slept until noon, then a strong coffee. pss called: she had installed skype on her laptop, so we chatted for a while. started to work and sort of finished the conclusion. well, sort of, only really. then, at night, i fixed myself something to eat (frozen pressed chicken nuggets and just-add-hot-water-mashed-potatoes-powder) then started to watch a film with audrey hepburn, but it was so late 60s-ish that i stopped and laid on the sofa instead with the coupland novel i’m preparing for tuesday’s session. now i’m sitting here, the book opened but face down on my legs, my eyes are aching, my elbow is hurting from some wrong movement i did in the gym yesterday and i’m listening to james yorkston. his voice makes me think about jana. ja. na. and the way her lips felt. and the way her hair smelt.
fell asleep while the music was playing. now, half an hour in time warp speed later, my throat feels sore, like i’m getting ill. have been pouring down one glass of diet decaf coke after another tonight because i’m so craving some candy, but i don’t have any.
yesterday night, before we ended up in this hip café where they had chemically exchanged all oxygen in the air with coolness (i swear, every girl was wearing either too much make-up or some sort of 80s commercialtvstationtypecastplasticbimbopopband chique that looked really pretentious while the boys were even worse: either wearing baseball caps or black, woolen, knitted caps (it was about 45°C in the café!), under which their dyed hair hung low into their eyes (and only a few of them had managed to get the genuine messy look and not the one that spells out “it took me 45 minutes and 20 euro worth of toxic-waste colored hairproducts to cement my hair this out-of-bed-fashion”) and i swear, when they were walking, they did not move their legs. they only moved their hips: hands in their pockets down to the knees, bow-legged, they got from one end of the room to the other by tilting their *entire* body along its vertical axis. a kind of john wayne arthrosis walk). anyway, i lost the beginning of my sentence.
so, before we ended up in this limbo sponsored by spex, calvin klein and the latest remixrecordlabel in town we had been to this exhibition. right now there’s a furniture fair in cologne, and accompanying this some local designers have organized little off broadway exhibitions and vernissages. and this was one of them. the location was in a semi-industrial area behind my gym, and the building was a lighthouse. now, don’t ask me why there’s a lighthouse 500 km from the next coastline, but there is. i suppose city-planers’ and architects’ motives are as mysterious and unfathomable as anybody else’s…
anyway, we walked in, and i felt bemused immediately. i wish i had a camera on my head because it was so, well, tapeworthy! the exhibition itself wasn’t an exhibition. a carpenter who restores fin-de-siècle furniture and does some designing of his own (50s style) had opened his storage, hung a couple of lamps between the chairs and tables and that was that. it was rather ridiculous. the whole thing called itself “light-sculpture” the euphemising way you call the janitor the “building management” nowadays. there were two djs spinning club-lounge-trip-hop-tribal-puke-and-bass records, the left headphone casually pinched between ear and shrugged shoulder [that entire dj-culture is *totally* lost on me!], and – thankfully – someone was selling beer. so pss, katharina and i got ourselves some alcohol and we walked around.
now, maybe i missed where they sold those, but everyone around us had just emptied a big bag of air-of-importance around them when we came. they stood in the storage hall with their champagne glasses and looked so serious and interested that i couldn’t stop grinning. it was laughable. most people there were between 25 and 50, i bet 85% had studied architecture and the rest knew someone who studied architecture. if they wore glasses they had dark-rimmed frames, if they wore jackets they were made of brown cord. people took clearly more interest in seeing other people – and, most importantly, being seen themselves – than in any of the furniture.
after we had walked around for some ten minutes and i felt like the only freak in a moderately talented design-student’s dream. eventually, pss and i sat down and leaned back. i was sitting in a very comfortable armchair (680 euro. delivery not included), pss sat next to me in a 50s ironframed swingchair (250 euro a piece, 1000 for all four) and suddenly i asked her:
“now, miss vandelay, first of all thanks *so* much that you have found the time to stop by for our show tonight. i know you have a busy schedule, so i would like to start right away with asking you what inspired you to do these remarkable creations…?” and my hand was waving all through the room in a semicircle.
pss inhaled audibly, cleared her throat, set erect and answered:
“well, phil, first of all thanks for having me. it has always been one of my dreams to be on the show. well, my inspiration. let me put it this way: simplicity!”
“very interesting! could you elaborate on that some more?”
“simplicity. simply simplicity. this is, heed my words!, the new trend. as we all know, form swallows function, and simplicity combines both: form and function. i call this new style si-si…”
“miss vandelay, your critics discharge your interior design-line as a bland copy of swedish semidisposable furniture catalogs. would you like to comment on that?”
“well, phil, great talent attracts great jealousy. of course my recent exhibitions in milan, at the guggenheim and during the documenta were not uncontested. but then my work is definitely aimed at being controversial. what good is being if you cannot be controversial, that’s what *i* say! hand me my water, darling, will you?”
“now, i must say that i could never understand how your critics could have underestimated the importance of the revolution that your employment of neo-baroque ornaments in combination with sober bauhaus forms and predominately industrial materials has brought about in the world of room-fashioning! i’ve always been a big fan of your work! please sign my chair!”
and this went on for about twenty minutes. it was great, and it irritated the people around even more than our non-forced-boheme clothes which were a dead giveaway that we were clearly not part of the peer group since we were neither design-students nor self-important striving artists whose favorite adjectives are ‘authentic’ and ‘*so* media-critical’.
