The Office

It's a short step from the front door to the office. We pulled 'Toinette, The Desk, out of storage and summarly positioned her as our ambassador to all things Grace & Style. It was the master ebeniste, Mr Boulle himself, who directed her construction in the late17th century. Somewhere out there, I've been told, is her mate, a perfect replica of this long legged beauty, but in reverse so as not to waste any tortoise shell or bronze "scraps", a lovely artistic comment on waste management indeed.

Forged from the same rib as they may be, it's doubtful Toinette's counterpart will ever find her here. Like a beached treasure from a forgotten shipwreck, she landed in my life, lost and damaged, although yes, structurally sound. A fine restorer, a bit of love, and she may yet find her way back to the regal surroundings she was born to adorn, though it would be right here, in America, far from her native France.

The leg warmers are unapologetically prophylactic. Dexter the Dog, our sweet unexpected arrival in January this year, immediatly picked up on the fact that Toinette was held together by aging rabbit glue. Those solid but worn out cotton cloths we use in the business of cleaning got applied immediatly, a solid layer of duck tape holds them in place, and a further layer of very hot pepper sauce have dissuaded Dexter from further investigation. Mr Boulle is turning in his grave, absolutely indignant, ah, l'horreur, oui, je sais, je sais...

A year in Freeland

We're celebrating one full year in our new house; apologies for not updating the blog sooner! Getting to this house has been like a really long marathon, but the bank was kind, and we were granted the mortgage, and Dan helped us move in, and the crew worked extra hard on the floors and the structure, and a dog did find his way to our door, and a young vigorous garden is about to sprout under the watchful eye of Alexis, who has made "sustainability" her senior class project, as mentored by an amazing Barton.

A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves

Is clutter standing in the way of your health? Join the discussion.

The country’s collective desire to clean up is evident in the proliferation of organization-oriented businesses like the Container Store and California Closets. Reality shows like “Mission Organization” on HGTV and “How Clean is Your House?” on Lifetime feed a national obsession to declutter. The magazine Real Simple has even created a $13 special issue on cleaning house.

Getting organized is unquestionably good for both mind and body — reducing risks for falls, helping eliminate germs and making it easier to find things like medicine and exercise gear.

“If you can’t find your sneakers, you aren’t taking a walk,” said Dr. Pamela Peeke, assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of Maryland and the author of “Fit to Live” (Rodale, 2007), which devotes a section to the link between health and organization. “How are you going to shoot a couple of hoops with your son if you can’t even find the basketball?”

But experts say the problem with all this is that many people are going about it in the wrong way. Too often they approach clutter and disorganization as a space problem that can be solved by acquiring bins and organizers.

Measures like these “are based on the concept that this is a house problem,” said David F. Tolin, director of the anxiety disorders center at the Institute of Living in Hartford and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Yale.

“It isn’t a house problem,” he went on. “It’s a person problem. The person needs to fundamentally change their behavior.”

Excessive clutter and disorganization are often symptoms of a bigger health problem. People who have suffered an emotional trauma or a brain injury often find housecleaning an insurmountable task. Attention deficit disorder, depression, chronic pain and grief can prevent people from getting organized or lead to a buildup of clutter. At its most extreme, chronic disorganization is called hoarding, a condition many experts believe is a mental illness in its own right, although psychiatrists have yet to formally recognize it.

Compulsive hoarding is defined, in part, by clutter that so overtakes living, dining and sleeping spaces that it harms the person’s quality of life. A compulsive hoarder finds it impossible, even painful, to part with possessions. It’s not clear how many people suffer from compulsive hoarding, but estimates start at about 1.5 million Americans.

Dr. Tolin recently studied compulsive hoarders using brain-scan technology. While in the scanner, hoarders looked at various possessions and made decisions about whether to keep them or throw them away. The items were shredded in front of them, so they knew the decision was irreversible. When a hoarder was making decisions about throwing away items, the researchers saw increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in decision-making and planning.

“That part of the brain seemed to be stressed to the max,” Dr. Tolin said. By comparison, people who didn’t hoard showed no extra brain activity.

While hoarders are a minority, many psychologists and organization experts say the rest of us can learn from them. The spectrum from cleanliness to messiness includes large numbers of people who are chronically disorganized and suffering either emotionally, physically or socially. Cognitive behavioral therapy may help: a recent study of hoarders showed that six months’ therapy resulted in a marked decline in clutter in the patient’s living space.

Although chronic disorganization is not a medical diagnosis, therapists and doctors sometimes call on professional organizers to help patients. One of them is Lynne Johnson, a professional organizer from Quincy, Mass., who is president of the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization.

Ms. Johnson explains that some people look at a shelf stacked with coffee mugs and see only mugs. But people with serious disorganization problems might see each one as a unique item — a souvenir from Yellowstone or a treasured gift from Grandma.

Many clients have already accumulated numerous storage bins and other such items in a futile attempt to get organized. Usually the home space is adequate, she says, but the challenge is in teaching them how to group, sort, set priorities and discard.

Ms. Johnson says she often sees a link between her client’s efforts to get organized and weight loss. “I think someone decides, ‘I’m not going to live like this anymore. I’m not going to hold onto my stuff, I’m not going to hold onto my weight,’” she said. “I don’t know that one comes before the other. It’s part of that same life-change decision.”

On its Web site, www.nsgcd.org, the group offers a scale to help people gauge the seriousness of their clutter problem. It also includes a referral tool for finding a professional organizer. But since the hourly fees can range from $60 to $100 or more, it may be worth consulting a new book by Dr. Tolin, “Buried in Treasures” (Oxford, 2007), which offers self-assessments and advice for people with hoarding tendencies.

Dr. Peeke says she often instructs patients trying to lose weight to at least create one clean and uncluttered place in their home. She also suggests keeping a gym bag with workout clothes and sneakers in an uncluttered area to make it easier to exercise. She recalls one patient whose garage was “a solid cube of clutter.” The woman cleaned up her home and also lost about 50 pounds.

“It wasn’t, at the end of the day, about her weight,” Dr. Peeke said. “It was about uncluttering at multiple levels of her life.”

E-mail: well@nytimes.com.

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Published: January 1, 2008

Greetings, Earthlings: Your Self Cleaning Toilet is Here.

When New York City’s open-armed embrace of tourists finally extends beyond the boundaries of Earth to creatures from outer space, these visitors will find themselves right at home in Madison Square Park’s sleek, shiny new public toilet.

G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times

The first pay toilet at Madison Square Park attended by (left to right) Dept. of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe and Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff.

Indeed, the toilet calls to mind not a port-o-let, but rather the sort of room one imagines adjoined the personal quarters of Capt. James T. Kirk on the Starship Enterprise. It is a 25-cent journey to the future — and, almost secondarily, a not unpleasant restroom.

The restroom was unveiled on Thursday, the first of 20 planned for the city after more than 30 years of false starts and frustrations. It faces Madison Avenue just north of 23rd Street, and at first glance looks like a bus stop shelter.

There are two architectural flourishes, both on the roof: a small pyramid of glass, like a little model of the Louvre, and an anachronistic metal stovepipe, reminiscent of a cozy shanty or an old outhouse with a crescent moon carved into the door.

But no one goes to a bathroom to look at it. When the green light marked “vacant” is lit, 25 cents — coins only, no bills — starts the visit.

What follows is possibly the longest and most awkward 20 to 30 seconds of a person’s day. The door slips open like an elevator, but then it stays open, to accommodate those who need extra time getting in. Meanwhile, men and women in suits walk past. It is very difficult to look inconspicuous in a bathroom on a sidewalk in New York with the door open. There is just nothing to do but stand there. And the delay will not please those who are in distress.

Finally, the door closes, and the first surprise is the quiet. The walls are padded to dampen street noise, leaving just the hum of a little fan overhead.

Six little lights and the skylight in the pyramid cast a neutral glow over the user’s home for the next 15 minutes, the maximum time limit.

This toilet, which cost more than $100,000, is very spacious, large enough to accommodate a wheelchair. One cannot touch the side walls with arms outstretched.

The floor is rubber and, more strikingly, very wet, but not in a bus-station-men’s-room way. There is an antiseptic, fresh smell to the place.

Sadly, these little surprises are forgotten with the first look at the toilet itself, an imposing, metal, cold-looking receptacle in the corner. There is no little stall around it, and so it looks exposed, like the facilities available in many prisons. It, too, is quite damp, for perfectly good reasons explained later, but the image first evokes a dungeon or a scene from one of the “Saw” pictures.

There is no seat to raise or lower, just the wide rim of the bowl, with covers made of tissue available in a dispenser to the side. Sitting down is a leap of faith, like falling backwards into a stranger’s arms at a corporate team-building retreat.

Turns out, it is cold. But once settled, the visitor finds the seat the perfect place to take in the room’s other amenities.

There seem to be as many buttons as on Captain Kirk’s bridge. Red buttons, blue buttons, yellow buttons, black and green buttons. The red ones near the door and toilet call the company for help in an emergency. The yellow calls for “assistance,” presumably something less dire than an emergency, but nonetheless, a situation. Blue flushes.

Black dispenses toilet paper. One will quickly familiarize oneself with that button, because the designers have deigned a little 16-inch strip the standard helping of paper. A word to the wise: There is a maximum of just three helpings. Another tip: Do not tarry. A grim yellow light turns on when there are just three minutes remaining, and after that, the door will open.

The sink is across the room. The big shocker here is the soap dispenser, which actually emits not a little squirt of soap, but a jet of warm water, with the soap already mixed in. Everything is motion-activated. No knobs anywhere. The warm-air hand dryer seems somewhat slow and weak, especially with that yellow light blinking by the door.

Assuming one finishes before the 15 minutes are up, the big green button opens the door. The horns and sirens and chatter of the city return, jarringly.

When the visitor steps out, the door shuts again, but the “occupied” light stays lit. Strange hisses and spraying sounds come from within — did someone slip past? No, actually, the room is cleaning itself. A robotic arm swings out over the toilet bowl and hits it with disinfectant, while similar jets spray across the sink and the floor. Then, dryers fan hot air over everything, but like the hand dryer, they seem to need more juice.

This is all taken at the designer’s word, for it is impossible to see. The cleanup cannot happen with someone in the room, with sensors below the floor to detect any weight.

After 90 seconds of cleaning, the green light outside comes back on.

Next?

Credit: New York Times;

By MICHAEL WILSON

Published: January 11, 2008

the Idea of Home versus House as perceived in TV Land

What makes a house a home is a topic suitable for poetry. But a house or a home is always something else. It is property. Does this fact contain poetry? Probably not. But it does contain entertainment. It’s a form of television entertainment I’d never paid the slightest bit of attention to until I got involved in buying property myself, which happened right around the time that the long housing boom was unraveling last year. Previously invisible to me, these entertainments were, for months, the only things I wanted to watch. Buying, selling, updating, restoring and “flipping” for quick profits — it all ran together, but I watched even when I couldn’t remember if the title of a certain show was “Flip This House” or “Flip That House.”

Illustration by Todd St. John

It turned out these were two different shows, and with every “pain of U.S. housing slump” headline, the inventory of real estate entertainment looked a little more glutty. It made me ponder this curious genre’s fate. Like sunny sellers’ agents, television executives and producers assured me that such shows had a post-housing-bubble future that was already in the works. I looked for signs of what that might mean as I watched, and pondered just what it was I was tuning in to see.

HOW TO EXPRESS THE SELF

In the distant world of 1980, episodes of “This Old House” began appearing nationally on PBS stations, documenting the restoration of an 1860 Victorian in Boston. Long, calm, detailed and earnest, the project carried the warm glow of education and New England do-goodism. In time, “This Old House” became a franchise (multiple shows, books, a magazine); its original star, a builder named Bob Vila, left in a dispute over endorsement deals and became a brand unto himself. The Thoughtful Improvement ethic — or at least the phrase “do it yourself” — became a trendy idea.

Entertainment is supposed to be better in the hundreds-of-channels present than it was in 1980, but of course new places for expressing ideas do not guarantee new ideas. The upshot is that what used to be a concept for a show is now the basis for a genre, in the form of dozens of shows, entire channels, a category. The HGTV channel went on the air in 1994 and is now in more than 91 million homes; it’s owned by Scripps Networks (which also owns DIY Network, Food Network and Fine Living). HGTV is a soft, warm, pleasant place where nice ladies make quilts during the day and nice young couples redecorate at night and lots of “tips” are shared. Here the home is an expression of the self: Michael Dingley, senior vice president for programming and content strategy, says the channel aims to “provide ideas and inspiration, to make the home better.” He continues, “And I don’t mean home as in the sense of four walls, but also home in a more emotional kind of way, more abstract.”

In 1999, the channel started “House Hunters,” which is now on five nights a week and is among its most popular shows. On each episode, the hostess, a genial automaton called Suzanne Whang — always shown wandering through some anonymous suburban environment — gives us a chipper sketch of the house hunter and his or her desires (the software engineer seeking a shorter commute, the single mom looking for space, the tedious young English prof who wants to have poets over more often, etc.) and three available choices. She remains in her undisclosed location as we follow the hunter through the houses, scrutinizing pros and cons, while canned music plays just audibly enough to subtly suggest that something is happening. The episodes conclude with a decision, and usually a coda about how it all worked out perfectly.

In part, “House Hunters” simply recreates the way that property functions as entertainment in the real world: like scanning the real estate pages for new listings and going to open houses, it’s a part of the mildly voyeuristic pastime of “seeing what’s out there,” of taking a peek at how other people live, a crash course on the market in Chicago or Atlanta or elsewhere.

Along with HGTV’s home design shows, Dingley maintains, such programming demystifies property, and has “enlightened and empowered consumers.” He uses the phrase “relevant entertainment.” On “House Hunters” you may learn that $379K gets you a surprisingly nice 3 BR, 2000 SF, 1927 Craftsman in Seattle. But by and large these happy families are all the same: enlightened and empowered to congratulate themselves for having the same instinct for which wallpaper is “dated” and which mantle has “a lot of character” that everybody on all the other shows has.

Meanwhile, much is left out. Buyer’s remorse, for instance, never materializes. Almost all of the property shows avoid one of the screaming issues of real-life real estate, which is the neighborhood. No one mentions crime statistics, lousy school systems or proximity to homeless shelters or Superfund sites. In an episode of “House Hunters,” a cute young New Jersey couple move to the shore, specifically to Asbury Park, which Whang brightly calls “a majestic boardwalk town.” Have you ever been to Asbury Park? She adds that the place was made famous by the songs of Bruce Springsteen, and that’s true. For instance, it inspired “My City of Ruins.”

HGTV, Dingley explains, is not a “mean-spirited” place. “We’re not a snarky, mean, nasty brand.” Perhaps the channel offers shelter from gloomy homeowner news. “For most folks, a home is not only the most expensive investment in their lives, it’s also the most personal,” he says, and a rockier housing market sharpens the viewers’ interest in “making the right, prudent decision.” That said, its “relevant” programming has been expanding to encompass a bit more of the things that have dominated property entertainment on those networks that are a little less concerned about how mean-spiritedness might affect the brand: namely, money and drama.

