The Ten Timeless Principles of Good Taste

(Originally posted at OC Tastemakers on March 10, 2013.)

Remember when Dr. Benjamin Spock told parents, “you know more than you think you do”? The same goes for good taste. We have an intuition of what is tasteful and what is not – but a perceived imperative to follow fashion and trends can block us from this intuition.

What is taste? There are as many answers as there are heads in the world. However, I hope that the following principles will be good lifelong guidelines.

1. Fashion and taste are not synonyms. Fashion is meant to dazzle, to awe, and sometimes to shock. Taste doesn’t do anything but be tasteful – and that is more than enough. Keeping up with fashion eats up too much money, time, and mental acreage. It’s easier to just be tasteful – and it’s more enduring. Fashion is fleeting, but taste is timeless.

2. What was tasteful in the past is likely to be tasteful now. Old things are often good things. The antique store and the vintage store contain many items of taste, and they have stood the test of time. It’s definitely worth your time to shop at these places.

3. Good taste is not just for special occasions, like parties or weddings. You can express good taste even when walking your dog or riding your bike on the beach. Casual does not equal sloppy.

4. Match bright colors with neutrals (white, black, brown, tan, navy), and neutrals with neutrals, but not two bright colors together (except for orange and pink, which will take you back to the swinging Sixties). When you wear two neutrals together, wear colorful accessories.

5. There is no reason for anyone to wear a shoe with a heel higher than one-and-a-half inches. Two, at the absolute maximum.

6. Wear clothing in the size you are now, not the size you want to be or think you should be. You can’t be your tasteful best if you are too aware of your clothing. Better a comfortable size 10 than a tight size 8. And remember, Spanx is just another word for girdle.

Photo credit: The Swedish (freeimages)

7. In the home, it is best to avoid too many dark colors. It makes visitors feel like they are swimming in mud. Best to balance both light and dark – dark furniture with light walls and light furniture with dark, for example.

8. You don’t need to be wealthy to be tasteful. Inexpensive options are everywhere. Taste is far more than what you wear – it is a way of life.

9. Taste is a matter of behavior, too. Taste is never mean or sarcastic or arrogant. Instead, it is kind, gentle, and supportive.

10. When your taste compass is sure, you can face bad taste without falling under its spell. This site is here to help.

In the days to come, you will read about how to live a tasteful life right here in Orange County. It is a subject that will not grow old; it will evolve and go into new and fascinating directions.

Welcome to taste, my friends.

Quitting time

Photo credit: zvon (freeimages)

This is a post I delayed writing for a long time.

Why?

Because of the lingering stigma attached to the word “quit,” especially in the United States.

Winners never quit and quitters never win – right? To quit is to fail, and to fail is the worst sin imaginable.

In March 2013, I started a website called OC Tastemakers with high hopes. My goal was to be an arbiter of good taste, writing generously illustrated posts about the best restaurants, cultural events, and beautiful things in Orange County. I also created Twitter and Facebook accounts with the same name. I wanted to leverage the site to become a thought leader, eventually writing books, giving lectures, and spreading the word about good taste.

Well, those high hopes fell to earth, making no more sound than a leaf falling to the grass. I last posted to the site in September 2013.

What happened?

The practical reason is I didn’t have enough money to go to the restaurants and cultural events I wanted to write about.

The spiritual reason is – I just didn’t feel like it anymore.

To many people, that sounds craven. An irresponsible dereliction of my duty to finish what I had started.

Quitting my website? How dare I?

But wait a minute...who is it going to hurt?

The only one I can think of is myself. OC Tastemakers never developed much of a following. By quitting, I’m depriving myself of potential income, influence, and productivity.

Or...I’m giving myself the time and space to gain all of those in other ways.

I realize now there is a difference between quitting a project I care about because of temporary setbacks, and quitting because I care about something else so much more.

I could receive a windfall tomorrow, but the interest in going out and reporting as the OC Tastemaker is gone, and I don’t know how to get it back.

But I don’t care. I have other projects to get involved in:

1.     Writing fiction

2.     Designing greeting cards

3.     Becoming a freelance editor for select clients

4.     Starting a new blog

Wait, you may be saying. Starting a new blog right after closing one?

Actually, I’m closing two blogs...including the one you’re reading right now.

Don’t panic, though – Meandering Mouse isn’t going dark. The site will be available for reading from now until eternity, because there’s writing on it that I’m mighty proud of. (Don’t be surprised if I link to Meandering Mouse posts on my new blog!)

Soon, though, I’ll have a new live blog. I’m not sure yet how similar it will be to Meandering Mouse, but I’ll figure something out.

I do know that I’ll copy selected posts from OC Tastemakers to here this week so they will “live” after that blog closes. After that, I’ll tie up Meandering Mouse and move to my new blog (name to be determined).

Come to think of it, sometimes quitting feels great!

Wake up and smell the outrage

Today, June 2, 2014, I woke up and did what I usually do in the morning – jump to my smartphone to smell the outrage.

