Wednesday, July 29, 2015

#210

https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA139&dq=Sir+Herbert's+son+who+lives+near+Canterbury+210&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMItuyW58OAxwIVhM2ACh1scwBc#v=onepage&q=Sir%20Herbert's%20son%20who%20lives%20near%20Canterbury%20210&f=false

So where are the holy cities in America? Let’s see: San Francisco? It’s beautiful if you’re wealthy enough to live there. Seattle? Not holy, interesting city. Portland? Not holy, interesting city too. LA surely has some beautiful corners only because it’s so big. And there were the Beach Boys, who demonstrate that an elegant soul can arise and make himself heard, and that he can just as well be crushed. Both. But how can I see LA as anything but a vast plasticized commercial wasteland? New York—there has been the folk rock movement, the abstract expressionists, bebop, Jazz Age Harlem, and so much more. It’s gentrifying too, from what I hear. You pay $2500 a month to live in a tiny cell and gain the privilege of calling yourself a New Yorker. I’ve been there twice, had a couple nice visits. It’s true there’s a lifetime’s worth of life in NY. Washington—no. Anything in Texas? No (though I hear Austin’s cool). Santa Fe isn’t what it used to be. Miami—no. New Orleans? Don’t think so, though it’s supposed to be a lot of fun. Chicago? Great town. Holy? Not quite. Savannah is gorgeous, on display but closed off. The thing about American cities is that there is such energy in the US that pockets of holy beauty coalesce all the time. They come and go, and as soon as they form, fad and fashion and money and hip glitterize and monetize what made them worth seeking. But I’m not part of any movable holy scene and I don’t pick up to land in the hot places. I’ve lived in Toledo, Louisville, Dayton, Bloomington and Cincinnati. Not much to say about Toledo—the actual city seems mostly gone. Louisville—paradise in the countryside when I was young, and it’s painful to go back because that lovely landscape is now one strip mall after another, one housing project after another. A soulless florescent hell of pre-fab houses and parking lots, motivated by cars and oil and the lust to sell stuff. Dayton, my home town—at the turn of the 19th century it was a fascinating city: the Wright brothers, Charles Kettering, Patterson and NCR, a city of engineers, problem solvers, forward-thinking civic-minded corporate tyrants, benevolent dictators committed to the common good, geniuses, well-mannered optimists forcing open new industrial vistas that they imagined then made real. Detroit was the muscle of the emerging auto industry, but Dayton was its brain. The 20th century took care of all that. Dayton migrated away from its birth-locus, like so many American cities, and cars and lights shine with mercury and money and the energy of electrified oil, all to the south, like a crazed wild sucker from the roots of a rose plant that overwhelms the delicate art of the rose. Bloomington is a wonderful artistically vibrant, holy college town. Like with all great college towns, unless you’re one of the golden professors or a Southern Indiana native, you only get a few years there, then you’re obliged to move on. Cincinnati is a big, complicated, grand old river city, with all the problems of the rest of the Midwest, but with an architectural heart that has some hardened arteries but is still beating, and an ethnic legacy that keeps it unique. German, Appalachian, African-American the big three. It’s conservative overall. It has pockets, small ones, of life that come and go. But it ain’t no Paris, and it ain’t that holy.

B.’s invocation of Atlantic City is perfect: For awhile the East Coast’s answer to Las Vegas, in B.’s day it was all about hyper oceanside tourism—wax museums, saltwater taffy, pinball arcades, the Boardwalk, a long shopping mall. Miles of crowded tourists under beach umbrellas stuck in gray sand next to the gray Atlantic. Is this holy? Not by any definition I might offer. B. is fully aware it’s not, but it’s emblematic of where he sees American energy trending. Better yet, in the winter Atlantic City empties out. Without the concentrated energy of the crowds—with purses and wallets full of money—you get an instructive glimpse of what America has done to its soul when the moneyed crowds anywhere ebb. What you get is Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not museum full of genuine shrunken heads and torture implements on display—admission half price during the off-season. Seagulls squatting on posts, looking around, blinking, wondering why the dumpsters are all so empty. The restless gray constancy of the North Atlantic surf. The beach sand, still studded with cigarette butts from last August. Stay out from under the Boardwalk—you really don’t want to see what blew under there. One pizza shop and one bar, still open, catering to the locals, who leave their black and white TVs behind once a week: Gunsmoke. Leave It to Beaver. Red Skelton. What do you say we get a beer or something? So they head out to the Impala and drive to the Boardwalk, clumping along the echoing planks, skirting the workmen who hammer in replacements for the rotted ones, and when a pod of dolphins passes, a pelican dives for a mackerel, and a humpback whale on the horizon spouts and the weak sun catches it in a brief sparkle of rainbow they don’t look up. They miss it, turning from the ocean and opting instead for Frank Sinatra on the jukebox in the dark, smoky restaurant with its Budweiser and Miller High Life on tap and the corned beef and sauerkraut sandwiches it’s famous for.

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