Radio smow Special: 2000 smow Blog Posts…….

So unwilling are we here at smow Blog to blow our own trumpet, we don’t even own a trumpet. Why would we, we’d never blow it. It would just lie in the corner, unused, wastefully untooted.

However, 2000 smow Blog posts is an occasion very much demanding of a fanfare.

Technically 2001 smow Blog posts, the nature of these things meaning this post didn’t appear as planned between Transform! Designing the Future of Energy at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein and 5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for April 2024, but hey when did things ever go to plan round our way.

And while we can’t sound a fanfare, wouldn’t sound a fanfare even if we could, we can do that thing we enjoy almost as much as furniture: we can have a bit of a dance.

And, and making a rare exception, it is after all a very special occasion, you’re all invited…….

The smow Blog formally opened for business on Friday November 7th 2008, or did in its current form, there was a very short-lived predecessor concept which historians in centuries to come will discuss in a manner far beyond its actual relevance, for it isn’t and wasn’t a direct component of the path currently unfolding, if very much a component of the wider thought processes in those early days of smow online that have brought us all this far; an opening post, indeed early posts, that, looking back on them from the safety of 2024, has and have a very, an overtly, a sickly sweet, corporate, commercial, tone. Or put another way, looking back on those first posts we are utterly shocked as to how corporate, how partisan, how commercial, how, in contemporary parlance, 😍, they, we, were. If however we do also notice a language usage that is singularly distinct from that of the norm of that period. The other thing that one notices is our idiosyncratic use and presentation of photos. What were we thinking? How was that approach even a possible thought never mind an actual action?!?! Youth!! Who’d want their’s back??

However, being as we, unquestionably, are smow, it wasn’t long before we began to feel uncomfortable in the confines of the norm, in the endless corridors of convention, and began to search for our own voice, a process that, as with so many teenage voyage’s of discovery, has, or certainly appears to have had looking back, its origins in travel, for all in our visits to Milan 2009, New York 2009 and DMY Berlin 2009; a Milan and a DMY Berlin that for varying and various reasons were to become of fundamental importance in the following years, and still are despite DMY’s sad demise and our rejection of Milan as an unsustainable, irresponsible, egoistic platform. And a New York we, as smow Blog, have never made it back to. If not for want of trying. And, no, not because we got deported in 2009. (Didn’t really, were just messin’ about because there were no tables in the press room at ICFF.)

And experiences independent of the smow family that, and although we still regularly penned sickly sweet teenage odes to the smow portfolio, still regularly crowbarred smow into any and every context regardless of how ill-fitting and inappropriate that was, meant we’d seen the world outside the walls of smow and wanted to understand our own being in context of that wider universe we’d seen, smelt, heard, drunk, licked, embraced. Wanted to, needed to, understand the interplays, the influences, the influencing, to understand how smow related to that wider universe and for all to find our place in that relationship and to communicate with it in our voice.

A teenage voyage of discovery that as with so many teenage voyage’s of discovery saw us, initially, adopt a somewhat, a very, arrogant, surly, sarcastic, ill-informed-know-it-all persona, the unmistakable voice of adolescence, and at times we were utterly out of control…..no, no, no, its for the best for all that we don’t give you examples, let sleeping dogs lie and all that. However, through making mistakes, getting lost, analysing our behaviour and voice in the rare moments of calm inner-reflection, listening to those wiser and more experienced than us, and continually starting over with the lessons learned along the way, our path has brought us, if imperceptibly slowly, to the inner peace of later life adulthood. If a later life adulthood guided, as our path has been, by the same questioning and desire and passions and irritations of its earliest phases. We are, as noted above, unquestionably, smow.

