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Hard to say where's a worse place to be smushed against strangers at holiday time: store or museum. Reap the gifts of both--peacefully online alone, rather than physically on line next to The Phlegmy Coughing Man--with the MoMA Online Store at www.moma.org. There, all 225 of the goods sold in the New York Museum of Modern Art's Design Store can be shopped for around-the-clock, purchased, gift-wrapped (and carded), and shipped in five to eight business days. So, while not a creature is stirring, secret-Santa you can be buying Marc Newson chronographs and Philippe Starck flyswatters. An offshoot of the award-winning MoMA Web site designed in 1996 by Oven Digital, the Online Store was developed by Silicon Alley e-commerce experts Pixelpark USA. The store features custom browsing and themed tours, so you can call up your favorite Cubist, list products by price, and search by parameters as specific as an American desktop accessory for under $20. A sampling of the decidedly un-misfit toys: textile "mesh" bowls by Chilewich ($40--$75); a motorized replica of the MoMA Ferrari ($495) for the racy toddler; and select pieces of furniture, including Raul Barbieri's ergonomic "Banco Desk" and Ron Arad's "Bookworm" bookshelf.
"A family living in a southern Colorado double-wide celebrates Thanksgiving. They roast a Butterball turkey, garnishing it with Stove Top stuffing and OceanSpray cranberry sauce. To wash it down, well, cheers to Asti Spumanti. Dessert? Mrs. Smith's Pumpkin Custard Pie. After the meal, the celebrants toss bones, remnants of packaging, disposable dishware, and another dozen pounds of refuse. A thousand years pass. An archaeologist shows up, digs a hole, and discovers the remains of the twentieth-century meal. "Jackpot!" says Andrew Duff, who is standing by his own hole, pulling garbage from the dirt. There's an old whiskey bottle. A pop-top beer can. Turkey bones. "The beer can's 1950s or '60s," says Duff, a field researcher with Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado. He notes that the pop-top era is tightly defined, bookended by the postwar demise of the church-key opener and the introduction of the stay-on pull tab in the early 1970s. The whiskey bottle's age can't be immediately determined, but a bottle hunting guide could settle that. The turkey bones are an open question. The Anasazi, a native group who lived in the area from around 700 BC, were big turkey-eaters, but the bones could easily have been discarded by later residents: Navajos, Utes, homesteaders, farmers, trailer dwellers. Archaeology is about garbage. Middens--the trash heaps left by native people--are gold mines for determined diggers. "When you're trying to find out how people lived," says Duff, "refuse can be very diagnostic." An Anasazi hole in the ground is one thing, but today's middens--towering landfills surrounding modern communities--provide a little too much trashy information. (The jumbled nature of such centralized refuse heaps makes it difficult to know if you or your neighbor gnawed on a particular bone.) Landfills are like garbage museums. Even the most biodegradable packaging stands a good chance of outlasting eternity when buried in an airtight, ultra-compacted pit. Today's tourists can visit Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, just above Crow Canyon, and pass dozens of ancient middens; millennia from now, the curious might be able to tunnel through an excavated Fresh Kills, New York's finest mountain of rubbish, and marvel at perfectly preserved Pringles canisters and Pampers. On an autumn evening, after coming in from the field, Duff heads to the Cortez City Market. He inspects the mythical trailer-dwellers' feast. The pie tin, the plastic-coated Stove Top canister, and the OceanSpray all contain numeric identifiers that could establish dates and places of origin. The imported Asti bottle--which idicates volume in liters, instead of in ounces as the other products do--evidences cross-cultural commerce, much as the presence of North Dakota flint in Anasazi ruins does. But many elements of a modern Thanksgiving feast just won't show up in the trash. The Butterball, for example, is "a thoroughly modern bird, making the best celebrations very convenient," according to company spokeswoman Amy Bortz. Basically, the factory takes the artifact potential out of its poultry: For one, drumsticks are tucked under the bird's skin, so that old-fashioned metal clips aren't necessary. And Butterball's "deep basting" of the bird, separation and individual wrapping of the innards, and removal of leg tendons for easy carving won't make the archaeological record. Luckily, modern consumers are better documented than the Anasazi. We're not exactly sure what they did when they gathered in subterranean kivas for ceremonies, but our rituals are recorded to excess, from advertisements to newspapers to home videos of boozy Uncle Larry carving the bird. Ancient cultures didn't categorize and tag future artifacts. Our compulsively databased society has already done that, so this year, in addition to blessing health and happiness, give thanks to the bar code, for with it comes immortality.
Corney and Barrow opened their first champagne bar in 1780 on London's Old Broad Street. It was the quintessential gentlemen's champers lounge: dark mahogany paneling, plump cushioning, and rich, heavy fabrics to complement, naturally, the finest in champagnes, wines, and cigars. But now that Corney and Barrow, along with the rest of the city, is experiencing a renaissance (hey, has anyone heard that London is swinging again?), Clare Nelson of Nelson Design has been commissioned to metamorphose the Corney and Barrow flagship with a contemporary look for the next generation of champagne swillers. Nelson's first remodel for the chain--St. Martin's Lane, overlooking Trafalgar Square--opened in August; Old Broad Street, the latest space for which Nelson relaxed the trademark Corney and Barrow opulence, opened last month. The bar area is laid out on two levels and has a limestone floor and hand-finished Italian stucco plaster walls; the bar itself is stainless steel topped with arctic blue granite. "My aim was to create a light and spacious lounge, but with elements of richness grounded in natural materials such as limestone and granite," says Nelson. "It's a comfortable, modern contrast to the Corney and Barrow of days gone by." Nelson has been appointed to redesign a total of three Corney and Barrow bars in different parts of the city, and she intends to diversify their image even more by specializing the design of the individual spaces. "It is unusual for a London chain to change their look with each location, but it was something I really wanted to do," she says. "Every Corney and Barrow bar will have its own identity." Should the space itself not transport you enough, drinking in the surroundings is strongly encouraged. There are 14 champagnes and 59 wines to select from --38 of which are available by the glass. Break out the Bollie, sweetie.
