LBM | La Baguette Magique * lifestyle with attitude: Edward-Bernays

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17 Jun 2017

Living Up to Better Homes & Gardens

Roby and I had an interesting conversation recently about home expectations and the difference between men and women on the subject and how magazines and visual social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are geared towards the female market.

Lebanese fashion designer Elie Saab's Beirut home is a man-woman pacifier of style and comfort!

My husband laments that women drive their men to an early grave through the way they organise home life. Women, he argues, are heavily influenced by home and interiors magazines and home improvement programmes, and as a result seek to recreate the look in their own home - at their own peril.

It must be said though that in general terms, a woman's forte is a certain idea of style and aesthetics that defines her individually, elegance, an indeniable eye for detail and for the eye-pleasing (understand all the cute little things out there!). This unfortunately clashes with men's domesticity quest for efficiency, practicality, comfort, ease of use, durability: the no-thrills, no-BS, no superfluous, home! In other words, emotion vs. reason.

Interior designer Suzanne Kasler worked her magic on this Atlanta home!

Generally women are a soft touch: easily influenced, and thus a marketer's dream. PR guru Edward Bernays understood it almost a century ago. In this day and age, the varied media platforms play their part in inspiring women as a priority because whatever the ladies fancy, it's quids in for the corporations!

Stenciled table project, via Better Homes & Gardens

A woman inspired has her appetite whet, i.e. her desire to purchase. The desire is influenced and reinforced further until they feel they have no other option than spend cash, seal the deal, make that purchase and with it that elusive slice of happiness!

Women have a propensity to spend cash on a whim, not only on fashion items but on homewares and home improvements that will come to pass with the next whim. New season paint scheme, furnishings upgrade, conservatory revamp, kitchen worktops replaced, when there is nothing wrong with what they have. They get bored quick and fancy a change and that house will never be quite enough. If they still feel unsatisfied, they will want to look for the next best place and sell this one off! Out with the (not so) old, in with the new...

A woman frets when her house is untidy (but is rather acceptant of her own untidiness). Their domesticity quest is form over function anytime! Clutter (trinkets, knick-knacks and other clutter contributors), poor sense of flow from one room area to the next... Objects are put away a certain way that only makes sense to her, everything in a place that is not about convenience but decorum. Yes I have been there too!

The Millhouse (Shaker) Kitchen by DeVOL Kitchens

If her home does not quite equate Better Homes & Gardens, a woman will be quick at blaming her man for not doing something about it (as in some DIY!) or getting a pay rise to afford the professionals in. A householder who strives for her house to look like BHG (and other lifestyle mags for that matter) might as well have a museum for a house. This is therefore a no-go domestic area according to my husband. You must feel at home in your own home. Point taken.

The DeVOL is in the (kitchen handle) detail!

Further Resources on Style:

Good Design according to Dieter Rams by Mirabelle
Mirabelle's Interior Design Delight Pinterest board
Stylessness is Lawlessness by LBM
French Design Thrift in the Fabulous Fifties by ibid.
Rétro-Géographie, a visual log of mid-century French architecture
Spacious Vulgarity: The Aesthetics and Morals of McMansions by Paul Mullins
Architecture of Doom, a visual log of brutalist architecture that will fail to make you feel at home!

17 Feb 2017

Transience, Pillar of Modern Society (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this essay, we established that theoretically speaking whoever strives to defy time would be able to make a claim for immortality. Thus whoever claims to be immortal has transcended the timely restrictions imposed upon their life as a human. The notion of immortality takes us back to the catchy aliteration of the timeless timeline of Time. Timelessness evokes magnitude, amplitude, uninterrupted vastness in space and time. It expresses continuity, cohesion and stability.

The Ouroboros symbolises eternity. (Pict source)

Transience, on the other hand, sits precariously on the opposite end of the spectrum. Transience implies a notion of time that is fleeting, brief, truncated, interrupted, non-lasting, whimsical and ultimately unreliable and inefficient. This is about discontinuity. There is a sense of disturbance to it like an underwater current. Beware the underlying chaos!

Now referring to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the noun transience is defined as 'the quality or state of being transient.' Synonyms: Ephemerality, evanescence, impermanence, momentariness. Antonyms: Endurance, permanence.

The adjective transient is defined as 'passing especially quickly into and out of existence: transitory. [...] Passing through or by a place with only a brief stay or sojourn.'

Bearing in mind the immediate adversity imposed upon us by entropy and mortality, the human prerogative aims to make the most effective use of time within a competitive production model. For should it not to be the case, the process would ultimately lead to doom.

Detail of the Vault, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna, Italy

However it appears that our production model has redefined efficiency under a new paradigm. Efficiency used to involve durability under a long-lasting good or service. This as a mission statement had a vision to it, to serve not only the present but the future too. Transience does not and cannot sustain durability. It does not build upon an impetus, it interrupts it. A society whose production model is built upon transience is akin to a transient (casual) friendship that you cultivate with somebody: it does not grow roots or leaves, it does not evolve and deepen because there is no commitment to it, no fire, no bond, no guarantee. It is a stunted affair that remains so until the transient element is corrected.

The faceless banking corporations and multinationals that govern us have cleverly refashioned efficiency since the industrial heyday - and have accelerated its process with the coming of age of mass-consumerism. We mostly have one person to thank for this, Public Relations spin doctor and business insider Edward Bernays - Simon Freud's nephew - and a top influencer in the world of advertising and consumer psychology. He used consumer profiling to serve private interests, using strong-arm tactics to influence purchasing decision. He is indeed the father of customer trickery.

