The Crater in the Center of Town

A vintage postcard featuring the Palmer House Motel

I stand before the putty-colored monstrosity and wonder: how did the place I love become this? I already knew they’d flattened the Palmer House Motel in Auburn, Nebraska. But I hadn’t known that the new owners intended to replace it with another chain store, another monument to the ways commerce makes every place the same. There’s no sign on it yet, but I recognize the architecture as belonging to Dollar General.

When my truck collapsed beside Highway 75 in February 2020, the Palmer House Motel had provided me an inexpensive room in a strange town when I had nowhere else to crash. That’s not a major personal investment, of course. Anybody hypothetically could’ve done that. The motel’s owners also provided me transportation, recommended food at affordable rates, and took time to make me feel welcome. They didn’t have to do any of that.

Palmer House mattered to me when I had nobody else to rely on. When all the possessions I’d accumulated were somewhere else, and I lacked food or a pillow, they offered a place to sleep, a connection to the world, a way that I could, for one scared and desperate weekend, still be part of the world. Palmer House was part of my life for three days, but those three days were embossed on my brain as a frightening encounter that, with their help, I successfully avoided.

And now they’re gone. No longer physically there, no longer part of the larger community fabric. Instead, there’s another standardized retailer, a place without any sense of local identity. They literally flattened the rolling landscape and made the community conform itself to the chan store’s demands, unlike the motel, which used the texture of the land. Palmer House was part of the community, and the people who worked there also lived there.

Before the Interstate channeled most Nebraska traffic into one centralized corridor, Palmer House offered travelers a connection to the community. Even after most traffic moved thirty miles north of Auburn, Palmer House attracted migrant workers and short-term residents, offering them a local address within walking distance of downtown. It offered people a base they could leave every morning and return to every night, right in the middle of town.

Now, it’s been replaced by commercial anonymity, a building useful but without character. A building people can visit without having any connection, where they transit across the space with ghost-like ephemerality. They aren’t part of the community, and the community doesn’t change them. Dollar General offers no opportunity for introspection or identity, like I received when I was stuck in Auburn. There’s just a vacancy at the heart of town.

The criminally underutilized downtown of Auburn, Nebraska

Auburn generally, and Palmer House specifically, offered a chance to look inside myself. A chance to evaluate my principles, and decide whether I approved or disapproved of my life’s choices. Three days wasn’t time enough to truly understand the community, but the community offered me an opportunity to understand myself a little better. An opportunity that, in my mind, is inextricably connected to a specific place.

Auburn has other motels. A trucker’s motel on the far north side of town, for instance. But, like the dollar store, it’s built on flattened land that ignores the natural terrain. Like the dollar store, it’s an imposition, a place people can duck into and then leave without having to see anything that changes their viewpoint. Palmer House was part of the community; the trucker’s motel is a crater, a concerted absence of local experience.

My experience in Auburn was colored by everything that came before, but also everything that came after. During my “lost weekend” at Palmer House, COVID-19 was making its first appearance in America. I had no idea that this introspective weekend would be my last opportunity to travel more than eight miles from my house for the next fourteen months. That weekend with no car, no phone, limited social contact, was a prelude for everything impending.

I learned important lessons that weekend, but sometimes I wonder whether I learned enough. I find myself drifting back into comfy but meaningless patterns of work, screen staring, and sleep. Before Palmer House was demolished, I’d considered going back, not as a scared and desperate wanderer, but as a seeker, to recapture the moments spent wondering. But, like so many, I waited too long. The place I needed is gone.

How many of us, I wonder, can look to the spiritual refuge we need, and find just another Dollar General in its place?

Affirmative Inaction

Sheryll Cashin, Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America

American race relations rests at a crossroads. While white Americans believe we’ve expunged our Jim Crow legacy, African Americans still recognize opportunities lost to wildly unequal resource allocation. At the heart of this disjunction lies Affirmative Action, Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to proactively redress historical injustice. In today’s putatively post-racial society, with an African American President, do such programs still serve, or hinder, their targeted clients?

Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin manages to straddle both sides of this important debate. Dispassionately scrutinizing the numbers, clearly black Americans bear multi-generational disadvantages that they cannot simply muscle through. Cashin’s analysis resembles a much briefer synopsis of Ian Haney López. But race-based scrutiny overlooks that poor whites face categorically different circumstances than the rich; Cashin writes, “Working-class whites are rarely disaggregated in these debates.”

Cashin sees the linking factor not as race, but poverty. As an educator herself, Cashin focuses on access to postsecondary schooling, which has distinct economic implications. Poor people, even what Cashin calls “low-income strivers,” have systemic barriers to education access (her lengthy demonstration defies abridgement). Lack of educational access has consequences which unspool throughout a citizen’s life. Therefore, Cashin says, poverty trumps race as a situation needing redress.

I’ll buy that. But Cashin’s solution is to focus efforts on geographically localized poverty. Public policy, like zoning regulations and the end of forced busing in the 1990s, have moved America’s poor into close physical proximity. This has racial overtones, admittedly: middle-class neighborhoods are more predominantly white and Asian, while poor neighborhoods are more black and Hispanic. While racial segregation is forbidden today, economic segregation is both legal and widespread.

Thus Cashin’s title: we should solve inequality based on place, not race. Because certain geographic regions have superior access to pre-college tutoring and career planning; because seventy-five percent of students entering America’s most prestigious universities graduated from less than one thousand high schools; because America’s college graduates now live in deep concentration, mentoring rising youth based on proximity, we must privilege geography in dispensing redress. How could anyone possibly disagree?

Easily. Cashin’s solution assumes economic segregation has remained largely constant, and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Sadly, reading Cashin’s well-reasoned argument, I cannot forget what I’ve learned from other authors. Jeff Speck and Brown et al. muster statistics that America’s demography is currently reversing after the 2007 housing bubble collapse. We’re living through the reversal of “White Flight,” and American poverty will soon look very, very different.

From the Great Depression until about the year 2000, those who could afford it abandoned America’s cities, creating new, largely black and Hispanic classes called “the urban poor.” But highly educated, economically mobile young Millennials now want to live within walking distance of work, commerce, and recreation, meaning they’re moving back into cities. Rich, mostly white investors have bought and renovated urban neighborhoods, pricing the poor out of their homes.

In our lifetime, we’re witnessing the biggest reorientation of money and geography since World War II. As dense urban housing becomes high-demand and prices soar, suburban housing values stagnate, even decline in certain regions. Cashin briefly addresses suburban poverty, but doesn’t linger on possibly the biggest counterargument: old neighborhoods, poor but blessed with strong social ties, are scattering outward as suburban rentals become the only housing “urban poor” can afford.

Linking poverty rectification to place assumes that money and geography have a stable relationship. Until recently, that was true, but the post-war cultural conditions that encouraged Levittown-style suburban development have reversed since the millennium, and accelerated since 2007. Geographically based programs would now either become quickly outmoded by events, or require costly new layers of bureaucracy to keep abreast of changing conditions. For obvious reasons, neither option is desirable.

Cashin makes a persuasive case that what we’re doing now no longer rectifies the problem that precipitated it. She musters copious evidence that we must recalibrate our attempts to squelch generational poverty. What we’re doing now, Cashin insists, had brief benefits, but currently only stirs the pot, keeping “low-income strivers” always one school district, one campus visit, or one need-based scholarship away from achieving the life their efforts merit.

Informed readers will have difficulty disagreeing with Cashin’s enlightening set-up. She exposes how, post-Johnson, America’s systemic problem has shifted off race, at least directly, and onto economics. But her suggestions for redress make the common mistake, creating a prior system we can plug into unique situations. She’s trying to solve a statistical problem, not a lived one, and statistics tend to squirm around inconveniently.

The New American Urbanism

Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, & Oliver Gillham, Urban Design for an Urban Century: Shaping More Livable, Equitable, and Resilient Cities

The years from 1950 to 2000 saw massive increases in America’s suburban infrastructure. While our inner cities withered from neglect, anyone who could afford to leave, fled to spacious towns, many hastily erected, where every house had large lawns, and zoning regulations separated housing, work, and commerce. Americans embraced the Levittown model, aided by cheap petroleum and generous government assistance.

But in 2010, for the first time since the Depression, America’s largest cities grew. They outgrew an infrastructure unprepared to handle them, and they grew faster than urban designers had any plans for. For the first time in three generations, Americans want the urban life, and will accept close quarters to achieve it. But America’s urban leaders need to design cities amenable to young, upwardly mobile residents, a semi-lost skill.

Suburbanism, this book asserts, has always been an essentially American phenomenon. Where European and Canadian cities built compactly after World War II, and poorer countries never had resources for car-dependent suburbanism, America embraced spacious postwar utopian ideas regarding space use. That’s why Americans burn nearly a quarter of Earth’s petroleum: because without it, our diffuse cities, with their single-use neighborhoods and looping street layouts, are just too damn big.

Early on, this book quotes Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, whose influence primarily echoed in America, and who championed spacious semi-urbanism’s “towers in a park” model, on why people hate built-up urban streets: “Our hearts are always oppressed by the constriction of its enclosing walls.” But fifty years of history have disproved this claim. Close-build urban streets give public life definition. Shapeless suburbanism alienates people, turning every household into a fortress.

But the Millennial Generation has rejected this suburban pattern. Propelling themselves around cul-de-sacs in hermetically sealed, carbon-burning cars has lost its appeal. Educated young Americans want to live in neighborhoods where home, work, commerce, and recreation co-exist within a few minutes’ walk. And cities which provide this quality of life have unique ability to attract and retain young innovators and knowledge industry workers. Briefly put, young Americans want city life.

Our authors note that a substantial shift in perception happened around 2008: the number of people signing massive suburban mortgages dropped off, while urban downtowns began a measurable resurgence. Owning land matters less than owning opportunity. They avoid assigning reasons, but the conclusion seems inescapable: when housing markets tanked, Americans decided tying their net worth to housing values was foolish. Essentially, the banks torpedoed a half-century of rambling suburban sprawl.

Those communities which build spaces where people want to live, will see economic growth, cultural abundance, and environmental healing in coming years. Those which don’t, won’t. This means rehabilitating existing urban cores, building new cores where none previously existed, and keeping fingers on society’s pulse. Our authors quote the designers behind recent renovations in Pittsburg: “Strengthening and protecting physical characteristics that support identity should be an integral purpose of zoning.”

This move inward will create significant dislocations very soon. Our authors quote statistics that urban neighborhoods will face a shortfall of sixteen million housing units by 2030. New demand will boost prices, driving “urban poor” into suburbs, where housing prices are already collapsing. This reverse ghetto-ism will lock American poor into car-dependent poverty. Unless governments, private developers, and voters act soon, we’ll see a radical realignment of American poverty.

But we have an opportunity, unseen since the Eisenhower years, to realign American society. Our authors provide examples, lushly illustrated, of cities which have rebuilt for pedestrians and mass transit. Former commuter towns have narrowed roads, inserted streetcars, and become desirable destinations. This book offers practical primers on how public-private partnerships, activists, and preservationists are actively reshaping American cities into places people really want to live, right now.

This book isn’t for everybody. Its squarish, two-column format and $85 MSRP reflect that it was written as a textbook. People encountering urban design principles and the necessities of public space use for the first time will find this book intimidating. For those readers, I recommend Jeff Speck’s Walkable City, which this book quotes approvingly. It recasts these authors’ admittedly dense principles in plain English for non-specialists and neophytes.

But for readers already familiar with the debate, this text provides up-to-date statistics, lavishly illustrated examples, and a thorough explication not just of how we could address these problems, but how some cities already have. Architecture students, city councils, and public advocates should familiarize themselves with this book. It provides important keys to building environmentally secure, economically stable cities where people actually want to live.

Swords and Sorcerers on the Sunset Strip

Greg van Eekhout, California Bones

Daniel Blackland, son of wizardry, wants none of his legendary father’s power. He watched the Hierarch of Southern California eat his father’s flesh to steal his power, so Daniel lives outside society, a penny-ante grifter keeping quiet. When a state traitor offers him the chance to burgle the Hierarch’s wizarding storehouse, though, Daniel gets his old gang back together for one last job. He only discovers too late how many lies pretty smiles can conceal.

I ought to hate this book. The author uses so many wheezy fantasy stereotypes that it resembles a genre checklist: the Boy Who Lived, magical genetic engineering pioneered by Jeff VanderMeer, even the apocalyptic confrontation common from Rowling, Tolkein, and every Holy Writ ever. Van Eekhout name-checks every fantasy cliché that ever existed. Yet I stayed up late to finish this book, genuinely concerned about these characters and their conflict. This novel surpasses its boilerplates.

Daniel, our hero, comes from a long line of osteomancers: bone wizards, who extract power from ancient fossils. Unfortunately, the most powerful magic creatures are long extinct, their fossils almost depleted, and the Hierarch has started consuming his subjects to prolong his magically extended reign. If the symbolism sounds pointed, I won’t disagree; on a superficial level, van Eekhout has written a very political novel. But the real allegory runs much deeper, defying flippant summary.

Van Eekhout’s vision of Hollyweird excess, the jagged gulfs between sunny SoCal mythology and high desert reality, suggests he’s deliberately creating the Great American Fantasy Novel. His brisk storytelling, backed by convincingly breezy Los Angeles speech rhythms, suggest a vision more ambitious than yet another sword-and-sorcery adventure. Daniel Blackland’s very existence outside the system threatens existing power structures. Corporations and kings fear his individuality. When society values subservience, van Eekhout subtly declares, originality is treason.

Los Angeles icons, from William Mulholland to Walt Disney, populate this story, their lives artificially prolonged, careers dedicated to upholding the Hierarch’s status quo. (Van Eekhout uses the word Hierarch frequently. You do the math.) This techno-feudal bureaucracy conceals true power: the Hierarch appears only at either end of this novel. By keeping the people entertained, satiated, and confused, this invisible government maintains a pecking order Angelenos cannot question, because it has become completely invisible.

When a rogue agent helps Daniel’s crew infiltrate the Ossuary, the storehouse of bones that keeps the Hierarch alive and enthroned, we realize somebody’s lying. It’s a waiting game to discover who. Ordinary relationships—Daniel’s ability to make friends and truly love—have political implications he cannot see, except in hindsight. Seasoned fantasy readers expect betrayal, conspiracy, and that final, Voldemort-ish confrontation. Van Eekhout delivers every plot point genre readers expect, but in subversive ways.

In a parallel narrative, Inspector Gabriel Argent unearths Daniel’s plan, taking his discoveries to the authorities. Gabriel is everything Daniel is not: magicless, compliant, cozy with authority. But for reasons too intricate to restate, Gabriel finds himself fleeing his state employers while his city burns. Gabriel wants ordinariness, but finds that if he doesn’t rebel, something inside him slowly dies. His desire for a blandly peaceful life seemingly contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Thus, van Eekhout’s message. The cop who can’t remain loyal to forces keeping him subservient and ignorant. The hero who tries to live a normal life, but finds himself pulled inexorably toward something greater. Van Eekhout builds a heroic fantasy around sunny Left Coast mythology, but this isn’t about some alternate California, with wizards brewing bones under the Santa Monica pier. Something important dies, he warns, when loyal citizens submissively refuse to step outside ourselves.

Not that it isn’t also a rollicking fantasy. Van Eekhout spins a heist yarn, with relatably flawed antiheroes keeping barely ahead of unimaginable, but invisible, evil they only partly understand. He dribbles out familiar fantasy tropes, they suddenly upends our expectations, or blindsides us with Poe-level grotesqueries that never become quite ordinary. Readers who don’t share van Eekhout’s anti-authoritarian philosophy can nevertheless enjoy sudden bouts of action, magical confrontations, and plenty of juicily scary monsters.

But van Eekhout isn’t satisfied giving us what we already know. In an era when organized traditionalists apparently fight for the right to serve their corporate overlords, van Eekhout reminds readers that humans exist apart from the machines that grind us. The forces of uniform blandness dominating public life, and the bought-and-paid-for legislators who serve them, want you to shut up. Van Eekhout says we become human only when we rise and break our chains.

Mustang Meadows

H. Alan Day & Lynn Wiese Sneyd, The Horse Lover: A Cowboy's Quest to Save the Wild Mustangs

Career rancher H. Alan Day purchased South Dakota’s failing Arnold Ranch in 1988, expecting to turn it into a cattle operation, like the two ranches he already owned in Arizona and Nebraska. Then he met Dayton “Hawk” Hyde, cowboy activist. Hyde told Day about the wild mustang herds controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, costly animals that needed constant attention and couldn’t run free. Suddenly Day found his mission.

Day constructs his memoir like a classic Western novel: the proving story of a man discovering life’s mission on the land, where all pretensions melt away. Day fights intransigent government bureaucrats, hidebound cowboys, and city suits who believe they can tell country people how to behave. But his love for these confined mustangs keeps Day motivated. Then, when he gets permission for his wild mustang sanctuary, his next battle begins.

People claim to love wild horses, which have historic standing in the American West, besides just being gorgeous animals. Their rearing outlines, with muscular legs and rearing manes, are iconic even to people who’ve never ridden the range. But unlike cattle and sheep, mustangs are economically precarious. While some can be tamed and turned to ranching, many mustangs just hoover prairie grass and anger agriculturalists.

These are the proverbial wild horses that couldn’t drag you away. Mustangs are strong, willful, and spirited. Hard experience has taught them to distrust humans, who often consider them vermin and chase them away, sometimes with guns. Nobody thought Day could domesticate herds numbered in the thousands; Day resolved to prove everyone wrong. The Arnold Ranch, rechristened Mustang Meadows, became America’s first wild mustang refuge.

An adept storyteller, Day mingles autobiography with a holistic description of ranching, as both a business and a personal vocation. He describes his lifelong romance with horses, beginning when his father gifted him an undersized mustang, sized just right for a growing boy’s legs. Day remembers horses’ names, habits and dispositions. He describes them with nearly human qualities, and sometimes with downright heartbreaking poignancy. Horses, to Day, are family.

He also describes moments of remarkable violence that remind us how ordinary people treat animals. Descriptions of capturing mustangs by paralyzing them with gunshots across the spine, or disciplining willful horses by whipping them until they bleed, make the blood run cold. Not everyone loves horses like Day, and these snapshots of stunning inhumanity underline why Day resolved to bring nonviolent techniques to horse ranching.

Day pioneered a technique called “gentling the herd” on cattle adopted onto his Arizona ranch. It involves pressuring cattle to stick close together, reminding them who’s in charge. This involves minimal effort from human ranchers, and allows the animals to remain essentially wild, provided they recognize humans as dominant. But to ranchers accustomed to using force to control and domesticate livestock, “gentling the herd” proved controversial, to say the least.

Worse, Day has to persuade skeptical cowboys to attempt his unorthodox technique on mustangs, much wilder and more ornery creatures than cattle. They have limited time to sand rough edges off 1500 animals and get them onto strange pasture, and several hands insist it can’t be done. Throughout, Day must contend with the one creature more high-strung and volatile than wild mustangs: the cowboys who ride them.

Day admits his technique resembles Monty Roberts’ famous “natural horsemanship” techniques, commonly known as horse whispering. Though he began gentling the herd before Roberts became famous in the mid-1990s, the overlap of techniques is pointed and conspicuous. Perhaps, when times are right, good ideas just bubble forth like water in the desert. One hopes Day’s techniques catch on, because they’re not only more humane, but more environmentally sustainable, besides.

Despite Day’s sometimes technical topics, he never bogs down in jargon or abstruse cowboy-speak. His story has a novel’s dynamic flow, mixing Western horseback action with a family epic and a concise memoir of ranch life. In talking about government wheeler-dealing, innovative animal husbandry techniques, and more, it would’ve been easy for Day to become impenetrably dense, but he doesn’t. His storytelling never loses immediacy through long, hot, horse-filled seasons.

This book will appeal to multiple audiences. Casual readers interested in a compelling memoir or modern Western will find plenty to enjoy. Fellow ranchers interested in lower-cost, ecologically supportable techniques can mine Day’s experiences for useful pointers. This isn’t a niche book just for horse people; it touches hearts and minds across disciplines, even a pointy-headed city slicker like me. This fun, touching, smart book won’t let you go easily.

The Concrete Grocery Blues

The new Kearney Hy-Vee, and its massive concrete parking lot (Kearney Hub)

Readers familiar with the Iowa-based Hy-Vee supermarket chain may think I’d celebrate its arrival in my jerkwater hometown. Hy-Vee runs a similar luxury grocery model that Wegman’s or Dean & DeLuca bring to larger cities, making healthful, sophisticated food available in prior cultural wastelands. And because Hy-Vee runs an employee-owned model, it spends more on workers than investor-owned chains like WalMart, Safeway, and Kroger. What’s not to love?

Plenty, actually. When Hy-Vee’s newest store opened in Kearney, Nebraska, this month, I arrived on opening day and left carrying six grocery bags and a market tracking card. I also left with a queasy feeling about the faceless, geographically indeterminate building and enormous parking lot. Rather than merging into Kearney’s existing community, Hy-Vee paved a cornfield, dropped an anonymous cube building on it, and lit it with halogen and dreams.

This never previously bothered me. But as my wages haven’t kept pace with inflation, as many prairie locations had record-setting high temperatures this spring, and as Nebraska’s economic growth remains a shadow of American aggregate trends, much bothers me that never did before. While Hy-Vee does nothing other chain retailers don’t, its sudden appearance and aggressive growth make it a new locus for my swelling anti-corporate umbrage.

Rather than building near where working Kearneyites live, Hy-Vee chose to locate within loogie-shooting distance of Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart, Menard’s, and the Hilltop Mall. This makes six concrete slab buildings, which could be literally anywhere, surrounded by enough parking to pave Luxembourg, closer together than six lesbians in a Penthouse Forums letter. One starts to wonder what planning genius considered this arrangement beneficial to Kearney’s interests.

Importantly, this strange conglomeration is so isolated that few people could possibly walk there. The nearest housing is a developed region behind the Wal-Mart, dominated by houses on quarter-acre lots, fronting onto looping, Rorschach-inspired streets, which may or may not have sidewalks. Beyond the first street or two, walking anywhere would require massive time investments, besides the extreme aesthetic displeasure of crossing multi-acre parking lots on foot.

That’s if you can walk anywhere. Many real estate developers don’t bother equipping new neighborhoods with sidewalks anymore. Residents drive everywhere, because everywhere is too far to walk; but developers don’t pave sidewalks because nobody uses them. Cause or effect, who can say? Either way, car dependence becomes the norm rather than the exception, walking becomes the refuge of children and the destitute, and responsible driving becomes increasingly impractical.

Find your way without a car. I dare you.

Hy-Vee built amid five enormous parking lots which are almost never full. The parking around big-box retailers and malls generally only gets used on one day, Black Friday; every other day, it sits unoccupied, putting physical distance between people and businesses, and encouraging irresponsible motoring. Yet rather than pooling with this already extant but substantially unused parking, Hy-Vee paved even more parking. Because it needs to be theirs, or something.

