City Squid

SharePGH

2011-09-04T14:46:00.000-04:00

A calender of learning opportunities in Pittsburgh

Just launched our sistersite, SharePGH. 'Tis a calendar of skill sharing events in Pittsburgh.

Skill Shares, Community Teaching, Distributed Learning

2011-09-04T12:51:00.000-04:00

Skill acquisition around the world is getting easier and easier, and Pittsburgh is no exception. Two trends are coming together: the rise of the virtual, and the rise of the local.

The Virtual

In the below talk, Chris Anderson (the TED curator, not the Wired Magazine editor) makes the compelling argument that the rise of broadband is allowing video to become the go-to medium for skill transfer. He argues that humans are primed to transfer visual understanding into physical understanding, and that online video allows anyone in the world to learn from the videos of anyone else. Thousands of hobbyists post months-worth of video every day showing how one can fix a toilet, make a creme brule, or start a one-square-food garden. The internet allows a global host of experts, expert amateurs (pdf link) and amateur professionals to quickly move their knowledge into the hands of others, usually with a high level of feedback and conversation (via clarifying questions in comments and author-responses to those comments and questions).

This influx of how-tos, demos, and explanations makes it easier and easier to Do It Yourself.

Importantly, the skill acquisition revolution, combined with a growing focus on living locally and sustainably, is allowing all kinds of marginalized experts to come out of the woodwork and share their knowledge before it is lost, both online and in person.

As artist David Calman Lasky put it:

It feels alien to live in a world where I have no understanding of how
I have water, or why, or heat, or food. The more I learn, the more I
find that I can't do everything on my own, but I also learn some of
why things are the way they are, and it makes me feel more able to
change the way I am living my life. In the end, it feels empowering to
learn how to provide something for yourself. Systems in the world- like
the commerce of utilities and living expenses- are demystified.

From woodworkers to Master Gardeners to canning, skills and tools that can be used to build resilience are making a comeback. The lines of apprenticeship may have died out for a generation, but there are new applicants lining up to learn.

The Local

Video is an excellent medium, but it cannot always replicate the speed and accuracy of teaching one-on-one, in a shared physical space.

In addition to the global, internet-driven trend, there has been a local resurgence in teaching spaces in Pittsburgh.

Technical projects and electronic gadgets find a launching pad at HackPGH. Art and technology meet at Assemble. Communiteach connects those who want to learn to those who are willing to teach. The Union Project is a spawning ground for dozens of community initiatives and projects. The Mr Roboto Project is a long-running d.i.y. space that just moved into a new home. Carnegie Mellon's Studio for Creative Inquiry has begun hosting a series of local conferences. PodCamp Pittsburgh is an annual conference of new-media folks sharing what they know.

Each of these local, physical institutions has a distinct, physical presence, but also has a strong web-presence. Communiteach in particular is exclusively a web-platform for connecting teachers to learners.

This double-hit of a strong, connective internet presence combined with an open, specific physical location is an ideal way to link digital activity with physical activity. As John Robb, asymmetrical warfare expert and author of Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, puts it:

"Localize production – virtualize everything else"

Production, in this case, would be the actual in-person transmission of skill from one person to another together, in real time, in a physical location. Everything else- the coordination and invitation beforehand, the marketing or branding of the event, the recording and archiving after, can and should be done virtually.

Cardamom Press

2010-07-13T12:29:00.007-04:00

City Squid loves supporting Pittsburgh artists and locally owned businesses. We also happen to have a special love for aromatic spices and good clean art, so we just can't get enough of Cardamom Press.

(image used with permission from Cardamom Press)

This gorgeous pgh-themed art/stationary is traditionally-printed by a pgh local. I've heard that the artist has plans to expand the line to other cities in the future, but for now, revel in the simple beauty of our great city.

Share the find with friends and buy some for yourself!

We haven't seen this kind of headline dichotomy since...

2010-06-17T10:58:00.001-04:00

... Pittsburgh was both the Best and Worst "Green City"
... the G-20 Summit was both a success and a totalitarian clusterfuck.

A screenshot from today's Post-Gazette online:

Article links:

Pittsburgh police investigating recent attacks on bicyclists

Pittsburgh receives national award as bike-friendly community

PS: City Squid isn't the only Pittsburgh based blog that finds odd headline pairings in the Post Gazette and highlight them with red outlines.

MOON8

2010-04-24T12:30:00.004-04:00

City Squid Highly recommends MOON8, a dedicated fan's NES version of Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon. As Connor put it "I love it because it reminds me of playing Mario as a little kid and loving Pink Floyd at age 16." While for me the scenarios were switched time-wise, I couldn't agree with those sentiments more. Enjoy!

Roslyn Place

2010-04-13T10:53:00.001-04:00

... has pavers made of WOOD!

The Times They Are-a-Changin'.

2010-03-18T20:48:00.000-04:00

Stand back and squint, and Apple is moving towards being everywhere.

They've been "hip" for a few years now, ever since the iPod, but under this hipness lies a push towards ubiquity. Not ubiquity in the sense of universal wifi or cell network coverage, but ubiquity across any one particular person's day.

When, once, Apple was just a computer company, now many people spend their entire day utilizing Apple devices. Your alarm clock is fueled by your iPod. Your phone calls, texts, and tweets happen through your iPhone. When you are at a computer, it's an Apple computer.

In a broad way, as more and more Apple devices utilize WiFi, bluetooth, and cellular connectivity, Apple is actually moving all of your data "into the cloud"- off of any one platform and on to, effectively, all platforms.

And increasingly, Apple is coming in to competition with Google.

Strange, to think that a hardware company and an internet search company are now vying for the smartphone and micro-computer market. A lot changes in five years.

But it begs the question: what is Microsoft now?

Irrelevant?

What To-Do Lists Can Learn From Video Game Design

2010-03-11T21:45:00.001-05:00

For five or six years now I've been a Mac-Owner, so for most of my adult life I have not been a computer gamer. All through high school I played PC games, but when I switched to Mac, the combination of limited game availability, the entrance into college, and the OS's relative beauty kept me out of the gaming habit- I didn't want to blemish this machine clearly meant for artistic productivity with games.

Jokingly, I developed a theory back then, that Windows machines automatically tainted themselves by arriving with the little Minesweeper-and-Solitaire game pack, while macs remained pure.

Then Kongregate arrived, and games returned as part of my life.

Kongregate, as the name implies, is a web-site that gathers together and hosts flash games. Its brilliance as compared to NewGrounds and other sites is in its API.

(API, for those not in the know, stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is an abstraction layer within the programming of an application (a website, a computer game, etc) that lets other applications interact with it in standardized ways. For example, one can embed a YouTube video (rather than linking to the video's YouTube page) into a website because YouTube has written an API that allows any random website to interface with it's video database and draw videos directly out of it.)

Via this API, a game can externalize internal game data in such a way that Kongregate can read it and, from that information, track a user's progress through the games on the site. In addition to the usual goals of any game (IE, beating it, getting the high score), Kongregate implements "Achievement Badges" given out for achieving certain in-betweeng goals (beat the first five levels, hunt 1000 ducks, etc). These badges are worth points on Kongregate itself, turning "the playing of games on Kongregate" into its own meta-game.

Interestingly, many Kongregate Badges are not for achievements that have to do with a game's internal definition of "winning" - they can be for something as anti-winning as "die 1000 times in this game" The badge system actually extends these games, given the players goals that were not even originally coded into the game itself.

(It's a bit like if you were playing Monopoly, but your friends have told you they will buy you pizza if you purposely limited yourself to only buying properties that were being auctioned (as opposed to buying every unowned property you land on, the standard practice in the game). You can ignore them and just play to win, but then you wouldn't get any pizza.)

This is all, of course, incredibly counter-productive (it might even be meta-time-wasting: I am slowly accruing veritable "time wasted points") when it comes to accomplishing real goals in real life.

Or is it?

Another experience I have had recently is with Chore Wars, an online chore-tracking site that frames the doing of chores as one-time-quests and repeatable adventures worthy of experience points, being undertaken by adventurers.

It is not just a set framework though- both the chores and their experience point values are user-extensible.

In addition to experience (an analog of minutes-spent-doing-chores), one can also program in treasures, which serve as tokens of having done any given chore repeatedly. For example, we have a chore in our house's adventure set called "Give Emergency Ride to Housemate" - a chore which as the only person with a car, only I can ever really complete. It gives XP and Gold, but also a "Ride Token". Looking at my total number of ride-tokens gives me an instant sense of how often I give people rides to school (IE, how often they miss the bus).

Where things get interesting is the bonus chores we have programed in. In order to encourage housemates to clean things up right when they make messes, there are a couple of bonus adventures that one can claim in addition to the chores themselves that reward doing those chores immediately. So if I was to make myself breakfast, and after eating it immediately clean all of my plates and pans and such, I would get not just the 30XP for washing-a-half-load-of-dishes-and-drying-them-too, but a bonus 15XP for "Speed-dishing". If I waited at all before cleaning the dishes, I would do the same amount of work, but loose that extra half-again-as-much XP.

Why does this work? I have no idea. Something in my brain seems to like the idea of more reward for equal work, and so just loves to get those dishes done now, when they are worth more. You would think that this do-it-now-bonus would be ineffective as a psych-out tool, as it was something I myself programed into the reward system, but that doesn't seem to matter to my reward-seeking brain- once the system was in place, I just started trying to work it.

There was an article within the past few years about the way in which World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs design their games specifically with this matrix of work, reward, and micro-milestoning in mind. Players tend to stop playing either within the first ten hours, or after many months/years. The leveling system is designed with this in mind- the first twenty or so levels are a breeze, deliberately short and satisfying as a way to hook new players in, a sort of rapid-power-gain appetizer to a much longer meal. From then on, levels are spaced as a slow curve of increasing time-per-level-gained, but rewards stop being about levels and start being other things- quest items, badges, etc.

A balance must be struck between making the game hard enough to be challenging, but rewarding enough to be fun- the game designers aim for a mix of easy-and-rewarding, hard-and-rewarding, and easy-and-rewarding, with just a hint of hard-and-unrewarding thrown in to add "grit" or "real challenge", but try try to keep the areas of the game separate, so that at any given level you are attempting only the challenging-and-rewarding bits.

How, you might ask, could this possibly extend beyond chores and games, into actual productive creation and work?

Easily, especially since I am already enmeshed in David Allen's Getting Things Done system, which requires the creation of a dozen or so to-do-lists as well as a weekly review system.

All of my lists have tick-boxes- completing any one action or project is like gaining a small achievement badge, and I have built into these lists meta-badges. Specifically, at the beginning of the day I write down a short list of the three or four Most Important Tasks I want (or need) to get done that day. Checking off those three-or-four boxes lets me check off a larger meta-checkbox- "Did Most Important Tasks Today"

Like Kongregate and and Chore Wars, these meta-goals don't even need to be directly related to the various projects that the lists are ostensibly tracking. They can be as abstract as the busy-making "Check off 40 things actions before bedtime", a meta-task which might not get me further down any one project, but which will probably encourage the cleaning up of a lot of little loose ends.

A week where I can check that box off every day is a special week, and worthy of a real little token of achievement, a meta-meta badge, like the ride tokens or an "impossible" badge on Kongregate, a holy grail of productivity-pride.

Such meta-tasking may seem a little odd and maybe a waste of time, but I find that the more I get things accomplished, the more I enjoy the sweet sweet satisfaction of checking things off.

It is that same part of my brain that Kongregate and Chore Wars scratches, the competition against others combined with-a-series-of-small-milestones combined with a slightly biased reward system part of my brain that loves to replicate models of these little systems and figure out the best way to work them, the part that loves... not cheating, but working the system effectively.

In a way, I am outfoxing my own mind, cajoling it to play a game that it can't resist playing, but setting up that game in a way that is fully conscious of the way I tend to work games, and guards against ways I might play the system that will win within the system but fail at turning that in-system productivity into real life productivity.

Refresh Rate of the Real World Update [Digital Density]

2010-03-01T11:17:00.000-05:00

Looks like Google Maps just rolled out a panning-between-photos-of-the-same-object navigation utility for the geo-tagged user photos that Street View now incorporates, in a manner similar to Microsoft's Photosynth but all in-browser.

Here's the Tower Bridge in London.

Excellent.

Cardboard, Collapse, and Creativity

2010-02-28T20:31:00.003-05:00

For some months, cardboard has interested me as an artistic medium. When I had the urge to create, I did it in cardboard. I have not had that urge often, but when I did, I created with corrugated fiberboard.

Cardboard interests me because of its marginality, imperminance, and ubiquity. Modern industrial society produces cardboard not as a goal, but as a side-product of packaging and shipping, and sometimes organization. Cardboard lacks inherent usefulness- it packages and protects other things, but does little else. If we did not make and use so much stuff, we would not need cardboard- its ubiquity derives from our ubiqutous consumption of other, non-cardboard things.

Cardboard crumples and breaks when exposed to water. It must live indoors, in the same conditions that humans feel comfortable in- cool, dry places. The elements make quick work of it if any kind of cardboard is left outside.

