ISO The Digital Sidewalk Critic

Last week Slate ran an example of the design criticism I am missing: “I hate my iPad,” by John Swansburg.

I admit that I bought my iPad for the wrong reasons. I got one because it seemed like everyone I knew had gotten one for Christmas and, well, I felt left out. I didn’t think about how it would fit in with the gadgets I already owned (laptop, Kindle, iPhone), and I didn’t borrow a friend’s and take it on a test drive. Now I just feel annoyed, having spent $600 on a device that hasn’t done anything to improve my life. A salad spinner would have been a better investment, and I don’t even eat that much salad.I don’t think the iPad is useless.

There’s no question that it makes browsing the Web while sitting on the couch easier. Though I have a relatively svelte laptop, it’s kind of a pain to tote around the apartment. But am I the kind of person who pays $600 to save the effort of detaching some USB cables from time to time? I don’t want to be that kind of person.

And so on. Swansburg disusses the tablet’s browsability and readability, distractions of the internet and requests for payment from iTunes. Then he gets into an IM duscussion with his tech-loving colleagues, and wins a few points.

Neat Freaks

I just pitched a story on one of my favorite Tumblrs, Things Organized Neatly, but Rob Walker, in a lovely final Consumed column in the New York Times Magazine, beat me to it. His theory of TON’s appeal is that looking at organized stuff allows us the vicarious pleasure of ownership — without the storage and consumer guilt. I thought that was the purpose of failed EBay bids (I am usually glad, in the end, that I didn’t win) and the proliferating social shopping sites: Polyvore, Svpply, and so on. So maybe all the eye candy, none of the bills, is the mode of the moment. Since Walker’s new projects (sign up for his newsletter here) include the Tumblr Unconsumption, he’s obviously betting on reduce-reuse-recycle.

I Was an Unhappy Hipster

My husband and I had three fights about our bookshelves. They are an important element in our house — our first house, a brick townhouse in Brooklyn. We have lots of books, many oversize, and the shelves form the 2 -foot wall of our parlor. We are both design professionals: he’s an architect, I’m a critic. So I am not sure whether three fights were a lot or a little.

This month those bookshelves (and the rest of the house) can be seen in Dwell Magazine, where our house is representing Brooklyn in the New York Issue. Now I know why the couples in Dwell look so disconnected: the photographer tells you not to look at each other! But the Unhappy Hipsters Tumblr may reveal a larger truth amidst the snark. For the kind of people whose homes are featured in Dwell, design decisions are emotional. By the time of the shoot, our emotions had cooled, and the disaffection was just art direction. But that wasn’t always the case while we were under construction.

Whatever Happened to the Dinner Party?

On January 24, 1981, my mother had a dinner party. She served mushrooms Berkeley, Creole bouillabaisse, a green salad and pear and ginger pie. She used her white plates—Arzberg Athena, a wedding gift from my grandparents—and a yellow Marimekko cloth probably bought at Design Research. On April 19, 1987 she also had a dinner party. She served cantaloupe soup, poached rainbow trout and strawberries with sour cream. The plates were Della Robbia and the centerpiece was hand-dyed Easter eggs.

How do I know this? My mother has kept a notebook of every dinner party she has hosted since 1979: menu, guests, cloths and flowers, and typically notes on recipes and sources. Those mushrooms were from the Vegetarian Epicure, newly popular in Cambridge circles. Previous years she relied heavily on Ada Boni’s Italian Regional Cooking, plus James Beard, the New York Times Cookbook, and Cooking for Crowds by local Merry White. Her notebook meant no one would be served Creole bouillabaisse twice at our house. That (once we moved to Durham) the political scientists from Duke might meet some political scientists from UNC, or some neighbors from down the block.

