Off to the Fair

Queens, NY - Lileks - Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 : goo

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Had a stone in my head all day; was good for naught. The only moment of satisfaction I had was dinner, and it was a sorry affair - that dismal Papa John’s pizza served in the church basement on choir night; it’s like eating a pillow smeared with ketchup. Usually I have someone to talk to, but The Gals weren’t around, and all the chairs in the youth center were taken, so I sat on the floor in the hall and read an Easy Rawlins short story. Read the whole thing. Easy solved the mystery, as is his wont; the ghost of Mouse hung over the story like smoke. (The story was called “Smoke,” and now I see why.) I noted that both Easy and Gordianus, the detective hero of the Roman novels by Steve Sailor I’ve been reading, both have adopted mute sons. The similarity stops there.

Rome looks familiar to us from this great distance; I wonder if Los Angeles of the 50s would have made sense to them. To the smart ones, no doubt. All the churches might surprise them. That guy? Seriously, that guy? But they’d recognize the architecture. You could take a Roman to an old movie and point out the numerals - we kept those around because they class things up. The politics they would surely understand. You could explain it all over a sandwich made with Roman Meal bread. He’d like that. Show him some pictures of Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. I suppose it would be like waking up in 2000 years and finding a vast gambling joint based on the 1939 World’s Fair. On the moon.

Speaking of World’s Fairs: a friend gave me a scrapbook put together by a young woman in 1933, detailing their trip from Bigelow, Minnesota, to the Chicago World’s Fair. I’m scanning it all for a site. Horribly fragile. The pages come apart if a photon hits them. It reminds me - again - that we haven’t had a World’s Fair in America in some time. If they could muster several in the 30s, couldn’t we?

No, I don’t think we could. Not now. You need a compelling, attractive vision of the future that can manifested in appealing architectural forms. We’re lacking on both counts. A modern American World’s Fair would be turned over to starchitects eager to express anxiety and trans-cultural modernity; you’d get hideous stark looming glass buildings and giant pickles and Gehry dreck that looked like a Nosferatu set sprayed with silver Krylon. The great World’s Fairs of the 30s had two things in common: faith in the future and faith in the past. The latter may have been pumped up for the occasion, and the latter greased over the nasty spots, but once a civilization loses one, it’s in trouble. When it loses both, it’s on a steep staircase without handrails.

Then again, the images of the old fairs appeal - in part - because they belong to the magical world of long ago & far away, which we like because it smells like the talc in Grandma’s medicine chest. The recent past we hate. No one today would think much of the ideas put forth by the Los Angeles World’s Fair of 2000. No one would give the event much thought at all; its flickr pages would be poorly attended, its official websites archaic. If someone uploaded video to YouTube the comments would either consist of WTF or I remeber this when I was a kid it was awsom. Its predictions would be either fulfilled, and hence irrelevant (been there done that) or still unrealized, in which case ha-ha EPIC FAIL. It takes a few decades before these things are rehabilitated, before we hear the poetry in the ballyhoo - and then they turn into silent rebukes. This is what you could have had. This is what you pushed away. Happy?

Well, yes, if you’re talking about the Knoxville Fair, and a qualified yes if you’re talking about some architecture of the 60s versions; modernism was getting thin and spindly and seemed to be preening for a Leroy Neiman portrait. Somehow this sums up the last gasp of Official WASPdom. It doubles as an ICBM launch site!

Then again, there’s this - Soviet echoes aside, the very name should give you pride:

It all looked kitschy and horribly square by 1973. Now? If you don’t like it, let it cook for a decade or two. It all takes time. Like I said, a 2000 World’s Fair would be forgotten now, just as ’48 had moved on beyond the ’39 Fair. In both cases, war cleared the decks. Something from eight or nine years ago is like a dorky friend from grade school who still wants to hang around with you in 11th grade. Get lost! I’m trying to impress 1949!

But in the case of the ’39 Fair, the war reset the theme. What had been constructed as a vision of the future was tweaked to face the vision of the future others were pressing on unwilling populations. From the modernity of ’39 to this reassuring image:

The Perisphere had been a featureless orb, a pure and perfect thing that contained the soul of our engineered future. One year later, they overlaid the shadow of George Washington. As I said: faith in the future. Faith in the past.

This was ‘64 on the same site:

This is the site today.

A Roman brought back to life today would nod: well, you and me both. It happens. And a practical Roman would not worry so much over monuments. There are other things that count. Columns in the Forum still stand.

So?

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