A bit late

Love and Flatware

There’s a scene in Sleepless in Seattle (It was on TV last week and yes, I got sucked in to watching the last half hour. Meg Ryan looked very nice in a French braid, but there was a lot of sighing.) where Meg and hapless Bill Pullman, her fiance, are in Tiffany & Co. They wander around the tabletop section, followed by a registry clerk, and she pauses in front of a vitrine filled with blue-flowered china. “Don’t hate me, but I love this pattern,” she says. Bill gets a look of wonder. “That was my grandmother’s pattern.” There is a pause for significance. Clerk asks, “How many place settings should I put you down for?” “Ten,” they reply in unison.

This scene stuck with me for ten years, 1993 to 2003, when I duly registered for 10 place settings. Of course, my premarital taste summit took place at Moss, where blue rosettes are banished. All our choices were white. And I did not throw my fiance over for Tom Hanks. Not with that hair.

But the scene, and the movie’s rejection of the idea that shared taste = true love made me think again about the topic of taste. I am looking for a book idea that is bigger than just architecture, and taste is the topic I keep returning to in my mind. Where does taste come from? Is it hereditary? And why are its practitioners so slippery to describe? All the architects I am interested in turn out to really be tastemakers, top-quality designers that were able to put aside their own egos and showcase the work of others.

Ben Thompson, first and foremost, created D/R as a sort of dream version of his own home, filled with everything he would have bought for himself. He and his team designed furniture, but it was mostly in the manner of “fill-in pieces”, the phrase Florence Knoll used to describe the particular genius of her rectilinear sofas and credenzas. Thompson’s pieces were chunkier, many designed as dorm furniture, but the work of both needs Bertoia sculptures, Noguchi lamps, fuzzy pillows, rugs or dogs to come alive. Alexander Girard too provided the structure in shops, exhibitions, his own house, for folk art and letters and plows to shine.

As I have journeyed back in time as a historian I keep encountering the origins of my own taste too. For this currently inchoate book to work, I think I would need a bit of memoir, from my grandparents’ building of their own modern house in the woods, in the late 1940s, to my Cambridge childhood with big paper lanterns, to designing my own house, with more paper lanterns, and a Girard sofa, and a Koenig kitchen. Those encounters can be a shock. The most recent: in the catalog for Girard’s amazing 1949 show An Exhibition for Modern Living, my silver pattern, Towle Craftsman. I felt like Girard and I had gone to Tiffany together and answered, “Ten.”

The truth isn’t that far off. While researching my dissertation, I had lunch with a number of former employees of Connecticut General, arranged by Vassar professor Nicholas Adams. I loved the feel of my fork so much I surreptitiously turned it over to peek at the pattern name. Towle Craftsman. The lunch was at the home of the daughter and son-in-law of one of the employees, and I have to believe the parents had bought the silver. My theory of taste is that it is environmental. After you had worked in Bunshaft’s glorious building, wouldn’t you start to see things in a modern way? Your eye would become Girard’s eye, as mine has. And that would seem to be the only pattern possible.

The Yuck Factor

Watch District 9 as a palate cleanser after the visual feast of Avatar. Many of the themes are the same, but the South African film’s more-with-less attitude has an emotional punch that those beautiful blue creatures can’t offer.

Again, we have civilization vs. so-called savages. Again, the military-industrial complex assumes its superiority and offering false salvation in bureaucracy. Again, a white man is transformed into other. But how long has it been since a film asked us to sympathize with a creature neither cute nor cuddly? The “prawns” are large, insectoid and frankly gross, hard to tell apart and hardly understood. Obviously they are a commentary on our perception of other cultures (am I not supposed to admit I didn’t want to look at them?), but the movie doesn’t apologize for their appearance. How long since our hero refused to save anyone else’s skin? We think we are getting another white messiah, but our expectations of a mass uprising are put off, perhaps due to budget, perhaps due to storytelling restraint. When every CGI film includes an obligatory march of thousands, the wow factor wears off. How long since we saw so much dirt and junk and garbage on screen? There’s a black market in cat food. Cat food! In Avatar it would have to be floating blue space goo, explained to us very seriously as the future equivalent of cat food. District 9 is happening in our supermarket space.

The first 45 minutes are District 9’s most political (the incisiveness of the Gazan/South African political critique begins to fade into action as the movie progresses) and also its funniest. There is a sustained tone of dry humor, wonderful underplaying by Sharlto Copley as our hapless hero Wikus Van De Merwe (just try saying that out loud), redeployment of the faux-documentary form from The Office. After that some of the cost-cutting starts to show, with too-quick rescues and too-confusing shoot-outs. The sentimental conventions are supported by the cleverness of Little Prawn, the gross-out conventions with lots of body parts. District 9 is very clever, and little of it feels like showing off.

