HOLING UP WITH MAGAZINES

So clearly can I summon the memory of the moment one summer afternoon in my slightly decayed but formerly elegant apartment in Portland when I had a blazing insight into my love of glossy magazines.  These were decades ago slick, expensive, explorations of style that I'd been following since childhood, moving over at the newsstand from comics to ladies' magazines.  It wasn't entirely impractical: as a graduating high school senior I received the Betty Crocker Homemaker of the Year for 1957 out of a class of 500.  I had to be introduced to the home-making teacher since I'd never taken a class.  So where did I get my love of these high-end mags?  I never did become as devoted to literary journals.

The real life person here was my dramatics teacher, Melba Day Sparks.  I often house-sat the Sparks' house with its big cage of birds and gentle doberman.  The rooms were dark turquoise and purple, the furnishings were sophisticated, but Melba had done most of the decoration herself: painted, papered, did needlepoint seats for the dining room chairs, and so on.  The magazines in this house were high end decorating and "Architectural Digest."  It was to me not an urging to spend money but an education of my eye to a different classification, one based on aesthetics, but not just one aesthetic, rather a magazine-guided way of thinking that morphed over time.

In the Sixties it was a Whole Earth kind of cabins and improvised recycled material, an interest in indigenous prototypes.  When I entered the world of religious buildings, the approach held, partly because my UU minister, Alan Deale was a fan of architecture, had built a church, and talked about it. Also, the English standards of the major academic establishments met my experience finally in the gothic quads of the U of Chicago and I was very pleased to receive my MA in the Rockefeller Chapel.  I loved the pretentious Meadville building and the First Unitarian cathedral imitation.

The summer afternoon insight of that magazine atmosphere was that I could enjoy it anywhere.  Living in Portland or Chicago did not make me any closer to the big shots, the trends, the glamour, than I was when I lived in, say, East Glacier in a wreck of a house where one room had walls so badly cracked that I just stapled coffee-colored felt over all of them.  From the beginning I had understood that a building, a domicile in particular, was an interaction.  I've never lived in a proper mere maintenance-requiring house.  When I see the fabulous glass-walled, terrazzo-floored mansions of LA hills, I wonder about industrial strength machines for keeping them clean.

But I solved the problem of eclectic taste to some degree by creating my own magazines, tearing out favored rooms, collecting them in plastic sleeves for 3-ring binders, labeled by subject.  It's calming to look through them at bedtime so I walk among them in dreams.

But I'm more likely to dream about exteriors, conflations of places I've lived.  One, when it's towards morning and chilly, is a conflation of East Glacier, Heart Butte, English small towns as depicted in PBS murder mysteries and the stage street from the movie of "The Red Shoes."  It's snowing and there's a bit of Browning.  

The other one is older and takes me back to my aunt's ranch near Roseburg on South Deer Creek.  Everything has changed since the Forties, but I still remember that it was summer and there were sheep and we made ice cream.  I think it's about safety and family, even though it was war time.  

Maybe that's also what connects me to French decorating magazines.  The best is "Marie Claire Maison" which is meant for the young and adventurous, but then there is a genre of cottages, like those designed by Mary Emmerling, which are often reclamations of neglected small houses.  (You can buy single issues and subscriptions of these seductive publications.  Use Google.)  

This is what I see as the housing of the future, along with the tiny houses movement, some of which can be towed to new locations.  Others are meant for homeless people, a minimum.  This again meets with wartime family when it was common to build a little house in the back for single and elderly relatives.  The political and social dimension doesn't interest me as much as the ingenuity and specificity of it.  English houses often have wartime greenhouses which now recur for healthy food and beautiful flowers.

Mini-houses were used in San Francisco and New Orleans to get people under roofs quickly.  The SF ones in particular were shoe-horned in wherever there was a space, something like Moccasin Flats, part of Browning that was originally one-room log cabins in a row for old people who had been living in tents.  The buildings gradually became the anchor points for all sorts of add-ons and mobile homes.  The insides were often shabby but immaculate.

There's a part of me that loved living in a delivery van and would have appreciated a tent.  It's biological, a nest-making drive.  In childhood a cousin and I cleaned out a small chickenhouse, using rakes and hoes to get at the layers of droppings.  When it was bare and scrubbed, we put blankets on the roosting poles and took naps there.  (She is very middle-class now and probably doesn't remember.  All my relatives are invested in prosperous safety and being in style.)

I have friends who love to vacation in yurts or tipis, or go "glamping" where the "house" is really a platform with canvas walls and expensively furnished.  They only work in warm dry climates.  It must be biological, this mixture of wanting fancy things, but also loving simple minimums, the religious contrast between the most fabulous and precious, versus the contemplative's cell with only bed, table, and window.

Unlikely that it may seem, this is the article ABOUT magazines that got me thinking about this subject.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/conde-nast-anna-wintour-roger-lynch.html