Building the better Main Street -part 2

Urban and town planers in America have come to rediscover the value of "walkable" space. Getting away from the total dependence on the automobile isn't only ecologically sound but people find it's really pleasant to have a community that's accommodate walking and biking. Once established walking and biking in town doesn't need much in the way of promotion.

The future of Main Streets in America is providing arts, culture and entertainment. Things that the suburbs don't provide. It's not enough to just have the venue space -like any other product it has to marketed. One of the best ways to market a location is go Hollywood. A movie could be the best possible advertisement to tell the rest of the world your hometown exists.  

You would think a city as beautiful as Salzburg Austria would not need to advertise. They have an historic castle, the birth home of Motzart, and even casino that would be a perfect setting for a James Bond film.

But thousands of tourists every year come to see the town where The Sound Of Music was filmed. The gazebo, where Liesl sings Sixteen Going On Seventeen is as popular as any other attraction in Salzburg.

It would be cynical say the hills are alive with sound of money but the 1965 film is the gift that keeps giving to Salzburg. One thing that I found out first hand is that the song Edelweiss is not a traditional Austrian folk tune -nor is it the country's national anthem. Austrians tend to be good natured and polite but they will remind you that the song was written by Oscar Hammerstein specially for the movie.

 King's Crossing Station is to London what Grand Central Station is ti New York City. It's an historic building that dates back to 1852, a major transportation hub and it's part of a world class city filled with museums, theaters and entertainment. But add to it the magic of Harry Potter and platform 9 3/4 becomes a destination people purposely come out to see.

 

If you're not a teenage girl, aspiring Goth or a fan of melodramatic vampires than you might not know about but the town of Forks in Washington state. It became famous as the backdrop for the Twilight movies. Forks had always catered to tourists because it's just outside of  Olympic National Park. The area was known for it's sports fishing and hiking trails through the Hoh rainforest but all that's now been eclipsed. Before the Twilight movies Forks expected to see about 10,000 tourist a year but by 2010 that grew to over 70,000 -and that's more visitors than you can shake a wooden stake at.







The 1972 movie Deliverance was hard edge thriller that to this day still makes people nervous when they hear banjos in the forest. For the people along the Chattooga River it was the beginning of a multi-million dollar white water rafting industry. Prior to 1974 and the success of the movie the Chattooga River was not protected from development.









                                           
William Wallace, the first hero Scottish resistance against English rule was either immortalized or exploited for the movie Braveheart. No matter how wrong the screen writers got the history, no can argue that the attendance to William Wallace's monument double after the release of the movie in 1995.  

 

It was Steve McQueen's first feature movie and a surprise sleeper hit  that has become a genre classic. It was filmed in Phoenixville PA and  for the last several years in the middle of July the entire town celebrates Blobfest. It's a weekend of music, street fairs and 1950's style science fiction / monster movie style entertainment. Of course there is a screening of The Blob.





After the movie there is a reenactment of the movie scene where the towns people stampede out of the Colonial Theater to escape from the Blob inside. It's all good fun that brings people to Phoenixville.  

One good event can inspire many more. Phoenixville has been able to capitalize on its past to help make it thriving center of commerce.

I'm not sure there's a way to empirically quantify the cool factor of having a movie made in your hometown but it's plain to see people want to be in places where extraordinary are happening.

What's The Blob worth to Phoenixville? I'm told it priceless.



 

Science Fiction for the other gender

Science Fiction is usually seen as an bastion of nerdy maleness. Men write it and boys of all ages read it. As I was cleaning the around the house I had found fifteen to twenty paperback books of Sci-fi. If I hadn't mentioned it before, I'm a hoarder and I need to pass on things before I get buried under them.

One of my sons has mockingly call me Smaug, the dragon from Lord Of The Rings that sits on his pile of treasure and would never think of having a yard sale. Anyway I gave that box of books to a single mom who has two sons of her own. Her oldest son is just the right age for a total emergence into the genre. As I said to the youth "let this rot your brain and inspire you at the same time".

Later on, we had a good rolling conversation on how and why science fiction became such an XY chromosome thing. You have action, adventure and cool gadgets; plus science fiction's ascending golden age was the 1950's when only guys were picked as astronauts. Another friend wanted to know if there was anything I could recommend for her daughter.   

