Posted 10:42 AM by Gene

And then there's our Mummers Parade, which despite the best efforts of our RENDELLS to turn it into an international tourist trap and corporate inpoverisher has never resulted in anything more than grown men wearing chartreuse ostrich feathers. At its best it's banjo choruses; at its worst it's standing and waiting, and still more standing and waiting, and so much standing and waiting you give up and go home, surely the worst organized parade in America (well, look who organizes it). This morning I had trouble blogging because of the one innovation of recent years, the massive mobile sound trucks playing rotten "music." Ten years from now those trucks will be so huge they'll shatter windows. They may have to look for money then.

P. S. The parade went well, and there were gratifying large crowds in some places (like last year), and lots of kids (and a few adults) gleefully sprayed one another with Silly String or generic variants, and all the vendors of pretzels and balloons looked alike, and the brigades were colorfully got up, and I found myself applauding a string band dressed as cowboys and Indians, but too many of the Fancies (I presume) paraded to those @#$%&* SOUND TRUCKS. Yet I could not escape this profound sense of melancholy. The Mummers head north on South Broad Street, and south of the Rendelltorium it is a sad place, block after block of brownstones echoing the Italian immigrants long gone -- Italian names appear on the funeral parlors along the way -- and a few closed shops like a furrier's named Maglio, its desks strewn with papers and junk, that could be preserved in amber; even the going businesses look out of business. Someone tried prettifying the scene with fading murals of Mario Lanza and Frank Sinatra, both of whom led sordid private lives and only one actually had anything to do with the city, unless you count both as Italians. (The Sinatra mural was financed by such philanthropic marvels as KnightRidder and CONCAST.) The street glows with offensive waste; the intersection of Broad and Washington Avenue is surrounded by a block-and-a-half of vacant lots, which would make good land for a supermarket or discount department store or something, but something won't appear solely out of race prejudice, and businessmen must be bribed to do right; industry was here until American businessmen decided they didn't need Americans to prosper. Heading east on Washington I saw someone is turning a handsome factory into unaffordable housing, a dubious prospect as not too far north is an EHDYUKAYSHUNUL complex with an elementary school whose neglected Web site exaltedly proclaims the "student population is racially desegregated with 95% African American, 2.3% Asian, 1.5% Hispanic and .77% White," reaffirming our SKOOL DISSTIRKT as the worst in the nation. That building brings on melancholy too; it was obviously planned in the Roaring Twenties and built in the Depression gale, and everywhere are haunting Art Deco touches -- and paint ineptly covering vast scrawls of art -- graffiti despoiling its dark-brown brick. As with City Hall, it rose on the notion the city would always be prosperous, and that such buildings could maintain themselves. Who could know cities are disposable?