On My Introduction to the CLE

Dearest Comrades! Esteemed Readers! Kind Visitors!

I now live in beautiful and bizarre Cleveland, Ohio. Consider this the inaugural post from this charming rust belt metropolis referred to by locals, fondly, as ‘the CLE.’*

As a way to launch what will be my cataloging of all things compelling about Cleveland, let me begin by briefly listing those experiential phenomenon to which I am now growing accustomed that make it unlike the other cities I have explored over the course of this blog and my short life on this planet.

1.) Cleveland is quiet. Due to a post-industrial exodus from the city center that made the metro area a sprawling expanse, Cleveland-proper neighborhoods tend, it seems, to be quiet places. Excluding Friday and Saturday evenings, you can stroll down nearly any residential street and many commercial strips without crossing paths with another pedestrian.

2.) Cleveland is segregated. This is linked, of course, to the previously mentioned exodus. Many of the suburbs in this city were a result of white flight. This has left the city unfortunately divided, geographically and culturally, between white and black neighborhoods. Though, from what I hear, this is changing.

3.) Not entirely unlike Los Angeles, Cleveland is divided into factions of folks hailing from the West or East sides. The West side is said to be more ethnically diverse (many of the steel-workers who helped the city thrive during the industrial era were European immigrants, largely working and living on the West side). The East side is diverse as well, but primarily a mixture of black and white folks (though the deeper into East Cleveland you get, it seems, the more African American the community: see above). The West side is said to be more characteristically Midwest, in cultural terms, and the East more characteristically East Coast.**

4.) Cleveland has to contend with its sprawl, not unlike Los Angeles. The distinction, though, is the forces that caused its geographical expanse. The demise of the industrial economy is felt, to this day, very distinctly in this city and is visible in the way the city-proper suffered a long period of vacancy after the shut-down of many of its industrial plants (primarily steel, though many others which were related to its production). ***

5.) Cleveland is magical. It is proof I think, having lived here but a month, that legitimately phenomenal and inspirational activity is ongoing in cities across the U.S.–regardless of the reputation or stature of these varied urban landscapes. It is strange and engaging and it has an ethos all its own. I recognize that I know but little yet of Cleveland, but I’d bet you anything, it is a city I will soon be proud to call my own.

6.) Cleveland has been active in seeking creative solutions to what were the long-time economic, cultural and social ills that came with the demise of the industrial era. This has, of late, meant that the city is undergoing a kind of rebirth. While most will suggest that this renaissance has been a boon to the city, it is not without its costs. Gentrification, as always, changes the character of neighborhoods and new industries can bring great economic benefits just as they come with devastating cultural costs. I am in the process of trying to suss out just what this particular moment in this city’s development history is doing to its cultural geography.

7.) Clevelanders love to eat, and they eat well. Because of the incredible waves of immigration that came into the city during its industrial heyday (not unlike those that made Buenos Aires so rich a city), and those that sought work in the U.S. long after, you can find cuisine of just about any regional bent. Polish and Ukrainian are something of a mainstay in my neighborhood. But the city boasts a fine ‘Asia Town‘ too. And then, of course, there is the foodie and farm-to-table revival that has made its way to Cleveland for its cheap real estate and proximity to Ohio agriculture, making the city home to some of the finest restaurants (and the cheapest, as far as I can tell) in the U.S.

The point, oh readers, is that Cleveland is, despite its many naysayers, extremely compelling. A good place, indeed, for an itinerant wanderer to land.

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*CLE is the airport code for Cleveland Hopkins International. Said airport is not, however, technically in Cleveland.

**In Los Angeles I was a hardcore east-sider. It has been something of a challenge moving to Cleveland from such a standpoint, given that here I live on the near West side. Angelenos who love me may thusly feel free to send propaganda claiming either West or East side loyalty.

***This means, in part, that I cannot defend the same benefits of sprawl in Cleveland that I was willing to celebrate in Los Angeles. More on this, no doubt, in later posts.

Now is the new (old) urban history

Readers! I have neglected you for far too long. For my absence, I offer my regrets and apologies. These long months of internet silence can someday be counted as archeological evidence that blogs (like humans, languages and machines) cannot so easily deliver on their promises: Noise is always already in the signal, diverting, disrupting, generally destabilizing. Here we are once more though, with feeling (and a snazzy new look). So let’s put the past behind us, shall we?, and remark instead upon the present.

As a means by which to resuscitate the blog and my neglected relationship to its small pool of beloved readers (i.e. you), I give you a brief  summary of my thinking on loving and wandering a city you’ve long known:

I have lived in Los Angeles for the vast bulk of my adult life and, of late, have been spending a good deal of time in neighborhoods, on corners, in buildings that I avoided, ignored or had simply forgotten for some years. Happenstance has had it, however, that some of these dormant domains in my cognitive map of the city have beckoned me back.* The eternal return of the same, I suppose, but such a return offers a nice, if sometimes uncanny, avenue of access to memory and to the ways in which it is so concretely spatial and materially present in the city.**

Spaces make the folks who wander through them aware, in exactly the haptic ‘now’, of a history to which their access is both immediate and distinctly mediated, and to the fictions (some personal, some social) on which we all ground our experience of place. At any moment a wanderer roams a space they confront in the present whatever weird and weighty remembered moments they shared with it, whatever weird and weighty stories they told themselves or were told about it. Place might well be described as the present experience of the environment thick in its presence with the past.

Here’s an exemplary gloss: I’ve had the good luck in the last few weeks to find myself on the rooftop of a building across the street from an apartment in which I used to live. From this rooftop I can see my old apartment, can map from that vantage point a spatial relationship between the place I’m standing, the apartment I lived in visible below, the other spaces of the city I have inhabited or with which I have engaged in some manner, and so on… And my mapping in turn becomes the milieu in which I make my knowledge of me, on that rooftop, looking at the Los Angeles I know and the Los Angeles I am coming to know and the Los Angeles I knew and lost.

If this sounds like philosophical jargon, it might be. But much in the muddy memories I’ve made in Los Angeles*** is linked to the ways I grew here to think about memory itself, about history, and about cities. The urban landscape, maybe all space, won’t hold memory so much as offer it as an immediate and ephemeral marking of the experience of wandering precisely where and when we wander. And all wandering (all experience) is always and only in and of the moment, or better, the millisecond, or better still the now.****

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*Yes, I am aware of the ridiculous amount of alliteration in this sentence. I make no apologies.

**I did it again. See if I care! You’ll see that I don’t.

***”What? She wrote another alliterative sentence?” That’s what you’re thinking. Yeah, dude. She straight did.

****Blame the obscure poetics of this post in its entirety on Itinerant Me’s recent and intense work on the closing chapter of her dissertation. You may either forgive her (me) or despise her (me) according to your disposition and constitution. And, of course, according also to where you are, right now.

Of heat waves

Record summer heat hit Los Angeles this week. So did a handful of small earthquakes.

I felt the first, shortly after 11 at night. I was sitting on my porch, lap-top open before me. The blue-grey glow of its screen fell on my face and flickered when the earth shook.

Such moments in LA are not so much common as part of the small cadre of miraculous phenomenon that pepper a life here. I love this about the city. That the earthquake or the record heat can become something of a skin on you. It belongs, is yours, but sometimes you catch it in a particular light and it still manages to be strange, other.

Such ecologically and geographically grounded markers of what it means to be living in Los Angeles, at this particular moment in time, emerge from the smooth surface of the quotidian and ask that you take note. And we do.

The nights in the middle of the heat waves here are spectacular. Arms and legs exposed to the breath of the city, all signs of the pacific snuggling against its border crushed by barometric pressure, we gather. We meet on porches and in parks, in backyards. We are slower as we walk. Our speech loses its affect. We have trouble performing ourselves with the weight of the heat pressing upon us and so are less able to guard against the world, against others.

I was once walking in the Marigny in New Orleans in deep August. It was very late at night and so muggy hot that the music spilling from open windows seemed, literally, to hang in the air. This week, nights in Los Angeles have felt like  that–thick, sticky.

I love a good heat wave in the right city. I love when the weather, or the shaking earth beneath, changes us, sharpens a moment, shifts the spaces we inhabit just enough to make them new.