January 19, 2007
Hey Eight-Track Fans, Move On
Professional organizers don't have it easy. Not even in Canada:
"Outdated machinery, gadgets and tools are also a common find. 'People who are keeping eight-tracks really have to get with the times,' List said.
Bet she says that about vinyl, too.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 05:55 PM
November 22, 2005
Stockholm: The Darkest Season
We had a lovely autumn but autumn is over. I took the photo above on November 7. On Saturday the first snow arrived, a glittery respite from the gray gray gray atmosphere created by the skeletal trees and the sun's stubborn refusal to rise at a decent hour and its unseemly haste to disappear entirely too early. Did I mention how gray it is? (And now the snow is melting. Yuck.)
The change in season means the national candle fetish is in full swing. This morning my kid and I munched our cereal by candlelight. I think it's the Swedish way of transforming an environment that could termed suicidally depressing into "cosy" and "warm." Swedes don't usually string up Christmas lights anywhere but on a tree. But I saw white Christmas lights everywhere during a February visit to Anchorage once and it was a swell idea. So this week I'll be stringing lights on just about anything not moving, so consider yourself warned.
With winter comes the need for winter boots, natch. The kid's boots are busted so we'll be buying new ones this afternoon. My old boots were fine--except for the zippers. The pull tabs were crap and disintegrated last season. (This despite the fact that in 1913 a Swede, Gideon Sundback, developed the modern zipper, the one with metal teeth. Where's the national pride in Sweden's rich zipper history?) Paper clips make lousy pull tabs, it turns out, and fall apart quickly but not before poking holes in your fingers when you pull up the zippers. Mr. Too Tall, my better half, suggested key rings. It will never work, I thought, but I tried it this morning and he was right.
There's an advantage to such wacky pull tabs. When you visit a friend and leave your boots in the hall (in the big pile of boots that are heaped in hallways in homes and schools all over Sweden this time of year), it's much easier to find them again on your way out. One time I had to find my boots in a collection of twelve or so pairs of black footware at a student performance and it was a bigger pain than you might imagine. Think black carry-on on an airport carosel of black carry-ons and you've got the idea. I'm ridiculously pleased that I won't have that problem now. Assuming the rest of the boots hold up!
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:36 AM | Comments (1)
October 28, 2005
Closet Tips and Rental Handbags
Now even the guys are supposed to be obsessed about storage. Exhibit A: The October issue of GQ includes a one-page article called "5 Point Plan for October: Get Your Closet in Order." But that's not the big news. The big news is that there is not one but two businesses that rent handbags, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Guess it's kind of like leasing a Lexus. Why own if you can rent and trade in an outmoded model for something snazzier? Especially when designer bags cost nearly as much as autos these days.
"Bag Borrow or Steal is the more established of the two. For $19.95 a month, customers can rifle through the Trendsetter "closet," stocked with less expensive brands like JLo and Liz Claiborne. Access to the mid-level Princess closet costs $49.95 a month. And for $99.95, the Diva membership offers the latest in Marc Jacobs, Emilio Pucci, and Louis Vuitton - bags that can retail for up to $1,000. ... Prices at From Bags to Riches range from $19.95 to $89.95 per month. High-end inventory includes Balenciaga, Dolce & Gabanna, and Fendi."
From Bag Borrow or Steal staff writer Teresa Méndez rented "a small mint-green Marc Jacobs (similar bags retail around $700).To my admittedly untrained eye, it looked like the real thing. The silver hardware was substantial, the leather gently worn and buttery - presumably from previous borrowers." So far so good. But then: "The Dooney & Bourke I chose from From Bags to Riches looked to be grass green in the photo (approximately $250 retail). But the bag that landed on my doorstep was much darker. It resembled and vaguely smelled like something my grandmother might carry, and appeared unlined - unlike most of handbags in the Dooney & Bourke line."
