Monday
Now is the Time on Sprockets When We Dance!
An excellent post by Michael Berube, the web's foremost Dieter look-a-like, has me nostalgic about St. Louis for the first time in nine months. The context of the post is going to visit his son at Wash U and walked down Del Mar with him. The best graf is probably:
And as we talked, I remembered all the reasons I’m so fond of St. Louis, and why I’m glad Nick is going to college there, and even more glad that he’s not staying on the carefully manicured lawns of Wash. U., but actually getting out and canvassing the city– not just for John Kerry (or Chuck Berry), but as part of his architecture program, one course of which required him to propose and design an urban-renewal project for a section of the urb that needs serious renewing. These days, though, my fondness for St. Louis is tinged by pity, and pity is among the cheapest and most insulting of emotions. May’s Department Stores, the third largest public company in town, is folding its tent; American Airlines, having ingested the sorry remains of TWA, has cut its St. Louis flights by fifty percent, leaving behind a giant sucking sound at Lambert International Airport; and the historic downtown area– which has, alas, fallen prey to the kind of fools who think you can revive a downtown area by building more stadiums and parking lots, and who don’t realize that after the Blues and Rams games let out, everyone heads straight to their cars because there isn’t a single index of ordinary life (like grocery stores) within ten miles– is a study in depression, economic and affective.
If you care about St. Louis, read the whole thing. It's really good.
On a separate note, I saw Gunner Palace. It's good, I recommend it, but it's not what I was expecting. In particular, it's much less intense than I thought it would be. I'll put togehter some comments about it tomorrow. Of course, a running theme on this blog has been that every post I say in writing that I am going to write in the future does not get written.
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And as we talked, I remembered all the reasons I’m so fond of St. Louis, and why I’m glad Nick is going to college there, and even more glad that he’s not staying on the carefully manicured lawns of Wash. U., but actually getting out and canvassing the city– not just for John Kerry (or Chuck Berry), but as part of his architecture program, one course of which required him to propose and design an urban-renewal project for a section of the urb that needs serious renewing. These days, though, my fondness for St. Louis is tinged by pity, and pity is among the cheapest and most insulting of emotions. May’s Department Stores, the third largest public company in town, is folding its tent; American Airlines, having ingested the sorry remains of TWA, has cut its St. Louis flights by fifty percent, leaving behind a giant sucking sound at Lambert International Airport; and the historic downtown area– which has, alas, fallen prey to the kind of fools who think you can revive a downtown area by building more stadiums and parking lots, and who don’t realize that after the Blues and Rams games let out, everyone heads straight to their cars because there isn’t a single index of ordinary life (like grocery stores) within ten miles– is a study in depression, economic and affective.
If you care about St. Louis, read the whole thing. It's really good.
On a separate note, I saw Gunner Palace. It's good, I recommend it, but it's not what I was expecting. In particular, it's much less intense than I thought it would be. I'll put togehter some comments about it tomorrow. Of course, a running theme on this blog has been that every post I say in writing that I am going to write in the future does not get written.
