I had a revelation inside one of the very hip (and very dark) lobby restrooms at the Ace Hotel. It was at the moment I dropped my hands into the narrow slot at the top of the Airblade hand dryer as if they were pieces of bread to be toasted. It felt vaguely humiliating, the same way opening your mouth super-wide for the dentist does. (My dinner companion said that this peculiar motion reminded him of the way women in the old Palmolive commercials dipped their hands into small bowls of the green fluid.) I wondered why the dryer wasn’t simply designed so that the slot is horizontal. This way it could be accessed in a more relaxed way, especially by those who are especially tall or short or in wheelchairs. A horizontal machine would stick out further from the wall, but could be tucked next to the sink and reached by swinging one’s hands over from under the faucet. It all seemed terribly obvious.

But Dyson, who design and sell the Airblade, care little about ergonomics or common sense. They’re interested in peddling products that look like they’re revolutionary rather than products whose operations are so seamless that they might have a chance to actually be revolutionary. I’ve never used a Dyson vacuum cleaner or fan. Like the Airblade, these products have a high-tech contemporary gloss, with strong shapes, clean lines, and a silvery finish. The vacuum cleaner turns dramatically on a big, visible ball pivot and the fan is a perfect circle. The Airblade doesn’t have those alluring geometries, but it certainly looks a lot smarter than a conventional metal enamel hand dryer, that kind that gets scratched and dented and wheezes and heaves and never really gets your hands dry enough. But is it? It might require less time and energy to dry one’s hands in an Airblade, but it requires a highly unnatural motion. This machine takes the mindless act of drying one’s hands and makes it onerous.

October 23, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Berlin-based conceptual artist and prankster Tatzu Nishi has encased the statue of Christopher Columbus that stands on a seventy-five-foot-high pillar at the southwest corner of Central Park in a living room. The installation, Discovering Columbus, will be in place through mid-November. Visitors can climb up six flights of stairs through a web of construction scaffolding, as I did last week, to a lordly panorama of Central Park and a closer look at the statue, which has got a swagger in its stance and a faraway look in its eyes. The play in scales is striking. The statue is about fifteen feet tall and the room enclosing it just a few feet higher and bears down uncomfortably. And while the statue is naturally-proportioned, its feet seem stupendously large while its head seems not quite big enough.

The installation is a great, simple idea. But I wish Nishi had thought a bit harder about the architecture of the space and the character of the man. The living room has the blank proportions of a double-wide. The walls are wrapped in a custom-designed wallpaper featuring American icons like Michael Jackson and Elvis, but that cheekiness doesn’t carry over into the furnishings, which look like they were ordered from Bob’s. The friend I was with wished for a picture window over Broadway, where Columbus seems to be looking. I wished for a lavish fifteenth-century interior with silk drapes and gilded coffers. From Nishi’s website we can see that he’s built similar “living rooms” to recontextualize prominent statues around the world, including one of Queen Victoria and another by Rodin. But did he stop to think about what Columbus did and why we need to memorialize him? Seeing the statue like this prompted me to reread the astounding opening pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which retell Columbus’ landing in the Bahamas using excerpts from the explorer’s diaries. Arawak Indians come to the shores with food and gifts for their visitors while Columbus, from the deck of his ship, observes their physical grace and good nature, and begins thinking about what fine servants and guides they’ll be. Discovering Columbus gives us a closer look at the statue, but not at the man.

October 22, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Earlier this year the New York Public Library (NYPL) announced, to considerable outcry, a plan to remodel the historic main branch on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. This plan included removing books from seven stories of underground stacks and building a lending library in that space. Then, last month, after receiving additional funds, the NYPL announced they would build additional underground stacks below the new lending library in order to keep more books close at hand. As patrons we won’t see these books, but we’ll know that they’re resting below us in Dewey decimal order in temperature-controlled vaults. The new plan makes everybody feel better because it recognizes that books are special things, and that this is what the NYPL is all about.

But let’s take a look at what’s happening right across Fifth Avenue at Mid-Manhattan Library (MML), NYPL’s main lending branch. This six-story library spreads its collections in the first four floors, with offices in the floors above. For over fifteen years the new books, most-lended books, DVD’s and CD’s were kept on the first floor, while other, more esoteric, less-lended books were kept on higher floors. It made perfect sense, because people could run in, conduct their business on the first floor, and run out. Then earlier this year the folks at the MML moved the stacks of (worn, scuffed, spine-damaged) most-lended books, which felt like the heart of the place, to the second floor to make room for more DVD’s. So now about half the floor has been given over to CD’s and DVD’s, just as people are, more and more, consuming music and movies digitally. While people are also, more and more, consuming books digitally, it’s the library’s original mission to house books. And MML was a one-of-a-kind urban library. It offered the exquisite comfort of endless rows of books, but housed inside a hideous brutalist building with turnstiles, security guards, buzzing fluorescent lights, and, at all hours, an eclectic, energetic stream of patrons. Now, except for perimeter shelves holding new fiction and non-fiction, the entire first floor is given over to music and movies. Shouldn’t it be all about the books?

Patience and Fortitude in sculptor Edward Clark Potter’s studio, c. 1911.

October 19, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I like to draft while listening to the morning talk radio shows hosted by Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The voices of these two men are preternaturally soothing, a perfect antidote to the focused graphic and mathematical thinking that goes into computer drawing. Whomever they’re talking with and whatever they’re talking about, it makes perfect Music For Drafting. There’s only one time when what I heard disrupted my work, and that was when Kenneth Branagh visited Lopate’s show this summer to promote a movie. He delivered all the predictable movie star platitudes, but as he started talking I stopped working. Branagh’s unadorned speaking voice is fine and soft; it carries England and Ireland in it, and sadness and music. It’s stunning.

In the PBS series Wallander, based on the crime novels of Henning Mankell, Branagh plays the titular homicide detective. True to the books, the series is shot on location in Sweden and many minor actors are Scandinavians. But Branagh and the other actors in major roles are British. The star adjusts his voice for the part. He doesn’t put on an accent but he holds something back, and in doing so he silences a large part of himself. Wallander is a laconic personality to begin with, so Branagh spends much of his screen time glowering silently and clenching his jaw. The Swedish locations give the stories an aptly gloomy tone. We see the stunted, spiritless streets, ports and parking lots of Ystad where the killers and killed pass their lives. The look of the perpetually overcast skies is remarkable – like aluminum. But what’s the point of these details if Branagh can’t use his voice fully? Why don’t they set the series in Belfast, or Manchester, and let him speak?

October 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses