kirkerblog 4.0

Wow. I know the trend towards viewing furniture and interior design as art is well under way -- it's a core element of my own business model, so I damn well better know -- but works of modern architecture being auctioned off by the likes of Christie's for potentially $25 million or more? That's a whole new level altogether.

My blog readers with good memories might recall that I checked out the Kaufmann House when I visited Palm Springs earlier this year. At the time the rumor going around town was that Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie were trying to buy the place, but obviously that intel was inaccurate. It's astounding to think the house was considered a teardown as recently as ten years ago, well after the mid-century Modernist renaissance had culminated in California. Neutra's one of my favorite architects (I actually like his work better than Wright's), so I'm glad to see his level of national recognition finally happen, and I have to wonder if it didn't happen earlier only because most of his work is in L.A. (a city still not taken seriously, in many ways, by the Eastern elite).

I've been semi-frantically trying to get my house ready in time for this weekend's housewarming / birthday / unofficial store preview party. This morning I had even more people here working simultaneously -- painters, electrician, tile guys, wallpaper guy, landscapers, landscape lighting guys -- than I did last week, but I'm at the do-or-die stage at this point. Let's not even get into what the day's total tab will come out to, but I had no idea outdoor lighting in particular could be so expensive (then again, they did have two guys rappelling up my front-yard trees to install mercury-vapor downlights, which create a moonlight-like effect). I'm a little skeptical the remaining paint work can be done in two days, but everything else should be complete by Saturday.

In the middle of finishing up the house and planning a party for 50+ people (including finding a bartender and hiring a caterer), I'm also trying to finalize my lease (yes, it really is almost ready - no, it won't be done before the party); work out my store financing (the number of hoops banks make you jump through even for a relatively small business loan and line of credit border on the absurd); hire an identity designer (I've narrowed it down to two very cool contenders); coordinate the arrival of my furniture from the NYC auction two weeks ago and consolidation of multiple small storage units into my new large one (happening tomorrow morning at 8am, so no late-night Halloween hijinks for me); and plan trips to Europe in three weeks (I have a plane ticket to London but nothing else, including my intra-European itinerary, finalized at this point), Miami in five weeks (Susy and I are going to Art Basel and Design Miami) and Utah over New Year's with my family. Good times.

Greetings from New Hope, PA (just across the Delaware River from New Jersey, which I hope isn't too confusing). Very nice countryside here, and downtown New Hope looks like something straight out of Rockwell. (Except gayer. I was somehow unaware that New Hope is a popular gay destination spot. The joke around town is that New Hope (population 1,200) lacks a hardware store but has four gay bars.) Too bad the drive from Philly was so awful - rush-hour traffic, pouring rain -- but it's clear and crisp now and the autumn leaves are at their peak.

Had a loooong first day of auctioning today; I threw in the towel around 7pm, and they still had a good 150 lots to go. The pace was mainly slowed by all the people phoning in bids, possibly a result of yesterday's NY Times article about the sale. While I appreciate the Times devoting so much glowing coverage to the career field I'm entering, the increased competition for quality product isn't helpful. Bargains today were few and far between, and they were nonexistent on anything A-list; all of the better Nakashima pieces went for well over estimates. (Okay, deals weren't entirely nonexistent; I scored a couple of good ones on Paul Evans pieces, but most of my wins were lesser or no-names.) I don't think tomorrow's auction will last as long, good considering I have to leave by 5:30pm (preferably more like 5) to make my flight back to Austin.

I've been robbed! One of the myriad guys in the house today stole, of all things, my kitchen scale. Totally bizarre. It's a small, flat electronic scale -- originally designed for scientific purposes -- and compact enough to stuff into a jacket pocket, and since there were three different guys in that area of the house, any one of them could have palmed it. My tile-installer guys (a father-son team who's still here, and definitely the least likely culprits) helpfully pointed out that such scales, which can give precise weights down to 0.01g, are popular with drug dealers, so perhaps one of the delivery guys does a little moonlighting on the side.

