A bit late

Look Again

When you go to the Museum of the City of New York to see the Eero Saarinen show (as you must: stop to watch the film of Aline Saarinen on the Today show talking about TWA, and the final triangular section being inserted into the St. Louis Arch), be sure to go upstairs. Tucked away in the south side of the second floor is the show Only In New York: Photographs from Look Magazine a small exhibit that could have been a lot bigger, showcasing Gardner Cowles Jr.’s picture magazine’s vision of the city from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. (There’s even a connection between the two shows, via Florence Knoll, who designed the Look offices.) There’s a lot of excellent photography, as well as the oscillation between the witty and the gritty that I associate with New York Magazine.

Times Square showgirls, socialites and top models all get warts-and-all treatment very different from the icy imagery I associate with beauty at the time (the very image Betty Draper is always trying to live up to on Mad Men). There’s a very clever portrait of MoMA director Rene d’Harnoncourt, master of all the miniature modern icons he surveys (Matisse, white china, that ball bearing from the first Industrial Design exhibit). And the photo above, a counterpart to the one snapped at the Beaux Arts Ball of 1931, where the architects of the Chrysler Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Museum of the City of New York and others dressed as their famous creations. Look simply had the architects stand behind shimmering cut-outs of their buildings in 1957—that’s Gordon Bunshaft on the far left, with Lever House; Ely Jacques Kahn appears in both photos.

Another New York

Every time I get an issue of New York Magazine lately I ask myself: is Adam Moss turning it into a men’s magazine? A thinking man’s mens magazine, but still. I have worked for the magazine in some capacity since 1994 (when my capacity was: “Hello, Kurt Andersen’s office.”), and they have kindly had me on the masthead ever since (maybe not for long now), but I can’t say I have any access or insight into the inner workings. All I know is that the covers this year have been Obama, Obama, Obama, Michelle Obama, money, money, money, flu (and a new sports blog), sex, music. The women have all been political or naked. Where are the spooked kids of yore, illustrating the problems of the upper 10 percent? Where are the profiles of powerful women, even power couples? Where are the candy-coated trends? When I was 22, these fetishes felt very distant, but now I understand who they were for.

I suppose these standbys of the previous incarnations of New York must not sell anymore, as the magazines largely devoted to such preoccupations—shelter magazines, women’s magazines, and mom magazines—fall by the wayside. New York still has plenty of shopping, but in its own section, where they also put kids stuff. Culture, too, is largely compartmentalized (except for music). The gossipy dialogue of stars and shows and openings flourishes online in the Vulture blog, which I love.

Even this year’s gift guide, adorably illustrated on the cover with Wes Anderson’s Fox family, isn’t the feature. Instead we have Taconic dad, Obama siblings, (male) kidney donors. Oh, and Nabokov. These aren’t topics just for men, but they don’t seem strictly unisex. I always liked the idea that the old New York balanced itself for both sides of the (heterosexual) couple. My husband may have used the recipes in Cookie, but he would have been startled if he actually read the articles.

When the “Screens” issue of the New York Times Magazine includes an entire article I understand not one word of, it becomes clear that I (female, 36-45) am no longer the most desired audience. And I never shopped enough when I was. I think I just realized that my first New York home, physically and psychologically, no longer fits (and just at the moment it fully embraces Brooklyn).

Bauhaus + Betsy

Two short pieces in New York Magazine this week, both on topics close to my heart.

The first, “We All Live in a Bauhaus,” is about the continuing influence of the Bauhaus (and Eero Saarinen) on contemporary product design—even in mysterious places. Exhibitions at the MoMA and the Museum of the City of New York open next week. Don’t Josef Albers’s nesting tables still look great?

The second, “Original Gossip Girls,” is my small tribute to Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books: the high school and young married novels have just been reissued in paperback.

