*“We Remember It For You Wholesale (Part One)” @ The Commercial Travellers Association Australia Martin Place, May 7, 2017. Photographs: S.T. Lore
Author: S.T. Lore
Client: Sydney
Pages: 30 (3-parts)
Format: Short Story PDF
Year: 2017
Presented by Sydney & fiction writer S.T. Lore this 3-part exhibition migrates between the CTA Business Hotel and Sydney gallery nodding to objects once peddled by travelling sales employees. Adopting modernist orthodoxies and bureaucratic associations from times past, in 2014 S.T. Lore became an annual member of the Commercial Traveller’s Association in Martin Place to have free-reign of the building space to write his surreal fiction. His short story ‘Best Seller’ is used here as a framework for an offsite exhibition. Disturbing replications of hotel fixtures — a video, photograph, noticeboards, vacuum cleaner, piping, soap, slippers, and bedwear — appear to meld into the hotel surroundings but also nod to a bio-mechanical invasion of people past and present ...
‘BEST SELLER (PART ONE)’
" ... using the swipe card key, the lift door opens onto a hotel paralysed in time. Under a portrait of the Queen, a rubber pot plant sits on a wooden bench supporting a circular map, a dial-up phone and a lockable glass cabinet. Scanning over the various death notices and membership applications, Hans Albers presentation is scheduled for tomorrow at 8 AM. ‘Board meetings occur on the second Tuesday of every month. Please note: front doors lock automatically. If you require entry post these hours please call +61 431 575 277. Non-attendance of members should be submitted the week prior to the monthly meeting.
By ORDER of the CTA Treasurer — Mr G. Gillespie. '
Above the lingering smells of long-extinguished cigarettes, cheaply stirred martinis, bitter pots of coffee and buckets of bleach, Hans prodigious nose twitches at a feminine fragrance defiantly at odds with his hotel surroundings. The floral bouquet instantly wrenches him into the olfactory equivalent of a tropical island. Plunged inside this proto-hippie daydream of palm fronds and the riotous greenery of a foreign jungle, an elderly man and a trio of almond-eyed women gesture for him to sit alone on a cream leather lunge ... shrouded in tobacco smoke …"
Read PART ONE
‘BEST SELLER (PART TWO)’
… AS THE LIFT DOOR BEEPS, Hans Albers olfactory hallucination is shattered. Stumbling in a daze down the curved corridor, he shakes off his daydream aroma by swiping entry to room Number 803. Bypassing a hallway closet, a double bed and a tiny bathroom (unfortunately with no tub) he kicks his luggage under a bedside table and drains a tall glass of water. Reefing open the window blinds, the cityscape is reflected back to him a thousand-fold in the mirrored facade of the opposing building. Despite having never visited the city, the scene is disappointingly familiar: replicated so many times in the Good Morning TV panel shows, foreign car commercials and big-budget movie scenes — something an epidemic of violence is unlikely to disturb.
Hanging up his jacket, Hans switches on the kettle and flips open a complimentary newspaper to his all-time favourite comic strip — The Wizard of ID.
In this week’s episode, Turnkey is about to torture Spook with a fire-heated iron but when he approaches the bedraggled Spook (hanging in chains to a dungeon wall) he pauses under a speech bubble, and pointing to Spook with the fiery orange glow of his torture implement, reminisces for a moment
— “Did I tell you I once Majored in Communications?”
Shaking his head Hans chuckles — ‘Who ever imagined a medieval kingdom ruled by a despotic king would not outlast its usefulness?” Dumping coffee into a teacup, pouring in a measure of hot water he settles down at his desk. Removing three sheets of A4 paper, using the same actions — every single time — he crosses his legs, removes the cap on a 0.4 mm black marker and begins drawing angled lines and looping spirals to fill an entire page with strange geometric patterns. This practice has also been observed in infantile scribbling and was ultimately found to stimulate the V4a processing centre of the temporal cortex. Located deep inside Brodmann area 37 of the Fusiform Gyrus this ambiguous brain structure is now linked with the development of lexico-semantic associations (i.e. word retrieval, visual processing and complex metaphor comprehension) that is crucial to Hans’ survival in his marketing career.
Read PART TWO
