blog (category: cleveland)
re-users, re-claimers
Susan Miller linked to an inspiring video on Recycled Houses. Building communities by training those in-need/in-want to construct their own homes (re-)using salvaged materials. Fantastic.
I met someone, Friday, at the recycle bins behind the West Side Market. He was sorting for metals as I was making a drop-off. We talked; I have some things he might want. He showed me a few spots to leave him aluminum, brass, copper: toss it over this fence, cover it with these boxes, leave a bag as a signal under the corner of this dumpster's lid...
They have a bad name from the start -- "Scrapper" having a pejorative connotation -- and they've developed a worse one, as many are catching attention by stealing from and dismantling houses and buildings.
The profession, itself, though, is indispensable by nature, for nature, for all. I can't think of a much more admirable but undervalued pursuit than sorting others' trash to reclaim and reuse -- particularly considering our society's overconsumption, energy inefficiency, and pollution :: material abuse!
What if we started with a new, positive, name for the scrapper: Re-user? Re-claimer?
Help!
We could clean up our land, cut material costs, decrease waste, and employ many, if we would better codify the process and bring it out from underground. Formalize the networks of people and organizations involved: connect re-claimers with builders, deconstruction agencies, materials businesses, waste management. (Integral industry!)
It starts, though, with respect for and the re-naming of this pursuit and those that occupy themselves with it.
MidTown Cleveland cracked by Iraqi e-Army?
One nice thing about online RSS newsreaders is that their scheduled caching often holds onto items that have been taken down.
This post showed up in the Midtown Cleveland blog in my Google Reader this morning, though it was already removed when I went looking for it on their site:
Hacked
This site was hacked by the Iraqi e-Army. Tell your Mr Fool Bush to get outside our country; Iraq, or all American websites will be hacked. All the database of this website was hacked, all names, contact numbers, zip codes, everything is with us now. Bye - actually, see you a lot later.
return to suburbia
Ten miles out of town, a cut-through from mall transit center to community college. Through residential neighborhood side-street-sides, past a high school. Conspicuously strange to not worry about surrendering peripheral vision by raising my hood to the cold -- no one else was out except the cars, (for whom the highway only ends at the driveway.)
According to health statistics, you're about twice as likely to be injured in a car accident as by physical assault. And you're much more likely to suffer that car accident in a sprawling exurban location where people drive more.
-- Safer and greener in the city, an email from GreenCityBlueLake
In the city, I feel safer on the street, in the open.
In the suburbs, on the sidewalk, out of traffic's way.
And what goes through the minds of people with the luxury of seeing these things from a "safe distance" -- white minds or black minds -- is this: "Thank God I've moved farther away, where nothing like that could happen."
-- Dick Feagler, Beating in Shaker leaves some ugly cultural welts (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
It had been awhile since I'd experienced that public privacy, safety.
Secure but desolate.
Still in my head, partly framing the experience:: an image of the great American disconnect conjured by Kate Sopko, reading from her new book last weekend: (Just $7 for local light, bright!)
Yet, suburban culture (especially as our suburbs move more toward the 'gated community' model) does not have much within it to encourage connection between people, and has a lot within it that encourages isolationism. If someone would like to disconnect from people, little will stop them: they can retreat into a single-family home, vast entertainment complexes, virtual reality an a daily series of scripted social interactions. This is far less likely for people who grow up in poorer communities, though, for sure, entertaining ourselves to death is becoming an accessible option across class lines in America.
-- Kate Sopko, Systems are Cowards, from Stewards of the Lost Lands
Rat Attacks MidTown
A few of us gawked out my cubicle window, guessing what the giant rat across the street was wild eyed about.
Ilya thought our neighbors were celebrating the Chinese New Year, (2008 is year of the rat,) to one-up their Christmas decoration. AsiaTown is on the other side of MidTown, though.
I wondered if the rats in Public Square had fled uptown, escaping the poisoning of their boroughs.
John guessed correctly: a showing against non-union labor. We hadn't seen the scab on the rat's underbelly, but it was grossly apparent when I went outside to shoot {photos of / the bull with} the guys making their stand.
ISO: guided wellness
I need a new dentist and general practitioner.
Would you suggest anyone?
I haven't had a dentist appointment since I moved to Cleveland ~4 years ago. The ridges formed at the base of my lower premolars/molars look to be storing coffee nicely for a winter emergency, but are becoming worrisome. It's time.
My doctor lives some 10 miles away -- not a quick bike-hop from work -- and is too cold and condemning; makes me not want to go. (So I don't.)
If you know of a good dentist and/or GP/PCP not too far from downtown Cleveland, please drop a comment!
Urban Harvest Garden Tour 2007
Saturday was one of those adventure days I enjoy so much.
I bicycled to eight gardens on the Urban Harvest Garden Tour. Met good people doing good work, transforming (mostly-)urban lots into fertile vegetable gardens, to feed themselves, their families, and their communities.
Re-learning, teaching, growing.
Some (like the Barkwill/Doloff Community Garden, above,) are transformations of once abandoned lots.
The community garden maintainers I spoke with seemed less interested in expanding their own gardens than in suggesting that Clevelanders interested in doing the same:
- find an abandoned lot in their hood,
- ask their councilperson to support its reclamation, and
- get started, with help from Summer Sprout:
Summer Sprout is a collaborative effort between OSU Extension and Cleveland, through the Division of Neighborhood Services, Department of Community Development. Community gardens registered with Summer Sprout receive vegetable seeds and plant starts, soil preparation services such as plowing and rototilling, assistance in getting fire hydrant permits and equipment for watering, and garden fertilizer and leaf humus.
Growers keep their vegetables for themselves or to share. The rest of the produce goes to area hunger centers and agencies.
For details, 216-429-8246.
-- Community gardening sprouting up all the time in the Cleveland area (The Plain Dealer)
To know that Summer Sprout consists of some 170 gardens in Cleveland is inspiring. To see just a few of them and meet the people behind them, even moreso.
I've put all the photos I took in a set on Flickr: Urban Harvest Community Garden Tour 2007. The descriptions list which garden they're from, and each photo's location is geo-tagged; look for the map link.
4415 Euclid recycles
Cleveland Midtown Innovation Center finally has a City recycling dumpster. :)
It was over a year ago that John McGovern referred me to Cassandra Moore, (Project Director for the City of Cleveland's Division of Waste Collection,) to request a city recycling dumpster in my workspace parking lot.
Our building owners and management were open and enthusiastic, (thanks, Michael Fleming, Heartland Developers, 4415 Euclid LLC.) Being publicly accessible 24/7 by Euclid and Chester made our location an easy sell to the City, we just had to wait on the new containers to arrive and be painted. A year of predictions, postponement, recontacting.
I've been collecting recyclables in the CleveMed kitchen for a few years -- in cardboard boxes from the water jugs we'd buy -- and toting them to City dumpsters every couple weeks. Until I'd drive my car to work, the filled boxes would stack to form a wall next to my cube, and the heap in the kitchen would tend toward constant overflow, pissing off the germ-paranoid.
Great, then, to return from California this week and find that our dumpster had finally arrived, and that the company switched from gallon jug shipments to a tap-water purifier.
An opportunity for us to collect more materials. Get some real bins, better publicize, and (hopefully) have the cleaning crew take the recyclables out with the trash. That's less crushing, stacking, and transporting for me.
I've added this to the Cleveland Recycling Locations Map (about).
ingenuity: progression, projection
Cleveland's 3rd annual Ingenuity Festival is already a week past, and I haven't yet squeaked about it here. I wrote half an entry the week prior, intending to promote the fest and my part in it, but I was too tangled and busy preparing, and left it undone.
In Ingenuity's first year, I walked through the festival a few times and paused for some music. I spent a lot of time at last year's 2.0, digging great music/dance (DJ Spooky and SAFMOD beat me up,) art installations, and goodfun (get-down in the rain,) and did a brief Capoeira performance with Shakthi and Taliesin on stage with Moises Borges and his band.
This year we made a somewhat bigger Capoeira roda for the festival's opening Samba of 1,000 Drums parade, but that was mostly just a break for me on Thursday evening before returning to my cube at CleveMed for a late night, prepping software and devices for the next day's Cavani/FES/CleveMed collaboration.
Friends from the Cleveland FES (Functional Electrical Stimulation) Center (Katie, Andy, Juan, and Dimitra) asked if CleveMed and I would like to work with them in a collaboration with the Cleveland Institute of Music's Cavani String Quartet. Over a number of months we experimented in acquiring EMG from the musician's muscles while they played (using CleveMed's BioCapture and Kinesia systems), and capturing motion data with FESC's equipment to generate model~animations.