It's 1pm. I've had no less than a dozen landscapers, tile installers, curtain installers, bed-frame builders, plumbers and deliverymen at my house thus far today, frantically getting everything ready in time for my (second) housewarming/birthday party next week. The shindig isn't just for fun, however: it's also serving as an unofficial preview party for the store, and I'm inviting some professional colleagues and -- assuming we can finally get the lease signed by the day before -- members of the local media. (Lease-wise, we're almost there. Really. To employ an analogy: it's kinda like the day before closing on the sale of a house. You know it's gonna happen, and you're past the point of no return in terms of backing out -- there would be both legal and monetary repercussions if either party bailed -- but it still ain't 100% until everything's signed and sealed.)

Remember my moral dilemma regarding self-storage from a few months back? The storage facility near my house finally opened (months later than planned), and I paid them a visit the other day. Not only are their prices reasonable, but the manager offered me a 10x30 unit for the price of a 10x20 because the unit number was mismarked on her paperwork. I'll be getting 50% more space than what I have now (in two separate units) for the same price, as well as room to add my recent auction wins.

Speaking of which, I'm heading up to Jersey tomorrow for one of the season's biggest modern furniture auctions. Will be back Sunday.

Mental note: do not pen blog entries at 2am while severely jetlagged. Horrifically sloppy, unedited prose forced a massive rewrite of my last entry. Apologies if you happened to see the original iteration.

I've had a remarkably stressful two days since returning, thanks to a couple of dramas I won't get into here. I also have an overwhelming amount of catch-up work; hell, I haven't even unpacked, gone through my accumulated mail or caught up on e-mail yet! (And yet I blog. I know.) Before I get back to work -- yes, at 1:30am on a Friday night -- I'll share a little story. Last night, en route from Newark to Austin near the Texas border, we encountered a thunderstorm in the distance. Having grown up in Texas, I am no stranger to thunderstorms, but observing one at eye level from 50 miles away is another thing entirely, and not a sight I've had the pleasure of viewing in all my years of flying. The display was nothing short of awe-inspiring. The best way I can think to describe it is a massive artillery battle on speed, and by artillery I mean 18th-century gunpowder and all its ancillary smoke. Rapid-fire flashes -- sometimes a dozen or more each second -- backlit the placid gaggles of clouds in front, a not-so-subtle reminder that after even after experiencing the man-made wonders of places like Singapore and Hong Kong, Mother Nature still holds the eternal upper hand. I don't mean to ascribe any particular metaphorical value to the storm, but it was a fitting finale to an altogether grand trip, and a reminder that one doesn't have to travel 10,000 miles to experience spectacle.

Home at last. Okay, so my intention to post multiple "leg reports" from my trip home didn't pan out. I started to write a second entry in HCMC, but a sudden monsoon killed the power (including Web access) at the airport ... not a great turn of events when you need to take off in a 550mph jet, but fortunately it blew over before we departed. In Singapore the Ethernet jack in my hotel room was out, and they didn't have wi-fi. My battery was dead by the time we hit Tokyo -- a situation that would have been solved by me pulling into the AC-plug electrical system on the plane, but the plane's whole system was out. As for L.A. and NYC, I had no spare blogging time and nowhere to recharge a laptop.

The trip back was long but, thankfully, unremarkable. Fortunately my way-out-the-way trip to NYC was fruitful ... in more ways than one. I won a number of items at the auction I flew there to attend, but it would seem that the auction house has finally landed on the radar of The Gays (always the first to colonize the most interesting foreign lands). They've finally gotten their act together in terms of spiffying up operations a tad -- brand-new gleaming loft space, gorgeous new bathrooms, etc. -- and putting out at least a semblance of a real catalog. (Last year's was on looseleaf paper; this year's was bound. They still have a long way to go, admittedly.) Last time around I was the lone bidder on the coolest items; this year I had two relentless queens vying with me at us every turn. They had their eyes on nearly all of the same items I liked, which was amusing; their willingness to pay outrageous fortunes for them (in most cases way above estimate) was not. I finally managed to win the few pieces they had no interest in, but it is simply not in my constitution to get into a catfight-slash-pissing-match over a piece I won't be able to affordably sell to my clients.