Lay aside how parking makes residents more car-dependent. Disregard how big-box stores building on towns’ fringes undercuts community ties. Forget how corporations, to construct essentially interchangeable buildings, must flatten the loess hills that my Nebraska ancestors, and the Indians before them, successfully farmed for ten thousand years. Even without that, these vast concrete tombstones, by their very existence, do manifest harm to the people and the land.

Though poured concrete sets solidly enough to walk on after six or eight hours, the chemical reaction that makes concrete hard continues for fifty years or more. Because that reaction runs on calcium carbonate, it exudes carbon dioxide as a by-product. Thus concrete creates greenhouse gases even without cars. It also doesn’t absorb precipitation or grow trees, so concrete is unbelievably cold in winter, sweltering in summer, and ugly year-round.

So, to reiterate: this new Hy-Vee, by its location, stands aloof from existing commerce. It forces me to burn carbon if I want better groceries. It makes locals even more dependent on cars, which, in a predominantly blue-collar town, isn’t small beer; transportation costs now outweigh housing costs for most Americans. And even without cars, this added concrete does added harm to global climate, just by dint of its existence.

To reach the Kearney Hy-Vee, I must drive four miles, past three supermarkets, two locally owned. (That’s besides groceries from Wal-Mart, Target, and elsewhere.) Though Hy-Vee has Kearney’s best grocery selection, it’s like eating the whole Cracker Jack box to reach the prize: by the time I get there, I feel sick and don’t want the reward anymore. Therefore, good groceries notwithstanding, I cannot return to Hy-Vee.

Democracy of Culture, or, Saving the Old Hometown

A young man with Asian features and 1990s-ish heavy metal swagger sets his guitar case down before a wooden bench. That’s all it takes to claim a spot on the moderately crowded sidewalk. The guitar that emerges has a matte black finish and uncut string ends waving from the tuning pegs. When he sings a mix of originals and covers, perhaps inappropriately loud, his voice has distinct Liam Gallagher qualities.

I’m on Massachusetts Street (“Mass Street”), the heart of downtown Lawrence, Kansas, a college town in the classic sense. Locally owned businesses do admirably selling locally made and major-label clothes, small book and music stores attract customers partly by the cat sleeping on the counters, and aggressive international chains like Starbucks rub shoulders with upstart hometown competitors. A department store sells bespoke suits catty-corner from a head shop selling crystals.

Across from the Oasis wannabe, a pretty woman in mime makeup, with a remarkable ability to stand stock still between sets, makes balloon animals for children who put tips in her jar. Mormon missionaries have occupied all four corners of Mass and Eighth, distributing pamphlets to passersby; yesterday it was the Kansas Green Party. Every Sunday, a scruffy guy with a knit cap waves a “Honk For Hemp” sign nearby.

A popular local bumper sticker proclaims: “Lawrence. 27 square miles of reality surrounded by Kansas.” I know what they mean. The Kansas legislature has recently passed numerous retrogressive measures, including a “Don’t Say Gay” bill and an attempt to regionally nullify the Endangered Species Act. The state’s Tea Party-dominated administration consistently makes attempts to inhibit progress, reject modernity, and willfully engineer a Koch Brothers-friendly libertarian paradise.

But Lawrence feels different. People walk Mass Street, window shopping and tipping street performers, chatting amiably, sipping homemade root beer floats from biodegradable plastic cups. Women in hijabs and men in kippahs stroll graciously, smiling around, completely ordinary in this street scene. Sitting with a book and coffee, I watch an attractive young couple walking hand in hand. They’re mixed race, but same sex.

And everywhere, people make or consume culture. Some, like Liam Lite over here, do it guerilla-style, grabbing his place and belting out Clinton-era classics. Others partner with fixed establishments. One bookstore features a grand piano, encouraging local artists to reserve time. A local venue hosts live music, poetry slams, and occasional eloquent speakers. Many restaurants have designated spaces, intermittently used, absolutely perfect for poets and one-(wo)man bands.

Lawrence zoning laws shape how businesses interact. Many stores that normally anchor enclosed shopping malls, like JC Penney and Kohl’s, instead occupy freestanding buildings. Businesses accustomed to attracting large crowds generally build on Iowa Street, an imposing miles-long stretch of concrete parking and prefab steel structures. Customers who prefer vetted commerce in standardized chains keep safe by doing business along Iowa’s impersonal but familiar storefronts.

Mass Street attracts businesses that enjoy rubbing shoulders. Restaurants encourage sidewalk seating, permitting customer service in proprietary space directly melding into public trafficways. Chain stores and local shops overlap; Mrs. Fields shares a back wall with a hometown t-shirt screen printer, while Starbucks and locally owned La Prima Tazza stare down across the street from each other. The heart of Mass Street resembles a pedestrian mall, and remains busy year-round.

This public companionability encourages buskers, street theatre, and other democratic culture. People don’t need street performers: Mass Street’s business district is bounded by Liberty Hall on the north and the Granada on the south, sizeable theatres that attract national-grade performers, from Gordon Lightfoot and Patty Griffin to Haim and “Weird Al” Yankovic. Yet this shared public space apparently reminds locals that they can create culture, not just buy it.

Many Midwestern cities and states lament the “brain drain,” outward migration of ambitious young residents. How, they wonder, to keep potential innovators and entrepreneurs from fleeing to lucrative coastal cities to find better jobs? Repeatedly, these communities respond by authorizing newer malls and big-box chain retailers. But while these actions arguably advance communities’ commercial prospects, they privatize formerly public space and reduce opportunity for resourceful guerilla innovation.

Like Austin, Texas, or Greenwich Village, Lawrence has taken the opposite tack. Commerce happens openly, not in hermetically sealed, climate-controlled boxes. Any company can buy into Lawrence’s economy, but they must honor Lawrence culture. And as Lawrence proves, money and culture travel together. Street guitarists encourage commerce, and commerce attracts street performers. Money and art serve the people, not vice versa. And Lawrence feels like someplace real life happens naturally.


See Also:
One Possible Cure For Small Town Malaise

The Poor Side of Paradise

Kristiana Kahakauwila, This Is Paradise: Stories

When the last story in Kristiana Kahakauwila’s debut collection described a rancher coming to grips with his sexuality, I had the same thought you probably did: “Brokeback Mountain!” Just as Annie Proulx’s collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories ended with that classic novella, Kahakauwila caps her book with a similar (but not identical) long story. Kahakauwila clearly aims to be Hawai’i’s Annie Proulx.

It’s a noble goal, one she mostly accomplishes. Hawai’i has a flavor distinct from Wyoming, more diverse, less laconic, but a character uniquely Hawaiian nonetheless, and Kahakauwila brings it out. Early stories wobble slightly as she apparently attempts to please too broad an audience, but she finds her feet, and depicts not only contemporary Hawai’i’s complex culture, but the different strata within that culture.

Like most Native Hawaiians, Kahakauwila was born elsewhere. In racially stratified Hawai’i, Natives live at the very bottom, and few can afford the islands’ astronomical prices. Most leave for better work and affordable housing elsewhere. But like Irish expats or Rastafaris longing for homeland, Kahakauwila returned and lived in her homeland for some time. She just couldn’t stay.

These six stories reflect Kahakauwila’s struggles with insidership and identity. Her homeland’s most prosperous residents were overwhelmingly born elsewhere, and those born locally often must leave “paradise” to gain marketable skills; too many never return. Pidgin, the islands’ distinctive musical patois, is a proud identity marker, but also a badge of poverty. Unlike Indians, Native Hawaiians don’t even have reservations to call their own.

“Wanle,” the story of a mixed-race Maui woman’s strained relationship with her own people, probably plays this most explicitly. The title character wants revenge for her father, a cockfighter who challenged his subculture’s leadership and paid with his life. But Wanle also romances “The Indian,” a Native American philosopher who tries to guide her out of that life. Wanle can’t be herself and her father at the same time.

“The Road to Hana” features a couple driving to one of Maui’s most fabled ancient sites. He’s white, but was born in Honolulu; she’s Native, but born in Nevada. Their complex, committedly non-confrontational banter conceals a subtext of feud over which gets to call themselves “real” Hawaiian. Their conflict boils over when they rescue a stray “poi dog,” only to discover it’s filthy with fleas.

Kahakauwila’s title story features a panoply of voices, self-identified only as “we,” the women of Waikiki. Hotel maids, hard-bitten surfers, professional women, the unseen people whose sacrifices make the legendary tourist paradise possible. A naive white woman’s attempts to fit in lead only to catastrophe, forcing the locals to re-evaluate what makes them insiders, and why they keep certain people out.

This creates a strange dynamic, where powerlessness becomes a badge of honor, and we belong to our people because outsiders have made us foreigners on our homeland. Such stories comprise a major share of contemporary American literature. Whether Cormac McCarthy’s tales of Western alienation or Sherman Alexie’s reservation life epics, American literature today is primarily a story of division between power and identity.

Each story uses its own terms to investigate the same basic questions from new angles: what makes somebody “really” Hawaiian? Who stayed truest to themselves, those who remained in Hawai’i, or those who left? What does “local” citizenship mean in a state where the best land and best jobs belong to off-island corporations? What price do locals pay for their long-held cynicism, the only tool that keeps them together?