Another representation of eternity. (Pict source)

Bernays was also a trendsetter who wrapped both corporations and consumers tightly around his little finger. He for instance encouraged women to take up smoking by glamourising the cigarette in post-WWI New York City by way of savvy advertising campaigns that centered around personal gratification and desire, concepts that still ring true to this day in advertising. He also engineered water fluoridation PR campaigns to get public trust. Apart from getting us into bad habits, Bernays also wrote a few influential books, including Propaganda, a PR treatise whose most fervent reader was Joseph Goebbels, that's right, Hitler's henchman and future Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Germany's Third Reich.

When efficiency used to be defined by the clever use of time in order to accomplish a task and deliver a good or service via a process that would bring a lasting effect in terms of quality (to stand the test of time according to our human proclivities), this is no longer applicable. In the third and final part of this essay, we will see how vested interests have corrupted the production model under a socio-political ideology in order to reframe and rephrase efficiency, with transience at the core. I will describe the areas which I have identified as being of a transient nature, under the remodelled paradigm of efficiency. (to be continued)

_________

Transience, Pillar of Modern Society is a 3-part series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

7 Sept 2016

Political Correctness: Weapon of White Destruction

Over the last 30 years or so, political correctness has seeped in, crept up, infiltrated every corner of our public and private lives. It was that dashing yet slightly overdone, uninvited guest that showed up with the RSVP card from the invited guest. It had all the credentials, wore all the bells and whistles, and most importantly was chaperoned by The Establishment, whose premise was/ is to make us citizens more polished and inclusive and thoughtful and tolerant. Boy, did that sound good to anyone willing to embark on a little journey of self-discovery and self-empowerment! So we allowed the thing in. It acted politely at first, obliged to the petits-fours and family photos in our living rooms, but it remained nonetheless focussed on its mission. It talked to us but it wasn't long before it was talking at us, yet convincingly enough: it made sense and we bought into the spiel.

Installation by Joschi Herczeg and Daniele Kaehr

Institutions and the mainstream media have purported the Establishment's social engineering programme, inspired by PR spin doctor Edward Bernays, or by pseudo sciences like the controversial NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and other mind control programmes aimed at channeling political correctness into us and make us more docile and acceptant of the borderless, multicultural, disempowered, deindustrialised, state-controlled, libertarian, UN Agenda 21-compliant One World end game. To this end, PC has morphed our behaviour, conversations, discourse, observations and thoughts, discreetly and politely at first before making itself compulsory and unavoidable. In a nutshell, you must embrace political correctness in order to align with the redefined societal values and be accepted.

There's no two ways about it: political correctness is the most insidious form of free speech repression. It is meant to deprogramme the mind of certain values and markers and re-engineer them like you rewrite a line of code before embedding it back into the mind through politics, media, education, religion and the tyranny of elite-funded humanitarianism.

Political correctness goes beyond the news channels and delves deep into the arcanes of power, reframing the mindset of the workforce within public institutions and private companies. The Common Purpose programme in Britain is one such example. In the USA, the controversial Common Core is a diktat from the U.S. Department of Education that is, for instance, instilling new computational methods that defy logic and common sense.

By exerting a paradigm shift, political correctness was/ is meant to change us. It got entangled with our value system, it struck where it hurts: family, race, gender, marital status, sexual orientation, education, religion, politics, and communication strategies. It decided on how we were supposed to think and act. The leftist, feminist, family-hostile agenda has had a field day with PC. If you crave examples, The Guardian and The Huffington Post are two models of political correctness that jump up my nose like a bad case of hay fever.

Kay Francis in Mandalay (1934), pict source

Political correctness was never meant to be politically correct. As a result, its divisive tactics aimed at the silent majority ended up overstepping the mark, outlasting its stay and forcing itself onto the very fabric of our Western societies like a blob of bubble-gum stuck to a shoe. A welcomed intrusion at first that forced itself into the collective psyche under the guise of promoting fairness, diversity and equalitarianism and giving a voice to the oppressed, it ended up gaffing and offensive. For the PC brigade had waged a war on the hard-working traditional white middle-class families, labelling them unfair, supremacist, bigot, racist, privileged, educated, sexist, homophobic, anti-feminist, and/ or fat-intolerant... Just tick the boxes and add to the list! And let's not get started on those micro-aggressions...

Blank it out at your peril, yet we have now reached a peak and might be on the verge of blowing a fuse. Early on in his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has blasted political correctness. He set a precedence for he managed to overrule the sacro-sanctity of mainstream media and get his message across to the American voters in ways that bypass the mainstream media altogether who had point blank hailed him a racist and a bigot.

The good news is that the aura - the taboo even - surrounding political correctness is fracturing down. Not down the mainstream but upstream thanks to the likes of WikiLeaks, Breitbart News, Infowars, UK Column, Nigel Farage, Anne Marie Waters and countless alternative journalists, writers, broadcasters, political activists, free thinkers and whistleblowers who are daring to question global governance and enjoin us to reclaim our Western identity, our national borders, our cultural heritage, our traditional Christian family values, our freedom of speech, and good old common sense. Governments are stepping up legislation in a view to control freedom of speech and clamp down any form of dissent that goes against the grain. Now it is all up to us whether we keep playing the recorded tune or finally get our word out.

Silenced, a Mike Cernovich documentary

Further Resources:

Below is a (working document) list of 'populist' personalities and alternative information channels that rock the (Establishment) boat and are described as not being politically correct per se: