aesthetics of joy

Joyful activism is a theme that keeps popping up these days. Rather than angry protests, a lot of people are realizing that a good way to effect change is to make people feel good.

I love this project, the Bed Stuy Meadow, by 21st Century Plowshare, the goal of which is to cover every vacant patch of land in the somewhat rough-and-ready neighborhood with wildflowers. Joy is at the heart of the activist premise:

The profusion of wildflowers will probably be relentless and visually unifying, and this relentless unity of wildflowers will probably make anyone walking down the street feel really good.

And the designer here recognizes that such positivity can have a contagious effect:

I want people who don’t even live within the five boroughs to visit Bed Stuy for the first time so that they can see the Meadow with their own eyes, and I want people who will never even come to be so inspired by the Bed Stuy Meadow that they make their own amazing neighborhood project and share it on 21st Century Plowshare.

Guerrilla actions such as this one have a much greater likelihood of success when the tone is positive. In a way, the Bed-Stuy meadow is a form of graffiti, the exertion of one person’s artistic will over a communal environment, but who can object to flowers? I think we’ll be seeing a lot more initiatives like this one in the coming years.

via PSFK

I’m guilty of not being much of a public television watcher (even as I adore public radio), so I’m awfully glad that the New York Times reviewed tonight’s Nova: Musical Minds in this morning’s paper. I haven’t yet read Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the latest of Dr. Sacks’s explorations into atypical neuroscience, but this was a pretty good primer. The show tells the stories of several people with unusual relationships to music: a guy with Tourette’s who discovered drumming keeps his tics in check, a blind and autistic man with a gift for piano, a man who developed a magical musical ability after being struck by lightning, and a woman who gets no pleasure from music at all.

The show also treats us to fMRIs of the brain of Dr. Sacks himself, on music, so to speak. Interested as I am in the way that music relates to joy, it was particularly exciting to see how many parts of the brain are involved in the enjoyment of music. Sacks points out that even some of the oldest parts of the brain, such as the cerebellum, get in on the act when music is processed in the brain, suggesting to me that music is a very deep, very old pleasure for humans.

You can watch the entire episode online tomorrow, here. I highly recommend it!

Here’s another allium, this one from my pics of The High Line. These look a lot like fireworks, another joyful thing, in the way they burst open from a central point. I’ve been thinking a lot about joyful movements lately, and I think this idea of “bursting” is a particularly joyful one.

Think about all the things that burst. Fireworks, of course, burst. Seedpods burst when they’re ready to cover the world with new plant life. Water breaks, or bursts, as a signal that a baby is ready to be born. Jack-in-the-boxes burst from their lidded confines. We say our hearts are “bursting with happiness,” that we have a “burst of energy,” and we burst into laughter or song.

Of course, bursting can also be negative. Bombs burst, and so do bubbles. But designed in the right way, with color cues or other joyful aesthetics, bursting movements can trigger a powerfully joyful response from an object.

I’ve been writing more than a little about the notion of the absurd as a route to joy lately, and as far as absurd flowers go, the allium pretty much takes the cake. Poofy, sparkly orbs, disproportionately large yet still light and airy atop impossibly tall, straight stems — the allium looks like something that would grow on a newly discovered planet. Its family heritage is no less comical: the cheery allium is actually a variant of the onion, presenting a globe above ground while its cousin hides one below.

The allium is one flower that never fails to make me smile. But of course there are many joyful flowers. Poppies, with their irrational exuberance — bright, fragile, and abundant. Peonies, which are perhaps more stately, but lavish with their fragrance and the endless layers of petals that unfurl implausibly from those tight, hard buds. Lilacs, which appear in an intoxicating fog of scent, offering a pure glut of sensation for only a few weeks. Tulips, too, with their early spring color and their way of opening themselves so wide as to practically turn inside out, offering all before going bare for another year.

The whole idea of the flower is joyful. It is an alluring spectacle, an unfurling of vibrant energy, both excessive and necessary. Color, pattern, scent, texture, intricacy of design — in the flower, nature spared no aesthetic expense. Surely she could have evolved other (more efficient) ways for plants to reproduce, but how lucky we are that flowers evolved to be the dominant means!

How’s this for a joyful pizza delivery experience? Place an order with Pink Flamingo Pizza near the Canal St. Martin in Paris, and they give you a pink helium balloon. You take the balloon with you to your chosen picnic spot by the canal and their bike delivery uses it as a floating beacon to find you.

It’s a simple, joyful way to create a magical experience for customers, a gesture that costs very little but pays dividends in the way it makes people feel about your service and your business. Aesthetically, it’s a hell of a lot nicer than those vibrating hockey pucks, both for the user and the surrounding environment. A bobbing balloon gives everyone a little lift.

