Little Pink Houses

I’m paying bills today: an unpleasant activity in which I engage once or twice per week. Among them is an insurance premium for a small rental property that I own by accident. I know that sounds odd, but the abbreviated story is that the accident involved a business deal during the real estate market meltdown of a decade ago. The property pays for itself (just barely), so I haven’t been in a rush to offload it even though (and to some extent because) it has not recovered its value of a decade ago. Besides, I might move there myself one day as an economy measure. I’m calling the house small, and it certainly is by today’s standards, yet it’s a kind of house built in large numbers after World War 2 when people were glad to get them. It’s smaller than the first house my parents built for themselves in 1948, but in many ways it reminds me of it. (Their house wasn’t actually pink – nor is mine – but that wasn’t an unusual color in the 50s; Mamie Eisenhower’s fondness for pink helped keep it fashionable even in interiors; my parents’ next house built in 1959 had a pink tiled bathroom.)

My parents building their first house
in 1948, age 22 and 20. Folks started
earlier then

The size of new houses in the US has grown decade by decade. Historical average square footage of new single family houses (i.e. not including apartments and condos) is below:

1950: 983

1960: 1,289

1970: 1,500

1980: 1,740

1990: 2,080

2000: 2,266

2010: 2,392

2018: 2,641

For those who don’t do feet, the conversion factor for square feet to square meters is 0.09290304. (My rental house, btw, is below average for 1950.)

Meantime, as area has grown, families have shrunk decade by decade, so living space per person has risen rapidly. Between 1970 and 2018 individual space in new homes doubled to its present size of 971 square feet per person: not much less than the entire footage of a new house in 1950.

The rise in size took place not just because builders were meeting the increasingly expansive demands of customers. The largest single reason for the change is restrictive local zoning, which makes the modest tract homes of the 40s and 50s impossible to duplicate on anything like the same scale in today’s most desired metropolitan areas. Accordingly, the 1950s were the last decade when single family homes truly were affordable to average working young people. 

What brings this to mind is not just the aforementioned insurance premium, but the most recent (and characteristically amusing) book by former National Lampoon editor P.J. O’Rourke: None of My Business – P.J. explains money, banking, debt, equity, assets, liabilities, and why he’s not rich and neither are you. The subtitle pretty well explains the gist of the book, but one chapter in particular caught my eye. The chapter is “The Price of Being Middle Class.” He writes of 1952 when his 5-member family’s lifestyle was financed by $10,000 per year with his father as the sole wage earner. The house cost $21,000. This was upper-middle class at the time, but not by a lot. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics overall prices have gone up 9.3 times since then. The “overall” is the joker. Some things are cheaper and some more expensive in constant dollars. TVs are cheaper today – and far better. Food is cheaper today in inflation-adjusted terms assuming you aren’t buying it in trendy restaurants while getting your coffee at Starbucks – as many folks now often do. Other things are vastly more expensive, however, and they tend to be big-ticket things of the sort that keep recently graduated Millennials from getting a toe-hold on financial independence: among them are education (for which they are still paying after graduation), cars, and housing. O’Rourke’s 1952 house in a comparable neighborhood in 2018 would not be $195,300 (9.3 times 21,000), but at least half a million – maybe hundreds of thousands more than that, depending on the particular metro area. The higher costs don’t stop with the initial purchase: the ongoing cost of owning a comparable house (notably property taxes, which support primary and secondary education) has soared in real terms. O’Rourke concludes that “to live an ordinary middle-class life, you have to be rich.”

A missing step for younger people trying to build assets in the way my parents’ GI Generation (and to a lesser extent Boomers) did is the availability of modest new homes at modest prices: homes of the sort built in abundance for 15 years after the war. [Aside: the current common preference of zoning officials for condos over small houses – if they decide they must allow for one or the other – is in part fiscally driven; there are usually very few 3 or 4 bedroom units in the mix, and 2-bedroom condos have been found to house few schoolchildren, so condos, unlike small houses, provide a net tax benefit to a town.] If new small homes were still available in large numbers, though, would Millennials buy them? Economists used to say “supply creates its own demand.” While it’s fashionable these days to dispute this, it really is true. So yes, at some price the homes would sell, though to very different customers from the 1950s. The customers would include many young singles (many of whom are likely to be single for life) who presently are not always so much “choosing” to live in apartments as recognizing they can’t afford anything else. Perhaps the demand would not be enough for the homes to sell at profitable prices, however, even if zoning laws were as liberal (and building lots consequently as cheap) as in 1950, in which case new construction of them would stall. No generation is uniform, of course, but the percentage of this one preferring the suburbs may be much smaller from earlier generations. We’ll never know, since no such broad zoning reform is on the horizon.

The generation in their 20s after WW2 by and large had very different hopes and expectations than people commonly do today. After global Depression and devastating world war they wanted no more excitement. They wanted normality: a secure job, a cozy marriage, an affordable ranch or Cape Cod in the suburbs, and a Buick in the driveway. They called it (in this country anyway) the American Dream. The song in the video clip below from Little Shop of Horrors was intended as parody, but it really does express aspirations commonplace six or seven decades ago. If there is any doubt, try the Harry James/Kitty Kallen number I’ll Buy That Dream from 1945 (not intended as parody at all) with the lyrics “We'll settle down in Dallas/In a little plastic palace.” Today we tend to set our dreams far higher and our expectations far lower: a recipe for dissatisfaction if there ever was one.

I don’t have any grand conclusion from all this other than that it is a very different world from the one in which I grew up. But then it always is for anyone who lives long enough. If I do end up moving to the little house for which I just paid insurance, however, it might not be so different after all.

Ellen Greene – Somewhere That’s Green

Never Too Late

Too Late Blues (1961) was John Cassavetes’ directorial debut. He regarded it as a failure, which might be why it was so hard to find prior to its DVD release in 2012. Critics didn’t agree with him then, and most still don’t, but I see his point. The film looks very much like a determined effort to reproduce the dissolute grittiness of ‘40s noir that emerges so naturally in films such as Singapore, Gilda, and The Killers but updated to 1961. The “effort” shows far too much in Too Late Blues, which is to say the movie’s style comes off as affected, and never more so than during the attempts to be socially edgy: attempts that miss  in any number of ways even by 1961 standards. Regardless, the movie is not without merit. The themes are interesting and there are some good acting turns. The movie stars Bobby Darin and Stella Stevens.

Stella Stevens is a better actress than most of her vehicles give her any chance to show. Sometimes she is the only redeeming element in a movie, as in The Silencers, a spy “comedy” from 1966 in which she provides the only genuine humor. My favorite movie of hers is The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), but she is probably best known from The Poseidon Adventure (1972). In Too Late Blues (1961) she has an early (and, as it would turn out, rare) chance to show some mettle. She also looks stunning in the picture. I’ve met Stella Stevens a few times at conventions in years past. She is charming and unpretentious. We talked about her fun novel Razzle Dazzle with its very Elvis-like protagonist (Stella worked with Elvis in the movie Girls! Girls! Girls!), but we also touched on this film.

I never met the versatile performer Bobby Darin (1936-1973), who recorded a number of hit pop singles starting in the late 1950s, but I nonetheless have a Bobby Darin story. My father was a builder, and in in 1962 he was building houses in Brookside NJ. Mostly they were ranch houses of somewhat less than 2000 square feet (185 square meters) on one acre lots; they sold in the $30,000 to $35,000 range, which was on the higher end of moderate at the time – nice but not extravagant. (The same houses today resell mostly between $400,000 and $500,000 unless upgraded significantly.) One evening my dad came home and said “This guy came on the tract this morning saying he was looking for a new house for his mother. He had a real chip on his shoulder. He said, ‘I’m Bobby Darin.’ I held out my hand and told him, ‘I’m Dick Bellush.’ He said again, ‘I’m Bobby Darin, the singer.’ I shrugged and told him ‘I’m Dick Bellush, the builder.’ He got all huffy and insulted.” My dad, of course, had no clue who Bobby Darin was. My sister, however, who was 12 at the time, was losing it at this point. My dad shrugged again. Bobby Darin never did buy one his houses.

