THERE’s a certain type of chief executive who really seems to go in for the weird photo opportunity. They’re all around, just look in the papers. It’s a trend not just confined to the odd eccentric either. Some of the sanest and most powerful people in the land seem to relish the chance of posing in strange guises or with an ensemble of weird and wonderful objects around them or in hand. Frankly it’s a bit disconcerting.

Now there’s nothing wrong with spicing up corporate life a little — I’m all for it. But at times like this, it gets kind of puzzling. Whatever the reason, it is a habit that gets indulged to the full at every Plc Launch Day (whatever it is for). Somebody told me they have started to call this conker syndrome’ — (a reference I think to National Savings & Investment’s chief executive Peter Bareau, who recently posed for the nationals with a giant conker in hand to launch the group’s new identity.

Sir Martin Sorrell has been a favourite patron of conker syndrome over the years — there is a chief executive with a penchant for the portraits. Sorrell, I hope, won’t mind if I refer to his head and shoulders for a minute, by way of example. Because over the years they have been featured in a striking array of poses, like the one with an illuminated light bulb over his head. Sorrell, of course, is allowed to. It’s his game after all (come to think of it he may have even invented the genre).

There is definite potential for an entire book of prints, of these honest and respectable captains of industry — plus prop. It’s just waiting to be compiled.

But what about those chief executive officers without such a good excuse? What possesses them to be caricatured thus? How odd is it that the big bosses can get away with it, and in company time?

An old PR saying springs to mind at this juncture, which might justify some of this behaviour: ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity’. (There are one or two people who might disagree with the saying anyway, but that’s another matter.) Its relevance? Simply this: that somewhere there must be a large strand of corporate-facing PR practitioners who think it doesn’t matter how you get into the broadsheets as long as you get there. Please think again.

CEOs, of course, know better than this, particularly the heads of our largest public companies. They can’t afford bad news, they really can’t. Not with the Stock Exchange and the city breathing down their necks at any rate. So the news has to be good. It’s what keeps these men and women at the big table. But back to the photos.

How times have changed. During the mid-1990s, it became a bit of a fad for some business publications to print the most bizarre portraits they could. The weird angle, the strange location and the crazy prop were actually photographic policy for the corporate people profiles in more than one magazine.

This might be fine perhaps for the profile, maybe even for a big consumer launch or a great set of financial results, but editorially thereafter things get more dangerous. And particularly for the corporate brand relaunch.

Over the years, for some reason or another, the rebrand has not been particularly well-loved. Perhaps it is the fault of the mainstream media, which fails consistently to grasp that there is more to the story than logos. Perhaps it is a reflection of the British public’s ’small c’ conservatism that sees change of any description as abhorrent, even when it is clearly beneficial. Perhaps it is the branding sector’s failure to communicate the business value it claims to provide for clients. Whatever the reason, it is a fact of life that we have to deal with.

To end on a moralistic tone, isn’t it time for big branding projects to create broadsheet headlines about strategy, re-organisation and vision, rather than about logos, colours and the symbolism of images. If it’s city desk coverage that is sought, why all the allegory?

If CEOs need something to hold, what about a brand strategy document. But seriously, the corporate identity should probably be an addendum to the business relaunch, not the story itself. (Really daring clients could even choose to casually forget the new marque.) The point is that selling the story a bit better than we do currently will not only create value for clients, but help rid us of this tired media image.

What CEOs get up to in their own time is their business. But what they get up to in the national press on your behalf needs to be calculated.

THE world is shrinking for brands. Consumers want to be able to fetch themselves a G&T safe in the knowledge that a Schweppes tonic and a Gordon’s gin are the same whether they are drunk in the French Alps or on a Spanish beach.

Familiarity can be bred by aligning the look of a product across different markets, even if it can mean changing a well-established brand identity, such as the renaming of Jif to Cif in the UK.

But catering for gaping cultural differences while retaining brand consistency is not easy.

An international brand can be perceived differently by a global audience. A country’s culture, historical perceptions of a brand and even climate all affect the way nations regard different brands.

Cadbury Schweppes is consolidating the branding and packaging of its entire soft drinks portfolio, including Schweppes tonic, across Europe .

The range is due to launch in Australia in October or November. Down under, Schweppes tonic is consumed without a mixer more often than in colder countries, and people are introduced to it at a much younger age.

And Schweppes lemonade is a cult drink in Australia, competing with soft drinks on its own, rather than just used as a mixer, explains Andrew Eyles, managing partner of Blue Marlin, which is redesigning the entire soft drinks portfolio.

‘Australians, for example, wouldn’t be seen dead drinking ginger ale, but in the US it is a major adult soft drink,’ he says.

The structural packaging of a drinks brand can also be as ingrained into a particular culture as the brand itself.

Schweppes lemonade is traditionally served in a beer-style glass bottle in Australia, and it may prove tricky to persuade Australians to embrace a new-look, unified corporate bottle, says Eyles.

Global consolidation of a brand, particularly one with strong heritage — the first Schweppes company was founded in 1783 — must take into account cultural nuances and that can only be achieved by doing your homework.

‘International brand management is all about immersing yourself in as much information about the product as possible beforehand to discover what it stands for, suggests Eyles.

‘It is at this point that you can draw out the common, consistent brand values that will work in any country or culture,’ he says. ‘Brand essence’ forms the basis of a consolidatory rebranding programme.

In some oases, however, a brand’s raw essence isn’t enough and its international variations are too ingrained to warrant change.

International gin brand Gordon’s, which has just been redesigned for the first time in 60 years, by Design Bridge, has a different bottle shape, colour and graphics for the UK market.

‘The UK version of Gordon’s historically had the same design as the international market–in yellow and red,’ explains Design Bridge board creative director Graham Shearsby.

‘But to cut costs during the First World War, Gordon’s shifted to green glass and a black and white label because it was cheaper to produce. The international design will stay the same, because it is has brand equity, so will the UK version,’ Shearsby says.

Certainly, not all cultural subtleties can be brushed aside, or companies could be accused of putting profit before customers. In this case, it is local advertising specifically and accurately tailored to a market, rather than subtle changes to packaging, that successfully differentiate a brand in different countries, Eyles says.

‘One country may use sex to win over consumers, but another may simply advertise a drink as a good mixer with alcohol. But the raw brand will look the same wherever, he says. This way, a country can even think that an international brand is home-grown.

‘You cannot force a change on a market. Any graphic or structural design changes must be sympathetic with a country’s culture and the brand,’ Eyles says. ‘The danger with a sudden, far-reaching redesign is that a brand can lose customers overnight.’ In cases where a radical overhaul is needed, a gradual approach is required, with an interim design filtered in over a period of time.

Shearsby agrees, suggesting international brands undergoing a revamp should aim to for the middle ground. ‘You can’t do something too leading edge, which might work in the UK, but not in the US, where it’s all about the hard sell,’ he says.

Cost, as Shearsby points out, is one of the driving factors behind consolidation of international packaging.

‘Most brand packaging is harmonised across all markets because it makes sense from a cost perspective,’ Shearsby says. ‘It’s logical that brand owners will want to minimise costs for marketing the product, which you can do if you have got the same pack across all markets.’

Eyles agrees. A consistent international brand identity could save a company around 15-20 per cent by cutting out repackaging and design costs, he suggests.

There are other, non-financial reasons. People are becoming less nationalistic and more global in their outlook, helped by increasingly global advertising and media, as ‘most brand owners want their products recognised the world over’, says Eyles.

Ease of international travel, despite a ‘hopefully temporary’ downturn since 11 September 2001, must add to the clamour for international brands.

Some will mourn the loss of quirky cultural differences in products at the expense of profit-seeking and corporate brand values, but consultancies are reaping the benefits.

Communicating a business philosophy and brand internally can be just as important as the methods used to market the company and brand to its target market and clients. Mike Exon finds out why this is.

WE are all pretty comfortable with the idea of external communications. It is no secret that the marketing of products and services to the outside world can help a company’s sales to grow. In the same way, the idea of internal marketing has been around for a long time. Educate your staff about your products and business and it will more than repay your investment. So the theory goes. This was all fine for a while, but then something changed all that — the workplace revolution.

With hindsight, the shortcomings of the old approach to communications are quite plain. An educational spirit is all very well if the teachers know what should be taught. But in this case they didn’t. There wasn’t much enthusiasm among managers of organisations to learn a thing or two from the people who actually make the business what it is — namely the customers and the staff. Well as we know, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

‘Internal communications was once seen as internal marketing. It was all very one way. But now that is changing it is much more exciting,’ says Imagination marketing and strategic planning director Ralph Ardill. In his view there is now a significant imbalance between all things internal and external.

‘One of the biggest challenges is the challenge of alignment — the alignment between companies-to-consumers and companies-to-themselves,’ he says. Ardill explains that there used to be a ‘wall’ between the two ideas, until it slowly dawned on organisations that there needed to be consistency between the two.

But for now let’s focus on things internal. Client organisations have slowly come to realise the tangible benefits of maintaining a dialogue between their people — particularly the ones at the top and bottom of the pile. It can save them money for a start. This was demonstrated in a recent US study by the communications group Fleishman-Hillard, (which polled 30 global organisations including 18 Fortune 500 companies). The study found that the two most sought after benefits of employee communications programmes were: the creation of bottom-line results, and cost-cutting opportunities.

But internal communications is still many things to many people. Like the elusive science of branding, internal communications is practiced by the full swathe of client services groups, ranging from design consultancies and business strategists, to ad and PR agencies. There are even several internal communications specialists, such as The Brand Union’s MCA Communicates.

Within the context of the branding sector, internal communications is often tied closely to corporate branding projects. After all, the success of most corporate branding depends on the ability of a management team to instill a vision inside the heads of the people associated with their organisation. These people are, necessarily, either outside the organisation (customers, suppliers and so on), or inside it. The art of the successful internal communications project is to marry the two.

The Tuft Consultancy recently completed an internal communications project for a major retailer, which sought to understand how the marketing department communicated with the group’s other departments. It is an area which clients have not given too much thought to until recently, says The Tutt Consultancy founder Simon Rhind-Tutt.

Internal communications projects take many forms, says Rhind-Tutt. He highlights internal marketing strategy, projection of the company vision, internal written and video communication, training and internal research, as the key areas.

Richard Brennan, managing director of training and human resources consultancy Time Manager International, defines internal communications nicely. For him it is, ‘connecting people together around a common message using a variety of mediums to reinforce the core themes and detail.’

As far as these mediums are concerned, the Fleischman-Hillard study found that the most common corporate communications channels are print newsletters and intranet sites, e-mails, voicemail, television, audiostreaming and videostreaming. Other groups have begun experimenting with some of the newer technologies like text messaging, digital radio and interactive news bulletins as well.

Historically, organisations have tended to look to the power of the internal communications programme at certain points in their development. The most obvious of these is probably following a merger or acquisition, where disparate groups are being integrated. People within the incoming group clearly need direction, and management at HQ is anxious to explain the game plan, as well as keep the wedding running smoothly.

After insurance group Primary Insurance recently acquired some half a dozen companies to form the Primary Group, it appointed Brand Frontier to handle the internal communications as part of an overall brand identity programme.

‘Internal communications has been vital for Primary Insurance,’ says Brand Frontier director Mark Pinder. ‘We looked to engage Primary’s staff in a conversation about what the brand stands for and what the brand is trying to accomplish externally. We also encouraged them to understand that each employee was part and parcel of delivering the brand. It came down to the fact that if they did not develop the right kind of relationship with customers then they were going to lose business.’

Like Rhind-Tutt, Pinder has seen interest levels in internal communications work growing, as companies have slashed marketing budgets and cut their workforces.

‘With the recent economic downturn across the Atlantic and many global companies cutting budgets and staff, it’s interesting to see how many of them are turning to internal communications to not only raise morale, but also to redefine their brand offer. Internal communication is a two way process: it’s as important to listen to staff as it is to communicate a given message. Rather than reacting to a time of crisis with such a dialogue, companies must keep communication lines open at all times,’ he says.

Internal communications programmes are also a powerful tool for any organisation changing its direction or positioning, even if for some management teams this can be an all too infrequent event. To give a simplistic analogy, if a traditional clothing manufacturer decides to start producing fashion clothing instead of traditional raincoats, there is clearly a need for this strategy to be well understood by the staff on the shopfloor, who are in direct contact with the customers.

The most enlightened management teams now have company systems in place to enable their people to have a much greater influence in the running of the company. Consider Richard Branson’s policy of encouraging Virgin staff to e-mail him about potential problem situations. This attitude goes hand in hand with Virgin’s policy of ensuring no letter from outside the business goes unanswered, no matter how banal it might seem. Such behaviour starts to fundamentally change what a business is about and how it behaves. And this is when a business starts to become the proverbial brand.

Of course all people within companies communicate, but not necessarily with as many people as might ultimately benefit from the act. The most important thing is for any communication to be a genuine dialogue whenever possible.

When the former Bank of Montreal chief executive officer Matt Barrett took the helm as chief executive of Barclays Bank, he needed to find a way to communicate his vision to bank staff. Imagination was appointed to design The Open Forum, an internal communications project designed to signify a new style of leadership for the bank. ‘Barrett wanted to meet and address the concerns of staff in a way that made an immediate impact and set new standards in communication across the Barclays Group,’ says Imagination marketing and planning director Ralph Ardill.

Imagination developed a rolling programme of meetings in which Barrett met with Barclays’ staff face to face. Within an informal setting, The Open Forum allowed Barrett to bring his vision for the business to life, while demonstrating his desire to forge a new business culture at the same time.

In addition to developing the concept and managing the production of the events, Imagination developed a distinctive identity for the programme, which was later adopted to cover all of Barclays’ internal communications activities. ‘The Open Forum meetings, attended by nearly 20 000 staff, constituted the largest internal communications activity ever undertaken by Barclays, or any other high street bank, and was met by a 95 cent approval rating from delegates,’ adds Ardill. Having toured the UK. The Open Forum concept was then rolled out to staff in the US and continental Europe.

One organisation where internal staff communication lines play a particularly critical role is British Airways. At its ultra-modern HQ near Heathrow Airport, which features a shopping mall and a street of coffee bars, BA staff can access computer touchpoints around the building hosting the company intranet. This system provides interactive information for all of BA’s office-based staff.

