What Women Make

Political Craft: Obama Nesting Dolls

I like the idea of nesting dolls as a metaphor for personality and layers of personal and social significance of an individual or an idea or both. What should you choose as the outer layer? What the public sees first would be the obvious choice, but maybe its the biggest thing about the person, the thing that will emerge ultimately. Is the biggest thing about Obama what his happy family represents to the world and to America as our concepts of family change? As a black man in a cohesive family unit as a role model to African Americans?

Or should that be at the center of who he is, the deepest layer, the most discreet and most protected part of who he is?

Is the family he came from a segue into his adult self? Is this a personal or political nesting doll? Are we talking about him as a figure or as a force? There’s lots of ways of slicing it.

Though a great idea, which is why I’m posting the picture here, I wish the designer had spent a bit more time on the execution. I would have liked to see a deluxe version with a bit more of a finish or more color. A shame to waste such a great idea on such scant development.

Saturday • November 15, 2008 • by Chauncey Zalkin

Category: Blog, Chauncey Zalkin, Essays

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Barcelona, Love, & The Economy

By December 1st, my boyfriend and I will have transplanted ourselves from Paris (me) and London (he) to a cozy 45 square meter flat in Barcelona. I’ve had a tendency through the years to disclose my flights of fancy in ill-conceived rushes of enthusiasm only to later regret it. As we all know, sometimes visions of sugarplums do not materialize. That is not to say that I haven’t given each and every one of my dreams my all and had more than a couple come true. It’s just that dreams can get a little fuzzy toward the final frame. This time, the final frame is all I see. As 2008 stumbles toward the finish line, my dreams are once again before me. One dream completes, another waits to upload, and a third begins at the very beginning. And at the same time, I’m driven to distraction by events taking place back home.

Living in Paris has changed everything, the order of my priorities, the sharpness of my values. It’s finally flushed away the detritus, the lovingly worn but ripe for discarding parts of my life – glib, clever, soulless part time players, shopping sprees packaged to my cerebrum as errands, the all-too passionate conversations about vapid pop culture personalities plastered on tabloids, playing along with the deification of brands. I came here to get some distance from the demands of materialism, to flee the ad world, to stop subjecting myself to the daily charades of office politics, to put a distance between myself and my language, and to question the mindless comprehension that becomes a hum under the surface of everything so blindingly familiar.

I’ve been gone 22 months. Now a new newness is at hand. I’m swapping French for Spanish. I have no foothold in the new land. No job awaits. No program. No new book to start. It’s not a sabbatical. I can’t couch it in any of those terms. It’s a nose dive hopefully onto a bed of roses on a cloud of honey and spice. We’re hoping for a little harp action – and a little financial luck. Because we’re going for broke precisely as we enter the worst economic period since the Depression.

I have to say, I’ve been anxious. I know that in five short days we will know who the president will be and we will either be elated beyond imagination, dancing in the streets (well, I’ll have to do so figuratively and through youtube), or so utterly frightened we’ll be running from the theater of American life like the opening scene of The Blob.

I’ve been watching this campaign so closely that it would be fair to call it an obsession. It’s a comfort to me that America (and its myriad of dreams) is still at arms reach even with all its follies and absurdities. Nobody on this side of the pond can quite understand the thing that makes us American and love it the way we do. It’s been quite an embarrassment lately and not just because of George Bush’s administration, but because of our insouciance about how out-of-touch we truly are as a nation. But now, suddenly, we have this person, this clear-talking level headed, comforting presence that has brought out a lot of hope in all of us, a sign that we’re not just crazy when we compare truth to sensationalism, globalization to domestic arrogance. Finally, someone who everyone can get behind and at the same time will tell us we need to ramp up and pay attention to the innovation going on in the rest of the world. That we should solve problems, not rest on our crumbling laurels. As chain stores and billionaires take over New York, I see that perhaps all is not lost. From under the economic and cultural rubble, lo and behold, there is a voice of reason.

I’m using the disaster of the economy and Obama’s campaign as a guidepost in my own personal affairs – my business plans, my conflicts about subjecting my creative projects to scrutiny and criticism by a flailing paradigm (the publishing world). A renewed effort to participate in the world of culture making without big compromises to my integrity and passions. And to my love life, which is also in uncharted territory. Never mix love with business? Well, we’re mixing it alright, and with relish. Please stay tuned and take a ride with us on the new adventures and misadventures of Girl on the street. And let us all pray for our futures.

Please check out Peter’s amazing photographs and go to the main site to see our latest Girl on the street coverage of the women at London Design Week, and shortly, The Freize Art Fair.

-Chauncey Zalkin

Friday • October 31, 2008 • by Chauncey Zalkin

Category: Barcelona, Blog, Chauncey Zalkin, Essays

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Meta-Tagging Your Life

previously titled “Mind Tag – You’re It”. My mind goes through so much subject matter with all that’s going on. My more precise thinking disappears before I can get my fingers to march.

Flit flit go the pages..

Flit flit the remarkable sentiment Obama unearthed deep in America’s heartland on Super Tuesday, flit flit Recession panic circling the globe showing how much the rest of the world looks to us to know their own fate, flit flit the conversation I had with an Indian bricolage store owner on Faubourg du Temple where he told me that the caste system in India has disappeared (his words) and how the country is becoming predominantly Muslim because in the Muslim religion there IS no caste system (his words); he thinks there will be a Christian Muslim World War Flit flit how a new bar for innovation in the online and offline world has us soaring to ever more hypoxic heights, flit flit my newly pricked ears homing in on companies like Ideo, flit flit taking online social networking innovations offline, flit flit amorphic online offline design and social space experience, flit flit living in paris, flit flit not living in paris, flit flit the view of New York from Paris, flit flit Should I consider Shangai? Hong Kong? How could I even get there? Could I find a way to live in the east for six months? flit flit the universal love quagmire and the single woman, and on and on.

While writing this an ex-boyfriend started up a video chat so again, my attention is divided. The distractions of multiple tabs and multiple agendas. I am writing and submitting. I am looking for a job. This is the first time that I am REALLY looking for a job because I want one and not just for the money. Actually honest to goodness desirous of a company I can believe in and call home. And it can be in Shanghai or Tokyo or Portland. I am open. I have a fantasy of looking out from plate glass windows onto some wilderness in some sort of city on the ocean/forest/cliff side/mountain range so that I can feel elements other than taxi horns, pedestrian body smacking, and foie gras stinky cheese sewage concoctions – but I love cities so I can accept the aforementioned. I just want my future to be ‘tagged’ innovation, design, experiential, experimental, revolutionary, ethnographic, social network, social space, team, creativity, and best of all user generated.

A CHORUS OF MANY VOICES FROM LIVES LIKE YOUR OWN BUT NOT

I currently live in Paris in case that wasn’t clear. I’m dedicated to my search to get a small chorus of multinational voices going as I continue to talent scout in the city of the ‘createur’ (createuse). I am looking for photographers, artisans, artists, visionaries, and designers for my next shopping party hosted in my home. I have found a great Vietnamese sister duo who have a store not far from my apartment. They are going to find a gang of like-minded souls that I can sift through as well. At least in theory they are.

I’m very happy to have Aja contributing to this site and I have a few interesting thought leaders lined up. Aja’s next post is already waiting in the wings as her mind is as fast as a Virgin Galactic plane. Daonne Huff has also written. She writes about sexuality in New York from a different point of view – not the jaded been there done that trickster viewpoint. It’s not ready to post though.

ON CROSS CULTURAL RESUMES

And outside New York, where I’m aiming to pick up more traction, I’ve met a woman at an international women in business event at the Deloitte & Touche building here in Paris who I think would be of great interest to you. She’s from Alicante, Spain. She just got her MBA (with a semester in India), she’s lived in Madrid and speaks Italian, Spanish, French and Russian. She raised her hand with great enthusiasm to say she was looking for a job in India and wanted to write a c.v./resume that would be of interest to Indian companies but make sure to separate it from her European C.V. (resume) in her online profile. What reads well in France wouldn’t work in India – or New York for that matter. In France, including a picture on your c.v. has been customary for years (one woman claims that’s a thing of the past but I was told to do so) and they always seem to ask your marital status and what your parents do -even when you’re in your 30s – and its not against the law. There is not one universal way to present yourself that is palatable or relatable to employers internationally.

FEAR OF FLYING IS NOT JUST A BOOK BY ERICA JONG

We know India and China have huge growth opportunities but I was really struck by the enthusiasm she had for every day life in Southern India. The danger right now is that these countries are drawing their own talent back home from the United States where they came to be FREE and CREATE and PROSPER because of our as-of-late impossible immigration policies and fear based government. But the even bigger danger is that us as Americans are still the most hesitant in the world to embrace cultures different from our own. ‘Assimilate to our ways gosh dang it’, would say our president. We are not natural emigrants – anymore. We cling to our comfort zone more than most anyone. Australians, as we’ve all seen, seem to get up and go and keep going once they do (I know, they live in the middle of nowhere). And though the French are afraid to put their toe in the water, the people I meet in Europe are infinitely better traveled than anyone (including me) that I’ve known in America. They are happy to trot around the globe as much as possible for work and adventure. We’re the ones that think Turks and Caicos is far enough for most vacations. It’s no surprise – with just ‘two weeks’ and 15 hour work days, there are a lot of reasons why this happens.

NOT GETTING INTO OBAMA HILARY

Lets see how the earth (r)evolves in 2009. I won’t get into Obama and Hilary as I really have to walk my dog but I will say I do hope to hear from my new Spanish friend and that she will tell you more about why she is so antsy to get back to life in Southern India.

-Chauncey

Saturday • February 9, 2008 • by Chauncey Zalkin

Category: Blog, Chauncey Zalkin, Essays, France, Motivation Monday, Technology Tuesday, Topical Thursday

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In Print: The Design Moment for Terrace Magazine

It’s on the topic of the Design Moment and it’s published in this first issue of Terrace by the founders of the brilliant and inimitable Trace. Pick it up at your local (better) newsstand. By the way, that’s me with the hat in the lower center square. Inspired by my 2007 visit to the Salone del Mobile.

And here’s the video: