Archive for September, 2009
Garage Sale Friday
It’s not that I’ve been finding great stuff at garage sales these last weeks and then not posting about it; it’s not even that I haven’t been going to garage sales. I have. Every week, without fail. I just haven’t been buying anything. Some of the sales even had really nice stuff that I thought about buying. But I didn’t. In order for me to buy something at a garage sale, it has to be something that I’ve already identified a need for, or something that is a true Antiques Roadshow find. And those things just don’t come around on a regular basis. Such is the unpredictable and random nature of the garage sale.
In the past, friends of mine have heard about my great garage sale finds, and insisted on coming along with me on a Friday or Saturday morning. After we’ve visited 10+ sales and walked away empty-handed, they sometimes get a puzzled look, as if to say “OK, where’s those awesome finds“? And the answer is that we may need 20 more Fridays. We may have to go to 95 more sales. That’s just how it is. But I always enjoy the ride. I enjoy the heck out of the 95 sales that I have to go to find the treasure hidden in number 96. The people, the clutter, the stuff, the peek into the choices someone else has made in their buying, and, in the case of an estate sale, a true look into the stuff of their lives – their travels, their kids, their memories. In a lot of cases, the stuff that I buy is just an added perk.
Fisher Paykel Dish Drawer: A Review
Because the repairman will be here this afternoon, and not, as I was told yesterday, this morning; I find myself with a little time to burn in which I’d like to write about my experience with the dishwasher that warranted the aforementioned repair call: The Fisher Paykel Double Dish Drawer.
We bought it in 2004, in the midst of our whole house renovation, for our newly constructed kitchen. We chose it because it was not only innovative and beautiful, but liked the idea of being able to run two loads of dishes simultaneously. We entertain a lot, and because of our renovation project, we had been without a dishwasher for long enough that two loads at once sounded like heaven. At the outset, we loved it. It looks great in our kitchen and is nearly quiet as a mouse. For a three year stretch, we would have had only positive things to say about it. Then came 2007, and our troubles began. Sadly enough, by this time our two-year service warranty had expired.
The plastic brackets holding up the top drawer broke, causing the drawer to stick and rendered the top unit unuseable. We had them replaced. Within a month, they broke again. We had them replaced again. But this time, the weight of the top drawer on the bottom had caused some leakage, and the resulting water spill resulted in the frying of the sensor and control panel underneath both units. We had it replaced. The following year, the motor on the top unit broke. We had it replaced.
This time, this year, today, the plastic brackets have broken again. In fact, they broke two weeks ago, and though I called for the repairman immediately, the parts have been agonizingly slow to arrive. I understand the brackets are now made of metal, which, fingers crossed, will offset this pesky problem from happening in the future. But in the meantime, we have invested at least twice the purchase price of the Dish Drawer in its repair, and I find myself fantasizing about an alternate reality in which we just chose another make of dishwasher back in 2004.
In my experience, in this case, sometimes expensive is expensive, too.
09/24: edited to add: According to the serviceman last night, the brackets (though he called them “actuators”) are not now being made from metal. We get the same plastic ones. Again. And we were his second F-P Dish Drawer repair of the day. That might not be a big whoop in, say, Chicago, but we are very much downstate. According to him there are only about 25 Dish Drawer owners in his service area. Doesn’t bode well.
02/16/10, edited to add: a few weeks ago, the actuators broke again. Yep, the same ones that we had replaced in September. Guess how long the warranty on the new parts lasted? 90 days. How long did it take for them to break on us? Just over 90 days.
07/30/10, edited to add: The last straw: last week, the actuators broke again. Rather than call our repairman, we went dishwasher shopping, and adopted a brand new Whirlpool Tall Tub. No bells or whistles, just a good, inexpensive, well rated dishwasher. Our journey with Fisher Paykel is over. Well, almost. It’s currently sitting all alone in our garage, and we’re thinking about creative ways of getting rid of it and venting our frustrations at the same time. Target practice, maybe? See if it’ll catch on fire? Any suggestions?
Art at Auction: Why the heck didn’t this sell?!
Among the unsold lots from Treadway Gallery‘s Sept. 13 sale are some fantastic pieces that are worth sharing. The auction overall had a very nice selection; although I haven’t been following their auctions closely for the last couple of years (but having been a frequent buyer and consignor before then), the selection struck me as uncommonly good. As with any auction, however, there are lots that go unsold, and Treadway is kind enough to post these online along with purchase prices.
Paging Walker Evans? This is a fantastic image, and although the photographer is not a particularly well-known one, the purchase price is dirt cheap. How did this beauty go unsold in the first place?
I’m bullish on Caser. Because he’s associated with Illinois, I see his work on a regular basis. And Treadway is an auction house that frequently offers his work. His beautiful, delicate art nouveau style of painting is consistently top notch, regardless of subject matter. And lovely young nude ladies, as far as subject matter, is golden. His auction records have only recently begun to pick up the requisite steam, yet oddly this beauty did not sell. As icing on the cake, the frame, at least from the front, looks an awful lot like a Carrig Rohane, which would be worth the asking price all by itself. Totally fallen between the cracks, this one.
I heart Brown County art. Especially that of the heavy hitters such as Griffith. This painting has all the glory of his best pieces; the only reason I can imagine that it didn’t sell (because Griffith’s work almost always sells) is that the estimate might have been a tad high (though perfectly reasonable) for this market at 10-15k. The purchase price, however, is a bargain, and a fine investment.
Why I love Hung
“I used to have a family. I used to have a wife, kids, a house, a job. Now I have my dick. A dick and a dream. If that’s not the American way, I don’t know what is”. — Ray Drecker
Ray Drecker is 40-ish and devilishly handsome. He’s smart, patient, loyal, and a talented athlete. A former minor league baseball player turned high school basketball coach and history teacher, he leads a modest life with his twin high school age children in the nice lakeside home bequeathed him by his parents. And oh yeah, as the series title suggests, he has a large penis. And his world is coming apart at the seams.
Like Nurse Jackie, the series takes a look at what good people turn to in untenable situations. In Ray’s case, he’s just hit bottom not only by his divorce, but also the near loss of his home to fire (after his insurance lapsed). As a teacher and coach, he simply does not earn enough money to be able to repair his home, and is forced to live in a tent in his backyard, while he works on fixing his badly fire damaged roof in his spare time. Because of these living conditions, he is unable to provide for his kids, and they must live with his ex-wife, who has gone on to marry a wealthy dermatologist. Emasculated and desperate to earn more money, he ends up at a hokey get-rich-quick seminar. Encouraged to find his “own tool” to market for success, he beds a self-described “poetess”; a former acquaintance and fellow seminar attendee, who, in a fit of rage after he leaves too promptly after sex, shouts “go and market your big dick“! And so a series is born. Ray actually is inspired to market himself to women.
I wasn’t sold on the premise. I realize that any reasonably stable person (and Ray does seem to be such a fellow) has to be desperate and bottoming out in order to go from that particular point A to that particular point B, and he just wasn’t coming across that way. And after all, isn’t the target audience for male prostitution primarily, well, other males?? But I took the leap of faith and stayed with it. I’m glad that I did, because what unfolded this season ended up being a fine Shakespearean tragicomedy. The “poetess”, Tanya, becomes Ray’s pimp, launching an enterprise entitled “Happiness Consultants”. Tanya represents the particularly feminine — the creative, the insecure, the caring and wily and intuitive, which, she insists, is her ace in the hole: she understands women and their needs. Ray, being particularly masculine, doesn’t. And so a partnership is formed, albeit a tenuous one from the start, as neither one knows particularly what they’re doing or getting each other into.
Thus begins a fascinating series of rendez-vous that, each in their own way, provide part of an answer to the question: “what do women want”? And the answer, it turns out, is really quite surprising and complicated. Enough, in fact, to base a TV series on. I got over my initial misgivings of the premise. We do, after all, now live in a Craigslist culture in which one can, in a straightforward line, decide what they want to do for a living and market themselves. And left and right, people being pushed off the edge – out of jobs, out of benefits, out of their homes, have used this Craigslist economy as a life jacket: doing what they have to do to stay afloat. And Hung provides a farcical celebration of this bottom-up culture, set in the symbolic heart of the American 21st century wasteland: Detroit, Michigan.
The cast is populated with deeply rich characters: The beautiful and Machiavellian Lenore, who began as Ray’s first client and wrapped the season as Tanya’s main rival for the helm of Happiness Consultants; Darby and Damon, Ray’s high school age twin children, who have almost shockingly (in a very refreshing way) not-ready-for-primetime looks, and even Tanya’s mother, who only appears briefly during one episode, but the exchange is so very real and palpable that you feel instantly that you really get Tanya’s character.
And despite the farcical underpinnings of the series, it is indeed chock full of these very real and palpable moments; as if the evocation of the penis in the title and in the storyline is a vehicle in which to instantly cut through to the very intimate – to get to what the characters are really like, and what they really want. With an episode, it can provide the depth that would take a regular series weeks of character development to access, and in the very capable writer’s hands, it deftly delivers. This metaphor is reinforced by the opening sequence, in which Ray is walking down the streets of Detroit, beginning in a full suit of clothes. Piece by piece, he disrobes as he walks until he arrives at his house and jumps, nude, into the lake. And the characters in the series tend to follow the same pattern, albeit on their own schedules, of disrobing, at least in the metaphorical sense. And people never seem to be what you’d expect.
Stay tuned to HBO for season two!
Art at Auction: James D. Julia, the Brave
It was without a doubt an exceptionally bold move: in the midst of this economic slump, at the end of the summer, when many art buyers are typically doing other things anyway, James D. Julia, a Maine auction house, holds a spectacular 4 day auction, including upward of around 850 lots of fine art. That’s right: 850 lots. The offerings ranged from those estimated in the low hundreds to the six figures, many offered without reserve. Talk about a stimulus plan for the art market! And here’s what happened: the auction brought in 3.1 million. People bought art. The top lot in the auction, and cover lot for their catalog, the Stunning 20″ x 30″ canvas entitled “The Villa Borghese, Rome, 1871, by George Inness: 
Sold for $132,250
Because the offerings were so vast and diverse, it’s difficult, at the moment, to characterize the individual results with any broad statement. Looking only at the unsold lots, though, the bulk seem to have been among the paintings estimated at the mid-to-high four figure, and low five figure range. Perhaps this is the market sector that has been hit the hardest over the last year: the buyer of the 10k painting. Outside of this range, the results reflect really a rather strong auction. By their website’s own account, “Along with a capacity crowd, active internet participation and a telephone bank that, in several occasions showed 16 people standing, bidding was very active and proved that fresh conservatively estimated quality goods are still in demand and can fetch strong prices”. A heartfelt Bravo, James Julia, for taking such a chance on the art market. Encore!!
Smart Choices?
Advertisers are very keen on making consumers feel good about their purchases: smart, beautiful, trendy, healthy, knowledgeable. Problem is, for us consumers, that the market is flooded with choices, and actually making well-considered choices from among our options would be at least a full time job. And who among us can take on another full time job? So advertisers operate in the business of shorthand, assuring us that we don’t really need to look into our options, because what they’re offering is the best choice anyway.
I can’t begrudge advertisers for this. I can, however, begrudge the food industry for this; for teaming up with nonprofits in the so-called “Smart Choices” program, wherein certain food items receive a big green check mark on their labeling, leading the consumer to believe that by purchasing the product that bears the check mark, they are making a smart choice (and the implication is: smarter choice than the products that don’t bear the green check). I can understand that food choices, in large part, do govern our health, and agree that measures taken to nudge the consumer towards healthier options are well worth the effort. But the criteria for selection of the “smart choices” foods is simply wrongheaded.
As reported in the New York Times, the following paragraph alone ought to illustrate just how wrongheaded the standards are: “Froot Loops qualifies for the label because it meets standards set by the Smart Choices Program for fiber and Vitamins A and C, and because it does not exceed limits on fat, sodium and sugar. It contains the maximum amount of sugar allowed under the program for cereals, 12 grams per serving, which in the case of Froot Loops is 41 percent of the product, measured by weight. That is more sugar than in many popular brands of cookies.” Hmmm…..is it that Froot Loops naturally contains those ingredients that help it to meet the Smart Choices standard? Nope. They are additives.
In fact, this type of program only incentivizes the food industry to add synthetic vitamins and fiber to processed foods that have been stripped of any nutritional value, a practice that has long made my head spin. Conversely, there seem to be no guidelines for the questionable additives that are placed in store bought food: preservatives, sugar substitutes, flavor enhancers, GMOs, food coloring, and the like. Wonder if Morgan Spurlock would do 30 Days on a Smart Choices Program diet and monitor his results?
Read all about the Smart Choices program on their website. And for added fun, do a search among the product categories. This is the telling part — how very few products are listed, represented by even fewer corporations that manufacture almost exclusively processed food. Among the few that are in my pantry at the moment: Hellman’s Mayonnaise and Quaker Instant Oatmeal (maple and brown sugar). Not exactly shining beacons of healthy food choices.
The only true shorthand I can think of that might be worthy of such labeling practice is this: Don’t eat anything with ingredients that your grandmother wouldn’t recognize. But the food industry wouldn’t be very gung-ho on that one, would they?
Updated 10/26: Success! Kudos to the news media for staying on top of this story, and to Gaga for the link: Food Label Program to Suspend Operations
Picks from my Ebay Watchlist
I haven’t been wildly excited about the pickings in original art on Ebay lately. The worthwhile investment pieces have looked either fishy (in other words, likely fake), or have been offered with ridiculously high prices/opening bids. I have managed, though, to pool a nice assortment together to post:
A great 16 x 20 oil by Beaux Arts graduate and San Francisco artist Ethel Marjory Wallace (b. 1891). This painting has such a delicate appeal, and the gold ground is highly Klimt-esque. Ethel Wallace is a listed artist, but without any sales records that I can find, so the pricing is somewhat arbitrary. The buy-it-now price of 950 seems a little high for an artist without sales records, but given the style and subject matter, this could be a real sleeper of a painting. As more of her work comes to market, a solid price point will be revealed, and it is likely to be at least in the four figures, if her other work is on par with this painting. I would think a winning bid of 750 or less would be an excellent buy.
This oil painting is full of bells and whistles for me — A period 1930s modernist city scene that is simple and charming and……..WOW! Can that price be right? Seriously, this painting is easily worth twice or three times the buy-it-now price of $325. True, Green’s sales records have been very mixed for the last 10 years or so, but it looks like the market has also been flooded with some pretty sub-par work. His early auction records are very strong; up to $2500. The clincher for me is that it looks like a distant cousin to a work in Barridoff Galleries Aug sale that I much admired: Stefan Hirsch’s “City Nocturne“, estimated at 70-90k, sold for 110k.
Great painting by an early 20th century California artist who was very prolific, so sales records are plentiful. Judging from sales in the last couple of years, this painting would bring about 2k; the seller has it listed for $725. Good buy! Quality work by early California artists continues to be a good investment.
