And then it was Tuesday

The Bison Presentation was a complete success. Every possible aspect of the bison’s life was answered in my daughter’s speech, as evidenced by the fact that not one peer in the 5th grade had a question afterwards. I think that says it all. Also, they were two minutes late for recess.

Hey, did you all CyberShop on CyberMonday? My wife tried, and Barnes & Noble servers were overloaded and hiccuped and lost the orders twice. Must have caught them totally by surprise, this whole online thing. It’s like going to a check-out counter with a stack full of books and having the clerk enter a catatonic state, then there’s a flash of light, you lose consciousness, and when you wake up all your books are back on the shelves.

I’ll admit the deals are spectacular – Amazon had a deeply discounted bongo drum, last time I checked. I did get on a waitlist for a Swiss Army Knife; if I ever find myself facing the Swiss Army, I want to make sure we’re evenly matched. (Was there ever a recent battle where the famously neutral Swiss used those things? “Reports are coming in now, and over 5000 enemy forces appear to have been killed with a corkscrew, with several hundred wounded claiming their nails were filed by that useless metal emory board.)

Just remembered I already have a Swiss Army knife, but it’s not a classic Red model, and hence maybe doesn’t count. Looks like it’s from some crazy Terminator future, where robots rule everything. No, it counts, all right. It’s the basics: every man should have a knife, a Zippo, and a flask, in case you have to saw off a limb and cauterize it. I haven’t seen “127 Hours” – I’m waiting for the extended director’s cut, “128 hours,” which contains a solid hour of screaming – but I’ll wager the guy had all the items described above.

Maybe not the Zippo. This may be Zippo’s fault, because they keep issuing such declasse downmarket lighters with goofy designs that scream I CAN HAS MULLET. Okay, Playboy Bunny, fine. Reefer leaf: sigh. Sparkly rainbow metal shimmery background with Confederate flag: if you must. I have a collection of Zippos, but haven’t added anything in some time, because there’s nothing to be had – unless you want to pay $150 for a Vietnam-era lighter, which I don’t, because I wasn’t in Nam and hence have no right to own it.

The fiche machine is acting up at work, a balky cow that gives no milk. But the other day I did find something interesting. Hey, look at this: It had a tower.

And a different name: American Agricultural Mart. No longer the world’s largest commercial building, but still PDB on the structure scale, or Pretty Damned Big. The tower was downsized to a squat nub, and probably just as well; that’s not exactly useful space up there. It was a product of the 20s boom, as you might expect, and just thinking about the 20s gives me intestinal grips. Because there, my friends, was a boom. The 80s also. In a lesser sense, the 90s. Booms that produced things. The last boom just made houses. Ten billion houses. Oh, we got a few skyscrapers out of it, but they were mostly residential; we didn’t spent the fat years pushing stone into the sky like we used to do. It was a thumb-twiddling boom like no other, and all the “landmark” architecture was mostly incomprehensible European-derived hell-boxes plunked down in the middle of progressive cities, and labeled “library” or “theater.” There’s no American vernacular for large-scale architecture, or for sculpture. O for the days when bewhiskered plutocrats with uncomfortable collars would cut the ribbon on a statue named VIRTUE then hie back to the hotel to meet with the mistress. I’m serious: at least there was a line between then and now, between the Classical and the Modern, instilling the urban landscape with timeless symbols of the concepts that undergirded society. A boom used to give us brick and it gave us stone; last time around we got houses with drywall a kid could put a fist through.

Or so it seems. The long yawn of history will probably find something interesting. I was poking through the fiche today, as I said, and I got out a scroll from 1954. Lots of stories about the debate over whether the hideous recession was over. I’ve no idea if it matches our contemporary travails; I doubt it. For one thing, no one’s talking these days about upticks in steel production. But you don’t think of the 50s as having recessions, do you? There’s WW2, which kicked off a boom, and then there was some sort of nasty business around Nixon time, and then there was the Carter trough, then here. People forget the dot-com crash, the ’87 crash, the “Worst economy since the Depression” talk of the 1992 election, and all the other dips into the ditch. This is why I never enjoy a boom. But this will be the third Christmas of the Great Contraction, and I’m tired of it. Everything still feels brittle and unsteady.

Art Notes: I’ve been reading “1922” by Stephen King, part of a novella collection with the great title “Full Dark, No Stars.” It’s the best thing he’s done in years, and there’s nothing supernatural about it. Just good fiction, without any of his tics or tricks. Probably took him a week to write. Also started the latest version of “Metropolis” – yes, they found more footage, this time in Argentina. If you don’t like the movie, or know it only from chopped-up crappy prints with a stupid soundtrack, you may wonder why finding 600 additional frames in poor condition matters. I suppose it doesn’t, except that it’s the most brilliant movie of its era. Yes, people GESTURE. Yes, they overact. Yes, it’s didactic. But for heaven’s sake, it’s brilliant. When you hear the original score the entire movie is elevated to a level few films inhabit, and the immensity of the thing is astonishing. The fact that it came from a culture that would go full-bore insane in a few years makes it even more haunting.

Well, enough; time to hit the TV, as is my right at the end of the day, and watch the IT Crowd. Broad, silly, hilarious, distinctly British – they do this sort of thing very well. Minor Matchbook update, here. Have a grand day!