(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. I doubt I will employ subscriptions here, but if you like the newsletter and want to buy me a treat, you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. I encourage all my readers to share with whomever might be interested. Today’s post will feature my reviews of people’s chairs I sourced yesterday afternoon while staring into the middle distance and trying to figure out what I should write about this week. This post went over the email limit— there’s a link at the bottom if you wanna read the whole thing. I will spare you an introduction and get straight to the chairs.)
Very biased here, because I have been to the space where Conor’s new bar is-- it’s not a bar until people are in it, if you ask me-- and Conor is my friend and I wish nothing but success for him in this and all of his endeavors. Also he is recently divorced and if this bar breaks bad in any way me and his other friends might have to send him to a divorced man gulag to get him straightened out. If this thing doesn’t work, I might have to watch him get in a fight with a trash can he is calling “Family court judge.” I also know the lengths that Conor has gone to get chairs for this bar: one time, I posted a picture of some chairs I saw on a lawn in NW Portland to Instagram, and Conor messaged me back in ten minutes time, asking me where the chairs were (I had forgotten, he did not acquire the chairs). Already, so early in this exercise, my critical eye is compromised. But we don’t choose our perspectives, folks. They choose us.
I like the stool. Ornate carving on the legs, a rich, warm color, fun bird claws on the feet (the bottom of a leg is a foot). It even appears to swivel, and if you’re asking me, a teetotaler with ADHD a therapist I recently spoke to described as “Severe,” nothing passes the time better when you’re sitting at a bar where you can’t drink like swiveling around on a spinny stool. Maybe you even do a 360, for whimsy’s sake. Good chair.
The other chair? I like the bronze tacks, but I’m a heftier fella and that seat back looks like a cage. If I are a whole cake while sitting in that chair I might end up reforming into it. I would be The Chairman, now.
This is a nice chair for a living room you never use, but sitting in this for a work-quantity of hours? Hunched over a little keyboard? While your imperious boss stalks through the cubicles, conspicuously heavy and loud breathing, running his long spindly fingers over flat surfaces, looking at the dust through his small glasses perched on the end of his long crooked nose, pinching his fingers, rubbing them together, taking the little clump of dust and hand moisture and inconspicuously eating it, daring his underlings to say shit? I just don’t think this chair is gonna give you the support you need for that kind of daily psychic assault.
Not really, but I'm game. My legs are a little too long and beefy for one of these, makes me feel a little clotty, but Rachelle is MUCH smaller than me so I’m sure it works for her. Sometimes when I think for five seconds before I meditate, I will put a rubber inflatable one of these under my butt, to encourage circulation in a cross legged position, but I could never live this life in a more permanent way. This review is too subjective. I do like the little white crosses on the fabric but I’m not crazy about the blue. Lemme get something a little peppier, colorwise!
What the fuck is this shit? Denies comfort, looks like a robot. Chairs should have some degree of organic quality. These are pure machine, but not efficient. They are the IBM Datamaster of chairs. Spiritually derelict and ass busting all at once. I reject them outright.
I can’t stress this enough: these are horrible. They swivel, which is nice, but:
Look at the shape that emerges from the center back of these things. Does this look like an attractive shape to you? A slim hourglass with a big top and a small bottom? This shape is both not of nature (Tell me a flower or a tree that is slim at the bottom, narrow more in the middle, and splays out a little at the top.) or elegant in a minimalist, even curve kind of way. It’s the kind of shape you put into the back of your chairs when you’re just sitting around with your thumb up your ass, trying to figure out a shape you haven't already put in your chairs before. Pure nonsense. The other shapes, built to slot into this central nightmare shape, are also oblong and inelegant, pure fart energy. Glossy black is a shitty color for nearly anything and especially for a chair. Horrible, just fucking awful. Buy some matted paint, it’s 2021.
Grimy aesthetic, putting out some powerful “I found these at the dump and restored them with lacquer” vibes. Can only make a full judgement if I see the piece in its proper context. If the whole crib is hanging low and slow, a of place where you and the boys can kick back with an XBox and a crush a few GamerFuelBombs while you bring the bullets to Master Chief, these chairs are pretty tight. Any other context? Tacky. The Gold 49ers starter jacket draped on the back of the background chair implies the former, so I gotta give these guys props.
Like the chair in the abstract, even if the color is a little hard to match and a worn out seat on pleather is not attractive in any context. The footrest makes no sense to me. Or is it a stool? It might be a rollie stool. It’s probably a rollie stool. I feel like if I sat on it as a stool it would put too much pressure on my butthole and I don't like that. Speaking of buttholes, that weird deconstructed yoga ball thing looks like a buttplug. That design is only acceptable if you put it in a sex deungon.
Ugly and uncomfortable. Why are there holes on the armrests? Like a peek-a-boo shoulder but on a chair. I hate peek-a-boo shoulders: they don’t make any sense as a flattering garment or a utilitarian one. “I love it when someone shows off a part of their shoulder shaped like a piece of pie” is something the world’s biggest pervert would say. Overthrow all bosses because they believe it’s acceptable to give their employees chairs like this.