I'm not a bag hag but my kidlet has developed a keen interest in designer bags, I'm sorry to say, thanks to teen movies like Mean Girls, in which the queen bees carry Prada bags. A shoe fetish makes sense to me but handbags? Handbags?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:19 PM | Comments (1)
October 05, 2005
Chopsticks, Please: Great Greeting Cards
Nearly twenty years ago my friend Judith Pollock sent me a birthday card in the shape of a head. The head of a flirty blonde gal, to be exact, who can flutter 3D eyelashes (if you give her a little help, anyway). I've been thinking about that card (which I still have) and the meaning behind it today because a friend of mine, Hae Yuon Kim, has a new company called Chopsticks, Please.
Hae, a Korean-American, is a talented artist and graphic designer who wasn't happy with the cards at the local mall. She couldn't find contemporary greeting cards with an Asian twist, so she created her own. That's great news for Asian-Americans and all the people who love them.
That includes people with little pumpkins and sassy girlfriends, people who adopt, friends of people who adopt, people born in the Year of the Rat, New Age practioners and notecard fans. My advice? Shop early, shop often, and stock up (there's a $14 minimum).
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)
September 29, 2005
Aventures in Viking Loot
According to the Guardian, a Norweign family didn't think much about the stuff that turned up in the toybox belonging to their five-year twin sons. Not at first, anyway.
It was only when an ancient-looking brooch appeared in the toybox mix that the Kruzes decided to do some research. It turned out that twins Arthur and Teodor, aged five, and their cousin Jesper, also five, had not been playing with tat but with 1,200-year-old Viking treasure unearthed in the back garden. "After we checked on the internet, we realised that it was not something from H&M," said Marita Kruze, mother of the twins.
Tat is apparently British slang for "an object which is tacky, cheap, vulgar, tasteless, sleazy, inelegant, of poor quality or shoddy." And the importance of tat in my life makes it shocking that I only just discovered the word.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:05 PM | Comments (0)
September 26, 2005
Lawsuit Over Prison Slavery
Some people keep pets. Some prison gangs keep slaves, according to a lawsuit covered yesterday by the New York Times.
Roderick Johnson, a former inmate at the Allred Unit, a violent prison a few miles from here, belonged to a gang called the Gangster Disciples, but not in the usual sense, the gang's former No. 2 man explained Wednesday in federal court here. "Was Mr. Johnson considered a member of the Gangster Disciples?" one of Mr. Johnson's lawyers asked the witness, whose name was withheld by the court because his testimony could subject him to retaliation. "No," said the witness, a soft-spoken, perfectly bald and quite imposing black man in a prison uniform and shackles. "What was he considered?" asked the lawyer, Jeffrey Monks. "Property," came the reply. That meant, the witness continued, that gang members could rape Mr. Johnson at will. They could, he said, also rent him out for sex, and they did, daily. A purchased rape, the witness said, cost $3 to $7. Mr. Johnson says the abuse went on for 18 months.
The two parties agree that prison is violent but apparently don't agree on anything else.
Richard E. Wathen, an assistant warden, testified that there was nothing in Mr. Johnson's seven written pleas for help that warranted moving him to what prison officials call safekeeping, a housing unit reserved for vulnerable gay men, former gang members and convicted police officers. "I believe that we did the right thing then, and I would make the same decision today," Mr. Wathen testified Wednesday. "There has to be some extreme threat before we put an offender in safekeeping."
Dictionary.com defines extreme thusly:
adj 1: of the greatest possible degree or extent or intensity; "extreme cold"; "extreme caution"; "extreme pleasure"; "utmost contempt"; "to the utmost degree"; "in the uttermost distress" [syn: utmost(a), uttermost(a)] 2: far beyond a norm in quantity or amount or degree. ...
Frequent rape and daily sex rental? Sounds pretty extreme to me.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:26 PM | Comments (1)
June 16, 2005
What We Keep: Prison Edition
According to AP:
A state hearing officer has upheld the termination of a correctional officer at Ely State Prison who let officers keep tear gas grenades used in a training exercise. ...The hearing officer ruled the evidence showed Cunningham denied culpability, manipulated official records and created a story explaining away the missing gas grenades. He also tried unsuccessfully to get the other officers to go along with that concocted version of the story. ... Cunningham admitted he had been drinking at the time and wasn't completely sure how many grenades he had given out and to whom.
