![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"Junque Mail"
As usual I'm not really sure where this is going. Credit to Don Hutton for the anecdote at the beginning.
It’s not as though I’m unaware of the trope of the Mysterious Little Curiosity Shop. I was walking down an empty street late one night when I saw a lit-up store window full of antique mechanical puppets; I actually said out loud: “You must think I’ve never read a story in my life.” And I crossed to the other side of the street and walked on.
But in the office lunchroom, my guard was down. So when I was without a book one day, and I saw a stack of new catalogues on the kitchen counter, I picked up the top one, and noticed they were all from the same company: H.H. Furnishings, Ltd.
It was the sort of faux-antique, faux-exotic décor that my friend Angie had once referred to as “junque.” We were at a party at the time. “This, Petal,” she had declared to me, picking up a carved wooden Buddha, “is exactly what’s wrong with all us white people.”
“Um -- you’re Buddhists?”
“Sometimes. But my point is --” she set the Buddha back down, a bit clumsily; we were both several drinks into the party, “We’ve got no cool history or culture of our own; so we feel the need to steal everyone else’s.”
I wasn’t going to let that stand, so I pointed out that You White People have exactly as much history and culture as everyone else does; the problem being that at least in North America you don’t want to talk about it. Except when you do. And that come to think of it I wasn’t even sure I accepted the initial premise of her argument, because wasn’t she the one always complaining that her parents make a hobby of being Irish descendants and how she barely escaped being named Siobhan?
I don’t recall her answer to that one.
Anyway, the H.H. Furnishings, Ltd. catalogue was still better than nothing, so I leafed through it on my break. The top catalogue was labelled “Plein-air entertainments” -- garden furniture sets, attractive enough in their way though horrifically expensive. Still, I supposed, if someone could afford them, and they were as high-quality as they claimed, why not? As I turned the pages, though, I found myself experiencing a form of disquiet. At first I thought it was the pervasive neutrality of the unbleached-canvas chair cushions, but gradually I came to feel it centred on the backdrops behind the products on show. Though the copy called them garden furniture, only one set of table and chairs was shown in an actual garden – and it was a rank, untended courtyard that might once have grown herbs. On another page, a couple of recliners were half-buried in a sand-dune as waves licked at the empty beach behind them. A table with an umbrella was set up on an alkali flat, space receding to infinity all around. A Southern-Italian-looking landscape of rolling hills, idyllic at first glance, proved fallow and empty of life, or even roads, the only sign of human habitation a dining table with six empty chairs, placed upon a hilltop. No -– on closer inspection I caught another detail: faintly visible in a corner of the picture just above the page number was a wire fence.
I tried another catalogue -- this one was simply titled: Objets. The contents looked like someone had picked through the trash bins behind Citizen Kane’s Xanadu: “Actual French military correspondence, lovingly recreated in facsimile, down to the water-marks and the coffee-stains.” Well, except presumably the original letters hadn’t been poster-sized. It would have been hell on the carrier pigeons. The third catalogue, ’Interieure’, by far the thickest, only got stranger. First off, they seemed to me to have gone way overboard with the “distressed finish” on the wood surfaces. Their chairs looked like stuff I’d found washed up on the Trinidad beaches when I visited my relatives as a kid.There’s “well-loved antique” and then there’s “left outdoors for fifty years and then thrown over a cliff.” H.H. Furnishings, Ltd. was definitely leaning towards post-apocalyptic chic.
As usual I'm not really sure where this is going. Credit to Don Hutton for the anecdote at the beginning.
It’s not as though I’m unaware of the trope of the Mysterious Little Curiosity Shop. I was walking down an empty street late one night when I saw a lit-up store window full of antique mechanical puppets; I actually said out loud: “You must think I’ve never read a story in my life.” And I crossed to the other side of the street and walked on.
But in the office lunchroom, my guard was down. So when I was without a book one day, and I saw a stack of new catalogues on the kitchen counter, I picked up the top one, and noticed they were all from the same company: H.H. Furnishings, Ltd.
It was the sort of faux-antique, faux-exotic décor that my friend Angie had once referred to as “junque.” We were at a party at the time. “This, Petal,” she had declared to me, picking up a carved wooden Buddha, “is exactly what’s wrong with all us white people.”
“Um -- you’re Buddhists?”
“Sometimes. But my point is --” she set the Buddha back down, a bit clumsily; we were both several drinks into the party, “We’ve got no cool history or culture of our own; so we feel the need to steal everyone else’s.”
I wasn’t going to let that stand, so I pointed out that You White People have exactly as much history and culture as everyone else does; the problem being that at least in North America you don’t want to talk about it. Except when you do. And that come to think of it I wasn’t even sure I accepted the initial premise of her argument, because wasn’t she the one always complaining that her parents make a hobby of being Irish descendants and how she barely escaped being named Siobhan?
I don’t recall her answer to that one.
Anyway, the H.H. Furnishings, Ltd. catalogue was still better than nothing, so I leafed through it on my break. The top catalogue was labelled “Plein-air entertainments” -- garden furniture sets, attractive enough in their way though horrifically expensive. Still, I supposed, if someone could afford them, and they were as high-quality as they claimed, why not? As I turned the pages, though, I found myself experiencing a form of disquiet. At first I thought it was the pervasive neutrality of the unbleached-canvas chair cushions, but gradually I came to feel it centred on the backdrops behind the products on show. Though the copy called them garden furniture, only one set of table and chairs was shown in an actual garden – and it was a rank, untended courtyard that might once have grown herbs. On another page, a couple of recliners were half-buried in a sand-dune as waves licked at the empty beach behind them. A table with an umbrella was set up on an alkali flat, space receding to infinity all around. A Southern-Italian-looking landscape of rolling hills, idyllic at first glance, proved fallow and empty of life, or even roads, the only sign of human habitation a dining table with six empty chairs, placed upon a hilltop. No -– on closer inspection I caught another detail: faintly visible in a corner of the picture just above the page number was a wire fence.
I tried another catalogue -- this one was simply titled: Objets. The contents looked like someone had picked through the trash bins behind Citizen Kane’s Xanadu: “Actual French military correspondence, lovingly recreated in facsimile, down to the water-marks and the coffee-stains.” Well, except presumably the original letters hadn’t been poster-sized. It would have been hell on the carrier pigeons. The third catalogue, ’Interieure’, by far the thickest, only got stranger. First off, they seemed to me to have gone way overboard with the “distressed finish” on the wood surfaces. Their chairs looked like stuff I’d found washed up on the Trinidad beaches when I visited my relatives as a kid.There’s “well-loved antique” and then there’s “left outdoors for fifty years and then thrown over a cliff.” H.H. Furnishings, Ltd. was definitely leaning towards post-apocalyptic chic.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-06-08 02:25 am (UTC)From:It *claimed* to be the headquarters of some hand puppet troupe that had patented new innovations in portable puppet stages.