Category: Tumblr crossposts

shadesofmauve:

When I formed the new patio, I built the forms as tedious little tunnels so that I could break them out later and plant things in the gaps. The 9? cross pieces in the grid were full length; the long top pieces went the opposite way, to anchor everything together. You can get a hint of how it was constructed here:

I finally finished it, we finally poured, and then I had the job of taking this whole laborious framework OUT again. I got the edge restraints and their stakes out, got one of the 9? cross piece constructions out and a few of the 3? shorties, and then it rained like hell, I hid inside, and all the wood swelled. So yesterday I’m out there with my trusty FU flat bar and my six foot iron bar, using all the tricks of leverage to slowly convince one of those 9? tunnels to come out. I’d been working an hour or two, and I’d finally gotten the free end up over the concrete. Rest of it was still wedged, not even budging with the 6? iron bar. I’m working it from the ends and from both sides (where the cross members made a gap) when I hear:

“YOU NEED ANY HELP? I’M FROM TEXAS AND THEY TEACH US TO HELP PRETTY LADIES.”

It’s an elderly man in sweat pants and a tucked-in-t-shirt, walking a three-legged dog. Oh dear, thinks I. I’m tired. I’ve been working all day. I do not want to risk a senior citizen breaking themself in my yard while trying to be flirtatious.

“No thank you, I’ve got it,” I said, and then “NO THANK YOU, I’VE GOT IT” because clearly not much remains of his hearing. 

“DID YOU POUR THIS YOURSELF?”

“Well, I had help on the pour, but I formed it all myself. I’ve been doing a lot of remodeling and –”

“MAY I SHAKE YOUR HAND?”

Well, I can hardly say no to that. So he comes up the driveway, grins, and shakes my hand. And with his other hand he passes me the dog’s leash. I take the leash because that’s just what you DO when someone hands something to you, he takes two steps over to where my 9? cross piece is stuck, and he lifts that end five feet clear of the concrete in one movement.

“YOU GOT A BLOCK TO STICK UNDER THERE?”

“Yes!” I run for the scrap pile.

“DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?”

“Yes!” I said, getting the block, but he couldn’t hear me because I was facing away from him.

“OH, THAT WAS SILLY OF ME. OF COURSE YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN, YOU BEEN DOING ALL THIS YOURSELF, YOU KNOW ABOUT LEVERAGE!”

“Leverage,” I said, turning back, “Is just about all I have going for me.” I stuck the block in place and *pop*, out comes the 9? tunnel.

“I WAS THE WEIGHTLIFTING CHAMPION OF TEXAS. I BENCHED 600 POUNDS. SQUAT 1200. I HAD CANCER FIVE TIMES FROM AGENT ORANGE. LAST TIME I WAS IN THE HOSPITAL, SOMEONE LET MY DOG OUT. VET CALLED ME, SAID ‘I CAN PUT HIM DOWN OR I CAN TAKE OFF THE LEG.’ I SAID ‘HELL, I RUN WITH GUYS WITH FEWER LEGS THAN THAT EVERY MORNING! TAKE THE LEG!’“

“Dogs have an advantage, starting with more legs,” I said, scritching the dog. “He’s really nice. And I limp too. Gotta stick together.”

In very short order I learned that his name was Tony, the dog’s name was Trigger, Trigger is Not A Pitbull (Trigger is totally a pit bull, and a sweetheart), he has four kids and five grandkids (Tony, not Trigger), he ran Arnold Schwarzenegger gym chain for twenty years, and sometimes he’s got so little to do around the house he builds things and then deconstructs them again, so if I need any thing else lifted when he comes back this way, just say so, Y’HEAR?

On the second lap of his walk, I wasn’t ready for any help – I had to take some top cross pieces off so I could get at the next 9 footer. He was ready for me, though, because apparently he’d spent his walk deciding which pieces of advice from his marine force recon days were best suited to a young woman remodeling her house. This time I learned about the five Ps and how having the right tool is most of the job and that when he woke up screaming one night his wife left him but the kids decided to ‘stay with daddy’, and do I know what marine force recon is? And I said maybe, I had a friend who did something like that but he didn’t talk about it.

“MOST GUYS DON’T, BUT MY THERAPIST SAYS IT’S GOOD TO TALK ABOUT IT.”

“Smart therapist.”

“IT’S HEALTHY. NOW, WE USUALLY TAKE A WALK IN THE EVENING, SO IF YOU’RE OUT HERE AND YOU GET ANY MORE OF THOSE BOARDS A BIT UP WHERE I CAN GET AT ‘EM, I’M HAPPY TO HELP. IT’S BEEN REALLY NICE TALKING WITH YOU.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be out, but thank you!”

“JUST LEAVE THE CROWBAR ALONG SIDE THERE, THEN.”

And off he went, and I went back to work.

I got one more 9? chunk out myself, and a bunch of little crosspieces. I really went to work on the rest of it, but when I packed it in there were two nine footers remaining, as well as about six littler pieces, and one of the long ones was stuck in tight.

“Erik and I are going out to dinner,” I told housemate Xed. “Uh, if a loud elderly man comes and starts tearing things out of the patio outside your bedroom window, please don’t be alarmed.”