BA design manager Mike Crump outlines a few of the airline’s other initiatives. He explains that the weekly newsletter, BA News, is received by just about everybody in the company. In addition, various niche workforces, like cabin crew and ground force, have their own newspapers, written in an appropriate vocabulary and style of language. There are also e-mail circulars for the management population, which highlight important company issues.

‘At BA, we have a communications department that runs the internal communications. It is a complex job,’ says Crump. ‘My responsibility is to provide a consistency and tone of voice for the brand internally as well as externally. In this respect, the way we speak to our customer is the same as we talk to our staff.’

WHEN is a brand not a brand? When it’s a signpost, according to Deborah Maxwell.

It’s her job to turn the Post Office from a mere signpost on the high street into a commercial brand with real live values.

Sounds like a tricky hill to climb and, when you start totting up the obstacles, it could be described as insurmountable. First there’s the dreadful state of the PO’s holding company, Consignia, with press speculation of 20 000-30 000 job losses. And the PO’s own losses are mounting: pounds 100m for the first half of the financial year 2001/2002. Couple those headaches with an internal culture that is uncomfortable with change, a decision-by-committee management style, an audience that is static in size but ageing and things look positively dire.

But Maxwell has made considerable in-roads since becoming head of brand marketing two years ago. Previously at the Woolwich and the Automobile Association (where she was involved with the campaigns With the Woolwich’ and ‘Britain’s fourth emergency service’), she was brought in to change the PO from being supply-driven to consumer-facing and she’s gone some way to achieving this.

She got Marketplace Design to design and articulate the P0’s brand values, which have been used to focus its advertising and communications over the past year.

It may be difficult to believe in this brand-sodden age, but here was an organisation with no guidelines, consensus or consistency among employees and agencies as to its personality. ‘It didn’t behave like a brand,’ Maxwell says. ‘It didn’t advertise on TV, it didn’t protect its intellectual property or trademarks. Its big selling point was its size. It was internally focused on suppliers like BT rather than on customers.’

The PO now has four different brand values for each audience, from consumer, business, employee and stakeholder. To the consumer it’s easy, personal, knowledgeable and helpful; to the employee it’s purposeful, flair, inclusive and accountable. It may sound rather dry and bland, but it’s a start.

And, according to some before and after research on brand perception, things are looking up.

At the same time, Maxwell has managed to get her budget hiked from a measly pounds 400 000 to pounds 15m in the first year and pounds 21.5m for this year. That in itself deserves respect from anyone in the branding business.

Maxwell’s role was newly created at the PO. Previously, there had been a head of marketing communications, who had taken voluntary redundancy. She and her 14-strong team sit within its customer services arm. It’s their job to strengthen the brand so that it can stretch into new markets and retain customer loyalty. There are a colossal 28 million customers. ‘We call our customers hostages because they think there’s no choice, but there is,’ says Maxwell. The brand should also help focus previously disparate employees.

She admits that working within the PO’s system is no picnic at times. ‘I had a preconception that it would be process-driven, but I’m shocked at how process-driven it is. A polite term for its approach would be consultative,’ she says. Which means: ‘It’s much harder to get things done here. It makes the job of changing perception even more difficult.’ This is partly because staff turnover is so slow: it’s not unusual for employees to have been there since their teens. The atmosphere is fun and friendly and although these people might be eager for change, implementing it is another matter.

One of the first things Maxwell did was to put together a pitch for brand development. Marketplace beat off Enterprise IG, Dragon, which created Consignia’s name and identity, and the ad agencies Publicis, McCann Erikson and Joshua. She went with the Abingdon consultancy because ‘it seemed the most down to earth’ and could work on redesign of the P0’s environments. The consultancy has also reworked the logo, making it three-dimensional.

Marketplace’s values for the PO were briefed down to Publicis and Joshua, both appointed in March 2001, to come up with above- and below-the-line campaigns respectively. The TV commercials last year featuring Richard Branson and Stelios of Easyjet were some of the fruits of this process.

It’s early days, but since the new communications went live brand perceptions have improved beyond Maxwell’s wildest dreams. ‘I have beaten my five-year goals in one go,’ she says. Findings from Millward Brown show that the consumer values of easy, personal, knowledgeable and helpful were already well received in October 2000. However, Maxwell has just revealed that consumers gave these attributes even higher scores in 2001, making the PO the UK’s most trusted brand, bar Tesco.

Maxwell admits that being trusted doesn’t in itself make you a destination of choice. She sees it more as leverage: ‘It allows us to develop new products and services with partners.’ Brand Finance calculated the value of the brand, so that it could be leveraged for royalty rights in partnership deals. To this end, TV ads for a new telecoms venture will start airing at the end of this month and a home insurance product will go live mid-March.

Come April, a new concept store will be on trial in Barking, with a symbol’ retail partner, such as Spa, Londis or Budgens. The concept will be jointly branded properly, rather than a corner shop with the P0 counter stuck at the back.

Maxwell is justly pleased that things are changing, but she’s aware that time, and to some extent the internal culture, is against her. ‘People don’t understand that if they don’t invest in the brand, it will collapse.’

The most decisive difference between an outstanding creative team and a poor one is its quality of leadership. Ian Cochrane looks at how great leaders behave.

YOU can always recognise a successful creative team when you see one. The output of the team is usually outstanding and when you meet the team you can feel the enthusiasm, energy and drive just pouring out of it. Staff and clients alike are drawn towards these qualities.

In my experience, the single most important factor is the skills and behaviour of the team leader. It’s simple: great teams have great team leaders and poor teams have poor team leaders.

In our industry these team leaders are often the same people who are generating ideas for clients — they have either come through the design route or the marketing route. They understand the process of idea generation and how to sell these ideas to people. Broadly speaking, they see themselves as ‘creative’ people. They have a passion for what they do and this passion infects staff and clients alike.

Successful team leaders have learnt three things:

First, always surround yourself with people better than yourself.

Second, play to your own personal strengths.

Third, be selfish when it comes to managing your own time.

As well as having quality people, it is very important to make sure that you have a balanced team or performance can be lopsided. A football team with no strikers is hardly likely to win the league.

In a design consultancy, it’s important to have strong hunters and gatherers with the energy and drive to win new business as well as those who are more concerned with getting the detail right on a piece of print before it goes out of the door.

One way to ensure this balance is to use a recognised personality profiling tool to make sure that you understand and develop your senior people and recruit the right sort of people into your team. Noone should ever be hired at a senior level without being profiled beforehand.

Playing to your strengths is also key. I say, forget about your weaknesses and focus on developing your strengths.

David Beckham spends his time practising free kicks rather than heading the ball. Tiger Woods practises those long shots rather than his bunker shots. Similarly, we should use the various tools that are available to identify our top strengths, then focus on and develop them over time.

Going back to that tip about being selfish with your time, a team leader’s time can be defined across five categories:

Activity                    % time allocation

Finance and administration          5%
Billable work                      15%
Marketing and sales                15%
Client relationships               20%
Talking to staff                   45%

Generally speaking, by far the most important category is talking to staff. It should take up anything between 40 and 60 per cent of a team leader’s time.

What we are really talking about here is the role of a leader as a coach. This is about helping others to do their jobs and helping them to get their priorities straight. Everyone needs help in personal goal-setting and encouragement to stretch outside their comfort zones. In general, people do not perform best when left to their own devices.

