Home Adjustment

So I just moved into my new digs for the next nine months. After sharing a 900-square-foot loft with two roommates, this is a big adjustment. The new crib has been blasted clean of every speck of dirt, and proffers gobs of space--a family could live here, and yet it's just lil' old me. I figure this is a good chance to finally get my shit organized--I mean, I have a guest room, but who the hell's gonna visit me so far off the beaten track? It'll spend most of its time as a 'projects' room--as well as to try to see how far I can diverge from the ways we commonly use living space.

A few years ago, a team of cultural sociologists talked their way into a number of middle-class living rooms in order to see what kinds of patterns obtained in the way people from similar backgrounds arrange and decorate their spaces. I was struck by how tightly folks tend to follow scripts without at all realizing there's any kind of script, and I have asked myself ever since how possible it is to improvise on them. Most middle-class people do their formal entertaining in the living room, right? Then there's the formal dining room; the family might have a den in which they do their actual living, as well as much of their eating (in front of the TV). Home office in the study, etc.

My place, too, is set up for Standard American Domestic Design. It's got a living room, dining room, wood-paneled study, kitchen, enclosed porches back and front, two bedrooms upstairs. Every room pretty much suggests what to do with it and how--the devil is in the details of where you put the couch. But since I don't have a couch--I drove down w/a bed, a dresser, and a bookcase--I figure I'm already a step ahead when it comes to trying to re-imagine this place.

Since I barely have any furniture, and since I'm ranging over the entire house, I figure the key is be (1) minimalist and (2) mobile. As big a pack rat as I am, I simply don't have enough stuff to fill the space, so I can let one object dominate and define each room. And because I've got a lot of room to cover, things should be on wheels whenever possible.  

And entertaining, too, in a James Bond-y, Swiss-Army-knife kind of way.  Can't forget entertaining.

I'm not exactly winding up to a punchline here--just thinking aloud about my process here. But I think it could issue in a couple of interesting pics in the next few weeks.

KenDo

I'm late to the John Edwards pile-on, but maybe that's because I don't much feel like piling on. I just hate the way we deal with political sex scandals in this country. Even humorists suddenly get serious: Maureen Dowd, for example, adds a little more bite to her snark than usual, dismissing even what might seem like positive aspects of Edwards' mea culpa. 'Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic?' she yawns. Now, talk of 'self-narcissism' is taking it to a level of meta that's beyond my ken--but however vague this term is in ordinary language, aren't narcissists quintessentially incapable of precisely the kind of self-awareness that Edwards displayed?

Both MoDo and Gail Collins (GalCo? Nah, I guess we have to save that one for Gal Costa) also take Edwards to task for stressing that his wife's cancer was in remission at the time of, er, transmission: for Collins, this 'may be a new high in the annals of weaseldom'; MoDo sneers at the claim that the tryst was 'oncologically correct', and dubs it 'the creepiest part of his creepy confession'. I guess I need to go to the videotape here, but given that cheating on a wife diagnosed with cancer is gonna be the most unsavory part of the whole scandal for most people, it makes sense to me that Edwards would address the topic directly.

The problem is that Dowd and Collins don't seem interested in a more sachlich take on this sad affair. They'd rather recycle every Ken Doll/Breck Girl cliche they can find.

Subway Seinfeld I

Fellow Gothamites: Why is it that the subway-candy-vendor meme typically goes something like this? 'Good morning/afternoon/evening, ladies and gentlemen; sorry to disturb you. I have candy for sale. No, I'm not selling for no basketball team, I'm selling this candy to stay out of trouble...'

In the first place, has anybody else been inundated by basketball-playing candy-pushers, such that it's a relief to be approached by someone else for a change? Secondly, am I the only one who finds the second qualifier slightly ominous? It's just a hair short of Robocop: 'Buy my candy or there will be ... trouble'.

Batty, Man

Finally saw The Dark Knight last night. My instant assessment? A dumb Hollywood action movie with lots of eye candy; improbable/implausible plot twists; labored political-philosophical musings; inadequate editing; and a beautiful, stirring final scene. Feel free to disagree--I mean, I loved The Matrix Reloaded when I first saw it.

The movie strains for relevance, but offers very little help to us in dealing with our current predicaments. The Joker (Heath Ledger, nuff respect) delights in spreading fear, killing innocents, and sowing destruction--and this all for the sport of it. He's a terrorist, get it? There's just no rhyme or reason to his appetite for destruction!

I don't see how this helps us in dealing with our current crop of bad guys, who--and maybe I'm getting stuck on labels here, but here goes--are fanatics and fundamentalists, sure, but hardly nihilists (there are certainly people who have deep and thoughtful things to say about the psychological connections or lack thereof between nihilism and terrorism, so there's a future post...). The Joker only poses interesting lessons for counterterrorism if you're one of those people who thinks it's sacrilegious even to suggest that some of the current hell Americans are catching has nothing to do with, say, the last five decades of American foreign policy.

The Dark Knight is equally sloppy--or worse, utterly cavalier--about current hot topics such as extreme rendition, torture, or random surveillance. There's a fair amount of interrogation-room-beatdown-porn (interlaced with an oddly prim aversion to slaying the main baddie), for example. At some point, the movie confronts the debate over the Bush Administration's domestic spying in the most misleading, melodramatic way: what would you do, if you were the Batman? Would you peek in on millions of Gothamites' cellphone transmissions, if doing so would help you to locate a criminal mastermind intent on sowing murder and mayhem in the next 24 hours?

Well, yeah, of course I would: how much privacy are you invading if you're simply trying to get a fix on an imminent mass murderer? ('Course, in a Hollywood movie, it's always a bad sign if you're on the other side of a moral debate with Morgan Freeman.) But that's a poor analogy to what the Bush Administration was dealing with, and how they went about doing it.

I'm boycotting Hollywood action movies for the foreseeable future. At least, that is, until I hear more about the Green Lantern's position on nuclear energy.

The Urban Village Idiots

One “room” is a cramped cubby that measures, in all, perhaps 25 square feet, just enough for a full-size mattress and whatever can be stashed beneath. The first-floor rooms, in the basement, are musty and windowless, like caves. The second-floor rooms have plywood walls but no doors, only cut-out windows that overlook a kitchen cluttered with day-old dishes, a chore wheel and the odd paintbrush.

One of the residents likens her home to a “giant treehouse.” Another says it is like “living in a public bathroom.”

“Where the stalls are just superficial sight lines that block the other person, but you can hear everything they do,” said Robyn Frank, a 23-year-old artist. She had just moved in to the McKibbin lofts in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and sometimes they literally become bathrooms. They are known for their giant, raucous parties; revelers occasionally urinate in the halls.

This is life in what some refer to as the McKibbin “dorms,” a landing pad for hundreds of postcollegiate creative types yearning to make it as artists, and live like them too, in today’s New York.--Cara Buckley, 'Young Artists Find a Private Space, Only Without the Privacy', New York Times (7 May 2008).

I'm leaving New York for nine months to teach at a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. Not too many people up here seem to have heard of it; but I've always had a really favorable impression of its academics, and I feel really lucky to have a chance to work there.

Thing is, it's not in New York, so naturally I'm spending a lot of time right now thinking about what I'm leaving behind. Among the things I'll miss most are (1) the living room of my loft in the abovementioned art/hipster 'dorms', (2) my neighbors, and (3) 'the McKibbin' in general (I've lived here over a year and never heard it called that except in The Times).

Our living room (I live with two others) is a really serene place. Southern exposure; overlooks the garden of a neighboring church, with its gurgling fountain and chiming bells; a tree spreads out right in front of our giant windows, providing privacy, oxygen, and the occasional visiting squirrel. I've loved the space from the minute craigslist brought me to it, and it's the first one that's really engaged my nestbuilding drive. It's pictured below the 'cage' shot that ran on the front page of the Times with Buckley's story.

Now, maybe our space is a little bit Ikea'd out for some people's tastes (that's a topic for another day). Maybe it wouldn't make the cover of Dwell or Paper or whatever else people read for images of hip, designer-infused living. Me, I think it's a pretty good place to come home to, and it's a sharp contrast to what Buckley would have you think was the norm.

I'm not saying that me and many of my neighbors don't live with paper-thin partitions: I can hear my roommates sneeze through the walls, and they can hear my 'Bless you!' in response. I'm not saying that there aren't raucous parties with plenty of stupid reveler-behavior: I once clambered up the stairs to check out a loud rooftop party, heard what sounded like Niagara Falls, and discovered a girl peeing at the top of the stairwell (yes, I called her a girl, but she started it by calling me 'sir' when I asked her what the hell she was doing). I'm not even denying that some of the residents and their friends are trustafarian/hipster interlopers with little self-consciousness regarding their own class and race privilege: the asshole quoted as saying 'I don't really speak to the locals' is a dear friend of mine. I'm just saying that's not the whole story. And unfortunately, even though I spoke to Cara on several occasions, introduced her to a number of local characters, and offered to show her my own loft and some much doper ones, she ended up with the story she ended up with.

Ah--maybe I'm just sore I didn't make it into her story (she told me right before it came out that I didn't fit the demographic she was tasked to cover). I've been reading the Paper of Record since I was twelve, and I guess I'll just never feel like a somebody till It records me. In any event, I did try to defend her when the shit hit the stands and all my neighbors were baying for her blood. Buckley's portrayal is a sore subject around these parts: during a recent discussion in the cafe downstairs, I tried to convince some tablemates that Cara, however one may disagree with her, was not in fact some sneering Manhattanite (FWIW, she lives in Park Slope) determined a priori to heap disdain on all things bohemian and Brooklyn; my immediate opposite simply turned her head and diverted her attention to a neighboring conversation while I was in midsentence.

Gosh, maybe the kids aren't alright.

Anyhoo, the more interesting questions have to do with the current state of the Bohemian Dream--if such still exists. But that goes beyond the limits of a simple 'That reporter nailed it!'/'That reporter doesn't know what she's talking about!' diatribe...