And perhaps most important, what language do you use to write a book like this? The working-class Hawaiians populating Kahakauwila’s stories speak Pidgin, a creole of every language that ever did business in Hawai’i. It has its own grammar and vocabulary, often incomprehensible to outsiders, with audible traces of English, Japanese, Portuguese, and Hawaiian, among many influences.

Other writers have attempted poetry and prose in Pidgin—Lois-Ann Yamanaka comes to mind. Always, authors must decide whether to go whole-hog with Pidgin’s musical insularity, or strip it down for English-speaking audiences. Kahakauwila chooses the bilingual route, writing dialog in Pidgin and exposition in English. She’s chosen an outsider audience for her stories of insidership, and thus serves as her own translator.

Mark Twain said every American town should have a novelist to record the distinct and unique language of each place. Kristiana Kahakauwila, an outsider in her homeland, highlights that language, in that arrangement, is almost an afterthought. Every place deserves its own novelist to record the exclusive patterns of thought which only language makes visible.

London—the Promise, the Dream

With the Olympics coming, the eyes of the world will turn to London this summer. But they will not turn to the real London; they will turn to a deliberately designed confection that will come down when the games leave town. Real people will continue to live in the city, sweeping streets and driving cabs and acting in theatres, servicing tourists, and teaching schools. London will continue being a real human city.

Canadian-born journalist Craig Taylor, who has adopted London as his own, looks at the real city in Londoners. Not the street maps or the tourist landmarks, but the people who walk those streets. He follows the people—the prestigious and the humble, the wealthy and the workaday—and lets them tell their own stories. And those stories really uncover the sparkling human beauty that lies beneath the Tourist Bureau veneer.

Ranging from a few lines to several pages, the stories Taylor gathers emphasize the scope of a city that draws people with visions of upward mobility. Dreamers, like the business student or the ex-convict or the expatriate, who strive to build new lives. The rapper, the photographer, the teacher, who try to leave something bigger behind them. The civil engineer, the barrister, the driving instructor, who just want to build a better London.

Some of the stories are remarkably revealing. Though known internationally as a financial powerhouse, a floor broker reveals that “Londin” is a stratified mess that reduces its citizens to mechanical drudges. A South Bank dominatrix describes the magnitude of subcultures that percolate under the surface of urban anonymity. Two bus operation specialists reveal the effort necessary to keep a city of millions thriving.

My favorite story is told by Sarah, a South London “skipper”—what Americans would call a “dumpster diver.” But as she lays out her life story, she actually reveals the life of a transsexual as the son of immigrants with old-world values. The contradictory pulls between urbane British modernity and the continuity of culture lie under most of what Taylor says about London. Dumpster diving is only part of a much wilder story.

And that is, beyond a doubt, the most important message Taylor gives us. Despite its millenia of history and its grand Gothic architecture, London exists very much in the present tense. People come to the city to shed their history and become new, and because of that, the city constantly reinvents itself. Unlike outlying Cotswalds crofters’ villages and Welsh hay farms, London does not pass its culture on to the next generation.

Those who, like me, imagine stepping outside our lives and remaking ourselves in a city like London can read a book like this and imagine. Whether we hope to follow through and learn from those who went before, or we decide this isn’t really the path we prefer, Taylor’s narrative speaks to anyone who has dreamed big. In that way, it’s not really about London; it’s about the part of ourselves that wants something more.

Do not expect to find maps, directions, and highlights for outsiders. Taylor does not care about travel and tourism. He does not try to teach us the parameters of pub culture. (If you want that, I enjoyed this year’s Fodor's England.) Instead, Taylor would rather create a biography of a city that refuses to stand still. His style and sweep make it come to life; Taylor’s London is a place we can imagine immersing ourselves in. We could walk to the corner, the workplace, or the store, and meet these people. London is so very real.

Taylor’s London is also more. It’s the heart of the dreams we all carry. The prerelease press pack compares Taylor’s book to American oral historian Studs Terkel, which is fair. Like Terkel, Taylor celebrates the people who turn the wheels, not the people who reap the benefits of the turning. But I would also compare him to historians like A.L. Morton and Howard Zinn, writers of “history from below.” Like them, Taylor believes that life happens in the streets, in the shadows, not in the spotlight of public acclaim.

This is no small book. Running over four hundred pages and over eighty interviews, Taylor takes readers on a real journey, not a package tour. But we don’t want a package tour, sanitized, with all the hard edges sanded off. Like a real visit to a strange city, Taylor gives us the pleasure of getting lost, seeing amazing new sights, and making our own discoveries. And what we find more than justifies the trip.