The plot (minor *spoilers*): A jazz musician who calls himself Ghost (Bobby Darin) takes his music seriously. He won’t compromise his artistic integrity for commercial success even if it means he and his band play charities, festivals, parks, tiny clubs, and old age homes for scale or for free. When offered a chance to record, he insists on playing only what he wants. Ghost meets Jess “Princess” Polanski (Stella Stevens) at a party where hears her sing; she is more than the floozy she chooses to be, but doesn’t have the self-confidence to act like anything else. She and Ghost have the same agent: a weasel of a man named Benny who deeply resents Ghost for being a better musician and for effortlessly winning the interest of Jess. He arranges for Ghost to be humiliated in front of her, after which Ghost acts like such a jackass that he ruins things with Jess. Ghost breaks up the band and pursues the dollar by acting as a gigolo to a wealthy woman who likes and supports jazz musicians, though he insists he still doesn’t compromise his music. There are other losses of integrity one can have than artistic ones, however, and perhaps those are the more important ones. When Ghost begins to suspect this, it might or might not be too late for him and for Jess, who has abandoned singing in favor of picking up middle age men in bars for a living.

Despite its flaws the movie is worth a look, not least for its glimpse into that strange period of time when the ‘50s were over but the ‘60s, as we usually think of them, had not yet arrived. As for its central question of whether it is ever too late to recover from our past decisions, sometimes it really is. Sometimes not. Knowing the difference can be tricky. So is knowing whether or not to try.

Roller Derby Recap: JDB vs. Suburbia

In an exciting match last night the Jerzey Derby Brigade (JDB) on its home track in Morristown took on Suburbia Roller Derby visiting from Westchester. Last November JDB scored a convincing win (254-161) against Suburbia, but a lot can change in 10 months and it did.

JDB got off to a good start with #3684 Californikate putting 14 points on the board. Firm blocking maintained JDB’s lead for the first several minutes, but a 15 point power jam by Suburbia’s #41 Harm’n’Hammer flipped the lead to Suburbia. #64 Madeline Alfight flipped it back to JDB with a 13 point jam. #1979 Smashing Pumpkin soon took it back for Suburbia and #1952 Queen Elizadeath II then expanded the lead. #21 Piña Collider showed a special knack for exploiting holes in JDB defenses. Suburbia blocking was also solid with #1234, #555, and #92 working well together in formation. Despite strong JDB efforts, including a nice apex jump by Californikate, the first half ended 82-112 in favor of Suburbia.

In the second half the score tightened several times only to see Suburbia widen it again. The trend of the second half suddenly shifted when a power jam by Californikate closed the gap to 4 points. With 9 minutes remaining, a successful jam by Madeline Alfight took JDB into the lead 177-170.  Queen Elizadeath II soon tied up the score and then flipped the lead to Suburbia once again. The score stood at 180-192 with 4 minutes remaining. Piña Collider put Suburbia over the 200 mark and Suburbia’s Smashing Pumpkin scored the last points of the game in the final jam.

Final Score: 184-207 in favor of Suburbia

MVPs:

Suburbia Roller Derby:

#1952 Queen Elizadeath II (jammer)

#275 Ramma Jamma (blocker)

JDB

#3684 Californikate (jammer)

#221 Det. Sure-Block Holmes (blocker)

Mars Rocks

Notes on a 2018 novel set on Mars and a 1956 movie so far removed from current realities that it might as well be:

One Way by S.J. Morden

Since the early days of science fiction there have been hard scifi aficionados, who prefer the science and technology in the stories to be correct or at least credible, and soft scifi fans who don’t really care very much so long as the story has other merits. There are writers for each. A few scifi stories clank with severe techno-accuracy while others are pure fantasy. Most fall somewhere in the middle with at least one crucial improbability driving the plot, but they still tend to lean one way or the other. The planet Mars has been the setting for plenty of both types, including the soft scifi The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and the hard scifi trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson starting with Red Mars. The latter is almost a terraforming textbook. Hard scifi has gotten a boost recently from the success of Andy Weir’s The Martian, which was made into a movie starring Matt Damon. S.J. Morden, a planetary geologist by training, is very much in the hard camp with his novel One Way, even though it is as much murder mystery as scifi.

Frank Kittridge is a murderer. He isn’t the ordinary sort of murderer if there is such a thing: he killed his son’s drug dealer. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to life without parole. The parent company of the private business that contracts to run the prison where he is incarcerated, however, makes him an offer: go to Mars and build a permanent laboratory base and living quarters for future NASA scientists. There is no coming back. He will serve out his sentence on Mars maintaining the facility even after it is built. At least technically it won’t be prison, but, of course, where can he go? Seven other life prisoners get the same offer. The six men and two women – most guilty of worse crimes than Frank’s – will work under a non-convict company supervisor who will return to earth after the construction. Frank understands that the eight prisoners are chosen for being cheap and expendable, but he accepts the offer.