This was not the strangest thing I’ve warned housemate Xed about, but it was right up there.

We’d been at dinner half an hour when Xed texted me. “Your elderly friend came back. The forms are gone. I said thank you.”

Came back home, and yup, every single piece of form is out.

“He wasn’t even winded,” said Xed.

I really have to think of some way to say ‘thank you’ to Tony and Trigger.

An elderly hard-of-hearing weightlifting marine-force-recon-veteran is a person in my neighborhood,
In my neighborhood,
In my neigh-bor-hood
Oh an

elderly hard-of-hearing weightlifting marine-force-recon-veteran is a person in my neighborhood,

He’s a person that you meet
When he’s walking down the street
He’s a person I met yes-ter-day!

mcmansionhell:

Oh boy are y’all in for a treat this week. I hope y’all like words because there are quite a few in this post. You’ve probably seen me refer to Postmodernism at least once, and if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I pretty frequently garbage post about it. 

Of all the styles in architectural history, none has become as ubiquitous in our suburban landscape as Postmodernism, later called PoMo, for short. But what is it? How did it get here? Most importantly, Why do I care?

BECAUSE POSTMODERNISM IS DANK AS HELL:

M2 Tokyo, Kengo Kuma, 1991 (Photo: flickr/wakiii)

But before we get to this dankness, we have to talk…

A wee bit about Modernism

For most of the 20th century, modernism dominated architecture. It’s focus on design efficiency and the lack or absence of ornamentation (ornament was for the Bourgeoisie) was eagerly adopted and practiced by architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius who were fascinated with the technological advancements of the early 20th century, specifically, the factory. 

Le Corbusier, the French-Swiss architect who famously said that a house is, “a machine for living in,” and his contemporaries were entranced both by the forms of industrial structures and their streamlined efficiency, as well as by the new materials of the modern day: steel and reinforced concrete. 

Don’t worry, I’ll be doing a post all about Modernism (which is my soapbox bae) so I don’t want to spend too much time here, but it’s the starting point of Postmodernism, so it’s, y’know, worth a mention. 

Here’s the thing about Modernism: it dominated architecture practiced by architects for almost a century, but made up only a small (well-documented and beloved) part of residential architecture built during its reign. 

The thing is, the people who toiled their lives away in the factories absolutely DID NOT want to go home to a house that looked like the factory. 

However, traditional architecture quickly (by the mid-forties) became a huge faux-pas in the practice of architects and was omitted from architectural education. In addition an exploding population that now needed housing (the Modernists thought it was a great idea to put them in high rises and we all know how well that turned out) emerged that wanted said housing to look like the centuries-old conception of home (aka a box with a door, windows, and topped with a triangle hat). 

The combination of these factors led to developers sweeping in (as architects chilled in the Modernism echo chamber), and, lo and behold, we ended up with places like this: 

While the modernists were practicing modernism, the rest of us were voraciously exploding out into the wilderness with our cars and highways and motels and suburbs and shopping centers and other ‘vulgar’ pursuits. And nothing communicated said vulgar pursuits better than the booming city of Las Vegas. 

Over the first half of the 20th century, the field of architecture was more than a little disconnected from the general public, and without their guidance, the suburban and commercial world developed an aesthetic language all their own. 

In the late 1960s, the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, took a group of students from Venturi’s studio at the Yale School of Architecture on a long trip to Las Vegas. 

What happened to Venturi & co. in Vegas definitely didn’t stay in Vegas, and architecture would never be the same. 

Learning from Las Vegas: The Stirrings of Postmodern Architecture

Venturi & co. set out to document the landscape of the largest and gaudiest strip in the country and came out with, yes, a study of a city and its forms, but more importantly a manifesto in two parts: first, that modern architecture is ignorant of what most people want, and what most people want is worth studying, and secondly, that the past has a place in present architecture, and that ornament in architecture has meaning, is intrinsically symbolic, and can be used communicate ideas. 

The underlying foundation of Learning from Las Vegas is that architecture is both a space and a symbol, and that modern architects abandoned the symbol in favor of the space, and in doing such made the space itself a symbol, AKA:

Venturi called this type of architecture –where the space itself (and by extension, the structure, and function of a building) was the symbol – a duck after the famous NY roadside stand that takes the actual shape of a duck. 

He contrasts this to the concept of the decorated shed where the space and structure are at the service of the program (the intended use or function of a building), and the ornament is applied independently of those things. 

TL;DR: The duck is a building that is a symbol, the decorated shed is the building that applies symbols. Venturi argues that the history of architecture is the history of ornament, and after this brief deviation of modernism, ornament and its symbolism is something to which we should return. 

The Expression of an Idea: Postmodernism in Action

Needless to say, Venturi & Co. telling the whole world of architecture “up yours” went about as well as you’d expect. But after a bit of fighting, a school of architects emerged and began working in this new style, a style that combined the symbolism of the past with the forms of the present. 

The Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi (1964) [Photo: Wikipedia] takes the traditional symbolism or idea of the house as a box with a gabled roof and a front door flanked by windows, and executes it in a new context – with new materials, minimal lines (hence the integration of the modern) and a bit of architectural irony and humor (e.g. the roofline above the front door is imitating a broken pediment, like one that is often found above a front door)

Postmodernism started out as the pursuit of a few outsiders in architecture working independently of each other in an innovative and interesting way, 

It quickly gained public popularity in the 80s and 90s and, thus, transformed into PoMo. (For the curious, this dichotomy between artistic Postmodernism and corporate/neoliberal PoMo is explained at length by Charles Jencks, the intensely detailed taxonomist of the movement, in his 2011 book The Story of Postmodernism.)

From Postmodernism to PoMo

In 1984, this broken pediment architectural pun  skyscraper by Philip Johnson went up in New York and became the most public symbol (and triumph/downfall) of Postmodernism:

Let’s just say developers loved it. Through developers looking for a big ROI, the great, elegant glass box of modernism, was transformed through said developers into cheap, soulless office boxes, forgettable skyscrapers, and loathed public housing. Their shoddy modernist jobs were, by the 80s, becoming rather passé and unpopular. Thank gawd the Sony Building came along, the developers thought. 

AND SO, the original spirit of Postmodernism, lovable, colorful, nostalgic for most of my readers and myself: 

WAS NOW, through developers seeking a quick ROI, transformed into: 

So, let me get this straight: 

This is the crux of the failure of PoMo: Postmodernism was about using architectural ornament within a modern context because we have emotional connections and connotations to architectural ornament. These buildings were about saying through ornament “I AM A HOUSE” or “I AM A BANK” mixed, of course, with a bit of clever architectural humor. 

However, this was also the 80s & 90s and the global corporation ruled all, and rather than using the clever language of Postmodernism, PoMo was global corporations saying architecturally: “WORK IS YOUR HOME” or “THE MALL IS YOUR HOME” or “DOLLAR GENERAL IS YOUR HOME.” 

That dull and mundane office block? Now it’s an insulting, dull, and mundane office block with a gable and Palladian windows. 

Remember those people at the beginning of this post who didn’t want to live in modernist houses that looked like the factories they toiled away at?

We have no choice but to live in houses that look like our office blocks, because our office blocks took the architectural symbols of our houses. And, in response, our houses took the vomited up architectural symbols from their corporate remixes, because residential architecture almost always imitates the public architecture of the time.

Now, I’m not saying McMansions are a product of Postmodernism, or that they are themselves Postmodern architecture, because neither is true. It’s more of a coincidence than anything else that they borrowed certain tropes from the PoMo office tower and integrated them into features like the two-story entryway with the huge transom window.

So what did we learn from this endeavor? 

Not much. And, much to Venturi’s chagrin, after this brief period of badly decorated sheds, architecture went right back to making, big, expensive ducks. 

---

BONUS: here’s a pic of me speaking at TEDxMidAtlantic about how much I love buildings and want to encourage others to love buildings as much as I do:

That’s it for PoMo, friends! I’ll see you Thursday with a Dank Southern Special, so stay tuned. 

Like this post? Want to see more like it, and get exclusive content to all things McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

rememberwhenyoutried:

basically if the government doesn’t put a stop to brexit it’ll be entirely because they would rather burn the country to the ground than be called “u-turners” and that’s everything wrong with our politicians

the960writers:

zoemay8500:

glorious74:

konekat:

oldmanyellsatcloud:

lunamax1214:

rosey-buddy:

paranerdia:

While you are worrying about whether beta readers will steal your ideas, there is a more genuine threat on the horizon.

When offered a publishing contract, please do all your research before you sign. There are a number of fakes and scammers out there, as well as good-intentioned amateurs that don’t know how to get your work to a wide audience. I won’t tell the heartbreaking stories here – there are too many.

Being published badly is worse than being never published.

It can destroy your career and your dreams.

The quick check is to google the publishing house name + scam or warning.

But, to be sure, check with these places first. They aren’t infallible (nothing is) but they can help you protect yourself. They are written and maintained by expereinced writers, editors, publishers and legal folks.

Absolute Write: Bewares and Background Checks

Preditors and editors

Writer Beware

and the WRITER BEWARE blog

Keep yourself and your work safe.

This is really important, so if you are a writer or have writer friends, or you are a writing blog, please reblog it.

Just to let you know, PublishAmerica changed their name to America Star Books.

HEAD’S UP, WRITER TYPES: THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PSA!

Also applies to many so-called freelance sites that are just content mills, and may not pay unless your work is used, even if the contract seems designed otherwise.

Listen, reading these is like legit reading horror stories.  When it comes to publishing your writing, always, always, ALWAYS do your research.  Not only will it help you avoid scams, but it will also be likely to help you land a much better fit for an agent/publisher/whatever.  Knowing more is never going to hurt.

Omg!!! Thanks for the warning! Writers— reblog!

I’ve heard stories like this that are scarier than horror stories. This is an all time worst nightmare for a writer. Everyone reblog and make sure you keep your work safe! 

Always, ALWAYS check Writer Beware. Let me also recommend Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog about contracts and contract scams for authors in her section Business Musings.