I listen to NPR while I shower.  The radio hangs on the towel rack and I tune in to whatever show happens to be on while I get myself ready for the day.  This is, usually, an uninspiring sequence of events.  A couple weeks back I found myself standing in the bathtub yelling at the radio during Tom Ford’s interview on Fresh Air.  I find that sparring with the radio, shouting during whatever pauses a speaker leaves in their sentences, to be immensely gratifying in the same way I’m sure a cat gets a kick out of punting a sock across the linoleum floor.  Meaningless, but productive in its own little way.  The tenor of Ford’s interview is what set me off, the way that successful people can mistake their own ego and self-petting for genuine ideas, the centricism and unjustified pomp of the world of high fashion, and, well, mostly my general disgust at how the forces of culture are bent by such bullshit.

I guess the conventional wisdom is to hate the game but, sans coffee, reason has very little sway over the direction of my shower-time tirades.  After primping myself in a most un-Tom-Fordlike manner, I sat down to my first cup of coffee and was pleasantly surprised when the interview changed pace from veiled preening into the more comfortable and honest world of ideas.  The most interesting snippet being where Ford describes a aesthetic shift towards post-humanism:

“…[W]e’re becoming post-human.  We are actually – we are! We are actually starting to manipulate our bodies, because we can, into a shape. We are becoming our own art. But what happens for me is that it desexualizes everything. You know, you start to look more and more polished, more and more lacquered and you look like a beautiful car.”

What’s interesting about this idea is not its narrow application to the world of fashion but, rather, the broader social implications on our collective preference for the artificial, the groomed, the ordered, and the packaged. This notion is something that I’ve been preoccupied with for the last couple of months.  It’s become a little blinking light on the radar of things that I’ve got my eyes open for while I’m shooting.  I got a bit of a start over the weekend while wandering around the zoo.  Really, it’s the perfect intersection of real and artificial, a place where you can consume either one depending on where you focus your attention.

I listen to NPR while I shower.  The radio hangs on the towel rack and I tune in to whatever show happens to be on while I get myself ready for the day.  This is, usually, an uninspiring sequence of events.  A couple weeks back I found myself standing in the bathtub yelling at ...