After rigorous but rushed training in the desert they are off to Mars. The details of the Mars facility design and how it would be constructed are accurate and based on actual proposals. The plot thickens during the construction on Mars when prisoners start to die in accidents that to Frank don’t seem to be accidents.

The book’s biggest weakness is that the only sympathetic character is Frank, which is why he is the only one I’ve bothered to name in this brief review. Of course, that makes all the others, including the officious company supervisor, credible suspects if in fact the accidents are murders. This helps with the mystery though not with the human aspects of the story. Still, it is creditable hard scifi, and in other respects the book works at least well enough for an overall Thumbs Up.

**** ****

Rock Rock Rock! (1956)

Produced on the extreme cheap by early rock promoter Alan Freed, Rock Rock Rock! (1956) is a bad movie (it really is) that I like to revisit once a decade or so, partly as nostalgia, partly because it is unintentional camp, and partly because some of the music isn’t bad at all.

The plot barely rises to the level of simplistic. A young Tuesday Weld as Dori needs money for a strapless gown for the prom. Despite a singing voice dubbed by Connie Francis, she doesn’t win (or enter) a contest for the money even though a friend urges her to enter one. (I suspect the initial draft of the script had her do just that, but the contest was written out in a revision.) Instead (do I really need to warn of *spoilers* in a movie such as this?) she bamboozles daddy for the cash. Meantime she breaks up with her boyfriend but then makes up with him at the prom. During the quick makeup kiss, her boyfriend Tommy looks very uncomfortable and standoffish, as well he should: though both are supposed to be in high school, he (Teddy Randazzo) is 21 while Tuesday Weld is 13 (maybe 12 at the time of filming).

None of that matters. The plot is a bare excuse for Alan Freed to host musical acts on a TV show and (as happens only in the movies) at Dori’s prom. The acts include Chuck Berry, LaVerne Baker, Jimmy Cavallo House Rockers, Cirino and the Bowties, the Coney Island Kids, the Flamingos, and Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers. This film requires a high tolerance for low budgets, bad scripting, and bad acting, but with that tolerance it’s an amusing peek at a moment in time when rock’n’roll was getting its footing in popular culture.

Trailer: Rock Rock Rock!

A Late Summer Night’s Screen

When I was still a grade-schooler, Max Reinhardt’s lavish 1935 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream played on TV frequently. (Television was very different then; due to a shortage of content, old movies got a lot of air time on the independent TV channels.) I watched it multiple times. I had only the slightest clue what was going on. I grasped that Puck was messing with the dreamers by using love potion eye drops and magic, but the details escaped me. It didn’t matter. The whole thing was such a weird spectacle with prancing bats, goblin musicians, flying fairies, and a man with the head of an ass that I watched it anyway. In the years that followed, however, I didn’t bother to revisit it precisely because I had seen it before. But of course in a significant sense I hadn’t – not with an adult’s eyes and ears and with a familiarity with Shakespeare’s written words. With some trepidation last week, I decided to spin up a DVD and take another look.

It is more bizarre than I remembered, not least because of the casting choices from the stable of Warner Brothers, which was a studio best known at the time for gangster movies and comic musicals. Jimmy Cagney as Bottom, Hugh Herbert as Snout, and Joe E. Brown as Flute? Cagney looks completely out of place, though he appropriately plays his character as a ham. Surprisingly, Dick Powell isn’t bad as Lysander even though (or perhaps because) he plays the part the same way he does any other role in a romantic comedy. A very young Olivia de Havilland does well enough as Hermia. 14-year-old Mickey Rooney’s enthusiastically cackling Puck is annoying, but that also works for the character. Several of the other actors put the lignin in wooden, but they are overwhelmed by the ballet-style (I hesitate actually to call it ballet) dances of fairies and woodland creatures to a score by Mendelssohn. The movie starts, by the way, with a 6+ minute overture for no explicable reason. The special effects are impressive and laughably hokey in equal measure.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is complex and freaky enough as written. As the reader likely knows, several subplots intertwine. There are the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, the forbidden love of Hermia and Lysander, the unrequited love of Helena for Demetrius, the three common laborers who struggle to perform a play about Pyramus and Thisbe, the dispute between fairy royalty Oberon and Titania over her abduction of a comely young boy, and the fairy Puck who causes mischief. It’s no wonder I lost track of the details as a boy.

We are unlikely to see anything like this version attempted again, and perhaps that’s a good thing, but if you can handle Shakespeare on screen at all (I do know people who can’t) this is in my top five of ones you should see. That does not mean it is one of the five best. It isn’t. It only means it is one you should see. I’m glad I finally did…again.

Dinner and a Show

As a single man, I find cooking for myself to be impractical as an everyday practice. I’m quite capable of it: I host Thanksgiving at my house for at least a dozen (often more) guests every year as well other seasonal get-togethers and summer BBQs. But that is the point: what is practical for a group is not necessarily so for an individual. Oh, I’ll make a sandwich or warm up something ready-made, but seldom anything more ambitious than that when I’m home alone. So, most days I’ll eat out for one meal; it can be any one of the usual three, but most commonly lunch. It doesn’t cost any more than eating at home – there is always substantial unintended waste when grocery shopping only for oneself – and the meals are better. Naturally, these aren’t expensive restaurants, but modestly priced diners and coffee shops. Fortunately, NJ has more independently owned non-chain diners than any other state, so they aren’t hard to find.

I usually sit at the counter in the places that have counters. There is a curious thing about being a “counter guy.” Counter guys are apparently invisible to anyone but the waiters and waitresses. People in booths within easy earshot of the counter stools will have the most remarkable personal conversations. Mind you, I don’t go to these places to eavesdrop. I go there for a burger, omelet, or Reuben or something, but when someone four feet away is complaining about a philandering spouse at a volume louder than the background music, short of slapping hands on one’s own ears and humming, it is hard to shut out the words no matter how much one would like to do so. Invisibility is not deafness.

I’m often the only person at the counter. Nowadays, most single patrons opt for booths, but counters were much more popular when I was younger as one veteran waitress confirmed to me. (Some counter waitresses – to whom I’m usually “hon” or “sweetie” even if they know my name – are chatty when business is slow; the waiters just ask if I want a refill of coffee.) “Twenty years ago,” she told me, “there was still a counter culture.” (I’m not sure if she intended her own pun.) “The counter guys were very regular,” she said. “They came in at the same time every day and had the exact same order.” She pointed at my Western omelet and said, “If it was a Western, it was always a Western. I would tell the cook to put it on as soon as he walked in the door.” I had the feeling I was a disappointment for never ordering the same thing twice in a row.

Except to the diner employees, however, my invisibility seems to engage as soon as my posterior hits the stool. From that moment, none of the other customers seem to care (or notice) if their voices project counter-ward. (I don’t know any of them, of course, which no doubt is a big factor in their disregard.) There is a noticeable gender difference in conversation among customers as well as among servers. The stereotype that men don’t talk about personal or emotional matters is untrue. They do. Often excessively. I know this for a fact. For whatever reason though, they don’t seem to do it much in diner booths, at least not audibly. Mostly I hear them talk about road trips and expenses and work deadlines and home maintenance and so on. Sometimes there is a remark that some business associate is a jackass, but without illuminating details. The less discreet conversations are almost always among women. I’ve heard an older woman give a younger one advice on how to deal with a fiancé whose ex is manipulating him with the kids. I’ve heard about difficult relatives at funerals, about break-ups, about evil bosses, about bad dates, about faithless friends, and about aggravating mothers. I heard two decide to walk out without paying because they didn’t like the Caesar salad. (I’ve had that diner’s Caesar salad, which tasted to me like every other Caesar salad I’ve ever had.) Once again, I don’t go there with the intent of listening to conversation. It’s like the music out of the diners’ speakers: it’s just in the air and hard not to hear without making a spectacle of oneself – and that would create another topic of ambient conversation.

According to biolinguist and author John Locke in Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, humans are hardwired to listen to surrounding conversations, and he says that the habit makes us better people. He means passive hearing, which is a kind of situational awareness. He doesn’t advocate active eavesdropping such as phone tapping, hacking, peeking through keyholes, or Jimmy Stewart’s version of voyeurism in Rear Window, though he does say the impulse to do so is a product of evolution “because there is no group of people in the world, no society that doesn’t do this, and that hasn’t been doing this for recorded history.” Children learn much about how to behave not just by direct experience but by overhearing other children and adults around them. Adults continue to adapt to social expectations in different environments the same way. So the invisible counter guy can’t really help overhearing all that, but at least (if Locke is right) it will make him a better person, so that is something.

Linda Ronstadt - Girls Talk