Room at Top STOP

















I love Europe and The Euro, and they're blown-up these days Stateside (Thanks to pop producers and The Jersey Shore cast?).
But, in this multi-task era, both The Euro and The American can be Top for The Euro and The American at the same time, you know (like, look at Lindsay right there, right always)? Like, Tom Friedman was totally off-base with the whole World-flattening, World-shrinking post-Internet theory back when......The World is (and seems) big and bigger. The more we know, the more we cannot say we don't know, and the more we cannot forbid and limit. All of The Decades may look good, at once (no need to say goodbye to 60s volume and 80s avant- because we say hello to the jolie-laide 90s and sun-bleached, nostalgic 70s via 90s). Understatement and overstatement and middling-statement may all be deemed effective, at once. A thing, a style, may be proliferated widely, Globally, and be treated/contained/strained differently in each place, demi-place, school, household, and all look good, at once.
This week, for the 4th, the 234th 4th, I intend to celebrate America, post all about America (good and bad), but none of it framed in opposition to Europe. New World and Old World, like Town&Country, one must needs both! I just think this is a moment for American styles (Tommy Girl) and a moment for Euro styles (Sally Shapiro), both at once (along with everything else...AFRICA, THE WHOLE EAST, THE OCEAN). And, as I write all about America this week, I want that kept clear. Style, as I see it, is just less exclusionary everyday (OMG!). Limitation of others is the only thing that's naff, really.
Now, we find (because we are more able) that we have so much in common with each other, and that we like difference too----WE BROADEN, more, more, more. But at the same time, we are not teleporting. It still took me eight hours (stuck in Jerz Turnpike traffic) this weekend to ride (on a G-d damn bus) from New York to D.C....to cross a border, an ocean takes still more time, and we can feel the distance, feel the scale of our Earth. Last night, on the leg back from the Capitol to home, almost in the Holland Tunnel, we spied a dusky pink moon, low and dim. Then it was orange, higher and higher, clearer. I thought maybe it was Venus (goddess, not planet). So, I made a wish. And I thought about how easy it is for me to pray to the moon, how direct and effortless...and necessary (?) it feels. And I felt Ancient too, like one of many, not simply the many of now, the teeming populations on populations made privy to the same moon at same or slightly delayed moment, but everyone, every ancestor, the oil in the ground.
I felt big (and...so did everything else).