A Letter to America

Dear America,

I love your "service with a smile". I love your twang... most of the time. I love your artists, your bluster, your swagger, your grand buildings with the names of philanthropists on the front. Your optimism, even when your economy sucks.

I love your absurd portion sizes, your ridiculous menu creations (donut french toast? whipped cream on everything?), your retro diners, your retro grocery packaging, the way you say "uh-huh" instead of "you're welcome". I love your opinionated self. I love your free refills, and the fact that you still have dollar bills, so that holding three of them feels like money and not change.

I (have grown to) love (even though it drives me CRAZY) the perverse dedicated way that ALL the gardeners in LA absolutely refuse to dead-head their roses, leaving overblown, blousy roses outside all the buildings, like aging starlets in faded summer dresses (scheming to hide the new blooms).

I love Broadway, and paying the U.S. price on things, even though there's the exchange rate to factor in. I love that I can justify this blog entry by pretending that it's an assignment for "The List as Post-Narrative Structure". I love that your sale prices are actually a bargain and not just marked-down mark-ups.

I know we don't agree on everything, and that I could make a list just as long with negative things, but I won't, 'cause that's not what love is about.

I Love What You've Done with Your Tenement Flat

I have no idea why this 1911 book, Housekeeping Notes: How to Furnish and Keep House in a Tenement Flat, is in print, but I'm so glad it is! It reminds me of my visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

It seems to be an instructional book for teachers in Housekeeping Centers who were to teach young women from the tenements (I'm assuming they were women), how to keep house. It lists what one needs to set up a home in a tenement, how much it would cost, and how to maintain everything. It is also full of things to be grateful for (i.e. that I don't need to keep coal for a stove, etc). It also defaults to a family of five, and addresses both units with or without shared bathrooms.


I like the frank approach the book takes:

Shelves for china in the dining-room are better than a sideboard, the latter being too large for an ordinary tenement room. Cheap sideboards are also very ugly.

Book shelves are a necessity in the living-room…

These courses dealt with the reality of living in the tenements. Tenements were notoriously crowded, poorly maintained, and were built with the absolute minimum regard for human comfort and safety. They were such unhygienic fire-traps that they essentially spurred lawmakers to create building code laws. Tenement landlords were eventually forced by law to upgrade all their buildings to have indoor plumbing, and they argued at the time that it was too costly and not worthwhile.

After the first Tenement House Act, landlords tried to get legislation passed to undermine it. Check out this New York Times article from 1896. (Viewing the full article is free.)

There are probably lots of current books regarding public policy on low-income housing, and plenty of material on organizing social activism, but I can't imagine anyone publishing something like this now. It would be like publishing "Your Home in the Projects: How to Keep It Clean and Gorgeous". There are plenty of websites to tell you how to live frugally, or make furniture from Fed-Ex boxes, but I'm not sure if it's quite in the same spirit.

These types of courses were what eventually became public school Home Economics courses (I think). They were gone by the time I got to junior high. Unfortunately, I really needed this kind of training - I'm a pretty lousy housekeeper! I wish Home Ec and Auto Mechanics had been mandatory. However, with tuberculosis and bedbugs on the rise in T.O., perhaps we may as well look to 1911 for help.

Photos of 97 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, NY, from Tenement.org

Moot Point

I'm a little late to the party, obviously, but I just discovered these. Women's Wear Daily asked various designers to submit inaugural fashion designs for First Lady Michelle Obama (and her daughters), and published their mostly fabulous illustrations here.

I would seriously wear almost all of those designs (one at a time), except for the very Betsy-Johnson-ish Betsey Johnson, and the oddly boring Zac Posen (dude needs to stop drawing faces - yikes!). The Badgley Mischka looks pretty, but a bad choice as it would catch on the President's suit, no? Awkward.

I only wish they had let the designers annotate the designs, 'cause except for Mizrahi and Chado (whose writing is impossible to read), they don't tell us what the intended fabrics are or what the detailing would be.

Anyhow, the Jason Wu dress she chose is growing on me. I would really like to see it up close once it's at the Smithsonian. I didn't love it initially, but I didn't dislike it either. It's just fun to imagine what might have been. Too bad the other runners-up (who actually submitted dresses) aren't able to publish their designs, too - that would be a memorabilia program I would buy!


One last thing: I wish people would lay off Aretha's hat! I thought it was bold and suited her. The grey was dignified, the bow was out there, and the crystals were celebratory. I thought it was kind of cute and very her. It seemed to reference the history of African-American women's church hats and royalty, - and she is the Queen of Soul, is she not?

Photo courtesy of Mr.Song Millinery.

R.I.P. John Updike

New York Magazine's culture blog reports on the sad passing of John Updike. He was seventy-six.

Here's a Salon interview with him from when he was sixty-four.