It’s Not Just Me

Way back in the beginnings of blogging in July, I praised the French film Summer Hours. I have recommended it to many people since, but few have seen it. Lo and behold, it is all over the New York Times’ critics picks for Oscar nominees (along with a lot of other willful choices). In honor of judgement confirmed, I want to re-post my original comments about the film. Among many other pleasures, Juliette Binoche in sneakers.

Last night I discovered something very exciting: the IFC on Demand section on Time Warner Cable Channel 1000. It lists independent films that are still in theaters, including Summer Hours, a recent French film I had put in our Netflix queue after reading the reviews. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, the film is about three siblings deciding what to do with their mother’s summer house, and their mother’s beloved things, after her death. It is a simple plot, one rendered realistically and without melodrama. All of the details were incredibly right, and so telling, from the terrible, practical presents the grown-up children give their mother for her 75th birthday, to the subtle career put-downs of mother to son, sister to brother. As one  sibling says to another, “We don’t really talk about things in this family,” but in fact they do in that underground way most of us instantly recognize. The relaxed nature of the setting, of the actors, and the slow unfurling of plot draw you in so that you are right there with Frederic, Adrienne and Jeremie dividing the estate. I couldn’t help but put myself in their place: what would I choose of all the beautiful and/or valuable things accumulated in that house over a lifetime?

For along with being about family relations, and about the slippage of France from its former central place in the world (one sibling lives in New York, the other in China), Summer Hours is also about changing taste. What do different generations value, and why? Is value in francs or in sentiment? The film is sophisticated enough to show us real things of value (or at least good copies of them) by real modern artists, so that we can decide for ourselves. There’s the Georg Jensen tea service Adrienne (Juliette Binoche, wearing a series of high-tech hoodies), an accessories designer for Takashimaya, wraps up and takes away. There are the small, tan Corots Frederic (Charles Berling) seems to value more for their name than for any aesthetic pleasure (he’s an economist). There is the Majorelle desk and cabinet, all crazy swoops and inlaid wood, that even the curators at the Musee d’Orsay question whether are ready for their revival.

The tastes that have changed are global, national and personal. For designers the movie serves as an entertaining illustration of the fact that things are more than just products. For collectors it gives notice that your children may think your prizes are disposable…or museums will one day prize the vase you always kept under the sink. It’s ironic that I just praised my own Jens Risom chair, for I grew up with an original Eames LCW chair that I always thought was ugly until one day, it wasn’t. My mother just gave me a gift of that chair for my finished house, where it is a lesson in patience (on her part) and the growth of good taste (on mine). My son likes to climb on it, but hasn’t vouchsafed an opinion yet. He may come to prefer our equally curvy George III chairs and try to get the MoMA to take the Eames and Risom for an estate tax deduction. Once you start thinking of your things in the future, and in the market, it all becomes a little emotional.

Annotated Avatar

It seemed half my extensive family had gone to Avatar last week, and half those who went were planning to return to see it in 3D. Meaning that, without Twitter, I can tell the film has legs. The dialogue is terrible (half the scenes in the action-heavy latter third could be subtitled “Whoo-hoo!”), the plot creaky (seriously, “unobtanium”!?), but the visual effects were wonderful. For those alone I was happy to pay $12, and I pray for some all-botanical YouTube version soon. For the ladies.

But Avatar is itself a hack, James Cameron is less auteur, more sci fi magpie. I have seen a few slideshows online picking apart the action (including Vulture’s FX comparison) but nothing picking apart the less recent or more sideways sourcing. With the help of my husband and a scuba-certified friend, we decided to start a list. Additions welcome.

1. Many of those spectacular botanicals were not quite such a surprise to those who, like my friend, have done dives around the world. A short list of underwater ancestors for Pandora’s flora would include the Christmas tree worm (the retractable whorl-like plant Jake turns into Whack-A-Mole); crinoids or feather-stars (the empathic “hairs” embedded in the Na’vi braids); young flying helmut gurnard (the pterodactyl-like creatures young braves must tame); moon jellyfish or hydromedusae (the floating seeds of Eywa). And the sand on some beaches in the Maldives is phosphorescent, lighting up beneath your feet like the lichens on the branches and rocks the Na’vi run across. Cameron, as noted in his recent New Yorker profile, is a scuba practitioner, and mined the aliens/sea creatures overlap in the must-despised The Abyss.

2. The tree-as-planet, an idea thoroughly described by Ursula K. LeGuin in her 1971 short story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” (title from the famous Marvell poem).

The branches, the epiphytic growths, the roots with those nodal junctures between individuals: they must all be capable of transmitting electrochemical impulses. There are no individual plants, then, properly speaking. Even the pollen is part of the linkage, no doubt, a sort of windborne setience, connecting overseas.

