Simply mesmerizing assemblage of joyful underwater photos on flickrblog today. Feels just right for a hot summery New York day!
Photo: estelucy
Being interested as I am in joyful objects, it’s only natural that I’ve become obsessed with all things bubble, ball, and balloon. So when the dvd of The Red Balloon caught my eye in the local video store, I couldn’t resist bringing it home.
It must be more than 20 years since I’d seen it, but the film has a way of turning you back into a child. This happens so subtly that you don’t even notice, and the joy you feel at Pascal’s discovery of the balloon is as unfiltered and real as it would be if it were you climbing that Paris lamppost, seeking out that enormous floating treasure. And the pain at its eventual fate is just as real, just as sharp as a child’s.
In childhood we feel these emotions for the first time, and for this reason they remain at their peak of intensity in our memory. Perhaps this is why coveted objects from our childhood, like balloons, become so deeply symbolic of joy later in our lives. But there is still the question of why we are attracted to them so intensely in the first place, and I think this points to intrinsic qualities that entice us no matter how far we are from childhood.
In a 2007 review, Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman wrote:
The timeless magic of Albert Lamorisse’s mostly wordless 34-minute 1956 fable. . . begins with the balloon itself, which looks like no other balloon you’ve ever seen. It’s so shiny and tactile, so luscious in its utter balloon-ness, that it’s like some wondrous spherical lollipop.
Joy begins with aesthetics, with our sensory experience of the world, with qualities like shininess, redness, roundness, and lusciousness. The aesthetics, and their contrast with the muted surrounds, capture our attention, the beam of conscious awareness that causes us to then notice all the other joyful aspects of the object, which are also communicated aesthetically. Aspects such as its magical movements — hovering inexplicably outside a window when it is cast outside, and taking off after an attractive blue balloon in the hands of a pretty girl encountered on the street — its surprising personality, and the story it tells.
Of course, the red balloon is not just an example of the aesthetics of joy. It is joy itself, and I was struck most of all by the purity of the allegory in the nearly-wordless narrative.
Joy is often found when you are not looking for it, and in unexpected places. It rewards the observant and those willing to make an effort to attain it. Joy has a mind of its own — you cannot predict where it will pop up or how long it will stay.
Joy is not welcome in school, a sad statement that is all too often true in contemporary education. And it is not welcome in church, though it should thrive there too. It isn’t really welcome in much of the adult world, and some adults are impervious to joy, but fortunately the child’s world is a much nicer place to dwell. Yet there are also adults whose inner children are alive and well — those who will gladly shield your joy from a stormy day under their umbrella or smile just to see it go by.
You cannot take joy by force, no matter how hard you try. You can kill it, though, but only for a moment. Because real joy is abundant and irrepressible, and always available to those who are open to it.
The film is online in its entirety here, but I can’t tell you how much I hope you don’t watch this version. There is so much pleasure in the details of this film, details lost in this low-quality upload. Put it in your Netflix queue and wait for the real thing, and let me know if it brings you as much joy as it did to me.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
The moment I knew joy had “tipped” (i.e. reached its point of mass cultural relevancy) came earlier this month when I received my copy of Dwell magazine. The magazine had an overleaf on top of the regular cover with what looked like colored tire tracks and on the underside a simple link: ExpressionOfJoy.com. Given the name I rushed to my computer and entered the URL. What popped up, as you’ll see if you click through, is a BMW promotional site featuring what looks like a child’s drawing but is actually a giant “car painting” done with a Z4 and gallons of primary colored paint on a giant canvas.
The site shows the making of the painting in elegant time-lapse fashion, from the laying of the special paneled canvas through the creation of the artwork, with the paint spraying out from jets over the wheels. It’s fun to watch, beautiful, and certainly novel, but is it joy?
