At the Sunlight Café..

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Europeans are endlessly inventive when it comes to radiator design. Why are Americans lagging behind?"

Questions asked in a NYT article illustrated by 2 photographs: an atrocious, "creative" Euro design and a beautiful, classic American radiator.

A nice example of the misguided Europe-does-it-better meme.

And that atrocious Euro-radiators — "life-size animal sculptures... draped... in skins... a red deer, a ram and an arctic fox" — cost $7,700 to $11,600. And we're told they are electric, so it seems to me they correspond to what Americans would call a space heater. (If you're wondering about all that fur, I believe NYT is generally pro-fur, so this article may be an under-the-radar service to its fur advertisers.)

Also available from European designers are...

... dozens of conversation starters, radiators that resemble a forest grove, a paper clip, a garden hose that uncoils and snakes around a room, and even a wall-hung homage to an artistic masterpiece. Hotech, an Italian radiator company, has a collection with names like Chagall and Fabergé. Its David model is a beefy male torso.

Wall-hung. That's wall-hung. Don't let the the snaking hose and the beefy male torso cause you to misread. And we've all seen David naked, so form your own opinion.

Have I started a conversation yet? Well, do you have any "conversation starters" in the interior decoration of your house? What kind of conversations do they start? 

ADDED: There's also a slideshow, here, so you can see what the hose and the torso, etc. look like. I was using my imagination, and I'm sad to report that David has no discernible genitalia.

"What Is Mitt Romney Hiding in His New House's Hidden Room?"

"You can see the room in the blueprint at right. It's a little over 50 square feet, twice as long as it is wide. The document marks where the 'hidden door' will be built in to shelving in the adjacent study. It's next to the 'powder room' and the 'coat room," which many people would call a 'bathroom' and 'closet.'..."

The open-plan bathroom-bedroom.

"Is having open-plan bathrooms just the natural extension of our open kitchens and a general global modern-day tendency to open up our living spaces and live in lofts or loftlike spaces?"

Is it an extension of the idea that bathrooms aren’t just functional necessities but spa-like focal points of our sanctuary-like homes? Or has the erosion of privacy in our public lives just made us all more comfortable being overexposed, even at home?

I like it. No mention at the link of where the toilet is, and I assume it goes in a small space behind a door. If I'm right about that then it's about how someone bathing or shaving wants to be interacting with someone who's reading in bed or watching TV or whatever. It's similar to wanting the walls removed from your kitchen, so you can cook while hanging out with (or keeping an eye on) people in the next room.

ADDED: I've seen so many TV real estate reality shows where everyone wants an open-plan kitchen/dining/living room area that I can't help thinking it won't be long before that starts to look like what all the boring, conventional people have and they'll start tsking about how it's "dated," and the reality show designer will be amazing the clients by building walls.

"Imagine working in an office that looks like a spaceship, or perhaps one that’s part rainforest."

"Just think of the ideas you could come up with while lying in a bathtub filled with foam, staring at dreamy-looking fish tanks."

"She has a bong in the shape of a penis."

"It was a birthday present, and is one of a few clues to her interior decor; the others being that she keeps fish and cockroaches ("Why u do not [sic] have any pet at home?")...."

#4 on a list of 10 things learned about Madonna via her "Ask Me Anything" stint on Reddit.

Floored...

... by floor details. I was surprised by the all-wood vent...



... and by the entry to the stairway, otherwise known as the gaping hole in the floor:

De-yellowifying the off-white.

We got a lot of advice from readers when we talked about paint to go on the walls of our newly floored room, and yesterday we got 4 samples and painted them on the wall in 2 places. The colors look very different at different times of day. They were chosen from a brochure with over 100 white/off-white swatches. All 4 that we have here are at the lightest 2 of 6 levels.

Pictures from the first walk on the new floor.

After 8 hours of drying time, I put on socks and walked out onto the new floor:

The floor project, Day 5, continued.

It's like watching paint dry...



... but more intensely fragrant.

The floor project, Day 5.

It's all over but the drying.



It will be ready to walk on in 8 hours, and we've got an 8 day break before we move the furniture back. So... ideas for things to do on a big, empty, shiny new floor. Don't say bowling!

The floor project, end of Day 4.

Today, the last of the wood went in around that tricky descent onto the spiral staircase. Then, lots of sanding and vacuuming, and this is the sealer coat going on. After that, coat of poly, then sanding, dust removal, and a final coat. Tomorrow's the last day. Tonight's the night for escaping from the fumes.

The floor project, end of Day 3.

Tomorrow, sanding and finishing, and then dodging the fumes. The floors, when finished, should be close to the color of the window frames, and Meade plans to paint the walls, which right now are a yellowish cream. What color would you paint the walls? Meade and I are in discussions about that, so help us (me) out here.

The aphorism in the abortion clinic: "Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge."

Here's CNN's article "Texas filibuster on abortion bill rivets online" — about state senator Wendy Davis's effort to stop a bill that would ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy and the tweeting it inspired, including President Obama's "Something special is happening in Austin tonight."

There's also a video, and I'm inspired to write about an aphorism you can see at 1:57: a shot of a room in a clinic — presumably a room where abortions are performed. The label on the door reads "Audre," and on the wall, in large capital letters, there's a quote and the name "Audre Lorde." The quote reads "Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge."

