One of the things that blows my mind about the Cosby thing is just how unconcerned everyone seemed to be about it. Cosby himself did not seem to understand the seriousness of it when he openly admitted to what he'd done. And there were dozens of people who knew but said nothing. It's exactly what people mean by rape culture.
1: I thought the way Jill Scott apologized for her prior support after the recent details came out was exactly what should happen. It was hard for me to believe anyone would still believe him in the allegations coming out last fall(?) but it's nice to see people being swayed by actual evidence!
I think our house is shiny maple. Anyway, when the revolution comes, people with strong opinions about wood finishes probably won't wind up against the wall, but they'll have trouble convincing anybody that having such opinions counts for much in terms of "from each according to their abilities." Collective farming will be good for them.
And even if my house if flat maple, which it might be because we never really polish anything, I still feel the same.
We ordered some espresso-tinted furniture just last week. Partially because our house has a "modern" (as in 70s) design and an off-white/off-black high contrast look suits it. I should have known this was me being concerned about macho-ness somehow.
"No wood looks like this; you need to paint it black instead of you don't want it to look natural" is a bizarre argument. I don't think we're fooling anyone by using a stain.
Google Deep Dream on porn is as fascinating as it is disturbing. Or more disturbing than fascinating. Long live the new flesh!
One of the things that blows my mind about the Cosby thing is just how unconcerned everyone seemed to be about it. Cosby himself did not seem to understand the seriousness of it when he openly admitted to what he'd done. And there were dozens of people who knew but said nothing.
It's almost like things that were once seen as normal are now not seen as normal. Look at the Kim Fowley story. Look at how about half of the lyrics to KISS songs from the 70s are about giving underage girls Quaaludes and having sex with them.
Yeah, I'm going to lose the point of this story because I can't remember the book. But Sally was reading some perfectly normal piece of twentieth century fiction, and raised some romantic interaction as really, wildly creepy. And it honestly was, by current standards, but honestly wasn't meant to be in the context of the book, and the book wasn't that old -- maybe something from the seventies?
This is maddening, because I can't remember the specifics, but it was a very odd moment of flipping perspectives, because the thing she was raising would never have struck me as questionable in the context of the book and the period unless I was consciously combing through it for disturbing consent issues.
Look at how about half of the lyrics to KISS songs from the 70s are about giving underage girls Quaaludes and having sex with them.
Is that actually true? I believe the only KISS lyric I know is "I want to rock n' roll all day/ And party every night"
I'm not sure I knew, or in fact believe, that there's a difference between "espresso stain" and black paint. The furniture in my kid's room - crib, dresser, etc. - is officially "espresso" but I don't actually see any woodgrain, just black surfaces.
Since it wasn't mentioned specifically in the article, IKEA birch veneer is classy, right?
10: I think the majority of American novels from the John Updike / Saul Bellow era are going to disappear from the canon soon, because the whole idea of how it's a constant struggle for middle-aged men to not have affairs with coeds is now either seen as a hilarious fantasy in the minds of middle-aged men or is simply not an acceptable topic of conversation.
On the other hand, Cherry Reds are great.
14: There were a couple of decades there, post sexual revolution but where career opportunities hadn't come close to equalizing, where in retrospect, the economic disparity between the sexes really looks as if it were driving a whole lot of sexual norms. Or, to put it another way, the John Updike/Saul Bellow era looks like a hilarious fantasy now that single women aren't presumptively too broke to sustain a middle-class lifestyle without help paying for it, but was probably a lot closer to realistic at the time.
14 Good riddance to bad rubbish.
13 I hope so, that's what I got my Billy bookcase in (it also goes with the decor in my furnished apartment.)
16: Maybe the economic disparity between the generations can help make it seem normal again!
Is that actually true?
Gene Simmons has always been stridently antidrug, so not so much with the Quaaludes, but Christine Sixteen.
The other thing I wonder along those lines -- modern readers (at least the small group of them that reads much non-current literature at all) don't have much trouble working with, e.g., Victorian mores for the purpose of getting through a book and empathizing with the characters. I actually have a harder time with Updike-type mid-20th century norms: it's more difficult to read it in context of it being a different period with different types of acceptable behavior, and I end up just thinking all of the characters are dull assholes. Is there a point of historical distance where it'll get easier to empathize by importing the appropriate historical context, or are you right that those books just aren't going to last?
As someone who has to furnish an apartment in a couple of months with only a few antiques and the natural dark woodwork of the 20s era duplex I'll be in to work around, I'll just note for the record that IKEA espresso finish will be all the fuck over my house, and the author can bite me.
20: No doubt part of it is that you've actually encountered the crappy mores of Updike-style characters in person, most likely. There's a closeness to the nastiness that's not there with Victorian era mores.
Also every time I type "mores" I want to type "morays" instead. Because eel ethics are slippery and will bite you when you least expect it.
Do you know what that sound is, highness? Those are the Shrieking Customs and Conventions of the Community. If you doubt me, just wait. They always grow louder when they're about to feed on human flesh.
Good Victorian lit, for example, though includes a much broader range of viewpoints and characters to empathize with, whereas in my experience the Updike/Bellow lit tends to be so monolithically bound in the WUMCM fantasy worldview that I suspect it won't wear well.
Re the OP link, I am probably more into decorating than the overwhelming majority of other people here but lord - I can imagine spouting off a similar VERY condensed riff along these lines while window shopping with a friend but taking the time to write it down, find illustrations, etc? Life too short. Unless the author was paid, in which case gotta do what you gotta do to keep artisanal hipster levain on the original finish Mategot table.
The author was paid. She's a professional interior designer and the blog is part of her (well-established) brand.
I don't think the Updike-type books will go away as long as there are middle-aged men.
Updike and Bellow are pretty different. Bellow and Roth are pretty different, for that matter. All of them are uneven. Updike's arc of popularity looks a lot like what I think D.H. Lawrence's was, and he'll probably remain in that "quaint but sincere" zone for a while. "The Adventures of Augie March" does not deserve to be mothballed as long as people are reading Franzen; in fact the thought of a world where Franzen's sensitive contemporary literature survives and Augie and Herzog are pulped is seriously fucking me up even to contemplate.
I actually have read a fair amount of Updike and loathed it all, some Roth and thought some of it was at least interesting, and I think literally no Bellow. So discount anything I'm saying as it applies to Bellow.
I'm sure some of Bellow's stuff deserves to be forgotten, but the high points are pretty high. But the domestic novel rewritten by men as macho really is an odd hybrid, and the fact that it's been confounded with the idea of the Great American Novel (because, you know, GOOD EFFORT GUYS!), is even weirder. I could go on and on about this but can't stay on the train all day.
Okay, I officially give up on the "pressing post before the comment makes any literal sense" problem.
29: Are (or were) you literally on a train or is that an expression?
the high points are pretty high
Exactly right. There seems to be some small movement to diminish Bellow, but some of his stuff is first rate. I've never read Roth or Updike, except maybe a short story or two that I've since forgotten.
Also, yes, wood should look like wood (this is actually a solid decorating principle: things should look like themselves, e.g., no floor tile made to look like distressed wood), but having a strong opinion about anyone else's decorating choices gets you a kick in the nuts.
Bellow, Updike, Roth?
Most of these conversations cull the list to the point at which whatever is said becomes much more about the lister than about the writers, or post-war American literature, or macho writers, or the "Zeitgeist."
When you can add Cheever, Mailer, Williams, Baldwin, Jones, Vidal, John Hawkes, Fowles, Capote, endless etc...a bunch of contemporaneous women to compare and contrast with, were Bishop, Plath, and Murdoch absolutely not self-absorbed?...add a bunch of Brits and French and Latin American writers...then might you have something to say?
Or something else, something that mitigates the need for intimidating erudition...perhaps a distance, an alienation from contemporary values, biases, and prejudices without nostalgia for any previous eras.
Or see 23
From what I remember of Seize the Day, Herzog, and Ravelstein (all Bellow novels, and all very different from each other), the unifying concern, if there is one, is less "problems of the horny macho aesthete" than "problems of the alienated homosocial intellectual".
Agreeing with lk particularly re franzen and with ogged re decorating except the woman is a professional opinion haver re other's decorating choices, people pay her in part to decide for them but probably mostly to run down the choices of the unwashed masses who didn't pay, or paid the wrong person.
And who hasn't indulged in a satisfying critique with their spouse/partner of the appalling decorating in the house of the work superior after the holiday party?
The other thing of course is the current fashion nurtured by feminist theory for weird forms of argument-by-anecdote in which pro forma denials will be made that Cosby and Fowley are only themselves in their radical specificity, and we don't have that long a list of rapist celebrities in order to say it is a universal mindset, but still, ya know, well, just saying...and there aren't enough women directors and Bechdel test and...aren't Woody and Roman monsters? Did you hear?
For the record, read a bunch of early Bellow, like 5; very little Roth or Updike, whom I did not like for reasons probably unrelated to the reasons the thread doesn't like them, some or a lot from the authors in 34, and a lot more...Mordecai Richler? Vonnegut, Heller, Salinger, Percy, a little John Barth, Barthelme, early Irving, Gaddis,...I don't remember. I read myself into a breakdown in the 70s, assisted by meth.
What do I see when I try to survey all these writers together? PTSD from the depression and WWII?
I remember admiring Cheever and Updike at least for their craft when I read them long ago, but as far as revelations about being middled-aged go, the last few pages of The Dead are worth pretty much their entire oeuvre.
I know next to nothing about decorating, but a quick skim of the linked article leaves me wondering which wood finishes are acceptable and how much they're going to cost me?
Mailer/Roth/etc could easily be forgotten while we retain, say, James Baldwin, John Rechy, Doris Lessing and others among the straight white coed-banging dudes' to me much more interesting contemporaries (ambivalent about Bellow; father is a big fan due to the Chicago-area thing). It's not as though every single one of the Victorian novelists who were well-regarded at the time are widely read today.
On that note, I sometimes think of how weird it is that Shirley Jackson's husband was considered the intellectual heavy-hitter in their partnership and no one reads him today. I mean, I imagine he's in some people's dissertations, but he's not a name.
On wood finishes: the wood finishes in my family's second house (blechy late sixties/early seventies semi-ranch; our first one was a smaller, nicer postwar Cape Cod) were all subtly pea-green. It was the worst. My family doesn't care about stuff like that so it just stayed translucently goose-shit until we moved out.
The best apartment I ever lived in had one drawback - that horrible orange finish described in the article. Well, no, two drawbacks - my room had cream-and-salmon late eighties dot wallpaper and salmon-colored blinds, and even when I offered to pay for a professional re-wallpapering and new blinds, the landlords would not let me. It was a wonderful apartment otherwise, though - it had central air and a big, gorgeous main room. I would be living there still had the landlords not turfed us out to install their son in our stead.
The theme of the advice is just to avoid heavily tinted stains in favor of paint or natural stains, right?
Surely Mailer will be remembered for The Executioner's Song? And there's no way Portnoy's Complaint (as much as I dislike it) drops off the "seminal midcentury novels" list unless literally all of the White Male Novelists go on the bonfire.
The building I work in is owned by a homebuilding corporation and they've decided to completely redo their grand entryway and the halls. The decorating decisions are so gross and clashing (both a brick wall inside and new faux-stone wall, the former not even painted white to be less obtrusive!) that I would not be encouraged if I were hoping to have them build me a home. But I'm not, so I just whine about how the carpet squares flow so badly you could get seasick and then go on with my life.
the wood finishes ...were all subtly pea-green.
Two of my very favorite pieces are intensely pea green wood laminate cabinets. They've also got these marvelously curved doors and dramatically ornate iron pulls. Also the tops lift up. Yet they don't have interior shelving. They don't quite seem to be old radio cabinets, nor bar cabinets, nor anything. I don't know what they were. Now they're just cabinets.
43: I don't know, the "medium-toned woods" look pretty natural to me. The only common wood color I don't see being mocked here is blonde/birch and surely IKEA has rendered that unacceptable as well.
I think the vast majority of IKEA stuff is highly innocuous compared to the stuff she's complaining about. She's basically pointing out that the stuff that was trendy in the late 90s now looks really dated.
If you are determined to be inoffensive and stay well within the bounds of "good taste" just follow ogged's advice - things should look like what they are, so wood should look like the wood it is not some tarted up or masked version of itself. Painted wood gets past the good taste rope line because it looks like paint. You now ask yourself why espresso stain can't proudly look like espresso stain - good question! Brazen it out espresso stain!
Or if you do not live in fear, go with hg's fabulous embrace of well the fabulous, relax and have a good time. Everyone else doesn't really care, so just go for what works within your budget.
If nothing else, I hope the Cosby allegations help start a national conversation about where to find quaaludes.
50: The drug companies stopped making methaqualone in the US in 1982, but Wikipedia says it is one of the most commonly used recreational drugs in South Africa, and is also popular elsewhere in Africa and in India.
stuff that was trendy in the late 90s now looks really dated
If I had the patience I would separately link each word with more examples.
The most fabulous places that I have seen were inhabited by elderly people surrounded by layered decades of minimal detritus, one a widower whose wife was a prolific amateur painter, the second my malevolent grandmother.