Joy, in word and intention, has been popping up all over these days, and this marketing gimmick from BMW is only the latest. Recent Pepsi ads have been using the word joy (among other happy words) with the “O” replaced by the new Arnell-designed Pepsi logo. Joy was in evidence on the cover of this year’s New York magazine design issue, featuring a nude woman gleefully throwing a gallon of fluourescent pink paint at a white wall. This week’s New York Time’s T style magazine proclaims that the Milan furniture fair was all about joy. And then there are the new brands that keep popping up with joy in the name or tagline, like Tipjoy, an app that allows you to send money via Twitter.
Of course, joy has always been a theme in our culture — witness Almond Joy, Joy dishwashing liquid, and the Joy of Cooking, as well as the many joy campaigns that flood the airwaves during the holidays — but there does seem to be a rising current of joy right now, and it’s not hard to understand why. When life is uncertain and hardship abounds, happiness may be a difficult concept to grab ahold of, but little peaks of joy are easy to aspire to. You may not be able to afford a the home you’d like, but a sunny day strolling the park is an always-accessible mood-lifter.
All of these examples, new and old, include aesthetic features we associate with joy — saturated colors, bright imagery, expressions of freedom and play — but sometimes looks can be deceiving. The BMW campaign is interesting to me because I feel it falls shy of the mark on joy. It is an enjoyable spectacle, to be sure, a fun example of the inner child let loose. But while it is wonderful on the first watching, on the second and third the emotional impact is noticeably diminished. The pleasure is in getting the joke, understanding how its made and marveling at the process. But the pleasure of the product is lacking in depth, and the piece plays like a novelty. Joy must be repeatable, and perhaps I am cynical, but I wonder if I saw this again in a year if it would inspire any emotional reaction at all.
Which is not to say I don’t like it. I really appreciate when companies engage the arts and try to raise the level of discourse and differentiation around their brands. Kohler and Bombay Sapphire have done this well, in my opinion. I do question whether this particular idea is necessarily on brand for BMW (a subject for another column, perhaps), and whether the naming was well thought out, or merely an attempt to glom on to the current trend towards joy.
It’s magic month in the world of Aesthetics of Joy. I’m currently working on the chapter about magic and joy, which is all about the transcendence of natural law and human limits. One of the greatest constraints we face as humans is gravity, so it’s no surprise that a lot of joyful things happen to defy it. Unable to fly naturally ourselves, we derive a lot of joy from assisted flight (planes, hanggliders, hot air balloons) and from surrogates (kites, bubbles, birds).
The magic of kites lies partly in this defiance of gravity, but also in the way it plays with another human limit: visibility. As our dominant sense, vision is something we trust without question, but human vision actually operates within a pretty narrow range. We have trouble seeing anything smaller than 1/20th of a millimeter with the naked eye. So even though we know that air is not actually “empty” but rather filled with invisible particles that are constantly being moved around by wind and convection currents, we can’t see these in action. There is, then, a magic in anything that manages to make these invisible forces visible.
The unpredictable dance of a kite reveals these hidden forces in a beautiful, joyful way. And the design of kites, while deeply functional, is also geared towards aesthetically enhancing this emotional experience. Kite designers design for the wind, for the spectacle created by the kite’s movements, adding loose tails or wings that magnify the gyrations of the form. Color, usually bright and saturated, is used to draw maximum attention. And though there is poetry in a simple diamond kite, kite designers are going ever bigger and more intricate in their quest to provide a joyful spectacle.
These features are clearly in evidence among the kites exhibited last night at the FlyNY kite auction. Founded by a trio of architects, FlyNY is a kite-making competition and kite-flying festival aimed at bridging the gap between the design community and everyday New Yorkers, and bringing joy through the pleasure of kite-flying. The non-profit held their inaugural festival earlier this month in Riverside park, and hundreds of families showed up to make simple paper kites, while the more hardcore brought their own finely crafted designs. Yesterday, the kites were exhibited and auctioned off at the Knoll showroom to benefit Architecture for Humanity.
I’ll be interviewing FlyNY founder Victoria Walsh next week, so look for more kite thoughts then! You can see images from the kites and the festival here.