"He has an apartment with pure white walls and a living room with about 4,000 watts worth of R-30 spotlights encased in white cannisters [sic] suspended from ceiling tracks and a set of Corbusier bentwoods, which no one ever sits in because they catch you like a karate chop in the small of the back but which remain on the premises because they are in the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He has a set of Mies van der Rohe S-shaped tubular-steel cane-bottomed dining-room chairs, which are among the most famous chairs of the twentieth century but also among the most disastrously designed, so that at least one guest always pitches face forward into the lobster bisque." —Tom Wolfe, "The Secret Heart of the New York Culturatus," in his book In Our Time, which I scored last night at Half-Price Books on Northwest Highway for $3.

Note to Tom: I have those Mies chairs — and you're right. But they're staying. You can have the lobster bisque, though. I hate seafood as much as you hate my chairs.