Modern life

Books and Books

When I was at Loyola High School in Montreal, my favorite room was the library. It wasn’t just the sight and smell of all those old books, but the opportunity to make discoveries wandering through the stacks. There was a whole shelf of G. A. Henty, and another of Edgar Rice Burroughs, that I worked my way through during an entire semester. This reading was definitely not a class assignment, and I don’t think anyone recommended the authors to me. I was probably attracted by the books themselves, solid Edwardian creations with colorfully illustrated cloth covers—no cheap paper jackets in those days.

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Up at the cottage

Jay Teitel, a writer and editor at Cottage Life magazine in Toronto, recently emailed me a question: he was writing an article titled “The Cottage of the Future,” and he wondered if I had any thoughts about what summer cottages would look like in the year 2050. The custom of having a country retreat goes back to at least the ancient Romans—Pliny’s villa—but the summer cottage is not simply a house in the country, nor it it a beach house or a ski chalet. The quintessential cottage is a cabin in the forest, perhaps in the mountains,

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The Sixties

My McGill schoolmate Hugh Hartwell, an accomplished pianist, sent me a link recently to a video of Count Basie’s big band. The hour-long film of a live concert was shot in 1962 (in Sweden), pretty much the same band I heard in Birdland in 1959 when I was sixteen, although Joe Williams is absent here. What is most striking about the film, apart from the wonderful music, are the serious demeanors of the musicians. Basie clearly ran a tight ship and no one is fooling around—except maybe Sonny Payne, a bit. These are pros doing a job, which just happens to be playing great jazz.

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Housing Redux

Every small rebound in the number of new houses built is followed by a flurry of articles about how the housing industry is poised to make a comeback. But if my developer friend Joe Duckworth is right, the U.S. housing market is not experiencing a correction but a major restructuring. With college graduates heavily in debt—and high school graduates without well-paying jobs—the first-time buyer market is stalled, and existing homeowners, who might have “moved up,” are stalled, too. The future, according to Joe, is likely to include many more renters than in the last several decades, and so-called starter homes are likely to become permanent homes,

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Kitchen Confidential

Last fall we renovated our kitchen. It was a piecemeal project that started with long-needed repairs to a cracked wall and improvements to lighting, and finished with a total gutting of the space. The work was done by Jay Haon and his assistant Sarah Finestone. The design was a three-way collaboration between Jay, my wife Shirley, and myself. My only advantage in the process was not my years of professional training and experience but the simple fact that I was the only one who knew how to draw. The result brings together Jay’s craftsmanship, my architect’s eye, and Shirley’s desire that the kitchen should be a workplace rather than a showpiece.

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Hotel Rooms

I have stayed in some memorable hotels—Brown’s in London, and Cipriani’s in Asolo—but for some reason the hotel rooms I remember best are the ones that were, let us say, sub par. My most memorable hotel experience was in a small town whose name I forget, on the shore of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. I was visiting a rural development project  in a nearby village. It was the late 1970s, some years before the military coup that devastated this small nation, and while the city was awash in young soldiers, the countryside was quiet. My wife and I checked into a hotel that was like something out of a B.

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On the Hot Plate

We’re having some work done on the kitchen, and since we will have to eat on the porch for a week or more, we’ve been shopping for a hot plate. I thought it would be an easy business, but there is a surprising variety of products, coiled element to induction, plain Jane to designy, anything from $14.99 to more than $1000. But what is more interesting—as usual—are the experiences that people recount in the product reviews, more specifically, the range of uses that hot plates are put to. I expected the occupants of motels, rooming houses, and small apartments would use them.

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Aspen

I spent three days in Aspen at the Ideas Festival. A curious experience. It’s been called Washington D.C.’s summer camp, and it’s full of policy wonks, pundits, and politicians, both active and retired. The politicos get to network, and the affluent audience gets to rub shoulders and point their I-phones at the politicos, so everyone’s happy. And everyone is happy, the atmosphere is relentlessly upbeat. Of course, none of the public figures really lets their hair down. Robert Rubin gave the same speech I heard him deliver two years ago. The British ambassador was hopeful about Libya—but what else could he say?

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