Historical Pause
A relaxing weekend. Golfing was planned for Saturday but the frigid temperature in the air made going to a see a movie a better idea. So we went and saw Kurt Russell do his his Herb Brooks impersonation in Miracle, the story of the US Olympic Hockey team in 1980. Good movie. They do this great job of having the actual AL Michael’s play by play dubbed over the acting hockey sequences. Obviously you know the outcome of the game but it was still suspenseful. There was one old guy in the theater who was so into it that he would applaud and get all excited whenever the USA Team would score against the robotic Russian team. He was definitely reliving some cold war memories. Also some nice props to Jimmy Carter in the movie. The film highlights the speech he made about the lack of American confidence and uses it as a backdrop upon which the achievements of the USA Team seem very important and hopeful.

Sunday was a good day for reading. The Good Doctor turned me on to The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. Huge book. I wish I didn’t have to work today and could sit back and finish it. The book is a thoroughly researched epic historical account of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It highlights two intense story lines, that of the Director of Works of the World’s Fair, famed skyscraper architect, Daniel H. Burnham and the crazed Dr. H. H. Holmes who went on a serial killing spree during the Fair. The sure grittiness of industry and city-spirit are captured very lyrically by Larson and you get a keen snapshot of Chicago’s turn of the century physical and mental landscape. Great side stories about Louise Sullivan, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Marshall Fields are tucked into the corners of this book.

The whole premise of the cultural fair is fascinating. Essentially the whole idea for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was born from leading brains of the time that were upset by France’s World Fair and their damned Eiffel Tower which had dwarfed any American structure. The cultural war was on and the American’s set out to prove that no one puts on a World’s Fair like we do. Especially not the French.

I must say that it’s far more impressive to watch a cultural war go down, one where the key soldiers are architects and landscape designers, than it is to watch a modern day occupying Iraq war. We need to get the hell out of that quagmire and return our attention to whipping the worlds butt in such things as building gardens, building amazing cities and beautifully constructed urban spaces. That’s a friendly and worthwhile battle I could get behind.