November 2008
1 post
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October 2008
2 posts
Halloween Politics
More than a year ago, the Obama candidacy became a real possibility after a spike in September 2007’s polls. Around that time, the mood was that though Obama’s run for President was, indeed, historic, it was too easy to say it portended the resolution of the race problem. That is, until the nastiness of the South Carolina primary made it clear there were white voters who felt...
Queen of the Repugnicans
If John McCain (I’m referring to the one who, in a quasi-fictional past, was known for distancing himself from the idiocies of the Republican party)—if that John McCain had watched Mean Girls, he would have realized he didn’t want to be the GOP nominee in the first place.
Cady Heron thought that the prestige and power that came with supplanting Regina would help her master the...
September 2008
5 posts
Remind you of anyone?
reminds me of
Liveblogging Shopping Period
10:16 am
It turns out that The Idea of Self, a Classics class, is a CAP course. Not that freshmen can’t be as intellectually stimulating as classmates as upperclassmen, but I’m a little wary of this course being a kind of kiddie pool. The book list initially intrigued me—no, I’ll be honest, I needed something to shop this period. But nonetheless, the book list consisted of classical and medieval...
Hipster →
How ironic that as Douglas Haddow delicately severs the hipster from any sort of cultural patrimony—denying hipsters the legacy of the beats, punks, hippies, and hip hop (all of which, by the way, “hipsterdom,” as he so lugubriously calls it, draws from)—he never questions his own right to complete ownership (and interpretation) of Western Civilization. Do you think he...
August 2008
11 posts
Theodore Francis Green, Gift of God
A Travelogue
PVD, August, 21, 2008
4:40 pm. Too annoyed to read, I’ll vent my travel angst by scribbling these notes. I had just stumbled off a tiny plane after surviving two flights on that puddle-jumper and a connection at Kennedy Airport. Forgetting I wasn’t still in the friendly Midwest, I stumbled toward the airport shuttle counter to ask if the five o’clock were...
I'm Going to Miss Queens
Me: You can’t put water on that. You’re gonna ruin it.
Daniel: Just a little!
Me: You can’t put water on suede! It’s gonna stay like that.
Daniel: It’s gonna stay dark like this? It’s still wet.
Daniel’s Aunt DeeDee: What, animals don’t go out in the rain?
Arcadia Amittenda
Michigan Central Station by David Kohrman, ForgottenDetroit.com
It’s amazing that what was once the prison of wide-eyed aesthetes looking to the East for cultural refuge in fact holds so much unprized grandeur. After half a year’s absence spent swanning up and down the East Coast amongst America’s glossy architectural flagships, I can now see Detroit as Gaugin’s Tahiti...
Surf on the Sandcastles of Memory
What a privilege for Edward Hopper to be the painter of your childhood’s landscape. One woman, Bobbe Franklin, remembers a lighthouse looking in her childhood exactly as Hopper recorded it in watercolor. But with such a famous rendering of the place branded into your psychogeography, how can you know whether the painter did capture building and its grounds or whether, over the course of...
Haul at the Strand Annex
The Strand Annex is closing, so for ten dollars I got:
Dreaming of Waugh
I had a dream where I was cast to play Sebastian in the newest adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, mostly, I think, because in the logic of dreams my high school role as Henry V was actually the role of Sebastian. My friend Hannah and I and others were driven to Castle Howard (which at this point is more or less synonymous with Brideshead in we fans’ collective...
1 tag
My newborn Flickr →
Copiously posting one’s photos on the internet is popularly thought less self-aggrandizing if not done on one’s Facebook.
