Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/06/emoji-house-paint-job-anno.html
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I’ve seen worse, a lot worse.
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Wow. I am a classic grumpy old man about neighbor noise, I’ve literally banged on my ceiling with a broom. But the tone of these people’s complaints is bananas to me. Unlike noise, with visuals you can just…look away… And the complaints about the increased traffic to the neighborhood? Do they really think that’s going to last?
I actually get the Airbnb complaint. Turning a home into a hotel is not my favorite, given that it’s her second home, and she seems like she’s being a twat about it. But petitioning the city over a mural _on her house?
Carol Madonna, who has lived on the street since 1998 and plans to attend Tuesday’s council meeting, said the situation could quickly become a slippery slope if the city continued to “cower behind freedom of speech.” If the city allows these emojis, she wonders if they would allow some of the more extreme ones, such as the poop emoji, and questions where officials would draw the line.
I also don’t like to do grievance Olympics generally, but the tone of these complaints just seems literally offensive given the stakes of current national first amendment conversations.
ETA, for cred, here’s the view out of the only side of my apartment that has windows…
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“I’m trying not to offend anybody,” Kidd said. “I did it for the purpose of being happy, being positive, and I think it’s cute and quirky and kind of funny, and certainly was a time for the emoji.”
Kidd doesn’t live in the home but resides elsewhere in Manhattan Beach.
What an asshole.
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But think of how easy it is for her AirBnB guests to find the place now.
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Eh. Not my cup of tea but cute and harmless.
So the headline is more like “Random gentleman annoyed by ‘emoji house’ paint job”
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Those murals are pretty ugly - and pretty dumb, too.
Yeah, it’s pretty easy to have a relaxed attitude about some murals if you never actually have to look at them.
I do wonder if that was actually the purpose - no one else is going to have ugly emojis painted on their house, so it becomes easy to direct people there and have them know they’re in the right place.
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There are reasonable, principled, honestly-come-by arguments that say things like this should always be legally tolerated. That the bar for stifling freedom of expression should be so high that nothing you could paint on a house could possibly clear it.
I respect that people make such arguments and I respect the rationale behind them. But I also firmly believe that for any person willing to make them, there are an infinite number of paint schemes and landscaping choices and so forth that would make them lose their shit inside a week if it were their neighbors doing it.
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To be clear, I don’t think this is the greatest injustice ever done to a fellow human, but I do think it is an example of a petty & vindictive act against the people who actually live in the neighborhood. As opposed to those like Ms. Kidd who merely own property there to rent out and therefore don’t care quite as much about eyesores.
Her rationale seem more than a wee bit disingenuous, no?
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But if your view was previously dominated by…just a beige house, is it really that much worse? I mean, yes, I would want people to have taste, and this is ugly, but ugly enough to angrily petition the city to step in? I would get it if someone bought a park, cut down all the trees and put up a shitty emoji mural, or painted it on a historic church, but this feels like a lateral move at worst…
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I’m surprised the term “property values” has not come up once in this discussion. That’s the go-to for anything the HOA doesn’t like. Or is the entire concept of lowering property values laughable in a place like Manhattan Beach? Everybody knows that home buyers will instantly reject any neighborhood where every house is not the exact same shade of tan with identical landscaping.
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This has a long and storied history:
Even so, this isn’t quite on that level. It’s a paint job that’s supposed to be cute but many consider to be ugly. If anything, it’s bad taste, but bad taste is in the eye of the beholder.
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I don’t live in a spite house. I live in a spite home.
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Way better than a swastika patio.
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I respect that people make such arguments and I respect the rationale behind them. But I also firmly believe that for any person willing to make them, there are an infinite number of paint schemes and landscaping choices and so forth that would make them lose their shit inside a week if it were their neighbors doing it.
The flip side of this is that I expect most people complaining about their neighbour’s paint job would be much less receptive to complaints about the paint job on their own house. I imagine they would suddenly be big proponents of the “it’s my house and I’ll paint it as I see fit” philosophy.
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That brown door, though.
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Oh sure. And then the response to that is that if there are 1,000 houses in the area and 999 of them are painted in a way that 999 homeowners have no issue with, it’s maybe not fair to suggest that there’s an exact symmetry at work. And then there are responses to that, and so forth.
I realize there’s no satisfying conclusion to this kind of argument, which is why it’s so perfect for the internet and so frequently gets posted on BB. I’m happy to just cower in my nice beige house and hope that nobody decides to paint one of the other nice beige houses around me. So far so good!
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I LIKE it!
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I live in spite of everything.
“Good fences make good neighbors”–Benjamin Franklin
If they don’t want to see the paint job then build a fence; at their own cost.
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