La felicidad es una esponja caliente (y fría)
Guillermo Fadanelli
1
Michael Sodeau Desks don’t seem to be man-made objects. They rise like plants out of the earth, they are rooted. When I sit in front of a desk my legs too become rooted, and on the surface of the desk lie toys, pencil sharpeners, adhesive tape, objects that bring me back to school. Even tyrants keep pencils in the drawers, and this makes them human.
6
Maison Martin Margiela Disappearing on command is, besides a privilege, proof of a mysterious talent. One must know to not be. Feminine feet touch the ground, but imagination gives them wings, and they are not. In mi wish shoes supplant an entire body, why do you want a body when you posses a symbol? The glass slippers are the only relic left of the erotic imagination: that is how it all began.
2
Terrence Kelleman Every time money takes a course I walk precisely in the opposite direction. It is not about ascetic ideals but a lousy nose. No wallet is capable of containing the bills that arrive in my hands. If wallets imploded instead of exploding they would look like a distinguished black hole of my reality: a wallet that folds unto itself until disappearing.
7
Felix Hoffmann Every night when he came home after work my father would ask me for an aspirin. What was in that pill that a strong and unbeatable man needed to take it? In the eyes of a child aspirin is a mystery, like conception or the spirit. And to think that there is a willow outside my house. Now I do not see it as a tree but as the very origin of the aspirin. To alleviate myself I take smaller and more potent pills: we all diminish, like soaps.
3 Kikuo Ibe
Time is the moving image of eternity (this idea has been preserved since Plato up until the far away times of Borges). The clock is not time but an object that measures the scale of human ingenuity. And a plastic watch? It’s a Dadaist act. Against the common custom of the gold watch, today wrists are bound to a Japanese watch. It’s not time but the times.
8
Nathan Frank y Richard Fine Health is the oblivion of the body: its silence. Only disease speaks to us, sometimes fatherly, sometimes with hate and determination. Nevertheless, in that two-hour flight in which I felt that bad, the stewardess extracted a medical chest and looked for pills. And I saw the open chest and its fragile and white objects, and the nurse stewardess’ delicate hands. And I felt better.
4
Reloj Digital The digital watch offers us an incomplete certainty, for it insists in exactly naming every particle of time. The dying man lies backwards to his sleeping woman, but they barely brush and he feels her body pulling away. “how can they keep on living together when death is present?” It is a scene from The Clock Without Hands, the novel by Carson McCullers. Language is like a clock without hands. Structuralism, on the other hand, is a digital enterprise.
5
Chuck Taylor How many times did I imagine myself fleeing through an alleyway while on my arms I carried my neighbors’ TV? My sneakers: Converse All Star. Could they be something else? Not white, but bone-colored, dirty, but effective. And all because I heard an old man saying that those where the thieves’ favorite sneakers. When I played basketball on cement courts and wore those sneakers I was a champion, that is to say, a phony. Not long ago I discovered a woman wearing her white Converse All Star and went blank: has fetishism reached these limits?
10 9 Set para Pic-nic
Pack 'n' carry + carriolier
Seating in the sidewalk’s metallic bench, the young girl places a plastic container on her legs. She waits for the pedestrians to clear away and in a moment of calmness opens the container and starts to eat its contents. She lowers her eyes every time an unforeseen pedestrian sees her and pokes into her food. She would wish her body turned into a snail at that moment. Has anyone known loneliness?
When she went to the country she would take a book with her. She chose it two or three days before the trip. Food came in second, until one birthday they gave her a picnic basket. And the books were gone. A quart of wine, some mushrooms cooked in garlic, white napkins, a loaf of bread cut in slices and the sheets of Jamón Serrano. Flaubert stopped surprising her and one afternoon, she and I sitting under the shade of a tree, I discovered her yawning as she read Bouvard y Pécuchet.
11 Greg Lynn -FORM
When she went to the country she would take a book with her. She chose it two or three days before the trip. Food came in second, until one birthday they gave her a picnic basket. And the books were gone. A quart of wine, some mushrooms cooked in garlic, white napkins, a loaf of bread cut in slices and the sheets of Jamón Serrano. Flaubert stopped surprising her and one afternoon, she and I sitting under the shade of a tree, I discovered her yawning as she read Bouvard y Pécuchet.
