The first shopping day of the Christmas season is upon us, with the usual crowds, the frantic sales and the inevitable parking nightmare. Even the name—Black Friday—suggests that Americans are deeply ambivalent about this strange shopping holiday. But is it, perhaps, the most American day of the year? A spectacle of commerce and crowds, consumerism [...]
Entries from November 2009
November 27, 2009
Thanks
In late November, the shade grows quickly over the landscape in the hills behind Albuquerque. From about 3 p.m. on, the shadows surge longer and longer, and if you’re hiking on the backside of the Sandia Mountains, it’s a chiaroscuro drama. But sometimes, as you walk up a gentle canyon, you come over a rise [...]
November 21, 2009
Bush Builds a Library
Designs for the new George W. Bush library and presidential conference center were unveiled last month. The architect is the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Robert A.M. Stern. Of Stern’s proposed design, I write:
Is it a great building? Robert Stern doesn’t design great buildings, at least in the sense of buildings that [...]
November 21, 2009
Newspapers and Museums: The Same Dilemma
I’m personally allergic to historical reenactments and most forms of interactive history telling. I think all too many museums and historical sites grasp at straws, technically and aesthetically, when they try to recreate the way history is told. But I acknowledge the problem of falling attendance, reduced engagement and the side effects for the [...]
November 15, 2009
Create Christmas Memories, Now!
I dropped into a place called National Harbor this afternoon. It is a large convention center, entertainment and hotel district created ex nihilo just a few years ago on the banks of the Potomac River south of Washington, DC. They were putting up the Christmas decorations, including a large Christmas tree made of a conical [...]
November 13, 2009
Cultural Rewind
The Post gave me a little bit of cyber real estate today, an online discussion group called Cultural Rewind. I pose a question, readers take up the thread. It’s a mix of popular culture and some of the esoterica I cover as culture critic, with the goal being something a little different from the usual online surveys [...]
November 11, 2009
Afro-Mexican History
I have a special fondness for the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, a small outpost of the big brand located a short drive from where I live. The museum used to have a running loop of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as part of their main display, and it was there that I [...]
November 10, 2009
New Deal for Artists
I missed the opening of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “1934: A New Deal for Artists,” which displays art made with the first tranche of money directed at artists under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s short-lived Public Works of Art Project. When I finally made it to the show last month, I was struck by [...]
November 7, 2009
Visual Acoustics
The title, which I don’t much like, strikes me as one of those clever mixing of ideas and media that doesn’t yield anything meaningful. But the film Visual Acoustics is great fun for people who love architecture, especially those who already know the huge role that photographer Julius Shulman played in promoting the mid-century modern [...]
November 3, 2009
Richard Moe retires
Richard Moe, for 17 years the head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, announced his plans for retirement today. He’s had some stunning victories since he came to the Trust in 1992-93, including a famous battle against the Walt Disney Company’s plans to build a theme park near some of the most historically hallowed [...]
