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Mogwai, The Sun Smells Too Loud (unofficial video)

from the new album, The Hawk is Howling, which is streaming in its entirety at their myspace.

the minor landscape of glouster, oh

cartogram of county-by-county 2004 presidential election results, by Gastner, Shalizi, and Newman (U-Michigan)

BLDGBLOG posted yesterday on what he termed "the geography of american political campaigns" (see above for said geography), which turns out to be a fascinating topic:

I read that President Bush had stopped off this morning to speak about the credit crisis "with consumers and business people at Olmos Pharmacy, an old-fashioned soda shop and lunch counter" in San Antonio, Texas. The idea here - the spatial implication - is that Bush has somehow stopped off in a landscape of down-home American democracy. This is everyday life, we're meant to believe - a geographic stand-in for the true heart and center of the United States. But it increasingly feels to me that presidential politics now deliberately take place in a landscape that the modern world has left behind. It's a landscape of nostalgia, the golden age in landscape form: Joe Biden visits Pam's Pancakes outside Pittsburgh, Bush visits a soda shop, Sarah Palin watches ice hockey in a town that doesn't have cell phone coverage, Obama goes to a tractor pull. It's as if presidential campaigns and their pursuing tagcloud of media pundits are actually a kind of landscape detection society - a rival Center for Land Use Interpretation - seeking out obsolete spatial versions of the United States, outdated geographies most of us no longer live within or encounter. They find small towns that, by definition, are under-populated and thus unrepresentative of the United States as a whole; they find "old-fashioned" restaurants that seem on the verge of closing for lack of interested customers; they tour "Main Streets" that lost their inhabitants and their businesses long ago. All along they pretend that these landscapes are politically relevant.

What is fascinating here is the notion that political culture is responsible for or complicit in constructing an imaginary landscape -- "landscapes of nostalgia" -- which then become the terrain on which the political campaign is acted out. The question implied here though, by the two possiblities of responsiblity and complicity, is interesting. Surely this insight isn't one that has eluded the politicians -- surely they are aware that they are playing a game, campaigning in an imagined terrain. So there are two possibilites: either voters are being willfully deceived about the nature of modern america or they are willfully complicit in sustaining an illusion - because they WANT to participate in that illusion, or because something about that illusion is attractive to them. I think it's more of the latter than the former -- the comments on BLDGBLOG get a bit into why this might be so (references to the Jeffersonian ideal, etc.) and I might add that there could be very positive goods -- real goods -- contained within the construction, which people may rightly desire (a sense of community and place, an imagined social equilibrium, etc.).

BLDGBLOG finishes the post by arguing that, if the landscape history of a candidate is understood to be an essential part of a candidacy, but the nostalgic landscape is illusory, then perhaps what contemporary America needs are urban candidates (urban being understood not along the exurban-suburban-urban scale but in the juxtaposition between urban and rural, where exurban and suburban are part of urban because they are within the system of networks that compose urban areas).

I don't disagree with this conclusion (in fact, I think I endorse it), but I think that, without denying the fact that the urban, suburban, and exurban landscapes are all more 'representative' of demographic reality, we can also acknowledge that the people living in rural America (and the crumbling smaller cities embedded in rural America) have a real and valid complaint when they worry that they are being forgotten and left behind. (This can be acknowledged, I think, without making a judgment about whether that leaving behind can and should be fought, and, if so, how) I made a similar argument in my thesis project in explaining why I thought the study of small cities in Virginia -- Lynchburg, Staunton, Waynesboro, Winchester -- contributed to the understanding of a facet of urbanism that is rarely studied. Without getting into that argument (in part because I think it is self-evident), I will skip to my conclusion, which is that understanding these forgotten places is key to knowing what to do with, for, and about them.

Glouster, OH (Google Maps)

To that end (achieving understanding), I point out this superb piece of reporting by George Packer in the New Yorker, which focuses on southeastern Ohio. Excerpt:

"Glouster, a coal-mining town with a population of fewer than two thousand (and falling), lies hidden amid the gentle slopes and thick woods of southeastern Ohio's Appalachian hills. If the state is dying, Glouster was long ago left for dead. Over the past few decades, it has lost its Baptist church, grocery store, railroad depot, parking meters, four car dealerships, ten of its dozen bars, and--crucially--all but one of its deep mines. It's become the kind of town where several generations of white families live on welfare, and marijuana is the local cash crop. I was given a tour by Bob Cotter, who is seventy-four, and Pete Morris, seventy-one, both retired from the post office. We walked in a warm drizzle along Main Street, which was nearly deserted, with a few parked cars and no pedestrians. Half the storefronts were shuttered, although a local citizens' group had arranged hand-painted furniture and traditional quilts in the show windows of some of the vacant stores. It looked as if nothing had been built since the fifties. In the middle of town stood a prominent three-story brick building with the words "Sam & Ellen's Wonder Bar--Home of the 'Wonder Dog' " painted across an exposed side. Morris had once owned the bar before selling it to his cousin, in 1971; now it was boarded up. Farther down the street, a hotel, a restaurant, and a two-lane bowling alley had been demolished, leaving a weed-strewn lot.