The least important category, as far as a team leader is concerned, is that of finance and administration. If your business has over 15 people, you need to employ a fulltime professional financial person to take control of these aspects of the business.

There are two reasons for this. First, the team leader has more important things to do and second, there are people better qualified to do this job. The skills required for the two jobs are poles apart.

Ideas generators who become leaders can often be described as: driving, forceful, energetic, direct, influential, optimistic and communicative. Whereas the financial person is better described as: disciplined, careful, systematic, precise, accurate, cautious and logical. You get the drift.

Strong team leaders always ensure that they have a strong financial person alongside to take care of the financial and systems side of the business. The financial controller or finance director will support the managing director and serve as his or her right hand. This person will have a broad remit of responsibilities within the company, including:

* Producing and reviewing financials

* Preparation of budgets

* Preparation of cash flows

* Personnel administration

* Salaries and rewards

* Systems

* Dealing with leases and contracts

* Pricing of client projects

* Cash collection

* Cash payments

* Statutory obligations

If the business comprises less than 15 people, the team leader might well spend in excess of 5 per cent of their time on the previously stated areas, but they should also rely on their external advisors to provide some of this expertise.

In the current climate, as we gradually climb out of recession, we are likely to see more start-ups appearing like the green shoots of spring after a hard winter.

In a start-up things are slightly different again. The prime mover is likely to be a new businessperson or a rainmaker. Without a rainmaker there can be no start-up. These people tend to be rather charismatic, driven and persuasive people who can attract clients to their cause and away from their previous employer if allowed to. By their very nature, they tend to be positive rather than realistic people.

Talk to any venture capitalist and they will tell you that the business plan targets for start-ups are nearly always overstated — people rarely deliver what they say they will deliver in the first year or so of a new business.

If the rainmaker has a start-up partner, it is likely to be a designer or someone who can deliver the product to the client. The crucial skill that is missing, once again, is that of finance.

Since start-ups have no need for a full-time financial controller, it is imperative that they use an advisor for sound business advice on how to minimise tax and to help them in producing a business plan.

Without a business plan, the new business will find it impossible to raise finance or get an overdraft with their friendly bank. Even friendly banks today require the level of comfort that comes from having such a plan.

A FEW years back advertising commercials director Tony Kaye and two agency creatives tried to get their venus in Furs spot for Goodyear (or was it Pirelli?) into the Tate Gallery’s collection. The film, they claimed, transcended its commercial function and justified inclusion as a work of art. The Tate demurred, Kaye picketed the gallery and lively press coverage was enjoyed by all.

This spat created tension in adland. Traditionalists were embarrassed by the pretension; others energised by the issues. As ever, perspicacity could be found in the grey area between the two camps. In reality, art and advertising remained separate and fixed in their constellation, what had changed was the self-confidence of the latter. Some ad people became so high on the industry’s growing social and cultural influence, and its obsession with its own ‘creativity’, that they had mentally dropped the word commercial from the term ‘commercial artist’.

The rapid increase in, and demand for, creative specialists hastened the death of this term. Where once was a commercial artist, suddenly there were art directors, copywriters, creative directors, typographers, graphic designers, planners, brand consultants, Web designers, engagement managers, imagineers and creative business holisticians.

The burgeoning design industry needed more precise job titles, but in playing fast and loose with conventional terms many designers lost sight of the differences between themselves and other trades and professions. While some claimed the most interesting fringes of contemporary graphic design and art were merging, others urged design consultancies to offer management consultancy services.

Advertising seems less interested in art these days, maybe due to so much contemporary art being hypnotised by the seductive and (worryingly) omnipresent language of commercial creativity. Many in the design world still hark after elevation to the gallery, however. It is a common fantasy that a creatively remarkable design work can transcend its origins and become art. I have two problems with this. One, it can’t. Two, believing creative excellence makes a work worthy of promotion to another realm misses the purpose of and devalues design.

Whether design can be art is a more complex question than whether advertising can. Neither design nor art are, by definition, promotional; advertising is. It’s tempting to say the difference between design and art is that the former is created on behalf of a client and the latter on behalf of the artist, but it doesn’t quite separate the two. What if a designer self-funds a poster to address a social issue?

For me, the difference between contemporary art and design lies in the relationship between form, function and audience. In art, form (expression) is free to take priority over function (effectiveness), and the artist is prioritised over the audience. In design, function has priority over form, and the audience is more important than the designer. This remains true even with a design work considered aesthetically or sensually beautiful - its beauty is redundant if it doesn’t achieve its functional objective.

Take the example of the self-funded designer - they are not constrained by the client, but they are by the need to communicate rather than simply express. A work of art has none of these constraints - it is what it is, regardless of how it is received. These contrasting positions with regard to effectiveness are why the world generally pays artists respect and designers money.

I take these tentative steps into the dangerous, labyrinthine design-art debate as a preface to a simple desire. I’d like to see the next generation of designers recognise the difference between design and art, banish the notion that design should aspire to be art, and celebrate the huge value of excellent design. Those driven by a desire to create art are free to do so, whenever they’re not designing.

Drawing a line between design and art is healthy for a design community to do. It lets us measure what we do against something other than the spurious, vague notion of ‘creativity’ that exists in most groups. Form, style and expression are vital, but can only be judged in relation to function. We’re here to inspire people to act in a certain way, and we should measure our success according to that, not just the pleasure evoked by the combination of design elements we employ. So design is a means to an end, art is an end in itself. The greatest question facing a designer is to what ends do you want to go?

KEEP-FIT culture has come a long way since Jane Fonda and the Green Goddess. From pumping iron to practising Pilates, there are now numerous ways to keep in shape. How you exercise is as much about fashion, it seems, as fighting the flab.

Spending on health and fitness reflects its growing status as a lifestyle option. Consumers sweated out almost pounds 1.7bn in health and fitness clubs last year (source: Mintel). This figure has grown 145 per cent since 1996 and the market is expected to double over the next five years.

Membership and admission charges represent around 70 per cent of this expenditure, with a further 10 per cent going on one-off joining fees. This still leaves a significant sum for health and beauty treatments, bars and cafes, which suggests consumers are looking for much more from the experience than a couple of gym circuits.

Traditionally, health and fitness club design has been more readily associated with a Lonsdale than a Gucci belt. But this is changing fast. The multi-million pound KX Gym, which opened this week in west London with interiors and architecture by Thorp Design, is the latest luxury offering. It follows Third Space and Naked, which opened in Soho and Earl’s Court respectively last year. Edinburgh now boasts Escape, owned by the Scotsman Hotel group, and Cambridge has The Glassworks, designed by Conran & Partners.

The fit-out of the pounds 2000-a-year KX Gym (pronounced ‘kicks’ and derived from ‘kickboxing’) is far from run-of-the-mill. Thorp Design managing director James Thorp says it displays a ‘residential mindset in a commercial space’. And he doesn’t mean two up, two down. Thorp’s track record is mainly in designing expensive houses, yachts and planes.

‘We understand what quality is,’ he says. ‘The style of KX evolved from these private commissions. It’s maxi-minimalist, or minimalism taken to a more opulent level.’ Design accounts for more than half a budget in the region of pounds 8m to pounds 10m. There are ebony panels and textured plaster walls. The flooring is either natural hammered stone or teak, Thorp adds. ‘It’s used for yacht decking.’

