Hi Ish....you may want to read this....although it sounds like you know how to fold clothes.....
canoe.ca
Martha Superior
We Worship Martha Stewart, Out Lady Of Lifestyle. But Why?
By HEATHER MALLICK
Toronto Sun
All this talk of "the dark side of Martha Stewart Living" is nonsense. The lifestyle dominatrix with the ruddy good looks and the thick thatch of corn-fed blonde hair who bakes Italian fruit breads in paper bags and grows sweet pea racks the size of the Vietnam War Memorial is my woman of the moment. I think. Easy to mock, Martha rises above her sniping critics - who are not houseproud - like the chatelaine of the Eastern Seaboard. Her massive media empire - publishing, television, interactive-media and merchandising - is irrelevant. All I know is that when I subscribed to her magazine recently, I received a thank you note. She is the woman who taught me to stagger my pumpkins at Hallowe'en. She is the reason I purchased what I call my "sock lamp" - a Laura Ashley wooden lampstand with a gathered sapphire-and-cowslip chintz shade placed carefully above my sock drawer to aid in distinguishing between what's black and what's navy.
Crazy, right? No, crazy would have been making the lamp myself which is what Martha would have done, and beautifully too, but I'm only just starting my Martha Stewart living.
Martha Stewart, an American, is 53 and looks 40. She's the Julia Child of cocooning. She was married for 29 years to a guy called Andy who is now the Stewart in the publishing house Stewart, Tabori & Chang. They produce coffee table books on bird watercolors and French gardens, and even though Andy and Martha have split up, because apparently Andy didn't like the lifestyle, they live pretty beautifully at Stewart, Tabori & Chang too.
"Living beautifully" is where it all began, with a woman called Alexandra Stoddard. Attacking Stoddard is like shooting ducks in a rain barrel because you know she's crazy, I know she's crazy but I can't help feeling that anything anyone does to encourage us to be cleaner, tidier and live in more attractive houses is a step in the right direction.
Stoddard's most famous book was How to Live a Beautiful Life, published in 1986. "Use a silver George III meat skewer as a letter opener," she urged. "Spray your hangers with cologne." "Serve hot perfumed freshen-up towels after you've served artichokes." "Send a love letter to your spouse, even if he lives with you."
Stoddard went too far when she wanted us to live beautifully at the office too. "Bring a hooked rug to place in front of your desk," she suggested. In my workspace? If she had written "Clean the dried-on vomit out of the pen drawer before you move in," it would have been more applicable. Plus, there are people here who don't even have a desk. And we have mice.
See, that was the problem with Stoddard. She may have been right, we should live more graciously, but she was so impractical. She was all talk and no action.
Unlike Martha.
Camille Paglia, the lesbian cultural theorist, says there's a homoerotic side to the Martha phenomenon. She may have a point. Martha is a woman who gets things done, which is what all power icons of the gay movement have in common. She's as demanding of her staff as is Barbra Streisand and she wields a paintbrush on her gilded cement planters with the same artistry Joan Crawford visited on her eyebrows.
Martha is a strong woman to whom self-doubt is a stranger, and that's the magnet that brings out the woman-haters. She's blonde, she's WASP, she's a divorced mother of one, she's a former successful stockbroker, she's rich and smart, she's sure of herself and she has a world of arcane knowledge to impart to women who have been raised to buy, not make, and whose homes have been uglified by industrialism.
Martha has a show on The Women's Network (where her trademark line is "It's a good thing"), a magazine called Martha Stewart Living, a hugely profitable backlist of books on entertaining, Christmas decorating, home renovation and gardening plus a line of paints. If there is anything that is truly distinctive about her, it's that she is so upmarket at a time when Canada and the United States are rapidly headed downmarket into the trailer park/Geraldo abyss.
The item that most exemplifies what Martha wants to destroy is the white plastic flower pot. Martha's pot would be terracotta, or tole (painted tinware), or wire lined with Spanish moss, or for indoors, a pressed glass compote. New York magazine quoted Martha's daughter, Alexis, as asking her parents as a little girl, "Who decided that polyester was ugly?" Why, Martha did.
Martha is about to become the object of a media blitz, since Canadian journalists, always the last to know what's going on, have suddenly woken up to her. They will probably peg her as an anti-feminist, back to the '50s nightmare, which she most definitely is not.
Please understand that "homekeepers," as Martha calls them, are not created equal. Some women are good at it - talented chefs, decorators, seamstresses and builders. Others are slobs. Martha isn't calling out to women but to all esthetically minded people. She is at the centre of three important cultural trends.
The first is a tendency in a world increasingly devoid of meaning to "venerate the object." Example: In hard times, we can't afford to buy lots of big, expensive stuff. Instead, we buy one beautifully designed expensive thing like President's Choice Memories of Key Largo sauce or a bread machine or a sock lamp. Example: I was recently sent a coffee table book called The Bed, which isolated and venerated the bed as a concept. But it went too far. It had pictures of stacks of white linen sheets; we were supposed to venerate the beauty and simplicity of the fabric. It became tiresome. Example: Newspapers used to squash stuff into their pages. Now they repeat the mantra, "white space," giving the reader fewer items and more time to contemplate them.
The second trend that has given Martha her power is the collapse of employment caused by globalization of manufacturing, automation and brutal corporate downsizing. If we have an employer, we don't trust him. We hold onto jobs by our bleeding fingertips and no longer think in terms of "career." What gives us pleasure now is the home. In a world like this, Martha is a beacon. She never mentions work. All her work is in her house called Turkey Hill. She even films there, and raises chickens (she is obsessed with hen culture), and grows her own circular herb garden. This is cocooning at its finest, when home is the sun around which we revolve. The centre can hold after all.
The third trend is a particularly American one - the Puritan impulse to self-improvement. Just as Jimmy, Rosalynn and Amy Carter used to spend their evenings in the White House taking speed-reading lessons, Martha improves her soil, she schedules her life (on the hilarious "Martha's Calendar" page in the magazine), she wraps scissor handles in herringbone linen-and-cotton twine to make them more graspable, she staples chicken wire to her house and weaves it with cedar branches to simulate an evergreen vine. She improves everything she owns.
Martha wears Armani but she looks pure Gap to me, accomplishing all her indoor work in pale steri-linen, her outdoor work in sturdy khaki gear.
On the other hand, when I survey the books and magazines (I rarely have the time to watch the show, even with VCR time-shifting), it's astonishing - and shaming - how few of Martha Stewart's "good things" I have actually done. Mostly I just watched her do them and felt some atavistic thrill.
I did not create an outdoor canopy, I purchased a patio umbrella. I did not make my own gift wrap with gold enamel paint, I bought it in bulk. For three years now I have intended to make spatterware cookies; they have not materialized.
Martha is something of a domestic dream, or even a drug. You don't so much watch her as mainline her. Her fans are mainly boomers, in other words, millions of people raised in the '50s, '60s and '70s to scorn domesticity as somehow beneath them. Martha is telling them that the home - whether you live in a traditional family or are single or gay - can be a handcrafted monument to oneself.
In The Lonely Guy, the type of mild movie comedy at which Americans excel, Steve Martin learned that it was possible to date/go out with your apartment. You stayed home with it, you bought it flowers, you purchased it small pointless gifts.
Martha Stewart Living is somewhat like this: The home as an object of desire. But not yuppie desire. No, it's the result of honest toil and brings a happiness fairly won.
It's a good thing. |
