Rustic Without the Mildew

I snapped the above photo at a garden shop in an nearby upscale shopping area. Outside the shop's main building was the wooden garden shed whose interior is pictured.

The intention is that this is all so rustic and charming -- a lovely touch for that half-acre back yard of yours.

As sheds go, it's nice. But it reminds me of the real sheds of my childhood it was patterned after. Those sheds were old, unheated and might have had smaller windows. Here in the soggy northwest the interiors would often develop mildew. As for those "distressed" pieces of furniture in the photo -- the real shed furniture I remember was old and genuinely beat-up.

In a nutshell, as a child I hated old, mildewed garden sheds and all that they contained. So the upscale, sanitized version at that garden shop charms me not at all.

Cliche, Refurbished

Unisphere, shown during the 1964-65 New York World's Fair

Today's Wall Street Journal has this article about the refurbished Unisphere built as the centerpiece of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair.

The article by Tomas J. Campanella, "Icon of a Fair, a Borough, the World," provides a capsule history of the Unisphere and then offers examples of criticism leveled against it when new.

The 1964-65 World's Fair never lived up to its own high expectations, drawing only a fraction of the projected visitors. To critics, the Unisphere symbolized the banal, corporate atmosphere of the event. Newsday called it "deathly dull. It looks like an ad for Western Union." ...

Architectural Forum called it "a heavy, literal version of the ancient armillary sphere, with decoration by Rand McNally." But the people loved the Unisphere from the start.

No reference supports the assertion regarding public "love." I never heard any spontaneous expressions of it in the years I lived in the striking-distance zone of the city. But then, the subject of the Unisphere never came up in any conversations that I can recall.

My opinion? I admired the Trilon and Perisphere, symbols of the 1939-40 world's fair on the same site. In comparison, I thought the Unisphere was a gross cliché, poverty of imagination in the extreme. And I still think so.

Exit Pino

Pino Dangelico (known professionally by his first name only) died 25 May. He was 70 years old, having been born 8 November 1939 in Bari, Italy.

My 2005 2Blowhards post about him can be found here (at least for a while). In it I note that biographical information about him is sketchy. For example, here is the bio page on his Web site: it doesn't say much.

In a nutshell, Pino was a commercial artist who did lots of romance book covers before evolving into a fine arts painter whose main subject remained beautiful women. His signature style (and most artists who rely on their painting for most or all of their income develop one or a few styles that are instantly recognizable by potential buyers) was smoothly-painted skin contrasted with bold brushwork over the rest of the painting. He tended to inject odd bits of color (often a bright red) even on parts of a face or other flesh, this perhaps to help tie the bold and rendered parts of the painting together better.

Possibly in reaction to criticism that all he painted were pretty women (and sometimes their children), he later added men as subjects -- typically older, life-worn gents.

I happen like Pino's work for the most part because of his virtuosity and skill, things I value highly all else being equal. If I had $30,000 or so to spare and collected art, I'd be tempted to buy a Pino original.

But not a Giclée -- especially not Giclées "enhanced" by the artist whereby thick strokes of oil paint are added here and there to the reproduction surface. The impression I get is that these supplemental strokes aren't as well thought out as those for the original painting; the usual effect of this added impasto is to degrade its integrity.

Moreover, I'd only buy one painting. That's because of the similarity of examples of an artist's work -- it easily becomes too much of the same sort of thing when more and more are added. I suspect that a roomful of Rembrandt portraits would become hard to live with too.

Below are some examples of Pino's paintings.

Photo of Pino in his studio

A Momentary Glance
This is a fairly typical Pino painting. He often did face-on views of pretty young women doing mundane household tasks.

Dressing Table
A very nice study. Note the contrast between the treatment of the figure and the rest of the scene.

Ditto what I noted regarding "Dressing Table."

Old Man
Here Pino diverges from the usual pretty girl subject matter. The man shown looks similar to Pino, but without a moustache. For what it's worth, one subject I can't recall him painting is mature or older women.

An Unneeded Restoration

The photo above shows an idealized version of Restoration Hardware's new showroom look. (The company's Web site is here and the Wikipedia entry here.)

The somber, pervasive decor has attracted some negative blogger comment this past week. But the showroom makeover is more pervasive, a huge mistake in my opinion.

Yesterday I was in the University Village store looking for light switch and socket covers. Restoration Hardware used to have a nice little display of such items, but not any more. A clerk told me I could order such hardware items through a catalog. I do not want to look at a catalog; I want to see and touch the items before buying. The store was missing lots of other cute and nifty items.

It has become Just Another Home Furnishings Store -- one currently with little choice of color and decorative theme if my first impression was vadid.

What on earth was management thinking?

New Heinlein Biography

Twenty-two years after his death and nearly eight years after the death of his wife who launched the project, the first volume of a two-part official biography of Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88) has been published.

Fine print -- Learning Curve 1907-1948 ... In Dialogue with His Century. Amazon link here.


