A Random Assortment

~ I love this Eric Gill Madonna and Child (via Hopkins).

~ From P.D. James, "Who Killed the Golden Age of Crime?"

Almost as if he was afraid the game might get out of hand, Monsignor Ronald Knox, himself an aficionado, set down the rules in his preface to Best Detective Stories 1928–29. These included certain imperatives. The criminal must be mentioned early in the narrative but the reader must never be permitted to know his thoughts. All supernatural agencies are inadmissible. There must be no more than one secret room or passage, no undiscovered poisons should be used, and no accident or unaccountable intuition should help the detective. He should not rely on any clues which are withheld from the reader, nor should he commit the crime himself. The Watson should be slightly less intelligent than the average reader and his thoughts on the crime should not be concealed. Finally twins and doubles should not appear without the reader knowing about them, and there must be no Chinamen. This last prohibition is somewhat difficult to understand. Was it that Chinamen, if inclined to murder, were so cunning and ingenious that the amateur detective would have no hope of outwitting them?

Via (who else?) Hopkins.

~ Francisco and I watched Mansome, since it touched on topics I've been thinking about lately. It had its moments, although it had a lot of silliness, too. Basically, the whole thing is about how manliness interacts with male grooming--mustaches and beards and de-hairing backs and shaving chests.

~ Relatedly, Camille Paglia both extols masculine virtues and gender bends in an interview:

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."...
As a child, she felt stifled by the expectations of girlhood in the 1950s. She fantasized about being a knight, not a princess. Discovering pioneering female figures as a teenager, most notably Amelia Earhart, transformed Ms. Paglia's understanding of what her future might hold.

~ Paoli girl pushes for American Girl doll with a disability.

My favorite Francisco happening (because it shows how kind he is to me and how unparalleledly bad at multi-tasking he is):

One time we were both sitting around and he got up to throw something away. I asked him if, while he was at it, he would throw something away for me, too. He put down what he was holding and threw my thing away. Then he sat down. Of course, in the meantime, he forgot to throw his thing away.

Twitter

What's up with these British Christmas Specials? Americans stop all tv shows over the holidays, whereas British people must spend the entirety of Christmas in front of their televisions.

The Yuengling Brewery

On Christmas vacation, my siblings and cousin and husband and I went to Pottsville to visit America's oldest brewery.

The bottling and canning room was very cool--you could see the cans flying by on conveyor belts as they were filled and pasteurized.

The tours were given with loads of spirit--praising beer and Yuengling in particular.

What I liked best was the stained glass ceiling put in to keep the sun from glaring off the shining pots.

And the murals on the walls below.

There were also cool hand-dug caves below to store the fermenting beer, complete with remnants of brick walls put up by the federal government during Prohibition.

The brewery, which, when it was built was on the far outskirts of town, was evidently built quite close to the only other thing that was out there at the time--a Catholic church.

Sadly, I forgot my camera, so we made do with Francisco's phone for pictures.

Twitter

Universities in strip malls?! What's next?

Zahav

To celebrate his birthday, Francisco and I went to Zahav, a modern Israeli restaurant. It's a much-loved and highly-rated restaurant in Philadelphia, and we weren't disappointed. Francisco and I like sharing small plates, especially since our taste is similar--we both loved the grilled duck hearts with falafel and green chickpeas. I mean, those things were the best meat I've had in years. My other favorite was the fried cauliflower, with a sauce that included chives, mint, dill, and garlic. Francisco ate most of the squash, with apple and pear on top. And I think we both loved the chicken shashlik--the chicken was like butter. We finished the meal with Turkish coffees and they brought a dessert for Francisco's birthday.

My only complaint is that I made the reservation online; they called to verify the day before. Since I missed their call, they insisted that I call them back to let them know that we were still coming. I find that inconvenient. However, they asked if we were celebrating anything, and I said my husband's birthday (otherwise, I've never really let a restaurant know that sort of thing)--so: free dessert.

NYC

Sadly, this was the only picture I took (except for in the Emily Dickinson exhibit) on our day in New York this weekend. Our day was jam packed with goodness: We left our car on Staten Island and took the ferry over. We got in line at 9 am for rush tickets to see Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. Our dear friend brought us coffee and stood in line with us, which made that far more entertaining. Then we joined him and his wife for coffee and a bit of breakfast, before meeting my childhood Latvian pen-pal for brunch.

