Jumbos from the sun

[imomus]

Tyler Brûlé has a column in the International Herald Tribune which he mostly uses to promote Monocle, his stylish, slightly smug business magazine. This week his slot sees perhaps the most shameless piece of advertorial yet. Headlined Haneda Airport leads top 50 travel poll, the article is nothing more than a plug for the next edition of Monocle, which runs "a year-end, top 50 list focusing on the best in travel". You'd think that a quality newspaper like the IHT would know that a "poll" is an inquiry into public opinion conducted by interviewing a random sample of people. Read Tyler's piece, though, and you'll find that "poll" here has lost all its democratic implications and become something imperial. The carefully-weighted sample group for this "poll" is just two people: Tyler and his Tokyo assistant Fiona.



What Tyler and Fiona have chosen as "the ultimate in flying" is equally imperial. "We nominated the Japanese government's pair of 747-400s - one for the prime minister and one for the emperor," Tyler tells us. "While not quite a flying palace, the emperor's 747 comes with a matching fleet of support vehicles that all feature the same signature black and gold stripes that run elegantly down the fuselage of the aircraft. The inside is decorated in subtle caramel and camel tones that reference ancient patterns used by the royal family." This isn't bling stuff, though. "There's also not a gold tap or gold seatbelt in sight. From nose to tail, the identical aircraft are exercises in restraint and good taste."

Now, expensive private aircraft have long been part of Tyler's dreamworld, which is to say his world plan. Wallpaper, Monocle's loungecore ancestor, encouraged its readers to imagine they all owned a Falcon 900B private jet with interior design by Marc Newson and were just about to fly off to Belgrade for a weekend of simply divine decadence in Marshall Tito's refurbished brutalist Interior Ministry, now a luxury hotel.

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But the stakes have now been upped: if you aren't an emperor, flying into Tallinn or Arlanda in twin 747s (one for you, one for staff, presumably Fiona) bearing the insignia of your chrysanthemum throne and, on the tail, the sun (your great, great, great... great granny), you're nobody, friend. If a fatal crash for your enormous plane wouldn't mean, quite literally, the end of an era (in this case the Heisei era defined by the lifespan of Japan's Emperor Akihito), well, forget it. You're a loser. You probably read Star magazine.



I must say, the sheer cheek of this recommendation intrigued me (as Tyler and Fiona knew it would) and made me want to see pictures of the interior of the imperial planes. They were indeed understated. The Japanese page providing those glimpses tells us that the planes are kitted out with conference tables and up to 350 seats for diplomatic staff if it's the PM who's traveling, but sofas for the Emperor. If practical power does, symbolic power is. The "job" of the Emperor is simply to be.

So what does the Emperor -- this creature whose job is simply to be -- actually do on his foreign visits, once his twin sun jumbos have touched down? Well, on a visit to Sweden this year Akihito made a visit to the Bergius Botanic Garden in Stockholm, had lunch with the Swedish Prime Minister at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, visited the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences then saw the exhibition “From Linnaeus to DNA” at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. The next day he attended the 300th birthday commemoration of Carl Linnaeus at Uppsala University, met with Japanese and Swedish students and researchers, then banqueted at Uppsala Castle.



Akihito, a keen biologist and scientist, is quite an expert on Linnaeus. When a Swedish delegation to Japan showed him a rare 1735 copy of "Systema Naturae" -- the book of Linnaeus' classifications of animals, plants and minerals -- the emperor "studied the copy with great interest and was especially interested in observing the notes and changes Linnaeus had made in the margins".

Reading this, it's hard not to think of Akihito's father, the Emperor Hirohito. Both emperors studied marine biology and published scientific papers (Hirohito published accounts of jellyfish previously unknown to science, his son is an ichthyologist known for his research into the taxonomy of gobies).

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In Aleksandr Sokurov's haunting 2005 film "The Sun" (the third part in his Men of Power tetralogy) the Shōwa Emperor is portrayed as a stammering, modest, sheltered man. Although it means life or death to his fanatically faithful lieutenants, the Emperor's announcement that he is not, after all, a god seems to matter little to Hirohito. Sokurov portrays him -- with more than a tip of the top hat to Dostoyevsky's "idiot", Prince Myshkin -- as, finally, a sympathetic character.

"A small, frail man with a high-pitched voice," Sokurov said in an interview, "an academic working on botany and hydrobiology, [Hirohito] was entirely unsuited to absolute tyranny, both physically and spiritually. He even turned his palace into a scientific laboratory - this wasn't the bunker of a bloody god of war. But that was the role that Hirohito had to play, that was the mask that he had to put on, and rejecting it was one of the main themes of the work that lay ahead... The Emperor gave the world a lesson for which no students could be found. The scale of the example that he set wasn't noticed in Europe or in the Soviet Union. Our creative group is drawing attention to the fact that good can be both strong and intelligent."



Personally, I find the idea of a shy, unworldly botanist -- Prince Myshkin with a microscope -- flying around in his own personal 747 rather an intriguing one. In our oddly hierarchical, endlessly greedy, nominally "democratic" society it may well be that everyone aspires, ultimately, to be some kind of consumer-emperor (or, at the very least, an airport queen). That's certainly the impression you get reading our magazines and their top-down "polls". Real emperors, though, dream of nothing more than being marine biologists, tweaking with tweezers at a curved, preserved guppy spine or leafing through Linnaeus. Imperial he may be, but I suspect Akihito is, in real life, somewhat less imperious than Tyler Brûlé.

Comments

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Boo, Star sucks, Heat is way better.

I nearly applied for a job at Monocle, but then I found out it actually had nothing to do with monocles and was so dissapointed I gave up.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think it's mostly to do with binoculars, telephoto lenses and penises.

[signorphibes (from livejournal.com)]

Monocle feels like the ultimate aspirational magazine. It feels like it's produced for a reader so cosmopolitan and affluent to be more non-existant than niche: how many people out there are equally interested in tips for buying houses in Athens or Economist-like pieces on energy in a northern european country AND clothing labels producing limited edition lines only sold in one store in London or Tokyo and minimally designed cake shops?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have a horrible feeling it's me.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Except for the affluent bit, of course. But the thing about mags like Monocle is that it's all fantasy. You're not actually buying a house in Athens, just dreaming about it. You just need to be affluent enough to buy the mag, then everything else is a daydream they allow you to have for the length of time it takes you to flip through.

[signorphibes (from livejournal.com)]

Yes, Vogue or other fashion magazines would only have a portion of their current circulation if they were bought only by readers able to afford the objects displayed but Monocle presumes the existence of an "ideal reader" equally obsessive about hard news and ultra-niche fashion minutiae, it takes the concept of man of taste so far away and in so significantly distant territories, it's almost ridicolous. I just got the impression that this magazine is not even supposed to make you dream, just to signify that the buyer belongs to a super chic global clique. It wouldn't be necessary bad per se but, as other Brulle projects, I have the feeling that all the pleasure is clinically removed and it's like some of bible, people with no time to think about lifestyle have to conform to in order to look "compliant"

signorphibes

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

I confess, I subscribe to Monocle and adore it, it is lifestyle porn with more taste than Robb Report or Architectural Digest, delivered in a plain brown envelope to my doorstep where I can drool over minimalist Scandinavia and fantasize about global business travel and understated hotels. The reality of being a jet setting technology executive is considerably more mundane, alas. It mostly means rushing to Laguardia to fly coach to Tulsa for some god awful conference. There is no way my boss allows me to stay in the places they feature in Monocle.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I just woke up and read this entry, and all that was going through my mind was this song:


It only started playing in my mind when I saw this entry, and I didn't even read any of it!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

it takes the concept of man of taste so far away and in so significantly distant territories, it's almost ridicolous.

Yes. Isn't it wonderful? It's stealth camp.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I rarely envy the great and good, but Akihito comes damned close.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

On second thought, nah. The brutal scale of living he has inherited, as exemplified in those godawful jet planes, is an albatross. I'd much rather have this light, nimble beastie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Avion_III_20050711.jpg) instead. The propellers are carved in the shape of feathers, for heaven's sake.

