Ray Pride

Sunday night at The Modernist's monthly event, "Lust"-themed for Valentine's Day, Cynthia Plastercaster spins a mix of lysergic and down-and-dirty. Friends of themodernist.com pout and blink on a video screen, interspersed with images like the Paris Hilton video. Jason Mojica, 29, self-described "furniture nerd" and co-founder of the website devoted to "twentieth century design and naked people," says the enterprise was inspired "by looking at porn one day and seeing it all taken in ugly surroundings, it actually ruined the experience. I couldn't get hard, because I was thinking, 'Why did they have to use that chair?'"

Partner Eric Ottens, 28, tends to less conceptual matters including the technical side of the neatly designed site. "It's a good collaboration," says Mojica, who co-founded Jinx coffee shop in 1997, and later the late, lamented Big Brother video store, "because it's an optimist/cynic relationship. Eric talks big ideas down, especially on a financial scale. I want to spend money in every way humanly possible."

"And I point out we don't have any," Ottens says. "I'm classic bite-off-more-than-you-can-chew," Mojica adds. They tossed ideas around for two years. "It just got to a point we were really sick of talking about it. So in December, we launched it hoping it would grow organically." New York nouveau pornsters Fleshbot hotlinked the site and its debut model shoot by "New York Girls"' Richard Kern, taken in a famous Paris furniture gallery. As admirers of 1960s Esquire and Playboy's graphic audacity, Mojica notes that "Playboy was really overwhelming in its use of `sex money' to fund articles by amazing authors and illustrators." Ottens and Mojica feel they missed their decade, the 1960s, as Hefner pined for the 1920s he never knew. They have similar ambitions. "Things that are perfect remain perfect for years," Mojica says. "Not that we'd be such mod-snobs as to ignore contemporary design." Mixing two fetishes, he says, is like "Lowrider magazine, girls in Chevy Impalas." Ottens adds, "Kind of a highbrow Lowrider." They hope to find a publisher for an annual of the site's best photography and writing.

The world of cool stuff "no longer belongs to the uber-rich or whoever Wallpaper magazine is oriented to," Mojica says, "but to people who'd rather buy a $600 plane ticket than buy an used car to get around in winter." Even with the party humming behind them, they agree it's still a labor of labor. "We have some money coming through, affiliate programs like Orbitz. But it's minuscule, trickles of pocket change. Things that pay for stamps." Kern spins at the March 14 Darkroom event, with a New York turn to follow in May.

(2004-02-11)

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