Getting Design Details Right

Guests are coming and my wife decided that today is the day to change vacuum cleaner bags. I had to deal with three different machines. And in the process got reacquainted with the art and craft of the machine-human interface.

All the detachable bags had the same annoying attachment feature -- a piece of cardboard stiffening on the bag along with a hole lined with rubber where the duct of the machine inserts. These are hard to deal with when it comes to actually making the insertion; a certain amount of aligning, pushing, fiddling with the alignment, pushing again -- with success usually coming after two or three tries. Since I'm asked to do this chore only a few times a year, I have no real learning curve to rely on.

I'm sure better bag attachments are possible, but the arrangement I found on three different brands of cleaners suggests that price of replacement bags was the most important consideration, so the arrangement was the cheapest one that would function passably well.



Hoover Portable Canister Cleaner


The little Hoover shown above had the best bag-changing design features. Even though the bag itself had the now-classical cardboard stiffener plus rubber-surrounded hole arrangement, the change operation worked smoothly -- almost.

It has a plastic connector piece where the cardboard could be slid on. Then all one needs to do is set the connector-plus-attached bag into a recess of the machine and close a hatch that has the waste hose attached -- it's aligned so that the hose connector inserts into the bag with no fuss.

But fuss there was. Not having the manual handy, I tried inserting the hose connection into the bag before shutting the hatch. The hatch refused to close. Repeatedly. Until I finally realized that the insertion was related to the closing of the hatch.

Ideally, a piece of equipment should be designed so that no manual should be needed, where everything should fit together only one possible way. That little Hoover comes very close to that ideal and is very nifty once one understands that final step. What's probably needed is a short message molded on the attachment plate stating that it and the bag should be placed in the bag compartment before closing the hatch. Perhaps newer versions than our three-year-old model fixed this detail.

[Cross-posted at 2 Blowhards.]

Insipid Penny

I'm not into coins and therefore was surprised when I glanced at the reverse side of a penny I received in change a few days ago. It seems that after nearly 50 years of having the Lincoln Memorial, the Treasury decided it was time for a redesign. (In 2009 a set of reverses were minted to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, but I somehow never noticed any of those coins.)

Here are the reverses of the main penny designs of the past century:


"Wheat" design: 1909-1958

Lincoln Memorial design: 1959-2008

Redesign for 2010 and future pennies


The U.S. Mint's statement is here, and the Wikipedia entry here.

I don't know about you, but I think the new design is about as insipid and ugly as any experienced committee of camel designers could ever have come up with. It's probably the worst coin design I've ever seen (and as reference, I've got baggies full of old European coins eagerly awaiting to be used again should the Euro meet its demise).

Bring back "wheat" -- at least its design is honest and fills the space nicely.

[Cross-posted at 2 Blowhards.]

Mayfair Matte

Maybe it's happening in Palm Beach or the Upper East Side. Or perhaps in Beverly Hills, Malibu or Rancho Mirage -- though I was in the latter three within the last six months and didn't notice it.

That "it" is cars with matte -- rather than shiny -- paint jobs.

I noticed this in London's tony Mayfair district a couple of weeks ago, spotting at least three cars with matte finishes. And each of those cars was an expensive one -- the cheapest of the lot being a Porsche.

Here are some photos I snapped:


Yes, there's one. Parked in front of that shiny new Jaguar XF.

And it's a Bentley four-door saloon costing several times the price of that Jag. The license plates are British.

This is the unloading zone for our hotel. The tan-colored car in the background with a normal finish is a Maybach, what Daimler hopes you'll buy if you think Mercedes' are too ordinary. Closer to the camera is a Mercedes SLS gull-wing door jobbie painted matte white. Both cars carried license plates from the Gulf; the SLS's number was "333333" or thereabouts (I forget how many 3s there were).


Of course one wonders Why?

I have no answer at this point, though my first reaction was that it must be some trendy thing for a small subset of those who buy cars costing more than $100,000.

[Cross-posted at 2 Blowhards.]

The d'Orsay Adjusts to a Renovation

Paris' Musée d'Orsay, with its magnificent collection of (mostly French) art for the period 1850 to 1900 or a little later, is undergoing some renovation. The top floor or two are closed while work proceeds.

So what about the visitor spending mega-shekels to get to Paris to view all those goodies in person? Will he be disappointed? Feel cheated?

Probably not.

I entered the d'Orsay last Tuesday wondering about those matters, but a quick walk-around revealed that most of the important works were still on display even though a subset had been sent off to San Francisco for the duration.

