Sunday, December 5, 2010

Boxes

I've been unpacking boxes for days.  I'm maybe a quarter done.  Boy, there are a lot of them, all over the place.



Yeah, Pete Seeger was an old Commie.  Yeah, this song was written to try to gin up support for living in Stalinist Apartment Blocks.  Yeah, we live (happily) in one of those "little boxes".

But I can sympathize with a lack of patience with lots and lots of little boxes.

4 comments:

wolfwalker said...

"Yeah, this song was written to try to gin up support for living in Stalinist Apartment Blocks."

Say what?

I always heard "Little Boxes" as a 60s-hippie jab at the levittowns that spread over the US in the 1950s and 1960s: acres and acres of identical little cookie-cutter houses with identical little green yards and seemingly identical cookie-cutter middle-class Ozzie & Harriet families living in them. I've never heard anyone suggest it was intended to support such things.

Hat Trick said...

I hear you. Seems like those boxes multiplied while they were in the PODS does it?

Home on the Range said...

I shouldn't read blogs when I just spent the day working closely in front of a screen, with an assortment of chemicals.

I thought it said "boxers", and that you'd been unpacking boxers for days, and I had a vision of Mrs. Borepatch going. . "what about the briefs!"

Yeah, I'm tired. One day to hunt but outside of that worked most every day the last few weeks.

NotClauswitz said...

Hey, this is MY neighborhood. The song was written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 (Seeger only made it a hit) and was inspired by Daily City, and the string of affordable/cheap pastel colored houses, a string of which are noticably visible along the ridgeline from 101 on the way to San Frandisco, and ddespite the "ticky-tacky" construction they are known now as premier examplars of Mid-Century Modern architecture.
Despite its original, musical attempt to mock the social conformity of the 60's it just shows how the Beat-Folkies and Reds were so out-of-touch with the mainstream and enduring values of America.