I didn't have high hopes for meeting my Latvian pen-pal--we had barely corresponded, except facebook birthday greetings, since I was 14. Plus, she chose to meet at Dean and Deluca's over the Cuban hole-in-the-wall or the diner with great architecture that I'd proposed. So Francisco and I were pretty nervous to meet her and her boyfriend. It turns out they were wonderful and kind and open and it was fun to reminisce about how we were when we were kids and used to write letters.

After meeting them, we went to our play--it was fun to see Ian McKellen and Patrick Steward in person. I've never seen an absurdist play in the theater, but I found it odd that the audience was continually cracking up. I found the play funny, but in an ironic, poignant, clever way; not haha funny.

There were lots of references to Eliot--the line "Now and in England" from the Four Quartets was picked up very obviously. There was another direct quote, but I forget it now. I need to look it up.

(Update: Terry Teachout's review of the plays links to the 1978 telecast of No Man's Land with the actors who originally played the part. Another line from Eliot: "I often hand about Hampstead Heath myself, expecting nothing. I am too old for any kind of expectation." (Which is reminiscent of The Waste Land's "My people humble people who expect / Nothing." And the Four Quartets' "wait without hope" and Prufrock's meditation on growing old.)

Afterward, our friends met up with us again and we headed down to the Emily Dickinson exhibit at The Drawing Center before dinner and heading home. Emily Dickinson's writing was a tiny portion of a small exhibit that was set at the intersection of drawing and writing. But it was wonderful. It was great just to see her real live handwriting.

She wrote on loads of scraps of envelopes--actually, it seems like she just wrote poetry on every piece of available paper.

The description on this candy wrapper said that Joseph Cornell was inspired by it and included some candy wrappers in his boxes. I had no idea. Here's one of his boxes that was inspired by Emily Dickinson's room (and poetry), but sans candy wrappers:

This fascinating--a poem that Dickinson writes on the edge of a flyer about foot health can be read differently, given its context. Particularly since I'm interested in thinking more about Emily Dickinson in the context of disability.

Sometimes there was a bit of impromptu art--one small sketch; a scrap of paper attached to another scrap; this collage of a stamp, a printed "George Sand" and "Mauprat" (the name of her novel) included in the middle of a letter.

Before Midnight

Francisco aptly observed that the formula of the whole trilogy (and this film left room for follow ups) is "very chatty with great scenery." Ain't that the truth.

Their adolescent chattiness becomes a bit more annoying as they age (and Jesse ages more so than Celine). Sometimes it's profound; often it's a little forced.

They are primarily chatting about gender relations and relationships. They hold their relationship loosely, as always, refusing to actually get married, and threatening to break up (although they have children together). Although, there's lots of romance and chemistry between them, as always.


(Before Sunrise and Before Sunset here)

Against Manliness or In Defense of Courage

When I was little, I had several kitchy items with a very spiritual meaning of my name written on them. I'm pretty sure all that name-meaning business (at least regarding my name) was made up: my name simply comes from a place. But the spiritualized name-meaning given to me so that I didn't feel left out was "woman of courage."

Funnily enough for something that may or may not have been made up, the meaning of my name was inspiring to me. Whenever I was (and sometimes still am) afraid, I would just remind myself that I'm a woman of courage (even when I was still actually a girl). I think it made me a little bit braver.

I think that life requires a lot of courage--a lot of attempting things that you're not sure if you can do, like taking a french language exam or changing the lights on your car or submitting papers to journals. It takes a lot of courage to do things in which your success is not assured--you're giving someone else the chance to reject you. Well I've done that about a million times, and succeeded once or twice.

The main thing that I'm trying to say is that I think that courage applies to women every bit as much as it applies to men. I'll take a roundabout way of saying that, though.

What exactly are we talking about when we talk about manliness? And is it just for men? I think that people who bemoan the erosion of manliness in contemporary society are referring to ancient ideals such as the pursuit of courage, virtue and honor (which is most often, although not exclusively, evidenced through bravery in battle in the ancient world).

