some of the older homes survive. Their shingles
sag, and the grass that grows claws its way into dirt
looking for water.  Those houses seem guests now—
shunned by politeness, supplicant somehow

to the stiff smiles around them.  No one can
will them gone—no one would—but their
resistance awaits opportunity, any excuse
to see them fall.  When I walk by, I stop

to re-imagine them new, how they were once
hope, their twisted trees once wired to stand
straight and their windows bright, uncurtained,
unclouded. I wonder if anyone inside remembers

bricks as scrubbed as the homes around them,
if inside someone is thinking about promises
and how every assurance dies too soon,
each empty lot the next front for amnesia.

this makes me want to create short films. makes me want to
travel.
/marjie

So, it's been a few weeks since my last mondays w/ marjie. Sorry. But this link that she sent me to the 2min15 blog is fantabulous...I'm curious what cleveland would look like in 2 min and 15 seconds!

Here's the gist...they invite all to collaborate w/ them from any city or location following four general ideas:

urban life is the main subject of the blog, the idea is to show the life of the city where you live, or where you travel; but always with a curiosity for seeing farther than the usual stuff. Either showing a normal day in the city, or the weirdest.

this blog was created with non commercial purposes, everybody has to be the owner of the material submitted.

videos should have a length of 1min to 2min15, we think is a proper time to show something without it being boring, less is more.

digital cameras and basic editing software is the base of the project, feel free to edit videos as you wish, these can be with music, real audio, mute, black and white and in any language. The idea is that everyone can watch it, without it being too personal.

see paris:

see bruxelles:

see valencia:

it's so nice to travel thousands of places w/o even leaving your computer...this used to be done in the narrative with books...thanks Billy Gates! What would we do without you?!?!?

This morning I got notice that one of my favourite sites, PSFK, was holding a conference in Singapore in October. PSFK's website is a constantly updating playground of inspirational ideas and creativity. The pricing of their conference, on the other hand, sucked. It's $1000 (and let's not get into a discussion about whether that sucks or not) but then there's a $15 fee tacked on the end. Now, I'd like to argue that if you're charging $1000 for a day of talks, surely there's latitude in the cost calculations there to include the $15 booking fee. I know it's a separate charge by the web vendor they're using to sell the tickets, but still.

It's something I suspect started with restaurants. In Singapore we have multiple restaurant pricing systems at work, depending on where you eat, and one favourite is "plus, plus, plus", which means that the price on the menu is exclusive of 10% service charge (usually thought of as a compulsory tip, but actually ending up in the pocket of the owner), GST and often a mysterious other item called "other government charges". No one seems to know why the restaurant industry and no one else chose to exclude their costs from their prices and add them on later.

At some point it became impossible to calculate an airfare, with everything including fuel (and now meals and baggage) being excluded from the price. The roadside signs of petrol stations began to include an impossible-to-decipher range of discounts and rebates. And now we have no idea how much a taxi ride is costing us until we get to the destination and the driver pushes the magic button that totes it all up.

Well, times are tough and to remain competitive I'll be giving away my services free from now on. Plus electricity, keyboard wear-and-tear surcharge, coffee tax, holiday fund contribution, variable email answering costs and mental health maintenance fee.

Pic: Sale Sale by creativespark

Such a low tech approach has its benefits. It eliminates ongoing costs of having to stay connected. I'm also immune to the Kafkaeque dysfunctionalities of Sri Lanka's Telcom providers. I have heard enough horror stories to bother with enduring my own. The price of waiting till I get home to put up a blog post is more "profitable" than the costs and hassle of being chained to net enabled telephony services. Particularly when the whole blogging thing is a hobby. Not a money earner or a requirement of my job.

Perhaps mobile connectivity makes looking up things on the web more expensively efficient. I'm not inclined to shell out money to find out. The utility of low-end "mobile blogging" is not about connectivity - but niche productivity. Blogging on a PDA means having an editable writing tool at hand whenever I get a free moment. It forces me to break up bloging the writing and research into stages. Which in turn saves the writing process from the distraction of the net.

The editable factor is the key difference between using a PDA and good old paper. Yes you can "edit" on paper - but the whole process hinges on transcribing hand-written posts. A time consuming "unproductive" process - even if you got decent handwriting and/or time to mess with OCR software. I have neither. As a long time Palm user, my Graffiti speed is almost faster and far more legible than my handwritten blog posts.

