judge city

Perhaps no object can capture a place in time quite like a chair. Where, say the wheel, boasts of industrial modernism and innovation, the chair is the mark of where certain people of a certain time decided to place their ass. Thus, where we place our asses is a snapshot of the cultural schematics of that chair’s time period.

In the late 90’s/early 2000’s many asses were sitting on (or, more aptly, sticking to) inflatable chairs.

Such novelty seatery, like inflatable chairs and their predecessors, are best at not only telling us where a culture was, but more importantly, where it wanted to be.  See, the novelty chair is the supposed prototype of what everyone will sit on in the future. They’re much like Space 1999,  a lovingly embarrassing 1950s’ book that I came across in my sleepaway camp’s infirmary in 2003. I looked at what my “future” life would be like,  leafing through pages of immaculately coiffed humans in their orb of plastic helmets, protecting them from the highly gaseous atmosphere of the red planets they now inhabited. Men in “space suits” flew off to work while pretty women in tight-in-all-the-right-places space gear handed them their space lunches (funny how the author saw only the technology and landscape changing in the year 1999, but not the gender politics).  Novelty chairs and Space 1999 garishly predicts and longs for the future where everything will be cool and blemish-free. 60’s egg chairs played upon sexy, hermetic, psychedelic sensibility. Late 60’s/early 70’s hand chairs deflated into lumpy beanbag chairs.

Then, there was a mix-up in the culture chamber and the inflatable chair was created.

The late 90’s was bleeding into the early 2000’s. Grunge was being swept away like garbage in Times Square after the ball dropped, all to make way for Y2k: the palatable future. In place of Nirvana-wannabes was going to be the real symbol of futuristic desire, the almighty “boy band.” Where the 60’s political activism soupily mixed with 90’s skepticism and apathy to form alternative music, the 50’s prissiness was solidified with the present’s realized sexual mindfulness and solidified in platinum. Boy bands were holy, yet raunchy. They’ll “never break your heart” or “make you cry. Gosh, they’d “rather die” than “live without you,” but give them “just one night, una noche,” they’ll be certain to “give you the time of your life.” For girls, it was even more confusing. The Spice Girls let us be sexy and fun without the confusing politics, but once they disintegrated we were given Britney and Christina who showed us that being a woman meant dressing like an ecstasy popping slut baby while never engaging in any actual sex. I.e. Be a tease.

Just like the inflatable chair, it was all sex, glitter and youth mixed in a fizzy bottle of Mountain Dew. The inflatable chair looked and smelled like the toys of your childhood, yet its trashy aesthetic was a bit naughty. The chair belonged in the dorm of coeds in the midst of their sexual awakenings, in the cheesy nightclub, in the home of an older guy who still hits on high school girls. It smelled like your childhood water wings, but looked like they came back one summer developed and mature. And just like a tease, the chair promised to be bouncy and comfy, but sitting on it was anything but.

As a young girl blindly sticking my toes between the hazy line of child and teen, I had  to own one.

So I did. A giant purple inflatable chair. It did not fit inside my cozy home, it was too big for the small ceilings and looked grossly out of place among the antiques that decorated my house. I longed for a cool apartment to share with my best girlfriends where everything would be bright and inflatable.

But I had a secret that prevented me from enjoying the chair.

I did not want to sit in my inflatable chair. I wanted to live inside of its plastic purple walls. I loved the translucent look of the chair so much that it pained me to sit in it  for I knew I would never be able to be transported into the soft plastic confines of this see-through purple world. And so the chair sat un-sat-in, bloated, in a room that went against its personal creed of fun and carefree youth.

I realized the chair was a mere manifestation of the maturity I so longed for and for that maturity to be in a time that would never happen again……….

In short, I over analyze chairs.