blog (January, 2008)
framing our discussion
I walked out of Art Etc. feeling full, connected, buoyant: way more than I paid for.
The look of the frame is called distressed, and that was probably the look on my face, too, when I saw it. That splotching wasn't there in the frame sample I'd chosen last month, though the previous attendant had spent quite awhile helping me select just the right match for the photo. Edie cheerfully offered to do it over. That would've required more time and another cross-town trip, though, and I explained I'm not so mobile with such parcels on bicycle. (I didn't tell her Jenita's Christmas present was already 7 months late.)
She said she carries framed photos on her bike all the time, but offered we experiment with the frame a bit -- and brought it into the studio. Steel wool and solvent to tone down the high-contrast speckles. Evened it down and odded it up ~ til I was happy.
She asked about my least favorite routes to ride.
Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other.
-- W.E.B. DuBois
Commiseration / Bridging: the Lorain-Carnegie puncture lane, fishtailing after rain on Columbus's slippery steel grating. Charging up Cedar, freedom on Hough, the highway that is Chester. Roads and roads.
She and her husband ride the winter too. Wool, neoprene, gore-tex. Balaklavas, breathe-ability. Boots in 40-or-below to avoid losing feet heat through clipless cleats. Racks, fenders, panniers. They have 18 bicycles in the garage: cargo bikes, winter bikes, touring bikes, a tandem...
Cars beget rage. The people inside, cagers. ("private metal pods with blackened windows".) Her cager friends ask just how to say "Hi." Two short beeps means hello. Anyone that lays on the horn is obviously saying something else.
She packaged and wrapped it when the paste had dried. I sat down and we continued talking. The world of cars, our house of cards. The future, if people don't wise up. The fun of slowing down. (If only they knew!) And one's freedoms at another's peril. Interdependence. The brick roads underneath the asphalt will resurface.
The gift of the multiple crises we face is that in order to address them successfully, we will have to fundamentally change who we are. Some say people don't change, but they do when they have to. And part of that change is the capacity to listen, to put aside those things that separate us as unimportant, and honor the core values that unite us.
-- Paul Hawken, on Blessed Unrest and Deep Economics, (interview by Jon Lebkowsky, Worldchanging.com)
We're wary but hopeful. She calls it skeptimism.
She's sure that we'll see each other out riding soon.
I'm sure that I'll suggest Art Etc. to anyone that wants a really great custom frame, and to find out what Etc. can mean for them.
So how about this? How about we plan our communities to be social and business hubs that people can walk to and from--cars unrequired--and participate in in meaningful way? How about we attach these hubs by public transportation? How about we build our communities in ways that both help people feel less alienated and let them lead less resource intensive lives?
-- Colin Beavan, (aka No Impact Man,) More on community versus consumption--smart growth
layers of paint and mystery
And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and -- if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament -- planetary catastrophe.
As the layers of paint and mystery are pulled away, it becomes apparent that unpredictability, chaos, and madness are some of the most important cogs in the city's machinery. The deck is stacked with jokers. There is a ghost in this machine, and it appears to be stupid and/or drunk. This situation will not change, because the human condition is its source.
-- Robert Hurst, The Art of Urban Cycling
cultivating freedom
The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.
The point of an economy, even a dynamic economy, is not to have more and more; it is to liberate us from the economic--to provide a material platform from which we may go on to build the good life. That's the alternative American dream.
-- Jerome M. Segal, Graceful Simplicity: Toward a Philosophy and Politics of Simple of Living (found via No Impact Man: An alternative American dream)
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