...

Dave Herbert was a stocky, talkative building contractor in an Ohio State athletic jersey. At thirty-eight, he considerably lowered the average age in Bonnie's. "I'm self-employed," he said. "I can't afford to be a Democrat." Herbert was a devoted viewer of Fox News and talked in fluent sound bites about McCain's post-Convention "bounce" and Sarah Palin's "executive experience." At one point, he had doubted that Obama stood a chance in Glouster. "From Bob and Pete's generation there are a lot of racists--not out-and-out, but I thought there was so much racism here that Obama'd never win." Then he heard a man who freely used the " 'n' word" declare his support for Obama: "That blew my theory out of the water."

Extra credit here, as Ross Douthat talks about Packer's article and his/Reihan Salam's book Grand New Party, giving some suggestions about what to do with places like Glouster.

a more careful american dream or a new american dream?

Two (very different) academics/architects have recently offered two (very different) commentaries on how the American understanding of home ownership might be altered (at least partially, I think, in response to the realization that the current realization of the ideal state of home ownership has proved somewhat problematic, as underlined by the current financial crisis, which (at least in my limited understanding) is driven by problems in the mortgage market).

First up is Witold Rybcyznski, who argues that the problem is not with the notion that home ownership is the ideal state of affairs for most American families, but with the implementation of that notion -- housing must be made more affordable. Rybcyznski notes that the term 'affordable housing' has only recently been understood to denote government-subsidized housing and traces the term back to Levittown:

"A pioneer of affordability was the builder Levitt and Sons, whose famous "Levittowns" were the first postwar examples of large, ­master-­planned communities. The story is ­well ­known. After World War II, as GIs came home and the peacetime economy gathered steam, the demand for housing grew dramatically. Levitt, an established Long Island builder, set its sights on this new market. William Levitt, the eldest son, applied his wartime experience building barracks with the Navy Seabees to traditional ­wood-­frame construction. He organized the building site like an assembly line. Teams of workers performed repetitive tasks, one team laying floor slabs, another erecting framing, another applying siding, and so on. No one had ever built housing that way ­before."

Witold then notes that the Levittown houses were considerably more affordable than contemporary homes:

"In 1951, the price of the original Levittowner ($9,900) was three times the national average annual wage ($3,300). In 2008, with an estimated national average wage of $40,500, a similarly affordable house should have a sticker price of $121,500. Yet according to the Census Bureau, even in the current declining market the median price for a new ­single-­family house in the first quarter of 2008 approached twice that: $234,100. So, the price of a modern Levittowner would have to be nearly 50 percent cheaper than that of today's average new house. Easy, you say, just make the house 50 percent smaller, about 1,200 instead of 2,469 square feet. But it's not that simple. In most metropolitan areas, the selling price of such a house would still be more than $200,000, considerably more than $121,500."

And finishes by explaining why that might be so:

"It is a vicious circle. Smaller houses on smaller lots are the logical solution to the problem of affordability, yet ­density--­and less affluent ­neighbors--­are precisely what most communities fear most. In the name of fighting sprawl, local zoning boards enact regulations that either require larger lots or restrict development, or both. These strategies decrease the ­supply--­hence, increase the ­cost--­of developable land. Since builders pass the cost of lots on to buyers, they justify the higher land prices by building larger and more expensive houses--McMansions. This produces more community resistance, and calls for yet more restrictive regulations. In the process, housing affordability becomes an even more distant ­chimera."

Lebbeus Woods, on the other hand, offers a more fundamental critique of the housing market, which might be paraphrased as arguing that the notion of homeownership has been replaced by houseownership, if a home is seen as a more expansive and permanent good and a house as a commodity to be traded frequently for the accumulation of wealth:

"The idea of owning your home has the sound of securing it, of making it a safe haven for you and your family. It is yours and, as long as you make the payments, and pay your taxes, and stay out of too much debt, will remain yours, and your children's (if you have any) in perpetuity. Also, no one can violate your home, or the land it sits on (if it has any), by entering without your permission--a sanctity the law says you can enforce with a gun, if necessary. Another part of this American vision is that home owners are the most responsible citizens of their communities, for the practical reason that they have the most invested in them, not just in terms of money, but also of moral capital--they play by the rules of their communities, which is the basis for their being granted, and sustaining, ownership of a part of them. Or, that's the way it used to be.

