10 posts tagged “zeitgeist”
We watched this (thanks again to Tanya) at the office a few days ago:
One big mistake is that the Toyota Avanza (the car behind the lucky recipient) is in shot for a lot longer than the Hyundai that the owner, Todd Jamison, was presented with.
Uncensored, since some of the words I didn’t want to share are no longer there, my Vox tag cloud:
Interesting, compared to the earlier one I posted. I assume Vox adjusts the tag cloud for currency. Some remarks about my personal Zeitgeist:
- there were a lot of posts either about 2008, but 2009 seems to be catching up rapidly;
- the US president got more mentions than Sec. Clinton, and the Republican candidates seem to have fallen by the wayside;
- Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt appear neck in neck, but there John Simm’s name does not appear. Jason O’Mara, his American counterpart, has slightly fewer mentions than Philip Glenister, who remains present. ABC, BBC, Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes all appear, but Ashes to Ashes’ lettering is comparatively small;
- still plenty of mentions about Lucire and Lucire TV and Miss Universe and Miss New Zealand pageants;
- New Zealand and USA seem to have a great deal of mentions and are probably close in number, with the UK, India and China following, and New Zealand is also detailed as Aotearoa, its original and still current name;
- New York appears to be the most mentioned city in this blog of late, with Wellington following (in both English and Māori) and Auckland third;
- there are more humour tags than politics’ ones;
- there’s courtship and dating but no romance;
- Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Ford are the only car brands, but GM gets mentioned.
If you were to make a mix tape to sum up 2008, what would the first track be? Please share that song with us.
Tape? I may be old-fashioned but even I have moved from tapes. (Nothing beats an LP though.)
The conclusion of Xanadu on Broadway deserves a note, too, especially with Kerry Butler as Kira, spoofing Olivia Newton-John’s Australian accent and exaggerating her singing style. Newton-John’s favourite song in the original musical was ‘Suspended in Time’, here performed by Butler and co-star Cheyenne Jackson:
[Cross-posted] Remember Xanadu? It’s become somewhat of a cult hit even though in 1980 it was considered Olivia Newton-John’s mega-turkey. Stylistically, it sits uncomfortably between the 1970s and 1980s, as though there was a vacuum in between the decades. In one scene, Michael Beck insists to Gene Kelly that ‘It’s the ’80s’, but you know that it must have been shot in 1979 and people had not rebelled against disco at the time.
Of course, reality tells us that you can’t mark off decades so clearly: elements of the 1970s necessarily continue into the 1980s, and some of what we regard as 1980s style had their roots in the decade before.
But by 1982 there’s no doubt that one was in the 1980s: Rick Dees poked fun at ‘Disco Duck’ on Solid Gold and even ABBA no longer could do number-one hits.
While there aren’t clear decade-dividers, there is a sense among us, as people, to want to bring new things into each era. Who can forget the sense of optimism we all faced as January 1, 2000 came around, even though it wasn’t technically the new millennium yet? We saw the year number beginning with 2 and it was a big deal. All those science-fiction films predicting a new era in the twenty-first century brought with them a sense of anticipation—and those that didn’t forecast the end of mankind in 1999 suggested that we might be a nicer bunch in the 2000s than we were in human history’s most violent, murderous 100 years.
Here we are in 2008 and not that much has changed. We definitely aren’t nicer; in western countries we might well be more paranoid. But these are, in my reckoning, not twenty-first-century issues. This is leftover business from the twentieth century that we have not sufficiently dealt with, and we still have the opportunity to do something about it.
Terrorism and nutty red brigades were with us through much of my childhood but various western democracies thought they could turn their backs on them. Arafat’s PLO came to the fore in the 1970s, not the 1990s. The negative effects of globalization have been with us since the postwar period. As has communism in Red China, which has brought us the censorship that western media are only now, with days to go before the Beijing Olympics, making a song and dance about.