Tableaux Vivants

If someone asked me to write a profile of Wes Anderson, I would start with corduroy. His stovepipe corduroy suits, I think, are the key to his personal mythology, one that’s a little bit country earl, a little bit little kid, and a whole lot self conscious. While I too love corduroy, particularly printed skinny wale corduroy, I do not like Wes Anderson. Rushmore was very funny, but Bottle Rocket was boring, The Royal Tenebaums was in love with its own tableaux, The Life Aquatic was boring and in love with its own tableaux, The Darjeeling Limited ditto. (Maybe it all went awry when he started writing titles that start with the somewhat pompous The.) I will see Fantastic Mr. Fox—my father read the Roald Dahl book out loud to me and my brother, and I can still hear him doing the farmer’s voice—but I am worried.  As Richard Brody’s new New Yorker profile of Anderson points out…and then fails to follow up on…Mr. Fox is wearing a corduroy suit just like one of Anderson’s. If you were casting the stop-motion animated version of your life, wouldn’t you also want to be voiced by George Clooney?

Brody is an Anderson fan, and his profile is so much better than the recent design and architecture features I have complained about. Brody writes the New Yorker’s film blog, and knows his stuff, and makes a case for Anderson while checking off all the biographical boxes, discussing his retrospective use of technologies and defending his allergy to forward plot momentum. What he obviously does not care so much about is Anderson’s visual world. When I see one of Anderson’s movies that’s all I can see, and I think that is a problem. The people in The Royal Tenenbaums move about their crazy house as if they were stop-motion animated puppets. Fantastic Mr. Fox sounds perfect for him, since he has a team of hundreds willing to do his bidding in a way many actors would not (though he does have his core group). Brody talks about the way Anderson filmed on the street in India for The Darjeeling Limited, but I don’t remember any fluidity or unplanned grace, only the train (above), decorated to within an inch of its life.

To me any deeper understanding of Anderson’s films would have required a look at his life. What does his Paris apartment look like? What’s he wearing? That girlfriend (Juman Malouf) mentioned in passing is a costume designer. Does she have anything to say about the corduroy? Maybe this approach seems shallow, fashionable or all-on-the-surface, but I feel there is a whole visual language that isn’t being explicated in this profile, or in lots of other profiles of people working visibly who aren’t designers. Design criticism isn’t just about designed objects, it should be about everything we are forced to look at.

More Hell (Beige Edition)

I thought the Kelly Wearstler fan-fest was over last month, when both Vogue and the New Yorker treated her to long profiles, lovingly and uncritically describing the new 1970s direction her decorating has taken. But lo, two of my November magazines feature more Wearstler: Cookie (R.I.P.) has her clever clever idea for book display (put them on shallow shelves, facing out, just like in a store!), Metropolitan Home her shared Malibu beach house. From what I have read, I can’t imagine Wearstler needs to share, so I couldn’t help but wonder how that works on summer weekends. Plus, with all the big shells and puffball sofas, there’s hardly any room for people.

After my last Wearstler post, I discovered a world of fellow haters, most notably the blog Mirror Mirror, which often features her in the Go Fug This Room category (given my love of the Fug Girls and home design I wish I had thought of this myself). And I am sure they too will have a field day with this so-called “beach house.” Never before have I read a beach house story in a shelter magazine in which the beach was so totally invisible. Yes, floors, walls, ceilings and furniture are the color of sand, but the overall effect is of a tasteful marble coffin. Do they need giant squishy chairs in hell? Why isn’t the man on the shelf wearing a bathing suit? Did she import that fireplace from turn-of-the-century Vienna? My new thought is that the de rigeur photoshoot image of her adorable boys jumping on the furniture is there to give the space some energy, and to cover up the fact that there is nowhere to sit. You can only perch or succumb.

Cutting Remarks

Design*Sponge alerted me today to the release of the first issue of Lonny, an online-only shelter magazine brought to you by some former editors of the late, lamented Domino. I wrote a couple of times for Domino and loved it very much for about 20 minutes each month, but it is only since its demise that I see what a particular niche it filled. Only Cookie seems to serve the same affluent, modern-but-not-minimalist, color-loving, kid-having mostly-female population, and they only run one house feature a month. (I love the Tennessee log cabin they show this month, with beautiful Matthew Hranek photography. My son even has all the same toys as the costumed tot in the shoot.) All the other magazines are too fancy, or too not-NYC, or too modern, or too too. I frequently found Domino too girly for my taste. Of course, we are now in the process of submitting our house to magazines to publish, and we would be foolish to turn our noses at any of them. Sometimes the critic and the proud homeowner cannot exist simultaneously.

I took a quick page through Lonny, and it recaps many of the choice elements in Domino: those front-of-the-book round-ups of a single material (Snakeskin! Disco! Prep!) in clothes, accessories and furniture; the little by-the-by remarks and practical tips; the variety of square footage and budget of places shown. But they also trumpet the freedom of the online format, and the fact that one of the features can be 35 pages. Now, is it just me, or is that not such a good thing? Yes, I have been frustrated by partial images and too-short glimpses of others’ domestic paradises in the past, but it has to be an awfully good, rich, fascinating place to warrant 35 pages of photos and I don’t think former Domino EIC Deborah Needleman’s country house and garden, lovely as they are, warrant that. The best effects, like the pewter-painted study, look almost too Domino to establish Lonny as having a different personality. Too many photos start to cheapen the effect, especially when you are virtually paging through. Isn’t the point of shelter magazines to show things looking their best? How else can we be aspirational? Does anything look best in 35 different ways?

I don’t want to be a grouch—I look forward to the progress of Lonny, looking for ideas to steal, gifts to buy—but the problem of the 35 pages of a single house is really the same as the problem I have with much of the web. Like a chump I believe in editing. Selecting the right images. Picking the right words. Paying attention (sometimes) to the word count the magazine sends you. Not just going on and on. These restrictions usually make a better product, however irritating they are in the short term. It is the same reason architecture is better for push-pull dialogue with a client. I hope the Lonny editors think hard about what the web could really bring: they have the insta-shopping in hand, since the items in each photo are clickable, but what about more unmercenary options and alternatives? With all the space in the world, I’d love to see wheels of red-and-white fabrics when I scrolled over a chair upholstered in just one, or more visual exploration of the visual steals people use to put their places together. I am endlessly fascinated by the evolution of taste, my own most of all, and there must be some way to layer that in with links. Go deeper into the best pictures, don’t just give us more of the shoot. We’re (not) paying for editorial judgment.

Home Front

I don’t usually read the short stories in The New Yorker because I don’t really like short stories except those of Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro. Even writers I do like can be cloying in short story form, and I often have the sense that I have just ruined my reading of their next novel by previewing it in the magazine. So I always receive the Summer Fiction Issue with a certain amount of dread: it is a double issue, so nothing in the mail next Tuesday, and it is mostly short stories. The latest was no exception to that sinking feeling. I may be outing myself for shallowness here, but I don’t really know who Bruno Schulz is, I struggled through Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, and I am not interested in the Book of Genesis, even in comic form. But there was a short story by Jonathan Franzen, and I loved The Corrections (while thinking he was way too snobby about Oprah).

Good Neighbors is delightful. It may be a 300 page novel compressed into five New Yorker spreads, but that just concentrates the delicious schadenfreude evoked by the downfall of Patty Berglund. Franzen knows that you know a Patty, the best mom on the block, with the cute kids, homemade cookies, and the answer to every domestic worry. She covers up her perfection with hyperbole and exaggeration, but you know that she knows she’s won. His story is set in St. Paul in what I would guess to be the early 1980s, before the Twin Cities had Target, and before the minivan (Volvos figure prominently). The Berglunds are gentrifiers, preservationists, and early worriers about toxins. So despite its faintly historic setting, Patty’s fall could be taking place on any block in brownstone Brooklyn, or Jamaica Plain, or whatever neighborhood in Cleveland the young couples are buying in these days. In a season of books about bad dads and worse mothers (all self-labeled, mind you) Good Neighbors is a cautionary tale, saying to all of us worried about sugar and lead, original woodwork and wild fish, that sometimes it is important to focus less on what’s coming in to your home and more on the individuals already inside.