DESIGN REVIEWED
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When my Apple Watch Ultra arrived on loan for this article, I did not want to open the package. In fact, I engaged in some light self-sabotage, leaving the unopened box to languish on my desk as my deadline inched ever closer. I’ve had health issues this year. As January opened, I watched the frightening unravelling of a loved one’s sanity. In the grip of this ongoing crisis, my appetite evaporated, and I awoke each day with the blind panic of a monkey falling from a branch. My skin sprouted with acne, and when I did manage to eat, my belly bloated and gurgled painfully. During this time I came face to face with the quaking, infantile animal that lives inside us all, who tenses for reverberations long after disaster has passed. It was a shapeshifter – sometimes a hummingbird beating against my ribcage, other times a baby deer curled in a knot in my heart, or a quivering rabbit in my throat. Often it was grotesque, roaring belches like a gassy dragon, and bulging like a digesting snake. I spent many months despising this vulnerable part of myself that, reeling with grief, prevented me from responding to emails or socialising in spaces where I could not cry. I feared being asked what I’d been up to in case it revealed how inept I’d become at working. As activist Jessica Gaitán Johannesson puts it in her book The Nerves and their Endings, I struggled with “the ingrained knowledge that I’m worth less than what I produce, especially if I produce less than others.” Forgiveness was the only way out – forgiveness for needing time to recover, for struggling with problems that most people would rather not hear about, for being unable to save someone I loved. Even though I was getting better, I knew my body still harboured stress. I felt my heart race at inconveniences that I had once found manageable, and I witnessed myself jumping out of my skin at the sound of my housemate entering the kitchen behind me. I started integrating earlier nights and regular exercise to help soothe my body, but forming new habits takes time. I tried not to punish myself for occasionally skipping a gym class when 20
it was raining, or recklessly staying up past midnight so that I could finish reading a chapter of my book. And so I feared the Apple Watch nagging me to stand up, exercise and burn calories, conjuring up new ways to fail within the day – and perhaps even revealing secret fault lines. The Move app frames clear objectives for its users, and infuses exercise with the pleasure of a game through rewarding messages, timely reminders, and the sheer satisfaction of closing the three multicoloured rings that track your movement, exercise, and the portion of your day you spend standing. The flip-side is that a lack of reward can feel like punishment; an ill-timed reminder or a gaping ring can deplete your self worth. Apple markets its latest watch, the Ultra, as “an incredible tool for endurance athletes or those who aspire to push beyond their limits.” Its newest features help you backtrack when lost on a hike, or perceive the depth of your dive – tools I wish I had a use for in my sedentary work-from-home lifestyle. Although it’s optimised for athletes, the watch’s other features are more generally applicable – I can use it to make calls, read messages, and listen to music. It’s also marketed as “the ultimate device for a healthy life,” as it can monitor my fitness, heart rate, sleep and menstrual cycle. Yet I find being encouraged to push myself beyond my limits rather daunting. When I finally start using the watch, I am pleasantly surprised. My daily circuits around my local park surpass its specified 30-minute exercise requirement. Given that I am prone to pacing, I easily meet my standing goals too. I feel great until I check my Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Although it may sound counterintuitive, greater fluctuation in the time between our heartbeats indicates that the autonomic nervous system, which regulates involuntary processes such as heart rate and respiration, is functioning better. HRV should hover somewhere between 60 and 100 for a healthy person in their mid-20s. My HRV is currently 10, and has been perilously low for the last two days.
As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explains in his book The Body Keeps the Score, the autonomic nervous system has two branches: “the sympathetic, which acts as the body’s accelerator, and the parasympathetic, which serves as its brake.” The sympathetic nervous system gears our bodies up into fight-or-flight, while the parasympathetic nervous system regulates functions that relax our bodies, such as sleeping and digesting. “Since the autonomic nervous system organises arousal in both body and brain, poor HRV[…] not only has negative effects on thinking and feeling but also on how the body responds to stress,” van der Kolk writes. With HRV, the more fluctuation, the better. Low HRV indicates susceptibility to potentially fatal illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, as well as life-diminishing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is considered a harbinger of future illness. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to do with the suggestion that I am 26 and hyperventilating my way towards an early death. The feeling that I am failing at living seeps in like rot, and I desperately want to rip off the watch and throw it in the nearest body of water. I feel a deep revulsion and I’m not entirely sure what it’s directed towards. Do I hate my body for malfunctioning or do I hate the watch for telling me about it? Do I hate myself or the device? “Apple decided to make a watch and only then set out to discover what it might be good for (besides, you know, displaying the time),” writer David Pierce explains in Wired. But after tinkering with different ways in which people might relate to wristmounted technology, the team ultimately landed on the watch’s purpose as being a less distracting alternative to an iPhone. “People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much,” software developer Kevin Lynch told Wired back in 2015. “People want that level of engagement. But how do we provide it in a way that’s a little more human, a little more in the moment when you’re with somebody?”
The public first glimpsed the Apple Watch at Parisian fashion boutique Colette in 2014. Customers were only allowed to look at the device rather than try out its features, buy it or even glean its price; nevertheless, early morning queues formed. Fashion elites such as designer Karl Lagerfeld attended the event, and the watch had a 12-page ad in Vogue the next year. Wearable tech is still treated as a luxury fashion item – Apple has teamed up with Nike and Hermès to produce different straps for its watch, for instance, while its competitor the Oura ring is sold at Gucci stores. It makes sense: owning the latest tech is a status symbol, as is the luxury to prioritise one’s fitness and wellness. “Unfit behaviour like smoking or reclining in front of the TV with a beer [signifies] lower class status, while a dedication to health, even if evidenced only by carrying a gym bag or yoga mat, [advertises] a loftier rank,” Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. The Apple Watch is a perfect form of conspicuous consumption, indicating not only wealth but virtue. Once the watch was finally released in 2015, Apple’s development and marketing placed greater emphasis on health and fitness as a way of competing with activity trackers such as the popular Fitbit. Subsequent editions offered ever more elaborate features, such as tracking your average lap pace when swimming. To bolster mental wellbeing, a 2016 update offered watch users guided meditations, and by the time of the Apple Watch Series 4 in 2018 it had evolved into a carer, offering fall detection and heart monitoring. When the watch was first conjured up, it represented wearable technology with no clear discernible purpose; now, however, Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams is unequivocal when he calls it “an intelligent guardian for your health.” In the case of my own health, I discover that although regular exercise and sleep can help raise HRV, the technique that promises to provide me with the most instantaneous relief is actually offered through the Apple Watch’s Breathe app. Resonant breathing synchronises 21
BODERLINE PRODUCTION Words Lily Wakeley
Image courtesy of Jessica Lutz.
Ecology
Sotol
I took my shoes and socks off to wade through the slither of the Rio Grande – at that time of year, more mud than water. Leaving Big Bend National Park in Texas, I emerged into the small Mexican border village of Boquillas, slick with sweat and floppy with heat-induced fatigue. Both sides of the river, and the roughly corresponding border, are part of the vast Chihuahuan desert. Overhead, birds and floating seeds make the same journey that I just have indiscriminately. You might struggle to identify the periphery of the Chihuahuan desert on Google Maps; quite possibly the cartographers have too, bearing in mind that it’s roughly the size of Afghanistan and traverses one national and many state borders. The national border, however, was rendered hyper visible when the United States closed the Boquillas border station after 9/11. Despite reopening in 2013, the poverty that this closure inflicted on Boquillas is palpable, as is the commodification of its culture through the sale of embroidered Indigenous textiles as a necessary lifeline. Today, the border is made tangible in its barbed wire detention centres and amongst the young white, Black and Mexican boys who are cooling off in a reservoir on their breaks from the continued building of Trump’s wall. Regardless of geopolitics, the landscape on both sides of the border is much the same: white rocks that burn rose-gold as the sun sets; stretches of arid land scorched by a heat that refracts off the floor in waves; and cactuses, fat with stored water. It is in this impossible ecosystem that the native dasylirion plant grows best. Also called “desert spoon”, dasylirion takes approximately 15 years to mature, at which point its leaves can be peeled back to reveal a giant pinecone-like heart. When roasted in an underground wood-fired pit for three days, before being milled and stored in a vat to ferment and the residual liquid distilled, the spirit sotol is born. Sotol was granted a domestic Denominación de origen (DO) classification in 2004. Similarly to the stipulation around the production of champagne and parmigiano reggiano, this classification from the Mexican authorities recognises that sotol is culturally tied to a ring-fenced region: the three Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Durango. Historically, the Pueblo peoples ate dasylirion stems like artichoke leaves and used its fibres to make sandals and baskets as far back as the 12th century BCE, but around 800 years ago, the Native Rarámuri people began to produce a lowABV sotol drink similar to beer or kvass, most likely for its medicinal and spiritual properties. It wasn’t until Spanish colonisers brought distilling
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FURNITUREHEADS Words Elizabeth Glickfeld
Image courtesy of Florian Böhm.
Object
Fauteuil Kangourou
Can you imagine hankering for a table more than you would an Hermès Birkin handbag? Or coveting a couch over a pair of Dior Jordan 1s? Swiss furniture brand Vitra seemed to be banking on as much when, earlier this year, it began circulating teasers for a lounge chair via email marketing, its website and on Instagram. In a video, the camera pans down over horizontal oak wood back slats. Register now. A house plant casts a moody shadow across a close-up of cobalt-blue bouclé upholstery. 12 days, 5 minutes and 36 seconds to go. A hero shot shows the chair seemingly staring out to a view of the sea, the main protagonist in the living room of a modernist house. Only 150 pieces. Then on 15 June comes: the drop. In a matter of minutes, the chair sells out. The object at the centre of this preamble is 20th-century French “constructeur” Jean Prouvé’s Fauteuil Kangourou. Today, Prouvé is considered the designer’s designer. Having trained as a metal craftsman during World War One, subsequently becoming a manufacturer and entrepreneur, Prouvé is admired for his life-long commitment to unearthing the poetics of then-new industrial processes – an ingenuity evident in the tapers of his blade-like chair and table legs. Prouvé applied his talents to everything from a letter opener to prefabricated housing and modular building systems, lighting to furniture. His signature was his structural approach. With an engineer’s understanding, he laid bare the modernist credos of “form follows function” and “truth to materials”. His designs went beyond simply exposing the logic of a chair’s construction, but also made legible where forces played out across its structure. The Fauteuil Kangourou (Kangaroo Armchair), one of his lesserknown furniture pieces, is no exception. Designed in 1948, the armchair gets its marsupial-inspired name from its sculptural wooden “haunches”. These slope back towards the floor to support the chair where the sitter exerts the greatest stress, allowing for light front legs made of thin steel tubes. But the Fauteuil Kangourou is not your usual attention grabber. Its no-fuss attitude is the source of its appeal. Except for the nuanced curves of the wood, the statement blue of the upholstery and the woolly caress of the bouclé, you’d almost be forgiven for tripping over the Fauteuil Kangourou at a house party. You wouldn’t be scared of sitting on it either. The chair is at once elegant and elemental, so much so that it makes its 20th-century peers look like they’re trying too hard. Robin Day’s Recliner (1952), too rectilinear; Hans Wegner’s Papa Bear (1951), too exuberant; Arne Jacobson’s
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READING BETWEEN THE SIGNS Words Khorshed Deboo
Image courtesy of Khorshed Deboo.
Policy Section 36 (A) of the Maharashtra Shops and Establishments Act
A stroll in the Fort area in the southern part of Mumbai is an exercise in engaging one’s visual, aural and olfactory senses. Your inclination to wander around at will on a weekday is driven by the frenzied pedestrian movement and the onslaught of traffic. This largely commercial district contains banks, law firms, fuss-free lunch establishments, tea stalls, streetside hawkers, shops – from hole-in-the-wall kiranas (grocery shops) to international couture labels – and a few longstanding places of worship that are tucked away in its labyrinthine lanes. It is named after the erstwhile fort walls that were built by the British East India Company in 1716, and demolished during the 1860s. While these ramparts are long gone, the vast swathe where the fort once stood is now occupied by a number of historic buildings in varying architectural styles, as well as landmarks and streets that are often still referred to by the names that existed prior to the formal nomenclature being tinkered with by the city’s municipal authorities over the last few decades. I have walked through these streets for as long as I have lived in Bombay (as the city was called until 1996, when it was officially changed to “Mumbai”). Over the last three decades, familiar sights have conjured a mental map that is imprinted in my head, while unfamiliar ones await their entrenchment in my mind’s eye. Among the many elements that make up the visual fabric of the cityscape, signage is one that not only serves the dual purpose of communication and publicity, but is also capable of revealing stories and secrets if one peels back the layers. They are a defining part of the city’s character. While in Fort, stand on the axis of the Horniman Circle Gardens to face a brick-red building that houses the premises of the oldest-running newspaper in Asia, The Mumbai Samachar. Across the building’s facade, “The Bombay Samachar (Pvt.) Ltd.” is rendered in black metal lettering, blending English and Gujarati. Today, this metal signage sits cheek-by-jowl with a hand-painted sign in Marathi, the most widely spoken language in
the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. It asserts “मुंबई समाचार” (Mumbai Samachar), written in the Devanagari script that runs from left to right, and which is characterised by long, horizontal strokes at the tops of the letters, usually joined to form a continuous line. Turn right onto Cawasji Patel Street, punctuated by stationery and Xerox shops, and you arrive at a coral-hued building with wrought-iron railings that houses Lilson Tailors, whose English signage – deft, flat brushstrokes in red – has now made way for a mundane, screen-printed one in Marathi. The old sign in the Roman script still exists, but it is no longer prominent enough rues the store’s proprietor, whom I seem to have awakened from his postprandial torpor with my questions. A few hundred metres away on the corner of Gunbow Street stands the Art Deco-style Hornby View, where Ideal Corner – doling out plates of fragrant mutton sali boti and caramel custard for more than 30 years – occupies the ground level. The Parsi eatery’s frontage has a haphazardly suspended flex banner in Marathi, almost overshadowing the elegantly hand-painted, cursive-lettered English signage underneath. Amble past meandering lanes housing old buildings whose pitched roofs are covered with red Mangalore tiles and you take in the aromas of Kerala-style ghee roast wafting from the unassuming Rahmaniya hotel. Here, the round, smooth-edged flourishes of the ligature-heavy Malayalam signage has been relegated to a corner. As summer tightened its tentacles over the city earlier this year, a transformation was underway – a number of storefronts across Mumbai did away with their extant signage, replacing it with makeshift signs announcing their names in Marathi. What used to be a visually multilingual urban landscape is now stripped of its diversity. What’s wrong with having signage in Marathi, one may ask; it is the official language of Maharashtra, after all. Moreover, when the city is dealing with deadly potholes, collapsing overbridges, and a lack of potable water and affordable housing, how can 75