Word: suburbias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There's something very depressing about listening to vacation plans which combine jet travel, Bermuda, suntan lotion and volleyballs when you know you're just trundling back to suburbia next week. Ever since my parents decided we couldn't afford the psychic toll of another family vacation (the fighting in the back seat finally got to them). I have known, with a sense of doom approximating the feeling of a Christian Scientist with appendicitis, that I will not be embarking on a spree in the Netherlands Antilles, but on a hopeless quest to entertain myself in a deserted suburban wasteland...
After I've exhausted the limited resources of suburbia, there remains that most hallowed of vacation traditions--visiting the relatives. In my family, that's quite a ritual, because the bulk of my father's large family still lives in one very clannish neighborhood in Brooklyn. They inhabit a world where no one ever moves away, women get married at 18 or 19, and everyone knows everyone else and what they're doing. Visiting my grandmother, one of the local matriarchs, is always an occasion Despite our protest that we have eaten, overeaten, or can feel our aortas congealing into...
...merely missed me in the overall picture of Mr. Eastwood's audiences. But I can't believe that he never noticed any other women in those long lines outside the theaters. The Eastwood image of strong, quiet masculinity turns on a large female audience, even here in suburbia...
...race and class, the stiffening resistance to affirmative action (or reverse discrimination, depending on your viewpoint), the call for more law and order, the idea that the federal government tried to do too much too quickly in the '60s and must pull back now, the white flight to suburbia, all fit together into one unhappy picture. Understanding Brooklyn, where the battleground is big, the players easy to spot and the conflict starting early, helps one to understand how the foul weed of neoconservatism flourishes in soil once overgrown with liberal begonias...
...lives on an estate in the middle of suburbia, and on all sides, far in the distance, one can see his neighbors. Their houses are undoubtedly fine and big, but they seem rather small-time from this inflated perspective. The estate encompasses some two or three city blocks. In front of the house is a huge lawn, bissected by the long, tree-lined driveway. On one side is a 5-car garage with a house on top, and on the other is a tennis court. Behind the house is another lawn, a garden, a sunken green house, a platform tennis...