HOW TO BE GREEDIER

The American entertainment consumer surely seeks enlightenment on matters of taste and style, but also on that other key aspect of the self, net worth. The soaring stock market of the late 1990s made CNBC almost as popular as CNN, supposedly because we’d become an enlightened and empowered nation of investors, but really because bull market geniuses loved watching a game they never seemed to lose. Tanking markets cleared up the difference between personal finance and rollicking fun, and CNBC’s viewership retreated to niche levels. The Thoughtful Improvement ethic of “This Old House” and the Something for Nothing ethic of Nasdaq-as-sporting-event come together in the form of the flip shows. Don’t make a home, don’t invest in a house — flip a property: how much money, how fast, for how little effort, can be extracted from a shabby, crumbling residence? Booyah! — as CNBC throwback Jim Cramer might shout — now you’ve got something.

TLC has included home-related programming since 1997 (starting with Bob Vila’s post-“This Old House” project, “Bob Vila’s Home Again”). And its show “Trading Spaces” — in which neighbors redecorate each other’s homes — was a home-entertainment milestone. The network began airing “Flip That House” in 2005. Every half-hour episode features a different “flipper,” some experienced, some with no particular background in real estate or construction but with an interest in what (on television at least) sounds like easy money. We learn the purchase price, tour the generally ramshackle property, and listen to an overview of planned updates and renovations. Usually a demolition montage follows: carpets ripped out, off-trend cabinetry smashed to pieces with a sledgehammer. Episodes involving experienced flippers tend to go rather smoothly, and I suppose the instructional payoff for the viewer comes in the form of tips. These generally involve granite countertops, Brazilian cherry wood floors, travertine tile. Often, the tips are communicated in the form of orders issued to the stoic head of some all-Hispanic construction crew, who simply nods.

The profit motive obliterates home-ness and all other topics. An episode involving a guy named Hay, who is “in the entertainment industry,” and restores houses in the area once known as South Central Los Angeles so he can rent them, begins: “The 1992 riots tore the city apart. But now it’s become an attractive destination for house flippers, hoping to turn their property into profit.” He goes over budget, and we learn to use angled paint brushes. When he’s done, the real estate agent says he can get $1,600 a month for the place.

The vague idea of learning from the pros animates “Flip That House” rival “Flip This House,” which runs on A&E. “We’re constantly looking to evolve the shelter brand,” executive producer Michael Morrison informs me. “And one of the trends in real estate, obviously, is house flipping.” “Flip This House” also made its debut in 2005, and rather than an endless series of flippers, revolves around recurring sets of real estate pros. The first season followed Trademark Properties, based near Charleston, S. C. and run by Richard C. Davis. The second season has focused on two different realty teams, one in San Antonio and one in Atlanta. “Flip This House” episodes each last an hour, and what’s added to the mix of tips are basic elements of drama. Most notably, the stars get more full-fledged character treatment.

The San Antonio shows are the serialized adventures of Armando and David Montelongo, who are brothers, and their wives. The series works more because the people happen to be entertaining than because they happen to work in real estate. Armando in particular has just the sort of polarizing charisma that can carry a show. A charming jerk, he lowballs subcontractors, bullies an unpaid intern and taunts his wife with a fistful of roaches grabbed from the kitchen of one nasty property he has acquired, pausing now and again to reflect on the all-American success story of his life so far.

In one episode, for no obvious reason, the brothers and their wives compete, flipping two houses at once to see who can make more money. By the time girls in bikinis arrive to distract one team’s subcontractors with free beer, the Enlightened Improvement ethic has been reduced to occasional text popping up on the screen making never-substantiated assertions about how much “value” a new fence or windows supposedly add to the final sales price.

Davis of Trademark Properties will be back on television soon enough, as it happens, with a new show over on TLC. It’s called “The Real Deal,” and it will, as he describes it, be firmly about the business of real estate. Davis is a creature relatively rare in entertainment but commonplace in real life: The Southern hustler, who doesn’t care what slow-witted stereotypes you read into his accent as long as he gets your money. Davis — still involved in a lawsuit against A&E that he filed after the channel decided to use those other groups in the second season of “Flip This House” — sounds flat-out thrilled about the end of the housing bubble.

Seven years ago, real estate was dominated by “A players” like him. Eventually, “you got to the point where you got your F players in the game—and making money!” Now that that’s over, “it becomes survival of the fittest, and cash becomes king,” he says, and the banks start telling loan-seeking F players to go back to their day jobs. He believes that this will be good not only for Trademark, but for his show. “Flip This House,” he says, ignored the important point that the key to his business isn’t mere remodeling prowess; it’s knowing how to find properties that are a bargain to begin with. The premise of his show is that he is an inspiring, visionary entrepreneur, and a down market will only make that clearer. “That’s when I’ll entertain you the most,” he says. “My most dramatic deals are always in a down market. That’s when it gets really crazy, and really fun.”

