Sean Means, who has assumed the mantle of "culture vulture" in addition to his usual movie-critic role at the Salt Lake Tribune, made a nice observation today in response to the news that yet another venerable SL institution, Squirrel Brothers Ice Cream (which used to be Snelgrove's, before it was infected with the "cutesy name" syndrome that runs rampant in this state), is closing down:
Speaking of Indiana Jones, here are a couple of items I meant to post a month ago but didn't get around to:
Briefly noted, today is the 75th anniversary of the first drive-in movie theater, which opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey. I've never been a regular patron of drive-ins, but I have had a few memorable experiences at them -- no, you may not ask me to elaborate on those -- and of course I'm always a bleeding-heart for anything that's both nostalgic and endangered, which drive-ins definitely are. (There are fewer than 500 left today, down from some 5,000 in their heyday.)
Wired.com has a short history of this venerable institution, and local movie critic Sean Means lists the surviving Utah examples on his blog. I recommend the Motor Vu in Erda, for what it's worth; The Girlfriend and I spent a very pleasant evening there last summer with her family, all of whom live nearby. It's a family-run single-screener, charmingly low-budget and down-home feeling.
One moment in particular from that night stands out: as the darkness thickens and a cool breeze begins to rise from the surrounding farmland, I notice a freight train chugging along the benches of the mountain range to the east, behind the screen. It's far enough away that it looks like a black thread with a light at its tip, sliding along beneath the huge, projected face of Johnny Depp, the mournful cry of its horn providing counterpoint to Captain Jack Sparrow's dire circumstances (we were seeing Pirates 3, of course; I have to say, it worked much better as drive-in fare than it did the first time we saw it in a quote-unquote real theater). That, my friends, is one of those rare moments when you start to think time travel might actually be possible, when you find yourself connected by experience to an audience that would've been experiencing more or less the same thing 50 years earlier. Moments like those are truly magical and all-too-rare these days.
Far out on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley -- about as far west as you can go without piling into a mountain, actually -- there's a little town called Magna.
My local readers probably all just snickered; Magna doesn't get a lot of respect around here. It began a century or so ago as a company town housing workers for a nearby mine and smelter, and it's never managed to live down its humble roots or its rough-and-tumble reputation. It's certainly not a place you'd think to go in search of an enjoyable night of live theater. But that's exactly what The Girlfriend and I experienced Friday night at a charming little place called the Empress Theatre.
I just learned from the blog of Irene Gallo, the art director for Tor Books, that the illustrative artist John Berkey has died. Irene mentions something about him being in poor health in recent years, but so far, I haven't been able to find any further details about his age or cause of death.
Berkey is probably best known for painting some of the very earliest pieces of promotional art associated with Star Wars -- the image above was a poster concept for the movie, which ended up instead becoming the iconic cover of the film's novelization -- but his work was pretty commonly seen on all kinds of books and posters in the late '70s and early '80s, and it was a big influence on my developing sense of aesthetics. Several of his paintings still live in my memory; when I read of his death, I instantly recalled an image of his that appeared on Navy recruitment posters throughout my high school and early college years, and also this painting,which was the cover of a National Geographic coffee-table book called Our Universe. A friend of mine owned a copy of that book; as I recall, I borrowed it several times, but about all I remember about it now was that awesome cover painting.
Berkey's work was more impressionistic than realistic, but one of the things it always conveyed was a true sense of mass. His starships and ocean-going craft and floating cities always felt huge and immensely powerful. It was a perfect style for the time of its greatest popularity, when Star Wars, with its mile-long Star Destroyers and moon-sized Death Star, set the tone for so much science fiction.
I don't recall seeing any new work from Berkey in years, and I don't know if that's because he's been ill or otherwise not working, or if his stuff just fell out of fashion. I rediscovered him a few years ago when I ran across a used art book at Sammy's, and I spent several days marveling at how many of his paintings were familiar, and how much I still like them. That Star Wars piece above, for the record, is one of my favorites out of the hundreds of Original Trilogy-related paintings produced over the years; this companion piece is, too, even if it inaccurately depicts several Corellian YT-1300 light freighters at the Battle of Yavin, rather than just the one we all know actually was there...
Before I shut down for the night, three items that caught my interest:
Incidentally, does anyone else wonder what Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane are up to these days? I've often had the thought that it'd be very interesting if Ferris has become a burned-out, work-obsessed capitalist and his old buddy Cameron shows up to remind him of the life-changing lesson he taught 20 years ago...
Nah, it'd never work.
I had a little surprise waiting in my e-mail inbox this morning and thought I'd share it with my three loyal readers. The gorgeous photo above was taken by my friend, Mike Gillilan; it's a panorama consisting of several overlapping images that have been digitally stitched together, then tweaked in the computer to produce a "high dynamic range image." I'll confess, I don't fully understand the HDR stuff -- hell, I don't even own a digital camera -- but as you can see, it produces some really striking results. Don't forget to click the image for the larger version...
Incidentally, in case you don't recognize this location, it's the Sandy TRAX station, a.k.a., the "end of the line, as far as we go," the southernmost terminus of the Salt Lake Valley's light-rail system. This is the station where Gillilan and I both begin our daily commutes. For the record, it looks much cooler in this photo than in the real world...
So, I work on a block of buildings that are roughly a century old, and one of them is currently undergoing extensive renovations. That means the nice, peaceful plaza where I like to sit on pleasantly warm days isn't very inviting right now, what with the constant beep-beep-beep of delivery vehicle back-up alerts and the crash and boom of broken masonry, wood, and metal being dumped down a ten-story-high disposal chute into a giant dumpster below. I'm frankly eager for the whole thing to be over with.
That said, however, the situation does have its amusing aspects. Like the signs I noticed on the building's front doors today, the ones that warn passersby of "Undry Paint."
Undry. In my day, we used to call that wet. I guess times change.
Saturday night, The Girlfriend and I attended a performance by the Peking Acrobats and were duly amazed by jaw-dropping exhibitions of human flexibility, strength, balance, and sheer showmanship. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend you see this show. You will be entertained, to paraphrase our old friend Maximus. And if you have children, it's even family-friendly. Seriously. The kids in the audience were utterly spellbound.
However, as fascinating as it was to see a 70-pound Asian woman of indeterminate age twist herself around so that her butt was literally sitting on top of her own head (and then have six of her friends get on top of her and do exactly the same thing!), that was only a prelude to the real show we experienced on the way home...
[Warning: harsh language and some ickiness ahead, so click away now if you're squeamish. I'm not kidding!]
By now, all my local readers have probably heard about the big news from last night, a four-alarm fire that gutted the building that used to house the old Club DV8. I never went to DV8 myself -- dance clubs were never my scene, and those that played so-called "alternative" music even less so -- but the place was an institution here in these parts for a very long time, and I'm sure there are a lot of folks along the Wasatch tonight mourning its loss. (The club has actually been closed and the building vacant for several years, but all the signage was still in place, and I understand there was hope that it might reopen eventually.)
My office is only a couple of blocks from the site of the fire; there was a thick pall of smoke hanging in the air when I stepped off the train this morning, as well as a rank odor like a freshly doused campfire. Just what we needed, I thought, as if the air quality isn't lousy enough this time of year. I expected the smell would go away as the day wore on, but when it was seemed to intensify this afternoon around 2 PM, I got curious. It took only a few minutes to walk to the scene, where it turned out the building was still on fire, or it had flared up again, and a plume of brown gunk was boiling up into the sky. It was actually a pretty fascinating spectacle: the building's roof had fallen in, so in between gusts of smoke I could see blue sky through the windows, and the lower floor was encased in dollops of dirty gray ice built up from the firemen's sprays the night before. A demolition crew stood ready nearby with a backhoe and a wrecking ball as a pumper truck moved into position and trained its water cannon on the stubborn fire, while, across the street, the sidewalk in front of the Salt Palace Convention Center was packed with TV-news cameramen and gawkers like me. I wish I'd thought to take my camera to work with me today. I could've gotten some cool documentary shots.
The smoke was drifting southeast, directly back to the block where I work. I can still smell it in my clothes as I type this. The working theory is that the fire was started by a transient or a squatter in the building who was trying to keep warm, but we'll never know for sure; the building was declared unsafe and the remnants of it knocked down late this afternoon, with no substantial investigation beforehand. If it was a transient, I hope the poor bastard got out.
As I said, I have no sentiment about Club DV8, but I do regret the loss of another of Salt Lake's antique buildings. I don't know when this one was constructed, but judging from the brick facings and the ornamental work up near the eaves, I'd guess sometime in the early 1900s. There are precious few buildings of that vintage left in the downtown area, and seeing the burnt-out husk easily toppled by the wrecking ball on TV tonight brought a lump to my throat. I imagine some developer will probably jump at the chance to fill in the empty lot with a soulless glass box...
This is interesting: according to some German scholars, the identity of the woman in Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting has been confirmed by an ancient note scribbled in the margins of a 500-year-old book. They believe this note indicates she is Lisa Gherardini, also known as Lisa del Giocondo, who was the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. (Curiously, the Mona Lisa is also known as "La Gioconda," Italian for "the happy woman," a little factoid I never knew and which seems to support the Germans' theory.)
I'm somewhat ambivalent about this discovery, myself. On the one hand, items like this always catch my eye, because I enjoy history and the pleasant "a-ha" feeling that comes from making a hither-to unknown connection. I also find it fascinating that there can still be a book with the handwritten notes of a centuries-dead man in it kicking around after five centuries, and that someone can be idly paging through it and suddenly notice something that no one has ever caught before and suddenly we have an answer to an age-old question. And yet there is also pleasure in mysteries, especially the ancient and essentially unsolvable ones, and part of the appeal of this particular painting is the questions that surround it: who is this woman, and what (if anything) is she smiling about? Wouldn't finding that woman's diary and answering those questions once and for all defuse some of that magical quality that surrounds the painting?
To use another example, it's a lot more fun to think about the possibility that there might be a Loch Ness Monster than to definitively know one way or the other. If you find the rotting corpse of the thing washed up on the shore, then you know that it was never anything more than a giant mutant otter or something, and it becomes mundane. And if you somehow prove that there's absolutely nothing in that lake, well, then you lose all the fun of thinking that maybe there was something there.
Ultimately, of course, it doesn't really matter who the woman we call "Mona Lisa" actually is. The painting remains what it has always been, a beautiful work of art and a touchstone of Western culture. As SamuraiFrog asks, does knowing the identity of the woman in the painting enhance your appreciation of the work? It doesn't for me, and in fact it arguably diminishes the experience of viewing it... but damn if I didn't rush to click through to that news item anyway.
The Salt Lake Tribune's film critic Sean Means is reporting that the Trolley Square Cinemas will go dark by the end of the month, a casualty of the extensive renovation project that is converting Trolley Square from an interesting, funky, uniquely Salt Lake shopping mall into a less-interesting, brighter-lighted, and no doubt utterly homogenized shopping mall. There is no word on whether a new movie theater will be incorporated into the redesigned Trolley, but my hunch is that there won't be. And that seems like real shame to me.
Continue reading "The Last Trolley Theater Calls It Quits" »
You know, I love Utah, I really do. I grew up here, my family roots stretch back to the very first wave of Mormon pioneers in 1847, and, for my money, you're never going to see anything as jaw-droppingly beautiful as the Wasatch Mountains on the first clear day after a snow storm. This is my home, and while I can imagine living in other places, I highly doubt I ever will.
But as comfortable as I generally am here, it drives me absolutely batshit insane when the busybody prudes of this state decide it's time to dust off their torches and pitchforks and launch yet another crusade against their latest perceived threat to the moral well-being of the community.
Case in point: the kerfuffle over the Blue Boutique.
Several years ago, I awoke on an overcast and wintry day to a most unusual sight: a hometown landmark called the Crane House creeping slowly down the street on the back of an enormous flatbed trailer. Evicted from its original location (which was soon to become a Hollywood Video store), the old Victorian mansion -- well, it was considered a mansion when it was built, at least in these parts -- was transported about a mile south, placed on a quiet side road, and reborn as the Riverton Museum, a rare case (at least in Utah) of a historic building that was spared the wrecking ball when progress came a-calling. (Incidentally, if you're inclined to follow that link for the museum, prepare your eyes before you click; the web page on the other end is a bit... busy.)
The moving of the Crane House was one of the most awe-inspiring things I've ever seen. The century-old, two-story home made the trip intact, not cut in half and reassembled like other older homes I've seen relocated. The place always looked big to me when I was a kid pedaling past on my Schwinn; it looked gargantuan coming down the middle of Redwood Road, as tall as the telephone poles it was passing. (Of course, the trailer beneath it raised it up a good five or six feet above ground level.)
