Bagel of Doubt

That's what I thought I heard said this morning on a perfectly ordinary radio commercial. I have already forgotten what was being flacked, but I will never forget this phrase.

I have spoken before in these pages of my peculiar connection to some commercials. But I haven't divulged all my peculiarities with respect to the interaction between various media and my head.

What happens is, I frequently hear an important phrase or term differently than intended (i.e., WRONG). It's the Pompitous of Love syndrome (a malady not to be confused with the 1996 movie of the same name but different spelling).

Like all conditions, this one has its merits. I mean, some writers would kill for a phrase like "bagel of doubt." It's so evocative for that, uh, bready but empty-in-the-middle feeling of, uh, doubt.

Anyway.

The best mis-hearing I ever committed was a few years ago when, wakened from a dead sleep by the radio blaring one of its conventional truck-jackknifed traffic stories, I could have sworn I heard the announcer caution that "the brie is scattered across the roadway."



(graphic via toothepaste for dinner)

Wonder Bread

Stuart's picture is so much better but all and sundry are blocked from uploading it from his site, and he has his partition of the home computer sealed off from me by passcode. Just another case of "so near and yet so far."

My daughter wants to know why they call a Twinkie a Twinkie. For a change, I thought I would ask some live beings instead of Googling.

I am a pathological Googler. Just ask anyone.

So. Nu? How did the Twinkie get its name?

Bonus points: How old is Twinkie this year? And what should we serve at its birthday party?

Midday Thought

This quote has been bothering me (as most quotes by Emily Dickinson do):


"To undertake is to achieve."


Does that mean that to underachieve is to take?


I am hoping so.

Tuesday, the New Monday

The Waking

by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

A Quiet Revolution

A friend sent me this link to the splendid blog Unrequited Narcisissm so I could make my vote really count in Decision 2005: The Race to Name the Washington Zoo Panda Baby.

You could too. This is one American vote that even a Scandinavian, a Belgian-by-marriage, a Texan, or other foreigners can influence.

So come on, vote the Butterstick ticket all the way. To do it right, click my "Decision 2005" link above. I did it, and it actually worked.

This message brought to you by Americans for a Free Choice Among Basically Irrelevant Variables.

Dubious Praise

Yeah, I know, "dubious" is a five-dollar word, and the correct expression is "damning with faint praise." But my choice is better.

Whatever.

I get emails from former students sometimes, and they always make me happy. Even this one. A clever and lovely individual who entrusted her brain to me for a semester added this postmark to a recent communication:

"Thought you might find this interesting: There's a website called rate your professors, and it's basically a catalog of a bunch of colleges, and lists of professors that students have rated and commented on. I figured it wouldn't hurt to know a bit about mine, so I checked it out, and
decided just for fun to see if you were on there. You are, and you have a 4.5 out of 5.0 highest rating, and the only comment left says : If you really dont like English, this is the professor for you. She is very helpful. "

Well. That is music to my ears. Of the Arnold Schoenberg variety. But of course I had to look. My name is spelled wrong, so I'm not sure how well my gracious rater is actually doing after my tutelage. And I note there's a category for "hotness," which the rater left blank. Could mean a lot of different things, but on the face of it, I'm not thrilled. I got a 4.0 for easiness and a 0 for hotness. That's like high school all over again.

Thoughts Upon the End of Shabbos

Yeah, I'm Ashkenazic, descendant of schmatte dealers, and so my pronunciation of your snooty proper Shabbat is sooo shtetl. Whattaya got to say about it?

Here's the Joke of the Day, courtesy Beliefnet:


Moses Negotiates the Commandments

The Hebrew people were sitting around Mt. Sinai. You could hear only a subdued murmur among them, but you could feel the tension in the air.

For hours now, Moses had been on top of the mountain, hidden from their gaze by clouds wafting around its top. Sometimes the clouds became dark and you could hear thunder rolling down. In spite of the warm weather, this caused a shudder among the waiting mass.The end of day was approaching and dusk was beginning to set in when suddenly a figure came through the clouds and walked down the steep mountainside carrying a heavy load. It was Moses.

Moses set down his load and raised his hands.

"Friends," he said. "Friends, it was hard work and I have done my best. I have negotiated with Him. I used every possible argument, every trick I could think of—and I think I was successful. The good news is: I brought him down from 15 to 10. The bad news is: Adultery is still in."