Jeez, I always have that problem, don't you?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 25, 2005
Earth-Friendly Goodies
Just dropped off two big bags of clothes at the local Salvation Army and it feels great. But I'd be a bad Buddhist; there's so much to lust after and I do, every day in every way. I have little talent for buying big new stuff (only because I don't have the cash to finance a home-decorating spree that would include a black Noguchi table, a brace of Hans Wegner Wishbone chairs and perhaps a Josef Frank cabinet or two). I'm much better at making do with what I have or scavenging from second-hand places. I tell myself that's not so bad. In a small way, second-hand shopping is good for the planet.
Plenty of companies are eager to market new stuff as a boon to the environment as well. I'm not necessarily convinced but here's one example: "At least 65 percent of the handle of the Preserve razor is made out of Stoneyfield Farm yogurt cups. To recycle, the handle can be easily separated from the blade, which isn't yet recyclable. (Mr. Hudson insists they are working on it.) The handles can be pitched into a recycling bin or mailed back to Recycline in a company envelope," noted Mark Clayton in the Christian Science Monitor in a tribute to last week's Earth Day. Clayton mentions several great gadgets, including the Juice Bag, "a large bag with a flexible solar panel sewn to the back" that let's you charge a phone, laptop and iPod, say, if you walk to work as one enthusiastic owner does. (The appearance of this gal in the article suggests a successful marketing effort. Which is fine with me, given the topic. But the bag's not for sale yet, according to the company web site, so how the hell did she get her paws on a bag? Is she an Edward Bernays-style plant, a relative of the owner, a beta-tester? That's the kind of information readers should have.)
For parents, something called KidBean.com is thrilled, utterly thrilled to announce the debut of new Organic Hemp Children's Sneakers, as they Insist On Describing Them. According to the release (note to company or agency: enough with the gushy adjectives already): "These amazing children's shoes are 100% vegetarian (vegan) and are: cruelty-free, sweatshop-free, leather-free, and are quite simply the most sustainable children"s shoes you can buy! They are made with only environmentally-sound materials, including organic hemp uppers and soles made from reclaimed used tires."
If the shoes can make the kid wearing them nag-free, I promise to buy a dozen pairs. But what about the grownups? I need new sneakers. Where's my vegan, environmentally sound and affordable option?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 21, 2005
Hotel Hanger Thief Explains Business Model
eHotelier.com offers snippets from the 2002 trial of a British man charged with stealing 40,000 hotel hangers--for clients. Excerpt below but the rest is well worth reading.
Counsel: And people come to you, do they, asking you to make special wardrobes so that they can use stolen clothes hangers?
Accused: It isn't so much the fact that they are stolen that makes them attractive. You have to remember that many top businessmen spend more of their time in hotels than in their own home. They become used to hotel life. They think of hotels as home. Therefore they become used to hotel hangers and think of them as normal, and on the rare occasions when they spend some time at home they can't stand these fiddly things with hooks which you and I may think of as normal but which the business traveller thinks of as loose-fitting and badly designed. So they come to me and get me to make a hotel-style wardrobe.
Counsel: Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who prefer hotel life to home life?
Accused: Certainly. A lot of businessmen would never go home if they had the chance. So when they get home they like to recreate the hotel experience in their own house. Many of my clients have their own mini-bars in their bedrooms. They have TV sets at the end of the bed on a raised shelf, often with an adult sex channel on it. All their bathroom products come in wrappers and are thrown away each day. I have even known people in their own home put out "Do Not Disturb" notices on the door of their own bedroom.
Counsel: Stolen, presumably, from some hapless hotel.
