#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

[Please Excuse This Brief Interruption]

But we’d like to inform you that our sister site, ANOTHER 300 Reviews launched officially today with a post from our very own Sara Joy Culver!  Please take a moment to check it out.  Thanks!

-300 Reviews

#24 – Boredom

I quit drinking. The reason I quit was that I was never bored anymore. This is a lie – there were many more reasons, including witnessing a man have his head opened with a pool cue. However, this is usually harder and more laborious to explain as it entails a story, several – so, I tell people I quit because I wasn’t bored anymore. My life had become a sorry triptych – drinking, hung-over, google reading. Indeed, somewhere in there I made my livelihood, but that was usually in the hung-over panel, and when proctoring exams, the hung-over and google reading panels met at the seams. I thought when I stopped drinking that I’d read more, write more, and that the boredom that would ultimately ensue would be a productive boredom.

This is not the case. I have read more – these last two days, five books. I haven’t written at all, but rather just tinkered with old poems, tabbing this line over or deleting the word sobriquet because someone said my poems tend to jump register. Dick. I google-image the people I read and have decided that poets are never attractive. They often, especially the young ones, bare a semblance to attractiveness, but there’s a key feature awry – a soft jaw, a stray eye, pock marked skin, fifteen pounds. It pains me to admit this, that you are being judged this way, but blame our celebrity culture, the internet, my boredom. I wonder if I’m attractive or poet-attractive. I know the latter. Forcing me to realize that if my parents were to have had my teeth fixed when I was a child or my nose were never broken I would’ve gone into investment banking, not to be left googling poets’ pictures imagining them in bed, here, alone.

-Nik De Dominic

HOT or POET HOT?

#23 – Text to Go

If all goes according to plan, the future of electronic books will be settled in an epic literary battle between Google, Amazon, and the anonymous authors of the Wikipedia article on “Intellectual property.” A staggering portion of this chin-scratching quarrel revolves around books by unknown authors that no one has ever heard of. For people actually interested in reading things that exist, the textual revolution has already occurred.

In 2009, the iPod became your library, your living-room table, your bookshelf. No longer just a minimalist fashion accessory or a flash drive for your music playlist, Apple’s device (and its cellular siblings) fulfilled its promise, paradoxically, by making the lowest of low tech perpetually accessible. Forget the clunky devices being peddled as stocking stuffers. Like the happy accidents that brought us 140 characters and Twitter, the decade’s embodiment of blithe, self-conscious detachment evolved into a portable repository of long-form journalism, essays, even classic novels.

Even as the proliferation of hyperlinked thinking has sparked an impassioned backlash against mere serendipity, the fact is that mobile technology now enables us to enjoy the simple act of reading reduced to its purest components: words, devoid of context or cover, margin or edge, scrolling upwards as if the book had never been invented.

While this new state of affairs benefits the compulsive reader and the subway commuter, it bodes less well for the neighborhood library. Ironically, the mass appeal of portable devices provides the groundwork for a 21^st-century Alexandria – a comprehensive but monolithic virtual repository in place of the local network that Carnegie built. The mechanics of reading have never been simpler – or more efficient. But with that efficiency comes the danger of walling ourselves off, like cloistered monks toiling in the stacks of antiquity.

-Andy Guess

#22 – The College of Physicians of Philadelphia – Mütter Museum

Located in Center City Philadelphia, the Mütter Museum’s initial purpose was to educate future doctors about anatomy and medical oddities. Now open to the public, its mission has expanded to “tell important stories on what it is to be human”. The exhibits, however, could suggest otherwise: 2000 Objects Collected from People’s Throats, The Soap Lady (who inexplicably mummified to adipocere), skeletons of Siamese-twin infants, among dozens of others. The exhibits are frequented, one could argue, not because they reflect daily experience, but because they exist so beyond what is perceived to be common and palatable.

In high school, I believed the museum was an endless freak show and on occasion would take dates there to elicit their gut-churning. Raised in a Catholic, working-class neighborhood, I was taught that the incurably deformed, the terminally ill, and death itself were never to be pondered or discussed, but feared and eventually mourned. A mysterious black cloud hung over a human’s final moments, where the will to survive was undone by one’s own finite timeline.

In short, a visit to the Mütter was an implied act of rebellion. And how surprised I was, each time, when my dates and I wandered not with nausea, but a shared, unspoken curiosity. Two decades later, my daughter came into the world with meconium jammed in her lungs. If Daisy were born just a century earlier—a blip in human history—I would not be a father. How many teens today know a newborn can die because her tar-like shit went down her throat? And the adults—now that we know that these same lungs can be cleared within minutes—are we any less loving when we lower our heads and kiss the infant squarely, as if we were the ones who needed the blessing?

