Come Back Baby Comeback
Safety-Comfort-Boredom,
Oh Ennui!
Ooh, on Wii!
Blog.
The drenched body of a siamese cat lay in the gutter
where the birds had cornered it--the small beast had
climbed all the way up a ventilation shaft from the warm
comfort of an apartment far below, embracing the day-
light for a few last seconds before the birds destroyed it.
Next to the cat was the carcass of a dead gull. Royal
picked it up, surprised by its weight, stepped forward and
with a powerful running throw hurled the bird far out
into the air. It plummeted towards the ground, in an
almost unending downward plunge, until it burst like a
white bomb across the bonnet of a parked car.
No one had seen him, but Royal would not have cared
anyway. For all his keen interest in his neighbours'
behaviour, he found it difficult not to look down on them.
The five years of his marriage to Anne had given him a
new set of prejudices. Reluctantly, he knew that he
despised his fellow residents for the way in which they
fitted so willingly into their appointed slots in the apart-
ment building, for their over-developed sense of respon-
sibility and lack of flamboyance.
Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste.
The building was a monument to good taste, to the
well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utensils and fabrics,
to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings--in short, to
that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated
professional people had inherited from all the schools
of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of
interior decoration institutionalized by the last quarter
of the twentieth century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of
the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours' apartments, he
would find himself physically repelled by the contours of
an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated
colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that,
Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apart-
ments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a
sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and
well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these
expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and
intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.
Royal would have given anything for one vulgar mantel-
piece ornament, one less than snow-white lavatory bowl,
one hint of hope. Thank God that they were at last
breaking out of this fur-lined prison.
- Ballard, J.G. High-Rise. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977. 96-97. -
Player,
Davidb
Oh Ennui!
Ooh, on Wii!
Blog.
The drenched body of a siamese cat lay in the gutter
where the birds had cornered it--the small beast had
climbed all the way up a ventilation shaft from the warm
comfort of an apartment far below, embracing the day-
light for a few last seconds before the birds destroyed it.
Next to the cat was the carcass of a dead gull. Royal
picked it up, surprised by its weight, stepped forward and
with a powerful running throw hurled the bird far out
into the air. It plummeted towards the ground, in an
almost unending downward plunge, until it burst like a
white bomb across the bonnet of a parked car.
No one had seen him, but Royal would not have cared
anyway. For all his keen interest in his neighbours'
behaviour, he found it difficult not to look down on them.
The five years of his marriage to Anne had given him a
new set of prejudices. Reluctantly, he knew that he
despised his fellow residents for the way in which they
fitted so willingly into their appointed slots in the apart-
ment building, for their over-developed sense of respon-
sibility and lack of flamboyance.
Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste.
The building was a monument to good taste, to the
well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utensils and fabrics,
to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings--in short, to
that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated
professional people had inherited from all the schools
of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of
interior decoration institutionalized by the last quarter
of the twentieth century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of
the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours' apartments, he
would find himself physically repelled by the contours of
an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated
colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that,
Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apart-
ments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a
sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and
well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these
expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and
intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.
Royal would have given anything for one vulgar mantel-
piece ornament, one less than snow-white lavatory bowl,
one hint of hope. Thank God that they were at last
breaking out of this fur-lined prison.
- Ballard, J.G. High-Rise. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977. 96-97. -
Player,
Davidb