A Certain Lack of Focus

Zombie Stores

Halloween is my favorite holiday, it always has been.

Part of the lead up to Halloween of course involves not only costume shopping, but generally trolling (hah) among halloween stores to see what beauties they’ve come up with this year. I choose to pretend the travesty of inflatable decorations do not exist, but otherwise, most Halloween decorations can’t be to cheesily spooky for my taste. Motion activated hand in a bowl, fake flaming cauldrons, strobe lights, it’s ALL good.

You can usually get a good dose of Halloween gloom at craft stores and fabric stores. Novelty stores like Hot Topic, Spencers, and their smaller counterparts are always good for some unique creepy items. Of course the big box stores like Walmart and Target usually dedicate a decent sized section to “seasonal” items.

For the most pleasantly overwhelming experience though, the best source is a dedicated Halloween store. The quality of these stores varies, but you’re pretty much assured to be surrounded by grey, black and orange props, often extensively enough to spend hours giggling over fake corpses and daggers.

Even in the “higher end” versions of these stores you’ll be hard pressed to find anything not made of plastic, they tend not to have anything particularly fine, but that’s really not the point. While a store full of Christmas decorations can probably cause a tinsel seisure, oversaturation of Halloween decorations just produces little kid giddiness.

I’m always curious about these stores though. In recent years they’re HUGE, the size of a Best Buy or a Target, because often they’re in a building that used to BE a Best Buy or a Target. Often the very same shelves that previously held decorative pumpkin scented candles, now hold… decorative pumpkin scented candles.

You don’t find this sort of retail recycling for any other holiday or event. Halloween stores are almost universally in previously empty buildings whose previous residents went out of business anywhere from 6 months to 6 years ago. Then on November 1st they’re gone without a trace like Mr. Elvis’s Magic Shop, leaving the boarded up shell in their wake.

As much as I love these stores, I find this a little disconcerting. It seems like these stores rely on a failing economy for their existence. I’m not trying to make some political statement, revealing Halloween stores as soulless opportunists, it just seems weird. It is, appropriately, creepy.

Where are the stores when there is not an abundance of empty buildings? Living in the Steel Belt, it’s hard to imagine this being a problem. I can’t see Halloween stores having a hard time finding a spot any time soon. But what happens on the highly hypothetical day that Cleveland’s economy explodes? Do these stores just disappear?

I don’t think so. I think they find a place where there was no space before. On a previously empty wall, a door glowing at the edges with evil smelling fake fog. A construction site completed overnight, then bulldozed again next month. Maybe a derelict house on the corner turns on a neon sign and starts selling ghosts. You follow a black cat and realize you’re lost in a part of town you’ve never seen before, and that you’ll never find again.

How else COULD it be? It’s Halloween.

Slinking Suburbs

I heard a story on NPR the other day (ok, maybe the other week) about a weird trend in recent post bubble real estate, where realtors pay ACTORS to pretend to be neighbors in suburbs, with staged barbecues and invitations to nonexistent little league games, so that an empty neighborhood would seem to have people living there on Open House day. The feeling I got from the story, and that I get hearing people talk about suburbs in general, is that does not just represent the dishonesty of some realtors, it is an example of an atmosphere of duplicity that is increasingly associated with the suburbs in general.

Why does everyone hate the suburbs? Why have the suburbs come to represent all that is evil, all that is fake, soccer moms and security moms and helicopter parents and materialism? This annoys me, because as Matt and I start looking for a house I find myself having to defend our choice to look in pure suburbia.

Really I know the whys. One of the first culprits is Tim Burton. More specifically, Edward Scissorhands. I’m sure this movie wasn’t the first vision of suburban sameness, but the uniformly green grassed sameness has come to be part of popular consciousness, whether people realize it or not. The creepy echoes in Buron’s invented neighborhood are a fairly accurate reflection of many developments in post 1960s America, but they just as well describe the world of Camazots from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Not exactly positive associations, as was clearly intended.

