Interior design
Home County Lines has been away for a couple of weeks, but don’t worry – plans are afoot. That’s the thing with a day job: too many ideas, not enough time. Anyway, much bemusement has been expressed at Vlad’s power-trip table, and rightfully so. Jokes about little man syndrome (Vlad looks like a little puppet in his chair, feet only just on the floor), speculation about frank paranoia, these are all valid, but don’t quite do full justice to the surrealness of it all.
Part of what makes this particular image so disconcerting is the contrast between the restraint and order of the interior – its empire-era proportions from when all the European monarchs were cousins, the formal rectilinear arrangement, the actual restraint set off by the bouquet in the centre of the table; it is the contrast between that and the utter, mad, grandoisity of its scale, its very excess that makes it so weird. Weird, and also a metaphor for the mind of Vlad: uncluttered, deliberate, completely unhinged. That, and the contrast of the managed, white, meeting room with the world that Vlad’s creating outside.
But returning to something lighter, I think it was Lucy Porter on the news quiz who observed just how camp it all was, suggesting that when Putin met with his henchman he ‘looked like he was in a gay marriage that had gone horribly wrong’.
Of course, she’s right, and I couldn’t help but think of Liberace at his piano, which is just funny given that Vlad is such a rabid homophobe. Such camp excess is de rigeur for dictator chic; think of the Ceaucescu’s palace (below), which is a complete head spin because it woud seem that Putin is somehow re-importing the over-compensatotry fantasy of a tin-pot tyrant of a once-satellite state who took his own cues from the mother country in the first place.
Or did he? Supposedly a drunk tourist once mistook Ceaucescu’s palce for his hotel, so maybe Ceaucescu took his design cues from Holiday Inn? But then the whole hotel-thing owes much of its architectural legacy to empire and empire to the country houses of 17th/18th Century gentry. Here’s a couple for fun: Raffles Hotel in Singapore and Uppark House, for a bit of home counties interest.
But here’s a thing: in order to deep fake an image of Vlad facing Liberace down the opposit end of the table using my advance software skills, I needed to find an aimage of Vlad facing one way and Liberace facing the other. But could I find a picture of either of them facing left? Basically, no. What does this tell us?
One: is it an unwritten, or even a written rule, that in photographs, one must always be oriented to face right?
Two: if that’s the case, then it does show how Vlad’s PR team have gone the extra mile for him.
So to make up for that, and in case anything be taken to imply that Vlad likes a bit of camp, here’s a picture of him in the bath. Enjoy.
