Chapels were not originally part of the program of the airport as it originated in the 1920s. In 1945, an Eastern Airways employee by the name of Edwin Hogg began to campaign for a chapel to be built at Boston Logan International Airport in part so fellow employees would have the opportunity to worship between shifts or on breaks. [1] Its patronage expanded to travelers faced with bereavement flights, anxious about air travel, or just looking for an opportunity to worship between destinations. This first incarnation was aimed specifically at Catholics and officially named “Our Lady of the Airways.” It had all the trappings of a traditional Catholic chapel: a circular wooden railing surrounded an altar over which a large statue of Mary presided. This kind of adaptation of the ornate Catholic space became the form for other chapels that were built in airports like Chicago-O’Hare, New York’s JFK (named Our Lady of the Skies, similar to Boston), and the now-destroyed Cleveland Hopkins. All of these contained a large central cross over an altar, surrounded by generic waiting-room style upholstered chairs of various (and sometimes, by the look of them, dubious) quality. Chairs appear in rows resembling pews, or radiate from the altar in a semi-circle. In spaces at Cleveland Hopkins and JFK, colorful stained glass windows flanked the altar, hearkening back to more traditional free-standing religious spaces. The root of the form is directly tied to the Catholic chapel that it sought to emulate, aided by the agency of chaplains and diocese who rented the space from the airport itself.

As chapels began to appear in airports across the country, the form morphed from that of a Catholic chapel to that of a non-denominational Christian space. Cleveland destroyed its former chapel in 2008 with the aim of making a new, smaller space “less Catholic.” [2] While crosses still hung over altar spaces at the front of the room, the traditional Virgin Mary statues and other paraphernalia associated with Catholicism were eliminated or diminished. Chapels now held imagery that could be stretched across denominations; doves, trees, and lambs are often the subject of stained glass and artwork that hang in addition to or in place of the cross and other Catholic iconography. Spaces like Orlando, Miami and Washington-Dulles capitalize on this form – being less prescriptive in terms of religious belief allows for more people of faith to utilize the space. The layout and furniture remain the same; upholstered (and sometimes, unfortunately for those spending a long layover, just plain plastic) chairs, in rows and recessed fluorescent lighting. Neutral colors dominate, ranging from muted greens to tans and off-whites. The non-denominational spaces are much less decorated than their Catholic predecessors, most likely because their funding no longer comes from a diocese but from the airport itself.

The most recently created airport chapel spaces differ the most from the original typeform of Our Lady of the Airways. They do away with most spiritual or religious art and iconography. Known as “interfaith chapels” or “meditation rooms”, these spaces strip away almost all ornament. Interfaith chapels may contain rows of chairs, an “altar” of sorts, and due to increased acknowledgment of religions aside from Christianity, a Muslim prayer rug facing in the appropriate direction and omission of the cross, allowing for those who practice Judaism to also benefit. Without any kind of iconographic restraint, the interfaith space can take any direction its user wants. In Atlanta, there is merely a large representation of the graphic icon for “Prayer”, a simplified person kneeling, that directs travelers to the room itself over the altar; icon worship at its most basic. Aside from rows of chairs and a small bookshelf, there is no decoration. Pittsburgh also uses this model, making the room seem more like a church in a temporary space than an oasis for weary travelers. Here, the interfaith chapel falls right in line with the “non-place” aesthetic seen throughout the rest of the airport. While the space offers silence and chance for reflection, its complete lack of character makes it seem like something has been lost compared to the colorful, more complex appearance of the original chapels.

In some cases, though, the idea of an interfaith chapel or meditation room has produced abstract and powerful new forms. Washington-Reagan offers a space that is strangely intimate and comforting. Large upholstered chairs face one another in a square, ringed by bench seating on the outside. This unusual placement offers travelers an opportunity to have time to themselves, but also to encourage comforting one another or having dialogue. The space is void of any decoration, but its warm and bright lighting seeks to reassure the traveler. In an even further break from the form, San Francisco International Airport’s interfaith space is open and bright, with plenty of plants and seating. Large windows offer plenty of natural light, as opposed to the fluorescent lighting of other, more generic spaces. Without being drab or boring, it offers travelers a space to worship, contemplate, and rest. This abandonment of the typical “leftover office space” vernacular of other airport chapels brings back the consideration of the early Catholic chapels without having to depend on religious materials. In this sense, the form has been reinterpreted and secularized.

The question is, does getting away from the traditional notion of a chapel mean something is lost? When an “interfaith chapel” is merely a room with a grouping of chairs and a large icon hung on the wall, does it retain any ties at all to faith? No matter the appearance, according to chaplains across the nation, chapel visitation has been up one-third since the events of September 11th, 2001. [3] While some spaces seem more relaxing and welcoming than others (I’d rather spend my moments of contemplation in San Francisco than say, Pittsburgh), perhaps just the set-aside nature of a chapel as a “place” within a non-place is enough to offer travelers of any – or no – denomination peace.

Sources:
[1] Harvard University Pluralism Research Report – http://pluralism.org/reports/view/82
[2] Cleveland Airport Considers Making Chapel “Less Catholic” – http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=90238
[3] “Airport chapels help flyers keep the faith, or just relax” – http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2004-12-20-chapel-usat_x.htm

“How much time you got?” he asked the powder-faced redheaded woman working the counter.

“How much time you need?”

“I just watched the cops beat the shit out of somebody,” the EMT said to all of us. “He was being stupid.”

He ordered a large coffee with double cream, and proceeded to tell us the convoluted story. He spoke with a flat affect and blank eyes. It was a robbery/assault at some house “by the train station.” He’d waited outside with the woman who had called 911. She kept telling him to go inside and help the man who’d been assaulted. “‘He’s spitting up, you gotta get in there.’ And I told her again,” he said, “‘I can’t go into a violent situation before the police get here, so we’ll have to wait for the police.’”

It took the police over half an hour to get there, and so they waited on the sidewalk while the woman grew steadily more agitated, railing about it being the EMT’s duty to save lives. She said, “I’m going in to get him! If he dies while we’re waiting and you aren’t helping him, I’m gonna sue the city.” The EMT replied, “Well, that’s a great idea, ma’am. Because in case you haven’t heard, the city’s broke. They don’t have the money to pay my pension. They’re taking away retirement benefits. I’m suing the city. So you can just get in line.”

“That’s Detroit,” said the lanky blue-eyed counterman, with a laugh. He had white hair and was probably of the first generation of Appalachian migrants to come to the city.

The young, pale fry cook, who seemed a bit slow-minded, started saying something about a stabbing that had happened around the corner earlier that night.

“When?” asked the EMT.

“About 9:30.”

“Wonder where we were … The other day we went out to Harper and Cadieux,” he said, naming an intersection clear on the other side of town. Detroit takes in a sprawling 140 square miles, just under 30 percent of which is vacant (the emptied properties alone occupy an area nearly the size of San Francisco); emergency services here have the worst response time in the nation because there aren’t enough staff to cover the ground. “A guy’d been shot with an AK-47,” the EMT continued. “Lying in the middle of the street. They waited half an hour — half an hour — to call an ambulance.”

Fry cook: “That guy isn’t alive anymore.”

EMT: “Well I had better get going … ”

He took his cup of coffee, paid absently, thanked the waitress, and left without explaining how the first story had devolved into the police beating the man in the house.

As he drove the ambulance back off the curb, the woman said, “I seen him on TV.”

“He’s the union rep,” the older, gap-toothed man explained. “That’s why.”

“I see him on TV all the time … Need anything, honey?” she asked, turning to me.

What can I tell you about Detroit that isn’t contained by that story? There’s Telway and a score of hamburger stands and diners like it, vestiges of the gritty, working-class mid-20th century city that would have been pushed out anywhere else but that hang on here. The EMT is just one of the beleaguered, unionized blue-collar workers who bear the brunt of the violence and disorder that stalk the urban poor. It is common for city first responders to live in the suburbs themselves: over half the Detroit police force live outside the city, and the number is estimated to be higher for firefighters and EMTs. The city used to require its employees to live inside Detroit, but the law was controversially repealed in 1999, which led to massive suburban flight among emergency responders and other city employees. The current mayor, David Bing, has an initiative called “Project 14” to lure police to live in the city again with massive subsidies (“14” is police code for “return to normal operations”). Bing argues that having police live inside city neighborhoods bulwarks safety. Detroit police who live in the suburbs counter that the city — with its high insurance rates, limited services, and poor school options — is a very difficult place to raise a family.

The “train station” the EMT referred to is Michigan Central, the most renowned symbol of Detroit’s ruination. It stands 18 stories tall, once magnificent and now in distress — all pocked window-frames and crumbling arches. You can see the sky clear through it. When people here give directions it’s simply “the train station” — from which no trains have departed since Ronald Reagan was president. That’s the ghost city that runs parallel to present-day Detroit.

Over the last 60 years, the city has lost 1.3 million residents from its 1950 peak of 2 million. The continual bleed of people moving to suburbs and other regions of the country means that Detroit’s current population is as low as it has been since 1910. The massive abandonment has invidious, far-reaching effects for the Detroiters who remain. Over the last year, there have been an average of 35 major fires a day in the city. A lack of maintenance funds and property abandonment mean it is not uncommon for power lines to hang low over the empty houses and cracked sidewalks. Last September, a combination of dry weather, high winds, and downed power lines caused 85 fires to break out in one 24-hour period. Five suburban fire departments were called in to help Detroit’s department combat the blazes. Whole blocks were incinerated. Louvenia Wallace, a hair stylist and mother of three whose east side duplex burned, told a reporter from the Detroit Free Press: “It was like blankets of smoke were everywhere, and the next thing I knew everybody’s house was on fire … My kids couldn’t sleep because it smells like smoke … My daughter is asthmatic, so she can’t be around here, no way … I don’t have the money to just move.”

An editorial in the following day’s paper concluded that though the 58 Detroit fire companies available worked “doggedly and admirably” they were “overmatched to an unsettling degree.” The tragedy was no aberration. Plummeting home values mean few people can recover anywhere near what they paid for their houses, whereas insurance pays back the replacement value, creating a perverse incentive for home owners to burn property they cannot sell. Others simply walk away from houses they can’t pay the back taxes on, leaving empty properties vulnerable to vandals, squatters, and drug dealers. The fire department has such a foreboding backlog of arson cases that a consortium of insurance companies recently partnered with the attorney general to conduct independent investigations.

Detroit is also home to “Devil’s Night,” a weekend of arson and vandalism beginning on Halloween eve, which peaked in the 1980s with 800 fires in a single night. Thanks to community patrols (“Angel’s Night”) and, this year, a citywide curfew on unaccompanied adolescents and children under 18, “Devil’s Night” has slowly declined since then, with 169 fires in 2010 and 94 in 2011.

Last Halloween my friend Claire Nowak-Boyd and I participated in a community patrol, driving slowly through blighted neighborhoods in northwest Detroit with our flashers on. Passing a fire in progress in Brightmoor — sometimes known as “Blightmoor” — we saw a firefighter on a ladder silhouetted by smoke over a small single-family house. We drove down dozens of other streets in that neighborhood, where houses stand exposed and ruined, their walls marked with Xs, signaling utility shutoffs, and yards full of discarded mattresses and furniture. The city doesn’t collect trash from vacant lots.

In a Free Press article about the neighborhood, African-American residents recalled the area’s vibrancy in the eighties and its slow decline. The reporter spoke to Eddie Holmes, a 55-year-old woman who lives on Rochelle Street. Most of her neighbors left a couple years ago after a drive-by shooting at the drug house next door. Another drug addict moved into the house next door. She recalled having recently chased burglars from her porch. “Almost everyone is gone out here,” she said. “We feel abandoned and forgotten.”

Camping on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula this summer, I met a white retiree who grew up in the area. He could remember that in the 1930s when his father built their house at Schoolcraft and Greenfield — a neighborhood near Brightmoor — people thought he was crazy; it was so far on the city’s edge. Back then, the man said, the area was full of vacant lots being sold by builders. As a child he watched them fill with houses. That 70 years later the area should be full of vacant lots again is one of the unbearable ironies that characterize life in Detroit.

The mid-20th century explosion of industry that made Detroit a leader in home-ownership also made it a leader in redlining and lending discrimination. Recent immigrants and internal migrants — whether southern whites, Arabs, or Eastern Europeans — adopted racial hierarchies by which their status could be elevated at the expense of African-Americans. As inner-city neighborhoods integrated in the middle of the century, suburbs and townships that had carefully protected racial, ethnic, and religious profiles (often by restrictive deeds) grew around the city like an ever-replicating tumor, killing its host.

As of the 2010 census, only 18 percent of the metro region’s overall population lives in the city of Detroit. Only 2.8 percent of the region’s white population does. Every year since the 1950s, Detroit has lost citizens while the suburbs have grown. Over the last decade, the city lost over a quarter of its residents — the equivalent of a busload of Detroiters leaving every day — while Livingston, Macomb, and Oakland, three suburban counties, held steady or gained population. Detroit is currently more than 84 percent black, a figure that represents approximately 61 percent of the metro area’s total African-American population. The rest live in suburbs: large-scale African-American flight from the inner city began in the 1990s and has accelerated with the recent real estate crisis, which opened up housing options for black families in suburbs that discriminated against them in more prosperous times. One disturbing trend of the past decade has been for white parents in the integrating inner-ring suburbs to send their children to whiter, more affluent school districts farther from Detroit. Typically, the farther from the inner city, the richer the suburbs: West Bloomfield, 27.5 miles from downtown Detroit, is one of the 10 wealthiest towns in the United States.

For every abandoned business, store, school, or church in the city, a new one has been built in the suburbs. Only 38 percent of employed Detroiters work in the city. Many suburban business names refer to streets in Detroit, though their original locations closed years ago. Telway has a second and larger location in Auburn Hills, a prosperous east-side suburb to which Chrysler relocated its main plant decades ago. Huge shopping and strip malls, office parks, and satellite downtowns mean that many suburbanites, the children of early white flight, brag about having never been into the city, while others visit it once a year to see one of the museums or attend a sporting event or a festival.

Detroit holds only 14 percent of the region’s jobs. On any given day after a heavy snow, young African-American men go door to door, seeing if anyone will pay them to shovel walks. The unemployed third of the city’s population roughly corresponds to the third that doesn’t own a car. An estimated 36 percent of the city’s residents and over half of its children live below the poverty line. Over 47 percent of the city’s residents are functionally illiterate. The Detroit school system continues to lose teachers and close schools, while grade-fixing and social promotion — where failing students are passed to the next grade regardless of performance — is rampant. Parents are expected to buy toilet paper and hand sanitizer for their children’s classrooms, many of which contain between 40 and 50 students.

You’ve doubtless read stories about Detroit’s burgeoning art scene: the legions of young and generally white hipsters and artists renting cheap studios and lofts in former factories and downtown buildings. The presence of artists, entrepreneurs, and students is palpable in some of the neighborhoods near downtown and Wayne State University. A couple of blocks from the defunct train station, just west of downtown, sits a trendy barbeque restaurant called Slow’s where there’s often an hour-long wait to get a table. It’s run by an international-model-turned-Detroit-impresario named Phillip Cooley. That neighborhood is called Corktown, a sliver of a neighborhood, really, once Irish, and made up of rehabbed Victorian workman’s cottages. Last autumn, I wandered through the arsoned hulk of a house, across from the train station, which had been turned into an installation called Salvaged Landscape. Artist and University of Michigan professor Catie Newell used burnt lumber from the back of the house to build a sculpture. Rooms that partway withstood the blaze were filled with murals. The house still smelled of charred wood and urine. For the opening, the artists placed a beer keg out back as well as a table laden with pasta and thin crust pizza. Musicians played on an impromptu stage. “This used to be a drug house, filled with squatters,” explained Marianne Burrows, an acquaintance of mine who painted the murals. “So the exhibit is a way of providing neighborhood stabilization as well.”