It costs no more to make something joyful than to make something dull, but it can mean the difference between a ho-hum neighborhood joint and an international destination.

Via Frugal Traveler. Thank you flickr user Antonia Hayes for the image.

Design*Sponge today has a lovely piece on an exhibit at the Rockefeller Center anthropologie of Vera Neumann’s textiles. I find joy in the outpouring of energy that makes its way onto the fabric in the form of vibrant color and pattern.

It struck me today, walking around my neighborhood in Brooklyn, where every passing car and every storefront had a different MJ tune blasting at top volume, how closely intertwined sorrow is with joy. Here we are, a culture mourning the loss of one of our most significant pop icons, but mourning with songs that make you want to burst out in spontaneous dance, no matter how lame your moves or how ridiculous you might look moonwalking down the aisles of the grocery store.

Michael Jackson found his own joys in odd ways, and probably there is much analysis to be done by someone more qualified than me about the inner child that, suppressed by early fame, persisted in peculiar and haunting ways through the rest of his life. But there’s no question he also brought joy to many millions of people, through the sheer delight of music and movement and spectacle. It feels like the appropriate way to say goodbye, then, is to celebrate what he left us, to sing along and dance (well or badly) and remember his remarkable, joyful contribution to our lives.

Jell-O is an absurd food, and there is often something joyful about things that are a little bit absurd (to wit: flamingos, hula hooping, and those wonderful Wayne Thiebaud cake paintings). Everything about Jell-O is somewhat ridiculous — the name, for starters; the color, because no real food is ever that neon; the dancing wiggliness of it, its preposterous, inelegant, delightfully unpredictable movements.

So it should be no surprise that people are drawn to doing absurd things with it. The Gowanus Studio Space’s Jell-O mold competition, held last weekend, challenged designers to work with the medium in a novel and engaging way. As a designer I was most impressed by the guy who roto-molded Jell-O spheres, which I think hold lots of joyful potential to be filled in surprising ways. But I was also taken with this Jell-O caviar, shown above, which apparently had a fishy taste to it (gross!). You can see these and more in this excellent video.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the joy of seeing the world from above. Today, I discovered more evidence that I’m certainly not alone in that penchant: the “From the Airplane Window” pool on Flickr, 1421 members strong.

But views from above need not be so high to be transcendent, to momentarily transport you out of the reverie of your usual way of looking at the world. The High Line park, recently opened on the West Side of Manhattan, accomplishes no less of a shift in perspective, though only about 30 ft above the ground. Being up on the High Line shows how little a distance is necessary to give you a new view on things. It allows you to experience the city, which is normally so enveloping, as a semi-detached observer.

This is particularly true at the amphitheater, which creates an ironic kind of street theater looking up 10th Ave., reminding us of the spectacle that is New York City, and that however blasé we may become about living here, New Yorkers are part of a metropolis that inspires interest and curiosity in much of the world.

There is something about this middle distance view from the High Line — above the city, yet still very much in the city — that makes the shift in perspective all the more powerful. In a plane the landscape has a surreal quality, but from the High Line the city is both transformed and yet still very real. The people are not ants moving away from you at a rate so quick you can’t hold onto them; they are still people, but from that bird-on-a-wire view they are placed in context. They are also removed from time, in a way, where you see their movements circumscribed on the earth and the streets seem filled with patterns.

I love this quote, by Lisa Switkin, a landscape architect involved in the design of the High Line:

Someone said to me ‘have you noticed that people have a different pace when they are on the High Line?’ This made me smile, as I remember the supportive but skeptical reaction when we first stated our basic mantra of ‘Keep it Simple, Keep it Wild, Keep it Slow, and Keep it Quiet’ that inspired the design. ‘Can you even do that in New York?’ was a common response. And yet, it’s true; people do have a slower pace and sense of delay when they are on the line. They are suspended in a unique urban condition – both a part of the City and removed from the City at the same time. I hope the magical sense of surprise and bewilderment that the site produces itself, along with the legible and deliberate elongated transitions embedded into the design – from streetside to topside, hard to soft, woodland to grassland, river to city – give people the opportunity to see the City in new and unexpected ways; the familiar and iconic side as well as the up close, textural, and backside of New York City.

The design of the High Line is so wonderfully sensitive that it provides aesthetic opportunities for joy in many more ways than just this transcendent shift in perspective. As Switkin notes, the site does evoke a “magical sense of surprise and bewilderment,” from the charmingly aggressive way it cuts through buildings to the odd twists and turns to the landscaping which feels even wilder and more native than the local woods in our nearby suburbs.The High Line feels absurd, spontaneous, and vibrant, all joyful qualities.