This morning I spotted something on the InterWebs that might be even more impressive:
That's a home that's probably about the same age as the Crane House, but appears to be much bigger to my eye, being moved moved seven miles downriver from its original site in Palmetto, Florida, to begin a new life as a visitor's center at a nature preserve. As this article points out, moving the house by water has one major advantage over the land-based method that was used for the Crane: you don't have to worry about power lines or automobile traffic.
Pretty amazing stuff...
My constant scouring of the InterWebs for the very best in afternoon time-wasters has uncovered a gem: Brenda's Babes, a blog wherein a woman who collects vintage pin-up art shares her treasures with the world, one piece at a time.
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I quite enjoy pin-up art (yes, kids, that's right! It's another Random Factoid About Me™!). The appeal is two-fold. First, there's the obvious reason: I'm a guy, and I like looking at pictures of pretty girls who aren't wearing much in the way of clothing (although pin-up art doesn't necessarily require skimpy attire or nudity). The other reason is that I just like the retro aesthetic of the classic pin-ups, the general look of '40s and '50s-vintage illustration. It's part of my whole fascination with a time period I never lived through, I guess.
This Brenda who runs the pin-up blog is currently a finalist in a contest that required her to make a video about her collection. She stands to win $20K if her video gets enough votes, so go give it a look, and if you like what you see, drop a vote for her.
Be aware that her collections feature lots of ladies in their underwear and occasionally some mild nudity (including a very unexpected image of a topless Betty White in her younger days. Yes, that Betty White, the one from The Golden Girls! She wasn't always somebody's grandmother, you know...), just in case that sort of thing bothers you...
In hunting around YouTube for videos of this morning's implosion, I found a few clips that may be of interest to sentimental slobs such as myself who want to reminisce about the downtown malls. The first is an appropriately titled "last look" that's heavy on schmaltz (warning: Barbera Streisand's "Memories" ahead!) and includes a little too much footage of the parking garages for my tastes, but also nicely encapsulates what's going away in the name of progress:
Continue reading "Video Tours of Crossroads and ZCMI Center" »
At a little after 6.30 this morning, the Key Bank Tower, a 30-year-old high-rise office building in downtown Salt Lake, was imploded to make way for the new City Creek Center redevelopment project. It was the first such implosion in the downtown area since the old Hotel Newhouse was demolished back in '83 (which I didn't care about at the time, but in retrospect seems a deep shame, especially since the place where the hotel stood is now -- can you guess? -- a parking lot! Moreover, a parking lot that is rarely anywhere near capacity! That was really worth taking out a historically interesting and beautiful building, wasn't it?)
I haven't been able to find an embeddable video of the Key Bank's death to post up here, but if you go to KSL-TV's site, there are several nifty clips for your viewing pleasure. I especially like Angle #1, which has a couple of men in the foreground to provide some scale and drama, and Angle #4, which is a long-distance shot that includes the First Security Building I wrote about a while back. (Look for the red glow; that would be the big neon sign I like so well.) With the Key Bank's destruction, the so-called Crossroads Block -- named for the mall that used to wrap around the base of the tower -- is now clear. Meanwhile, across the street, the demolition of the ZCMI Center Mall continues. (Yes, you out-of-towners, Salt Lake used to have two malls right across the street from each other; it actually wasn't as insane as it sounds, as they had a different mix of retailers and catered to different demographics. As with so many other things about Salt Lake culture, it's a little complicated and it reflects the social schism between Mormons and non-Mormons...)
Continue reading "Key Bank Tower Implosion: The End of Crossroads" »
...there's a giant rubber duckie floating around the Loire Estuary in France:
I will admit that many modern art installations leave me utterly baffled and sometimes even offended at their inscrutability, but this thing is just... charming. And maybe that's the best thing art can do sometimes, to simply bring a smile to one's face. Especially at times when everything else in the world seems to be teetering on the edge of Eternal Suckiness.
A number of items from the Department of Changing Landscapes have caught my eye in recent days, but one in particular makes me a very happy boy indeed: I've learned that there is a genuine 1940s-vintage diner on its way to Utah even as I type this, the very one you see in the photo above.
I confess, I have a deep affection for old-tymey cafes and greasy spoons, the sorts of places where both of my grandmothers slung hash and where men in hats hunched over their eggs and coffee at long counters while they read the latest news about the War in Europe. There aren't many such places left in Utah, and the ones that do still endure tend to be pretty far from the Wasatch Front, out in the small outpost towns of the state's hinterlands. (I recommend Mom's Cafe in Salina, if you ever find yourself in Salina for some reason.) As far as I know, however, Utah never had a diner like the one in the photo above, one of those streamlined prefab jobs that resemble train cars and turn up in period movies like, well, Diner.
