The Rage Diaries

What I read last week: the kitsch edition

So there I was, reading Kitsch In Sync: A Consumer's Guide to Bad Taste, when I ran across this passage:

As soon as there was a demand for objects which signified 'I have good taste' and these objects were mass-produced, then many people could possess them and claim the good-taste status these objects were supposed to being. But this process of instant mass acquisition  and ownership of good taste meanst the objects in question lost the element of exclusivity that formed a fundamental part of their appeal as symbols of good taste. [...] It also broke another rule of taste: having taste meant you exercised personal judgment in an enlightened way, but copying what other people approved removed this faculty of judgment almost entirely.

Speaking of ways to make your place your own ...

The discussion in this post shaped my weekly reading (more on that tomorrow) and it was the first thing I thought of after reading about Stumasa.unfinished furniture. The Cole Valley store stocks raw wooden furniture and custom-builds items as well. I personally am intrigued by their benches, as I have been looking for one and I haven't found anything in the exact shape and color I want.

(Also, I recently refinished our kitchen table and it looks great, so I've got Refinishing Fever. There's a gallon of Citristrip and four kitchen chairs currently calling my name in the garage ...)

Embarassingly, I was in Cole Valley two weeks ago for my Crepes on Cole fix, and I didn't even notice this place. Enough about me: Stumasa seems like a place where you can have your cake and eat it too. If that copycat neighbor wants to know where you got your fabulous bookcases, just smile and point -- the raw materials come from Stumasa but the personalization is all you.

Back in the saddle

Y'all know I'm still recapping for TWoP, right? Sure, Prison Break is on hiatus, but I wrote an extra, recapping, Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? It's Tori-tastic!

It's so hard having fabulous taste

In "When Imitation Is Annoying, Not Flattering," (NYT, Feb 19, 06), the author effectively makes this argument: it's not fair for you to copy me when I spent all this time and money on my house. I have been trying to figure out why this whole article rubbed me the wrong way. Was it the author's name-dropping? Her casual flinging about of five, six and seven-figure budgets?

Or is it simply the behavior of people who don't seem to realize Absolutely Fabulous was a comedy skewering consumption-as-identity-statment? Witness this passage:

It took Michelle Dewey, the mother of one of my daughter's water polo teammates, more than two years to build a 6,300-square-foot "Old World French-style" home in La Canada Flint-ridge, Calif. "I'm a perfectionist," she said. "If I'm looking for doorknobs, I want the best doorknobs in the country."

I challenge anyone to read that and not think of  "Door Handle," the AbFab episode where Edina takes the Concorde to New York City to find the perfect doorknob for her kitchen.

Hey, I'm sympathetic to the time and mental energy that goes into finding the items you want in the house: I'm in the middle of picking out a sink for our bathroom and not only is finding a sink I can live with crazy-making, so is realizing that I've spent weeks brooding about a bathroom item. Were someone to waltz into our house at some point and decide to get all Single White Female on our bathroom, I might be miffed.

More likely, I'd be complimented. I much prefer the "share what you know" approach I see to so many shelter-oriented sites online, like Apartment Therapy and House In Progress, and one of the reasons I love visting ljcfyi (and thank you, Tracy, for pointing me to that site) is that she's got an entire projects gallery where she details how-tos around the house. I think reno/decorating/style weblogs are an excellent way to actually prevent copy-catting, because they give people the inspiration and know-how to craft a personal take on someone else's good idea.

But is there room for the burning shame?

Suburban homeowners are so full of angst, guilt, despair and frustration over their bulging garages that they spent $800 million on garage organizing products last year, double the amount spent in 2000, according to the market research firm Packaged Facts. Alleviating that garage guilt could easily cost $12,000 per job.

The amount of money spent on garage makeovers is expected to rise by 10 percent a year for the rest of the decade, making garage organizing one of the fastest growing segments of the home improvement market.

[...]

According to the National Association of Homebuilders, the size of the average new house built in the United States increased more than 50 percent between 1970 and 2004, even as the size of the average family grew smaller. Internet sites like eBay were supposed to help homeowners turn their clutter into cash by feeding the habits of pack rats across globe. Even garages themselves have grown: 83 percent of all new homes built in 2004 had two- or three-car garages, double the number in 1970.

But the surge in online retailing and a flood of inexpensive imported goods has made it all too easy for recreational shoppers to overfill their McMansions. So the landscape of countless American subdivisions now features a peculiar anomaly: three-car garages so crammed with junk that the three cars are parked in the driveway.

-- "After $12,000, There's Even Room to Park the Car," NYT, Feb 20, 06

What I read last week: the Nothing With Paragraphs edition

Last week was a good week for comic books (hello, Birds of Prey!) and magazine subscriptions, which more or less tells you all you need to know about exactly how much uninterrupted reading time I had, and how long my attention span was. Phil surprised me with The Complete Far Side 1980-1994, and I did manage to clap eyes on all 1,272 pages. Thank goodness for cartoon panels -- they're like potato chips for the brain.

In my mental taxonomy of comic strips, The Far Side is classed with Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County: all three used punchlines as a way to hide bigger, smarter, sharper points. All three respected the potential of human imagination. All three did not respect boundaries that were imposed by others. And all three ended*.

I keep trying to articulate something bigger about these strips, how they may have shaped a generation's sensibilities, how the writers' retirements may have had just as much of an impact on us that their strips did. But I'm undercaffeinated this morning and can't find the premises to support my position. All I can write is this: in my four years at Virginia Tech, I couldn't go through Davidson or Derring halls without walking by some professor's office door papered with Far Side comics. It was a daily reminder of the role humor plays in interpreting everyday life -- and the role smarts plays in building humor. There are worse legacies for a comic strip to impart.

Right on, Charles!

You few, proud Wait, Wait -- Don't Tell Me! nerds will recognize Charlie Pierce because he's one of the dudes who regularly pops up on the show. He has now popped up on Slate with one of the most amusing and incisive Winter Olympics articles I've read, "Hail the Conquering Goofballs! America's Endearing Olympic Misfits."

In talking about Shaun White*, Hannah Teeter and Johnny Weir, Pierce sums it up with a beautiful finish:

This is now and always has been the greatest country in which to be completely off the wall. We are the place that acclimated itself to the bizarre concepts of Gov. Jesse Ventura, Rep. Sonny Bono, and President Ronald Reagan. We are the only society ever that could have produced Little Richard. We are better represented as a nation by this blizzard of youthful flakes than we ever will be by, say, Bode Nike on the slopes or the collection of dutiful accessories who will be skating for our men's hockey team.

With any luck, the performance of these very unique Americans will once again prove to the world that we are not a nation of snarling, liquored-up senior executives who spend our spare time hanging out with the likes of Brit Hume. Perhaps more than a few foreigners will look at Hannah, and at the Flying Tomato, and at the baroque concerto that is Johnny Weir, and say to themselves, "Geez, that's right. That's the place that gave us Liberace and the Marx Brothers." That was a great country, once.

Bravo! If we were scoring columns like an ice-skating judge, I'd give this one a 90.

Should you be so moved ...

My dad was a huge fan of elephants and of the Green Bay Packers, so it's practically written in my DNA that I too will pledge allegiance to the pachyderms and the Packers. Although he seemed to like African elephants more, I prefer their Asian counterparts.

The photo at left is from the National Geographic, from the Feb 14, 06, article, "Elephants Make a Love Connection." It's not an awesome monkey photo, but it is a pretty awesome animal photo, so I'm including it in that moribund monkey category.

In any event, if you too are a fan of elephants, the Wildlife Conservation Society runs an Asian Elephant Conservation Program. The program works because it focuses on protecting the elephant population and figuring out ways the great animals can coexist with humans nearby.  If you're looking for someplace to donate a little extra cash, please consider donating to the WCS's elephant conservation efforts.

Zounds!

Last week, Zillow.com told me my home's market value has plunged 7% in the 5.5 months since I bought it. Before I did anything like question the veracity of its conclusions, I worked through the five stages of grief -- denial ("No! This can't be!"), anger ("Stupid site! What does it know, anyway?"), bargaining ("If I only knew how it worked, I could understand this number."), despair ("Oh, God, it's true -- we bought a house at exactly the wrong time.") and acceptance ("Ah, I got Zillowed. Whatever.")

Having gone through that, here's why Zillow.com struck me as maybe not the best tool for assessing fair value: Like I said, it claims my house's value has plummeted 7% since August; it also said that housing values in my county have dropped 7%. This struck me as not entirely correct: According to the California Association of Realtors, median housing prices in Alameda county have logged double-digit year-over-year increases since we bought: Aug -- 19.2%; Sep -- 21.3%; Oct --16.6%; Nov --19.4%; Dec -- 14.9%. According to the National Association of Realtors, home prices in the San Francisco/Oakland/Fremont region rose 9.4% in Q4.

The data would seem to point to rising market values for properties in my area.

Another reason the site seems hinky to me: it's not in keeping with the sales trends I've personally observed. I've been watching home listings and sales on the island with some interest, noting the price ranges at which comparable houses are a) listed and b) sold. As of last Sunday, we were among the lowest three sales prices on the island in the last six months; prices have been trending up ever since we bought.

You can see where I was wondering how Zillow's data was so incompatible with my firsthand observations and research. I'm not the only one: Leslie Walker reports in "Site's Alluring Facade Is Built on Shaky Foundation" (WaPo, Feb 16, 06) that Zillow's valuation formula has been overriding actual sales data too frequently. This goes a long way toward explaining why our own Zestimate seemed hinky when examined in context with other data.

Walker also writes this:

Nationwide, 62 percent of all Zestimates fall within 10 percent of the selling price, according to Zillow. That means 38 percent are more than 10 percent off the mark, which strikes me as significant.

So you have a nearly two-in-five chance of your Zestimate being way off the market, and a three-in-five chance of your Zestimate being 10% over or under the selling price. Ten percent may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, but for anyone who plans on refinancing once they hit a certain equity benchmark, 10% is the difference between PMI and a plain ol' mortgage. That 10% margin of error can be mighty pricey -- especially in a state like California where more than half of new homebuyers in the last year have the kind of nontraditional financing that's linked (directly or indirectly) to the amount of equity they'll get from their home.

It'll be interesting to see how Zillow.com affects the house-buying process -- whether it'll gain credibility, undermine the credibility of realtors and appraisers, or be dismissed as a valuable tool.

I can't be the only one who reads these, right?

I am looking for a new medicine cabinet for our bathroom's pending remodel. And I am beginning to wonder who is crazier: me or the copywriters who describe medicine cabinets.

Exhibit A: "the Zen-spa gestalt of the modern bath." By its definition, "gestalt" means "a functional arrangement with properties not easily derived from its constituent parts." So how is "Zen-spa gestalt" not contradictory? Wouldn't the gestalt mean that the zen and the spa have been subsumed by the greater arrangement? Also, does that phrase seem that would be more appropriate if the Axis had carried WWII, or is that just me?

Exhibit B: "English elegance and fine tropical materials." Or as several million inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent saw it, "imperialism."

Yeah, I'm picking on one retailer here, but seriously ... would you be inspired to buy after reading those phrases?