Cardboard is a great medium to work in when you are poor and creative. It's the junky crap of an overloaded culture bent on shipping material goods half-way across the world, maddeningly enamored with outsourcing, distance-sourcing. It's the side effect secondary cud of the great modern industrial machine, the ubiquitous trash of a culture made with things. It's everywhere, it's free, and it's big. It's not a shiny, expensive medium. It's not vellum or canvas. It doesn't require upkeep. It CAN'T be upkept. It's emminently replaceable, entirely suitible for rapid prototyping, quick acts of making and creativity. It's great for making a bunch of things fast and loose. It's great for making things that will disapear in a week.

It's there, it's ubiqitous, it's easy to collect huge amounts of it quickly. It works well with tempera and zip ties- sudden, dirty billboards, a little more solid than flyers and posters, but just as fast to fall appart and disapear into the mushy strangeness slicking in every city gutter.

It's great because you don't have to care about the logistics of what you make- you don't have to worry about making it too big or too small, or worry about wasting canvas or paint or time. You can just take ideas and get them out there quickly, get them done and into the world, where they can only be improved upon. And if you hate them, they are gone in a week, forgotten and melted like the Wicked Witch. Put them out into the world, and the good ones will survive.

Do it now, and do it in cardboard!

The City Squid, in Cardboard

Great Speech by Bruce Sterling: Atemporailty for the Creative Artist

2010-02-26T10:48:00.002-05:00

Link

An excerpt on problem-solving in the modern world:

‘Step one - write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already. Step two - write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys. Step three - write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted. Step four - open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further. Step five - start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem. Step six - make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem. Step seven - create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it. Step eight - exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine - find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’

Looks like City Squid's methods to a T, and that is just the warmup. The real meat of the thing is much further in. Go take a look!

The Great Migration

2010-02-10T13:38:00.006-05:00

You might notice some interesting things happening in your RSS readers or through your careful examination of our Archives.

Indeed, we are migrating three older blogs of our little collective, Aphilotus! Aphilotus!, Man and Bits of Paper, and Ekistomancy, over here at City Squid.

For the unfamiliar,

Aphilotus! Aphilotus! was our earliest blog, and stood as our exploratory record during our adventures in Pittsburgh's urban spaces.

Man and Bits of Paper revolved around organization and de-cluttering.

Ekistomancy was a blog cataloging and commenting upon the connections between the Occult/Alternative Spiritualism and Urbanism/City Life.

Enjoy!

The Salton Sea

2010-02-10T13:22:00.022-05:00

In light of our great content migration and as a break from all the cold posts, we thought we'd bring out a warmer article from our archives. Enjoy the catalog of our visit to Southern California's Salton Sea in Spring 2009.
Article originally published on June 3, 2009 over at SF0.

Brought you by Connor && Rigel

160 miles from the shores of Long Beach, California, the remains of a once hopping resort town lay. That place is Salton City. Initially, Connor and I considered driving out to El Centro, the true center of nowhere in particular, but we decided otherwise, and it proved to be the better choice. At this point in time, you would never recognize Salton's existence without knowing some of its history.

What happened there? Why was there a whole subdivision worth of winding residential roads named for every positive nautical image imaginable, now just dust and asphalt?

We came to Salton City already knowing those answers, but ill-prepared for the eerie, disturbing reality of the place.

H I S T O R Y

Salton City was one of a half-dozen tourism-driven resort towns circling the once-famous Salton Sea, in the heart of Imperial Valley, a fault-created rift that digs a long trough through Southern California.

The Salton Sea was once the Salton Sink, a local low point, 226 feet below sea level, but well enough inland that it remained as dry as the desert around it. It was formed by the shifting movements of the San Andreas Fault, which runs the length of California and is the main fault responsible for that state's Earthquake reputation.

The movement of the San Andreas, and the corresponding rise and fall of various Southern California landforms, is also, at the geologic scale of time, responsible for the changes in outlet of the Colorado River, which once ran out to Santa Barbara, but now runs south into Mexico.

When colonizing Southern California, much was done to levy up the River, so that more water could be directed towards the new settlements of Los Angeles, San Diego, etc.

But in 1905, heavy rains and snows in states upriver caused the levy to break catastrophically, letting the bulk of the river flow into the Salton Sink, which prior to that had been the flat, salty former-sea-bottom of a once-vast inland sea. For three years the river reconstituted at least a part of that vast sea, destroying the town of Salton but making a sudden and quite salty inland ocean, an ocean that due to it's relative height below sea level had no outlet.

For thirty years, between the 20s to the 50s, it was stocked with fish and brought thousands of bird species into the ecologically scarce Southern Californian desert region.

But as the Colorado River was brought back under control and used to fuel agriculture across the valley, farm runoff began to be the main source of input to the sea. In addition to causing floods that sometimes harmed the surrounding communities, the agricultural runoff also slowly poisoned the sea. Each year it gets 1% saltier, and immeasurable agrochemicals enter it, as well as all manner of bacteria.

Some time in the 60s it became unavoidably apparent that it had become a pollution-sink, and by 1986 it was all but abandoned as a tourist center.

It is now saltier than the Pacific Ocean, and only the Tilapia fish still survives, though thanks to frequent algal blooms, they wash up on shore in the thousands periodically.

There have been repeated years where the poisoned lake has killed the whole ecosystem, even claiming the lives of migrating birds who eat bacteria-poisoned fish and drink chemical-laced water. They take off again, only to die mid flight.

The system gets more unstable every year, and with it's bottom nearly the lowest point on the Continent, there is no easy way to drain the sea and return the land to it's pre-1905 state, to the time before we started fucking around with things.

T H E V I S I T

When we finally arrived, only a well-worn sign assured us that we had.

Eventually we found our way to a lonely boat launch, an abandoned dock.
(note: there's a near 360º view that's worth checking out which you can download into your browser from the full list of photos over at SF0.)

To get to that dock, we had to drive, zig-zag, through what was once a residential subdivision. The road structure still reflects this- roads with names like "Mirror Lake Ave" and "Sea Nymph Ave" twist and turn, slowing traffic the way one might want to in a residential neighborhood. What made this surreal was that there was nothing- dirt and scrub plants, maybe- between most of the roads. The whole town is a big, empty plain, crisscrossed by a maze of crumbling asphalt.

For the most part, there are no longer even remains of past dwellings. While the actual sparsity of inhabitants was astonishing, more astonishing was the fact that people still live there at all.

The city even has a motel, although it's beyond us who'd travel to this city specifically and stay here.

The dock, if a little eerie, seemed mostly stuck in time. Signs still touted regulations, procedures and guidelines. The sea itself is still aptly named. It's vastness creates a near indistinguishable end. There were even pelicans to complete the illusion.

We walked out onto the jetty, and it seemed normal enough, disrepair aside, until we started examining things more closely. The water is murky and full of algal growth.

Along our pathway, we ran into the occasional dead fish, presumably lifted from its watery grave by a hungry avian creature.

There's the occasional unidentifiable litter, but the general pollution of the water is visually obvious. Amazingly enough, we still saw some live fish braving the waters.

Even the material of the path seems harmless enough, sand and crumbling concrete- until you look a little harder. Upon closer inspection, the length of decay becomes far more tangible. The edges of the jetty are, in reality, mainly comprised of thousands and thousands of tiny bones, and dead barnacles, all of which reside a good 10 feet above the waterline.

bones:

barnacles and bones

I even picked out some prime specimens to prove the point (and retain a memento.)

One can only speculate how they must have settled there. A more thorough scanning of the water revealed numerous dead and decaying fish in the waves. This gave us a new theory regarding the overwhelming odor with which we were initially greeted upon exiting the car (we thought it was just the water.)

dying

dead

Connor proposed that we take some photos posed with a dead fish, and then get out...

(images scaled to approximate actual height relationship)
Which we did, but not before I remembered I could get an even better look at the sea's awful contents by walking down to the waters edge, a realization that produced the most disgusting scene yet. As mentioned in the history, an algal bloom must have occurred some time just before our visit, because the ramp was lined with them, in various stages of decay. Here, the stench was at least triple the initial wave, and Doctor Subtle could not even venture towards the edge because of his sensitive gag reflex.

Even worse, as I stooped closer, I realized that those blooms really must be frequent, as the fish lay on an existing layer of clean, dry, bleached bones at least 4 inches thick in places.

And although my morbid curiosity compelled me to stay, the good Doctor prescribed we retire from this awful place. And wash our hands ASAP.

In spite of all the detritus, the strangest thing about this already weird area, and indeed the biggest contributor to the unsettling feeling that grew the longer we lingered, was the silence. When we stood on the bony shoreline, dead fish littering the beach the way beer cans litter other ones, the only sound was the birds and the small lapping waves and the wind. So it was in silence we quickly departed, bid the ghosts adieu, and hoped to hell they didn't follow us.

The Future is a State of Mind [Self-Reflective Futurism]

2010-02-08T17:21:00.001-05:00

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

—William Gibson

Here at City Squid, we live by the above quote.

A few months ago on a long car trip I posited to my fiancée Rigel that we could probably pick up a USB power converter that plugged into the car's cigarette lighter outlet (most of which are now expressly designed not to be cigarette lighters) so that she could charge her iPod.

I had never actually seen such a device, though I knew that other, device-specific charging cords existed. I just guessed that someone somewhere would have gotten around to manufacturing the proper inverter-socket combination, seeing as specific-device converters have existed for years. We found a USB Car Adapter a couple of gas stations later for $15, at which point Rigel remarked that it was a different brand from the last one she had seen.

"Wait, you knew these were real?" I asked.

"You didn't?"

I had posited the theoretical existence of a vaguely futuristic device, and it was available at a random gas station for under twenty dollars, and other people already knew about it already. In predicting its availability and existence, I was actually behind the curve.

Maybe its that so many more people are working on stepping into the future that the entire sense of it has become lost — what was once front-page-worthy is now just daily advancement. What was once science fiction is now just existence. Science Fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson said just as much recently:

The fifteen-year-old who figured out a particular sequence of applications and services to use to be able to send a text message from his cell phone to update his Facebook status (before Facebook itself implemented that feature) has done network-and-connectivity work with complexity on the same order of magnitude as the creation of the Associated Press in 1948, just a thousand times faster and more pedestrian.

Communications technology has advanced so far, and advances so far each new day, that what was once a great leap into the future that only a tiny few could accomplish is now a baby-step that any teen with the right inclination can perform.

While working on this blog, my colleagues and I regularly experienced such moments of future-stepping.

The layout of the blog, for example, started as a paper sketch drawn in a notebook at a random Starbucks in Pittsburgh. I photographed it with my digital camera, pulled the photo onto my laptop via a USB cable (a cable which is being slowly replaced with wifi transfer technology), logged onto Starbucks' WiFi (which they protect by tracking in-store purchases and granting blocks of free use based on those, requiring three or four other computer systems syncing together), and emailed the photo of the page out to my collaborators for comment and review.

The Photographed Mock-up in Question

Alan, who was on his laptop at the time, got the email, looked at the picture, and immediately called my cell phone with his feedback, which I wrote down on another page after a brief discussion. During that discussion, I referenced the page itself to make my points, while he referenced the photo-of-the-page. I wrote down our conclusions on another page. Two hours later, Rigel looked at the email, and, knowing that I was at work and couldn't take calls, texted me her thoughts, which I also wrote down. When I came to a point in my day where I had some free time, I added her thoughts to my hand-written list.

Hours and hours later, long after the actual collaboration and critique had occurred, when Rigel and I were both at home, I took my notebook out and put it on my desk. She came over and pawed through it, opening to the above-pictured page. "Oh," she said. "There it is. In person."

The page had become a physical artifact of a transaction that had occurred mostly digitally.

Further iterations of the design process continued to occur in cyberspace only. The current logo was actually part of Rigel's Photoshop-made mockup of a possible design.

Articles have been written in one county and edited in two others. Newsroom banter has occurred via SMS, email, and Facebook as much as it has happened in person. Thanks to the cloud computing of Blogger, we aren't even sure where the servers that host City Squid even reside, nor do we particularly need to care.

As blogging organizations go, the tools we use are not even all that sophisticated. We have yet to dive into liveblogging from smartphones, or seriously figuring out how to link Twitter, Flickr, or other services into the page. But even small aspects of our process would have been technological marvels fifteen years ago. This blog is a step forward, a deliberate step towards the next stages of journalism, criticism, and engagement.

Bur rather than a jarring "future shock" each time we do something new and interesting to collaborate and publish, what registers with us is more of a hazy lens of futuristic-feeling, a pervasive sense that what we are doing every day is the kind of stuff that used to be in Science Fiction books. We are constantly aware that we live in a strange new world.

The difference is this: what pushes us into the future now is our own willful actions, rather than the greater technological advancement of civilization. Part of the continual acceleration of technology is that more and more people are becoming part of that advancement. It is not scientists and great thinkers who are pushing most things forward now — it is the combined baby-steps of everyone. Feeling futuristic is itself a step towards the future. We are futuristic because we have decided, consciously, to be so.

