When I started this blog, my reasons were:
a) people told me to do it ('people' also told me I should get married, and we know how that went);
b) I figured it would be a good exercise in discipline (it wasn't);
c) it seemed like a better, more socially-sensitive outlet for my tirades than foisting long ranting emails about pepper grinders in the shape of roosters on people who just wanted to know if I wanted to get some dinner Thursday. (Success!)
And with some generous periods of silence, I've managed fairly frequently to write at least something. Which I think is good and proves I should be doing this or, minimally, that however crap whatever it is I'm going on about at any given time is, I have sufficient motivation to go on about it, and in this forum, rather than face-to-face, in a journal, through email, or by stealing a megaphone and standing outside yelling about poor taste in front of terrifyingly misconceived subdevelopments. So far so good; I think I am content with the 'Just because I'm not Goethe doesn't mean I shouldn't have a blog' stance.
But once it kind of evolved into having a voice/persona behind it - even if the focus or the voice itself changes at times, because we can say each little slant is part of the larger, overall slant - I kept thinking about all the goofy tags. Few serve any practical taggy purpose: nobody does searches for 'appalling taste' or 'Tuscan toilets,' and if they do, I don't think they want to end up here. Nor would a serious-minded searcher for Amelia Earhart trivia get very much rewarding stuff by clicking on her name in my tags. For what it's worth, I know which picture I have of her, but I have no idea why she's in here, what kind of a point I would have making to have had need of natty early-20th-c. aviatrices to support it, but I see her name every time I look at the blog, since she is up near the top of the tag list under A.
There are a couplefew problems. One is the disincentive of how much effort it would take to winnow down all the tags and to make new, sensible ones that might actually provide a clue as to what a posting is about. And it would be a very dull list. Another is that I like how the tags applied to a post better illustrate its content, just in a different way, than labeling it very precisely with what topics it literally contains. Then, too, I still find some of the goofy tags amusing to myself, and if this is really a blog, then that's my target audience: so as long as I keep chuckling nothing else should matter. I like having three entries obliquely or explicitly referencing 'bad monkeys' and another four mentioning Gauloises cigarettes, even if the postings are more substantively about interior design or telephones or pastry cream disasters.
And I imagine I could at least get rid of the ones that only link to one or two posts. 'Amelia Earhart' would be one of that group. But in many cases there is no reason to think I will only ever have one post that mentions that thing or person, so why take it out if I'm going to put it back in, I say. Still, I do think I could afford the time at some point to lose tags for types of wine and just have all fermented grape products under one 'wine' label, for example, without substantively compromising integrity. I could move all three 'fatuous boobs' and both 'idiocy' references to, perhaps, 'fatuity,' 'overarching incompetence,' or 'inanity,' depending on the content. But the thing is, when the posting is really a rant, or some ghastly stream-of-consciousness catalogue of aesthetic sins, and I go all over the place connecting things that in no way relate to each other except thematically and only to myself in some damp corner of my brain, I do go through the list of tags and often find one to append that I wouldn't have thought of had I not had such a long list. And today, I had to add 'China,' which I almost have many times but didn't because I had enough 'Chinese __________' tags. I didn't, on the other hand, make a new tag for 'Nestorians,' but I am sure I will have to at some point, and then it's going to end up between 'neo-Darwinism' (1 link) and 'neuroses' (likewise just the one) unless those have been excised by that point as having been insufficiently utile for all the nonexistent topic-shoppers reading my tag list hoping to find something truly worth reading.
You have to think like a cornichon.
Showing posts with label Tuscan toilets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tuscan toilets. Show all posts
Monday, September 8, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
Matteo Ricci, Mandarins, and Moksha...
So, R. gave me a copy of What Makes You Not a Buddhist, which is a brilliant little book that brilliantly feeds into my particular prejudices, except that it lays out a solid argument for what I get too cranky to articulate beyond the level of whininess. Moreover, it is written by a Tibetan Buddhist, and 'Tibetan Buddhism' is at the moment the preferred flavor for those who are too young to have been 'Zen' before its huarache-wearing disciples were supplanted by 'Tibetan' flocks in Tevas and Birkenstocks. What binds the two groups beyond their shared fondness for open-toed shoes is a distaste for 'organized religion,' 'dogma,' and a purportedly mediated experience of the Divine, as well as the sense that what they perceive as lacking in Christianity can be found in a bastardized version of a tradition that, being exotic, they have no bad memories of.
I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:
'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'
And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.
Chesterton again:
'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).
But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.
As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.
I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.
I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:
'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'
And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.
Chesterton again:
'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).
But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.
As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.
I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.
Friday, July 25, 2008
'It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.'
Said Benjamin Franklin (and you already know I love him recklessly), who preceded it with 'Poverty often deprives a man of spirit and virtue' and a semicolon, and tonight on the local NPR station KUOW a host had a brief interview with a Mercer Island pastor who wants to host a new Tent City at her church (and thought she was going to). The host asked Rev. Leslie Ann Knight, the United Methodist minister on whose church's property the encampment would be sited what she thought of the residents' protestations that such use of the church's property would force Mercer Islanders to look at portable toilets and showers. The reverend answered that those objections were not factually accurate, as the camp would be situated on the church grounds such that those facilities would not be visible from the street. She then went on with a bit of the humanitarian stuff one would anticipate and hope for, but I just want to climb under the covers into my pulpit for a minute here and attempt to digest the inhabitants' basis for resistance.
