Jon Caramanica drops in to tell us about HGTV's Mike Holmes, International Design Yearbooks, The Jordan Two3 Cavvy loafer, and more.
August 24, 2021
Brooklyn’s Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic at the New York Times and the writer of the men's Critical Shopper column. At the Times he’s penned great pieces such as Into the Wild With Kanye West (keep an eye out for Jon’s upcoming book on Kanye West and American Culture) and New York, It’s Time to Shop!, a round-up of the exciting new stores such as Kathleen Sorbara’s Chickee’s Vintage, Bijan Shahvali’s Leisure Center, and Andrew Chen’s 3Sixteen. In addition to his pop music writing, he’s also the host of the NYT’s Popcast, a podcast where he covers the latest in music trends and news. Jon has great taste and lucky for us, he’s here to talk about what he’s been into.
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Sometimes I think I’ve reached, like, the end of TV. I don’t really care about prestige drama. Reality franchises on their 7th or 12th iteration bore me. I gave up on cable news because it made me more jittery than coffee.I can watch HGTV for hours though. Inject all that mid-period Chip & Joanna straight into my veins. Show me all the secret brick-cuttters working on the fringes of Laurel, Mississippi. Interested in couples therapy? Sit with a few episodes of “Love It or List It.” Want to know exactly why that first wave of commercials for “Christina on the Coast” got reedited? I’ll tell you if you ask nice.Most of these shows revolve around how to make something more beautiful. Beauty fades, though. Is your dream built to last?When it crumbles, Mike Holmes can fix it. A no-nonsense Canadian who tears down drywall with bare hands, he has a persistent mien of disappointment. Electricians, roofers, landscapers, plumbers - they’re all colossal idiot cost-cutters who prey on unsuspecting homeowners. In Mike Holmes’s world, all is chaos, and he is the only hope for order.On his old shows - “Holmes on Homes,” “Holmes Inspection,” and so on, you get the point - - he glumly but firmly tears apart homes to find the evils that lurk within. He’s almost impossibly astute, an “Iyanla, Fix My Life”-level reader of the needs of a house - and its owners. (Reruns air mostly on the DIY Network, part of the extended Discovery/HGTV ecosystem.) I love how simple the homes are, and how catastrophic the hidden scars are. And yet time and again, he makes it right - an everyman healer and an avatar of the lost art of competence. In a time when every day feels like free fall, these shows are a somber acknowledgment of the ubiquity of disrepair, and a paean to the belief - the certainty - that it can be overcome.