin Getchell. Photo by Mark Mahaney

Murray’s Next Act

Moss—impresario, provocateur, and inventor of the store-as-museum concept—is the retailer most responsible for transforming Soho and taking high-end design mainstream. Now he embarks on a new adventure. Moss, the iconic shop, is gone. In its place, Moss Bureau, the consultancy. Here, he talks about his decision to “kill” his beloved store and reinvent 
the brand as a showcase for the gloriously messy business of design.

By Jennifer Kabat

Posted April 13, 2012

Seeing Murray Moss at home in his stocking feet, squeezing out a teabag and putting it in a cup, is touching. This domestic scene stands in contrast with his store, the impeccable Moss. It’s not that his home isn’t impeccable, but that there’s something wrenchingly human about it. In part, it’s because he’s such a novice at this. There’s no small irony in a housewares maven who doesn’t entertain. He doesn’t quite know what to do with my coat or where to stow my gloves, and until about three weeks ago, he’d rarely had anyone over. That was when he announced that his iconic, eponymous store was closing. 

It seems he’s trying to use the life change presented by closing the store to expose a more private part of himself, something that’s less the “impeccable Moss store” and more personal, more open. He’s starting by taking people into his home. In the kitchen, he describes his first foray into hosting as something of a trial by fire. He set off the smoke alarm making toast for the hors d’oeuvres. After the toast-burning fiasco, he had a group of journalists and close friends over for coffee (safer than canapés), to explain why he was closing the store. It was, he says, a “jump-out-of-the-airplane moment.” 

Murray, 63, is bald and boyish, with a puckish expression that makes him look simultaneously amused, engaged, and welcoming. He’s wearing a black shirt and jeans, and apologizes for having little milk and no cakes. He waves open the cupboard to show how rarely he and his partner (in life, and in the store), Franklin Getchell, cook. There’s one can of Progresso soup and two cans of Campbell’s tomato soup. In anyone else’s apartment they’d just be soup; in his kitchen, though, those two cans look like a Warhol. They’re raised up simply because Moss is Moss, renowned for his ability to arrange objects in a way that creates context and meaning. Some would see in his closing a sense of Greek tragedy, the great brought low, the end of an era, etc., etc. I don’t. Instead, it’s moving to see how unguarded he is as he navigates these changes.

His apartment at 51st Street and Fifth Avenue has the kind of view of Manhattan that makes the city look like canyons and cliffs chiseled from granite and steel. “You know where you are, here,” he says. “You know you’re in Manhattan.” His address, the Olympic Tower, is tony. With its gloved doormen, and elevator attendants, and halls lined with carpeting that creates a dizzying one-point perspective, and doors that have no numbers on them, the place can be so off-putting or expensive as to inspire judgment. But Murray points to Radio City Music Hall, and, like a kid, says his favorite thing is to watch the camels being fed at Christmas before the Rockettes’ shows.

In the living room, Murray tells me to take the black chair (they are all black), and says he’ll “take the low one”—the Jasper Morrison. His not using the names, not saying, “the Citterio sofa,” is remarkably down-
to-earth. The reason this is so poignant is that Moss is no ordinary mortal, but one who has defined the design decade, who helped shape how we see and value and even shop for things, and his store is seminal and powerful. It has launched careers, and now it’s closing. It will have closed by the time you read this. 

Its final week, the store had an elegiac quality. There were still the giant Gaetano Pesce vases and a biscuit-porcelain wedding cake with skulls and bows, next to classic Nymphenburg birds and dolls modeled on designs by the Huichol Indians, as well as the Campana brothers’ Panda chair, but a white moving van was parked outside, and Claudy Jongstra felted rugs were folded and stacked on the counter. The techno music played on, and signs continued to admonish people not to touch. A couple of movers in flannel shirts and baggy jeans, their sneakers slouched from their sloping gaits, rolled dollies in and out of the store. 