The proof of joy in any design is in the way in makes people feel and behave, and in this, the High Line demonstrates its positive emotional worth. The High Line blog notes a “renegade cabaret” that has sprung up on a balcony neighboring the line, an entertaining phenomenon made possible by the almost-uncomfortable adjacency of the park to the surrounding buildings. It also talks about the first marriage proposal on the line. These are the true markers of joy in a space, joy that will endure past the initial exhilaration of its newness. Does a space make people want to break into song? Do people see it as a place they want to start their lives together? Do people behave in unexpected ways, ways that may surprise even themselves? Are people smiling, not from the thrill of discovery, but in the sheer pleasure of being there?

If so, then you might say you’ve designed a joyful space.

This is a great find by my friend Maggie. Two-thousand LED paving stones have been set in amongst the cobbles on the Place du Molard in Geneva. What a magical place!

These lit pavers disrupt our expectations in so many subtle ways. We are so used to light coming from above that lights from below seem to upend the world in a beautiful way. We also expect solidity and density from the stones under our feet, not translucency. And every day, there is the renewed joy of dusk — watching certain stones defy the graying landscape and come to life.

Today on Deep Glamour: my thoughts on Barbie. I’m going to be a regular contributor on Virginia Postrel’s wonderful blog on glamour, taking occasional departures from the world of joy to think about more adult aesthetics.

My focus in the post is on Barbie’s lost glamour, but at heart Barbie is a joyful topic for me. Part of it is the nostalgia for childhood, part the delight of imaginative, open-ended play, and part the delicious appeal of Barbie’s indulgent, over-the-top, feminine world. For a true girly-girl, Barbie’s ability to do this is unmatched, and probably has something to do with her continuing ability to bring joy to generation after generation of young girls.

Virginia Postrel sent me these joyful pops of color from Apartment Therapy this morning. Scroll down for more. I particularly love this one, especially the rubber duck and the Pinocchio felted rug by Hay. This would be so joyful in a neutral-toned apartment, under a favorite reading chair…

I love that the Best Made Co., makers of the wonderful axes in my previous post, list these polka-dotted cement mixers among their inspirations. Like the axes, they’re a great example of joyful aesthetics in a utilitarian context. A heavy, noisy cement mixer receives a totally different reception from passers by when clad in polka dots than the usual industrial gray. And no matter how many times you see them, they never seem to get old.

Photo from the photostream of So Cal Metro.

Not so appropriate for the urban jungle, perhaps, but I still find these joyful axes completely irresistible. Amazing how the cheeriness of the handle strips out all the violence of the blade. Also, a good example for me of how the aesthetics of joy know no age or gender, as I could see these in the hands of a young woman or slung over the shoulder of my dear old grandpa. Makes you want to get your hands dirty, and whistle while you work!

Axes from the Best Made Co. Via Daily Candy.

I had such a good time at the insanely cute Putting Lot this weekend, a mini golf course created for this summer by a bunch of artists on a disused lot in Bushwick. The Putting Lot is like a joyful little oasis in the heart of a typical urban-industrial Brooklyn landscape. While I think there’s always something whimsical about mini golf (notably the idea of miniaturization, a key trend in joyful things), this particular course takes it a step further with its surprising location and artfully inventive holes.

The hole featured above (thank you to Flickr user jamfan2 for the image), aside from its wonderfully appealing color scheme, involves spending a lot of time with your feet in the cool water as you fail time and time again to vault your ball over the canal that separates the tee from the hole. My other favorite hole is like putting on a green where the Caddyshack groundhog has set up a dozen technicolor burrows. One leads to the hole, while the others shoot you back out the way you came. It’s endless fun to try and figure it out.

The genius of these holes is how open-ended they are. You can play them in a competitive game, but the real pleasure comes from discovering the many different approaches and traps and testing out their various properties. Sometimes the balls get stuck, or come out somewhere they clearly weren’t intended to, but this DIY feel is all part of the fun, and in my view makes it even better than a slick, “commercial” mini golf course.

I highly recommend a visit this summer. Just make sure to dress appropriately!

I love this project, called TRASH: any color you like, by the artist Adrian Kondratowicz. The project involved getting local businesses in a particular area to put out their trash in these specially designed hot pink polka-dotted bags. Typically we pass by piles of garbage bags on our city streets without blinking, but these are so strikingly different, we can help but take notice. And in the process, the artist hopes, we’ll reflect on just how much trash we throw away.