12 Ludwig Littman
“If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.” Yes, Clint Eastwood said it. And she asked me whether bad people have toasters. I can’t stand the bread loafs that jump up in the morning. They have a shape planned in advance, a thickness and certain consistency. You arrive to the ball and there is a partner of the same height waiting for you. No, definitely nothing is guaranteed.
16 17 Joseph Hudson
The sound of an authority is terrifying. It does not matter if it comes from a harmless or legendary whistle. There are some who experience tranquility at the voice of police, but some us feel our soul withering away. And the thing is the sound of authority changes with the wind.
Anónimo Juego de cucharas medidoras
In my old school, from elementary through high school, authorities used to get everyone in line from the tallest unto the shortest, but the short said that the line had to form the other way and that they were the first. “Men is the measure of all things”, stated the Greek sophist Protagoras of Abdera. And time is on their side. Humanism has not managed to solve this issue of spoons and distribution. There exist some too small and some grotesquely large.
13 Exprimidor de limones
To the writer Norman Mailer, that raging boxer, plastic represented the worst plague of our time. He was 37 seven years old when a plastic lemon squeezer was invented. It is possible that this squeezer could have gotten a smile out of him, and for a moment the idea of apocalypse would have left his mind and his world. And then to keep on fighting.
18 Sylvian N. Goldman
“A detached voice announces an offer on the home department. My shopping is one of the lankiest in the supermarket, on top of the squeaking of the wheels its contents are flimsy: a can of preserved goods and a bottle of rum. Night is about to fall and Glenn Milles is playing Chatanooga Choo Choo.” I wrote this fifteen years ago. The bicycle, the highway and the skates have not announced new times. On the other hand, the self-service shopping cart transported me to another age.
14 Anónimo Exprimidor de limones
“The more work resembles prostitution, the more tempting calling prostitution a job, becomes” Wrote Walter Benjamin. And I wonder whether squeezing lemons is similar to peeling potatoes and if both activities lead us to prostitution. No, as long as the lemons are few and the potatoes are few. Otherwise Marxism will fall upon us. A well-designed lemon squeezer, which is to say rugged and efficient, cannot be a symbol of oppression.
19 Solomon H Goldberg
Hairpins look like ants eating away at the head, or hungry larvae. Joe uses them to open doors and to fix an old watch. And Albert, the barkeeper, asks women for their hairpins in order to pick his teeth. “Give me a drink and I’ll lend you the pin, it is new and tastes like perfume”, answers back that elegant fatty. Usually thin and small objects terrify me: with patience, sooner or later someone will turn them into a weapon.
15 Reinhold Weiss
The associations between things and ideas that people make are not ruled by clear laws. Everything comes from nothing, an idealist would say. Who owns a small desk fan? Detectives do. Philip Marlow, Sam Spade, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Heath does away with the patience and cunning of the detectives; I don’t know if Chandler, Dashiell Hammett or Chester Himes would agree with me, but without a fan no case can be solved. The same thing happens with people who lack in grace: nothing to do. Graceless and without a fan: what hell.
20 Leo Hulseman
I was walking around Istambul, back in 88, about to board a ship so full that it couldn’t fit a cat. Then I discovered a water seller. I asked him for a drink and he gave me a glass, not a paper cone, I accepted it and while I drank it I knew I was absorbing the waters of the Bosphorus, and its disease, and all the dead bodies that sleep in the bottom of the sea. The water was splendid but had a smell I’ll never forget. A day later I was about to die in Pamukkale. Paper cones are beautiful and simple gymnastics: I discovered them once I didn’t need them.
21 Shinichiro Ogata
And if the food runs out… we’ll have to eat the dishes. Only if it is possible. And a paper tableware provokes that eating the dishes becomes not a desperate or pathetic act. I wish I could erase from my mind the image of my mother washing the dishes, and the nervous sound they made when she, tired of her labor, hit them one against the other; she wasn’t trying to break them, only to let us know she was tired. She loved beauty, but in her imagination, piled up tableware next to the sink hurt.
26 Mario Bellini
The abacus is a calculation board. A brief biblical night befell and the next morning the abacus woke up turned into a plastic divisumma. It can happen to any of us: starting at the beginning and finishing prior to the start. It is true that time moves from the future towards the present. Otherwise technology would not be understood.
22 Bidón
In the trunk of the old Plymouth there were a tire, a jack, a plastic hose and a jerry can. The rest was called enthusiasm. The car belonged to my father and had shark-fins. It was back in 66. Since then, the image of the jerry can gives me relief. When the car stalled on the middle of the road and refused to go any further, a biped with the surname of my father would walk to the nearest gas station and came back with the jerry can full of fuel. We returned tired, the bipeds, after so much walking. We would wish we were German, as the inventors of the jerry can, but one cannot want to be the thing in itself.
27 Anónimo Vaporera
Family is a soup. A good soup can be cooked by boiling water and adding bread, onions, salt and a piece of wood. Now: an enormous steam pot frightens me because there are all kinds of physical disgraces that could fit in there: from a rat to a tamal. And regardless of its disproportionate presence, the steam pot instills security in people, it is a shinning monument, and means: “In this house we can organize a feast. As long as the family is satisfied.”
23 Walter Hunt
A cluster of small metal locks are a prudent image of philosophy. Kant would have liked a philosophy without words to avoid any fissures. On the contrary, Gadamer, Feyerben and Rorty knew that knowledge is foremost conversation and bondage. And something near a conversation is a myriad of metallic locks. Does it seem foolish?
28 Tomás y Frantisek Grebners
In his person I have tasted the pleasure of drinking a cup of coffee, while he plays with a lump of sugar. This man has dedicated his entire soul to contemplation. He is a Platonic and knows that ideal forms give us notice of their perfection through lumps of sugar or aspirins. There are some that are pleased with the brute shapes, but not this man, a hermit. I remain faithful to the sugar jar and mediocrity.
24 Ernie Fraze
“Intelligence is not tiresome, but its fruits fester”, wrote Nicolás Gómez Dávila. A can that does not open would be the philosophical invention by antonomasia; there are some in museums, but not in stores. And when I open my can I know something has ended even before it started. The liquid sleeps no more, it turns into a living thing. Disposable cans are a product of engineering and do not rot, they only change their function. Hundreds of cans in a self-service shopping cart, what kind of metaphor is that?
29 Diseño Popular Cesto
When I was Young I read B. Traven and met the story of Mr. Winthrop, the foreigner who wanted to do business with the Oaxacan indian that weaved paper baskets. Business did not prosper because the indian did not want to build baskets in series. We’ve all heard this story. It is a parable about restraint and prudence. It is a corny story, like the tales my thinnest aunt told me. And me watching her legs
25 Ralph Gamber
The saliva of bees helps to produce honey. Afterwards men store it and sell it in pots. And I have the impression that a pot that used to contain honey cannot contain anything else: that is it. Bitterness is a good partner because it keeps you alert, sweetness seizes the mood like an incurable disease. Cioran said that love is just a saliva swap, perhaps if he had thought of bees his image would have been even more caustic.
30 Diseño popular Mulitas
“Altruism in itself depends of the recognition of other people’s reality and of the equivalent capacity of looking at oneself as a simple individual among many.” Thomas Nagel wrote this. I agree with his definition, but risk a yet more obscure phrase: “Altruism are the mules”.
31 Diseño popular Banco plegable
Proverbs won’t abandon us: sayings, aphorisms, epitaphs and prayers containing wisdom. “Wait by the door of your house and you will see your enemy’s corpse pass by.” It is a Chinese proverb. And if instead of waiting by the door we do it in a foldable bench? And not by the door, but anywhere: at a lake’s shore or in a hotel’s terrace. The bench we can take everywhere and in that way the enemy’s corpse won’t escape.