With a newer PDA/mobile phone the seperation of the writing and research/editing stages will blur.
Each generation of lowend mobile phones will have some kind of notepad application. If you can peckout a post and put it on your blog from your portable device you would be a higher tech blogger than I am.

Last winter, we introduced our first Cincinnati-inspired product: these Vine Street coasters which, from what I hear, have been a hit with local urban planners [is that the smallest target market ever?]. We think of them as an installation for your coffeetable. Although it's still summer, we're already developing new wares for the holiday season, which will be unveiled locally in the coming months. In the mean time, new products are being released in our Etsy shop; get your Vine Street coasters, in brand-new colorways, here.

Etsy seller kpetuck is a Brooklyn-based architect who also creates these sort of sweet, sort of bizarre collages out of vintage photographs, bits of map, and red stitching. What, no Cincinnati?

From the top: Providence 2, Detroit, Wichita, and Indianapolis.

In this case, the nagging matter had actually nagged very little; in fact, it had gone unnoticed. Specifically, I noticed its effects, but uncharacteristically, I did not examine the source for a cause. The matter was my glasses; something was the matter with them.

Normally, I am hyper-attentive to anything concerning my glasses, because they are so necessary to visual life. This time, I simply didn't particularly wonder, or at least care to know, why, for the past several weeks, my glasses were pulling my hair out when I took them off, or why they were pricking the back of my ear. But yesterday the source of the nuisance cried out for discovery, and I noticed that the end of one of the temples had become delaminated, leaving the smooth plastic a jagged jaw. This immediately won emergency status and pre-empted all plans of doing nothing for the afternoon.

I called the megacorporate optical shop in the mall and read off my prescription to one Bob over the phone. Can do. They had such lenses in stock. What a wonderful thing, to be standard in a world that penalizes the exceptional with special orders.

Lens guy Bob said my glasses would be ready in an hour and a half if I could get there in an hour. Even though my husband forgot how to get to the mall, we were there in 25 minutes. It's a round world, and there are so many ways to the mall that it didn't matter.

Neither of us had been to the mall in at least two years. We had no idea where the optical shop was, but decided just to park and combine the exigent errand with a walk.

It turned out we had parked at the opposite end of the mall from the optical shop. It also turned out that the mall still had the same hard tile floors it had always had. Walking in the mall tends to disarticulate my joints, a small matter in the face of the excitement of getting new glasses.

And the prospect was truly exciting. I have worn progressive lenses for many years, and had wanted for the past year to try lined tri-focals. I was tired of the progressives' narrow field of view. I didn't like resorting to bifocals to read because the reading field in my crunched progressives was too small. Lined tri-focals were my only shot at life in one pair of glasses, but two opticians had said no, it wouldn't work with my prescription; the differential between my distance and reading refraction was too great, or something like that. But can-do Bob said it would be no problem. Corporate America was going to come through where neighborhood small business had failed. I didn't like it, but I'd take success where I could get it.

I tried on a few frames and decided on some Versaces, made in Italy. They seemed more suited to a super-model who owns an airline, but they had to do; at least they weren't made in China, and they were big enough to provide ample viewing areas for the three fields. I picked the plain ones, without crystals. My glasses would be ready in an hour and a half.

We had already been out to lunch, and we had no idea what to do in the mall. We both lack the mall-maundering gene, we hate to shop, and we weren't hungry. I recalled that I had been longing for some time for an effective bread knife, and we found one at Excalibur. The salesman considerately cautioned the young man checking out Samurai swords not to swing the one he was holding while we were standing behind him. I had already planned my disarmament strategy, and I knew my husband certainly had one.

We entered a kitchen store to see if we could find a toaster made in the U.S.A. Toastmaster no longer manufactures in the U.S.; their toasters are now made in China. For $600 we could get a professional toaster made in Canada, but I couldn't imagine ever feeling professional enough at making toast to justify such a thing.

We went to Sears and I regretted not having brought my camera. An entire wall displayed Craftsman wrenches, forged in the U.S.A. I'd have sent a photo to Matthew for his Made in U.S.A. blog. I felt more sentimental looking at those wrenches than I do looking at the American flag.

I had a sudden Mom moment as we passed See's and thought I'd get a box of chocolates to send my hard-working kid in Alaska. But the line inside was so long that I decided to hold that thought and send her an equivalent token from Trader Joe's.

Malls do kill time. We were approaching the time of my transformation into a wearer of Versace lined tri-focs. We decided just to return to the optical store early. Hailing frequencies were screaming in my left shoulder, right hip, and both knees. At least we could sit down and wait in the store.

My glasses were ready when we arrived and they were perfect. I was issued a smart white case, an enveloped receipt, and a snazzy gift bag.  My new glasses cost less than my old pair did three years ago; there was some kind of megacorporate sale. The service had been excellent. Corporate America came through and I had new glasses in a little over an hour on a Sunday afternoon.

On our way home, my husband remarked that Tacoma Mall seemed to have reverted to normalcy since our last time there. He was right. The mall was full of people--the recession didn't seem to be hindering their consumption. People weren't just browsing; nearly everyone toted store-brand bags. And no one was in costume.

The last time I was at the mall, I saw lots of people in theatrical make-up, punkface, and costumes. It was a thing--people dressed up in chains and vampire gear to go to the mall to entertain themselves with their own shock value. This time around, I saw no one dressed to chill. The scene was suburban America: people you would ask to hold your baby if you had to pick up something you dropped, people with kids in strollers, and coffee cups in their hands. And me, in my new Versaces, just wanting to leave it all behind, yet infinitely relieved at the intactness of it all.

Except for an addiction to Momus's blog I'm otherwise pretty normal, honest.

Post Secret

Secrets can be funny, weird, heartbreaking or kind of scary, and Post Secret has seen 250,000 of them. This ongoing collaborative project from Frank Warren is updated every week. Frank's mother says it's "diabolical".

Passive Aggressive Notes

Passive Aggressive Notes specialises in painfully polite and hilariously hostile writings from shared spaces the world over. Housemates, work colleagues, neighbours, fellow commuters and service staff... beware.

Postcards from Yo Momma

If your mother arrived later in life to the internets and she uses it with a kind of unique, loopy charm, you're not alone. Postcards From Yo Momma is a repository of modern day maternal correspondence between New York writers Doree Shafrir and Jessica Grose and their mothers, peppered with "love you, xoxoxoxo"s and advice like "don't forget to take your valium" and "some mace is a great idea".

I called the police.

A few minutes later, I heard pounding and the sound of something breaking. I called the cops again. They sent an officer over, who discovered the perp is a Cox Cable worker.

That's right. Cox sends guys with hammers and power equipment into residential neighborhoods to set up a racket outside people's bedroom windows in the wee hours of the morning before dawn. The guy is still out there banging around.

Heaven forfend that some hapless viewer should have to wait until daylight to watch television!

In the 1980's,

Baltimore's slogan was

"The City that Reads."

This could be viewed

on bus benches

throughout the city.

People mockingly changed it to

"The City that Bleeds."

Politicians didn't like this.

They concocted a new phrase:

"Believe."

Now, many say, "Bereave."

This picture was taken on The Johns Hopkins Hospital's Campus.  At the entry/exit, of every location on the grounds, is a security guard post.  Note the video camera above the mini police station.  Once one leaves the campus and the watchful eye of police/security guards; one is in gang and drug territory.

These decoupage trinkets from NYC-based John Derian are a bit twee for me, but I do appreciate the ship images. And, hey, old maps! [Just don't get me started on actually buying a paperweight of a faux antique map.]

His site has offered brilliant examples of his own work and brought together a wonderful community of like-mindedly passionate lovers of poetry. I hope people can follow the link above before he expunges his work.

Let this poem be a tribute to all Scot and all he has meant to so many writers in the blogosphere...

The Video

For Charles Bukowski (and Scot)

You knew—
no sort of blindness
sees only things
or their surfaces.

If the pond had no depth,
tame goldfish would
swim to its surface.
As orange as they were,
you dreamt fire
swimming inside them.

The house
couldn’t be a house—
you waited for its master.
And even if what emerged
wasn’t what you expected,
he needed to live there,
was always there,
bottled spirits in hand,
waiting to come out
and name you.

What bamboo could be
thick enough,
wild enough,
uncombed enough
for truth to hide?
Each act is its motive
in the end.

You thought about it.
You decided—
all the beauty inside
has to blaze.

Forget about the music -- check out the places in these rock posters designed by John Solimine, a.k.a. Spike Press. His big-name clients include the Chicago Tribune, American Express, and Best Buy, but these posters are where it's at.

As a side note, John Solimine is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati, so there's a local tie-in as well.

Have you ever noticed that megaretailers raise their bargain prices once most of the local competition has been driven out of business? Check prices at your nearest surviving Ace Hardware (you'll have to drive a ways to find it)-you may be surprised to find Home Depot's prices are actually higher on many products.

 A study of the effect of chain stores on the economy of Andersonville, a suburb of Chicago, showed that for every $100 in consumer spending with a locally owned firm, $68 remained in the Chicago economy, but only $43 remained from $100 spent in a chain store.  The same study showed that 70% of residents preferred to shop in local stores and 80% preferred shopping in traditional urban business districts to big boxes. Nationwide, experience has shown that chain stores drain tax revenues through ill-considered subsidies, leave shopping areas blighted, and actively work to drive local companies out of business. Meanwhile, the carbon cost of pointlessly hauling food and other goods around the world continues to skyrocket. And as we know, we no longer can trust that our food is safe, nor our pet food, nor our children's toys...

 It is past time to fight back.

 Stalking the Local Merchant

I was pleased to find a fight-back weapon here in my state: a coalition of businesses has come into being to foster local commerce and to encourage people to shop locally. The retail landscape here has become so homogenized it's hard to find local stores. Most of our wonderful independent bookstores were hounded out of business years ago, people mysteriously developed a penchant for taste-alike restaurants, our fine local hardware shops closed their doors within months of Home Depot's arrival, and now Phoenix, like every other major American city, looks just like every other major American city. Cookie-cutter commerce has brought us cookie-cutter cities full of cookie-cutter people. And so, it is excellent to come across an organization that will tell you where to find local shopping.

 So far, I haven't located a national clearinghouse or umbrella organization for such groups, but a little googling suggests they're all over the country. As you might expect, smaller municipalities, recognizing that chain stores threaten their job base and the very character of their towns, are resisting vigorously. Taylor, Texas, for example, has a lively shop-local movement; there's one in central Illinois  and another in Cape Cod.

But larger cities are also starting to join battle: Salt Lake City's Vest Pocket Business Coalition complements Utah's statewide organization.  New Orleans urges citizens to patronize local businesses, and Brooklyn has an active shop-local movement.

No doubt there are many more. Visits to just these few websites will show you the endless good reasons to buy on the local economy as much as you can, and most of them list locally owned businesses. Try googling "shop local" and the name of your city or state.

The Costs, the Benefits

Does shopping local cost more? Possibly, since megacorporations have no qualms about undercutting local competition-at least until the competition is gone. But we've already seen what abandoning our local economies for huge box stores has done to the quality of life in our cities: we have lost what makes our towns our towns, as every city in America has come to look alike. We've lost jobs and wages. We've lost nearby shopping and quality neighborhoods. As the cost of fuel has risen, the cost of flying and trucking food from far-away megasuppliers is making the most ordinary food items unaffordable. And now, in the era of globalization ushered in by vast corporate interests and their political allies, we are enjoying unsafe food and toys, engineered obsolescence of big-ticket items, less and less choice and variety in the products offered to us, longer drives to fewer stores...to say nothing of carefully orchestrated corporate invasion of our privacy.

Penny wise and pound foolish, with a vengeance! Some things are worth paying for. One of those things is our way of life.

I for one intend to start shopping local whenever I can reasonably do so. I hope you'll all join me at your local merchants' stores.

It's simply good for America.

categories: shopping, urban life

2 Comments left on iWeb site:

BeThisWay

Excellent article!  We just discovered our local Ace Hardware, and it's less than three miles away!  Husband and I both enjoyed browsing their shelves, and the prices were sometimes lower, sometimes higher, and sometimes the same as the Big Boxes.  The customer service blew the Big Boxes away...

I much prefer the local farmers market to the big grocery stores, even though they are pseudo-local.  Local, neighborhood restaurants are often sooo much better  than the chains.  I think people like to eat at chains so they know what to expect.  Levels of cleanliness and quality are assumed to be good.

Sometimes I have to choose price, but when they are comparable I'm going to make the effort to shop locally whenever possible.

