![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jul. 29th, 2009 09:32 amA late reply to the five words meme (you ask someone for five words that remind them of you, you get those words, then you write about those words in your [Insert social networking service here]. From ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vandringar, I got these five words:
Urban exploration
Keweenaw
Gary
face-blindness
skull
I could write so much about those!
Urban exploration is, to me, the practice and craft of going places you're not supposed to go. Storm drains, abandoned buildings, machinery rooms, basements; fun places. Since I was a kid, I've wanted to go exploring. To see things. Whenever I was out camping with my family, I'd want to go tromping off every mysterious path into the woods that I could lay my eyes on. I have great parents who encouraged this sort of thing, and it's continued on to the present, and expanded into wanting to climb every tall structure I happen to pass by, wanting to sneak into every boarded up building, and so on. As well as just being fun, that sort of the thing is the focus of most of my photography and has honestly changed the way I see the world. I'll take more about that under Gary.
The Keweenaw peninsula is a little (about sixty miles long) spit of land that protrudes from the top of Michigan's upper peninsula. It's the UP's UP. It's also the site of dozens of ruined copper mining towns, minging buildings, rusting machinery, waterfalls, picturesque towns from the late 1800's, rocky Lake Superior shores, a small secluded monastery, a NASA rocket testing range, and dozens of square miles of wilderness, dotted with crumbling remnants of the steam age. The Keweenaw feels special to me. Seeing the ruins all over the wilds makes me think that the land is taking a well deserved rest after a hundred years of frantic activity. It's like seeing the transition from human-occupied space to nature on a large scale. That process of transition intrigues me, and it's one of the things that draws me to Gary.
Gary is a town just a short drive east of Chicago. Built by the US Steel corporation to serve their foundry on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, it has gone into severe decline with the shrinking of the American industrial base through the last decades. Gary is home to some incredible ruins; the 2400 seat Palace Theatre, The breath-taking City Methodist church, an abadoned Sheraton hotel, and many more. As a whole, swaths of Gary seems caught in transition, from city to ruin. I'm fascinated by the thought of a space one day being a room, or a building, and the next day or month or year, being nothing. The same space is there, but the room or building will never be there again; it's lost forever. I'm mesmerized by that transition.
And, as I noted above, Gary (as well as other ruins I've seen, but Gary primarily because it's so recent, so modern, and so close to major cities) has changed the way I look at civilization as a whole. You can't help but see this place, in the metaphorical shadow of Chicago's skyscrapers, reverting to nature and crumbling away after just forty or fifty years, and meditate on the transience of humanity. I am consciously more appreciative of, and inspired by, our cities and suburbs and infrastructure and engineering and technology. I've seen first-hand evidence that all these things are really so tenuous in a way that most people don't appreciate it. And in just fifty or a hundred years, in the blink of a geological eye, it could be gone.
Face-blindness. Well, there's a lot about it here, but to make a long story short, I have a great deal of trouble recognizing people by face. This is a neurological deficiency; the part of my brain that is supposed to remember what people's faces look like doesn't work. It's not something I can 'get better' at doing, or need to 'try harder' at. I can get better and try harder at coping mechanisms possibly, but it's not the same thing, please.
I think that's had a great deal to do with shaping me into the person I am. I never made friends in school because I couldn't recognize any of my classmates. I was bullied a lot and felt alone and depressed quite often. (My parents or teachers would ask who was picking on me, but I couldn't tell them. I didn't know.) I felt very much disassociated from humankind while growing up, and I think that lead me to feeling closer to animals than people and being a furry. It's also lead to me being terminally shy. I'm getting better at that, though it's still hard for me to get to know new people. If I see them one-on-one, then obviously I can tell who they are, so that eliminates that problem, and that's why I prefer very small groups or one-on-one time with people. But decades of having no experience at the actual process of getting to know people has left me a bit ill-equipped for it at this stage of my life. It's a scary thing, but I'm trying hard!
And as for that skull... I don't think there's much more, or better, that I can say about it than I did right over here. I got to handle a human skull for a while. It was a singular experience, and has kind of made me think about people like seeing ruins has made me think about buildings. Life is short; enjoy the hell out of it while it's here.
=============================
*woofs* And now, please enjoy (though perhaps I'm giving myself too much credit?) more pictures, courtesy of the travelling Stormdog. Below is the entranceway to the Calumet theatre in Calumet, Michigan. Opened in the year 1900, when the copper country was flush with cash thanks to a booming mining industry, the Calumet has been in continuous operation ever since.
There aren't many theatres from the twenties or earlier that have never spent any time shut down ('dark' as they say in the theatre biz), and there aren't many theatres as old as the Calumet is at all. Most theatres of her vintage have burned (probably due to the gas lighting they employed!) or been bulldozed in the name of progress.
( A few more pictures behind the cut. )
vandringar, I got these five words:Urban exploration
Keweenaw
Gary
face-blindness
skull
I could write so much about those!
Urban exploration is, to me, the practice and craft of going places you're not supposed to go. Storm drains, abandoned buildings, machinery rooms, basements; fun places. Since I was a kid, I've wanted to go exploring. To see things. Whenever I was out camping with my family, I'd want to go tromping off every mysterious path into the woods that I could lay my eyes on. I have great parents who encouraged this sort of thing, and it's continued on to the present, and expanded into wanting to climb every tall structure I happen to pass by, wanting to sneak into every boarded up building, and so on. As well as just being fun, that sort of the thing is the focus of most of my photography and has honestly changed the way I see the world. I'll take more about that under Gary.
The Keweenaw peninsula is a little (about sixty miles long) spit of land that protrudes from the top of Michigan's upper peninsula. It's the UP's UP. It's also the site of dozens of ruined copper mining towns, minging buildings, rusting machinery, waterfalls, picturesque towns from the late 1800's, rocky Lake Superior shores, a small secluded monastery, a NASA rocket testing range, and dozens of square miles of wilderness, dotted with crumbling remnants of the steam age. The Keweenaw feels special to me. Seeing the ruins all over the wilds makes me think that the land is taking a well deserved rest after a hundred years of frantic activity. It's like seeing the transition from human-occupied space to nature on a large scale. That process of transition intrigues me, and it's one of the things that draws me to Gary.
Gary is a town just a short drive east of Chicago. Built by the US Steel corporation to serve their foundry on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, it has gone into severe decline with the shrinking of the American industrial base through the last decades. Gary is home to some incredible ruins; the 2400 seat Palace Theatre, The breath-taking City Methodist church, an abadoned Sheraton hotel, and many more. As a whole, swaths of Gary seems caught in transition, from city to ruin. I'm fascinated by the thought of a space one day being a room, or a building, and the next day or month or year, being nothing. The same space is there, but the room or building will never be there again; it's lost forever. I'm mesmerized by that transition.
And, as I noted above, Gary (as well as other ruins I've seen, but Gary primarily because it's so recent, so modern, and so close to major cities) has changed the way I look at civilization as a whole. You can't help but see this place, in the metaphorical shadow of Chicago's skyscrapers, reverting to nature and crumbling away after just forty or fifty years, and meditate on the transience of humanity. I am consciously more appreciative of, and inspired by, our cities and suburbs and infrastructure and engineering and technology. I've seen first-hand evidence that all these things are really so tenuous in a way that most people don't appreciate it. And in just fifty or a hundred years, in the blink of a geological eye, it could be gone.
Face-blindness. Well, there's a lot about it here, but to make a long story short, I have a great deal of trouble recognizing people by face. This is a neurological deficiency; the part of my brain that is supposed to remember what people's faces look like doesn't work. It's not something I can 'get better' at doing, or need to 'try harder' at. I can get better and try harder at coping mechanisms possibly, but it's not the same thing, please.
I think that's had a great deal to do with shaping me into the person I am. I never made friends in school because I couldn't recognize any of my classmates. I was bullied a lot and felt alone and depressed quite often. (My parents or teachers would ask who was picking on me, but I couldn't tell them. I didn't know.) I felt very much disassociated from humankind while growing up, and I think that lead me to feeling closer to animals than people and being a furry. It's also lead to me being terminally shy. I'm getting better at that, though it's still hard for me to get to know new people. If I see them one-on-one, then obviously I can tell who they are, so that eliminates that problem, and that's why I prefer very small groups or one-on-one time with people. But decades of having no experience at the actual process of getting to know people has left me a bit ill-equipped for it at this stage of my life. It's a scary thing, but I'm trying hard!
And as for that skull... I don't think there's much more, or better, that I can say about it than I did right over here. I got to handle a human skull for a while. It was a singular experience, and has kind of made me think about people like seeing ruins has made me think about buildings. Life is short; enjoy the hell out of it while it's here.
=============================
*woofs* And now, please enjoy (though perhaps I'm giving myself too much credit?) more pictures, courtesy of the travelling Stormdog. Below is the entranceway to the Calumet theatre in Calumet, Michigan. Opened in the year 1900, when the copper country was flush with cash thanks to a booming mining industry, the Calumet has been in continuous operation ever since.
There aren't many theatres from the twenties or earlier that have never spent any time shut down ('dark' as they say in the theatre biz), and there aren't many theatres as old as the Calumet is at all. Most theatres of her vintage have burned (probably due to the gas lighting they employed!) or been bulldozed in the name of progress.
( A few more pictures behind the cut. )
