apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Feels like a Wallpaper* just doubled the size.

I saw Tyler at the Slipper Room in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1999. He was surrounded by aspirants and epigones, but seemed in fine spirits, chatting with Slipper Room co founders Jeff Dachis and Craig Kanarick.

Jeff and Craig started the company Razorfish in 1995 in the former's East Village apartment and built it into a $2 billion public corporation with 1,800 employees in 13 cities. Their story is much less prominent that Tyler's today. The one certainty, though, is that the luminosity that filled the Slipper Room and characterized its celebrants – Tyler, Jeff, Craig, me -- is gone.

That evening Tyler excitedly told me that he had just put to bed the January-February issue of Wallpaper. The cover featured a beautiful couple whose fierce stare and slight, knowing, upward lift of the left side of their mouth (the viewer’s right) signaled their ownership of a very special knowledge -- presumably located in the pages behind them. This knowledge was subtitled “Bunker Down / What to Do In Case We Crash / Wallpaper’s designs for millennium meltdown.” The couple held a crossbow between them, and sat in front of at least a month’s supply (or weekend!) of champagne, fine foodstuffs, and sundry luxuries.

Tyler ordered a pomegranate martini. Who did that in 1999!?! He did, and it took half an hour for the barman to make it. Tyler’s deliberate and smooth manner in making the order suggested a style sense that transcended magazine production cycles and press releases. I could imagine that Tyler’s bunker was even more fabulous than those featured in the Wallpaper cover story, and the only redoubt that any halfway stylist survivalist would aspire to occupy, come the Horsemen. Unsurprisingly my attempt to order the same drink with the same bartender, on a different night, got nowhere.

We all know what happened to the “dot-com bubble,” which covered roughly 1997-2001 and saw stock markets rapidly increase in value based on speculative money and business offerings that, today, in our more sober clime, seem outlandish.

I lost touch with Jeff and Craig, although understand that they are doing well. Could it be that we are the first peoples to follow our hedonism with so sophisticated a regime of health and fitness that the latter technologies nearly erase the damage done? Cigarette scorched fingers and faces, dried up eyes, leaky membranes of the nose, tight skin across the temple --- all correctable and, if not internally set right, then cosmetically repaired. Jeff and Craig seem to answer my question in the affirmative.

I’m happy to see that we are not yet in our bunkers, and heartened by Tyler’s decision to launch “Monocle”. This move suggests an undiminished verve and a resolve to explore with Falstaffian spirit the aesthetic boundaries of our manufactured and mediated existence. It will be interesting to see the magazine take shape. Whereas the title “wallpaper” suggests a structured and preexisting environment ("the stuff that surrounds us") – a line wholly appropriate to its apolitical times, when we prioritized experience over knowledge --“monocle” implies the act of sight, of visual pinpointing. I would argue that this latter mode involves objectification in the classical sense, and the necessary making of judgments.

Perhaps this is keeping with our more sober times, and awareness that wallpaper is but a very thin layer and easily pierced. I wish him the best in his new endeavor.

Christ Rick, what a novel!
Anyway, does anyone know where Monocle is stocked? Do they sell it online?

I bought mine at Universal News on 23rd Street by Home Depot. One can subscribe on the site linked in the post.

I saw this the other day and thought it was one of the nicest sites I've seen in awhile.

I will second that Margo very nice site