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Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Blog Found, Loved Immediately I've added a permanent link to Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler, a blog by the author of Geography of Nowhere and other criticism of American development patterns. He recently returned from Paris and had some withering but insightful comments to share about American public life. Here are two samples: There, we would duck into a "brown bar" (so-called because of the dark wooden wainscotting) at five p.m. and it would be full of well-dressed, gainfully employed adults in animated conversation. Public life in Europe is only minimally about shopping and maximally about spending time with your fellow human beings. American public life by comparison is pathetic-to-nonexistent. Americans venture out only to roam the warehouse depots, and only by car. In most American places bars are strictly for lowlifes, and the public realm for the employed classes is pretty much restricted to television, with its predictable cast of manufactured characters and situations. The alienation and isolation of American life is so pervasive and pathological, compared to life lived elsewhere in this world, that all the Prozac ever made will never avail to make things better for us. . . .Yes, nowhere style development is more prevalent in the red states, but it is capable of infiltrating our own beloved Brooklyn, where Ikea is demolishing a Civil War-era building in Red Hook that has more character than a hundred perfectly convenient roadside strip malls. This demolition is to make way for a parking lot that will serve the same type of anonymous, soulless big box store that could be found off of any Interstate highway, anywhere in the nation. Economic growth is great for New York City because it encourages people to come here to live, work, shop and otherwise enjoy leisure time. But why does it have to be done in a way that rips apart a piece of the pedestrian-scaled urban fabric that makes New York different from the rest of the nation?- Posted at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments: 2 | Post a Comment | Be careful with Kunstler. If you read him too much you will find yourself stocking your basement with canned goods, bottled water and ammunition. You should see my basement. By aaron, at 1/06/2005 11:46 AM
Well, personally, I'll never be shopping at Ikea again. By downtownlad, at 1/07/2005 6:05 PM |
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