by David Byrne
The folks here love their private clubs, and they’ve only admitted women to some of them since the 1980s, or so I am told. The clubs must be a legacy of the class system, which lingers obstinately in so many forms. In this classist view one must separate oneself from the hoi polloi if possible—in speech, in dress, and of course where one drinks. Even if you’re not upper class, you need to wall yourself off from those slightly beneath you or even those alongside you who are different in some way. Hipsters need their clubs and workingmen need theirs. Once everyone is in their place—in their appropriate drinking establishment in this case—there is order and peace in the world.
Another remnant of class and caste is the notion that everyone should stay in their place and station. To get involved in areas, jobs, and even (or especially) ideas beyond your station is bad form and is frowned upon. It is viewed as pretentious (if you’re going from low to high) and inauthentic (if you’re going from high to low). A film on the life of the late Joe Strummer brings out his diplomatic and vaguely upper-class upbringing and how he did a perfect job of hiding it—or at least of keeping it quiet—as it would not have sat well with the image of the anarchic justice-seeking punk hero he was to become. I always found that pure-rogue pose a little suspect regardless of anyone’s upbringing, but in later years Strummer and his collaborators ventured into other musical areas that didn’t require him to carry the burden of that image of a working-class hero. He seemed liberated in a way. Similarly, Prince Charles gets roasted every time he speaks out about organic farming or the evils of modern architecture and urban planning. The criticism leveled at poor Charles is usually along the lines of “royals should be seen and not heard” more than anything substantive. What difference does it make anyway where you come from? Can’t you be judged by what you do, make, and say, and not by what caste you were born into?
All Happy Families Are . . . Eccentric
I meet Michael Morris, of the public arts organization Artangel, at a gallery opening. There are security people at the door, and I spy someone holding a guest list. Michael e-mailed me earlier that he’d “put us on the list.” For an art gallery opening? Well, lots of New York galleries now have hired security guards, just like museums, so I guess guest lists and velvet ropes are next.
It is a pretty spectacular place, this gallery—floor after floor of exhibition spaces in an industrial zone in funky Hackney, topped by a large room with one glass wall leading to a balcony that looks out over the skyline. Young women with trays offer glasses of champagne. The current show is of paintings by the late Alice Neel, a portrait painter who worked in New York for many decades. She was scorned for her old-fashioned and conservative style—painted portraits—and then, near the end of her life, she experienced a short burst of acceptance. Now, decades later, there is a new appreciation welling up again. Maybe the work looks prescient? Maybe it looks prescient every decade or so, whenever a slew of younger artists do work that is vaguely similar to hers? In that way maybe she’s being used to validate the present, and in turn the present is being used to validate the past?
I am introduced to Grayson Perry, the transvestite potter who won the Turner Prize a few years ago. “It’s about time a transvestite potter got this prize!” he said when he won. He also said that it was more significant that a potter got the prize than a transvestite. He’s right. I have one of his pots. He covers them with images and often with rude texts. Here’s one called Boring Cool People:
He is in full Victorian baby-doll little-girl drag tonight, looking like Alice in Wonderland when she suddenly got big. A blond wig, a floral pinafore frock, and bare legs ending in little pink socks with ruffles and white patent leather Mary Janes. (Where does he get this stuff in his size? Someone must make them by hand. Yes, he confirmed, and they’re not cheap.)
He knows that I have one of his pieces, and he was thrilled when he heard that news years ago. I am thrilled to meet him. He is married and has a daughter—I saved a family picture that was in the UK papers when he won the Turner Prize. In the picture, he stands in his dress alongside his attractive and seemingly ordinary wife (she’s a shrink!), she giving a full-on laugh, and in front is their daughter, beaming a huge smile, obviously happy that Dad has won the most prestigious art prize in the land. Dad puts on an expression of mock horror at all the fuss, but clearly it’s all in fun. If this family can be happy—if this family can even exist—then thank God for the English toleration of eccentrics. In another place this lot might be miserable, oppressed, and sequestered. Not all cultural stereotypes—such as the English eccentric—are completely inaccurate or harmful.
We chat casually for a bit and then C suddenly unleashes a volley of what I think of as pretty probing questions: “Do you do a bunch of different characters?” (Yes. The little-girl character is called Claire.) “When did you first start dressing up?” (He was thirteen and he tried on his sister’s ballet outfit.)
Front and Back: Cultural Stereotypes 2
Later I have dinner at a hip restaurant where I am sitting close to a largish couple from Northern Ireland, who, to be honest, don’t seem to belong in such a groovy temple. (Here I go applying my own class evaluations and stereotypes—what are they doing in this place?) He’s an IT functionary in town for business meetings, and she’s along for the ride on the expense account, or so I would guess. They look like northerners on holiday in the big city, but they mention that they’re staying next door, at the Ritz, which is more than I would imagine an ordinary regional branch manager could afford. It’s way more than I can afford. They explain some of the local dishes to us. Jersey Royals are a miniscule type of potato only available at select times of year. I look over as we talk, and either from a glass of wine or some medical condition the woman has turned bright red all over—face, neck, and arms. But they’re both so unassuming, easygoing, and lacking in all pretense that after a minute or two I don’t even notice it.
The restaurant has doormen dressed in traditional English tails, as does our hotel. I love the juxtaposition between the two opposing poles of dress and manner: the reserved, polite, perfect, and solicitous staff in contrast with the world of theatrical shock, horror, and gross-out represented by Chapman Bros., Damien Hirst, Amy Winehouse, chavs, and football hooligans. It all has to come out, I guess—the bigger the front the bigger the back. You can’t have one without the other. I’m reminded of the ads that plaster the phone booths offering spankings and humiliation. One assumes that for an upper-class type especially, keeping it all in and maintaining that reserve can get to be a bit much sometimes, so one needs to be put in one’s place artificially and theatrically to somewhat redress the balance of power. I’m jumping to national stereotypes myself here.
In Venezuela there are chains of coffee shops where the clientele, almost exclusively male, is waited on by attractive women in tight outfits. The twist—what separates this chain from ordinary coffee shops—is that the interior architecture allows the female waitstaff to tower over the men. The women are positioned behind the counter on a slightly elevated platform. This means the typical Latin macho man is either being put in his place, and enjoying it, or that he is being transported back to his childhood, where his primary view is of his mother’s breasts looming conveniently above him.
Toffs and Yobs: Cultural Stereotypes 3
We go for drinks at a nice place in Soho, a white tablecloth place, but nothing hoity-toity. However, after a few minutes, while we are having a drink, a couple of football louts stroll in, shoulders back, tense, tattooed, and possibly a little high. They scope out the place briefly and then begin shouting something to the effect of “come the revolution you lot will all be sorry.” There is a short face-off with the poor gay maître d’, who backs away—he’s sure he’s going to get punched—as the rest of the staff reach for their phones.
The yobs push farther into the restaurant and toss out a few more choice insults toward the worried diners. (The restaurant is next door to the Ivy, a scenester hangout
. Maybe the anarchist louts got the address wrong?)
Nothing happens, and the pair wanders out. I smile at one, but he murmurs something about “yer all gonna get it,” which seems bad manners, to say the least. No policeman inside these fellows.
They’re gone, and the maître d’ apologizes to the customers and then disappears and we never see him again.
British class antagonism lives on. It keeps the yobs in their place and makes the toffs nervously squirm in theirs. No wonder they like private clubs!
Later in the evening I dismantle my bike in the hotel room. The seat, handlebars, and wheels pop off and then it folds into a large suitcase. Time to go home to New York. Sometimes the hotel staff doesn’t like me bringing a bike inside, but often it arrives hidden in its big suitcase so they haven’t a clue that I’m up in the room with an Allen wrench and rubber gloves to keep the grease off my hands, assembling—or in this case, disassembling—my means of transport.
The businessman across from me in the Heathrow lounge is making baby sounds into his cell phone.
I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. news-magazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren’t biased as well—they certainly are—but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed—there is the “reporting” that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases.
On arriving in New York one immediately sees that the labor and service jobs are almost all being done by African Americans and recent immigrants. The first things you notice in the airport corridors are ads and banks of TVs on which CNN or Fox News is running constantly. The propaganda blast starts the minute one steps off the plane—there’s no option except to be inundated.
There is, however, the almost welcome third-world aspect of New York that mitigates this obnoxious propaganda just a little bit—the clunky lopsided baggage carts you have to pay for, (despite most people not having dollars yet), the touts offering rides, and the generally aggressive chaotic hubbub—cursing, shouting, pushing, and shoving—as the exhausted foreign traveler wonders how in the world he or she is going to get home. This anarchic arrival must be frightening to a foreigner, but to me it’s almost a welcome relief. It’s honest, crude—the whole city as one big souk.
San Francisco
It was raining when I arrived here last night, but today the weather has cleared up and this city sparkles with that crystalline northern Californian light that makes everything pop out from the background. All the buildings and people have hard, crisp edges. It’s bucolic and hard to believe—a picture postcard, unreal. The folding bike I brought will come in handy.
San Francisco is philosophically and politically bike-friendly, but not geographically—the famous hills can make one think twice about some trips around town, even though the city proper is concentrated like Manhattan, or a European city. The local cycling organization has issued a wonderful map that shows, by the deepness of the red shading, the steepness of the streets. A street shaded light pink is a mild slope, but a dark red street is a major hill to be avoided unless you’re a masochist. Luckily, this map allows one to plan a hill-free trip at a glance. I wouldn’t have thought so, but one can plot a route to and from almost anywhere and avoid the worst hills—almost.