Okay, enough for tonight: I'll continue this trip-home tale tomorrow.

Leg #1 of the Long Trip Home: Ho Chi Minh City to Singapore. The HCMC airport has the nicest business-class departures lounge I can recall seeing, with the exception of Virgin Atlantic's Heathrow flagship one. Great food, too. It probably helps that the terminal just opened a month ago.

So: Saigon. Much more agreeable city than Hanoi, in my opinion, if only because it's newer and, thus, better-designed for automobile traffic (e.g. wide, multi-lane, grid-patterned roads and uncluttered, mostly parked-moped-free sidewalks). The weather's not as good -- it's nearly as stifling as Singapore, in fact -- but at least crossing the street isn't a life-threatening proposition. On the down side, the only interesting art I've seen is the same stuff I found in Hanoi (literally: several of Hanoi's top galleries have smaller Saigon branches).

As for small handcrafts ... well, except for one Saigon store that sells Post-Its, drinking glasses, t-shirts and placemats emblazoned with old Communist-propaganda posters from the '50s and '60s -- which, I suspect, wouldn't sell terribly well in Texas -- I've seen nary a thing I'd be interested in selling, or at least not anything that can be realistically (as in easily, quickly and inexpensively) transported back to the States. Almost none of the shopgirls -- an accurate term, given that they've been without exception female and in their teens or early 20s -- I've encountered anywhere in Thailand or Vietnam have spoken effective enough English for me to adequately convey the fact that I'd like to buy a given item in bulk, resell it in the U.S., and potentially order additional supplies from abroad. (The concept of placing a small merchandise order over the phone or online seems to be a foreign one here in Vietnam, in fact.)

And thus I come to the trip's big epiphany: I need to revisit my idea of incorporating globally sourced handcrafts. Not only would the margins be minute in comparison to the profit potential on vintage furniture and artworks, some of the coolest items I've encountered during my travels over the past year -- e.g. Pop Art-style Mao-emblazoned dishes and colored pencils carved into hollowed-out twigs -- are already being sold in Austin at places like Wildflower and Mercury Design. I don't mean to imply that my trip to Asia has been a waste; given that Susy and I have been traveling mostly on the cheap, flying on discount airlines or with frequent-flier miles and staying at inexpensive (by Western standards) hotels, I can easily recoup the expense just from reselling the art I've found. I don't, however, have enough bandwidth to make multicity treks like this one a regular endeavor, particularly once the store opens.

That said, what I really need is a central destination where I'm certain to find small pieces incorporating cutting-edge design (and I know I'm contradicting what I just said a bit). Vietnam's design scene is too young and tourist-focused to embrace such a concept (and its government still frowns on fully free artistic expression); Hong Kong and Singapore are too culturally conservative; and Thailand seems too oriented towards clinging to its past rather than pursuing legitimate artistic innovation (as discussed a few blog entries ago). I can think of only one place on the planet where I know I can find a critical mass of design-oriented objects: Tokyo. And I think that'll be my next stop. (Not this trip, however; I have to figure out a time to go before the store opens. Since my lease hasn't yet been executed and it'll take about 120 days to build it out afterwards, my travel-availability window has been expanded to include January and possibly part of February.)

Returning to the subject of Austin while I drink my morning Vietnamese coffee: the Warehouse District is finally movin' on up, with a local outpost of Pangaea set to debut sometime in the next few weeks. This being Austin, the story made the front page of last Sunday's Statesman; a predictable backlash ensued. Pangaea was the hottest club in NYC when I moved there in 2003, and it was one of the first to introduce the velvet-rope-and-bottle-service concept; it's since expanded to London (where Prince Harry once had a little kerfuffle) and Miami. I had a few interesting nights there, one in particular (but that's a really long story), but the NYC outpost closed in 2004 after the city started getting oversaturated with copycat lounges (and, to be honest, Butter - a competing lounge a few doors up Lafayette - stole a bit of their thunder once the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and the Olsen twins became regulars).

I'm very curious to see if the idea will fly in Austin. Do I think it will? Yes, because I know first-hand -- from my own experiences as well as my friends' -- that there's plenty of pent-up demand for such a place. There are quite a few folks who don't care of any of the city's current club or lounge offerings, myself included; they're jam-packed on weekends, the music's usually terrible (top-40 remixes and the like), the crowd's often too young (all teenyboppers and college kids), and the service is often wretched unless you happen to know one of the bartenders (or patronize the place multiple times a week). I don't even go out much in Austin on weekends these days, in fact, unless it's to a friend's dinner or party, or if we're going someplace casual outside of downtown (Polvo's is always a fave, of course).

And yes, this does all have direct relevance to my store. I'm sworn to secrecy as to why and how, but I can hopefully reveal more details once my lease is signed (and it still is not - ugh).

You'll find most of my trip pics at the link to your right, but I had to give this one -- from my Saigon hotel's spa brochure -- a special, in-blog mention. Pardon my French, but what the FUCK?

Ever stepped on an ant pile, either accidentally or intentionally? Remember how all the thousands of ants went scurrying wildly in every direction? That's a rough approximation of what it's like walking the streets of Hanoi, except instead of ants it's young Vietnamese on mopeds. Hanoi's public transportation system is largely nonexistent, and few people here can afford cars; consequently, mopeds and small motorcycles (both cheap, easy to park and easy to repair) have become their primary means of transport. Most of the taxis are mopeds. They consume nearly every inch of sidewalk space in Hanoi's Old Quarter, and some building owners have created makeshift parking "garages" by installing regular elevators by the front door and using them to transport mopeds to the roof. In all my years of traveling, I've never seen anything like this place, and it's not one I think I could handle for any length of time, if only due to the noise (instead of turnlights, car and moped drivers use their horns to signal) and pollution (possibly the worst I've seen - Hanoi has a semi-permanent haze due to all the moped exhaust).

Crossing the street here is an interesting experience, since there are few traffic lights; stop signs and striped crosswalks are ignored by one and all; and every block is crammed with at least 100 mopeds in motion (and not adhering to any rules regarding lanes) at any given time during daylight hours. In essence you have to take a deep breath, step out into moving traffic, and pretend like you're Moses parting the Red Sea (the mopeds sweep around you). No, seriously: that's how they do it here. You get used to it, believe it or not. The weirder part comes at night when all the mopeds disappear. Again, seriously: the Vietnamese are traditionally early risers, and even here in the capital nearly everyone's in bed by 11pm. The bars usually close up by midnight, except for a tiny handful of after-hours places (technically illegal).

I'm off to Saigon tomorrow -- formally called Ho Chi Minh City, I know, but everyone in Vietnam still calls it Saigon -- and I'm glad to say not only did I have luck finding some fantastic, reasonably priced art, I even bought several pieces (for the store, not my personal collection) from an emerging female artist with a jawdropping knack for capturing landscapes in a modern, minimalist fashion. I plan on gauging people's reactions to them at my store preview/housewarming/birthday party in a few weeks (three birds with one stone there, as well as a probable surprise announcement); if they're as positive as I suspect, I plan on ordering more of the landscapes prior to the store's debut. As a refreshing change of pace following my multiple problems shipping art out of Argentina, these three will make it to the U.S. with no bureaucratic red tape (including duties) on either side, and at a cost of fifty bucks each.

