"It's very beautiful in its shattered state.... Do you see how wonderful it is?"

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An overabundance of furniture.

On Wednesday, I saw the APT production of "The Chairs," which involved dragging an ever-increasing number of chairs into a surrealistic environment...

Then, on Friday, I went to the movies for the first time in over a year, to see "The Backrooms," and it too involved a piling up of furniture in a surrealistic environment....

It's a bit much. A bit meta. Seemingly separate surrealisms are converging. In one week, I'm seeing 2 things playing out so similarly, and I can't think of any other play/movie where the furniture was so important. I didn't set out to experience plentitudinous furniture.

Watching both the the play and the movie and thinking about them afterwards, I thought a lot about whether we were supposed to think of the place as a fantastical external environment that contained the characters or whether it was a depiction of the deteriorating state of a character's mind. 

"I have a message, that's God's truth, I struggle, a mission, I have something to say, a message to communicate to humanity, to mankind"/"To mankind, my darling, your message!"

Said the old man and the old woman in Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play "The Chairs," which we saw last night at American Players' Theater — "A Comedy About the End of It All."

We settled into our chairs before the crowd arrived, and the 93-minute play is about a crowd arriving and settling into the many many chairs dragged onto the stage by the old woman:

"Tasteslop is slop made out of things considered tasteful. It comes in two flavours..."

"... either AI/algorithmically generated content that deploys recognisable taste markers — a brand mood board featuring a designer suitcase, a skinny-neck kettle, a Dieter Rams book — or tasteful things deployed in service of slop, like a curated influencer dinner for a tech company. The key is that the visible signs of taste have been extracted from their original social context and redeployed generically."

Said the trend forecaster Emily Segal, quoted in "The rise of social media ‘tasteslop’ — and how to avoid it/From clothes to interiors, the internet has created good taste as defined by the algorithm. The trend forecaster Emily Segal tells us how to step away" (London Times).

After Segal coined the term it went viral.... [S]he pinpointed a dinner party at a New York restaurant considered to be classy and slender-spouted kettles as slop, and explained why Jennifer Lawrence’s style is too (“she looks more like a shopper/demographic and less like an individual figure”, Segal wrote). Once you see it …

Dieter Rams? Here's Dieter Rams pointing at things he doesn't like:

"In 1968, Janet Malcolm visited a new showroom for high-end furniture that was, she wrote, among 'the most beautiful and interesting' in New York."

"The venue was designed by Warren Platner, an architect who himself designed furniture; Donald Trump would later acquire a set of his chairs, and sounded gratified when, during an interview in 2010, a reporter from the Times recognized them. Platner’s son, Bronson, went into law, in Maine; his son Graham studied at Hotchkiss, a tony boarding school in Connecticut, though he hated it, skipped classes, and was quickly kicked out. Graham transferred to a different private school closer to home, where he starred in a production of 'My Fair Lady.' He played Henry Higgins, the haughty phonetician who teaches a lower-class flower girl to speak proper...."

Those are the opening lines of an essay by Jon Allsop titled "The Changing Face of 'Authenticity' in Politics/What Graham Platner’s scandal-plagued Senate run says about a tired cliché" (The New Yorker).

Here's how Platner entered the political arena, last summer:

Allsop ponders "authenticity":

"All the judgy comments here made me feel like I had accidentally wandered into a thread on Bluesky. For cryin' out loud, relax!"

Ha ha. I agree with that commenter about the comments at "David Sedaris/The humorist on art collecting, interacting with fans and a surprising upside of the Upper East Side" (NYT)(gift link, because there are lots of pictures of David Sedaris in his New York apartment, with all its oddball artwork and enigmatic rugs).

The judgy comments are mostly resentful of Sedaris's wealth and his choice to spend what he has on art and on chairs that seem as if they might be uncomfortable. 

And here's Sedaris's new collection of essays: "The Land and Its People" (commission earned). It came out 5 days ago. I've read it and will read it again and again. I love David Sedaris's voice and his books are, by far, my favorite book to listen to while falling asleep. But this new book won't work for that. It's got loud, aggressive clapping/percussion between the essays.

"Bob would just mow paths through the meadows and put a bench down and just read his book, and probably have a drink."

