Centerblog on Pinterest

FYI, I am now Pinteresting via http://www.pinterest.com/centerblog/

I'm taking just the best content posts (minus the blabbermouth editorials) and consolidating them for easy reference under a series of headings.  

With more than 650 blog posts by this time, I've basically lost mental control of my own content.  And Blogger doesn't help - despite being a Google product, it has one of the worst search engines I've ever seen.  I can't find half of what I search for, even when I'm sure of my keywords.  Even if I search by tags (labels), it's unworkably cumbersome.  I don't think the developers figured that the average blogger would be as prolific as I am, because the tools don't match the task.  

Recursive screengrabs from Pinterest. 

Some of my stuff gets Pinterested by other internet users anyway, so I decided to start consolidating all of that in one visually-navigable place.  So if you think that you once saw something mildly interesting on this blog, browsing through Pinterest might be your most efficient way to re-access it.

And you only have to look at all my garden critters if you choose to.
:-)

Did Arcade Fire's art sample a house on Ramada Drive?

Back in 2010 when I first saw the album cover for Arcade Fire's critically-acclaimed album The Suburbs, my jaw hit the floor.

It took only a fraction of a second for me to realize that I'd seen that house somewhere before, but it took me about two painful weeks to zero in on its location.  It was one of those mysteries that nagged in the back of my mind until I finally figured it out.   

It's on Ramada Drive in Clear Lake, although for the privacy of the owners, I won't give the address.

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps. 

It's not necessarily that the house literally looks like the album cover feature for feature, but moreso that it feels the same.  Of course, it's convenient that both are shown as painted the exact same unusual shade of "rancher red", but back when I first saw that house in the mid-1980's, I believe there might have indeed been a boat-sized sedan parked in its side yard (the house is unusual for Clear Lake in having lateral access to an integrated garage).  The art work doesn't show a garage, but it shows a sedan in an otherwise-unlikely position.  

It's a provocative suggestion that the two might be related because Clear Lake City was Houston's first master-planned suburban community, so there's a certain nexus of precedent between Clear Lake and the album.

Boat-sized sedan (or perhaps a station wagon) parked in front of a brand spanking new rancher as shown in a promotional brochure reported to have been produced in 1965.  Every once in a while this eerie thing circulates anew on the internet (e.g., this HAIF reference), but I can't find a live reference for it right now.  I believe photo credit should go to Friendswood Development Company (as it was owned in its original incarnation by Exxon), but I'm not certain.  

More purely-speculative forensics:  The Suburbs was inspired by band members Win and William Butlers' upbringing in The Woodlands, but that palm tree on the album cover does not scream "Woodlands" to me.  I've been to that mysterious, far-off place called The Woodlands and they do indeed prefer a lofty forest canopy feel there, just as the name suggests.  But in coastal Clear Lake, palm trees have historically been de rigueur, especially during the era referenced by the art.  Drive around "old Clear Lake" and you'll see classic examples of palms that seemed like a good suburban planting idea at the time (i.e., several decades ago), but which have since morphed into rather shaggy imposing behemoths quite similar to the one depicted in the art work.

We'll probably never know whether art has intentionally or just accidentally imitated life here, but one thing we do know for sure is that The Suburbs is unmatched in its artistic achievement.  This particular passage neatly sums up why.

Screengrabbed from this review by The Hipster Conservative. 

The Suburbs won Grammy Album of the Year on February 13, 2011.  I started this blog about a month before that.  My tag line references the same realizations that are explored by the album's concept.  We spend the majority of our time and most of our money on our suburban lifestyles.  Shouldn't our experiences here be just as deep as the pockets needed to fund them?  They are - but only if we are smart enough to consciously realize it instead of falling victim to shallow surface messages.   

The suburbs - not as lame and formulaic as often depicted.

Screengrabbed from the 1965 Friendswood Development Company brochure (I think).  

Garden of art-in'

This is my brain.  This is Warhol.  This is my brain on Warhol.  Any questions??