The positioning, like the look and feel, resembles that of a boutique hotel and is intended to appeal to a similar clientele. So important is location to the target market, Thorp confides, that plans for a site in South Kensington that were ’shut down a week away from work starting’ when the old Harrods depository in Brompton Cross came up. ‘It’s nothing like a Harbour Club, Cannons or Holmes Place,’ he says.

Ian Sherman, Corporate Edge chairman of interiors and architecture, warns against seeing all health and fitness clubs ‘in the light of KX’. He says, ‘it’s at the extreme end of the market, both in terms of costs and what it is offering.’ Corporate Edge has designed 70 gyms over the past 15 years, including the Harbour Club (first and second time around), Champneys City-Point and most recently the ‘affordable luxury’ brand Amida, which opened in Becken ham, Kent, last November.

Sherman says, ‘The market has changed massively. Early on, design was not seen as a key element in the mix, but now it’s increasingly important. The market is also broadening and stretching, so it’s inevitable that there is greater segmentation and more differentiation.’

He likens the position of the larger groups, ‘Fitness First, LA Fitness and Cannons’, to that of retailers such as ‘Burton and Top Shop’ in the 1980s. ‘They’re developing and evolving standards,’ he says — but suggests this has led to a generic style.

Bespoke clubs like KX Gym, Third Space and Naked certainly break the mould. But the challenge, Thorp suggests, is integrating the ‘hotel aspects of the operation, like laundry and day-to-day running’ with calm, spacious design. How feasible it is with more typical budgets, though, is another matter.

The wiring at KX Gym is hidden away ‘under the floor, like a dealing room’, says Thorp. Using a PIN, personal fitness programmes can be downloaded to all the exercise machines. Such individualisation also depends on consumers becoming more sophisticated about fitness techniques. KX is ‘very studio and martial arts-based,’ says Sherman. ‘People have to understand training.’

However, what is common to both the high-end and the mainstream market is a broader definition of what gyms are about. Mintel leisure analyst Richard Bowyer says, ‘In general, a more holistic approach is being taken towards health and fitness. Consumers are interested in a wider range of exercise activities, which explains the popularity of Tal Chi and Pilates and alternative therapies such as reflexology and aromatherapy.’

Sherman points to ‘the growth of relaxation’ as opposed to fitness. He describes cardio-vascular gyms as the ‘pump primers of the industry’, but says the Amida concept is ‘not quite 50/50 but 60/40′ in its ratio of fitness to relaxation. Design, necessarily, has to be more ‘warmer, softer, lower-lit, more contemplative’, he suggests. Having more varied spaces will make greater demands on designers.

With its self-conscious exclusivity, KX Gym’s aesthetic will remain aspirational for most. ‘It’s the Ferrari ticket,’ says Thorp. He thinks the technological rather than the design elements will ‘filter down’. But the boutique hotel comparison might suggest otherwise. First there was Schrager, now there’s Malmaison.

