Steve, modesty
In today's lofts as is commonly understood, the guest goes to the bathroom and the others are talking about BSE, Aids and whoever the trend intellectuals are of the time – for the purposes of this text lets pretend its Hawking or Michel Foucault, (personally I'm reading Adorno but he's not very trendy because he has been dead to long....) but there is something in the air as if everybody wanted to forget that they can hear and at the same time maybe they are attuned to the rather echoy soundscape that is the loft apartment and the mythopoetic space that in our compressed and huddled society is only 2-4 metres away from the place where the intellectual conversation is taking place, and it is certain that the missing guest will not disclose its activities and the guests will speak loader and perhaps even turn up the music but still it being a loft the walls will resonate with the dull sounds that punctuate even the loudest other white noise conversations.
If it is Steve who has gone to the strange bathroom his horror, due to his secret repressed nature, can only be compared to the intensity of the colic that that has caused him to be shut up in the room. It is not that he is neurotic or has some strange bathroom complex it is just that he knows that his friends have sad paperthin walls and that his intestines behave increasingly waywardly as he gets older. Everything starts off fine softly and silently and then like a proverbial dung beetle which assassinates its prey with hypersonic farts, and keeping a fine relationship to gunpowder and the glorious 12th a horrible detonation will shake the electric toothbrush in its rack and start it off with a horrible hum, the elephants on the shower curtain shake and roll. Steve can do nothing to prevent this, he has tried almost every method he can imagine, such as piles of books to raise his feet high above the floor with the idea of straightening the passage, he read about this in a book purchased from a mystical bookshop in Cecil Court. But nothing works, even the silencing devices, towels, paper sheets, bathrobes and so on, nearly always at the end of the evacuation an enormous noise erupts. Afterwards when someone else follows him into the smallest room he feels great pity for them. He awaits for some great cry of horror to erupt but for some reason it never does. It's not that they are not aware but that they cover it up with violent coughing, scraping of chairs and extra loud speech and music. He wonders at the loss of childhood innocence and contemplates major surgery.
Steve de Vos - London 01/14/98