Stop Me Before I Vote Again

http://manhattaninfidel.com/__oneclick_uploads/2011/01/us_capitol_1814c.jpg

modest grub state

http://0.tqn.com/d/history1800s/1/0/y/2/-/-/Washington-troops-burning.jpg

early critics take direct action

I guess that's one of the advantages of actually being from Washington, DC: ponderous, pompous, faux-Classical Greek/Roman piles like the Capitol and the Supreme Court building just sort of fade into the background clutter -- and especially so as living on Capitol Hill, just four or five blocks from said piles, the Capitol and Supreme Court buildings are pretty much literally "in my backyard". Seriously... in the fall and winter, when the leaves have thinned out and fallen, I can see the tops of the Capitol and Supreme Court from our third-floor bathroom. At night these days, I can look out the window and tell whether or not Congress is in session while I'm taking a dump.

When out-of-town friends and family come to visit during holidays, they seem absurdly impressed that we live so close to all that "history" and a bit surprised that we haven't actually been inside either of those bloated marble hulks. I tell our visitors it's because "I can't stand the smell", which makes the DW get all pissy at me. In the over fifty years I've lived in and around DC (including twenty years living on the Hill itself) I've been inside the Capitol building a grand total of twice -- once, when shooting a Statehood Party sit-in protest at Eleanor Holmes Norton's office about seven or eight years ago, and another time about six years ago, when I managed to bullshit my way into the media pit to shoot George Galloway's glorious bitch-slapping of Sens. Levin and Coleman. And believe you me, gang, it's just as overwrought and conceited a building on the inside.

Still, as wretched and self-important as the Classical Greek/Roman revivalist marble crap is (don't even get me started on the West Building of the National Gallery), the mass of Rooselvelt-era pseudo-Stalinist/pseudo-Nazi-looking stinkburgers along Pennsylvania Avenue are even worse... especially the 8th and Penn entrance to the Department of Justice building:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/US_Department_of_Justice.jpg
...which just screams "Seig Heil". I mean, jeezus, look at those goddamn' doors. It's as if when they first built that heap, the DOJ was expecting to be stormed by a bunch of Communists with battering rams or something.

Yeah. That DoJ building is quite possibly the very worst of a very bad lot.

Conceited is one thing, but just ignorant, tone-deaf, and bad is quite another. That crushing dome overbearing the weeny spindly orders beneath it, the curiously doubled columns on one or the other of the two facades, the layered terraces of the other facade that recall nothing so much as the keyboard of an old-fashioned typewriter, and the general way that classicizing ornaments have been plastered on in a random confectioner's way, so that no part of the damn thing has any discernible relationship with any other part -- truly, we have the Capitol we deserve.

Not just the exteriors....

Recall this item from 1986?

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/02/us/state-dept-suite-with-tobacco-motif-angers-smoking-foes.html

Of course, op will likely punish me for seeming to make common cause with the nosmo kings.

i have no "issue" with scale
or ugliness or faux fauxing

i just wish the faux fauz fraudulence went full bore
like epcot
so we could redo make over etc at low cost and with near skill -less wage forces
nothing perminant

government part travel capable amusement park
part pro temp expo

nothing in l'enfantville
compares to the hall of presidents
for transitory conviction
fuck the old dudes can even spout lenin
while doing the cha cha or a conga line
and afternot much more then an afternoons
reprogram-ing

and even better
the DC oughta ...road trip

gubmint site as moveable encampment

to hell with the static ride on ghost mountain
the haunted hotel dump
or the hoop-dee-do revue
lets put the HUAC re enactment mobile on the road baby ...

bottom line
any new emperor of ice cream
could have off with all of it
in a flash

and we could have a neat new gubmint "look "
up and running by easter next

"Of course, op will likely punish me ..."

ah but lad
it will hurt me
more to virtually lash your tender hind parts
then it hurts you

perminant

perminant

perminant

the law of ortho-spelling
and official erections

'Perminant' is a perfectly good Latin coinage: per + minor, minari -- 'ever-threatening'. Congrats, Owen.

Better Demokitsch. It will bring you closer to our legally elected and constitutionally installed president.

I recommend all their videos. They help the candidates bring an unusual clarity to their public addresses.

Fadduh Smiff sez on 12.11.11 @00:05:
...That crushing dome overbearing the weeny spindly orders beneath it, the curiously doubled columns on one or the other of the two facades, the layered terraces of the other facade that recall nothing so much as the keyboard of an old-fashioned typewriter, and the general way that classicizing ornaments have been plastered on in a random confectioner's way...

I guess what pisses me off so much about all the Classical revivalist crap on Capitol Hill and nearby is that in four years' art history study in college, I got to see lots of the real stuff, and thought it was awesome. Classical Greek and Roman are my favorite periods of historic architecture -- along with Bauhaus* -- and having seen real Classical Greek and Roman architecture, looking at all the piles in DC is like looking at a conceited culture's monuments to itself, all bluster and pretense and self-importance.

But, aaaa-aaaanyway, back on-topic... yeah, that goddamn' Christmas tree ornament just makes me want to tear my own skin off -- but then, pretty much every piece of Washington-themed Christmas kitsch I see around here every year makes me want to do that.

--

*Yeah, I dig Classical Greek and Bauhaus... but then, I'm also a Deadhead who also really digs old-school British punk. Go figure.

This loathsome ornament, instead of defacing a Christmas tree, should be suspended from its owner's neck: serving, like the leper's bell of olden times, to warn us that an afflicted one approaches.

"Classical Greek and Roman are my favorite periods of historic architecture "

greco-roman architecture ??

that's where you design a building
without using your legs right ??

and as to
weimar weiner " bauhaus"

shit sheet rock socialism beats that crap ....

i prefer amerikan sizzler steak haus

eisenhower
interstate moderne

secular public architecture
good bad and indifferent
all of it
is
the core of a statist aesthetic

oil refineries and off ramps
that's design you can live with

op sez on 12.11.11 @14:38:
... and as to
weimar weiner " bauhaus"

shit sheet rock socialism beats that crap...

Speaking of sheet rock socialism... when I was about 13, back in 1970, while our family was stationed in Germany, our Boy Scout troop took a week's trip to Berlin. After the obligatory visits to Checkpoint Charlie and the museum there, some friends and I went up to some of the observation points that were set up to let us look over into the Eastern Zone. Squinting into the distance across the Death Strip, tank traps and barbed wire, I saw what had to be some of the grimmest, nastiest-looking apartment blocks I'd ever seen. Even the Section 8 housing in Southeast DC looked palatial compared to those goddamn' horrible-looking East German apartment complexes. I remember thinking jeezus, man, no wonder they're trying to escape.

It was a nasty place, to be sure. but the very byword in mendacious State Political Police, the Stasi had fewer informants per capita than the West's darling (no "dictator", he) Mubarak employed in Egypt. If I remember correctly, at least from the archives they also killed far fewer (less than 100) than the thousands who came to a grisly end under the Mukhabarat and it's torturers who also had access to Western equipment that could with the greatest of ease carry out surveillance that would have been practically unfeasible or outrageously expensive in the pre-Internet and pre-cellphone East Germany.

One imagines a good use for the Capitol:

...and that they get to destroy it.

Back at ya:

http://www.correntewire.com/fascist_kitsch

Nicely observed about the border, Lambert. Funny how immediately recognizable the motif is, even though it's so minimalist and attenuated.

lamby commenting...here again... ??

amazing what gets you to stick out your tongue these days

where btw is that great anglo canadian bethune

have the local
fever swamps production
of an-narco black flies and other
pink-black
ideological midges
sent him to higher ground ??

i sure hope so