The Couch Chronicles, Volume IV

Posted on April 14, 2012 by The Chop

We announced a few weeks ago that this blog has been selected to be a part of the Test it, Blog it, Win it contest from local retailer Su Casa Furniture. We’re thrilled to be participating, and win or lose it’s been an incredibly positive experience for us.

After demonstrating just how bleak and bare our living room is, and discussing how difficult it can be to design a room from the ground up, we’re finally ready to reveal our selections.

Now, having a decent budget to work with and knowing how much there was to choose from, we thought it would be excruciatingly difficult to choose a new sofa. It wasn’t. It was incredibly easy. It all started when we walked into Pad and saw this chair on display…

“Does this chair come in a sofa?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a two cushion sofa?”

“Yes. Here’s a picture of the sofa version.”

“Oh good. I’ll buy it. And a matching ottoman please.”

And it was really as simple as that. Here’s what the sofa looks like:

(We should also say that we could be that confident because we had already seen this particular sofa on display at another high-end independent furniture store in Hampden. The only difference was that Pad beat their sticker price by $50. When you factor in the free delivery that Su Casa and Pad offer on all their items, They actually beat them by about $150. Not too shabby.)

We had dozens of fabrics to choose from, and after narrowing it down by texture, we settled on a shade of gray not too different from what’s pictured. We’re thinking it will work well with the paint color we’ve chosen, which is (and we’re not kidding) “Lavender Sparkle.”

But wait, there’s more! We’re only “testing” the couch as per the contest rules, but we’re not done shopping yet. The whole way we found out about the contest is because we were shopping on the Su Casa website in the first place. Contest or no contest, they still come out ahead of the competition on most items as far as price and quality, and with the extensive customization options we wanted to pick up a few other pieces while we were at it. (A 30% discount on additional pieces for contestants was also a nice incentive.)

Transitioning from Pad directly across the street to Su Casa was absolutely seamless. They just faxed over our order sheet and even let us carry our chosen fabric swatch from one store to the other so that we could match it up.

Now, what we wanted to do was to select chairs that are complimentary, but not matchy-matchy. So as much as we like sweep-arm chairs (and Su Casa has several), we went with something more traditional, but with a low profile on the arms which sort of sweep in reverse. We bought two of these… The Highland Chair:

Obviously, we chose a much different fabric.

The design we’re aiming for is modern, but not ultra-modern. We’re looking to hit a sweet spot between mid-century chic, traditional living room function, and here-and now sensibility. We’re incorporating a lot of subtle masculine touches, and Lavender Sparkle aside, the whole thing is somewhat menswear inspired so we went with this herringbone tweed fabric.

So, if you’ve got a tweed blazer, gray tie, and linen handkerchief (curtains) What are you missing? What’s your foundation? A white dress shirt. In this little design analogy, the dress shirt is this rug:

White, but hardly plain.

As nice as all their furniture is, Su Casa is a world-beater when it comes to rugs. There are only a few samples hanging in the shop, but they offer four full catalogs with literally thousands of rugs. This one is from Surya and was made by hand in India. Not only that but it’s handmade from 100% wool, which was important to us, and was available to ship in just a few weeks.

Shopping from any of Su Casa’s rug catalogs, or the links in their rugs section can be daunting, because none of them include price tags. Not to worry though: the 5′ x 8′ rug we chose was on sale for $355, which would be cheap even for a machine made polyester rug. For a handmade wool rug, it’s ridiculously inexpensive. All of the rugs we saw, even wool/silk blends were very competitively priced.

So now… we wait. We’re expecting our furniture to arrive around the last week of May, but we’re going to make a lot of progress between now and then. Check back next week when we’ll have some pictures to share of the early stages of our design.

Rooftop Drinking in NYC

Posted on April 13, 2012 by The Chop

With the advent of regular Boltbus service from Penn Station, New York City has gotten a lot closer in the last couple years. Honestly, if you’ve never been on the Boltbus, try it. When you factor in everything involved, their service to NYC is actually faster than flying and much cheaper and easier than driving your own car. It’s also much more economical and flexible than train service and only a few minutes slower. Speaking as someone who’s living without a car, Manhattan doesn’t feel any further away now than Towson.

So that’s what we’re going to do this weekend… run up to New York just for the hell of it. We’re going to visit one of our best friends, hit up some restaurants, chase some skirts, possibly pop over to Brooklyn, and maybe even play a round of golf. One thing that’s definitely on the agenda is getting drunk in a fancy rooftop bar.

This is how we're spending our weekend. The rest of you can go to hell.

Spring is the ideal time for rooftop drinking. The wind doesn’t blow too cold and the sun doesn’t shine too hot. There are leaves and flowers and birds in abundance. Baltimore has always been sorely lacking in good options for rooftop bars, and now that the Dizz Grandview has come and gone and the 13th floor is closed for renovations, the pickings for drinking above street level are slim indeed.

As much as we love and champion Baltimore, we’ll admit it when NYC has it all over us. They give away free food at happy hour. They respect the law of the buyback. And they’ve got some of the best rooftop bars in the world. In fact, they’ve even got an entire website dedicated to rating and reviewing rooftop bars… rooftopdrinker.com.

They’ve assembled brief descriptions and reviews of almost 40 rooftop bars in Manhattan and posted a rating and map location for each one. Their site is definitely worth a bookmark and a second look for the next time you’re on the Bolt to NYC. For now though, it’s our turn. While you’re spending your Friday drudging away at work, take a few minutes to look at some of their gorgeous photos and when you’re fighting beltway traffic tonight, just remember: that’s where we’ll be, getting the weekend started right.

David Sedaris @ The Meyerhoff Tonight

Posted on April 12, 2012 by The Chop

Hi David Sedaris. Welcome to Baltimore. We hope it’s nice and sunny today and you can walk around the Inner Harbor and get a crabcake for lunch and maybe even do some antiques shopping and sneak into Jay’s on Read for a drink after the show. Oh and we hope the show goes really well. We hope you bring down the roof in front of a packed house. But we’ll have to read about it online the next day, because there’s no way in hell we’re going to see your show.

The Chop has a bone to pick with you, David Sedaris. That bone is this: You’re a one-trick pony.

He's reading about his boyfriend cooking soup. To his boyfriend, who's cooking soup.

The Santaland Diaries was great. A masterpiece, even. The problem, David, is that that was 1992 and you haven’t come too far since then. Let’s face it: you leaned on the Santaland Diaries pretty hard, republishing that story multiple times, and it was so successful that you got it into your head that you could make a nice little career on nothing more than writing and talking about the experience of being David Sedaris.

And it worked. And it still works, because you’re still selling books. But those books are becoming increasingly dull and predictable. It was one thing to read about the David Sedaris who worked odd jobs and couldn’t get laid and had delusions of grandeur. That was funny. It was endearing. it was interesting.

Now all you offer your readers is David Sedaris the famous author, who has no job and can get laid (by your boring permanent partner) and is no longer delusional… just grandiose. We don’t care about your cottage in France or first class seats on the airplane or your sabbatical in Tokyo because you want to quit smoking. Fuck you, dude. The best part of your work was always the clear, relatable struggle of feeling exceptional in a very average existence.

Now that your own existence has become exceptional, you’ve been so long in the rut of writing about yourself that you don’t know how to write anything else (except that book about chipmunks that flopped and that we didn’t read and that was probably really about you anyway). You’ve even single-handedly legitimized and popularized this whole genre of the humorous personal essay as literature. We just this year got around to reading Augusten Burroughs and you know what? He’s even more boring than you are now. Hope you’re happy.

So we won’t be paying ninety bucks to see you at the Meyerhoff tonight. We already know what you’re going to say. We’ve heard and read it all before. It’s a yawn. Wake us up when Dave Eggers comes to town.

That Frothy Mix: Our Bi-Weekly Political Roundup

Posted on April 11, 2012 by The Chop

“There are no second acts in American lives” is a famous quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hardball host Chris Matthews is often fond of adapting that to say that ‘There are no second acts in American politics.’ Matthews is a pretty bright guy and usually knows his stuff, but on this point he’s dead wrong. Any time you hear a news anchor say on election night that someone is “fighting for his political life,” you know that they’re trying to make their coverage appear a bit more interesting than it is.

If anyone ever lost a ‘fight for his political life’ it was Rick Santorum in 2006. Santorum lost his Pennsylvania senate seat by 19 percentage points, which is a bona fide landslide in a state like that, and conventional wisdom holds that his time has come and gone. People on both sides of the political spectrum are doing their best to black out the horrible muck of the Bush years. The religious right has lost a lot of its clout over the last few years and being the holiest of holies is no longer a write-your-own-ticket in national politics.

Pints and politics at Liam Flynn's tonight. 7 pm.

That said, the religious right may have fallen too far too fast. Now that a lot of the old fucks (think Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond) have died off, and people are long tired of Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin has finally been pretty well discredited, evangelicals lack a top-tier name to act as a ‘crusader’ in the national media. Enter Rick Santorum.

In a manner of speaking, the Santorum campaign is no second act at all, but the same old tired Jesus-and-pony show that they’ve been running all along. No mistake: Santorum is one of the most hateful, bigoted, venomous figures in American politics ever. In 2012, he’s become pretty good at hiding that venom behind a milktoast sweater vest and a bunch of family photos. That’s exactly what the right wing wants; someone who can dress up discrimination and hatred to make it presentable and even attractive to a modern audience.

Trayvon Martin is still the most important thing in America right now. We as a country have spent more than 6 weeks watching the developments and talking over the case. What we’ve noticed, what has stood out to us the most is that some people want to look at you with a straight face and deny that there is any racial element to it at all. These people are the biggest racists you will ever meet in your life. Newt Gingrich is one of them. Rush Limbaugh is another.

Racism is as real as it’s ever been. It needs to be called out and confronted more loudly and fiercely than ever. There were deniers of the holocaust, deniers of the Armenian genocide, and now there are deniers of Trayvon Martin. That’s not a stretch. It’s not hyperbole. It’s people masking their racism behind a desire to go along and get along.

We have the same trouble with Santorum. Santorum absolutely hates gay people. Don’t fool yourself- in Santorum’s ideal America gay people would not be allowed to teach school or donate blood or go in the locker room at the gym… let alone get married. Santorum would love to lock every gay person in a church basement somewhere under the guise of ‘family values.’ Don’t think he wouldn’t.

And the way Republican politics work, he’ll probably get a chance to try it again. Romney was a primary runner-up in 2008, as was John McCain before him. No matter what happens this primary season, we haven’t sniffed the last of the frothy mix that is Santorum.

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Drinking Liberally meets at Liam Flynn’s Ale House tonight, 7 pm and open to all. Just look for the red, white and blue bottle on the table.

How to Pull Off Wearing a Soccer Jersey

Posted on April 10, 2012 by The Chop

The work we do in our non-blogging life takes us all over the world. We’ve been to some very exotic places and had some incredible experiences, and everywhere we go we like to pick up something in the way of a souvenir. The only problem is; we hate souvenirs. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in India, Israel, or Indiana, They sell the same crummy crap everywhere in the world. It’s overpriced and tacky and touristy and you’re already over it before you even lug it home on the plane.

So in the course of our travels we’ve ended up with a drawer full of soccer jerseys. Soccer jerseys make an almost ideal souvenir because they’re one of those souvenirs-that’s-not-really-a-souvenir. They’re a bit of local color that doesn’t mark you immediately as some sucker off a tour bus. Think about it: when your long lost relatives visit Baltimore, would you encourage them to buy some corny t-shirt with a crab on it, or a Ray Lewis Jersey? We know plenty of locals who wear Ravens Jerseys, but don’t have any friends who go around in shit from Crabby Dick’s.

What’s more, jerseys are available all over the world, they’re easy to carry, and when you buy them overseas they’re only like $10-$12 apiece.

vintage poster of Manchester United's George Best

Like this, but with pants.

So we’ve ended up with soccer jerseys from places as far flung as Cameroon and Turkey, South Africa, Mozambique, England, and even Djibouti. They haven’t seen a lot of wear until now, because they’re just not the easiest thing to get away with as a fashion statement. Now that we’re bicycling daily though, we’ve found that they’re the ideal solution for warm weather riding, providing comfort, flexibility and visibility while looking significantly less douchey than actual cycling gear. But how do you pull it off once you get off the bike? Follow these simple rules:

Know what you’re wearing… or Don’t. As we mentioned once before a soccer jersey can make you a magnet for people who want to talk about soccer. With this in mind it’s better to sport something that most people don’t care about. So for the non-fan, the whole premier league and the other prominent Euro teams like Milan and Barcelona should be avoided. Likewise Brazil. If someone still wants to bullshit about soccer you should carry a yellow index card in your pocket and aggressively wave it in their face when they approach you. Failing that just look them dead in the eye and say “I don’t know dude, it’s just a shirt. Leave me alone.”

Wear it with pants. One reason we shy away from wearing jerseys more often is because they’re hard to match. Most of them are very bright and colorful and loud. Since they’re meant to be worn with soccer shorts, that’s the only way they really look right. You’re not going to go around in soccer shorts though, so make sure you’ve got a killer pair of white (or off-white) flat front chinos to go with your jersey. Loud on top, blank on the bottom. To mimic the aesthetic of shorts, we highly recommend the proper execution of the highwaters and sandals look. This isn’t as easy as it appears so don’t screw it up.

Wear it with jeans. actually, don’t wear it with jeans. Most of these things look ridiculous when paired with jeans, but you can pull it off if your jeans are slim and well fitting and less than a year old. Muted shades like burgundy and amber work better with denim than fire truck red or sunshine yellow.

Mind your socks. If you’re rocking sandals (or maybe espadrilles) with your chinos then you don’t need socks at all. However if your choice of pants or footwear requires socks, opt for bright ones. The key is to match without being matchy, or to clash without being ugly. It’s not easy, but with millions of possible jersey-sock combinations, it’s entirely possible.