![]() ![]() Any insular New Yorker instantly “gets” Paris and its Métro it’s harder for us to “get” Los Angeles. ![]() The weary and wary faces of Daumier’s people, in his images of “Les Transports en Commun,” are still familiar. The Paris Métro and the New York subway, built at roughly the same time, undergird two cities where people ate and made love in different ways but remained modern, in large part, because they moved rapidly in units. ![]() Food tastes can change from decade to decade, even from year to year the history of transportation tends to span half-century intervals, marking whole epochs in consciousness. The history of transportation will always be social history, writ large. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. Cars are for poets and outlaws, the subway for the intimidated and the enslaved. Allen Ginsberg’s “ Howl” pities those “who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on Benzedrine / until the noise of wheels and children brought them low,” while dreaming wetly of the glories of the open road, which leads to sex, possibly with an idealized version of Neal Cassady, subsequently memorialized as Kerouac’s irresistible Dean Moriarty. In Jack Kerouac’s “ On the Road,” the car was the vehicle of liberty for the bohemian kids of those working-class Brooklynites. Yet it was also in the mid-fifties that the hipsters and beatniks and rebels feverishly celebrated the car and the burst of autonomy, even anarchy, it offered to postwar life. Public transportation was the self-evident bedrock of working-class life. What’s striking is that no one watching in the fifties needed to think about any of this. When Ed and Ralph go to Minneapolis for a Raccoons convention, they take a sleeper car on a train. Neither the Kramdens nor the Nortons seem to own an automobile. He and his best friend, Ed Norton (Art Carney), who works in the sewers, make daily use of the subway and bus system, which was designed to whisk the outer-borough working classes into light-industrial Manhattan. His employer is the Gotham Bus Company, which seems to be the sort of private-public enterprise that, like the I.R.T., built the subways. Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) is a New York City bus driver, deeply proud to be so and drawing a salary sufficient to support a nonworking wife in a Brooklyn apartment, not to mention a place in a thriving bowling league and membership in the Loyal Order of Raccoon Lodge. British P.M.“The Honeymooners” (1955-56), the greatest American television comedy, is-to a degree more evident now than then-essentially a series about public transportation in New York.Hooverphonic song about the first garden?.Depiction in Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights"."East of _" (movie based on a John Steinbeck novel)."Earth's Last _" (subtitle of the "Survivor: Gabon" season).Actress Sher who had a recurring role on "Weeds".Actress famously known for hitting the bottle?.Actress _ Sher who plays the middle child Sue on "The Middle".Biblical place Talk Talk had the "Spirit of".Biblical place Brandon Heath was "Leaving".Biblical location within "sedentary life".Biblical garden where the forbidden fruit grew.Biblical garden where Adam and Eve sinned.Biblical garden where Adam and Eve lived.Biblical garden that was literally perfect, take me back.Biblical garden described in the Book of Genesis.Biblical Everything But The Girl album?.Apple site whose terms were famously violated.Apple site created before computers were invented?."A river watering the garden flowed from _".Ancient starting point of an ongoing race?. ![]()
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