Over the past 20 years or so, the term “Mid-Century Modern” has made its way first, from an outre hipster preference, or what would get called an “aesthetic” nowadays, to a standard term within the layman’s design discussion, to its final form, something dangerously close to being turned into mere cliché (let’s call this process “steampunking”).
A certain irony, given the
degree to which the principles of mid-century design were quickly disparaged
after the peak years of the design idiom.
Cultural liberals would evoke mid-century modernism as the aesthetic representation of the horrors of Stepford-wivery, of Levittown’s postwar American garishness, of the final victory of mass production over the natural world, of the arrogance of better living through chemistry, of the last dying gasp of the hegemonic straight white male patriarch.
Conversely, conservatives
would seek a return to more conservative form, to flowery Laura Ashley living
room sets, to the first suburban McMansions with their fanlights and cathedral
ceilings and other echoings of previous eras (funny how the conservatives were
OK with this form of postmodernism), mewling equivalents to a doddering old ham
declaring that it was morning in America.
Now, I’ll always argue that an aesthetic principle can, to a certain extent, be decoupled from its point of origin (certified author-killer up in here), but it’s hard when looking at mid-century modern furniture, architecture, and product design not to be enraptured to a certain degree by this past moment of unbridled optimism, when the future still seemed shiny.
I started with a metal desk
and a manual typewriter purchased at a school auction when I was a teenager,
and now I have the whole package.
For the past several years, I have woken up every morning to my teak parquet floor, to high clerestory windows. To the sun slanting in through those windows, and through the screen patio door, designed to let just the right amount of sunlight in but to not overheat, with high ceilings to cool the air, a building truly constructed with the monsoon climate in mind. I can step out onto my cool tile patio, with the wicker cage around the hanging light, palms and bougainvilleas whispering outside, something of a vision of a jet-age tropical paradise, Viewfinder slides of the lands of stone idols and bronze Buddhas and drooping serapes in the high-modern decades between the signing of the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri and the appointment of Paul Volcker as the chair of the Federal Reserve.
I can hear the opening chords
of a Joni Mitchell song as I pour my French press, leftover charcuterie and dry
Riesling in the fridge, with no comment as to why the Cathay Pacific stewardesses
at the party last night were sniffling so much after coming back from the
bathroom.
But what I am living in is a remnant of a remnant.
My apartment is what is known as a “court” in this town, a term widely applied to the apartment buildings of the 1960s and 1970s built as Bangkok transformed from a raggedy and malarial third-world outpost to an international city, as Yankee GIs did their resting and relaxing (and a whole lot else), as Thais in pursuit of the good life for the first time turned their eyes more towards Los Angeles than Hong Kong. And I live in one such building.
They’re disappearing, slowly.
Torn down to make room for higher buildings in the city’s most expensive
districts, left to rot. Hell, they already ripped out the tennis court and put
in a KFC.
And yet this translates into a sort of Gothic splendor.
What portent is there in the rotting
concrete beams? In the members of the old and well-connected family who live in
the houses along the perimeter of the property, dying off one by one? In the
relief sculpture of the mermaids by the pool, cracking, House of Usher-style
before falling apart completely, only to be followed by the papaya tree that
crashed into the pool the next day?
More than a few people have commented on the similarity of my court to that portrayed in the (mediocre) BBC miniseries The Serpent, about the life of Charles Sobhraj, the bastard son of a Saigon whore, a teenage petty criminal turned hanger-on of the glittering Parisian high society of the Gainsbourg/Bardot era, before becoming a sort of Charles Manson of Southeast Asia, carrying out the murders of backpackers on Ngam Du Phli Road – what was then the backpacker ghetto, and coincidentally where I first stayed – with the help of a ragtag band of deluded Western hippie girls. His actual killings took place at a court called Kanit House, once one of several in the neighborhood, just across the street from my own court, torn down sometime in the 1990s.
The series was filmed, too,
in an old court in seedy Sukhumvit Soi 4, likewise about to be demolished at
time of filming.
You still see the concrete panels tumbling, woodwork ripped out, ready for the new “smart building” office complexes and condos designed for Chinese and Saudi money launderers.
I too am waiting for a deal to be finalized, for another bit of Bangkok during the era when the country was thought of as a critical domino, when Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn and his men slithered through the city at the behest of Kissinger and McNamara and all the rest. When real money first flowed into this town en masse, accompanied by Chinook helicopters, and the crisis of modernity suddenly arrived, optimism and terror intertwined.
Once again, we look backwards to remember what forwards was supposed to look like.