HOW TO ENJOY THE MISFORTUNE OF OTHERS

Watching other people make money because they’re smarter than I am doesn’t actually sound like that much fun, but there’s little danger of it on another flip show on TLC that I found perversely gripping, “Property Ladder.” All reality shows rise and fall on casting, and despite the show-opening tease (“Want to make more money in a few months than you did last year?”), here the producers seem bent on finding “real estate rookies” capable of catastrophe. One episode involved lunkhead buddies who got interested in house-flipping through an infomercial. In another, a newly married couple more or less disintegrate over the course of an ill-fated, months-long flip fiasco. Shouting matches feature prominently in nearly every installment.

Like “Flip That House,” the show focuses on a different project every week. The twist is an expert named Kirsten Kemp (billed as a veteran house flipper, she also, somewhat curiously, happens to have a bit-part acting résumé that includes appearances on “JAG” and “Married With Children”), who shows up periodically to give advice and pass judgment. My favorite episode involved a Simi Valley couple who bought a “wrecked” and “abandoned” house for $435,000 and not only planned to flip it for $600,000 after putting in $50,000 worth of renovations over 10 weeks, but pledged to do so in an eco-friendly manner. “We’re really supporting the planet this way,” the wife cheerfully explains, wearing an unconvincing smile that stays frozen on her face through the many disasters that follow.

Kemp openly scoffs at the particulars of their budget and makes a face when told about plans for a solar panel. She tells them they’re better off putting French doors in the master bedroom — that way they will actually add some value. Perhaps what ensues can be characterized as advice. The smiling wife buys eco-trendy bamboo flooring but “violated her green ideals,” as the near-mocking narrator puts it, when tiles made from recycled material prove too expensive. They also blow off some “energy efficient” windows in favor of the French doors that Kemp suggested, and of course they give up on the solar panel scheme as time runs short and their spending balloons. And when Kemp returns toward the end of the show, they inform her (big smile from the wife here) that not only did they opt not to install air conditioning, but they’re going to sell the house themselves so they won’t have to pay a real estate agent’s fee.

Kemp is TV-attractive, articulate and informed, but her most fascinating quality is her two-faced snakiness. She hugs her amateur charges, softens her stern advice and raised eyebrows with compliments and smiles - and then, alone with the camera, coldly enumerates how they blew it. In this case, Simi Valley’s summer highs average 91 degrees, and the for-sale-by-owner approach just proves that in addition to being naive, the eco-flippers are greedy. It will end up costing them money, she announces. And indeed, the show closes with a montage of months passing with no offer; an end note says they finally went with a listing service, and found a buyer, after more than six months. Cackling on my sofa, I’m pleasantly blasé about where I stand in the property zeitgeist. Aside from inspirational business savvy or handy news you can use, here’s another thing that’s entertaining: schadenfreude.

HOW TO ESCAPE REALITY

Property shows seem so profoundly American — it is our manifest destiny to own a 4,000-square-foot place in a good school district within five years of obtaining a college degree — it’s a disappointment to learn that the contemporary property entertainment model is largely an import. “Hot Property,” which first aired on Channel 5 in Britain in 1997, involved a prospective home buyer looking at three houses. The original “Property Ladder” runs on Channel 4.

Fenton Bailey is one of the founders of World of Wonder Productions, which creates programming for both the American and British markets. He’s British, and he lives in Los Angeles. Not everything works in both markets. A World of Wonder show that aired in Britain, “Housebusters,” addressed the problems of various homeowners — can’t make friends in the neighborhood, can’t seem to save any money since moving — by bringing in supernatural types like a “geopathic stress” expert, an electromagnetics guy, a feng shui advocate, a psychic and even a witch. Americans, he says, seem uninterested in home solutions that are less tangible than, say, buying a plasma-screen television, and Bravo passed on a United States pilot.

But the markets also have much in common. The key to property drama, Bailey says, is the key to all drama: transformation. “Very little of what’s on television is about accepting who you are and being happy with it. The old you, the threadbare you — no one wants to know about that.” If anything, he says, the British housing market has been even more overheated than the United States market, and got that way earlier. And finally, he says, “The destiny of television is to put everything on television,” so housing shows had to happen at some point.

“Buildings and interiors have been only something the very rich can enjoy,” Bailey continues. “They formed an elite pastime that’s been absolutely democratized by television.” World of Wonder also happens to be responsible for “Million Dollar Listing,” which ran on Bravo last year and probably made real estate more entertaining than any other single show, not least because it took place in Malibu, a world well beyond the reach of most of the democratized audience.

Over the course of six episodes, “Million Dollar Listing” deconstructed transactions and failed transactions in astonishing detail, giving a more complete version of the harrowing mix of emotions and egos and half-truths of the property drama. Getting suitable access to so many buyers, sellers and agents consumes a great deal of time, and Bailey says the first season of “Million Dollar Listing” took nearly a year to complete; a second season is being cast now. Bailey doesn’t sound worried about what effect the housing slump might have on the show, and it’s easy to see why. “Million Dollar Listing” deals with falling property values by unfolding in the borderline freak show of high-dollar Southern California, with characters who make Armando Montelongo look like a cream puff as they whine and wheedle in the never-ending sunlight of this promised land. By now we are far from “This Old House,” where an earnest discussion of cabinet installation might last three or four minutes and include the phrase “medium density fiberboard with a thermofoil wrap.” The only practical bit that I picked up from “Million Dollar Listing” was the superiority of “whitewater” ocean views to regular old ocean views. You can’t get any further away from everyday reality without actually making things up.

