Sleeping in Ethiopia

The background: In Ethiopa the average household income is US$180 a year (source: UNICEF). The foreground: In Addis Ababa, the cheapest available rooms at the Hilton and the Sheraton cost US$275 and US300 a night.

From the Hilton: Welcome to this spacious 33m²/355sq.ft room with a balcony offering a mountain, garden or city view. The bright and airy room, decorated with original artwork, has 1 king bed and a desk. Special touches may include daily newspaper, mineral water, chocolates, flowers and fruit.

From the Sheraton: Discover what luxury really means. We offer 293 deluxe guest rooms. For added convenience, each room features a private safe and 24-hour room service.

Fax Machine

Air-Conditioned Room

In-Room Safe

Private Balcony

24-Hour Room Service

Hairdryer

DVD/CD Player

Maid Service

Data Port

Room with Sitting Area

Butler Service

Desk

Room Service

Wake-up Service

Back to the background: Elsewhere in Addis Ababa ...

Is this the most tasteless fashion shoot ever?

That's the question a Guardian journalist asked recently following Vogue India's not so hip and trendy use of the poorest of the global poor for a not so funky photo shoot for luxury fashion accessories. It's a story which has, thankfully, been taken up pretty widely in the blogosphere and the traditional print media (as with this NYT article). In the picture above, for example, the baby's wearing a $100 Fendi bib.

Here's how the NYT reports Vogue India editor Priya Tanna’s response to the widespread criticism she has received for this shameless/shameful move:

“Lighten up,” she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the “power of fashion” she said, and the shoot was saying that “fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful,” she said. “You have to remember with fashion, you can’t take it that seriously,” Ms. Tanna said. “We weren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world,” she said.

She got that right. Mostly. The magazine's quite apparently doing absolutely nothing to save anybody. It's decision to promote luxury goods this way is, however, a major political statement about things (and people) falling apart. A world in which it's the brand that's more valuable, more important than the people. Hermès not humans.

The life hereafter

This (thanks to Adam) reminds me of my earlier "Ex oribus dei" post. So much for the "eye of the needle"!

A fucked-up follow-up

I wanted to write "no comment" and leave the image to speak for itself, but I just not that capable of restraint. I mean, are you kidding me?! How perverse is this ad?! On any number of levels.

"Believe." So, this is what belief has come to? This is the extent of our moral or spiritual aspirations nowadays? Le dieu c'est moi.

"Believe your expectations can actually be exceeded." So, our culture of expectation is now a taken for granted? That's the new baseline.

"You can shower at 43,000 feet. ... The future has arrived." You got that right. Well, maybe it's more a question of the future hurtling towards us - even faster than before. And it's not looking quite as pretty as a moss-coloured tank top.

I came across the ad this morning while I was at home flicking through the latest issue of Travel & Leisure magazine (research data, I swear) and, unusually, listening to KUOW's Weekday programme hosted by the altogether inarticulate Steve Scher - known in our house as Steve Slur. The main guest this morning was Paul Ehrlich, author of "The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment" in which he paints a pretty damning picture of our future without water. And this comes only a week or so after I had screened The Possibility of Hope for my students - a powerful documentary in which John Gray, Fabrizio Eva and Saskia Sassen have, respectively, this to say:

"The most fundamental reality at the present time is that the human species has overshot the capacity of the planet to sustain it, both in terms of human numbers, and in terms of the impact of these human beings on the planet."

"Human mobility is uncontrollable unless you act on the main cause of mobility, especially in our days. I think the main cause is inequality – inequality of opportunities, not only socioeconomic conditions."

"... global warming delivers its goods, which is a lot more water in a lot of parts of poor countries, which means that people will have to leave. We can call this a kind of environmental-driven migration."

Water is undoubtedly going to feature large in our future. But not in the way first-class passengers on Emirates would have it.

Water, water, everywhere...

It's been a while since my last post, but, hey, it's not like the gulf between super-rich and super-poor just got smaller. No sooner have my feet touched the ground in Seattle...

Emirates now offering first-class passengers showers (see pic for demo). The grimy details of this latest display of filthy rich were to be found all over the media. In fact, it was the media's fascination and delight with this story which was almost more disturbing than the showers themselves. There were stories in the British Mail, the Guardian, the Times, the LA Times, and so on. And the blogosphere's taken it up big time - ranging from the critical to the celebratory. Everyone appears to be taken with this newsworthy snippet of technological innovation and luxury lifestyle consumption.



Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot : O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

The new/old world order

Just when I think the promotion of super-elite status can't get any more ridiculous, any more superlative, any more unashamedly narcissistic, I find this advert in the latest issue of Condé Nast Traveler magazine. In addition to the synthetic personalization of the tag line (see also "your needs always come first"), here we find an explicitly racialized and gendered ordering of the world: our European Neocolonial Man in first class, the East Asian woman in steerage. There he is with all the "personal space, individual privacy and attention" he desires. And there she is, clearly very happy with her lot in life - maybe even writing a poem or a diary entry about it all.

Super-elite airline crashes and burns

It's all happening today. Perhaps there are some limits to the excesses of the super-elite luxury market?

I've just learned (thanks to Adam) that eos - the all-business-class airline - filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday (source Times Online). What an ignominious demise for an airline that touted itself "uncrowned" and "uncompromising". "Unairline" was, it seems, something of a portentious labelling for this now non-airline. Here below is the open letter they posted on their website (or click on the link above). I can't help but wonder what poor old Adam Komack, the airline's Chief Lifestyle Officer, is going to be doing now - how will he ever find another job in this day and age?


Oh, and speaking of the possible limits of the limitless, while reading about eos on the TimesOnline website, I discovered that the luxury doesn't really cease after all: eos goes down, but The Times flies. Here's their new ezine called, wait for it, LUXX. Clever, huh? This is the kind of "article" they produce:


Now that's more like it. I guess Adam Komack's sent his CV in already.

Luxury discourse, luxury drivel

It's a truffle. This small, turd-like lump of chocolate apparently finds itself at the epicentre of the luxury lifestyle. Here's a case in point.

My graduate colleague Kris Mroczek pointed this one out to me - she knows I'm always looking for choice examples of the insanities of luxury discourse. It comes from Katrina Markoff, the "founder" of Vosges Haut-Chocolat - how much hard-to-pronounce French can you pack into one name?

"Some people just see a fancy, expensive chocolate, but once you read the story behind it, it has a strong, renegade, save-the-world voice. ... I always made sure the craftsmanship of my product was super high-end: I used regal colors, created luxurious textures, gathered unique flavors from all over the world, gave it a chic feminine vibe, and mixed it all in with my cause."

Come on! It's chocolate, for god's sake!

It's a description which takes up the luxury discourse in a big way - a language of utterly semioticized, aestheticized nonsense. What/when is "super high-end"? Or, for that matter, "regal"? "luxurious textures"? "unique flavors"? "chic feminine vibe"? It's drivel - both the slavering kind and the twaddle kind.

No, but seriously. Who knew saving the world (from what? itself? chocolatiers?) would be as easy as consuming the Green Truffle Collection which, we are informed, is:

A collection inspired by the spices, teas, fruits and flowers indigenous to Asia, including cardamom, pandan leaf, macha green tea, and Japanese cherry blossoms. Available in the Spring while supplies last.

The natural (sic) consequence of arch-consumer lifestyle marketing? I know it's lavatorial of me, but we also know where that "exotic truffle" ends up. And, it has to be said, looking remarkably like it did at the start. Or maybe that wasn't the start after all? Hmmm... maybe I'll pass when that antique, filigree truffle salver comes round again.

Source: Ladies Who Launch - Entrepreneurship and Creativity as a Lifestyle (whatever that means).

Elitism

This card is one of a series of "demotivators" produced by Despair Inc. I bought a set of these particular cards ages ago because I liked the elitism play, but I also love Despair Inc.'s overall parody of trite corporate culture - here's how they put it themselves:

Psychology tells us that motivation- true, lasting motivation- can only come from within. Common sense tells us it can't be manufactured or productized. So how is it that a multi-billion dollar industry thrives through the sale of motivational commodities and services? Because, in our world of instant gratification, people desperately want to believe that there are simple solutions to complex problems. And when desperation has disposable income, market opportunities abound.

AT DESPAIR, INC., we believe motivational products create unrealistic expectations, raising hopes only to dash them. That's why we created our soul-crushingly depressing Demotivators® designs, so you can skip the delusions that motivational products induce and head straight for the disappointments that follow!

That there is something decidedly circumlocutious (to put it nicely) about Despair Inc "productizing" their critique says a lot about the nature of post-industrial capital. We really are monkeys chasing our own tails.

Poverty for profit

This advertising image, pulled from an in-flight magazine or some other tourist literature in July last year, has left me flawed. I may be naive - in fact, I know I am - but what kind of world are we living in where it's somehow appropriate, somehow desirable to produce such a text? Here's a clean, serene, ordered scene of a solitary, boiler-suited, South Asian (I can't be sure) worker hand-painting the median line of a freeway in the middle of an arid, sun-burnt desert. How does this come to be - to be used as - a marker of good taste, of progress? I suppose it's the inevitable consequence of arch capitalism's intensely flexible, highly semioticized economies. In the process, what gets concealed are the squalid conditions of labour - its material, financial, social and emotional realities; its political, economic and ideological circumstances. Only the "nice bits", the "savoury bits" are selected in a representation of global inequality that is so highly stylized, so perfectly sanitized as to appear aesthetically pleasing and morally defensible. Here's we have a "material" labourer putting the finishing touches to a road (a road to nowhere?) in the service of "immaterial labour" (Hardt & Negri, 2000) targetted by the advertizers as: project finance, insurance, reinsurance, corporate and private banking, assest management and Islamic finance. We have hard labour semioticized and commodified for the soft economies of information and finance. As such, the advert is what Adam Jaworski and I would regard as another quintessentially "banal enactment of globalization" (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2009). In this instance, and to borrow a phrase from the anthropologist Ed Bruner, we have a perfect manifestation of "poverty for profit".