youth rebellion for kamikaze teens

An object encounters its image, an object encounters its name. It may be that the image and the name of the object encounter each other.

Christ will never more come down to earth nor will there be any lawgiver, nor will murder cease, nor theft, nor rape, and yet… and yet one expects something, something terrifyingly marvelous and absurd, perhaps a cold lobster with mayonnaise served gratis, perhaps an invention, like the electric light, like television, only more devastating, more soul-rending, an invention unthinkable that will bring a shattering calm and void, not the calm and void of death but of life such as the monks dreamed, such as is dreamed still in the Himalayas, in Tibet, in Lahore, in the Aleutian Islands, in Polynesia…

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.

These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only “forced draft” consumption, but “expensive” consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption

I think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit.

Our goal is simple objects; objects that you can’t imagine any other way. Simplicity is not the absence of clutter. Get it right, and you become closer and more focused on the object.

The shoes I wear today are from John Lobb, they are 25 years old. When I first got them they weren’t really comfortable but after 25 years, they really feel comfortable. With beautiful things, it is all about learning to wait, being patient.

People today, they don’t want to give it time. But it is like love, it is like a relationship, it is like learning, like all the things we admire, it takes time. Anything that happens in the snap of a finger isn’t good.

I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

The metal-and-plastic machines are all amoral. But by their design and function they lure us to be better or worse than we might otherwise be.

Taste is one of those human concerns in which a lack of experience is no hindrance to opinion.

Aesthetic judgments rarely transcend the culture of the judge.

All they want is a quarterly report that shows what products came out of it. That is so short-sighted it shows the beginning of the end of your culture.

…it is the exact opposite of poetic writing. Here the word does not explode, nor explore; its function is not to confront the object in order to pluck out the heart of its substance an ambiguous, summarizing name: language here is not the rape of an abyss, but the rapture of the surface…