Plato talks about spiritedness (thumos) as one of the three parts of the soul--it is the part of the soul that, like a soldier, defends a country or a person. He is clear, however, that spiritedness alone is next to worthless; it needs to be guided by reason in order to defend the right things.

Aristotle writes, similarly, about the virtues, praising courage as among the highest virtues. Considering courage in the context of virtue, of course, means that Aristotle isn't referring to having courage in any situation, but rather having it in the appropriate amount in the appropriate situation.

Of course, honor is at the center of The Iliad--however, Homer is certainly problematizing Achilles's pursuit of honor. While Achilles bends over backward to protect his property (including his woman war-prize) and to gain recognition from the gods, his pride consumes him.

Harvey Mansfield, in his book, Manliness, is modest in his defense of manliness--"Manliness ... seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad." While writing against contemporary gender neutrality, Mansfield is attentive to examples of women being manly--for instance, he lists Margaret Thatcher as his first example of manliness.

Above: from The Art of Manliness, not my favorite website (especially insofar as it presents a monolithic understanding of what it means to be a man).

This quote is used on that website to supposedly show something about manliness. In my opinion, this shows what's wrong with appeals to manliness--what C.S. Lewis is talking about in The Abolition of Man isn't manliness at all, it's actually about the need for humans to have moral sentiment and reasoned emotion. He speaks about man in the sense of humanity, not man in the sense of being male--Lewis is arguing that moral sentiment, emotion, and spiritedness should be an integral part of every human life. We should all have the ability to engage in moral reasoning and to make distinctions between right and wrong. He advocates such moral reasoning against relativism (or the idea that the only thing you have is your feelings and so no point from which you can judge someone else's feelings), building a theory of natural law in the process. It wouldn't makes sense for C.S. Lewis to argue that only men should engage in moral reasoning, that women should succumb to relativism.

Gendering spiritedness and virtue and courage and moral sentiment and emotional reasoning seems to me to be a problem in several respects. First, it can lead us to praise things that aren't unabashedly good, such as war, hunting, sports. There are benefits to hunting and sports, I bet (war at best is a necessary evil), but there are also downsides. Sports (for instance, football) can be incredibly dangerous, especially when engaged in at the professional level. Teaching at a D1 school, I see the way in which sports take seriously away from academics. Hunting, especially when separated from eating the animal, can degenerate into a bloodthirsty entertainment. Obviously, spiritedness is good when a country needs to be defended, but dangerous when it calls us to more quickly enter into a war than we need to (or, in the case of The Iliad, fight all the time for almost no reason at all).

Another problem with gendering manliness is that it can denigrate men who don't follow sports scores as if their life depended on it (I can't think of a more moronic thing to be obsessed with, myself) or like to kill things. What about the sensitive artist or the bumbling academic? (Both stereotypes that I prefer to the growling Tarzan.) Portraying one view of what it means to be a man is dangerous: clearly not every man can fit into one mold (nor should every man wear one type of outfit; incidentally, looking to the internet to tell you how to dress strikes me as distinctly unmanly). Praising one certain view of manliness downplays other men's experiences and strengths.

Another problem with gendering manliness is that it can denigrate women whose strengths are in the area of courage. It can discourage women from acting bravely or courageously by setting up social norms that push men toward courage and women toward babies (incidentally, I'm convinced that babies need men and women to care for them, not just women).

The idea that men are aggressive and women are passive is based on a very simplistic notion of sex. From experience and from history, we can see that aggression and passiveness aren't strictly split among males and females. I'm not saying that gender difference doesn't exist at all, just that it isn't absolute: male and female bodies are different, and it's quite possible that these differences can have a bearing on the person as a whole, since the body and soul are intimately connected (this is Edith Stein's point).

I am inspired by courageous women--by Deborah and Esther and Antigone and Tecmessa and Lysistrata and Joan of Arc and Edith Stein and Corrie Ten Boom. These women aren't perfect, but I admire their spiritedness and their courage. Much of my life has been oriented to being taken seriously along with the guys. It hasn't been easy, and it certainly isn't easy to mesh that with being a wife, but I think that everyone, man and woman, is called to the virtue of courage, and is called to develop that courage in accordance with reason. (And, on the flip side, I think that every man and woman is also called to kindness and gentleness and caring.)