First Slate:

“I Could Have Been Elliot Rodger” (if you have the stomach to read that creature’s entire manifesto – I don’t – you will understand that he is nowhere near Everyman, or even Everymisogynist, but way out there in cuckooclockland)

“U.S. Measles Infections at 20-Year High” (thanks, pseudoscience)

“Tennis Star Thinks Women Don’t Belong on the Pro Tour” (one man’s OPINION)

Then Salon – Salon, which was named after intellectual social gatherings but is now, in fact, the left-wing Breitbart:

“8 worst right-wing moments of the week – Bill O’Reilly is so smug that it hurts” (and FYI, water is wet)

“Monsanto vs. the monarchs: the fight to save the world’s most stunning butterfly migration”

“How to save the creative class: universal healthcare and no guns, basically”

Now, let’s pay a visit to Jezebel:

“Woman Threatens to Shoot Everyone Dead Over Stale Cinnabon”

 “Adam Corolla Says that Rich People are ‘Better than Poor People’”

“Justin Bieber is So Sorry About Horrible Racist Joke: ‘I Was a Kid’”(this has to be the first and last time I mention that guy in here)

And her big brother, Gawker:

“CEOs Make 331 Times as Much as Their Workers Last Year”

“$10 Million Apartment Probably Has Nice View”

“You Need to Stop Reading This and Get a Life”

The last one is a headline that should have been there. Really.

I need a new morning habit.

What does the information superhighway do for us, really? It was supposed to connect us to the wonders of the entire world – and at its best, it still does. If you are aware.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia

But most of the time it’s like one of those popcorn makers with the big yellow dome. Readers are the kernels, and under the dome they get hot and angry – so hot and angry that they explode and turn themselves inside out.

Here is one recent example which is especially irritating: NPR – yes, NPR, a place that I normally trust for news told with care, put a story about a “racist” ice cream truck song on one of its blogs. That’s right – the ice cream truck in your neighborhood might be delivering racism along with Drumsticks and Popsicles:

Or maybe not:

For his creation, Browne simply used the well-known melody of the early 19th-century song "Turkey in the Straw," which dates back to the even older and traditional British song "The (Old) Rose Tree." The tune was brought to America's colonies by Scots-Irish immigrants who settled along the Appalachian Trail and added lyrics that mirrored their new lifestyle.

So, a melody which became popular in America in the early 19^th century was based on an even older English tune. In the year 1916, one Harry C. Browne added lyrics which were exceptionally racist (I’m not even going to type the song title here).

Think about that for a moment. That was ninety-eight years ago – long before the children who flock to ice cream trucks today were born. Before their parents were born. Before even their grandparents were born.

History – and the public, except for a handful of esoteric musicologists – quickly forgot Browne’s gross lyrics. Now – ninety-eight years later, that’s two years short of a century – this NPR writer drags them out of the dumpster of time.

To what end? To make Americans – specifically, white people – feel guilty about something that they had nothing to do with, namely ninety-eight-year-old lyrics that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of us would find extremely offensive? (Please do NOT tell me that America “isn’t talking about race enough” – one look at any famous news site proves otherwise. We talk and talk, but what exactly is all that talk doing?)

Or...to get thousands of people to click on the article, get good and angry, and leave a pointed comment? And share it on Facebook and Twitter, which brings even more people to the article...and so on, and so on, and so on?

How do we stop this cycle?

How can I?

Yesterday, I re-read Alexandra Stoddard’s Living a Beautiful Life, and I found the wisdom I needed:

Quiet and calm before the rush of a new day gives you time to reflect on your dreams and visualize the opportunities that lie ahead.
Friends of mine who have the strongest morning rituals are writers who need to tap into the ideas and images developed while they were asleep. Bob O’Brien, a senior editor at Reader’s Digest and author of eight books, advised me not to read the New York Times first thing in the morning. The first hours should be spent being creative.

That makes so much sense, it’s scary.

I need to know the important things that go on in the world.

I don’t need to read all this outrage. All this bullshit. All this meaninglessness.

Seriously, my time deserves better. Everyone’s time deserves better.

I usually recharge my phone in the bedroom. What if I did it in the living room instead, so I couldn’t reach my phone right away? (Or grab it when I suddenly wake up in the middle of the night?)

What would I do with myself in the morning instead?

Or, for that matter, throughout the day, because I often check in to the outrage trough sites?

Stay tuned.

Cutting the crap, one show at a time

Lately, I made a pledge to myself not to read, write, listen to, or have anything to do with crap. I realized that I’ve spent too many mouse-hours on the ingestion of crap, and it’s time to stop because...well, I was going to say because I’m too old for that, but the truth is that age has nothing to do with crap tolerance, and you are never, ever, too young to cut the crap.

One of the ways I have begun to honor my pledge is to avoid getting sucked up in Internet drama, such as the production of long steaming webpages of crappy protest over a rape that never actually happened, i.e., was scripted, on one of those television programs that every one of you is supposed to care a great deal about, never mind that the rape (an incestuous rape at that) is a small sin compared to the numerous gruesome murders shown in graphic detail on this same program, including the stabbing death of a pregnant woman and a man suffocating under a coating of liquid gold (no, not Velveeta), as well as torture and castration and mutilation, none of which have brought on as many crap-pages of OMFG that is the worst scene EVER and how DARE the public not be as outraged about it as we are!!!

Which brings me to the crappy attitude that sexual crimes are so much worse, exponentially worse, than other serious crimes, to the point that too many people think that rape is a worse fate than murder, which is not true, not true at all, and that attitude is far from helpful to people who have actually experienced rape because they are expected, nay, have a duty to be traumatized for life, and if they’re not, well then they weren’t really raped, amirite?

Don’t watch crap, don’t have crappy attitudes.

Is that really so hard?