“Many citizens set out to buy a house because of an indistinct yearning, for which an actual house was never the right solution to begin with and may only be a quick (and expensive) fix that briefly anchors and stabilizes them, never touches their deeper need, but puts them in the poorhouse anyway.” So observes Frank Bascombe, narrator of Richard Ford’s novel “The Lay of the Land.” Bascombe drifted into realty in Ford’s earlier novel “Independence Day,” and while he may have done so in order “to keep something finite and acceptably doable on my mind and not disappear,” he is perhaps the wisest observer of property drama we are likely to have.

The agony of property, for example, is rarely more visceral than in the long episode in “Independence Day” in which Bascombe deals with a Vermont couple whose problems will most likely not be solved by a new home in New Jersey. “The realty dreads,” in his view, are never about lost money or the wrong house, but “in the cold, unwelcome, built-in-America realization that we’re just like the other schmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold.” Thus when Bascombe successfully leads clients “toward a feeling of finality and ultimate rightness,” he achieves an outcome that is “not poetry but generalized social good with a profit motive.”

Television, however, differs from literature in the following way. The dramatic shows, for all their tears and shouting matches, in the end, read as harmless, campy cartoons. It’s the happy shows full of smiles and high-fives -- the ones that loudly promise us that you need not worry about unchinkable molds when you can consider how much airier the living room will feel if you simply move that sofa -- where, every so often, thin cracks in the happy facade can reveal things wholly unintended.

One of HGTV’s newer hits, for instance, is the perfectly upbeat “Designed to Sell.” A relatively winning host named Clive introduces us to someone who is having trouble selling a home and brings in experts to improve things as much as possible for $2,000. One step in the process involves the homeowners watching a videotape of a real estate agent walking from room to room, enumerating what they’ve done wrong. The basic lessons recur over and over: reduce clutter, define the space, brighten up this bedroom, do something about the dated window treatments, and please, American house sellers, pack away your myriad collections of weird figurines immediately. What we learn, in other words, is that despite the supposed home-design revolution, you people have not gotten the point.

Clive and a rotating crew of design experts soften the blow by reminding the homeowners, and us, just what the point is: money. “More light, more space . . . more money,” one designer announces. Replace this “losing-money lime” color with a “money-making mushroom” hue, Clive advises, and “Top dollar!” he says, many times. So the homeowners shrug off the remarks about their grandmotherly decor by smiling and saying, for instance, “Ka-ching!’ Or in one episode, huddling with the design team and chanting, “One, two, three — money!”

A remarkably similar show called “Sell This House,” on A&E, stars Tanya Memme, a high-energy party girl type who favors plunging necklines and has no obvious skills, and a bulbous-muscled bear named Roger, identified as a “home design consultant.” In this version, the flummoxed homeowner listens to the snide, videotaped remarks of random prospective home buyers. The most crushing episode involved a faultlessly polite Southern woman whose wallpaper looked to be 31 years old for the simple reason that she had never stopped liking it. Other features of her long time home include shag carpeting, a mind-boggling menagerie of tchotckes and a mailbox done over to resemble a fish. The videotaped critiques are much what you’d expect, with the added insult of some ill-mannered oaf saying that the place “smells like old people.”

“I will admit,” this sweet woman tells Tanya Memme, “I did cry.” She knows full well that her things might seem idiosyncratic — but they are her things. And she cannot for the life of her see what difference that makes. “If they buy the house, there won’t be any of this stuff here,” she says, reasonably. “That was my version.”

Here we learn the ultimate lesson of these shows: You can look at a free-standing building wherein some persons reside, and you can spin house-or-home poetry out of that all day long. But at the end of that day, property is what it is. Your home can look like an expression of you, but your property needs to look like a Pottery Barn catalog. Your wallpaper decisions may have expressed your individuality when you made them, but you are not an individual anymore, and no one wants to think about you. Stop expressing yourself. This place you live needs to look, in fact, like the total obliteration of “you,” because selling property is about someone else’s dreams of self-expression and taste.

Tanya and Roger rip up the carpet and consign to storage every object that means anything to the nice Southern lady. When the show ends, Tanya brightly informs us that prospective buyers are giving it “a second look.” In other words, it hasn’t sold. One imagines the dignified and bewildered owner imprisoned there still, looking around at the catalog pages that have become, not so much her home, but merely the place where she lives.

-Rob Walker writes the "Consumed Column" for The New York Times Magazine. This gleaned from the March 18th'07 edition.

Winter coats are a'sheddin: Which vacuum can help?

By MICHELLE SLATALLA

Published: February 15, 2007, The New York Times

I ARRIVED home, opened the front door and stepped into what looked like the set of a movie being shot on location in the Old West.

Huge tumbleweeds of dog fur rolled across the floor. Every step I took created a dust storm. Searching for the source, I made out the faint outlines of furniture — yes, that was the piano in the distance — and a snoring lump of something brown and molting, sprawled in a warm spot under the window.

My dog Otto napped peacefully, unaware that he was casting off so many fistfuls of fur that he looked like a plush toy whose stuffing was leaking.