A recent New York Times article lauded Detroit as a “Midwestern Tribeca” of socially aware folk; but off of its bustling main drag, Corktown is surrounded by Detroit’s burned-out industrial structures and houses, weedy lots, and subsidized housing. For every white entrepreneur in an inner-city neighborhood, a score of young, college-educated kids live in dense, hip suburbs like Royal Oak and Ferndale. The Detroit perceived by artists like Catie and Marianne — often from privileged, suburban backgrounds — is radically different from the city visible to EMS workers. I have doubts about the city’s oft-vaunted creative scene, which I was part of for much of the year: to what extent were we dancing to electro-pop while Detroit burned?

On a summer night, I drove around a particularly desolate stretch of the east side. Charred foundations outnumbered houses. Grasses grew waist-high around them. On Belvidere Street, a brightly colored convenience store came into view. It had recently been refurbished: freshly painted graffiti-like letters, colorful and stylized, proclaimed it the “NEW BORN PARTY STORE,” while the other wall boasted of “A MAN with a VISION …” The words reminded me of a speech Mayor Bing gave last September. Bing’s arrival came on the heels of the felonious ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and many look to him for new direction; a city official introducing Bing quoted a passage from Isaiah about the restoration of Jerusalem: “[A]nd they shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.” Restoring Detroit, however, is a formidable task. Bing announced the first stages of Detroit’s strategic plan to shrink services in neighborhoods that are too far-gone to recover mid-century population levels — but those neighborhoods are not entirely empty. I wondered about the optimist who had opened the New Born Party Store. It seemed like a symbol of the stubborn, creative resilience that somehow manages to thrive in Detroit’s harshest, most decimated corners.

One of the great open secrets of Detroit is its spoken-word scene, which is among the most vibrant in the nation. Earlier this spring, I went to the open mic at Nandi’s Knowledge Café in Highland Park. Highland Park is a microcosm of Detroit — a small island of a city surrounded by Detroit on every side — which resisted incorporation because of its massive wealth 100 years ago when its tax base included Henry Ford’s Model T factory. Then, it was full of beautiful wide-porched houses and known as the “city of trees”; verdant elms lined its avenues. In the 1940s, the Highland Park grade school included students of more than 38 nationalities. But in the 1950s, the Ford factory closed. Chrysler, which had also built a major plant there, moved operations to Auburn Hills in the early 1990s. White flight and disinvestment decimated the city, and in the meantime, Dutch elm disease wiped out Highland Park’s prided trees. Today its population is almost 96 percent African-American, 40 percent of whom live below the poverty line.

Nandi’s Knowledge Café is a local hub. On a Tuesday night, $5 will admit you to the basement where soul food is served in a low-lit, mirror-paneled room and some of Detroit’s most talented poets take the mic. As with many cultural spots in Detroit, when I went I attended one night, not only was I the only white person there, but I got the feeling that I was the only white person who had been there in a long time (the MC joked that if I was from the police or the DEA, I’d better fess up). The themes of the poems ranged from thwarted love (“I’m trying to be a King/But I’m still looking for my Coretta Scott”) to black media stereotypes and Obama. The most impressive performance was by a petite woman named Alfie, who looked about 25. Her hair was in tight pigtails, and she wore a pink T-shirt and acid-washed jeans. “I wrote this at work today, actually,” she announced, taking the mic. Alfie unfolded a crumpled piece of lined paper and launched into her poem:

I work at a Chrysler plan-
-tation…

She explained how her mother told her to get a career, not a job. But college was costing too much money. So at 22 she took the full-time plant gig in the suburbs where her high school diploma and 3.3 grade-point average “might as well be a GED.” She knows she’s wasting her mind: her 50-cent raise means she “made more than last year.” Running around the office in high-heeled boots, she said, doing what the white managers tell her, she feels it’s not so different from decades ago when she would have been “cooking their chicken” and making her own chitterlings. The refrain of the piece was that she should still be grateful when many friends and family don’t have jobs at all. In her prayers, she tries to hold fast to gratitude instead of dwelling on all the missed opportunities:

But I know it could be worse
I don’t mean to complain
So every night I thank Him
And He says, “You’re welcome … ”

As I left the open mic, I drove the long way around the residential block that surrounds Nandi’s. I made a left onto Cortland Street, full of once-lovely mid-century brick houses, the stoops of which now crumble into the weeds. My headlights illuminated the pale fur of a stray dog. Right in the middle of that block, a fire was engulfing one of the two-story houses. Flames flickered between yellow and orange in the night. I slowed my car down for a moment and watched the glow reflect on my windshield and hands. I contemplated dialing 911. But the house was pretty far gone, and the buildings on either side were both vacant. Highland Park’s emergency services are so overstretched that the state of Michigan recently seized control from the local government. So I sat there and watched it burn. Whether the continued presence of creativity, hope, and resilience amid such devastation seems a triumph or a tragedy varies second by second, block by block.

Thankfully, novel developments are not all this way. The expanded and re-designed Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, is deliciously tricked out, but because its architect—Tom Leeser of Leeser Architecture—has done this in a conscientious way that is integrated with the building’s protagonist (the moving image) and purpose (showcasing the moving image), the result has a deep integrity.

The “new” museum opened in January 2011, and includes the addition of a 264-seat theater and 68-seat screening room; video screening amphitheater; small café; exhibition gallery; and high-tech educational spaces. The complete redesign of the ground floor along with the construction of a three-story addition and a (work in progress) 10,370 foot courtyard garden, has doubled the size of the old 1920s building, enabling the museum to more effectively deliver on its mission to “advance public understanding and appreciation of the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media.” From the exterior of the building, the new addition is clearly demarcated by materials: its pale blue windowless surface is made of aluminum panels, which are laser cut as triangles within triangles. This introduces the building’s two key motifs: color and the triangle shape, which, on the building’s exterior, butt up against the old cream concrete of the original structure.

True to the experience of the moving image, which can envelop and transport us to other worlds appearing in different colors to our own, much of the museum’s new architecture ushers in and cocoons one in a multi-plane, other-worldly colored space. This evokes the spacey feeling that we might just be inside a film like 1997’s sci-fi, space age Gattaca … set somewhere in the distant future.

This sense of being inside a moving image is most intense on the ground floor. The entrance on 35th Avenue is surrounded by mirrored glass delineated into small Art Deco-esque triangles emblazoned with the 3.5-foot tall letters THE MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE in hot pink outline. This is flashy and dashy, but not merely for flash and dash’s sake. The mirror façade embodies the central idea of the building: that all surfaces can come alive and can become screens. Indeed, standing in front of the entrance one can see oneself reflected in a mass of mini home movies.

The idea of the “alive surface” continues inside as one walks past a 50-foot-long wall space to the left of the lobby area, on which artworks selected by the museum’s curatorial team are showcased on a changing basis. Singapore artist Ming Wong’s Persona Performa is being exhibited here as a site-specific theatrical event until April 1, 2012. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, the work is a video panorama, using five projectors and software that seamlessly integrate a row of 24 frames of 24 actors, playing 24 “personas.” This space provides the museum with a key area in which to display digital artworks that address issues like the effects of participatory media on culture.

The lobby has a blue-almost-white floor and surfaces, and features custom-made white Corian counters and benches. At its far end is a café, located opposite a gathering space beneath a sloping ceiling. The café’s furniture is made from white molded plastic and has been produced at an almost child-like scale: sitting in a small chair at a small table, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Mike TeeVee, one feels as if shrunken and beamed inside a television set. Even the entirely unembellished, slick, white, strictly rectilinear stairwell ascending from the lobby looks as if it has been borrowed from the Star Trek set.

The theater, accessed on the right of the lobby, is the grand climax of ground floor. It is entered as if on a trip to the moon, through a sloping tunnel of intense electric blue. The interior surface of the theater space itself is webbed in a galaxy of skewed triangular panels in the same electric blue, with the seams lit from within. The theatre is clearly designed to successfully facilitate a voyage into the fantasy of film, and is equipped with state of the art equipment in order to do it.

An education center takes up the remainder of the ground floor, and it enables the museum to accommodate 60,000 students a year. It has a screening room with a hot pink felt lined entrance that is in contrast to the theater’s electric blue, and a grey, perforated wall treatment for effective acoustics. There is also an open plan seminar room, which can be divided into two separate classrooms by pulling hospital-style, double-sided fabric curtains, with Mondrian-esque designs on them. This is a mod environment in which the beautiful surgeons of Grey’s Anatomy might flirt with each other while giving important medical presentations.

As one moves upward through the building the interior architecture becomes less and less programmed and increasingly less interesting, as the magical cocooning effects of the ground floor’s design drop away. One is alight and alive inside Gattaca on the ground floor, but progressing up though the building, there is a feeling of being spat out backstage at a play, where suddenly all the manual workings are apparent and the fantasy fades.

At the first landing, the Star Trek staircase delivers one directly into a 1,700 square-foot video screening amphitheater, which has the familiar white cube feel of a contemporary museum. Up the staircase to the second floor, there is a small exhibition gallery, a secondary entrance to the theater and an entrance to one of the two floors of the 15,000 square-foot core exhibition Behind the Screen, which has been refurbished with new monitors, computers, interactive software, and lighting. This exhibition is, for the most part, set in a traditional black box spaces, replete with static foam-core board signs and display plinths. The viewer yearns for more movement (could the old film cameras on display be animated with film backdrops of directors shooting film in that era?) and modernity (could the static signs be digitized, and feature engaging fonts like that of the museum’s logo?).

These two upper floors have to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of displaying a plethora of moving image related artifacts and interactive experiences, so the more down-to-earth practicality here in the interior architecture is understandable. But, after feeling so very cool and futuristic on the ground floor, the traditional settings and display techniques in these two floors are a buzz kill. It is the inverse of the world depicted in Fritz Lange’s Metropolis: here the heavy, less fantastical lifting is done above ground, leaving us to glide around fantastically in la-la land on the ground floor.

This ascending glory fade gives the net impression that the new Museum of the Moving Image isn’t one hundred percent in the can: the ground floor’s brilliant visual novelty is not seamless and unified throughout the building. One wants to linger on and on down there, enveloped in filmic cool, but there is a feeling of being pleased to leave the upper floors after having viewed the key contents there. There is the sense that in the ambitious additions, the museum spent the lion’s share of the budget in the stunning main public areas, and neglected the exhibition spaces to the extent that they feel left behind in terms of the overall design.

That said, the knockout success of the Museum of Moving Image’s ground floor means that, overall, the “new” museum is in no danger of being dull. This is a progressive, stylish, and fascinating architectural addition, which delivers thoughtfully on the building’s purpose … being in it is like watching years’ worth of incredible films all in one delicious hit: almost too good to be true.

Started in 2005, Citi Pond is now in its seventh season. Originally the brainchild of Daniel A. Biederman, executive director of the Bryant Park Corporation (BPC) in the 1990s, the free skating rink was installed not for the pleasure of the park’s constituents but in order to drive traffic to the struggling pop-up holiday market that lines the park for 10 weeks from October to January. According to Biederman, “The business concept is this helps the market and the market helps this.” Because the private BPC, which manages the public park for the city, could not afford the $4 million price tag of installing a portable rink, they sought corporate sponsorship from Citibank, which continues to foot the annual bill in exchange for the right to advertise (heavily) within the park. Rebranded from “The Pond at Bryant Park,” to the more clever “Citi Pond at Bryant Park” in 2010 – this winter wonderland is a model for successful single sponsorship of public space.

The Citibank advertising is so ubiquitous, in fact, it almost recedes from view. The 17,000 square foot oblong rink is framed on four sides by 15-foot-tall banner advertisements for its sponsor. Held in place with elaborate aluminum rigging and framed by blinding banks of klieg lights, the banners don’t advertise Citibank’s services but instead shout friendly encouragements to get out on the ice. “Leave your boredom with your shoes,” reads one, “Skate in circles and unwind,” another. Even the Zamboni, which resurfaces the ice every few hours, carries a small “Citi Pond sponsored by Citibank” banner with the mantra, “If you can read this, you’re the perfect distance from work.” The design of the banners is sparse, a Citi Pond logo at top, large blue rounded sans serif copy below, and silhouetted figures skating against a white snowscape in the bottom third. It’s rather benign as far as advertisements go, and preferable to the loud billboards or non-themed ads imaginable if each space were sold instead to the highest bidder. The ads were designed by specialty development firm Upsilon Ventures, a hybrid marketing, event and production company responsible for the creation not just of Citi Pond, but the entire winter-themed venue including The Holiday Shops, and Celsius, the two-story pop-up restaurant at the rink’s edge.

Once swayed by the advertisements’ call to “Loosen your tie,” and “Tighten your skates,” skaters must queue up on the 40th Street side of the park to gain access to the ice. It is here that the whole endeavor starts to feel less like an outdoor adventure and more like a trip to the airport by way of a Midtown club. The entrance to the plastic and plexiglass structure that houses skate rental, bag storage and concession stands, is guarded by 2 hulking bodyguards and lined with retractable rope. Instead of red carpet, skaters stand in line atop low-pile, speckled, dark blue rugs. Admission is free thanks to Citibank’s sponsorship (unlike most rinks within city limits) but skate rental costs $14, and checking a bag adds an additional $7. As night falls, the structure glows blue from within, and giant white snowflakes are projected onto the carpeting inside and out.

The scene, once you’re safely inside, is strangely familiar. A mash-up of airport, ski lodge and roller rink comes to mind as the circular benches and banks of standard gray lockers come into view. This temporary tent-like construction is ostensibly set-up anew each season, but the furniture looks like its been here for years. The white painted wood benches are chipped, giving them the look of aged concrete, while the red vinyl bench pads are ripped and torn in many places. Rounded fiberglass archways with inset pink lights flank the snack bar and locker area, an oddly futuristic yet dated detail. The rental skates are gray and nondescript and it’s a little surprising Citibank missed this opportunity to brand them with at least a logo or some zippy copy – perhaps when not in use at Citi Pond they travel to some other locale for the off-season? In fact, the interior could benefit from more branding. What works so well surrounding the rink, is the unifying effect of Citibank’s omnipresent ads – the sweet slogans and simple graphics make the space feel cohesive, encompassing, and far from temporary. Inside, static logos play on mounted flat screens, but the mismatched furniture and unadorned walls emphasize the makeshift environs; the overall theme is momentarily lost.

Less crowded during morning and afternoon hours, the pond fills up in the evenings with couples, children, and teenagers. Stepping out onto the ice, lights bright and the jazz standards blaring, there’s a moment of exhilaration as your skates make first contact. Circling the rink in a mess of people who are mostly stumbling or holding onto the sideboards for dear life is more fun than it should be. While impossible to get up to high speeds, it’s still a good time – everyone is smiling, laughing, or shouting. Past the shining lights and the towering blue-lit tree on the eastern edge of the park, stand some of New York’s greatest buildings: The New York Public Library to the west, itself the pinnacle of Beaux-Arts design, Raymond Hood’s American Radiator Building clad in black brick and gold to the south, and to the north the graceful form of the W.R. Grace building.