I'm reading "Sometimes, the Best Way to Explore a Landscape Is to Sit Down/Madoo, in Sagaponack, N.Y., is giving visitors a different way to view a garden, with outdoor seating in a variety of styles and colors" (NYT).

"No one ever believes me when I tell them it’s 1.91 acres.... They always think it’s much, much bigger, because you have all of these little mini-follies and these little windy paths that you get a little bit lost in as if you were in a much larger garden. But you’re not."

Xi is pulling the old chair-rigging power trip.

沙发肯定是特制的，习近平座的沙发明显高过川普的沙发，而川普比习近平身高10厘米，中共在这些细节上处处用尽心机。 pic.twitter.com/qP4ifU8im7

— David Tsai/蔡慎坤 (@cskun1989) May 15, 2026

Reminds me of the time Trump confronted David Letterman. It was December 2, 1987:

"How come this seat is at such a low level? You know, I'm looking at him. He's got this stage rigged, folks.... That seat is a good six inches higher than my seat."

Even better, the dictators cranking up barber chairs in "The Great Dictator" — here.

"Pittsburghers take pride in their practical solutions, especially the quirky ones, such as the 'Pittsburgh chair'..."

"... that we use to save the parking space we shoveled out after a snowstorm. There are folding chairs, barstools, even an occasional upholstered chair — whatever your choice. The chairs are sacrosanct, and they help avoid neighborhood disputes. Or the 'Pittsburgh toilet' that stands alone and unobstructed in the basement of many older working-class homes — porcelain artifacts of when the mills were booming. It made practical sense when the men returned from the mills to wash off the grime in the laundry tubs and finish their business in the basement before going upstairs for their meal. But there has been no easy solution for keeping schools open when an expected 500,000 to 700,000 visitors attend events...."

Writes Duquesne lawprof Joseph Sabino Mistick, in "Schools are closing for the NFL draft. What does this teach students? Pittsburgh prides itself on showing up and working hard. Students should, too" (WaPo).

"A love of dogs is somewhat of a tradition for French leaders: the past six presidents all owned at least one black Labrador."

"The two owned by Nicolas Sarkozy, and a chihuahua, reportedly caused damage totalling tens of thousands of euros at the Élysée Palace by chewing on 200-year-old furniture in the Silver Salon. President Macron’s dog, Nemo, was once filmed urinating on an ornamental fireplace in a presidential meeting, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s was a gift from the late Queen and nicknamed Sandringham Samba...."

From "Can the French love of dogs be transformed into election success? Doggy food banks and shared human-dog drinking fountains are among the promises on offer as candidates for the local elections try to win over voters" (London Times).

Check the reaction that's closest to yours.

What good is culture if you can't piss on it?

Why black Labs? Is it racist? Samba... really?

I want political promises for America's dogs!

It's all about love. Love is the answer.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people."

"It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there."

The quote is from Colin Domnauer, "a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica," quoted in "'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans" (BBC).

Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.... 

In a 1991 paper, two researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences described cases of people in Yunnan Province who had eaten a certain mushroom and experienced "lilliputian hallucinations" – the psychiatric term for the perception of tiny human, animal or fantasy figures....

[O]ther known psychedelic compounds also usually produce idiosyncratic trips that vary not only from person to person but also from one experience to the next within the same individual. With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported", Domnauer says. "I don't know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations."

Do rats see little rats? 

Are there other substances that produce such specific hallucinations?

"There is a reason the world’s gardens are full of benches that nobody ever sits on."

"We aren’t built for leisure or built to relax. Rather, we are built to strive. We still need fulfilling work. The only difference, in retirement, is that we don’t have to worry so much about whether that work comes with a paycheck."

Wrote Jonathan Clements, quoted in "Five Pearls of Wisdom From a Legend of Financial Writing/Jonathan Clements, the longtime Wall Street Journal columnist, died this weekend. Here are some of his best ideas" (NYT).

Speaking of finance, I was just reading: "It was only last summer that women declared they were looking for a man in finance, 6-5, blue eyes. The goal posts appear to have shifted since then. Now, some social media users are extolling the virtues — with varying degrees of sincerity — of settling for a partner to whom they’re not initially attracted. Such a person, the thinking goes, will ultimately treat you better than someone who is more obviously desirable."

That's in "'Shrekking? Intelligence Gaps? When Did We Get So Cruel to Our Lovers? Social media users have coined new, even meaner terms for 'dating down'" (NYT).

