Cleveland Uber Alles

Untimely Dispatches from the Neighborhood of the Unrepresented & Inarticulate; Anecdotes that Pedal and Coast Through the Boot-Print of 20th Century American Urbanism

Saturday, December 31, 2005

CleveWiki Via Brewed Fresh Daily I see that a woman named Julie Kent has just founded an wiki site dedicated to becoming the definitive guide to Cleveland. A local blogger, Stuart Spivak has some interesting posts up about the project. For the time being, I'll merely note that efforts to create a CleveWiki are in league with the collaborative, virtual map of the city that I proposed for this little blog only a couple of days ago, though the things I imagine tracking and writing about are not the sort of things that might make their way into CleveWiki's various content areas (I'm more interested in oddments, like that giant "Read My Lips" Rooster sculpture on Chester Ave). The entire wiki phenomena is a fascinating one: the ability to have an endlessly revised and user-edited text hints at all those promises that the last decade's technocrati made about the democratizing power of the web, but it also points to the peril of that any technology of this sort has of becoming just one more way by which people will be "gamed by the system." Free information and diversity of content and voices often gets put to poor use. Funny how now, when Americans have unprecedented access to a free flow of news and information, when the internet gives them a portal into a heretofore unheard of diversity of opinion, they are all the more likely to be uninformed and downright wrong about reality. So the question is: what will CleveWiki ultimately look like? Here's hoping that our city's brightest and shrewdest made thoughtful contributions to it, and that a healthy number of folks will be doing their part to make sure its not just an annex to, say, the AOL City Guide.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Cheap Airfare, the Engine of Culture Childish boosters of our city, whose notion of promoting life here involves little more than touting the "low cost of living" and urging frightened suburbanites to dine downtown, probably aren't much concerned with how our local culture--with all its quirks, imperfections, backwardness, and originality--has been gradually disappearing since, say, the groundbreaking of Gateway in 1994. But forgive Madeline Bruml, the Hawken High School student and child of the well-to-do who founded Brain Gain Cleveland. She's young, and knows not what she does, and her program at least contains the very good idea of giving local high school students and opportunity to shadow people doing business downtown. Cleveland Uber Alles suspects that Bruml's project will look wonderful on her application to, say, Harvard, or some other elite, out of town school. Now if only she had thoughtful adults around her who might help her pro-Cleveland marketing message reflect more than emptyness about our region's economic future, like this from Adam Paulisick a Manager in Channel Sales at Amco :

“To be rich or not to be rich? That is the question. It is not the question of whether or not you can obtain success in other cities but the speed at which you want to get there. After attending college in Cleveland and actively networking throughout college, I hit a harsh reality. Did I want to work until I am 35 and be middle management or did I want to focus my energy on becoming successful now? If you are willing to be confident, respectful, and listen to the guidance you have in this city, you have nowhere to go but up."
Oh, our city's "respectful" intellectual cheapskates, who'd sell you Cleveland on the basis of its low rent (which, in fact, isn't all that low) and the fact that "it's easy to be a big fish in a little pond." These are the same people, I am certain, who blather on and on about how this restaurant or that bar is "like New York" or "like Chicago"--their logic running something like this: "See, we have all the same glamour and finery, really, as the big city markets, and better yet, we pay only $7 for a Cosmopolitan, instead of $10 or $12, so there's money left over for splitting an appetizer now or a Pannini sandwich later, and this, plus a chance to drive my car home drunk later tonight, is really living," as if the only reasons anybody would choose to make a life somewhere were the ready availability of fattening foods and cheap, poorly mixed cocktails. (Ah, Cleveland, forever an Eastern European city at heart, forever marching on its stomach and searching for that existentially soothing buzz!) No matter that the people next to you at your Cleveland bar are likely to be lost if they tried to make conversation without prompting from the two giant TV's overhead, especially since only 11.4% of city residents over 25 have achieved a bachelor's degree or higher; nevermind that almost no one among the pool of people you'll meet while you're out there enjoying the city on the cheap is at the top of their profession--just keep slugging down those drinks and believe in Cleveland. And the Cleveland you'll be believing in will look a hell of a lot like everywhere else, as each and every mid-market city strives--a la, Target, which offers fine design at a low price--to be more "like New York" and more "like Chicago." That's what you'll enjoy: metropolish lite, the big city made easy, or a simulacrum of it anyway. Gateway, by the way, is hardly the cause of the sleek urban sameness that is blotting out regional character throughout the Midwest, though the sports complex's arrival, way back when, along with Michael Simon's Caxton Cafe, the first real money behind gentrification in the Warehouse District, etc. was concurrent with this latest explosion of our city's longing to be like somewhere else (it goes back much further, of course, to around 1910, when Cleveland actually did compete with Chicago and New York). And as for the cause of all this "other city envy": my money is on the arrival of low cost air carriers, which allowed foolish Clevelanders (including most of our local restaurant and bar owners) to visit other cities on the cheap and use the restaurants and bars they saw there as fodder for their own half-rate designs. Consider this, non-scientific, anecdotal information: A Google search of Cleveland "Like New York" yields 52,000 webpages; the current two week advance purchase airfare for a trip to the the Big Apple is just $171 via Expedia A Google search of Cleveland "Like Chicago" yields 28,200 webpages; the current two week advance purchase airfare for a trip there is just $131 via Expedia A Google search of Cleveland "Like Los Angeles" yields 16,700 pages; airfare here bought two weeks in advance via Expeida is higher, at $319. But of course there are a lot of other reasons why Cleveland is not "like Los Angles." Still, as it gets easier to go from place to place, more and more of America gets the same. And all those new makers of "local culture," like Great Lakes Brewery, which appeared around this same time, are mere attempts to grasp at what has already gone, and what's now fading. Note how the Euclid Tavern closed. Note how seldom anyone talks up going out to an odd, truly local place like the House of Swing. To me, you can't believe in Cleveland without remembering places like these.

I should add, too, that we're fools to reduce our talk of cultural life to talk of bars and restaurants. I might just as well say that you can't believe in Cleveland by talking about whose playing at the Scene pavilion and not talking about who's learning to play music at CIM.

And so on.

Monday, December 26, 2005

Proposed Topics/Projects for Cleveland Uber Alles in 2006 Here are a few ideas I am thinking about pursing via this blog as the new year approaches: 1) An index of anecdotal economic indicators, to be compiled in conjunction with the this site's small readership. Anecdotal economic indicators, I suppose, would consist of things of potential economic import that are observed and commented on, rather than quantified. An example of this would be a report that "a number of for sale signs have appeared in front of houses in the E. 40's, between Superior and Payne. But obvious ones like these are only the beginning. Consider: in my daily travels throughout our Metro area, I notice a significant number of couples that are made up of young women and older men, with girls, really, of, say, 21-25, pairing themselves with men well over 30, or even in their late 40's, 50's, and so on. Obviously, I haven't quantified the number of these couples I've observed, but, anecdotally speaking, I seem to be seeing a lot of them. Well, one way to explain the prevalence of couples like these is through the lens of Psychology: since women mature faster than men, they are more likely to require a more mature partner. Another way to explain these, too, is through an examination of my own biases as an observer (I myself am in my 30's and I am often at places frequented by those in my demographic; therefore, I'm more likely to see more of these pairings than, say, a first year student living in a dorm at John Carroll or whoever). Yet another explanation for prevalence of these couples may be economic: since our region is currently "stingy" with opportunities for younger men to make a good living, and since these young men, furthermore, are being cut out of educational opportunities and other advancement tracks in greater and greater numbers, they are less and less able to compete with older men for interest of women within their own age group. Simply put, "Sara Recent College Grad is more likely to go out with Billy Over-30 Corporate Job than Bobby 21-year-old, since Bobby 21-year-old didn't go to college with her, as of yet still lives at home with his mom, and can't get a job of his own that pays more than eight dollars per hour. So, what I'd like to do, is collect observations like these, and have them argued over, contradicted and corroborated. Ultimately, Cleveland Uber Alles would be home of "anecdotal economic indicators for Cleveland," and the site could feature a sort of index that casually measures all sorts of things about our city's economic prospects--not only the number of young women with older men, but also the number of homeless on Euclid Ave., the size of crowds at hotel bars where visiting business travels ought to go, and so on, and so on. The idea, of course, would be to use these casually observations as a springboard to encourage real economic thinkers in area to do real research. Meanwhile, we can get a good conversation going about how the casual things we see in our everyday lives inform us about our economic prospects and hopes of improving life in Cleveland. 2) A collaborative, virtual map of Cleveland, collecting not only these "anecdotal indicators," but also stories of life here to raise our awareness of both problems on the street and those odd miracles, too, that make life here interesting, like tags from SYM or that shrine at the side of Chester Ave., with its now rain-soaked and salt stained teddy bear, marking where someone either crashed their car or got shot. This "interactive" Google Maps-driven collection of NY Times reader stories regarding the NYC transit strike approximates the kind of map I am hoping to see here on site. Comments on these ideas are welcome and encouraged.