Audre Lorde was a Caribbean-American writer (1934-1992) who is a source of some popular feminist aphorisms, notably "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." The one painted on the wall shown in the video suggests an argument about abortion that resonates with abortion rights doctrine, that the woman finds her own meaning. The Supreme Court's cases depict the woman engaging in a philosophical/theological/scientific inquiry into the significance of the entity she may choose either to nurture within or to extricate. The Lorde quote seems like a feminist paraphrase, where the mental process runs along a path of feelings.

The woman entering the room is invited into an awareness of her feelings. Feelings are the most genuine way to your decision. Perhaps the woman entering the room thinks: I don't feel this is anything like a baby or that I am murdering anyone. Or: I hear my future child begging for life. The quote — to my eye — calls you to experience your conscience, and it doesn't let you off the hook. The painted letters seem to be the only decoration in the room. It's the place to focus your eyes throughout the procedure.

I wonder what women's names appear on the other doors. Do the names take the place of room numbers and are the rooms referred to by name in an effort to give warmth to the place? You're a name not a number.

I wonder what are the other aphorisms in the other rooms. Are they all so neutral and open-ended as to the woman's right to choose?

The snobbish rejection of pre-fabbishness.

We're finally getting around to putting wood flooring in the one room in this big house that hasn't had it, and we got into comparing pre-finished wood flooring and what I call — in my impoverished lingo — real floors. In the showroom, I had to suppress my urge to say things like "It doesn't look real" and "It looks like fake wood" and "You might as well have wood-patterned linoleum" more than... well, what do you think is decent? 20 times?

Back at Meadhouse, 12 hours later, we had a conversation about the prejudice against pre-fab things. We're not disrespecting pre-fab homes anymore. Some of the best-made, coolest houses are in this category. And no one sniffs at ready-to-wear clothing, because no one even knows anyone who wears couture. You might sew your own clothes and knit your own sweaters if you had some meditative, aesthetic relationship with fabric/yarn, but you still wouldn't think ill of the pre-made stuff in the stores. Some people might coo over handmade pottery, but it's more elevated aesthetically to value straightforward perfection that's mass produced and machine-made.

So, let's talk about packaged food — processed food. It's another category of prefab, and it's an area where rejection is on the upswing. The idea of cooking your own food and making everything from scratch — the finest, purest scratch — is pushed by opinion leaders. Should we be following Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan — or would a scoop of skepticism hit the spot? Here's a long — really long — article in The Atlantic with the somewhat distracting title "How Junk Food Can End Obesity."

Foodlike substances, the derisive term Pollan uses to describe processed foods, is now a solid part of the elite vernacular. Thousands of restaurants and grocery stores, most notably the Whole Foods chain, have thrived by answering the call to reject industrialized foods in favor of a return to natural, simple, nonindustrialized—let’s call them “wholesome”—foods....

The Pollanites seem confused about exactly what benefits their way of eating provides. All the railing about the fat, sugar, and salt engineered into industrial junk food might lead one to infer that wholesome food, having not been engineered, contains substantially less of them....

The fact is, there is simply no clear, credible evidence that any aspect of food processing or storage makes a food uniquely unhealthy.... The results of all the scrutiny of processed food are hardly scary, although some groups and writers try to make them appear that way....

In many respects, the wholesome-food movement veers awfully close to religion.

When pre-fab things are good, opposition is superstition. That's not sophisticated. The better class of snobs is looking down on you.

ADDED: Meade, reading this post, getting to the excerpts from the really long article, observes that they are the equivalent of fast food. My blogging is processed journalism. Blogging is pre-fab.

ALSO: Here's the actual pre-fab flooring we ended up liking — specifically, the "stained white wash." We're still comparing that to "real floors" — hardwood that is installed and then finished.

"Working for him, the whole crew being artisans, this whole thing that rose from the earth — it was a real castle."

"There’s a whale-watching tower. Each room has a theme — there’s a cathedral room, a storytelling room. We set up a tile factory on the property because there’s a million dollars worth of hand-made tile in this house. It’s an extraordinary place."

Him = Bob Dylan. 

"Notorious prison is transformed into luxury hotel (and guests still sleep in the cells)."

In the Netherlands. 

Nice repurposing! I like it.

"I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care."

"Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out 'Is he as crazy as I am?' I don’t need that question answered."

That's a quote from Philip Roth, which I read just now on rereading one of the books I'd be most inclined to keep if I pared my book-books down to the minimum — "The Writer's Desk." I was going to type out the quote, but I tried Googling roth oates habits and found a whole interview surrounding it — from 1984.

Here's an interview with Jill Krementz, the photographer whose work is collected in the book. My favorite writer-and-desk in the book this one of E.B. White.

Let me see your workspace.

Lots of links to photos, collected in a Metafilter post, but the links all go to LinkedIn, and there's some serious hostility to LinkedIn for spamming us all these years. And it's not just that....

I'd be happy if they'd just get rid of the "influencers". It seems as if they had deliberately set out to make a list of the most annoying, unselfconscious people on Earth. I mean, which other list manages to contain the globular egos of David Cameron, Deepak Chopra, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and Martin Varsavsky, a.o.?

If you want to see the workspaces of some admirable people, I love this book, "Writer's Desk," with excellent photographs by Jill Krementz (who was married to Kurt Vonnegut) and an introductory essay by John Updike.

And here's what my desk looks like right now:


(Partial view, with snow.)

ADDED: What's with "a.o." in the blockquote above? Is this another call for me to check Urban Dictionary?

A.O.    7 up, 3 down
Stands for Accidental Ownage. When someone shows off and fails, or something like that.

Dude, this guy was trying to do a handstand on a rail and he flipped over.
Whoa, that's total A.O.

At the Sunroom Café...

... we can wait out the winter.