One of the mystery photos in LOC’s crowdsourcing Flickr experiment turned out to be my hometown back in the 1940s: “Sylvia Sweets Tea Room” in Brockton, Massachusetts. The daughter of the late owners of the restaurant left a comment on the photo giving further background. It makes me somewhat sad to read the comments (”me god such a lovely place !!!”) because I never knew the city this way. Home of the first department-store Santa Claus. The city’s big industry — shoes — was nonexistent by 1970. Although boxing is still a big deal there and I hear great things about The Fuller Craft Museum (still one of my favorite buildings.) And like any post-industrial town, there are attempts to coax the creative class into “loft condos.” Now Brockton is a place for those who “like hearing gun shots and 5 year old kids cussin worse than most adults and seeing creak heads walking around all day.” LOC has a number of Norman Rockwell Brockton snapshots. But so much has changed.
Demand a Read/Write City: “Our city is read-only. You’re free to read advertising, business signs, and city signs. But dare you write or hang anything of your own; you will be labeled as a criminal - a graffiti vandal. In many cities it’s even illegal to hang a sign for a garage sale on a light pole. If you happen to have a several thousand dollars, you might be able to say what you want - as long as it’s not too political.”
The web is full of dazzling architectural renderings (many unlikely to ever get made) but I cannot stop thinking about Herzog & de Meuron’s Le Project Triangle. The triangular building will not cast a shadow on adjacent buildings once construction is completed in Paris in 2014. Citylife is defined by its noise and perpetual darkness. I can’t help but dream of a future where every building is like this. A utopian cure to seasonal affective disorder.
Here’s a new way for cities to combat graffiti: throwing a cleaning party. Seattle Paint Out (slogan: “The difference between art and graffiti is permission”) targeted several neighborhoods last weekend.
Are towns designed for the benefit of men? BBC on a Cambridge University study explaining road planning is better suited to men’s needs than women, “Studies show women make more complex journeys than men, dropping children off at school, going to work, getting the shopping before going home…In contrast, men tend to just travel straight to work and back again. Women are also more dependent on public transport, making 75% of bus journeys and only 30% have access to a car in the daytime.” (via.)
When Humanity Only Survives Within Driving Distance of a Shopping Mall
The city can become an addiction. Live in it too long, and your body will reject the outdoors. Over the weekend, I got up early-ish to catch La Strada at the Brattle (part of the free Elements Of Cinema series.) It seemed like a good Saturday morning thing: get coffee, watch a smart film, maybe browse the dress shops and get coffee again.
But as soon as I opened my eyes, they started to burn. I left the window open that night and the airborne pollens — ragweed or whatever it is that Zyrtec normally takes care of — drifted into my room and into my eyes like evil pixie dust. I shut my window, got dressed, and did what I normally don’t do trying to get to Harvard Square: I drove.
The whole “pahk the cah in hahvahd yahd” thing is a joke not just on the Boston accent. Driving in Harvard Square is kind of like pushing marbles through straws. Saturday morning isn’t much of a problem. Well, any Saturday other than yesterday.
Due to construction, the two and three hour parking spots within eight blocks were unavailable. The open spots were limited to one hour. Hardly enough time to attend a movie and a lecture. No going around it: the meter maids in this city are busybodies. After circling around several times, wishing I were on my bike, I ended up parking much farther than I intended and came smack in contact with exactly what I’d been avoiding all morning: the outside air.
It was a beautiful day. Low 80s, clear skies, perfect for biking, running, reading under a tree, anything outside. But rather than delighting in the weather, I was cursing it. Lightheaded, my eyes feeling like sandpaper lined the rims, sneezing, I was just a mess. I thought wearing glasses would make it better but it was just the opposite: contact lenses shield against these allergens. The sunshine was bouncing off the lenses, only making the situation worse.
This is urban New England, I’m hardly Lawrence of Arabia in a sandstorm, but it bothered me so much, and realizing I was already twenty minutes late, I returned to my car thinking, “how far to the Cambridgeside Galleria?”
I was looking for refuge from the outside world in the form of a shopping mall. My body was rejecting nature in favor of the sanitized, always-68 degrees shopping center down the street. So I watched the sky from the Whole Foods cafe, waiting until I could blink again without discomfort.
Just as domesticated pets can’t make it in the wilderness, city people, according to the “hygiene hypothesis,” live in such clean conditions their immune systems weaken. Preschool peanut bans are so prevalent and contentious, I wouldn’t be surprised if the DEA gets involved eventually.
In addition to increased sensitivity, cities produce more ragweed due to CO2 levels — increasing with climate change. There are additional ripple effects on tree pollen, fungal spores, and other allergens. And warmer climate means the allergy season is much longer than it ever was before.
Years ago, people with severe allergies found relief in the mountains. But “increased human activity such as building and other disturbances of the soil, irrigation, and gardening, have encouraged ragweed to spread to these areas as well.” We’re building our way unhealthy.
Damien Atkins’s play “Lucy” (Kurt Anderson interview here) is about an anthropologist with a 13 year old autistic daughter. She comes to the conclusion her daughter “is perfect. She’s the future,” making a stunning hypothesis that autism is evolution. Mankind is protecting itself from the devastating environmental consequences of modern living. (A little Kumbaya, but quite a lot smarter than whatever M Night Shyamalan was going on.)
Wall-E so radically tackled devolution with the future human race portrayed as gelatinous blobs. More accurately they would have sneezed uncontrollably at contact with the plant.
Todd Haynes’s 1995 film [Safe] was a great comment/parody/prophesy of the modern age fraught with yuppie ailments:
“Safe” has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband and a beautiful house. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone. That doesn’t turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grand-mal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she’s become sensitive to the common toxins in today’s world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong. An allergist finds that she has an allergic reaction to milk but explains that there is no treatment for that sort of allergy. She sees a psychiatrist who does nothing but make her nervous. In the hospital, Carol sees an infomercial for Wrenwood, a new-age retreat for those who are “environmentally ill,” and leaves her husband and stepson to try and find salvation at this retreat: headed by a phony, grandstanding, “sensitive” individual named Peter Dunning.
I remember watching it in high school, thinking “just get over it!” Likely someone is thinking the same thing reading my opening paragraph. It’s embarrassing, but I’m not alone:
Ragweed pollen and mold thrive in the opposite conditions. So when it’s dry and windy, you get ragweed; when it’s damp and rainy, you get mold.
Here’s the other cheerful news, you might want to prepare for a worse ragweed season next year. Dr. Mark Dykewicz, chief of the Section of Allergy & Clinical Immunology, at St. Louis University School of Medicine says that next year’s ragweed crop will be from this years rainy, fertile conditions.
In Europe, they are putting up “Wild West ‘wanted’ posters” advocating burning the ragwood (”ambrosia”) plants, which climbing north to Germany, and even Scandinavia.
‘Some gardeners naively think it is an attractive plant and give it water and fertilizer in their front gardens,’ says Susanne Schwarz of Berlin’s Health Department.
‘They should be eradicating this menace instead,’ she adds. ‘Best thing to do is pull it out by the roots and burn it, since the seeds can remain fertile for up to 40 years.’
In case you’re wondering, yeah, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this week. In the meantime, a friend advised me to take local honey because the pollen in the honey acclimates you to the pollen in the air. Sounds unlikely, but I appreciate the concept as a narrative. Maybe if The Happening hadn’t resigned itself as a joke, Mark Walberg would have hunted the wilderness for an antidote. A lab set up in the fields somewhere. The twist ending M Night Shymalan forgot to write, like a riff on Dorothy’s discovery: the answer is “no further than our own backyard”
Until then, closing my eyes is as heavenly as a dive in a pool full of feathers. And I’m thinking allergies are nature’s way of reminding us to pay attention.
Photography by Julia Fullerton-Batten.
Previously:
Who Needs Sleep?
An Apology for Idlers
Related links:
- Hygiene Hypothesis on PBS, Evolution: “The Evolutionary Arms Race”
- Architects take Beijing’s smog into account, LA Times (via.)
- Ragweed Allergy Heats Up With Climate Change, Medical News Today
- Take Me Out To The (Peanut-Free) Ballgame, Channel3000
Graffiti in the Wilderness: Rock Climbing in a Granite Museum
Yesterday afternoon, my father took my sister and me out rock climbing in the Quincy Quarries. He has climbed nearly every weekend for the past seven years. My sister never had, and I’d only climbed indoors and that was a few years ago.
