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Cheese royale | page 1, 2

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.

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Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday.

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Read more about Philippe Starck's intuition and invention at BARNES & NOBLE

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

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About the writer
Sarah Vowell is author of the book "Radio On: A Listener's Diary" (St. Martin's Press, 1996) and is a regular commentator on NPR's "This American Life." Her column appears every other Wednesday in Salon. For more columns by Vowell, visit her column archive.

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