Fascists always get the best stuff

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For us progressive amateur aesthetes, it's always been somewhat unsettling that so much top-drawer design has emerged from 20th century European fascist regimes. Does anybody have any insight into why that might be? My first guess would have something to do with repressed homoerotic urges.

Meanwhile, Behold the 1938 Hispano-Suiza Dubonnet Xenia:

I wonder what Franco's army tanks looked like. We do know that his son, a military pilot, thought that the bombs he dropped on unarmed Ethiopians looked like flower blossoms when they exploded.

The only company I'm aware of that consistently produces world-class industrial design today is Apple, which thrust itself into the public mind with it's "iconic" (and in my opinion overrated) 1984 Superbowl commercial. Old-timers will remember that the archetypal living symbol of Freedom and Justice For All---noted war hero, business executive, and human-rights crusader Ronald Reagan---was presiding over the American Experiment at that very moment in history.

It may be hard to believe that, at one time, high design in computer technology could be achieved with putty-colored plastic, a 9 in. monochrome TV picture tube, and a handful of simple picto-glyphs and 16-bit screen fonts. You had to be there; your mainstream business-grade alternative was an IBM (or clone) PC box about the size of Francisco Franco's tombstone displaying its data on a bile-green 8-bit VGA monitor, or amber if you were really uptown. No mouse necessary, or available! (And, yes, Amiga fascists, I do know about your pet machine. Highly respectable, but no design awards from this amateur aesthete.)

Mac 128 image above ganked from this blog, but it certainly doesn't belong to him!

Not exactly a purported image of Jesus in a piece of French toast

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But it's even better! See the outwardly mediocre photo below and try to find the super-awesome subliminal image embedded within it.

Shot at the Cowboy Monkey, Champaign, Ill., Friday evening whilst Big Rock Head was blowing some section work with the Parkland College In-Your-Ear Big Band.

And I will hasten to add that, no, the ugly motherfucker at center left is not your genial host. How could you even think such a thing?!?

Click to enlarge. Taken with an iPhone 4s in available light using its digital zoom capability. The camera in the thing is quite impressive. I'll share some of the landscapes I made over Thanksgiving in western Iowa, on the estate of one of this blog's correspondents.

iPad: still not convinced (or even tempted)

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Xeni Jardin --- who is hip enough even for me, I guess --- has a gratuitously heady hands-on review of the iPad, sounding like a smitten fangirl. ("iPad fappery," one of the commenters calls it.) Well, her words at least make me wonder about my initial summary dismissal of the device. She assures us that the form factor is just right --- perfect in weight and tactile sensuality. That happens to be my greatest doubt about the iPad, i.e., that it could possibly have great ergonomics for much of what it is designed to do. We'll see. I still think it's a case of trying to improve Hostess Twinkies by releasing Giant Chocolate Hostess Twinkies. Or maybe more to the point, trying to improve a Ghirardelli 72 percent chocolate bar by releasing Giant Chocolate Hostess Twinkies. And anyway, just look at the docked iPad with that wireless keyboard: how does that go together, design-wise?

Introducing the failPad

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In the previous comments thread, our prolific commenter "Anonymous" glibly predicted that the overhyped new Apple mobile media device would be "stupid." I could faintly imagine innovative possibilities for a highly portable multimedia touchscreen computer, but could not figure out how it could be successfully implemented. Forward-facing camera for videoconferencing and texting? Maybe cool, but cellular nets certainly don't have the bandwidth to support too much of that. Larger touch keyboard with tactile feedback (haptic) technology? Of interest to me, but I really can't see any advantage to a screen that you can't reach at least 3/5 of the way across with your thumbs, because laying the "pad" flat on a table would give the user a lousy viewing angle, and propping the screen up would give the user lousy typing ergonomics.

I felt that all the mockups were wrongheaded --- basically large iPhones with no apparent redeeming social value. Certainly the guy who sent engineers back to the lab a dozen times until they designed a MacBook trackpad with exactly the right texture would have obsessed over the ergonomics of the device, the hand feel, the effortless graspability, I thought.

Nope. Jobs's failPad is, in my opinion, astonishingly banal. The device appears to incorporate zero technical innovation and clumsy ergonomics. It offers no new essential, or even interesting, capabilities whatsoever (unless you think it's important to have a ridiculously high-def 10 in. display that you can hold up to your face with both hands while watching YouTube porns).

Apple didn't introduce a technology innovation today --- it unveiled a new business model for media content owners. I'd imagine that those giant media corporations --- which actually are people just like you and me, granted --- already have a mighty case of blue balls owing to several years of foreplay. These behemoths have gently been urging Apple (like a thousand tiny fingers) to market a stylish new widget that will seduce foolish young consumers into turning their media collections into a never-ending revenue stream for Time-Warner, Disney, General Electric, and all those other friendly folks who rent you content for your life so you don't have to provide your own.

When I read the description of the iPad today I'm sure I felt the same kind of bile rising as Ralphie did when he discovered that the Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring message was just a lousy commercial. Early Apple geek reaction to the failPad in blog comments threads has been pretty negative (about 2:1, in fact), which is uniformly unheard of after any new Apple rollout.

I may be wrong, but I'll bet anyone a beer that I'm not. I think the reason this new offering is so lame is that it wasn't really designed by Jobs and Jonathan Ives: it was developed for control-horny media conglomerates.