Increasingly, Americans buy their homes and condominiums as a financial investment. Far from seeing their homes as places to be handed down to their children, or, for that matter, to live out their lives in, they are viewed as instruments for getting a return on their money, primarily through selling them at a higher price than they paid. Whether they are living in Denver suburbs or Lower Manhattan, homeowners have an eye on the real estate market. If they can sell at a high price, they can afford to move upward, to a better and more expensive home. Leaving aside the issue of those who cannot keep up in this game (and there are many), and lose their homes (becoming effectively 'homeless'), or who have to move because their jobs are lost, or they get transferred and have to sell at any price, it is clear that the character of the American Dream of home ownership has changed radically."

This argument is the sort of broad critique that is difficult to disprove because of its generality (though someone might be able to effectively quibble with the history of home that Woods presents), but I think it is, like most of Woods' writing, at the very least useful for prompting the reconsideration of assumptions.

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Life to Experience, Falling from Cloud 9

mongolia

As my sister is currently living in Mongolia, I found this travelogue on Slate a week or so ago to be particularly interesting, but I think it is probably of interest to people without relatives living in Mongolia, as well. Its a five part series, so start at the beginning, but I think the highlight is probably the fourth part, on Mongolian food. Probably my most outlandish menu selection in a while was the grasshopper taco at Oyamel here in DC, which people tend to think was a fairly adventurous choice, but I think it pales in comparison:

"On our very last morning on the road, the mutton problem became a crisis. At fault was our dear driver, Bimba, who decided it was time to celebrate the trip by buying a whole sheep and slaughtering it. As we went into a local ger to eat breakfast, I noticed that the sheep's head had been removed, and the internal organs were being poured into a giant pot, the same way you might empty a can of beans.

Surely this was to feed the dogs, I thought. No one really wants to eat the lungs, stomach, and intestines of an aged sheep.

Au contraire. I'm sorry to say that we had to watch the whole mess boiling for a while on the dung fire, yielding bubbles of brownish-gray scum. Afterward, a giant steaming bowl of internal organs was placed before us with some ceremony. Out came knives and a mixture of anatomy lesson and breakfast as we sampled one organ after another. I must stress the degree to which our dear friend Bimba considered this the way to cement our friendship. There was no backing away from trying each and every organ and making a good go of the whole thing. Even fearless Miki looked a little pale.

Comparatively speaking, I suppose the stomach and heart were the highlights. Despite our host's enthusiasm, I felt there was something deeply fishy about the lungs--they had a spongy texture that you had to bite hard to get through. There were many organs that I didn't really recognize but also did not enjoy. And as for the intestines and connecting flesh covered with fat, I felt, for the first time, what 19th-century writers refer to as "rising bile." I said to myself, "This is like a horror film, except I am eating the special effects."

All the while, the sheep's severed head sat off to one side, watching us sadly. Next to him sat his forearms and legs, placed in a small pile. But fear not. We did pack that head into our jeep, and back in the capital, we ate him for lunch. "Omoshirokatta," said Miki. "That was interesting!"

a brief moment of levity to interrupt this crisis

As stocks plunge and hairlines recede, I suggest we all take a deep breath and consider the humble kiwi-berry:

"I'd like to think that the kiwi berry was the result of a cross-pollination accident between a kiwi and some sweet New Zealand berry. I hope it happened on its own in nature's strange glory, by adventurous bees or brisk spring winds. A more likely scenario is that the kiwi berry is the result of bored and overpaid New Zealand genetic-fruit scientists tampering with God's plan. The grape-sized lime-green fruits have all the punch and vigor of a kiwi fruit wrapped in the convenience of a berry. Gone is the coarsely haired rind and in its place is an edible skin not unlike that of a muscadine. The interior is reminiscent of the color and texture of a kiwi, only with tinier black seeds around a tinier white starburst. The taste is far less tart, though--somewhere between a fig and a blackberry. I imagine the mutation process providing many failed attempts before the current result. Surely somewhere there's a laboratory filled with nightmarish atrocities of fruits misshapen and foul. Like the scene in Alien Resurrection with all the horrifying failed Ripley clones, the kiwi berry, too, must have had several botched representations--each with a more grotesque and testicular appearance than the last. The kiwi berry might only be a gateway experiment, though, only a step in a process that will eventually lead to the discovery of some sort of über-fruit, which will no doubt look like a peach but taste like a cheeseburger."