Glittering backdrop aside, overall Citi Pond delivers an aesthetically pleasing, successfully branded experience. By embracing the single sponsor model in a temporary space, visual cacophony is avoided and a sense of place remains. The Project for Public Spaces points to the park’s good management, and its ability to “develop and implement innovative ideas to attract people during all seasons.” The creative approach of the BPC in making the Citi Pond experience a destination, coupled with its attractive programming provides a rare example of corporate sponsorship done right. As impermanent architecture becomes more prevalent in the city (via pop-up shops or other fleeting endeavors), and the economic climate forces many parks to fundraise for themselves, the template of this park’s success is a useful guide.

Last year Bryant Park was named one of the 10 best “Great Public Spaces” in the nation by the American Planning Association, and after skating around its fake yet enchanting “pond” I’d have to agree. With a deft mix of public and private partnership, tasteful sponsorship, and one frozen surface, Citi Pond succeeds in unique placemaking. Sure, skating here is not the same simple pleasure we might remember from childhood, but a grown-up New York version of the same – keep that in mind and you won’t be disappointed. As the ad says, “A story with a triple axel is one worth telling.”

Flavaboom is exemplary of the new typology. Its walls and floors are starkly white with brightly colored, bulbous furniture that resemble Mochi, the colorful Japanese jelly-like rice paste. The hyper-modern stores, by using bright lights and smooth, clean, plastic-like white materials with colorful accents in soft, plush furniture, simulate the experience of being in a giant bowl of yogurt.  Reyner Banham wrote of detached motifs and patterns on ice cream vans which paralleled the sprinkles and stars of the emerging ice cream trends of 70’s London.  A similar condition exists in the contemporary Yogurt Vernacular.  The pristine yogurt-like ivory glitz serves as a base for the “toppings”, smears of color, usually chairs, benches, tables, and graphics.  Why is it that frozen yogurt establishments have spawned a particular form of hi-tech bubblegum modernism, the Mochi-Moderne phase of the Yogurt Vernacular?

Frozen yogurt shops are the most “Modernist” buildings being built in 2011.  Self-serve is an update of the Modernist tradition of efficiency, technological innovation, and mechanization.  At flavaboom, for instance, brightly colored cartoon-like signs guide you through the experience, or more accurately, the process of the building. You start by getting a hygienic paper cup, and filling it with your choice of yogurt.  Workers are available to help you sample the different flavors.  Once you have your base, it is off to the topping bar.  Spatially, these are arranged in a more or less linear fashion, to speed the process and eliminate unnecessary movement. Toppings are dusted and drizzled, and then up next is the weigh in.  Payment is handed over based on weight.  This process cuts down on unnecessary workers leaving an employee to act as a personal assistant, should the need arise.  The self-serve process pares the need for food delivery infrastructure, and thus the building, down to a minimum.

Gropius and the Bauhaus, influencing this design, would herald it as perfectly “modern”.  It is efficient, but also clean.  Surfaces are smooth, unadorned, and easily cleaned.  The mechanized delivery system at self-serve Yogurt shops is integrated into the building and efficiently serves a healthy, mass-produced food product.

It is of course, updated to more accurately suit the “zeitgeist”.  The colorful LED screens above the yogurt machines, pulsing in synch with the techno-pop, truly embody the “Modernist” spirit. One cannot pretend, as Michael Meredith jokes that “time stopped in 1903 in Vienna”.  The music is extremely trendy, but it fits and reminds me of Uniqlo, whose seminal work, the Heattech Tunnel® at their global flagship on 5^th Ave., employs the same led-fueled sensorial overload with animated LED screens and techno (though the tunnel cranks it up a notch with mirrors and high-tech underwear packaged in reflective metallic plastic bags).

The absurd interior design of these techno-fetishized escapes echoes self-serve yogurt’s technologically and politically progressive cultural construct.  The colored LED screens, lights, and furniture tell us a story about progress. The stores are not only progressive in their delivery methodology, but the architecture is also symbolic.  Ice cream stores tend to have striped awnings and nostalgic elements drawn from the days of the neighborhood ice cream shoppe.  This brings us back to the days of hand-churning milk from the farm into a sinfully sweet creamy blob of milk fat.  In today’s high-tech, high speed, but low-fat consumer sphere, there is no space for milk fat or the dumpy aesthetics of the small town ice cream parlour.  This is frozen yogurt; it is healthy, hip, and chic.  It is not the food of little kids or clowns; it is for clubbers and city-dwellers — the young, the fashionable.

This marketing strategy is apparent in the names of the shops. 16 Handles is named after the movie 16 candles, an overt pop reference that aims at two demographics.  The first is 30-something’s who grew up watching 16 Candles.  The second is the actual teens.  Both demographics are concerned with being healthy, and these are the users of the spaces.  Snog, a London-based yogurt chain, falls short in the Modernist test, as it is an old-fashioned walk up counter, but its name and its architecture is stunningly techno-funhouse-like.  It contains the same elements as flavaboom, LED pixels, white walls, and brightly colored “mochi” furniture.  Snog, a British slang, means to make out, so we immediately see who is being marketed to. It is again the young, hip urban city-dweller.

Techno is the music which embodies this spirit; it is colorful and fun with glittery synths mirroring the sparkly high tech interior. The remixes played over the speakers in the ceiling allude to the personalized yogurt mash-ups which are being constructed below.  The individualization of the yogurt-building process is thoroughly expressed in the absurd experience of these shops.  Young people are drawn to the experience because it is everything they crave: fast, healthy, and “hip”.  The architecture is part of this branding. I can’t get enough of it.

These thoughts came to mind while I was leafing through A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, an impressively erudite and readable collection of mini-histories drawn from the expansive collection of the British Museum. After the glut of holiday object giving, this book functions like two tabs of Alka Seltzer; the fizz of its intelligence counteracts the hangover of over-consumption.

Who would have known that 7,000 years go in Japan people were using the first ceramic pots to make soup from oysters and clams? The Jomon pot is beautiful in a muted kind of way: it’s of a coiled construction, latticed on its surface with fibers, and molded into a basket-like shape.

These pots transformed a culture. Food previously had been stored in baskets (prone to decay) or in holes in the ground. Now you could not only cook up a fish stew but you could also store food in a way that “kept freshness in and mice out.” This was a simple yet profound innovation.

Things, and their making, tell us more about a culture than any other mode of cultural expression. Design, in the broadest sense of the word, is a gateway to history. Interrogate a Ming bowl, a Hebrew Astrolabe, a Hawaiian feathered helmet, or a Sudanese slit drum and trade routes, social hierarchies, population movements and the rise of cities can all be deduced.

If this sounds dry, think again. MacGregor’s chapters, often four or five pages long, are bite-sized narratives packed with extraordinary historical detail. The best of them revolve around conflict or mystery. These are non-fiction stories based on things.

Take the case of an Australian bark shield. It’s a beautiful lozenge of reddish brown Mangrove wood about 40 inches high with a hole near its center. On April 29, 1770, on a clear Sunday afternoon, Captain James Cook sailed into what would later be called Botany Bay in Australia. Two men stood on the shore. When Cook and his men approached, they tried to “oppose” the landing party and Cook fired his musket, aiming between them. It had no effect. The two natives gathered up their “darts” and threw a stone. Cook retorted by firing a second time. He hit one man “yet it had no other effect than to make him lay hold of a shield or target to defend himself.” He advanced down the beach but soon ran away, dropping his shield.

This shield was one of the first objects brought back to England by Cook from Australia. We have Cook’s written account of the fateful encounter. But for the man standing on the shore, who represented a people who had lived in that land for some 60,000 years, and who could not write his account of his encounter with the Europeans, we only have the shield. But the shield, says MacGregor, is his statement.

Then there is the case of the jade ax. Another stunning object: a polished green teardrop, smooth to the touch, but with a razor sharp edge. For years the ax was cloaked in mystery. It was clearly all about aesthetics: its reflective surface is polished to a mirror-like shine and it had clearly never been used. But more mysteriously: there is no jade in England or anywhere near England. Jade is normally found in the Far East and in Central America, thousands of miles away. How did it, some 6,000 years ago, get there? The archeologists were baffled.

But in 2003 after twelve years of exploring the Italian Alps, two archeologists discovered blocks of jade high up in the mountains. They deduced that fires had been set near these blocks, large chunks were chipped off, and the blocks were then laboriously carried back down the mountainside. They were hauled for miles and probably broken apart and hewn by craftsmen in Northern Italy.

But because jade is so hard to sculpt these ax heads were then carried hundreds of miles to North West France where they were refined and polished. This particular ax head then made its way to England. With Sherlock Holmes like detail there is one last twist to the tale. Because of the specificity of jade’s geological signature, the archeologists were able to source the exact boulder high in the Alps from which this 8 inch ax head had come.

This book is hefty, weighing in at 707 pages, but I’d still recommend reading it while soaking in the bath, or riding on the subway, or best yet, nestled on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon. What better place to read the story of the rhinoceros that came to Europe from India in 1515 and whose woodblock portrait was made by one Albrecht Dürer?

We know how this is going to end: The video is titled “Soldier coming home from Iraq surprising his family,” and soon we’re seated with our camerawoman at an outside table where two women and a young man are waiting as the seconds tick by. “So our close family friend’s son came home after spending a year in Iraq,” our camerawoman has written in the YouTube description, “his mom thinks that we are at the restaurant to surprise my brother for his birthday, little did she know the surprise was on her!” The mom is clearly the younger of the two women, wearing a green sleeveless dress and looking anxiously toward the door as a teenage waitress delivers a few cocktails and a round of waters in enormous plastic cups. The camera steadies around 0:54, pointed directly at her, and for the next 35 seconds we wait. She’s waiting too, but she doesn’t know what we know. For 35 seconds, nothing much happens at all. Then her eyes erupt, and she screams for joy.

The soldier-return video1 has become a defining folk-art creation of the War on Terror, a kind of distant, internet-era descendant of the small-town parades that greeted WWII veterans. This war’s survivors aren’t often met by marching bands or floats, but in a different, no less poignant way, their returns are celebrated even more fervently: Plenty of these videos have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. Many of them have been viewed by millions.

Uploaded on Sept. 8, 2011, by user srmelancon06, “Soldier coming home” is my favorite of the hundreds of soldier-return videos on YouTube because it incorporates all the essential tropes of the genre. It’s one continuous handheld shot, lasting only two minutes and 10 seconds—longish compared to other soldier-returns, but not a moment is wasted. Its setting is both nondescript and perfectly universal—the untouched bowls of chips and salsa are the only things identifying the restaurant as Mexican, and no one has a recognizable accent or even a regionally specific piece of clothing. These videos almost always take place in generic locations: yards, airports, schools, churches, living rooms, or basements. You can watch them for hours and see nary a brand name or noteworthy public place; they seem to exist on some calmer, more reasonable plane of American culture than mass media ever provides.

Every soldier-return video follows the same narrative, and “Soldier coming home” is a master class in this regard, as well. Each video starts with the photographer setting up the shot by focusing on the unsuspecting civilian while the soldier remains hidden. The best videos drag this anticipation out, waiting until the halfway point or later before the greeting takes place. And then we get the goods: The child or sibling or spouse or friend (or dog—this is the internet after all) suddenly sees the returned serviceman and the scene goes from utter banality to hysterical jubilation. A college graduation turns into an explosive display of sibling affection. An unsuspecting woman goes mute in the airport arrivals area. A boy in a buzzcut and gray hoodie walks into his school’s terrace and collapses to the ground, disbelieving what he sees.

But the truly heart-melting portion of these videos takes place after that initial burst of happiness. Like lit magnesium, the reunion explodes before immediately reducing to a simmer. The serviceman (female ones are hard to find, though here’s a great one of sisters reuniting) and his loved one embrace silently while family or coworkers look on, and after a few beats, someone in the scene, often the soldier himself, eases everything down to a lower emotional gear with a funny quip or a pragmatic comment. The award here must go to the young man who asks his sobbing mother, “Ready to go to IHOP?” Talk about a mission.

On the rear patio of our commonplace Mexican restaurant, Mom bolts upright and shrieks a piercing high note twice before exclaiming, “Oh my God!” at the same pitch. She has her hand on her mouth at first, then it flies off to the side as she tiptoes, apparently in high heels. As she rushes toward her off-screen son, she gives the briefest of glances to our camerawoman, and you can almost see the gears turning: She’s putting it all together, how her close friends colluded to make this moment as powerful as possible and tape it for posterity. Maybe she’s one of the 14,000 YouTube subscribers or 18,000 Facebook likes for Welcome Home Blog, “The #1 Site for Videos of Surprise Military Homecomings.” They post a new video daily, and maybe she’s even considered that she might star in one someday.

Whatever the case, she’s overcome. It takes her four seconds to reach her baby boy, who’s grinning the same pleased-with-himself grin that every soldier wears in these scenes. She pulls him in and grabs him by the back of the head and they turn gently 90 degrees, until his back is fully to the camera. When she pulls away from his chest to look at him, she seems to have aged 10 years since she sat in her chair. She’s gone from shrieking adolescent glee to the most profound maternal devotion imaginable. The family and the other diners all fall silent. For 20 seconds all we hear are our camerawoman’s soft weeping and Mom’s thankful, rhythmic cries. Her eyes are clenched as her right hand explores his back, squeezing his T-shirt at 1:42, and if fingers could talk these would be screaming: Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me.

This is how everyone wants to be loved by their mother, which means that at this moment she could be anyone’s mom, that restaurant could be in anyone’s neighborhood. Near midnight on Dec. 15, the day America’s war in Iraq finally, truly ended, I watched this 130-second clip another dozen or so times, and felt like this nameless mother and son were reuniting right outside my window.

***

Turns out, however, that they were 1,600 miles away, in San Antonio. Early the next morning I sent srmelancon06 a message over YouTube, asking to learn more about her video. I felt compelled to thank her—”I’ve watched it many times and I feel privileged that you’ve shared the scene”—probably because she’s a proxy for that soldier in my mind, and like a lot of upper-middle-class Americans I’m so conflicted and removed from this war that a flummoxed thank-you is the only thing I can think to offer to its participants.

Her name is Stacey, and she’s a senior-year history major at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Certain of my assumptions proved true: She used a basic hand-held camera, a $100 Kodak Playsport, to film her video; Welcome Home Blog is one of her favorite sites (“I of course cry with every video and by the time I am done watching them, I am a complete mess, but it’s a happy cry so I guess that’s why I continue to watch them,” she wrote me); and the surprise was the soldier’s idea. She’s known him for 15 years; he and his mom are “practically family.” They’d joked about doing a soldier-return video ever since he was deployed on Sept. 11, 2010, and kept in touch over Facebook throughout his deployment. As she wrote to me,

I was actually very surprised to find the email from him stating that he was coming home and he wanted to surprise his mom. We were expecting him home during the weekend in September (I forget the date you’ll have to forgive me) but the Thursday before we were expecting him home, he called me that morning and was like, “I am here, can we surprise her tonight?” so our plans quickly changed and to get her to meet us at the restaurant…

Stacey had feared that worried her friend’s mom might not react so positively: “She wanted to drive up to Fort Hood and watch the little ceremony thing that they do whenever the soldiers come home so surprising her meant that she would miss it.” The video was uploaded the night the reunion happened.

I exchanged several long emails with Stacey, sharing my own fascination with soldier-return videos and asking about her family and hometown. I felt entitled to know everything about her. I’d pored over this intensely personal moment that she’d experienced with her close friends, and on some level now felt that it was in my fact my moment, my personal wartime catharsis. Such is the effect of any home video on YouTube, but I’ve never had this sense of ownership and intimacy with, say, “Laughing Baby Ripping Paper.”

After a few rounds of questions and answers, however, I realized Stacey’s generosity with the facts didn’t increase my understanding of “Soldier coming home” or my appreciation for it. The value of any soldier-return video is its anonymity, and additional information can only distract from its closed, tidy perfection. If this particular enlisted man were, say, a valedictorian and an accomplished jazz pianist, or even if he had struggled with drugs or joined the Army to impress his dad, it wouldn’t make the video any better. It would only make “Soldier coming home” a specific person’s story, rather than a distilled symbol for how we all wish the War on Terror could end.

***

“Elsie, Mich., is just the sort of Middle American town that used to welcome its boys noisily home from the wars,” writes journalist Karl Fleming in a March 1971 Newsweek article about the return of a Vietnam veteran, “The Homecoming of Chris Mead.” Fleming’s subject is a 21-year-old infantryman who had enlisted while still in high school, and Mead’s first postwar days back in Elsie are marked by isolation, aimlessness, and the creeping realization that there aren’t any jobs or respectable girls waiting for him. Mead “took a lot of gunfire,” writes Fleming. “He saw trucks blown up, kids maimed, women killed, buddies bleeding and dying,” and he is now unambiguously opposed to the war. No parade greets him at the bus station; just his younger brother, Greg, who drives Chris back home to a quiet, awkward dinner with their parents and his old room full of Steppenwolf and Beatles records.

Fleming quotes the official Certificate of Appreciation Mead received from President Nixon: “I extend to you my personal thanks and the sincere appreciation of a grateful nation,” it reads, right above the reproduced executive signature. “You have helped maintain the security of the nation during a critical time in its history.”

An entire generation of pop culture has grown out of the disparity between that painfully overstated letter (its first sentence nearly buckles from gushing adjectives) and the reality that greeted its recipients. Through movies like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Casualties of War, and books like The Things They Carried and Born on the Fourth of July, the plight of the Vietnam veteran became common knowledge, yet it was never seriously rectified. The sudden appearance and eerie ubiquity of “Support the Troops” paraphernalia after 9/11 almost feels like a mass penance for that Vietnam-era failure.

Soldier-return videos reveal both the extent and the limits of that penance. They might be advertised and conceived as a tribute to the war’s survivors—and they certainly are tributes of a kind—but the queasy truth is that the soldiers themselves are the least important people in them. The men and women in fatigues are always less defined than their surprised relatives, and the grateful shrieks of greeting are proof, however momentary, that we civilians haven’t treated them like we treated Chris Mead.

YouTube’s web presence launched on Valentine’s Day 2005, less than five months after the thousandth American had been killed in Iraq. The tally hit 2,000 by Halloween of that year, and 4,483 by the time the last troops came home. Unlike during the Vietnam War, the American media were prohibited from showing many of the coffins coming home from Iraq. But a lack of photographic record doesn’t erase our need to recognize the dead; it just deprives us of an object for grief.

YouTube might be better known as an ocean of memes and copyright infringement, but through the soldier-return genre it has also evolved into a surprisingly effective outlet for all the sadness and ambivalence that have marked the American people’s relationship to the military over the last 10 years. These airport and driveway scenes play like miniature versions of the hysteria that greeted the “Mission Accomplished” banner or Osama bin Laden’s assassination—cries of relief from a society desperate for good news and gluttonous when it arrives. Below “Soldier coming home from Iraq surprising his family,” commenter Zeezilicious writes, “My god, been watching a million of videos like that for the past 2 hours and I still CRY, seriously?! It’s just… so emotional.”

The video ends right as Mom pulls away from her son a third time and stares directly into his eyes. This is the first moment in the whole sequence when she seems relaxed. At the beginning, when she thought she was only waiting to surprise someone else’s son for his birthday, she had the blank expression of a person anxiously chewing through a disposable moment. When her own son first appeared, she became a conflagration. But now she realizes she doesn’t have to grip him so tightly: He’s here to stay. So she loosens up, and her face glows at the sight of him. We see only the back of his crew cut. She touches his head one last time and her face tilts to the left. Her mouth begins to open—she’s about to say her first real words to this boy who by some miracle has escaped becoming coffin no. 4,484. And then the video stops abruptly, as if to keep us from hearing her voice. It’s the only conceivable ending: In silence she speaks for all of us, saying everything and nothing about this awful, exhausting war.

Now that that’s out of the way, it is time for my annual post on the horrors of design for kids (previously: designer toys, baby clothes). This year, it is not just me that is talking about the gender gap when it comes to toys. The week before Christmas there was lively debate online about the news, via this Bloomberg BusinessWeek story, that Lego was creating a new line of pastel pieces for girls. Peggy Orenstein wrapped it all up in the New York Times on December 30.

The basic horror seemed to be the realization that Lego had gone from this:

(Could have been me, from the braids to the dungarees.)

To this, from the Hero Factory line:

Thus necessitating the creation of a whole other-hued product category. As a parent who suffers, in a minor OCD manner, from having too many different and incompatible building toys, the idea that my son’s Lego and my daughter’s Lego might not be able to commingle brings on some frustration. I already have a labeled bin! Which means that, while I truly appreciate the toned-down, gender-neutral colors and 100-percent recycled content of Green Toys blocks we received, I wonder if it might be more/equally sustainable to stick with Duplo. Who wants to start over each year with an incompatible building system? Modularity has its purpose.

The giver of the Green Toys was thinking of me and my husband, the interests we would like to pass down, the developmental stage my daughter will soon reach. I’m having a harder time reckoning with the Melissa & Doug Pretty Purse Fill and Spill. It’s true, my daughter loves nothing more than pulling everything out of her own go-bag (a sturdy, lightweight LeSportsac messenger bag), and cellphones have recently become something of a fascination. So the Pretty Purse is also developmentally on target. If only everything else about it wasn’t wrong.

Why pretty? Pretty, in this case, means pink and purple, hearts, velvet. Who says that’s pretty? And what adult women has a purse that looks like that? If part of the idea of this toy is to give your child a makeshift adult avatar, I don’t see how a one-year-old can make the connection between my gray LeSportsac, or her babysitter’s silver tote, and this new object. Same deal for the ersatz (and, naturally, heart-shaped) compact. First, I don’t want a toymaker telling my daughter to get excited about make-up and second, who has one of these anymore? Seems like a leftover from Sally Draper.

Why a purse? As far as I can tell, my daughter’s toy choices so far are gender neutral. She’ll chew on a car or a stuffed animal. She’ll knock over blocks or a butterfly stacker. If Melissa & Doug made a fill-and-spill messenger bag in a nice bright green it could hold a cellphone, wallet and keys, and be sold to 100 percent of the baby population. Don’t one-year-old boys like to take things out of bags too?

(It turns out they do, but their bag looks like this. Pity the uncoordinated. I do rail against the boys-love-sports hegemony every time I shop for shirts for my son.)

And why this design? It’s ugly, it’s girly, and it doesn’t even work. The multi-color keys (on a heart-shaped key fob) are made of plastic, so they slide easily. It would have been nice if they could also have been different shapes and included numbers, like this classic toy. So why couldn’t the phone also have been plastic, with mashable buttons. The fat stuffed oval included looks more like a worm than a contemporary phone. There are numbers on the coins inside the change purse but again, they remind me more of cookies, especially since the digits are enumerated in more hearts. Might fabric bills not have worked better?

And finally, the change purse, like the purse that holds it, suffers instead from a more basic design failure: material. Both are made of clear plastic, with purple velour piping. But once the plastic decision had been made, legal issues kicked in. You can’t have a little girl suffocating in her Pretty Purse. So the opening of the big purse is made quite small, so small it is hard to get all those fat and furry accessories in and out. So much for spilling. So much for filling. Even if I loved everything else about this toy, this lack of functionality would doom it.

Along with more “realistic” figures, more domestic settings, and more role-playing about animals and food, the new Lego Friends collection includes more accessories. Front and center in the spread for “Stephanie’s Cool Convertible” is another pink purse. And she’s got a mirror, with a heart on it, in the backseat.

Maybe I should just give up now.

This was our third and final attempt. In order not to inconvenience the Star by asking her to suffer a limo ride to the hotel we suggested filming in her apartment. Surprisingly, she agreed.

We arrived at the appointed hour and entered a space that was frozen in late 1970s style: the era of Halston, Studio 54 and endless blow. There were white leather sofas and mirrored walls and pristine marble floors. Over the fireplace hung a Warhol.

A chain-smoking assistant, looking like she hadn’t slept in days, led us to a small room that overlooked the New York skyline. A gleaming black Steinway piano dominated the space. Two walls were floor to ceiling glass. A tall almost life sized black and white photograph of the Star’s famous film-directing father lounged in a corner.

We wheeled our ungainly equipment into the spotless space. There were just three of us this time: a cameraman (also called the DP, or Director of Photography) a soundman and me. I had not worked with either before. My regular crew was booked on another job.

A film crew, like any small group that works together in pressured situations, builds up experiential knowledge over time. They develop the ability to carry out certain tasks without speaking; they defer to each other’s expertise; they watch each other’s back. I didn’t know these guys and they didn’t know me. I was on edge.

One of the most crucial moments when filming an interview takes place before the camera is even set up. It comes when you walk into the room and choose the shot. Part aesthetic and part practical, the choices you make literarily and figuratively set the frame for the rest of the job.

Usually the director takes the first stab at it. The cameraman will respond with thoughts on lighting, camera angle and over-all composition. Sometimes a chair will be placed in the vicinity of where the interviewee will sit and the soundman will “sit in” while the DP and the Director refine and discuss the shot. Will there be enough room for the lights? Will there be enough depth behind the interviewee? Will the background look elegant or cluttered? It’s not unusual to try two or even three variations.

This time, the DP had set up his camera up before I even had a chance to ponder the shot. He came from a news background and was fast and by-the-book. I usually like to take this moment slowly and to savor it: the search for a frame that is a little bit different, the feeling of being lost, and more importantly, the necessity of collaborating in order to come up with a solution. On this day, the process felt short-circuited.

I saw a different shot that would make use of the abundant natural light. Done correctly, the Star’s face would be suffused by a complimentary glow and the New York skyline would have a defused, almost abstract look to it. To get it right would take a lot of work and patience. It was also risky if the light changed abruptly. But it had the potential to look filmic.

The DP disagreed. He thought it was safer and more practical to shoot the Star going in the opposite direction with the piano and a wall of books behind her. It was a more controlled and conventional set-up.

We debated and I decided he was probably right. It cut down on the variables and there were plenty already in this situation. My job was to get usable footage. With amateur art direction we could re-arrange the background and make sure it didn’t look cliché like an all those Sixty Minute interviews with flowers in the background.

While the crew set up their equipment I sat in what would be the Star’s chair and crammed: I re-ordered a question or two, looked quickly at some research notes and tried out a couple of phrases in my head. Sitting in the Star’s chair gives the cameraman a stand-in subject so that he can position his lights. It also gives the soundman a position for his boomstand and microphone. He can also pre-check his sound levels.

But sitting in the interviewee’s chair serves a third function as well: it always reminds me what it feels like to face the looming eye of the unblinking camera and to experience the blinding glare of the lights. It also reminds me to be empathetic and not to forget how much pressure even an experienced interviewee is under to perform. To paraphrase Norman Mailer, the interviewer serves up 1% of himself during an interview while the interviewee gives up 99% percent.

The cameraman positioned his lights and checked his focus. He stood back and indicated that he was finished. This is the second crucial moment: when the director looks at the monitor, or through the lens of the camera, and makes comments on the shot.

I looked at the monitor. The soundman was “sitting in” for us. The light fell evenly, if too brightly, across his face; there was a no modeling or shadow. The background was a mess: light bounced off the shiny black piano and the books were a jumbled pile. The objects on top of the piano — including an Emmy, a Grammy and a Golden Globe award — were illegible lumps of metal. This was not the stylish and elegant composition appropriate for an International Star. It was the shot for a hair-brained professor.

I told the DP that it wasn’t working. He made a face. We re-arranged the books, moved the awards around and adjusted the lights. Still not working. We moved the camera to the right, shifted the chair. We even (bravely) moved the piano a few inches to cut down on the glare. All to no avail.

“Just go with it, man.” he said. “Relax.”

I couldn’t relax. The shot wasn’t working but I couldn’t solve it. My frustration (mostly with myself) grew. The cameraman stopped making suggestions. The soundman, wisely, kept quiet.

Suddenly the Star appeared in the doorway. She had a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other (I kid you not). I mustered professional pride and introduced myself and the crew. The Star looked suitably bored.

The Star pushed herself off the doorframe and sashayed over to the monitor.

“Oh darlings, this isn’t good at all.”

She stood back and looked the room over. My heart sank. She walked over to the piano, put her drink down, lifted two of the awards and put them on the floor. She then slowly moved the remaining awards around on top of the piano into a geometric pattern. She picked up her drink and walked over to the corner of the room. With a bump of her hip she slid the photograph of her father over five inches. She then put her drink down again and removed a hefty stack of books from the shelf. She picked the two awards off the floor and placed on them in the emptied space. She stood back. She then spun them 180 degrees so that the light glinted off their surfaces. You couldn’t tell exactly what they were; they just glowed. She stood back again and took a drag of her cigarette.

“I think that should work better.”

I looked through the monitor. It did look better, infinitely better.

“Thank you”, I said, “that really helps.” With a futile attempt at authority I pointed to the chair.

“If you take your seat” I said, “we can begin.”

We took our positions and I asked my first question.

The Star began with a strong answer that included a quip and a revealing insight. But her next answer trailed off into a digression. I re-phrased and tried again. I got about twenty seconds of useable material.

I moved on to the next question.

“Oh that’s boring.” She said.

I abandoned my pre-set questions, changed tack, and asked about her current work. She didn’t fall for it.

“Darling? Where did you get those jeans? They look great on you.”

I was in trouble. I immediately moved on to the most important question, the one I knew we needed to make the film work.

She answered but it was barely coherent. I was losing her. Her drink was winning.

“Do you play the piano?” she asked.

“Chopsticks.” I said hoping for a laugh.

“Well let’s hear it then.”

I got up and moved over to the piano and sat down. She stood above me. I was sweating. I plastered a devil-may-care smile on my face and tried out a few notes. She laughed. And then she provocatively leaned over the piano and began to sing.

I have absolutely no memory of what she song she sang. I remember thinking “I can’t believe that I’m being serenaded by an International Star.” Swiftly followed by “I am going to lose my job.” I remember the cameraman’s smirk when I looked over to him for support. But mostly I remember how hard it was to keep that ridiculous smile hiked up on my face. It actually hurt.

The interview had tanked. Recovery was impossible. I tried to relax and enjoy the moment but I failed.