pop up romantique 

—Special Reservation—

Pop-Up Romantique 

This is a shipping crate. A wooden box with 4 sides, a top, and a bottom. Standing at a tall 10 feet. 4 feet cubed. It is seemingly suitable for storage, yet contained within are the tools to tell a story. Tools to write a poem.—a mutable narrative to be told by those who wish to tell it. 

There exists a room within these walls. Each corner of this “box” is hinged allowing the sides to open 130° exposing walls a ceiling and a floor. All surfaces are fully wired and complete with J-Boxes and outlets that are all powered by a single 120 volt plug in. It is a shippable showroom. A showcase home. A portable pied-à-terre. 

I invite other story tellers to come with paint-swatches, patterns, and pens.

I invite the interior designers and the contemporaries I have worked with so often. The walls are easily transformable They are skinned; ready for what ever story you wish to tell. Be it lime wash wainscoting or wallpaper. A bedroom. A ballroom. A bistro.  It is portable. Set it in a picturesque landscape— the sun soaked fields of a California super bloom or an empty baseball stadium parking lot.  

I invite you and your creative spirit— Come play.

This Pop-Up Romantique is called: “Special Reservation”

A two-top meant for locked eyes long after closing time. A depth of discussion for two souls tethered to past lives. Longing for resolution or even redemption. Lovers, please come sit in these chairs. I will cook you a meal. I will pour you a drink. I will light a tapered candle on a silver plinth to count the hours.

   In this room I have found myself lost in a love story with a fictional timeline—somewhere between a world at war, then interwar, then more war. A socialist uprising. An era of walkouts, whisky and whistle-blowing. Coat checks. Men hunched over chess boards at bistro tables in bar light. Whispers of “Union” and “Change”. Hashish and hand grenades. Dear John letters. Kept promises. Pining lips “stained” Cadmium reds. Cloche hats and cane umbrellas. Opera gloves & etiquette. Walls laced with rouge pigments; Scheele’s Green—Paris. The poison of everything tantalizing that touched tongues—Cobalt and lead. Arsenic and cyanide. Juniper. The history of Prussian Blue—Elixirs of death brought to all in the form of fashion. A transformation forced by the hands of modernity. Gas lights & candles replaced by Invention & Innovation. The visible waking world, bound to a faith in ultimate creation was usurped by men collectively competing to dissect it into smaller and smaller parts. Gauging out their eyes to see the unsee-able. Concocting formulas and equations. Mixing molecules and matrixes. They dream up quantum physics and gave themselves the new ability to create the un-creation of everything.

A siren alarms in the distance; “Another round barkeep!”

The Grotesque scholarship that is science. Madmen in tweed with tuberculosis.

“The blind advancement of science, the most dangerous of all human arts.” —Mary Shelli

How quickly the “advancement” of science replaced  “growth” with “speed’; “productivity” with “industrialization”. The same chemist responsible for the poison gas clouds suffocating the soldiers on the battlefields in 1914, Germany’s Fritz Haber received a noble prize for this earlier isolation of nitrogen while he was on the run from criminal trials after the war. His discovery lead to the invention synthetic fertilizer which ultimately was responsible for the population explosion of the coming century. This same population explosion is now deemed a crisis by the same governing bodies who initially awarded him the prize. —Science. 

There is for me a romance to this past timeline. It is not dissimilar to the present. Perhaps it is what hope is. 

While the then rulers of the world collectively tore pages meant to rewrite the past into oblivion and myth, there where men bound to blank pages, feverishly writing down all they could remember of a time before atoms. A time of tradition and awareness and magick. These men simply closed their eyes to see the un-seeable. And believed.