Saturday Miscellany

A selection of topics today. To begin:

Those intrepid why-didn't-I-think-of-it purveyances of the modern commute,
articulated buses. Not to be confused with articulate buses, the likes of which I have yet to encounter. I often bring a journal onboard the bus with me, hoping that this time at last the act of doing so will render me more articulate. But no.

And in case you don't have enough to do (irrefutable evidence of which is the fact that you are reading my blog), then you might have found yourself wondering lately (1) how and (2) where I find all my neat graphics.

No? Oh. Well, I'll enlighten you anyway. (1) I take them lawlessly (stealing is such an ugly word), and (2) I constantly Google.

This time the big G disappointed, though. Lots of pics of articulated buses, but nary a one articulating.

Anyway.

While doing my spurious research, I was attracted to the nutty fragrance of half bakery, a communal blog of crackpot ideas that actually had something to say about this, but I didn't understand it.

Just like you might not understand this:

zorch

or this:

zorch

or even this:

zorch

What I'm speaking of is what someone else on another Web site has called a "Zilch" (emphasis theirs). This is something you should never try at home unless you are under 30 and still taking advantage of all plausible means of recreation that life has to offer.

I find it more than a little disturbing that the only other people in America who seem to know about this activity are the folks who frequent Fiberglass RV. They claim the name "zilch"--which I insist is "zorch"--comes from the sound of the phenomenon one creates by:

Taking a bunch of plastic bags (we used drycleaning bags back in the day) and tying them together to make a long strand with knots every foot or so. Then you thumbtack the resulting four- or five-foot strand to your ceiling (we were all happy renters in the days we did this).

Then you put a pan of water underneath this whole affair, and you light--yes, you light--the bottom of it (all of us smoked in those days too, so lighters were a-plenty).

You turn out the lights and wait. What happens next can hardly be described, but basically you watch drippy little psychedelic masses of burning plastic zip into the water-filled basin at an increasingly shocking rate, all the while making little zorching and zipping noises. As if that were not enough excitement, whenever the flame hits one of the knots you've made, the thing drops into the water and the room goes briefly dark until the residual heat relights the next segment, and so on and so forth until the fire reaches the top when, for a grand finale, the whole mess goes zooming down into the dark for a noisy, satisfying climax.

Neat, huh?

I think it's called "zorch" because after you turn on the lights, somebody among all you renters will inevitably say, "Zounds, man, your ceiling's totally scorched."

categories: amusement miscellany

Lucky Thirteen

The man who could have aced my Wednesday quiz lives in New Jersey, turns out. Except he doesn't yet know I exist. We'll fix that. He even would have gotten Ernic Kovacs. Thanks, Frank, for keeping the torch lit in New Jersey.

Anyhoo. I got more to say. Natch.

So: You don't think thirteen is a lucky number?

Think twice.

How about a baker's dozen? Huh? Huh?

I'm lucky enough to be 41 and counting (my birthday, September 12--it fell on the Thursday before Friday the 13th in 1963, incidentally--and I'll have my wishlist up by then), so I remember the golden days of hippie public TV, most of it from WNET13, which we watched in Dallas on KERA13. I think the public stations got that channel because it was cheap and no one else wanted a jinxed number. Or maybe they were making a point. I don't know. It was the sixties. Everything and nothing was funny.

I watched shows like The Great American Dream Machine, produced by and starring Marshall Efron for two short-lived years before being pulled for lack of funding and plentitude of kiss-my-ass-White House attitude. After giving people like Chevy Chase and Albert Brooks a leg up in the business, Efron has pursued a frankly depressing career of bit parts and voiceovers, including a two-year stint as Sloppy Smurf on the Smurfs (a show I won't dignify with a link).

I also remember climbing into the family bed (we were that kind of family) to curl up and watch late-night episodes of An American Family (which was most assuredly not that kind of family). If you can't do the math, I was ten at the time.

Incidentally, I don't know where I was when Lance Loud: A Death in an American Family was broadcast.

Maybe I was actually earning a living that year?

Naah.

categories: amusement film life miscellany

"Desiccation Was Its Saving Grace"

So says Maine science teacher Roger Bennatti of the shelf life of your average Twinkie.






The little snack cake he set atop his blackboard 31 years ago as an experiment is still there.

In fact, he retired before it expired.

