Absolutely Fabulous, Season two, Episode five, “New Best Friend”.
SO, I am at that age when many of my friends think they can change their whole lives by trading in their cluttered apartments and houses for spare, modernist lofts. Their difficult, incomprehensible lives will somehow be streamlined and managed by stripping it all down. Oh how the weight of things holds us down, how it keeps us from happiness, and from succeeding! When we live, travel, work, explore, fall in and out of love, have things grow and die, we pick up these things along the way: it’s terrible, this detritus of our lives. This trash is putting enormous unseen pressures on us, imposing on us a sense of constant acceleration, of incoherence, of the imminent obsolescence of the individual. In short, History itself is a weight that we have to try to climb out from under.
Good thing it’s a NEW YEAR and we are in the eternal return of the common hostility to “clutter”, the collective paroxysm of guilt and anxiety about our “stuff,” the tyranny of the tidy. Books called things like Spark Joy! An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up or “The Life-Changing Magic of Japanese Art of Pants Folding”. Are shoved up our asses, inciting guilt and shame at our messy, undignified lives. Magazines offer formulas for how to rid yourself of your evil stuff (most of which involve buying new stuff). Entire companies have been built around the propaganda of divestment, on the backs of a neurosis that makes us believe that the process of shedding is necessary and complicated to the point of paralyzing.
My 2016 Guide to DeCluttering
Start at the top – The Freezer
Time to tidy up that frozen crap box at the top of your fridge. Toss those popsicles, that Trader Joes halibut, those frozen peas. Take out that Jolly Green bags of old fashioned crap, pour em straight into your garbage disposal and hit the switch. Where you’re going you’re not going to need those peas.
Kitchen Cabinets
Toss your space-hogging cans of soup, that spaghetti and those boxes of macaroni and cheese, then toss out all your pots and pans and utensils. You can live on neat and tidy snacks from 7-11 until you die
Your Home Office
Your home office’s clutter culprits are your desk, your desk chair, your computer, your printer and all the ancillary traces of labor (paper and stuff). Nobody really knows what to do with this kind of stuff, so just hoist it all into the back of your car and drive it somewhere – I don’t care where, the LA River, whatever – at night and unload it. Run like hell.
Your Bathroom
Your bathroom is a revolting hellhole positively filled with junk you do. Not. Need. These include soap, Band-Aids, half used tubes of Neosporine, your toothbrush. Stop being so fckng vain. Your personal hygiene is not more important than a clean, streamlined expanse of tiled counter. Things to keep: hostile faucetry, blinding fluorescents and vicious, exposed ductwork.
Your Bookshelves
Face it. Most people’s bookshelves hold unsightly books they’re never even going to read. Make a pile of these books on your front lawn, then douse them in some Matchlite and light the entire mess on fire. And tell the “PC Police” to kindly fuck off.
Your Dining Room
Your dining room is where you have dinner parties for your friends and other people. Don’t humiliate yourself with your shameful, messy materialism. Since you will be only eating from 7-11 from now on, you don’t need this stuff anyway. Throw all your dishes into your fireplace in dramatic fashion.
Your Bedroom
You want your bedroom to a calm oasis – a retreat from the stresses of the outside world. You want it to be like a hotel room – spare, sparse and colorless. Pick up each object in your bedroom that isn’t beige or puce, and throw it out the fckng window.
Your Closet
This is probably the most indulgent, disgusting space in your disgusting home. Dump it all on the BBQ and light it up. An empty closet is a good closet.
Your Yard
Your yard should be a flat expanse of plain brown dirt or maybe stones. Plants sprouting up? Rip em out. Overrun by birds and bugs? Gather them up in the dustbin and toss them over the fence into your neighbor’s disgusting yard.
Your Living Room
This is your hanging out space, so you want it to say: I have control over my home and my entire life. Hide your prescription bottles! LOL! You don’t want to make anyone too comfortable. Think: Puritanical discomfort. Consider swapping out your comfy sofa for an austere, back-breaking bench with straight clean lines. Your sofa should feel no more comfortable than a church pew (prior to the Protestant Reformation – before they had backs). If you have an easy chair or settee, think third-class railway carriage.
Severe right angles and flat planes win the day. Decorate only in black and white and gray .Rip out any existing molding – a fussy, dust-collecting artifact that is out-of-place in homes and apartments inspired by Dwell magazine. Tile over that old growth wood and rip out those annoying built-ins that you can’t even move. By all means get rid of any inanimate object that makes you feel oppressed. Concrete floors are good. Your space should represent stage-set modernism, “a flat without a past”. That means NO family heirlooms to spoil the effect. Toss away family photos, especially of anyone who is dead. Only a spare assemblage of modernist items specifically purchased to suit the room. Sentimentality represents nothing less than an attack on American national character.
Your Curb Appeal
Look at your house from the street. Do you see clean lines and nothing in sight? That’s the “IT” factor. Limit the color palette to the starkest neutrals – beige or grey, maybe a pop of tangerine or Silver Lake (olive drab) green. Remember, you want to give away nothing of yourself to the outside world. If you live in a midcentury California bungalow that has been converted into a Dwell-proud depression den, you are halfway there. Your massive weird box casual and funky home already sits starkly on its barren plot, its blank façade and weird gravel yard shoved into everyone’s faces brilliantly merging inside and out. This is what you want to convey: antisocial while deliberately attention-grabbing. You can still say it retains its essential character even if you’ve ripped out its walls, tripled its square footage and redone every visible surface in a new shape and material. You may have a fence of unpainted, horizontal wood slats, sans serif street number and red door, maybe recessed lights.
Spouse
Take a long, hard look and ask yourself if this person honestly warrants the real estate he/she is taking up.
Children
Children are disgusting, malodorous blobs, the opposite of modernism no matter what kind of clothes you put on them, pack them off to a less codified family.
Pets
Like your revolting children, pets are messy and rarely have sleek clean lines. Drop them off at your local ASPCA for some bohemian lesbian couple to adopt. Your empty spaces of your floor will thank you. Exception made for a Vizsla.
Plants
If you must, make it a cactus – its obliging habits suited to the long absences of their owners which is part of modern life, a backdrop that frames the owner but demands nothing.
Dispel any ideas about coziness, comfort, history and life. Efficiency is beauty. Good luck.