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We are happy to announce that WE HAVE MOVED to a brand new address, our very own domain!  The process began late last week and there is still work to do (we have heaps of links to fix, images to align), but we aim to keep the transition period short.  For now, though, please update your subscriptions as all new reviews will post to 300Reviews.com.  As of right now, you can see the new review of Anaphylaxis by our newest contributor, Elizabeth Wade!

So thanks if you’ve come here looking for a “mushroom cloud” (not to mention “Nushroom cloud”) or “Egyptian cat mummies” or “acqua di jio” or “Tetley Green Tea review” or even “atomový hřib” (double-you-tea-eff?), but we’re in new digs.  Please search us there.

-Your People @ 300 Reviews

[Please Excuse This Brief Interruption]

But we’d like to call your attention to our own Kevin O’Rourke’s review of tantalization and boredom in Mass Effect 2, which is now available on ANOTHER 300 Reviews.

#32 – The Stairmaster

The first thing you notice when you step onto the machine is gravity.  The floor slowly begins to sink from underneath your feet—the one thing we trust the most has become unstable.  The floor is the floor is the floor.  You must bring the earth up to greet your body, as if for once you have control of the ground beneath your feet.  This, of course, taxes your muscles, taxes your heart.  You are Atlas in reverse.

Your heart rate rises.  While walking on a treadmill or using an elliptical machine, it is ideal to keep your heart rate low in order to burn fat.  If your body senses a struggle, it feels as it is prey—you are running for your life.  You are sinking.  Your body will take hold of your muscles and eat them, as they provide the most fuel.  You will feel sick.  The staircases keep rotating.

While going for a run in the park, you pass people; you pass trees.  The pavement ahead is the pavement ahead.  On the mechanism that does not move, ponytails swish out of reach as women walk past you.  A friend waves on the way to get a drink of water and continues walking. Lanny Potts, the inventor of the Stairmaster, once had a dream where he was exercising on the moon. Look at the scale.  Look how little I weigh here.  When I was a child, I too had dreams about being on the moon, but instead of considering the effects that the loss of gravity has on movement, I considered isolation:  there is no one here.  There is no one to talk to.  You can only explore for so long before wondering what the world is doing without you.

-Brian Oliu

#31 – The Pedestrian Thoroughfare

Strada Republicii - Brasov, Romania

Municipal officers take note: what makes a city should not be defined by either population density or sprawl.  Have minimum thresholds in these measures, but the first criterion of a city is its modes of circulation.  Public transport should be a given, because in urbanity we sacrifice lesser luxuries, such as the personal vehicle and reduced risk of sudden nuclear attack, for the greater joys of city living, such as walking.  A city is no city if its people do not walk.

Country folk have long understood that walking drives a connection with environment that can only be achieved on foot.  This holds true everywhere.  The point isn’t pace (decidedly, walking in Manhattan is never slowed), but space—spatial understandings of community as they are manifest in the greatest of humankind’s creations, the goddamn metropolis.

This is best evident in the survival of the pedestrian thoroughfare.  In streets and plazas reserved for foot traffic there are opportunities to sublimate the individual and the community in ways otherwise unachievable.  Without the nostalgia for the countryside inherent in many civic parks, pedestrian thoroughfares create space for the body among other bodies, while making no apology for the city itself.  Even otherwise banal cities like Milan have piazzas where people make la passeggiata and flourish.

Yet American city makeovers are failing to understand.  Near mega-convention centers and corporate hotels you’ll find a paltry block lined with TGI Fridays and manky Irish pubs.  The allure is meant to be a stem in vehicular traffic, as if we would marvel at canned country music and open asphalt.  No, we know the real novelty here.  Even if our ancestors stood back for passing chariots or sedan chairs, common men and women walked in the streets first.  Their hands built the buildings; their feet touched the ground.

-Jeremy Allan Hawkins

#30 – Graffiti

Bob is gay.  Or so I’m led to believe by the crude scrawl on the wall outside my flat (Bob, to his credit, has maintained a dignified silence).  Sadly there are still people who think this kind of thing when we use the word graffiti.  For them it is something systematic of a crumbling society: a nuisance, devoid of any merit, that needs to be stamped out. Similar to say glue sniffing or homosexuals like Bob.