Jeff

I agree!  This is a great article and highlights the most important reason to shop local and support American businesses ... because it keeps jobs, and our money, in the States where it belongs.

schimb sărăcia de r.a.t.b. cu metroul în care privirile oamenilor sictiriţi îmi aduc aminte că au o mamă care-i aşteaptă cu braţele deschise între picioare...culmea sentimentul este reciproc...

ies de la metrou,,,e vânt,,,îmi dau seama după ce incerc să-mi dau jos un ziar jegos ce m-o pleznit peste mutra-mpietrită...şi chiar că e vânt îmi spun în gând luând cu grijă o flegmă verzuie de pe ochi de la boul din faţa mea...

fac greşeala să mă uit în jur...taximetrişti plictisiţi....ţigani,,,,,curve care-şi plimba bucile rupte-n 23 de colo colo aruncând din când în când o privire prin coşurile pline de gunoi...oameni urâţi,,,distruşi,,,terminaţi.

aştept r.a.t.b. ul din nou ,,, incercând să fac abstracţie de peisajul desprins parcă din universul eminescian al lui bacovia. Simt că cel mai frumos lucru care s-ar putea întâmpla în momentul ăsta e să iau autobuzul...dar nu oricum....PE DEDESUBT!

vine 69.....wow ce plăcere domnu şofer fir-ar mă-ta a dracu merg 3 staţii cu un lache-flaushache care are impresia că transportă cartofi, mă dau jos plin de bu(L)şituri pe coate, calc într-o roşie stricată-n faţa căminului...intru....aia de la poartă se uită ca la un căcat plouat (dar o înţeleg),,,,ajung în cameră şi mă pun liniştit la calc...pe mess ca tot omu...dar totul culminează cu o ceartă cu una dintre persoanele cu care n-ar trebui....aşa, ca de noapte bună....

mâine: idem, poimâine:idem, răspoimiercuri:idem,,,,

şi-mi vine să suspin întemeiat: futu-ţi paştele mă-tii de viaţă....

Marketwatch.com is reporting that the housing slump, credit crunch and recession are conspiring to bring people out of the suburbs and into the cities. (In your face Joel Kotkin!):

Stricter lending requirements also seem to be enabling larger cities to retain more of their residents. Young would-be homeowners who can't get a mortgage in order to buy a home in the suburbs may be remaining in the city for now, [William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution] said.

In addition, higher gas prices might be making larger cities with more sophisticated mass-transit options more appealing -- an attitude that could become more permanent if high gas prices become a long-term problem, he said.

Was there any doubt that economy is the base motivator for most decisions? But the other side of this story is about 20th century American ideas of the city's relation to the country and the spaces in between. As I have noted elsewhere, one of our foundational national mythologies is the ever receding Western horizon. In the 20th century the automobile became the mascot for American cultural, economic, and political dominance throughout the world. For many people it is still the foundation of American identity. I love this example from the Washington Post a couple of months ago:

The Car Care Council, an association that promotes auto maintenance, has resorted to marketing the benefits of driving, arguing that even if gas hits $5, driving is still cheaper than flying.

"These soaring gas prices shouldn't sour our love affair with our vehicles," said Rich White, the council's executive director. He added that the changes in driving behavior may be temporary. "It's going to take a lot for Americans to give up that freedom of mobility that they cherish," he said.

"Our love affair with our vehicles" is precisely what makes living in a suburb with a giant, water hungry lawn and a drafty, inefficient house possible. But a perfect confluence of events, including higher gas prices, have made it more difficult but not impossible to live that dream. Policy makers in cities need to take this opportunity to make cities more efficient economically and environmentally. They need to create a fair tax burden that reflects the needs of workers to get to work without a car and save the money they make their so they can invest in the city. That means taxing cars and especially the biggest recipients of the wealth that a city produces who decide not to live in the city.

Also, check out the update at the bottom of my second Celebration, FL post.

Meyer and Associates/ 18 Washington Ave/ Chatham, NC 07928-9903

sent:

Overheard in DC:

A woman having a conversation with another woman's 2-year-old:

Woman: "So who do you want to be president?"
Two year old: "OBAWMAH!!!!!"
At least seven people on the train: "Yaaaay!"

reasoning:

adorable. i'm sure this irked mccain supporters to no end, but i love the overheards in [urban city] because they are all about complete strangers being bluntly open and honest, saying things you normally wouldn't in public, but yet somehow the urban crowds provide some sort of anonymity. it seems completely counterintuitive b/c it's along the same thinking that people in cities are crazy, and outwardly rude to each other, but there's also an unspoken support amongst locals that manifests itself in particular situations, and shows a type of safety, or "we're all in this giant world together" net that makes me love urban interactions.