Me & Malvina

Weeds stopped using "Little Boxes" as its introductory theme song and opted for a cold intro last season. I think it was a sound decision. I prefer the pithy visual puns, and "Little Boxes" has to be one of the most smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious songs ever written.

I didn't always feel this way about Malvina Reynolds's, ugh, classic. Dad loves the Pete Seeger cover version, and I'm certain the first time I heard it was on the drive back home from a fishing trip with my father. Later, in university, I thought the bit about how "the system" forces us to conform and become "lawyers and doctors and business executives" quite clever and perceptive.

However, working summers in a warehouse convinced me that being a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or a business executive wasn't such a bad thing. If someone has the moxie and discipline to put themselves through school and become an architect or engineer, only an asshat would mock them for it. Despite my mercifully short stint in the blue collar trenches, I still retained some residual affection for the song. After all, nobody really likes a McMansion, no matter how hard the owner worked for it, right?

Maybe. Although I still had pleasant memories of fishing trips and sympathized with the class warfare angle (those lawyers might be rich, but they have no taste, ha-ha) I didn't fully appreciate what a douchebag Malvina Reynolds was until I saw this photo:



Malvina Reynolds is a soulless, bloodless, "political activist" freak. The houses are by no means "ticky tacky". They were built out of red wood, which is apparently one of the most durable woods that can be used in construction. As for the "boxes" charge, these are the kind of suburban homes latte sipping, Prius driving, urban hipsters would throw their own Grandmas under a Hummer to own.

In other words, these are creative, attractive homes to live in. It's not just the fact that there are X number of floor plans that can be combined in any number of Y different ways. Look at all the angles and cantilevers on the homes. It's straight out of Frank Lloyd Wright. The design is done in a fundamentally modern, American idiom. Why any self-styled "creative" person would want to mock it is puzzling to me. Malvina Reynolds is nothing more than a philistine for heaping scorn on the architects and the developer that built this development.

Look at the shriveled old bat:



It's not that hard to imagine someone like Malvina being taken on a tour of some Xenuawful concrete monstrosity of a Cuban or Soviet apartment complex and clapping her hands with childish glee upon seeing the communal kitchen or hearing that the happy workers only have to walk or bike two miles to the nearest bus stop.

But middle class people in America looking for a nice, affordable home? They can go fuck themselves as far as Marvina Reynolds is concerned. The architect who drafted the plans for these houses doesn't get any credit for his creativity from Malvina either, although some commie hack probably got a blow job of a "folk song" for his concrete abomination, if Malvina Reynolds ever visited the USSR or Cuba. And brainiacs like Malvina Reynolds profess astonishment when Ayn Rand's novels are embraced as classics by the masses in America???

So, Malvina Reynolds, you, like your hero, Karl Marx, can go suck it. As for me, I'm putting Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Mid-century Suburb by Rob Keil on my reading list.