Friday, December 10, 2010
Extravagance
I stood in Mishawaka’s new Apple store admiring the glamorous iMacs and MacBooks set out in rows for customers to try. The screens glowed as with a deep inner light—how could I fail to become a beautiful and creative wordsmith if I had one of those glorious machines to write on? I was in love. Next to me a well-dressed man examined an iPad, leaning in the way he might have at certain romantic moments when he was a teenager. His young daughter stood beside him, her hair in shiny ringlets, her upturned face barely reaching the tabletop. He held the iPad lower so she could see, and when he waved his hand the brilliant icons glided across the screen. “Look, honey,” he said, “It’s just like your iPhone, only bigger!”
I recoiled at those shocking words. Seriously, a Michiana pre-schooler who had her own iPhone? Didn’t the fellow know that the Midwest has rules against displays of extravagance? And yet I myself was longing quite irrationally for one of those deeply fancy, deeply unnecessary machines. Like many others who imbibed Midwestern values from the earliest days, I carry a dose or two of greed and certain crimped and cramping lessons about life with me wherever I go. On vacation once I walked around Versailles, the complex of palaces and gardens that was, for the French monarchy, the pinnacle of pre-guillotine extravagance. In the royal bedrooms, you could see that each new king and queen commissioned increasingly larger portraits of themselves. When they tired of one of their fantastic gardens, there were a dozen more gardens around them. If life grew hectic at the palace, no worry, for there was a smaller, more secluded palace out beyond the lake, and when that palace grew burdensome, Marie Antoinette, the queen, had a further little palace to the side, and beyond that a make-believe village where she could pretend there were no such things as palaces in her life. Here and there in the magnificent rooms and gardens I heard Americans with comfortable Midwestern accents saying to each other, “No wonder they got their heads chopped off.” From the point of view of down-home Michiana values, that kind of extravagance is wrong. It’s just wrong.
But some things we love here are nothing if not extravagant. When I walk the dog at night, in living room windows I spy flashing television screens the size of royal portraits. At the holidays we fill our tables with heaping bowls and platters and then fill ourselves in similar fashion. The mp3 players we give our children for their birthdays would have been the property of the king in days gone by, yet they are ordinary to us. Many folks in Michiana who have escaped the recession are, by historical standards, among the wealthiest people in human history.
And we believe in extravagance too. Georgia O’Keefe’s painting of clouds in Chicago’s Art Institute is 24 feet wide, but when you stand before it nobody around you ever says she was showing off. They say that it’s grand and glorious, and they soak it up in their souls. Artists pick up the iPad and see new ways to make images shimmer before our eyes; technologists see new ways for citizens to learn and share and speak out; captains of industry see new ways to make money. You can hardly tell the difference sometimes between excess and bounty, but when you look at the most uplifting as well as the most alarming episodes in human history, you find extravagance and extravagance and extravagance.
Commerce • Community • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
A random pick from more than 460 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:
April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe
Ken Smith -- Extravagance / More essays by Ken
Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette
Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather
David James -- More essays by David
Elizabeth Van Jacob -- More essays by Elizabeth
Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff
Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise
Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan
Chronicles Home | Email:
Leave a note for any of the authors at our WebNote page, or maybe you'd like a copy of our book? Then there's our Twitter and Facebook pages!
About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, Ken Smith, Heather Curlee Novak, David James, and Elizabeth Van Jacob.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
| May 2012 | ||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
Recent pieces
Useful to Be Useless -- Is it better to be useful or useless? I can’t decide, and that’s a problem. I have the age-old drive to “do something” with my life. I feel compelled to be practical, to pursue realistic goals, and to turn my skills toward earning money or helping people. Those goals allow me to justify my existence. But I also feel the strong tug of uselessness. I enjoy creating for no purpose and thinking for its own sake. I could be a happy lay-about. But always that other drive to please people, to fill my resume, to prove my worth, to show my team spirit – that residual sociability keeps me from wandering away entirely. By Joe Chaney.
Good Eaters -- Reflections on the topic of food, brought about, no doubt, by this time of harvest and Thanksgiving, led to my reading Thomas Keneally’s recent book, “Three Famines.” In it, he gives a general overview of the physical and mental processes of starvation – pretty horrifying and unimaginable from where we sit – then writes specifically about the three hunger-events. Ireland in the 1840’s, Bengal in the 1940’s and Ethiopia in the 1980’s are the “three famines” of the title. Although seemingly unrelated as to world-area and time period, there is a striking commonality and it’s not the traditional “act-of-God” explanation. “Acts of God:” droughts, floods, etc. often begin the privations, but the human hand exacerbates the problems into a cataclysm. By Jeanette Saddler Taylor.
The Excellence of the Long Distance Runner -- Consider cross country, the sport of choice for our family’s young athlete. That’s a 5000 meter feat of speed and endurance. At practice each day the teams run even farther, so on Saturdays they’re ready to race each other hard for 20 or 25 minutes. Near the end of the course they speed up because that’s the kind of people they have become, and they don’t stop until they have travelled the length of 54 football fields. By Ken Smith.