Left to Right, lower series: 
Broccoflower, cheddar cauliflower, and purple cauliflower all currently growing in my suburban back yard.  Unlike Andy, I did not take artistic license with any colors here - that's what these three specialty cultivars actually look like. 

I was afraid that the hard freeze of two weeks ago would wipe out each and every one of them, but they all bounced back to look exactly like this today.  This is an amazingly easy and productive vegetable to grow in our area. 

The memory tree

Here's a creative and potentially meaningful idea for those of you, especially you younger people just starting out in your lives, who would like to develop a Christmas tree tradition that's a little deeper than the typical practice of simply buying a chopped-down tree and tossing a bunch of generic plastic and glass ornaments on it. 

It looks pretty and it's very traditional, but does a thing like this have any personal significance whatsoever??  Christmas is supposed to be a time of reflection, humble gratitude, and goodwill.  What do these brand new $2.99 fabric bows have to do with that? 

Screengrabbed from Wikimedia Commons. 

When I was a young woman beginning my post-graduate-school adult life in the early 1990's, I decided that my Christmas tree would be a memory tree, and that I would build it incrementally, year by year, just as I was building my life. 

There would be no cheap garlands and made-in-China shiny tinsel.  There would only be symbols of important rites of passage.  I myself would acquire only one new ornament each year, plus I would add gifts from other people that held personal significance. 

Once I settled on this idea, the obvious thought hit me:  Maybe I would live long enough to see my tree achieve decorative completion, or maybe I would not.  There was only one way to find out. 


A carved cat ornament, hand-made folk art from the deep American rural south, which I received as a gift.  This was my very first Christmas ornament. 

The other decision I made was that I would not kill a tree each year.  I bought a small Norfolk Island Pine, so that it could grow with me and the family I created.  By this time, we have cycled through a few of them, as they outgrew our house!!  One of those is now planted just outside our front window. 

That first Christmas, only that cat hung on my tree.  He was all alone there with his wide-eyed stare.  How could there be anything else on the tree??  I had not built my life yet.  To have a fleshed-out Christmas tree at that point would have felt false to me. 

But then came the relentless passage of time, with all of its extraordinary events.  Here's a small sample from the years that followed. 

From a year when Enron passed out hundred-dollar Swarovski ornaments as if they were candy canes.  And I went to one of those legendary Enron Christmas parties and I wandered around feeling completely helpless, wondering how on earth I would ever be capable of comprehending the essential mechanics of business, because money seemed to be raining down from the sky, and I couldn't for the life of me identify the source of it. 

And the rest, as they say, is history - not just mine, but every Houstonian's.  I stare at this ornament today and I am transported back to those moments of helplessness in the face of hollow grandeur.  And even now, I become as breathless as the now-lifeless corporation whence this expensive bit of glitter derived.     

A sterling silver ornament that was attached with a bow to the outside of one of the many baby shower gifts I received.  It is now tarnished, but to remove the tarnish would be to strip away some of the authenticity, because it's been a long time since I gave birth to that baby. 

A gift from a family member in 1999, because elephants never forget, and I am known for having a very good memory. 

More gifted folk art:  Santa on the half shell.  My extended family likes to support local microbusinesses just as I do. 

As my baby grew, so did the collection of ornamental art projects that she produced. 

A S'mores ornament which we selected to commemorate 2005, because we did a heck of a lot of camping that year!

From more than a decade ago, a twin ornament commemorating the last Christmas visit we had with a close friend's family before she died of cancer.  There's an inscription in the center (redacted here) and the other family has an identical ornament with the same inscription. 

Our chosen ornament for 2010, the year we brought our dog home!!  We had a heck of a time finding this one, and then we had to take a fine-point Sharpie marker to it in order to simulate her brindle coat.  But it's a pretty good resemblance, wouldn't you say? 

The answer for me was yes, I did, in fact, live long enough to see my tree completed - and completed with a richness that exceeded my wildest early-90's dreams. 

May your holiday be deeply meaningful to you according to whatever your personal traditions comprise.

More art criticism, please

Book-ending my "bony-butt ugly" post in which I'd applauded Council's decision to deny a Special Use Permit (SUP) to Stripes Convenience Stores on the grounds of municipally-inappropriate design, I'm reproducing and expanding my rebuttal to the GCDN op-ed titled "It's time to cut the art criticism". 

It's actually time to ramp it up.  GCDN argues that evaluating aesthetics is not an appropriate function for City Council by virtue of the facts that (a) Council is not qualified to do that in the first place, and (b) the issue is too subjective to be productively broached by Council anyway.  But this stance disavows the complexity of the issue and it also ignores the fact that property values are very sensitive to "the views" that they offer.

Um, yeah.  Add to this list arguably-unsophisticated retail designs that delete the use of building materials consistent with established local character and precedents. 

Screengrabbed from this source. 

Anyway, rather than me beating that horse to death, let me just reproduce my comments on GCDN's editorial, with visual and referential embellishments. 


***

By Heber's rationale, the same justification would apply if a fast food franchise applied for a permit to build a circus-themed drive-through next to the 1894 Opera House on Postoffice. Why not - it's a tax-paying business, isn't it? It's a commercial area, right? And obviously there are scores of people who do not find circus-themed fast food establishments to be unacceptably "ugly" because they patronize them with great enthusiasm. So what legitimate basis would there be for a construction permit denial in that scenario?

Made for each other??  Justified by sole virtue of projected individual tax revenues?  Really?!  Do you think this combination of development would bode well for further refinement of The Strand as having the type of distinct and irreplaceable character that draws crowds of money-spending visitors? 

You could argue that League City's Main Street isn't in the same league (pun intended) as The Strand, but if League City doesn't start acting to help cultivate a cohesive character for Main Street, it's never going to get there, either. 

Opera House photo from Wikipedia.  Microsoft clip art.

The flaw in [Heber's] logic should be obvious. If it's not, quit reading now, because the rest of what I have to say won't mean a darned thing to you.

League City has struggled for years to define a municipal identity for itself, and a lot of folks poke fun at their consistent track record of failure.

But then when Council takes a baby step toward actually doing something (rather than debating the issue to death and paying big taxpayer bucks for questionable consulting studies)... actually taking a concrete step toward constraining an identity, a lot of folks poke fun at them, including this newspaper.

They can't win, can they? I'm the first one to cry foul whenever Council screws up, but I don't think they can be faulted for drawing a line on the issue of municipal esthetics in an instance where they had every right to do that (in fact, that's their specific function).

They aren't exactly sure what it is that they're supposed to BE cultivating, but at least they realize that willy-nilly construction variances are NOT going to get us to where we need to be in terms of municipal cohesion.

For once, Council is sticking to their guns instead of obsessing about their guns. I'd encourage everyone to recognize progress when it manifests.

***

Flat-butt, bubble-butt, bony-butt ugly

I felt compelled to go two better than Councilman Becker with that post title, so please excuse the rather indelicate visual impression that it conjures. 

It's just a personal opinion but it's a really, really strong one which the two of us share:  That the Stripes gas station (corner of SH 96 and West Walker) is "flat-butt ugly" (per Becker as quoted by GCDN (paywalled)). 

This Googlemaps screengrab above shows that corner before it descended into esthetic ruin.  I have always hesitated to publish a pic of the Stripes itself for fear of attracting the wrong sort of attorney communication, even though all I'm expressing here is a Constitutionally-protected personal opinion which - thank God - the majority of our City Council shares with me.  They wisely decided to deny a special use permit for Stripes to erect yet another similar visual atrocity on Main Street.  And in so doing, they gave me a journalistic "out" on my own commentary. 

Screengrabbed from Google streetview. 

As I explained in the GCDN comment section, this question is not just a matter of land use - it's a matter of property values.  I personally do not believe that the Stripes visual brand is appropriate for our type of development.  Look at the corner of West Walker and State Highway 96 (League City Parkway) and what do you see? 

(1) Substantial investment in the Gas Dude, which is more than architecturally appropriate for the area.

It may have a funny name, but they put some serious big bucks into all that stacked stone.  In a visual quality sense, it even outstrips Buc-ee's, which now sets the bar for C-stores in southeast Texas (and beyond). 

Screegrabbed from Yelp. 

(2) Even more substantial investment in the ACU Federal Credit Union, which is actually LEED-certified as well as being architecturally appropriate.

Artists's rendition creengrabbed from this site.

(3) On the northeast corner, there's Walker Commons, also appropriate.


Screengrabbed from this site. 

(4)  Aaand then on the southwest corner of that same intersection, we now have this:

No tasteful natural building materials, no neutral tones whatsoever... how is this even remotely consistent with the established architectural character of our area?! 

Screengrabbed from this GCDN article. 

It's a style appropriate for some areas, but this isn't one of them, in my opinion.  Perhaps next to a children's museum with oversized Lego contemporary art outside, or perhaps a park with a matching playscape.

Would it not coordinate beautifully with one of these?  The colors appear to be a perfect match. 

McDonald's playscape screengrabbed from this site. 

Anyway, the other day when I published "Breaking news", I was in the mood for some good news about something League City might have wrought.  On that day, I sure never got my wish.  But this makes up for it.  Bravo to Council on this one. 

Tap to expand.  Text of my GCDN comments. 

Modernizing with color, Part 3

Wagner's designers knocked it out of the park with their traditional fireplace mantle color make-over.  Seriously - they absolutely nailed it.  They re-set the tract home creativity bar. 

Here's a screengrab from this YouTube video promoting their Flexio paint sprayer. 

Look at that color shown in the pic above!!!  Compared to that, my fireplace below looks downright drab: 

 I did a make-over in an unremarkable battleship gray.  It's better than the builder-grade white that was there originally, but it lacks the wow-factor of Wagner's paint, which is subtle but with vibrant teal undertones. 

Action shot of spraying in process.  The TV commercial was supposed to be about the sprayer itself, but when we saw it, we became transfixed by the color to the point of not even remembering what corresponding product was being advertised.

As soon as my husband saw this, he said, "We need that color for our house".   I still have additional trim work and three sets (count 'em) of double converging pocket doors that need updating from builder-white to an appropriate non-traditional paint color, so the color choice question is huge for us regardless of what we do with our fireplace. 

I know there will be people all over American asking the question, "What color did Wagner use in their sprayer commercial?" But if my results are any indication, they won't be finding an easy answer, because Wagner appears not to have published the formula. 

However, where there's a will, there's a way.  What we did is capture a number of image stills from that commercial, and then I asked my husband to use Photoshop to extract some representative formulas from those stills, bracketing the shade range, which obviously shows some variability due to lighting and angle differences.  Even if Wagner had published what they used for their paint, their formula wouldn't necessarily look optimal in my house or your house or any other house.  The trick is finding the right color formula for the specific space and lighting conditions, and that's usually a trial and error process involving a number of approximated colors. 

Anyway, here are the stills:

Taken with my DSLR pointed at my paused TV set.  This appears more vibrantly teal than the YouTube grabs shown above. 

Another one taken with DSLR pointed at TV set, but this one is more a mix of teal and navy blue. 

This one shows the TV in the same view as my Richard Eastman pottery piece which is sitting on the console beneath the TV.  Look at the center section of that pottery and you'll realize why we're after that paint color.

Eastman's work is described further in a post about local artists titled "Art that wows". 

Here are the corresponding Photoshop extractions, roughly from lightest to darkest.  The numbers on them are in Hex and can be converted using sites like this one. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I finally get around to tackling our double converging door-painting project and zeroing in on the best color for that, I will publish a post about it, much as I did with respect to the skylight color selection process (one of my most popular posts, that one). 

