Nostalgia: What’s the Role of the Past in Fashioning the Future? One of the better talks at Frieze with Owen Hatherley, Matthew Brannon, and Dan Fox.
Urban Outfitters sells Diana+ cameras and now, Olivetti typewriters (via.) Their electronics section is full of replicas vintage payphones. Should we call this aesthetic “nostalgia tech”?
Chicago-area buildings endangered, a photoset by the Chicago Tribune, (whose own iconic tower will be condos, should Sam Zell get his way.) Aggressive plans for energy efficiency and poor upkeep have put many remarkable structures like Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Hospital and Elgin Mental Health Center, and even a Frank Lloyd Wright home at risk. More from the Sun-Times. Stop Smiling gets a “sinking feeling,” as would anyone lucky enough to have spent time in the city.
Suburban Ruins and The Ethics of House Flipping
People turn to the past because they are looking for something that they don’t find in the present — comfort and well-being… Only the wealthy or the very poor can live in the past; only the former do so by choice.
- Witold Rybczynski, Home
Although her home has been on the market for several years now, my aunt (by marriage) isn’t stalling because buyers are asking too low. She’s hesitating due to emotional attachment to the property — it’s the house her father designed and built, and the home she grew up in. I lived there briefly myself when I was going to college nearby. Recently, she was to close on a deal with a young married couple, but then she looked up the wife on the internet and discovered the woman is well known as an area “house flipper.”
This neighborhood eschews miles and miles of Washington, DC suburban sprawl with its vestiges of pedestrian life: it is a 10 minute walk to the West Falls Church metro, and 5 minutes to a main street with a coffee shop, dry cleaner, TJ Maxx, a good balance of chains and small businesses. A bike trail is nearby.
Because of its conveniences and location, the land is pricey. Buyers willing to pay for West Falls Church real estate generally want several bedrooms and five baths. Over the years, my aunt has complained about the trasformation of modest homes — 70s-style “post-and-beam extravaganzas” as this article in Residential Architect puts it — into regurgitated palatial fantasies. Soon hers will be the only non McMansion on the block.
And gross remodeling may be its inevitable second life. For now, she’s still waiting for someone who will respect the design of the place. This isn’t some kind of a penance — the house is really beautiful. There are few places I’ve felt quite as cozy in, as I have reading a book on the back porch looking out at the garden. The use of the space, the way the windows are shaped, so much of my idea of a perfect house comes from living there that year in 2003.
A few years ago, I was guiltily obsessed with A&E and TLC house flipping programs and marveled at how often the flipper blatantly conned people out of their property. The worst of them was Armando Montelongo, a San Antonio flipper who is half as likeable as Roger Clemens, just a little less weird than that plastic surgeon on Dr 90210, an internet scam artist, and known for habitually neglecting to pay his contractors.
“Mondo” does a lot of objectionable things on the show, from piggish to illegal. He once had his wife and sister-in-law dress in beekeeper costumes to exterminate a colony of bees, so he could save $300 on a professional beekeeper. He watched them from a lawnchair, beer in hand. Then there’s something about him hiring children of illegal aliens for a demolition project. Now he’s dealing with several lawsuits — facing jailtime — not paying one contractor, owing backtaxes, and the 20 or so properties of his that went into foreclosure. The guy is a crook and A&E should have known better.
But I most despised him when he’d make false promises to whomever he’s buying the house from: that he’d never strip the Victorian wallpaper. That he likes the bar in the kitchen their father made. That he’ll keep the structure the same way, but just clean it up a little bit. A widow or widower passes, and the descendants can’t afford to keep up the house. All they want is to know someone is enjoying the home as grandpa made it. Money isn’t a main issue at a time like that. So he pretend to agrees, taking the bargain, and soon after breaks his word — neglecting the family’s wishes on TV! It’s not just knucklehead-ed behavior, it’s usually aesthetically disappointing: ironing out everything that made the home unique in order to appeal to the most buyers. A hardwood floor and granite countertop sacrificial rape of a property.
