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Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Music
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Summertime guilty pleasures Headbanger's ball Hell hath no house band like Slayer; Ozzy has no mojo. By Gavin McNett [06/15/99]   Sarah Vowell Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday. + Biography + Archives Read more about Philippe Starck's intuition and invention at BARNES & NOBLE

There is a kind of patriotic pleasure in yelling from the rooftops that you think "The Cable Guy" got a bad rap. But it is indefensible to stick up for a person, a French person, who calls his style "subverchic" (suberversive + chic, get it?) and subtitled his product line "The Catalog of Non-Products for the Non-Consumer for the Next Moral Market." I can't help it. First of all, I think his smiley-face kitchen spatula is -- well, I think it's cute. I also enjoy that pokey, kooky metallic horn shape he sticks on everything from lamps and the 1992 Winter Olympics flame to toothbrushes and a building in Japan. And let's not overlook the "Dr. Skud" fly swatter, whose big human head must loom Godzillalike over the unlucky insect in the split second before its death.

And then there are the Starck-designed New York boutique hotels -- the Royalton and the Paramount. They might be the two most pretentious places in all of New York, which is saying something. I confess. I have been known to down a drink or two in the Royalton's Space Age lobby -- a drink with fruit in it, served by chilly waitresses who have to literally look down to overcharge me because I am sitting on the cold stone steps since all the biomorphic couches are occupied by people richer, prettier and cleaner than me. And I have been known to stay at the Paramount of my own volition even though (because?) the rooms have been reduced to the dimensions of a queen-size bed and the staff all look like extras from "La Femme Nikita." These places are seemingly against everything I stand for -- truth, justice, the American way -- and yet I am occasionally drawn to them.

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