Accused: Never call a hotel hapless. They know what they are doing. No hotel loses money willingly. They may have things taken from them, but the stuff that guests leave behind is just as valuable.
Counsel: Are you serious when you say that clients of yours drink from their own minibars in their own bedrooms in their own homes?
Accused: Certainly. And just as in a hotel, they grumble about the price and size of the bottles, and the absence of ice.
Counsel: So why don't they get a proper fridge in their bedroom?
Accused: Because then it wouldn't be like a hotel.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:56 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 05, 2005
Diane Arbus, Parkinson's and Weird People
My dad says he has Parkinson's because he parks so much. It's a good joke if you know my dad, who has eight or nine vehicles on his property here in Grand Junction, Colorado, and has had, he tells me, up to fourteen. In my junior high days he collected Corvairs and acquired eleven or so before the lust wore off. He's horsetraded, tweaked and sold hundreds of cars and trucks in his time and as much as his wife would like him to be finished with this obsession he is not and won't be until his heart stops as completely as the Ranchero he has out back.
I popped into the Diane Arbus exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum just before I left New York. It was packed and easy to listen to other people's conversation. Such as:
"I will decide, it's not up to you," said one woman into a forbidden cell phone that she used nonetheless. And
"She became her art." And
"How did you get in places to take these weird photos?" But many of the people in these photos did not seem weird, just dated from being fixed forever in the 1960s. One of my favorite photos shows the 1938 Debutante of the year at home in Boston. It is 1965 and the elegant, now old woman is in a satin dressing gown and white fur bed jacket lying against the pillows in her bed. A cigarette is in her right hand, she looks straight at the camera and you know that her live, while prosperous, is not the life she somehow expected it to be during that glittering year of gowns and guys and parties. My other favorite shows a Mexican dwarf in his hotel room. He's wearing a mustache and a hat. There's a bottle of booze on a shelf immediately to the right of his shoulder, and he looks more serene and easy in his sking than anyone I've ever seen.
Back in Brooklyn, while walking my friends' elderly dog around the block, I passed a young woman, a dwarf, and her family. The average-size dad took baby from mom and walked into the apartment while mom struggled to get the heavy stoller with groceries up three steps. You got it? he asked. I got it, she replied.
Seeing her made me realize why the comment about "weird photos" at the museum upset me a bit. The subjects in Diane Arbus' photos may seem odd or weird but they are not odder or weirder than we are. It's more comfortable, of course, to pretend they are. But most of us carry around plenty of irregularities. They're just as real and warped if not always as visible.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 30, 2005
Road Warriors and Salvation Army Bargains
Happiness is hard and I'm not good at it. So there's no explaining the warm glow that I'm basking in right now. Maybe it's because our tiny triangle (spousal unit, energetic daughter and cranky scribe) survived our first truly long road trip and just got back whole and relatively unscathed after an Easter vacation that entailed eight or nine hours on the road between Stockholm and Malmö, (a "city in transition" according to the English-version of the site, such a welcoming headline) then seven or eight hours heading north to Karlstad, then today a weeny little jaunt of three hours back to Stockholm, the newly christened Capital of Scandinavia. (Can't find the link yet but will. Are you shocked, shocked to learn that no one in Norway, Finland or Denmark was consulted about this blatant marketing move?)
So I'm tired but not exhausted. My kid is dancing wildly to Swedish bubblegum pop called Superduper Kille (Superduper Guy) while my very own SuperDuper Guy is sipping a brewski, cleaning up the kitchen and working on dinner. (Some wonder why I married a Swede. Duh.) All the small irritations of the trip--the kidlet threatening to jump out of the speeding rental during a freeway spat; the husband's snarls in response to calm, reasonably expressed concerns about parking in dark, gloomy parking garages filled with sneaky evil thieves; the wife's clear, appropriate setting of boundaries by threatening to force-feed her daughter an entire Bratz doll on the spot--are behind us now. So what's left? Plenty of stuff.
*The small teak magazine display rack bought near Ales stenar. We didn't make it to the ancient stones but we sure as hell found the flea market.