Maarten Baas’s burned grandfather clock stood like a sentinel in the window, as if it were testimony to the passage of time. The few shoppers seemed to be paying their last respects. All wore black and had their hands clutched behind their backs, talking in hushed voices as if at a wake. The posture and dark clothes were as befitting a gallery as they were a funeral, and here Murray had the last word. He hung the landlord’s for-rent notice inside the iconic, white-neon Moss sign, reframing the sentiment of closing. In his kitchen, over our second cup of tea, he laughed. “Someone came in saying, ‘If you’re not careful, people will take you seriously and think you’re really for rent.’” 

After a brief notice—barely two paragraphs long—in the New York Times announced the store was closing, word spread wildly across the Internet. Moss was described as an institution. “Influential” and “iconic” were used repeatedly. It was called the end of an era. So, after 18 years, what happened? 

In bold strokes: the economy, the recession, rent—and success. The design market had spread. The store created to look like a museum inspired museums to look like stores. Soho changed. Everything started to look more like Moss. As Michael Maharam, who’s worked closely with Murray over the last decade through his family’s textile firm, explains, “If you look around, and I did last weekend, there’s not a lot new or fresh in retail. At Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the art was being shown in vitrines and on tabletops. 
At Partners & Spade, they blend found objects with a gallery feel, and Phillips de Pury has its art shop.” 

Benjamin Genocchio, the editor in chief of Art + Auction, says, “Design sales are strong and name recognition terrific. It is kind of counterintuitive to think Murray’s closing is, in part, the product of success, of design going so mainstream. But now there are so many opportunities to buy online and at auction that people really don’t need to go to Murray. His work is done. He’s mainstreamed all this stuff, and is now stuck like an old airline with huge infrastructure costs.”

Murray agrees. He just adds a detail. His collateral became his competition. Many of his vendors opened their own stores not just in Soho, but on Greene Street. “Basically, every major vendor of ours opened up on our block.” Amazingly, he doesn’t sound bitter: “We shot ourselves in the foot. We were the biggest Alessi distributor. I was the biggest Kartell distributor. Ingo Maurer was—is—a close friend of mine, and opened up a couple of blocks down on Greene. We sold Cassina…. So what are you going to do about that?” 

His answer: close. He started thinking about it three years ago. Sales had dropped to one twentieth of what they’d been. He thought he’d lost his touch, and would tell Franklin, “I got bad.” Franklin would reassure him. People were still coming in, and talking about how much they loved the store. Then, this January, their landlord wanted to renegotiate the lease—wanted, in fact, to raise the rent (it’s currently $80,000 a month), and he gave Getchell and Moss 24 hours to decide if they wanted out of the lease. They did. 

All those reasons, Murray explains, are, “the socio-economic changes. Then there are personal cycles.” He talks about Gail Sheehy, and her book Passages. “You can read all the newspapers, but you’ll never find the deeper explanation. It’s the rosebud. Changes are happening in my life which are the result of multiple”—he sighs and struggles with the word—“scenarios, but then there is also the personal.”

His personal reason, his rosebud? Parkinson’s. He’s not emotional as he talks about it, but he was diagnosed a year ago, and part of the sense of frailty surrounding him this afternoon is his slight limp and small tremor. “The diagnosis isn’t the defining element of my life, but it’s there. It’s not ‘Murray is sick’ ”—his voice rises, and sounds remarkably like Kevin Spacey’s—“I go to the doctor and take the medication and I’m okay, but the deal is, you don’t know where it’s going to go.” 

That medication literally keeps him up at night. The doctor said he’d become a gambler. “I told him that I’m Jewish. I don’t play cards. The likelihood of my becoming a gambler is so remote.” Instead, Murray found himself up at 2 a.m. shopping for facecloths and linens—and writing the letter he sent out to his closest friends about the closing. In a sense, though, he’s always been a gambler. You have to be to shape paradigms as he has.

Before opening Moss, Murray tried out the idea in a more limited form. In 1990, after he’d left the fashion business, he had an idea that design could be big. He went to the heads of Saks, Bendel, and Bergdorf, and, he explains, “I said, ‘You know fashion is iffy, and you’ve got ads committed to it and windows on the high street,’ and I said, ‘Shift it. Give me some of the power. Shift it to another sector of design that you can own, and it will blossom and you can have it.’ And no one said yes.” 