At the height of Goya’s career, when he was deluged by demand for his brutal and profoundly cynical visions of humanity, the patron saint of young, angstful intellectuals and political revolutionaries painted a quiet and humorous work that has escaped much scrutiny. It is a self-portrait. Goya is working in darkness in front of his easel. He is wearing a large black felt hat, and on the brim blazes a halo of several dripping candles. He is looking out at us (at himself in the mirror, really), his expression one of wry and relaxed amusement, laughing no doubt at the paradoxes of his rapid climb to court painter and burning the midnight oil for the consumption of his less than flattering dark and apocryphal canvases. The painter encircles his head with the flickering flames of industry.
In prehistory, light, heat, and cooking were one and the same. You had your fire, you cooked up your meat, and you sat around in your cave (or wherever) to stay warm–the light from the fire drove back the hoards of hungry night predators. While cooking and heating stayed married for a great deal longer, light became its own entity early on. The discovery that any kind of oil (vegetable, animal, or mineral) with fiber in it could be lit and burn brightly led to the use of lamps, which were easily transportable.
The candle has most often been considered inferior to the lamp, due to its inconvenience and mess prior to the progressive changes made in its manufacture during the nineteenth century. Early candles were made of tallow, which could be any animal fat, though most often it was derived from mutton or beef. The fat was rendered before putrefaction had set in; nevertheless, it was difficult to thoroughly purify the tallow before it was made into dipped or molded candles, and the result was a smoky light, foul odor, and a candle that sort of collapsed into a puddle of hot grease rather than burned itself efficiently. Wax, either on its own or in combination with tallow, provided a cleaner light, but it suffered similar problems.
Candles made of either substance needed to be rigorously tended by the householder or servant, its wick needing to be trimmed (using a scissorlike device called a snuffer) several times an hour or else the candle would start to gutter, causing the wax or tallow to melt and drip instead of being consumed by the flame. The candle’s light would flicker annoyingly. Great occasions of state and church were always lit by candles (often several hundred or more), and it was common for these events to become overwhelmingly hot and smoky, with a constant rain of molten wax falling onto the spectators from chandeliers filled with guttering tapers. The invention of the self-snuffing, plaited wick in 1820 drastically revolutionized candles, eliminating the hazard, waste, and mess of the untended flame and pretty much bringing the candle into its present incarnation.
The ingenious but perversely gruesome use of “found candles,” if you will, abounds. Candlefish (a relative of the salmon) were used as bizarrely decorative lamps by Native Americans of Vancouver who caught the fish, dried them, propped them up on Y-shaped sticks, and lit one end at nightfall. On the Shetland Islands, the population caught a little bird called the storm petrel by the thousands, and after drying the bird threaded it with a wick, stuck its feet in a lump of clay, and lit its beak. In the West Indies, fireflies were caught and placed in small wooden boxes, and were adhered to the big toe with a gumlike substance to illuminate the path at night and spot any deadly snakes that may be lurking in the shadows.
The eternal struggle and expense to keep a light going before the modernization of illumination with gas and electricity cannot be exaggerated. Getting and keeping a light was almost as critical to survival as was food and shelter. Indeed, the choice between food and light was a constant for the poor–many lamp oils also being edible. This fact was duly noted by an increase in shipwrecks along the coasts of England in the nineteenth century, when lighthouse keepers used their surpluses of tallow candles for food instead of as warning signs for dangerous waters ahead. Being able to burn a candle anytime you wanted meant that you were rich, and probably literate. It signified freedom, order, and privilege. It also provided protection from the unseen chaos and the debauchery of the night.
Up until the latter half of the twentieth century, the candle was a necessary and sensible object, used thriftily and with reverence, for the most part because of its ability to turn night into a somewhat navigable situation. Its shape and color changed little over thousands of years, varying marginally from the cone to the taper, each dictated by the wick to candle-diameter ratio, and its color a result of the raw materials at hand. The candle gained symbolic significance within the spiritual realm as well, where its use in religious ritual has been prolific and widespread. The early Christian church discouraged the superstitious and pagan use of candles in services or in the common practice of guiding the dead to their final resting place. By the late third century, the church gave up this losing battle and embraced the candle. It then became a trinity of meaning: beeswax, the pure body of Mary; wick, the soul of Jesus Christ; and flame, Divinity.
Of course, candles served a sinister and lucrative role as a votive for fearful and guilty petitioners who wished to whisk their loved ones away from the jaws of purgatory and through the pearly gates. But more fanciful, empowering, and interesting uses of the candle as a sympathetic object can be found in fourteenth-century France, where a town, during pestilence or war, would make a taper the length of the town’s perimeter (which might be several miles), dip it in wax, and wrap it around a wooden barrel; the protective votive might burn for a couple of months or more. Similarly, a taper would be stretched around a sick animal and brought to the church to burn for the beast’s recovery. In both instances, the candle is thought to attain metaphysical power through the believer’s will and imagination. Magical practices have always employed candles, as literal and figurative constructions of reality through which the mind operates on an unseen level. Blowing out the candles on a birthday cake while making a wish originates in this transmutation of reality via a little bit of wax and flame.
In the mid eighteen hundreds, gas was beginning to replace the lamp and the candle in factories and homes. It was centrally supplied, required almost no maintenance by the householder, and provided bright and constant light that certainly revolutionized the dark and dangerous workplace. But there was a mysterious resistance to the use of gas light in the drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie. People clung to their candles and lamps. For decades, they refused to allow family meeting rooms to be converted to gas, though hallways and kitchens had gas installed almost immediately. Gas was accused of being poisonous and eating up too much oxygen! But the real reason was that gas did not have a mellow, warm flame that emulated the gentle, poetic, and hypnotic character of the hearth. The gas flame was harsh, and too bright. It did not do for the psyche what the flame of the candle or of the lamp could do: It provided no reprieve.
Nowadays, candles reside as blurred relics to their forgotten spiritual and domestic functions. They have lost their critical necessity, and in so doing have been given the time and luxury to expand from their tried-and-true modest singular form into the most fantastical, horrific, hilarious, and kitschy forms imaginable. Springing up and spreading like wildfire in the nineteen fifties through the seventies, the populist arts and crafts movement derived its momentum from a revolution in domestic life, whereby labor-saving devices and the sudden availability of inexpensive, factory-made goods altered the role of women in the home. As an adverse reaction to the modernization of housework into bland consumerism, the craft boom was in no small part a nostalgic re-creation of childhood memory, as well as a collective and unquenchable desire for individual creative activities that required skill, attention, and care. As a consequence, candle-making, along with macramé, ceramics, braiding, crocheting, quilting, rug latch-hooking, and decoupage, became hugely popular handicrafts in the postwar era, spawning specialty stores, books, magazines, television shows, classes, societies, and fairs.
Novelty candles flooded the marketplace, appealing to all tastes and embracing the bohemian counterculture’s aspiration for a chilled out, homespun, eastern-flavored, artsy, incense-burning exoticism that has seeped into every nook and cranny of the culture. Who does not remember making the hippie (or sand) candle at school or as a stay-at-home project? Or how about the multicolored drip candle, which, when placed in an empty wine bottle, would develop the counterfeit patina of a rich kaleidoscopic past of love-ins, happenings, and consciousness-raising sessions? The Hari Krishnas adopted the psychedelically patterned candle as their trademark and money-generator. And there are the gigantic trophy candles bought by upwardly-mobile suburbanites, those elaborately poured, dolloped, dripped, and sculpted forms–always a god-awful wood-brown color whose wick never tastes the bite of the match: a final footnote on the candle’s road from service to ornamental home décor.
Less swingin’ your-pad-or-mine candlealia is perhaps even more glorious and unbound: note the Santa Claus Winter Wonderland candle, the pressed-flower candle, the ice-cube candle, the head-shop skull candle, the layered candle, the fake-rock candle, the fake-woodgrain or brick candle, the pop-confection ice-cream-sundae candle, the little boy and girl candle (you light their heads), the many assorted animal candles . . .
Perhaps only artists have clearly understood our complicated relationship to the candle, or the vast possibilities of narrative, allegory, and pictorial promise of a candlelit space. Yet, surprisingly, representations of the candle in art are slight in number. In making Barry Lyndon, a 1975 film set in the eighteenth century and shot entirely in period lighting, director Stanley Kubrick was obsessed with using only candles and natural light in order to visually recreate the tone of Romantic-era paintings. When told that filming would be impossible without fill lighting, he adamantly made his own camera lenses and specially developed all the film. The technical difficulties facing painters have been similar; the challenge even more onerous. Candlelight is not stable: The flame changes continuously, shuddering palpably under the slightest air current, while expanding and contracting at will–moving like water over all it touches. Many artists just haven’t bothered, painting during the daylight, then adding a few candles here or there, hoping that their addition would be enough of a clue that the depicted scene occurred at night.
Postmodern resurrection of seventeenth-century French painter Georges de La Tour is a notable exception. His late portraits of Magdalenes–born through a demand for trifling voyeuristic portraits of morally repentant and anonymous women of clandestine reputation–are exquisitely reverie-inducing and brilliant studies of lighting. The object lesson of the fallen is overridden by the sheer transformative wonder of de La Tour’s technical virtuosity. Likewise, Gerhard Richter’s photobased paintings of skulls and candles critique Romanticism, while delivering a healthy hit of sensuous swoon. They recontextualize the dichotomous versions of the candle as both soulful reflection of the vanities and as parabola of sensorial seduction. Furthermore, the spiritually and sympathetically symbolic effects of Robert Gober’s candle pieces–a stubby, white candle with pubiclike human hair growing out of its base, or a truncated and formally clothed human form with candles sprouting from its limbs–mine the well-submerged but unconsciously recognized powers of the candle as a vehicle of wish fulfillment on the physical plane. Nam June Paik’s technological translation of a single candle into a multitude of variously scaled and colored video projections in One Candle of 1988 meditates upon the transition of our attention from the flame of the candle to the glow of the monitor. And picking up the thread of the nineteen-seventies aesthetic candle explosion is Jorge Pardo’s extravagant avocado, yellow, and orange drippy chandelier.
Just about the time that art was taking a major nosedive in significance as the main game in visual communication, the candle was being replaced by gas and electric light, and its significance in religious life was being devalued and forgotten. (Today, the Catholic Church in Rome has converted to electric votives; you pay and then hit the switch). With similar persistence–in the face of humiliation, debasement, and criticism leveled at its frivolity, self-indulgence, and lack of substantial meaning–the visual arts and the candle soldier on. As a consequence, they have become more ridiculous, exaggerated, inventive, and grand as time goes on. Indeed, the existence of the visual arts today is a testimony to a kind of faith, endurance, and desire for an illusionistic experience of life. The line between fact and fiction is wherever you want to draw it; undeniably, for the imaginatively evolved, the distinction is moot. Still, like the individual efforts of the artist, a dim candle burning in a darkened room continues to assert its right to blur, dream, trip, disguise, and pull the rug out from under everything else.