TL;DR but teak can get pretty expensive. (I have been idly shopping around for something that is more attractive and less uncomfortable than our couch in the room I end up sleeping in some for purposes of kitten detente. )
One of my malevolent great aunts had a tremendous 40's bent bamboo sofa, chairs, coffee table set. Other than that it was a grim slog through Fresno's finest Louis XVI. Grannie wasn't malevolent but rather extravagantly poor and died young so no detritus at all.
I think of espresso finish as being the West Elm look.
My poisonous grandma had really great decorating taste. It was hard to credit her with any virtues, but when we went to clean out her apartment, I had to concede that she had a good eye.
52. was me. Fabulous in the sense of being noteworthy, places that had something to say, rather than being harmonious and carefully arranged.
The places in the OP seem like set pieces to me, kind of neat, but I would respond as to someone who is too carefully dressed or too carefully made up. Not actually inviting or very pleasant, why would you do that to the space you live in. Furniture and decoration are there to serve and please you, not you there to implement the decor.
I'm gradually filling in a new place myself now-- the biggest challenge rather than choosing shades that aren't quite right is I think maintaining something like harmony among stuff bought separately. I guess having somebody else pick everything at once works, but yuck.
...maintaining something like harmony among stuff bought separately
Even on a room by room basis, that's hard for us. Especially since I insist on having at least one recliner.
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Genre of humor I hate: "making reference to things is automatically humorous." So like...cartoon making the rounds called "David Byrne gets Alzheimer's" that shows him in bed saying "This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?" Um, the point of the song was a kind of disorientation and you're not pointing out some unnoticed or unintended nuance/implication. You're just quoting the song and throwing in a reference to a disease. Yes, I am grumpy about absolutely everything right now.
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Here Smearcase, this was funnier.
I'd say that's less "references are inherently funny" than, "I'm simple-minded enough not to realize this is more-or-less the intended meaning of this lyric and not a radical recontextualization."
55: Indeed, I have an espresso-hued shelf thing from West Elm in my office (the one on campus, not a room in my house). It's the right home for the object.
The trouble is that "natural wood color" is also known as "beige," and beige sucks. Maybe it doesn't suck as much as hideous fake maple, but espresso (or "black walnut" as I've always known it) is indeed superior for many applications.
Judging by the internet, updog will outlast Updike but you should never combine pea green finish with avocado green.
Late to the thread, but this:
10: I think the majority of American novels from the John Updike / Saul Bellow era are going to disappear from the canon soon, because the whole idea of how it's a constant struggle for middle-aged men to not have affairs with coeds is now either seen as a hilarious fantasy in the minds of middle-aged men or is simply not an acceptable topic of conversation.
is rather alien to my memory of what Bellow I've read.
The trouble is that "natural wood color" is also known as "beige," and beige sucks.
Wait, are you actually colorblind?
we took out a closet and had to put in a beam and it is a dark wood stain that may be espresso and I like it.
44 there's no way Portnoy's Complaint (as much as I dislike it) drops off the "seminal midcentury novels"
I see what you did there.
My living room's wood is all that Ikea finish (which they just call black-brown). I like it and don't think it's pretending to be something it's not; plus it's obvious it's Ikea anyway. In short, haters to the back.
I'm now pleasantly contemplating various iterations of pea green - avocado green combos. Sweet idea! Also got the kid set up with a variety of salsa dance class options pre wedding reception, expect him to have outrageously good time and then sleep for like 28 hours straight.
How old is he? Can he hit on the bridesmaids or something?
Probably not. Same side of the family.
No but he can cut a rug with them!
I'm pretty sure that salsa dancing with the bridesmaids constitutes hitting on them.
with a unique pirate face butt
55: we were just in a West Elm looking at espresso (well, "chocolate") furniture. Yeah, they're full of it.
Chocolate furniture sounds like something Lenny Kravitz would have in his purple velvet refrigerator.
The bridesmaids either held him in their arms when he was a newborn or met him when he carried a stuffed bear about as his constant companion and had a pronounced lisp. It'll be a lovely evening of dancing and nothing funkier.
Oh, hey, speaking of weddings, my best friend from college is getting married in Boston on August 22. I'm definitely going to go, and if I can I'll probably try to take a few days and make a little vacation out of it, including an Unfogged meetup if people are around.
GODDAMN IT YOU PEOPLE. We clicked the "old man search" link and laughed and then I fucking searched for "avocado green" and "pea green" (my intuitions about vegetable colors are probably not to be trusted), which made Mr. kayak and I collectively realize that we'll now be accusing one another of "old man search" as a gotcha until the end of time. This is so terribly inferior to the last few pages of "The Dead."