The interview was on today because Mercer Island residents have just filed a new lawsuit attempting to prohibit the city from allowing the camp within its borders. From court documents quoted in the Olympian newspaper: "Neighbors will be forced to look at Honey Buckets, temporary shower facilities, tents and an array of equipment necessary to serve the camp," the lawsuit says. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer likewise reports that residents complain 'the homeless camp would endanger the "comfort, repose, health and safety" of nearby residents, in part because the camp would be a "visual blight" on neighboring homes. It also asserts that the city of Mercer Island issued a permit for Tent City in violation of city law.'
The 'health and safety' issues have indeed been addressed by the Mercer Island authorities - including law enforcement, which will have a regular presence at the encampment including 'routine walk-throughs' - and by all previous host jurisdictions of Tent City's various incarnations, and it is patent that neither is adversely affected by the temporary residence's presence. That, however, is a factual matter, and thus easily resolved. At least in theory.
'Comfort and repose,' however, are less amenable to objective measurement, and I believe the good citizens when they assert that they will be made uncomfortable by the presence of poor people visibly in their midst. I take them at their word that being 'forced to look at' so thin a veneer of civility, in the form of a portable toilet or camp shower, only feebly veiling the most basic and physical of human needs would perturb their repose.
But what else are we 'forced to look at' everyday? Thousands of things! Why should poverty be the one we refuse to admit into our line of sight?
Well, it's not. We see, if perhaps not look at, the poor every day. But unless you ride the bus or work at DSHS or the public defender's office or county hospital, the poorest of the poor are often conveniently arrayed in groups of one, thus obviating any need to register them consciously as part of a pattern. It's a lot like shoes: until you hang them over every door in the house by the 10s or 20s or 30s to prove a point to yourself, you don't really have to know you have 12 pairs of semi-identical square-toe black 2 1/2-inch-heel sling-backs.
And if you don't feel like proving a point to yourself, it might be hard to find a justification.
Unless the justification antecedes and supercedes the apparent matter-at-hand, such as mercy, or love, or compassion, might. And this is where I get cranky. I am not lying or exaggerating when I say the law-and-order issues are a straw man. All that stuff has been (tediously, thoroughly, exhaust/ingly/ively) covered in every 'concerned citizens' meeting ad nauseum since Tent City began. This is all about aesthetics, and not-in-my-backyard, and solecism, and apathy, and a terrible, horrible, blindingly unskillful misunderstanding of what Poverty in its deeper sense really looks like.
Poverty is saying 'I can't bear to be reminded of poor people having to shower, or poop.' Poverty is thinking 'My happiness is so brittle I can't risk it by looking on suffering.' Poverty is knowing that your late-summer luau-themed barbecue's ambiance would be utterly ruined by the sight of a homeless man shuffling back to camp eating a Slim Jim with two litres of Fanta (always cheaper than Coke!) tucked under his scabby arm.
Poverty is knowing the value of your house, but not the value of a man.
Again, I reiterate, every day we are forced to look at all manner of things. They may not register fully, as with one homeless person, or one stupid billboard, but in either case, the nature of vision being what it is, the majority of what gets processed by the optic nerves and the brain is information we haphazardly encounter, not stuff we asked for. I was 'forced' to look at three Hummers today. I think they are hideous, I think they offend terribly my refined aesthetic sensibilities: what redress do I have? The Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles more than once involitionally entered my field of vision: I am certain I shall never recover fully. I have likewise, despite my best efforts to the contrary, ocularly encountered orange plastic shoes, orange plastic flowers, 'Country Geese' as a decor element, 'Tuscan' toilets and 'Tuscan' subdevelopments, Unitarian lady ministers in pseudobatik two-piece ensembles with 'chunky' earrings, reality TV, 1960s architecture, 'flip-flops,' and people wearing their inside clothes outside.
Not to mention the green dumpster against which I was raped, the Albanian laborers in Athens serving as human donkeys with three-foot-high stacks of bricks laden on their bent backs, irreparably abused pets queued up for euthanasia at the animal shelter, the shooting we drove past on our way to register me for sixth grade at my new school, the three men beating up one guy on the freeway exit as I attempted to make it to a Nick Cave show in LA, the clear pure blue East Coast morning of September 11th, the black and hideous aftermath, the lover's hands reaching out to circle my neck, not caress my cheek: none of these I asked to see. None of these shall I ever fully surmount. --And these guys are worrying about Porta-Potties???
The interview was on today because Mercer Island residents have just filed a new lawsuit attempting to prohibit the city from allowing the camp within its borders. From court documents quoted in the Olympian newspaper: "Neighbors will be forced to look at Honey Buckets, temporary shower facilities, tents and an array of equipment necessary to serve the camp," the lawsuit says. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer likewise reports that residents complain 'the homeless camp would endanger the "comfort, repose, health and safety" of nearby residents, in part because the camp would be a "visual blight" on neighboring homes. It also asserts that the city of Mercer Island issued a permit for Tent City in violation of city law.'
