Where perfection goes, nonsense is sure to follow

Rescue from Domestic Perfection: The Not-So Secrets of Balancing Life and Style
by Dan Ho

With slogans such as "Life over Style" and "Real life is gorgeous, makeovers not allowed," Dan Ho plans to save the DIY audience from home-improvement magazines and home makeover shows by emphasizing self-expression and individualism - not a prescripted formula for a showroom perfect dwelling.

Ho's philosophy is "gai," translated from the Chamorro language as "is there now" or "be here now." His easy, humorous tone makes the text extremely accessible and fun to read. Every aspect of domestic life is addressed - cooking (with chapters like "Plate it Forward"); gardening ("Basic Garden Thinking"), entertaining ("Emphasis Entertain"); decorating, cleaning, organizing, and maintenance ("Pantries, Plastic, and Storage," "Closets," "Style from the 'Hood"); and of course, simply being.

His theory about "The Seven Enslaving Myths," drives home the mission of the book - to liberate readers from the deluge of lifestyle gurus, TV shows, home magazines, and innumerable other things that portray an impossible standard of so-called perfection and an absurd obsession with "designer crap," all at the expense of true, expressive style. Ho wants us all to relax, embrace individualism, and keep life in balance.

And style ain't nowhere to be seen, neither.

I'm hardly a statistician, nor does this book purport to present the results of some major study on useless junk as it exists in America's homes. Still, I'm willing to bet that the average person reading this book (or one who has ventured into the aisle in the bookstore where it is located) has some collection of scented candles, vases, or glue-gun sticks that are doing little else but gathering dust. Stuff that'll probably never come out of its dark corners except for a once-in-a-blue-moon appearance for a never-to-be-had-again reason - in other words, that perfect moment.

One of the curiosities of our contemporary lifestyle is the glaringly huge disconnect that exists between what we know and how we live. Take baking, for example. We know that buying flour in bulk saves money, time, and energy - so we do it. Yet we have little, if any, hesitation about wantonly disregarding the gain from this knowledge by spending more money, time, and energy putting that flour into some container that conveniently matches the sugar jar, pasta jar, and bean jar. Then, to accomodate the display potential of said containers, we appropriate even more money, time, and energy to procure merchandising-appropriate cabinets, drawers, and countertops. And so it goes: the appliances require a certain look and quality; all of a sudden your perfectly fine plastic measuring cups seem wrong, and in march the new stainless-steel ones. One day you encounter grilled bread, and your life and its accoutrements change again. You spend days, weeks, maybe months, finding the right bread-grilling tools. Someone (bless them) gifts you with the perfect bread knife - the kind the bakers at Poilane in Paris use. But what becomes of the old bread knife? Furthermore, the new one doesn't fit in the knife block. Witness how a seemingly small perfection turns into a mountain of nonsense.

Mercifully, you're too busy giving away holiday gifts of homemade Linzer tortes to worry about it (although you make a mental note: "Gotta find a new knife block"). The twistedly organic thought comes to mind: there's no such thing as patisserie cards and gift wrap. So you outfit a craft kit and load up on the card stock and ribbons in order to properly present the fruits of your labor and give evidence that you know how to buy flour cheaply.

Of course, at this point a craft room is inevitable (as though it were remotely logical that baking would beget a space entirely devoted to creating disposable mementos). You can't help but envision a wall of perfectly sized cubbyholes for your glorious paperie but fail to ponder the effects of the Atkins and South Beach diets on your mini-industry. Nobody wants your pastry anymore ?the flour is killing them. What do you do? Switch to beef jerky, starting off with bulk beef buys and a walk-in meat locker? Oy. Vey.

The cycle of perfection is unending. Worse, it is downright insidious. How'd you get from baking to craft room? Did it begin because a financial guru said that buying in bulk saves money? Was it because you liked the way sugar looked in jars at Williams-Sonoma? Be very aware: when people lose their singularly distinct personal resonances with objects in their lives, the latter become irrelevant. This is sad but true.

For the record, I personally have nothing against things that don't end. Yet the constant pursuit of lifestyle perfection has no payoff that accompanies it. Love gets you compassion, and a healthy heart gives you longevity. The perfect set of dining-room chairs offers, at best, a fleeting satisfaction - let's face it, they're only going to be perfect as long as nothing changes. And so here lies the essential problem with the notion of perfection: it is unmoving, inanimate, incapable of evolution.

Life, alas, is entirely about change: fabrics and paint pigments fade, roofs leak, carpets and floors get stained. In fact, dining tables as a concept have gone in and out of fashion at least twice in my adult life. When you pursue the trappings of a home where you can cook, entertain, and garden perfectly, you get zilch. You don't even get style - there, I said it.

Perfection is a cheap caricature of style, which is why committing to it is nonsense. You can fill your home with things every decorating diva has deemed must-have; you can cook all your food in the manner of celebrity chefs; you can edge your perennial borders in a manner that emulates that of the chief groundskeeper at Kew Gardens. But these will all be pointless style exercises unless and until you understand what style really means. It is my hope that you will gain that understanding in this book.

Rest assured, this ain't no makeover. The first place to start is inside - rather than worrying about how things look, coordinate, taste, and smell, simply start thinking about who you are inside. If you can do this much, I promise you will be well on your way to true style.

Copyright © 2006 by Dan Ho

About the Author

Dan Ho is the publisher and creator of Rescue magazine and has been called "the anti-Martha" by Time magazine and USA Today. Ho will have a series on Discovery Health network, as well as four one-hour specials.