32 Francisco Torres y Colectivo Tlama
John Ford: “In the United States there are no roads, only highways.” In design, shapes come form patient observation. When someone gets confortable in a couch you can tell by his face that he is confortable. Then the world, though for a brief moment, is also at peace.
36 37 Arik Levy
Hands get in the way because we gave given them some rights. Imagine, relating, and then ideology: how many ideas come from doing? Hands have as many rights as machines to give shape, but they can go beyond a human horizon. Still they alter technological fields. It won’t be forever.
Anónimo Batidor de globo
Movement is the principle of evil. The hermit saints knew it: immobility and wisdom know each other. But the mixer causes no evil and from its movement, cakes are born. “They are cheap and won’t break down”, a lady told me about these metallic mixers. “Yes, you’re right”, I answered, but I was thinking of something else…
33 Charles Stillwell
When I was a child everything was wrapped with Kraft paper. Paper bags are elegant. My uncle Eduard always covered his liquor bottles with a paper bag. He was ashamed to drink, but even more ashamed of not drinking. Paper has many histories. Plastic is writing his: the final one.
38 Cuaderno Moleskine
I move towards a bookshelf and take one of the Moleskine notebooks full of notes. I promise to write here the first thing I read and then a phrase written by Peter Handke appears, which says: “In the streets the cars are open and you can go inside when you are tired.” And I wonder if this is possible: to write a phrase and think that it says something. To point at that phrase between all of the words and believe.
34 Anónimo Silla Corona
When I lived in Berlin, at 20th Innsbrucker Str., there were four foldable chairs in the kitchen: they didn’t say Corona, but several times my guests and me had a beer in the morning instead of yogurt. Wood chairs were found in the dining room, but were not as confortable as the metallic ones: I believe that mean and miserable souls once separated the kitchen from the dining room.
39 Charola para hielos
The Ice Tray has failed. Ice is never enough, and there are problems when one tries to take it out. And it has a certain taste and fauna. That, the refrigerator’s temperament, is what ruins the plans: the fucking temperament. But the tray must be there, like the mirror in a woman’s purse.
35 Tokujin Yoshioka
Doors are for being opened, this is a saying, but a shut door is a blessing. Chairs in a closed and inhospitable house are beautiful because they evoke the presence of someone who is not there. The designer, the artist and the engineer try to create a chair that turns out confortable for the person who hasn’t yet arrived. If they had a different intention, then they would surely lose the battle. All of science concentrated in generating the comfort of the absent.
40 Anónimo Escoba
“My wife is allergic to dust — said the shopkeeper—, poor thing, but what is dust? That is a very serious problem. I’ve had many problems and more even at the time when I used to give credit for merchandise, but dust, that definitely has no solution. Debtors sooner or later come and pay, but dust…” “And the broom won’t do it —this man told me—, no broom will be able to remove the dust.” His wife will die, but the broom will remain frank and unchangeable.
41 David M. Smith
I went out a February morning to a discreet restaurant with good food. The waiters recognize me and smile. Without asking, they bring the Ribera del Duero that goes with my dish. The piano lady is old and nice, she reminds me of Joseph Roth, not to one of his novels, but to Joseph Roth before he died. Suddenly, music stops and the waiters look at me. The captain has discovered that in one of my shirt’s shoulders I carry, without knowing it, a clothespin. Everybody laughs. I take out the small object and, right after that, as if nothing had happened, music goes on its way.
42 Anónimo Bolsa para líquidos
My stomach is a rubber bag, but it supports my stupid anxiety, I imagine it moving in the middle of the night, sleepy. And I wonder what omens would sprout in the scryer’s mind after reading my insides. We would coincide in that those insides won’t last more than my fists. More rubber bags in my future, and no new stomach.
47 46 Peter Holmblad
Karl F A Wienke
Waiters are not your friends. They are as helpless as you are. Take care of their hands, for there they carry an object that can hurt you. And in their white jackets’ pockets, the poison you need to sleep.
English poets sometimes commit vulgarly arbitrary actions, as Alexander Pope did in his song The Rape of the Lock: “Men prove with child, as pow'rful fancy works, /And maids turn'd bottles, call aloud for corks.” And I still don’t know what he meant.