Finally, Jon Weiser, of the famed Charivari store on Madison Avenue, where Marc Jacobs got his start and Japanese designers were first introduced to American shoppers, gave Murray a floor. The New York Times wrote glowingly of it in 1993, and even hinted that Weiser might open a store in Soho. He didn’t, but Murray did. Back in 1994, who would have thought that a housewares-store-as-gallery would have any truck in Soho, sandwiched between Metro Pictures and Pace Gallery? 

This was two years before Steve Jobs went back to Apple, and it predates Wallpaper* and many of the other forces credited with the designing of our world. Back then, Soho had little shopping—no Chanel, or Prada, or Miu Miu, or streets lined with high-end home-goods and monobrand stores. It was still the heart of the art world, and when signing his first lease, Murray had to promise the co-op board that he wasn’t a store but a gallery.

Murray was revolutionary not only in elevating housewares, but also in how he displayed them. He’d move things around every day, creating striking contrasts between objects. He describes it as theater, but says, “Objects have economic, sociological, political baggage, which is why I love them. They’re not in a vacuum. They’re like triggers, like souvenirs, of what’s going on.” He grabs two pairs of baby shoes off a shelf. One is white and “prissy,” as he puts it, the other like a pair of work boots, and they’re his (the prissy ones) and Franklin’s (the butch ones). “They’re like a picture of us, and you can do that with so many things.”

He might describe what he does as theater, but really it’s more like comparative literature, this idea that objects have meanings that can be revealed by their intertextuality. For him, the meanings often outweigh something’s use-value or form-follows-function-ness, and they have been a key tenet of what’s he’s been doing in the store all these years. In a sense, the man who started as an arch modernist evolved into someone at war with modernism. 

He talks of fragility, and how precious it is in an era of democratic design. “We are so dishwasher-safed out, which means invulnerable, so we’ve lost our ability to appreciate the humanness of vulnerability. It humanizes these things, because you want to cherish and protect them, and you feel loss if you break them, because they can’t be duplicated exactly.” 

I can’t help thinking of my glass of sparkling water on the table before us. It’s Lobmeyr crystal, which translates to me as terrifyingly expensive and delicate, with its thin, exquisite glass. But he’s right, drinking from it is special. It’s thrilling, as is the small detail of a bee etched on the side. You can see the insect only when you’re right up close to it.

Over the years, Moss became the champion of a certain kind of experimental design: first Droog, and the Dutch conceptualists of Eindhoven (everyone from Hella Jongerius and Studio Job to Maarten Baas), as well as the flamboyant Brazilian Campanas and others whose work crossed the boundaries between craft and art and design. He also pioneered the idea that old and new could rub up against each other to create fresh meaning. He did it first with his Nymphenburg exhibit, showing porcelain that wasn’t decades but centuries old. He now describes that exhibit as being as personally transformational for him as is closing the store. 

It was 2000, and he decked out the gallery with rococo figurines. There were blushing maids and dashing men in buccaneer boots, which was enough to incite a riot in the world of high design. “I went to Nymphenburg,” Murray shakes his head at the memory, “and I was supposed to look at these Konstantin Grcic pieces taking the electrical parts for wiring and casting them in porcelain. But how can you, when you have Franz Anton Bustelli, the foremost sculptor of rococo porcelain? Here were the most iconic of the hated enemies of modernism, you know, tchotchkes, and I was like, ‘Oh, figurative. Oh, wait, I can breathe again.’” 

When the exhibit opened, he got hate mail. “They said you’re making fun of us, you’re jerking us around after calling yourself an industrial design store. People felt I was pulling their chain.” He had place settings from the Bavarian royal palace with birds and figurines.

In the last week of the store, he still showed conceptual design next to porcelains of siskins and sparrows and nuthatches. Such birds have trickled down and become such a staple of hipster chic that they’re parodied on Portlandia, and the punk craft coming from designers in the Netherlands has spread so widely that things like Studio Job’s skull-and-bow wedding cake can seem so very Etsy. 

Now he’s ready to give up “the constant cleaning and Glass Plus poisoning,” as he puts it. He’s not ending Moss; he’s morphing it into Moss Bureau, which will be Moss minus the store. “Retail at Moss doesn’t work on the high street. So we’re going to take the retail away. We’re going to close it as a store on Greene Street, and take it to a different environment,” his voice rises, sounding Spacey-like again. “We’re not going to fade it. We’re going to kill it.” Instead, he’ll do what he loves—curating and connecting designers and companies, as well as advising architects on contemporary design. Design is at a turning point, he explains: “Banks have taken over iconic companies, and made a mess of them. Some are being bought back by entrepreneurs. They all need advice.” He uses fashion as an example. It’s gone through booming successes over the past decade. “And how do they do it?” he asks. “They don’t take chances. They don’t open this week without knowing there’s a narrative being presented arm in arm, so the store has a story to tell, and they don’t have to make it up on their own.” 

With that analogy, it’s fitting that Murray is moving to the garment district. For him, the change is akin to opening his home to visitors and exposing what goes on behind the scenes. He’s going to post the cost of the rent on the wall, so you can see everything in all its messy glory. There will be exhibits, yes, but also the filing cabinets, the photocopier, and the desks where people work. “I want transparency,” he says. “You’re going to see the chairs we sit in, the phones we use, the person’s pictures of their kids. You’ll see the business of design.”

As he shifts paradigms as well as locations, other design companies have started to get in touch with his broker, and are asking for space in the building. Just as the art world moved to Chelsea, now New York’s design world might decamp en masse to 36th Street. He’s also interviewing for teaching positions at prestigious universities, is lined up to curate an exhibit in London that will juxtapose art and design (“It would be me playing with Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp,” he says, giddy at the idea), and recently met with the head of a London museum to talk about shaping its museum shop. But what’s really on his mind after spending the day painting his new office is how he will close the door at Moss come Friday. 

He glances down as he considers having to leave the store behind after 18 years, long enough to have a child and send her to college. “I opened the door, so I should close it, but it won’t be easy. I’m freaked out about it, to be perfectly frank.” It’s one of the life transitions that needs to be marked, he says: “I don’t have to dance in the street or go to a party, but I need to take the key and turn the lock, because those moments are precious.” He does, however, know what he will wear. He laughs as he describes the outfit: a new Lanvin shirt, black jeans, and Louis Vuitton shoe boots. 

* * *
Original Story Can Be Found At: 
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=5032

The Rumpus Interview with Thomas Thwaites

Ever dreamed of making your own toaster? No? Thomas Thwaites did and the process is a bit like string theory: toasters plus The Hitchhiker's Guide plus digging your own ore and applying for an MA in design. Okay, well not string theory but this is all that went into Thwaites' making his own toaster. He even smelted the ore in his mom's microwave. 

You can read my Q&A with him in The Rumpus. Or below...

 

Toast is hardly a starting point for a theory of late-day capitalism and consumption. Unless that toast is in the hands of Thomas Thwaites, that is. A British conceptual designer with a degree in macroeconomics, he has turned toast into a philosophical inquiry. In itself the food is a British birthright, and he set out inspired by a quote from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.” Thwaites put that idea to the test and in grad school decided to take the cheapest toaster he could buy at Argos (kind of like a British Best Buy but not nearly as fancy, maybe more like Sears) to try and make the machine himself. This included mining ore, smelting ore, calling BP to see if he could visit an oil rig for a jug of petroleum and then trying to make plastic from potatoes.

The result was the world’s most expensive toaster at $1,860.93 (not including labor). He took the 404 individual parts of his toaster apart, including the 42 individual copper wires entwined to make the power lead and ended up with a ghost toaster. As if hinting in some Platonic sense at what it might do, the device looks hauntingly like the original but is utterly unable to perform its intended task. The story of making the toaster is comic and quixotic not to mention a study in what cheap things (the original was around five bucks) actually cost. He asks questions about where things come from and where they (and us along with them) are going. All of it is recorded in his book The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch(Princeton Architectural Press, 2011) which also made NPR’s list of best books for 2011 and netted Thwaites a spot on The Colbert Report as well as a TED Talk. The toaster is also now spawning a TV series for Britain’s Channel 4 where Thwaites makes another attempt at making a toaster from scratch as well as trying his hand at sneakers and light bulbs.