The Snowpocalypse of 2010

2010-02-06T16:32:00.012-05:00

Here in Pittsburgh, PA we are experiencing what the yout's have affectionately dubbed the Snowpocalyse or Snowmaggedon (Snownami?) . . .

And it's beautiful.

It does, however, pose a variety of infrastructure problems.

In the span of just over a dozen hours, the greater metropolitan area received more than 18" of snow. While last night it the coverage was easy to dismiss as a heavy but reasonable, today the difference was overwhelmingly clear.

11:50 February 5th vs. 10:30 February 6th

Currently, the Port Authority is running only one of it's 184 routes (an EBA, between Swissvale and Penn Station), with no projections for when service will return to normal.

This, of course, has more to do with the progress of the city's plowing efforts. Around noon today, the city had just begun plowing secondary streets. Now, 3:50, even Wilkins has yet to be plowed.

In reality, conditions have been deemed so bad that Governor Ed Rendell "...has declared a statewide disaster emergency to enable state, county and municipal governments to respond effectively..." (via P ublic Opinion.) Indeed, running "City of Pittsburgh" through Google today brings up the Snowstorm Emergency Information Page.

By midnight last night, the accumulation measured around 11.4" and has already broken several records including the Feb 5th 1899 record of 4.7" and the most snow received on any one day in February (the previous record being from February 20, 1947 at 10.4".)

Our local drifts ranged from ~20" near the edge of our steps to 25" in some places, with most vehicles boasting 10" shells.

In addition to residents being snowed in, flights coming into to PIT have been re-routed and flights out have been delayed indefinitely. More than 100,000 people are without power as the accumulation has snapped many lines, and various trees, including three on the Carnegie Mellon campus, have fallen under the additional snow-weight.

It's a little difficult to balance one's love and appreciation for such a mesmerizingly transformed landscape with the fact that it causes so much trouble on so many levels. Fortunately, for some, hopefully many, it's still a pleasant surprise and one worth enjoying while it lasts.

We can also take comfort in knowing that the city is hard at work doing all they can to improve conditions and restore access, just as citizens themselves work towards clearing their own small section of the world. It'll take a little while, but things will be back to normal soon enough. For now, enjoy the snow day.

This isn't so SNAPpy... [Oh SNAP!]

2010-02-02T09:42:00.003-05:00

There's great news on the Government Transparency front: The city of Pittsburgh has collected and collated all of it's public planning data into one big document, for easy reference. They call it PGHSNAP, short for Pittsburgh Sector and Neighborhood Asset Profiles/Action Planning.

There's only one problem! It's a eight hundred page document, mostly maps, and all of those maps are at incredibly low resolution. Most of the maps, despite being saved in a file format perfectly able to handle high-density vector data, are vector files saved as low resolution images and pasted in.

Exhibit A: the Open Space and Parks Map

Looks OK, right? Here's what happens when you zoom into the PDF:

It's a pixel disaster the likes of which I haven't seen since the PDFs the Port Authority puts out. True, slightly higher resolution maps exist for each specific neighborhood, but you don't hurt anybody's pixels by making the city-wide map, you know, readable too.

Here's the deal, City, in case you never got the memo:

It's OK to produce detailed, data-rich documents. This is the Internet Age, we can handle it. And for god's sake, don't put text in images without extracting it into something searchable. I wouldn't have found this whole page of blight maps via search, even thought that's text right there:

And I guess this would actually be pretty interesting data, if I could zoom in on the maps at all without getting a good idea of the number of Vacant Parcels in Pixelville:

And as for PGHSNAP's sister Project, PGHGIS, I'll like you better when you don't have such intersting rendering-issues, and are a little more navigable:

This isn't transparency in government quite yet- its more of a hazy translucence, like windows that have newspaper taped over them.

I'd love to find some real life examples of such windows, but the blight maps are too pixilated for me to see.

Oh. SNAP.

You Don't Know What You Got 'Til It's Gone, Especially When What You Got Is Your Property Tax Base [Paving Paradise]

2010-02-01T09:27:00.000-05:00

Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato does not like property reassessment one bit, which is bad because property reassessment is part of his job description.

Once upon a time, governments derived much of their revenue from property taxes, but in America income tax has slowly taken the lead. For the most part, American property tax dollars are the primary means by which local services (schools, fire protection, police, sanitation, etc.) are paid for. In Pennsylvania specifically, it is used primarily for supporting local school districts.

The Uniformity Clause in the State constitution allows different counties to tax properties differently, but requires that within any one county the tax is done in a uniform way. This seems like it would work simply in the case of property: just set the tax to be a blanket percentage of the property value of each property in the county. Uniformity? Absolutely.

The problem: how do you actually determine the value of a particular property in the county, and how often do you reassess that number?

Until the late eighties, the state required that every county do a full reassessment annually. In Allegheny county's case, this was done generally by looking at sales prices of properties in different areas, and using those to push the "assessed value" of the surrounding properties up or down a blanket percentage. That is to say, if the market in, say, Edgewood went up two percent over last year, the properties in Edgewood would all be reassessed two percent upwards.

When a given area's assessed value started getting out of whack with its real value, the county would do a "real" assessment again.

All through the nineties, various suits plagued the County over this practice, since the areas that got reassessed "for real" got reassessed heftily upwards 85% of the time, creating disparities in assessed value vs. real value between areas that were targeted for reassessment and areas that were simply recomputed.

Finally, thanks to a court order, in 2002 a county-wide reassessment was performed. Soon after, Dan Onorato was elected County Executive. He put a freeze on reassessments, choosing instead to regard 2002 as a "base year" and simply collect property tax based on every properties 2002 value. Since all properties were "really" reassessed in 2002, this would seem to satisfy the Uniformity Clause.

Not so fast, Dan.

The state law about using "base years" to compute property taxes does not require periodic reassessment at all. 2002's data can be (and has been) used indefinitely to compute Allegheny County's taxable property values. This creates its own set of disparities, as areas where property values have gone down (and, consequentially, the real net worth those area's residents have has gone down too) are now being overtaxed, while areas where property prices have risen are being undertaxed.

Three separate complaints have made their way all the way to the state supreme court, which ruled (pdf link) against the county's current practice and demanded an immediate reassessment. It's a pretty epic ruling, well researched and written, with a great introductory quote from a 1909 court decision:

“Controversies growing out of the assessment and collection of taxes are as old as civilization. To question the assessment, to doubt the levy, and to delay the collector may be classed among those inalienable rights of mankind not guaranteed by any Constitution, but very generally asserted under the law of human nature.”

-Delaware, L.&W.R. Co.’s Tax Assessment, 73 A. 429, 430 (Pa. 1909).

Essentially, the court found that by indefinitely re-using 2002's numbers, the county was levying taxes in a sufficiently non-uniform manner as to be unconstitutional, specifically that "The Allegheny County scheme, which permits a single base-year assessment to be used indefinitely, has resulted in significant disparities in the ratio of assessed value to current actual value in Allegheny County."

Onarato, though, will have none of it. Though there is clear wording in the decision telling the county to reassess and instructing the lower court to see that through, the County Executive (and as of October 2009, candidate for Governor) had made it clear that he will not be carrying out such an assessment, and plans as Governor to address the situation at a statewide level.

Now, City Squid understands why the early Aughts were a time where reassessing property value seemed like a bad idea. The real estate market was clearly bubbling, and to let county income be based on such a volatile measure is foolish at best. But to cling to 2002's numbers indefinitely is equally foolish. We can see why, though: when the reckoning comes, and assessed value finally catches up to real value, heads will most certainly roll, either because the population feels slighted for having been overtaxed for so long, or mad as hell that their taxes just got hiked so high.

Our thought: better in the long run though to be fair and accurate and unpopular, than willfully ignorant of your own tax base's value.

From the City Paper: Water Torture [Link-A-Saurus]

2010-01-23T11:02:00.000-05:00

City Squid would be remiss if it failed to exhort its readers to check out Chris Young's great exploration of Pittsburgh's aging water-and-sewer system in last week's City Paper, aptly called Water Torture.

Panel on Pittsburgh's Transport Future [Bus-O-Matic]

2010-01-22T20:18:00.002-05:00

On a cold winter day, nothing warms the heart like a half-full Port Authority bus pulling up to your stop, its open doors pouring warmth onto the street like Bacchanalian wine. And nothing curdles the heart more than that same bus, full, zooming past, splattering your pants with oily road-slush. Twenty years hence, such a dichotomy might be a thing of the past.

Today, Carnegie Mellon, and specifically the Smart Growth Club, a student initiative based in the Heinz Business School, hosted a panel on "Transportation and Economic Expansion in Pittsburgh", looking at how transportation might grow and change in the next twenty years. The Traffic21 Initiative also helped host.

The panelists were a who's who of the public, private, local, civic, county, and state organizations involved in transport decisions in the city, moderated by a man who has served, over his career, in all of those catagories: Allen Kukovich, currently the Director of the Power of 32 Regional Visioning Project and a former PA State Senator.

Panelists included:

Breen Masciotra – Director, Uptown Partners (website is apparently a placeholder)
Councilman Bill Peduto – Pittsburgh City Council, District 8
Court Gould – Director, Sustainable Pittsburgh
Patrick Roberts - City of Pittsburgh Principal Transportation Planner
Stephen Bland – CEO, Port Authority of Allegheny County

The panel was an hour and a half long, and the time was divided roughly thus: fifteen minutes of general introduction, thirty minutes of short introductory comments from the panelists, thirty minutes of the moderator directing audience questions (written on index cards) to various panelists, with just a hint of back-and-forth between them, and then fifteen minutes of closing comments from the panelists.

Almost all the panelists opened by bashing the "purgatory" of low-density, high car-use suburbia, a big initial "we don't want that" caveat. Further talk trended towards the need to fix and creatively reuse the systems and infrastructure already in existence before talking of huge new projects. As Bill Peduto put it, "We need to fix city roadways up to the era of Duran Duran, at least."

Steve Bland mentioned a few exciting Port Authority upgrades, especially the introduction of Smart Cards, electronic bus passes that would be easier for consumers to use, harder to fake, and provide PAT with much more data on their riders.

He also mentioned the need to get real-time data to riders. According to market surveys, he said, if a person waiting for a late bus still knows how soon it will be arriving (is it two minutes late? or ten minutes late?), they are twice as likely to perceive the system as being "on time", regardless of how off-schedule it is.

(Very recently, the Port Authority actually opened up all of its scheduling and route data in Google's Transit Feed Specification, though with a pretty restrictive license that disallows modification and warns that a licensing fee might one day be instituted. This begs the question: why is a public utility's data not completely open and free to its public?)

Finally, he discussed ways in which the bus system (which contains 90% of PAT's overall ridership) could become more train-like, with bus terminals and stops that were not only efficient, but beautiful, appropriate, and which felt like real places integrated into their respective neighborhoods.

Steven Roberts had a lot to say that reinforced the above points, and added his own thoughts regarding cycling. He seemed like he had a lot more to say, seeing as he is the city's Transport Planner, but time was pretty limited and much of that talk was curtailed to a couple of buzzwords, most notably Livable Communities, Slow Streets, and Complete Systems (rather than Complete Streets).

The other two panelists got a bit edged-out of the panel-time (and my notes), but Sustainable Pittsburgh's Court Gould did make one striking point during his brief mic-time: there is no need to "balance economic development and transportation development. We can predicate economy on transport."

In all, it was a pretty optimistic panel. It looks like there are quite a few smart people thinking very hard about Pittsburgh's transport opportunities as time moves on. They did, though, all seem to be waiting for the money to come in for new projects and ideas, either from the federal government, from a restructure of local monies, or from public-private partnerships that have yet to materialize. It makes one wonder if there are ways that the money currently being spent could be spent in more interesting or efficient ways.

City Squid likes to think about these problems.

A few easy-to-implement ideas that the panel missed:

Posted, relevant schedules at every stop. This can be done today- many bus shelters are actually paid for by advertising companies, but have areas where such schedules can be posted inside the shelter.
Downloadable and printable schedules that are slightly more bespoke than currently available (pdf link), letting one print out, for example, a schedule of all of the busses that pass through a specific stop, with the relevant junction-points further afield calculated and specified.
Bus schedule and route data made available online- in an open format.
Serious development to make that data available via the mobile web, via cell phone txt queries, and with a sensible web interface.

And a few ideas that are a bit harder, that the panel did cover:

GPS transceivers on every bus. Real time scheduling corrections and shifts. Better metrics on lateness, clumping, etc. Data-driven schedule changes.
Live feedback at bus stops.
Electronic fares and passes.
The better rider data generated by the above ideas rolled back into route and schedule planning.

One can only hope that these ideas get implemented, and implemented well.

A final thought, the one that Bill Peduto chose to end on:

The city has, currently, a pretty-much-unused rail line that from Lawrenceville past Carnegie Mellon and down to the Monongahela river. It is ripe to be transformed into a commuter rail, one that could be the beginning of a region-wide rail system serving from Washington to Meadville. This line's right-of-way is so perfect for intra-city transport that its existence is near-miraculous to us, as we have forgotten that the region was built around rail lines, not the other way around.

