Shepherd's Pie

Hell's Furnishings: Furniture Aesthetics after September 11

Momus's article for Metropolis where he responds to finding "A Clockwork Orange" in the "Good Furniture" section of a Japanese video store.

"...You wonder why so many films have used immaculate Modernist design as a symbol of fascism, an enemy of human agency: Welles's The Trial, Tati's Playtime, Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, Woody Allen's Sleeper. It's as if--for screenwriters, for literary people, for humanists--the achievement of a beautiful environment represents the end of all human struggle, and the termination of both their own utility and that of language. ..."

"...Japan takes the threat out of Western cultural products by stripping them of their transcendental values at the border. You could almost say that gays and Japanese prefer fetish (secretive, personal, deviant, diffuse, libertarian) to sexual intercourse (dutiful, social, normative, convergent, hegemonic). Intercourse is, finally, duty. Fetish is, in the end, glamour. ..."

via Marxy

posted by JRS @ 4:39 AM