Words Don't Come Easy

F R David, whoever he was, was right. So after the last few wordy posts which have filled me with a sense of dread as to how much time one could actually really spend doing this, not to mention the self loathing at having not done lots of grown up things that people have actually asked for, a couple of posts of more image based stuff.

Notes and Corrections:

BTW thanks to the generous and seemingly inexhaustibly curious author of this most excellent site, for his generous linkaging which has increased the readership of this blog by about 800%. A special shout out then to the reader in Qatar (who knew?) for their interest in obscure Dorset villages.

And finally, having re-read the salient chapter in The Village That Died for England, it's actually Fred Scott who accompanies Warren Chalk to the pub. David Greene is mentioned later. He also has this exhibition opening at the AA soon, which is well worth checking out.

Form Follows Fiction: A Brief History of Spaceship Design

If Modernism had it that Form follows Function, then how do you design something that has an imaginary function? If a reductive functionalism denies the role of culture in shaping the objects we design, then do objects with no function represent a kind of pure form of culture? Do they represent our dreams and fears somehow more purely, because the pragmatics and restrictions of 'real' design have been removed?

In the 1950's spaceships were rocket shaped and came in bright zingy colours. They zoomed purposefully off into space, styled to suggest a thrusting ambition. UFO's, by contrast were designed by aliens and therefore, for some reason, round. This abstract styling made them ambiguous vehicles, never clearly heading anywhere or with any clear purpose. Their threat was suggested not through aggresive styling but through their mute indifference.

In the late '60's and 70's all spaceships were white, styled like orbiting laboraties, with doors that slid silently open and endless corridors that stretched out like an existential maze. Then, in the 1980's, they became beige like early PC's, their flickering green MS Dos screens representing, perversely, a step back from the blinking colours of the '60's. Space became not a new frontier but a new source of dread, with spaceships full of leaking pipes and slowly failing technology. Today (an oxymoron in science fiction, but still) they seem to have taken on the baroque manifestations of ancient cities, flying pyramids of the sun and the moon, covered in vein like hieroglyphics and of vast planet-like scale. They are, perhaps, something to do with ancient wisdom, a distant sense of civilisation our technology has alienated us from.

The following is a brief, visual and highly partial history of spaceship design.

Municipal Analogue Shuffle Mode

The other day I went to the library. Actually I have been going to libraries a lot recently for professional reasons, but the other day I went to my local one and joined, on the evidence of an unpaid mobile phone bill, and walked back out again with 13 CD’s.

Once upon a time everyone went to the library. This was before they routinely shuffled a deck of twenty personal credit cards and had the illusory spending power of a small country. If you look at photos of, say, London in the 1960’s, the age range of cars on the street is probably around twenty years. If you looked at one now it would be three or four. Going to the library flies in the face of the logic of 21st century capitalism. The veins of consumer spending are so finely spread and run so deep that an institution not dedicated to it is like an archaic ruin, or a preserved fossil. It does funny things to your choices too.

Freed from the restrictions of having to use your own financial resources the mind can run rampant, unfettered by Added Interest on New Purchases, through lush musical pastures of delirious possibility. Constrained instead by Hackney Council’s limited spending capabilities and the arbitrary collective taste of the council employees charged with buying up what looks like the bits of Dalston Oxfam Shop not already featured, the librarie's CD collection is a bracingly random cross section through popular culture.

Basically you have to shelve any idea of going in to try to find something specific. It doesn’t work like that. Which is just as well for me as going into a music store (physical or digital) induces instant amnesia anyway. So it’s a lottery but one where a limited jackpot win awaits you every time. Freed from the need to be fashionable, niche, retro or cheap, freed in fact from almost any contemporary determinant of value, the library represents a social utopia of taste.

This is the opposite of personalised radio, which works on the basis that you might never have to hear anything that doesn’t already sound like something you have. It represents the endless refining of niche taste till your ears hurt with the over-familiarity and your brain folds in on itself. Unfortunately, I can’t get Xfm’s Personalised Radio to work on my mac, so I’m not quite sure how refined it can get.

It may be possible for instance to listen exclusively to Songs Featuring Excellent Voice Distortion (sample playlist: Kylie Minogue Put Yourself In My Place, Cher I believe, Sally Shapiro He Keeps Me Alive, ELO Mr Blue Sky) or Songs About Outer Space (The Beloved’s lost classic Outer Spaceman, The Carpenter’s Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Most Extraordinary Craft, Chris De Burgh’s A Spaceman Came Travelling) and nothing else. Or indeed Taylor Parke's Right Wing Rock. Ever. So, the choice is: the digital precision or refining your music taste into an ad campaign for the contents of your own head, or the random joys of municipal shuffle mode.