Would be nice to have a couple greenhouses, though.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think your ambivalence raises an interesting question -- whether dandyism could exist without empires, without overproduction, without wasteful extravagance. Whether, in other words, there could be affected provincials without affected urbanites. I'm sure you address this in your book, but I don't have it to hand.

Since Tyler's assistant Fiona is mentioned in this piece, here"s (http://monocle.com/sections/design/Web-Articles/Tokyo-Designers-Week/) her video report on the recent Tokyo design week events. You get a glimpse, in that, of something even more extravagant than the emperor's jumbo: the city of Tokyo itself, buying and selling things, using vast amounts of electricity, working and playing, inventing new stuff, wasting and saving, living and dying.

[(Anonymous)]

jean snow's blog is very useful as a directory of events and magazines including monocle but he never does interesting analysis of the contents like this. he just goes gaga at things at that look pretty.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I prefer things that have a light, nimble and modest quality about them. Excess is boring, and too easy; I'm more interested in the Brummellian practice of editing the excess down to its essentials: an impeccable cut, but of an unassuming cloth. Flat out opulence is for the fops. Perhaps that gratuitous excess must be there for the dandies to reject in order to make the necessary distinction.

Some form of civilizational ferment seems to be crucial to dandyism; of course that can take many forms. Dandies are aspirational and middle class for the most part, taking the old conventions of the upper echelons and turning them on their head in a variety of ways.They engage in both celebration and satire, and are both hero and pariah.

Right now the times are ripe for them, because they seem to thrive in settings when things have reached their peak, and have almost exhausted themselves. As I said in the book, bohemians often set down the broad, bold strokes, and the dandies tend to limn the delicate calligraphy in the spaces that remain. I find myself both attracted and repulsed by that milieu--it is simultaneously brash and utterly bloodless, anxious and smug.

I must admit that while a few things caught my eye (like the writhing chandelier), that Monocle piece on Tokyo leaves me somewhat cold. It's a bit too self-satisfied and arid for me to find any purchase. Perhaps it is not the thing itself but how it is being presented.

I prefer a garden party to a red carpet event; to me, they feel more civilized, glamorous and luxurious than the hives of relentless expediency that media/art/design shindigs in cities have now become. They tend to be a clustering of industry types talking to other industry types trying to bed aspiring industry types. Hardly any amateurs--all "pros". I much prefer gatherings where there are sure to be hobbyists--that's where the diaspora, and synthesis lies. Those who fancy themselves in the center of things in time are revealed to have been practicing merely another form of provincialism.

(Alcibiades always struck me as a proto-dandy, of sorts.)

godawful jet planes

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

In the way of the Japanese animae Last Exile,it would be good to see an ornithopter or two!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Speaking of marine biology, a fossil of an ancient sea scorpion was found that was over 8 feet long. (http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/11/20/giant-scorpion.html)

Re: godawful jet planes

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

More elegant, I think.

Of course, this might be the most elegant mode of flight ever devised:

[(Anonymous)]

and often writes "oooooh, i'm gonna get that for suuuuuure!"

(dramatic license applied)

meh.

[(Anonymous)]

your criticisms toward tyler here are weak at best. how can his IHT post act as a promotion to the next edition of monocle when the magazine content appears in the article? the top-50 list is printed in it's entirety, so how can this be called an ad? seems like he's giving you a reason not to buy it if your only reason to do so is to read the list.

it would be just as easy to point towards your flimsy wired posts as promotions for this blog, no? i adore your hypocrisy, though, it's kinda cute.

this one gets a "meh" AND a "pfft".

Re: meh.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

how can his IHT post act as a promotion to the next edition of monocle when the magazine content appears in the article?

Come, come! Just the list appears, not the whole content of their Top Travel feature. There are no pictures, for instance. Reading about the imperial 747s, I immediately wanted to see pictures of the interior Tyler describes. Online there isn't really much; you have to buy the mag. Which costs money, unlike Click Opera.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's odd; Murphy is confessing that he wears the horns of the cuckold, the cornuto. His girl is sexually incontinent and prefers just about anybody to him. And yet the gestures are triumphalist, air-punching. "You go, my cuckold horns!"

Anyway, I have no idea what this has to do with the entry. Were you trying to make some parallel with Tyler Brule, or did you just not care whether it came across as kind of random?

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, the topsy-turvy world of Momus, in which an editor gets some stick for promoting his magazine, while an emperor who presided over some of the last century's worst atrocities gets a sympathetic hearing...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I follow Sokurov's view (and, by the way, the Americans' post-war decision too) that Hirohito was a figurehead trapped by his position in various compromises -- doing what the Japanese nationalists want one moment, what the American occupiers want the next. Such is the fate of symbolic heads of state. No wonder they have quiet hobbies to occupy themselves.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I know you're a big fan of Wikipedia, and its page on Hirohito makes clear his active complicity in the atrocities of the Sino-Japanese wars at the very least. The thing is, he wasn't just a symbolic head of state until the post-war period, was he? The Americans' decision to keep him in place was less about what he had or hadn't done during the war(s), and more about the perceived need for some symbolic continuity. Ultimately, the fact that he was unsuited for his role doesn't let him off the hook.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

As a biologist, myself, I am offended that a chickenshit like Hirohito would bury his hands in marine biology, as if some sea water would wash the blood of millions from his hands. He deserved a public hanging and an unmarked grave, yet he was allowed to live so that he could be a symbol of some kind. I never got that. Unlike Germany, where old Nazis are still hunted down and exposed to the burning light of modern justice, Japanese soldiers who committed atrocities were allowed to live as if nothing had happened. Wow.

World War II was responsible for the deaths of 99% of my Okinawan family and directly influenced hardships in my own life, so maybe my thoughts are heavily biased, but many people would be alive today if the Showa emperor had put down his microscope, picked up a pair of testicles and announced on the radio that he would not support the war. I suppose when you believe that you descended from a god, you protect your own life in exchange for millions of others.


Arrrrrgh.

Re: meh.

[(Anonymous)]

TACHIYOMI.

no need to buy, just make the effort to go look at it.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, James Nice once told me that you and he had fallen out over something, but he wouldn't tell me what. Can you enlighten me?

[(Anonymous)]

Aren't your world views and Tyler Brule's remarkably similar? I mean in that as an ideal we should live in a more aesthetic, better designed and peaceful world? I see the difference in that Brule uses the current world environment to show an ideal lifestyle which brings into focus an incredible ethical negligence for its realisation. Where your world - which I believe would be very similar - comes about ethically due to natural progression of the human state towards a more aesthetic, better designed and peaceful world.

I think what I am trying to say is that I don't think you disapprove of these things but that you feel that they should come about in a future, intelligent and aware social context.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

"It is not pleasing that I place Man among the primates, but man is intimately familiar with himself. Let's not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name we use. But I request from you and from the whole world the generic difference between Man and Simian, and this from the principles of Natural History. I certainly know of none. If only someone might tell me just one! If I called man a simian or vice versa I would bring together all the theologians against me. Perhaps I ought to, in accordance with the law of the discipline [of Natural History]." - Carolus Linnaeus

j'espère que tyler se brûle

[(Anonymous)]

hmm. if you are intrigued by akihito, are you also intrigued by prince charles, pottering in his highgrove garden? or do emperors trounce mere princes in the aspirational stakes?
also, amusing to see this link (http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www_de.cgi/http://www.livejournal.com/"http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/27/europe/france.php?WT.mc_id=rssfrontpage") on the front page of monocle. i wonder where moushin and larami would come in its 'quality of life' index?

- mrs elva miller's warbling pants

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I don't know, whenever I wake up and read your entries some random 80's song pops into my head. Right now it's the Safety Dance.

It's fun imagining that you are the one singing the song!

