Modern life

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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The Paradox of Travel

Good food is a reason to visit Belgium. With the U.S. dollar in decline we’ve been eating in brasseries rather than two-star restaurants, but there have been some memorable meals during our stay in Ghent. The service at the Pakhuis was somewhat perfunctory, but the pig’s knuckle took me back to the taverns of my youth in Montreal, and the setting–a converted warehouse–was interesting. The Café Théatre, next to the opera house on the Kouter, is an elegant place whose  daily lunch special is a bargain.  They  served the best frieten of our trip—no small thing for French fries are the national dish,

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Bon Appétit

My wife is a Québecoise, and when we sit down at the table we always say “Bon appétit.” When I visit Germany it’s “Guten Appetit,” and in Italy, “Buon appetito.” Omniglot.com lists similar expressions in scores of languages, including Kazakh, Korean and Klingon, but observes that “There is no exact English equivalent.”  The most I’ve heard said before a meal in English is grace. My parents were observant Roman Catholics but we never said  grace, and the only time I remember grace was the year I spent in a Jesuit boarding school. According to the OED, the custom of saying grace (usually in Latin) was adapted by the early Christians from the Greeks,

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