P.S. How is this manly soap? Can only men make it? Or can only men use it? Or is the problem that "[m]ost soaps out there are designed for the ladies and have foo-fooey scents"? I'm not sure what "foo-fooey" means, but since I hate scented soap, does that make me "manly"? Also, it seems like "foo-fooey" is a little condescending. What if I did like foo-fooey scented soap? What if I were a man who liked scented soap--does that break some rule? Etc. 

P.P.S. The other problem with arguing that we need more manliness, and which I didn't address here, but will perhaps address another day, is that Christianity is an important intervention into the ancient idea of virtue: Christianity introduces faith, hope and love as virtues; it introduces humility. It is really a fundamental critique of the spiritedness that so easily becomes pride. The lives of David and Jesus offer an alternative type of courage--the courage that is required to be humble. 

The Postal Service

In my opinion, over the last month or so the postal service has really gone downhill. Almost everyday we get mail for one of our neighbors on either side, not to mention mail from the previous occupants, which is supposed to be forwarded. Some mail that we're expecting (like our electric bill), we just never get. And the postal service estimates 4-14 business days for shipping now! That's nearly three weeks! Some days we get our mail after dark; occasionally first thing in the morning. We've gotten it twice in one day before, and I think once on a Sunday.

And, to top it all of, yesterday our mail lady broke our mailbox. Like literally pulled it off the wall of our house. And didn't even apologize.

The 27th Kingdom

This is the best thing I've read in a while. It's fabulous: go read it at once.

My take is it's novel of manners meets magical realism--something that I never could have imagined before reading this. The Afterward's view is that in it "the comedy of manners discovers a religious vocation." Also true.

Alice Thomas Ellis is devoutly Catholic and yet sarcastically wry ("'She killed her lover,' said Aunt Irene, going on and on. 'Everyone wants to do that at some point. It's only natural. She just went too far.'")

Ellis dances gracefully between the trivial and the theologically deep. She's hilarious and sharply observant and I wish she were still alive and we could be friends.


(Ellis's The Summer House trilogy here.)

Hannah Arendt

I finally saw the Hannah Arendt biopic. It brought her private life, especially as it bore on her work on Eichmann in Jerusalem, to life. (Most of what I knew previously of her life came from the masterful biography, For the Love of the World.)

The funny thing about learning about Arendt's private life is that it seems like, theoretically, she wouldn't approve. She advocates a separation between public and private and privacy for the private. So it's a bit shocking to see her, for instance, chopping vegetables.

I love how she worked in the film--reclining on a chaise lounge, smoking a cigarette, often closing her eyes. I'd like to adopt that method.

There's a lot of friendship in the film. The most surprising line for me in the film was when Arendt said,

I never loved any people, I only love my friends.

Which was, it seems, paraphrased from a response in a letter to someone who accused her of not loving the Jewish people:

How right you are that I have no such love, and for two reasons: first, I have never in my life "loved" some nation or collective — not the German, French or American nation, or the working class, or whatever else might exist.  The fact is that I love only my friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love. 

The film also made me curious about her friendship with Mary McCarthy. To file under Hannah Arendt on women:

It would be a mistake to think of Arendt and McCarthy’s alliance as the result of some shared sense of “sisterhood,” in the parlance of the second wave. Neither was particularly sympathetic with what they called “women’s lib.” A graduate supervisor of mine, Jennifer Nedelsky, of the University of Toronto, was a student of Arendt’s in the nineteen-seventies. She remembers riding in an elevator to a seminar with Arendt. On Nedelsky’s coat was a button for the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Arendt noticed it, pointed, and, drawing her finger around in slow, disdainful circles, said to Nedelsky, “This is not zerious.”

Christmas Caroling in Philadelphia

"Are you with the rolling fire?" the girl at the gym asked after we'd finished caroling inside. I was pretty confused about what she was talking about--the rolling fire sounds like a motorcycle gang or a rock band. And then Francisco pointed out that she must be referring to the garbage can in a shopping cart with a fire inside that was pushed by a member of our group.

Christmas caroling in Philadelphia not only involves fires burning in shopping carts, but plenty of hot spiked drinks (one guy kept a bottle of wine in his coat as if it were a flask; a bar we caroled at was handing out free beer to carolers; other carolers carried eggnog and apple cider). And the crowd at one bar requested the Eagles chant after our caroling was finished (which, from what I can tell primarily involves spelling the word, "Eagles"). Also smart phones--everyone wanted to videotape us on their phone: I'm sure we're celebrities on facebook by now.

