On Ted Gachot's Through the Cooking Class (from AIGA Journal of graphic design) and Micheal J. Golec's Martha Stewart Living and the marketing of Emersonian Perfectionism (from Home Cultures.
I have to say that I am forever in awe of anyone that can read a Martha Stewart Living magazine and see as much in them as these 2 men. While Gachot weaves the company into a sinister Godmother of life with every question answered, Golec takes the "Self-Reliance" route and both settle on the concept of perfection in some of the most witty journal writing I have had the pleasure to read. Everyone loves to poke fun at big business.
Gachet's point is that Living is more about the lore, the witchery delivered to the reader than the actual practical value, and, having also been reading Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, I found myself weaving the lore concept into Golec's insistence that the success of the magazine carries back to the US' Puritan roots.
"Of course!" I think. The Crucible! Golec goes on to give his reader a Cliff's note version of Emerson's Self Reliance before plowing through concepts of Martha's perfect modest extravagance (and I remember Puritan silver buckles), and finally landing on a point, a good point: "The visualization of perfectionism configures the private sphere while simultaneously evoking the public sphere.... Perfectionism as a principle of conduct is not so much embodied in a person as it is distributed through bodies, surfaces, lights, and gazes....."
In a visual culture perspective, I can totally see how these perfect objects take the reader outside of space and time, and deliver an indulgent simplicity, a fairytale, a form of entertainment wherein the reader may never actually bake the perfect truffle or collect those woo woo plates, but can and will live within the walls of a life that does- for a few pages, anyhow.
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