-Joseph P. Wood

#21 – Lemon-Lime Citrus Drinks

Between Coke and Pepsi, Coke is the older of the two brands, the dominant one. It associates itself with warmth, nostalgia. In a Coke commercial, computerized polar bears sip from icy bottles on Christmas Eve. Conversely, Pepsi is a drink for the young, an underdog, a moment of impulse. Pepsi is the “choice of a new generation,” “the right one, baby, uh huh.” Of course, most soda fountains provide other choices, too. There the additional brown liquids. The hyper-yellows and hyper-reds. And also, as afterthoughts, the lemon-lime citrus.

7UP and Sprite have been associated with slogans like “Make Seven Up Yours” or “Lymon.” Their catchphrases seem to come and go, barely remembered. For decades, advertisers have hatched campaigns to sell their lemon-lime drinks. But nothing seems to stick. Since their creation, not 7UP or Sprite have been able to invent any kind of lasting narrative. (Sprite even showed lack of confidence in their longest-running “Obey your thirst,” truncating it to the innocuous “Obey.”) And this may be partially the point. Transparent sodas aren’t supposed to lead the marketplace. They only allow consumers the possibility of choice. We choose them to satisfy a momentary desire for change, a temporary departure, a vacation from the usual cola.

In the narrative vacuum that surrounds 7UP and Sprite, we begin to take responsibility for our own choices. It is a decision unaided by advertising, and it shows the undercurrents of our personality. This common selection lays us transparent: The devastating sweetness of Sprite sheens our mouths with a protective coat of sticky sugar. Sprite is for the depraved; those who yearn to be wrapped up, nurtured, comforted. In contrast, the tart lime and violent carbonation of 7UP stabs us repeatedly in the tongue and throat. Only closet masochists drink it; those who secretly desire to destroy themselves.

-Lucas Southworth

#20 – Acqua di Giò pour Homme

Giorgio Armani’s Acqua di Giò pour Homme is currently the top selling men’s fragrance in the United States.  The opening citrusy blast is pleasant and invigorating, and soon after the heart of the scent appears:  synthetic jasmine lending a pleasant floral aroma, a bouquet of fruits gushing in the accord, and a well integrated aquatic note imparting a slightly salty tinge.

This is where things get murky:  the opening scents of the perfume are rather fleeting.  Within a short period of time, the basenotes of the scent are revealed:  cedar, patchouli, white musk, and rock rose.  These basenotes (the true test of a great scent) differ greatly from the hesperidic start and smell like a wet cardboard box of rotting watermelon.

Acqua di Giò’s popularity is commonly associated with the younger set; it is many teenagers’ first cologne—their graduation from various Axe body sprays.  These body sprays rely solely on topnotes:  the initial scent does not change; it only grows weaker and needs to be reapplied (too) liberally.  Upon acquiring their first frosted bottle of Acqua di Giò, cologne novices apply this technique as well—they desire (and most importantly believe that women desire) the initial marine scent on continuous loop—yet there is no time-traveling when it comes to scent and skin, and thus a layering effect occurs. The cologne is applied to the point where the scent lingers behind the subject like a motion-blur.

The Italian grand couturier house has failed us in this regard—less so for their subpar product, but for creating a flawed universal.  One senses that Armani is aware of this; they mistakenly placed its highest label (Giorgio Armani) on Acqua di Giò and are now looking to distance itself from its best-selling product.  Perhaps too late for our sons and suitors of our daughters.

-Brian Oliu

#19 – The Adirondack Chairs of the Main Line

The Adirondack Chair is a quintessential symbol of relaxation in the Northeast, though I have never actually seen someone from the Main Line sitting in an Adirondack chair. These Main Line Adirondacks, frequently spotted in pairs, positioned on front lawns, remain quintessentially a symbol.

The Main Line is a strip of Philadelphian suburbs characterized by wealth and, perhaps, plagued by aspiration. Think white-picket fence, minus the fence—because a fence would block the passerby’s view of the house. I grew up walking its sidewalks, landscapers lining curbs with their mowers and blowers, their trimmers and shears, each house a child in perpetual need of a changing. And children, of course, are expensive.

Recently, while walking through the back roads of the Main Line, I pass a lemonade stand staffed with a sister and her younger brother. “Would you like some refreshing lemonade?” says the sister. “If you buy two, you get a discount,” says the brother. “He’s the one good with money,” says the sister. “He’s going to be an accountant when he grows up.”

Perhaps it is only when the residents of the Main Line grow old that they finally sit in their Adirondacks. They work long and hard to keep them there on the lawn, to keep the model of leisure in sight. Sadly, the majority of the Main Line are not quite the upper class they aspire to be, and the seat of the Adirondack is deep. The Adirondack is build for extended sitting, its arms wide enough to hold not just the glass, but the bottle. And this is the sort of time unavailable to the Main Line because there is always a new object of consumption on the horizon, just out of sight, where, as the Catholics teach, remains the face of God.

-Laurence Ross