When I was first writing about Japan, it was at the peak of the Bubble. Bubble popped, but they kept on going. Japanese street style feeds American iconics back into America in somewhat the way English rock once fed American blues back into America.

What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger.

I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from?

Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.

My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me

The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.

If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.