Through Middle School and High School I lived off of science fiction and read a lot of Andre Norton. Most of her books span the pre-teen to adult market, all her stories are very accessible . She's most famous for The Witch World books, one of the first successful science fiction fantasy  franchises. Andre Norton was very prolific and is sometimes compared to Marrion Zimmer Bradley, now I'm trying to stick with authors I've actually read. I was introduced to Marion Zimmer Bradley's books back in the 1970's by a woman who was also into Ayn Rand -it was not happy event and sad to say out of that negative association I never looked further into Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Octavia Butler is one of those rare science fiction writers that bridges the genre to mainstream fiction. I've heard it said that the best science fiction uses an exaggerated future to examine the past. Her book The Kindred is her most famous and if you take out the element of time travel it's one of the most grimly haunting depictions of slavery ever. It's not a book for younger teens. Once I hear Octavia Butler in a radio interview, her deep, wise and almost other worldly voice still sticks in my mind.

Ursula LeGuin is the only person to win both the Hugo and Nebular Awards in two consecutive years. She is probably best known for the science fiction classic The Lathe Of Heaven -a story where a man's dreams alter the course of reality. 

Women writers seem to have a different spin on the world. Women have no problems writing solid credible male characters just as many men have written truly believable and memorable female characters. Maybe that fact alone is good to know that men and women can have equal talents but different outlooks.

As part of that conversation we also talked our favorite science fiction stories. Mine was a short story, by Robert Heinlein, The Green Hills Of Earth. Not to be a spoiler, I'll just say it's about true courage and maybe how history embellishes the story afterwards.

Robert Heinlein was a career naval officer and very staunch conservative (read Starship Troopers) but he was also an exceptionally decent man. Once Phillip K Dick asked him for a loan (PKD was notoriously bad with money), Heinlein didn't talk politics or get smugly superior. He just gave him money and said "pay me when you can".     
The best things about science fiction is the idea that the imagination has no boundaries, and the future is out there waiting for us. I'm happy because I got to recycle my old books and put them in the hands of the next generation. It's kind of a gamble because most kids will only read a fraction of all the books they're given but match up the right book with the right child -well that's magic.

Please feel free to comment or send me your favorite sci-fi tittles.

Building the better Main Street

Nothing seems more quintessentially American than Main Street, European towns and cities have their piazzas, fountain squares and former Medieval walls and towers. The America Main Street is the product of an open town, a location that never had to be walled in for its own protection, because very few battles in North America ever involved siege warfare. Even during America's colonial history, farmers usually did not live in town and commute to their fields. Once the Native Americas were subdued or push out of the frontier the farmers rushed in to fill the vacuum; they built their houses on the farm and only came to town when they had to. The American town became the outpost of commerce and more of a place for people to meet at than to live in.   

Main Street evolved out of the technologies of the industrial revolution and nearly died with the development of mass produced automobiles, paved roads and cheap gasoline. This made life in the suburbs possible for the middle class and created an opportunity for large retailers to build the shopping mall and big box stores away from Main Street. Lower prices, free parking and the fact that the middle class had moved out of town totally change the location of where people did their business.

So? Where is the most visited location in the United States?  

That's right -Main Street Disneyland. And every Disneyland Park has a Main Street. It does not matter what attractions you visit at any of the parks, eventually everyone is drawn to Main Street. That fact hasn't escaped the community planners at Disney.

Outside of Disney World in Orlando Florida is the town of Celebration.

The town of Celebration was conceived and build by Disney corp. Seen as return to small town values in a safe and walkable community. Some critics call it "The Stepford Wives" of planned communities but almost all of the 8,000 residents who live there, like it there. As one person said "nothing much bad happens in Celebration but then nothing much spontaneous happens there either".  

In Celebration the car is not king and parking is difficult to come by. The housing lots are purposely small and every house is built with a porch. One feature that universally comes up is how easy and safe it is to walk or bike in Celebration. Like any other planned community all the residents have to follow the rules of a homeowners association. Such associations regulate and restricted almost anything that can be seen from the sidewalk. This includes any outside decorations, the color of the curtains, wind chimes, political signs. I find this very restricting but for the people in Celebration they find it liberating they don't have to drive everywhere for everything. A little later on I want to get back to the idea of "walkable space".  

This is an picture from 1952 of a real small town in America. In past posts I mentioned that I live near two towns in Pennsylvania, Pottstown and Phonixville. Both towns were once blue collar work-a-day towns, dependent on heavy industry and manufacturing. About 30 years ago the steel mills in both towns closed and practically every other manufacturer packed up and left. As the cost of transportation went down many towns and industrial centers lost their economic advantage.

Both towns suffered tremendously but Phoenixville has recovered and Pottstown is still in a downward spiral. The two places are less than 10 miles (15 km) apart and if anything Pottstown is the larger community with more potential resources. Why the big difference?

I think it all come back to walkable space. One of the great cliches of the suburbs is that they are boring -but like all cliches it has some ironic truth to it. Many of my neighbors are busy all week, do the yard work and chores on Saturday and it's church and football on Sunday. Phoenixville has capitalized on people's need to be social. 

About twenty years ago Phoenixville tried to save it downtown shopping district on Bridge Street by promoting it as "Antique City" . There were around a dozen second hand shops that opened and they were a modest success.

At that same time and almost totally under the radar a non-profit group took over and began to renovate the Colonial movie house, making it an art house theater. 

Then Jane Tucker opened up the Steel City Coffee House. It wasn't just a cafe but a venue for live music.

It took time for the Colonial and Steel City to establish themselves but just after a new restaurant or two came to Bridge Street it was suddenly like a flood gate opened. In five years over two dozen new businesses  came to a four block section of Bridge Street and every second hand shop eventually closed up and moved away.

My theory is the most important segment of the market is twenty-something adults. Twenty-something adults are not saving up for their retirement, they're looking to be in a relationship. Any relationship starts of with three dates and twenty-something adults are willing to spend money on a date. If your town's Main Street has at least three nice places to go on a date, it will attract those young adults. And those twenty-something adults will attract everyone else because other age groups like being around young attractive and vibrant people.

Now look at other towns. What is on their Main Street? If it can be summed up with something like a hot dog vendor, a dollar store and a smoke shop -well then it's safe to assume this is a dying town. You're probably not interested in walking that street.

The future of small and medium towns in America is entertainment, arts and culture. It's providing a walkable space where people from the suburbs can go and experience things, instead of just killing time watching TV or shopping on-line. 

Guy Fawkes -the man of the hour

One of those holidays that really confuses me is Guy Fawkes Day though it also reaffirms my faith in human nature -that people are always looking for any excuse to take a day off and have a party.

Guy Fawkes was a Catholic in a country that in the 1600's was deathly afraid of it's sizable Catholic minority. The Anglican Church was the state religion that broke away from Papal control almost for the sole purpose of getting King Henry the VIII a divorce in 1534. It was really a battle of who had more control over England, the King or the Pope in Rome. There were other political considerations too but when King Henry confiscated all the property of the Catholic Church in England and redistributed a lot of it to his friends and allies, that meant there would be no simple reconciliation short of war.

Spain lost its chance in 1588 to invade and conquer England in the name of the Pope. The new Protestant nobility felt it was under siege and saw any Catholic as a security risk -much the same way as many Americans thought about their Muslims neighbors after 9-11. Under Elizabeth I there were a number of heavy-handed attempts to convert or eliminate Catholicism in England. One law was the Recusancy Act of 1593, which meant if you did not go to your local Anglican Church every Sunday you would be fined and jailed.

The Recusancy Act was one reason why Guy Fawkes was part of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to blow up Parliament in 1604. Out of the 13 conspirators Guy Fawkes is the one we remember because he was captured on November 5th guarding several tons of gunpowder in the basement of the Parliament building. Parliament voted this day should be celebrated "for their deliverance" . As part of the legacy of the event, a century and a half later American political philosophers look at the Gunpowder Plot as an example of what happens when the state and religion interfere with each other.

Another legacy of Guy Fawkes is how people recycle historical images. The Occupy Movement has made the Guy Fawkes mask a ubiquitous symbol of resistance. Even the Tea Party in America has embraced the image of Guy Fawkes, though the Tea Party has pretty much the opposite agenda of the Occupy Movement.

Catholics in England did not have full citizenship until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. This reform didn't come out of altruistic sentimentality. In the early 1800's England was entering the industrial age full force and suffering a brain drain of talent; many Catholic mechanics, engineers and skilled laborers were leaving England for the much more religiously tolerant United States. These expatriates helped jump start the industrial revolution on the other side of the Atlantic.

It's funny how today is Guy Fawkes Day and tomorrow is Election Day in United States. Election Day is not exactly a holiday here, God forbid that workers should have a day off to vote. Even in nation wide Federal elections voting is controlled by the states. The rules for who can vote, how they vote and if they need to show a picture ID varies from state to state.

Voting is one most important acts a citizen can participate in. The principal of "one man, one vote" makes the poorest equal to the richest and it demonstrates that the power of
political consensus is greater than the force of dictatorship.




This presidential election is has been very negative and nasty. I have neighbors ready to start throwing punches at each other. The rhetoric is shrill and people get threatened for posting anything that questions either major party or the narrative they are trying to present. It's politics in action and as frayed as the tempers are right now things will return to normal.

But then again isn't that part of what elections are all about? People don't always make rational decisions with there heads. People vote based on a sense of affiliation and shared values. One of paradoxes of human behavior is how many people will vote against their own economic interests to elect a candidate that they can emotionally relate to. 

In short whoever wins there will be plenty of sore losers questioning the legitimacy of the vote.

As a joke one friend has suggested making investments in guns and ammunition. He's not expecting an armed uprising -if anything like the election of 2008 nothing too much is likely to happen. But back in 2008 when Obama was elected a rumor went around that Obama planned to restrict gun rights and even confiscate guns from private citizens. Nothing was further from the truth but millions of gun owners stocked up on extra weapons and ammunition.

One example is a neighbor down the road from me. In 2008 he was very much against an Obama presidency. He felt the world was coming to an end and for him things were pretty bad. He had inherited his father's business, which was a sock factory that was going bankrupt. Wal-Mart had found a cheaper supplier in China and when I say cheaper I mean cheaper by lees than a couple of tenths of a cents per dozen socks delivered -the business is that cut throat. In the end my neighbor lost his house, sold most of his possessions but still scraped enough money to buy two AR-15's, two Chinese made AK-47's (the Chinese AK-47's are supposedly the easiest to illegally convert to full automatic) and two 9mm Glock pistols. For each gun he purchased 1,000 rounds. It's not rational but if Obama is elected to a second term there will a whole new wave of panic buying for an imaginary crisis.



So maybe I take a bit of advice from one of my favorite movies -Shaun of the Dead. Meet me down at the Winchester and I'm sure to ask you if you have a penny for the guy?


Update: So here it is three months later, no one could have imagined or foreseen the mass shooting in Sandy Hook Connecticut. The sale of guns and ammo have only accelerated. A survey last week had one in five respondents saying they believe Obama is a secret Muslim. I'm not sure what to make of that except it gives me a bad feeling the next four years will not be smooth, simple or easy.

Reports on last quarter's world economic growth looks bad enough to worry about an other recession.  


Other than buying into the survivalists advice of purchasing canned goods and shotguns I am hearing that investments in agriculture and Africa are paying regular dividends. Money will continue to flow into the United States, keeping interest rates extremely low. If any of these trends should rapidly reverse the world economy could go into a tailspin.

The really big question is economic growth and income inequality in the United States. If the American middle class is allowed to further shrink it will effect the patterns of development in other economies. Conservatives are in total denial that the American middle class was built on New Deal socialism. The ultimate goal, as one economist said, is to create a system of "industrial feudalism" with a very small middle class and a vast pool of wage earning serfs. If such a thing happens in America then any other nation that competes on the world market will be pressured to follow along.

At a local political rally one speaker summed up the goals of neo-conservative economics -not just to end all entitlement programs in America but to stamp out socialism in Europe or anywhere else in the world. Anything that challenges free enterprise is an evil that needs to be destroyed.

Think about it -what was once the power of kings will be pasted on to employers. What scares me is a keg of gunpowder can be mistaken as a solution when it's really a symptom of an age old problem. Even when Cain and Able had all the world to share -the story still ended badly.

I Like Ike

The 1950's were a time remembered for it's economic prosperity and it's struggle with social conformity. It was the only in the 20th century were the growth of wealth in the working class outpaced the top 1%.

Money is not just the representation of wealth but it the blood of an economy and like blood in the body it is meant to be in constant circulation and reach every extremity in the system. In the 1950's progressive taxes, regulations and labor unions redirected money back to the growing middle class and that actually had multiplying effect creating even more wealth. The businesses on Main Street also prospered along with Wall Street. 

Part of Eisenhower's success came from his background as a career Army officer. He firmly believed rank had its privileges -but every privilege came with a reciprocating responsibility. During World War 2  the Army Officer Corp was held to high standard of accountability, where any officer including generals were quickly relieved of command if they did achieve their mission's objective or if they recklessly endangered the soldiers in their unit. More than once Eisenhower acknowledged that the soldiers in the field is the backbone of the Army; and that officers managed and planned warfare but it's the common soldier who wins the battle. Eisenhower brought this philosophy to the White House.  

With the up coming presidential elections the above picture is a good illustration on some of the differences between Obama and Romney. Romney is a businessman and he had his campaign hats manufactured in China. From a business standpoint this is a wise move, if you save a few pennies per hat that adds up to a lot of money over the tens of thousands of hats given away.

Obama's background has been as a community activist and politician. In politics the first question is who are your supporters and friends. The Obama campaign made a clear decision to show it's support for American workers over the benefit of saving a few dollars.   

Every national election is a referendum on what should be the role of government. Should government be run as a ruthless business entity? Or should it be recognized that government is there to provide services that private capital can not or should not provide? Americans have historically rejected private armies and private police forces but right now we are in a dialogue arguing the merits of private schools over public schools. There is no argument that government should protect its citizens against acts of foreign terrorism and natural disasters but we're not so sure about helping each other during economic downturns. 

Maybe somewhere we have to accept the fact that managing a functioning and orderly society is a messy and   not always a cost effective effort.

As one historical irony was when King George the 3rd of England tried to run his dominion strictly as a business. In 1762 he made a fateful business decision to demand that the American colonists pay their share of the cost for the French and Indian War. The colonists balked at the bill and this was the beginning of a fight that lead to the American Revolutionary War.

                                 History has deep roots

What happens now will reverberate into the future. One of the most graphic examples is how every major battlefield of the 20th century still yields up all kinds of un-exploded bombs and shells.

Eisenhower's more egalitarian interpretation Republicanism created a backlash of ultra conservatism. In 1964 Barry Goldwater ran on a party platform that was hostile to civil rights and government intervention in commerce. One of his campaign slogans was "in your heart you know he's right" but the electorate retorted with "in your guts you know he's nuts". 

Barry Goldwater's defeat did not end the ultra conservative movement in America. It returned with Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, Ronald Reagan's Supply Side Economics and the deregulation of the housing and lending industries in 2002 -which lead to our current economic recession that almost became a world wide depression. 

I know some of the overseas readers of this blog are tired of hearing about the upcoming election here but it does effect everybody -it is a global village.

Maybe in the end we have to recognize that extremism for any cause is the ultimate vice.

                                       In the mailbox

I got an email about my post on Batman yesterday. Rob felt that Batman and Robin were not gay. If I wanted to write about gay comic book characters I should check out Percy in Sargent Rock platoon.

This month viewership is up over 50% and is now read in over 25 countries. This week new viewers logged on from Malaysia, Sweden and Poland.

Batman -superhero and pop icon. Personally I have only a passing interest in comic book heroes but there are many people deeply steeped in the alternative world of pulp fiction. My one friend, Tom the collector of everything, had such a large collection of comic books that he rented from his parents his childhood bedroom  -that is until the weight of 80,000 comic books began to compromise the structural integrity of the house.

Another old compatriot in that circle was Rich. Rich's goal was to be a writer of pulp fiction and the last I heard he's been published multiple times but hasn't yet achieved the level of success to let him quit his day job. Every November Rich would help his friend Al set up a mini comic convention over in Upper Dublin PA. What this mini convention lacked in size, it made up in enthusiasm  Al was well known in the business with is roots going back to DC comics just after they changed their name from National Allied Publications.

In the 1930's many of the comic book companies where started by business men who made their money in pornography -or at least that's what I've been told. Comic books were a way to diversify and legitimize their profits. 

The first appearance of Batman was in May 1939 but November 1939 is a monumental month for both the Batman story and comic book evolution. The November issue of DC comics #33 the back story of Batman is revealed. The young Bruce Wayne traumatized by witnessing the murder of his parents at the hands of street mugger becomes the brooding caped crusader. Other characters already had established back stories but Batman's add an extra psychological element. Batman didn't fight crime because he was morally good like Superman but instead Batman was compulsively driven and motivated by darker personal struggles. This was going to effect how the story of every other superhero would be written.   

Batman wasn't always meant to be brooding and vengeful  The TV series during the mid 1960's was camp humor at it best. A time when painters like Roy Lictenstein made comic book images high art and everybody appreciated an occasional respite from the political turmoil of the times.

In 1940 Robin was introduced to the story line. Sales doubled. Over the years there were always questions about what kind of relationship Batman and Robin really had. It was one of those nagging questions that the Senate investigation on comic books and juvenile delinquency specifically asked as several Senators stumbled with the word homoerotic. The question was never answered but Robin and Batman seemed to be a little more at arms distance after 1955.

As one person put it "Batman is like the Samurai warrior". In Japan the Samurai is the toughest guy at the top of the food chain. After practicing everyday  to coldly dispatch their enemies with a razor sharp sword, the Samurai were expected to balance out their activities and do something delicate like flower arrangements.

So in the future will Batman become totally ironic or ever grow old?

For over 70 years the Batman saga morphed and changed with the times, then almost disappeared only to be resurrected by another generation of writers and movie makers.

Maybe we will always have superheroes because they fill a need that goes back to the Epic of Gilgemesh -where some one heroic and identifiable wins and they defy death ever time their story is retold.