Maybe the PA legislator should just go all in and pass a law making it illegal to vote for Democrats. Or, failing that, making it illegal for any to be placed on the ballot. For fuck’s sake.
kara vallow, american depressive.
The Borromeo del Rio Carmelo Mission, Carmel.
The Spanish settlers of 18th century California established 21 missions, from San Diego north to San Francisco. I have visited almost all of them. They are sort of the West Coast version of the old Quaker meetinghouses I loved back in PA. More often than not, the missions in SoCal seem stranded in California’s banal surrounding, shabby hamlets of deep beauty and resonance. Unlike Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, or the Tower of London, the old Spanish missions rarely fit into their modern surroundings.
California architects, landscape artists, builders and other such scam artists usually lack the ability to successfully mesh old and new. And “New” in the American Southwest is something so uniquely grotesque. There is the Hipster Flip, or “Dwell” minimalist monstrosity; olive green or gray exterior walls, white trim and a bright, tangerine-colored door, flat, unpainted, horizontal wood slat fence. There is Tudor suburbia, Faux-Tex-Mex, and the “Beaux Arts” starter castle. Lastly, we have the signature of sprawl, the “Tuscan Villas” – faux Italianate style, tile roofs, stucco walls, shuttered windows and crenellated corners, or some derivation of the Palladian style (with sartorial historical quotation). Aggressively shoddy, cheap mini-mall quality construction, generally too big and proportioned poorly, and made of materials that are veneers, blatantly more contemporary than the image that they are constructing, with some rough hewn element tossed in, Home Depot style, oh and the stained glass windows, miles of slate countertops, lordly ceiling fans and brass fixtures that no Tuscan house ever witnessed. The Architectural Monstrosity du jour is a two-pronged emotional event: the cheapness in the rendering provokes a deep, deep sorrow while the blatant, solipsistic disregard inherent in building one’s hideous monolith right up to the property line and paving over the rest makes me want to stick forks in my eyes. All of these are so cheap and profoundly ugly, so fundamentally separate from both their natural surroundings and intended occupants. Despite all the renowned architects who made careers in California, the place still lacks a defining vernacular. [click to continue…]
I heard some fatcats talking over pecan encrusted sand dabs last night, about how we “may be” on the brink of “another Rapture.” My ears went into radar mode. We are heading for a Rapture, alright, but apparently, they were not talking abouot your typical nuthatch evangelicals exploding off Earth. No, this time, according to the Carmel gentlemen, the Rapture is just “all the world’s moneez,” and instead of Spaceman Jeebus perpetrating this nefariousness, it’s “humans as usual” with their corrupt financial institutions and cascading European sovereign debt crises poised to annihilate the global economy, again. Expect Earth to liquefy back into a state of primordial ooze by approximately Halloween. Don’t worry, friends, humanity will be OK eventually, look how Europe began to recover from the collapse of Rome after just a thousandish years.
