Unisphere, Perisphere

I didn’t go to Queens to see the Unisphere.  As I approached it, it opened and arched and bent different ways, and I stepped up and over the edge of what would hold in water, if it was summer, and walked under it, and there was a kite caught in one edge, near the Americas, and […]

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For Peace and Freedom

So they dug out this ash heap in Queens and built all these pavilions. They had cars already driving around in 1939. Cars were not yet drudgery and traffic jams and Jiffy Lube– they were leisure and freedom. They had an early television. Television was not yet aesthetic assault and battery everywhere you turn. You could see the Magna Carta. They had a dishwasher, which was about to make everyone’s life better (except for people who insist on living in minimally renovated pre-1935 housing like stupid, stupid me). They had a robot who smoked cigarettes. He was seven feet tall, spoke 700 words from the record player in his belly, and I would definitely go out on a date with him if his reconstruction goes as planned.

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