Today’s Link:

Bad Candy, where two intrepid Internet journalists have discovered and put on review both the freaky, horrible, burning-hot ear-of-corn-on-a-stick-dipped-in-burning powder candy that I saw in the colonias of Reynosa, Mexico, and the freaky double-salty licorice candy that pale, opprobrious Westtown teacher Master Norman Robinson used to force on his German students, including Kate.

Kate and I also went to the Chester County Hospital’s May Day Carnival this weekend, and I just about wore out the digital camera trying to catch the spooky, doomed atmosphere that a carnival has when the weather is 45 degrees and cloudy. Or maybe it was just due to the worried animals in the fun-house murals, or the constant references to eternal damnation. Or the traditional carnival blending of Mardi Gras-style hilarity with abject terror. No, wait. Really, I think it was the scary fey carousel panda with the big teeth!

Today’s Links:

• Kate’s Blog: Billionaires
  
• Genevieve Futrelle’s Blog: East siders
  
• Tim Griffin’s Incredible Webcam
  
• Best police chase photo ever
  

More vituperation: a taxonomy of service camp crews

I painted a whole bunch of the new house this weekend; I put a second coat of ‘Moss White’ on the used-to-be-red bedroom, and two coats of the same color in the hallway and living room. In fact, I finished everything except the bathroom, hurrah!

Usually, I really, really hate painting, because painting is the ghetto team of every service camp I’ve been a part of. Every organization I’ve worked with or for is roughly the same. At the beginning of a day’s work, you’ll be presented with Rorschach test in the form of a job signup list. Your choice immediately and irrevocably reveals the innermost recesses of your personality:

• If you have carpentry skills, or if you’re just unafraid of hammers and bad jokes, you volunteer for carpentry. Minuses: bruised fingers, many unlovely ass-cracks on display. Pluses: learn to use a hammer, learn many bad jokes. (“Damn, I cut it twice and it’s still too short, har har!”)
  
• If you’re unafraid of hard work and are generally good-natured, you volunteer for landscaping and/or yard duty. Minuses: hard, dirty work, thin-walled lawn bags have been purchased at the dollar store. Pluses: Best cameraderie.
• If you own a Slipknot hoodie or have any sort of haircut that would look appropriate at a tractor pull, you volunteer for demolition. Pluses: you get to bash walls with a crowbar. Minuses: you own a Slipknot hoodie.
  
• If you are some kind of giant saint walking the earth, you put your name on the list that has no volunteers on it: cleaning and mopping. Minuses: probably involves shoveling ankle-deep cat poo out of an explosively smelly row house. Pluses: Grateful Habitat leader will personally bring you an extra sugar cookie at lunch.
  
• If you fall into none of the above groups, however, if you’re only half-sold on the idea of spending a day in service, if you’re boring and bland and willing to be told what to do but don’t want to do something too hard, you sign up for painting. Or you get put there; painting crew is the big catchall of a service camp, because you can post all the warm bodies like pickets and give them minimal instructions and walk away and they’ll still be there an hour later without requiring new instructions. Got someone who doesn’t know what they’re good at? Painting crew. Showed up 90 minutes late for the start of work? Painting crew. Complains about the temperature of the coffee in the 40-cup church percolator? Scraping crew, a service project’s Ninth Circle of Hell.
  

This is not to say that everyone on painting crew is a boring, whiny waste of space who knocks off early and grabs the good sandwiches in the lunch line before you can get there. I have many good friends who were on the painting crew at last year’s [My employer] Volunteer day. I don’t think less of them as people; they simply didn’t know any better, and this year I’m sure
I’ll see them carrying shrubs or carefully sorting the nails in their carpenter’s apron into two piles, depending on which way the points are facing (“You see, the nails pointing this way are for the other side of the house, nyuk nyuk!”)

Meanwhile, this weekend I was the painting crew, and I actually kind of enjoyed it.

Rem Koolhaas must die.

A couple of months ago, I did my best to tear Rem Koolhaas a new one for the friggin’ godawful new Prada store on Prince street. “The ultimate luxury is not shopping!” burbled this great, horrible pillock when describing why he had, on purpose, designed a space that was good for nothing.

Evelyn Waugh loathed chrome, mirrors, and sheetmetal-paneled studies as a harbinger of Horrible Modern Society. It wasn’t the chrome decorations that Waugh hated, it was the decadent, frivolous, and ultimately pointless lives that were surrounded by them that Waugh equated with the Apocalypse. Flip, trendy, and a self-important generator of deeply crappy soundbites, Rem Koolhaas could have been ripped whole from Waugh’s darkest nightmare. Witness his latest abomination: the new flag for the EU, guaranteed to cause headaches and look already dated TWO FRIGGING YEARS AGO.

As an antidote to Koolhaas’s feckless and burbling embrace of mid-nineties post-productive post-representational awfulness^*, I present Cal Hopkins Amish Armada: clean graphics, sarcasm used AS sarcasm (not masquerading as some kind of delicious postmodern irony), and a T-shirt I can wear on my motorcycle in Lancaster county.

