That night he has a dream. He’s building a machine… He’s trying to blueprint the impossible
    --Richard Siken from Editor’s Pages, Six Point Goodbye, Sporkpress.com

Layers of Irony

I’m borrowing this title from construction and notes fetishists Richard and Drew, editors of Tucson’s late, great Spork literary journal—which was as much artifact as reading material.

Many of its issues deserved to be exhibited—say, in a small city museum on the applied and decorative arts. Drew, Spork's principal physical builder, had a bespoke tailor’s chops: his hand-stitched bindings were sublime, whether Japanese-style (cotton-covered buckrum boards over perfectly aligned signatures of creamy paper) or punk (rubberized, stamped, smashed, yet crafted as a Vivienne Westwood). Spork was 19th century’s new industrial arts made anew, used to cosset edgy, marvelous, modern writing. Reading, you might get a whiff of letterpressed ink’s metallic scent. But the effort required a hothouse diligence, a vow of purity (never use synthetic thread) and a fierce loyalty to handcraft. So rarefied and labor-intensive as to contribute to its own extinction within 6 years.



The image of ink-smudged, needle-pricked fingertips, of a leather-aproned printer stooped over a balky press, has a Victorian frame to it. The Victorians (not the harajuku costume goths, but the real, sewage-systems-as-new, drafts-cause-illness-but-perhaps-taking-the-air-will-help, god save the queen version) were causing and witnessing a vast change in their world. Industry was rising, and with it, cities, urban blight, pollution. Soon there would be carbon emissions. And we know where that’s brought us.

We’re certainly experiencing aspects of that sensibility made anew. We’re a civilization on the verge of change. So on this last day of oh-seven-oh-seven let’s celebrate the victorianesque—the pattern-laden ornamenture is no accident in what may be the last coolish decades. Fabric.com, the great discount site where you never know what deal tomorrow brings, describes its new offering of vibrantly patterned and colored Amy Butler Nigella twills as making “an exotic, neo-Victorian statement.”


The phrase-amatics come from a press release, and neo-Victorian actually has, in politics, a disreputably conservative ring. But here it is: ornament at its most vibrant and complex:  Butler's (and many others')  fabrics,

Tord Boontje Tyvek curtains,

Lene toni kjeld wallpaper,


 and urban outfitter rugs.

These are patterns so potent as to come from a dream, layered with not just layers, but the perception of layers. What comes first: the laser-etched deer figures? The printed-on stain or the fading foil pattern? It is a wonderful reflection of our own sensibility: saturated with detail, so technically, precisely rendered, until the prettiness in on itself. The digital edge of these patterns has a coldness, even within those Midwestern-wholesome colors and that modern-naif deer outline. It makes such beauty ironic, which, in this era, is probably just right.