Slouching Towards Slackerdom

It's official: Providence is a slacker town.

I'm increasingly of the view that the New York Times chooses content largely for blog-worthiness. How else to explain such a lackadaisical, listless, wandering...oh wait, those are the people the article's about. But the article in question, Towns They Don't Want to Leave, tells you just what you already know—that college towns are havens for hangers-on, some of whom do nothing and others of whom experiment and accomplish—in that special NYT kind of way, which is to spot trends so slowly that everyone's already forgotten about them. And to wrap them up in a top-k listing to give bloggers something to argue.

But, all that's neither here nor there. What (or who) is here is, for instance, a class act as a cheese-maker: according to the Providence Daily Dose, that's Louella Hill, who revolutionized the food sources and products at Brown. The article's central Providence slacker, Megan Hall, is one of the sharpest, liveliest Brown students I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, brimming with great attitude and incadescent energy. It's people like this make Providence a worthy competitor to Davis or Athens, GA. And while I disagree with some of these people about their politics or economics, life would be much, much poorer without them.

(Somewhat disturbing is a mutual friend's claim that the author is a friend of Megan's. A rather relevant fact that ought to have been in the article...if it were in a serious publication, that is.)

I Am Not a Spammer, I Am a Free Man!

Houston is an eccentric city. Its apparent mono-culture actually creates a remarkably strong and flavorful counter-culture, of which there is probably no more delightful manifestation than the Art Car movement.

Two lesser, but even more eccentric, attractions are the Orange Show and Beer Can House. And now, a twofer: the NYT informs us that the former has acquired the latter, melding the city's passion for eccentricity and capitalism. The article contains a key insight about Houston:

Marilyn Oshman, the art patron who founded the Orange Show, said it was no accident Houston played host to such attractions. “One good thing about not having any zoning is you can do stuff,” Ms. Oshman said.

The problem lies in notifying your friends of such events. I sent email to old Houston friends with the title “Orange Show buys Beer Can”, to which one responded:

I deleted this message as spam (but didn't purge) before I noticed that it was from you. I guess "Orange Show buys Beer Can" is more like the title of spam that I get than a typical legitimate message.

When the names of a city's museums trigger spam filters, you know it's doing something right.

The What in the Where?

I was watching (with subtitles) Godard and Gorin's cartoonish Marxist rant, Tout Va Bien. In it is this remarkable sequence of lines, as two voices conjure up a movie:

There'll be a country.
In the country, there will be a countryside.
In the countryside, there will be cities.

In most of human history, this last line probably seemed entirely natural. The great secular and spiritual centers, such as castles and temples, were built in part to dominate their surroundings, serving as an overpowering beacon to the visitor from the countryside. And yet, to an urban creature like me, cities are what there is; countrysides are what you obtain by subtraction. To hear of cities as the passive actors, planted into the countryside, is remarkable.

When I'm in Paris, I imagine what it must have been like to boat down the Seine, pass the exurbs of huts and fields, and then come upon the towering majesty of the Ile de Cite. (Likewise for Madern Gerthener's great cathedral alongside the Main in Frankfurt, or any number of other such monuments.) That's why the view of the Notre Dame that most impresses me is from the waterside on the embankment—from down below. Then we see the cathedral as its builders actually intended it to be seen.