goodandevil

     It can be on a grand scale, like destruction of the rainforest, where you watch how you pollute, and you don’t buy teak furniture, and all the activities you’re asked to engage in if interested in helping out don’t keep the guy driving the machinery from plowing down an acre of trees.

    Like a poacher, a law is designed to keep him in line, but like all laws it’s only as good as its enforcement and the means to provide enforcers with the resources to enforce are often as limited as the remaining vegetation.

    It can just as easily be in your own backyard. I used to live in southeast Michigan and in the middle of Macomb County there’s a thoroughfare known as Hall Road. In my mind, as I got older, it secretly grew into more of a concept or legend than a real place, because Hall Road is so littered with commerce that you can literally drive four miles without seeing plants.

   I’m not taking anything heavy, either; like many places you yourself could live it’s got a mall and a Best Buy and a Wal-Mart and some fun things to do. But this road is stripped. Even the medians are devoid of grass.

    In recent years I visited Boca Raton and it had a sort of masturbatory way of reminding me of the Road of Legend simply because they like to fill their space their too. Boca Raton seems in love with the idea of its own money, and is the only place I’ve ever been that made me feel like my very nice coastal home was in Hicktown. Unlike Baltimore, the place you want to visit but never live, Boca is only good for a visit or two because the grandeur you’d expect just isn’t there either. They definitely have some vegetation, but you get the idea that it’s there for decoration, designed to provide the illusion that you’re in a real place.

    Like a shallow supermodel, you sometimes marvel at its looks, and it has a soul, but is riddled with insecurity and for as much as it drips with expense it never lasts long as a source of stimulation.

    That’s my eventual fear for small-scale overdevelopment. Even in this great country, development to severe points is a relatively new construct (no pun intended but pun enjoyed so I’m keeping it) and the long-term effects have yet to be evaluated in any way I’m familiar with. I imagine that writing to your politicians does a good job of getting them interested in the problem — in fact I know it does because I’ve written, as have others I have known, and met with great success — but often they themselves have to cave in the interest of bringing money into an area.

    Unfortunately the salesmanship of developers doesn’t require an education or even a plan beyond a theory, and you end up with useless garbage no one wants to live in, or the space is filled with architecture or citizens that clash with the surrounding architecture or citizens, and in no time at all everyone’s leaving the miserable dried-up city, all parties acting like the victim at some great mysterious dinner theater murder mystery.

The Good | Reconsti-’tude

    The Harbor City was hopping today with the rumblings of a craft fair, and I had an opportunity to act as patron. I enjoy coming up with slogans in my mind, and after discussing the difference between arts and crafts with a relative, I arrived at “Crafts: Art without a Point.” This is not to disparage the very real skill of craft makers. They know their role and usually don’t attest to being anything more than they are. You still have “the juice,” a desire to express yourself and the work ethic to pull it off.

    There just simply aren’t larger considerations, like concept, subject, topic, theme, and an execution in materials serving the focus of all of the above. If you don’t know what it means to be an artist, and truly understand creativity, you’ll have a less than full idea until you do.

   That’s not to protect any idealism or trying to elevate artists undeservedly. The so-called “art world” has its fair share of what I like to call “shock art” where in absence of any true ideas, someone finds something that hasn’t been done yet and exploits that niche to get their 15 minutes of fame. That’s where we get local galleries full of porcelain-covered cow dung inscribed with the names of prominent Greek scholars alongside placards explaining the creator’s vision of a world where only blue-eyed people are truly understood.

   I discount those people as hacks. Fortunately, if you enjoy making manifest with cow dung, there’s a spot for you in the jewelry sector and you can be a craftsperson and not offend the sensibilities of the open-minded.

     Aside from having an amazing off-the-cart sausage where even the bun gets griddled in the same gloriously sick fat as the vegetables and the three hundred preceding sausages, the highlight of the trip was a stand where a man developed small dresser drawers out of wood carvings, many lines with red felt and containing secret compartments. The delicacy and the handiwork were amazing, as was the tasteful finish. For all the dedication at work though, I wasn’t completely sold until I overheard the attached story.

    This same individual owns and used to operate a tree removal service — important work out here in Hurricane Country — and decided that rather than hauling off the debris as garbage, and all that entails, he’d select the few choicest bits and develop these drawer systems out of them.

   He also carried what he referred to as “4D jigsaw puzzles” which have pieces, carved straight from the slab of wood, that are so thick it can genuinely be hard to tell which side must face down to properly solve the puzzle. For the amount of time that went into these deals, twenty bucks a pop is not much to ask. If it’s a one-shot deal and you’re after a present for that closet whittler in your family it’s a truly unique present idea that’s literally one of a kind.

My challenge to you is to consider the spectrum of possibilities between driftwood and craft dressers and apply that same trash to treasure principle to all the other fodder in your life that simply doesn’t demand your attention.