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The Rumpus: Why remake something so cheap and prevalent?

Thomas Thwaites: It’s that common feeling of wondering where does everything come from. One of the reasons I was doing the project was to satisfy that question for myself, and obviously there is that other nagging feeling of the guilt we have when we buy things we don’t always need or when we don’t want to buy things but are told to buy stuff to keep the economy going and that the economy needs to grow, and if it shrinks it’s a disaster and all this stuff, so it was just a conundrum I wanted to solve or, at least, explore.

Rumpus: What was particularly inspiring in to you in the Hitchhikers Guide – and toast?

Thwaites: Like many people, many males my age, I should say, I read it as a teenager, and it’s both epic and mundane at the same time. The same can be said for what I tried to do. I tried to connect different scales of things and find the humor in that as well, and it’s true the Adams’ quote, no toast got made, not yet at least, but I’m still working on it.

Rumpus: The toaster was a school project, but how did you stumble on the idea of an Argos toaster? Or into Argos itself for that matter? It’s a weird place.

Thwaites: There’s an Argos on High Street Kensington near college (The Royal College of Art which is in the tony ‘hood of Kensington and Chelsea). Argos is pretty bizarre. It’s sort of like Walmart. It’s consumerism at its rawest, only there’s nothing on the shelves. You just go in and look through these laminated catalogues and write down the number of the thing you want and then you hand in the number and the sales clerk types it in, and then it just emerges from the conveyor belt at the back. Obviously in the back they have this big nondescript warehouse. It’s like cutting costs to the absolute minimum, so you don’t have to display anything. And, I had – still have, in fact – this fantasy of climbing over the counter and climbing up the conveyor belt and going in the warehouse and then following the toaster back to the source and hitching a ride on the delivery truck and on its return journey….

The toaster I bought was basically just the cheapest toaster I could find, and one of the reasons why is this very cut-down mode of retail.

Rumpus: So once you had it in pieces, what happened? Tell me about your process with it.

Thwaites: I wanted to go from digging something out of the ground and turning it into components for the toaster and just following that process from the very beginning to the end, and once I decided which materials I was going to focus on out of the 100 or so that I guestimated were in the Argos Toaster I could actually start trying to find and mine them.

Rumpus: So, first was iron?

Thwaites: You can’t go buy iron ore in, like, Argos, so I looked online for somewhere I could get the ore, which was also within a reasonable distance of London, and I found this place in the Forest of Dean. I phoned up, kind of cold calling: “Can I come and mine some iron ore?” The guy Ray just said, “okay, sure,” and I went there the next day. I dragged my friend Simon along and took an empty suitcase with me. Like you do if you want to transport iron ore around. That sort of seemed to make sense-ish. The place was a tourist attraction, and it was interesting because here was this grizzled former miner who is now a tour guide for this mining museum and me, this sort of naïve, art school, I don’t know, idiot, perhaps? So, I felt a bit stupid pleading with him to let me mine some ore, but then I took it home in the suitcase and smelted i

t.

Rumpus: Yeah, in a trashcan, right? Why? Or more to the point, how?

Thwaites: Well, I’ve got this suitcase of rock and have to figure out how do I make it into metal, and then how do I build a furnace? I spent a long time going back and forth with the health and safety officer at college, and even though it’s not very dangerous, I’m sure something about smelting ore in a car-park in London made it seem a bit more dangerous than it was. I built this furnace out of a dustbin and an antique chimney pot I’d taken from my mom’s garden and a leaf blower. Only it didn’t work.

Rumpus: So what happened with this flaming trashcan and leaf blower and iron oxide?

