Matisse and Botticelli and Net Dreams

A Matisse I just put in my dull dining room.

My Verre Francais, wearing a hat of flowers from Walmart (C’est Affreux!) with a ‘found’ bowl (It came with a Christmas centerpiece) and a Wedgewood urn I already own. With lemons to imitate the Matisse. Dried out lemons, no longer good for eating.

In my house, there’s plenty of windows, but no direct sunlight, especially in the summer. I’m not alone, I have discovered. There are a number of Chateaux in France, worth 20 million or  so, with a similar problem.

I’ve been spending the last few days on Sotheby’s and Christie’s websites looking at expensive property, but more specifically the decor.

I especially like California and New York Style. But of course. It’s all over the map, but it’s almost always interesting. And sometimes inspiring.  You’d think looking at these beautiful spaces might make me hate my house, but quite the opposite.

My house is no different from anyone else’s. It’s a particular space with good points and bad points. (No light!) and I have some nice things and some ugly things, and I need to re-arrange them better. And then I have to decide what colour to paint the walls.

So I’m looking to the Net for inspiration.

Looking at expensive homes for sale elsewhere in the US, outside of CA and NY, I decided the payback wasn’t worth the effort. Well, Nantucket is nice and Philly had a few pretty places.

But then I went to France. To Paris. And my eyes nearly popped out of my head. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but some of the homes on the banks of the Seine have out-of-this-world decor.  Like an impressionist painting. Like Matisse’s Atelier Rouge.  Living Art. Dizzying. Dazzling.  Break your heart beautiful.

I also noticed one other thing. Wealthy people in France still showcase their books. Sometimes to the ceiling.  In the US, not so much. In the States they tend showcase their ‘home theatre’ – as in Britain.  There’s almost always a big screen TV mounted in or on the wall in all the beautiful Los Angeles or New York City apartments or townhouses . Not in France. In fact, one Paris apartment I looked at, filled with Louis Quinze furniture (or whatever) had a 40′s style TV in the ‘reception room.’ Like the kind I had as a kid!

Anyway, I spent some time today looking for a throw for my living room. Something with texture, colour, but a weathered look.

I visited the Thrift Shop in Ste. Anne. I was looking for Bright Orange, which is all the rage with the Beau Monde, but could not find it.

I also have decided that I need a tapestry to hide the ugly baby-shit coloured paint job over the stairs. We painted it years ago, the colour comes from mixing different paints we bought, and then never repainted, as it is such a huge job, needing scaffolding.

For this tapestry, I want something beautiful, bright, unusual.  Like they might have in one of the apartments in Paris.  ( I saw that one pricey New York penthouse had a wall covered with Botticelli’s Primavera. Very grand, or grandiose.  I like Botticelli.)

But where to find such a tapestry and in my price range, as in very cheap? eBay?

All this, when I should be writing my story Diary of a Confirmed Spinster. I actually emailed the CBC today, pitching my Milk and Water Story.

I have an idea that they’ll run from it big time. Too political. But maybe not.

Meandering Thoughts on Procrastination and the Thrill of Good Design

I gave myself a deadline to finish the first draft of Edith’s Story, (Diary of a Confirmed Spinster) by April 14, which is (I believe) the anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking, the 100th anniversary.

But I’ve only spent a few hours on it.  I returned from 10 days in California to two snow storms, and then my husband got bronchitis and stayed home from work.

So, while my husband watched CRAP TV all day long, complaining about the little pains in his chest, I mostly made him chicken soups and surfed the Net. Excuses, excuses.

My latest Internet addiction, looking up beautiful homes for sale all over the world.

It’s not a waste of time I tell myself. It’s research. And why should I miss out on these million  dollar views. If I ‘capture’ them now I will have them forever, on my desktop.

And I like to see into nice homes, who doesn’t? In times past, I had to spend 10 dollars on some flashy magazine like Architectural Digest to glimpse a few lovely abodes a month, to get my fix.

Today I have thousands of pictures of beautiful rooms at my fingertips. And all in  HD.

I’ve always liked beautiful spaces, and I like the contemporary homes best. (They remind me of Expo67, the Montreal World’s Fair in 1967, when I was twelve. That is where I got my first taste for avant-guard design.)

Lofts in West London and Soho and Tribeca and Soho in New York are always fun to gaze upon.

Santa Barbara has some gorgeous homes for sale, to eat up with your eyes.  No kidding.

And some uber-costly New York penthouses, despite their breathtaking panoramic cityscape views,  are often decorated like banks or insurance companies. I’d hate to live in one of them, although IF I HAD TO…

Anyway, the picture on top is especially nice. I pinched it, so I can’t tell you where it comes from.  BEAUTIFUL HOUSE.

Such nice chandeliers in these online homes, and many quirky chairs. I love design, good design. But to please me, the decor  in these million dollar plus homes has to look homey and not like a hotel or tourist venue. You see, I can’t imagine myself living there, otherwise.

I prefer simple bedrooms, all in white is nice, but ones with a window on a lake or the sea or a mountainside. Overdressed bedrooms bug me.  (My own bedroom is a bit of a pigsty, I must admit. Faded pink curtains from Walmart, one shorter than the other! and the dog chews all our comforters, so I gave up on nice ones. Two Ikea chests of drawers and one lovely art deco chest with corner marketry on every drawer, fanned shaped, I inherited, with a mirror over which I’ve draped an antique piece of lace. ( I did that BEFORE I saw the same thing  in the movie Young Victoria.) I also have picture windows onto the area in the back yard where we have placed the composter, so I am dreading what it’s going to smell like starting in Spring.)

But I prefer the living rooms that are decorated in vivid colours.  And plenty of rooms that I saw online were, indeed, swoonsomely colour coordinated.

Which makes we wonder, have these  houses been professionally ‘staged.’

I know lesser homes for sale are staged, because they all have diaphanous curtains and white furniture and glass coffee tables, to give the impression of space. Some have plastic dining room chairs.

But these super expensive homes, I assume they are not staged, as such, that the furniture, at least, is the genuine article. These people already have gorgeous designer homes, decorated by the best. Why would they need a stager?  I can tell someone has come in and placed the perfect bowl of  golden ripened pears in just the right terracotta bowl in a corner of the kitchen, but that’s not staging, is it?

Still, I noticed, an awful lot of homes and apartments have a picture on the wall of Marilyn Monroe by Warhol. And lots of those art nouveau dancing ladies with big bellies in wrought iron, too.

Old oriental carpets are also popular. One house had a ‘classic’ red and blue oriental carpet and placed an orange striped chair over it. It looked  great! I must tell my sister in law. She has the EXACT same carpet in her living room, which came from her parents’ house, which is also my husband’s parents house.  It was kept in the basement, over a cold and damp concrete floor for decades.

My kids played over it  sometimes when visiting their grandparents. My sister in law recognized carpet as a very nice piece and asked for it, when the house was sold,  and paid a small fortune to repair it. The craftsman confirmed it was a fine Persian carpet, handcrafted by children somewhere, I guess.

She knew the carpet was a fine thing, even if her parents thought it was an awful thing.

And now I have proof. Some very rich person has the very same carpet in his/her Chelsea townhouse.

Anyway, we’ve all seen those sci-fi movies from the 70′s that predicted that people in the twenty first century would be living in boxes with metallic or plastic furniture, all monotone. (And that they’d all be super fit and slim, wearing tinfoil pant suits…Actually, Expo67 showcased Habitat, an odd-ball pile of boxlike units, by an Israeli architect,  predicted to be the future of low-cost dwellings, which had mixed reviews at the time (but which I liked) and which are now very high-priced condos. So it goes.)

Back then, in the 70′s,  I recall predicting “BULLSHIT.” In the future, as the world becomes more and more mechanized, impersonal, colder on the outside, people will be making their homes bright like a Caribbean sarong.  They will bring nature with its textures and colours and warmth indoors.

I was RIGHT. I have the proof right in front of me on my desktop.

I’ve always been pretty good at predicting the future. So here’s another prediction. Soon, people will take pictures of beautiful homes and beautiful views and project them on their dingy apartment walls, in HD. (That’s what I’d like to do. Then it doesn’t matter where I live when social security runs out.

Actually, my house pleases me because I decorated it. Too bad there’s no light in summer, when the trees get leaves. And it’s against the by-laws to cut the trees down.

True story:  My brother has a place in sunny Greece, but on vacations he spends most of his time in the basement where it is dark and cool, watching Dr. Who and other TV programs he’s downloaded and drinking oozo, just as he did decades ago as a teen when my family vacationed in Maine along the coast. (Well, he didn’t drink oozo then. And he only watched Red Sox Baseball.)

I visited him last year and complained “You might as well be in a basement apartment in Pittsburg.” And the I went out by myself in the 100 plus degree heat and had some wine at a cafe on the Mediterranean.

I’m in this game of life for the beauty of it.

How to Attract Readers to your Blog?

Flora in her bathing suit in Nantucket.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/i-give-myself-permission-to-write-the-worst-first-draft-in-history/

That’s the first and most popular page of this blog, Flo in the City. It sums up what I am trying to do in this blog.

I’ve been writing this Flo in the City Blog now for almost two years, musing about life 100 years ago as compared to now as I deconstruct the Nicholson Family Letters www.tighsolas.ca and write Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf.

