The White Peril 白禍

Virginia Postrel links to a post by her husband about bad design and why we can't stamp it out immediately. My favorite part of his list was this:

Auto-numbering in Microsoft Word, which behaves like a peevish poltergeist, randomly changing number and letter headings, creating and destroying tabs, etc., instead of almost any other numbering utility I can imagine.

When I give instructions about how to submit documents to me at work, the very top of the list is "Before making a single keystroke, go to 'Autocorrect,' choose the 'Autoformat' tab, and TURN EVERYTHING OFF. No smart quotes. No automatic lists. NOTHING." I like me some properly-sized em-dashes, but even they can turn on you if you have to use both Japanese and English in the same document and then have it read by computers with Japanese and English versions of Word.

Postrel focuses mostly on design that isn't utile, but I had a funny exchange with a friend last night about design that's just not good to look at. The fast food chain Lotteria has been changing the design of its outlets, and last night when a few friends and I came around a corner (in Jimbocho), I said, "I like the Lotteria redesign (though I could do without the 'straight burger' part)." One of my friends smirked and said, "No, honey, you don't necessarily like it. It's just the only building on the entire street that's not assaulting your eye with neon, blinking lights, a menu board written in every available color of dry-erase ink, various gew-gaws pasted to the facade, and some rotating thingamajig somewhere. Just stripping away the junk is enough to result in a Design Statement around here." Too true.

People can be very odd.

I got my hair cut yesterday. Exact same haircut as I've gotten every month for the past decade (including the gunking up of the finished product with styling wax, as if it were long enough to be disarranged even by a typhoon).

You'd think I'd gotten cosmetic surgery. "Wow! Something's different...you look great!" said one of the giggly, flirty girls behind the counter at Dean & Deluca. She was politic enough to add, "I mean, even better than usual. Refreshed." A less politic friend last night gushed, "Don't you look butch tonight!" Her "I mean, more than usual" wasn't forthcoming for a good thirty seconds and several further sips of beer. I'm not averse to compliments by any means, but is it too much to ask that they not be so time-specific and be delivered without hammy astonishment?

So Belinda Carlisle finally released that album of French pop songs she's been threatening to unleash on the world for a while now. A friend of mine was raving about it. Despite (because of?) being a committed Go-go's fan, I was cautious. We need a version of "La Vie en Rose" by Belinda? But I sprang for it, and it really is good. She clearly chose songs she'd come to be personally fond of, and she pours herself into them. Even if it's just a curio, the album's enough to make you forget some of the crap she's shoveled out over the course of her solo career. (Requisite bitchy comment: Belinda's brow lift makes her look like Marcia Cross.)

I wish Tracey Thorn's new album were less scattershot, but the single really is super-cool, even (I assume) if you don't remember the Yazoo songs it's produced to recall. And the video is the best I've seen in a few years. A friend e-mailed that I had to see it, and he was right: memorably interesting and actually pleasing to look at. The budget for every damned music video made by a pop diva in the last half-decade seems to have been spent on (1) making her up to look like Beyoncé, (2) dressing her up to look like Beyoncé, and (3) having her frolic in various outdoor settings (the desert! the beach! the rain forest! the savanna! the edge of the savanna at the exact moment that the process of desertification turns it into part of the Sahara!) like Beyoncé. Beyoncé is very good at what she does, and of course people imitate what sells. You can't fault them for that. But it's all gotten samey and dull. And cluttered.

One nice thing about being on vacation was that during the inclement weather and the flights, I had time to read without that nagging feeling that I should be doing something for the office instead. The books I chose were worth investing time in, though I thought they both felt kind of short of what I'd hoped.

One was Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne, a themed biography of sorts by Australian reporter Ben Hills. I don't remember seeing any egregious factual mistakes, though there were little inaccuracies and self-contradictions; but I was distracted by the way Hills has trouble controlling his voice. There are writers who can move from journalistic sobriety to flippancy to human-interest bathos with ease; Hills isn't one of them. Sure, that's subjective on my part, but when the meat of a book is speculation--as an attempt at explicating how the forces operating on Masako got her into her current state necessarily is--its author needs to come off as unusually trustworthy and sensible. The swings in tone are jarring and subliminally make Hills seem a bit flighty.

I was also a little unsettled at the unremittingly flat way Masako was cast as a victim. One doesn't want to underestimate the way the royals in Japan are treated by their handlers as living museum pieces, which Hills is hardly the first to document. (Under pressure from the palace governing agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kodansha isn't going to publish the planned Japanese translation.) But as he himself notes, plenty of other eligible women turned down the opportunity to marry Crown Prince Naruhito. I was especially charmed by those unnamed candidates who threatened to make themselves unfit to be royal brides by getting body piercings or tattoos--never underestimate the resourcefulness of the Japanese woman!

Naruhito's mistake seems to have been in promising Masako that she could channel her talent for and credentials in diplomacy into modernizing the role of the Crown Princess and, later, Empress; Masako's mistake was in believing him. Even so, she was an experienced woman of the world by that point and presumably knew how to weigh her options. She also had the example of the current Empress Michiko to learn from. No, she probably didn't know exactly what she was getting into--otherwise, it's hard to imagine that she would have accepted the prince's proposal. But part of being an adult who makes a risky decision is that you might lose.

Princess Masako was better than Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, which I picked up while hanging out with Eric. I was distracted by Marc Eliot's inability to do basic math and by his factual errors. (For a gay man, I'm hardly a film expert, but I'm pretty sure that if Auntie Mame had won the Oscar for Best Picture, I'd have remembered. It's also pretty obvious that you can't say Cary Grant retired from acting a half-decade before making North by Northwest.) And to read Eliot's summaries of Stewart's own movies with Hitchcock, you'd never know how deeply, powerfully disturbing they are. In fact, nothing Eliot writes indicates why Stewart was a fascinating enough character to warrant a four-hundred-page biography.

Cruel but so, so true.