Architectural Disgust and My (Possibly) Broken Toe
I think I broke my toe yesterday. I was walking around my place barefoot, as I like to, and drop-kicked the bedpost for no good reason other than that it was obscured by blankets. If traffic were better, I’d drive down to campus to have it checked out, but I know too well that there’s not a lot one can do about a broken toe, especially when it’s probably just stubbed.
There’s nothing quite like a nagging pain to put one in a misanthropic mood. At least, that holds true for many people. I require nothing to put me in such a mood other than casual observation of the world around me. Today’s bout of misanthropy was triggered by a short perusal through the pages of a recent copy of Architectural Digest.
Sitting on my couch with my leg extended, I flipped the pages of the magazine and began to long for someone to come by and just tie a tag to my toe and get it all over with. Something horrible has happened to Architectural Digest since I last paid attention to it lo those years ago.
When I was younger, I used to spend many nights in the library at the college where my mother taught. I loved to read the old architectural magazines and the ones from the 1930’s and 40’s were my favorites. The articles in these journals were well-written without being pompous and they featured large and modest houses alike, with a focus on design innovation and creativity.
AD appears to have suffered from the bloat of nouveau riche toxicity. The promotional material for the magazine invites one to give a subscription as a "gift of good taste.” But the magazine itself has little good taste to show for itself and the true gift of good taste in this instance would require the kind of restraint unknown by the editors of AD, at least as evidenced by pictures such as the following: a portrait of the house-owners done up in mock impressionism with a gilt rococo frame above a baroque fireplace of red and white marble with gold-plated andirons; a bathroom with gold-plated plumbing fixtures; a Waterford crystal, gold-plated, twelve-arm chandelier costing $24,000.
I guess Auric Goldfinger survived being sucked out of that plane and made a soft landing as an interior decorator specializing in the feng shui problems of well-off people with cataracts. For goodness sake, if all it takes is some golden drek to make a décor, why not stack a mountain of raw ingots in the corner next to a La-Z-Boy and call it a day?
Of course, if your home is featured in the pages of AD, you’re probably terribly nouveau riche anyway. First off, these are clearly pictures of houses in which nobody actually lives. These are houses designed specifically to gain the owner social acceptance into a world where having a house in Architectural Digest matters; real living goes on in second and third houses in other places. The people in the photos, if there are any, appear as lost and stiffly out of place in these abominations as they would, say, at a UN conference on human rights violations, or at the downtown public library.
Moreover, no self-respecting minor earl or old-money socialite doyenne would air their bath mats in public. But if you grew up with an aesthetic dominated by the Montgomery Ward catalog and made your money either as a mass-market carpet retailer or an overproduced adult-contemporary diva, then it fits your psychological profile to desire attention from the very middling sorts who considered themselves your superior in those hard, early years (and who eventually made up your customer base) and you now can nourish yourself with the delicious thought of those mere commoners back in Harrisburg dazzled by your golden showers. AD is not a design magazine, then, but a sort of sick exercise in schadenfreude for its subjects who, I am presuming here, delight in the fact that some of us can’t acquire the Pussy Galore décor without ever venturing to contemplate why we would ever want to.
The lesson in all of this is quite a cliché. You can’t buy good taste, but you can acquire it. The trouble is that if you pay for taste without taking the trouble to develop it (which is quite an involved education), your hireling will provide you with all the garish things necessary to delight an aesthetic simpleton such as yourself in an effort to justify his fee. This was half the problem of the Gilded Age – excessive, intemperate, tasteless displays of wealth thrown at the faces of the laboring public out of crass ignorance. In those days the mob did not seem to desperately desire the trappings of the class overlords, but only their fair share of a living wage, and seemed to enjoy simple pleasures more than the rabble of today. Innocent, healthy amusements like reading newspapers, drinking at union halls, and throwing brickbats at stockbrokers have been replaced by the empty promises of reality television and fast-food sweepstakes which hold out to today's consumer the slim chance to mimic the lack of refinement we find in Architectural Digest.
Perhaps now the swelling has gone down enough to put on my gold-toe socks.
There’s nothing quite like a nagging pain to put one in a misanthropic mood. At least, that holds true for many people. I require nothing to put me in such a mood other than casual observation of the world around me. Today’s bout of misanthropy was triggered by a short perusal through the pages of a recent copy of Architectural Digest.
Sitting on my couch with my leg extended, I flipped the pages of the magazine and began to long for someone to come by and just tie a tag to my toe and get it all over with. Something horrible has happened to Architectural Digest since I last paid attention to it lo those years ago.
When I was younger, I used to spend many nights in the library at the college where my mother taught. I loved to read the old architectural magazines and the ones from the 1930’s and 40’s were my favorites. The articles in these journals were well-written without being pompous and they featured large and modest houses alike, with a focus on design innovation and creativity.
AD appears to have suffered from the bloat of nouveau riche toxicity. The promotional material for the magazine invites one to give a subscription as a "gift of good taste.” But the magazine itself has little good taste to show for itself and the true gift of good taste in this instance would require the kind of restraint unknown by the editors of AD, at least as evidenced by pictures such as the following: a portrait of the house-owners done up in mock impressionism with a gilt rococo frame above a baroque fireplace of red and white marble with gold-plated andirons; a bathroom with gold-plated plumbing fixtures; a Waterford crystal, gold-plated, twelve-arm chandelier costing $24,000.
I guess Auric Goldfinger survived being sucked out of that plane and made a soft landing as an interior decorator specializing in the feng shui problems of well-off people with cataracts. For goodness sake, if all it takes is some golden drek to make a décor, why not stack a mountain of raw ingots in the corner next to a La-Z-Boy and call it a day?
Of course, if your home is featured in the pages of AD, you’re probably terribly nouveau riche anyway. First off, these are clearly pictures of houses in which nobody actually lives. These are houses designed specifically to gain the owner social acceptance into a world where having a house in Architectural Digest matters; real living goes on in second and third houses in other places. The people in the photos, if there are any, appear as lost and stiffly out of place in these abominations as they would, say, at a UN conference on human rights violations, or at the downtown public library.
Moreover, no self-respecting minor earl or old-money socialite doyenne would air their bath mats in public. But if you grew up with an aesthetic dominated by the Montgomery Ward catalog and made your money either as a mass-market carpet retailer or an overproduced adult-contemporary diva, then it fits your psychological profile to desire attention from the very middling sorts who considered themselves your superior in those hard, early years (and who eventually made up your customer base) and you now can nourish yourself with the delicious thought of those mere commoners back in Harrisburg dazzled by your golden showers. AD is not a design magazine, then, but a sort of sick exercise in schadenfreude for its subjects who, I am presuming here, delight in the fact that some of us can’t acquire the Pussy Galore décor without ever venturing to contemplate why we would ever want to.
The lesson in all of this is quite a cliché. You can’t buy good taste, but you can acquire it. The trouble is that if you pay for taste without taking the trouble to develop it (which is quite an involved education), your hireling will provide you with all the garish things necessary to delight an aesthetic simpleton such as yourself in an effort to justify his fee. This was half the problem of the Gilded Age – excessive, intemperate, tasteless displays of wealth thrown at the faces of the laboring public out of crass ignorance. In those days the mob did not seem to desperately desire the trappings of the class overlords, but only their fair share of a living wage, and seemed to enjoy simple pleasures more than the rabble of today. Innocent, healthy amusements like reading newspapers, drinking at union halls, and throwing brickbats at stockbrokers have been replaced by the empty promises of reality television and fast-food sweepstakes which hold out to today's consumer the slim chance to mimic the lack of refinement we find in Architectural Digest.
Perhaps now the swelling has gone down enough to put on my gold-toe socks.
1 Comments:
"the delicious thought of those mere commoners back in Harrisburg dazzled by your golden showers"
That line disturbs me...
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