Ducks, decorated sheds, ugly, ordinary, heroic, monumental, interstates, Main Street, Route 66, the Strip, White Towers, the End of the Road, Learning from Las Vegas, the Architectural League, Wayne McAllister, the Sands, the Fontainebleau, the Rat Pack, Ant Farm, Archigram, Telethon, Warhol, the Factory, Pop, postmodernism, Mies, Rudolph, Venturi, Scott Brown, Nam June Paik, Ed [...]
My friend Adriane Herman is an artist, curator, and associate professor of printmaking at the Maine College of Art. Her work is all about consumption and found imagery: 409 bottles, Little Golden Books, vintage postcards, discarded shopping lists, post-it notes, surplus bird seed. In Adriane’s work detritus and ephemera become art, not simply through object [...]
In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain reccounts his 1878 journey through Europe with his characteristic, and occasionally annoying, curmudgeonly humor. Late in the book, after too many months of fine dining and hotel fare, Twain is clearly longing for “American food and American domestic cookery.” In Chapter XX (pp. 235-241), he launches a mild attack [...]
Not surprisingly, my “life in the woods” was far less literal than Thoreau’s, involving little isolation and only fitful removal from my neighbors. Still, there was sufficient labor (more intellectual than physical) to keep me away from this particular place (my sadly static URL) for more than half a year. But unlike Henry David, I [...]
It may seem odd to still be writing about Maine nearly four months after my return from Vactionland, but the Pine Tree State has a way of staying with you. While this is due mostly to the essential quality of the place (see Genius Loci in Acadia), the quantity of made in Maine products that [...]