And that’s fine. The artificiality being satired in Edward Scissorhands absolutely exists, and it can often be found in the suburbs. The problem I have is with the modern assumption that the suburbs are the cause. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, a small enough city that it might as well be a suburb of itself. In my memory I lived in two different houses that were both cookie-cutter floorplans resulting from Eugene’s relatively rapid expansion. In spite of this supposed “sameness,” there was NEVER during my childhood, any sense of conformity in the homes around me. I’ve seen developments where the only difference from one house to the next is the paint color or a window shape, or a brick pattern. In the neighborhoods where I grew up, there was no need to fight for differentiation, because in spite of the repeated architecture, there was no standard look that the residents needed to fight against or conform to.

The sameness we find, I think comes from desire rather than actual similarities. The reason is not the location (suburbs), it’s that keeping-up-with-the-Joneses race that probably helped get us into the whole real estate mess in the first place. I need a bigger, more perfect house, because the neighbors have one. He needs a BMW because his cousin just bought one. It’s stupid, and it has nothing to do with a place, it has everything to do with people.

Matt and I eventually want to live in a house with a bit of land around it, in a safe neighborhood, with decent schools (since we’ll eventually be having kids) and less than an hour commute to the city. These are really not ridiculous wants, and the obvious answer, the only answer, is the suburbs. We hope to keep a garden that grows as much of our food as possible, maybe put up some solar panels or even small windmills, to keep energy costs down. I grew up with a backyard and I want my kids to have one too. We’d like some sort of woodland nearby. Basically, we want a compromise between urban and rural living.

If the human race is to survive into the 23th century, or the 30th century, I imagine someday we’ll all end up living in cities. This is (or could be) the most sustainable way to live, and at some point we won’t have a choice. In suburbs, people use hours worth of gas daily getting to and from work, burn up heat in poorly insulated homes, and spend gallons of water on uselessly green lawns. Maybe that’s why living in the suburbs is so detestable: the seizing of privacy, of space, of control and resources may well be selfish. I am occasionally drawn to the idea of living in an urban environment, with rooftop gardens and shops downstairs. There is appeal, until I remember that I can’t breathe after a few hours in New York, that I get itchy when I hear my neighbors through paper-thin walls, that the only thing I would own of the outside is a door. Someday I hope, large buildings will be planned with more public space, more green space, more space in general to keep us sane. Right now urban living is fun for some, but not a life I can imagine.

Ultimately, the life I’m seeking may not be sustainable. Suburbs, and most rural life, may fade away as energy sources dwindle and people are forced to huddle together for conservation. My response to that is to try and make a life with as small a footprint as possible, mainly to assuage the guilt that we’re contributing to the problem. I do think it’s possible to enjoy living in a dense population, I just don’t think it’s possible for me, today. I can only hope that by the time we have no choice, urban designers have come up with ways to make living wall to wall more tolerable.

*First photo by Wildernice, all others by me.

The Other Cathedral

Matt and I made sure to get to the National Cathedral when we were in DC this May.
I’ve been there before, when I was twelve on a school trip in middle school.

Actually I based a lot of my suggestions of sights we should see in DC on things I’d seen while on that middle school trip. I think we were there for a week, and we saw far more than I could have retained. I guessed however, that anything which DID stick in my memory from that trip was probably worth seeing. After all, most 12 year olds are more interested in hanging out with friends than seeing national monuments.

Probably the most memorable images from that first trip were our tours of the cathedrals in Washington DC. I thought there were several, now I’m not sure how many we went to see. Definitely more than just the National Cathedral.

Matt and my mom and I went to the National Cathedral first, because that was the only cathedral we could find any information on.

In a way, we picked a bad day. We got there at about noon on a day where tours were canceled until one. The reason for this was interesting: there was a graduation in progress.

The National Cathedral has two high schools associated with it– a boy’s school and a girl’s school. On the day we visited, the girl’s school was having their graduation mass. I don’t know if they call it mass at the National Cathedral, which is (I think) Episcopalian. I went to a Catholic school and we called it mass. It made me think of all the small prayer services and holiday masses, and I wondered whether they had them all in the cathedral, vast and beautiful.

It must have been an amazing place to have a graduation. We stood and back and waited until it was done. There couldn’t have been more than fifty girls, so the whole thing seemed rather quiet, and more relaxed than I would have expected for the setting. It was lovely. The architecture of the cathedral makes it a fascinating setting for any service, or just to walk through.

They have continual tours, and though we waited until one for the first tour to begin, we ended up wandering without it, which I think was more enjoyable, if less informative.

We got a vantage point that I never saw on my first tour, because the upstairs floor would be too cramped to bring a large group. I remember being a bit disappointed in the cathedral as a 12 year old, because I’d wanted to see the gargoyles and grotesques, but couldn’t see any close enough to really see them. From the upstairs observatory we could see much better, not to mention a great view of the surrounding area. There’s no doubt that the National Cathedral is awe inspiring. An exhibit on the main floor told us that it took almost a hundred years (83 actually) to build. I didn’t realize when I visited in 1993, construction had only just finished three years ago.

What I really remembered from my first trip was that while the National Cathedral was the stone worked gothic arches that you envision when you hear the word “cathedral,” it wasn’t the one that struck me as most beautiful.

None of the local advisors seemed to know what I was talking about when I mentioned another cathedral, a place full of mosaics and side chapels. For some reason it took us half the week to find the Cathedral of St. Matthew.

St Matthew’s is a Catholic cathedral, and like many Catholic buildings walks the line between beautiful and gaudy. Churches lined with gold tend to annoy me, the overt expense reminds me of a time of dishonestly rich cardnals and popes.

St. Matthews manages to avoid that feeling, though I imagine the piles of marble used must have cost every bit as much as gold plating. Everything is so colorful that it’s almost distracting.

Not quite though. Unlike the flashiness of gold, marble is beautiful but understated, expensive but not braggingly so. The cathedral is full of skillful beauty, with marbled alters tucked away in side corners, and mosaics lined up on the walls like paneling. I could have looked at the art of this cathedral for hours, but Matt and I decided we’d better make it quick instead.

Unlike the National Cathedral, St. Matthews is not so orderly a tourist attraction. I imagine they give tours (I went on one when I was 12) but when we walked in, the building was silent with worshipers. We tiptoed around the perimeter, trying not to disturb anyone. At one point my camera flashed (it turns it back on every time the camera restarts) but I mostly covered it.

I’m sort of conflicted over whether this building should be more of a tourist attraction. On one hand, it’s an amazing sight. I suppose construction probably didn’t take 83 years, and the type of beauty is completely different from the majestic depth of the National Cathedral. Spanish rather than French maybe. The difference I see is that the National Cathedral is a coherent masterpiece, while St. Matthew’s is a gallery of brilliant mosaics. It’s not that they clash, it’s just that they are meant to be seen one at a time, up close. In prayer I suppose, though as a non-believer, I’ll have to appreciate it for artistic value alone.

It seems a shame that more people don’t know about St. Matthews, but on the other hand, part of the beauty may well be it’s quiet. So nice to walk in and see people meditating, praying, thinking, believing, instead of chatting and taking photos. I think they try at the National Cathedral to retain a sense of holiness, they remind you to please be respectful and speak in lowered voices, but they tell you in a tour-guide yell, so it’s hard to take it seriously.

St. Matthew’s is a church first and foremost. I love it because it’s beautiful, but I’m not sure it would be quite so beautiful if it weren’t so respectfully hushed.

The two cathedrals can’t be fairly contrasted. Stone work vs. marble. Architecture vs. mosaics.

One area where you ought to be able to make a straight comparison are the stained glass windows.

