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 [...]
Archive for December, 2009
#19 – The Adirondack Chairs of the Main Line
Posted in reviews, tagged Adirondack chairs, aspiration, leisure, lemonade stand, Main Line, Pennsylvania, Suburbs on December 30, 2009 | 1 Comment »
#18 – Washing One’s Car
Posted in reviews, tagged car, easy and free, Murphy Oil Soap, soap, speed, wash on December 28, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Unfortunately winter is upon us, which means that the time of the year during which one can wash one’s car has basically ended. Alack! For the chance to wash one’s car is truly one of the greatest pleasures offered by car ownership, aside of course from speeding on country roads or from having an excuse [...]
#17 – The Ultimate Romanian Christmas Special
Posted in reviews, tagged broadcast, Ceausescu, christmas, execution, truth on December 25, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Twenty years ago, three paratroopers shot Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu, rulers of Communist Romania, to death. Footage of the event, along with the hour-long secret trial, aired on Romanian television later that day. Christmas day. Do You Hear What I hear? Frosty the Romanian. Feliz Navi-dead. Details are murky, though news outlets try to present [...]
#16 – The Annual Christmas Crossing Reenactment
Posted in reviews, tagged christmas, crossing, Delaware, Hessians, New Jersey, toy fire truck, Washington, winter on December 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The crossing begins at one o’clock in the afternoon; a good 23 hours before Washington ever stepped into a boat, though, perhaps, this is for the best: children have been up for hours now, and to ask them to stay awake in the Titusville cold a shade before the crushing disappointment of December 26th would [...]
#15 – Winter
Posted in reviews, tagged cold, dull illumination, length of days, poetry, Wallace Stevens, winter on December 25, 2009 | 2 Comments »
It is best to begin with Wallace Stevens. “One must have a mind of winter … not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind.” I frequently return to that first half of the singular syntactic unit that constitutes “The Snow Man” because I vacillate between a lack of comprehension and [...]
#13 – The Personal Vehicle
Posted in reviews, tagged cinema, personal vehicle, speed, the palaces of amusement, vehicles, Walter Benjamin on December 21, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Walter Benjamin tells us that there is a homology between the pace of modern life and the cinema. The speed, shocks and dislocations of the city were “established as a formal principle” in film’s “rhythm of perception”. Perceptive as it is, we need to update Benjamin’s thesis. In the 21st century, there is a new [...]
#12 – Telling People “Everything Always Works Out for the Best in the End”
Posted in reviews, tagged destiny, dime store wisdom, fate, goodness, laser bowling, leukemia, Willy Loman on December 14, 2009 | 9 Comments »
An Olympic hopeful once told me that when his swimming career ended in a vehicular collision, it was all for the best since he was enjoying having a social life at last. I asked him if he ever still dreamed of gold in the hundred fly and he turned silent. We both knew that a [...]
#11 – Cats
Posted in reviews, tagged aesthetics, cats, cheeseburgers, love, mythology, Rick Astley, tolerance on December 11, 2009 | 10 Comments »
Cats: In short, you can’t trust them. Perhaps that’s being a little too dismissive. Let’s dig in, like claws into a peacefully sleeping stomach, and contemplate cats. Aesthetically: An animal made of angles; sleek, small, light on its feet. Their movements are so subtle that one doesn’t see them when they’re there, does see them [...]
#10 – Rogue Taxidermy
Posted in reviews, tagged death, life, mutants, mutation, taxidermy on December 9, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Rogue taxidermy is the practice of creating stuffed animals that have no real, live counterparts out of the corpses of animals that have real, live counterparts. As literal hybrids, rogue pieces serve as 3-D manifestations of our anxiety over the ethical use of animals and our fear of the ever-growing threat of mutation. Rogue taxidermy [...]
