Stick it to us

The Post-it note is 30 years old this year. Can we imagine life without them? Ten years ago someone visited my office and laughed because I had yellow reminder notes to myself stuck around the edge of my monitor. "Post-it notes?" she jeered. "Use the Stickies tool on your Mac!" I do, but I still like scribbling and sticking. Newsweek magazine has a vivid collection of the crazy and vivid and political and sentimental things people have done with Post-it notes over the years.

http://www.newsweek.com/photo/2010/11/16/how-post-it-notes-have-stuck-to-our-history-and-culture.html


As a for instance, I love this Korean bridal car - a mass of flapping yellow. Apparently they started out yellow because when 3M scientists were messing about with a new adhesive they happened to have some yellow scrap paper in the office. The idea languished for a while until one of the guys, who sang in his church choir, realised a tag of the sticky paper they'd been playing with would be a great way to keep his place in the hymn book. Small idea. Big business.

The online world of pretty

The web started out as a realm for geeks. The content was all about business, computer science, numbers and graphs. But something more beguiling flooded in when artists and dreamers began to play. While hard-sell merchants are screaming their names elsewhere on the web, the appeal of pretty sites is partly due to the fact that nobody’s shouting at you.
Lovers of all things beautiful tend to hope you’re not so much interested in them as the style they espouse. Sometimes you can’t even find their real names.
Take, for instance, the mysteriously labelled Gypsy Purple, who loves all things French and can be found at http://gypsypurple.blogspot.com Her opulent blog is a bit of a gypsy tea-room, overflowing with romantic, retro and nostalgic art of all kinds. The elegant white Swedish dining room above is from her blog.
If it’s the colour grey (or ‘gray’ if you’re American) that spins your wheels, see www.aperfectgray.com, a blog full to the brim with lovely charcoal, dove and pearl-toned goodies. Its creator rhapsodises that life has “four phenomenal goodnesses; décor, art, antiques and style – and this girl’s search for that one perfect gray wall colour.”
Needlework fans should cruise http://karenruane.blogspot.com, where there are oodles of embroidery pieces to admire, mostly in white on frosty white. Karen’s gorgeously detailed pieces come with lots of helpful chat about how to be an expert with needle and thread.
No such colour blindness is exhibited by an English architect who rolls out an almost daily post of all things bright and beautiful. Blogging at http://ijeomabyijeoma.blogspot.com, she recently displayed the interiors of Kim Kardashian’s plush home (remarkably restrained for a Kardashian) and the site is always full of international interiors to die for.
At http://adiaryoflovely.blogspot.com you can find Helena, who has about 1000 “lovely people” instead of “fans”. Her blog is awash with cool clothes and design.
Some style bloggers love to pair up words to make cute, double-barrelled names for their sites. Already taken – just in case you’ve been musing on such a move – are Lilac and Grey, Velvet and Linen, Linen and Lavender, and Chi Chi and Luxe, all of them bursting with sweetness and colour.
But there are no fluffy words at www.cleverbastards.co.nz, where you can browse and buy arty stuff made right here. On show is the work of huge talents from all over New Zealand. The idea in setting up the site (say the six people who run it) was to give you a place to purchase something from a creative Kiwi and also “get an idea how it was made and what the hell made them do it in the first place”. Clever.
* This piece appears in my Webmistress column, Next magazine, Dec 2010.

A different look at going back to the future

Was just browsing around in Slideshare and came across this beguiling piece of work - setting romantic visionary images against the reality of today's world. This sort of thing is why I love the internet.

Yesterday’s future

View more presentations from Nicolás Svistoonoff.

I'd love to know more about these images, but the person who posted is from Ecuador, and being horribly monolingual I can't ask him. But the pictures speak for themselves.

Skimming the shallows

Have you noticed lately that your ability to concentrate has dropped off? I have, especially when it comes to reading. And I'm an old-school, hard-core kind of reader, so it's a bit weird. I'm finding that when I bring my customary stack of three or four books home from the library, I'm then reading only one or two of them. I have little patience for books that don't grab me instantly, or magazine stories that go on too long.

I've worked on newspapers and used to be a cover-to-cover kind of reader. These days I flip, scanning headlines, and only stop if a story looks sufficiently enticing. Trouble is, of course, most newspaper stories are already at least 12 or 24 hours old and we know the news already from a thousand other sources. Which is why, of course, newspapers are having such a hard time of it.

But according to author Nicholas Carr, there's more to it than stale news. He reckons that the internet, and all the other fast-moving media we're saturated with, is forcing us into too much multi-tasking, making us distracted and turning our brains to mush. Well, he's too cautious to put it quite like that, but it's the general thrust of his book, The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. Carr gathers lots of scholarly evidence to show that even as we're enjoying the many excellent things the web has to offer, it is rewiring our brains, flattening our brilliance, reducing our capacity for deep, meditative thought - and suppressing human empathy and compassion.

He writes, "There is no Sleepy Hollow on the Internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its resorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street."

Oops. Just as well I've taken a quiet walk by the sea today. But then I did come home to get back to my keyboard and write this blog, send three emails and post videos on two websites, all time thinking of my next media projects as well. And it's Sunday, supposedly the day of rest. Perhaps Mr Carr is right. Sigh. Time to switch off the laptop and firmly close the office door.