Today, you are a member of… Push Push Carnival
In the 1950s, a button was an archetypal fixture, red and ominous, mythically installed on the desk of the leader of the free world, there to save us from the tyranny of the axis with a single atomic depression. In the 1960s, buttons proliferated into tiny metal pinnings that bespoke from the chest in pithy rounds a person’s ideological bent. In the 1970s, buttons turned to plastic squares, upon which one’s fingers did the walking in order to connect through copper across distances. In the 1980s, buttons grew to grotesque proportions, bespangling clothing far too padded in the shoulder area. In the 1990s, two buttons, one with the word “play” and the other with the word “record” if engaged together produced the art of the mixed tape. In the Oughts, buttons gained a ridgid array, splayed uniformly on the computer keyboard, making everyone’s posture suck. And now members, in the teens, buttons have smoothed out, lost all sense of three dimensionality and only live as a representation of themselves on a touch screen. Regardless of version, all manifestations of buttons require one thing: prestidigitation. Ergo, in the single digit weeks left in 2014, there are still marvels to wrest from hats if you know which buttons to push.
