Can Design Save The World?

Every human being is a big fleshy vacuum cleaner, sucking up cultural debris and storing it in a sort of cranial repository, the mind’s dust-bag. We spend our time subconsciously mapping the empirical world and honing migratory impulses depending on what we’ve seen and where we’ve been. If design plays a role in shaping our world, then surely it has a part to play in changing our attitude towards it for the better. What is external to us is in that sense clearly, undeniably, crucial. Isn’t it?

I’m not so sure. What is ‘natural’ for human beings is just what’s natural this week, or this year, or this decade. Across the eastern hemisphere as well as in the good old U-S-of-A, a rather horrible little hobby occupies the sideways minds of many a God-fearing citizen. It’s called bonsai kittening – strange toothless men with dirty hands and a penchant for ventriloquism stuff newborn cats into transparent hourglass containers and watch them develop into funny ol’ shapes. Eventually the little brutes are corked out of their glassy homes and sold to yet weirder human beings. The point is – obviously – that kittens aren’t meant to be the same shape as an egg timer. They’re meant to be kitten-shaped, and spend their lives doing lovely kitten things like chasing ladybirds and what have you. It’s what’s natural to them (I know this because they talk to me).

It’s different with humans, though. What’s natural with us comes and goes. None of us want to be bottled and squashed either, but I think taking that possibility into question would stretch the credibility of this answer, which is already dangling by a thread. Our minds are not like the bodies of cats - although we are profoundly susceptible to manipulation from the outside, it is up to us what we do with all that junk once we’ve brought it in to our mental domicile. To return to the cat analogy (in which I suddenly have a renewed and fortified faith), if my cat brings a mouse to the door, it doesn’t make any difference how much I tell him off or feel sorry for the mouse. He’s a cat. It’s the same with buildings, for example. We have to stop blaming them. It’s the people on the inside that decide what the world is like, and that decision is strung together from recent trends, fully assimilated cultural prejudices, and utopian (or, in my nan’s case, apocalyptic) fantasies about possible futures. People can complain about the look of the block they live in if they like, but it’s up to them how they want to furnish the interior of their particular flat. Beyond that, it’s up to us all how we want to decorate the inside of our minds, and it’s how we do that job which will ultimately help change the world. In the process, we might be able to rescue some of those poor squished kittens. 

The Underground Rebel Book Club

‘Underground. Rebel. Book. Club. Say it nice and slow. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Now just bite down on this copy of Catcher in the Rye. That’s right. No crying now - this won’t hurt one, little, bit…’

Obviously the name of this blog needs some explaining - not everybody will be familiar with the URBC. Some, like poor old Adrian above, are all too familiar with the Rebels. When bridge clubs, Live Action Role Play societies or neighbourhood watch meetings make the mistake of holding their get-togethers in the same pub and on the same night as the URBC, they don’t repeat the mistake in a hurry. Adrian took his lesson well though, as any veteran of the Great War would. Petitioning for more disabled access in the village are you? Not on my clock. Bless his withered, gently fading heart.

The point of the book club is to get hardened anti-socialites reading. Bring a club, to the club. Watching the 250-page long train roll by isn’t much fun unless you can gabber about it afterwards and then fight each other. The book club is an attempt to steer the conversation away from the usual topics (of crime, nudity and violence) towards discussion and understanding, the sharing of ideas and thoughts.

Unfortunately, proximity to alcohol was a precondition of the club’s establishment, and has proved an obstacle to achieving these aims ever since. Despite having been in session for just one month (two meetings), already six people have died. A further eight others have been arrested for ‘copious public indecency and inside-out exposure’. The club goes on, though, despite no indication that anything relating to these hideous fortnightly occurrences is likely to change any time soon.

The two books read for the meetings so far have been A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell. The third book, to be read for a meeting in two weeks time, is A Company of Liars by who cares. We never should have let Will choose.

Both books have been well received by the Rebels, though a couple of us struggled with dodgy translations of A Day In The Life. Mine was the oldest translation of the bunch, deep-fried into English by Ralph Parker in the 1960’s. The insult ‘bitch twat’ is everywhere, though I can’t imagine that slander provoking anything other than a smirk or a look of stark confusion. Discussion raced along faster than Stalin could lock away whoever he wanted, a lot of it focussing in on the juxtaposition of scale that the novel deals with – a single day in 3,653; the humble struggle for survival against the bellowing ideological crank of the Soviet machine.