Just as a new decade does not begin to be “felt” till two years in, a new century won’t be felt till, I reckon, its second decade begins.
The twentieth might well have been marked by our arrogance and over-dependence on technology as the Titanic set sail. And as that century dawned, indeed we were bullish about globalization brought about by shipping routes and the British Empire. As the Titanic sank, we were reminded that we could never be over-confident about technology. We might have said a few years before that we had too much to lose from going to war, with the expansion of global trade, but humankind sank into the Great War with new innovations of aeroplanes and machine-guns.
Yet humans remain optimistic as we head into the 2010s. I would say there are more Americans hopeful about Sen. Obama’s race toward the White House than Sen. McCain’s at this stage, regardless of the latter’s attack advertising—because Obama has not defined things well. There is a sense of casting off the twentieth century. You see the same in so many areas as people question the economic system, politics, and how we are exposed to global disasters through the media. You also see questioning of the media. All of this inquisitiveness seems to be happening on a wider scale, maybe sparked off by authors and thinkers writing in the last part of the twentieth century trying to lay some useful groundwork for the rest of us as their ideas got out.
What sort of century is emerging? We would like to think that we can solve all the world’s problems because we are blessed with the ability and desire; yet institutions seem to constantly thwart our collective wills. Various individuals take matters into their own hands, be they international philanthropists setting up funds for poorer countries or bloggers trying to break the mainstream media’s deadlock on what we are allowed to know.
Meanwhile, corporations try to feed consumers products as a substitute for Orwellian soma—not necessities which we should look at having, but unnecessary items that take us away from being true to ourselves.
I don’t have the answers to what sort of century we will face. I know what sort of century I would like to face. One where people from all walks of life can realize their dreams, where people can receive the education they want, and where deceit and avarice are shown to be harmful to the collective good. One where imagination and innovation drive forward human progress, rather than impeded by society or corporations because they view them as threats.
The answer might lie in examining the changes in style between decades. Were they the result of companies dictating fashion or some deeper change in the Zeitgeist, driven by many individuals?
I like to think it was the latter. When the end of 1999 came about, I certainly was not told to head into town to see how crowded or fun Wellington city was. I just went. Something drew me to it.
There is something to be said about people driving the mood of the planet, and how we still have a chance to shape the twenty-first century’s destiny as we cast off the negative effects of the previous one.
We know where we goofed. We have seen it in the destruction of freedom or the greed of certain parties; we have seen it through a failure to understand other cultures or how institutions block aid from getting to the people. We know there must be solutions, and we now have a twentieth-century invention—the internet—where we can band together, make some noise and maybe generate real progress. We just need to wake up, realize what is useless in our lives, what we can do for ourselves and others, and get back to first principles. Technology, for instance, is here to serve us, rather than direct us into buying the next little toy to waste away whatever precious seconds we have each day.
We might define the new century through new energies (hybrid cars are so last century—we can do better), through new ways of reaching people in need (which we are already doing through unprecedented dialogue), and through redefining institutions to turn them into agents of change rather than stiflng collectives of people.
It’s through simplifying our lives and our directions that we can sense what we might want in the twenty-first century. Have a think—and maybe we can just put something out there into that Zeitgeist as this century really begins unfolding.
[Cross-posted] Yves Saint Laurent’s passing is such a shock to the fashion media because he was the world’s greatest couturier.
When we broke the news on Sunday night at Lucire, it was obvious that we were marking the end of an era.
The casual observer might say that the end occurred in 2002, when Saint Laurent retired to his house in Marrakech. But while he remained alive, there was always that link to one of fashion’s pure geniuses.
Saint Laurent, perhaps like Mozart, did not have formal training when he created clothes for his sister and mother. He was talented enough to be accepted into the Chambre Syndicale. When he created the trapèze look at Dior in 1958, he was not following some great marketing-trend projection. Nor were brand advisers present with studies about liberating women when he gave the world le smoking or the safari look.
It was only with hindsight that we, the media, made the connections for him, hiding the real inspirations that he had in his quest to become France’s greatest couturier.
The great irony is that as his influence grew, so did the YSL brand, which meant his name became so tied up with marketing, business, financial projections and trend forecasts.
While that brought Saint Laurent wealth, it was always clear that he was happiest simply being a créateur. It was a sign that it was better to preside over a genuine maison de l’amour than seeing if money bought happiness.
His passing perhaps marks the demise of a pure couturier who drew from something within, finding the essence not only of his muses, such as Catherine Deneuve, but of himself.
Today’s couturiers, while incredibly talented, are also more calculated and savvy. Saint Laurent could leave the calculations and savvy to his lover and company president, Pierre Bergé.
I am not saying one method is better than the other. But I do miss that era where we praised Saint Laurent because he was simply so good at what he did, setting the Zeitgeist for the simple reason that he did not watch the Zeitgeist.
Today’s designers, such as Gaultier and Ford, and even to an extent Saint Laurent’s contemporary, Lagerfeld, have a more balanced outlook, which obviously have kept them away from the down sides of Saint Laurent’s behaviour: his severe depression and his reclusiveness, especially during the 1980s.
It is also Yves Saint Laurent the recluse, the victim of school bullying, the man who saw himself as a latter-day Swann, that also makes today’s story all the more compelling. But again, it hides that single-minded desire, one which few of us would dare to do because we know of its personal cost.
When President Sarkozy made him an Officier of the Legion d’Honneur, the title of ‘hero’ wasn’t inappropriate for Saint Laurent.
He is a hero for that reason, and he has set the bar so high that it will take an extraordinary person to beat his record.
The Proust connection—Saint Laurent as Swann, by his own reckoning—does point to how he saw himself, cast out by society. It is invalid, because we are all the poorer now.
We have lost one of the purest designers; one fewer great figure on whom we can not only report, but bask in his genius.
Carla Bruni has been romantically linked to French president Nicolas Sarkozy, according to Point de Vue magazine in France. The cover headline reads (translated), ‘Carla Bruni: the woman in the President’s heart.’ The magazine launches tomorrow (December 19) and contributes to the largely positive press M. Sarkozy has been receiving since his election. (More at the Lucire Insider blog today.)
[Cross-posted] Honda’s Takeo Fukui has said that he will put the world’s first hydrogen fuel-cell car on the market by next year, with a sticker price of around £50,000. The car emits water vapour as its “exhaust”.
This is fabulous thinking: rather than hold the technology back, as all the other automakers are doing, Honda is going full steam ahead and pioneering.
In one move, it’s overcome any slowdown in the Japanese car market and made an impact in an eco-conscious world.
And £50,000 isn’t a lot to pay for a large sedan that’s brimming with technological advancements.
Asked how the new Honda FCX might overcome the absence of hydrogen filling stations, Mr Fukui gave a great answer that shows the company has really considered its car in a historical context: ‘When the car was invented, countries weren’t full of petrol stations. When the demand is there it will happen.’
It makes Red China’s copying of western automotive models seem outmoded and silly, considering that it had nearly a carte blanche with which to play in the 1980s and 1990s. That could have meant jumping ahead of the rest of the world without having the worries of old plant costs to contend with.
It also shows that brands will only get you so far: major leaps ahead like this, without reference to what the establishment might think, can spell success when it taps in to the Zeitgeist. And Honda has detected that the world in the late-2000s is still going to be obsessed with global warming and climate change. It has detected that there is a rebellion against brands that do not help the planet. And it might have also considered that there will be a rationalization in the brands we deal with, so why not get ahead now?
I quite like this collection of magazine covers, not just because it includes Lucire. It is a snapshot of the Zeitgeist, typographically, stylistically, and culturally. See which celebrities are “in”, how prominent the type is, the overall design balance, and how the covers might work side by side. It’s reasonably current, too.
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