Dear Pottery Barn,

Do you know how much I hate you alltimes, the things I want to do to you? I want to stick pins in your eyes for that letters-and-numbers-cum-wall-decoration trend, which wasn’t enough for you, since you’re now plundering the world of punctuation. I want to rip your shriveled balls off for you, so you can sell them in ebony-stained shadow boxes as folksy artwork. I hate the fact that, due to your reign, millions of stupid families everywhere made black-and-white enlargements of their photographs and hung them in gallery frames in gagful fucking symmetry behind their overstuffed couches. I hate those scroll-y iron votive wall things that are shorthand for “global style.” I hate global.

I hate a decorative birdcage with a plant inside it. I hate flatware shaped like twigs. Or a lampbase shaped like a twig. I hate those seagrass baskets neatly tucked into bookcases across the land. I hate brick red: it’s indisputably the ugliest color in the world. I want to reach down your throat, into your lungs, and crush each alveolus one by one. I hate the reductivist thinking of your sycophantic art directors. “Hey guys, put down your lattes–how about we style the Logan Full Media Suite wall unit ($2699.00) with olde-timey movie projectors and still cameras!”

Get it?

I hate the elitist/faux-elitist/elitist assumptions in your copy:

One of the most memorable things about visiting Paris is having a café au lait at an authentic French café. We’ve always loved the traditional French caféware [sic] printed with black menus and recipes, and have adapted that style here….The coffee pot and mugs are imprinted with the words Café, Established 1986.

Hey, Pottery Barn! 1986 sucked.

Your problem is that everything has to be wacky, or funky, or whimsical, or quirky, my four most-despised word-concepts. Like the way you turn the spines of all these books so they’re facing the wall? Yerk. The wider shot in the catalog reveals that on that bedside table, in addition to the olde-timey radio propped up on a stack of backwards-facing books, and the glass pot of tea, are a giant ball of moss and an open carton of Chinese food. We’re so funky we sometimes eat Chinese in bed!

OVERSIZED CLOTHESPINS. Our whimsical clothespins look like sculptural elements on the wall or tabletop.

“Sculptural elements.” Remember when pretension was the privilege of the upper classes? I miss those days, Barn. Now, thanks in great part to your efforts, it’s not only the privilege but the domain and the right of the resolutely middle-class, the middle-mind, the suburban deathmill. The soccer mom who takes hip-hop aerobics on M/W afternoons, the dude in finance who eases into his Manhattan chair ($1499) at the end of a long day. Don’t worry, there’s room on the overstuffed ottoman ($799) for everybody’s feet! Just make sure you move that darling film reel canister ($29) out of the way–after all, each “eye-catching” replica is “the perfect collectible for a film connoisseur.”

Hate,
Left Hook

p.s. Do you know how many empty film cans we used to throw out, every fucking day, when I worked as a negative matcher? They were GARBAGE. How about you dig around in our nation’s landfills for them, instead of making “replicas.”

by Left Hook | 3 February 2007 | rant | Comments