My South African friend Johno has known me since I was a little Amsterdam boy, naïve and fresh-out-of-art school (yes, I really did just say that, so shut up!). For whatever it is worth, he’s has been a huge influence on me, and he introduced me to the notion—or better yet, was living proof that fabulous and exciting things may happen to you if you leave your town of birth, and relocate to a bigger place, to meet a lot of people who made the same choice. I followed his advice, but since “exciting” is in the eye of the beholder, I will never objectively be able to tell you how exhilarating of a turn my life took for it. Johno practiced what he preached, and was indeed very fabulous and flew and moved all over the place for decades, until he went back to where he once belonged: South Africa. Where he lives with his twin brother David, who also used to move and fly all over the place.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Johno for BUTT magazine in 2002 (!), and while I won’t publish the entire interview—because it gets into more detail than I think Johno would care to have googlable for all eternity—I’ll give you tidbits.

When I reread this interview it made me remember how Johno is part of a generation of people who, as behind-the-scenes and in-crowd as they may have been, pretty much created everything we take for granted around us. Being hip was not something that was for sale, and an interesting taste in music or art was not just a few mouse-clicks away. I don’t want to come off like a sourpuss, but there is something to say for “taste” not being so democratic.

The interview actually starts with a completely hilarious timeline Johno wrote himself, spanning from birth,
12 March 1951,
via the seventies:
1972-1973: Becomes a hippie in a commune. Wears caftans and dabbles briefly with vegetarianism,
to the eighties,
1984: Fabulosity quotient secured, his name is on every downtown guest list. Select does great and large-format magazine The Manipulator is launched. Continues with Bartsch to promote avant-garde fashion in New York and Tokyo. Makes Chelsea gay by moving into a space on West 18th Street,
and the nineties,
1996-1999: The Century Hotel is sold. Travels to Cape Town to do a city profile for Select and everything falls into place. Johno and twin decide: “Capetown is where we’ll die,”
up to the time of the interview. The above examples are just a couple of the dates that we listed in the print interview.

TG: By 1984 the boy from South Africa had become a super-cool New Yorker, smack in the middle of everything hip and happening. New York was at the beginning of its post-disco heyday, a lot of stuff going on: Chelsea and body culture were coming up, a new club vibe, people were getting into design, matte black, sushi, and so on. There must have been a huge sense of excitement…
JdP: Well, yes, by the late ‘80’s anyway, there was this “new thing” happening in New York with house music and XTC and new fashions for new bodies, and travel-for-all, and a whole host of design sensibilities promulgated by life-style magazines and a burgeoning cult of celebrity, that were becoming common fodder for the common man. Up until then, the state of being fabulous was a condition reserved only for the stylish few who were “in-the-know”. An augury of the ubiquitous fabulosity that now pervades everything in a modern, neo-millennial life, I suppose. So yes, it was fun-creating it as it were—but the results, now fifteen, twenty years later, are all rather dreary. Housewives in haute couture, Gucci boutiques in Las Vegas, reality TV turning dingbats into heroes, all corners of the Earth brimming with tourists, and tastefulness for sale. I once read of a teacher who told her star student that “if the tragedy of the world is not the evil wrought by the good, I’ll eat my hat!” I tend to agree.

TG: In all the years that I’ve known you, and obviously before that as well, you’ve never had a real home. While I and your other friends were showing off their fabulous new arrangements of mid-century furniture finds, you were living in Century Hotel rooms, places of friends who weren’t around, or in your apartment-slash-offices in Chelsea. How is it to have a proper house now? A sigh of relief?
JdP: Totally. Although it’s about more than simply having a home; it’s about having a home at the right time. There’s a W. Somerset Maugham quote about the point of life, if any, being that one makes a good shape of it “with its beginning, its middle and its end.”
Until I was 45, my life was lived out and about, on the streets and in the restaurants, clubs and bars of the world. Who needs fancy furniture and lovely lamps to support that kind of lifestyle? My expendable income was spent on decorating myself, not my bloody walls. But now life is no longer lived out and about, but rather in and sedentary. And so my environment is nurtured while my wardrobe collapses. Just as it should be. Preserve me from becoming some silly old fart who perpetually invests in bolstering his aging façade. What we call in our sententious ways—and à propos the very subject: “decorating the lobby while the house is burning down.”

Now, if you feel like reading the whole interview—and I can’t blame you because Johno is so smart and funny—just find BUTT issue # 5, from 2002 on eBay. Unfortunately Johno is not inclined to write an autobiography, because, he explains “We all secretly snigger at the fatuousness of something like a Patsy Kensit or Mary McFadden or Francesco Scavullo memoir…God forbid there should be one from little ol’ moi too!” I just hope he changes his mind.

Links:

This >link< goes to Johno’s own site, on which he has a great little version of the timeline he wrote for our interview. But his is a little more family-friendly.

Johno founded a company upon his return to Cape Town, for which he is the principal designer. His cowhide rugs, ottomans, headboards and what have you, have won the South African ELLE Decoration Design Award twice. Check it out >here<

Here’s a >link< to another BUTT interview I did. It’s with Stephen Galloway, for issue # 9, 2004.