Heinlein was a major light in what has been called science fiction's golden age, when the field crawled from the pulp magazine side of the cultural tracks to mainstream "slick" publications. This transformation was marked by the appearance of a Heinlein story in the Saturday Evening Post. A lengthy summary of Heinlein's career can be found in this Wikipedia entry.

I got hooked on his "juveniles" a few years after they first appeared on the shelves of the local library. I was especially taken by "Rocket Ship Galileo" and "Red Planet." I also liked a number of his books and short story collections that appeared before the mid-1960s. (A Heinlein bibliography is here.) The later books that I tackled didn't hold my interest and I failed to finish them.

As for the new biography, I found it interesting and finished off its nearly 500 pages in short order. I agree with early Amazon reader reviews that the author gives every appearance of being fair-minded, delivering warts as well as favorable information in his coverage of Heinlein's life up to his marriage to Virginia in 1948.

I never delved deeply into Heinlein's life, so I was surprised to learn that he grew up holding prairie socialist beliefs and, during the mid-to-late 1930 was very active in the left side of Democrat politics. Apparently he never liked Communism and opposed Red efforts to hijack his faction of the party in California. He also was a world-government fan.

Author William Patterson, Jr. suggests in a footnote that Heinlein didn't change his political view all that much in life; presumably this will be dealt with in Volume II. I'm inclined to think Heinlein held on to certain core beliefs and changed his overt politics as political parties changed their stripes. (An example of stripe-changing is Democrats moving from Harry Truman's robust defense policies to today's reluctance to fight under almost any circumstance.)

One thing I would have liked to have found would be capsule synopses for each story and book mentioned in the text. No reviews, literary criticisms or that kind of thing. Just a paragraph or two outlining the plot. I needed this because I've either never read the material or read it so many years ago that I've forgotten most of the plots and characters.

Wings Over Rochester, NY

I lived in the Albany, New York area for several years and got to know the eastern half of Upstate pretty well. Because of my population forecasting job and the fact that I had a cousin living nearby, I occasionally ventured to Rochester and other parts of western New York.

Downtown Rochester, aside from the Genesee River cutting through it, always seemed standard-issue to me. Aside from one building.

That building, designed by Ralph T. Walker and completed in 1930, was originally home to the Genesee Valley Trust Company.

What distinguished it were huge, Moderne-Deco wings that capped the design.

In the top photo, those wings don't seem particularly out of proportion. But both in person and in memory they strike me as being huge. And a little odd, even though I'm a fan of Art Deco.

I find it hard to put a finger on the problem. The best explanation I can come up with is that, compared to the wings and supporting tower, the rest of the building is a little too plain. It seems to need more Deco decoration -- perhaps in the way of spandrels linking the windows vertically and more sculptural-relief elements on the part of the building below where the tower sits (not necessarily on the "back part" on the left of the top photo). In other words, transition elements are needed.

In any case, if you happen to travel to Rochester and are anywhere near downtown, take a short detour and give it a look.

Retail: To Niche or Not to Niche

A number of years ago -- in the 1990s? -- I walked into an Eddie Bauer store shopping for a windbreaker jacket. And discovered that they no longer sold winter jackets; their entire product line was now sportswear.

I staggered out in shock (slight exaggeration), long-term memories of Eddie supplying Mount Everest climbers and all sorts of other out-doorsey folks their garment needs rattling around my skull.

Rather than hitting its sales mark, Eddie Bauer eventually hit the wall. A couple of ownership changes later, the company is now returning to its outdoor togs roots with a vengeance, stressing Jim Whittaker's Bauer-clad Everest exploits to the point of adding a Whittaker product line.

Let me add that, after ignoring Eddie Bauer for several years, I'm shopping there again. Whether enough others are doing the same remains to be seen. But at least the company is distancing itself from the run-of-the-mill sportswear crowd.

I have no direct experience in retail rag-trade marketing. I rubbed elbows with marketing staffs as a data supplier, but that was about it. My perspective is that of a casual customer, so take what follows with that caveat.

In retrospect, the Eddie Bauer strategy of forsaking its outdoors roots in pursuit of a supposedly larger market segment was a mistake. Casual observer me has trouble sorting out distinctions between store chains selling sportswear. To some degree I can identify companies that strongly focus on the youth segment (Hollister, Abercrombie & Fitch, etc), but otherwise I have no strong images regarding product-line "personalities."

This is not to say that each retailer doesn't make at least some effort to be distinctive and that hard-core sportswear shoppers indeed understand and appreciate such differences. But not all shoppers are hard-core, and failure to attract enough of these can damage a balance-sheet.

Eddie Bauer's new risk is that it's facing a set of competitors that have had years to recruit loyal customers that Eddie had lost and now must peel away. Recreation-wear is a smaller niche than sportswear, and competition is equally fierce. This is why Eddie Bauer is going to great lengths to stress Mt. Everest, World War 2 aviation gear, sports fishing togs and other strong outdoors-related themes. The company may yet "auger in" as test pilots put it, but it's taking a tack that makes more sense to me than its previous efforts.

Conclusion? The thought of working in any aspect of the rag trade scares the hell out of me.