Continue reading "The Road Island Diner from Rhode Island" »
Some random stuff I've run across in recent days and would like to share with my Three Loyal Readers:
As long as I'm talking about painters whose craft I've admired since childhood, I ought to put in a shout-out to Don Davis. His imaginative renderings of what it would look like inside Gerard O'Neill's proposed space colonies -- essentially giant cylinders that would spin to simulate gravity -- seemed to be on every third magazine cover when I was an impressionable kid in the 1970s. Don's got his own web site, naturally enough, and it turns out that he's offering a number of those iconic images up to the public domain, for folks to do with as they please. I remember this one (or one very like it) in particular. Go have a look, and see if you remember any of these yourself...
(My thanks to the Paleo-Future blog for mentioning this.)
The Trib also has a brief history of Trolley Square, if you're interested. Here's the even-briefer version:
The area served as territorial and state fairgrounds until 1908 when Union Pacific Railroad magnate E.H. Harriman made it the site for an innovative trolley car system. At one time, more than 144 trolleys operated from mission-style car barns erected at the site. They served the area until the line was discontinued in 1945.
For years, Trolley persisted as a decaying garage for Utah Transit Authority buses and Utah Power maintenance vehicles and the historic block was littered with junk vehicles, old tires and trash contained within barbed wire. Then, in 1972, developers dedicated to historic restoration renovated the old barns, which were painted yellow at the time, into a collection of boutiques and trendy restaurants.
There has been talk lately of a new owner planning to do some major renovations on Trolley. I've been concerned that these plans (which of course have not been revealed to the public) will change the quirky Trolley characteristics that I described last night and personally like, namely the maze-like layout and dimly lighted corners. I suspect that the shootings will now make such changes inevitable regardless of whatever the earlier plans were, and all in the name of our singular modern concern, "security."
I've just been reading about a massive new development project that's planned for Lehi, Utah, a town just south of where I grew up, in the next valley over. Up until a few years ago, Lehi was a bucolic farming community where the largest structure of any kind was the old roller mill where Kevin Bacon and his friends staged their high-school dance in the movie Footloose. I used to love driving down that way in my big Ford Galaxie, past the sweet-smelling fields along narrow two-lane (and in some cases, one-lane) roads that were so infrequently travelled that no one had bothered to maintain the lane stripes.
As with so many of the places I knew as a teenager and young adult, however, that Lehi is gone forever. Nowadays Lehi is another anonymous suburban wasteland with some of the most congested traffic conditions along the Wasatch Front (the result of a whole bunch of new residents trying to get to work along those narrow old roads), and it's about to get worse. The planned development is described as an "85-acre 'high-adventure' residential and retail development" that will include the tallest building in Utah, a 450-foot, five-star hotel and convention center. I have no idea what a "high-adventure" residential and retail development is supposed to be, and I can't imagine a less likely place to plant a skyscraper than the wind-swept bluff that divides the Salt Lake Valley from Utah Valley, but here's the really agonizing part: this entire project is being designed by none other than Frank Gehry.
[Ed. note: this topic is well past its prime -- which was way back around the second week of December, if you're keeping track -- but it's something I still wanted to talk about, so here we are...]
I write fairly often on this blog about the changing face of the Salt Lake Valley, how places and landmarks I've known all my life are disappearing, and how difficult it is for me to see them go. I'm not sure why this so-called "progress" affects me so deeply, but it does. Watching yet another familiar old house or historic commercial building fall, or an alfalfa field get paved over to make way for yet another WalMart-Home-Depot-Chili's-cell-phone-store cluster, fills me with a genuine sense of despair. And it makes me downright angry that the local Utah culture, collectively speaking, pays so much lip service to its heritage by throwing a parade and fireworks every July 24th, but seems so disinterested in preserving any of the tangible aspects of its past, namely the buildings and landscapes of earlier times.
In the high thirties art, technology and design are so intertwined it is sometimes hard to pry them apart. ...Since 1939 art and technology have broken apart, for many reasons. Architects still design skyscrapers, but they are rarely technological showpieces. we have stopped building bridges. Locomotives nowadays are not candidates for design competitions. Airplanes never were. Artists no longer paint heroic murals. Even if they did, one suspects that technology might not be a favorite subject. (Unless it were the villain?)