"Did I lie? Yup. Did I also write a book that tore people to shreds? Yeah."

Said James Frey, quoted in "Oprah Shamed Him. He’s Back Anyway. Twenty years after 'A Million Little Pieces' became a national scandal, James Frey is ready for a new audience" (NYT)(free-access link).

As Frey sees it, the public has gotten increasingly comfortable with falsehoods, without getting fully comfortable with him. He finds it all a bit absurd. “I just sit in my castle and giggle,” he said.

I'm using my 3rd free link of the month of June on this because I am a long-time admirer of photographs of the interiors of writers' homes. As I wrote 12 years ago: "I love this book, 'Writer's Desk,' with excellent photographs by Jill Krementz (who was married to Kurt Vonnegut) and an introductory essay by John Updike."

I see Frey has an "extra-large mohair Eames chair, which he had custom-made so that he could sit in lotus pose." I identify. I've been buying chairs that accommodate the lotus position since I first bought furniture, which would have been in the 1970s. I wish I still had the chair I bought at Conran's that got me through law school. I'm one of those people who feel more comfortable with my legs folded up. 

Speaking of things written on this blog long ago, I've been around long enough, doing this low-level writerly thing that I do, to have covered the "Million Little Pieces" foofaraw when Oprah was agonizing:

"A bothy is a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge."

"It was also a term for basic accommodation, usually for gardeners or other workers on an estate. Bothies are found in remote mountainous areas of Scotland, Northern England, Ulster and Wales. They are particularly common in the Scottish Highlands, but related buildings can be found around the world...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Bothy," after encountering this word, which I don't remember ever seeing before, in the London Times article "Have William and Kate fallen for ‘west coast bothy frenzy’?It’s never been more fashionable to hole up in the Scottish isles like the Waleses, says Victoria Brzezinski."

Ben Pentreath, head of the architectural and interior design studio of the same name, is widely reported to have assisted the Prince and Princess of Wales... has had a connection with the Scottish west coast since he was a teen.... In 2018 Pentreath and his gardener husband, Charlie McCormick, bought a teeny pair of buildings (a Victorian two-roomed cottage and a much earlier stone bothy) on a sea pink-covered estuary in the far west coast of Scotland. “It really does feel a long way away,” Pentreath says. “Bothies really can’t be more than one or two rooms. And I think we all find romance in living in small places — for a while!”

"Those hours of standing also turned out to have their own downsides, increasing people’s likelihood of developing serious circulatory problems, including varicose veins, abnormally low blood pressure and blood clots..."

"... compared with people who rarely stood.... In theory, being upright should stave off this harm, since it’s the postural opposite of sitting.... But surprisingly little credible science supports all this verticality, and some studies have raised doubts.... [A]s you stand still, blood flows through your legs sluggishly at best and often pools there, potentially contributing to circulatory disease. You also barely raise your heart rate, which is necessary to improve cardiovascular health...."

From "Your standing desk isn’t making you any healthier/A large new study found that standing for more than two hours a day doesn’t protect against the cardiovascular risks of too much sitting" (WaPo).

I have a motorized stand/sit desk. I recommend switching from sitting to standing and from standing to sitting whenever you notice that you feel a bit uncomfortable. Be in touch with your own feelings. 

And by the way, is standing "the postural opposite of sitting"? I was going to say no, but then I remembered...

"And multiple speakers delighted the crowd by alluding to the fabricated viral claim that Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, wrote in his memoir about having sex with furniture."

"'I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said of the GOP ticket on the final night. 'I know a couch commando when I see one,' Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said minutes later. The jabs were just part of a more expansive case against Trump that Democrats laid out over four nights in Chicago. But they reflected a broader shift in tone for Democrats toward a no-holds-barred kind of rhetorical warfare many in the party once eschewed. Eight years after the Philadelphia convention cheered Michelle Obama’s famous line 'When they go low, we go high' — and with Trump still waging a campaign full of personal insults and baseless accusations... some Democrats said they are tired of being polite...."

From "Democrats once strove to ‘go high’ against Trump. Not anymore. This year’s convention culminated recent efforts to needle Trump on topics known to strike a nerve in the former president, with some Democrats saying they are tired of being polite" (WaPo)(free-access link).