In the National Cathedral, each window is different, with a separate burst of color and composition. Oddly, in St. Matthew’s, where each nook and cranny is individually crafted, the windows are very nearly identical. The windows in St. Matthews seem to be made of impossibly thin marble pieces (either that or painted glass to look like impossibly thin marble pieces). The variety of windows in the National Cathedral is breathtaking, but I couldn’t pick a winner between the two.

I’m glad I saw both. For the National Cathedral I’d say it’s worth taking out an hour or more. At St. Matthew’s we felt disruptive, and left after 20 minutes, which was enough to see everything since the space is so much smaller. I won’t claim St. Matthew’s is prettier, or more impressive than the National Cathedral, but I am surprised that one is almost unknown to tourists while the other is a visitor staple.

Chicago Coffee

I meant to write this post after our last trip to Chicago, then I forgot all about it. Fortunately, when Matt and I went back to Chicago last week (ok, two weeks ago?) and I remembered again.

We found this funky coffee shop somewhere near Evensville. In terms of design elements, the main thing that caught my attention was the use of coffee mugs: they had an entire segment of wall pegged with non-matching mugs. There were a few pretty ones I guess, but most were nothing special. They weren’t all that different from a collection you might expect to find in a less organized home cubbord. Some of them were pretty dated, some were downright ugly, though not ugly enough to be really special, if you know what I mean. The total effect was interesting. The fact that they didn’t match just made the collection more impressive, it looked fun and eclectic, and really matched the feel of the coffee house. Also, eco-friendly– using obviously recycled mugs instead of buying new ones or using cardboard cups– which is nice.

Another feature I liked was a more common coffee shop element, a collection of for-sale artwork hanging on the walls. This is a great, probably free (or even profit making) way to decorate a coffee shop that also supports local artists (I assume local) which is fantastic. I love to see businesses helping each other, realizing that it’s possible for more than one party to profit at once; not everything is competition.

I’m not sure whether it’s a common occurrence, but the night we were there, a drum circle was practicing/preforming. When they started out I thought I was going to have to leave, the rhythm wasn’t all that, well, rhythmic, and it was unbearably loud. Pretty quickly though I got used to the noise level and, more importantly, the drummers warmed up, and pretty soon I was really enjoying it.

While I was there I did some sketching:

Edit: Sketches added in later post.

Around Cleveland

Turns out I’m a bit out of it today for whatever reason, so I’ll write about Shmoocon tomorrow.  Fortunately, I ran across this photo post which I somehow never published.  I think I just forgot.  Didn’t have to go in for jury duty today, which is lucky.

This photo of entering downtown is one of my favorite views. It doesn’t show the whole skyline, but it’s just a cool entry photo.

This photo is taken by the flats. There’s some digital editing going on there. I actually really like the sort of industrial feel of the flats and the warehouse district.

Another photo from the flats. There are a lot of archways and old, pretty buildings mixed in with the factory buildings and abandoned bridges etc.

I don’t remember where exactly this photo is taken from, but I think it’s also near the flats. Also a bit of digital editing here.

A bridge in the flats. So I guess having band-aids holding a bridge together isn’t exactly comforting, but it is pretty.

Another view of the cityscape from the flats.

An abandoned drawbridge in the flats. I love how the ivy is growing up and taking it over.

Another bridge in the flats, by night (duh).

Sky view, down near independence.

A shed dragonfly exoskeleton in the metroparks near independence.

Bridge in the metroparks, viewed from another bridge.

View looking the other way on the bridge.

The bridge where I was standing for the pretty views.

Cool water gate system at the metroparks.

Pretty plants in the metroparks. There are larger versions available for some of them if you click on the image.

A Place for Kids

I’ve always loved spaces that are well designed for children. Too often, adults have weird ideas about what kids should like: grinning clowns, pastels and the like. The children’s room in the Seattle library shows a bit more thought, and at least an attempt to get on a kid’s level.

