The Detective's Office - the Decor and Accessories

It's a lazy Sunday and I thought I'd provide a pictorial update on the status of the detective's office.

Over the past week we've hung paintings, going with a Victorian feel by crowding them in tightly in the office. The subject matter, on the other hand, ranges all the way from the early 1900's to the modern era and include artwork by my dear wife Kelly Madden and good friend Crystal Helt.

As part of the artwork, we converted an old Indianapolis Brewing Company frame to a chalkboard. The process was easier than I thought it'd be and we hung the end result last night. Please forgive the blurriness, my little point-and-shoot couldn't conceive of the fact that a flash would be required and I didn't want to futz about fixing the problem.

You might remember my diatribe on the Royal typewriter a friend donated to the office effort, well it's finally found a home.

And finally I did a little antique mall rummaging yesterday and came up with the perfect coat rack for a detective's fedoras. Now I have a place to hang my hat.

Coming before fall will be a new ceiling fan and a appropriate door. I'll post another update when that happens!

Detective's Office Phase I - Completed!

Well, it took a lot of effort, but with the help of my darling and understanding wife and a lot of sweat and swearing, phase one of establishing my little noir detective's office has been completed. Here are the last photos, from our Memorial Day weekend push.

We start with Sunday and cutting the chair rails to length. Wonderful day for working with the garage door open, though it did keep Kelly from lounging with a glass of wine on the deck. As a bonus, as we were closing down for the night I gave the old ceiling fan one more try and it had magically healed itself. Nice to have house elves with union electrician's licenses! Extra milk on the doorstep tonight, and maybe a little beer too!

We follow up with installing the chair rails, they went up perfectly, the corner joints I sweated were just right. Didn't even need to do any coping. How's that for catching a break?

De-junkified and starting to look like an office again. We moved the desk back to its proper place, took away all of the drop-cloths, stowed the tools, and in this picture I'm in the process of getting the electronics back in place. The floor lamp went to Kelly's office where it has found useful employment.

Beauty shot time. Here's the finished product (so far). My desk with dear Spriggan's bed on one end, no writer should be without a cat after all. Printer stowed inconspicuously in the corner. Cedar chest in its proper place under the window.

The waiting area is ready for the next fem fatal. She had legs that went all the way from her shoes to her hips, that's how she got into the place...

And finally, the dingus.

The Detective's Office Takes Off

The detective's office has languished for a long time, waiting for the convergence of resources and time. Race day weekend, as we Hoosiers call it, proved to be the magic date and the project finally has started rolling. Here's a little before picture to set the stage. I hope you'll pardon my camera's desperate attempt to adjust to the bright desk lamp, but I think you can see that over the months the office has become a depository for all things junk. I've collected disused keyboards, dead cell phones, broken laptops, extra pads of paper, and the tools for actually painting the place in an attempt to recreate an episode of Horders, but that'll be changing soon enough.

Scene two, it's Saturday morning and a good deal of the junk has moved on. Thanks to Kelly's hard work the painter's tape has been applied and my brother helped move all the heavy furniture so we could get to the walls. The night before work began the hall was so crammed with stuff from the office that late night trips to the bathroom became a treacherous affair. First thing in the morning we tuned in some peppy music and got to work.

Drop cloths, or old blankets, in pace and ready to paint when we encountered our first problem. We purchased the paint for this project late in the fall, with the thought that if the weather allowed we'd paint before winter started. Unfortunately, we didn't get to painting and the paint cans spent the winter months in the garage where one can froze. The result, paint that resembled cottage cheese and never was going to mix properly. I was off to the hardware store to buy a replacement can on the Saturday mid-morning before the Indy 500. As you can guess, it was a harrowing trip. After lunch and a Valium to bring me down from dealing with traffic, we got started.

To my surprise, we had the top half of the room painted in no time. The color is hummus, but to me it looks more like butter. You might be asking what kind of noir detective paints his office hummus or butter, well the idea was to replicate the cigarette smoke-stained plaster you might find in a downtown LA office that had another life before the neighborhood went sour and a two-bit gumshoe moved in. I think the color does a pretty good job, and I'm not willing to do painting effects or glazes to make a more accurate imitation. You can also see the beginning of the faux wainscoting in orchard green and it reminded me of the felt on a pool table, perfect for our detective.

