Quote:
Originally Posted by jacksonian
Oh, look who it is... surprise, surprise.
It seems you have successfully proven the fact (once again) that you do indeed suffer from little (wo)man syndrome. For all who are unaware, GrandviewGloria hales from the "fancy" suburb community of Madison, MS, where everything (and I mean everything) is built with brick and then covered with fake columns and/or pilasters. They keep touting that they were on Family Circle's "10 Best Towns for Families" list in 2007, which oddly enough identifies good suburbs that have access to big-city opportunities (which in this case would be Jackson). They like to think that their population of just 17,000 and land area of 13.7 square miles is "to die for" yet they can't even keep up with their immediate neighbor Ridgeland which is doing much better.
For being a bedroom community, Madison meets all the standards. It has the required Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe's and surrounding fast food joints - there is quite a bit of job opportunities for those looking to work in this type services. For the white collar jobs, the Madisonites travel to Jackson. For every 1 car leaving Jackson headed to Madison at 7 am, there are 20 leaving Madison headed to Jackson.
What is most extraordinary is how they think that they would be just fine if Jackson disappeared tomorrow, and many of them expressively wish that it were so, even though the very existence of the community is dependent on the very thing (Jackson) they despise. If there were ever a community to define hypocrisy, Madison deserves the title.
Oh, and YES, Jackson does still host the USA International Ballet Competition (next one is June 12-27 of next year) and it does come only every 4 years, because IT'S THAT EXCLUSIVE. For someone who likes exclusiveness and "fanciness", I expect to see you there. It's not like you can see this event anywhere else in the USA 
[ What's sad is that most metro areas work together to make the collective better as a whole, yet here in Jackson, our state capitol, the suburbs do nothing to support the metro and are so selfish that they only tout their respective communities. The debate between Jackson v. burbs went personal a long time ago, and it started with suburbanites talking negatively about our city. A few years ago, a billboard was displayed in Jackson on the interstate saying something to the effect of "Don't forget to turn the lights out on your way out." On the tacky meter, that's pretty far up there. I still can't believe someone had such bad judgement to put up a sign like that.
In my opinion, today, the negativity is vocalized much more by suburbanites, not Jacksonians. It is very politically correct to trash Jackson from the bedroom communities. I've never been in a state where it is so PC to trash the capital city or the state's major city, even in states where those cities have major problems. We've been put on the defensive for a long, long time. At some point, people started fighting back because they got sick of taking BS from people who left. Some of that fighting back gets negative. Maybe that is not ideal, but that is the reality ] |
Thanks to you, jacksonian, I have learned so much! I thought maybe 'pilasters' were something nasty....I could see football players getting naked and getting in a pile.... it always intrigued me that they'd do that...and that's what
pilaster sounded like to me. So, I looked it up on Google Image Search. I was hoping for nekkid statues like of
Laocoon writhing with those snakes
(although I should have known better, since nothing naked is allowed in Madison...not even skanky semi-clad nymphets on billboards) and was ever so disappointed. But anyway, I got a crash course in architecture, last night.
So for any friends at home who may not know,
'pilasters' are flat columns applied to walls. And all the best buildings seem to have them. And all the lovely Colonial homes of our founding families of Jackson seem to have been fitted with drab little pilasters around their front doors...back when our founding families built these lovely
Colonial Homes during the
Colonial Era (C. 1930 to 1980). I apoligize that our pilasters are bigger and fancier than yours. But we're nothing but a bunch of new money rednecks. Maybe we would know better if we were
Mayflower descendents, possibly like 'jacksonian'. However, our grandfathers were not bootleggers or crooked politicians, and so were not part of that illustrious assemblage that gathered nightly at the
Mayflower Cafe, during Jackson's halcyon days, when the founding families were founding their fortunes, during the
Colonial Era (C. 1930 to 1980). Possession of such
ancient fortunes by such heroic individuals would have an enlightening effect, and I guess we were just
left out.
Being left out of the glittering social whirl of Jackson's fine old Mayflower-descended aristocracy, we were forced to look to inferior sources for our aesthetic improvement. Our Mayor has looked as far afield as Sweden and Renaissance Italy. Obviously, these sources just can't cut the mustard when compared to the eternally thrilling splendors of
Colonial Williamsburg...the wellspring of all things socially unimpeachable. But then, few Madison families have any social savvy at all. I don't know of even one Madison family who have snuck their daughters into good
Ole Miss sororities
the back way (friends at home, you send them to a 'backwater' school with an 'easy' chapter of the sorority, long enough for them to 'get in' , then you transfer them to Ole Miss). But I know of several of Jackson's finest and loveliest families who have employed this honourable expedient.
But back to Architecture. I got the 'pilasters' concept with a little googling. But the thing about 'fake columns' has me totally baffled. The columns on my French Colonial house
(sorry, I'm just not good enough to have a Colonial Williamsburg house....) are square brick things covered with mortar. Are they fake? But now, my Mom's house has some fiberglass ones that cost just as much, with curlicues on the top. Are those fake? There are a pair of 'Scagliola' columns between my redneck newmoney livingroom, and my redneck newmoney dining room. Scagliola is multicolored plaster made to look like marble...only better. And the curlicues on top are gold-leafed. Are my inside columns fake, too? My decorator showed me palaces that had them, and so I thought that made them good enough. But I didn't check with the Williamsburg people to see if they were fake or not.
Now, my great-great Grandparents' house had twenty-foot-tall scalloped wooden columns with those same curlicues. But they rotted at the bottom. They were sent down from New York. Were those fake? My kinfolks were just country redneck new money doctors and didn't know any better, I guess. So Mom ordered the fiberglass ones because she didn't want any rotting going on. Which is faker? The wood or the fiberglass? Or does the fact that they were ordered from a catalogue make them fake? If they are, then my contractor just ordered thirty thousand dollars worth of fake columns for my (Madison) office's porch. How much would four
real ones cost?
Does the fact that the brick columns on my house were made right there from scratch make them real
(assuming that ordering from a catalogue makes columns fake)? If so, then the brick columns at the ruins of Windsor are real, too...execpt the curlicues on top are bronze...which I guess had to be ordered... so that would mean that the columns of Windsor are semi-fake.
So, from another angle, what does it take to make columns
real? Do they have to be carved from marble...from any stone, as long as they were actually carved? Are the ones on the Governor's Mansion and the Old Capitol really carved from stone?
Does being hollow in the middle make them fake? So would that make all the cast-iron columns all over America's old downtowns fake? Or is it a points thing, like deciding whether someone is a redneck? You know, you get points for being solid all the way through. You get points for actually being carved from marble, not pulled out of a mold and made from plaster. You get points for being made from scratch right there on the spot, and not ordered from New York like poor ignorant new money rednecks like my great-great grandparents and the people who built Windsor had? Please help me! I'm struggling to understand. Where, oh where, did I go wrong?
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