MeghanIsMe

My little apartment in Syracuse. Perseverance on top, Longing on the bottom.

It's so weird to really think about that being most of three years ago now.

A couple paragraphs I wrote elsewhere in response to a discussion of politics (and a lengthy expansion of those thoughts):

"I'm frustrated with myself that it's so hard for me to try to rationally engage with people who are right-leaning politically. Understanding and respecting alternate systems of understanding, recognizing their internal validity and engaging them in ways that make sense not to 'me' but to 'them' is the very core of my undergraduate degree.

Hurtful language and petty attacks are counter-productive, but oftentimes these days, it's all I'm capable of. So I stay largely out of the discussion. I feel like I'm failing at politics."

My therapist asked what it was that kicked my legs out from under me in Syracuse. There were a few things that reinforced each other. One is that I have lost the belief that I have a chance of having an effect on society; of making it better. Because of that, so many things I was fascinated by because they were important to me as part of understanding how to do that are just depressing. Rather than being motivated to thoroughly understand systemic inequalities in urban geography, they just make me want to cry. Geographers and anthropologists and others have been talking about ways to make things better for decades, but the ears of the dominant paradigm are deaf to them.

The ruined buildings and blighted urban landscapes that, as objects of fascination for me, led me to photography and school and art and anthropology and geography, are also symptoms of that dominant paradigm's disregard. They are still history and the passage of time made manifest; that was what I hoped to convey in my photography. But their meaning as the chewed-up and spat-out leavings of a seemingly inescapable and deeply discriminatory system overshadows their other meanings.

Artistically, I'm still fascinated with the thought of how a space is made and unmade. When does a space become a place? When does it unbecome? When is a room no longer a room, as its doors and windows and ceilings and walls slowly rot away? I'm drawn to that kind of liminality in ways I can't explain. But that making and unmaking does not occur in a vacuum; it is part of the making and unmaking of communities, and livelihoods.

Divorced from that context, it is apt to call images of Detroit's burned out houses or Gary's empty church 'ruin porn.' It's an empty aesthetic that provides a thrill disconnected from the reality of the subject's life. "I love Brutalist architecture!" I excitedly commented in an online discussion. "You don't have to live and work in it," one person responded. In Detroit, a woman approached me to ask why I was photographing a crumbling stone house with a sagging roof. "It has a kind of beauty," I said, somewhat self-consciously. "Ain't nothin' beautiful here," was her sharp response.

The more I've thought about those exchanges, the more photography of ruins feels like a kind of exploitation; converting someone else's miserable day-to-day existence into some pretty pictures to show to other people to evoke some sense of authenticity and wonder. "I was there! I saw this myself and I am sharing it with you!" What does my brief passage through the place really teach me about its nature and its place in the lives of people for whom is is part of their everyday world? How much less does my self-conscious abstraction of that experience into a few photos show someone who looks at my photos? It's hard to think of a more inauthentic way to experience a place.

It's not documentary work with some redeeming intent to communicate what these places are like. That's been done, and claiming that's my intent without doing the very real and extensive work necessary to contextualize what I'm producing is a poor excuse. If anything, it has the opposite effect, abstracting real, living places into mysterious empty landscapes of decay and ruin that contribute to unfounded apprehension of cities, the very places I feel are the best way for vast numbers of people to live on Earth.

I...think I've lost my thread. I was writing about geography and ineffectiveness.

The study of urban geography makes clear that, just as these ruined landscapes are a result of the destruction part of the engine of creative destruction that powers the economic redistribution system of post-Fordist capitalism, their reconstruction is a result of the creative part of that same engine. When buildings are created or revitalized, when infrastructure like highways and rail transit are constructed, it doesn't matter who the metaphorical architects of such plans claim will benefit from them; the real winners are those who have the means to invest in their creation and the real losers are those who do not have the means to avoid the consequences of significant and irreversible change to their landscape. Everything I read in my urban social justice class (with the possible exception of that damned inscrutable book by Henri LeFebvre that I wanted to pitch into Onondaga Lake) pointed to that conclusion. Some of the best minds in geography and progressive academia can't figure this shit out; what can I do?

I don't want to feel so ineffective and helpless. But I do.

I also don't want to see random pictures of dying places anymore. I don't want to produce more of them myself. If I produce more urban photography, I want to make images of living systems. Working infrastructure that shows how deeply interconnected we all are. How many ways we all work with and for each other. How we all cooperate, consciously or unconsciously to create these beautiful, ridiculously complex, heart-achingly imperfect yet deeply optimistic engines of assault against entropy called cities. (Is that even what cities are anymore, or is it just a side-effect?)

But I don't know how to do that either.

In the meantime, right now, I'm conducting my own tiny fight against entropy as I work to repair my VTVM. For now, as I slowly work out where to go from here, that will do.

restoman took some pictures of me with his dog, Lily, and Zoe, a dog who belongs to one of his crew. Lily and Zoe often play together in Restoman's back yard. They were both back there on one of the days I came over for my usual walk with Lily, so I joined them. So much fun! Pictures he took of us are over here:

http://restoman.livejournal.com/250428.html

I had a nice four mile walk with Lily yesterday. We walked up to Thornden Park, a large green space just west of campus. We traversed the stage of the WPA amphitheatre, stopping to look out over the seats. The terraced bowl formed of fieldstone and green grass looked strikingly like a classical ruin. Two young women who were also enjoying the site played with Lily for a little bit and pronounced her "the perfect dog." That might be going a little far; she has her issues. But she is pretty wonderful.

We walked to the top of the hill the park centers on, up to the massive municipal standpipe building, and looked out over the city for a while. Rather, I looked out while Lily stared at a small white dog that started bounding up the hill toward us while her people called and chased her. She stopped halfway to us and and was caught and distracted. This is good, as she looked about Lily-snack sized and I'm still not sure about how Lily deals with other dogs.

She interacted pretty nicely, though, with a Pitbull we met on the walk home. I moved off the sidewalk to give room to the man and his very large bully, but he stopped and the dogs seemed interested in meeting. He gave his dog a little more leash, which made me a bit uncomfortable since he hadn't asked, but Lily and Rambo happily sniffed each other. (Rambo looked like a Pitbull on steroids. Not just big, but I've never seen a dog with a chest like that!)

I'm running out of new green spaces to take Lily. I think next time I might go back to Thornden and walk all the way around the periphery. There's an old brick sidewalk that surrounds most of it; at least, on the edges I've seen. It's maintained in some places, but in others its so overgrown that you can barely see the depression in the grass where the bricks underlie the earth. It's one of those very tangible signs of the passage of time that I find so fascinating.

I biked the block and a half to restoman's house and back today. Time with a friend and his dog was really good.

The snow here is amazing; we're supposed to have about 15" by the end of the day. Makes me wish I wasn't having surgery tomorrow; I want to ride somewhere in it.

I even managed to get back up the hill to my apartment without getting off and walking. The plows have been coming. When I got back in my rental car days ago, I couldn't get up the hill; I had to drive around and come down from the top. I've seen several cars and trucks today out my window having the same issue. They give up a little way up the hill and try to turn around without sliding back down to the Lodi Street intersection. And this is not the steepest hill in this city by any means. I'm glad I have those studded tires now.

I passed this old stone wall as I walked along Green Street toward Lincoln Park this afternoon.





Photos of the park itself and the view from the top of Lincoln Hill behind ( the cut. )

At some point, I'll go over there with my big cameras....

Hey restoman; I just copied the entire 1892 JW Vose fire insurance atlas from the SU library today! I have the whole thing, and you're welcome a copy if you have 8GB of space to store it somewhere. Bird Library has maps from several other years scanned from Hopkins atlases too, all on DVD. I'm going to get all of them, as time allows.

Here's one sheet cropped down to our little neck of the woods. The canal was so close! I can almost imagine it! And those mansions you told me about lining James Street; those were really something, weren't they? I can tell, even with these simple plan views. The paths sprawling over the grounds, the carriagehouses in the back, the one with a greenhouse on the property....





I need to email you. I see a Chinese buffet trip in our future, if you're free on Sunday for dinner.

I needed to take a break and be active, but I didn't want to deal with getting my bike out of the apartment. Instead, I took a 1.3 mile walk/jog to a park I hadn't explored yet, climbing up to the top of the large hill in the center and back down. When I got home, I ate a salad and some yogurt with granola. Am I becoming one of those weird health-people?

Maybe not, 'cause I'm probably going to have some ice cream later.

The park has a disused path up the side of Lincoln Hill consisting of stretches of bricks set long-ways into the ground interspersed with flights of disheveled stone or concrete steps. It has the kind of lonely, secreted-away atmosphere that I find so appealing in urban nooks and crannies. It's going to be one of my favorite nearby places.

Here's a photo of the bottom of the path. I'll get back with my big cameras when I have some time. Probably next year, at this rate.

Trying to figure out the Syracuse public transit system is like deciphering encryption. The website sucks, the trip planner on it doesn't work, Google Transit doesn't seem to have the routes in its system, and the proliferation of route numbers on the PDF map are beyond comprehension. If I wasn't carrying a bunch of heavy books, a laptop, and four days of clothing, I'd just walk the two-and-a-half miles. It's not that far.

There's supposedly a bike path, a rather short one, at the border between Syracuse and Liverpool. It would appear to offer an easier way to navigate a complex bit of road that includes a highway interchange.

Having been there, it is my considered opinion that this is not a bike path. This is a horror movie.

The path has clearly not been maintained in years. The surface is cracked and rippled. The plants to either side cover up to half that path in places, reaching out to slap passing cyclists. They also block any visual connection with the outside world; you travel this twisty little patch of asphalt, winding under graffiti-covered overpasses and fenced off road-side thickets and you can't see another human being. I fully expected to find a homeless encampment as the space seems well-suited to that kind of ad-hoc place-making, but it seems that even they steer clear.

I almost forgot; the southeast terminus is in the middle of some kind of construction site under one of the aforementioned overpasses. The northwest end...well, it just kind of runs into a wall of plants and stops. There was a patch of grass that seemed to go on to somewhere else from there, but I elected not to find out where.


A representative portion of the path.


Degraded section of pavement (one of many) on the path.



On the way home, I passed these side-by-side building on Pond Street. The "All American Market" stands next to the "All Asian Store". Ethnic rivalry?





All that aside, I had a nice five mile ride to a thrift store in Liverpool this morning, then back home. Time to get to work!

I'm going to the Westcott Street Cultural Fair! When else do I get the chance to dress up like this?

http://westcottstreetfair.org/



(And then I have to get back to work....)