I also found a number of more elaborate (and much more expensive) works I loved at a gallery owned, believe it or not, by a former Austinite; I'm attending an exhibition opening there tonight, in fact. I don't know how much buying I'll be doing there -- her works are not only pricey, but also mostly large and/or non-canvas-based, making the prospect of overseas shipping onerous, expensive and time-consuming -- but I'm guessing the party will attract the local ex-pat crowd, which should make for some interesting people-watching (and maybe meeting).

I’ve checked the local weather forecast each day since my arrival in Asia; without exception it’s been cloudy and a 40%-60% chance of showers. (It’s still monsoon/typhoon season.) By some miracle I made it ten days with nary a raindrop in sight … until today, when we got hit with a torrential monsoon out of nowhere. As it unfortunately so happens, we’re presently in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand where the predominant form of public transportation is open-air tuk tuks (think motorized rickshaw) and there’s nary an indoor mall anywhere in the city. There also isn’t any halfway-decent form of storm drainage, so streets and parking lots flooded practically within minutes. (It could, however, be worse: parts of Vietnam are experiencing Katrina-level flooding right now.)

We’re on the home stretch at this point – less than a week left before heading home – and as a whole I have to say the trip has thus far been a disappointment. With the exception of the incredible tapestry I found today in the midst of the monsoon, I haven’t uncovered any handcrafts that would be a good fit for the store, or at least anything that’s not extremely fragile or cost-prohibitive. Since we’ve hit a few cities since my last blog entry, I’ll summarize them one by one:

Singapore: The ARTSingapore fair was a huge disappointment. Most of the art was Chinese – even the work sold by non-Chinese dealers – and nearly all of it had prices bordering on the absurd, even by New York and London standards. Susy and I were only truly wowed by a couple of pieces, and both were in the six-figure range. A lot of the Chinese work in particular seemed cynically calculated, created in terms of what will likely sell as opposed to a genuine artistic statement. (Pieces incorporating Mao in some context sell well; ergo, a disproportionate amount of the art on hand had him in it.)

Bangkok: Upon arrival I quickly remembered why I disliked the place the last time I visited. Recent Thai governments have been repressive, to put it lightly; the one overthrown in a coup last fall, for instance, banned smoking in all public places – even outdoors, on the street – and forced cigarette manufacturers to incorporate photos of diseased human lungs on carton packaging. (Not that I encourage smoking, but c’mon.) They have not, however, done a thing to combat the actual societal evil of sex trafficking. Prostitution still runs rampant, much of it involving underage girls forced into the trade by their families (and then held in a form of indentured servitude). You see a significant number of unattached, unattractive, middle-aged white men walking around Bangkok, and it’s patently obvious why they’re there (and you can tell from their attire that they’re not there on a business trip). All disquieting, to say the least. Then there’s the matter of the insane level of traffic, the con-artist taxi drivers, the relentlessly aggressive hawkers (by far the worst I’ve seen anywhere in the world), and the absolute farce of an airport that opened last year, one that’s so poorly designed – each terminal has one bathroom for each gender, containing three stalls each; keep in mind that it’s larger than any airport in the U.S. – that its international transport license was almost revoked. (Commercial flights can’t land at an airport without it, so in essence the entire airport would have been forced to close down.)

All that said, I did at least find one art gallery I’d be interested in working with. Very interesting work from emerging artists there.

Chiang Mai: We’re staying at the d2hotel, one of the most well-designed boutique hotels I can recall seeing (and much more so than the places we stayed in Singapore and Bangkok, which are vastly larger cities). Still, the city’s handcrafts have been a letdown, even at its famous night market (largely the point of the visit here – I was hoping to find more unique objects along the lines of what I’ve seen at street markets in Buenos Aires). Contemporary Thai design, both here and in Bangkok, remains too rooted in the past; as opposed to exploring new mediums, craftspeople instead rely on putting slightly more modern spins on ancient forms of art. Celadon might be available in shiny new colors and patterns these days, but it’s still essentially the same pottery Thais have been making for centuries.

