2006-02-10

irony still being dumped

Last September, the international version of the NYTimes ran a short article about restrooms in the new Moscow
“Restaurants are outdoing one another to create the most elaborate restroom in this booming city awash in oil money, with such things as gold-plated toilets, walls of padded leather, urinals with spectacular skyline views and toilet bowls resembling Gzhel porcelain, the Russian version of Delft”
Among other people, they talked to a movie director about this:
“[Andrei] Konchalovsky discerns deep-seated psychological complexes behind the quest for luxury toilets in the restaurants and homes of Russia's nouveau riche.

"Rich Russians, because they didn't live in very good conditions 10 to 15 years ago, sublimate their attitude to money with extravagant, unthinkable toilets and wine for $1,000," he said.”
The article uses Russian history as its frame (it includes toilet quotes from Putin & Lenin). Finally it gets to this:
“Yevgeny Katsenelson, a prominent restaurateur, waved off attempts to analyze the fancy restroom fixtures - all imported from England - at his latest hit eatery, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which takes its name from the film by Luis Buñuel, who, coincidentally, often used toilet imagery in his films.”
Coincidentally?

Somehow I don't think the reporter saw the movie...  Released in 1972, its most memorable scene is a bourgeois dinner party set up around a table as usual but on toilets instead of chairs (they may also have not worn pants). [someone who saw it]

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I am not posting this now because I just learned there is a new restaurant stupidly referencing an ironically-titled movie. Or that the NYTimes has a bourgeois reporter that didn't seem to get any of the ironies (even as she used the term 'nouveau riche').

No, the reason I post about this now is because a restaurant has just opened in Japan with toilets as the decor! [photos]