The 'health and safety' issues have indeed been addressed by the Mercer Island authorities - including law enforcement, which will have a regular presence at the encampment including 'routine walk-throughs' - and by all previous host jurisdictions of Tent City's various incarnations, and it is patent that neither is adversely affected by the temporary residence's presence. That, however, is a factual matter, and thus easily resolved. At least in theory.
'Comfort and repose,' however, are less amenable to objective measurement, and I believe the good citizens when they assert that they will be made uncomfortable by the presence of poor people visibly in their midst. I take them at their word that being 'forced to look at' so thin a veneer of civility, in the form of a portable toilet or camp shower, only feebly veiling the most basic and physical of human needs would perturb their repose.
But what else are we 'forced to look at' everyday? Thousands of things! Why should poverty be the one we refuse to admit into our line of sight?
Well, it's not. We see, if perhaps not look at, the poor every day. But unless you ride the bus or work at DSHS or the public defender's office or county hospital, the poorest of the poor are often conveniently arrayed in groups of one, thus obviating any need to register them consciously as part of a pattern. It's a lot like shoes: until you hang them over every door in the house by the 10s or 20s or 30s to prove a point to yourself, you don't really have to know you have 12 pairs of semi-identical square-toe black 2 1/2-inch-heel sling-backs.
And if you don't feel like proving a point to yourself, it might be hard to find a justification.
Unless the justification antecedes and supercedes the apparent matter-at-hand, such as mercy, or love, or compassion, might. And this is where I get cranky. I am not lying or exaggerating when I say the law-and-order issues are a straw man. All that stuff has been (tediously, thoroughly, exhaust/ingly/ively) covered in every 'concerned citizens' meeting ad nauseum since Tent City began. This is all about aesthetics, and not-in-my-backyard, and solecism, and apathy, and a terrible, horrible, blindingly unskillful misunderstanding of what Poverty in its deeper sense really looks like.
Poverty is saying 'I can't bear to be reminded of poor people having to shower, or poop.' Poverty is thinking 'My happiness is so brittle I can't risk it by looking on suffering.' Poverty is knowing that your late-summer luau-themed barbecue's ambiance would be utterly ruined by the sight of a homeless man shuffling back to camp eating a Slim Jim with two litres of Fanta (always cheaper than Coke!) tucked under his scabby arm.
Poverty is knowing the value of your house, but not the value of a man.
Again, I reiterate, every day we are forced to look at all manner of things. They may not register fully, as with one homeless person, or one stupid billboard, but in either case, the nature of vision being what it is, the majority of what gets processed by the optic nerves and the brain is information we haphazardly encounter, not stuff we asked for. I was 'forced' to look at three Hummers today. I think they are hideous, I think they offend terribly my refined aesthetic sensibilities: what redress do I have? The Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles more than once involitionally entered my field of vision: I am certain I shall never recover fully. I have likewise, despite my best efforts to the contrary, ocularly encountered orange plastic shoes, orange plastic flowers, 'Country Geese' as a decor element, 'Tuscan' toilets and 'Tuscan' subdevelopments, Unitarian lady ministers in pseudobatik two-piece ensembles with 'chunky' earrings, reality TV, 1960s architecture, 'flip-flops,' and people wearing their inside clothes outside.
Not to mention the green dumpster against which I was raped, the Albanian laborers in Athens serving as human donkeys with three-foot-high stacks of bricks laden on their bent backs, irreparably abused pets queued up for euthanasia at the animal shelter, the shooting we drove past on our way to register me for sixth grade at my new school, the three men beating up one guy on the freeway exit as I attempted to make it to a Nick Cave show in LA, the clear pure blue East Coast morning of September 11th, the black and hideous aftermath, the lover's hands reaching out to circle my neck, not caress my cheek: none of these I asked to see. None of these shall I ever fully surmount. --And these guys are worrying about Porta-Potties???
Sunday, March 30, 2008
'Joy Is Not in Things; It Is in Us,'
said Richard Wagner and perhaps, in his staunch Teutonicity, dying in Venice sufficed and he never regretted not having built a 'sun-drenched Tuscan villa' in Bayreuth. It doesn't matter; it isn't 'Tuscany' that is the problem. The houses, and their bathrooms, and their greatrooms, their wall treatments, thematic toilet-brush holders, disguised three-car garages, incongruous media centers and 'authentic details' could all equally well be replaced by 'Hobbit' or 'Siheyuan' or 'Iroquois Longhouse' style with the principle remaining the same. Part of the problem, as I mentioned before, is the lack of hope these buildings signify, but there are other disturbing aspects.
Yes, in a perverse sense, these homes are all about hope, or American optimism, at least in its basest form. They are a testament to material success, to the fulfillment, in all caps, of The American Dream of home ownership. But what appears to me bleak in this reading is the notion that anyone's American Dream reaches its dramatic finale in a tract home rather than an alpaca farm in the mountains or a high-tech ultra-green penthouse condo or a craftsman bungalow with a beautifully, lovingly, tended garden. Your visitors will know you have money -- but will they suspect you have a soul?
A more troubling aspect for me is that the 'Tuscan' home and all its necessary 'Tuscan' appurtenances represent the recent widespread conflation of 'lifestyle' with Life, which then gave rise to the current tendency to disprivilege or ignore the latter in favor of the more comprehensible and convenient former. The problem with Life, I suspect, is that invariably it must be lived. We fall into it sodden with drool and incontinence, often leave it in much the same manner, and in between --
Well, in between we stammer at countless beginnings, stare at the creeping minute hand through lots of tedious middles and cry to ourselves over unfortunate endings; we get punched, sacked, ridiculed, betrayed, lied to, and cut off mid-sentence just before brilliant ripostes. We give our hearts away, we sing babies to sleep, we take up astronomy, then Jung, then Uilleann pipes; we take photographs lest we forget it really was just that beautiful, once. We have one too many, we don't get the promotion, we sit on the edge of the dance floor waiting; we practice kissing with a pillow and proposing with a mirror, we sometimes get the girl and we sometimes get the grippe.
None of that can be purchased. Much of it wouldn't be a very good deal, anyway, at any price, and I suppose that is the point: better to try to ignore it, and then perhaps the breathtaking crescendo of life, what all those clogged sinuses and broken heels and soothing kisses have been leading up to - death, in other words - might get distracted and not disturb us, after all. Life can be boring, painful, taxing, and too long or too short. And it always ends poorly.
Lifestyle, by contrast, is a narrative the user can control. It begins and ends as you wish, and you can leave out any of the parts that don't suit your desired image. Lifestyle, moreover, is nothing but a commodity, and an imaginary one at that. It consists in the things a consumer buys to convey to others and to himself the persona he wishes to inhabit. It is cosmetic surgery for your life, and just as there is a code of conduct regarding what should and should not be said to the obviously pulled, pleated, and plumped, so, too, will your posture as suburbia-dwelling daimyo, pasha, doge, or Indian Chief remain unquestioned by your neighbors. After all, you didn't neglect to include thematic outlet covers.
I suppose part of the problem for me is that it's just all so rickety. They are in the main not nice houses, just expensive ones. The majority tend to have a distinctly Disney feel, as though around the next cul-de-sac our little boat will sail past Olde Siam. There is an attempt at wholesale replication on the one hand, and a jarring failure in execution on the other. Neither is appealing; both together are horrifying. All art incorporates older elements, some art cross-cultural references; nothing man-made can ever be wholly new. That fact notwithstanding, history, geography, and culture along with form give a work its content, its meaning. The meaning of these tract homes is simply 'Tuscan sells.'
Why is that more troubling than an older neighborhood filled with bungalows or ranch-style homes? Are not all houses, since the dawn of modern real estate, designed to sell, to appeal to the buying public? And what's more, was not the Atomic Age as executed in the American home a perfectly articulated lifestyle, as detailed and complete as the 'Tuscan' variety, down to its Saturn-shaped lamps, spiky, Sputnik table legs, and galactic-design curtain fabrics?
Okay, yes, in theory, but in the case of the 1950s, few people kitted out their entire house in space-age furnishings, and there were plenty of other 1950s looks that mixed with the outright futuristic ones harmoniously. One could have an up-to-the-minute television lamp atop a table from 1947 with no grave sensation of aesthetic malaise nor expectation of scorn from the neighbors. Additionally, the house would not come with an actual satellite in the front yard, which is as good an equivalent as I can imagine for faux-cracked walls, faux-aged fake beams, faux-ruined paint jobs, and murals in the toilet of someplace you are not but which the entire house contrives to make you believe you are. And, yes, too, houses and minimalls and BP stations reflect the aesthetics of the time, but there is the additional problem that the aesthetics of earlier times demanded better craftsmanship and genuine materials. Moreover, people bought furniture differently decades ago, as companies realized they could sell more over time if they offered 'sets' that could be acquired slowly as finances allowed: even the counterparts of today's neo-Tuscans would not have bought a whole new household worth of thematically-congruent furniture, appliances, and accessories when they moved up in the world and bought a better house.
Lastly, 1950s style didn't seem thematic in the 1950s, because it wasn't thematic. It was simply up-to-date. Muddled, forced and fauxed tract-home half-iterations of a Tuscan fantasy lifestyle seem tragic to me because they hold out a series of promises they can never keep. The garish, kooky exuberance of Atomic Age decor cohabited in its enthusiasts' hearts with the very real fear of nuclear annihilation. Gratitude for the end of the War was balanced with the grim knowledge of how the War ended and what that could portend for future conflicts. Satellite table lamp and cars shaped like rockets were symbols not only of the power of technology, but of the hope that with proper stewardship it would lead humanity to more good than ill. It hurts my soul to contemplate the hopes these McMansions encapsulate.
Yes, in a perverse sense, these homes are all about hope, or American optimism, at least in its basest form. They are a testament to material success, to the fulfillment, in all caps, of The American Dream of home ownership. But what appears to me bleak in this reading is the notion that anyone's American Dream reaches its dramatic finale in a tract home rather than an alpaca farm in the mountains or a high-tech ultra-green penthouse condo or a craftsman bungalow with a beautifully, lovingly, tended garden. Your visitors will know you have money -- but will they suspect you have a soul?
