Sunday, June 20, 2010

Happenstance is Dead!


There use to be a time when you could happen upon some place and be in awe, to really feel like you had discovered a gem, that only you knew about, and you could be able to, only if you wish, share it with those that were in your life, the ones who could appreciate and cherish the place as much as you did. You could have your own little close knit community of those in the know. Today, that is gone.
Last week I received a stack of Time-Out Chicago magazines. The overwhelming amount of in the moment, what to do and where to do it information that was in these weekly magazines blew my mind. The competition between bloggers, tweeters, zines publishers, yelpers, online site barkers, and app developers to mine the city for the most events and most obscure places dwarfs the oil industry's search for new oil fields. The new peak oil worry should be one's ability to stumble upon something or someplace.
On Friday, I went to St. Paul, Mn., I brought the previous week's Time-Out, the magazine sent out four writers to live and breathe the Twin Cities for four days. What came out was an itinerary that leaves nothing in the Cities to be discovered. How cool am I going to be traveling to Minnesota, to eat Hmong food in Frogtown, St. Paul, going to a farmers market at the history museum, taking a kayak excursion to Minnehaha Falls along the Mississippi River, taking the light rail to a Twins game in their new stadium, and ending the night in the diviest bar, for Zombie night, in the Lyn-Lake area of Minneapolis, the "Wicker Park" of the Cities. I have just consumed an intentionally manufactured experience by people hired to create a false sense of happened upon.
I guess if you have the money and know how, you have the ability to capitalize on these happened uponed experiences. I am also overwhelmed by the those in Chicago that have parlayed the money for the Olympics into a full blown effort to exploit unknown or uncharted areas by tourists or local consumers of the next dive bar or cool shot for Flicker. These monied individuals have financed something called Eat, Pray, Love Chicago, and a full on army of individuals from the Department of Tourism and people that do not live in those 77 neighborhoods, have done a very superficial job of giving neighborhood history, landmarks, and cool places to visit from their limited perspective. In the past, the definition of place was gleaned from individuals that lived in that place over a period of time. We should ask ourselves, who defines meaning and history of where I live. Today, place and space is being cheapened and sanitized for the next quick fix. I can say I've been somewhere cool and edgy because the Reader or that blogger did the dirty work of finding it in the first place, I can experience a far off place, or a dangerously hip place in the ghetto without being there because it has been geo-tagged, or made virtual via Google Earth or streetview. I can miss out of visual and spiritual minutiae of a place because my hand held device augments my reality of that place, it acts as my viewmaster overlaying and mashing restaurant, accommodation, travel, historical information, and other people's You Tube, Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Four Square feeds so that I have all the data about that place, that may have originally taken decades to define, all ready and for me to consume, without any conscience effort, in minutes' time. What do we do when every quiet, corner of this city and world has been shared? What will be left to discover?

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Wow, I Haven't Blogged in a Long Time

I haven't blogged in almost three months, lots has changed in those three months. Officially, I started up the guerilla historical society. Currently we are closing in on 800 fans, not bad. I love that we have been able to play with the whole idea of "place" and what defines a place. What has defined a place throughout history has been something gleaned over time by individuals living there. What we have attempted to do is define this place, North and Pulaski, oh by the way, this area was never called North and Pulaski, just by creating the Facebook page and by getting it out in cyberspace, we have just created the definition of space and place in time, not in the historical sense of the fixed, gleaned definition, but through the medium of the social networking site we have created a fluid, working, ever changing, wiki-nition of this place. Right now our fans skew in the 45-65 range. Through their comments, and online interactions with each other, a perception of this neighborhood's history has been conceived based on their recollections and experiences during a certain time period. However,as time goes on, as online demographics of our fans grow and change, the definition of this place will morph and mutate. Is this good or bad, I don't know, it is very new. Our hope is that the definition that arises in dynamic and maliable enough that we can bridge the gap between all people that have been affected by this space and place through time.