In an email to me, my dad had this to say about his own days on Amtrak, commuting four days a week from Philadelphia to edit Travel Holiday magazine:

I remember the rag trade crowd from my own Amtrak days. Some of them can complain longer and louder than anyone I’ve ever heard, but they’re great in emergencies — pushy, funny, indomitable. One day, a young kid got separated from his parents in the Newark station and got on the train by mistake, leaving his parents behind. How scary can that be? The conductor, a grumpy Italian we called Toscanini, wouldn’t help the blubbering kid, so the garmentos stepped in, locating a cell phone (those were the early days of cell) to call Newark station and get word to the parents, calling ahead to Metropark to arrange for someone to meet the kid, comforting the poor lad, etc. etc. It was a combination of commedia dell’arte and Yiddish theater, which pretty much represented the garmentos’ ethnic milieu. I still see some of them at fashion events at Drexel. It’s like seeing college classmates or army buddies.

I took some guitar lessons in high school (guitar playing, juggling, sandals; the embarassing triumvirate of quaker youth): enough so that the neck of the guitar stopped being a single, inscrutable unit and resolved itself into six separate strings and a fingerboard. I often think about that when I learn something new; a larger, complicated object suddenly resolves itself into an aggregation of smaller, less complicated ones. Or, in the case of a motorcycle engine, it resolves into an agggregation of smaller, equally incomprehensible things that can burn you.

Anyhow, Amtrak is starting to resolve itself in the same way; I know most of the conductor’s faces on the Keystone run now, including the big, goofy guy you get if you sit in the rear half of train 654. His top-volume soliloquy over the loudspeaker every night:

“In five minutes, we’ll be entering Philadelphi…AAH, the city that spoils you, loves you back, and leaves you begging for more. Exit only where you see one of the handsome conduct…AAHs. Thank you for riding Am-TROCK! …your preferred MEHW-de of trans-por-TAY-shone.”

I’ve also started being able to separate the passengers into groups. There are the garment workers, buyers at the big wholesale mills in the fashion district: the men are in old, good suits with suspenders, the women in loud animal-print dresses. One introduced herself to me as being “in the schmatte business”, which was pretty damn cool. Then there’s the grad students: one, like me, starts in Exton, traveling five days a week to the College of Pharmacology at NYU. Then there are the dot-commers; about five of us, all living where the living’s good, and traveling to where the working’s possible. A smattering of stockbrokers, lawyers, and salespeople, and then one woman with a furry, squirrely shock of hair: red on top, gray on the sides. I overheard that she’s an NYU professor, but I forgot her name. Which is a damn shame, because with hair like that I bet she’s a famous kooky professor.

Today, the Amtrak-ing happens to be good; I’ve gotten a seat in the dinette, with a table so I can use a mouse. And there’s food, and we’re on time. Being on time is actually the thing that made me realize that my train is a human enterprise, not a Mysterious Manifestation of Bureaucracy; we arrived ten minutes early in New York yesterday, and everyone’s still praising the engineer this morning. It’s like a folk song:

“He musta run every stop signal on the tracks!”

“He got every lucky break from North Philly to Newark!”

“He’s Rocket Man!”

See what Kate had to say about my most recent post.

My great aunt’s estate (my maternal grandmother’s sister, that is) is getting auctioned off in New Jersey this weekend. Boy, there’s a weird feeling for you. Seeing as both of us are from Chester County in Philadelphia, Kate and I share a Thomas ancestor here and there. (Mine: Anna Thomas, of the meek and Quakerly grand tour diary. Kate’s: George Thomas, Anna’s brother, who I’m convinced was sneaking out of the hotels to whoop it up in Khartoum.) The auctioneer’s indifferently-spelled history of the Thomas family is here, though it’s got me scratching my head about which aunt is which.

There’s likely to be a Young family/Smith family caravan to Morris Plains, New Jersey to bid on some items, like possibly this corner cabinet of my grandmother’s, or maybe these dessert spoons, or this bookcase, which has no sentimental value but is a great bargain if the estimate is to be believed. And I’ll probably bid on this Westtown School Sampler (from two years after the school opened!)

Missing is the cool suit of samurai armor that Dr. Chandler brought back from feudal Japan, and that used to scare the hell out of me when I rounded a corner in the attic. Just as well; I wouldn’t have been able to afford it. As it is, I don’t think I have the spondulix to get this smirking matriarch.

Sartorial Week continues

My friend at work, Kyle Smith, has spontaneously decided to start “Bow Tie Thursdays.” This is the same Kyle Smith that actually made one bazillion dollars selling CutCo knives during his summers in Kansas City, and whose Horatio Alger powers will either turn him into a kind and benevolent force for change in this world, or a towering force of evil, depending on whether he gets bitten by the radioactive spider or snorts the evil green swamp gas. Either way, I’m happy to join in on his project, and hopefully get [My employer] a reputation as “that Orville Redenbacher agency.”

Also, in re: kilts and eyepatches, my friend Alejandro Rubio sent me proof that eyepatches are the cognoscenti’s accessory of choice, and — best of all — Tiffany Webb, member of the The Ultimate Water Gun Council of Elders^* sent me this link to my very next lawn-mowing, painting, and general utility outfit for the new homeowner. Follow this link immediately!

www.utilikilts.com

^*(Moniker: “Mrs. Webb”, which has, I think, a Diana Rigg Healey/catsuit/judo-chop panache)