Longtime reader and commenter and all-around swell guy Sixty Grit has poked me through the bars about an off-hand comment I made in “Tear The Roof Off The Sucka.” I’ve been living for about a year now in a house that was something of a drunkard’s nightmare cum insane asylum, so perhaps I’ve grown inured to the gaping strangeness of the place.
Wait, you can’t just throw out “shingled inside” without further explanation. I have seen some stuff, but I have never seen that. One of my houses was owned by a guy who used to saw off molding using a chainsaw, from the looks of it, square, sort of, then nail it next to another piece, on an outside corner. He didn’t know you could buy a saw with more than 1 tooth per inch _and_ saw an angle cut. But I never saw shingles inside.
I don’t want Sixty Grit to think I’m a liar. I am a liar, by birth, education, temperament, proclivity, and inclination; that’s why I don’t want Sixty Grit to think I’m a liar. But indeed, I hereby aver that a goodly portion of my house had cedar shingles applied to the interior walls like lumberjack wallpaper:
That’s my bedroom, which is still something of a horror, but at least it’s not shingled now. The foyer was shingled. A bedroom upstairs. The kitchen was shingled, too, including the backsplash –even the backsplash behind the stove. A cedar shingle dried indoors might as well be soaked with napalm. Using it for a stove backsplash tests the lower limits of behaviors that result in continuing to abide above the lawn. And at least some of the former occupants smoked like steamship funnels. There are scorch marks on the rim of the sink in the bathroom, and the ultimate sign of the hardcore smoker: scorchmarks on the wooden floor around the toilet where the truly dedicated would put down their ubiquitous butt to look after their other ubiquitous butt.
There’s a great deal that can be learned from my house. It’s a fine example of what happens when a house is worth a lot less than it cost to build it. Every single house in the town I live in is worth less than it would cost to build it. The United States is learning right now how people behave in, and towards, things that are currently worth less than they cost to build. No one takes care of inexpensive expensive things. They amuse themselves with wrecking it, or tinker with it, like a Home Depot flyer exploded in it, pasting nonsensical gewgaws all over everything instead of fixing the roof or keeping the pipes from freezing. People become inordinately interested in “saving energy,” and are prone to listen to the siren song of rubber windows and plastic siding and willy-nilly insulation. The buboes appear as vinyl siding, generally; then the long, slow, slide with lots of stops along the way to copper thievery. Human beings are locusts to a house they don’t care about.
You can have expensive houses or you can have no houses. I’d exhort you to choose, but it looks like we already have. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got shingles to put on the roof, and take off the walls.
Semi-obscure footage of a sound check from 1986 at a Shriner’s hall in Pittsburgh called the Syria Mosque.
Stevie’s yawning and picking his nose, so I imagine he’s been rousted out of bed at some ungodly hour like four in the afternoon so the roadies can figure out if everything is plugged in.
He looks a little like what would happen if John Wayne was accidentally assigned Liberace’s dressing room, but he sure could play. He died and they tore the Mosque down. The end.
[Editor’s Note: Written two years ago. In the interest of verifying “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is,” one cannot help but notice the author and his family moved into a somewhat larger version of this shed one year ago. Reposted with comments intact, as they are so trenchant.]
[Author’s Note: There is no editor, and there are a lot more squirrels and bees in my house than in that shed.]
Here it comes: I would rather live in this shed than in your house.
Click on the picture. It’s a very high resolution shot. Look at it. It’s beautiful.
I’m generalizing, of course. It’s possible that I’m not referring to you. But there are so few of you that are exceptions to my impertinence that I simply say it matter-of-fact-like: Your house has no soul. It’s got no anima. It’s a misshapen plastic lump dedicated to the exaltation of your car and your television. It is the bastid love child of a realtor with the taste of a vegas hooker and a contractor with a prominent eyebrow ridge.
It makes you unhappy. You don’t know that, because many of the ways it does that are subtle. Paying for the damn thing, though it brings you little pleasure, is not so subtle.
I do listen to people a little in these matters. I watch them a lot. And what they do about their house cancels out what they say about their house every time.
You tell me that absolute neatness is paramount. Then I see you camping out in one little corner of your house in a midden of messy but prized possessions.
You tell me you want to luxuriate in a whirlpool while reading poetry with candles next to an open window. Then I see you showering in a hurry in a room with all the shades drawn. The spiders like your jacuzzi, so it’s not going to waste, exactly.
You tell me that you like your television over the mantel in the living room. I see you turning one room after another into a “den”, then eventually building additional rooms, trying to make a comfortable place to look at a screen. I call your living room the “Furniture Mausoleum” when you’re not around. Sorry.
You tell me how much money and effort you’ve spent to make your home perfect. Then I watch you leave it, gladly, on any provocation. You can’t wait to escape your homemade Colditz.
You’ve explained to me in some detail that under no circumstances should you be expected to pay any attention to the maintenance of your house. If a material can deteriorate in any way, and so require the touch of a hand, it’s verboten. So you flee your vinyl house for a vacation in Tuscany and wish your house had soul like the one with grime from the 17th century still visible in its stucco.
You spent $35,000 on windows, and then boarded them up with blinds and drapes because they don’t look at anything.
No stranger can ever find anything in your kitchen without asking, or find a bathroom.
The sun doesn’t shine in your windows, except in your eye when you’re trying to sleep.
It’s impossible for guests to sleep comfortably at your house, though it covers 3500 square feet and is two stories high.
You can’t prepare actual meals from raw materials in your kitchen.
You feel isolated but have no privacy.
You exit and enter your house every day by bumping into a trash can in an unlit warehouse for your car. Your dog wouldn’t.
There are birds in your yard and you’ve never seen them.
You tell me all the live-long day you adore your house, but when your mortgage is ten cents more than your Zillow estimate you mail the keys back to the bank.
It may just be that my idea of what a house should be is dead. I have to respect other people’s opinions, after all, especially about their own affairs. I might tell people they shouldn’t do things, but I’m not interesting in telling people they can’t do things. I mostly try to dwell on the positive in these matters, but if my opinions about housing were unleashed, I’d make Gordon Ramsey look circumspect in comparison. In a way, my cottage furniture business is a rearguard attack in this regard. I’m trying to save the entire stock of housing in America one end table at a time. Big job. It would be unwise to bet on me. But it’s always unwise to bet against me, too. I sense that many are dissatisfied with their abodes now but are confused about the genesis of the feeling.
I’ve watched the “Let’s Wander the Earth with a Floozy Realtor and Choose Between Three Tawdry Split-Level Houses” show with my wife, and my advice to all the prospective homebuyers is the same. I yell at the screen: nuke all of them from orbit, and maybe you can make something pleasant out of the hole.
Why not head on over to Rightnetwork and read the latest installment of Maine Family Robinson. Leave a comment or three over there about Getting Ahead In Today’s Mad Max Realty Market. It fools the management into thinking I’m pleasant and people like me. My bad; I meant it fools me into thinking I’m pleasant and people like me. Sorry.
{Author’s Note: I guess I hadn’t figgered out the Intertunnel doesn’t pay by the word yet. There is no editor.}Let’s be positive today. Nary a discouraging word, as they say.
O.K. I’m positive that Hollywood hasn’t made ten movies as good and entertaining as “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” in the intervening 57 years since it was made. Yup, I’m positive.
Hollywood is in a slump, according to Variety. People don’t plunk it down reflexively at the box office any more. Lots of head scratching up and down the Sunset Strip. Well, let me give you some hints, over there on the west coast, about why we’re not buying as much of this piffle as previously: It’s because it’s crap.
It always was crap, I know. When I was a kid, TV was in black and white, and had three or four channels. You watched whatever was on it. Period. And if you were home sick from school, propped up with pillows in the bed, fortified with those wonder drugs, aspirin and ginger ale, the one treat you got was the 11 inch black and white TV at the foot of your bed, and bad movies all day long.
TV, with only those three or four channels, still didn’t know how they could possibly fill all those hours. They’d show any drivel: Candlepin bowling for a couple of bucks, or maybe just a gift certificate. Community Auditions. Anyone who’s ever seen Community Auditions can’t watch American Idol. Once you’ve seen the spectacle of an overfed adolescent in a tutu twirling a baton to a lounge combo version of a Sousa march, nothing else will do.
But of all the dreck, Dialing for Dollars was king. Dialing for Dollars was a local show, where a bad radio announcer would host an interminable movie in the afternoon, and occasionally pause to pick bits of a shredded phonebook out of a rotating basket, and call the phone number on the scrap. At first, the available technology didn’t even allow you to hear the person being called, making the tableau seem even stranger than it was. If the person was home, and watching the movie, and could identify the movie, and knew the exact amount of cash they were giving away, they won a few bucks. Think of those odds. The unintentional comedy factor was pretty high; picture watching, watching mind you, a bad emcee count on his fingers and intone: One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four Rings…
People would actually answer their phones back then, and talk to whoever was on the line. No call screening. No unlisted numbers. No cold call salesman. No answering machines yet. Hell, the host would still reach party lines occasionally back then. For you youngsters, a party line was a phone circuit that served several homes, because phone lines used to be precious, and expensive. The phone would ring slightly differently for each user, and your neighbors could pick up their phones and listen to your conversations if they felt like it. And so occasionally the host would be talking to three shut-ins at the same time, none of whom were watching his movie.
The host would mostly get elderly ladies, who didn’t know what day it was, never mind what the movie was, and started talking to the guy as if they were restarting a conversation they had started in 1936, and he’d sit there, politely trying to get an interjection in edgewise, always failing, and looking at the camera like it was an oncoming freight train. Finally, he’d get the question out, and the women would say:
“What did you say your name was, again?”
And he’d always say: “Buh Bye” sweetly, and they’d add ten bucks to the till, and he’d PUT THE PHONE NUMBER BACK IN THE BIN. Try, try again, indeed.
