On the Fascinating Vernacular

AMERICA (The Epitome)I have to admit that like JB Jackson, I too have a strange fascination with the vernacular landscape of America. I have always chalked this down to the fact that I didn't grow up in America, and therefore I find all obtuse aspects of American culture both amusing and of interest. I have traveled through West Africa and various other foreign places and seen many structures and landscapes that natives of that area might describe as unappealing or ugly, but I have found them authentic, charming or too revealing of the culture to dismiss. This is how I feel about America. Conversely, I have been depressed a almost reduced to tears of despair by many European landscapes that were familiar to me. Many parts of France, the country in which I spent most of my formative years, are the most miserable places I have ever had the misfortune to see. Whereas the suburbs and strip malls of America appear as symbols of something greater to me - they are illustrations or manifestations of the nation's history, present culture and its vision of the future. I was never able to see such meaning in the parts of France that I hated.

When I was a junior in high school I visited a friend of mine in the suburbs of Boston for a week. She apologized for her friends, her town, her life in Holliston Massachusetts, but I was deaf to her apologies and positively gleeful. A group of teenagers driving around in the woods, secretly drinking beer in each other's basements and cranking the radio up as they pulled up at the Burger King drivethru. How magnificent! I still love using and buying the red, white rimmed party cups because when I was growing up in France we always saw them in movie scenes at high school house parties.

I know no one will break out the violins for me, but I always wanted my friends to have crazy house parties instead of spending our weekends at the bars in the Latin Quarter. It's a true case of the grass always being greener on the other side. That is not to say I didn't love living in France and coming of age there, but there was always something alluring and incredible about the US. Everything is bigger, louder, brighter. The customer is always right, the choices are myriad and in the strip mall suburban architecture of "Amur'cuh" I saw these things. At my school is Paris we bartered American candy and boxes of mac 'n' cheese, and Abercrombie was all the rage, but these things didn't mean to us what they mean to people who grew up in America and what they mean to me now. Though I still get a kick out of Betty Crocker and American TV shows.