*The tasteful sewing kit in faux leather my daughter bought for 1 crown at the same place.
*The summer wardrobe my daughter picked out at the Salvation Army outlet in Örebro.
*The four fabulous 80s-era do-it-yourself home decorating mags I scored there.
*Hubby's haul of comic books.
*Four groovy square glass candleholders and
*My kid's 80s-era IKEA teen chair, which she bought with 7 bucks of her good-behavior money. (Repeat after me: It's only a bribe if they get it before they meet the agreed-upon goal. It's a *reward* if they get it afterward.)
Tomorrow I'm going to go pick up a teak office console (low, lean, accordian-doors it is soooo cool, way cooler than I am) that a friend is giving me. Of course, I don't need it; I don't need any of the stuff I picked up today, either. But I enjoy flea markets and Salvation Army outlets and antique stores. So maybe the miracle of the trip wasn't just that we survived but that we were able to take turns doing stuff each of us enjoyed. (One of my ears is still leaking liquid from the water park we were at today.) It's kind of a crazy concept, this taking-turns thing. Like win-win, it's not exactly a world view native to our little tribe. But we're home, we're happy, we're each doing a little jig, so maybe we're about to get the hang of it.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 03, 2005
The Life You Save
Why spring cleaning is a really good idea.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:41 AM | Comments (3)
Pickle Forks
Paperback Writer details her fight against clutter and how she pissed off her family by imposing a strict limitation on gifts. Then she sends us off to Country Living, where all thoughts of clutter control evaporate in the reflection of gorgeous photos with captions like this:
"James sets his outdoor dining table with 19th-century Blue Willow transferware, heirloom linen and a mix of old family silver and vintage pieces he has collected. The pearl-handled pickle fork and engraved butter trowel are favorites."
Well of course they are.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:28 AM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2005
Moving Sale
When I sold my house, I thought it had to be empty. Silly me. Nearly two years ago a woman sold her neglected old bungalow in Chicago. Then she cut out. You know, took off. (She did call an auction house first to have the furniture removed.) The plucky (soon to be dusty, downtrodden and exhausted) young owners had planned to renovate an empty house, not excavate through thousands of items left by a stranger. But they rolled up their sleeves, got rid of the rocks (yes), dusted off notable finds, and put them up for sale. To get an education in what people keep, start at the top, with the first item offered. Not that you need an education; checked the garage lately?
I adore stuff. Shiny new, crappy old, cool, uncool, it doesn't hardly matter. As a result, I'm fascinated by the human lust for stuff, by our desire to acquire. And by the companies that profit as a result. There are true minimalists in the world but they're rare and an affront to nature, like whole-wheat pie crusts and Michael Jackson. I used to blog about PR and the media. But those topics pale next to blogging about, say, the lure of the sassy Hello Kitty boombox on my desk, there courtesy of fabulous friends in the States. Friends like Pete, Tim and Mitch, Derrick, Melissa, Chris, Peter, Joe, Mik, Caroline, Ingrid, Jess, Joanne, Sara and Sarah. (Did I forget anybody? Thanks, Toys!)
The boombox was a gift sparked by my move from California to Sweden nearly three years ago. Before the move, I too had thousands of items, most crammed into the garage-basement of my small bungalow. Some of the things came to me after the deaths of my mother and grandmother but others just followed me home. The help of many, many friends and relations was required to sort through the stuff, get rid of most of it, and ship the pitiful remains to a new apartment. (In many parts of Europe, closets are mythical and more difficult to locate than elves or unicorns. There's a reason why Swedish retailing giant IKEA carries all those wardrobes.)
The sorting process was long, nightmarish and incomplete. (Um, don't mention it to hubby but at the very last minute I stashed a few things in Oakland. And maybe a few other things in Berkeley. Or was it El Cerrito?) The move dampened my ability to acquire but not my lust for stuff. Welcome to Stuffola. I hope you'll be happy here.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack