I started this blog to broadcast messages from the future - good and bad - as evidence of our conscious and unconscious striving for pattern, balance, and knowledge.
I find evidence of fear and a hangover from the past so painful, so palpable, that we have given up the struggle for something new, something better.
In a thousand years from now, I would read the news of today and say to myself: We learned nothing from the past - we ignored it, relived it, enslaved ourselves to it.
[And maybe, a thousand years from now, we will still be enslaved.]
Rebuild New Orleans? Why?
It would be more honest just to burn it to the ground, erect a wall and never venture there again. It would amount to the same thing as the plan that is now in place, and the gross neglect perpetrated by our government and our society [that's you, me, your mom and everyone else] on the people who used to make that place their home.
Even ignoring the classic
New York Times progressive-urban-liberal journalism [Ha!], it is clear that the Bush administration never gave a shit about the human beings stranded in and/or expelled from New Orleans during and after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The
rhetoric was good, though.
Yeah, there are
black folks on TV [interracial relationships, even!],
Oprah is one of the richest women on the planet [and building a
school in South Africa...], and maybe, just maybe, a
black man will win the Presidency [
ummm...].
Meanwhile,
"Sicko" shows President Bush congratulating one of his supporters for her patriotism when she tells him she urgently needs subsidized
healthcare because she is barely making it on the income from 3 jobs - the working poor are invisible, even though they comprise a large portion of the US. [And also on the front page of the
NYT, a market for
mattresses in the $20-50K range.]
Let's not continue to fool ourselves. Prejudice lives and breathes, crushing everyone under a weight of anger, guilt and futility more destructive than poverty, violence or outright fascism because there is no way to confront it.
Two articles from the New York Times:
July 12, 2007
Road to New Life After Katrina Is Closed to Many
By
SHAILA DEWANCONVENT, La. — This was not how Cindy Cole pictured her life at 26: living in a mobile home park called Sugar Hill, wedged amid the refineries and cane fields of tiny St. James Parish, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket. Sustaining three small children on nothing but food stamps, with no playground, no security guards and nowhere to go.
No, Ms. Cole was supposed to be paying $275 a month for a two-bedroom house in the Lower Ninth Ward — next door to her mother, across the street from her aunt, with a child care network that extended the length and breadth of her large New Orleans family. With her house destroyed and no job or savings, however, her chances of recreating that old reality are slim.
For thousands of evacuees like Ms. Cole, going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile.
“We in storage,” said Ann
Picard, 49, cocking her arm toward the blind white cracker box of a house she shares with Ms. Cole, her niece, and Ms. Cole’s three children. “We just in storage.”
Their options whittled away by government inaction, they represent a sharp contrast to the promise made by President Bush in Jackson Square on Sept. 15, 2005.
“Americans want the Gulf Coast not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to cope, but to overcome,” Mr. Bush said. “We want evacuees to come home, for the best of reasons — because they have a real chance at a better life in a place they love.”
As of late May, however, there were still more than 30,000 families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita spread across the country in apartments paid for by the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, and another 13,000 families, down from a peak of nearly 18,000, marooned in trailer or mobile home parks, where hunger is so prevalent that lines form when the truck from the food bank appears.
Thousands of families have moved off disaster aid. It is not clear how many evacuees have permanently settled into their new communities, but postal delivery data suggest that more than 56,000 people have returned to New Orleans in the last year.
Those still in trailers and
FEMA apartments are the least equipped to start over. In Houston, according to a city-sponsored survey in February, a third of the people in those apartments were elderly or disabled, a third were employed in mostly low-wage jobs, and a third were still looking for work.
Hardly any of the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt, in fact, and the local and federal governments have done almost nothing to make it possible for low-income renters like Ms. Cole, who has a ninth-grade education, to return. Because she was never a homeowner, she is not eligible for a federally financed Road Home grant to rebuild her house, destroyed in the hurricane’s
floodwaters like the rest of her neighborhood.
With rents double or triple what they were before the storm, she could barely afford a studio apartment, much less anything like the little shotgun house she had, serenaded by brass band parades, on a street traditionally used by
Mardi Gras Indians on carnival day.
Despite their longing, some evacuees are afraid to return; they must choose between formaldehyde-laced trailers and a city they view as contaminated, poorly protected from floods and more violent than ever before.
For those who do not plan to go back, or just want to sustain themselves until they can, government solutions like the trailer parks have turned out to be obstacles, especially for the many evacuees like Ms. Cole, who has no car and lost her job at Jack in the Box when she could no longer get a ride to work. At Sugar Hill, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket, the public bus stops only four times a week.
Into the Garbage Can
JoAnn Anderson needs a job.
She has filled out applications and taken drug tests. She has asked people who are already employed for help. A hotel housekeeper for 22 years in New Orleans, she has called every hotel and motel in the hotel and motel section of the Memphis Yellow Pages. They are not interested.
“I keep calling them back,” Ms. Anderson said. “Once I get started working, I know they would like me because I know I do my best and I do my job. I want to work. I don’t want to just sit around getting my bones all old and everything.”
Ms. Anderson, 53, and her longtime companion, Jeffery Evans, 52, are in the category of people for whom recovery is furthest from reach. Near the end of their working lives, unappealing to employers, yet financially unable to retire, many are on the brink of ruin — or will be when their federal disaster assistance runs out.
“I was born poor; I’m probably going to die poor; and before the storm came through I was doing pretty good,” Ms. Anderson said. She and Mr. Evans paid $325 a month for half a duplex in the Uptown section of New Orleans, with “a little porch watching the
laundrymat,” she said, “and a backyard.” The streetcar took her right to her job at the Columns, an elegant 1883 hotel in the Garden District. Mr. Evans built cabinets and
countertops.
Now they live in a monochrome apartment complex. An empty swimming pool bakes in the Memphis heat, and frayed ropes dangle where the swings should be.
FEMA pays the rent. Their social life consists of church on Sundays. For the first time in their lives, they are on food stamps, and to make them stretch, Ms. Anderson shuns the nearby Kroger in favor of a distant Save-a-Lot. Without a car, she trudges home from the bus stop with frozen turkey legs in a canvas bag over one shoulder.
For months, they searched the unfamiliar city for work — she at hotels, he at temporary agencies and, when that failed, at fast-food restaurants. But being an evacuee seemed to be enough to tip the scales against them, perhaps, the couple said, because the evacuees who took jobs right after the storm were not in their right minds.
“I
didn’t really ever think that I was going to get hired, for the simple reason that I have to show my Louisiana ID,” Mr. Evans said. “It was like, I give them an application, and from their hands to the garbage can.” At one business, he said, hurricane evacuees were required to take anger management tests.
Ms. Anderson said she applied at one hotel that never responded but, weeks later, was advertising for housekeepers again. She filled out another application.
In May, Mr. Evans finally found a warehouse job near downtown. The bus ride takes so long that he leaves the house at 5 a.m. to get there by 7. He earns $6 an hour.
But Mr. Evans is not complaining. “I’
ve been trying to get a job forever,” he said, “so I’m very, very satisfied that I got a job like that.”
Closed Doors for Renters
What makes this couple’s situation all the more bitter is that New Orleans is desperate for workers like them. Luxury hotels are trying to recruit temporary employees from South America. Homeowners are desperate for craftsmen and builders.
But Ms. Anderson says the city is doing nothing to bring them back, pointing out that Charity Hospital, where the poor received heavily subsidized medical care, has not reopened.
“The places where poor people, poor black people lived at, they
wasn’t trying to fix up any housing,” she said. “Everything was closed down.”
