Facion Fashun

Musings on fashion trend which consists of super-hero or otherwise cartoony kids backpacks being worn by black and maybe other races which I see on my metro transit as follows:

Fashion must have some form of consciousness that it is conforming to some larger trend or it is not fashion it is individuality. I sense the conformity and connection between each user of these cartoon super-hero children's bags. A person, by herself or himself, who is reduced to by lack of means, or otherwise inclined to buy one of these cheap facilitators of transporting personal belongings (your own belongings or the belongings of others) , does not consititute fashion unless there is a connection, a thread, reaching out to all the other bags of similar style being used, usually in relatively close proximity, i.e. a metropolita.

Further, it is impossible for 'fashion' as an industry to capitalize on the 'fashion' as a consciousness unless it has existed over time and established itself in the minds of more than a few. Only then can it pick up where initial motivation and collective behavior have placed it and carry it further in similar or semi-similar form, as manufactured fashion suitable for high margins.

And here is the job of the fashion industry to take existing behavior, combined with past behavior and past forms, to bring a higher return on fabric, plastic, metal, paper, ink, and thread.

More on City Planning

Wow how long has it been since I last entried.

I'm still working my way through Jane Jacobs' book, and now someone has put a hold on it, so I can't renew and have to return tomorrow. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind stopping a non-fic right in the middle and just taking away the ideas gleaned thus far. In this case however I find each of her ideas new and interesting enough to get all the ones in this book. I'd like to share an excerpt before I turn this thing in, it's a particularly indicative paragraph that shows quality of writing and the clarity of mind which created this work.

Jacobs has turned her attention to the financing of large, in her words, cataclysmic, urban renewal programs, i.e. projects. She is truly breaking down the approach that only huge dumps of cash and wholesale renewal is the answer. She clearly identifies problems, such as dearths of funding for areas that have been blacklisted by banks. She indicts city planners in linking their maps to the maps at the bank. She then starts to explain an alternative theory, not one to only rip to shreds the views she doesn't agree with.

This paragraph is her segue, and I think it's indicative of the ills of many many people who think in only one way, especially in an erroneous way, a way that was and so always will be so. From page 418:

All that is indeed no small accomplishment. The devices of large-scale clearance, slum shifting, slum immuring, project planning, income sorting, use sorting have become so fixed as planning images and as collections of tactics that city rebuilders, and most ordinary citizens too, face a blank when they try to think of city rebuilding without these means. To get past this obstacle, we must understand the original misconception on which the rest of the fancy structure rests.

Cities & Urban Renewal

Getting back to one of the intents of this blog, to provide quality backyard reviews of slected books, I am currently reading The Life and Death of Great American Cities By Jane Jacobs. Who knew a book about the ills of urban renewal (yes the ills of urban renewal, not the ills of the urban space itself) could be so interesting to read. It is the writing and the clear opinion that sucks me in. Though I can't say I have an activist slant myself (yet) I love the clarity which comes from a true interest and belief in what Jacobs is talking about. I enjoy the absolutes that are peppered throughout her narrative. She adds illustrative stories help her concepts stick, and she apologizes up front, in the introduction, for the fact that many of her illustrations come from New York City where she lives.

One more point and I'll add an excerpt. I'm reminded of my Organic Chem professor's completeness of explanation, and his ability to head off loopholes and 'but what ifs.' Jacobs intelligently adds caveats when her parallels are only making a certain point and not completely applicable. One example of this is her comparison of urban planners to doctors in the sense that many urban planners (probably more true in her time) are incorrectly inundated with the 'right' way to plan an urban space the same way doctors of the 19th century were incorrectly inundated with bloodletting as the 'right' way to cure illness. She makes it clear that she is only illustrating the ability of an institution to perpetuate the wrong approach.

In this excerpt she is talking about what makes some streets safe and some streets unsafe. One element she says is that there needs to be eyes on the street, either from the windows, from the shop fronts, or from passers by.