As the Councilman says, "fix it first."

The Refresh Rate of the Real World [Digital Density]

2010-01-19T14:43:00.000-05:00

(Times Square Photo from flickr)

What if all we had was photographs? What would future people guess our world was like? And if they had millions of photographs to search through? Billions? What would they come to understand about 2010 if they had just a photographic record?

Times Square, New York City is not the most photographed place in the world, according to a study of all 35 million geotagged photographs on Flickr, but it is in the top hundred. Does that make it an important, historical place?

Digital cameras have outsold film cameras for nearly a decade, and every year they get lighter, smaller, and able to hold more photographs. People take more pictures with them, and more of those pictures get shared with the general public on Flickr, Facebook, and other social platforms. Times Square, then, will only become more photographed as time goes on, and as time goes on more and more of that photography will enter the near-public record, on Facebook, Flickr, and other social sites (not to mention whatever ends up part of Homeland Security databases, etc). What sort of world will all that data show off?

We already have such a photographic record, and I think we can start answering those questions.

This photographic record is getting more metadata-rich too. Metadata is data about data- in the case of photographs, things like the time and day the photo was taken, the latitude and longitude of the camera, who took the picture, what the light was like that day, and a host of other things.

As cellular phones and other devices incorporate better and better digital cameras, and as stand-alone cameras add better and better features, digital capture devices can add more and more metadata to those photographs, from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to specific GPS geo-tagging.

As recently as two years ago, Microsoft and the University of Washington began taking advantage of all this tagged and coded photo-data to build Photosynth, a software package that generates three dimensional models of heavily-photographed areas, as well as stitched-together continuous images of that object. This is their demo video, from 2008, showing their model of St. Peter's Basilica:

It's a pretty neat demo, but it is also a demo of a highly photographed space, on the order of Times Square or the Eiffel Tower. Sitka, Alaska, on the other hand, probably doesn't get photographed nearly as often, and would not have made the most interesting of demos.

It may sound obvious, but there are a couple of reasons for this. Sitka is remote: it's a major fishing port, and a stopover for Alaskan tourism, but not an international trade center nor an airline hub. Not to be cruel, but Sitka is less important to the vast majority of travelers than the commercial spectacle of Times Square.

One may note from the video above that so photographed is St. Peter's Basilica that the video-authors can actually show the progression of an event registration just by browsing deeper into the future-end of the time-scale of the photos taken and seeing volunteers arrive, chairs unfold, and up spring tables.

If the photographs taken of a place can be imagined as a hyper-rectangular volume populated with photograph points set in space, (as they are in the above video) and perhaps colored by time (red is the past, blue is the future, a feature not in the video), but limited to an hour or a day or so, then one can see that Times Square would be a virtual sea of reference-frames, with thousands and thousands of data-points, many of them overlapping spatially, but splayed across time (implying that there are certain iconic shots that everyone wants to capture). But not all places in the world could boast such a crowded ocean of data.

The photograph of a woman standing in front of Sitka National Forest has no such overlapping photography. Instead, its volume would show something more like a wandering line through space and time, with just a few photo-points demarking its passage. From the photostream the picture is part of, one can see that it is part of a series of vacation photos, a single point in a long, narrow tunnel of personal experience, nowhere near as data-rich as an intersection like Times Square or a landmark like the Basilica.

If one extended the time-frame of the Sitka National Forest volume to a week or so, one might come upon a few dozen more such tunnels-through-space-time, whose various photo-points might reveal what people in general find interesting at the site (the totem pole, apparently).

Comparing these three space-time volumes (Sitka, Times Square, and St. Peter's Basilica), one notes that, beyond the data conveyed by the photographs, there is meta-data that can be derived from photographic density. Density, in this case, is almost shorthand for interestingness or famousness. The thought might be I was here at this important thing, and that makes me a little important too. Let me record this temporal-spacial meeting.

If one was mining this photographic data for, say, an idea of the number of people who were at a rally, or what might have happened during a riot, then density of photodata around that event is a key factor. Places that are heavily photographed, in effect, can be more accurately surveilled -- the gaps in the record are correspondingly smaller.

So when historically important events happen at famous or crowded locations, this meta-data composed out of many different photographic references becomes magnified, sometimes overwhelming the photographic data itself. An act can appear innocent or incredibly guilty, depending on exactly how it was captured on film. If a man spends five minutes tying his shoes, is he really clumsy, or is he watching someone? The photographic record can save or damn him.

The Kennedy Assassination, for example, has been so scrutinized that every single frame of the famous Zapruder Film has been carefully scanned and preserved, and various conspiracy theories have arisen not based on what was in that series of 18.3 photographs/second, but on what might have happened between frames and whether or not the between-frame events make sense. The questions arise not because of the data itself, but because it is not dense enough.To use a more computer-era phrase, the Zapruder Film needed a higher capture and refresh rate. In general, history would be better understood if data on Dealey Plaza refreshed faster for those key seconds (The Watchmen movie used this data paucity to great effect (at 2:43)).

In a way, one can think of photo-density as bandwidth: data-transfer between the real world and the nebulous digital record that shadows it. The Zapruder film is like a bad dial-up connection: there is a lot of noise mixed in with all that signal. Times Square, on the other hand, is like broadband- a veritable river of data. Sitka would be like a satellite phone: often off, but data-heavy when in use.

But does photo-density actually improve surveillance? I would argue that it doesn't. If photo-dense places are people-dense places, then there are a vast number of crimes, from murder to rape to robbery, that simply would not be captured in the public photo record, as they are not crimes one commits around big crowds of people.

My guess is that the photo-density in the real world is only going to increase as time goes on, and that the higher it goes, the more and more metadata we will figure out how to draw from it. The number of places data-rich enough to be accurately and usefully modeled in both space and time will only go up. The algorithms for enmeshing all this photo-data and recognizing real-world objects within it will only get better. The willingness of people to add their own photographic data to the general data will go up (though whether this is out of a newfound cultural sense of the commons or because a form online somewhere is set up as an opt-out rather than opt-in remains to be seen).

In the future, Times Square may still be highly photographed in the public record. But the rest of the tail of that graph will have seriously caught up.

I doubt that this spread of photo-density to more places will do much to improve security, capture more criminals, or make huge discoveries about human interaction.

No- I think that its ultimate contributions will arrive in the same ad-hoc way that its data does- small, interesting, strange patterns that careful, persistent data-mining will make quite clear.

From Potholes to Political Pavement: Road Repair in Pittsburgh [Urbanism]

2010-01-18T20:07:00.008-05:00

Destroyer of axles, wrecker of undercarriages, bane of wheel alignment, tireless foe of tire tread -- ladies and gentlemen, I present The Pothole.

This bad mother lived over on Negley Ave, just north of Fifth Ave. Negley is a main artery from Squirrel Hill down into Shadyside, Bloomfield, Friendship, and Garfield. From Wilkins one can take it down one of the steeper grades in the city, across Fifth, and right into this pothole, which sits on the far right side of the northbound lane.

Busses (especially the 71s and the 500) use Negley to get to Center, and I've seen a couple of them enlarge this sucker as the pass, ripping little pieces of the roadway off and out.

It took the city six days to fix this bad boy, from my notification to them on the 8th, to further notifications on the 11th and 12th, to its ultimate repair on the 13th.

It's clear what potholes are -- big holes in the road where the road surface seems to have collapsed or been removed, leaving bare earth (or sometimes gravel) underneath.

The word Pothole (and the synonyms Kettle and Kettle-hole) was first used not by angered motorists, but by naturalists and geologists, to describe pot or kettle-shaped holes, usually quite large, formed by the gradual spiraling erosion of those rocks by nearby water sources (usually rivers or oceans).

Essentially, natural potholes are formed when pebbles settle into a depression in a rock, and then are washed repeatedly across the rock-face by flowing water. As the pebbles spin round and round the depression, they slowly carve it out, forming a hole many, many times larger than the pebbles themselves.

Road-potholes are great analogs to natural ones, but require a little more explanation.

The smooth, even road-surfaces we are used to are a pretty recent innovation. They are made of asphalt or concrete, both words that describe pliable mixtures of mineral aggregates (gravel or rock or sand) and a binding agent that glues this slurry together. One heats the mixture up, pours it onto the road that needs surfacing, and compresses it to cool, whereupon it hardens into a smooth, glossy driving surface.

It is, of course, not that easy.

First, one needs an appropriate road-bed to put this surface on -- hardpacked stones and gravel that won't erode away if the ground around it does. If the underlying roadbed is too weak, or starts eroding, then the cemented surface above it will start to stress, crack, and break.

Second, really strong asphalts are both expensive and temperamental. Both the binding agent and the mineral aggregate in any given mix have a large scale of options, and the best-of-the-best can cost probably two orders of magnitude (100x) more than the cheap stuff. Additionally, the strongest cements can only be laid down in the summer months, as the longer they take to cool, the stronger they are, and the less likely they are to crack. Even worse, if one paves in winter, the mix cools before it can be properly compressed and shaped.

Most municipalities opt for the (pardon the pun) middle-of-the-road options when it comes to construction and paving -- not God's Own Paving Slurry, but not Pebbles-N-Spit either.

The More You Know:

There are actually two famous Scottish men named M(a)cAdam in history. John Loudon McAdam, no 'a' in Mc, invented the modern way of paving roads (mineral aggregate + binding agent), while John Macadam, 'a' in the Mac, is known as the botanist who discovered Macadamia nuts!

The middle-of-the-road stuff is, of course, susceptible to nature's wrath, especially the wrath of water. General erosion, combined with the heat-and-thaw cycles common to Northeastern winter, do much to soften roadbeds. Hundreds and thousands of cars (which it should be noted are thousands-of-pounds machines that rest on just four contact-points) traveling over the road-surface every day, pounding snow and water and dirt down into it, does the rest. Stress cracks form, fill with water, freeze and expand, over and over again until the tires of the cars can get a bit of a foothold on the crack-lip and start tearing out the very surface they rely on. A pothole forms, and as cars pick up the gravel in the center of the hole and push it towards the edges, or slam their tires into the new couple-of-inches-deep sides of the hole, the kettles get bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

Just like their natural counterparts, potholes that also hold water grow the fastest, as the water actually washes all the abrasive gravel back into the center of the hole, making the hollowing process even more efficient.

Pittsburgh's roads have even more complications than the average city. We are an old city, without much of a grid, built on many, many hills, and many of our streets are paved-over cobblestones. Additionally, we have a couple of the steepest streets in the hemisphere. Also, our public transport busses and delivery trucks can actually pull roadways apart when they stop repeatedly at the same places.

Here is one such stress-crack, at the bottom of Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill.

All of this is to say: Pittsburgh has potholes, and new ones form every winter, quite reliably.

Bram Reichbaum wrote an excellent expose about Pittsburgh's paving and pothole filling habits over at his news-blog-paper The Pittsburgh Comet. Essential conclusions: the city has no money, and prefers to ignore the little problem --- sealing cracks, reinforcing obviously-deteriorating roadways, filling sprawls and holes and joints, and noting frequency of repair, all of which costs not-small amounts to fix -- and let them snowball into larger problems (potholes or even Capital Investment-level repairs), which cost much, much more to fix. This would be fine, except that by the city's own admission (pdf link to their 2009 Street Maintenance Audit), ignoring preventative maintenance and only fixing problems when they become public, political problems, is wildly more expensive than just fixing things right, once, when they are small.

It gets so much better, though.

As mentioned above, in winter it is too cold to effectively use hot asphalt to fill potholes. Instead, the city uses what it calls cold-fill, which should be called coal fill. Cold-fill is, no joke, bituminous coal mixed with tar. Coal. Coal, heat-your-house-with-it coal, is used to fill thirty- to thirty-five thousand potholes every Pittsburgh winter. It is grossly ineffective, and many of those 35,000 potholes are therefore repeat offenders.

As they say in the movies though, follow the money. Cold (Coal) Fill costs $69 a ton. Rapid Set, an asphalt mix used by Columbus and Cleveland to great effect, costs $12 a bucket, or (assuming a five gallon bucket weighs seventy-five pounds, which is a low estimate based on this datasheet) $320 a ton, an almost fivefold increase.

Even better is the asphalt mix that the city has started to use to repave streets. Called Superpave, it has been adopted by the state as the go-to mix for repaving streets and highways. Unfortunately, though it was touted as being able to last ten or fifteen years, the parts of the PA Turnpike that use it have cracked in just five.

Besides logistics and funding, potholes (and paving generally) have turned into quite the political issue.

In October 2006, an official "Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's Response Line", 311, was set up. One of its features is the ability to call in and report potholes.

On July 1, 2008, there was criticism from Councilman Bruce Kraus concerning the way in which street paving around the city might be politicized: various city employees have conflicts of interest as they both work for the paving department and sit on neighborhood specific councils. Mayor Ravenstahl announced plans to contract with infrastructure-data firm CarteGraph to track repairs apolitically, plans which don't seem to have publicly materialized.

A report released by the city in early 2009 showed that the city was neither reaching its own goals as to how much it paved, plowed, and de-potholed, nor was it following its own best-practices guidelines for any of those activities.

March 11, 2009, the mayor launched pittsburghpothole.com, a redirect to a pothole reporting form on the mayor's website. The form has just two large fields for entering data about the pothole, and ten fields, all of them marked "Optional", for personal data about the pothole-reporter. It doesn't seem to do more than auto-fire an email towards the mayor's office. It does not send the reporter a confirmation email, or even a way to track the request entered. It is a one way street, almost as bad as tossing requests over a wall.

That same day, City Councilman Bill Peduto called for an approximately $3M system-and-staff that would not only let citizens report potholes and other infrastructure problems, but track their repair for the city. This plan, like the Mayor's hundredth-of-the-price one from a year previous, has not seen further daylight.

It was also reported that the Stimulus Package was sending $4.5M Pittsburgh's way for Community Development. Saith the Mayor, "When specific program guidelines become available, I will be working with members of City Council to help formulate an aggressive paving program." As far as this journalist knows, no such program has been widely announced.

August 2009 the city launched an iPhone application, iBurgh, which let users upload geo-tagged photos and descriptions straight to the city. The app has gotten over 8000 downloads, but it is unclear how many actual issues have been reported via it (and how many of those actually got addressed).

Just last month, the Post-Gazette had a great writeup of what has and hasn't been working (and what Non-Emergency Responses the city does and does not respond to), which included a link to PittMAPS, another wing of the mayor's website.

PittMAPS reports back some amount of data about infrastructure complaints and repairs, though not enough to actually corollate how many pothole reports were responded to, what percentage of pothole fixes were based on reports, etc, just totals for "Potholes Repaired" by quarter, and "Potholes reported" by quarter. Unfortunately, it does so by hosting a series of information-lite pdfs and impossible-to-read jpgs, rather than more easily accessible data (html?). It was reminiscent of the Port Authority website, come to think of it.

I guess that makes sense, considering parts of the mayor's recent inaugural speech (emphasis mine):

"[The city's job] isn't just about paving streets and keeping crime at bay. It's about championing and marketing our neighborhoods to new residents and businesses."

You're right, Mr. Mayor. If there's anything this city isn't about, it's paving streets.

Dialectical Metaphor [Ekistomancy]

2009-12-06T11:28:00.002-05:00

There is a double-frustration in the practice of magic, a rock and a hard place.

The rock is this: there is a certain minimum level that a magical result needs to hit to really consider a spell or a ritual to be something that "worked." Below that level of result, you are down in the noise of everyday mystery- the random fluctuation of situations and events.

To charge a sigil, release it into the world, and feel, later, that it did it's job, one must expect results, and catalog those results. This, if for no other reason, is why many occultists insist that a strong magical practice includes the keeping of a magical journal in which to record praxis and payoff, a sort of objective catalog of which things worked and which things didn't.

But one must also not get bogged down in such details, and that is the hard place. To practice magic, fundamentally, is to open yourself up to the possibility of grand things. You dabble not with just a single fire, but with the entire elemental idea of fire. Cosmic winds sweep through your body, coalescing upon your magical instruments and shooting out into the world. You must act inside the realm of gods and spirits and the shooting, sparking planets that whirl endlessly across the sky.

One must be the tallest man (or woman), with the broadest shoulders, to bridge these two needs. To keep one's head in the sky and feet on the ground is to be a giant, a great huge curtain of a creature, Mr. Fantastic and Atlas combined.

It is hard to hold two things in one's heart, but the magician must do it. She must think boldly, as if the marshaled forces of Eternity stand with her, and everything comes naturally and easily. But she must work as if all stand against her, as if magic didn't work and she was alone in the universe. She must be strong enough to work through the times that it seems as if she is alone, even if she is not, but bold enough to seize synchronicity when it flies past.

Baum-Centre Must Awaken! [Ekistomancy]

2009-11-29T09:49:00.002-05:00

Baum-Centre is a not-quite-neighborhood, a sort of no-man's-land between North Oakland, Shadyside, Bloomfield, Friendship, and East Liberty, which seems not to fit well with any of them. Baum and Centre run parallel across it, and in those long, thin blocks between them are all manner of businesses, many of them closed, and the strangest of houses nestled between and amongst.

It is a commercial corridor, but seemingly by accident. UPMC Shadyside takes it over for a block or so. Car dealerships come and go. Huge warehouse buildings lie empty.

Baum-Centre is shadowed in a valley to it's south by Train tracks and the East Busway, making connectivity from the south intermittent.

On the north of the corridor, Garfield, Bloomfield, and Friendship hit Baum askew by nearly 45 degrees, deriving their vague grid from the diagonal Liberty Ave (not to be confused with East Liberty Ave a mile East), Friendship Ave, and Penn Ave, rather than the nearly-East-West Baum-Centre.

In any case, Corridoria, as I like to call it, it very much its own weird place- a long thin strip of not-other-neighborhoods right on the edge of half a dozen contenders. It is a place that I wish to see awaken, a place which I wish to see become its own place, different from its neighbors, and a place I wish to see respected as different.

To work, then!

These are a handful of the small rolled-up sigils I have been quietly dropping all along the Baum-Centre corridor. I tried to make the sigil itself reflect the linear nature of the place.

Here they are wrapped up, outlining the rough shape of the place they serve.

The work continues!

Construction on Panther Hollow Road Appears to be Over [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2009-11-22T14:55:00.001-05:00

Looks all new and patched and shiny, too!

The Game is Afoot [Ekistomancy]

2009-11-16T12:34:00.001-05:00

As alluded to in previous short post, things are happening in that Big Webpage we call the Real World. They are still happening. The words written herein have inspired real action, real motion, not just scholarly debate.

Temple Area Zero has been given siblings: a group ritual ignited Temple Area Two, the square of streets formed by the non-intersection of 56th Street and 56th Street. Seperately, a carpet-bombing of sigils is causing that great creature called Baum-Centre to rise and awaken.

More on these developments as time allows- for indeed somewhere in the river of action, there will be eddies of reflection, and at those points, I will post

Fear not! [Ekistomancy]

2009-11-02T10:29:00.001-05:00

More updates are on their way. Many Real-Life Ekistomantic things are occurring, and will be posted when they are completed.

Beautiful Ruin: Exfoliation of the Divine [Ekistomancy]

2009-10-23T11:21:00.001-04:00

Something that Pittsburgh "does" exceedingly well as a city is to have truly beautiful decay.

Broken windows, re-natured properties, rusting train tracks, all these things are of course terrible signs of the passage of time, the entropy of things, and the slow death of neighborhoods and lives. To the people who watched such places inside a city die over time, who saw the glory days and now see the destruction, such things are terrible.

But to come upon such a place knowing it only as a ruin is something different. Ruin seen without direct historical context is something humans find beauty in- just think of the Parthenon or the Pyramids- whose rounded edges and crumbling columns display proud scars of weather and chaos, cracks and breaks that show the ancient hand of time, that impress us rather than make us turn away.

The specifics of ruin- the way that concrete cracks and breaks and crumbles, the size-stages of a soon-to-be-rocks sidewalk, the tones and hues of rust, wet or dry, the varieties and shapes of plants that begin to grow through rooftops, the strange stew of plastic, metal, and organic trash that gathers in the corners and eddies around old courtyards- all of these shapes and forms are pregnant with meaning.

They stand in for whole webs of causality- how did the seeds for this specific plant end up in this exact sidewalk crack? Who left this ancient beer can? What kind of machine was this odd metal rust-ball part of? And even larger questions- How did this neighborhood die? Who specifically last lived in this apartment? Did they leave because the stairs caved in?

These objects drift together in the kind of striking pairings that only intense and lengthy neglect, combined with the elements, can produce. These discarded and abandoned places and objects have been given over to the City and the Land- no human force pushes or pulls them. It helps that most humans hate going to ruined parts of their own culture- most abandoned places are devoid of, well, stewards. They are some of the few places where one can be alone in the city, alone with the city. And sometimes it feels like through these ruins, the City speaks to you.

These feelings can be especially sharp when drifting- it feels as if the city has pulled you and these things and this place together specifically for your edification, especially if you are the only person around. The lay of the detritus, the broken angle of the rotting roofline, they are all signs just for you.

But doesn't decay also signal disease? Ill Health? Don't we think of Detroit, a city mostly-abandoned, as a failed city, a dead place?

Yes, yes, and yes. Decay is close to death. It is achingly beautiful, yes, but it is also a sign of change.

Is it the kind of change you want? Is it the kind of change the city needs? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes suburbs are unsustainable, and the healthy long-term thing is for the city to contract in area and rise in density. Sometimes industries die, and new industries must be found.

Ruin is thus a call to action- find what the city needs to right this ruin, and do it. Maybe it should be cleaned up and re-natured. Maybe it should be rebuilt. Maybe something in between. The ruin, and the city, will speak to you.

Go to the ruined places you know- the empty lots, the shuttered streets, the decaying industrial parks. Bring a friend. Explore! Look for the cracks in the pavement that are also cracks in reality!

As the Situationists once scrawled on walls across Paris,

Sous les pavés, la plage!
Under the streets, the beach!

Panther Hollow Road is Under Construction! [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2009-10-23T10:37:00.002-04:00

In Schenley Park, the main drag, Panther Hollow Road, is being rebuilt.

I knew there was trouble when some time over the summer, jersey barriers appeared in the northern (westbound) emergency lane, routing pedestrian traffic around a bad section of sidewalk that used to have a metal guard rail, as the hill down into Panther Hollow is quite steep there. Before the Jersey Barriers were up, that sidewalk looked like this:

In mid-September, the Jersey Barriers expanded again, taking over the whole north (westbound) side of the road- both lanes- for a few hundred feet. More barriers were erected to squeeze the eastbound traffic down to one lane (the southmost of the four lanes) and squeeze the westbound traffic across the double-yellow-line over into the second-most-southern lane, which usually is the fast east-bound-lane.

As far as we can tell, the whole sidewalk and north-most lane collapsed and started sliding down the hillside, and the construction crews are there to repair and replace that part of the hill with stronger soil- probably gravel, so that Panther Hollow Road stops trying to sink into its namesake.

A few days ago we photographed the whole thing as we drove through it. Enjoy the Aphilotus-o-mation!

A Survey of the Web Resources of the Field To Date [Ekistomancy]

2009-10-19T13:54:00.002-04:00

To contend with the printed word, I'd like to present a more ephemeral collection of references: a survey of the web resources related to Ekistomancy that I have found so far. For a more general magical link resource, Sk4p.net has an excellent one here.

(Note: Know, of course, that like any, pardon the pun, linked list, links may die and links may break. I intend on retroactively updating the list as time goes on, culling dead links to old branches of the web, and I shall mention when I most recently update down at the bottom of the post. In the future, then, there may therefore be some discrepancy between when this list was first posted and when I have most recently updated it. If this discrepancy irks me, I might even farm out the list to be its own page on the site, an event which shall also be retroactively noted in-post. I am, if anything, a thorough webcreature.)

One should note the paucity of direct Ekistomantic resources- this is not a long list, as it is a tiny, tiny field. I actually feel bad, as not a few of the links are to websites I myself have contributed to, lending a subtle air of self-congratulation to the list that evaporates only when one Googles the hell out of the iterations of city-magic keywords and comes up with little else. Such is the result, I guess, of original research and study, to be a self-reflective field.

Our first stops are two message board threads:

Barbelith Underground>>Temple>>Urban Occultism
Barbelith started soon after Grant Morrison began publishing The Invisibles, as a gathering-place for those interested in the comic and the issues/pursuits it discussed. It saved itself from the miseries of Eternal September (the massive increases in noise over signal during internet discussions that has happened since the web's inception) by requiring prospective posters to competently fill out a webform stating their interests and intents. Unfortunately, the day-to-day moderation of the place, including pawing through new apps and pushing fresh blood into the place, seems to have dried up in the last few years, and the board has had a number of outages and database explosions in 2009. The thread linked to above has not, for example, been updated since 2004. Most of the other threads one can find via google search haven't seen action since 2003.

Many of the more active posters on Barbelith's Temple section moved themselves over to Liminal Nation, where our second thread hails from:

Unreal Cities- Urbanomancy, urban shamanism, etc.
Liminal Nation, a forum specifically for offbeat magical practice, has been much more active than Barbelith as-of late, perhaps because it was set up by 'Lithers and specifically poached much of that board's magical conversation. This thread is more-than-representative of that activity. One might even be able to figure out who their beloved Ekistomancer posts as over there.

And some other things:

Megapolisomancy, Or Why All Cities Are Haunted
This post on the sci-fi blog io9 is a nice roundup of tangents to the field, if in the context of, well, being a blog about science fiction.

Unknown Armies net.magick Archive- Urbanomancy
Here is the earliest site I can find relating to the Urbanomancer character class presented in the quasi-magical RPG Unknown Armies. It is vaguely helpful to the practitioner, but is mostly game mechanics.