Take Philip Marlowe, only with an Aero lamp fetish, or The Duke contemplating Pythagoras in a bow tie, and what do you get? Hollywood's hippest rebel, the Lone Architect. Noir yet cultivated, insouciant (but neat), the maker of the skyscraping phallus has replaced the detective, the cowboy--even the ad executive who sports a Nicole Miller tie--in the role of leading man. As home stores mainstream aesthetic interests and design-savvy becomes increasingly desirable in a mate, architects are starring with a ruthlessness not seen since The Fountainhead. The legacy of Howard Roark's sexy hubris touches even the untouchable Hitchcock: in the upcoming remake of Rear Window, Jeff (played by Christopher Reeve) is an architect instead of the photographer he originally was. Coincidence? We know what Ayn Rand would say. Or just ask Mary, as in Something About, what her dream date does for a living.
Troy, the spendy Soho "Gallery for the home," has compiled a holiday catalogue containing a dozen gifts, one for each day of Christmas. "I searched for a year to find special things within a reasonable price range," says Troy Halterman, who founded the exclusive store in 1995. Considering that Troy has a $12,000 Fritz Henningson chair for sale--one of 12 ever produced--the miracle perhaps deserving its own holiday is that the catalogue items really are reasonable. The biggest-sticker item is a Troika travel desk clock that costs $85. An anti-roll pen cylinder, also by Troika, sets you back $32, and the least expensive item is an Arttikel nickel-plated yo-yo for $29. Purchase any of these objects and Troy wraps it in style. "The gift will hang in the middle of a Pop Art box," says Halterman. "The wrapping itself is a gift." Lest you worry that Troy has gotten too generous with the people, there is a guest mailing list and a limited number of catalogues. To request one, call (212) 941-4777.
Even in anything-goes Venice, California, graffiti must go. When city officials invited nearly 100 young artists to spray-paint a mural at a municipal pavilion, it was embraced as a lefty-leaning civic improvement. Basking in the gesture, just yards from the boardwalk, 23-year-old participant Richard Taylor squirted out an angry pig in a cop uniform who's beating a kid holding a can of spray paint--and outspoken became over-the-top. Neighborhood and police organizations howled, and now, some 16 months after the Krylon dried, the conflict that the mural started may not be resolved until a federal court date in February. Taylor has conceded the ultimate loss of the serve-and-protect swine. But, funny enough, his proposed replacement--a boar chasing immigrants--has also been rejected by Los Angeles brass, and the artist is suing for violation of his First Amendment rights. "What's unreal about the controversy is that the pavilion is smack-dab in the middle of a celebration of free speech," says Niki Tennant, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles city government. "Venice is the last place you'd think would lack tolerance for graffiti." Well, welcome to the burgeoning graffiti-intolerance club. Graffiti, its foes like to say, is art when you spray it on your own property but a crime everywhere else, and it's currently being eradicated like never before. One estimate has the United States spending $15 billion this year battling graffiti and related vandalism. In Southern California, the Multiagency Graffiti Intervention Committee, an L.A.--county cooperative that includes law enforcement and transit authorities, pays $42 million annually to remove unwelcome "pieces" and "tags" from walls, buses, and trains in 88 cities. Chicago spends approximately $4 million a year removing graffiti, "and it's just about the most popular money spent by the city," says Terry Levin, of the Department of Street and Sanitation. "Last fall we cleaned our 400,000th building." But no government office follows graffiti-removal stats with the zeal of New York's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. From July of 1994 through 1997, the city's Department of Transportation carefully measured some 21.5 million square feet of eliminated gloss and scribble--lending a linear measure to Giuliani's "quality of life" improvements. "The city was so covered that it had become a walking advertisement to paint more graffiti," says the mayor's press secretary, Colleen Roche. "Nobody wants to live where there's a written invitation to deface property." Some entrepreneurs are taking to the anti-graffiti crusade like a tagger to a blank municipal wall. Scores of fledgling companies now provide the equipment, labor, and materials to paint, blast, and coat surfaces in aiding the cause. "Wherever there's a marked surface, there's a business opportunity," says Frank Castellano, president and CEO of Antek International in Valencia, California. Despite the fact that Castellano still answers Antek's phones ("We've been able to do a lot more without office expenses," admits the insurance-marketer-cum-graffiti-stopper), his company has gone public, and he's hoping to do $100 million in business within five years. For the graffitiati, however, the coast-to-coast whitewash represents the demise of spray and be seen. "I'll give this to Giuliani: He's doing a damn good job keeping the highways from looking dumpy," says Per One, a longtime Bronx graffiti artist with another name and a day job. "But there's no satisfaction when you hit a subway train and it's immediately taken from service and buffed out. The stuff just don't ride around." A Miami artist known as Raven, who publishes the graffiti zine 12 Ounce Prophet, insists that society is wielding a deaf ear: "These kids are often lost and trying to create an identity. The graffiti-removal movement is about making everything look pretty regardless of what's going on beneath the surface." The importance of not being obscured is the same point being stressed by supporters of the ACLU-backed Taylor, creator of the uniformed pig art. Indeed, their unlawful censure suit against Venice is so strong that city government may wiggle free with an out-of-court compromise. But in a manner, the case has already been settled: Taylor's infamous image has been tagged by others, dishonoring a rule among artists not to deface sizable works with more graffiti. The removal of that paint hasn't happened so quickly. |
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