Try to ignore the dust on the camera lens, or as the paranormal investigators would call them, orbs. Wainscoting first coat done as the sun started heading for the horizon. We removed the painter's tape before calling the day finished, but I didn't think that warranted photographs. The race day agenda will include touch-up of the walls, correcting paint lines where needed, painting the baseboard and window sill, and cutting the chair rail. Still to come is replacing the ceiling fan and wall switch with something appropriate, installing the chair rail, and generally putting the furniture back in order. More updates and photos soon, in the meantime I'll have an exorcist look at my camera.

The Fountain Pen - Inkwells

A recent discussion about dip pens, quills, and refillable fountain pens left me looking for a new accessory, an inkwell. As I've mentioned in previous posts I'm in the process of fashioning my little writer's office into my own Sam Spade-style noir detective's office and that means choosing an inkwell of the appropriate period as well as one with the appropriate nior sensibility.

What is a noir sensibility and, while we're at it, what exactly is noir? According to University Press of Kentucky:

"(Classic film noir) is characterized not only by a constant opposition of light and shadow and a disruptive compositional balance of frames and scenes, but also by dark, foreboding characters and plots and an overriding sense of alienation and moral ambiguity. Noir films reflect the sense of loss, fragmentation, and nihilism at the heart of the human condition in the twentieth century. Although the classic film noir period ended in the late 1950s, its impact on more films has been profound. While typically not black and white, these new films incorporate the noir sensibility of alienation, pessimism, moral ambivalence, and disorientation. This sensibility is obvious in films such as Blade Runner, Reservoir Dogs, Chinatown, and Memento."

This means leaning toward the Art Deco movement's hard, geometric shapes and industrial materials, but there is a complication. Personally, I'm drawn to the fantasy of Art Nouveau with its ornamentation, exuberance, and incorporation of mythological and fantastic creatures. So, to make my office uniquely my own I'm striving to blend the two worlds. And that's how I came to my first serious inkwell crush.

I'm not sure about the age of this bronze Japanese figural inkwell, but I wish I would have found it before the auction closed. It reflects the perfect blend of art and fatalism embodied in noir and I've long collected skulls and memento mori. I guess there's nothing more noir than finding something perfect after it's too late to obtain it. The hunt goes on.

Noir Office Fan

The noir detective’s office has been progressing, albeit slowly and in the background. The latest addition is a little gift provided by two close friends, a Barcol Eight two bladed Bakelite fan.

The Barber-Colman (Barcol) company once was the largest manufacturer in Rockford, IL with a nearly 65 acre facility that made everything from temperature controls to garage door openers. The factory now sits empty, it’s once busy corridors gathering dust. Like in so much of American manufacturing, the well-paying jobs that once fed and clothed a generation have been shipped to third world countries where it can be performed at slave labor rates of pay under sweat shop conditions.

I did an Internet search for Barcol fan ads and came up disappointingly empty. I did turn up a 50’s era garage door opener ad that ran in the Rotarian magazine. Sometimes its striking how much these ads remind me of the suburb where I grew up, right down to the coffered garage doors. This is an image of suburban sprawl before the term carried the negative connotations it’s associated with now. You’re seeing an image of the blue-collar American dream Ozzie and Harriet-style; a three bedroom bungalow on a tree-lined street with a two car garage and a swing set in the backyard.

Dreams die hard, though. That same neighborhood in 2013 is a run-down second-ring suburb. The streets are in disrepair, the sidewalks are cracking and heaving more every winter, and Dutch elm disease or emerald ash borers have killed just about every shade tree. The people who occupy these 50’s bungalows can barely hold on, their dream is to make the mortgage and maybe put away enough to send their kids to college. But I digress.

I stumbled across a page from a 1939 catalog that features the Barcol Eight. It's probably appropriate that the fan which will be stirring the air in my little detective's office is the cheapest model available. Now we'd never consider something like a power switch or speed control as options, but Barcol produced a fan that had neither. You got one speed and if you wanted to turn the fan off you unplugged it and liked it. The trade of was you paid a  whopping $2.35 for your fan. As for my part, I’ll have to perform some minor repairs before plugging my Eight in. It has an iffy cord and the one time I dared plug it into an outlet it made a grinding noise that suggested it might burst into flames. I’m guessing I’ll either be cleaning the motor or replacing it.