The Faster Lane / Tyler Brûlé
Skimming the surface
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Let’s kick things off today by taking a look at a typical weekend. My Sunday usually goes something like this: I wake up around 7.30 and by the time I have checked out what has happened since I passed out on the couch, I’m served a perfect little flat white, blood orange juice and a tiny bowl of an improved version of the Bircher muesli recipe from the Buchinger Wilhelmi Klinik. Once I have scanned the Wall Street Journal, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Le Figaro, Blick, The Sunday Times and Bangkok Post, I’m in correspondence with my colleagues, Emma Nelson and Désirée Bandli, who oversee the output of Monocle on Sunday – the radio show that I host for 75 per cent of the year. In the warmer months, I swim in the lake for a few laps and get in the car by 9.15 for a 9.22 arrival at our offices. This is, however, a slight fantasy as I’m usually in the car by 9.35 and standing ready at the mic at 9.47 to pre-record the top of our show.
Things took a slight turn last weekend. I arrived reasonably early but was confronted by a few dim-faced colleagues who pointed me in the direction of our café tables and the “tagging” that had occurred at some point in the early hours. You will be well aware that I have little patience for graffiti in any form, so I was fit to be tied when I saw that our lovely beige metal tabletops had been scrawled with the letters FCZ (Football Club Zürich) and other mindless scribbles in fat, black paint markers. My colleague, Guy, had already attempted a rescue effort but it to little avail. “We can thank the Züri Fäscht,” he said, blaming the vandalism on the city’s rather undefined, freeform, once-every-three-years street festival. Switzerland and Zürich get many public order things right but coming up with preventative and clean-up measures for the defacing of public and private space is not one of them. If you’re part of the management team for the FCZ or city of Zürich, I’m sending you an invoice for the clean-up for our tables. As a football club, you might want to focus on winning more games and spending your profits on cleaning up after a certain faction of your fans who think that behaving disrespectfully is somehow acceptable. As a city, Zürich is at a “broken window” tipping point – there is too much concrete and wall space dominated by graffiti, which invites anti-social behaviour. It’s very simple. Dealing with graffiti (prosecuting the sprayers and cleaning up surfaces swiftly) is a powerful symbol that says such antics will not be tolerated and have no place in a civil society. If you live in a city suffering from similar issues, you might want to turn to page 30 in our July/August issue to read about how Clean & Art in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward tackles assaulted walls. Zürich take note.
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Speaking of unsightly surfaces, I have a question. I’m at my local bathing club right now and it seems that there has been an increase in tattooing on the backs of biceps. Am I right? And if so, why? Like graffiti, I’m not a fan of tattoos and I’m wondering what the motivation is for choosing this particular surface? Is it because it’s easy to cover up but still allows for a feeling of edginess? Or is it because the owner will rarely have to look at it and will forget about the inking until their upper arm gets saggy and the mandala applied in 2020 turns into a lasagna in 2040? The odd tattoo gently placed on the very tanned forearm of a sailor in the French navy can work but beyond that, it’s tricky. The good news is that there will soon be so much cultural appropriation guilt and legislation around using Maori symbols and Chinese characters inappropriately that it’s time to start investing big in tattoo removal equipment.
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As we’re on to a bit of a theme with surfaces, do you prefer yours sharp and angular or fluid and curvy? I’m talking about cars by the way. For the past few years, I have been thinking about getting myself an old-school but technically up-to-date Toyota Land Cruiser. There has, however, been a household discussion about the desired model being diesel, which is not quite fit for the future. While the fate of four-wheel power is another discussion for another Sunday, I’m happy to see that Toyota is going for all of the right angles with their next-gen Land Cruiser that comes in more of a mid-sized Prado scale. The press team at Toyota are doing a good job of keeping fans of boxiness keen with the odd dribble of info about the soon-to-be-released wheels. The new Lexus GX550 is supposedly an indicator of the shape of things to come but a little bird at Toyota HQ tells me that it’s best to wait for the real deal. Small question: Will it hit in time for next summer’s mega Med roadtrip?