Here's how they pulled it off. Galleries on the level above the main floor that usually are devoted to special exhibits were used to display paintings formerly found in the galleries on the highest floors. And it's possible that some paintings were re-hung closer together than previously in some other galleries (though a number of galleries seemed the same as they were last May when I paid my previous visit).

So, if you have tickets to Paris this summer or fall and want a good d'Orsay experience, you will find one.

[Cross-posted at 2 Blowhards.]

Blogging Note

I am now in Paris and Internet access is spotty, especially because I'm (1) sightseeing and (2) trying to type this on a keyboqrd with a (éçèàù) French layout.

Normal blogging resumes after 16 July.

Blogging Note

Yr Obedient Blogger is in England (then Paris), and Internet contact is iffy. Which means posting may be light for the next couple of weeks.

I've been hitting the art gallery (that's what they call art museums here) scene pretty heavily and will have grist for future reports.

Also saw the new Andrew Lloyd Webber show Love Never Dies, in which the Phantom of the Opera goes to ... Coney Island?!? Kind of a so-what deal in my opinion. No take-away songs. Staging had some interesing Art-Nouveau touches. Probably lacks Phantom's legs.

Kees: From Anarchism to High Society

Some paintings by Kees van Dongen (1877-1968, Wikipedia entry here) have been selling at auction for prices north of three million dollars in recent years. Not shabby for an artist not particularly well known, a man whose role in the modernist explosion of 1900-10 is generally given secondary mention by art historians.

Van Dongen was born near Rotterdam, moved to Paris as a young man and spent most of the rest of his life either there or on the Riviera. During his early Paris years he mostly did illustrations for anarchist and other publications, but then returned to painting as part of the Fauve movement. It also was at this time that he had a small studio in the same Bateau-Lavoir building as Picasso.

Instead of focusing on still lifes and landscapes (think Cézanne), van Dongen mostly painted people. Some of his earliest Fauve subjects were his wife Guus and Picasso's girlfriend Fernande Olivier. Within a few years he reached the point where his work was colorful and notorious enough (a painting of his wife, nearly nude, containing until-then-seldom-pictured details was ousted from an exhibit by the police) that he began his transition to being a society painter. An early titled subject was the even more outrageous Marchesa Luisa Casati, with whom he probably had an affair.

As his earnings increased, van Dongen moved to progressively larger studios and began hosting large parties for artists and the bohemian-inclined sector of the moneyed set. This effort was aided by his fashion industry mistress Jasmy Jacob who later dumped him to marry a general.

The Great Depression and age eventually took their toll on van Dongen's productivity, though he continued to paint up to within a few years of his death at age 91.

His career was briefly stalled in the mid-1940s thanks to a sponsored 1941 cultural visit to Germany in the company of other artists including André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. After its 1940 defeat, much of France was under German occupation, the Germans were doing well militarily, and the likelihood of liberation was small. Given those circumstances, a decision to let life go on and accommodate oneself to reality is understandable; most French did pretty much something similar at the time.

Here are examples of van Dongen's work:


This photo of his studio shows van Dongen's typical working setup -- the subject on a platform and a not-much-smaller than life-size canvas in place.

Woman in Black Hat - ca. 1908

Portrait of his wife Guus, 1910

Women at the Balustrade - 1911

Mme Claudine - 1913

Le coquelicot - ca. 1919
This is perhaps the most famous and popular van Dongen painting.

Jasmy Jacob

Woman in green dress - 1920s

Venise no. II, le manteau de cygne - ca. late 1920s

La comtesse de Noailles - 1931
Van Dongen painted this portrait about two years before her death. The painting underlines the saying that van Dongen painted women thinner than they actually were with jewelry larger than in reality. Compare this to the photo below of Anna taken a few years earlier.
Noailles was a trim beauty when younger, and van Dongen's portrait evokes that period of her life.

Brigitte Bardot - 1964
Van Dongen always favored beautiful women. A few years before he died he grabbed his paints and brushes to create this tribute a fellow Riviera dweller.


Kees van Dongen was a somewhat cynical cuss, but with a sense of humor. And his paintings of women (unlike his "socially conscious" illustration work) were almost always colorful and not critical of the subject. Even though I'm no fan of a lot of modernist painting, I make an exception for van Dongen's. Yes, they're modernist, but they're fun to view -- not the usual trying-to-prove-a-point modernism we encounter all too often.

Can van Dongen be considered a great artist? I don't think so. He was an enjoyable artist, and I find nothing wrong with that.