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If you look at an aerial photo of Eugene, Oregon, the downtown is easy to find: it looks the most empty. Vast, warehouse-like commercial buildings look as interesting as parking lots when viewed from space: residential neighborhoods look dense by comparison. Not coincidentally, right now, if you visit Eugene's downtown, you'll find the least active neighborhood in town. The lack of density and differentiation, visible from space thanks to urban renewal, make it a very weak place economically: there's not much anyone can do with such a massively built downtown, in this economy. Unless you find some tricks. One trick, is to take some of these commercial buildings, and convert parts of them to housing. Then you'll have more real life downtown. Unfortunately, uniform building codes require serious, and very expensive, seismic upgrades for old commercial spaces, when converted to multiunit housing. But there's an interesting exception -- if you turn a space into a house, or a boarding house, both of which are occupancy category R3, you do not need a seismic upgrade! So, take a bit of a commercial building, and call it a house. Put in five bedrooms, a kitchen and bathrooms. What use is that? Don't people want apartments? I wouldn't advocate everyone live in a boarding house or communal apartment, but in certain situations, it's perfect. Say you're trying to find ways to make vast, former commercial spaces into a community center. The R3 trick can be the key to making it work. Community projects rely on volunteer labor and donations, but they also need a core team. If the project is running quickly enough, the core team can survive from the income of the community project. But it needs every subsidy it can get. If subsidized housing, even a boarding house, can be provided on site, then the core team can expand to include the guests there, and they will be at the community center, thinking about it all the time. We're doing this here, in this building. We hope to re-inject people into the commercial district using this technique. Watch this space for details. Greg Bryant
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I was in a downtown meeting, and someone complained that a conference on 'civic revitalization' he attended was held in a shopping mall. The organizers said "look: pedestrians & commerce! What can we learn here?" They similarly promoted the notion that downtowns must study supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, sweatshop economics, and branding & advertising campaigns. This isn't new territory: downtowns have been trying to become brand-name chainstore shopping malls for 50 years. And yet, even the inventor of the modern US mall realized what a horror he'd unleashed, and spent the rest of his days trying to bring back the local community market. The biggest problem is that these are machines for making money, not for doing good. They are even purposefully unpleasant. Go into a brand name store today and you'll be assaulted by snooty, forceful, heavy-handed sales tactics, working hand-in-hand with disorienting interior design. Because it sells more. Because shoppers are basically nice people and pliable victims. The opportunity for community developers here is obvious -- the more real, honest, good-natured, communal, deep, coherent and alive you can make a project or place, the more likely it is that you can rescue people from the mauls of the malls. Greg Bryant "Do you know when the kibbutzim system failed?" the old fellow was testing me, on a hot twilit evening in Eugene. I gestured for him to continue. "It happened when they started hiring people." He was there. In the early day of the kibbutz movement, idealists of all stripes joined with like-minded people to return to the land and make the desert bloom. It was egalitarian for as long as they were poor. But, inevitably, someone with extra time would build something, say, a fire engine. And then the kibbutz had five orders for fire engines. And then they transformed, from little communes, into little corporations. The moment they hired people, they were participating in the national economy. They lost their radical idealism. They lost the notion that individuals could maintain their individual freedom, and yet cooperate freely. In this country, we're all trained to be part of a corporation, owned for the time we are on private property, managed as a herd by a hierarchy of "good" or "bad" bosses. This is tenacious stuff. One of the main lessons of the Internet boom in silicon valley, for me, was that despite the unprecedented money & freedom, where co-operative work would have seemed natural, instead the bureaucratic ecology reasserted itself quickly, and entrepreneurs hired people who needed, and wanted, to be told what to do. The people came, from big old corporations, to young small ones, and brought their habits with them. Fitting in perfectly. They were still wage slaves, doing what they were told. They were still not free. I hope this is because of habit & culture, and not something innate in people. I always tell people that "hope" isn't a very good strategy. So, what can move people away from these habits? From the federal government's point of view, it isn't possible to run a company where everyone is an independent person. The IRS forbids it. The nominal objective is to prevent abuse of labor. Which obviously hasn't worked. The true objective is the IRS ensnarement of as many people as possible into the regular corporate payment of income tax. The side-effect is that it's very hard for people to stay independently self-employed. A self-employed person is a kind of "one-person corporation", which is terribly ironic, since the laws defining corporations intended to create a "legal person", or an abstract individual. Anyway, just as a start, to promote true individual freedom, people need to be corporations. And they need to co-operate. To keep people free, and to