We’re off to Vietnam tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll fare better there.

Btw I started a new photo album for my Asia pictures; here's the link.

Before my arrival, I thought the comment in my Singapore guidebook about needing to wear absorbent underwear here was hyperbole. It's not. I lasted less than two hours walking around Chinatown before soaking through my clothes in sweat. Think Houston-in-August heat and humidity, but worse. And year-round. The only difference is summertime (as in austral summer) has typhoons and endless rain, too. I've visited Singapore previously, but apparently I blocked out the horrible memories of its weather.

Still, the city has its good sides. One is its hawker centres, where many of the locals eat. Each has maybe a 100 or so food vendors, selling virtually every permutation of regional Malay, Thai, Indian, and Peranakan cuisine imaginable. Jean-Georges Vongerichten got his concept (and the basics for his dishes) for NYC's Spice Market from them, and they're the backbone of the city's eating scene. That said, many are being eradicated from gentrification; Singapore's increasingly well-off middle- and upper-middle classes tend to prefer indoor food courts. I'll be hitting a few more before I leave, but for lunch I had some Hainanese chicken rice from the Maxwell Food Centre near my hotel.

I hit a few art and design galleries during my semi-brief outing; thus far I'm underwhelmed. One gallery devoted to "emerging local talent" has the kind of amateur stuff one would see in sophomore art class, but with a US$2500 price tag. I certainly hope the ARTSingapore fair yields better fruit (and more sane prices).

Lesson learned today: October 1 is National Day, the anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China. As the Chinese equivalent of Independence Day, it's a national holiday. That means all of the country's public facilities, and most of its shops, are closed. This is bad -- putting aside one's feelings about celebrating the birth of a Communist nation -- since it put the kibosh on my plans to look for art and handcrafts; my flight to Singapore leaves at 8am tomorrow morning, so today was my last chance.

Can't say I'm terribly disappointed, since what I did manage to find yesterday and today (some places were open) wasn't encouraging. At the low end, HK is awash in fake everything (Gucci and Vuitton, of course, but also things you wouldn't expect, like Columbia Sportswear ... which, as its ads emphasize, is made entirely in the U.S. and couldn't have funneled out of a Shenzhen factory or something), and while I was tempted to buy a couple of not-bad Diane von Furstenburg wrap dresses for my friend and business associate Susy, I had no way of knowing whether they were legit factory-second DVFs or total knock-offs. (And if they were the latter, there was no way of knowing whether the sizing is accurate; an American size 4 ain't the same thing as an Asian size 4, thanks to steady "size deflation" by American designers.)

The most interesting art I encountered was at the Opera Gallery - no surprise there, given that they're one of the top contemporary art dealers in the world. They mostly focus on blue-chip pieces -- the HK branch currently has a Warhol exhibition going on, for instance (naturally, the Mao portraits sold instantly) -- but also carry work from relatively well-established young artists. Right now they have a breathtaking painting by up-and-coming Chinese artist Tianbing Li, and their hunch about him turned out to be on the money (literally): last week a similar Li piece set a new auction record at Sotheby's for an emerging Asian artist. The hammer finally fell for $181,000, far beyond its $40,000-$60,000 initial estimate. (Opera's piece is a comparative "bargain" at US$90,000.) Keep in mind that this is a 32-year-old artist we're talking about!

The Opera visit also reinforced my thoughts on Chinese art in general, namely that its prices have spun completely out of control. The art world is just as susceptible to trends as the fashion world, and right now everyone's curious about China due to its emergence as a global economic power (one likely to eclipse the U.S. at some point, but we're talking art, not geopolitics). Thus, anything that can be branded "Chinese" commands a huge premium, never mind the tenuous connections some of it has to the country's and its current state; Li's lived in Paris for the last 11 years, for instance.