The more upscale local station tried a bit of class by showing the same dreadful movies at midnight on the weekends, but with a host in a tuxedo. He’d stand on a set reminiscent of a Busby Berkley musical, in bow tie and tails, and try to find something interesting to say about the movie. There was a problem. The fellow hosting the show used to be Bozo the Clown on Saturday mornings, and we all knew it. And try as he might to be urbane, many of us would always look at him and smirk. That poor fellow spent his whole rest of his life trying to be suave and sophisticated, but the greasepaint and fright wig always showed somehow, like a tattoo you got when you were young and drunk, and regretted for every waking moment for the rest of your life.
Off topic perhaps, but I met his son once. I attended a party at the local junior college, the summer between high school and college. The college had always had the reputation as a place where wealthy people send their ne’er-do-well children to dry out and be babysat by the faculty, until they could ram them back into the real college that had expelled them for partying too much. My friends and I were just the poor local schlubs, very out of place, and must have looked like the dead end kids to these little inebriant fauntleroys. We were the guests of a lovely young lady who was dating a friend of mine. The movie host’s son was there, drunk as a lord, and began hitting unmercifully on my friend’s girlfriend, right in front of him. My friend could have disassembled the little blighter into his component limbs, and stacked them like cordwood if he’d had the mind to, but he was a gentle sort, and slow to anger. The little cretin eventually brought out what I’m sure he thought were his big guns: Do you know who my father is?
I butted in: “I sure do. He’s Bozo!”
This was not the answer he was looking for. He withdrew.
Anyway, eventually you saw every movie ever made- good, bad or indifferent. Occasionally they’d show a good movie like “Blandings,” by mistake perhaps. And you got a perspective on how hard it is to make a really good movie. It must be difficult, there’s so many of them, but so few worth watching.
What I suspect, however, is that recently they’re not really trying to entertain us anymore. They really don’t seem to care that a vast majority of potential viewers, me included, don’t need to see another movie about a hit man with a heart of gold. Forty five of them a year for the last ten years has fulfilled my need for comic murderers, thank you. I’d rather see stories about interesting and attractive people, like the Blandings.
“Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” was made in 1948. It was essentially remade in the 1980s, with uneven effect, but still with enough of the original’s luster to shine on through, as “The Money Pit.” Tom Hanks and Diane from “Cheers” made a good comic team, and we own that one too and wqtch it occasionally. But Blandings is king.
Cary Grant is da bomb. Cary Grant is a movie star. Picture Tom Cruise sitting on a couch across from Jay Leno. That’s a very small picture, even if you have widescreen television. Now picture Cary Grant sitting across from Johnny Carson. They’re both too big for the screen, no matter how big it is.
Everybody in Hollywood is a homunculus compared to Cary Grant. He’s dead, and in black and white, and my wife still reminds me: “You know, Cary Grant is a babe.”
Grrr. Yeah, I know.
And unlike modern actors, he can act. Not Olivier acting. I mean, “Hamlet” isn’t in danger of breaking out in the middle of one of his movies. But you only need so much Hamlet in your life; somebody tell a joke, will ya? Cary Grant knew how to.
And Myrna Loy was a babe. She had the looks of the woman you would marry, and stay that way. She started her career as a vamp, but morphed into a matron eventually. The vamp always showed, though, like a glimpse of garter, and I still remind my wife: “Myrna was a babe, you know.”
Grrr. Yeah, I know, she says.
And Myrna knew how to deliver her lines for their full comic effect. Most actresses today sound like they’re reading that shredded phonebook I mentioned earlier, aloud. Without their glasses.
The story is and interesting cultural artifact about city folks building their house out in the countryside. It’s funny to hear them talk about Western Connecticut like it’s out on the prairie, and bucolic as Vermont. Mr. Blanding’s house would fetch tens of millions of dollars today. But the story is universal, for anybody that builds a house, and raises children, and works at a job. The humor is the sort that’s a lost art these days. It’s quiet, and self effacing, and subtle. Mark Twain used to rail against people that “told jokes.” He knew how to be funny, which is to tell a story in a humorous way, and avoided punchline fodder. And a movie, a comic movie, is just telling a story in a humorous way, isn’t it? It should be. This one is.
And it’s interesting to look through the actors who have small parts in the movie. They all know what they’re doing, and push the story along nicely. Only a a fetishist would recognize more than a few of them by name, but they all look familiar. Then you look up their resumes, and are amazed:
Louise Beavers, who plays their maid, and comes up with the advertising slogan that pays for that house, was in 163 movies!
Harry Shannon, the well driller, who has the best scenes in the movie, appeared in 149 movies. I vaguely remember him shooting at John Wayne, or shooting at the someone else with John Wayne, a few times.
Nestor Paiva, who plays an appraiser for 30 seconds in the movie, was in 186 movies.
And Jason Robards (Senior) knew how to work. He appeared in no fewer than 206 movies, and then had a son to be in a few hundred more.
And you know why they worked like that. They were professional, and people that knew how to write and produce movies knew enough to use accomplished and dependable actors, and tried mightily to entertain us. They still do entertain us, though they’re all dead now.
It’s the live people in Hollywood that have forgotten how, or never knew.
Tag: architecture
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments