A bit late

The Greatest Thing You Will Read This Week

lazybookreviews:

…is Roseanne Barr’s NY Magazine piece.   It is everything you loved about “Roseanne,” one of my top-five shows of all time, but with a FUCK THE PATRIARCHY angle which will send you into gleeful bursts of rage on her behalf.  And yours.

Also: this awesome portrait by Robert Maxwell makes me think Roseanne should be doing Shakespeare, not reality TV.

NYT Opinionator: If These Walls Could Talk

For the second time in as many weeks, this blog has made the big time (i.e. publication). A post I wrote last winter about the ABC TV show Modern Family developed into my third and likely final entry in the New York Times Opinionator series Living Rooms: If These Walls Could Talk.

The show, produced by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, is about three intertwined families living in the Los Angeles suburbs. We meet them in the pilot, each in a moment of stress, with no mention of how they are connected. The Dunphys, a husband and wife with three children, are at home, arguing over the length of their teenage daughter’s skirt and how to get their son’s head out of the banister (baby oil). The Pritchetts are at a soccer game, where Jay, played by Ed O’Neill, is mistaken for the father of his wife, Gloria, played by Sofia Vergara. The Pritchett-Tuckers, a homosexual couple, are on an airplane, headed back from Vietnam with their new baby, Lily. Their differences are underlined by crisis, but I could have understood their respective characters with mute on, just by looking at their living rooms.

All three were incredibly fun to write, and I wish it could just go on. But they’d have to pay me more money for that.

Approving of the Approval Matrix

Who says criticism is dead? Bravo just bought the TV show based on New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix and developed by one of my first bosses at New York Magazine, Michael Hirschorn. (Yes, I keep referring to the olden days at New York. I learned a lot while always wearing the wrong thing. Since this week the magazine referred to someone in their late 30s as a member of an older generation, I want to make sure I remember my place.) Everyone loves the Approval Matrix, but what I especially love is that they have truly highbrow things in the highbrow section. Even, sometimes, architecture and design (Debbie Millman).

Highbrow, as you may know, was a term popularized by Russell Lynes that eventually ended up in this chart in LIFE and his 1954 book, The Tastemakers. If you scan across the chart, at the intersection of Highbrow and Reading is “Little magazines, criticism of criticism, avant garde literature,” so while the magazine as a whole is obviously Upper Middle-Brow, except in the matter of Highbrow, Salads (“Greens, olive oil, wine vinegar, ground salt, ground pepper, garlic, unwashed salad bowl) the matrix strays into Highbrow territory. My territory, for better or worse.

Since it is Bravo, I have a shred of hope they will keep that mix. There is something closet Highbrow about Project Runway, despite itself. To hear someone (who is a younger, hotter, less unctuous Charlie Rose?) fighting for the inclusion of the latest typeface from Hoefler & Frere-Jones, or subversive wallpaper made in Brooklyn or (more likely) arguing that selling the original Whitney would be Highbrow Despicable would be so fun. If the whole show devolves into a wrestling match over the lower left quadrant, whose residents are often unknown to me (Lowbrow, Games, “Craps”), it will be a lost opportunity to have criticism on TV, and architecture maybe treated like it is part of mass culture.

Playing House

Modern Family is really funny. Yes, I like something, and it is on TV! The set-up seems overly complex, with an unseen documentary crew, three families that are somehow related, and lots of pre-teen kids, but in fact all of that post-modern framing makes it brisk and funny. Scenes don’t get drawn out, because they can always cut to a character’s recap of the outcome, and the visual changes more often than in a typical sitcome because instead of one living room sofa, there are three.

In fact, those three living rooms, and those three houses, are used as a structuring device, cluing us in both to the character of each respective family and to the fact that we are switching POV. I would like to think that the houses, each more enormous than the last (and this for people who don’t seem to work, at least not yet) are meant as subtle satire. Yes, Virginia, everyone on TV does live in a McMansion. The sheer size of the sets astonishes, and offers the female audience the kind of shelter porn that Nancy Meyers movies are always good for (see Lisa Schwartzbaum’s EW review of It’s Complicated).

I have already read UrbanBaby love for the beige transitional living room of the most conventional of the three houses, inhabited by the most conventional of the three families: Claire, Phil and their three kids. What makes the show funny is that Claire and Phil, the good-looking heterosexual married couple, are the weirdos of the bunch. She is played by Julie Bowen, so pretty, so unthreatening in Ed, etc. Here she spoofs her natural niceness by being socially awkward, bad at giving gifts, once an ugly duckling. It is the explanation for why she would have married the even awkwarder (but unaware) Phil. He clearly loved the duckling, not the swan. They are actually characters, not cardboard cut-outs of what TV people think is normal.

Meanwhile, Claire’s father Jay (Ed O’Neill, a.k.a. Al Bundy) is married to a Colombian hottie with an awkward son of her own, Manny. They live in a house he can only have bought after his first wife’s passing: it is modern in the extreme, as glimpsed in the still above, and every time they show its angular front door it screams “mid-life crisis.”

The nicest house of the bunch, and the one we have spent the least time at so far is the home of Mitchell, Claire’s brother, Jay’s son, who is married to Cameron (a man). It is Spanish-style, hung about with vines, and actually looks like it might have been built before 2005. They adopted a little-seen baby Lily. I hope next season they can spring for some baby actors, since the Lily is mostly played by a Snugride. Cameron is actually the most popular member of the family, funny and wise, and has so far been given the most reveals: he was a defensive lineman; he is a clown; he was kicked out of the Greensleevers. To me, at least, the jokes seem more knowing and less stereotypical than most gay humor on TV. But they have given Mitchell and Cam the best taste.

The Modernist State

Any CT readers of this blog should watch “Living Modern in Connecticut” tomorrow night at 9 on CPTV, with additional broadcasts over the weekend. The half-hour show gives a short history of modernism in Connecticut, offering brief tours of the state’s three mid-century hot spots, New Canaan, New Haven and Hartford. It is a primer on the preservation issues facing the architecture of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and manages not to demonize the architecture or the demolishers.

I hadn’t realized it before, but I have done a lot of writing about preserving the work of modern architects who lived or worked in Connecticut, and the show mentions Philip Johnson, Gordon Bunshaft, Eliot Noyes, Paul Rudolph and Eero Saarinen. The episode ends with a building still hanging in the balance, Warren Platner’s Kent Memorial Library. Platner is better known for his restaurants than for his buildings, but this is a beautiful structure, and it would be a tragedy to lose it to the digital age.

Word on the Street

My son shows his first interest in the New York Times! But only because Big Bird was above the fold on Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section in honor of the show’s 40th anniversary. We have begun a bit of a study of Sesame Street in our house, as we alternate, depending on wake-up time and day of the week, between the two DVD sets of Sesame Street: Old School (please make more) and what we like to call “real Sesame Street”. And all three of us much prefer the fake one.

As my husband said, at various weekend brunches:

The older Sesame Street had more trickster figures and anti-heroes than role models.

The divine anarchy of Grover, the dopiness of Big Bird, the grouchiness of Oscar, all were accepted and accomodated by the wise, relaxed adults of the Sesame Street of my youth, who seemed to be going about their business (were David and Maria dating?) but always willing to join in a big brass band. They didn’t spend all their time trying to entertain us (as personified by the puppets) but could be drawn in by an argument or a game. And all instruction was a game, Susan with her “One of these things” song, the Count with his laugh.

We have never been able to figure out why the episodes come with a warning that they are for adults. Is it the disco? The “Macho” man, looking like the guy on the side of Brawny paper towels, that illustrates the letter M? Because they do a much better job of holding the attention of a two-year old. Every segment is short and to the point (every time Neil Patrick Harris as the Shoe Fairy comes on, my son moans; adults may find NPH funny, but it is just too long, too abstract and jokey for a toddler). In the old school episodes there was much more variation in the on-screen visuals, as it jumps from the space of the street, to lightly animated (and often very stylish) sequences, to skits featuring the puppets, to songs. Nothing is very long, nothing is endlessly repeated, and no one overacts. Several segments are just weird, like Capital I, which will stick in your head for days if you watch it on YouTube. Several of the adults on today’s Sesame Street spend all their time looking at the camera, popping their eyes and over-articulating. It is tiring from an adult perspective, and perhaps an indication of the child-centered world we are raising our son in, as dissected by Daniel Zalewski in his recent review of current children’s books in the New Yorker, The Defiant Ones.

My son’s favorite segment, to which he begs us to return, is one in which Grover and Kermit have to figure out the order of cart, horse, and driver. It is hilarious, and even a two-year-old can see what the problem is. If they tried to do the same thing with Elmo, it would surely involve Mr. Noodle, nervous laughter, yelling, and a full cast. Back in the day those two had to work it out for themselves, by themselves, and move on to the next thing.

And speaking of the alphabet: ABC Books on the Design*Sponge guest blog.

Kicking Down the Door

If Mad Men were only about the corporate architecture of the 1960s (which it is not, and thank god for that, as even I need a romance plot under the hung ceilings… Speaking of which, didn’t it look as if they had lowered the ceiling in Roger Sterling’s rarely-seen office? Just to increase the feeling Sterling, Cooper and Draper had of being literally boxed in?) the last shot of the very satisfying season 3 finale, “Shut the Door. Take a Seat,” would have been Roger Sterling and Don Draper staring back at the rows of desks, the grid of lights, and the pink and blue office doors, all receding into infinity, that were the scene of their greatest glories and disasters. That’s it, the shot seemed to say, on to something less hierarchical, fleeter-footed. Out with the old, in with the 1960s. The scenes of all our fan favorites packed together in a hotel room was merely a prelude to what I hope is the magnificent new architecture of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (Campbell Olsen) offices. In reality it took some years to shake off the SOM model, and in truth it never really went away. But if Matthew Weiner’s minions are looking in the right sources, SCDP could owe a debt to the Ford Foundation, a project bridging the gap between the buttoned-down and the opened-up. Or could they emphasize the temporary nature of the new group’s arrangements (and that same forward momentum) by using some of Herman Miller’s Action Office? Both would require a jump forward in the timeline to 1968, which I don’t think will happen, but he’s fudged the design dates before (see Selectric).

I love the show, but this was not my favorite season (and I am not just backlashing, as I have no water cooler about which to kibitz). I did not like the way Weiner hermetically sealed his characters in their own plots, acting as puppeteer, thumping us over the head with his themes, and occasionally forgetting their characters entirely (Peggy and Duck, really?). I felt like I never got to see enough of the characters I loved. I now see that that sense of stasis, the inability to advance the plot was part of his plan. Until the final episode the characters were really no further than they were at the start of the season (false new beginnings abounded), allowing this episode to explode with the drama of people actually doing something. It was like Mission Impossible, assembling the team. When Roger says, “Let me make a call,” and we know it is to Joan, I felt a little ping! of pleasure. I still think he delayed our gratification too long, but I can’t wait for season 4.