My friend Melanie C arranges a field trip to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, just south of here, and lunch with their chief designer Jonathan Ive. Ive’s team designed the original iMac and its successors, the original iBook and its successors, the Power Mac, the Power Mac G4 Cube, the PowerBook, the iPod family, and more.
Ive does a brief show-and-tell with a deconstructed PowerBook, showing us how even the inside is thoughtfully and elegantly designed. He seems as proud of the intricate foldings and stampings of the invisible insides as he is of the elegant exterior. His point is that the design goes clear through: it’s not merely an appliqué on the outside to make it all seem groovy, but extends into stuff most of us will never ever see. In the Bauhaus and Wiener Werkstätte circles, extraneous decoration was verboten—thought to be inessential and superfluous to the integrity of the object or architecture—and therefore it had to go. Adolf Loos famously equated decoration with the devil. Might Ive’s pride at the thorough design of the PowerBooks harbor a little of that legacy?
I don’t think this show-and-tell is all just ego and pride. Ive implies that the elegant insides actually make the thing work better too—that good design equals better functioning—that if the true path of good design is followed scrupulously, then not only does the thing look very cool, but it is also a better object all around. Not only has the devil of superfluous decor been banished, but there is also the implication that good design is therefore morally good too—it’s on the side of the angels. It feels a little bit like he’s done this presentation before, but it’s a beautiful piece of work all the same. I suspect, however, that we’re not going to hear him or anyone else think out loud about what they’re actually working on at the moment, and say, for example, “Now if we could get all this into a phone . . .” (This was pre-iPhone, mind you.)
I mention that I am in the midst of a collaboration with Fatboy Slim (whose real name is Norman Cook) and Jonathan says he is having dinner tonight with his friend John Digweed, one of the world’s top electronic DJs and a pal of Norman’s. At first I am mildly surprised. I wonder if Jonathan listens to dance music as he designs? But then I see this guy in front of me with short-cropped hair and a T-shirt and realize that, yeah, he looks like a slightly older version of any British club kid. Wonder if it gets boring for him here in Cupertino?
Cupertino is south of San Francisco and west of San Jose. What little town there is lies nestled among the coastal hills and wineries. There isn’t much here—some business campuses, malls, and an amazing Asian grocery store. The rolling hills to the west are home to many of the new mansions that the technocrats have built. Not so far away are Hewlett-Packard, Google, Sun Microsystems, and the other Silicon Valley companies that have turned the area that previously was known as the home of Stanford University and the sleepy little town of San Jose into a computer and IT powerhouse. The area features an intense confluence of engineers, nerds, techies, entrepreneurs, visionaries, and hangers-on.
From what I can tell, there’s really not much to do around this part of the bay. I ride my bike fairly aimlessly down clean, spotless arteries and see no one around—not walking or biking anyway. All roads lead to places that are versions of what I just left. I ask if folks here go up to San Francisco to catch shows, exhibits, or to sample the wildly innovative cuisine in the San Francisco restaurants. Nope, these folks just love their work, so they stay put here in the beautiful suburbs, working late, or they take their work home.
There are massive amounts of money here. In the era of the Carnegies, Fricks, Mellons, Dukes, and Lauders, billionaires would make a visible fuss of supporting the local art museum, hospital, library, or other charitable institution or cause—as Bill Gates has done with his Gates Foundation and Paul Allen did with the Experience Music Project. But for the most part I get the feeling that this bunch prefers facing the challenges within their own chosen fields—software development, Internet technology, cool gizmos, and what happens when you bring all those together. I get the feeling that at least some of them don’t really care that much about all the money they are making either—they’re too busy to count it. It’s all about as real as Second Life.
I remember San Francisco during the earlier dot-com boom. Back then everyone was going to start their own online business and the world was going to change overnight and investors were lining up to throw money at every geek with a
vague idea, a pitch, and some programming skills. The fervor and enthusiasm at that time might have had parallels with the Manhattan Project and the zeal focused on developing the atomic bomb. That is, it was exciting and potentially world changing. But here that same missionary passion was embodied in the wacky inventor/entrepreneur. There were Web site proposals for anything and everything—services for your pets or ones that would run all your errands for you. The future seemed preordained—no one was ever going to have to leave their house ever again. Every idea was a great idea, earthshaking, revolutionary. It’s no wonder the Web world is sometimes described as a legacy of the hippie era—but with more expensive toys.
It’s no accident that the humble garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began their partnership in Palo Alto is an icon here. Like Sun Studio in Memphis, where rock and roll was born, or Menlo Park, New Jersey, where Edison lit up the world, this funky little garage is revered partly because it’s nothing special. Its ordinariness is the point. Their first product was an audio oscillator for testing sound equipment. HP refers to it as “the tone heard round the world.”
The garage is considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley, which makes it the perfect visual metaphor for the anyone-can-do-it doctrine that is still alive and well around here. Start small, think big. Think out of the box. Think different.