Just Popped Out

Google image "French Cafe," and this painting comes up, offered for $425:

Now let me tell you, I see these types of pictures in American homes all the time. It's highly possible you have a picture of some European cafe or other such social setting somewhere in your house...the hallway...the guest bedroom...maybe the living room. I've got one between the kitchen and downstairs.

Every time I go into a house with these sorts of pictures I like to query the inhabitants about them. Isn't it odd that we've got pictures of foreign urban settings in our housal units that presumably we'd like to have in our own neighborhoods, yet instead we build shit like this:


Yep, a nice blown-on Styrofoam stucco exterior with ample room for your parked car. An All-American Cafe.

A few of my neighbors are smitten with Hawai'i. Large framed prints of beaches and hula kahiko. Of course not everyone can live by the beach, so we hang pictures of places we admire. Yet, we don't ever stop to consider how ridiculous it is to put up a photo of an urban environment when all we had to do was build these urban environments around us in the first place. It's not like we can go out and build a beach here in Elk Grove, but we certainly could have built a city worth a shit.

Tell me something. Do you think that if I went to any random house in Belgium or Portugal I'd find a picture like this All-American Cafe? Think this picture hangs in the parlor of some house in Mont de Marsan?

Perhaps a visiting Austrian from Graz hangs her photo of the SPAM museum when she was out visiting relatives in Minnesota:


Or hangs photos of her relatives front yard...you know, the family that loves to put those cute plywood cutouts of Santa at Christmastime, or the little boy peeing in the bushes. This one better sums up my America:



These are the products of a culture that doesn't give a damn about the dignity of place. These are the trappings of a throwaway society, one that fails to concern itself with the value of public settings such as a walkable street, with buildings that connect to one another, with buildings built of durable materials, built to last. This is why we have to hang pictures of places elsewhere. It's as if we know better but we just don't know better.