P.S. peep, I was literally on the train, but you can co-opt my verbiage anytime. I was delighted by your ham sandwich joke in the other thread, incidentally.
Bellow is pretty great, at least his short stories and Ravelstein. I've read some other stuff and it's up and down, but you can always recognize an amazing mind at work under whatever bullshit, outmoded culture, etc.
And the linked thing in the OP gets it right about wood finishes. It's so vexing, because nice-looking finishes seem so achievable but are so rare in my price range.
82
If Chinese erotic cell phone novels mean anything, that's actually a major turn on. You might wanna make sure he's carrying condoms. Teenage incest babies are awkward.
I'm pretty sure that I'm a sexual legend in Chinese erotic cell phone novels. Please don't tell me otherwise.
You know, the American erotic cell phone novel market seems woefully underdeveloped compared to the Chinese one. I think there's an opportunity here.
erotic cell phone novel
So, books about dildo-shaped cell phones? Seems like a limited genre. Or maybe its my imagination that's limited.
86: Thanks for the clarification and compliment, lurid! So, you would get involved in commenting here, miss your stop, and then say, fuck it, and spend the whole day riding the train in circles and commenting on Unfogged. Probably not a good idea.
I have a real wood kitchen table that is solidly built from IKEA. I also have a whole bunch of IKEA black/brown Espresso bookcases. They blend into the background and are simple - which is what you want in cheap furniture.
I have an Ikea desk too, but I don't consider that to be adult furniture.
84: I don't have dates yet, but I'm expecting to be in Boston around then, too.
On the OP: gosh, do I embarrass myself if I admit that I did read further at that blog? Namely the posts on having too small rugs and hanging art too high or too small.
Um, I take the remarks there under advisement! Rug size in particular -- and, well, frankly, art hanging -- are both things that bug me about my own housemate's judgements. I'm often hedging and stammering: uh, that plant is too small for that plant stand (or too large for it), can we put that one on that one, and move that other one over there?
It's all about the feng shui, man.
That said, the post about sofas is bullshit.
Taste articles are impossible to write for the generality-- any discrimination is snobbery to some and unconvincing faking it to others. I like the principles of "don't try to fake materials" and "if you like it, it's good for your house" and definitely "plan so that you don't want to replace everything over and over". I'd like to see a professional taste maker describe how to use well-made but unfashionable furniture without destroying it. The shabby chic style started there and got consumer-ized, as did glamping.
Good intentions carefully said.... A professional decorator publicly said she never sees real cherrywood and confused veneer with varnish. This is evidence of ecological destruction - material that used to be a middle-class norm is now imitated badly for a middle class that's never seen the original. Baseline error, I think it's called.
More frivolously, I think the unattractive version of "espresso stain" is a grain-hiding opaque stain with a transparent topcoat. This reads to me as an imitation of sun-aged wood, usually oak, under a varnish or polish or beeswax, but it's never a good imitation of that. What's stylish on Knifecrime Island where there's actual old oak to be seen? The California Missions have plenty, come to think of it, so I guess that doesn't matter.
(Tried and True finishes will look good on any wood with nothing more skilled than patient rubbing. Gemmunz.)
Reading the couch article made it clear her main problem is wanting to be snobby & bitchy but then walking it back and wanting to be nice. You either have to be one or the other, no half measures.
I do have to say none of her offensive sofas seemed all that offensive to me, and many looked more comfortable than the ones she recommended. She also said she'd never sat in any of the recommended ones, which seems like a huge flaw. Comfort should be #1 in buying a sofa. I actually agree with the art and the tiny rugs, but not enough to really care about what other people do in their houses.
I can read it more charitably, that her job is to show people how to social-climb in the mass-market segments of the US economy, and part of that is to recognize that the rules in any year are just matters of fashion. She does mock advice to "just get the best" at a impossible prices, but that's not her readers, I should think.
The sofa post was odd. Don't get a sofa that looks at all comfortable. Get one that is as square as possible and looks horrible to sit on, and that you know you'll end up with loads of cushions on so you can slouch in comfort, thus violating one of her earlier rules about fussiness.
The art one made sense though. My parents have a big square picture that we got my mum for her 60th, and my dad has hung it so bizarrely that it pains me to see it. (And I am really not precious about home decor.) It looked good in their old house, but god knows what he was thinking when they moved. I am almost tempted to say to them that if they don't like it - and given the placing, it's hard to believe they care about it at all - can I have it please?