I think it’s about time I took all the posts in hand and edited them, edited them myself,  and sent them to a regular publisher for consideration. 800 posts.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/five-cent-fascinations/

This is a post about the Nickelodeons of the era.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/small-island-montreal-1910-version/

This is a popular post because it is about the famous Black educator, Booker T. Washington, whom Marion Nicholson hears speak in Montreal in 1905. She finds his jokes very funny.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/small-island-montreal-1910-version/

This is a post about the Women’s Political Suffrage Union and their Hunger Strikes, from their era magazine. The suffragettes were good communicators as this shows. I wonder how they would have exploited Facebook and Twitter.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/ice-boxes-wood-stoves-washing-tubs-5th-installment/

This is a popular post, that has an excerpt from my original Flo in the City book, where Flo and Mae visit Sutherland’s drug store and have a Cherry Phosphate.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/lordy-lordy-passing-the-buck-over-a-fatal-fire/

This is an essay about the 1927 Montreal cinema fire in Outremont where many  children died. My grandfather, the Director of Services, testified first at the inquiry.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/shirtwaists-more-than-a-mere-blouse/

This essay is about shirtwaists. I mentioned the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf.

http://flointhecity-aworkinprogress.blogspot.com/2011/10/blog-post.html

My story about my childhood love of horses got a lot of reads this month.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/eugenics-and-iq/

Here’s a bit on eugenics and IQ. People today, most educators even, hold the IQ test sacred, yet it is a remnant of the Eugenics movement.

Anyway, this “Best of” exercise is an experiment, to see if it attracts more people to this Threshold Girl blog or my mirror Flo in the City blog on Blogger.com.

http://flointhecity-aworkinprogress.blogspot.com/

But is that the point, anyway.

WordPress is always advising bloggers on how to get more readers.  “How to attract visitors to your blog.”  Their advice: Link to Twitter,Facebook or visit other blogs.

Hmm. The easiest way to get readers is write about sex, use sexy tags. But that attracts the wrong readers…this is a thoughtful blog, meant to educate and, from what I see, students come to it often.

On my www.tighsolas.ca social studies website I once put up a picture of my grandmother and wrote about her humungous boobs. She was fat, which was in fashion in 1900. Boy, I got a lot of visitors, but none of them interested in suffragettes or child labour in textiles, or the purity movement.

Students are often looking for a quick fix, easy answers to exam questions and such. And no one has any attention span nowadays. And we’re all suffering from information overload.

So, What can you do?

DO I DARE EAT A PEACH? 1st installment

Above. Richmond Folk. Circa 1908. That is probably Flora seated at left. Perhaps Edith is the woman standing behind the boy. Interesting picture. The people seem to be waiting for a parade. Maybe it’s an Easter Parade. Look at all those funny hats~ Now, Miss Eugenie Hudon, the town milliner, surely had a hand in the two creations at left. They appear to be Paris style fashions, a little out of place on aged Richmond matrons. But what about the other headpieces? Flora. What were you thinking? Edith? Is that a pom pom on top of your head?

OK. Get on task. Do I dare write that first sentence. Do I dare eat a peach? I can hear the mermen singing each to each, but will they sing for me? I dunno why that came into my mind, ’cause I was about to commit-to-digital that first sentence of that first draft of my first novel Flo in the City.

Here goes… (Sx. Drumroll) Just a change of colour. Just a change of colour. ( I know. I know. A bit anticlimactic since I’ve already chosen that line for the Chapter Title. But I continue…)

Why couldn’t she get that silly line out of her head? Flora wondered. She had much more important tasks to attend to. Much much more important. Like the take home exam on her knee. The one fluttering in the spring breeze. That imposing mimeographed foolscap sheet with its list of impossible questions. A composition test of all things. Her worse subject! And questions relating to an essay on Life back in the 30′s. History. So it was boring too.

Describing farm women, so it was extra boring.

Flora was tired of hearing how hard women worked in the good old days, compared to today. The first question glared out at her: Read the above essay carefully and 1) compare your life to that of the women mentioned and decide whether you have it easier or harder. Give concrete examples. 2) in your opinion, what is meant by ‘the Canadian character’ and give examples of people in your life who exemplify it.

What does the teacher mean by asking me to answer such a stupid question! For a moment Flora thought she might write down that cheeky answer. For just a moment. But instead she adjusted the hem on her blue wool jumper, and pulled on a little blue thread until it grew longer and longer.

“Mother,” she called in to her mom. “I need you to mend my school uniform. The seam is splitting.”

Any other day, she would have had her mother to keep her on task – and to help her with any difficult homework. Margaret had a sharp memory and even sharper opinions on just about every topic imaginable.

She was famous in her birth family for being the one ‘who knows things.’

She loved history. Family history especially.

She could remember the exact dates Grandfather Malcolm McLeod and his family left the Isle of Lewis, Hebrides Scotland to come to Quebec. She knew what port they landed in, how they got to Lingwick, and what they did to keep the wolf from the door during that first bone-chilling winter.

Margaret, born in Canada, way back in 1854, before Canada was a country, even, was so very proud to be Canadian. She had cut out this poem My Old Canadian Home and pinned it to the recipe board in the kitchen.

The shades of night are falling
I am sitting all alone
Thinking of my happy childhood
In my old Canadian home

But today no homework help was forthcoming. No sewing help either. “It will have to wait,” Margaret shot back from the room off the kitchen, without missing a beat as she tap tap tapped the big bronze pedal on the old Singer. “I hardly have time enough to sew this pocket into my corset, for tomorrow’s train trip to Three Rivers. To protect my cash. Father’s orders. And come in from the veranda, Flora dear, the wind is picking up and you’ll catch a chill.”