Eccentric Flower:199904/the hissing of summer lawns
From Eccentric Flower
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april nineteenth the hissing of summer lawns I got mail from my friend in Estonia today. She had seen my list of CDs. Most of them were, as she put it, "Chinese to her," but one of them - Discography by the Pet Shop Boys - she actually owns. I am continually surprised at the tastes of people whom I apparently think I can second-guess. I've got to stop doing that. The antepenultimate time was when I posted the B story in twenty-six and some of the most unlikely people told me how much they liked it. The penultimate time was when Nonelvis said she liked Fatboy Slim. Knock me over with a feather. With the Pet Shop Boys - oh, I hate to say this - I have not heard from anyone who likes them (besides me) who isn't a gay white urban male currently between ages 25 and 40. Sorry - I'm just repeating what I've personally observed. Anyway, I digress. There is a song on that collection called "Suburbia." She wrote me, asking "What is suburbia? What has a district to have to pass as a suburb? What makes it impossible to call a district suburb?" And I replied .... - - - I think "suburbia" is a very American concept, but it may be spreading. Unfortunately. Suburbia is neither rural (farms, cows, pigs, fields of crops) nor urban (big buildings, glass and steel, traffic). It's not a small town either, because it may be very populous. Suburbia is what happens when people pursue the dream of having a lawn to mow and waste water on and a garage to put their two automobiles which guzzle gasoline into. It's what happens when people are drawn to a city because of all the good things in the city, but refuse to actually live in the city because of all the bad things in the city. Suburbia is a fair-weather friend. It is a hypocritical place of identical houses with identical sidewalks, a false countryside which has been tamed and made safe and artificial. Suburbia is where all the young adults move when they marry to have children because "they want their children to get a decent education." Of course, by turning their back on the city, they eliminate the possibility that the schools in the city will ever improve. Suburbia is a cop-out. Eventually the city dies and the businesses and factories the suburbanites have been commuting to every day slowly move out into suburbia themselves, one by one, and we have the phenomenon called the "edge city," a ring of healthy life and activity surrounding a decayed and abandoned core, the way the explosion corona expands out from the collapsed center of the supernova.
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