Thwaites: For a few days I did think I’d actually done it, and I was basically a genius at smelting iron.  But I used the wrong fuel. Because modern furnaces use coke, I assumed coke was better somehow so that was what I used. It’s not used nowadays because it’s a better fuel, but because it’s cheaper. Also smelting is more art than science. You have to judge the temperature and the gas mixture from the color of the flame. When it didn’t work, I was pretty mopey for a few days. I mean, the first thing I tried didn’t even work.

Next, I looked online for other ways to smelt iron. I’d melted my furnace, and getting the health and safety guy to agree to my doing it again was never going to happen. I’d used up a lot of goodwill from the foundry people at college, so I found instead this patent for microwave smelting or industrial furnaces that use microwaves. I knew my mum had a microwave, and I went over to her house and sort of borrowed it one day.

Rumpus: Sort of borrowed it? Does she use that microwave anymore?

Thwaites: Well, yeah, I got her another one. I basically destroyed her microwave.

Rumpus: Which is funny because it costs more than the toaster. Did you buy the second one from Argos?

Thwaites: No, actually I got it secondhand from the Red Cross at a charity shop.

Rumpus: How did it work? I can fix a cup of tea in microwave for a minute and no iron comes out.

Thwaites: Yeah, it just so happens that iron oxide, iron ore basically, is a fantastic absorber of microwaves. Do you ever have a particular cup or bowl where you put it in a microwave and it becomes insanely hot? Some glazes have iron oxide in them, so I’ve had cups where I’ve burned myself when it comes out, but the liquid inside isn’t hot. The cup has absorbed all the heat. Similarly, you put a lump of iron oxide in a microwave and insulate your lump so it doesn’t lose heat and you keep pumping energy into it for 30-45 minutes, and the ore will just get hotter and hotter and hotter. Then, if you also have some carbon in at the same time – and for that I used my mum’s ramekins – you turn your iron oxide into iron. Actually she was more cross about the ramekins than the microwave.

Rumpus: So how hot are we talking about here with the microwave?

Thwaites: At least 1200 degrees Celsius. Iron oxide / iron ore has to get to that temperature. To do that though you have to insulate the inside of the microwave in part to keep it at that temperature, but also if you didn’t insulate it, the whole inside of the microwave would melt.

Rumpus: Once you turned rock into metal, how did you get it into the shape you wanted?

Thwaites: I borrowed an anvil and heated these bits of iron basically in the same way a blacksmith would. I beat it out into long strips, heating and bending them into a very rough toaster frame.

Rumpus: What was the hardest part of the toaster to make? Or collect?

Thwaites: The wires. I had to make copper wire and nickel copper alloy for the heating element. My source material for the copper was very impure. That’s fine if it’s in a lump, but I was rolling it through this wire-making machine in the jewelry department at college. Obviously they’re used to rolling out gold, but if you roll out an impure plug of metal, as it gets thinner and thinner any cracks in the metal become more and more important. As it gets thinner and thinner, the cracks start to spread, so you roll it through and try to file out these cracks and then roll it through and file, roll and file. It just took ages to make.

Rumpus: Iron and copper, they’re metals; they’re elemental but plastic? That’s tricky. With most materials you were going back to like the Iron or Bronze Age.

Thwaites: Yeah, the plastic age only got started recently because it requires this huge infrastructure to make plastic from crude oil. I learned this when I tried to do it myself. I had to get hold of some crude and so phoned up BP, which didn’t go anywhere. They thought it was a joke. Since, I have gotten hold of some crude oil. I went down to this little oil field in Dorset and have refined the crude using fractional distillation but still there is this problem. Crude oil is this mixture of hydrocarbons, and separating the mixture is really, really hard. I’m going to continue to try to make plastic, but I realized I would also need this other catalyst. I’m still thinking about how I might be able to do it but it goes back to the pressure cooker and balloons of flammable gas so I haven’t quite worked it out yet. This is for the TV program, so I can give it another go

Rumpus: For the toaster you also tried to turn potatoes into plastic. How did – or does – that work?