Only 21 percent of the 77,000 rental units in the five parishes in the New Orleans metropolitan area are slated to be rebuilt through government grants and tax credits, according to a recent study by
PolicyLink, a nonprofit research institute, with a disproportionate number for families on teacher or police officer salaries, rather than much lower-paid home health aides or hotel clerks. Rents on the remaining units have doubled or even tripled.
Despite pitched opposition, the federal
Department of Housing and Urban Development is going forward with plans to demolish and redevelop the city’s four largest housing projects, knocking out 3,000 apartments that were occupied by low-income families before the storm and adding middle-income families to the mix. So far, there is money in place to rebuild only about 1,000 units affordable enough for previous residents.
At the state level, officials have allocated $6.3 billion for the Road Home’s assistance program for homeowners, dwarfing the $869 million allocated to the Small Rental Property Program, which housing advocates say is the most likely to replace affordable units quickly.
And when the homeowner program faced a shortfall, one proposed solution was to transfer as much as $667 million from the rental program to cover it, said Broderick
Bagert, an organizer with the Jeremiah Group, which advocates for renters. That idea died, but the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which controls the money, recently voted to transfer 5 percent of the budget for renters to the fund for homeowners.
Walter J. Leger Jr., the chairman of the authority, said the 5 percent transfer was temporary to satisfy Congressional demands. Washington will be asked to replace the money down the road, he said.
Mr. Leger said the state’s focus had been on homeowners in part because landlords were more likely to be insured, but he acknowledged the need to do more to replenish the city’s work force. “We’d like to get more money for the rental program, if Washington will help,” he said.
Poor renters, though, are not the only ones who need a hand. Terry
Coggins, the coordinator of a consortium of aid groups in Memphis, said many middle-class people were only now asking for help.
“They’
ve exhausted their savings,” Mr.
Coggins said. “They’
ve exhausted their insurance money. They’
ve exhausted their ability to drive back and forth and check on their property.”
Barriers for Trailers
In many ways, evacuees have become the region’s new pariahs, shunned by towns and parishes who have erected a number of legal barriers to keep them out.
At least five jurisdictions in Louisiana and Mississippi — St. Bernard, St. John the Baptist, and Jefferson parishes in Louisiana and
Pascagoula and Ocean Springs in Mississippi — have begun revoking permits for trailers or allowing their zoning exemptions to expire. Those moves affect families still living in 7,400 trailers across the Gulf Coast, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group based in Washington that has sued to stop the evictions.
Joseph D. Rich, project director for fair housing and community development with the committee, said some jurisdictions have complained about crime in the trailer parks, prompting
FEMA to provide extra security. Mr. Rich said he believed there was another motivation for banning trailers.
“There are severe racial overtones to these actions,” he said. “Because there’s all this concern that black and low-income people will be coming into your neighborhood.”
Some local jurisdictions are also fighting to prevent the construction or repair of rental units. In Jefferson Parish, the suburb just west of New Orleans, officials blocked a 200-unit complex for the elderly in
Terrytown, citing concerns that it would increase crime, and they are fighting a second complex for the elderly in
Marrero.
Westwego, also in Jefferson Parish, has placed a moratorium on multifamily buildings.
“You have some people that just lack any degree of civilization,” said Chris Roberts, a Jefferson Parish councilman who has fought to remove
FEMA trailers and block subsidized housing developments. “I think low-income housing which is not properly run invites those people.”
Mr. Roberts complained that such residents were often idle, but many evacuees have burdens that prevent them from working.
Gwendolyn Marie Allen, 55, formerly of the Uptown section of New Orleans, now lives in Renaissance Village, a large
FEMA trailer park near the Baton Rouge airport. Ms. Allen is the sole caretaker for a son, 20, who was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia after a violent episode in the park, and a severely retarded brother, who huddled on the bottom bunk of a bed in their travel trailer, clad only in adult diapers. In an interview, Ms. Allen periodically shushed his wordless moans by waving a green flyswatter in his direction.
