It's Easy Being Green: The Death of Fancy
On Mondays, Michael explores the world of environmentalism and its intersection with queer culture in the column It’s Easy Being Green, despite what Kermit says.
Surprisingly similar, but not the bed I slept in.
I’m going to take a different approach to today’s column. Normally I start from the environmental perspective and then (stretch to?) connect it to queer culture or mainstream gay culture. Today I’m going to take a recent personal experience connected to modern gay culture and then stretch to make it an environmental issue. Hopefully the stretch won’t be too, um stretchy.
I hate fancy. I hate luxury I hate premium. I hate executive. I hate, and I say this as strongly as possible, all of these expressions of excess that have permeated our American lives. It used to be that a house in the suburbs and a nice Caddy were signs of success. We’ve taken this further, flaunting our excess through obvious, ostentatious expressions of wasted resources. Modern well-off Americans squeeze their hulking frames into disgustingly oversized luxury SUVs to walk their dogs around the block. Well, not all of them, but you get the point.
I recently had the opportunity to stay the night in a luxury hotel on a business trip. The room was pretty standard, actually, with all the usual features, but one aspect of it really just made me angry: the bed, and more specifically, the pillows. This king-sized bed had at least 8 pillows on it of varying shapes and sizes. Some were huge square puffs covered in coarsely woven fabric with ruffled trim. Others were standard square throw pillows you’d find on any suburban couch. Others still were thin, rectangular and dark brown, resembling over-sized round-edged chocolate bars. Underneath all of these fancy decorative pillows were two standard queen-sized sleeping pillows with white, high thread-count pillow cases. Of all the pillows on this bed, only two of them were made for resting one’s head while sleeping. And sadly, I needed three.
Why does this hotel keep so many unusable pillows on the bed? What purpose do they serve? Sure, they’re pretty, and maybe if I wanted to sit propped up on the bed they could assist in that. But why such excess? This hotel had 16 rooms per floor and 24 floors. That adds up to 2304 completely useless pillows. What a waste.
Washington DC was, at least until recently, experiencing a housing boom. Developers were moving in to underused and disinvested neighborhoods and constructing lots of multi-unit buildings, many with ground floor retail. In general, it was great to see revitalization of so many neighborhoods that had been on the edge of decline for so many years. The disappointment set in, however, as the buildings began to come on the market. Large signs advertising the new apartments screamed “NEW LUXURY CONDOS” and “EXECUTIVE LOFTS”. Nearly all the new units came fully equipped with granite countertops, marble entryways, stainless steel appliances. Luxury strikes again.
The three Rs of environmentalism are Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The third gets most of the attention. The idea of reusing things instead of disposing of them is a brilliant idea, and designers need to do a better job of considering the “afterlife” of the packaging of products they develop. But the easiest way to have a huge impact on the environment is to reduce your consumption of resources. This reduction of consumption is in direct conflict with the decadent, luxury lifestyle that is readily becoming the new American dream, one which is all too often targeted at the gay community. A major component of “mainstream gay culture” is decadence and luxury.
(Note: the primary definition of the word decadent is “in a state of decay.’)
Washington DC’s gay nightlife scene has changed pretty drastically over the past handful of years. To my recollection, it all started when one venue reopened a previously fire-damaged floor with a look and feel totally unique to gay bars in DC at the time. The interior design and decor were so fancy that it looked like you were walking into a Pottery Barn catalog: long elegant leather couches wrapped gently around corners. Comfy upholstered ottomans played triple duty as footrest, coffee table and extra seating. Pendulum fixtures cast cones of light onto the marble bar, where grinning young gentlemen in sleeveless black t-shirts waited patiently to charge you $7 for a bottle of Blue Moon beer. While I thought this innovation was ridiculous, the venue had no problems paying its bills. The gays wanted to drink in luxury.
This entry to the scene was followed by another, then yet another bar, each of which tried to up the ante on “fancy”. Finally a new gay “super disco club” opened that surrounds its large wooden dance floors with high-design interiors, state of the art lighting systems and full-wall video displays. Not only can we drink in luxury, now we can dance in it.
Why are we engaged in this arms race of decadence? Does the interior of a space really have such a huge impact on the amount of fun we have in it? I go out to bars and clubs to be entertained by music (live, or to dance to) and to socialize. I can do both of those things in a large black box as easily as I could in a white one with light-up floors lined with white leather couches. Perhaps without all the shiny objects and flickering screens, I’d actually be more likely to talk to other people since I’d have fewer distractions.
Fancy, luxury, decadence… these things exemplify unnecessary use of resources. This is my personal call to STOP THE MADNESS. Let’s begin a tradition of sensibility, of simplicity, of adequacy. I crave cozy and uncomplicated. I want these things in my home life and my social life, and the earth is better place for it.
What do you think? Please fill in this week’s poll, the TNG “Fancy” Survey. Last week’s survey on litter is still open, too.
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Why do you need 3 pillows?
Since you ask, I need 3 pillows because I’m a side-sleeper. I use two under my head and one between my knees. I had actually written a paragraph about why I need 3 but I decided it was to far afield from the main topic.
Sigh…
In Michael’s mind, there is an acceptable state of luxury (which somehow or other involves the use of 3 pillows). This acceptable state (let’s call it the status quo, for lack of a better term) is as arbitrary as that which you rail against. Why is a luxury hotel with a comfortable queen size bed acceptable? You can’t sleep in a twin bed? What do you need all of that extra space for? With all of the single business travelers rolling through, wouldn’t it be more environmentally sound to have a certain portion of rooms with only twin beds? What a waste of mattress coils!
You want to drink a beer and talk to gays in a room. Do you want that room air conditioned? Should your beer be cold? Served in a glass? Why is that not luxurious? I’m pretty sure most people in Bangladesh would call that fancy. Does chilling that beer and washing that glass not affect the environment? Talk about an arms race of decadence- look at how many beers they’re offering! Why do we need so many choices? We have to keep all of those brands cold?
Why do you draw the line where you do?
The answer is, of course, is that you like drinking cold beer in air conditioning, right? You like having a little extra space when you sleep. And that’s what all of these articles really come down to, don’t they? “You, evil reader, are doing x, and that is not environmentally friendly. And since it’s also not particularly important to me, I will deride the practice.”
For instance, I haven’t read anything in these columns about smoking. Does smoking not affect the environment we live in? I personally hate leaving bars into a cloud of cigarette smoke, and I certainly hate the fact that when I’m dining outside in the summer, smokers are free to ruin my meal by billowing their vile fumes around me, while at the same time poisoning my lungs. I’d like to hear your take on that.
If Cobalt and Town — which I assume are what you are making veiled references to — are so environmentally appalling, why have you held events at both of them? I haven’t noticed your repainting the white walls black, changing the bar from some space-agey thing to a recycled wooden table, or asking that leather couches be removed when you inhabit these spaces. Wouldn’t those actions make a bigger statement than deriding those places at arm’s length?
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