It takes only the slightest investigation to begin to understand why this is such a ridiculous point of view but, like most modern art, you need to know what to look for.  Broadly speaking graffiti can be divided up into signature like ‘tags’, 2 or 3 tone ‘throw-ups’ and more complex ‘pieces’ and like any other visual art there is a critical framework for appreciation.  The interplay of line, quality of fill and overall harmony of the graffiti are important but unlike most other art forms the critic must also take into account the location.  A reasonable throw-up in a daring spot has as much, if not more, merit as an intricate piece on an approved wall.

The graffiti that stems from the Bronx of the 70s is now global and deserves a greater prominence in reviews of 20^th century art.  Clearly though, the temptation to neatly package graffiti into some sort of art history narrative should be avoided. Modernism needs graffiti more than graffiti needs Modernism.  However, by channelling the techniques of mass media and advertising to confront the feelings of insignificance that taint modern life, pioneering writers like PHASE 2, Lee Quiñones and Fab 5 Freddy essentially achieved everything that Modernist painters had been trying to do for the past 70 years.  And hell, that ain’t no crime.

-Cameron Foster

#29 – The Park Across the Street from My House

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice park. I like it just fine. It’s nicely landscaped, has a nice fountain in the middle and a nice jogging track around the perimeter.  It also nicely, politely evokes the city’s social priorities.

Annette Shelby Park sits at the intersection of one of Tuscaloosa’s primary arteries and another busy avenue. To the southeast there is an overpass surmounting the train tracks. Nowhere is one shielded from the sounds of traffic or the sight of billboards across the street. Its location favors access by car, and few save those who live in the surrounding neighborhoods will walk there.

Lately the park has been closed for maintenance. This is possible because the park is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence topped with pointed spikes. No other park in the city is so circumscribed. In the language of urbanization this tells us that a threat is near. And indeed the park is located at the threshold between a wealthy historic district and a section of town comprised of retail, light industry and low-income housing. As the park’s builder’s noted “The park will become a buffer between the historical district and 15th Street.” Not just a buffer but a warning.

Publicly accessible space comes with dangers. Drug users might shoot up in the park and shed their needles like feathers. Lovers might have illicit sex in the bathrooms. Irresponsible citizens might litter,  dog owners may leave shit in the grass. There might be drinking and thus broken glass and intoxication. There might be a little less atomized individuality. Better that the park is gently used, the heads of the town think.

This park warns that the complete disappearance of ‘public’ space is on the horizon. Even our commons are enclosed and regulated at the behest of private interests.

-Jim Toweill

#28 – Breast Feeding

On the topic of breast feeding, expectant moms are quickly caught between upbringing, aspirations, and the mixed advice of sisters, strangers, and doctors’ office pamphlets. In the 60s and 70s, many American women considered breast feeding an unwelcome chain to their infants, contraindicative of their recent lib. For the current generation, however, being fully female and freedom from patrilineal oppression are no longer mutually exclusive. Breast feeding is back, and it comes with designer nursing covers.

The mom who chooses to nurse will be told that that a proper, comfortable latch is all that is required. To this I would add persistence and luck. My daughter and I had the first but not the latter. Did we start all wrong? Perhaps. Despite the aid of nurses, friends, and a well-paid consultant, my daughter and I never achieved that “comfortable latch.” Then, for weeks, my daughter cried, her whole body scrunched tight like a fist, and rarely slept:  she was allergic to milk. I removed all dairy and soy products from my diet, eating mainly vegetables, meat, Thai food. Soon my baby slept through the night. Unfortunately, the combination of her new appetite and our poor latching skills led to mastitis, an infection of the breast tissue, and it would not heal. Around three months into nursing, my daughter began to spit up blood. It was mine. It was time to stop breast feeding.

Allow me this: while the decision to breast feed has become both personal and political, the act of breast feeding is necessarily individual. Excepting twins, it involves only two, and is the first success or failure of the mother-child relationship. It is not woman against the world reclaiming her mammalian roots. It is mother and newborn alone at night, hoping to feed and be fed.

-Jennifer Gandel Ridgeway

#27 – Political Accessory

People who fancy themselves as folk who are engaged in the world at large have an upsetting tendency to deck their children, pets, and messenger bags with political slogans.  These accessories are troubling because they usually shut down actual debate of the issues the accessories purport to be for/against.  This is because the sporter of a political button/t-shirt/tattoo comes off as someone whose mind is already  irrevocably made up.

Political accessories date at least as far back as George Washington, but the concept that one can and should publicly announce one’s affiliations has been exacerbated by the likes of (everyone’s favorite boogeywomen) social networking sites.  We belong to cultures where individuals are defined by the things they list in the “About Me” section of their profiles and “Political Beliefs” is now a category wedged in-between “Favorite Bands” and “Eye Color.”  This creates an environment where people announce their politics to the world for the sake of image-building as opposed to the sake of creating a space for meaningful dialogue. (Though, it’s probably unfair to blame everything on social networking sites, there’s always the possibility that narcissim predated Facebook…)

But the epitome of political peacocking isn’t the Obama Hope t-shirt, the Tibet! button,  or the sparkly MySpace graphic encouraging you to Choose Life.  The epitome of this kind of peacocking is the political bumper sticker.  It is the ultimate way to show off your beliefs to as many strangers as possible while minimizing the possibility that one of those strangers will want to or even be able to engage you in a discussion about said beliefs.  Also, the display of any bumper sticker is a selfish act as it encourages drivers to divert their attention from not crashing into a van of Girl Scouts in order to take note of your beliefs.

-Daniela Olszewska

#26 – Watching Your Train Leave You Behind

When a train leaves you behind, it is the watching that is most painful. The doors to the platform are already closed, but through the glass you can watch the last silver car pulling away. You watch, because what else can you do? Indeed, it recedes, it shrinks. And as that sight dwindles, what magnifies is the knowledge that, had you set your alarm for the appropriate time, had you the foresight to pack your bag the previous night despite the spinning room, had the traffic lights been any color but red as your friend sped toward the station in his white pickup truck, you might have made it.

Don’t think of this scene—of your abandonment, of your inability to keep yourself together—as metaphor. It would be too poignant.

Cliché is kinder, even a comfort at times. Cliché means having something in common with the everyman. Cliché means having ties to something larger, more universal. It means you are not alone with yourself. You stick with that.

You are close, but no cigar. And as you watch your train leave you behind, as you watch that last silver car, you know it is not only the last car, but the last train. And not the last of the day, but the last of the week. You are stranded, a verifiable fuck-up. Yes, you’ve really done it this time. Yes, you shot yourself in the foot.

Your body unsteady, you regret that last beer, in fact, that last bar. You’ve been intentionally placing yourself in jeopardy for a while now, and now here is your train leaving you behind, and you are watching it. Think penance; think detox tea; think reconciliation. You think you need to get your life back on track.

Because this isn’t really happening to me.

-Laurence Ross

#25 – Soup

Soup is a fixture on most menus. This hot, cold, or, unfortunately, lukewarm liquid meal is comforting even in its most bastardized forms. Still, though it might be difficult, we must make distinctions. It is a painful fact for soup lovers to accept, but the truth is, not all soups are created equally.

Consider soup to be a system of European feudalism from the middle ages. A soup such as French Onion would be considered a lord, whereas a canned, viscous, over-salted can of chicken noodle soup would be a serf.

Lordly soups reign over the epicurean feudal manor, making lowly soups look even more pitiful and peasant-like than ever before. Cheesy baked potato soup, Gazpacho, and brandied- cream of mushroom all provide robust, royal flavors that a lesser soup simply cannot achieve. When hosting company, it is critical to serve a lordly soup so as not to offend guests with a pauper’s fare.

A mid-grade soup of some quality, like a good tomato soup, is a fine example of a vassal soup. It is not a meal on its own, yet it is an essential compliment to a grilled cheese sandwich, a Monte Cristo, or goldfish crackers. Because it is incapable of ruling over taste buds without some assistance, a soup like vegetable or consommé must hold the title of vassal.

Serf soups are the kind of things that are used when an appropriate meal or soup cannot be prepared, usually due to illness. When the taste buds are coated and the throat is shellacked in mucus, few things are as comforting as an easy to prepare can of serf-soup.

All soup castes, from lords to serfs, are needed to run a successful gastronomic fiefdom. However, take heed because soup cannot revolt, but consumers of soup can and will.

-Casie Wexler