Despite the fact this road is in the middle of a mule’s ass, miles from any town, it positively pounds with speeding, heedless traffic criss-crossing the junction. I have rarely felt less secure on a rural highway. When you pull over, the passing cars are going so blazingly fast your whole vehicle shudders. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Andersonville wasn’t done to Americans by the Viet Cong or the Japanese. Americans did this to other Americans. This is our burden entirely. If we forget it, we forget it’s possible.
“Since Walt wanted the Matterhorn Bobsleds to open in just over a year later, along with a Submarine Voyage, a larger Autopia, and a Monorail, he asked if it could be built faster. He asked me to design a bobsled and two track layouts. He asked Arrow Development, Walt’s favorite outside manufacturer, to find a way. Arrow said bent up pipe would be the quickest way, thus it turned out to be the world’s first steel pipe coaster. See, Walt would know all about the various manufacturing possibilities and wound up inventing something new, just to get the attraction he wanted.”
At the time? Embarrassing. Now? Fun! Strange how a few years makes you see the joy that was intended.
Second person isn’t just a way of announcing, I’m a musical! I’m talking metaphorically about abstract concepts! It’s also a way for writers to distance themselves from the toughest feelings their creations have. As if to apologize for the absurdity of breaking into song, lyricists use You to provide some intellectual breathing room. It’s the hot mitt of musical emotion.
Jimmy Carter spent two nights here in 1994. Steinhatchee, Florida.
We pass desultory intersections like Rosewood’s every day. And we will never know how many of them were once the settings for brutal events, in which Americans, believing they were right and on the side of God, were in fact the instruments of something sinister and evil.
I round up a few links to a selection of the coolest things I’ve been up to in the past few months.
Something happened at the very start of Chicago that marked a pivot in musical theatre. In fact, what happened in the first five minutes of Chicago the movie could be said to have set the filmed musical on a new course forever, and few people even noticed it had happened.
Just turn on the TV right now and count how many times people say it on the news, reality shows, and interviews. Whenever someone runs out of an ability to properly explain something with specificity, they run to the adjectival filler ‘amazing.’ It’s cheap, industrial-grade description — the corn syrup of self-expression.