Fall gourdian angels
Our recent heat wave leaves us craving fall’s chilly nights, warmed by the smell of burning wood, and all the pumpkins and gourds that the season’s home decorating mags have on offer.
If there is a common theme to the autumn mags, it might be the color orange. But Martha Stewart Living tweaks the common in what can only be described as a precious take on pumpkins on the cover. It’s just too easy to make fun of the domestic diva, but her tip to keep cocktail napkins creasefree by storing them around bathroom tissue tubes takes the cake. We’ve got to give Martha credit for a sixpage spread on the renewal of Yonkers’ Unterberg Garden. The breathtakingly restored ruin on the Hudson River is worth a look — or a trip.
Southern Living evokes the season with an apple cake cover, but inside the first recipe gives away its downhome accent with buttermilk and baconfried chicken. The magazine is obsessed with white houses with big porches, stirring a lazy farmhouse feel that looks good any season. We were pleased to realize that we, too, had avoided “clichéd country decorating tropes — a farmhouse sink, rooster knicknacks” — as did their profiled house of the month. The upside down back end “fall style” guide featuring Reese Witherspoon’s new fashion line fell flat.
Country Living always runs the risk of being too quaint for words. This month’s tales of mansard roofs that it thinks are “eerie” and a patchwork quiltcovered easy chair, are just two examples. But we have to admit that its special on log cabins made us say “cool.” A mixture of unfinished wood walls actually goes well with Persian rugs and velvet sofas. For those of us who don’t have a second home that’s a log cabin, Country Living even offers a US map of cabin lodges from the Alaskan wilderness to a cabin motor court in Ashville, NC.
HGTV Magazine gets in the fall improvement act with, you guessed it, a lot of orange. But the overall look is a bit cheesy — especially the use of colored Sharpie pens to “dye” pillow covers or decorate ceramic knobs. That’s not nearly as bad as a hot pink floral decal for a frontloading washing machine. We liked a spread on four houses in Newton, Mass., whose curb appeal was more inspiring.
This week’s New Yorker may be called the style issue, but its view remains decidedly high brow. A piece on the Mediterranean fashion shows by Dolce & Gabanna quotes one slave to fashion saying once you have everything, “then you start getting in the mood to buy exclusive clothes.” Not surprisingly, the mag chooses Julianne Moore as the brainy actress to profile in this issue. And, as a severe juxtaposition to the frivolous, the magazine does what it does best. It goes behind the news to detail a severe miscarriage of justice by the feds on a PakistaniAmerican family — a father and two sons — whom it busted in 2011 for financing the Taliban in the wake of hysteria that began a decade earlier, after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. With scant evidence against them, the two sons were released after spending months in solitary confinement to return to lives ruined financially and emotionally, and shunned by neighbors, friends and employers. One of the sons is suing the US for malicious prosecution. The father’s conviction, based on an informant’s entrapment and a few hyperbolic Islamic rants, is on appeal. These experiences are often a shock to immigrants, the article concludes, quoting one of the sons saying, “The whole purpose of this country is to protect people like us.”
Time tries to catch our attention with its cover’s provocative question: “Is monogamy over?” Not surprisingly, the answer is no — “even though it isn’t natural and therefore isn’t easy,” one of its guest writers concludes. But monogamy does offer the benefit of biparental care. We suspect that with so many of us pressed for time, monogamy is simply easier than the alternative. Another thing Time predicts: Fur will be considered a “savage, selfish notion of luxury” in the future. Take a look at what the children of the moguls are wearing, and you might conclude that it already is.