Thwaites: There’s lots of ways of making plastic and one of them happens to be oil, but you can make it from sugarcane and other materials. I went to a conference where this guy was using bacteria to make plastic from sewage. The bacteria digest the sewage to produce a type of plastic that they can harvest and injection mold into whatever shape you want. And, you can use potato starch, but again the chemistry is quite difficult. You need additives to make sure this starch-based plastic doesn’t crack, and I didn’t have them. My starch plastic was all right in small bits but not on a toaster case.

Rumpus: So, then you said uncle and gave up and went to the dump?

Thwaites: It was quite tempting. Everyday I’d say, “How can I make plastic, how can I make plastic?” And going home, I’d pass these piles of plastic, trash, that had been discarded, and look at them longingly. It was also a good opportunity to start thinking about the other end of the spectrum. Here I’d been thinking and working with mining stuff and taking it out of the ground, but then it will go back into the ground as landfill, so I wanted to focus on the other end of the lifecycle. I mean this stuff is sucked out as oil, turned into plastic, then sits on your desk for a couple years, and then where does it go? It goes back into landfill or recycling centers, which is just down-cycling.

Rumpus: I know this one didn’t make toast, but are you worried about making another for TV and what will happen?

Thwaites: Yeah, I’m slightly worried. There is one key piece of apparatus that I didn’t have when I first plugged in my toaster. That’s a variac, which lets you gradually turn up the power you’re feeding to the toaster, so rather than plugging it in and hoping that the power will make the element glow red hot without becoming white hot and melting itself, you can slowly increase the power until you’re putting just the right amount through the heating element wire. Which I’m hoping will make it work the second time round. On TV.

Rumpus: The first time you were on stage, and how did it feel when it didn’t work? You were at a conference, right?

Thwaites: Yeah, but because it was an art/design project the goal wasn’t really to make toast. In a way there’s something more poetic about not even being able to make a toaster, like Arthur Dent was right, and it was nice to go out in a blaze of glory.

Rumpus: But there was no blaze just glory? There was no fire, and you didn’t electrocute yourself or anyone else.

Thwaites: But it was dramatic in that it flashed. I could feel the heat on my face for a brief moment.

Rumpus: Do you eat toast now? Do you even like toast?

Thwaites: Yeah, I do. I still like toast. I’ve got back into it after a period of going off toast and toasters, and I’ve rediscovered a love for toast.

Rumpus: And what do you like on it?

Thwaites: Just butter actually, just plain.

Rumpus: What kind of toaster do you have?

Thwaites: I have an Argos Value Range Toaster as a bit of nod to the project. I had to buy a few for various reasons, so I put one back together and use it now.

Rumpus: What are you working on other than the TV series?

Thwaites: I’m doing this project in Germany on the home of the future and what will be in it. It all continues from the toaster project. The toaster is about how can we continue this cycle of purchasing more and more stuff and replacing stuff. Maybe we can and maybe we can’t, but the home of the future will look at what will we change and how will that change how we live? So I’ve gone from the Iron Age and smelting to the home of the future via plastic. Arthur Dent would like that continuum because it’s going from one to the other and somehow encompasses the whole history and future of human civilization.

Sex and Big Words... And Pinups

Recently a brainy Columbia undergrad, Jessica Gingrich, interviewed me for the Columbia Spectator on the penchant for pinups amonst today's empowered and feminist-like (or lite) young ladies. I got to rock the big words and sound brainy. Lucky for me perhaps, she cut me going on and on about Althuser and the Ideological State Apparatus. Anyway, read on where you can get my take on this phenom. (AKA girls just want to have fun-- with their images).

Daisy Dukes, Bikinis On Top

Pop culture in recent years has seen the reemergence of a classic sexual icon: the pinup girl. From celebrities like Katy Perry and Dita Von Teese to the branding we see Sunday nights in Mad Men, this early-20th-century image of female sexuality is making a comeback. Yet unlike many other representations of feminine sexuality, pinups have gained widespread acceptance within female communities in addition to the expected male audience.

The daintiness, femininity, and harmless countenance of the pinup may be part of what has garnered her approval among women today. “These images have been emptied of their sinfulness,” says Jennifer Kabat, curator for the Museum of Sex exhibition “Vamps & Virgins: The Evolution of American Pinup Photography 1860–1960.” “They are not transgressive or forbidden like they used to be. They are suggestive of something playful versus taboo about sexuality.” The pinup fits nicely in the modern feminist toolbox, which treats sexuality as a source of female empowerment. “The idea that women can be sexy is still a very powerful idea,” Kabat says—and the return of the pinup has provided women with a relatively safe outlet for that sexuality.

Today’s pinup is also three-dimensional, leaving behind the flat cigarette ad or 1940s calendar for appearances on TV, in live burlesque performance—and, in effect, in us. “We take different information from that than we would from just a still image,” says Simone Wolff, a junior at Barnard and the vice president of Conversio Virium, Columbia’s BDSM group. “You see the person in the motion of posing and I feel like that is the sexualization of the person as a whole. The thing that is desirable has been moved from the pinup image to the person itself, the pinup girl.”

In this sense, the pinup has diverged from the pure objectification of her earlier representations. She is no longer just an image, but an identity, which can be accessed by anyone at any time. “People have become interested in performing the role more broadly, that is to say, the movements, the ways of taking up space,” says Kellie Foxx-Gonzalez, a junior in CC and the president of Conversio Virium. “It becomes a persona or state of being one can tap into as art as opposed to just an image caught in time.”

Von Hottie, the pinup alter ego of prominent New York producer and performer Laura von Holt, is the new live pinup incarnate. Von Hottie’s eye-catching appearance—a black curve-hugging bathing suit, sunglasses, and a chunky pearl necklace—casually adorns the city streets. Her mission? To promote “the ability to be comfortable with yourself, in any moment, in any situation,” according to her website.

Von Hottie is more than a figurehead of female sexual empowerment: The fact that she releases a yearly pinup catalog and has her own brand of condoms gives her an agency over her sexuality. “Women are often objectified in circumstances where they have no control over how or why they are admired or objectified, and pinup provides a moment where they can turn and ‘take the reins’ of their sexuality, present themselves as they would like to be seen, and wield momentary control over how a man sees them,” von Holt told Jezebel.

The modern pinup girl is also challenging the style’s traditionally exclusive association with heterosexual white women. “The image of the pinup is still usually a white woman and usually relatively thin, so looking back and seeing yourself in that image is not necessarily a privilege that everyone can have,” Wolff says. “But then again, definitely queer people, people of color, people of various sizes can recreate those images with their bodies and take those images for themselves for the first time.”

There is a rich history of pinups and burlesque performers of color, which until recently has been largely ignored. In a Racialicious blog entry last June, Sydney F. Lewis, a professor at the University of Washington, informs us of the many forgotten women of color in burlesque history, such as Rosalee Takeela, Elizabeth “China Doll” Dickerson, and Rose Hardaway. “Black and brown women must be acknowledged as pioneers and integral players in the golden era of burlesque ... and given their proper dues for being among the first to shamelessly bump and grind,” she writes. “As long as the historical face of burlesque is porcelain then contemporary neo-burlesque performers will always be seen as exotic others, brown-skinned derivatives of Sally Rand, Dixie Evans, and Dita Von Teese.” Contemporary groups such as Brown Girls Burlesque and Harlem Shake Burlesque are among the many dedicated to redefining the image associated with the neoburlesque and pinup movements.

Despite these motions toward self-empowerment and reclamation, sexist sentiment still lingers behind the pinup girl. Even with the major advances of feminist movements, the pinup girl’s often innocuous and borderline submissive image complicates the ways in which she is perceived and the ways in which women should therefore use the pinup to their advantage. “This isn’t an Andrea Dworkin world we live in where porn equals rape, which doesn’t allow for any of the flippage between spaces. But as women, when you objectify yourself, what are you saying?” Kabat says. “It’s not to say that there isn’t a sort of self-awareness, but it is something that [can] recreate a certain kind of sexism.”

Though the redefinition of the pinup girl is limited, it has provided women with new possibilities for expressing their sexual identity, a way to counterbalance more explicit representations. Using the pinup as inspiration, a woman can explore herself while directing how she is perceived—a unique fluidity vital to modern feminine sexuality.