The Demon-Haunted World
The slides and notes to a great presentation on the interaction of cities, technology, and magic by Matt Jones, a designer at dopplr.

And tangentially related:

Urban Shamanism
The website of David Lang, advocate of modernized shamanistic practices, who lives in Oregon. Not strictly city magic, but certainly aware of the role Shamanism needs to play in modern life, and the need to reconnect many cities with their geography and environment. Ekistomancy is cousin to such practice, but not directly related.

Last updated October 19th, 2009

Temple Area Zero [Ekistomancy]

2009-10-12T21:37:00.002-04:00

Over the weekend, I set out to give life and material presence to what I call Pittsburgh's Temple Area Zero, the sacred site I feel is the heart of the city.

My goal was to outline the space physically, to inform the city that I considered this already-holy site worth further study and investigation, and that I wanted to make it's already-sacred nature more materially present. In short, I wanted to take a sacred site and make it a Temple.

The Name

I named it Temple Area Zero for two reasons: as a former computer science nerd, I index from zero, and so the most important temple should therefore be the zeroith one. Second, and more subtly, Temple Area Zero acronymates to TAZ, a reference to Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone.

The idea came to me last year, in Long Beach, that the space I already hold sacred (and have for quite a number of years) should be instantiated even more as a Temple. The idea also came to me that such a temple would need a guardian, a physical creature with a larger etheric body attatched, to protect it and protect those in it.

All of the Temple Areas i instantiate will have such guardians- and a few are already built.

The Guardian

The Guardian is not the first of his kind. Years ago I built a City Totem, a wire construct of different detritus I had found in the city. Its head is a rail spike. Its body, a property line marker, its arms more rail spikes. Its tissues are steel wire.

The Guardian is a smaller cousin of this City Totem, built of a rail spike, a rusty, decorative hinge, and steel wire. Long yards of thinner wire attaches him to a strange volcanic stone I found in my youth.

The Ritual

The ritual, briefly, consisted of the following steps:

Building the Guardian and sanctifying him with the city (happened months ago)
Taking the Guardian to the Temple Area
Using my City Key to open a way into the Other City.
Once in that magical medium, calling four city spirits (in this case, historical figures) for each direction
Walking the West, North, East, and South outlines of the Temple Area, speaking to each spirit in turn, asking it to watch over the site and lend it strength.
Going to the center of the Area and beseaching the City to continue to strengthen the site magically, especially within the Temple Area previously proscribed.
Asking each of the spirits to imbue the Guardian with something kin to them: life, motion, will, and temperance.
Placing the Guardian.
Dismissing the Spirits in reverse order.
Speaking directly to the City.

We'll see how well this Temple Area works out, but building it felt excellent.

City Yogas [Ekistomancy]

2009-10-04T17:02:00.001-04:00

No, not stretching in the middle of the street. Here I mean yoga in its most general sense: a discipline, regimen, or structured set of training goals. The well-honed City Mage must set goals in these areas, and take action to achieve those goals. As general areas, these things require not so much mastery as continual learning and growth. As with any spiritual practice, such training should engender a certain level of frustration and hard work, but just as much pleasure and joy.

The Knowledge

London taxicab drivers are known the world around as some of the most competent cabbies in existence, despite living in an old, confusingly laid out city whose streets are mostly one-way and non-rectangular. This is in no small part due to the elaborate, strict testing required to become licensed to drive a cab in London, called officially "The Knowledge of London" Examination System, or more informally, the Knowledge. The testing system was put into place in the 1860s, and has changed little since (save to update the road and route information).

Officially, the Knowledge of London is the memorization and internalization of 320 well-defined "Main Runs" or routes across London, the locations of all 25,000 streets in the Central London area, and the locations of and order of about 50,000 Points of Interest that appear along those routes and streets.

The study of the Knowledge culminates in passing an "Appearance", a sublimely simple test- one must, without looking at a map, identify the quickest route between any two points that the examiner names, and then describe in detail and in order all of the stops, turns, signals, and points of interest along that route. Most initiates Appear twelve times or more before passing, and the average time a beginner takes to master the Knowledge is around 34 months.

Recent studies have (of course) shown that pre-Knowledge and post-Knowledge brain scans differ quite a bit- when asked questions about maps and routes, post-Knowledge people access an entirely different brain area than pre-knowledge ones do.

But the Knowledge is not something that needs to be limited to London, or cab drivers.

Key understandings of a city's functioning can be garnered by extensively studying its street layout, and whether by car, bicycle, or boots, exploring the grid in person. Theoretical knowledge, for the most part, must bow before experiential study. Such study reveals information about geography, history, neighborhood relations, and the psychology of the city's inhabitants, as well as insight into the psychology and character of the city itself.

Not only does such Knowledge help in the day-to-day activities of errand-running and appointment-making, it elevates such activities into a form of prayer or practice- one is communing while one commutes. Stringing together those three shortcuts and in doing so routing around the normal world of traffic is a kind of magic itself, a playful interaction with the greater system of the city.

Exploration can also can lead to many magical experiences on its own, as there are any number of wonderful hidden gems scattered across a city- tiny public parks, beautiful houses, or enchanting stores or cafes, just to name a few examples.

If the city was a book, its pages and words would be its streets. If one wishes to know one's city, one must read it one avenue at a time, perhaps by...

Drifting

As much as one should be familiar with nearly every street in the city, to the point of never being lost, it is equally important to surrender that control and structure sometimes. Indeed, sometimes in order to really learn the streets of a city, one must get lost in them.

Any physical map of the city will be wholly inadequate to describe what really exists in that city. Lines on paper can never transmit the feeling, the taste and sight of a place. It must be explored in person, in the most irrational and emotional ways, following scents or ideas or invisible forces through back lots and across busy streets.

In the mid-50s and 60s in France a group of artists known as the Situationists rediscovered this idea, and labeled it the dérive, or drift. Guy Debord, the key theoretician of the group, explains the purpose of the drift thusly:

The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they are never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis and turned to account.

In City Magic, Christopher Penczak calls the drift experience sidewalking and recommends it as a sort of ambulatory meditation, an effort to engage with the physical world in a very magical mindset, as if was an outside observer, seeing physical objects from a vantage point that also showed their magical sides. Though we arrived at the thought independently, he and I both recommend drifting as an excellent way to find and acquire magical tools and materials.

The most I have ever physically drifted was a full day- I wandered about Pittsburgh for long enough that I managed to cross two rivers and three freeways. I took two bus lines all the way to their termini, and visited countless neighborhoods and subneighborhoods. I started in the early morning and ended the next morning; I ended up hanging outside a downtown coffee shop at 5 AM waiting for it to open, and then took a bus home.

This occurred at the apex of a week of mental drifting, with various smaller physical drifts leading up to this one long day of magical wandering.

Another Situationist, Ivan Chtcheglov, points to the danger of very long drifts.

The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now repudiate my Formulary’s propaganda [Debord's propaganda] for a continuous dérive. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us.

He is correct. Drifting does push one towards boundary dissolution. After ten hours of following one's nose, so to speak, one begins to wonder what one this nose might actually belong to- the urges to turn left, to walk up or down a hill, stop seeming to come from within, or if they do come from within, it is some hidden part well below consciousness or ego. By surrendering discretion-of-direction, one becomes much like the oft-remarked-upon plastic bag from American Beauty- at the mercy of fate, and maybe the weather, without volition, but still acting.

I don't think that long drifts are a strict necessity to the practice, and if they are, once or twice is enough. Many of the drifts I have taken are probably better called "evening strolls" or "long walks". Robert Frost summed up the kind of walk I speak of, and drifts generally, better than any other, in the following:

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Though I don't advocate duration, I do advocate quantity- I probably have a few hundred hours of drifting under my ekistomantic belt. I'm betting Frost does as well.

Recognition

When exploring the city, either as a drifter or in more mundane mindsets, one may sometimes come across something which evokes a magical feeling- something strange or uncanny or beautiful or scary. It is important that the practitioner recognizes these feelings for what they are- reactions to real magical occurrences.

Maybe such feelings arise from something as mundane as the quality of light in the area, or from something as supernatural as a ghostly presence or a recent, strong magical working, but in either case fostering a sensitivity for and recognition of such feelings and the places that cause them is vital to the practice.

Whether the feeling ultimately stems from some internal issue or an external, occult source, the practitioner would be wise to note such subtitles, and explore them further. It is always necessary to trace strangeness back to its source.

Focus

This may stem from my Chaos Magic training, but focus, whether the penetrating stare that frightens the normals, or an hour of zen meditation, or the gnosis sought by Chaos Mages and Thelemites alike as the will-concentrating heart of their practice, being able to focus the mind on a particular task, object, or thought is a core skill to Urbanomancy.

Detailed explanations and exercises can be found in all manner of books, from Peter Caroll's Liber Null to Crowley's Magic (Book 4) to almost any book on zen meditation. The idea, though, is to empty the mind of thoughts, or to unify the mind behind a single thought, through any number of methods, from maintaining a still and empty death posture, to intense repetition of a mantra, to riding the mind-wiping bliss at the moment of orgasm.

Further posts will detail these ideas of focus, concentration, and gnosis, but for now, being able to quickly move from a general awareness to an intense concentration is the skill in abstract.

The First Lesson [Ekistomancy]

2009-09-27T23:29:00.001-04:00

... and maybe the last lesson.

So often is it cited as a core truth of almost any practice (law, medicine, sports, magic, or life) that I feel almost shameful mentioning it here: It is always the simplest pieces that take the longest to master.

They are always taught first, and always take the longest to teach. When I hear the word "fundamentals" I cannot help but hear it in the gravely, heavily accented voice of my high school water polo coach. He yelled that word at least once a practice for all four years of school, usually followed by "god damn it!" He was not wrong to make this a near-mantra.

In this respect, Ekistomancy is no different. The simplest action within the practice is the most vital.

Be present with the city.

That's it.

Be present with the city.

You live in it. So do thousands or maybe millions of others. It is the amalgamated physical result of billions of man-hours of thought and dream and action. The least you can do is acknowledge its being around you.

The city is an arcology of buildings: examine them from basement to roof-beam.

The city is a mass of people: chronicle them as if you were a writer hunting for characters.

The city is a wunderkammer of objects: take them home with you, recombine them, and push them back out into the world.

The city creates the air you breath and the (usually) concrete ground under your feet: feel them.

Look around you. Notice. Record. Wonder. Enjoy.

Possible Worldviews for the Practice [Ekistomancy]

2009-09-23T14:28:00.001-04:00

One fact I take for granted across my whole practice: cities contain within them a fair bit of magic.

But where does this magic come from? From what place does it extend? Are there other paradigms for magic that fit living in cities?

Another thing I take for granted is the notion that magic uses some kind of energy system to work. That is to say, places that are "very magical" I understand to have large concentrations of some kind of etheric energy, while places that are "magically dead" seem to lack this energy (I use the word etheric not in an effort to create circular logic, but in an effort to avoid it. I use the term as shorthand for "unknown to science and also seemingly unmeasurable". Whether this is Reich's orgone or some other invisible energy is, to use a pun, immaterial). Now, it is entirely possible that this energy model is wrong, that magic is more like a field of forces, or maybe something entirely different, but having experienced things like clear magical flows, fountains, and sinks, I feel that an energy model is, if not correct, a half-decent approximation.

In any case, I would like to present a couple of different sources of the magical energy I find in cities, as well as some of the traditional methods for manipulation the energy that might flow from these sources. For any given ritual, I tend to find one or more of these possibilities applicable. Some of them are mutually exclusive, but I like to think that when held in the kind of dialectic framework post-modern magic is known for, even mutual exclusivity can be reconciled vis-a-vis appeals to shared base principles, etc.

Ley Lines

Out of all the possibilities presented, this is perhaps the most direct decedent of neo-pagan thought. Ley Lines, or Dragon Lines, or Lines of Power, are roughly, a system of energy lines embedded within the earth, across and around local geographic points. They are most well-recognized in England and Ireland, and in China under the geomantic rigors of Feng Shui, though practitioners contend that they exist across the whole earth, a kind of extended web of transmitted and received geological etheric energy.

Ley lines tend to be easily visible in rural land- animals follow them, so do brooks and rivers. Some contend that they are not magic at all, but a certain kind of mapping-thought-onto-land that seems to be universal among humans, less an actual property of land than a way of seeing it.

In a city like Pittsburgh, the Ley Line model makes perfect sense, as the city is old enough to have been laid out not on a strict and rigorous grid, but on the kinds of cow-paths and "flat but winding" road systems that tend to go along ley lines. When I try to seek out ley lines for use in my work, nine out of ten of them run right down the middle of arterial Pittsburgh streets. The other one-in-ten happens either in a city park that lacks streets, or at places where the street system seems to have interrupted itself due to considerations of grade, previous land ownership, etc.

On the other hand, when I lived in Los Angeles I found exactly two ley lines in the whole city- an intersection atop Signal Hill (in Long Beach), which also seemed to mark that spot as the heart or belly button of that city (more on that later). Everywhere else, the grid seemed to have overtaken and eliminated whatever ley lines may have naturally occurred there, driven it, to pardon yet another pun, underground.

