Posts from — September 2008

The autumnal equinox occurred on September 22 at 11:44:18 A.M. EDT. On that day, we experienced nearly equal time of light and dark.

On that day, ABC television promoted “National Stay at Home Week”. What an abomination. How could anyone with any intelligence or respect for this world promote something so assinine.  In a   culture overrun with stuff, people making stuff, and people working ever harder to pay for more stuff, someone cooked up some terrible idea to get people to stay at home, watch more advertisements, and ultimately buy more stuff.

Go outside! It’s the first week of fall.

when you get back inside, turn off the TV and watch this.

strange to memorialize so many things in such similar ways. strange that where architecture, landscape and money meet in a greater confluence than anywhere else in the world I can walk away uninspired. While many of the memorials that plaster Washington DC pay honorable tribute to great individuals and collective American efforts, I continually leave these places unsatisfied and devolved from the time, place and person they are meant to respect.

Even the Vietnam memorial, so precise in concept and execution, is metastasizing into something less thought provoking. The interpretation centers, sculptures, and bookstores that are added to this and other memorials result in an intellectual and emotional debasement; a narrow allowance of interpretation and freedom to explore what these events and people mean to our country, culture, greater society.

Actions to these thoughts are born from a comparison between the DC World War I and the National World War II memorial. One is currently on the the DC Preservation League’s Most Endangered Places list and the other has an entire website run by a company called the Maximum Response Group where I can buy any number of things from a U.S. Navy – The Ageless Fleet Puzzle, to a Official National WWII Memorial Mug.

Nearly hidden by summer foliage and dwarfed by sprawling constructions around it, the DC World War I memorial is sited between the Tidal Basin and the reflecting pool. There are no bus drop offs. There is no vending. There is no bookstore. and there is no tour. There is simply a small, elegant marble structure set in the landscape. Its dome reaches just below the reach of the trees, carved into the canopy edge. It is a moment that reminds me of Versailles.

The peristyle dome was designed by Frederick H. Brooke to honor the DC residents who lost their lives in World War I. The memorial was completed in 1931. Running by on a Sunday night I stopped and thought about 1931. I thought about war. I thought about war in 1917. I thought about 2008. I thought about war. I thought about war in 2005. I thought about baseball cards that advertise war. I thought about beautiful buildings crumbling from bombs and I thought about beautiful buildings crumbling from moss. I thought about war. war. war. I thought about running home. I thought about 1931.

strange how small things can make you think about big things and big things can sometimes make you not think at all.

It is unlawful to pick sea oats.

Or so the sign by the side of the road says. Upon reaching the redneck riviera and entering St. George Island Florida, one is greeted with these words of advice.

Leaving the sea oats in place is of course a very wise (and apparently lawful) course of action. This dune binder is a native, perennial, semitropical, rhizomatus wonder grass. Yummy to the oldfield mouse, Perdido Key beach mouse, marsh rabbits, and songbirds such as sparrows and red-winged blackbirds, this grass helps build and maintain dunes along the eastern shore from Washington DC south to Florida and west into Texas.

I don’t know what it tastes like with raisins but it looks laid back in my front garden and even calmer on the beaches of St. George Island.

Plant it porchside and watch the seedheads bow to the lawful soul.