I'll close by embedding the Flexio commercial, just in case you'd like to see more of this gem (I can't comment on the efficacy of the sprayer itself because I haven't used it). 

Modernizing with color, Part 2: Light fixture make-over

In Part 1 of this post, I described how to use color unconventionally to modernize a builder-grade fireplace mantle.  Targeted use of color has become a hot trend for updating a wide variety of household items that would otherwise be too costly to replace. 

This photograph of our TV set shows what would otherwise be an extremely traditional cabinet painted blue to give it new life. 

West End Salvage is one of my favorite shows because they've substantially raised the creative bar of home improvement - and by using reclaimed materials to boot. 

In my case, I haven't done this kind of color updating with furniture so much as with fixtures.  Newer neo-eclectic builder-grade tract homes are quite schizoid right now - by popular demand, they are leaning more toward modern or contemporary designs, but they still tend to get built with a large number of residual traditional elements.  For example...

The builder-grade faucets in our house look like this: extremely modern...

...but the builder-grade exterior light fixtures are so traditional that they look like they pre-date the invention of the electrical circuit!!

Good grief - they don't call it neo-eclectic architecture for nothing!  Those two fixtures don't even belong to the same century let alone the same style! 

The translation on "a wide array of decorative techniques taken from an assortment of different periods" basically boils down to it being a dog's breakfast from an artistic perspective.  And "not creatively experimental" is putting it mildly. 

Screengrab from Wikipedia. 

Those two fixtures don't even belong to the same century let alone the same style and, furthermore, there was absolutely nothing that cross-references them.   Which, of course, is exactly the kind of nonsense that grates on my artistic nerves.  So I decided to do something about it. 

I painted the ancient-looking things in a new way.  If you compare to the dreary grey gas lamp fixture above, this repainted one looks crisp and clean and well-defined and new, much in the same way as the white Victorian chair does in the CB2 ad I showed in Part 1, and the cabinet does in the West End Salvage make-over room shown above.

Why blue specifically?  See this post on complementary colors. 

It's a bit pronounced when you see that navy blue fixture closely-framed in a photo like that, but in this example it's important to remember two things:

1. When you instead see it within a massive 60-foot-wide full-frontal view of a completely beige house, that one-foot pop of color does not overwhelm.  I don't think any of my neighbors even noticed that I made this change.  (And by the way, I'm not kidding about that width.  Our otherwise-abnormally-small 100% beige house is 60 feet wide for reasons I haven't blogged). 
2. This is not the only pop of blue in our emerging front-yard design.  It is precisely coordinated with several other objects: 

(a) This stunning focal point planter (stacked stone make-over post here) and the smaller array of planters behind it. 

(b) This other large ceramic planter we have in the front yard, of which I've done this close-up to show the navy undertones.

My efforts were not limited to gas lamp style light fixtures.



(c) Here's the before-and-after on this atrocious-looking hose rack, which I painted and re-adorned with my current favorite model of garden hose.  I think it looks much more sophisticated in the "after" shot. 

Hose hangers aren't currently sold in modern or contemporary styles.  The paint pushes them toward the modernized end of the design spectrum. 

Now look at another of those same hose-hangers on the other side of the house: would you have even noticed the hanger was navy blue unless I had pointed it out?  Probably not.  How could you notice?? It's drowning in a vast sea of builder beige.  You probably would have just noticed that the photo on the right looks "cleaner". 

And by the way, you can't really claim to be a real homeowner until you've broken out your builder's paint samples and painted your ugly utility boxes to match your house trim.  Blogger's Rules of Order. 

I didn't just stop with light fixtures and those attached hose hangers.  I extended this blue-ification effort with other similar objects in our outdoor space (William Moss likes to say that "repetition" is the key to any successful landscape design.  I tend to use the term "cross-referencing"). 

 

Another hose hanger, but it's the kind that sticks into the ground rather than bolting to the exterior wall of the house. 