Which leads us to our second model:

The Grid

So if the natural lay and curve of the land in a city doesn't seem to hold (magical) water, one might turn to the next clear system of movement- the street grid. This certainly has non-magical bearing on the character of a city. Manhattan wouldn't be Manhattan without its rigorous grid of Avenues and Streets, nor would Los Angeles be LA without its mile-by-mile parceling of land, and such rigor seems to foster some amount of magical energy.

I would contend, however, that strict geometric city grids do not so much foster an etheric energy that flows (like blood through a body, or rivers across land), but rather heightens magic's resting state, at least when it concerns very geometric functions. I tend to imagine a very computer-simulation-esque kind of grid, all glowing green line floating out and above a boring plain. Structured city grids, I think, tend to be a good base on which to build highly structured magical forms, but a terrible place to build magic that has any sense of motion or life beyond, say, the level of a computer or an equation.

Part of the nature of a grid is its very Cartesian normalness- it equalizes all places it touches, making them all, in some sense, the same. Where the power of this comes from is in the forcefulness of its imposition upon the ungrided land, the replacement of more "natural" structures with the severe logic of mathematics. The cities where the grid has displaced the lay of the land as the guiding structure for building are cities that in some sense have abstracted themselves away from notions of place or land. They are mighty institutions, sure, but their non-integration with local spirit and character deadens them somehow.

Again, I seem to have built a nice segue into the next topic:

Genius Loci: Organizing Spirits, Local Ghosts, and the Shadows of History

The word "genius" in Latin means, literally, spirit. Where our word for applicable intelligence comes from is the roman notion that artists were not themselves creative, but rather were channels for the creative power of these sort of muse-creatures that hung out near them. So to speak of someone's genius was to speak of the shadowy entity that was constantly throwing them ideas and visions. It was not to flatter them; in fact is almost belittled the artist's own creative thoughts, and rather praised his ability to translate forms from etheric to physical.

A Genius Loci, then, is a "local spirit", not in the sense of "ghosts tied to a certain place", but rather "the sense of place" itself- a sort of guard and edifier of a particular location, a preexisting force or creature that shapes a location into what we see of it physically.

Ley lines seem tied to characteristics of the land around them, but the causality of that association is unclear. So it is with Genius Loci.

Here are the thoughts of Alexander Pope, English Poet, on the subject (in verse, of course):

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

What draws a genius to a certain place is unclear- they seem, when they are discovered, to have always been there. A neat trick.

An aside: in gardening and landscape design, the notion of the grid and the idea of a sense of place are the two guiding principles of the field, and the proper meshing of their interactions the mark of a true master.

I give, for you, the example of Mount Vernon's gardens. George Washington had two gardens built next to the house- the upper, or northern garden, and the lower, or southern garden.

The upper was a vegetable garden, meant to supply the house with food year round. As such, it was (and is) a testament to regime and order; it is rows and grids, a neat, nearly phylumological series of plant-types, careful gradients of soil-types and the botanical rigor of a textbook graph.

The lower garden, on the other hand, was meant to be a wilderness- to show plants not in neat rows but in natural clumpings, an artfully designed mini-paradise, bringing the wilderness right up to the foundation, but taming it as well, so that if one was to sit, one could look out and see the whole of the natural world unfolding and exposing itself like some delicate crystal.

The point, though, is that one garden was not whole without the other: Mount Vernon, and George Washington, needed both.

And so it is with urban spaces. As much as city magic is imposed by the grid of streets, the flows of people and traffic across the city-scape, it is also informed by the very specific, unique sense of place that different spots in the city engender.

Overlooks and vista points are wonderful places to work communication magic, as the very character of the place fosters the casting of a wide net, the spectacle and vision of looking out from the highest hill or the tallest tree.

Freeway underpasses, to take the opposite example, are a great gatherer of detritus and secrets, and an excellent place to work magic that requires things to be tossed aside, buried, and generally put underground. They are huge bridges, underwhich hide mighty trolls.

Some senses of place, though, come not from spirits far more ancient than man, but from the very human history of a place. Signal Hill, in Long Beach, CA, for example, might be such a magical spot because it is the highest (and really, only) hill for miles, but it was also the site of the first oil spout in town, the place where the city first had a reason-to-be.

These origin-places are sometimes called omphalae (singular omphalos), Greek for "navel", a literal center. Indeed, the usually-cited "omphalos" is the Greek one, just near Delphi, which is said to have been located by two eagles Zeus sent out to find it. Some legends say that they found not a navel, but the largest earth spirit ever seen, the Python for which the prophetic pythia, the Oracle at Delphi, is named. Apollo himself is said to have tamed it, and buried beneath a great rock, also called the omphalos.

In any case, more modern omphalae have much more human origins- they represent the seats of civilization in particular areas, the beginnings of settlement.

Other nexuses, not exactly omphalic but certainly central, might be formed through conflict or violence, or from the long shadows of historical action. It is these non-central locations whose sense-of-place might not draw from metaphysical spirits, but from real ones- ghosts and shadows of past human action. A site of great slaughter, an old market square, or the place where some great figure died, might all gather mystical forces about them pertinant to those past injuries or experiences.

Though some omphalos are simply central places, many of them really do seem to have a larger, central genius to them, one that perhaps is the emperor or organizer of its greater locality.

There is another school of thought derived from this hierarchical theory, the idea that perhaps whole cities are organized not by the mass collection of local spirits in the area, but by

The Living, Deified Heart of the City Itself

Or, as some might think of it, the metaphysical instantiation of the city as a centralized being, whose wants and wishes are reflected in the greater function and geography of the city.

Under this rubric, the city itself is a kind of localized god or deity. Different cities would be ruled by different gods, whether by the god gathering the city around it, or by a good adopting a settlement as a kind of patronage. The most direct and well known example of this later phenomenon is Athens, Greece, whose patron deity is, of course, Athena.

In my own case, I believe that Pittsburgh, the god, not the city, was formed much more recently, beginning during the first human habitation as a sort of organizing idea, and growing to incorporate in its own will and whim the desires and drives of the humans who settled (or conquered) the area, evolving its divinity organically with the population, but with a larger eye towards the future.

As such, these City-Gods are the rulers of their stated domains, and have a feudal or at least governmental relationship to the smaller spirits and forces under them. But that idea of hierarchy points to a further thought:

The All-City; The Ur-City

Perhaps there is not a separate god for Baltimore and one for Brooklyn. Perhaps, instead, there is just one god, the God of Cities generally. Perhaps the cities of the world are each facets of one archetypal city, the sort of city on a hill that near-mythical Golden Age Rome is supposed to have been.

Perhaps, though, there is a City Court, presided over by the most ancient of archetypes, with the cities of the world arranged in their respective standings, vying for a piece of the population pie. Maybe there is no central authority, just a loose brotherhood or pantheon of city gods.

Or maybe there are no gods per-say, just one great Platonic City, capital C, whose etheric shadow looms large over our physical dimension, instantiating itself repeatedly across our world, tying civilization to itself in one great Gordian knot of streets and cars and skyscrapers.

Conclusion

Or maybe all these things are true. Maybe the unseen realms from which magic emanates are just crammed to the brim with all sorts of idea-forms and godlings, smack full of ghosts and geniuses and gods, lousy with loci.

Maybe when tapping the street-power of some traffic artery to enforce some spell upon an area one is really calling the aid and attention of a genius loci, or maybe one is through supplication influencing the will of the unitary Great City, or maybe one is simply enforcing human will onto the local geomantic ley lines.

In the end, why ekistomancy works is less important than that it works at all.

In my own practice, I use whatever belief from the above set seems most appropriate and handy. They are all situationally valid, and in a way, they might all be the same thing- tools of thought.

Tools of the Trade [Ekistomancy]

2009-09-21T17:52:00.001-04:00

So how does one go about this Urban Magic business, exactly? Like man modern practices, ekistomancy asks its practitioners to craft certain tools for ritual and magical use.

The living-in-your-parents-house response is usually "but what if I don't have access to these kinds of things? What if my parents find my stash of magical rail spikes? Why can't I use astral tools, so that no one has to know?"

Well, sure, you can use astral tools instead of physical ones. I've done magic with both, and let me tell you, actually holding something magical that you've found, fashioned, and/or built in your hand, feeling the weight and temperature of it, is orders of magnitude easier to use as a tool than building some kind of astral dagger or what-have-you. As much as the city one wishes to interact with may exist in other, stranger realms, it is in large part a physical place, and appreciates physical tools.

That said, in another sense, it is only in those further, stranger realms that this tool actually holds any kind of might or power, and so it is just as good to hold in your mind the thought that superimposed onto whatever physical tool you craft is an astral/etheric/urbanomantic double, the importance of which should not be done away with.

Development

When I first started practicing ekistomancy, it was while also attending the Golden Triangle Temple, run by my good friend S. Knight. Temple 31, as it is also called, descends from a long line of western mysticism that traces itself through the six-kinds-of-awesome occultist Tau Allen Greenfield, through the organization he schismed from, the Ordo Templi Orientis, back through the Order of the Golden Dawn and back to the early Christian Gnostics.

But since the closer end of this line of mystical succession is actually a series of heretics and demi-heretics who have acquired legitimacy from their once-sects, but moved on to start newer, more interesting ones, Temple 31 draws from more recent and strange circles (Chaos Magic, Pop Magic, Post-Modern Magic) as well as more Crowley-ish trappings.

As part of Temple 31's weekly Magic Roundtables, some of the more Chaos Magic inclined of Temple 31's members began down the path of magical tool creation and subsequent use laid out in the ill-named LIBER KAOS KERAUNOS KYBERNETOS, or Liber KKK (The author, Peter J. Carroll, is British, and as such has no associations with that particular three letter acronym).

The rather short book lays out the general framework for a long term magical practice, a framework that can really be applied to almost any system.

Imagine, if you will, a 5x5 grid.

The columns are the classical magical acts: Evocation, Divination, Enchantment, Invocation and Illumination.

The rows, from Top (hardest) to Bottom (easiest) are:

High Magic
Astral Magic
Ritual Magic
Shamanic Magic
Sorcery

What Carroll suggests is that the beginning magician work his way up from the bottom, perfecting all five acts for each level before moving on to the next one.

He goes on to specifically define the first fifteen operations (Sorcery 1-5, Shamanic Magic 6-10, Ritual Magic 11-15). Astral Magic is a revamping of the first three, but entirely within the mind, and as such is sketchily defined.

Carroll finishes by pointing out that by the time one reaches High Magic, "The magician must rely on the momentum of his work in sorcery, shamanism, ritual and astral magics to carry him into the domain of high magic where he evolves his own tricks and empty handed techniques for spontaneously liberating the chaotic creativity within."

For Temple 31, those of us participating endeavored to complete the first rung- Sorcery. Further rungs were planned, but interest moved around and along, and at least in that context we never got to them as a group, though we continue on our own paths.

In any case, from this Liber KKK workshop through Temple 31, I began crafting some of the tools I now consider essential and basic to any practicing Urban Mage. As tools they no longer quite match the exact specifics laid out in Carroll's work, but so it goes. The studious among my readers should feel free to analyze where my tools differ.

The Goods

This, my gentle readers, is the Key to Pittsburgh. It was constructed from, if I recall, a speaker knob, some kind of drawer handle, and, most importantly and awesomely, a beetle encased in a clear plastic marble. There are other Keys to Pittsburgh that other local occultists hold, but this one is mine. It is held in the hand, either knifelike or keylike, and used in those ways in ritual- cutting the air, opening hidden locks, turning spigots and spouts of magical energy across the city's ley lines. It is also kept in the pocket, a constant reminder of my intention and will as a magician.

In practice, the Key is used in almost every ritual I perform, as an opener-of-the-way, as a spiritual sword or instrument, as a way to turn energies on and off, or direct them in certain manners.

Before creating the Key during Temple 31, I tended to use rail spikes as my mode-of-cutting-and-opening-and-pinning. They are excellent for their weight and for their association both with movement (as part of rail systems) and their stillness (they are, after all, solid steel or iron). They are especially potent for use in Pittsburgh, as Steel and Iron were its founding industries, and rail one of its chief exports.

I still use rail spikes in my practice, channel and anchor ley lines, to construct guardians, to demark local sites of magical interest, etc. Anything that needs to be marked out or held down in a permanent (but reversible) way is treated to a healthy dose of spike.

This device-creature is a companion to the Key, a mostly passive drawer-down-of-information, a Library-Fetish, a little servant that aids me in finding and collating data on various subjects, that pulls secrets towards itself.

In practice, this Library-fetish is used quite passively. It sits on my desk and is willed at every once in a while to aid in a task. More than anything, it serves as a sort of research-time battery, lending back the help and strength I push onto it in less hectic times.

Mapping is a super-important piece of my practice, and as a 21st century mage, I tend to most of it on the computer. The image above is actually a cut from a PDF map put out by the Pennsylvania Mine Subsidence Insurance Board showing which parts of the city are at risk of, I am not kidding, abruptly being eaten by the earth.