2000 posts in 15 years and 5 months, which, by our math, is an average of 2.5 posts a week, which is a decent average, all things considered, not least considering the size of the smow Blog team, the resources at our disposal and our banishing to the very remotest backwater of contemporary culture and society, a forlorn speck on the periphery of civilisation. If an average admittedly helped by several very intense phases of posting, including, and aside from the great many furniture fairs and design weeks visited over the years, and lest we forget we used to post several times a day from events such as IMM Cologne or Salone Milano, how we managed that we now have no idea……. several very intense phases of posting, including, for example, our coverage of events such as the 2010 Designer Furniture World Cup with its epic final between Switzerland and Germany. The Swiss, as we all recall, winning thanks to two goals by Fritz Haller. Or our very much lamented and missed #campustour through international design university summer showcases and international falafel culture. Or our introduction of the smow advent calender. Just one several innovations, alongside several designers and products, to have premiered in the smow Blog before arriving in the mainstream. But, as we said, no trumpet blowing here. It’s not something we do.

And an average that is also all the more remarkable when one considers the structural, formal changes over time, that manner in which as we’ve moved on from the straight-to-the-chase unashamed commercial posting of our youth, over the provocative, pointed, brevity of adolescence, we’ve increasingly used ever more words. That manner in which as we’ve increasingly began to understand those relationships, interplays, influencing and influences that caught our youthful imagine, set our youthful passions ablaze, as we have learned to better question and challenge the existing and to demand alternatives where contradiction and incongruity reside, we’ve increasingly used ever more words. And increasingly moved to argument and discourse rather than the “I’ll tell how the world is from my perspective and then insist you accept that position, because I’m right” so beloved of contemporary social media. And contemporary politics. If words that for all their increasing number are, arguably, still those of our youth, still find an echo in the earliest posts. An increase in word number per post that hasn’t always been celebrated by the wider smow family, but which, we’ll always argue is and was necessary, important, not in least in context of the contemporary dumbing down of popular discourses on design and furniture, the increasing skewing through lazy commercialism of popular appreciations of design and furniture, the increasing reduction of the complexities of design and furniture to half-truths unquestioningly, thoughtlessly, dangerously, repeated in and by an increasing mass of shiny publications physical and virtual; if an increasing number of words per post which will inevitably begin to revert back towards fewer words per post as advancing age cripples our mental faculties. And sees us spending ever longer in doctors’ waiting rooms rather than in the libraries, archives and museums we currently haunt.

And an increase brought into perspective when one considers that posts 1 to 10 have a mean of 259.6 words per post and a median of 261.5 words per post, while posts 1990 to 1999, the last ten before 2000, have a mean of 3,548.5 words per post and a median of 3,339 words per post. And that in terms of time spans, the first ten were published over a period of some 5 ½ weeks, while the lattermost ten were published over a period of some 5 ½ weeks. Which, we’ll argue, is indicative of, testament to, our development over the intervening 15 years; would argue that increasing some 13 fold the number of words used within the same time period, of using words 13 times quicker, is a direct consequence of the experience and experiences of the intervening 15 years, a direct consequence of the people we’ve met, the conversations we’ve had, the projects we’ve been exposed to, the exhibitions we’ve viewed, the books and articles we’ve read, the thought processes we’ve wandered along, are still on.”¹ People, conversations, projects et al we will always be thankful to and for. And will always question what would have become of us without all that? Would we still be penning short, sickly sweet odes to the smow portfolio? Still crowbarring in smow at every opportunity regardless of whether it actually passed, was actually appropriate? Still thinking smow was the centre of the universe and not a component of that universe with responsibilities and duties alongside its needs and desires? Where would we be today? Imagine! No, don’t!! Dance!!!

Whereby we’re not saying the voyage thus far have been all plain sailing, it hasn’t, far from it, storms, beam winds, windlessness and broken masts, and lost oars, and sharks, are ever present companions, as are the risks of falling into an easy self-contentment, of feeling settled, of forgetting not only that you’re on a journey, but why that journey. Of just accepting things. Then there’s the mid-life crisis that so often follows the inner peace of later life adulthood, and that may yet still come, wouldn’t surprise us, and should we start writing increasingly seriously about motorbikes, skateboards, expensive watches, our new hair colour or yoga, or heaven forfend begin extolling the virtues of delivery drones and flying taxis and H****, do please let us know.

But that’s all for the future, for now let us celebrate 2000 smow Blog posts with a playlist celebrating all things 2000…….

Disco 2000 – Pulp

Pulp are an important band in and for smow Blog, not just providing a regular soundtrack to our work, but also on account of the lesson one learns from Jarvis Cocker, a lesson he in turn learned from Philip Larkin, that not only can poetry be about the banal, mundane everyday things of life, but also there is no necessity to employ either the accepted conventions of rhyme, metre, tempo et al nor the niceties of formalised language, in case of Cocker and Larkin Oxford English, rather use language as it’s actually spoken, as a living breathing component of any society, not as a museal exhibit, fixed forever in a glorified, idealised time past. And use it to describe the world as you experience it, not some generalised, idealised world no one has ever visited. And use your voice to explain your position, not a voice with which you have no relationship and via which you thereby can’t explain your position because the voice your using doesn’t understand it. Can’t understand it.

An appreciation that one finds at the start of Disco 2000 in the pronouncement, denouncement,

Your name is Deborah
It never suited ya

which is not only brutally direct, but also implies a familiarity that means it won’t be taken as an insult, that impertinent directness in friendship that makes friendships so important. And also rhymes ‘Deborah’ with ‘ya’ which is outrageous. Deliciously so.

Liberties with rhyme continued to be liberally taken in the chorus

Oh, Deborah, do you recall?
Your house was very small
With wood chip on the wall
When I came ’round to call
You didn’t notice me at all

a monorhyme, a not unknown scheme, certainly not in Persian poetry, but in more recent European poetry unfamiliar, if very familiar, as in a very friendly, personal, unpretentious manner of communication; a friendly, personal, unpretentious manner of communication reinforced by the shortening of the final word from two syllables to one, and of the final word itself, as one progresses that brings a dynamism to what could otherwise be as monotonous as it is monorhyme. And a familiarly unfamiliar scheme within which Cocker packages not only the intensity of the pain of teenage unrequited love, a pain that can endure decades, that you know in this case will never subside, but also an astutely keen observation of the interior decoration of Deborah’s family home. Which isn’t something most poets would try. Even consider. Apart, arguably from Larkin.

And a familiar unfamiliarity of youth that allows Cocker’s narrator to suggest, invite,

Let’s all meet up in the year 2000
Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown?

And at post 2000?

Fully grown?

We do hope not, that would be truly awful. To never develop further, to remain where you are. To know you’ll never change, to be consciously aware that you’ll remain where you are and who you are. For ever. No, no!!! Unbearable. We hope never, ever, to be fully grown. Hope never to lose the desire to leave behind that which we are for something we have become. Without ever actively forcing that process, rather through letting it unfold.

Aquarius/Let the sun shine in – The 5th Dimension

“This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius” The 5th Dimension inform us all, a reference to the astrological opinion that the earth, and human society on that earth, spends around 2000 years under the influence of one of the signs of the Zodiac, before that influence passes on to the next in turn.

And while the exact date of the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius is a hotly debated subject amongst astrologers and their ilk, indeed the question if it has occurred or is still to come, The 5th Dimension are, were, very much the opinion that it had occurred in the late 1960s, in the midst of hippy euphoria, and will usher in an age of

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions

yeah, that’s exactly what happened post-1969 🙄
And as for their faith in the Age of Aquarius bringing,

The mind’s true liberation

that miscalculation is hardly their fault, no-one could have predicted the toxicity and homogenisation of social media back then, that way social media closes minds.

Not that such reflections should distract you from the song’s primary message: Let the sunshine in.

But do please use sunscreen, in the late 1960s the importance of such was much less well understood. If, yes, adding that advice would have disrupted the flow of the boogie, made it a much more awkward, less funky, construction. Which is why we have Baz Luhrmann. And, originally, Mary Schmich.

And while we clearly don’t buy into the hippy, esoteric, astrological, “mystic crystal revelation”, nonsense inherent in considerations that the astral position of the earth has an influence and impact on how things develop on earth, that is something alone for us, individually and collectively to define and take responsibility for — hippies, like conservative libertarians, never have been very keen on responsibility, freedom yes, responsibility no, and so let’s push that responsibility outwith our sphere of influence — we do very much like the idea of living in the 5th dimension. Sounds like the sort of space we’d be happy.

We Didn’t Start The Fire – Fall Out Boy

Much as we adore Billy Joel’s original we are absolutely fascinated by, as in obsessed by, Fall Out Boy’s update and for all with considerations on whether it was necessary, or whether Joel’s original, despite its dated references and content, doesn’t remain as informative and instructive for contemporary society much as the works of a Goethe, a Shakespeare, or a Zola do. The original was after all released in 1989 the most momentous of years when globally so much exploded, releasing as did so a lot of tensions, and ushering in the relative calm of the early 1990s, thus making it a monument to an important moment in the recent (hi)story of human society. A relevance not least on account of the social and political explosions we all kind of sense are approaching ever closer, the tensions that need to be taken out of contemporary global society. And are also obsessed by the comparison between the positions advanced by Joel’s burning embers of society’s path to self-annihilation and Fall Out Boy’s, and what the differences tell us about how far global society has moved, developed, and how far it hasn’t, since Joel penned his warning and admonishment. And also in reflecting on which embers could have remained in Fall Out Boy’s update. And if they shouldn’t have. And why do Fall Out Boy say “Trump gets impeached twice”, rather than employing Joel’s “Richard Nixon back again” as a structural tool for bringing Trump in twice as Joel brought Nixon in twice? A wasted opportunity. It could have been so good. And why do both insist that “when we are gone, it will still go/burn on”? Will it? Must it? Is it inevitable? Have we no hoses and buckets of sand at our disposal? We genuinely often spend hours listening to one after the other on repeat.

Among the smouldering embers of Fall Out Boy’s social and cultural arson is ‘Y2K’. Now younger readers may not remember but Y2K is and was a global panic that spread through the course of 1999 and which claimed that as December 31st 1999 clicked over to January 1st 2000 computers worldwide would cease to function as their chips couldn’t process the year. And thus leading to an apocalypse that would destroy the planet.

Didn’t happen.

Everything went on as normal. 1999 clicked over to 2000 and we in Europe were saved the terror of watching Australasia descend into chaos, knowing there was nothing we could do to stop it engulfing us. Except to party till it came.

And while the experience of Y2K doesn’t teach us to dismiss out of hand all warnings of coming disaster, far from it, it does tend to highlight on the one hand the low levels of popular appreciations of the workings of the technology on which we all depend, and how easy media of all types and hues can create situations of anguish, anxiety and distrust around situations where wider popular knowledge is lacking, and yes we are expanding away from technology here, are using technology as an analogy. And on the other hand highlights that blindness we have in appreciations of where those disasters could come from. For the risks are real. Something tended to be underscored by Fall Out Boy’s continuing on from ‘Y2K’, which was a real concern that passed without incident, to naming ‘Boris Johnson’ and ‘Brexit’, two very informative and illustrative examples of the severe problems we create for ourselves through egoism and chasing economic growth as the holy grail rather than seeking cultural cohesion and a robust social fabric; the problems we create for ourselves in that we fail to see where the real dangers lie because we rarely look through objective lenses, preferring subjective lenses. Preferentially our own rose-coloured subjective lenses. See also, for example, ‘GMOs’, ‘Belgians in the Congo’, ‘Burj Khalifa’, ‘H-bomb’, and, and somewhat inevitably being us as we are us, ‘self-driving electric cars’. And thus tending to argue for the urgent need to develop new collective objective lenses if we’re going to have any chance of allowing some coming musician(s) to pen a second update.