How I dread his annual molting season. Some pet owners face an even greater challenge — I realize it can’t be a picnic to remove an abandoned snakeskin from a cage — but my situation has been exacerbated by a vacuum cleaner crisis.

Call me indecisive. For years, I have been trying to buy a new vacuum cleaner. But which one? I flirt with fancy, high-price models with “high efficiency particulate air” exhaust filters, like the Nilfisk Silver Bullet ($1,095 at bestvacuum.com). I keep up with the latest ratings on consumerreports.org, which warns that “high-priced, feature-laden machines don’t necessarily deliver better cleaning.”

A few years back, after I got a $100 repair bill for my ailing vintage Electrolux canister model, I even went so far as to phone Jeff Bagnall, a vacuum specialist who at the time operated a bricks-and-mortar store called Sweeps Vacuum Center in Hudson, N.Y., and had the foresight in 1993 to register the domain names vacuum.com and vacuums.com.

After hearing my tale of woe, Mr. Bagnall asked a few succinct questions (“How big is your home?” “Carpet or wood floors?”) and then recommended an immediate vacuum upgrade. But in the end, I balked, not only at the price but also at the overwhelming range of choices.

The age-old question — upright or canister? — was just the starting point. Shoppers also face lures like vacuum cleaners that wash floors (like the Hoover FloorMate SpinScrub, $169.99 at target.com) and robotic vacuums like the Electrolux Trilobite, $1,689.99 from Ace Digital Club, an amazon.com retailer.

But we all have our breaking points, and I reached mine, it turns out, when I walked into a living room that had been transformed into a bleak landscape that more resembled the O.K. Corral at high noon than a place where you might want, say, to put your feet up.

I had to get rid of those tumbleweeds of fur.

Being a longtime canister person or, as consumerreports.org summarized it, a person who always needed a machine that was “best for cleaning bare floors, and stairs, drapes and upholstery,” I ruled out uprights, which are best for deep-cleaning medium- and deep-pile carpets.

But beyond that, I needed to ask Mr. Bagnall a few more questions. In search of him, I went to both vacuum.com and to vacuums.com, only to find that both had become useless domain name parking sites full of automatically generated ads relevant to the word “vacuum.” There was no sign either of Mr. Bagnall or of his small-town vacuum store.

I panicked. What would I do without expert advice? Luckily, I found Sweeps Vacuum in the phone directory, and called.

“What happened?” I asked Mr. Bagnall.

“I sold both,” he said. “We don’t sell online much anymore. We operate, well, we operate a store.”

“But a few years ago, you were selling 20 vacuums a day online,” I said.

“Go to Google and type ‘vacuum,’ ” he said. “At the top of the page, it says 1 through 10 results of how many?”

“76,200,000,” I said.

“I rest my case,” he said. “What happened with the Internet is it almost turned in on itself, with everybody and his brother having an Internet site. The only way to prosper now is to pay for ads on Google and Yahoo.”

“But you still sell online?” I asked.

“Now I have sweepsvacuum.com, and some people still find me,” he said. “And if I recall, you have pets. Any new pets?”

“Same shedding pet,” I said. “Same house. Same hardwood floors. A few rugs.”

“No allergies?”

“No allergies.”

“Then the Miele S251 Plus vacuum I discussed for you back then is still the one for you,” Mr. Bagnall said. “It’s the least expensive Miele that comes with an electric power nozzle. I seem to recall a conversation about pet hair, so you need a power nozzle.”

“Lots of less expensive brands have power nozzles,” I said. “And what about a vacuum that also steam cleans, or is a robot or cooks dinner and folds laundry, too?”

Mr. Bagnall recommended I stay focused on the task at hand — banishing the Badlands from the living room — and avoid getting distracted by gimmicks.

“Any vacuum will break at one point or another,” he said. “A Miele will break less often. And any decent vacuum that you get from a quality vacuum store will have enough suction and power to pick up the dust bunnies.”

“Tumbleweeds,” I corrected.

“The next question is how much of that is contained in the vacuum as opposed to being thrown back out into the environment you’re trying to clean. With Brand X from Wal-Mart, you will do an excellent job of pulling in, pulverizing and then dispersing back into the air all the dust, where it will linger for 8 to 12 hours. With a quality machine, it will keep the dust inside.”

“The Miele S251 doesn’t have the fancy filtration system of the more expensive models,” I said.

“The least expensive Miele canister has better filtration even without a HEPA,” or a high efficiency particulate air system, which you need if you have allergies, Mr. Bagnall explained. “It has a filtration system to handle anything that’s one micron or bigger. Let’s put things in perspective. I’m bald. When I used to have hair, the average hair was 70 to 80 microns in diameter. At 10 microns, something becomes invisible to the naked eye.”

The Miele S251 cost $529 at sweepsvacuum.com. It cost $499.95 at vacsew.com.

I could save $30 by comparison shopping. But Mr. Bagnall’s advice was worth at least that much. So I bought the vacuum from sweepsvacuum.com. Then I went to look for Otto’s hairbrush.

E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com

Seeing Red for Valentine's

Valentine’s Day is nearly upon us, that sweet Hallmark holiday when you can have anything your heart desires, so long as it’s red. Red roses, red nighties, red shoes and red socks. Red Oreo filling, red bagels, red lox.