Now, my politics are more freemarket than most: I don’t believe in rent control for the reason of economic scarcity, but sale of a home has so much more at stake than most financial transactions. A price that is agreed to with the understanding the buyer will preserve without excessively altering the property, can be a binding agreement. But does this ever happen? I’m right now trying to find examples of this in real estate cases. I guess this is more of a post I’m writing as I’m thinking about it, rather than a clear statement of any kind. And any books readers might recommend on the subject are much appreciated.
Like with the Neutra Kaufmann House house that just sold in Christie’s auction. Is it only a tacit understanding that the buyer isn’t going to tear down a wing to build a gnome garden?
Here’s an example of preservation gone to an unpleasant extreme:
Richard Lucas has been trying to win permission to cut through his elderly, infirm parents’ front porch so they can get from their living quarters onto the street without climbing stairs. And for more than a year, the D.C. historic preservation authorities have found reasons to say no to a ramp.
After all, as the city’s architectural historian put it, “repeating porches of similar height and depth create a notable pattern and rhythm” along the Lucas family’s Mount Pleasant street, and the District wouldn’t want to let that rhythm be broken just to accommodate a couple of old folks who have lived in their house for 47 years.
Houses in communities respond to the changes in houses all around them, which is why I fear my aunt’s beautiful house will eventually go all Stepford. Even if they did find buyers to fall in love with it, there is the risk that given time they might give in to the status-conscious vibe of the neighborhood and build additions.
One of the best articles, one of the most linked-to essays this year, The Next Slum? by Christopher B Leinberger for The Atlantic, so immediately struck at the hearts of most of us, the unfortunate truth that the wealthy really are taking over our cities. Sure crime is down, but you try to live in Brooklyn on an artist’s salary.
One vacant home, means the depreciation of an entire neighborhood. And down like dominos the foreclosure crisis, which may likely “stay with us well into the next decade,” as Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com says in Bloomberg, puts pressure on all the neighboring homes until they too eventually tip.
It’s easier to erect a new house than it is to change an entire landscape. Recently, I learned there’s a “ghost cloverleaf” in Canton, MA, just several miles from me. Eventually I’ll check it out and post about it, until then, here’s this write up on Xconomy:
[It] was constructed between 1962 and 1968, and is the northern half of what was originally intended to be a fully working interchange between I-95, aka the Southwest Expressway, and I-93, aka Route 128, aka the Yankee Division Highway.
From here, the state’s highway blueprints called for the Southwest Expressway to continue about 10 miles north into Boston. It would have barreled through farmland and residential neighborhoods in Milton and joined up with the American Legion Highway, which would have been converted into an expressway running along the eastern edge of Franklin Park. From there, the expressway would have turned Blue Hill Avenue into a six-lane gash through Roxbury and Dorchester, eventually connecting with I-695 near the present-day intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street (which happens to be about four blocks from where I live in the South End).
Never heard of I-695? That’s because it was never built, either. Also called the Inner Belt, it was part of a scheme laid out in 1948 to help interstate drivers and truckers avoid the congestion in downtown Boston by circling through outer Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville. Perhaps it was a good idea at one time. But had this 7-mile loop been constructed, the Boston cityscape would be immeasurably different today.
“We do not pine for period cuisine,” Rybczynski wrote, paraphrasing Adolf Loos’ point that nostalgia is absent in most other aspects of our everyday lives. And most houses, just out of practicality due to changes in energy usage, really should be remodeled. But there are reasons we might value those floors that no matter how many times you sweep, will never seem clean. Reviewing Flipping Out, the only remaining house flipping TV show on the air today, Heather Havrilesky cleverly compares two of her neighborhood cafes. One where “tables are the wrong height for the chairs, the chairs are uncomfortable, the walls are covered in bad art, the bad stereo system blares the worst of Journey and Lionel Richie, the breakfast sandwich features over-buttered bread and that fake-smoke-flavor ham, the room is too hot or freezing cold, the teenage cashiers are friendly but inattentive, and a herd of middle-of-the-room flies circles endlessly in the sparsely populated dining area,” another a, “more corporate place nearby where everything is right. The tables and chairs are made of smooth wood and are perfectly placed, the menu is tastefully designed, the lighting makes everyone look like models at a photo shoot, classical music soothes patrons from a safe distance, cool breezes blow in the open French doors, and the small cup of gazpacho they serve has little slices of melon and a dab of pesto in it. Delightful! But it’s always crowded with people who have expensive haircuts and alarmingly nice shoes.”
As repellent and deeply wrong as the local cafe is, the overpriced, meticulously designed corporate eatery seems certain to transform you, slowly but surely, into the kind of person who pays too much for haircuts and shoes, the kind of person who experiences gazpacho that doesn’t have a little dab of pesto in it the way the rest of us experience a herd of middle-of-the-room flies. And therein lies the paradox of American upward mobility: The higher you climb, the thinner the air gets, until you can barely breathe.
Nostalgic or not, my aunt’s house as a standing protest against the McMansion-ization of suburban DC, and a call for the better days. If anyone is looking for such a property, please get in touch.
Images by William Eggleston.
Previously:
Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip
A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post Facebook
The World’s Strangest Housing Communities
Related links:
- Home by Witold Rybczynski
- Do Hard-to-get Mortgages mean Better Cities? Treehugger
- The Broken Angel on Wikipedia
- Flip This Lawsuit
- Flipping Houses Ethics: Any Place for a Weasel?
- They Needed to Talk Some More, Smithsonian Magazine explaining William Eggleston’s most famous image
- The Stepford Wives of Worcester Park, Adrian Short
Science Fiction: Women Do It Better
In a cafe in New Orleans a couple years ago, I overheard a couple in conversation. The girl was explaining the book she planned to write. For about thirty minutes I listened to this extraordinary idea for a narrative, a Jekyll and Hyde-inspired story dealing with female body insecurities that I’m not going to further explain because I really hope she’s still working on it, if not near publication.
“So that’s almost like science fiction,” her boyfriend said. “Not really,” she replied
No, it’s not just “like” it, her idea is science fiction. But for some reason the classification is avoided when the work is written by a woman. It’s speculative fiction, fantasy, or quirky McSweeny’s-style stories, but if a woman wrote it, it’s certainly not sci-fi.
Just look at the brilliant book Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall. I haven’t read anything better in years. The science fiction community has all but ignored it, giving only passing mention of its James Tiptree Jr award win.
This may seem like a superficial concern. Why should it matter whether something is part of a genre or not? But “science fiction” is known as the literature of ideas, intellectual rigor, and philosophic arguments. Science fiction indicates an imaginative literature: analytic, scientific — a creative work of scholarship rather than banal solipsism.
Even if a female author is labeled science fiction, another distinction is made: that she isn’t “hard science fiction.” The “hard science fiction” bar is raised when women want to write or film science fiction. Women tend to write a lot about biology, and more women study biology than other sciences. As Peggy at Biology and Science Fiction points out, “there aren’t that many gadgets that have come out of the biological sciences, at least as compared to the physical sciences” — and gadgety is representative of “hard science fiction.”
There was a panel about this at the WISCON, the women in science fiction con:
JB: Part of the reason the concept, the term is problematic is it’s used as a norm for “real science fiction” and however we define it, it has changed as more women enter the field. Fantastic, speculative, there’s other terms they call it when they don’t want to call it sf. Femspec. In early days of 50s and 60s sf, male authors would write about social issues and the social issues around tech but when women do it’s soft sf. Then we come to 70s and 80s when writing about biology was considered soft, because (the rhetoric is that) women are their biology in some way, women can therefore more easily be biochemical scientists… I expect the next thing to fall is going to be mathematics. Real, normative, actual, the only kind we should really care about, that counts, used in book reivews, not included in canon. This changing definition has a gender bias to it.
Margaret: Just like what has been called “art”. At various times pottery, woven stuff, wasn’t art, because it was women and people of color who were doing that. And very similar things done with gender and hard sf. As you’ve suggested, when men were doing very similar things with social issues, that was still “hard”.
There’s pressure on a woman to write “hard science fiction,” even if she doesn’t really want to — just to prove that she can.
People gave Sleater Kinney a lot of guff because they didn’t have a bass player; but no one ever said that meant they weren’t a rock band! Classification is always arbitrary. Had Joanna Russ befriended Donald Bartheleme in the 70s, instead of editors of Amazing, her work would be called metafiction, (or whatever.)
Going back to the idea that every subject can be science fiction, those of the gender that breed and bleed, have plenty of interesting science fiction concepts to bring to the table.
And they are definitely consuming science fiction. At least as many young girls have read the Handmaid’s Tale as young boys have read Ender’s Game — perhaps an equal number of boys and girls have read Ender’s Game. Females tend to read more fiction, after all.
Another two reasons I just don’t buy the idea that men are inherently more interested in science fiction than women: Small Wonder and Out of this World, about a girl-robot and time-shifter whose dad is an alien, respectively. Those two shows (and Punky Brewster about an orphan who was obsessed with astronauts) were my favorites and yours if happened to be a girl growing up in the 80s.
What makes these two television shows unique from other widely enjoyed tv sci-fi like Lost in Space or even BSG today, is both of the lead characters were girls. It might be the first time science fiction was made just for a mass young female audience. Silly as it seems now, the shows were no better or worse than any other 80s sitcoms.
Children watching these programs were engaged with philosophy of science fiction: what would it be like to stop time just by touching your fingertips together? (I’m sure I’m not the only one who practiced this in my bedroom when no one was looking.) Or if your friend is made of metal and wires, do you treat her just like everyone else?
Women love science fiction! We do! Probably more than you dudes! Nearly every art school girl has Ursula Le Guin’s books on her shelf. Women actually write most of the fanfic. Even at the basest, lowest low culture it is in there: a number of romantic comedies, (many starring Mel Gibson for some reason,) use science fiction furniture. And I learned, during a period of unemployment, that nearly every soap opera has a supernatural gimmick — clones, witches, even aliens. Instead of mocking it, we should embrace it, as the feminine counterpart to the shlocky science fiction made by the likes of The Rock and Sylvester Stallone in the 90s.
Some work by women that should be welcomed into the Science Fiction cannon: the writers Anna Kavan, Angela Carter, Shelley Jackson, Katharine Burdekin. In film: Lynne Littman, Kay Linaker, Caroline Thompson, and so many others. The music of Anne Clark. Art by Sara Sze and Patricia Piccinini. These are all just off the top of my head. I should probably make another post on this.
And let me praise Daughters of the North yet again. It’s magnificent. The Handmaid’s Tale comparisons were inevitable, but Atwood’s dystopia, while bleak and repressive, isn’t nearly as horrific as Hall’s vision. Hers is a world of hunger, suffering, torture, shit. It’s even better than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Sarah Hall is a genius.
Images of sculptures by Sarah Sze
Previously:
- Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
- Dario Argento and the Paradoxical Feminism of Horror Films
Related links:
- Bat Segundo interviews Sarah Hall
- When Harry Met Sexism, Bidisha, The Guardian
- Science Fiction Fandom Has No Sex, This Recording
- What Chicks Don’t Like About Science Fiction, io9
- Gender and Fan Studies, CCC
“Retro is all about ownership, solidity and lastingness, of having some concrete possessions in an increasingly virtual world. Inured to on-screen digital images, the theory goes, we (and our teenager offspring) yearn for three-dimensional stuff you can hold in your hand rather than access by remote control, through a Wii console.” – John Walsh
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