Deceased, long-coffined genius Douglas Adams pointed out the three broad stages of civilisation:
- Survival
- Inquiry
- Sophistication
Or in his canonical example:
- How can we eat..?
- Why do we eat?
- Where shall we have lunch?
Let that message sink in for a moment. It’s the last leap – sophistication – that comes to my mind most often in NYC.
We have collectively scrabbled from the tar pit of base survival. We have lit the world evenly with neat beacons of science. And now, having avoided the grey lands of functional homogeny, we wander in an odd, disjointed land of inconsistent capitalist freedoms. Like Iain Banks’s Culture, with random patches of repression.
Two examples of sophistication that happened to me today. One is good, one is bad. Neither may be entertaining.
1. Sock pairing
This is just flat-out the best thing in the fucking world. Forget your anal bleaching (now available in my neighbourhood). This is the gasping stratosphere of human achievement, and it’s in your local laundry.
Forget the grim-faced, impatient hunt; the fabric match, the is-it-black-or-dark-blue, the scratchy wool on dry fingers, the turning-inside-out; all these dark seconds of hell are whisked away, to be deftly performed in secret by a stout professional for the sum of a few dollars. I would give these sweet cloth-loving people my children.
2. Stamps
Stamps. Your actual, post-a-letter, postage stamps, and the incomprehensible torrent of choice available to you. A baffling bible of design after design, where every christ-fisting token functions identically.
The US Post Office on Lexington Avenue is a granite bunker. Inside, bright billboards proclaim release dates of upcoming stamp designs. Banks of stamp machines whirr, sensuous in gluey anticipation. Mittened mothers ogle and dither, glassy-eyed over glass-top rows of coy, scalloped paper. See them furrowing brows, chewing fingers and earnestly weighing up the options with the intensity of someone hitting ‘Reroll’ on an AD&D character for 45 straight minutes, waiting for the lucky 18s.
07-Jan-08 at 5:08 pm | Permalink
3. Cheques
The good – chequebooks feature old-school, magic carbon pages so you keep a copy of every payout.
The bad – not for us, the dull efficiency of an easily read design. No! Your cheques are a chance to express yourself.
My default chequebook has a different cutesy background on every page. A farm scene; a geometric pattern; Bugs fucking Bunny on the beach.
Moreover, every cheque has a different (and seemingly random) set of fonts – enough to make a typographer vomit her own spleen in rage.