A more troubling aspect for me is that the 'Tuscan' home and all its necessary 'Tuscan' appurtenances represent the recent widespread conflation of 'lifestyle' with Life, which then gave rise to the current tendency to disprivilege or ignore the latter in favor of the more comprehensible and convenient former. The problem with Life, I suspect, is that invariably it must be lived. We fall into it sodden with drool and incontinence, often leave it in much the same manner, and in between --
Well, in between we stammer at countless beginnings, stare at the creeping minute hand through lots of tedious middles and cry to ourselves over unfortunate endings; we get punched, sacked, ridiculed, betrayed, lied to, and cut off mid-sentence just before brilliant ripostes. We give our hearts away, we sing babies to sleep, we take up astronomy, then Jung, then Uilleann pipes; we take photographs lest we forget it really was just that beautiful, once. We have one too many, we don't get the promotion, we sit on the edge of the dance floor waiting; we practice kissing with a pillow and proposing with a mirror, we sometimes get the girl and we sometimes get the grippe.
None of that can be purchased. Much of it wouldn't be a very good deal, anyway, at any price, and I suppose that is the point: better to try to ignore it, and then perhaps the breathtaking crescendo of life, what all those clogged sinuses and broken heels and soothing kisses have been leading up to - death, in other words - might get distracted and not disturb us, after all. Life can be boring, painful, taxing, and too long or too short. And it always ends poorly.
Lifestyle, by contrast, is a narrative the user can control. It begins and ends as you wish, and you can leave out any of the parts that don't suit your desired image. Lifestyle, moreover, is nothing but a commodity, and an imaginary one at that. It consists in the things a consumer buys to convey to others and to himself the persona he wishes to inhabit. It is cosmetic surgery for your life, and just as there is a code of conduct regarding what should and should not be said to the obviously pulled, pleated, and plumped, so, too, will your posture as suburbia-dwelling daimyo, pasha, doge, or Indian Chief remain unquestioned by your neighbors. After all, you didn't neglect to include thematic outlet covers.
I suppose part of the problem for me is that it's just all so rickety. They are in the main not nice houses, just expensive ones. The majority tend to have a distinctly Disney feel, as though around the next cul-de-sac our little boat will sail past Olde Siam. There is an attempt at wholesale replication on the one hand, and a jarring failure in execution on the other. Neither is appealing; both together are horrifying. All art incorporates older elements, some art cross-cultural references; nothing man-made can ever be wholly new. That fact notwithstanding, history, geography, and culture along with form give a work its content, its meaning. The meaning of these tract homes is simply 'Tuscan sells.'
Why is that more troubling than an older neighborhood filled with bungalows or ranch-style homes? Are not all houses, since the dawn of modern real estate, designed to sell, to appeal to the buying public? And what's more, was not the Atomic Age as executed in the American home a perfectly articulated lifestyle, as detailed and complete as the 'Tuscan' variety, down to its Saturn-shaped lamps, spiky, Sputnik table legs, and galactic-design curtain fabrics?
Okay, yes, in theory, but in the case of the 1950s, few people kitted out their entire house in space-age furnishings, and there were plenty of other 1950s looks that mixed with the outright futuristic ones harmoniously. One could have an up-to-the-minute television lamp atop a table from 1947 with no grave sensation of aesthetic malaise nor expectation of scorn from the neighbors. Additionally, the house would not come with an actual satellite in the front yard, which is as good an equivalent as I can imagine for faux-cracked walls, faux-aged fake beams, faux-ruined paint jobs, and murals in the toilet of someplace you are not but which the entire house contrives to make you believe you are. And, yes, too, houses and minimalls and BP stations reflect the aesthetics of the time, but there is the additional problem that the aesthetics of earlier times demanded better craftsmanship and genuine materials. Moreover, people bought furniture differently decades ago, as companies realized they could sell more over time if they offered 'sets' that could be acquired slowly as finances allowed: even the counterparts of today's neo-Tuscans would not have bought a whole new household worth of thematically-congruent furniture, appliances, and accessories when they moved up in the world and bought a better house.
Lastly, 1950s style didn't seem thematic in the 1950s, because it wasn't thematic. It was simply up-to-date. Muddled, forced and fauxed tract-home half-iterations of a Tuscan fantasy lifestyle seem tragic to me because they hold out a series of promises they can never keep. The garish, kooky exuberance of Atomic Age decor cohabited in its enthusiasts' hearts with the very real fear of nuclear annihilation. Gratitude for the end of the War was balanced with the grim knowledge of how the War ended and what that could portend for future conflicts. Satellite table lamp and cars shaped like rockets were symbols not only of the power of technology, but of the hope that with proper stewardship it would lead humanity to more good than ill. It hurts my soul to contemplate the hopes these McMansions encapsulate.
Coming Soon: 'The Birth of Venus' on Your Toilet Seat!
Oh, dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, dear, dear. It is not as though it is inconceivable. No, indeed; not in the slightest. Absolutely to be expected, in fact. And, had I troubled myself to think about it, I should definitely both have conceived and expected it. No questions asked, no surprises whatever. One would not be far off to call it ineluctable.
But the fact is that, as with so many other distasteful and frightening things, I rightly - righteously! - keep my delicate soul from straying into such foul places when possible. It is a great stretch to say I am blissfully ignorant of the ills plaguing this world; it is rather the case that I must cultivate what ignorance I can in order merely to sustain the crudest emotional equilibrium, in order not to plunge a 'French Provincial' rooster-shaped carving knife into my jaded heart, or attempt futilely, yet again, to impale myself on a 'shabby chic/Paris apartment' Eiffel-Tower-motif pepper grinder.