Day-of-show -- at CleveMed in the morning and State Theatre in the afternoon -- was one of the most stressful I've known, but everything really just came together by evening performance-time, and both shows were about as good as I could've hoped. The members of Cavani are amazing musicians and people, and their delivery of Dvořák's "American" was beautiful. The devices and visualizations provided another (sometimes stunning) dimension to the music, as hoped. All of the projections, stage calls, queues, and speaking parts (probably the root of my greatest stress) went smoothly, as a result of focus, attention, and generosity from everyone involved.
Photo by Imagine24 (Some rights reserved.)
More pics: 1,
2,
3
I owe thanks in a lot of directions: FESC friends and colleagues, the Cavani musicians, the stage management and ops people at Playhouse Square, my supervisor, Craig, (both granting me this freedom and for life-saving pair-programming assistance in the final moments,) the rest of my conspirators at CleveMed for making top-notch tech, and Rich Weiss from Ingenuity for gluing us together with logistics and motivation.
I'm already looking forward to next year's festival, and forming vague plans for a project. The intersection of art & tech is one crossroads where I could set up shop, (or at least be happy just hanging out on the curb.)
Peak Suburbia, and Suburbia 2.0
we had better prepare to make other arrangements for living in this country, by which I mean specifically re-localizing, de-globalizing, with an emphasis on local agriculture wherever possible, the emergency restoration of passenger railroad service and related modes of public transit, the rebuilding of local commercial infrastructures, and a radical rethinking of how we inhabit the landscape under New Urbanist lines.
In any case, those who keep wringing their hands over the bulldozers leveling the plots of prairie, or cornfield, or desert -- those distressed folks can direct their anxiety elsewhere. Worry less whether one final strip mall will tilt up out in gloaming, and think harder about how you are going to feed yourself and your family in a couple of years when the stupendous motorized moloch of American life begins to sputter, and the Cheez Doodle shipments can no longer make it to your supermarket shelves, and all that is "normal" melts into air.
-- James Howard Kunstler, Peak Suburbia, (Clusterfuck Nation)
I've been tossing around some ideas for a plant/seed/produce/tool-sharing site to grow a community around local gardeners, (urban, rural, and in-between.)
It seems a nice blend of [my interests in] web, software, ecology, and local community -- helping to build that economy/ecosystem that'll become necessary as our current concoction collapses, (as Kunstler continues to promise.)
I need a good project, but it might be more than I'm up for right now.
participation is passport to effective non-profits
Alex Steffen of WorldChanging suggests that a more personal and empowering kind of participation is becoming the key to maintaining healthy non-profits:
[...] I think that more and more, non-profits are going to be in the business of not so much maintaining memberships, which is what they have done up until now, where basically it's a series of one-to-many communication where you basically send people various form letters and ask them to give you money and to support what you are doing in other ways. I think that is on its way out.
I'm sure they will continue to exist for quite some time, but I think that non-profits that are going to be really effective in the coming decade are going to be the ones that create at least a sense of many-to-many communications, where people feel that they are not just a member, they are a participant [emphasis mine]; where there is lots of communication happening from people in all sorts of positions in the organization, and that there starts to be this blurring of the line, [...]
-- Alex Steffen, Sharing Solutions: An Interview with Alex Steffen of WorldChanging (NetSquared)
I read this and was reminded of Passport Project, a near-and-dear Cleveland non-profit whose maxim is: building community through the arts.
Passport Project is one of the reasons I'm still in Cleveland. I found their Global Community Arts Center (E. 128th and Buckeye) shortly after moving back here ~3 years ago, and began learning Capoeira there. Then some modern dance classes, jazz concerts by excellent (but little-known) musicians, workshops..., and before I knew it I was helping paint the side of the Center, going out with Chloë and Ben, hanging artwork before a party, performing in demos at the Walk & Roll, House of Blues, Parade the Circle...
Chloë and Ben do a great job of blurring those lines of participation. They take sincere interest in those who come share, and infect all with healthy laughter, openness, confidence, and Chloë's mantra of 100% Love. The students become the performers, participants grow into community, and all are invited to the party -- family.
Passport Project has a blog now. A community blog -- everyone can post.