Real estate folks like to talk about the highest and best use of a parcel of land; I am fairly certain that the highest and best use of the internet (and possibly of computers, as well) is to read McSweeney's.

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The Bar-Kays, Holy Ghost

the late david foster wallace

I am a bit late to the late David Foster Wallace, unfortunately. I have not spent much time with contemporary authors (not out of prejudice against contemporary authors, because the few that I have read -- DeLillo, Eggers, Wolfe, Roth -- I have enjoyed; my prejudice is against fiction in general, which I find somewhat less interesting than non-fiction. Hence I thoroughly enjoyed From Bauhaus to Our House but never really got into Bonfire of the Vanities.), but I have taken the time to read a few things by Wallace in the past week, and I would like to recommend some of those things.

First, there is this piece on lobsters in Gourmet magazine, which begins by explicating the history of lobster as food, veers into a discussion of the nature of tourism, and ends with a consideration of the ethics of eating lobster, which is written in a way that reveals Wallace's undergraduate education in analytical philosophy. I would quote a piece of it for you, as it is really excellent, but the pdf is a scan and so I would have to type out the text for you, and it is really hard to quote Wallace in less than a couple paragraphs, because his thoughts take a bit of time to unfold and usually contain more nuance than can be easily captured in a line or two. Much of the excitement is in how he gets to the end of a thought, anyways.

The second is this adaptation of a commencement address Wallace gave in 2005 to Kenyon College, which I can't endorse exactly but I do endorse whole-heartedly:

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

one grows rich in a year but dies in six months

The Times has an excellent article from a couple days ago on the work of recent Rome Prize winner Alan Berger (whose books, particularly Reclaiming the American West, I can highly recommend) in Italy's Pontine Marshes.

[google map of a portion of the project area]

The article (and Berger's work in general -- see P-REX) -- focuses on the damages caused by contemporary land uses (farming and industry, in this case) and repairing those damages through landscape architecture -- the practice of reclamation, as guided by landscape architects:

Before Michele Assunto hauls in his fishing net from the banks of a reed-lined canal here, he uses a pole to push the garbage out of the way. "They really need to clean this up," he growls.

Where another canal empties into the sea here at the small community of Porto Badino, the only animals that can survive are giant rats, local officials say. Of course, the sea is not fit for swimming for 200 yards on each side of the outlet, they add with a shrug -- yet bathers splash in the Mediterranean nearby.

In many parts of this affluent coastal region southeast of Rome and northwest of Naples, canals dumping effluent into the Mediterranean from farms and factories coexist with fishermen and beachgoers. There is little doubt that this area would need considerable work to return to a more pristine state. For places as far gone as this one, however, a new breed of landscape architect is recommending a radical solution: not so much to restore the environment as to redesign it.

[the Agri Pontini, image by flickr user nikonphotoslave, creative commons license]

Berger's proposal, now being developed in conjunction with the local Italian government, suggests constructing a wetland machine, which would serve both as a mechanism for cleansing the water supply of the Agri Pontini and as a regional recreation area. (For more detail on the proposal, I recommend reading Pruned's summary, which features some higher resolution images than the P-REX website).

[the canals and pine-forests of ravenna]

This sort of transformative reclamation process, where natural and artificial processes are blurred in the service of renewing the land, has a great deal of currency in contemporary landscape architectural practice, but it is perhaps not as new or foreign a concept as it might seem. While the particular problems being addressed by contemporary remediation efforts have shifted -- strip mines, rivers clogged with industrial wastes, and so on -- the notion of employing designs on the land as a means to reclaim damaged land is nearly as old as civilization.

[map of the Pontine Marshes, prior to reclamation]

The Agri Pontini itself, after all, is itself reclaimed: disease-ridden marshland (the Pontine Marshes) transformed into productive agricultural land and settled city centers. Generations of Italians, from the Romans to Popes Boniface VIII, Martin V, Sixtus V, and Pius VI to Major Fedor Maria von Donat (a Prussian military officer) battled the marshes, concocting various failed schemes to drain the marshes (though they did succeed in penetrating the marshes with the Via Appia).

The 19th century historian Victor Duruy notes the way in which the marshes of the Italian penisula were regarded:

There is nothing so charming and so treacherous as those plains of the Mal'aria ; a clear sky, fertile land, where an ocean of verdure waves under the sea-breeze; all around there is calm and silence; an atmosphere mild and warm, which seems to bring life but carries death. "In the Maremma," says an Italian proverb, "one grows rich in a year, but dies in six months."