In the 1970s and 1980s dinner parties were how my parents socialized. Selected, mixed and remixed groups of six to eight. They came to our house at 7. My mother wore perfume and lipstick (not an everyday occurrence). My father offered drinks to start and did the dishes at the end. My brother and I were allowed to pass the hors d’oeuvres and eat a specific number of pita triangles dipped in hummus or babaganoush before being sent upstairs to bed. (Now my son eats Trader Joe’s edamame hummus out of the container with a spoon, but back then hummus was exotic and entirely homemade. Edamame: then called soy beans and grown locally in North Carolina.) We hosted a dinner every month or two, and my parents went out to one at someone else’s house almost every other Saturday night.

My mouth waters when I read my mother’s notebook. Saltimbocca. Lamb tagine with apricots. Pollo al Jerez. Italian cornmeal cake and my Omi’s plum tart for dessert, caponata or caviar toasts to start. I have white china in my cabinet, an orange Marimekko tablecloth in a drawer, the New York Times Cookbook and the Silver Palate and the Silver Spoon on the shelf. I could have a dinner party. And yet I don’t. And none of my friends do either.

I don’t think I have ever been invited to a meal at someone’s house where the table was laid with china, tablecloth and flowers, the hosts dressed up, the food prepared, the guest list a balance of new people and old friends. Lest I never receive another invitation again: I am not ungrateful. Yes, we gather around the coffee table and in the kitchen in groups of ten and up. We brunch with another couple and hope the children won’t fight. It is fun and you do have a few minutes to catch up. But I know I have served the same people the same quiche more than once. I’m always wearing the same thing as my three-year-old. Paper napkins from IKEA are fine, right?

The dream of the dinner party, in my mind, is the reciprocity of effort: care has been taken by the host to get the food and the people and the mood right, and care has been taken by the guest to be on time and accessorized and without children. We could talk in peace, drink as much wine as we want and, maybe, relax. Those that we invite would invite us back. We’d make new friends. The ambitiousness of cuisine in Julie & Julia used to be universal (among a certain set), and now it is worthy of blog, book, rom-com. But I’m equally intrigued in the ambitiousness of the social life—as distinct from social climbing.

So what happened to the dinner party? (And I’m told, in certain redoubts like Princeton, baby boomers are still having them.) Short answer: time, space, skills. We work more hours, and a Saturday spent cooking just seems like more work, particularly if there is (as there often was at my parents’ parties) a professional agenda to some or all of the invitations. I just went to a fun, tasty Christmas party for which the host had cooked nothing. Costco, IKEA and the local gourmet shop supplied all. No one had to spend all day cooking while their spouse took the kids out, though my mother speaks fondly of pounding, slicing, whisking and listening to opera on NPR. She can’t remember where we were.

In the city, people often don’t have space or furniture to set a table for 8 or ten. If we get married later, or not at all, we might not even have plates and forks for that many. Ironing a tablecloth is something I have to gear up for. A recent WSJ.com article, “No McMansions for Millennials,” recommends houses of the future skip the dining room, but “don’t forget space in front of the television for the Wii, and space to eat meals while glued to the tube, because dinner parties and families gathered around the table are so last-Gen.” This is an architectural change that’s already happened in most apartments, where the sofa is much more important than the table.

And then there’s the food. My mother can’t remember anyone who was such a bad cook that they would say, in the car on the way over, “Let’s drink and not eat.” Cooking was what women did, some were better than others, but no one burnt the roast. But one of the gifts of feminism has been letting women off the hook as cooks. If a strain of organic parenting wants to hang them back up, so be it. Among my acquaintance, it is as likely to be the husband as the wife who cooks, but both work full time so either might feel put upon about the division of labor come Saturday. Standards are also higher. I think my mother is an excellent cook, and we think alike in our preference for Italian over French. But now we eat Thai for lunch, buy hummus in tubs, can get a tagine from the fancy salad bar. The New Brooklyn Cookbook is filled with recipes I don’t want to try to impress my (nonexistent) colleagues with at home: I can buy them down the block.