The rocks in this suburban Boston climbing park are completely covered in graffiti, unfortunate as it makes the surface slippery and more difficult to grip. Visually though, it is interesting.
We think of graffiti as an urban thing. And nature as something separate. But the nature that exists not too far from the city is usually a pale substitute. Graffiti is always found in transportation centers — subways, trains, bus stations — the stations, the bathrooms, or the cars themselves. Marking a place you’ve been and don’t intend to return for a sense of permanence.
But we also unintentionally leave traces of ourselves in the near wilderness. Maybe JG Ballard’s themes are the concerns of children. As a child in suburbia, the same woods that seemed so expansive, contained random traces of civilizations like long abandoned rusty tricycles with the tires removed and moss growing over the handles. Trash and shattered glass, a bobby pin, a sock, a condom wrapper — the outside world is rarely experienced as something pristine — people always leave something behind. This may be why the longer you live in the city, the more likely you are to shun nature entirely. It is never as pure as you imagine it to be.
Rock climbers become obsessed with the surface textures, not unlike how in bicycling you are much more aware of little bumps or pieces of gravel in the road. It is similarly an individual’s journey and an intellectual sport. Just like you dodge the cars on your bike, you need to think about where to position yourself and how to grip. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were to become a fad the way biking is now.
Plus, it’s emotional. It’s fear rather that physical exhaustion that prevents me from ascending any higher than 20 feet. When we visited my grandmother a half-hour later for blueberry pie and ice cream, I was still feeling the rush. My hand was shaking as I lifted my fork like I had too much coffee.
In May, I read the quarries were cleaned of graffiti in order to film a Tina Fey movie. Can they really clean the paint off? Or do you paint the rocks granite grey?
Anyway, they didn’t do much of a job. I can’t imagine this much graffiti only collected in the two months since. But I’m not complaining. If only it were less haphazard — really beautiful work that respects it’s surrounding, and is mindful of those good nooks climbers need to get their feet in. Like, what I wrote about tagging houses, if only it were work as good as Swoon, Imminent Disaster, Conor Harrington, Armsrock… If the rocks will be covered with paint, why not graffiti that’s really great? The state could turn it into a legal graffiti park and maybe attract real talent. Think of it as an induced-Stendhal Syndrome.
Quincy quarries images by The Urban Pantheist, art by Swoon
Previously:
Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection
With Speed Graphic Cameras, Art is a Crime [Scene]
Related links:
- Quincy Quarry Panorama
- The Battle Over Central Park, New York magazine.
Six Bauhaus-style social housing buildings in Berlin are now UNESCO World Heritage sites, “outstanding example of the building reform movement that contributed to improving housing and living conditions for people with low incomes.” Maybe Detroit is next?
From WebUrbanist: “Guerrilla Art Versus Guerrilla Advertising: What’s the Difference?”
The Best Fireworks Display is Seen From a Plane Flying into LAX Sometime Between 9 - 10pm
Independence day is my favorite holiday. Partly because it’s not in the winter, so there’s no seasonal affective disorder. Another reason is you don’t need to celebrate it with your family. It is the first guaranteed easy day of summer. Plus it means my birthday is just a few weeks away.
Last year to the day tomorrow, I was flying into Los Angeles. The cheapest flight I could get was on the 4th in the evening. I thought I would be missing the parties, but what I got was so much more.
From my window I looked at the beautiful infinite motherboard of lights that is the city as seen from the air. And just above it, little ripples of hundreds more colored lights. The firework explosions were all so tiny, and yet I could see them go off above every city subdivision. And all of it was happening at once.
There was the Glendale fireworks and the Long Beach celebration over there. You could see another firework show above Malibu and Culver City, and Westwood, and everywhere else. A firework show for every neighborhood, and from my vantage point, I could see them all at once. It was one of the most beautiful and amazing things I’ve seen in my life; made even more special by that fact so few people will have the chance to experience it.
If this were a short story or a better crafted essay I might have played up my disappointement in missing all the Independence Day barbeques, or emphasize that the day has some sentimental significance to me besides what I’ve already written. But it is just a blog post so I’ll state the point here more directly, and even use a tired cliche to finish this post: the best things come when you least expect them.
Enjoy your holiday!
Images by Yoon Lee.
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