Fred Toelle, "P.O.W.'s draining in the Pontine Marshes"

Success came in the late 1930's, when Mussolini initiated a massive centralized effort to drain the marshes:

The Pontine Marshes were finally drained and reclaimed in works begun in 1926 under the responsibility of the Opera Nazionale Combattenti, a governmental institution reformulated under the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini that supported both rural development and war veterans. The government drained the marshes via three canals that intercepted runoff from the hills and pumped out low-lying regions, cleared the scrub forest, and placed about 2000 families (most from northern Italy and of unimpeachable Fascist background) in standardised but carefully varied two-storey country-houses of blue stucco with tiled roofs. Each settler family was assigned a farmhouse, an oven, a plough and other agricultural tools, a stable, some cows and several hectares of land, depending on local soil fertility and the size of the family. The project, constantly referred to in terms of a battle, was a huge public relations boost for Mussolini, fulfilling his long-term belief in the "rural vocation of the Italian people" and their triumph over nature, an epitome of the Fascist conception of progress.

The Times has more on the literal machinery of progress (presumably the parallel between this original machinery of progress and the new wetland "machine" has not escaped Berger):

Latina's prosperity is built on drained swampland, kept habitable by six pumps as huge and noisy as airplanes, put in place in 1934 by Mussolini. Each day they pull millions of gallons of water -- up to 9,500 gallons a second -- out of the soggy ground, directing it into an elaborate system of cement-lined canals that ultimately dump it into the sea.

The entire province would return to marshland in seven days if the pumps were turned off, Carlo Cervellin of the Pontine Marsh Consortium said. He is in charge of maintaining and regulating the immense machines, which are in a pump house at the lowest point in the province, in Mazzochio.

This history reveals that there has been another, more subtle shift in the practice of remediation: in what counts as damaged and what counts as remediated. Where once the marsh was viewed as the problem, as a sort of landscape whose presence is compatible with human habitation, Berger is now suggesting that the marsh -- in some form, in perhaps an altered or designed form -- is in fact essential to sustaining human habitation. Perhaps restoration is even cyclical: marshes are drained to eliminate the threat of disease and yet draining is found to create the conditions for pollution and contamination, necessitating the human reintroduction of marshes into the landscape. In three hundred years, will future landscape architects need the develop systems to remediate the landscape that Berger's design seeds?

Letters to the Editor

From the New York Times:

To the Editor:

Dear Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson:

My student loans are too big and it is hurting the economy. Can I have a bailout, please? I need $92,000.

Thanks.

Nathan Kottke
St. Paul, Sept.
17, 2008

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Sera Cahoone, "Couch Song"

If it were on youtube, this would be "Only as the Day is Long" -- but there's no video for that (yet). Though you can listen to it here.

quick movie review a: southland tales

It's got masterful pieces, but its not a masterpiece.

Trailer:

brian doyle: "no"

In which I quote at length from said essay without offering any commentary other than the suggestion that you will be rewarded if you read it in its entirety (unless you have a serious objection to run-on sentences, in which case you will probably not enjoy that essay, or, for that matter, anything I write, so why are you reading this?):

Sometimes I daydream of having rejection slips made up for all sorts of things in life, like for moments when I sense a silly argument brewing with my lovely and mysterious spouse, and instead of foolishly trying to lay out my sensible points which have been skewed or miscommunicated, I simply hold up a card (BRIAN DOYLE REGRETS THAT HE IS UNABLE TO PURSUE THIS MATTER), or for when my children ask me to drive them half a block to the park (GET A GRIP), or when I am invited to a meeting at work I know will drone and moan for hours (I WOULD PREFER TO HAVE MY SPLEEN REMOVED WITH A BUTTER KNIFE), or for overpious sermons (GET A GRIP!), for oleaginous politicians and other mountebanks (IF YOU TELL ONE MORE LIE I WILL COME UP THERE AND PUMMEL YOU WITH A MAMMAL), etc.

On the other hand, what if my lovely and mysterious spouse issued me a rejection slip on the wind-whipped afternoon when I knelt, creaky even then, on a high hill over the wine-dark sea, and stammered would would would will will will you you marry me? What if she had leaned down (well, not quite leaned down, she's the size of a heron) and handed me a lovely engraved card that said WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT WE CANNOT ACCEPT YOUR PROPOSAL, DESPITE ITS OBVIOUS MERITS? But she didn't. She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn't believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse. Anyway, there I was on my knees for a while, wondering if my lovely and mysterious paramour had actually said yes, while she railed and wailed into the wind, and finally I said, um, is that an affirmative? because my knees are killing me here, and she said, clearly, yes.