Serious fireworks turn something into nothing, very suddenly, and do it repeatedly until (only) nothing is left. Life should thereupon feel scrubbed and new. Socially, fireworks are a generously wasteful gesture–a potlatch–like publicly burning one’s money in a sincere way. Audiences must feel that the event honors their presence. Of course, they are stunned, overmastered, blitzed, sent. Such is the fireworker’s humble ministry. I love setting off fireworks, which I do for less than twenty minutes once a year, after thinking about it a great deal.
I seldom enjoy professional displays, which are academic. They expect to be admired. You know: ooh, ahh. Forget that. Think sob, scream. When doing fireworks, never consider beauty, which will take care of itself. Contrive only intensity. Fireworks should not be something that people watch, but something that happens to them.
My wife Brooke Alderson’s and my annual Fourth of July party began about fifteen years ago at our country place (a third-hand trailer at the time) with a few friends and some bottle rockets that I’d scored in Chinatown. It grew, last year drawing over 200 friends and neighbors. For a while, I bought in bulk from a Midwestern outfit that ships to interstate-trucking depots. Today, I patronize a savvy, passionate dealer named Joe. My partners Eric and Kate and I make a road trip to Joe’s cinder-block bunker in a bucolic field each spring. Joe has taught us different uses of “black match” (gunpowder-impregnated cotton fuse wrapped in waxed paper) and electrical “squibs” (which, with wiring, enable battery-powered instantaneous mass firings at a distance). There is so much more to learn, but we’re taking it gradually.
I haven’t tried to get professional-grade ordnance. We use the “C”-class that is legal in some states. Except for forget-about-it “A”-class complexity, the main difference is size, which can be compensated for by grouping units, exploiting features of the terrain, and, above all, keeping the show close to the audience–which contributes a bonus frisson of fear.
The main types of display fireworks are rockets, fountains, and tubes (mortars). “C”-class rockets, which we launch from PVC pipes stuck in the ground, are generally unsatisfying. Most sacrifice bang for color; some do the opposite. (All share that lovely takeoff, whoooshh.) We use them for filler. Best are “cakes”: bulky bundles of tubes that shoot “flaming balls,” as it says on their labels. At different altitudes, the effects include many-colored banging, whizzing, darting, showering, corkscrewing, shimmering, and whatnot. We like to pack the air with cake phenomena–sort of all-over sky painting–for a long spell. Some of the cakes we use are named Oriental Thunder, Blinking Dragon’s Breath, 37 Shots Shining Star, Millennium, Wild Boar, Insanity, Magic Whirly, Vendicator [sic], Star Gate, Drinker of the Wind, Black Cat Warp Speed, Super Stallion, Gold Strike, Dagger Falls, and–most mysteriously–Dayton Night.
Our nine-year-old house tops a slope that descends, from the porch, through a distance of one hundred feet in tiers and across a lawn to a stream which, for the past few years, has been swollen into a virtual lake by beavers. (The beavers surely loathe the Fourth; living on our land rent-free, they can jolly well put up with it.) From the stream, a meadow extends one hundred and twenty feet to the base of a wooded mountain. We do most of our show on the lawn–with, this year, six front-line all-purpose crew members, a rocket man (hi Seamus!), three reloadable-tubes people, and Eric supervising. Last year, we involved a nearby big willow (more about it later) and the stream itself (a homemade barge loaded with fountains for a curtain effect); this year, we expanded further to small cherry trees and the entire meadow. Next year, the mountain. The offered loan of a gut-quaking gunpowder cannon has been accepted. You can’t beat a narrow mountain valley for acoustic enhancement, by the way.
Reloadable tubes include the exuberantly flashy Critical Acclaim and the indispensable Violence Ammunition, which produces very loud, hard bangs. Applying lessons from Joe, we have learned to remove the propellant from VA projectiles and to fuse the warheads for use on the ground.
The largest “C” tubes are preloaded, one-shot mortars, pretty expensive, that launch with heavy thumps, “break” (explode) impressively, and yield the high, colored blossoms and cascades that most people think of when they think of fireworks. Joe despises them as uneconomical, but if you don’t give folks some of what they expect, what kind of host are you? We used to finish with large tubes. Now I like them as a false finale, relaxing the audience into the ooh/ahh mode, and thus setting up the knockout that I’ve lain awake for months scheming.
Saturns. Everybody who knows any small fireworks knows the bricklike launchers of twenty-five or one hundred little plastic rockets that scream upwards erratically and go bang. Rule of life: You cannot have enough Saturns firing simultaneously. It feels crazy every year at Joe’s, loading up on so many of one item. But I’m girding to really go for it next year: a colossal, shrieking wall of ripping fire that gives an intimation of satiety–too many Saturns. My friend Mark’s auteurial dream of a show is just, say, fifty thousand Saturns and good night. That would be quite cool. We might need to call two hundred ambulances from the nervous hospital. But I bet Mark that we can get a heartwarming, though brief equivalent with a mere three thousand. We’ll see.
Now and then, I sense our use of fireworks crossing a line into art. I try to suppress the thought, which threatens crippling self-consciousness. I keep reminding myself of my earliest and still perhaps only insight into the pyrotechnical sublime: “Shoot off everything you have as fast as you can.” A no-bidding corollary: “Absolutely no dead time.” A half-second pause between fireworks is an abyss in which is glimpsed death by boredom. If art can handle the pace, bully for art.
The arts that fireworks are closest to are music and painting–the pure structuring of time and the optical field–both of which operate automatically on any perception we have that is susceptible to them. I made an instructive, arty mistake this year, expending many person-hours of wiring and splicing to prepare a ten-second effect in the meadow: ranks of Critical Acclaim and Violence Ammunition warheads detonating in the grass from the mountain to the stream. Mark and I crouched in the dark as, keeping the beat, he handed me wire leads and I touched them to a battery. I had envisioned a barrage rolling toward the audience. The percussive aspect was gratifying–and would have been more so if I hadn’t missed connecting one of the ranks. But people didn’t much get the visual idea, surely because their gazes composed the explosions frontally, in pictorial space. Middle ground (between near and far, and properly the domain of sculpture) is a headache in fireworks as in landscape painting. Only Van Gogh ever did major things with it, by accounting for its every dip and veer with cobbled strokes. Give me a ton of money, several miles of wire, and a huge crew, and I’ll do you a Van Gogh.
The finest fireworks tour de force I ever saw (only on TV, alas) was the Eiffel Tower on Millennium Eve. There had to be hundreds of thousands of charges set off in geometric patterns and syncopated rhythms: classicist. (As a northern type, I’m a romantic, but teachable.) I mentioned that masterpiece to Joe. He tensed up. “Fuckin’ French,” he said bitterly. “The best. We just think we do it.” The example gave me the idea of loading our big willow tree with cakes (Niagara Falls–white balls and spark showers) fused in overlapping sequence and aimed to bounce around in the branches. The tree appeared to disintegrate in concatenating fire. This is the one stunt we do that I am perfectly happy with. This year, we duct-taped Snow Storm fountains into two hawthornes near the mountain, to enchanting effect. Look for more of those next year.
I recently heard an eyewitness account of New Year’s fireworks in Naples: how the city blazes with amateur stuff for hours, then the official show erupts all over the magnificent bay. I am proud that this fits my own instinctive pattern. At Brooke’s and my party, inexhaustible heaps are set out of small and medium rockets, firecrackers, minor tubes, Roman candles, flying spinners, sparklers (the multistage, spitting kind), and novelty items (such as little boats which, afloat on our pond, putt forward, shoot cannons, and launch helicopters). People may help themselves all day. Age restriction: ability to use a Bic lighter. Small kids radiate bliss that disarms leery parents. O.K., ten-year-old boys can be a pain (vide Lord of the Flies). This year, I passed one who was twisting rocket fuses together for a multiple launch and heard him growl, “They will feel my power.”
How much does all of this cost? I was tickled last year when some people formed a pool to guess, and their low figure for the show alone was $5,000. Three of us, splitting the bill, had spent a total of $1,300. Never underestimate Chinese productivity. Of course, we must escalate each year. Maybe someday I’ll hit the reset button and begin again with bottle rockets on the porch.
Isn’t it dangerous? (I hear you, reader.) I eschew cherry bombs, M-Sos, and anything else paramilitary. Fireworks should destroy only themselves. Slight burns are the worst peril with what we use–barring extraordinary misfortune which, in fifteen years, has yet to occur. Well, during the show this year an outsized Roman candle, brand-named Brilliant Envoy, fell over and fired into the crowd. That was sobering. Observing with horror from across the stream, I marveled at the alacrity with which human beings can remove themselves from the flight paths of flaming balls. Whew. And once, years ago, my sister Mary was soldiering in the front line as usual, when her hair caught fire. Someone whopped her about the head until the flames went out, and she returned to duty almost without missing a beat.
It’s incredible in the front line: infernal fire, smoke, noise, and scampering bodies. Fireworks condense the fun parts of war, without the bad. Occasionally, a rookie freezes up or skedaddles. Few of us, including me, have ever seen our show. I’ve viewed a couple of volunteer videos and some photographs. I was interested, but for anyone to step back and record the event seems to me misguided. Fireworks are a participatory experience, like sex. Be there or be square.
People who think they’re being funny call me a pyromaniac. I resent that. Refer to me and my kind as pyrophiles, if you please. Or else, Pyro-Americans.
The political content of the Fourth should be kept freshly in mind: kicking English ass. Every rocket is targeted spiritually at old George Three. Last year, atop the bonfire that instantly follows our show, we flew a vast Union Jack painted on muslin by Hannah Harvey. Seamus dug that. English guests at the party took it a mite queasily. I assured them of our benevolence. I quoted Winston Churchill: “In victory, magnanimity.” And Ulysses S. Grant: “If we have to fight, let us do it all at once and then make friends.” (Notice: all words of one syllable. Amazing writer.)
I suppose that, psychologically, a defiant devotion to something illegal, morally woozy, or just foolish–fireworks no less than drugs or art–is neurotic in a particular vein. It may express stubborn loyalty to the person or persons who, when we were children, conveyed to us that we were, or even perhaps ought to be, bad. I have ideas about myself in this regard.

Fairyland is every man’s dream of perfection, and changes, dreamlike, with the mood of the dreamer. For one, it is a scene of virgin, summery Nature undefiled by even the necessary works of man. For another, it is a place where there exist no codes, conventions, or moral laws, and where people love or hate at sight, having their virtues and vices writ large upon them. For another, it is a champaign dotted with fine castles, in which live sweet ladies clad in silk, spinning, and singing as they spin, and noble knights who do courteous battle with each other in forest glades; or a region of uncanny magic, haunting music, elves, and charmed airs and waters. For still another, it may be an anarchy of the beautiful touched with terror, tenanted by spirits who must be propitiated with cakes left on the window sill and soft words spoken up the chimney at night. No two minds see fairlyland alike or demand like gifts from it, and to the same fancy it alters from day to day, as the winds change which blow about a house, and with as little apparent reason. Nevertheless, it gives by contraries so accurate a reflection of life that the spirit of an age is more essentially mirrored in its fairytales than in the most painstaking chronicle of a contemporary diarist.
The visions of what is called idealism are only reflections of fairland and its experiences; they share with the scenes of that wonderful domain the merit of telling the truth about those who see them, and of telling it the more clearly because unconsciously. Yet, there have arisen in the last half-century, more or less, certain long-faced, earnest, intent, and seemingly very daring people, who inform us sadly that we must look dull facts in the face if we would see truth, that we must not delude ourselves with rosy dreams or golden castles in Spain. By way of showing us how to proceed, they rake over the rubbish heaps of humanity in its close alleys and noisome slums to find fragments of broken moral crockery, to nose out the vices of unfortunate people, to set upon them the worst possible interpretation for the social system, and, by the simple process of multiplication, to construct from them what they consider typical human beings.
Determining to hide nothing, and to show every side of life impartially, they forget that the things which necessarily strike them most in their impartial survey and appear most emphatic in their work are mere offal of the senses–as a man with a delicate sense of smell would find unpleasant odors the chief feature of life in a hovel of disease. Boldly declaring that they will cast aside all factitious optimism, they automatically choose the dark aspect of all things in order to be on the safe side; as a result, unpleasantness becomes associated in their minds with truth, and if they wish to produce a faultlessly exact portrait of a man, all they need do is to paint his weaknesses and then, for the sake of propitiating the instinct of kindness left by some oversight in their hearts, to explain that his shortcomings are the inevitable consequences of a mistaken scheme of life. There remains only to set down the man thus portrayed in a milieu, the dullness, sordidness, and stuffiness of which is “reproduced” with a monotonous and facile elaboration hitherto unknown in art, and a masterpiece of realism is obtained. It is hardly surprising that when such stuff is given to tired and overworked men and women with unsteady nerves as a study for their leisure hours, it is apt to cause a certain flavor of despondency and pessimism to become characteristic of the time, with the social result that if any difficult problem of life clamors to be solved, those best equipped for solving it have utterly lost all youthful hope and cheer and have no energy for the labor. They pass on with sighs, leaving the task to bureaucrats and party politicians.
It is an old sneer, no doubt, that realism is a picker-up of life’s refuse, and it may be just that any point of view which belongs to a large class of people should find representation in art. But it has never been proved to the satisfaction of the most reasonable and easily convinced visionary that the realistic is a definite point of view. For, in truth, it is only the mood of every man’s dull and depressed hours. We are all realists at times, just as we are all sensualists at times, all liars at times, and all cowards at times. And if it be urged that for this very reason, because it is human, realism is essential to art, the obvious answer comes that this claim entitles it, at most, to a niche in the temple, not, as at present, to a domination of the whole ritual. Truth in art, as in other things, should not be sought by that process of exhaustion encouraged so fatally in our age by the pedants of science, and by their fallacy that it may be discovered by considering all the possibilities: a method which surrenders intuition and all the soul’s fine instincts to receive in exchange a handful of theories, which, compared with the infinite forms of immortal truth known to the gods, are as a handful of pebbles to a thousand miles of shingly beach.
Faulty as its philosophy is, however, the realistic creed that dominates our literature is not due so much to bad theories as to bad art. To be an idealist, one must have a vision and an ideal; to be a realist, only a plodding, mechanical eye. Of all forms of art, realism is the easiest to practice, because of all forms of mind the dull mind is commonest. The most unimaginative or uneducated person in the world can describe a dull scene dully, as the worst builder can produce an ugly house. To those who say that there are artists, called realists, who produce work which is neither ugly nor dull nor painful, any man who has walked down a commonplace city street at twilight, just as the lamps are lit, can reply that such artists are not realists, but the most courageous of idealists, for they exalt the sordid to a vision of magic, and create pure beauty out of plaster and vile dust.