And I had a bistro set that I was not willing to part with, despite the fact that it was many years old and no longer conforming to my taste.  So I updated it by taking it in the direction of non-traditional blue. 

For crying out loud, I even blue-ified the dog's dish pedestal.  Do you know what this thing is?  It's one of those kitschy wire fruit bowls.  I use it to hold the dog's bowl because fire ants are not good at navigating all those wires.  I don't leave food in the bowl, but fire ants have very good noses, and they'll come in search of the smallest food residue.  This wire is like a maze for them, and they tend not to mess with it. 

Here is my favorite weapon in the War on Beige:

Rustoleum gloss navy blue.  I've tried just about every shade on the market.  I've found other blues to be too, too blue. 

I usually do a slight overspray of everything with Rustoleum gloss black, to naturalize the appearance of the sprayed items. 

I'll close this post with the corresponding DIY sequence, because if I don't, someone will email me asking how to paint an exterior light fixture like I've shown here. 

As usual, these are the steps I did for my fixtures - yours might be quite different.  Some fixtures are not intended to be painted.  You should check with the manufacturer to see if it's OK in your case, yada yada. 

Happy painting, whatever your modernizing accent color may be. 

I disconnected the electrical breaker for the circuit that feeds our exterior fixtures.  This is a very important step for safety. 

Then, while they were still intact, I gently scrubbed oxidized powder coating off the top of them (with the bottom portion still in place so that water would not get into the bulb sockets). 

These fixtures had a bottom part that unscrewed. 

Gross!!

The top part appeared to be metal, but the bottom was some type of plastic.  It completely unscrewed into little pieces. 

Important not to lose any tiny pieces, including rubber washers. 

Good to set all the hardware aside in a secure location. 

Careful disassembly made for easier cleaning and painting. 

While you're doing this kind of work, don't forget to look around and enjoy your surroundings, because that's the most important part.  Coincidentally, I did this work on a day of rapidly-evolving weather that included a vibrant blue sky and this unusual cloud formation, which later morphed into a mackerel sky. 

Glass panes in a bucket ready for scrubbing. 

Bottom pieces laid out on a tarp and sprayed. 

We actually left the fixture itself on the side of the house for spraying, because the sealant was in really good shape and I didn't want to re-do it.  You can see the sealant / caulk near the bottom of this photo on the lower edge of the fixture.

Important to mask the bulb socket so that paint does not get into it. 

This wasn't just an exercise in style.  If you look at the upper edge of this fixture, the powder coat has flaked off, and the metal underneath is corroding (it appeared to be an aluminum blend and it was beginning to crumble).  If I hadn't re-painted them now, I would have had to spend hundreds of dollars to replace them in a year or two.  I don't like them, but I don't feel like spending hundreds of dollars would be a priority for me here. 



My teenager did the masking.  Perfect job for a teenager.  These days, teenagers aren't called upon nearly enough to contribute to the running of a household.  But they benefit from living in the household so they should contribute some of the maintenance effort. 

Mackerel magic.  Because I was painting hardware blue under a riveting blue sky, the song that got stuck involuntarily in my head was "Blue on Blue" by Bobby Vinton.  Nobody under the age of 50 has the slightest clue how frightening that is. 

The same masking technique works for anything else bolted to the house.  Here I used a hand-held shield to protect the top section of brick because I ran out of tape.

Remember that, if you engage in this type of design approach, the final result should contribute to the overall impression without calling attention to itself.  It's like eye shadow (especially blue eye shadow): if you look at a woman and visually register that she's wearing eye shadow, then she's wearing too much.  But if you look at a woman and your overall impression is that she's well put-together for no specific reason other than her entire appearance just seems to work, then she's wearing the right amount of eye shadow. 

As I mentioned above, with some pieces such as these light fixtures, I do a light overspray of black just to tone down and create some shade gradation in the blue, because otherwise it can look too plastic.