My block of the street, I must explain, is a small one, but it contains a remarkable range of buildings, varying from several vintages of tenements to three- and four-story houses that have been converted into low-rent flats with stores on the ground floor, or returned to single-family use like ours. Across the street there used to be mostly four-story brick tenements with stores below. But twelve years ago several buildings, from the corner to the middle of the block, were converted into one building with elevator apartments of small size and high rents.

The incident that attracted my attention was a suppressed struggle going on between a man and a little girl of eight or nine years old. The man seemed to be trying to get the girl to go with him. By turns he was directing a cajoling attention to her, and the assuming an air of non-chalance. The girl was making herself rigid, as children do when they resist, against the wall of one of the tenements across the street.

As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to intervene if it seemed advisable, I saw it was not going to be necessary. From the butcher shop beneath the tenement had emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs the shop; she was standing within earshot of the man, her arms folded and a look of determination on her face. Joe Cornacchia, who with his sons-in-law keeps the delicatessen, emerged about the same moment and stood solidly to the other side. Several heads poked out of the tenement windows above, one was withdrawn quickly and its owner reappeared a moment later in the doorway behind the man. Two men from the bar next to the butcher shop came to the doorway and waited. On my side of the street, I saw that the locksmith, and the fruit man and the laundry proprietor had all come out of their shops and that the scene was also being surveyed from a number of windows besides ours. That man did not know it, but he was surrounded. Nobody was going to allow a little girl to be dragged off, even if nobody knew who she was.

I am sorry -- sorry purely for dramatic purposes -- to have to report that the little girl turned out to be the man's daughter.

Throughout the duration of the little drama, perhaps five minutes in all, no eyes appeared in the windows of the high-rent, small-apartment building. It was the only building of which this was true. When we first moved to our block, I used to anticipate happily that perhaps soon all the buildings would be rehabilitated like that one. I know better now, and can only anticipate with gloom and foreboding the recent news that exactly this transformation is scheduled for the rest of the block frontage adjoining the high-rent building. The high-rent tenants, most of whom are so transient we cannot even keep track of their faces, have not the remotest idea of who takes care of their street, or how. A city neighborhood can absorb and protect a substantial number of these birds of passage, as our neighborhood does. But if and when the neighborhood finally becomes them, they will gradually find the streets less secure, they will be vaguely mystified about it, and if things get bad enough they will drift away to another neighborhood which is mysteriously safer.

Dedicated to Hate

Random musings on my transit to work:

This blog is dedicated to hate, for I hate what I am not and it is the hate that makes me wonder at myself. Hate or jealousy I can't decide. Jealousy of hte surface but under the dirt is it hate or love?

Also random quote for a shirt:
'I'd rather talk to an African than an African-American'
maybe on the back...
'The truth hurts.'
And as I thought about the African-Americans that would take offense, I thought, "No big loss from my life."

Let's just say I won't be sailing with Captain Jack on The Diversity Pearl.

Major Event Completed - Next Level

Major event last half of Feb, hence why I haven't been around. You know if I had a real topic to write about, it wouldn't be painfully obvious that I just kept my personal life out of my blog. On the other hand, I find myself looking for clues in others' blogs.

One random thought, why do I want people to link to my blog? If you look at Okaskaki's blog, he tells you how to make money with a blog. This is good. See my money maker to the right, and click on something please.

On the other hand, is there any greatness ahead for me in the bloverse? the blogfog? I'm going to add someone else to my side bar.. so far it's been ppl I actually know of, or have conversed with more than zero times, and ppl who have are hard core web-loggers. My addition falls into the latter category.

Today's word comes from my current book, and a very good one! Note to self remind me again to email my sister and get her to read it. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Well today's word has slipped my mind, but it had an extra a in there, which make me think of the word's origins, the 'a' must have been a Latin 'ae' at one time.

Word of the week, however, is easier: meh.