allow them to initiate cooperation easily & officially, a "consortium corporation" is needed. This is so individuals can represent themselves as a group, without being forced to hire themselves into a corporate bureaucracy, become employees, and thereby forfeit their economic identities as independent individuals. If such an ad hoc co-op was common currency, it would be put together quickly, for any project, short or long or permanent. It could circumvent the temptation to make ourselves slaves to our own dreams, or to someone else's. With government-economic-engineering-pressures out of the way, we could then concentrate on the important work of getting along, for the good of the individual and the community. Greg Bryant The Romans named the first month of the year January after their word for door. This may seem like devoting a major holiday to the pencil, or the teapot. A door is just another household item, right? Even more extremely, Janua, or door, was intertwined with Janus, really the god of the door. And the god of much more. Janus was the god of beginnings, and of endings, in time and space. In most cultures, still, you can find an expression of the sort "What starts well, ends well". The Romans took this very seriously, and always celebrated the beginning of anything. That's because the beginning of one thing often means the end of something else, in the way that a door marks the beginning of one room and the end of the last one. But that ending is not abrupt -- there is always a connection between the two, and if that connection is as important as the two, it makes the whole ensemble stronger. This understanding was embodied in the representation of Janus, a single god with two faces, one looking back, and one looking forward. A door, a transition, means looking at the whole. It means preserving the best of the past, and working towards good in the future. A useful new year's sentiment. That's why any transition -- a goal, gate, door, etc.-- must be treated with great care, and, well, positive energy. That's why the Romans, and most other cultures, worshipped transitions. They worshipped connections between the past and the future, between one place and the next. And they built the best doors they could -- and the most wonderful entrance experiences. And the gave special attention to courtyards, balconies, roads, paths, etc. All of these connections enhance, and join 'parts' into a harmonious whole. Today, ironically, the future has forgotten this aspect of the past. But, it's a fact of nature that these transitions occur. So we can be quite sure that conciousness, about the importance of doors in creating wholeness, will rise again. Greg Bryant The most influential new trend in the art-museum-biz is the Giant Spectacle -- big showcases of the most famous names in art history, be they Tutankhamun or Chagall, Bonnard or W. Eugene Smith ... these shows are put together with investors, insurance companies, museums, private collectors, publicity specialists ... all with the reasonable goal of bringing new generations in contact with art that can only be truly appreciated in person. But, in concentrating on such spectacle, or rather, by falling into the trap of spectacle which engulfs our society, museums are fundamentally missing the opportunity to serve the future. Art Museums traditionally were tied to Art Schools -- one didn't really make sense without the other. An art school needed great art to inspire and instruct. An Art Museum needed talented curators and restorers, often an important stepping stone in the life of a professional artist. But 'professional artist' is a modern distinction, given that, a lifetime ago, the bulk of traditional craft -- carpentry, ceramics, clothing, metalwork -- required a higher level of skill, patience, and heartfelt effort than most professional artists today ever achieve. By today's standards, almost everyone 100 years ago was an artist. They had to be. When everyone made most of their own goods, or the goods consumed by their neighbors, why wouldn't they do their best work? By putting all their resources into merely showing off the best of the past, today's museums are simultaneously highlighting and ignoring something crucial -- the huge and regular gap between the present society and the past cultures that produced works of great care and skill. Go to a modern show about ancient China, and you'll wonder immediately "where did they get all these amazing artists?" The answer? There was a rich culture of good work, and good art. But there isn't one today, especially in the west, in a desolation that began to take hold in the 19th century, accelerated during WWII, and is now complete. As a result, we're all willing to wait in lines for hours to see Vermeer, or travel for days to see Venice. So, isn't it obvious what a responsible art museum should do? They should teach art. But not like the old days, only to specialists -- they need to teach it to everyone. That's the primary modern responsibility. Displaying the best of the past is a complimentary activity, but makes no sense without genuine learning. Learning with the heart, with the hand and with the mind. I'll give an example from a current project, The Tango Center in downtown Eugene, Oregon. The best moments here are when people come to the introductory class, before the dance on Fridays and Saturdays, to actually learn to tango, not just to be a spectator. This is a place where people are artists, creating hours of the best improvisational art they can, for the benefit of their partners, themselves, the people taking a break, and the community watching through the window. This is true public art. The same could happen in a place dedicated to making clothes, ceramics, woodwork etc. The same could be true of a place where people off the street learned to draw, paint, sculpt and photograph. Or learn to play music. Or learn to build a community. Museums have a long way to go to get close to this kind of energy. By packaging the creative process instead of engaging it, they're going in the wrong direction. Greg Bryant Googling
Architecture by Greg Bryant Look around you, at the built world. It's the work of nameless economic forces, some named architectural movements, and a few named architects. On the other hand, there's Google's Page Rank, a citation weighing of web page content. It doesn't reflect the built environment. It reflects the Internet. Google is the largest index of documents ever created, but it's also the newest. You can see this by asking the question about living architects: who's the googliest of them all? The answer is architecture's primary philosopher, who is also anathema inside modern circles. Water
wins! The elements, in order of popularity The Corporate Theory of Government by Greg Bryant It was fun to watch the government torture Microsoft. Unfortunately, they did not do it for the right reasons! They didn't do it because they hate proprietary software, or Microsoft's draconian practices, or its blandness, or its lies, or its shoddiness -- and they certainly did not do it because they feel capital should flow freely, upon an even playing field, in fairness to the little guy! The government prosecutes monopolist corporations because other corporations lobby the government. Sure, prosecutors pick up the ideology when it suits them. But they've been pressured to do the work. The US government itself is a company, with many employees, which establishes partnerships with other companies through government contracts and good old- fashioned hobnobbing! The Soviet Union was a corporation: the largest of all time. It was a giant "company town", of the sort that was eliminated in the US mostly because it kept people, resources and markets from rivals. Lenin was the most successful CEO of all time, a kind of hyper-super-meta-Bill-Gates, who locked up an entire continent against all competition. Well, no one could allow that! Both sides slathered the ensuing competition with oceans of empty, rhetorical PR. Just like today's corporate battles. Talk to anyone who grew up in Soviet Russia, and you realize they sound very much like people who "grew up" in large US companies in the second half of the 20th century. Inculcation, policies, ideologies, hierarchies ... the parallels are mind-boggling. The Big Media monopolies are governments too, and have been for over a century, with their own self-interests and alliances. Journalists have developed a coping ideology, in order to survive the crackdowns of these influential little dictatorships. Corporations do not like their brands stolen: Mussolini was the original 'Fascist', damn it, and he didn't much like Hitler stealing his trademark. Later, they partnered. Hitler himself had a 1000-year business plan, which he spun to his workers and his shareholders. These are not metaphors. It really is like this. Think about it when you're trying to figure out what's going on in any kind of politics: corporate or ... corporate. February 16, 2003
Ancient
Blogs by Greg Bryant I wrote giant, heroic articles for Rain magazine in the early 90's. But I eventually withered, defeated. Comprehensive analysis takes forever, and saps your strength. I couldn't publish a quarterly magazine this way. So I switched to small essays. Then I switched to vignettes, snippets and drops. During the cold war, USSR film studios didn't much care about intellectual property rights in the west. Only rarely did any Western film show in the Soviet Union. Instead, an equally good homespun movie industry produced an entire alternate universe of film. Some of this is just starting to get released, But in a very capitalist kind of censorship -- some of it may never be seen here. You won't be able to see anything but a bootleg of the Russian Winnie Pooh, because Disney's ownership of the film rights prevents distribution of this clever Mosfilm version. --GB by Greg Bryant A skeptical fellow pointed out a new psychological profile fashion called "enneagrams". Even though this would be dismissed by psychiatrists as pop, modern psychiatric evaluation tools are equally trivial and disturbing. The main problem is the division between this sort of psychology, and real life, a chasm almost too vast to describe. But let me give it a try. The test asks you some questions, and for each, it gives you two choices -- to force you to pigeonhole yourself into one of nine personality categories. The questions run like this: "I have tended to be: "I've been more of a: Et cetera. It's terribly misguided. A balanced and full life is one where these kinds of complementary attributes are striving towards equilibrium and convergence. In life, while trying to create a flow of positive moments, you always have to watch these others things, and strive not to let one get the better of the others. This is the basic goal of self-awareness, and the deep challenge of life. Taoism, to take only one example, is predicated upon it. As is the golden mean. But this pervasive truth is lost among these psychopartitions. I mean, in what possible way are idealism and street-smarts mutually exclusive? Could it possible mean anything to say: "Are you Yin or are you Yang"? These make a necessary whole: that's the point. One means nothing without the presence of the other. It is inconceivable to me that any sensitive person could ask "are you focussed on yourself or others"? The point of life is that these things are inseparable, and that the differences dissolve if you manage equal emphasis. ... but if you get rid of the "enneagram"-ist's matrix, the one that categorizes you, and instead use these questions rhetorically, to see if your life is out of balance, then this is actually useful research. They could be like a new bunch of koans. But this is not the apparent intent. Another sad day for humanity. On the other hand, without their work, this article couldn't exist ... July 22, 2003 |
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