b. I had a live-in robot once, Marie. Marie wouldn’t get hung up on name pronunciation, or whether she could experience seasonal shifts, or seasonal affect disorder for that matter, which is a real thing, but whether she was as true of a fan as I was, or whether she really appreciated the oceanic pungency of the market we used to stroll through, always on a Tuesday, my favorite time. There was a period where I told them I was taking my mother to therapy on Tuesday mornings, rehabilitation for her spinal injury, the escalator incident that was so embarrassing for her even though I knew no one to actually read that trash that wasn’t under 25, and how they’d introduced this epidural stimulation, a sort of synaptic sensor plate that I was told was smaller than a credit card, even though I never saw it, but did make the joke, to no response, that credit cards weigh more than they appear. What a pain in the ass, that lady. Anyway, she’s dead, and Marie was more than alive, nodding warmly as I showed her the urchins, their spiny backs all slanted toward the white bulbs in the center aisle, the gooey ducks, a delicacy here all the way from the PVC-pipe traps on the sand bars of Puget Sound, the Algerian irises, the same color as your silk scarf, which veiled your somewhat obvious mechanics, and the lady who sold them, her forgiving face, so confident with us, always wishing us a long future and inviting us around some time for a tea she’d never intended to honor or pour, but the thought was so nice, and we were like everyone else, a bit obvious to the outsider, in that way that couples split each other’ sentences in half, or talk only in the royal ‘we’, but to us, some unfiltered and unrelenting cosmic stroke of happenstance and chemistry brought us there, at a very particular moment in time, and there was no separation. How we love.
THE UNCANNY RESULTS: SIT DOWN, KICK UP YOUR FEET, AND SUPPLANT THE PERILOUS CONCERNS, THE OVERCROWDING, WITH A WEE LOSS OF BONE DENSITY AND A BRIGHTER, REDDER TOMORROW
And she enters the room, looks around tiredly, and reclines into an amber-tobacco gold biodegradable plastic chair that looks a bit like a maple leaf. At first, it works, she’s at ease, there’s respite from this tiresome scene, and then, with a phone retrieval, her Fendi clutch gets stuck on one of the leaves’ fanning fronds, and as she tries to yank it free, the disproportionate base of this expensive settee gives way to her now-four-months-Xanax-free, fish-flopping torso and limbs, and soon the maple leaf is on its side, she’s face first into a poolside puddle, that combo of cloudy loafer and chlorine dilute, and we’re all hip to the fact that life on this planet has outdone itself, that the glut of bad design has won over that of exemplary, that we’re all choking on the air, and our pineal glands are fully calcified, the kids we foolishly spat out will only know radioactive sunsets (and should we tell them they’re limited, or wait until they ask?). WTF are we doing here? It started as an innocent poke around the park, turned a corner with some interventional cyber ingenuity, but who were we kidding? This whole mise-en-scène has been colossally fisted for quite some time, hasn’t it? Alas, only a Fool gives up on what’s sat there on the Fool’s plate, or is the Fool feigning giving up, knowing that to be agreeable at what’s been plated is basic hospitality, from San Blas to Phnom Penh, and you’re better pushing some bites around a bit until the opportune time to feed it all to the dog and then gorge thyself on dessert?
RICK GUIDICE, STANFORD TORUS, INTERIOR VIEW, 1975 CREDIT: NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER
Enter Moving to Mars: Design for the Red Planet, from London’s The Design Museum, the first book to lift the hood, with sumptuous panache, on the critical role of design in our desire to explore the fourth planet from the sun, to get there, to have a look around, to sustain, ideally in comfort, inspired and well-oiled. From the cartoony, prophetic ideas of the Cold War era, to the ultra sleek realism of today’s propulsion rocket accoutrements. Space suits. Mock-up communal mole-hills made of galactic gels³, from the cutlery that will slice and spear the future’s “meat and potatoes,” to the sexy style chair beckoning to the party’s despondent damsels in distress, to the groovy, uncharted decadence of space life, to the science, by god the science, of endeavoring out there where we’ll look at this folly of a planet from afar and think, “Did I leave the oven on?”
Edited by Andrew Nahum and Justin McGuirk, with a foreword by Deyan Sudjic, and text by Mike Ashley, Stephen Petranek, Fred Scharmen, Lydia Kallipoliti, Daisy Ginsberg, Kim Stanley Robinson, Moving to Mars reminds us that for decades we’ve longed for a bit more backyard space, less rank in the air, silvery, temperature-controlled onesies that simultaneously oxygenate and discard of our walking excrement (we’re on the move up here, no time to putz about), and create promise for another way to be, without the same mistakes as the last episode. A Fool’s Errand? Well, you’d be tempted to assert as much, and who could blame you, but with views like this, who cares about the Sisyphean, take-a-few-leave-many-uphill-effort to get here, eh?! We’re only as good as our last planet.
LUCY MCRAE, ‘ASTRONAUT AEROBICS’, INSTALLATION AT THE DEZEEN AND MINI FRONTIERS EXHIBITION: THE FUTURE OF MOBILITY, LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL, 2014. CREDIT: NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER
3. There was this calendar I was making notes in, but then it combusted, just like that. They’d said that paperworks were subject to climactic incident, but I grew up in Tornado Alley, USA and climatic incident typically meant your roof blown off and a few hundred homes’ sewer waste water gurgling down the street like Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament for the common people, and we’re all gathered in local churches, praying for engines to restart and missing’s to show up, and you’re so at the mercy of the heavens, you wouldn’t ever think that the heavens were made heavier with fossil fuels, or animal consumption, or our curiosity as expressed by jet engine, or designed burns, whatever those mean, or every one of ‘em out there’s self-prophecy and/or parental yearnings’ resultant dweebs and do-dads without dads demanding and entitling, and you get the rest. What a mess. I remember a few weeks in marking down that the literature and albums of the former way of being were pretty well gone, couldn’t even hum the refrain of “Start Me Up,”ⅽ which was ironic, of course, because what a song about rocket-like living and believing in the human spirit, but given I haven’t the foggiest for the opening chords, which used to excite me beyond all hellⁱⁱ, inspire a volume crank, a sorta crow walk across the room, the gold of it all is increasingly lackluster, more like out-of-place, fickle, inconsequential dust. And now there’s no calendar anyway, even with my space men and all, and the animals they’ve brought up here heaving about my little ovular looking glass, as if to say they didn’t sign up for this, and I wanna communicate to them out there. I want to tell them the truth. Neither did I, mate, neither did I. Nothing is ever as good as it sounds.
c. Said engineer Chris Kimsey, of the 1981 hit, in 2004, as testament to its errand-like origins, “Including run-throughs, ‘Start Me Up’ took about six hours to record. You see, if they all played the right chords in the right time, went to the chorus at the right time and got to the middle eight together, that was a master. It was like, ‘Oh, wow!’ Don’t forget, they would never sit down and work out a song. They would jam it and the song would evolve out of that. That’s their magic³c.
ii. Says Flaunt Publisher, Matt Goodwin, decidedly, devotedly, and derisively English, on the lyrical conceit, “You Make a Grown Man Cry,”: “It’s because she’s so beautiful, she makes grown men cry.”
3c. Buskin, Richard. “Classic Tracks: Start Me Up”. Sound on Sound. Archived from the original on 20 July 2008. Retrieved 13 December 2009.