Hear more on NPR.

For really special science fun with Twinkies, waddle over here.

And if you think you can gaze unblinkingly at the personal consequences of ingesting Twinkies, check in with the aptly named Candy Sagon of the Washington Post or with my distant neighbor Joseph Stirt at his preservative-free blog, bookofjoe.

This was going to be a post about Twinkies, articulated buses, and the PBS classics of the 1960s and 1970s I mentioned on Wednesday.

But I think one irrelevant bit of flotsam from my mind at a time is plenty much. Don't you?

[Image of "Twinkie Henge" via Tian Harter's Art Everywhere link]

categories: amusement miscellany

Poetry Thursday

Around Us

by Marvin Bell

We need some pines to assuage the darkness
when it blankets the mind,
we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly
as a plane's wing, and a worn bed of
needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind,
and a blur or two of a wild thing
that sees and is not seen. We need these things
between appointments, after work,
and, if we keep them, then someone someday,
lying down after a walk
and supper, with the fire hole wet down,
the whole night sky set at a particular
time, without numbers or hours, will cause
a little sound of thanks--a zipper or a snap--
to close round the moment and the thought
of whatever good we did.

Iced Coffee

Well.

Shows how much I know about the world of television.

Zip. Zero. Nada.

As I write this, I am sitting waiting my turn to be taped--taped, people--for a segment of Coffee House TV that will air in October. You know, closer to the event I am promoting. That would make sense to anyone. Anyone but me, that is.

So though I know nobody was rushing for their remote with the last post, I just thought I'd give you a heads up to relax. Just in case.

MoCo CoHo. Solo? No, No!

Tonight's the night to watch local cable, at least at my house. With colleague Patricia Elam, I will be a guest on Coffee House TV, promoting the first annual Washington Write-a-Story-Day, which will happen this fall.

Elam's novel Breathing Room was published by Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster in 2002, and she has written extensively about Buddhism, family, and life in D.C. She's also the advice columnist for Seeing Black.com.

Washington Write-A-Story Day (scheduled for two days, actually, October 8 and 9) promises to be a phenomenal affair involving more than 30 writers who will conduct workshops at as many sites all over Washington, appealing to D.C. residents who don't consider themselves writers. In a day, these "nonwriters" will turn out fiction or nonfiction concerning life in our nation's capital, and some of the results will be broadcast Sunday night on National Public Radio.

The busy mind behind all this? Novelist and activist Joyce Hackett.

Count me in, if only for the pleasure of meeting writers like the Mss. Elam and Hackett.

(Note to self: remind aspiring writers that the perc of meeting cool people is, basically, the only really rich payoff in the writing life).

As for Coffee House TV, I'm hooked. To wildly paraphrase Wallis Simpson, you can't have too much caffeine or too much culture. CHTV's claim is far from modest: "It's what public TV is supposed to be." But they do live up to it. A glance at CHTV's program guide will remind those of you over 40 of what public TV used to be in the 60s and 70s.

(Pop trivia quiz: Virtual hugs and kisses to anyone who can tell me who the mastermind behind The American Dream Machine was. And who can forget the famous _____________ Family of An American Family, hmm? Hmm?)

(And for those over 50, bonus question: Whisper sweet nothings to me about Ernie Kovacs.)

(Hey! No fair Googling! Answers tomorrow.)

So, if you want to check out CHTV on your computer, go to this link and scroll to the CHTV section for a broadband connection. If you want to look for us, we're supposed to be on at about 8 p.m. EST tonight.

Which One Is Just Right?

Have you noticed a certain inconsistency in my posts of late?

No, this isn't a character issue. Not that sort, anyway.

It's an eyesight issue.

As in:

Big print?

Or little print?

You decide.

Votes please.

Electronically of course.

We aren't in Florida anymore.

What Goes Around Comes Around

I just visited Poetry Daily today and found that the poet I featured last week, Carol Edelstein, is today's deserving Featured Poet.

If you, gentle reader, are coming upon us a day late and a dollar short, just go to Poetry Daily's archive and look up Ms. Edelstein under E.

For Excellent.

Will you do that? Thank you very much.

categories: poetry words

Monday Pop Quiz

I'm wiped out. Anyone who knows me knows why (and a few astute virtual friends too).

So what does any good teacher do when he or she has nothing to offer?

Pop Quiz!

