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October 29 the longest decoration and morea proof that the our new home decor has been going on for too long: today i called the guy who set up a private satellite plate in our new home months ago to check his availability of testing our satellite signals. guess what? his number is now OUT OF SERVICE!
the first batch of furnitures has arrived today, with others to come in the next two months and some decor trivialities in kitchen still waiting to be settled. i've lost almost all my excitement for the new home, as i've witnessed the whole process of it changing from emptily nothing to a total mess and then now gradually something i once had in mind. but it's still a bit too long a process that has now turned into a torture for me, and i just cant wait to see it all fixed asap.
had a cantonese dinner yesterday with an ex-colleague in an unexpected vulgar looking bistro near my current flat. anyway the food was quite AUTHENTIC (though not THAT authentic , but reminiscent enough for me). then i took him to the new home for a walk and just to see how he would respond to the outcome of my months of struggle. he said it was good, partly because of the original environment and the original structural layout, and partly because of....well...he skipped that part. actually it was already a flatter to me not to hear his criticism on the decor, as everyone who knows him knows that he could be a little bit picky sometimes. or maybe he just didn't want to disappoint me after a treat of cantonese food. and actually everytime i send photos of decor to friends, i just wish to receive their flatters, maybe just to prove that my several months of torture is not totally wasted?
but should i really care about other ppl's opinion on the decor? "yes" but "no". "yes" because ppl are HOMOGENEOUS in nature regardless of all the differentiating efforts they make. "no" becasue regardless of the former truth we would still persist to carry some personal (or customised as this chic consumerist term suggests) marks to distinguish ourselves from other, in a self-deceiving way that is , though... therefore when you buy a lee tee, i'll get a wrangler one instead; when you like a peugeot, i'll pretend to love citroen (though proved to be REALLY self-deceiving and costly). but wait! aren't lee and wrangler of the same clothing conglomerate while peugeot and citreon of the same automobile group? i can now remember about a month ago at my mom's birthday party when two guests found each other wearing the same tees, i immediately felt a sense of embarrassment between them. though both of them were trying to ease the tricky uneasiness and prentending that they didn't care by joking each other off. but didnt they really care? they must have really cared as much as we hated our middle school uniforms! the two guests are not really alone, as everytime i shop at jack'n'jones i would just start worrying about the similar embarrassment of "shirt crash" with other people on street. yet luckily so far i havent encountered such an embarrassment. does it mean that i've got a unique taste for clothing? not really! it simply means that i am far too house-y (宅) to go out and meet other jack'n'jones copycats!
and what could be the last saving grace for such a disgrace of consumerist dilemma? well the GZ based <CITY PICTORIAL> had an issue dedicated to the japanese MUJI (无印良品) brand, which seemed to be an alternative solution as it was recommended as a simplified, pacified, self-conscious and self-content alternative product brand. MUJI products are now sold in BJ, and soon in SH, at a higher price than in japan its original birth place where ppl are earning much more than us here. then what's the implied rationale to us here? the rationale here is that now the PBs ( petit bourgeois）in SH and BJ (rather regionally exclusive huh?) can spend an above-average sum of money on MUJI clothing, MUJI furniture and MUJI home appliances to modestly BOAST their understated yet exclusivised simplified alternitive way of lilfe. em, but doesn't it rather sound like an alternative hierachical division in disguise? cos' what really at play for MUJI to attract the Chinese attention here is not the claimed simplified alternative living philosophy, but rather the AURA of EXCLUSIVENESS. Can you imagine MUJI one day being as popular and cheap as BALENO and seen everywhere (by everywhere i mean even a fourth-rate chiense city)? i dont know whether that day will come, but never underestimate the power of capitalist consumerism, even though it's now undergoing some perdiodical disorders. further we might ask how would the MUJI fans react should that forseeable day really come? dont worry about it, a new cult of fetishism in a more unexpected disguise shall be created for thee!
that said, i still admit that i really love MUJI design, only for the sake of design, just as once i thought i could enjoy football only for the sake of JOGA BONITO ("beautiful football" in portugese that appeared in NIKE's adverts two years ago). wasn't that just too innocent? well i just couldn't care more and i really wanted an award-winning (see,a symbol of exclusiveness again) wall-mounted and somehow over-simplified MUJI CD player and a sleak black zen-style CD stereo. for that i had even contacted an agent in taobao who buys such MUJI products for customers from japan with an extra comission reasonably charged of course. but to my disappointment, that agent told me such larger size items might be charged of a considerable amount of tax when brought through chinese custom. thus it'd almost become a farce to me: for the purpose of getting inspired from the pacified and and simplified MUJI products, i'd have to FIRST take the risk of worrying about our diligent cutom officers and making things really complicated. so, i just had to end up with the naked truth of the "marginal jobless third-rate city dweller" fix i am now stuck in.
and maybe ultimately a question should be raised on my behaviour of buying <CITY PICTORIAL>: what 's the point of buying and reading it in CHONGQING when it only gives credit to the near-transcendental alternative way of living (and business of course!) philosophy and practice in BJ, SH and GZ? well the answer has much to do with TRANSCENDENTALISM. i loved it, and i still do, though now in a rather farcical bittersweet fix.
back to decor, i am just starting to think of some of the elaborations made by KENGO KUMA in his <DEFEATED ARCHITECTURE> (japanese again huh~) that how vainly people strive to make an outstanding design of architecture just to make up for what they FAIL TO ACHIEVE outside the realm of architecture. thus just as an expensive LV pouch won't actually elevate the social status of a white collar, a classy cosy home decor might just suggest some substantial lack of well being somewhere else. either we live with it or we pretend to ignore it, just as those two guest did at my mom's birthday party.
finally is there an ALTERNATIVE philosophy coming to our rescue? well talking about alternative i then recall that the other day i came across the term "伪非" in a football video game forum, and after some effortless googling, i learnt that's a term coined by some so-callled true-alts (真非) a few years ago denouncing the fake-alts for their poor taste of music, dressing & other practice. and consequently their disgraceful categorization of these hobbies and behaviours. such disbutes seem rather teenager like and i also wonder how should we define "alternative". back in the 1990's or so there were singers like jewel kitcher, sarah mclachlan, paula cole and shawn colvin that i liked. later as i got bored with them i also learnt that they were almost all categorized as alternative folk , alternative-adult-pop or alternative-whatsoever. my first response to the term "alternative-adult-pop" was:bullshxt! and how jewel kiltcher fared in her 30's (musically i mean) was near-catastrophic and cruelly truth revealing (maybe also revealing is the fact that they were all american grammy nominees or winners) .
nietzsche announced the death of god and the dusk of the moral idol a hundred years ago. but how would he see today the old time worship re-incarnated in this all-sweeping cult of consumerism and the now-in-crisis-but-once-taken-for-granted virtual financial speculations? this kind of question belongs to post-modernist thinking and when it comes to post-modernity, things are just becoming fragmented and blurred, just as the state i am in now. but maybe in a certain way I should be blamed for wasting time on video games NO MORE than those virtual financial speculation gamers.
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