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I also had a dream about you wearing Crocs. I told you that you looked like a dumbass but you still wore them. You muttered under your breath "but they're COMFORTABLE and I LIKE THEM." They were baby blue and you flew away into the sky.

I still say that if you wear Crocs, you look like a dumbass. EVEN IF the Crocs have magical flying powers.

even if...

[(Anonymous)]

you do own your own 747, it seems you still can't escape having enya serenade you in to land.... I wander what the in-flight shopping magazine contains?

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I didn´t see any penises when I leafed through it, just a lot of pictures of planes and ugly buildings and a hilarious comic about gays from the 60s. The buildings and planes and cameras weren´t even phallic, it was most disappointing.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I've never had a falling out with James. Haven't seen him for years, I think I stayed in his house in Brussels the last time we met. Maybe I left the towels damp or something? Anyway, we both manage to mention each other fairly positively in essays, sleevenotes, etc.

[slime-slime-sly.livejournal.com]

Funny to read this, just when Im finding out about all the stuff thats going around the king of Spain these days. You should check it out. Well I'd like to tell you the story in a few words but since im out of the country i dont know all of it and im also a bit drunk. But anyway anarchists where burning his picture in the streets, satyre magazines were making very dirty jokes about his family and all that, nobody seemed very grateful anymore about him helping out to build a democracy, and then a few weeks ago in a big conference he told Hugo Chavez to shut up. He just burst out in the middle of Hugo being a jerk and without any political correctness or democrat professionality just went "why the hell dont you shut your trap".
Anyway i dont know if this makes any sense in relation to this. It does to me but i cant really explain.

Re: meh.

[(Anonymous)]

There's no mention in the article that the Monocle version contains photos, and the list really doesn't require visual aids to work (unless you are having a hard time getting your mind around visualizing "in-flight wi-fi" or "Terence the butler"). Your criticism is fickle, cranky, and padded.

Oh, and surely a minion would gladly fork over a Monocle subscription -- it worked when you advertised on Click Opera your need for a flickr pro account, deshoooo?

[(Anonymous)]

Completely unrelated, BUT:
"Nick, do you notice anything wonderful and epic-ly exciting on this link? Dig deeper still..." : http://www.vinylinternational.com/

love,
John Flesh

Re: meh.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I know that when I had a Wired column I tried not to make it an advertisement for my activities. I certainly wouldn't have described my own personal opinion, expressed in a song or a book or something I was just about to release, as a "poll". Unless you have some kind of vested interest in Monocle and Tyler, you have to admit that's a bit odd, ne?

Re: j'espère que tyler se brûle

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Prince Charles does have the potential to be a Prince Myshkin sort of character too. I prefer him to most of the other royals, though I think he's pretty reactionary (but sort of eco-reacionary, which is something).

It's funny, I just saw a video here at the Vienna Secession of Bush's visit, on Air Force One, to Berlin in 2002. The video concentrates on the minutiae of the security surrounding him, and specifically on the marine who walks behind him carrying the "nuclear football" with which he can order nuclear strikes while on the move. And I wondered at my capacity to see Akihito in his 747 as a benign marine biologist, yet Bush as some sort of crypto-fascist. I suppose it does have something to do with that little doomsday case. Akihito doesn't have one. (Also, Japan has never nuked anybody, but has been nuked by a man -- an American -- who also never faced any war crimes tribunal.)

Stugar

[(Anonymous)]

Obviously, tyler brule is mostly a cunt, but he used to write in the FT about summering in the stockholm archipelago, so he can't be all bad.

Re: j'espère que tyler se brûle

[(Anonymous)]

akihito has marine biology, charles has his odd theories on architecture; they're interesting baddies with glimpses of humanity, of a slight geekishness, maybe. bush is a former fratboy and thus can only ever be loved by other former fratboys. he is singularly free of endearing quirks. he's the boring baddie, and thus we all boo.
and yup, the evil football of death doesn't bring on the love much either

- secret modernist stealth corgi

[testemapa.livejournal.com]

oi