The art-and-technology divorce has been a disaster for both parties, and it has profoundly alienated us from the future. "The story of the relcamation of the site and the building of the [New York World's] Fair on it," says the 1939 Guide [to the Fair], "is a romantic saga of modern engineering." Yes, once upon a time, engineering was romantic. ...Today we respect technology, spend heavily on it and can't live without it. But the spiritual glow is long gone. Art has lost its grip on technology, we have lost our grip on the future; and the American religion, in which skyscrapers and steam engines were beautiful and inspiring and numinous sacred objects, is dead.
--David Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair
I've been saying for years that one of the most disheartening things about the modern-day world is that, aside from a handful of rare exceptions, nothing has any style anymore. Looks like this author agrees with me.
Here's a striking (if rather depressing) quote attributed to city planner Victor Gruen, writing for Life magazine in 1959:
If the good life of the future is not to degenerate into a vast traffic jam and a strangled complex of cities, there is urgent need for immediate urban, regional, statewide and nationwide master planning.
The growth of the cities will not be an evil if we make them again a pleasant place to stroll, eat, shop, sightsee, enjoy cultural amenities, and live. Only then will our leisure time be worth living. Otherwise, we will spend our precious hard-earned leisure within our own four walls, cut off from society by the foes we have created: murderous traffic, smog, disorder, blight and ugliness. We will be trapped in our suburban or city homes, all dressed up with no place to go.
1959. Think of how much trouble we could've saved ourselves if we'd paid more attention to him way back then. Salt Lakers certainly could have; almost 50 years after those prophetic words, it seems like we're struggling desperately to catch up in a race we didn't know we were running, trying to figure out how to revitalize downtown and deal with traffic problems that just kind of happened while we weren't looking. I get so frustrated at the collective short-sightedness of my community. We waste so much time shutting barn doors after the fact instead of just sitting down and doing a little thinking before we approve the building permits...
[Thanks to Leif Peng for the quote, and the great old illustrations of how the future used to look.]
A couple of items that caught my eye last week and that I'm only now finding the time to blog about:
With rare exceptions, I'm not a big fan of modern architecture (or perhaps "post-modern" is the more appropriate term). Neither is Lileks, who I've quoted on this subject before. He and I are light-years apart politically speaking, but I think we share the same philosophy when it comes to buildings:
Sad news this afternoon for fans of fantasy art: Tim Hildebrandt, who, along with his brother Greg, was one of the most prominent book illustrators of the 1970s and '80s, died yesterday at the not-very-advanced age of 67.
According to Sean Means of the Salt Lake Tribune, the old Avalon Theater in South Salt Lake is being converted into a live-music venue. I haven't been to the Avalon in years -- I think the last film I saw there was a documentary called Microcosmos about a decade back -- and I didn't even realize it had closed, which, apparently, it did some time ago. Still, I mourn its passing. If I'm not mistaken, the Avalon's repurposing leaves the Tower as the only single-screen theater still operating in the Salt Lake Valley. And I find that terribly sad.
I see in the paper this morning that another local landmark, the old Geneva Steel mill, has fallen in the name of progress.
Now, before you start thinking my unquenchable sense of nostalgia has finally gotten the better of me and caused me to abandon all sense of perspective, let me state for the record that I'm not especially sentimental about decaying old industrial sites. Geneva was ugly when it was in operation, filling the skies of Utah County with orange haze and dumping god-only-knows into Utah Lake, and it was twice as ugly after it ceased operation and commenced to rotting. In addition, it was located in the next valley south of mine, so it's not like I was seeing it every day and acquiring the affection that comes through constant familiarity. Still, it was familiar, if not intimately so, and its demolition is just one more step in the on-going process that is erasing the landscape I grew up with.
Continue reading "The Demolition of the Hand-Me-Down World" »
It's one of those days when there's so much stupidity floating around that I don't know what I should be outraged at first.
It�s another one of those grab-bag days here at Simple Tricks when I�ve got a whole mess of items that I want to write about, including celebrity deaths, human achievement, human striving, and stuff that�s just plain cool. Some of these have been kicking around my brain pan for a couple of weeks now, so my apologies if this is old news to some folks.
Chicago's Millenium Park must have been built on an old Indian graveyard or something. It's the only explanation for the evil I keep seeing in that place.
