It's exam here at the good ole U. of C. That means I have to crank out term papers that I really don't give two shits about. Except my Urban Sociology term paper, that one I actually will enjoy thinking about. Thank God that I only have to take two more history classes ever again. I am sick of it. I realized yesterday that since I am going to fulfill the last six credits of history that I need with a Senior Seminar on the urban underclass taught by the ever-amazing Nikki M. Taylor, Ph.D., that means that I only have to write one more history paper ever!!! Hooray!
I checked a book out of the UC library yesterday on Historical Sociology about the 70's. I am hoping that it will explain to me what happened to my parents and relatives in that decade, since they apparently thoroughly enjoyed it and arrived in the 80's a few brain cells shy of a full load. There was a ton of cultural shit going on there with my kinfolk that I really don't understand at all. Some strange combination of street drugs, Eastern mysticism, deindustrialization, a vague anti-government sentiment, and personal indulgence as spirituality. I have been reading a lot about the sixties and seventies lately and I am totally unable to figure out how my parents and their siblings totally missed all the amazing ideas and social and political movements of that time but totally caught the drugs, music, and fashion trends. I guess that's what the lack of a basic intellectual curiosity or college education does to people. Also I want to understand why as a child my mother variously told me that (1) the government is watching us through our TV (2) Barney the Dinosaur is part of a plot to make children like reptiles so that lizard aliens can easily conquer the earth (3) Federal Income Taxes are an unconstitutional conspiracy (4) the government is about to collapse any day, money will become worthless, and therefore we have to learn to grow our own food. She also lived on salad and tofu for many years and got really into Transcendentalist Meditation and went to the TM institute in Kansas or wherever that was founded by the Maharishi. The 70's must have been a good time I guess. She knew somebody that knew Andy Kaufman and has friends that travel between dimensions and read people's minds.
I am hoping that historical sociology turns out to be more what I thought I was getting into with straight history, namely examining the ways that culture has changed in the past. So I'll have to check that out. I also learned that Urban Sociology rocks this quarter. It does all the things I was trying to do with Urban History and Urban Geography, but it 's main focus is social inequality. Same subject matter, different focus.
My professors and the McNair program are urging me to go immediately to grad school after I finish my sentence at U.C. They are mostly steering me towards programs like Harvard and places like LA, New York, and Chicago. Somehow the part of my personality that really feels at home walking barefoot through the woods with my dog, or collecting other people's garbage in a beat-down truck has apparently been lost on them. I have a really hard time imagining myself living in a huge city. I always wanted to own a few acres, keep chickens, grow my own food, and have room to work on old cars and build art projects. I feel like Cincinnati is as big of a city as I could function in. I have been to New York and Boston and I really didn't like 'em. The money and frenzy there were really surreal to me. I grew up in a world where it was rude to not wave to passing motorists drivin' home from work. I do like living in a city because I meet other people who care about learning, read books, and are open minded. I am glad that I don't work with people who want to be in the KKK anymore, but I miss the relaxed pace of rural life a lot. I would hate living someplace that was really sped up. I feel like my life in Cincinnati is pretty fast already.
Also I would hate being at a really elite grad school. I am reaching my limits on the number of overprivileged and arrogant young undergrads I can be around right now, and I'm at a state school in a relatively unimportant city. Princeton or UCLA might make me want to jump off a cliff or go postal on a room full of trust fund cases. I am so immersed in mainstream, middle-class, American normalcy it is oozing into my pores. I fight it desperately, but it still gets to me. I wish I had the time just to hang out with down-to-earth people. Hillbillies and rednecks have many faults as cultural groups, but pretentiousness is not among them. I wish I could say the same for my classmates. I also miss making art and hanging out with social deviants all the time.
I am contemplating buying a big abandoned house around the corner from my place and founding some sort of artists/weird people colony/co-housing type arrangement. I have a lot of friends who I think would dig it. But then if I'm grad school bound it wouldn't make sense to invest in real estate here. I feel conflicted and poorly.
I like Cincinnati mostly. It is pretty down to earth, relatively inexpensive, and has some pretty gritty places. I like it that we have abandoned houses and factories all over the place. You can drive through the postindustrial wasteland and do 180's and throw beer bottles at gutted warehouses. From my point of view all that makes it a lot easier for me to live like an urban hillbilly/bohemian on the cheap. I could buy up a few acres in the inner city here and probably get away with having farm animals, and definitely get away with stacking up dismembered cars in my yard. I could never get away with that in Boston or San Francisco. We have a lot of blue-collar people who just want to survive, and I identify with that.
Cincinnati has history, and roots. I like it that I live in a city that clings tenaciously to a nickname it was given in the nineteenth century that is now totally inaccurate. Longfellow called our fair town the "Queen city of the West". That was when Oklahoma was Indian territory, Las Vegas was a dusty water hole, and no one had dreamed of Phoenix having pro sports teams, much less being a city. Not only is Cincinnati no longer any sort of urban royalty, but we are no longer even in the Western United States. But that's Cincinnati: insular, nostalgic, conservative, and backward-looking. The conservatism is lame, but I grew up with it so I expect it. The historicism is pretty cool though. We have a whole neighborhood of abandoned breweries, the largest tract of nineteenth-century Italianette buildings in the country, and the oldest pro baseball team and professional fire department in the country.
Over-the-Rhine was nominated for the National Trust for Historic Preservation's 11 Most Endangered Places List in 2006.
The National Trust's Plea to Save OTR in 2006:
http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/midwest-region/over-the-rhine-neighborhood.html
We were a city of movers and shakers when Europe was busy colonizing Africa and people speculated about whether horseless carriages would ever catch on. Our city, and its worldview, were conceived in the Victorian era. This means that we have a lot of pretty old buildings that are now falling down in interesting ways, but it also means that we live in a stew of dangerous and ugly ideas, some of which have been made illegal since the Queen City's heyday. Cincinnati is famous for its amazing racial inequality and tension. According to 2002 U.S. Census data we are the sixth most segregated city in the nation. Being a student of sociology, geography, and history (and a class-conscious anti-racist white man) this of course troubles me. However there is plenty to study here.
Cities that are growing rapidly - or even important - in the early twenty first century are much different than Cincinnati. They different aesthetically and geographically because they often have massive issues with sprawl, horrendously high cost-of-living, and gentrification that threatens to devour large swaths of the urban realm. I am frightened by all of these things.
Sure there are awesome vegan restaurants in San Francisco, Boston has great public transit, and it never snows in Florida. Portland has great music and cool streetcars that urban planners in Cincinnati are jealous of. Chicago has a great job market for young professionals. D.C. has scores of bars for yuppie nightlife on Capitol Hill. New York is the cultural and economic capitol of the Western hemisphere. Gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and allergy sufferers (like myself) find miraculous respite from their symptoms in the Arizona desert. Political lefties and eco-hipsters move to the West Coast where they find a surprisingly entrenched culture of massive liberal dissent that is decades old. Beach junkies move to the ocean and all the stoner hippies I know want to move to Denver right now for some reason. I guess it must be the mountains and the skiing or something.
But who wants to move to Cincinnati?
Pretty much no one. We have a slight immigration of foreign students here for the U.C. medical and engineering programs. We have a relatively small Mexican immigrant enclave and a community of Africans, mostly Wolof-speaking Senegalese. I used to know some Bosnian refugees. But these are all basically people who would go anywhere they could make a living wage and eat three meals a day. Are Americans moving here? Not really, unless you take a big-money job working for Procter and Gamble and they then pay you to move here. Actually, the reputation of the city is apparently making it hard for P&G to recruit for their professional workforce. The proposed solution to this right now is the massive gentrification of Over The Rhine by Center City Development Corporation, a front company run by local corporate execs that the city has abdicated urban planning responsibility to. I find this a stunningly clear example of Harvey Molotch's ideas about The City as Growth Machine. For readers who aren't into sociological theory, basically his idea is that cities are run by rich people and continuously reshaped by them in ways that make the rich richer and screw over all the poor folks.
http://www.3cdc.org/content.jsp?sectionId=10
Cincinnati's lackluster image has its pros and cons.
On the good side it is cheap: you can buy a small 2-bedroom house in my neighborhood for about $20,000 right now. You can also ride the bus for a dollar and parking is not really hard to come by anywhere in the city, except UC campus - and then only during business hours. You can expect that after you have lived here five years you will see someone you know pretty much any time you go out in public. Cincinnati has a great public library, a research university, and an Art Museum full of the kind of paintings that were once prized by railroad barons who were aping European nobility. It's not especially dangerous, although we do have our ghettos. People may not be super-friendly but they are also not especially harried.
The downside to this situation is that the city is mind-blowingly conservative. Personally I think it has something to do with the cultural psychology of the demographic majority's ancestry. I am talking about hard-core German Catholic peasantry here. The kind of people who believed in rules out the ass, intense discipline, obedience to authority, damn hard work, thriftiness, and generally being uncreative and dogmatic. I feel that I can make these judgements as I am about 2/3 German. (1/3 hillbilly.) That's the vibe I get from my culturally German grandparents anyways. My paternal grandmother keeps a picture of the pope on her dresser and my grandparents remember relatives whose thick German accents were barely intelligible to them.
Cincinnati is famous for its stick-in-the-mud conservatism. Mark Twain apparently joked that he wanted to be here when the world ended because it wouldn't happen here for ten more years. (Or something like that.) We only adopt new ideas when everyone else in the world has already accepted them for years. We tend to like things that not only not-cutting-edge, but pretty friggin' mundane. Its a tough place to make a living as an artist, actor, or musician and Richard Florida's Creative Class people are generally bored out of their minds here.
But what the hell it's home, it's cheap, and you can get really awesome goetta and cheese omelette's at 3 am. And there's great urban decay if you're into that.
No comments:
Post a Comment