It seems the word ‘hunk’ can be used to describe two things in life – a bronzed, square-jawed pin-up boy or a meagre little piece of bread. From the two books read so far, it seems to me that if someone’s got a hunk of bread it’s usually pretty much all they’ve got. There’s a lot of hunk-hustling and hunk-hiding in A Day In The Life, and a fair bit in Orwell’s book on the Spanish Civil War. Class-conflict and the emancipation of the proletariat all seems a bit petty when all you’ve got is a stale ball of French loaf and an unknown amount more years to serve on a sham sentence.

Meanwhile, Homage To Catalonia starts off being unashamedly (I think…) funny. A great number of the injuries inflicted on the POUM (the United Marxist Workers Party, a socialist militia which Orwell travelled to Spain to fight alongside) are self-inflicted. Dodgy rifles send bullets flying everywhere (though poor alignment means that having the rifle pointing straight at you when it goes off is not a guarantee in itself that you will be shot. It pointing elsewhere, though, is no guarantee that you won’t be). Bombs regularly fail to explode or explode when they’re told not to. One bomb passes back and forth between the socialists and the fascists almost every day and never goes off. A lot of the soldiers are teenagers and a lack of strategic awareness means, for instance, that trenches are regularly dug so far away from the enemies’ that neither warring faction can actually war with one another. It was hard not to laugh – Orwell’s descriptions of this initial stage of his involvement are deliberately wry. The humour leads you up a very specific perspectival bridge which comes crashing down when, as rivalries and treachery within the fragments of the Left cause the whole thing to implode catastrophically, shit gets serious and people begin being locked up, tortured and shot by their own ‘comrades’.

Another thing I noticed when I was doin' readin' was that ‘Manana!’ echoes thorugh the book like some dismal prophecy of the inevitable failure of all that Orwell felt possible in terms of democratic socialism, the end of inequality and the tyranny of class hierarchy. It’s almost a subliminal voice – manana, as Orwell frequently says, often never comes.

Death

The perennial green of the heath

The falling sun

The leaving trees

I run

And all I see is death.

I wrote that. I went for a run yesterday, and I was thinking ‘this is beautiful, real nice like. If I were a poet, I’d write a poem about this’. And then I thought, ‘except I’d have to mention the death’. And so there it is, my poem about how nice my daily runs on the Heath Extension are, except for the death, which is everywhere. About a week ago I had to practically hurdle over an enormous dead rat. Three days ago it was a pigeon, proper murdered, intestines everywhere. And today there was what looked like the bottom half of a squirrel, tail and all, except there were feathers all over the place so I suppose it must have been half-squirrel half-duck or something.

I’m almost scared to go out for a run. It’s awkward enough with all the dog shit everywhere and the weird I’m-looking-but-I’m-not-looking-at-you looks you give and receive from other runners. Then there are all the people stalking their pets through the bramble with little black bags, trying to kidnap their poo. I tell you the whole thing’s becoming really unpleasant.

At this rate I’m going to have to re-subscribe to the gym, and I vowed never to step foot back inside that Molochean enterprise when I saw a man actually sucking liquid out of the eye of the water dispenser. I always had my doubts about those machines – all that sweaty breath at such close proximity to the source of the spring. (Also, since we keep going back to talking about shit, there’s also a silent competition going on in the men’s toilet to see who can produce the biggest, fustiest log. They are left on show for all to admire, like some disgusting art gallery or food counter. ‘I’ll ‘av that one!’ Foul).

But the death – it looms large, like the porn, in the public subconscious. The recent fascination with the death of Jade Goody is just one example of a public anxiety which is worsening. The combined threat of terrorism, global warming and flying debris is really fucking with our minds. People are more aware than ever of the threat of extinction, not only of themselves, but of their species as a whole. Wot that John Donne sed were right:

‘any man’s death dimishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee’.

It don’t matter that Jade Goody weren’t a man, because some other people aren’t men either. Besides, as women become more and more equal with men in everything but cleverishness that’s just another source of anxiety for the blokes. Innuntit! I’m only joking of course – women are crucially important and also suffer from death. It is this overarching similarity of eventual experience that I believe we all share and which trumps any sexist sentiment that the conditioning of patriarchal society might have caused in us. In fact, I actually think that women when they’re in charge, like cats when they are asleep nearby, can calm people down and instil a sense of optimism. Exactly what we need at the moment. Women of the world, the men say unite!

And then there’s that death thing again. That thing that we all think about but don’t want to talk about. That thing that informs everything we say that isn’t about it. That spectral presence. It seems even when you try to write something about death you end up talking about poo, or the gym, or women. Even when you talk about it you don’t talk about it. It's a sort of defence mechanism, but it means that whatever we say, about whatever we want, is informed and shaped by this perennial anxiety. Does that mean we’re always talking about it? And if so, what is my point? 

Porn

Porn looms large in the public superego. Every now and then someone turns around and reminds us “oh yes, and this porn. It’s not on!” Well it is on, and it’s on everywhere. In this week’s Sunday Times David Baddiel wrote an article ‘Too much free porn is a big concern – for pornographers’. Shortly afterwards Jaqui Smith’s husband was forced to apologise publicly, not for looking like a cross between George Galloway and David Brent, but for having his way with two pay-per-view channels at the taxpayer’s expense. I remember my philosophy tutor at University writing a paper about whether pornography could be art (he concluded that it couldn’t, but gave no thought – if I remember correctly – to the question of whether art could be pornography). Beyond that, there’s no end of sociologists, psychoanalysts and journalists telling us that pornography is seriously bad for us. To live in an online world of hairless men, breasts the size of small clouds and ponies who fancy women is to decide to take the blue pill – to agree to live in a fantasy land, the Zizekian Desert of the Real, with reality proper disappearing into the distance like an anal bead down a MILF’s shitter.

In the same way that computer games supposedly make kids impervious to the stark brutality of violence, overexposure to pornos apparently leaves adolescents and adults unable to form meaningful relationships. The fact that no teenager ever marched into a school with a raging boner and shagged thirteen pupils and two teachers before sucking himself off is irrelevant. Porn works in more subtle ways than that. Porn gives us…a dodgy idea about what sex and the world is all about. God forbid.

I, frankly, disagree. I think porn is a perfect example of what the world is all about. You know that age old joke (still appearing in stale American coming-of-age comedies) about how ‘wrestling isn’t real’. (Invariably some pimpled anemiac leaps up to defend the obese-erotic charade, having his naivety remorselessly shat upon by both his tormentor and the audience in process). This joke relies on one overarching presupposition: that everybody in the audience already knows wrestling ain’t real.

When the pretty brunette waitress smiles and takes your order in a restaurant, returns half way through the meal to ask how it’s going and then thanks you at the end for visiting the place, do you really think she fancies you? Do you actually tell the truth when your elderly neighbour asks how you are (or when anybody asks how you are, for that matter), or how school is going, or how the family is? Of course you don’t. Our world, the very fabric of our most intimate interactions, is comprised of an endless series of meta-fictions and cultural narratives that we have ourselves assembled. We suspend our disbelief because otherwise we’re in the Matrix. And everyone knows, deep down, that the Matrix is shit. It’s virginal, it’s intact, it won’t do anal.

‘But, but…’ I hear you. ‘Porn stops people forming proper relationships and gives them the wrong idea about what good sex is like’. Not for men it doesn’t. Fuck. Porn gives men a great idea about what good sex is like. The real point is - what is anybody – anybody – suggesting as an alternative type of education. Sex education in schools is determined to leave the urethra fundamentally uninteresting, identical in diagrammatic form to the magma vents on photocopied geography handouts. I suspect the same person is commissioned to draw the pictures in all secondary school textbooks. His name is Ernie and he likes pterodactyls best. Where’s the boisterous sperm, the wanton egg? With no other education to go by, and nobody making any attempt to provide any, porn is as good a guide to exciting, fun, humorous bedroom antics as you’re likely to find. What would you rather, boys and girls, to fuck like porn-stars or fuck like drunken teenagers? There’s a big difference between having meaningful sex and having better sex. Porn isn’t capable of solving any problems related to the former (and might well create some if monitors are left on when they shouldn’t be), but sex should be a jolly old romp, the longer, the noisier, the sweatier the bettier. 

‘Watching too much porn’, my mother would say ‘will seriously warp your idea about what the majority of the female population are actually like’. The idea here is that not all women are promiscuous, perennially horny and rubbery to the touch. Fine, I accept that. But what if I’m into, say, fat women, or older women. What if I dig the little imperfections –the real norks, an unruly pubic expanse, wheelbarrows of cellulite? (I don't). Go a bit beyond that and you’re just looking at normal women (or, indeed, men) naked. That’s not warping my idea of what’s under the bonnet at all. I crave the real! Allow it me! I get that this doesn’t really address the main issue, the ‘ethical’ issue – but we’re dealing more with the conceptual side of things here. And anyway, when straight men do gay porn are they being exploited? What about when they call it ‘a job, like any other’?

I would like to draw a parallel here. In our culture, particularly (though not exclusively) amongst women there exists a prodigious and seemingly unstoppable fascination with celebrity. Those girls who routinely buy Grazia but forbid their boyfriend access to PornTube will be distressed to hear that they are peddling the same intellectual and cultural ills as their nut-crushing darlings. Serial voyeurism? Mindless indulgence? Self-aggrandisement through one’s imagined proximity to a coveted object? (Whether it’s a designer cunt or a designer handbag it doesn’t really matter, you’ve still got an addiction to something vacuous, irrelevant, low-brow). The same goes for blokes too, I’m afraid. You can’t knock The Hills if you’ve bashed one out over a home-made starring the main girl.

Libidinous normalcy is a myth. Fetishes for the peculiar (or, more commonly, the grossly stereotypical) are things ready to blossom well before the porn and don’t disappear when the ‘perfect relationship’ comes along. The sooner we accept this the sooner we can start being honest with each other about matters of the flesh. Reality can be as fake as these orgasms.

For a list of compelling reasons to disagree with me, most of which I agree with, read this excellent article by Edward Marriott in The Guardian: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/08/gender.weekend7

Skiing

Imagine this – hundreds of oversexed females descending annually upon Hyde Park to seek out park-keepers, gardeners and walking-tour guides and gawk at them until they agree to plant some silver seeds of their own on the inside of their adorer’s wombs. Is there anywhere in the world where this actually happens? Indeed there is – on the piste.

Ski slopes are a melting pot of outdated oddities, the oddest and outdated of which are the four or five-decade-old men in red jumpsuits who guide lascivious women of all ages across the mountain by day, then slump like bronzed billy-goats at the bars of ‘apres-ski’ drinking holes at night waiting for them to appear and voluntarily repay the favour. Is there anything more clit-tingling than a sexegenarian who can still find their way about the place? Apparently not. Being a ski instructor is the qualificatory equivalent of being a London cabbie, except instead of the rather sprawling Knowledge you’ve got to familiarise yourself with a simplified version of the Tube Map where the only direction is down. Am I missing something here? What the fuck is so impressive about that? In fact, girls, I’ll wager you’d have far more fun romping with a park-keeper than you would an ageing ski-guide. You could work on cultivating the tricky discipline of florae-recognition as you bounced. Blood-drop Emlets, Spring Cinquefoil, Pleated Snowdrop. The best you’re going to get with Jacques from ESF is ‘snowflake, snowball…uuh...snowman?’

It’s true of skiers, period. A piece of advice for you all: never, ever, brag about skiing. It is the capstone of hollow vanity, the antithesis of substance and talent. As a friend recently remarked, the best skiers are just the ones that have done the most skiing. It’s as mindlessly simple as that. And the ones that have done the most skiing are usually just the ones who were taken on skiing holidays when they were kids, which means they sat at ‘children’s tables’ until they were fourteen and probably still demand ‘frites!’ as an accompaniment to anything consumable.

Middle-class, middle-brow middle-earth. Yea, skiing is all of these things, but it’s something else as well. It is humiliating. You might not feel humiliated, but that’s your own fault. Take a step back and have a better look – every method of transport available to the skier is designed to make him look silly. Flying chairs, claustrophobic floating eggs, microphone stands dragging everyone up a hill by the bollocks. The button-lift masquerade looks to me like dozens of fawning minions, dressed as different kinds of fruit, refuelling an unseen iron Yeti. And then there’s the skis themselves, or, more specifically, the boots that clip into them. Suddenly, like the Tin-Man, you have to turn your whole body if you want to face something. Somehow locking your ankles in one position automatically causes the neck to cease functioning properly. Everybody on the mountain looks like they’re trying to casually walk off a lengthy breakfast session of pain-au-chocolat and anal rape.

I oversimplify. There’s more to it than this, of course. But not in a good way. In what other place would a regional dish consist of a cauldron of cheese and a tin bucket of crutons? Where else does everyone smell so sweatily, sun-creamily foul? Like fat people in their fat-fleeces - who over time come to pong like the unmade bed of an incontinent eighty year old - skiers all smell funky by the end of the week. Is it any surprise? You’re sharing ski boots with about four thousand other people. Fabreeze might well destroy 99.9% of kiddie-fiddling bacteria, but you can guarantee whatever is sprayed into your ski-boots is only there to cover up the stench of the morons who came before you.

Shin-burn, sun-burn, ring-burn – expect all of these and more if you hit the slopes this year. ‘But wait!’ I hear you say. Except, frankly, I don’t. Cancel your ticket and go to the park instead. You’ll be glad you did.