As it happens, red is an exquisite ambassador for love, and in more ways than people may realize. Not only is red the color of the blood that flushes the face and swells the pelvis and that one swears one would spill to save the beloved’s prized hide. It is also a fine metaphoric mate for the complexity and contrariness of love. In red we see shades of life, death, fury, shame, courage, anguish, pride and the occasional overuse of exfoliants designed to combat signs of aging. Red is bright and bold and has a big lipsticked mouth, through which it happily speaks out of all sides at once. Yoo-hoo! yodels red, come close, have a look. Stop right there, red amends, one false move and you’re dead.

Such visual semiotics are not limited to the human race. Red is the premier signaling color in the natural world, variously showcasing a fruitful bounty, warning of a fatal poison or boasting of a sturdy constitution and the genes to match. Red, in other words, is the poster child for the poster, for colors that have something important to say. “Our visual system was shaped by colors already in use among many plants and animals, and red in particular stands out against the green backdrop of nature,” said Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and the author of “Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness.” “If you want to make a point, you make it in red.”

What is it, then, to see red, to see any palette at all? Of our famed rods and cones, the two classes of light-sensing cells with which the retina at the back of each eye is supplied, the rods do the basics of vision, of light versus shadow, tracking every passing photon and allowing us to see by even a star’s feeble flicker, though only in gunmetal shades of black, white and grim. It is up to our cone cells to capture color, and they don’t kick in until the dawn’s earylish light or its Edisonian equivalent, which is why we have almost no color vision at night.

Cones manage their magic in computational teams of three types, each tuned to a slightly different slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, the sweeping sum of lightwaves that streams from the sun. As full-spectrum sunlight falls on, say, a ripe apple, the physical and chemical properties of the fruit’s skin allow it to absorb much of the light, save for relatively long, reddish lightwaves, which bounce off the surface and into our greedy eyes. On hitting the retina, those red wavelengths stimulate with greatest fervor the cone cells set to receive them, a sensation that the brain interprets as “healthy, low-hanging snack item ahead.”

In fact, human eyes, like those of other great apes, seem to be all-around fabulous fruit-finding devices, for they are more richly endowed with the two cone types set to red and yellow wavelengths than with those sensitive to short, blue-tinged light. That cone apportionment allows us to discriminate among subtle differences in fruit ruddiness and hence readiness, and may also explain why I have at least 40 lipsticks that I never wear compared with only three blue eye shadows.

Whatever the primary spur to the evolution of our rose-colored retinas, we, like most other animals with multichromatic vision, have learned to treat red with respect. “In the evolution of languages,” Dr. Humphrey writes, “red is without exception the first color word to enter the vocabulary,” and in some languages it’s the only color word apart from black and white. It’s also the first color that most children learn to name, and that most adults will cite when asked to think of a color, any color.

Red savors the spice of victory. Analyzing data from Olympic combat sports like boxing and tae kwon do, in which competitors are randomly assigned to wear red shorts or blue, Dr. Russell Hill and his colleagues at the University of Durham in Britain found that the red-shorted won their matches significantly more often than would be expected by chance alone. What the researchers don’t yet know is whether the reds somehow get an subconscious boost from their garb, or their blue opponents are felled by the view. After all, said Dr. Geoffrey Hill, a biology professor at Auburn University in Alabama and no relation to Russell Hill, “I’ve seen some of my biggest, toughest students, these tough, athletic guys, faint right to the floor at the sight of one drop of bird’s blood.”

Red refuses to be penned down or pigeonholed. It has long been the color of revolution, of overthrowing the established order. “Left-wing parties in Europe have all been red,” Dr. Humphrey said, “while the conservatives, in Britain and elsewhere, go for blue.” Yet in the United States, the color scheme lately has been flipped, and the red states are said to be the guardians of traditional values, of mom and pop, of guns and red meat.

Context, too, changes red’s meaning. A female bird may be attracted to the bright scarlet sheen of a male’s feathers or of a baby bird’s begging mouth, but will assiduously avoid eating red ladybugs that she knows are packed with poisons.

Given red’s pushy reputation, design experts long thought people felt uncomfortable and worked poorly when confined to red rooms. But when Dr. Nancy Kwallek, a professor of interior design at the University of Texas at Austin, recently compared the performance of clerical workers randomly assigned for a week to rooms with red, blue-green or white color schemes, she found that red’s story, like the devil, is in the details. Workers who were identified as poor screeners, who have trouble blocking out noise and other distractions during the workday, did indeed prove less productive and more error prone in the red rooms than did their similarly thin-skinned colleagues in the turquoise rooms. For those employees who were rated as good screeners, however, able to focus on their job regardless of any ruckus around them, the results were flipped. Screeners were more productive in the red room than the blue. “The color red stimulated them,” she said, “and they thrived under its effects.”

And the subjects assigned to the plain-vanilla settings, of a style familiar to the vast majority of the corporate labor force? Deprived of any color, any splash of Matisse, they were disgruntled and brokenhearted and did the poorest of all.

- found in The New York Times, February 6 2007, and authored by Natalie Angier