aesthetic laundry: notes

The photo on the left is from the June 06 Martha Stewart Living, on the right is the Baldizzi kitchen as recreated to c.1935 in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

The Museum is an imaginarium of immigrant struggle and veers, unfortunately, into quaint nostalgia. Its cleaned-up, prettified tableaux are irritatingly appealing to me. "People suffered social and economic privations in these stifling hell holes," I have to remind myself... and yet...that linoleum is... really cute.

The Martha aesthetic rarefies the commonplace and defamiliarizes it. It takes the everyday and makes it exclusive.

“vexatious” peaches and the nostalgic voice

On a tip from a friend, I turned to the Wednesday New York Times greenmarkets column, Bringing it Home, entitled "Ode to a Peach." As my eyes fell on the first sentence, “Peaches vex me,” I knew I was going to settle in on some entertaining reading. The piece, a perfectly lovely little meditation on flavor, home made desserts, domesticity and fetishistic description, had a tone that was immediately recognizable, but a difficult one to define exactly. The author CB, an acquaintance from long ago, is a former long-haul Martha Stewart Living editor and the voice she employs, what I call High Martha, is lyrical, allusive, nostalgic. For me, the writing style in general is gag-inducing but intriguing; I'm simultaneously drawn to it and repelled. It parlays the now-familiar commercial "romanticism" of Ralph Lauren (or even, at another price point, JCrew) that makes one yearn for weathered cedar shakes, heirloom candlesticks with evergreen bobeches and a compound on the Vineyard. I am forced, over and over, to "remember" the succulence of fresh-picked berries and pumpkin carving parties that, oh yeah, I never experienced growing up. This nostalgia for what one has never experienced is the most insidious --and fascinating--aspect. A longing for false memories. It is this tension of being both drawn in and repelled, comforted and disappointed, that leaves me with a faint malaise. It is this nostalgia that almost brings the term's medical origins back to the surface.
In CB's column, the tone has less of the prescriptive aloofness that is part of classic Martha, more "just us girls" :

But the best thing I’ve ever done with a peach isn’t something I’d serve to company, or even to my family. It falls into a category of things I think of as single-girl food, since it reminds me of the quirky indulgences that brightened my days before my husband came into my life....Purchases in hand, I rode the elevator upstairs and entered the remarkable quiet of our empty apartment. I set everything out on the dining table. First, I spread the fromage blanc on the bread, then sprinkled a bit of damp gray sea salt over it. With a little paring knife, I cut a peach into slim slices and laid them carefully on top. Then I dipped an old baby spoon into the honey and let it drizzle onto the peach slices.

A soft halo of light reflects back from that old baby spoon and envelopes the reader in the warmth of... mounting queasiness? Envy? Befuddlement. From whence this style? And I don't mean CB specifically, I mean all of it. The whole precious lot of it. I am guessing-- and I need more research and input here-- that the poetic, metaphorical tumbles of MFK Fisher and the arm-in arm, raconteurism of EB White have been distilled, or better still, left to ferment in the mouthblown heirloom glass decanter of self-consciousness...

I will be mulling this over further. [photos: polo.com; Gerry Manacsa]

the olfactory of facts*

(a "postcard" from Robert)

Its August in New York, the pavement is fermenting, there's an abundance of what my friend Robert calls, far too evocatively, "curb chowder," so perhaps its not quite synchronicity that the New York Times had an article about smells in the Real Estate section yesterday.I've been thinking about odors: good, bad, memories related to. The other day I passed a store that exhaled an odd combination of cat 'spray' and a very specific mustiness-- the kind that, to me, indicates old water pipes, a mossy dankness. Immediately a vision of myself at about 6 or 7 with my parents, visiting an aunt in Lynn, Massachusetts, popped into my head. At that time she lived in a very working class neighborhood, in a New England version of a rear tenement: three or four stories, 19th c., wooden. I remember my mother attempting to make tea and recoiling from the ring around the insides of cooking pots left by boiling water. A discussion ensued on the state of Lynn municipal water supply. All this, in an instant, came back to me on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn as I passed that store on my way to lunch. I have several olfactory connections that aren't typical, lyrical associations. Oil-based paint, for one. That will always bring back my grandmother. A small-statured but hefty woman in her early 70s, she was, in my memory, always up on step ladders painting her rooms colors I would never choose but seemed right back then, pale pink, yellow, a soft blue. A certain kind of diesel fuel reminds me of Paris. I was on my first trip there with my parents and we stayed in a small hotel-- the Ideal-- that had an astonishingly tiny--lilliputian!-- elevator that put-putted along on fumes of diesel... This elevator could accomodate 1 slim French person with, perhaps, a baguette. Large American baggage was sent up, unaccompanied, piece by piece.

A "trick" I have that seems so saccharine it belongs in Real Simple is to begin wearing a new perfume at the start of a trip. Thereafter, every detail of that trip--breakfasts, museum highlights, clouds, purchases, persons met--will be contained in that bottle. I haven't smelled the perfume I wore (I think it was my first bottle of perfume) on that Paris trip in years, but I remembered the commercial!

*see Luc Sante The Factory of Facts