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Clean living | page 1, 2
In what seems to me a rather fitting irony, a piece on "stress reduction" (that could have been titled "Meditations on running out of gas") by Francine Prose is broken up with a butt-ugly ad insert for a variety of household products. Prose recently wrote a jeremiad against the vapidity of the Oxygen network and women's magazines in general for the New York Times Magazine. For a writer who has benefited financially from writing for some of those same publications, it seemed an ungracious and self-serving move. Seeing her writing offset by a plug for kitty litter gave me some perverse pleasure. There is some requisite editorial about things to buy here, most notably in the front-of-the-book section "small pleasures" and the sole fashion feature. But none of it is very high-end (OK, a $32 bra), and most of the emphasis in Real Simple remains on getting rid of it (whatever it is). There are articles about how to pay your bills online and do less laundry. ("The first rule you should establish is: one towel and one washcloth per person a week" -- which I believe is the rule on Rikers Island.) A few months of Real Simple and things will start disappearing from your house so fast you'll think your boyfriend is a junkie. Too much simplicity can be a dangerous thing, though. Take this advice from a service piece on cleaning your bathroom: "Next, spritz the bathroom mirror with glass cleaner and wipe it down with paper towels." Or the observation in the flowers feature that "any signs of yellowing and withering ... could mean they were picked quite a while ago." Suddenly "real simple" starts to take on a "Forrest Gump" cast. Trying to sell the simple life is a slippery task. Real Simple is handsome in its design; the food spread looked especially inviting and some of the writing is cool and concise. But there is an air of unreality to the whole enterprise that I find off-putting. The articles say incorporate these steps to simplicity in your daily life, but the pictures portray a life of cleanly privilege unlike any I know. "Art-direct your life" is more like it. The reality of these contradictions is brought home in what I thought to be this issue's signature piece, Megham Daum's first person account of moving from Manhattan to ... Nebraska. The high cost of New York living and the threat of ending up in Brooklyn compelled her to pack up and head for the heartland. "There are few fancy restaurants," she writes, "no one gets dressed up for a night on the town, and movies never cost more than $6, and they never sell out." I like the idea of paying $6 for a movie and getting a seat with no problem. I've actually found a way to do that here in New York: It's called a matinee, and most theaters still have them. Sure, it means taking time off from my work day and laboring later into the evening. It's not often I get a chance to go to a matinee but it's a hell of lot less of a commitment than moving to Nebraska. It's like the old farmer's adage about breakfast and the difference between involvement and commitment, the kind of thing you'll hear out in Nebraska. "The hen was involved," the farmer says, "but the pig was committed."
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