Night in Tunisia

Happy shower curtain

Well now,

Newly installed in Tunisia and trying to get settled, I was in a quandary yesterday. I was in the mini-market (there is onesuper-market in Tunis, and it's on the edge of town far far far fromhome, so I don't go there much if at all) and looking at their shower curtain assortment.

We need a shower curtain, that much is certain, since our bath is barely worthy of the name. It's about two thirds regular size and clearly designed for sitting, as one side is raised up halfway to the top. It's atrocious and we almost didn't take the appartment because of it. It's that bad. I'll send photos.

Anyhow, I was looking at the assortment of semi-transparent and ugly vinyl shower curtains - because that's all they had - and faced with a decision. Do I, as an artist with a serious aversion to design culture, where cheap products try to pawn themselves off as luxury products, buy the ghastly curtain with four rows of smilie faces filled with happy-coloured goo, or do I buy the curtain with big ugly squares of faux-artisnal paper in a pseudo-random pattern hidden away in plastic pockets?

Now, I'll admit that the paper-filled one looked a little nicer. But what of consistency? It was crappy trying to look good! That's like playing the spice girls through an expensive sound system, or dressing a barbie in Versace, or getting your MacDonalds meal served by a butler and on a silver platter. It screams wrong! I imagine that two weeks down the road I'd be secretly sticking pins in it so that we'd have to buy a new one sooner. Maybe I'd light a tiny corner on fire. I think I'd crack. I just couldn't do it.

As for the other, well, it was cheap and plastic too. But it kinda fit. I mean, big happy faces certainly don't fit many people's idea of high class, and neither does an ugly vinyl shower curtain. So it was consistent - a seamless union of medium and message - and it had
happy faces all over it. And I've been having a rough time adjusting to the crazy Tunisian world, so happy was also good (plus I have to admit to having gone through the eighties without a happy-face clad anything, and feeling like I was a little left out). Imagine, every morning you wake up in a somewhat cruddy building (they all seem somewhat cruddy, something about the way they're constructed here), you walk across semi-clean stone floor, though a doorway that's been painted quickly but not too carefully, and you see a big smilie-faced curtain. You must admit, it's a perfect fit. That settled it. There was no comparison. The smilie-faces were in!

Then there was the tiny matter of explaining it all to Tiara...

posted by Loren @ 11:19 a.m.