And yet, it isn’t so fun to go to restaurants anymore, not when you can’t get a table on Sunday at 3 p.m., no restaurant designer understands that at least one of the room’s six surfaces should be sound absorbent, and salads are in the double digits. I want more connectivity. More good food. More time with friends. I want to talk. Dinner parties used to do that, and I wonder if they can again. It’s my entertainment resolution for the new year: I want to make an effort, and I doubt I am the only one.

The Moms Aren't Wrong: Why Planning for Children Would Make Cities Better for All

When urban parents, particularly mothers, complain about the public realm they are often caricatured as whiny and overprotective. Your child was burned by the climbing domes at the new park? Kids are too coddled. You can’t carry your stroller and child down the subway steps? Make him walk. You can’t find a public bathroom? Stay at home. But what if the mothers, in many cases, are right? Access to safe, green open space, to accessible transportation, to clean bathrooms and places to rest are not solely the needs of children. What if catering to our youngest citizens, rather than dismissing them, would help us all live happier, healthier urban lives.

The Moms Aren't Wrong

I live in Brooklyn, and have children, and in the eyes of most New York publications, that makes me a walking, whiny cliche: running people over with my stroller, insisting on breast-feeding in inappropriate locations, instructing my toddler in a loud, performative voice at every opportunity. But as a critic and a journalist, I began to wonder if we weren’t dismissing mothers’ complaints too quickly. Is it so wrong to want shade at the park at which you work several hours a day? Why is using public transportation so punishing?

Objects Fall From the Sky

Ralph Caplan writes:

During a period when some designers who had worked for him were complaining that they got no recognition for work they had done in the George Nelson office, George complained to me, “I understand that some people are saying that some of our products came from their ideas. Well, if they didn’t think they were hired to have good ideas, why did they think they were hired?”

I consulted Caplan when I was writing my review of The Story of Eames Furniture. I was nervous about my negative take on the book, and I thought I would ask someone who was there: Was Ray involved? Did Charles hate furniture? Where should credit lie? Now he has written his own take on the question of credit for AIGA journal Voice, “Where Credit Is Due,” which includes the pointed remembrance above.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Eameses?

I don’t know what to do with this book. The Story of Eames Furniture, by Marilyn Neuhart with John Neuhart (Gestalten, 2010), is a labor of love, a two-part, richly-illustrated history of some of the most famous modern chairs in the world. To reject it seems harsh. It contains fascinating tales of false starts and under-known design careers, what could be a separate book of clever mid-century magazine covers, furniture catalogs, and abstract photographic odes to mass-production. And yet I was unable to enjoy it. It is the kind of book that the design blogs love, picking out 10 fabulous images, glorying in its heft entirely in the abstract. Another chance to cite the Eameses! But as a real thing and as a work of history, it is less than the sum of its pages.

Bring Back Braids

Can we bring back braids? Little girls of my acquaintace have bobs with bangs, long “princess” hair, wild curls, but I rarely see braids. When I think of braids, I first think of my own, still coiled in a shoebox at my mother’s house, but I also think of a variety of spunky literary heroines: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Anne of Green Gables, Tacy of the Betsy-Tacy books. Cutting off your braids has ever been a rite of passage and a sign of rebellion.

Is No the Answer?

Before Christmas I posted my joy at rediscovering AMAC Plastic Boxes at the Container Store. A childhood favorite, they seemed to me modern design perfection: useful, colorful, cheap. But I was brought up short by the very first comment:

Edward: I can’t help but think, “Yikes. More plastic for the landfill (or the gyre).”

No plastic at all? I wondered, and then ordered some Duplo for my son. It came in a plastic tub, fine and useful for storage (although its size camoflaged the true volume of product, much like a cereal box) but within the tub each 10 Duplo blocks were sealed in their own plastic bags. Not sorted by color or size or shape, as if from different production lines. Just separate. I wondered if bulk Duplo sales were a next step.