“I want to get out of here, baby, this is not no house,” she said. “I want something where he can move around.”
As proof of her resourcefulness, Ms. Allen opened the freezer of the trailer’s compact refrigerator where, to make room for bargain packs of meat from the supermarket, she had removed the shelves.
“The renters
aren’t asking that much, just give us a start,” she said. “Put us there, and we could do what we have to do to survive. We could catch it from there.”
July 12, 2007
The Money’s in the Mattress
By
PENELOPE GREENONE hot morning in late June, I was lying flat on my back on a bed in lower
SoHo, my eyelids struggling to stay aloft, when Henry
Burney, a gentle guy with a borscht belt sense of humor, leaned over and asked, “So, would you rather sleep with an Italian or Mr. Ed?”
Mr.
Burney is the United States sales representative for
Magniflex, the Italian mattress company that makes the $24,000 foam mattress I was lying on in the
Casa Poggesi bedding store on Crosby Street. His little dig was aimed at a Swedish mattress maker, Hastens, which stuffs its versions with horsehair and charges as much as $60,000 for them. But his focus in this seduction scene was less on trashing the competition than on winning me over, not just to his product but to the seemingly absurd notion of the
multithousand-dollar mattress. And he was not alone.
All spring and summer, Hastens has been running an ad in magazines like Elle Decor: a photograph of the blue-and-white-checked
Vividus bed topped with a puffy white down comforter, one corner pulled back invitingly, with a pair of sharp-toed stiletto shoes on the floor beside it. The come-on reads: “Who would spend $59,750 on a bed?”
Who indeed? And what is the calculus — economic or otherwise — that brings a mattress to that particular figure? Or to $24,000, in
Magniflex’s case? Or $50,000, which is the sticker price of a bed being made by
Hollandia, an Israeli company that opened a showroom in the Marketplace Design Center in Philadelphia last fall and a flagship store in the Mall at Short Hills, N.J., last Thursday. I mean, what the heck? Why would anybody pay that much for a mattress?
“What did that guy say when he was asked why he climbed Mount Everest?” said Pamela N.
Danziger, a marketing consultant and the author of “Let Them Eat Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses — as Well as the Classes” and “Why People Buy Things They Don’t Need.”
“ ‘Because it’s there!’ ” she exclaimed. “I would be very interested in how many they sell at that price. I would suggest the price is more of a positioning tool, though it is true that there are a lot of rich folks. Those making over $250,000 a year are the fastest-growing households by income in the country. We know that from our survey.” (Ms.
Danziger’s company, Unity Marketing, tracks the luxury market in an annual survey of the spending habits and behaviors of affluent Americans.)
Like nature, the luxury market abhors a vacuum. But certain luxury items are selling better these days than others, Ms.
Danziger said. Driven, still, by inexorably aging baby boomers, all 78 million or so of them, the luxury market is most active right now, she said, with things that can be described as “experiential” and restorative, like a huge new spa bathroom or an exotic vacation. Further, some boomers are suffering the aftereffects of those exotic vacations — some may even have mounted Everest themselves. Their rotator cuffs are torn, their knees and hips are shot. They are, in fact, more achy and tired than ever — and are sleeping less, as a raft of sleep studies will attest.
“They don’t want to put their money on a new handbag anymore,” Ms. Danziger continued. “They aren’t buying that Kelly bag. A mattress really does deliver an experience to the consumer. And as you get older, sleep doesn’t come like it used to.”
After the craze over Ambien, the boomers’ last deep love, was derailed by a flurry of bad press about its potentially bizarre side effects, including sleep-eating and sleep-driving (a state that Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, may have experienced late one night in Washington last year), the mattress industry is cheerfully hurling itself into the breach, marketing mattresses to cure every ill, claiming even to put the brakes on time itself.
The narrator of a Hastens promotional video states, in a charming Swedish accent, that its beds, which start at $4,375, will give you fewer wrinkles and can slow aging.
(Hollandia turns out to be a maker of adjustable “sleep systems, ” priced from about $15,000 to $50,000, that look and feel like nothing so much as high-end hospital beds. With their German motors and 12 massage programs, they seem to acknowledge that a body ravaged by time can be only soothed, not remade. Its marketers also claim its beds cure snoring.)
Tempur-Pedic, the foam-mattress maker whose beds range from $1,200 to $7,299 (chump change on planet Hastens), sponsored a study recently that claimed, straight-faced, that Americans would rather sleep than exercise as part of their “wellness regimen,” that three out of four Americans say a good night’s sleep makes them feel younger and that a good pillow is a better “sleep accessory” — nine times better — than a “sleep partner.” More than a third of them spend as much money on their mattresses as they do on their sofas or their televisions, and 17 percent as much as on their vacations.
At the low end of the luxury mattress market, at least, things have been heating up. Six years ago, barely 2 percent of the mattresses sold cost more than $2,000, according to the International Sleep Products Association, a trade group for the industry, which had $6.7 billion in sales last year. By 2006 about 5 percent of purchases had crossed the $2,000 line. (The median price of a queen-size mattress was $650 last year, according to a survey by Furniture Today, a trade magazine.)
“I think it’s about time that Americans place the value on sleep that they place on other aspects of their life,” said Rick Anderson, president of Tempur-Pedic North America, adding, as every good mattress executive is wont to do, that “after all, we spend a third of our lives in bed.”
Mr. Anderson’s company has just rolled out a television campaign — with dreamy little spots of tropical islands, misty fjords and glistening jungles — that positions Tempur-Pedic as a “wellness brand” and its mattresses as “nighttime renewal aids.”
“If you asked someone 10 years ago what their mattress is for,” Mr. Anderson said, “they’d say it’s where I sleep. Now they expect it to relieve their stress, to relieve their aches and pains, to provide comfort. It’s emotional, it’s physical and it’s a status thing, too. You know what they say: sleep is the new black. Sleep is in style.” Gone are the days, Mr. Anderson suggested, when captains of industry bragged about sleeping just three hours a night. The power nap, he said, is gaining currency.
As proof, Mr. Anderson pointed to nap centers like the two that MetroNaps and Yelo operate in Manhattan, charging $12 to $14 for 20 minutes of shut-eye, and recent studies by the
National Institutes of Health and Harvard about napping and productivity. (There is even a nap how-to book, out since January from Workman: “Take a Nap! Change Your Life” by Sara C. Mednick, a napping-research scientist at the Salk Institute.)
Ty Wenger, editor of Trader Monthly, a lifestyle magazine for a select segment of the self-made superrich, like hedge fund managers, agreed with this paradigm shift: a good night’s sleep isn’t a sign of weakness, but something to boast about.
“My readers are almost like athletes in the way they perceive themselves and pamper themselves,” Mr. Wenger said. “A good night’s sleep can mean millions for them the next day. How they prepare themselves for their job is the difference between brilliant and wealthy and going completely belly up. They aren’t hedonist playboys like those ’80s guys. They work out like crazy; they eat the finest food. It’s all about honing their instrument.”
Will they spend tens of thousands on mattresses?
“Absolutely,” he said. “The high end exists because there is somebody who wants to spend that kind of money. It’s like a consumer dare.”
Casa Poggesi has been offering the $24,000 Magniflex Gold for a month and a half, and as of yesterday afternoon, Mr. Burney said, no New Yorker had bought one. He added that on average, Magniflex mattresses go for $1,200 to $3,000. “But the Gold gets people in the door.”
