Mirror frame on the upstairs landing and dresser in progress

Here's the mirror frame I finished painting with acrylics a while ago! It's built out of trim nailed to the wall overlapping the edges of the mirror that was there (with a narrow piece of wood trim padding in between to hold the trim the right distance from the wall), because it's had a chip in the corner since we moved in. Likely my last project with acrylics. So stinky!!

Here also is the dresser that goes in that alcove. It's been sanded and vacuumed and puttied and then painted with this minty shade of milk paint. This is about as much pigment as you're meant to add to the milk paint, according to instructions, although I've added a bit more in the past. It gets too thick and you have to add more water as well and that starts to weaken the binders in the paint, which are all contained in the powdered mix we started with. You can always make your own milk paint and replace some of the white chalk, which makes it opaque, with a darker pigment when you want a dark color, but the mix we've been using already has chalk. My issue is that in the poor light we're gonna have in winter this current color will likely read as white, so I'm going to have to add another, greener coat.




And finally, here's Tristana helping. Notice the cute little footprints inside the dresser. I've already had to add another coat of paint because she left dirty footprints on a drawer front the first time.

And in retrospect it's an attack that sounds so peculiar it doesn't even register as funny at first

Golden Age detective novels from the 1920s and 30s occasionally betray an obviously widespread societal meme, because the casualness and briefness with which it's invoked imply that it would be easily recognized and understood by the audience: that jazz isn't "real" music.

Take this representative example from Bats in the Belfry by the prolific and popular Golden Age author, ECR Lorac (Edith Caroline Rivett), wherein a young woman thinks that a stuffy old uncle has done his best for her because he's "done what he could to teach her to read, to appreciate literature and despise trash, to listen to music as well as to jazz, and to speak English instead of schoolgirl slang."

This is interesting because this is exactly what a certain large subset of people thought was witty to say, and other people would sincerely and angrily say, about rap music in the 1990s.

Of course, it's not like it was a secret at the time that this claim was just racism, but there were always plenty of people who didn't know it, like other things that are well-known to be just racism like the 'blue lives matter' movement, or welfare cuts, or "bad neighborhoods".

But the point is that jazz not only sounds completely different from rap to the neophyte (I'm aware this is ignoring the musical traditions that connect them and plenty of sophisticated music analysis), with the main feature that connects them being their Black roots and their associations with Black culture; jazz has also now attained a venerable status as a genre, spoken of in the same breath as classical music.

Anyway, the pattern makes it even clearer, doesn't it? It's the exact same preposterous criticism.