3. Miyazaki. The Japanese animator can do as much with drawings as Cameron with CGI, and was there first (in Princess Mononoke, Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle) with a military stampede of wild beasts, a goddess-tree and the magical floating mountains (see image above).

4. Mary Jemison, Indian Captive. Others have noted the triteness of the outsider captured by native tribe, learns the language, defends the tribe against his own people plot (Dances With Wolves being the leading reference). But I immediately thought of this true story with a similar plot, sexes reversed, that I checked out of the library dozens of times as a child. Something about the terror, and then the science fiction-like descriptions of life among the Seneca really captured my imagination, and it seems, Cameron’s. He switches the sexes, much as he switches Wes Studi, an actor I totally identify with Last of the Mohicans, from bad guy to good.

5. Sigourney Weaver, a self-conscious nod to Cameron’s own oeuvre. It was obviously his desire to return us to his first triumph, but also a little melancholic to see her young again, a la Ripley, as an avatar. For a man who consistently casts, and marries, Amazons of her ilk, it seems a little too much like manufacturing your own fifth wife.

6. The first and hence the scariest fight: Jake versus the Pandorized saber-tooth tiger. I know I have seen this in a movie before, with more fur flying, but I can’t think where.

In a F.O.G.

Image of DZ Bank, Berlin, by Manuela Martin

The fall semester is not yet over, and I have been plunged into spring semester planning. I am teaching architecture criticism again, this time to undergraduates in NYU’s Urban Design and Architecture Studies program. I am thinking of adding films for the first time, partly as a fill-in for days when written critiques are due and few students actually do the reading assignment (2.5 hours is a long time when no one has anything to say but me), partly as a way to show a different form of architectural criticism, partly to give them something else to critique. The problem may be in keeping my mouth shut.

I started my pre-viewing with Sketches of Frank Gehry, Sydney Pollack’s 2005 documentary. I have been avoiding this film for years, not a Gehry fan, and I thought I might not make it through the first five minutes, so saccharine was the tone. I calmed down, and so did the hagiography (for a while), but I can’t say I learned a thing. It is deeply strange when a film about a contemporary architect never mentions any other living practitioner of architecture; uses only friends of Frank, all artists, buddies, clients (or all three), to comment on his work; and treats the only living architect most people have heard of as an embattled revolutionary figure. Maybe that was true of Gehry in 1975, or even 1985, but it is not any more, and after years of group therapy, he should know it. (As a side note, when Gehry’s therapist mentions that other architects have come to him hoping to be head-shrunk into geniuses, I couldn’t help but think of my husband’s former boss, also a group therapy habitue, and also someone who thinks of himself as an embattled revolutionary figure.)

Sketches plays like what it is, a noodling side project for a couple of old friends (Pollock is on camera half the time, and we often hear him agreeing with whatever Barry Diller, Thomas Krens et al. are saying in praise), tanned, leather-jacketed, successful. Gehry’s aw-shucks act is only eclipsed by Pollock’s, in a scene where he acts as if he has no idea why Frank asked him to make the documentary, and hasn’t the least idea how to do it.

But maybe he doesn’t. If the adulation hadn’t gotten to me, the lack of any brilliant scenography would have. The good thing about a film about architecture occasionally making it into theaters is the opportunity to expose more people to the thrills of buildings far away. The experiential and emotional qualities that the late Herbert Muschamp (also on screen praising Gehry above all others) was so good at dramatizing can be shown. But Pollock only tells, largely shooting the outsides of Gehry’s buildings in no particular order. The inside shots are static overviews with busy people. We never follow a ramp, discover titanium around a corner, get blinded by a reflection. We never get down on the ground, so one of the most interesting and controversial aspects of Gehry’s work, its urbanism, is totally lost.

I could go on: about the punch-pulling inherent in using an academic critic like Hal Foster, with whom no viewer will ever identify, as the lone negative voice; about the vague and invidious rejection of unnamed other architects’ work as “white cubes”; and so forth. But I won’t, because the way Gehry and Pollock set it up, I can only sound like a stick-in-the-mud unable to accept change.

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.

Unhappy Homes

I think that Sam Mendes has a decorproblem. As I wrote about Revolutionary Road, which he directed, the suburban house in which the Wheelers reside is beautifully decorated in a modern style, but they fail to evince any emotion about their stuff. It is background, and the lack of emotion toward their surroundings contributes to the viewers’ difficulty in believing their inflated emotions toward their terrible situation: loss of artistic dream, entombment in suburbia. It is just a set, not a house, not a home, which makes it hard to get sucked in to the characters’ reality. Their cool modern chairs were speaking to me but not, apparently, to the Wheelers.

