The Breaking Time

Defending the hicks: A valid life outside New York/LA/SF/Portland/Boston...

Saul Steinberg's classic will, sadly, always be relevant

Here's an interesting piece from former New Yorker Cord Jefferson about finding a home in Los Angeles, and the blindness many Gothamites have about life outside their own borders:

A year ago, New York's Time magazine said the revitalization of downtown LA could be dubbed the neighborhood's "Manhattanization," as if New York invented the idea of clustering bars and restaurants to attract crowds. A few months later, writing about Pacific Standard Time, a massive multi-museum retrospective of the best in LA art from 1945 to 1980, the New York Times called the collection "overcompensation" from a city "where interest in culture starts and ends with movie grosses and who is on the cover of Vanity Fair." "It's corny," art critic Dave Hickey, who also used to direct the Reese Palley gallery in New York, told the Times of the collection. "It's the sort of thing that Denver would do."

When I moved out of New York, I knew at the time that it was the best decision for my career and pocketbook. Only now have I come to realize how important leaving was for my sanity, as well. Not that I was afflicted with claustrophobia or exhaustion or any of the pseudo-ailments with which so many hypochondriac New Yorkers diagnose themselves. Rather, I'd deliberately forgotten that life outside New York is just as pure and valid as life inside New York, which is a hazard of the City just the same as street crime, and one that's far more prevalent.

On a side note, Denver must've mauled Dave Hickey's family at some point in the past. Sheesh.

While I like Jefferson's piece quite a bit, it's worth noting that rural areas and small/mid-size cities get this sort of crap directed at them constantly, and from more corners.

Defanged metropoli

Cities! Over half of humanity now lives in the damn things. Naturally, the futurists are f'ing beside themselves over the wonders this portends. Why, here's prosperity prophet Richard Florida, writing in The Atlantic about how "giant city-states" will own your future: 

Gradually, our great complexes of cities and suburbs are being knit into mega-regions -- giant city-states that are home to millions upon millions of people and generate billions and in some cases trillions of dollars of economic activity. Driving this is not just our individual choices and preferences but the very logic of economic development. Geographic concentration and clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates powerful economies of scale.

He's got a point, of course, though for additional perspective you should read Nicholas Lemann's (paywalled, sadly) piece on the fight over urban identity. But there's one problem with dubbing this the new age of city-states, namely, the "state" part: most metropoli don't have a huge amount of say in government, often even in their own.

Why, for all their economic and cultural importance, are cities still politically impotent?

What happened with Lewis Kyle Wilson?

 

My article on the case that's wreaking havoc in the Asheville community is up on Mountain Xpress.

Warning: while this article raises several important issues, it contains extremely graphic material about rape and violence:

Asheville resident Lewis Kyle Wilson, charged with the brutal assault and kidnapping of a prostitute, has been dubbed a “person of interest” in a 2006 murder and several similar attacks. Search warrants reveal details about this case, while people who know him shine light on the havoc the situation has wreaked throughout the community. 

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Since the allegations arose in November, rumors have swirled around the case and acts Wilson is and isn’t accused of. Some of those who knew Wilson describe him as active in the community and say the case’s impact has been wrenching. 

“This was someone who came to our parties, was a babysitter to our children and repaired our houses — it’s wreaked complete havoc on all of us,” Morgana Davis, who has known Wilson since 1999, told Xpress. “To hear those allegations ... there’s a lot of trust issues now, a lot of people questioning themselves.”