43 OOMS
Materials, as different as they might be, find a spot where conversation is possible. This conversation is the curiosity that takes shape through human sensibility. There are already too many objects in the world, and only some of them are related and turned into a habit.
48 Anónimo. Malla de gallinero
Pluck a chicken and you will have the man who Plato described, the featherless biped. That is what Diogenes did to mock definitions. Today we suspect that almost all definitions are an object of laughter and contempt. But plucking a chicken is a different mater. What you need these days, anyway, is a netting to contain the featherless, a park, a humanism, some norms in the shape of a henhouse’s wire netting. So much perfection hasn’t yet been achieved.
44 Macintosh Powerbook
A grey computer is a good signal. Such was the Powerbook 170. The graveyard of my old computers is so populated that their bodies get confused. I keep their corpses in the closet, but I have lost the memory. And literary invention is not enough for progress to return to daily life. My next computer will be a peak capable of opening a hole in the door. And surely behind that door I will find a Powerbook 150 and not a 170. Will I recognize it?
49 Bicolor hexagonal
She accused him of being bigamous, but the defendant’s lawyer diminished his sorrow by signaling he had not two, but three women. This is, as Philippe Sollers would have it, one of the strongest arguments against dialectics. The sun and the moon, good and evil, all of these emblematic vices have made our lives heavy since Noah’s Arch. However, the bicolor pencil has in my memory a sense of school innocence, a memory stopped somewhere in time.
45 Jonathan Ive
Nostalgia takes over me when someone announces to me a novelty. Computers are the saddest objects in the world for, as soon as they appear in the market, thousands of minds are creating new models and doing everything in their power to make them older. Computers are more precise than clocks for giving us news about time. The thirst for novelty, broken time, the new object at hand and the world on its knees: a religion.
50 Zhang Xiaoquan
Industry creates objects for elephants to enjoy, that is true, big chimneys, workers, vapor orientated towards the sky, gloves and protective helmets, fire extinguishers, syndicates and high walls, cards for checking punctuality, night watchers: all of that scandal to produce. And a pair of huge scissors to cut the umbilical cord with earth.
51 Anónimo, Cintillos
I should have tied her so that she couldn’t escape. I wouldn’t have even used a string or a resistant rope: I’m sure that I would have leaned for the straps to hold her fingers. And to be at the level of her disdain I should have used plastic tie straps, because plastic offends people like her. After that subtle insult, of course, I would have let her go.
52 Alfred W. Fielding & Mark A. Chavannes
Children play at breaking bubbles and plastic is still intact. Plastic walls whose only purpose is to wrap important packages. How I hate important packages! If I bought bubble wrap with a mercenary I would be exaggerating the analogy. I would be stupid. What Christ would wear that transparent mat?
53 MotorolaStarTAC: teléfono celular
From its apparition, cellphones disturbed my routine. Before them I used to sit on a couch all night and talked while I drank. The party was in one single place and no one listened to the fixed telephone in the house. Today, at daybreak, no one finds peace, the telephone rings and the promises fall out of the night, and unexpected presences, and anxiety that looks for a deeper experience, but nothing: deepness has moved to the surface.
54 Lentes l.a. Eyeworks (Spot 2 542)
The look changes the world to its whim and orientates objects and ideas towards relativism. The most enigmatic glasses I know belonged to Fernando Pessoa. These glasses were present in my most recent trip to Lisbon. I was careful not to step into his crystals when I walked down la Rua de Douradores. “There is a weariness about abstract intelligence, and that is the worst of all weariness”, the Portuguese wrote in his Book of Disquiet.
55 Mathias Goeritz
A chair from where to contemplate the towers. While all of these men work, I am sitting in a chair someone imagined like a crossing of paths, a lookout’s place made out of mahogany and steel. On this imaginary spot, from my chair, I contemplate, and sometimes offer some words to the passersby. Ionesco’s chairs remain empty, like mine. I’m a voice without strength or convincement. I don’t complain, my chair is fragile and soon it will be dawn.