Category: Beauty

Missing The Cold

Beauty, Weather

From Reader Joe Donuts (probably a pseudonym):

“Your wallpaper got me pondering as do many of your posts about what used to be Great Britain.  I spent most of my 20 plus years in Uncle Sam’s Traveling Air Circus stationed in East Anglia. Miss it terribly and shudder at what it, and the rest of Europe, has become.

“Fall left here last week.  The snow has been on the ground since Monday and is here to stay until late April. I’ve woken to single digit temps the last day or two; they’ll have a negative sign soon enough. Call me odd, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Nor would I.  Possibly the strangest thing is that as much as I wouldn’t live pretty much anywhere in the North that I used to (Chicago, New Jersey etc.), I do miss the seasons thereof.

I loved the spring:  the way that one day it’s brown and ugly after the snow has melted, and a week later the trees are in full bloom and the grass has somehow recovered after being buried in snow for a few months and is now green again;  the joy of a warm, occasionally-hot summer when it feels good to be outside and life just seems more worth living after the February-April dreariness;  of the fall, where the trees change from uniform green into a kaleidoscope of many colors and the sweaty heat of summer is replaced with cooler temperatures;  and finally, that first snowfall, the beauty of the white covering over everything and the incredible hush that falls after the snow has fallen…

I miss it all, terribly.

And yes, I know that raking the leaves is a pain in the ass, that shoveling snow every morning at 6am in sub-freezing temperatures can become tiresome, and that after the snow has more or less melted away in the late winter/early spring that everything looks dirty and ugly.

As the man said:   “Show me paradise and I’ll buy us the tickets.”

Wallpaper

Beauty, Weather

This doesn’t count as a post, but I thought I’d share my Fall wallpaper with y’all.  I think it’s somewhere in England, but it could equally be somewhere in New England.  Whatever.  Right-click to embiggen and/or save for yourself.

“Why Fall wallpaper, Kim?”

We had our first cold-ish snap of the season last Wednesday… 49°F when New Wife went off to work.  Sure as hell beat the 85°F at the same time during the week before.

Not Just Chrysler, Not Just Manhattan

Architecture

I wailed about the difficulties facing the people trying to fix up / sell New York City’s Chrysler Building, and saw the possibility of the disappearance of that wonderful structure.

Well, it’s not just Manhattan.  Heeeere’s London:

A number of major London office blocks costing more than £300million each have recently been put up for sale at the same time.

The four buildings have hit the market at a time where deals have been extremely rare due to rising interest rates and continuous uncertainty about working from home.

All the same issues facing the Chrysler.

Unlike the Chrysler, however, the four London skyscrapers are anything but wonderful:

The first three are of the Le Corbusier-Gropius-Modernist ilk — and frankly would be no great loss to any skyline, let alone London’s — while the last, the aptly-nicknamed Can of Ham, is an architectural carbuncle of the direst kind, but at least it has something of a sense of fun about it.

And while I and many others would dearly miss the Chrysler Building, these British edifices would not only not be missed, but applauded in their implosion.

So mote it be.

Failed Landmark

Architecture, Corporate Fuckery

This just sucks:

The future of the iconic Chrysler Building in New York City is uncertain as its owners face eviction – leaving the crown jewel of Gotham’s high-rise at risk of falling into disrepair.

The owner of the land on which the skyscraper stands said it has terminated the building buyer’s ground lease and taken control of the Art Deco gem in Midtown Manhattan.

To call the Chrysler a “gem” is to do the building a great injustice.  Alone among all the skyscrapers in New York, it’s a building worth saving because its beauty makes it truly a work of art rather than just another grubby office building.

The problem with a building — any building, no matter how well constructed or of what durable materials it was built — is that it needs constant care and refurbishment, which clearly has been neglected by this lovely structure’s various owners over the decades. And to be frank, all of them need to be whipped at the post.

A cursory glance at what the landowners have been demanding for rent over the years, however, may be a clue as to why the neglect has occurred.

But like all downtown buildings, the Chrysler was nuked by Covid and its aftermath of “work-from-home” and empty offices thereby.  So its chances of survival at this point seem remote, unless some super-billionaire with imagination can think of a way out.  (One thinks of the much-maligned Donald Trump, who could probably pull off the miracle;  but he has other things to occupy him at the moment.)

So the Chrysler will probably be taken down like some exhausted Las Vegas casino, except that unlike the typical Vegas eyesore, a piece of great architectural beauty will disappear, and Manhattan will lose, in my opinion, far more of its soul than it lost when the Twin Towers fell.

Might as well look at it while we still can: