cribs

My recent and disgusting gentrification fantasy, conceived while walking around Toa Payoh Industrial Estate with a cutesy Diana Mini and wearing American Apparel:

The leases for industrial spaces finally expire, and people can now buy old factory and warehouse units as homes. The corridor on the fourth floor is sooty with oil stains and no amount of wallpaper or lavender-and-clove parfums can ever cover up the smell of turpentine and sawdust, but it's all OK and cool, because I can strip off the old chipped tiles to expose the smooth concrete and call it Post-Industrial Deconstructionism. I suppose it could complement the sleek lines on the Miele induction range in the microkitchen. (Who can, of course, leave out the mandatory Kitchen Aid in the corner? In blood orange, no less.) The entryway can squeeze only three (extremely waif, Nordic-looking, portfolio-toting) people with space left for maybe a large wooden easel for my keys, and maybe three vintage recycled-paper gift tags hanging from cream-painted walls. A garden gnome dressed as a pink flamingo stands at the gate, because it is ironic. 

Upon entry, my footsteps create loud echoes because the ceiling is so high, and because I have stripped off all the plaster and installed steel beams to suspend the rice paper mobiles that a performance-artist friend from Belorussia created for my birthday. Come in, I motion to you, and you leave your (comme des garcons knitted) shawl hanging on a chrome hook next to the easel. The sitting room (no one does living rooms like they used to anymore, you demur while spritzing your face with an evian atomizer) opens up to large windows with the bamboo blinds drawn up. It is also cool to reuse old milk crates, and I have covered the entire height and length of one wall with crates-as-shelves, filled with first edition Nabokovs, maybe some Walser (they are so hard to come by these days, I explain) and old Super 8 film cameras. I play a recording of Arvo Pärt's Summa for string orchestra, and you recline on a Le Corbusier chaise lounge. (So ubiquitous, you condescend.)

While you ask me about my work in the Susan Sontag Foundation and my thoughts on Jung's Synchronicity, I stare into the depths of my glass of 1999 Château-Chalon, feeling screwed existentially within this nightmare.