re: Honoré de Balzac, Traité de la vie élégante (1830)
With the exercise of real estate, luxury becomes cubicled, inveterate, moot. The pixel swelters architecture, rendering the vaulting atlas of our capital sharp and chunky. Because the agent fears the surplus life force emanating from the pancake houses and saloons, and from the open commerce of the street-as-beach, our civic delectation is continuously scuppered by the inverse marketing of ostentatious privacies, by upward innovations in containment, by introducing floating angles to the vaunted personality. Image is now a lightweight cladding, style lonely and
normal. Everything must be merely fancy, or invisible. The commodity is blanched.
To thus insist on the ubiquity and private reflexivity of the deluxe, to enclose the world of our desire within the compulsive simulation of deserved comfort, impoverishes truly mutual fantasies. What had been the matrices of our collective glamour, the public baths for one, no longer ornament the public sport with their fabulated adjectives. Now we are neither clothed nor nude. Fabrics are no more. We rehearse a meal. Parks are offered under the condition they remain a virtuality.
Still, this swarm of numbing planes unfolds a louche, opportune ulterior. The remnant demimonde is glitching there, its protean largesse still twinkling like a campground or a sea-sponge at the edges of the fugitive construction site. We few surviving dandies cleave to this mutating seam, installing flirty zippers, seeking to reconstitute our own publicity, to deliquesce all prefabricated optics, to discover the erotics of this civic garment precisely as a future ruin, to return the condominium to its tentlike nature, and perhaps vice versa. We enact the continuity of essence and
exterior. To this end, the barbecue begins a new career. We dream of a communal opulence. We submit that disclosure in itself is elegance, that the eclectic tickles. We are a thrift store.
Let our barbecue be prolix. Our work demands a beatific rapprochement with the street-as-beach, with the tower-as-parade. Translating to the surface of all real estate the hearty and precarious, we light up the cabana as the ruling grammar of the present city. Everyone will come outside to see our fireworks. The parlour will become a duct. We recognize the air as urban medium par excellence. It makes us tubes and bundles. Our theory’s a gigantic shop without center or periphery. We have hot dogs, salads, and cake. Soon everyone will be as marvelous as bugs. For now see how the scattered sheaf of relish packets iterates its ardent, sparkly realm. Herein we boogie. Because we surf civic deformity, not as barricade but barbecue, our sculpture is a profligate burlesque. Eventfulness is our magical technique.
The commodity will no longer be a bulwark against social life. We unfold its promiscuity, reinvest the glass-clad with its revolutionary informality, which consists in lightness and sincerity. If the cost of a fulsome sensibility is transience, we reinvest cuisine with portability. Our pleasures are allowed to be a bit less stiff. We must always never be at home. Warm winds sustain us.
Julian Butterfield 