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	Sunday, September 26, 2004

TBogg ("A Daily Dose of Snark") on this designer disaster:

To be fair -- not that O'Beirne (sort-of-famous conservative commentator) is -- I think the curtains are black and pink taffeta. Like a Fifties ballgown.

And what a low ceiling! The house is probably one of those excruciatingly expensive and incredibly inconvenient antiques that litter the Virginia landscape. They're snapped up by trendoid Washington plutocrats who claim to want to breathe in their history (and two-century-old molds). But, oddly, Ms. O'Beirne hasn't elected to decorate it in period. Unless the house is Thirties Faux Federal. They built rooms low and "cozy" in those days, too, and you could make the case that this is the kind of drawing room they showed in Depression-era movies set in the Main Line.

If you have a low-ceilinged room with stunted windows, you don't leave them half-uncovered (especially at night when the white-edged grid of black panes will look even smaller and more awkward), you don't put a stark, bare, attention-getting line of curtain rod at the level of the crown molding, and you SURE as hell don't hang lumberjack plaid on it. Everybody knows that plaid, especially large-scale plaid, will make any room look shorter and fatter.

Too few people know how to handle a fireplace and mantel these days, which is weird given their ubiquity in the last two decades. Here the mirror is too short and wide, the clock is too green, the candles and figurine are awkward overkill, and I should probably just draw a decent veil over that trite brass fan firescreen as it fights with all the angles and squares in the room -- but you know me. Embarrassing details are what I live for, and this one fairly screams "Bourgeois Climber Who Refuses To Discard The $450 Firescreen She Bought In 1984 Because There Was One Just Like It In House Beautiful Last Month." Never mind that the House Beautiful room was a well-designed period masterpiece, while this room is merely -- I THINK -- a stab at retro chic. Orange County 60s or 30s Hollywood, it's hard to tell.

Then again, I suppose a hackneyed brass firescreen is better than a board shaped into a basket of flowers with "Welcome to My Home" tole-painted above it in pastel ribbon lettering. But that would really have to have sandpaper distressing along the edges and picturesque hammered dents in the crackled surface, so even a decorator as clueless as O'Beirne's would realize it wasn't right with those shiny curtains.

Update: Here is my extremely crude and dirty hack at showing what different proportions and patterns could do in this room. I turned the curtain fabric so that the dominant line was vertical and reduced the scale. Of course in real life I'd never just hang a flat hank like this, but I did want to demonstrate what hanging proper curtains from a built out cornice rather than a bare rod could do for this room's sense of height.

1:32:58 PM    comments [] trackback []
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In a blog entry brilliantly entitled "Women are From Shrewville, Men are from Idiotown" World O'Crap reads "Dr." Laura's new book Woman Power so we won't have to. Woman Power is billed as a workbook (yes, really, just like in third grade!) to accompany her best-selling, terminally insulting The Care and Feeding of Husbands. As WoC says, "that means it covers the same material as the previous tome, but it also gives you lots of blank pages."

One of the pages that might just as well have been blank is the following:

Within only two weeks of the publication of The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, I received a letter from a six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound police officer. It was painful to read, but I shared it on my radio program. The response to it from all across the United States and Canada was amazing. Why? This big, masculine, powerful, accomplished guy was turning into depressive mush because his wife never seemed to be proud of, or happy with, him.

Yes [WoC comments], his wife turned this big, strong, macho policeman to "depressive mush," and she alone bears responsiblity for his emotions and feelings. I mean, he says so, and Dr. Laura concurs.

Fortunately Dr. Laura has a quick fix, as she indicates at the end of the intro:

Just a look of the eye, the tone of a voice, the touch of a hand.

Simple. A few minutes each day . . . tops.

Some listeners were inspired by the policeman's story to read Dr. Laura's book.

David, a listener, wrote:

"I bought The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands because I wanted to read it myself just to see if I had unrealistic expectations of my wife of seventeen years.

Translation: "I bought the book because I heard it chastizes women for not having sex whenever their husbands want it, and I wanted my wife to know that Dr. Laura agreed with me that my wife was a bitch."

“It is unreal what simple creatures men really are. If I could just get that little bit of physical love from my wife, I would absolutely be her slave. I have told her this many times and it is just so much water off a duck’s back. I work sometimes twelve to fourteen hours a day to provide the income necessary for our family to live with some degree of comfort. And all I ask from my wife is fifteen minutes a couple of days a week (which I never get)."

David, maybe if sex took longer than fifteen minutes, your wife would want it more.

Men are starting to come out of the closet and admit that they are hurt and angry and don’t want to take it anymore. Tim, a reader, called my radio program asking me what he should do with his anger toward women, an anger crystallized by reading The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands!

Much, much more here. Don't miss the cheese ball seduction. With grapes.

I was so disgusted with this dipwaddity that I got to pontificating (and blogwhoring... I'm so ashamed... ) in the comments at WoC, to wit:

It's the underlying attitude that's sick. Methodology. Quid Pro Quo. Tit for Tat. Looking at the OTHER person as your source of happiness, the sole dispenser of the things you must have. So you need to work it out of them, you need to MAKE them behave the way you want.

Sick, sick, sick.

You hit the nail on the head, WoC, with that guy whose anger increased when he read Laura's book. All he wants, he says, is a little sex. He deserves it because he works so hard. He's OWED sack time, dammit. Never mind why or how it happens. He thinks if she just lets him get his rocks off in her body on a regular basis, he'll be satisfied -- even happy!

But the more mature among us know that it doesn't work that way. When men get dutiful sex they complain that it's not ENTHUSIASTIC sex. Just "getting it" doesn't satisfy their deeper needs, which are for love and admiration -- or at least a confirmation of their masculinity/sexual power. A non-responsive woman, even if she were to let her body be used twice a day, every day, on demand, doesn't fill that emotional bill.

That's why Laura advises (fake) admiration, compliments, enthusiasm, non-stop verbal reassurance, and other methods of ego massage in order to manipulate a man. But the funny thing is that human beings are very sensitive creatures when it comes to things like that. Most men will begin to sense the falsity, no matter how good an actress a woman is.

And since human life tends to rebel, sooner or later, against such fundamental forms of fakery, a woman won't be able to keep up the quality of her pretense over time. She'll start to resent having to continually admire/compliment/give in. Acting is exhausting work, as anyone on Broadway will tell you. A few months later her show will deteriorate and she won't be nearly as good at convincing him he's a marvelous guy. He'll start to doubt himself again and demand more reassurance.

Bottom line is that "working" people from your power center (no matter what that power might be based on: economics, sex, hierarchy, whatever) is not the way to a happy life.

You don't get love by getting over.

Yes, too long and too serious for that venue (as Jonathank might say, "You're better when you're breezy"), but luckily others offered real entertainment in that thread. For example:

Oh, and on the always hilarious subject of Dr. (of Gymnasium Science) Laura Schlessinger, you might remember the time she hinted that she might return to Christianity from Judaism because her fellow Jews weren't being very nice to her. Waaaah.

9:53:42 AM    comments [] trackback []
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With tongue firmly in cheek, of course.

Read more here.
8:09:17 AM    comments [] trackback []
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