Mr. Burney said his company had sold 53 Gold mattresses to individuals in Russia, and one to a hotel in Dubai. Its cost, he said, is largely a result of the fact that its cover is woven with 22-karat gold thread — “gold is a natural antimicrobial,” he said, as well as a barrier against dust mites and bedbugs — and has a cashmere underlayer. What’s inside the mattress is, as in most mattresses, a mysterious layer cake of stuff. Like every mattress sales agent, Mr. Burney has cross sections at the ready, along with diagrams and schematics and a pocketful of scientific-sounding terms.
“I know, none of it means anything to anyone,” said Mr. Burney, who explained that in plainer terms the Magniflex mattress is foam with holes drilled through it. So it breathes, as opposed to, say, a Tempur-Pedic mattress, he said, which has ridges so the air flows around the foam, but not through it. “People complain that the Tempur-Pedic is too warm,” he asserted.
“If you consider the average person sweats about a pint each night,” he said, pausing to let his words sink in.
WARREN SHOULBERG, the editor of Home Furnishings News, a trade publication for the furniture industry, reckons that a mattress purchase is the most “blind” purchase anybody ever makes.
“You only buy it once every 10 or 20 years,” he said, “so you are woefully unprepared and uneducated. You are confronted with this police lineup of white boxes that all look remarkably similar. The one that’s $500 doesn’t look all that different from the one that’s $5,000, or, now, $50,000, the way a Hyundai looks different from a Ferrari. The attributes that distinguish this product you can’t see.
“So you do the obligatory five-minute lie-down, but you’re incredibly self-conscious. Whatever very personal way that you sleep, you can’t do it on the floor of Sleepy’s. It’s not a product you can shop smart for, and that’s allowed the mattress companies to be all over the place. They kind of went crazy, and you’ve got to hand it to them.
“Now, there are a lot of affluent people who will pay a lot of money for a good night’s sleep. Or the perception of a good night’s sleep. I think the mattress guys are the smartest people in the whole home furnishings business. They have managed to attach an emotional element to your mattress. It’s not just layers of foam and padding.”
The Hastens store, in a classic SoHoian cast-iron building on Greene Street, is huge and white. This whiteness sets off the fetching blue and white plaid ticking that covers nearly every mattress. (The alternative is a white and taupe plaid.) Lina Schleenvoigt, the store’s young manager, listed the layers in a Hasten’s mattress: flax, wool and cotton, as well as horsehair, which has been not only cleaned but permed.
“Horsehair is hollow tubes,” she said proudly. “Nature’s air-conditioner. If you consider that you sweat one liter a night, and all that stays in the bed, unless the bed can breathe.”
Here we go again.
If the foam mattresses promise, as Mr. Burney said, better living through chemistry, Hastens, with its horse-and-fjord imagery, is the antifoam — the free-range bed. Its show pony, the Vividus, lives behind a velvet rope. With permission, I clambered aboard, and Ms. Schleenvoigt pushed down on my shoulder.
“You want to feel that the bed accepts you,” she said. “You have to open yourself to a new experience.”
“This,” she said, answering the $60,000 question, “is something without compromises. It takes 160 man-hours to make this bed. The horsehair is hand-selected, for example, and longer and straighter than what we use in the other beds. It has a deep feel, a bottomless feel.”
Not only that, she said, it comes with a brass plate engraved with your name.
I spent an hour here, rolling from bed to bed. It is true that the Vividus is very, very comfortable, but all the mattresses there are — beyond anything you can imagine, which is as it should be, considering that most of them cost more than a car. They even need maintenance like a car, specifically a massage and a flip every month for a year. “We call you and remind you,” Ms. Schleenvoigt said.
I flopped down next to Beth Fussell, who was splayed out on the Excelsior mattress ($15,500), her clogged feet hanging over the edge.
Ms. Fussell, 41, works at an architectural firm around the corner. She said she and her husband, who is also an architect, have been visiting this bed once a month for a year, and they plan to buy it in 18 months.
“What do you need in the city?” she said. “You don’t need a car. We sold our car last year. I think you need a good bed. It’s so stressful here.