Not maximally comfortable, but the color is so slick that I don’t care. Really goes with that rug. The person who shared this expressed some disconsertion about their wallpaper: I think the time has come and floral wallpaper has become a precious, kitschy-but-tasteful object. Excellent wood paneling, as well. I celebrate this whole setup.
I shouldn’t let people get two bites at my precious mind apple, but I just needed to say, this chair on the right looks like it will break if you make love on it, and the second one is too square for an upholstered piece. Cotton wants to be curved.
I’ve never enjoyed a mesh back chair as a sitting experience. Doesn’t conform to my back. I don’t like it when my chair pushes me. Honestly I’m a yoga ball in the office guy, so maybe my take on this might just be useless to a normal person.
Replacement level chair, acceptable for sitting at your kitchen table and sipping on some soup while flipping through a fashion magazine. I am concerned about the placement of this guy’s fire alarm, though. If your house is on fire, and you need to stand on a WOODEN chair to reach the alarm? That thing is gonna burn, collapse, and leave you sprawled out on your back, turned into fuel for the oncoming flames. Please, sir, deal with this before you are burned to death.
Dorm room ass chair. When you sit on this, Fight Club plays on the nearest TV and your crush starts holding hands with another person on the love seat across the room. This chair brings only torment and hatred. Drive this piece of shit to the dump.
I can’t see the back of this chair, so I can’t review it. I think the color on the upholstery is hideous, though. Out of control 2005 color selection. Send this vinyl swatch back to the war on terror.
This fuckin’ guy, getting in my mentions to flex about his five thousand dollar chair. I couldn’t remember what this thing was called, so I ran a generalized Google search to try and narrow it down…
…and Google was like “Oh yeah we know EXACTLY the chair you’re talking about no problem bro.”
Okay look: it’s a modernist classic, beautiful silhouette, fits in nearly any room, and I’ve personally sat in one (I live the lush life) and it was comfy as hell. Does owning it throw something out about you, make people assume you’re the kind of person who looks at stuff and says “Design excellence?” Yeah, absolutely. But that’s NOT THE CHAIR’S FAULT. It’s society’s fault, for getting you to associate this beautiful, widely manufactured piece with taking a midday nap while you listen to a podcast where a whispery voiced person tells you an anecdote about birds through a pair of Grado SR80s. But who am I to deny society?
Spare thought: I bet smoking weed in this bad boy is a choice experience. Kids are asleep and you prop your dogs on this footrest and light a fatty spliff? Baby, that right there is the kind of modern living that would have convinced Kaczynski that human existence DIDN’T fall off when we discovered agriculture.
I don’t care for sitting on leather, personally, but this right here is a fat boy and I respect the shit out of it. I don’t quite know why Michelle Obama’s book is standing up on the trunk, positioned so she is smiling at you 24/7, but I’m just here to review the chair.
Impossible to have sex on this chair which is a mark against it, but I admire the sheer brutality of this whole scene. This is a chair that says “Hey, you: you need a hard surface because you have to drill a hole into something. I am not your friend but I WILL keep you stable so you can drill that hole.” Complete lack of sentimentality in this chair.
This is a time out chair. It was built for a bad, evil child, tucking their horrible little nose into a corner. The stains, a clear sign of age, imply the ownership of an adult, a stern adult, whose desire to show love to their child has been blurred with a nonstop craving for some degree of order in their lives. They can’t tell one from another anymore. A hug has become a punishing act, yelling “FUCK” after stepping on a LEGO transmuted into nostalgic, poetic affection. This chair has horrible energy.
I have actually sat in this chair before, so I can review it from lived experience.
Here is how I feel about it: it’s not for me. My friend Tasha is like 5’ 1”, and this chair was built in a lab for her. You can even see where it is dented and warped, totally surrendered to her self, plopping down in it night after night, to watch YET ANOTHER episode of Frasier (Tasha watches Frasier a lot: you don’t know this because you don’t know her, but I DO know her so I do know this.). It’s just too small for my giant limbs. But I respect what it means to Tasha. This chair is like a beloved, trashy teddy bear from her childhood, but if you could sit in the teddy bear. Like Fraiser’s dad’s chair, in a way.
A LOT to break down here. First off, it’s perverse for Spike to post a nude picture of his dog, Edgar. Look at poor Edgar, shivering in the harsh Sacramento chill, looking at the camera and whimpering “Please… clothe me…” Revolting action.
Second: this office chair is just way too much. I have already talked about how I am not fond of mesh backs as a seating experience, but they usually look okay. The back of this chair looks like a PlayStation 3 tucked away in the back of a sex club. Terrible.
The third chair is pure Ikea-core but the blanket is nice. If I’m Spike, I throw this fucking thing in a DUMP and get myself a nice, Tasha Norton Style Fraiser’s Dad Chair, sit in it, and set that blanket on my lappitty lap. I’m not an infamous anhedonist like he is, though.
Nice chair for eating dinner but.. Is that your laptop, there, Louis Keane? You’re working in this thing? Treat yourself better than this, old friend. I’m weeping over here.
I’m done writing this now. I thought the new Hawkeye was pretty good.