The first most obvious thing any children’s space should have is some consideration to a child’s size. This ought to be obvious but it’s amazing how often it’s over looked. Some of the first things I noticed in the children’s room at the library were these low, podlike rubber seats.

They’re not fantastically comfortable for an adult, but I imagine a small child would love how they bounce slightly. Because they’re non-directional (no front and back like with a chair) they’re also more suited to a child’s restless style of sitting, constantly shifting. I remember getting yelled at in school for kneeling on my chair, but with these pod seats there is really no “wrong” way to sit, and the likelihood of a kid hurting himself from falling off is very low. Anyway. My point: I like the seats.

Another clever feature Matt noticed was more directed at parents than children. In one section of the children’s room, near a separate reading room (which unfortunately I didn’t get to peek inside) were plastic kits loaded with picture books on different themes. Themes like a new baby in the family, or animals, or the alphabet. These would be a nice shortcut for parents with kids obsessed with Dinosaurs or something, or for kids who are facing a major change in their lives.

The artwork was one area that I was less impressed by. This is not so much because the artwork is inappropriate for children, (it was actually pretty cool, and quite unique) it’s just because for the most part it was too high. All the artwork was hung high on the concrete support beams, it was clear that the child friendly art was intended mainly for adult enjoyment. While I appreciate the stark industrial feel of the room and the contrast of the paper mache style wall hangings, I think many kids could be intimidated. I’d have liked to have seen more artwork at a child’s eye level, but on the other hand, maybe kids don’t care about that sort of thing as much as adults. Perhaps the abundance of space in this room is more valuable.

In one corner of the room there was a nice little children’s media area that I appreciated. I didn’t get a good look at the computers to see what kind of software they were running, but the child sized tables and chairs made for a welcoming space to learn and engage. Though I felt for any parents that had to cram themselves into the child sized space. The headphones are also a smart detail.

It is evident that the designers of this room tried to incorporate the library’s industrial style into a more kid friendly space, and for the most part I think they succeeded. While the decoration for the most part seems geared towards adults, the function of the room is clearly oriented towards children. Ultimately, I think the kids won’t mind the starkness of their surroundings, after all, if they want something to look at, there are always the hundreds of books.

Geek Out

You can tell Matt and I are nerds when we do things like, say, squeal in excitement because our favorite NPR reporter has returned from a two week vacation. Still, even we had to admit that it was a bit over the top to be spending an entire day of our honeymoon in a public library.

If I’m not careful, I’m going to sound like I’m used to a pretty pathetic library, so I should clarify that Cleveland actually has a fantastic library system. Ohio in general actually has an amazing library network, I think we top lists, yearly, for our wonderful libraries. This isn’t so much about the books, though, it’s about the super cool building. The Seattle library has got to be the coolest library I’ve ever seen.

The outside of the building is interesting, lots of glass and weird angles, but nothing too out of the ordinary really. It’s the inside that got me. Everything is super modern and sleek, to the point of feeling futuristic, but there’s still something about the place that screams “library!” Well, whispers actually, otherwise it would be thrown out.

It think what really struck me about the space was the way the separate floors were not necessarily cordoned off by ceilings, most areas took advantage of the ample natural light streaming in through the slanted glass walls. I shudder to think how much it would cost to heat a place like that, but I suppose that’s the advantage of living in the Pacific Northwest… winter really means something different there.

You would think, with the wide open feel of the building, there would be a constant paranoia wherever you went. I didn’t get that sense however, in most work and rest areas, though they are easily observed, there is an illusion of privacy both visually and in terms of noise.

Only a few areas seemed to be set off into formal room structures: the children’s library (which I’ll discuss tomorrow probably) and a sort of indoor amphitheater. The rest flowed smoothly together, feeling both super high-tech, but somehow light and relaxed at the same time. Since most ultra-modern structures come with a feeling of hardness- cold and sterile, that’s an impressive balance to strike. I can easily see the Seattle Library being a place not only to research, but to spend time.