I love this because it’s one of many examples of what I see as a new trend in social and environmental advocacy: joyful activism. Joyful activism looks to incite changes in behavior not by scaring or shaming people, but through the power of positive emotion. I can’t help but think that when we’re made aware of an issue through this kind of joyful disruption, we receive the information with a different level of openness, and that we might just be more receptive to the idea of change.

Are socks the most joyful article of clothing?

A few years ago, in a serious meeting in the boardroom of a big company, long table surrounded by executives, I looked down and noticed that the besuited division head sitting next to me had on rainbow socks. I couldn’t help but smile, and compliment him, and after a moment of sheepishness at having been outed, he just looked delighted that someone else understood that inside the suit was a free spirit whose inner child was alive and well.

Since then, I’ve encountered many otherwise serious people who wear crazy socks, and I wonder what it is about socks that makes them such ideal vehicles for our sublimated whimsy. Is it because they’re normally hidden under shoes and pants, so that usually only we know they’re there?

The fun socks above are from Hansel from Basel, in case you get inspired to bring a little joy into your wardrobe.

I haven’t seen an approach to joy quite like this before. A group of over 500 Latvian blondes tired of sitting around being depressed about the recession decided to do something to bring a little levity to the people. Dressed in bright pink and white, they marched the streets of Riga, hoping to lift the country out of its emotional, if not economic, doldrums.

The image gallery has me thinking they were probably pretty successful.

This morning, the driver of my taxi here in Montreal advanced his own theory of joy. “Joy,” he said, “is anything you love to do.” But this theory of his has attenuating complications. As my driver said, “When a serial killer murders people, he feels joy too.”

Can this be possible? We think of joy as a wholesome, innocent sort of feeling — how could something so horrific bring joy? It seems to violate one of the key premises of joy, that joy comes from things which are generally good or at least neutral for humanity, not things with damaging consequences. There are joys that have a mischievous feel which I call transgressions, but these transgressions are notable for having no real harmful consequences: the trivial destruction of bubble wrap, the illicit pleasure of jumping on the bed, the forbidden delight of dessert before dinner, where the only thing ruined is an appetite. (And as Jerry Seinfeld says, it doesn’t really matter if you ruin your appetite because there’s always another one right behind it.)

Joy may not always be universal, but it usually has the potential to be shared and appreciated by others through participation, observation, or retelling. I may not myself enjoy spinning until I’m dizzy, but watching a trio of girls do so probably would bring a smile to my face.

Not so with murder, which makes me say that while a serial killer might feel pleasure from his actions, he doesn’t feel what we call joy. It may feel good for him, but it’s not transcendent, it’s not taking him out of his everyday prism and changing his perspective. If anything, like an addict, it’s only deepening his narrow field of existence. In that case, we might say the serial killer feels a sort of euphoria, an emotional high that does not shift your perspective, but just provides a temporary peak.

My thinking on this is evolving, but it is a worthwhile practical challenge to the theory. I’d love to know what people think. Do serial killers feel joy?

Adulthood has conditioned me to an aisle seat (all that water downed to prevent dehydration demands proximity to a loo) but my inner child always wants a window. This morning, with the luxury of both, I was comfortable and free to recall the simple joy of staring out an airplane window.

Often I find joy in things that others might not, but here I feel I’m on safely universal ground. After the widespread success of Yann Arthus Bertrand’s La Terre vue du Ciel and the 12,422 image hits for the search terms “from plane window” on Flickr, I think we can say there’s something many people find joyful about looking down on earth from thousands of feet up.

Surely there is the magic element that I mentioned in my post on kites, the feeling of soaring up and away from earth’s gravity. Literally, in the moment of takeoff and as we find ourselves above the clouds, we realize we are temporarily transcending earth. But there is also a subtler kind of transcendence that accompanies such a radical change in perspective. In essence, it’s really just a very sudden, very simple scale shift, as if the earth very quickly shrank Alice-in-Wonderland style before our eyes. We are transcending ourselves, the narrow prism of perception and attention we operate within, and the newly detached relationship between ourselves and our earth gives rise to all sorts of transformative feelings and thoughts.

There is nostalgia too. As I watch the cars shrink to marching ants, the roads to graphite lines, the backyards to an abstract pattern of greens, I can’t help but recall my first experiences of these things, my nose pressed up against the cold porthole, mesmerized. But in a landscape as varied as Earth, there is always something new to notice. These days, it’s the swimming pools that captivate me, the turquoise kidneys, oases, reservoirs of summer joys to come.

Thank you to Flickr user sharwest for this evocative image.