Readers, all six of you, please comment in any and as many words as you wish:

The meaning of routine in your lives. You may choose an expository or compare/contrast approach.

Try to use at least three of the following words in your reply. Feel free to use the dictionary.

palimpsest
weight
flicker
stay (any form, verb or noun)
embrace
rubber
blue

Have fun. And if you can't have fun, just put up with it.

categories: amusement miscellany words

Poetry Sunday

If You Were Still in That Novel Composed at the Head of the Stairs
by Cal Bedient


Listen, nothing happens. Your whole body wants to turn from slush to fire. Think of something that surprised you. Perhaps from the back porch you saw a woman standing barefoot in a hospital gown by the Mutability roses; come on now, there’s a story here. You ask the disaster in and sitting on a kitchen chair she begins to sway in time to unseen waves. Her green smell makes black pools in the table cloth and you know whatever you have always been having done to you was wounded out of her voice and the stiff height of the bed on the fourth floor of the hospital in which a pale a shudder a breathing hard escaped into stinging death. She’s crude, you think indignantly, as she laughs at nothing at all. When you open the door on a rainy mauve dusk and point the way out in your sternest manner, she kisses you on the soft center of the cheek and whispers into your ear with burning conviction that happiness might still burst into your life like a marvelous catastrophe.

Denver Quarterly
Volume 39, Number 2
(source: Poetry Daily)

photo credit: Dan at http://www.wiredgirl.com/katy/artwork.html

Found Troll

My brother kept this one all these years.

All the way from the fjords, by way of my father's hands.

There were others, but they went missing.

Inside My Messy Head

Here is the embryonic list I am compiling at my.del.icio.us.

So, is it me, or does that site's name sort of put you in mind of Dora the Explorer?

Okay. It's me.

categories: amusement miscellany technology

Monster in a Box

(with apologies to Spalding Gray...)

(...and to you, my six readers. This is a long self-referential post of which Anonymous will heartily disapprove.)

SO: This morning I finally hightailed it over to my ertswhile grad school and registered my thesis with the appropriate authorities.

I finished it in April. Had it signed the first time around in April. Had it returned by the Dean's Office with fixable but annoying errors in early May. Took till the end of June to return it, with new signatures, to the Dean. By that time I'd gone through commencement with my spiffing blue robes and mortarboard, had been hired elsewhere to teach college, and had also been alerted that I wasn't, strictly speaking, a master of anything.

Well, I could have told them that.

Bad things happened in late July and early August. But I have no excuses for those first two weeks in July. This could have gotten resolved a long, long time ago.

So when I got a letter August 12 (an especially bad day for me anyway) saying I'd have to now pay to matriculate as well as resubmit my thesis, was I surprised?

Nah. It's the way I've let my summer go. For the record, I also haven't yet removed the trash bags from my garden as reported July 31.

There. Now you know everything.

Anyway. When I presented myself today, some things went right. First, the Cashier accepted my credit card. That's a plus in any transaction I undertake.

Then, I actually saw the individual who wrote me the August 12 letter of bad news. You've gotta love small universities. And summer sessions. And diminutive, kind-faced women who have worked in the Registrar's Office for years and seen it all.

She led me through a long warren of houseplant-infested hallways to her desk, past the inevitable Desk-of-the-Jesus-Loving Colleague whose sign, this time, read "I Keep the Love of the Lord in My Heart and Don't Worry About Anything!!!!!!!!!!!"

A clear case of denial, if you ask me. Why all the exclamation points?

Where was I?

Oh yes. With a wave of her slim and probably perfumed little paw, my new friend in the Registrar's Office made the bad dream go away. "Oh," she said, "You will graduate this summer. We were just wondering about you."

That makes more than one of us.

I'm already wishing I had brought my camera, because there was the perfect illustration therein, buried in an area of the Registrar's Office I will never be permitted to enter again. It was a plain closet marked 'Utility,' to the nameplate of which someone had added a simple black 'F.'

I know, I know. Words don't do it justice. Maybe I can arrange to have my thesis rejected somehow, just to be allowed back there again...

categories: amusement life miscellany words

Everything Used to Be Something Else

The title of this post is from the work of Walter Ong, the Jesuits' answer to Marshall Macluhan. The image above is Jenny Holzer's .

Ong's archivist at the University of Saint Louis, a diligent scribe and medievalist named John Paul Walter, keeps his own entertaining and informative blog Machina Memorialis. I stumbled on it while I was supposed to be doing something else. I highly recommend it.

categories: art religion thought

The Disappearing Letters

Northampton, Massachusetts native Carol Edelstein has won the 2005 Perugia Press Intro Award, and high time too. Edelstein's gentle, witty, and always elegant verses deserve a wider audience.

See for yourself:

Earth Signs

See—each ant staggers into the nest
with a dream-shaped crumb.

There they go, there they go—the swallows
who were late for school, doing
their extra arithmetic.

Stand here long enough, and a dragonfly
will perch on your index finger,
the first note of hundreds.

Hear the plop of a palm-sized stone
hefted into the pond? It is a frog moving head first
toward center, squeezing those legs

that would be wings if water were air.
The earth must be glad: why else
would these great clouds lying low in the grass

seem like the doffed hats of giants leaving a party?
Or very cruel, to make this white violet,
then hide it under a leaf.

category: poetry

Sabbath

George Morrison.
"Spirit Path, New Day, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape," 1990 pastel and acrylic on paper, Minnesota Museum of American Art.





On Saturday we needed a place to go.

We visited the National Museum of the American Indian and went to our favorite floor, where the two-man exhibit called Native Modernism is housed.

There you can see the work of an artist who moves one more and more on repeated viewings, Minnesota's Ojibwe artist George Morrison.

Kudos also to Morrison's companion in this exhibit, Allan Houser. It's just that Morrison is an abstract expressionist and Houser is a figurative sculptor. And the older I get and the more I see, the more my eye seems to prefer abstraction.

Here is what the Museum of the American Indian had to say about Morrison:

George Morrison was a painter of color and light. As he traveled from his birthplace in Minnesota to New York and beyond, his evolving interest in Euro-American art resulted in an individualistic and vibrantly colorful form of abstract expressionism.

Here's an interview with Morrison.

And there is a book on Morrison's life and work, Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art

Last, lest we neglect the fact that Morrison was an impressive sculptor, here is the remarkable Red Totem.

categories: art life religion thought

Coming and Going

They don’t make it easy to find the Office of Decedent Affairs at Inova Fairfax Hospital.

You have to ask someone. And of course, if you are in need of the services provided by the Office of Decedent Affairs, chances are you won’t have the presence of mind to ask someone.

Instead, you will do what I did Sunday morning (they do have weekend hours, that much I had already discovered): you wander the first floor, then the basement, in search of a sign to direct you.

See, I figured an office like that would be on the first floor. You know, along with Patient Relations, Volunteer Services, and Admissions. I mean, wouldn’t it kind of make sense for Emissions to be next to Admissions?

Then, when I didn’t find it, I headed for the basement. This is the business end of many hospitals, the place that houses the E.R. and the O.R. and the morgue and the cafeteria.

On my way through the warren of halls, I asked several personnel to direct me. Not one of them knew where the Office of Decedent Affairs was. “The morgue, then?” I asked.

I always like to be helpful.

The guy I was asking, though he was in green scrubs and a very important-looking hairnet, couldn’t tell me where the morgue was, for the life of him.

Anyway. He did remind me I could ask at the Information Desk. And at the Information Desk I got clear directions.

Turns out I was almost right. I had looked on the floors either side of the Ground Floor. The office in question was behind the elevators on Ground.

When I got out, still more mystery. No signs to direct me until I was almost on top of my destination. Then I counted only one more sign after that. Two signs total.

I arrived at a small, comfortable office with one young woman in it. She was eating take-out Chinese food and had my brother’s identification card out on her desk. I answered her questions and that was that. The transport, she said, would be made tomorrow.

I navigated my way back into the light of afternoon, wondering why we are so ashamed of our deaths. In the parking lot, a large heavy man wearing an absurd plush hat shaped like Nemo from the Disney movie was walking toward the hospital as I walked away. In this intense heat, such a gesture is no small one. There must be someone important in there, I thought, for him to go to such lengths to cheer up.

A Man in His Life

For my brother.

A Man in His Life
by Yehuda Amichai





A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

category: poetry

Emergency Instructions

Poetry Thursday

What Kind of a Person

by Yehuda Amichai

"What kind of a person are you," I heard them say to me.
I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.

I'm a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I'm not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.

