When you put a lot of graduate students in a room together, what you usually wind up with is a pissing contest where everyone tries to prove that he or she is the busiest person in the room. Screw that. I know I’m the busiest person in the room, so I have nothing to prove.
Sheryl Crow
All I Wanna Do, 1994
I always just liked this song. It makes me think of mildly hungover nights driving around San Francisco, which begs the question of why I like it so much. But still…
One of my big, pressing projects right now is to create an EAD-compliant finding aid for the papers of the man who was chancellor at UNCG when I was an undergraduate there. I’m not sure if I’m more disturbed by the fact that my undergraduate years are now officially part of university history or by the fact that my undergraduate years are now officially part of university history and that I’m the one documenting them. Either way, it’s nothing but a really big XML file anyway, I guess.
One of my other big, pressing projects is my exciting annotated bibliography on the history of the America shopping center. No, I’m not really sure what it has to do with what I’m studying, either, but at least it was more fun than most of the stuff I’ve been doing the past month or so. I’ll post it here when it’s done. There are pretty pictures and a nice history essay as well.
This may be the last you hear from me for the next couple of weeks.
There’s always a point near the end of the semester when you have that sort of breakthrough and realize that, even though you still have a ton of stuff to do, you will get it done and live through it all. That point came at about 3:00 this afternoon for me.
Unfortunately, it was also tempered by some sad news as I found out that my friend Taylor Green had passed away this weekend. I met Taylor via email back in 1997; he’d wandered into the website and noted that we were both Greensboro expatriates, and conversation ensued. I met him in person on the 1997 US Tour a few months later, and several more times over the years, often when I was visiting North Carolina over the holidays, etc. He was a truly original sort, and at the same time something of a archetype representing much of what is intriguing about southern culture. He was fun to be around, and he’s probably the only person I’ll meet in my lifetime who knew Tennessee Williams. I’ll miss Taylor.
S-Express
Theme from S-Express, 1988
It’s like watching an old friend die all over again.
No more Ellis Brooks Chevrolet, it seems. The longtime dealer on Van Ness Avenue is apparently switching to used cars only, which probably means it will be gone and replaced by a big box retailer within a year or two. The really sad thing will be the loss of all those great bits of neon on the building, most of which will now refer to a brand the dealer no longer sells and will have to be removed.
We may have a new record.
Only twelve days till I can rest and relax, though. And only an hour until my boy gets home for the weekend.
Wish I could spend more time nuzzling with him.
Not to sound opportunistic or anything, but I like it when other people’s mistakes work to my advantage.
For example, last week I finally bought a copy of a long out of print book by Victor Gruen that I’d been wanting for quite some time. I’d never seen a decent used copy for less than forty or fifty bucks, but this one Amazon seller had one for about twenty. It had an intact dust cover, but the seller noted somewhat apologetically that there was writing inside the front cover from when someone had given the book as a a gift. I think that may be part of why it was priced so low.
As I looked at the book yesterday, I noticed that the signature looked an awful lot like the name of the author, and that the inscription looked an awful lot like something an author would have written. After a quick Google search or two to verify the signature, I realized that I did in fact have a book signed by one of my favorite commercial architects of the 1950s (the designer of America’s first enclosed shopping mall, among other projects) and at a nice bargain price.
…when we find the most sincere Christmas tree lot in West End and wait there for the Great Pumpkin to rise up and sell us our tree.
Wait a minute…