The same problem rears its head in the seeminingly entirely different, but really not so, Away We Go. Like Frank and April Wheeler, Burt Farlander and Verona De Tessant think they are better than the circumstances in which they find themselves. Unlike the Wheelers, they live in the 2000s, so they actually go off in search of a better home (their lucky baby hasn’t been born yet). Their search takes them to Phoenix and Tucson, Madison, Montreal and Miami, and in each place they drop in on another caricature of family life, each one set against a densely decorated backdrop. The characters they meet are too weird, too overwritten and too idiosyncratic, to be useful as contemporary satire. But their homes, each one larger than the last, seem to include every decorating cliche on the planet in a vain attempt to ground them in reality.

I know plenty of attachment parents. They hardly need to have a vast family bed, family money, and an over-attachment to seahorses to seem terrifying. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s constant plucking at her easy-access tunics told me all I needed to know about LN (formerly Ellen). But it wasn’t just her. Do “loving” parents have to display as much art by their kids as possible to pass muster? Do all homes in Miami come with teal chairs? Burt and Verona seem to be sketched as hipsters (work from home, drive a Volvo, facial hair) but he sells insurance futures and she is a medical artist. To these professions I found it hard to relate, and found them impossible to place. Would a seller of insurance futures really not know the difference between cobbling, carving and whittling? Would they live in a little house full of junk (or was that supposed to be Craigslist irono-junk)?

So many questions… My point is, Burt and Verona and all the people they meet stand in front of their homes like actors in front of a painted backdrop, and the semaphores of sofas and sculptures don’t go with the words being spoken. When Burt and Verona do find their home—and it is a beautiful one—they act as if it has been made just for them. But really, who wouldn’t love an antebellum mansion on the water, beautifully faded to Martha Stewart hues? Their taste doesn’t make them special. And it did not make me love them, or their movie.

Cooking for Crowds

I saw Julie & Julia last night, was duly charmed by Meryl Streep, wished for the first and perhaps only time that Stanley Tucci was my husband, agreed that Amy Adams could never play a bitch, and got very distracted by the lamps. Nora Ephron, or at least production designer Mark Ricker, must have spent a fortune on cute lamps, from the Artemide Tolomeo desk lamp on Julie’s desk, to the bullet-shape, paper-shaded bedside lamps in one of the Childs’ European bedrooms (I think it was Oslo, where their living room appropriately featured Scandinavian modern, a welcome change from all that French gilt). The Childs’ progress through Europe was rightfully accompanied by the changing styles of the postwar period, but I think Julie’s apartment was a bit overdone for L.I.C. Would a cubicle-dweller and an Archaeology magazine editor really have Anthropologie bedding, Fiestaware, and vintage Thonet chairs? I felt like the Le Creuset French oven (the one overlapping kitchen item from Julia to Julie) needed a footnote, “*purchased at T.J. Maxx in Texas.” Yes, we are used to ridiculous New York apartments in movies, but not when the whole point is that our heroine needs to rescue herself. Fishs Eddy hotelware would have been more like it.

Besides, all those lovely interiors distract from the real design revolution Julia Child engineered. While she was making French recipes more scientific and more accessible (i.e. more American) she was also democratizing the way we cook and the way we entertain, with a little help from her Cambridge community. In the early days of “The French Chef,” Julia Child (via her husband Paul) met up with Benjamin Thompson, architect, designer, and creator of Design Research Inc., one of the first modern design stores in the United States. He and his staff provided pots, pans, platters, plates and graphic textiles for Julia’s television kitchen and dining room, restocking the set each Tuesday with the latest European imports. Julia also told him what to buy for the store, which soon started selling copper pans and garlic presses, Peugeot pepper mills and French knives. New food required new equipment, and that equipment suggested more casual ways of entertaining. Ceramic pots pretty enough to go from oven to table were part of her patter. In the servantless home, who wanted to replate every dish? I doubt the French would have suggested an omelette party, with a camp stove and fixings set up in the living room (I can’t find the clip on YouTube, but it was recently shown on WLIW).

In the movie, Julia’s plates are far more pedestrian than those lamps, and we only see her entertaining in a rather formal, if whimsical, manner in Paris. Marimekko didn’t enter her life until 1961, when she moved to Cambridge, Mass. In my Cambridge childhood I passed by Julia’s house all the time, as it was near my father’s office at the Center for European Studies. The woman who cooked for CES, Merry White, published a cookbook with same title as this entry, which served as my mother’s Bible—more ethnic, more stews, more 1970s than Mastering.

I know this because I am co-author with Jane Thompson, Ben Thompson’s widow, an urban planner and former editor of I.D. Magazine, of the forthcoming D/R: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle, 2010). In the book, there is an oral history of Julia and D/R, and I only wish the book were out now to join in the Julia renewal.