Bacon Before Husband -- Do you have a daily list? I don’t mean tasks for work or chores for home, I mean a Happy List. I have a Happy List running through my head most of the time. This list tends to be fickle and definitely changes with my mood. It is rare that something gets crossed off of it but I get immense satisfaction from my list just the same. My list makes friends laugh and strangers think I am...stranger. By Heather Curlee Novak.
“A feminist walks into a fraternal lodge …” -- Today’s story begins like a joke: What happens when a feminist walks into a fraternal lodge? The answer isn’t very funny, and it isn’t really about me -- it’s about who runs for office, and who doesn’t. But, yes, in this scenario I am the feminist cheerfully walking into the fraternal lodge, of the kind gently lampooned in The Flintstones as the Royal Order of the Water Buffaloes. By April Lidinsky.
South Bend Spring -- Would I ever think I’d find myself parting from one group of young adults yesterday, and then actually tearing downtown to join another? My knee-jerk reaction would normally be to slip into my hidey-hole on the third floor of Wiekamp Hall on the IU campus, or to run home—only three blocks—to read in solitude and eat Raman noodles. The first group—my first-ever class of college freshman English students—seem bemused at my political positions and ready to describe me as “professor,” but as a hopeless product of another day and time. By David James.
Call Me Bartman -- It’s that time of year when we wait in expectation of another World Series victory by the New York Yankees or the Philadelphia Phillies, while recalling (or trying to forget) another lost season in the sad history of the Chicago Cubs. Anyway, that’s the way Cubs fans talk about it. I don’t see it that way. In my view, the Cubs are the greatest team in the history of sports, and I wouldn’t change a thing about them. By Joe Chaney.
Autumn -- Have you noticed too? Can you feel it? Are you as excited as I am? After the wait of nine months for its rebirth, autumn is back. The real weather for football is here. The heat has abated, there’s a nip in the air, spiders are extruding blankets of webbing, and if you look up into the trees, here and there you see a bit of fall color beginning. Like so many of you, autumn is my favorite season. Time to clean up the detritus of summer – those only semi-successful tomato plants, for example – and to move on to the planting of crocus, bluebells, tulips and daffodils: the dreams of spring. By Jeanette Saddler Taylor.
Casting the Bronze Bust of Dr. Lester Wolfson -- There on the floor was the hand-made barrel-shaped white plaster matrix into which the molten metal would be poured. Near it stood a small furnace with a hole at the top the size of your fist. A stream of yellow flames roared from this hole and had been roaring for a long time. The metal inside was now over 1000 degrees. The sculptor’s wife cautioned us, If anything goes wrong, don’t rush up to help, back away—if it touches you, the bronze will burn right through your body. By Ken Smith.
Complaint Department -- I have struggled to maintain the peace and raise my girls well, but the stress of my days often means by the end of each one I am not the sweetest woman to be around. I often hurl the myriad challenges of my day at my husband as soon as he walks through the door. Sometimes dinner isn't made and the house looks like a toy bomb went off and I feel guilty about it. When I try to explain how the day went down I think it is a lot more like complaining than anything helpful. By Heather Curlee Novak.
Mad Men’s Maddening Style -- Oh, the elegant style of the early 60s. For men: the narrowly tailored suits and knife-thin ties; for women, the pencil skirts with wide cinching belts, the clinging cashmere sweaters punctuated by pearls. Take a look around and it’s clear that this season we are mad about Mad Men – and not just the TV show. Suddenly, in the “ya-gotta-have it” world of merchandizing, the winking vintage sex appeal of the early ’60 is being cranked up to sell upscale mall clothing, batwing eyeliner, and even retro telephone handsets so you can have Bluetooth technology but still look like you’re answering the phone for Don Draper in a red-lipsticked whisper. What the heck is going on? I’m a sucker, myself, for vintage fashion, but I wonder why now – in this political moment – we are hungry for the style of those very conservative “men will be men” and “women will be objects” times. By April Lidinsky.
Mandala -- I remember that year as the spring when my dad roared down the driveway at our home near Emory University in Atlanta in a new Austin Healey, a roadster, the proper name for a British rag-top sports car. This one was red with all the trimmings and served as waterproof glue for the closest period of bonding between a father and son. I say “waterproof” because the top on that car was a tight fit from the start, and had maybe fifty snaps to secure it around the cockpit; and of course after a couple times getting wet it shrunk, so there it stayed, behind the back seat squab—British for the seat’s backrest—for seven years, molding in peace. When it rained we got wet, so we cultivated raincoats and laughing. I didn’t mind a bit. By David James.
Categories
Archives and syndication
- By author
- By category
- By date
- RSS 2.0 syndication
- RSS for iTunes
- Technorati Profile