To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment June 16, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/col/vowe/1999/06/16/starck Cheese royale Where's the shame in liking "The Cable Guy"? It's my devotion to fluffy French designers that I'm embarrassed about. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Sarah Vowell Guilty pleasures in the USA? No such thing. Why should anyone, especially any American, waste a single pang of regret on affection for pop treats? On liking something? I will proudly, publicly own up to the fact that I own the Hanson Christmas album, revere Alec Baldwin and will see any movie Steven Spielberg decides to make (except "Amistad," which looked like a drag). I do, however, have one nagging little weakness, one shameful secret: My guilty pleasures are all pretentious. Eyes downcast, I slither to the cash register with the American Scholar as if it were pornography; I never miss a single pompous episode of "Inside the Actors Studio"; and -- how embarrassing! -- I have a thing for French designer Philippe Starck. 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. I have even brought Philippe Starck home. I clean my bowl with his 1995 polypropylene toilet brush "Excalibur," which was, for some reason, a gift. I myself purchased two Starck items that currently live in my living room. An eggshell, egglike plastic armchair Starck calls "Lord Yo" faces the window. A little orange plastic table is perched in front of the couch. The table, shaped like a molar in a dental health instructional cartoon, is the silliest piece of furniture imaginable. It is often called upon to bear the weight of items that, at least spiritually, threaten to crush its foppish Euro frame -- books like "Wisconsin Death Trip," bottles of Kentucky bourbon, the 10-song sadness sampler that is Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska." A painting of this setup -- in which a gloomy book chronicling depression (in every sense of the word) in the Upper Midwest in the 1890s, whiskey named after the childhood home of Abraham Lincoln and a record whose title song is a ballad about a condemned serial killer declared "unfit to live" -- are pouting on top of such a happy coffee table might be titled "Still Life With Schizophrenia." That's actually the point. Just because I'm Miss Memento Mori doesn't mean I need to bring every last stick of furniture down with me. In Fay Sweet's new monograph "Philippe Starck: Subverchic Design," Starck talks about his household product line: "We have stopped using anything which causes death -- so we no longer use leather." There you go. In a room full of death books and murder ballads, Starck's graceful if childish pieces of plastic are signs of life. I enjoy my "Lord Yo" armchair precisely because I cannot picture Bruce Springsteen sitting in it. My fondness for Starck might have something to do with the way he makes the males of my acquaintance, even the homosexual ones, nervous. Try to get the average American boy person to sit for more than three minutes on a curved metal chaise in the Paramount lobby and he will stare at his shoes as if he were being made to crochet a doily. There's something too froufrou, too capricious, too girly about Starck. Which, if the designer himself is to be believed, is intentional. He claims, "For too long the mechanical objects in our everyday lives, the cars and bikes, for example, have been designed as macho symbols. They are very aggressive. My idea is to sexually reposition these things and make them female." Though that's not entirely true -- the horns! the horns! -- no one is going to make a buddy movie in which a couple of guy's guys set off on an adventure on the 1995 motorbike of Starck's design, a curvy, silvery machine one is tempted to nickname the "sissy-ped." Forgive me, Uncle Sam, for I have sinned. I have handed over a tiny portion of my heart and roughly two and a half square feet of my living room floor to a girly, silly, decadent French fluff man who humbly calls himself "just a Christmas-gift designer." I cannot take Philippe Starck seriously, and for that, I admit, I am grateful. salon.com | June 16, 1999