I'm not flat and sly
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little tasteAnd a little fragrance.

Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.

Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.

I'm not a car, I'm a person,
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.

Valley of the Trolls

Someone I love is quite sick today.

It gets me to thinking, why am I bothering to keep this blog updated? And what do I say that is relevant to me without being too personal? How do I find a middle path?

Roundabout is the best way to go perhaps.

So I will tell a story not about this person but about his father, who was also my father. And my father loved Norway.

Land of trolls.

No, not those trolls.

I mean the kind of trolls that might hang out here.

My father was stationed in Greenland during and just after World War II. He was a radio engineer, and among other things he helped invent the Weasel, the first successful crevasse detector for use in polar regions. Before the invention of the Weasel, people crossing the Ice Cap in Greenland were subject to fatal falls through the crevasses, great cracks in the ice that were impossible to detect through thick drifts of snowfall. Whole vehicles and convoys sometimes disappeared into the ice this way.

I have a picture of my dad somewhere, after he has been lowered into a crevasse. He is looking up, smiling, confident nothing can go wrong. He is 35, younger than I am now.

When he was on leave, he visited Iceland and Norway. He fell in love with the immaculate cities and with the fjords and the craggy landscape, softened by patches of pasture. And, I'm sure, with a lovely Icelandic or Norwegian girl or two. Probably from afar, knowing my shy and courtly father.

Eventually he married and had children. He went back to Greenland a few times in the 1950s, and then he gained more responsibility at his job in the States. The years passed, the crevasses continued to open and sometimes to swallow up innocent lives even with the best technology available.

And Norway? What about Norway, land of the trolls?

I'll tell you more tomorrow.

One last odd, interesting link: Norwegian music

category: life

Prayer Fragment

Awakened one night recently to this phrase:

...and let regret be carried off by time.

categories: life words

Thinking Twice

It always pays to think twice. After the last post I decided to do some more digging on Bertrand Goldberg's work. Beauty is as beauty does, in architecture as in other things.

I find that Goldberg's work is, in fact, all the more interesting because aspects of it are difficult to assess, maybe even disturbing.

Perhaps most famous among his designs is Marina City, a set of towers nicknamed by some Chicago wags as The Corn Cobs. Completed in 1964, Marina City was a largely successful attempt to draw residents back to the city core from the 'burbs and to create a full-service, 24-hour neighborhood therein (complete with marina facilities and boat locks).

Unveiled to great acclaim, Marina City was viewed as a success from both an architectural and city planning perspective until the 1970s, when it fell on hard times and gained a reputation as another 1960s experiment gone wrong.

In its heyday, here is what Goldberg himself had to say:

This is Marina City. Here in Marina City, we have completely eliminated the concept of the street. We have created a plaza in the best European classical sense of the city square, and on the plaza we have erected five interrelated buildings.

The plaza in itself marks the disappearance of the corridor street. The plaza becomes the open platform on which automobiles and people, alternately passengers and pedestrians can wander as they choose. Also, in terms of space here in Marina City, we have done what few cathedrals in Europe are able to do. We have reached out for a piece of vertical space, which is so thrilling to men everywhere.

Well. Yes. Men do rather seem preoccupied with, uh, vertical space. With all due respect.

Here's what the online magazine Jetsetmodern.com has to say about Marina City:

Since the Sixties, Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City Towers have been an iconic part of Chicago’s skyline. Millions of readers, moviegoers, and TV-watchers know the twin buildings mean “Chicago”, even when they don’t have a clue what the towers are or how they came to be. Conceived as a “city within a city”, the Marina Towers complex has been through four distinct stages in its history: promise, acclaim, disrepute, and renaissance.

The towers are arguably more stylistically rooted in the Sixties than any other buildings in America; many onlookers misinterpret them as a grandiose, unnecessary realization of the cartooned architecture seen in the “Jetsons” TV show. They could not be more wrong: Goldberg’s complex has much to teach us today. An early attempt to stem the urban exodus to the suburbs, Marina Towers offers a self-contained world: there is little need for residents to leave it. Planned with a theater, restaurant, bowling alley, health club, ice-skating rink, grocery store, bank, and parking garage, the complex both concealed and revealed a secret heritage.

What Goldberg intended Marina Towers to do was to compete with suburbia by giving people reasons to stay in the city; that goal was what dictated the unusual program, packed onto only t