I was born September 17, 1988. 211 year earlier on the same date the American Constitution was adopted. 136 years after that, September 17, 1923, Hank Williams Sr. was born.
Say what you will about the zodiac, horoscopes, and the consequences that position of the sun has on any given day. Maybe planetary positions at birth don’t influence traits, attitudes, strengths and weaknesses, but maybe they do. I can’t be sure, but I do feel a certain connection to the American Constitution-Maybe not in the way that say, Sarah Palin feels connected to it- and Hank Williams.
As a child learning about the founding of our nation I thought of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as rebels with a cause. George Washington was pretty much the same as Moses and all figures of history lived together in the woods. When I was in elementary school I was taught to consider the ideals of America wonderful. I was taught to seek Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Hank Williams understood that ideal, but in the pursuit he took a wrong turn somewhere during the early fifties and got mixed up in drugs and alcohol. They found him dead in the backseat of a Cadillac on New Years day. He was 29 years old. The last song that he released during his lifetime was the aptly titled, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”. He didn’t, but neither will any of us.
So what does all this have to do with me? I guess it means that I like stories. True stories that seem like a magnificent lie. I like history because we all have one. I think that a man can learn how to live by listening to Hank Williams or Woody Guthrie or Buddy Holly or Bob Dylan or even John Coltrane- sometimes words only get in the way. I wish we all lived together in the woods like the founding fathers of my childhood dreams, not in a weird hippy way. But in an industrious way, something that probably has never existed outside of the Swiss Family Robinson.I, like Brian Wilson, feel that "I just wasn't made for these times".
Swiss Family Robinson Style Industry. Is that even possible? Remember that scene in Badlands where Kit and Holly run away into the woods and live in a tree house? They have paintings nailed to the trunk and a record player so that they could dance. What is architecture doing to make that plausible? How can we make the buildings we live in both practical-economically/socially-and beautiful. Why is it so expensive to take a house off the grid and return to the earth? Will/can sustainable architecture become the norm?
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