This gets my "civility bullshit" tag, which in this case reflects my belief that the old "When they go low, we go high" was just a strategy choice, to be abandoned when it didn't seem effective... or when the low material is tantalizing enough, like that well-upholstered couch that seems be calling out to you.

"Going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight."

Said Michelle Obama, at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.

Quoted in "Walz’s 'couch' quip, and Democrats’ growing comfort in going low/The Democratic VP nominee’s apparent reference to a lewd, fake internet story reflects a more bare-knuckle campaign against a GOP presidential nominee who has spent years plumbing new depths." That's an essay by Aaron Blake, at WaPo.

It gets my "civility bullshit" tag, because civility has been advocated in the past, and Democrats are in a phase where they see an entitlement to reject it.

This also gets my "masturbation" tag. Who would have predicted that Democrats would lean heavily into masturbation shaming? It's 30 years since Bill Clinton fired Jocelyn Elders!

"The 25 Most Defining Pieces of Furniture From the Last 100 Years."

"Three designers, a museum curator, an artist and a design-savvy actress convened at The New York Times to make a list of the most enduring and significant objects for living."

It's the 29th day of the month, but I still have 1 — and only 1 — free access link to the New York Times to give to you: HERE! 

#1 is the original beanbag chair, the Sacco chair.

#3 is something I actually have: the Le Corbusier Chaise Longue à Réglage Continu. The designers say things like "it addresses how our bodies are meant to sit" and "it’s also comfortable," and that's what I thought looking at it, but the truth is, I almost never sit/recline in it. It doesn't properly take account of how the body sits. Do you want your arms hanging over the edges, like Alexander the Great in his coffin?

Check out the whole list — I bet you have #15 — all on one page, with lots of pictures and explanations.

I want #21 — "Yes, they’re little peens."

Laughed out loud at #22.

Possibly the best furniture article. Better than an entire coffeetable book... about coffeetables (and other tables and chairs and sofas).

"At a Dumbo company warehouse recently in East Orange, N.J., on an industrial stretch opposite a cemetery..."

"... a crew of workers was preparing to jettison the last of a 9,500-pound office lot that a Brooklyn tech company had had in storage since April 2021.... [T]he client paid for the disposal of, among other things: 25 Herman Miller chairs; 20 computer monitor stands; 10 cubicle panels; nine boxes of carpet; and two flat-screen TVs. 'The amount of waste in this industry would boggle your mind,' said... the owner of... a refurbishing company and liquidator.... In a choppy motion, the mouth of the excavator swung over the half-ton pile of furniture and chomped down, contorting the chairs into a dangly metal cephalopod."

From "The Afterlife of Forlorn Office Furniture/Some office furniture in the New York City area has been caught in pandemic limbo. What happens to it if no one really wants it?"

"Generally speaking, the best you can hope for in Horizon Worlds is the kind of aimless if well-intentioned chat you might get on a smoke break outside the work canteen."

"There’s usually a lot of talk about where people are from, of the 'I used to live in X, but now I live in Y' variety. That said, the unlovable lo-fi graphics and interpersonal randomness can give Horizon Worlds a kind of a perverse, bockety charm. Unlike Twitter or Instagram, there’s no scope to broadcast your brand here; everybody’s just thrown together, like at a ’90s music festival with no music. Plus the metaverse is the one place I don’t look at my phone every five seconds. There’s no option but to be present. I meet some nice people, particularly at A Very British Pub. BusinessAlum has bright-yellow, strawlike hair and speaks in a high, reedy voice, as if he’s just dropped in from Sesame Street. 'I used to live in Quincy! But the commute was so bad! And the snow! Ten feet of snow in a week! I fell and broke my back! Now I live in Florida!'"

I'm reading "Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland" by Paul Murray (NY Magazine).

Nice to run into that because I was just wondering if anyone was using Metaverse... and I was just trying — 2 posts down — to start a conversation about conversation.

Plus, I learned a new word: "bockety." This is an Irish English word. (Murray grew up in Dublin.) Used to refer to a person, "bockety" means able to walk only with difficulty. Of a thing, such as Horizon Worlds, "bockety" means rickety and ramshackle. I found these definitions in the OED, which points to the words use in this story by Sean O’Faolain, "The Sugawn Chair" (The Atlantic).