“We were subletting an apartment and sleeping on a futon. I like the idea of something that lasts. The feeling of this bed is almost primal. You feel safe on this bed. You can’t forget this bed.”
It took two years of research and bed-testing for Suzanne Durand, 57, and her husband, Everett Ferri, 62, to circle in on their Hastens, the $22,950 2000T, which they bought in December. (“Lina let us take a nap one Sunday,” Ms. Durand said. “She turned up the air-conditioning, turned down the lights and gave us a comforter.”).
Her husband has had rotator cuff issues, she has sore hips and they had been buying mattresses every four or five years, they said. “I was still waking up as stiff as a board,” Ms. Durand said. “The way I rationalized the cost was that this was something that was going to last us for the rest of our lives. And I think that you wake up and feel better is worth it. And I do feel better.”
Mr. Ferri said he did ask Ms. Schleenvoigt if she would take their ’05 BMW X3 in trade.
The 2000T is the company’s best seller, said Erick Svensson, Hasten’s sales manager in the United States. As for Vividus sales, he said guardedly that “more than 15” have sold since the introduction last fall.
THERE is something about a hospital bed that works, said Sharon Kaplan, 59, who bought a $23,000 Hollandia with her husband, Arthur, 62, a few months ago. Or dueling hospital beds, which is what a Hollandia looks and works like: two single adjustable beds that sit side by side but operate independently.
The Kaplans, real estate developers who live in Philadelphia, weren’t looking for a new bed, but a friend invited them to Hollandia’s grand opening last spring, and one thing led to another. “You get to a certain age,” Ms. Kaplan said, “and it’s the one thing you can do, give yourself a good night’s sleep. I haven’t slept this well in years.”
I asked Mr. Kaplan how he rationalized the cost.
“You don’t,” he said. “It’s not possible.” And then he tried to, a bit: “I used to sleep on a $6,000 mattress. Now I sleep on one that cost $23,000. I sit on a sofa that costs as much, and I’m only on that for about 20 minutes a day.”
On a recent Monday, David Ashe, who is marketing Hollandia’s beds in the United States, was presiding over the company’s showroom in Philadelphia.
“Let me get you on a bed,” he said soothingly, leading me to a red velvet number in the showroom window. He drove the remote, elevating both my feet and my head, and Maria Rohe, another marketing manager, tucked a sarcophagus-shaped blanket around me. It had a pocket to slip the feet into and two pockets up top, for the hands. It was wicked comfy.
“Do you like the way that feels?” Mr. Ashe asked. “All our fabrics are coated with aloe vera.”
The obligatory cross section was hauled out, a stunning array of layers and mystery substances. The curly stuff was coconut fibers; the pink and cream-colored stuff, drilled with holes like a Magniflex, was a foam. “A natural foam,” Mr. Ashe hastened to say.
What’s in it?
“A bunch of stuff —— ”
Ms. Rohe broke in: “A proprietary blend of material.”
And then, like Mr. Burney, Mr. Ashe began tearing into Tempur-Pedic. “Take Memory Foam,” he began. “It’s synthetic, it’s dense, it doesn’t breathe, it’s hot, you end up lying in a pool of your own perspiration.”
The sweat again. How much did Mr. Ashe reckon the average person dropped in a bed each night? Was it, and I quoted Ms. Schleenvoigt, a liter?
“That’s disgusting,” he said. “I’m not sleeping with you. I’d say a cup, max.”
Fine. Now where was the $50,000 bed? We’d discussed it on the phone — its mohair cover, its built-in iPod jacks and television. I was ready.
“It’s not here,” Mr. Ashe said. “It’s in Israel. It will be here in a year. I do have a $35,000 that’s coming next week ...”
This is what’s known as the old switch-eroo.
Mr. Ashe said, in a mollifying tone, “You know, I can get you a great night’s sleep on a $17,000 bed.”
Sleep, sleep our little fur child,Out of the windiness, Out of the wild
