Festivals and Culture

Although the outfits at Anthropologie stores aren't generally suited to our age, the chain store is not known only for browsing current fashion and what daughters and granddaughters might be interested in wearing, the home decorating goods are marvelous: bright, ethnic, colorful and useful. In fact, I save their catalogs and have given store gift certificates to my daughters.

We don't get the Sundance Channel on our cable service (yes, we've cut back) but the series, Man Shops Globe, can be viewed at the Sundance Channel website, led by one of the Anthropologie buyers, Keith Johnson. The Sundance Channel site described what the series has set out to explore:

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by Rose Madeline Mula

All my life I have lived within pitching distance of Fenway Park — well not quite, but never more than twenty miles from the Green Monster. Yet I have never attended a baseball game. The closest I’ve come is viewing an inning or two on TV when the Red Sox have been World Series contenders. Other than that, I’ve had zero interest. The old clichés come to mind — for me it’s like watching grass grow or paint dry. In other words, b-o-r-i-n-g!

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by Rose Madeline Mula

Whatever happened to the concept of rewarding long-standing customers for their loyalty? Don’t ask the cable companies. They haven’t a clue.

For the past two years I had been a faithful client of Cable Company X. I had been happy with the service — well, as happy as anyone can be with any cable service — and I expected our relationship to continue until I got old. Oh, wait. I’m already old. Well, I figured I’d hang in at least for the foreseeable future. And they would have been delighted with that arrangement, as long as I agreed to a fat fee increase — forty dollars per month more than the already hefty sum I had been paying.

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Michael Kammen's new book from the University of Chicago Press explores the grave sites, among others, of Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis (below)  and  Abraham Lincoln.

"Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America from February 1861 until its collapse in April 1865, died in New Orleans on December 6, 1889, at the age of eighty-one. Five days later, following a frenzy of local and regional arrangements, Confederate veterans and many others packed an immense procession that accompanied the body to Metairie Cemetery for what turned out to be temporary burial in a vault guarded round the clock, awaiting a decision about the erstwhile CSA president’s permanent interment. Bells tolled from every church tower in New Orleans to accompany the long and solemn parade to Metairie. The issue of his final resting place, however, had actually begun on the very day that Davis died and swiftly became what we now call a'hot button issue.' Although his reputation revived during the 1880s, he had been reviled by white Southerners after the Confederacy fell and he fled from Richmond only to be apprehended by Federal troops in Georgia. During his lingering last illness he wisely said to his wife, Varina, 'You must take the responsibility of deciding this question, I cannot — I foresee [that] a great deal of feeling about it will arise when I am dead.' "

"Davis understood the delicate situation all too well. Southern press coverage of his death signaled swelling admiration and pride in the former leader — utterly inconceivable less than a generation earlier, at the time of unbearable defeat. Six Southern cities each hoped to 'host' the body into eternity, above all Montgomery, Alabama, where Davis had reluctantly assumed the presidency, and they all intensively lobbied the quickly created Jefferson Davis Memorial Association (JDMA). The decision belonged entirely to Varina and her children, however, and they waited more than eighteen months before choosing a prime site at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, where the Davises had lived for four years and where a great many honored Southern dead already lay buried. The civic leaders of New Orleans, feeling bitter disappointment at surrendering a prized symbol of states’ rights and resistance to Northern aggression, decided to build a monumental memorial to Davis that would equal in scale the ones already erected to Abraham Lincoln in Springfield and just recently conceived for Ulysses S. Grant in New York City. Their ambition, however, wildly exceeded their collective or potential purse."

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