Sexy Boy – Air

A song not only with honey drippingly intoxicating, sleep denying sensual, guitars, vocals and Moog, but which describes an

Apollon 2000
Zéro défaut, vingt et un ans
C’est l’homme idéal
Charme au masculin

[Apollo 2000,
Zero defects, twenty-one,
He’s the ideal man
Masculine charm]

Yet you can’t help thinking that despite the highly seductive environment Air have so carefully crafted for their Apollon 2000, Air are mocking him.

Or more accurately mocking the idolised image of the perfect male that has passed down to us all, certainly us all here in Europe, unchanged and unchanging, from ancient Greece, those “héros”, “Aux corps d’athlètes”, “Mal rasées”, “bien habillées”, ‘with the bodies of athletes’, ‘unshaven’, ‘well dressed’, those visions of Ken who continue to blight society every bit as much as visions of Barbie. And which should rightly be mocked. And left with all the other ruins of Ancient Greece, a society past from whom we can learn an awful lot, but needn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t, actually be.

And as for the narrator’s closing words,

Moi aussi, un jour
Je serai beau comme un Dieu

[Me too, one day
I will be beautiful as God]

You were made in God’s image, you already are. Don’t forget that. Or doubt it.

In addition Apollo isn’t just associated with idealised, suffocating, controlling, anti-social beauty, rather is also closely associated with music, dance, poetry, truth, healing, and is that not a much better context to consider an Apollon 2000 than purely on visuals?

Whether the all-prevailing Ancient Greek visuals as described by Air or the 2024 European variation that far from being “Mal rasées”, “bien habillées” is as hairy as possible and pointedly, actively, conspicuously, dressed down, habillé pauvrement, by way of being fashionable.

I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) – The Proclaimers

500 isn’t 2000 but The Proclaimers, proclaim, see what we did there, that they would walk 500 miles and 500 miles more, so 1000 miles in total. And there are two of them. 2 x 1000 = 2000. Ain’t math brilliant.

However, much as we decided very early on that I’m Gonna Be ((500 + 500) x 2 Miles) was going to be in this playlist, we still can’t work out if this is song is a homage, a warning, an omen, a celebration, a mocking, a monument, a what? of the past 2000 posts. We’ll work it out one day, probably far, far too late. As ever. As Craig and Charlie said in another context, “you know our sense of timing”. But we will get there. And yes, we do haver a lot. An awful lot. Far too much at times. But it’s also sometimes deliberate. Indeed often is deliberate. But not always. Depends. Like. Gettin’.

All together now:

Ta-da-da-ta, (Ta-da-da-ta),
Ta-da-da-ta, (Ta-da-da-ta),
Ta-da-da-dan-te-la-dan-te-la-da (Ta-da-da-dan-te-la-dan-te-la-da)

The 2000 smow Blog posts party continues on the smowonline spotify page. Where all Radio smow playlists can be found and enjoyed.

Ta-da-da-ta, (Ta-da-da-ta),
Ta-da-da-ta, (Ta-da-da-ta),
Ta-da-da-dan-te-la-dan-te-la-da (Ta-da-da-dan-te-la-dan-te-la-da)

Ta-da-da-ta, (Ta-da-da-ta),
Ta-da-da-ta, (Ta-da-da-ta),
Ta-da-da-dan-te-la-dan-te-la-da (Ta-da-da-dan-te-la-dan-te-la-da)

1. Yes, it may also be because back in 2008/2009 it took longer to find subjects for posts, unfamiliar as we were with sourcing material for such a vehicle and needing to develop the concept, for all within the confines of its, then, corporate focus. But if so then the experience and experiences of the past 15 years have also speeded up that process, and today we have themes and subjects for a dozen blogs waiting, forlornly, to be penned. And no we didn’t have more other things to do back then, just different other things to do. And so which ever way you look at it the smow Blog has grown and developed in context of the experiences, peoples, conversations, projects et al of the past 15 years….. And for which we are, and always will be, unspeakably grateful.