But here (and I swear I was looking for something else; you must believe me; I am not a masochist, nor do I enjoy inflicting this sort of thing on you!) on Design Observer I couldn't help but read every last letter, and linger over every last plaintive semi-colon, of a heart-rending account of those Tuscan varlets' invasion of solid, stolid - and hitherto predictably 'Spanish'/neo-rancho in its design choices for suburban subdevelopments - Orange County, California. Tuscany already has the Renaissance, Michelangelo, Dante, da Vinci, Botticelli, Brunello, Vino Nobile, and Chianti. It doesn't need to annex the whole bloody United States (not to mention parts of China, too!).
Look, I understand if postmodernism scared off a few people, looked a bit jarring, felt a bit dislocating. And I for one don't ever need to see another purportedly postmodern BP station, I assure you. However, at least postmodernism was inquisitive. At least it involved thought. At least it was, well, not inherently dishonest, not an impoverished, anemic, false, wheezy new version of a distinctive, geographically specific older thing.
You can object that 'thought' and 'inquisitiveness' are not exactly what most people are looking for in a bedroom or latrine, but I fail to see the superlative soothing powers of pseudo-Tuscan kitsch. Granted, I am not the sort who wishes to stay in the 'Jungle Room' or 'Circus Room,' either, or indeed find myself in the sort of hotel that has such things, but as Ms. Wild correctly points out,
'Perhaps it is not so much styles per se, and "Tuscan" in particular, that I am whining about, but the transformation of styles generated from the heart and the brain that actually contained meaning, to lifestyles generated by highly paid marketers and branders that are deliberately emptied out of meaning.'
It could even be argued that the Jungle Rooms of this world, coming from the (admittedly kitsch-riddled) heart as they do, do contain meaning, because they are an expression of someone's honest desire. The only desire the faux Tuscan McMansions of the world express is the vulgarian's desire to seem cultured, rich, and stylish: Nabokov's poshlust, in other words:
'Russians have, or had, a special name for smug philistinism—poshlust. Poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of civilization. A peasant has to become a townsman in order to become vulgar. A painted necktie has to hide the honest Adam's apple in order to produce poshlism.'
I would also concur with Ms. Wild that the variety of anachronisms and other discontinuities that inhere in such endeavors as tracts of 'Tuscan' homes irritate rather than soothe in my case:
'The appearance of this faux Italianate style (tile roofs, stucco walls, shuttered windows and crenellated corners) is not all that different from the "Spanish" but it seems a world away from the coherency of the rancho house. This is not helped by the fact that the new construction in this style is generally too big and proportioned poorly, and made of materials that are veneers, blatantly more contemporary than the image that they are constructing. Real Tuscan villas possess a sort of laconic elegance from their relatively unornamented rustic style: the rough hewn here is more of the Home Depot "I forgot" variety. And the houses sport "great rooms" and "master bedroom suites" and beveled or stained glass windows and brass fixtures that no Tuscan house ever witnessed.'
I need to be more careful in my browsing, more judicious in my reading. Heaven knows the sort of permanent damage that could befall my psyche should I continue to encounter such troubling stories.
But the fact is that, as with so many other distasteful and frightening things, I rightly - righteously! - keep my delicate soul from straying into such foul places when possible. It is a great stretch to say I am blissfully ignorant of the ills plaguing this world; it is rather the case that I must cultivate what ignorance I can in order merely to sustain the crudest emotional equilibrium, in order not to plunge a 'French Provincial' rooster-shaped carving knife into my jaded heart, or attempt futilely, yet again, to impale myself on a 'shabby chic/Paris apartment' Eiffel-Tower-motif pepper grinder.
But here (and I swear I was looking for something else; you must believe me; I am not a masochist, nor do I enjoy inflicting this sort of thing on you!) on Design Observer I couldn't help but read every last letter, and linger over every last plaintive semi-colon, of a heart-rending account of those Tuscan varlets' invasion of solid, stolid - and hitherto predictably 'Spanish'/neo-rancho in its design choices for suburban subdevelopments - Orange County, California. Tuscany already has the Renaissance, Michelangelo, Dante, da Vinci, Botticelli, Brunello, Vino Nobile, and Chianti. It doesn't need to annex the whole bloody United States (not to mention parts of China, too!).
Look, I understand if postmodernism scared off a few people, looked a bit jarring, felt a bit dislocating. And I for one don't ever need to see another purportedly postmodern BP station, I assure you. However, at least postmodernism was inquisitive. At least it involved thought. At least it was, well, not inherently dishonest, not an impoverished, anemic, false, wheezy new version of a distinctive, geographically specific older thing.
You can object that 'thought' and 'inquisitiveness' are not exactly what most people are looking for in a bedroom or latrine, but I fail to see the superlative soothing powers of pseudo-Tuscan kitsch. Granted, I am not the sort who wishes to stay in the 'Jungle Room' or 'Circus Room,' either, or indeed find myself in the sort of hotel that has such things, but as Ms. Wild correctly points out,
'Perhaps it is not so much styles per se, and "Tuscan" in particular, that I am whining about, but the transformation of styles generated from the heart and the brain that actually contained meaning, to lifestyles generated by highly paid marketers and branders that are deliberately emptied out of meaning.'