The Sessions

The Sessions is about a man who uses an iron lung and who can move only his neck who sees a sex therapist. The Sessions ends supposedly triumphantly--Mark O'Brien, the poet who had polio and requires the iron lung--through embrace of his sexuality--overcomes his self-loathing (he blames himself and his polio for his sister's death), resulting in a happy and fulfilling marriage.

I have three complaints: 1) The transition in Mark's character that is purported to have happened simply doesn't in the film. Supposedly, as a result of seeing the sex therapist, he overcomes his guilt and comes to love himself, resulting in women being attracted to him and one marrying him. The fact is, though, no shift in his character actually happens in the film--at the beginning of the film he is a poetic, charming, witty character, and at the end of the film he is a poetic, charming, witty character.

2) The ending of the film is different from that of the essay on which the film is based. NK found and sent me the essay, "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate." When Mark initially reflects on seeing a sex surrogate in the article, he sees the experience as positive, as mitigating his self-loathing and the oppressiveness of his parents refusal to talk about sex and of Catholic guilt. However, the ending that he wrote to the article before he published it four years later is quite different in tone:

I began this essay in 1986, then set it aside until last year. In re-reading what I originally wrote, and my old journal entries from the time, I’ve been struck by how optimistic I was, imagining that my experience with Cheryl had changed my life.
But my life hasn’t changed. I continue to be isolated, partly because of my polio, which forces me to spend five or six days a week in an iron lung, and partly because of my personality. I am low-key, withdrawn, and cerebral.
...
I wonder whether seeing Cheryl was worth it, not in terms of the money but in hopes raised and never fulfilled. I blame neither Cheryl nor myself for this feeling of letdown. Our culture values youth, health, and good looks, along with instant solutions. If I had received intensive psychotherapy from the time I got polio to the present, would I have needed to see a sex surrogate? Would I have resisted accepting the cultural standards of beauty and physical perfection? Would I have fallen into the more familiar pattern of flirting, dating, and making out which seems so common among people who have been disabled during or after adolescence?
...
People have suggested several steps I could take. I could hire prostitutes, advertise in the personals, or sign up for a dating service. None of these appeal to me. Hiring a prostitute implies that I cannot be loved body and soul, just body or soul. I would be treated as a body in need of some impersonal, professional service — which is what I’ve always gotten, though in a different form, from nurses and attendants. Sex for the sake of sex alone has little appeal to me because it seems like a ceremony whose meaning has been forgotten.
...
Which leaves me where I was before I saw Cheryl. I’ve met a few women nearly as wonderful as Tracy, but they haven’t expressed any romantic interest in me. I feel no enthusiasm for the seemingly doomed project of pursuing women. My desire to love and be loved sexually is equaled by my isolation and my fear of breaking out of it. The fear is twofold. I fear getting nothing but rejections. But I also fear being accepted and loved. For if this latter happens, I will curse myself for all the time and life that I have wasted.

From this final ending of the article, it isn't clear to me that the transition toward loving himself has fully happened. Moreover, seeing the sex surrogate certainly doesn't have the effect that the film leads us to believe of initiating Mark into a happy world of companionship and sex.

3) The priest in the film encourages Mark to see the sexual surrogate. The irony of the priest encouraging Mark to see the surrogate is that in Catholicism the celibacy of priests is a testimony to the good of chastity. A life devoid of sex isn't something to be lamented as a life not worth living. Rather, chastity is a positive good that, if embraced, can itself point us toward union with Christ (or at least is a suffering that can be offered up). Mark's priest friend has chosen a life of chastity and should be able to bear witness to the good of that choice to his friend.

Village at the End of the World

A must see for all Front Porchers, Village at the End of the World considers a community that tatters at the brink of sustainability. The film traces the town through the changing seasons--its life is profoundly connected to the movement of the seasons. It's a bit hard to find--we watched a version on youtube that I'm afraid was shortened and seemed to have been broadcast by Al Jazeera (why? because it portrays community living?).

The ending is pretty happy--the community manages to reopen their fish factory and to open fish factories in other town.

However, you also see the downside and difficulties of community. Lars lives with his grandparents, as if they're his parents. His mother was unmarried when she conceived him, and he thinks of her as a sister now. The man he thinks is his father has never acknowledged him, despite being another member of this 50-some-person community. No wonder he wants to leave--he's not interested in hunting and fishing, which is the primary activity of the community; he spends a lot of time online and is afraid he won't meet a partner in his town.

The man who was the comic relief of the documentary was the man in charge of emptying each house's sewer. He moved to the town in order to marry one of the inhabitants, whom he'd met online.

The film was an honest look into the benefits and liabilities of such a close community.

A Random Assortment

~ Above: a trailer for a series of short films on Pennsylvania fracking.

~ Sprayable caffeine?!

~ No idea what to think about this: Amsterdam gives alcoholics beer for work.

~ Via Hopkins: "People with Disabilities React to Mannequins Created in Their Image."

~ Wow--this is straight out of Covert Affairs.

Advent.3, Our Christmas Tree and Some More Homemade Ornaments

We got a tiny little Christmas tree, since we had only a handful of ornaments and all the rest I made (or found around the house).

 Here's some made from Mucha designs (I cut them out in circles and glued Christmas carols from an old hymn book to the back).

 

I decoupaged other ornaments using old hymns and pages from books.

Here's Francisco's contribution--made from his favorite newspaper.

Mama Leopard gave me some Christmas cookie cutters, so we hung those up.

Simcha Fisher writes about advent for adults--what adults can do to get ready and prepare themselves for the Christmas season. This section really resonated with me:

Be alert to nesting impulses.  When a woman is almost ready to give birth, she is often seized with an irrepressible compulsion to clean and prepare --  in obvious ways, such as stocking up on diapers and baby clothes, and in ways that have no apparent connection to the impending birth, such as alphabetizing the pantry or polishing lightbulbs.  Pregnant women are on a constant alert to prepare in any way that they can.  We can all do the same:  make a conscious effort to be open and ready to do what God wants us to do to prepare for the birth of His Son.  

I've definitely been nesting (in very modest ways) these last few weeks and am pretty proud of the way we've decorated for our first Christmas together.

Longwood.2

There were lovely peach poinsettias. And those green columns are to die for.

An orchid Christmas tree!

A succulent wreath.

I'm looking forward to seeing these gardens in the daytime.

Floating Christmas trees.

Longwood Gardens at Christmas

We visited Longwood Gardens, which is all decorate for Christmas. It was pretty, especially the Conservatory. But there were also loads of people and strollers there. I think that might've been a one-time thing.

The organ was playing Christmas carols and everyone was singing.

The swirls are made out of apples!

Mural Arts Program.2

Employees of the Mural Arts Program are the characters in the mural on the side of a restaurant. The setting is supposed to be a mix of Italy and Lancaster County. I love it.

A celebration of women.

That's Grace Kelly in the wedding dress.

I love this one--it's in the theater area of Philly.

Quote

"If this is terrible, we're saying you made it."

--Francisco on the pot roast he's cooking for guests

Mural Arts Program

We went on a walking tour given by Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program. It was interesting to really look at the murals that I often pass and see. It was interesting, too, to hear more about the Mural Arts Program and the work that it does.

In general, it seems like a great program. Only I wouldn't want them to be in charge of all the murals in Philly--whenever there are donors, there are silly restrictions on art. Plus, when you base art around unanimous community decisions, it may lead to some good community results, but it sometimes leads to pretty boring art.

Above: the mural was originally supposed to feature William Penn, but Lincoln Financial sponsored it, so they switched the statue to Lincoln. At least our tour guide was honest about it.

In this one, also funded by Lincoln Financial, there is an actual coin with Lincoln's face on it. How much more overt can you be?

This mural (above) was done (as many of them are) on pieces of parachute cloth off site. This one was done by inmates, as part of the Mural Arts Program's focus on Restorative Justice.

I think that these two aren't part of the Mural Arts Program:

Here is one that was designed by Philly kids as part of the Youth Program:

Here's one from near the theater district:

Some, such as this one, are done by artists, while others are done by a computerized paint-by-number thing that lets everyone participate. Lets just say, the differences in quality are obvious.