Page 606 - Demo

for increasing the apparent size of the room) and, in one bathroom on Dean Street, everything was done in black marble with white trim.A very popular method for achieving the elite in Brooklyn is the use of elevated platforms%u2014a great technique!From the very start, bathrooms were decorated to the hilt. Going far back to the times of ancient Egypt, believe it or not, bathrooms were available only to the veryBut the bathroom suffered the defeat in the Victorian era that all things connected with bodily functions did. It was the day when women sprinkled cornflour in their bathwater to avoid seeing their own bodies that bathrooms struggled through the dark anonymity of being a water closet, or worse yet the out-house perched at the end of a long cold trail, for moral reasons as well as structural ones. It was, perhaps, the rebellion against executing such personalelsewhere, because they prefer rustic atmosphere in their bathrooms. Much to the frustration of plumbers, many homeowners insist on keeping whatever %u201c antiques\way of fixtures or decor, and building around them.When Jim and Norma Marshall started renovation on their 1886 brownstone, they %u201cwere absolutely estatic%u201d to find the original bathroom fixtures still in place%u2014have their facilities updated. Annette Wilson of Dean Street says she got a bargain with a $3,500 job to her dilapidated bathroom. It was expanded, the ceiling lowered, the bathtub was originally raised and then sunk, and everything was modernized. %u201cI love it,%u201d she exclaimed, saying that her bathroom%u2019s new identity gives her whole house an uplift and makes her feel better all around.The only really important thing aboutGoing far back to ancient Egyptian times, bathroom s were only available to the very rich, and thus were status sym bols...In Brooklyn, today, classy hom eowners include such luxuries as steps leading up to the tub and wall-to-wall mirrors.rich, and thus were status symbols. Throughout history, the toilet became a facility of much concern and attention. Often glorified (or disguised, it%u2019s hard to tell) as a winged woman, a seated dragon or an elaborate flower. The interior of the bowl was usually painted, very elaborately, and, of course, by hand. (Among the lower class it was the habit to paint portraits of enemies on the bottom of chamber pots; Napoleon kept turning up in Italy.acts in such unpleasant conditions that has led to the present glorification of the bathroom.An employee of I. Weiss & Son, a third generation plumbing business at 103 Atlantic Avenue, discussed bathrooms in Brooklyn. %u201c Sure people care about their bathrooms,%u201d he said. %u201c Sometimes more than other rooms.%u201d People in Brooklyn, he explained, differ in opinions of their bathrooms from people he's done work forbrass fittings, wood trim, and marble platforms and all. %u201c We were just delighted,%u201d relates Norma. %u201c So we just stripped the paint and all of that awful old plaster and built on the fixtures.%u201d The bathroom is basically Edwardian, she says, but they have done the walls and tapestry in Art Nouveau style and colors.Other brownstoners found that their bathrooms were too far gone to bother with renovation, so they paid whatever it cost todesigning a bathroom, as far as I%u2019m concerned, is making sure that it%u2019s comfortable for you. I%u2019ve been in terribly mundane houses where the only room that had any personality was the trusty old W.C. Consequently, these families spent a lot of time in their bathrooms. With an occasional trip to the kitchen, they were set to go%u2014and with bathrooms as great as some of these...it%u2019s the only way to go.Browsing in the Bathroom%u2014 We All Do ItBY L.J. DAVISWhile it is entirely possible to read Unamuno in the bathroom, I think it is fairly safe to say that most people don%u2019t. The bathroom is one of the very few places in the world where the wish is consistently father to the act, and the distraction of heavy thinking, moral uplift, or gripping plot is the one thing you don't want to be bothered with while, er, bathing. In the days of my ill-spent youth out in Idaho, a stack of Reader%u2019s. Digests on the hamper was generally thought to be the mark of the town%u2019s big intellectuals, and to this day I still have a soft spot in my heart for the publication. The bathroom, it seems to me, is the ideal place to learn that a cure for cancer is just around the corner, labor unions are ruining the country, and nothing has been the same since the New1 Deal; as they say in the computer game, garbage in, garbage out.I am not going to reveal the titles of the books that currently adorn my lavatory' because one of them was edited by a friend of mine and he would doubtless feel that a mention in such a context was lacking a certain cachet, while the title of the other one would probably strike some readers as perverse. It would be all right if it were in my parlor, though. That%u2019s the funny thing about bathrooms: dirty work is widelyBook Beatthought to be afoot there, and if I were to reveal that the bathroom happens to be my favorite room for reading mediocre science fiction (as it is), I would run the risk of tarring the entire science fiction profession with the brush of guilt by association. Since very few people above the age of fourteen spend great amounts of time with their domestic plumbing, the ideal powder room reading matter is, perforce, the sort that can be absorbed quickly and in small increments, which is why my excusado is usually stocked with indifferent SF (see above). It%u2019s something that makes no greatdemands of urgency and, since I am sleepy during a goodly portion of the time I spend there, it doesn%u2019t matter whether I remember any of it or not. A friend of mine used to keep Fear of Flying in his john, as much by way of an editorial comment as anything, but he soon found that it was counter-productive; the bathroom may very well be the single spot on the entire planet where the ambience is entirely convivial to that particular little tome. No, what you want in the bathroom is Clarence Buddington Kelland and Norah Lofts and the collected speeches of Calvin Coolidge%u2014in other words, the literary equivalent of Musak; the bathroom is not a place where you want your emotions to run high. Of course, the great exception to this rule is embodied in a letter from an author that a literary critic received some years ago, and which I here reproduce:%u201c Dear Sir (it began), I am seated in the smallest room in my house. I have your review of my book before me. In a few minutes, it will be behind me.%u201dThat, however, is a unique situation.W.C.s with N oble HeritagesEverybody likes a nice bath, and as others on these pages can tell you, the bathroom has many pleasant uses. But did you know that every time you lower yourself into a steaming hot tub, you are revisiting the scene of history?Murders, profound revelations, accidents that changed the course of human events%u2014all these came upon the great and near-great while reclining in the bath. Many of these turning points are included in %u201cThe Book of Lists%u201d by David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace, under the apt heading, %u201c 15 Famous Events That Happened in the Bathtub.%u201dPelias, king of Thessaly, was murdered by bathing in poison provided by Medea%u2014 according to Greek mythology. Agamemnon, too, met his end when his wife, Clytemnestra bludgeoned him in the bath.On a lighter note, Archimedes is known to have composed the law of physics in the bath%u2014and thereupon became so excited that he ran into the streets of Syracuse, Sicily, stark naked, shouting %u201c Eureka!%u201dPolitics, too, is no stranger to the bathtub. A famous argument between the Bonaparte brothers over Napolean%u2019s plans to sell Louisiana to America occured during Nappy%u2019s morning soak. The little Corporal%u2019s consternation over this dissension in the ranks resulted in his brother Joseph getting splashed with bath water.Sidelight: Historians also note that a | major revelation leading to the Reformation came to Martin Luther while sitting on ,the privy. So don%u2019t underestimate your . bathroom. It has a nobel heritage..................by L.J. DavisWhen it comes to the game of life, I am the original Little Jack Horner. Long before women's liberation became a national rage, I not only allowed my wife to go to work, but I let her support me, too. Later, at the ripe age of thirty, I fulfilled my father%u2019s darkest prophecy and became a part-time unpaid Brooklyn garbage man; in short, I ran a recycling center, but your garbage secrets are safe with me%u2014my silence has already been bought. Unfortunately, though, I failed to realize enough on the deal to sustain my organic food habit. Indeed, I doubt if anybody makes enough from any kind of deal to sustain an organic food habit, except maybe a Morgan partner; organic food is costly grub. (Somebody ought to teach the organic butcher how to slice meat, too, but that somebody will not be me. To mix a metaphor, I have other fish to fry.) At 32,1 caused Watergate and brought down a President, but how I accomplished this is a story I will reveal only if the sweetheart movie deal I%u2019m trying to negotiate with Robert Redford falls through. In the picture, Redford will play my father-in-law, and since I obviously can%u2019t trust anybody else with the role, I will appear as myself.Where was 1? U h, yes. i was explaining what a wonderful person I am. I chased a mugger once, too, but since I didn%u2019t catch him, the knotty problem of what I would have done with him will go forever unanswered. My stories and articles are always neatly typed and filed in advance of deadline, and I am very good aboutkeeping my sidewalk shoveled%u2014an activity, because I live on a bus stop, that keeps my busy the year around.I know what you%u2019re thinking. You are thinking: if he is such a paladin as he claims, why has he not, as they say, gone solar? By a happy chance, I was turning that very question over in my mind the other day while taking a break from working out how the Gadsden Purchase could be renegotiated in a way that would require Mexico to keep Las Vegas. These little schemes run in our family, by the way; my uncle was the only American soldier in the history of the Pacific Theater to attempt to hold a Japanese prisoner for ransom. As he explained at his court marshal, he was only trying to show the country how it could win the war at a slight profit.But why haven%u2019t I gone solar? The answer to that is simple, my friend. I haven%u2019t gone solar because I am a firm lover of both the English language and the Baskerville type face, and the people who write books about solar energy are invariably strangers to one or both. As evidence, I submit two recent books from the house of Van Nostrand Reinhold, the* n i t * ______ %u00ab ,t . _r n t t u c a i u u i u c u i J U IIU u u u i c o u y m eeditors of Hudson Home Guides, and Natural Solar Architecture: a passiveprimer by David Wright, A.I.A. While these are estimable books, veritable cornucopias of helpful hints and sound advice, the former sounds like it was written by one of the engineering studentswho occasionally finds his way into my English class to, it is needless to add, our mutual regret (%u201c I are a enigineer. Six months ago I couldn%u2019t even spell enigineer. Now I are one.%u201d ) And while David Wright possesses a serviceable command of the language of Milton, it happens that his book is laid out in the sort of cutsey-poo format that one used to associate with certain cookbooks of the 1960%u2019s%u2014the kind that were written by somebody named Elvira Buffalo Hide, whose idea of a tasty and nutritious meal was to whip up a cutlet of potato seeds. Not to put too fine a point to it, it is just loaded with darling little pictures and printed to it, it is just loaded with darling little pictures and printed in a freehand alphabet that not only converts the word %u201c busy%u201d into %u201c lousy%u201d but probably cost the publisher a peck of money.This is too bad, because, as I said, both books are chock-a-block with vital info and Wright goes so far as to offer a series of mathematical formulae for computing your heat loss that, judging from their arcane complexity, must alone be worth the price of purchase. Among other things, I have learned that in a temperate climate such as tun, a, mu w p tt.uiT. cricntat.cn for asolar collector is 12%u00b0 south-southeast. I have also discovered that one should not assume that just because December 21 is the shortest day of the year, it is also the coldest; weather lags behind the sun by about two months. I have finally found out what a berm is, the Practical Guide listsjust about every solar product known to man, and Wright tells how to make ice in India without using a smidgeon of electricity. Any man who can do that is definitely an okay guy, and it is a thousand pities that the format of his book instantly puts the alert consumer on the qui vive for advice on how to warm your home by burning dried oleander fronds. For the tenderfeet out there, oleander-frond space heating (which, let me hasten to add, is nowhere to be found in Wright%u2019s book) ranks as one of the Worst Ideas of Western Man, and should you be dumb enough to try it, it also comes under the heading of Last Idea of a Particular Western Man.Be that as it may%u2014and despite the fact that I forgot to mention that both books are designed in a way that makes them maddening hard to hold%u2014if you happen to be thinking of going solar, I suppose the Guide and the Primer are obvious places to start, and they also provide you with an invaluable test of the depth of your committment: if you can put up with their drawbacks, you%u2019re probably hooked.Practical Guide to Solar Homes. TheEditors of Hudson Home Guides. Van*T a-----------1 n %u201e t _ l%u2014 1JI %u00a5_ J A - J e _________n v D u i w i u a t v i u u u a u * u i u v a a v i m v i %u00bb%u00bb%u00bb%u00ab143 pp. $10.95.Natural Solar Architecture: a passiveprimer. David Wright, A.I.A. VanNostrand Reinhold. Index. 245 pp. $14.95 (cloth), $7.95 (paper).Page 14, THE PHOENIX, November 9,1978