It could even be argued that the Jungle Rooms of this world, coming from the (admittedly kitsch-riddled) heart as they do, do contain meaning, because they are an expression of someone's honest desire. The only desire the faux Tuscan McMansions of the world express is the vulgarian's desire to seem cultured, rich, and stylish: Nabokov's poshlust, in other words:
'Russians have, or had, a special name for smug philistinism—poshlust. Poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of civilization. A peasant has to become a townsman in order to become vulgar. A painted necktie has to hide the honest Adam's apple in order to produce poshlism.'
I would also concur with Ms. Wild that the variety of anachronisms and other discontinuities that inhere in such endeavors as tracts of 'Tuscan' homes irritate rather than soothe in my case:
'The appearance of this faux Italianate style (tile roofs, stucco walls, shuttered windows and crenellated corners) is not all that different from the "Spanish" but it seems a world away from the coherency of the rancho house. This is not helped by the fact that the new construction in this style is generally too big and proportioned poorly, and made of materials that are veneers, blatantly more contemporary than the image that they are constructing. Real Tuscan villas possess a sort of laconic elegance from their relatively unornamented rustic style: the rough hewn here is more of the Home Depot "I forgot" variety. And the houses sport "great rooms" and "master bedroom suites" and beveled or stained glass windows and brass fixtures that no Tuscan house ever witnessed.'
I need to be more careful in my browsing, more judicious in my reading. Heaven knows the sort of permanent damage that could befall my psyche should I continue to encounter such troubling stories.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Your Tuscan Holiday Awaits. In Fredericton.
And while we are on the subject of appalling taste, I would like to go to Tuscany for a moment, if you don't mind. Not the real Tuscany, of course, but the false, 'fauxed' Tuscany of interior designers and housebuilders and underpaid furniture painters in China.
I am not certain when this started, as I am a delicate soul and try not to notice things that will wound me. I still remain unaware, for example, that people use bed sheets sewn from tee-shirt material. But it has been going on at least a few years: the first 'Tuscan Square' restaurant cum 'Tuscan Lifestyle' shopping plaza went up in 1997 in Rockefeller Center. And I don't fault Americans or anyone else for wishing they had more time to sit around drinking brunello and eating good olives. It's just that they don't actually live in Tuscany, and that drywall from 1997 made to look like cracking marble or rotting lumber is still drywall from 1997. (Notice in the decorating example left that the ceiling has been painted, as well, to make you believe you are simultaneously outside in the Tuscan sun and inside a 'Tuscan' dining room with real faux masonry!)One of the problems with attempting to copy something is that you are unlikely to get it right. Think of any number of 'period films' and you'll realize it's not just a matter of adding in a few Studebakers and bakelite phones, but being able to resist, as well, current fashions in such seeming minutiae as eyebrows, lip shape, location of hair partings, and how to line (or not line) eyes. A film made in 1984 about Joan of Arc or Marie Antoinette will always look like a film made in 1984. Likewise, you're not fooling anyone with your 'Tuscan villa' in Manitoba or Missouri.
Nor do I understand why someone would wish to try. On the one hand, if I am overtaken by the urge to stay in an Alsatian chateau, that urge is predicated on the Alsatian chateau being in Alsace. Not in Edmonton, and not in Buenos Aires. As for 'Tuscany,' no amount of 'timeworn' copper pots, 'sun-drenched accents,' hideous pre-cracked 'majolica' knockoffs, 'Old-World' murals of grapes and vineyards, dining tables that 'cleverly' incorporate wine racks, or wooden beams 'aged' by having the gardener beat them with tire chains are going to evoke anything other than sadness and dyspepsia in a reasonable person.
On the other hand, there is a persistent belief here in an inexorable correlation between price and worth. I remember someone proudly and wistfully showing me a pre-aged, pre-yellowed, 'crackle-finished,' 'French Provincial' (I think, although it is easy to get these things wrong, and, frankly, I tried not to look at it too long) formal dining set he was soon to need to replace, once his estranged spouse's boyfriend's wife was completely moved out of her residence. 'You can't imagine how expensive this was,' he whispered as his hand caressed its 'crackled' corner gently, believing (quite reasonably, under normal circumstances) that only with this knowledge would I be able fully to appreciate its 'timeworn,' 'Old World' charm, and grasp by extension the measure of the sort of man willing to lay down thousands of dollars for a Sino-Gallic gamboge monstrosity such as this, with its premature patina so skillfully achieved through the meticulous application of coats of various subtly contrasting tints overlain with caustic solvents and a gloss finish by 75-cents-an-hour artisans in Guangdong.Clearly, his revelation had a rather different effect than that intended. Nonetheless, I cannot help hoping I am not alone in this, that someone else, wherever he may be, finds the existence of
a series of tract homes (with 'old world charm' and 'individual Tuscan flavor'!) called Toscano as odious and incomprehensible as it patently is. Not to mention the 'Tuscan' salt shakers, 'Tuscan' latrines, and 'Tuscan' condo kitchenettes one cannot help but encounter no matter how assiduous or numerous the precautionary measures undertaken. I am starting to feel as though I am living inside an Escher drawing of a purgatorial pizzeria in which each step I take leads me not to a door, not to respite or sanctuary, but to another stairway up to another 'marble'-columned, plastic-grape-arbor-festooned, trompe-l'oeuil toilet-wall mural that doesn't trompe anyone.And if anyone has the vaguest notion what the following sentence means, I'm all ears. I, for one, have never hid any gold in any of my 'furthermost crevices', and I shudder to contemplate the day when that would seem desirable or well-advised: The earth's hues in ranges from blistering yellow like the sun itself to the concentrated gold's like those she hides in her furthermost crevices are used throughout this theme.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Uncanny is human existence and still without a meaning
Well, it's not a terribly interesting admission on the face of it, but I went on a date. Not as uninteresting as it sounds though, when I say I actually wanted to, and still less so when I say I blew it quite roundly.
I talked a bunch of crap, for starters. I don't know what crap, or I'd tell you, but I was so nervous that I ran on at the mouth about anything that came up. Well, not anything, as I at least had very little to say about Fibonacci spirals or stochastic finite-state machines, but don't let that stop you from thinking I'm an idiot.
So that was unfortunate. It was more unfortunate the day after, when the physiological effects of alcohol withdrawal commingled torturously with regret, embarrassment, and after-the-fact recalculations of what I might better have said when ____. Adrenaline, clams, and unassuming French reds are a bad, bad combination.
And if it is surprising that I had anxiety or nerves about this rather than merely my usual dread and stalwart pessimism, it was because I thought there was Potential. Which never happens usually so I should have known. But known what? If you have optimism, you don't know anything. That's the point, the beautiful, delicate, feather-soft, unpointy point of it, of looking up at the billowy clouds and the V of geese flying in for the summer and the budding branches softly waving in the sifted sunlight rather than straight ahead at the flaccid, factual mundanity of things. Hope doesn't spring eternal, at least not after the first time a daunting third-grader steals your favorite doll and puts her head in the toilet, but we do at least hold out some expectation that it will visit us from time to time and allow us the fleeting luxury of seeing what we wish to see.
We hope for hope, we have faith in hope, and, as Unamuno asserts, we believe what we hope for. The ingratiating Spaniard also admits that, beauty being the goal of hope, hope is perhaps in its essence irrational (_Tragic Sense_ cheap Dover English Ed., p.205). And, indeed, hope regarding the mundane world does amount at some level to a rejection of reality, or at least a refusal to read the small print on parts of reality from the correct perspective or distance. It is a failure of exegesis, a problem with literacy: if we had our thinking caps on instead of the baseball ones and the correct prescription for our invisible-line bifocals, we'd accept that it's broken, all of it -- and move on.
But we don't, of course. We're stuck here, presbyopia, lisps, stutters, and all. There is nothing to read and nothing to say in this dissolving, insubstantial pageant. And we're big, strong Derrideans or Lacanians or situationists or even deviously retro hardcore structuralists, so we can do what Unamuno couldn't, and eschew eschatology and with it the only real reason for hope, and stare once again from our poorly-upholstered fold-up chair at the proscenium arch in the half-light, crank the pot to 10 on our collective ingenuousness and convince ourselves that we're dying to know if that Ariel gets set free in the end.
Which has very little to do with my date, really, since there were no pretend-shipwrecked actors pretending to be actors in a pretend shipwreck. It was just my date and me, with little distraction from the 'pressure' (what pressure? it was a bloody date, girl, not the Kyoto negotiations!) other than my adrenaline-fueled, disordered thoughts -- and the wine.
But that pressure, I suppose, was the problem. If I could see no potential whatsoever beforehand, I wouldn't go out with someone, so there is no pressure in that case. And if at some point on a first or subsequent date it becomes clear I wouldn't wish to spend another hour with him ever, let alone the rest of my life, involitionally I pull back a bit, relax, and it feels like I'm talking to a friend of my brother's visiting from elsewhere: no risk, no investment, no stress... It doesn't matter, then, that he spends the remainder of our time together droning on about how early he got Microsoft stock or with how many wives he had to suffer inside before he came into his own, listened to himself, trusted himself and his inner voice, and finally accepted his heart's true desire for a Ferrari.
And most men in my purported demographic seem these days to have some kind of 'Ferrari' lurking around. They wear oddly casual clothes either always or at unexpected moments; they decided at the midcentury mark to grow their hair; all presets on their car stereo are rock stations of varying descriptions; they have convertibles, jukeboxes, $5,000 beer dispensers, leopard print, baseball cards, 'flip-flops' beneath their chinos at dinner in restaurants, bubble gum, sports caps for sunscreen, labels, vintages, iPods with Avril Lavigne and Nickleback and Matchbox 20, 'Tuscan' toilets, knockoff watches that can't tell time but do what they're meant to, season tickets, McMansions and McBungalows, plastic and MDF 'craftsman' everything, and soul-sucking careers...
So it should not be surprising or unforgivable if I feel a frisson when someone diverges. When I encounter someone who has read a book from other than the self-help section. Who doesn't once reference the Food Network, the next big arena show he's going to, what he's currently 'listening to' 'inside himself,' how early he got in on Google ( Really, IPO? Wow. You must be ____ --- what, able to listen to the radio, numbskull???) , 'soft jazz,' books about wine, magazines about wine, food intolerances, any business located in a strip mall, and why he doesn't stay at the Sheraton anymore when he is in Paris.
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