I tend to use derives or drifts as my method of divination, rather than some specific tarot deck or rune set, relying on the whole city to show me the signs I need to see.

Some mundane materials play parts as well: a leather messenger bag, a notebook for recording signs/grafiti, a digital camera, and, sometimes, a stick of chalk, for putting up temporary sigils.

These tools are all part of a longer process, and in time I may move on to different ones. For now, though, these are what I use.

There are some more complicated magical constructions I have made, but I'll save those for another post.

A Survey of the Printed Fiction of the Field To Date [Ekistomancy]

2009-09-21T10:28:00.002-04:00

Urban Magic as a field seems to be prefigured by quite a lot of printed fiction, specifically the horror genre and what is called the "New Weird".

Much of this fiction stems from the odd stories of turn-of-the-century American author H.P. Lovecraft. From his New England home, he drew strange inspiration from the new-but-ancient American landscape, and wrote many sordid tales of mankind's encounters with what became known as the Cthulhu Mythos- ancient alien beings of unimaginable power and imperceivable will, whose very forms could drive men mad. Many of his shorter works explored in some detail various disturbing elements of Greater Boston, especially the warrens and tunnels beneath Beacon Hill (Pickman's Model is the best example of this), though nearly all of his stories relied on the cities of the eastern seaboard as places under threat, or from whence threat might emerge.

Generally, Lovecraft moved the "horror" genre away from more rural tales, and towards the monstrous horrors of modern civilization and modern science. His "cyclopian, primordial cities" buried deep in the arctic or high in the Himalayas lend their vast strangeness to the steel canyons of New York, London, and Tokyo. His terror, as he once eloquently put it, was in the thought that one day "modern civilization" might finally link together enough strange facts that some greater, mind-destroying truth might be revealed. From the opening of his most famous story, The Call of Cthulhu,

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Many of the authors discussed below cite him as a direct or indirect inspiration for their work.

Post-Lovecraft

The most direct fictional use of urban magic, in the sense of magic or supernatural activities for and about cities, rather than in them, comes from Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, published 1977.

Leiber, inspired by Lovecraft, started writing Science Fiction and Fantasy in the early 40s, and kept writing up until his death in the early 1990s. Our Lady of Darkness was written in the middle of his career, and breaks from his other work by being set in the present day. It tells the story of a (vaguely autobiographical) recovering, alcoholic writer, who from his San Francisco apartment discovers a strange and horrible magic about his city, with the aid of a strange volume of occult science called Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities.

In a very Lovecraftian turn, this volume is referred to as being a real, factual book, and its purported author, Thibaut de Castries, to be a real historical figure, and possibly Like Lovecraft's Necronomicon, Megapolisomancy is meant to be real. The author encourages citing it in other works, and there are those who really do look for copies of it. Our Lady of Darkness also introduces de Castries' second work, also fictional, a companion volume called the Grand Cipher or Fifty-Book, wherein de Castries explains the mathematics behind how magical forces gather in and around cities, what he calls "Neo-Pythagorean metageometry", as well as 50 key astrological figures and their uses.

Megapolisomancy deals very specifically with spirits called paramentals, elemental spirits drawn to cities by their dense collection of Steel, Electricity, Paper, and other "city-stuff". By arranging the very street grid, and by constructing skyscrapers of sufficient height, material, and design, one can apparently alter the flow of these paramental forces, and in doing so change the future. Obtusely, paramental seems to be both an adjective describing certain magical forces, but also a noun, describing the golem-like creatures.

The main character of the book, though, is not a practicing megapolisomancer, but rather a sort of hapless victim of megapolisomantic machinations.

Further googling of the term "megapolisomancy" revealed a greek wordpress blog, which used to contain a few articles, but now seems to be empty/abandoned, save for an ominous picture of the sky over a city. Strangely, one of these deleted articles was translated version of David Langford's short story BLIT, in which the author (and also editor of Ansible) first posited the idea of a basilisk, a specific image that "crashes the human mind", as well as defenses against them.

Spiral Jacobs, New Crobizon and UnLondon

New Crobuzon is the city in which much of the fiction by China Meiville takes place. The city was first introduced in his novel Perdido Street Station, where it was the lively backdrop for a sort of extended science-noir romp. The second book, The Scar, is mostly set outside the city, but it returns as a setting in the third book, Iron Council.

New Crobuzon is a vast, London-like city, inhabited by literally hundreds of humanoid and nonhumanoid races- walking cactus-men, bulky warrior hedgehogs, women with the heads of beetles, and disgustingly decadent frog-people, just to describe a few, which during the books is just coming out of an industrialization period, where objects are just as likely to be powered by steam engines as by steam elementals, and many fields of magic are regarded as much closer to science, or art.

Where these books intersect City Magic is in the character of Spiral Jacobs, seem most prominently in the third book, Iron Council. He appears for most of the book to be a crazy homeless man, endlessly wandering the city, and scrawling on its walls intricate, elaborate spirals.

As it turns out, the spirals are actually a linked series of strange sigils, placed at seemingly random, but actually hyper-specific locations around the town, and when they are complete, are used to turn the city itself into a living, breathing weapon against its inhabitants, and Jacobs (perhaps named for the great urbanist Jane Jacobs) not a mad derelict, but one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world.

Meiville's other books are more directly tied to city magic, mostly because they are set in the present-day. They are not fantasy, rather "Magical Realism" or "Urban Fantasy".

King Rat explores, if not a sort of magical London, than certainly an underground one, mixing the mid-90s drum-and-bass scene of warehouse raves and underground clubs with the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the cryptozoological urban legend of Rat Kings- groups of rats whose tails have become intertwined, acting as horrifying collective-animal-groups. It is definitely a work of Urban Fantasy, though like Our Lady of Darkness, no characters perform actual city magic, rather they experience magic or supernatural pheonomenon in an urban context.

Un Lun Dun, Meiville's latest, is most applicable to the field. It is a young-adult book describing the adventures of two young girls as they make their way through London's strange, magical twin city, UnLondon, a city inhabited by the cast-offs and leavings of its "normal" twin, presided over by an evil cloud of living pollution called, appropriately, "the Smog". Various magicians from both cities aid the girls as they battle the evil pollution cloud.

Neil Gaiman
Many critics have noted the similarities between Un Lun Dun and another recent book, Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. Neverwhere also tells of a normal person caught in a sort of sinister-twin-London, this one called London Below, this time a young businessman, rather than two young girls. After rescuing a young girl who turns out to be a sort of princess, but also a key-mage with the power to unlock any door, the businessman is drawn into the other-London, and must right certain wrongs before he can return to London Above. Some amount of city magic is performed, but like Un Lun Dun, the book mainly concerns a cast of strange creatures and characters inspired by and reflecting more concrete aspects of the city, such as The Angel Islington, an actual celestial creature, purportedly for whom both the neighborhood Islington and its Metro station, Angel Station, are named.

Other works by Gaiman have similar Urban Fantasy bents, especially American Gods, a novel which forwards the notion that the hundreds of years of immigration to America has brought to this country all of the old-world gods, or strange instantiations of them, as well as created new gods reflecting American wants and desires, such as Media, Celebrity, and Technology. Again, there is much magic in and around cities, but very little City Magic. Though at one point, the main characters do escape a city by traveling one of its strange, alternate alley-streets, which is very Paper-Street-esque (more on Paper Streets in a future post), and that probably counts.

At two other points does Gaiman play with cities. Both of these appear as mini-stories in the long comic Sandman.

The first, collected in Sandman Volume Three: Fables and Reflections, is called "Ramadan". The Caliph of Baghdad calls Morpheus, Lord of Dream, to ask a deal of him. The Caliph is troubled that Baghdad, in all of its glory, is impermanent, and wishes the Lord of Dream to preserve it. Morpheus preserves this Golden Age of Baghdad by sealing the magical, flying-carpet city inside a bottle, and recasting what are in fact real occurrences of magic as tales and legends, where they will live on forever. The Caliph awakens in a duller, sadder Baghdad, with no memory of its magical days save but in legend. This tale is told in a frame narrative to a young child in present day Baghdad, in whose thoughts the Golden City now lives on.

The second story is from the final volume of Sandman, a story called "A Tale of Two Cities", about a citydweller who awakens to find himself in a familiar-but-alien version of his own city, empty save for grey crowds of non-people. Slowly, he realizes that he is not in his own city, but in that city's dream of itself, the total unconscious-points of spectral geography that make up people's dreams about that city. Eventually, the man exits the Dream-City and wakes up, but wonders aloud what will happen when the City itself Awakens.

Gaiman later cited the Cthulhu Mythos as a direct influence over the second story: "You can tell it's Lovecraftian, because I use the word "cyclopean" in it."

This idea of a dream-city leads us to our next topic.

Invisible Cities, Unreal Cities

The lyrical, nearly poetic Italian author Italo Calvino wrote, late in his life, Invisible Cities, a book of prose poems, framed as a sort of scholarly debate about imagination and linguistics between Marco Polo and the aging Kublai Khan. As many merchants had done before him, Polo described to the emperor the various cities within his empire- brief, incredible descriptions of stories and experiences within those cities, half recollection, half dream.

In addition to capturing ideas about language, narrative, and imagination, Invisible Cities also captures the visionary potentialities that city structures present, their strange ability to foster all kinds of unreal structure.

TS Elliot's poem The Waste Land similarly ensnares and engenders this power of the cityscape to create, in the viewer, untapped mindscapes.

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

The Subterranean and the Invisible

Both Neverwhere and Un Lun Dun, above, posited a sort of underground inverse-city, and that theme of subterranean habitation is continued in two other books.

The first is, like many of the above, directly tied to the Cthulhu Mythos, mixing Lovecraft with the rapid prose style of the Beat Generation. It is called Move Under Ground, by Nick Mamatas. It is a sort of sequel to the various autobiographical Beat books (On the Road, The Yage Letters, etc)- Jack Kerouac witnesses the ancient, terrible island-city of R'lyeh rise off the California Coast, and teams up with William S. Burroughs to drive across America and save the day. The entire book is available, free, here, for your reading pleasure.

City of Saints and Madmen, on the other hand, is pure fantasy, a series of connected short stories set in a strange city whose human inhabitants long ago pushed its founders, a race of mushroom people, underground, but, sinisterly, the mushroom people still live, and cast a long shadow upon the surface dwellers. Shriek: An Afterword is also set in the city of Ambergris, which the reader might note is named for the most secret and valuable excretion of whales.

And now, to round out the list we come to Grant Morrison's long-running comic epic, The Invisibles. In some ways, the work can be framed as a drug-addled occult-induced romp through every weird conspiracy and activity anyone ever thought up, having nothing to do with cities and city magic. But one would be overlooking the many subtle references and practices of city magic the hyper-allusive comic contains.

There are certain passages early on in the series that are clearly an aging ekistomancer, Tom O'Bedlam, trying to pass on his knowledge of city magic to Jack Frost, the main character. He shows Jack how to see the strange underside of Cities, how to meld with pigeon-minds, how to hide in plain sight, how to interpret graffiti. He speaks of ancient, alien, mushroom-like entities, whole planets taken over by this extraterrestrial notion of city-building, where the towers rise like gravestones over a dead population, as the cities have finally won out. He points out William Blake's Urizen, chained to the bottom of the Thames, and to the black pyramid atop the Canary Wharf building. He shows Frost the city as it truly is- alive and magical and strange, and most of all, able to be manipulated.

This magic, combined with the kind of strange spontaneous mixing of pop culture and ancient ritual that happens through the rest of the comic, is City Magic done right.

One of the key icons in the series, a sort of magical orb-satelite, is first seen as a graffiti scrawl in the London Subway, BARBELITH, which is now also the name of a very active web forum devoted to the topics that The Invisibles collated, including city magic. But that is the start of a whole other survey, which I shall save for another day.

The Beginning: A Time for Definitions [Ekistomancy]

2009-09-20T12:26:00.002-04:00

What is Ekistomancy?

Ekistomancy is the art and science of city magic.

Definitions breed further definitions. What do I mean by city magic?

City Magic is a narrow term that refers not to any magic done in cities by an random pagan, but specifically to that magic which is done with or about the city. Worshiping a particular street, leaving offerings for ancient denizens long passed, or drifting through downtown looking for signs (both prophetic and terrestrial), are all wonderful examples of ekistomantic practice.

Ekistomancy has been known by many names: the urban fantasy book Our Lady of Darkness calls it Megapolisomancy, literally the "Divination/Magic of Big Cities." This name was misinterpreted in a recent io9 article about city magic in film and print, calling it Megalopolisomancy. The roleplaying-game-cum-magical-handbook Unknown Armies calls it Urbanomancy, a sort of odd mix of Latin-based English and a Greek suffix. The book of the same name calls it City Magick. More properly (though not strictly proper) it should be Urbomancy, and some call it by that name.

Ekistomancy (my own neologism, which might also be spelled Ekistimancy) is derived from the Greek term Ekistics, a word coined in 1942 by Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis, a famous Greek architect and town planner, from an old, old greek word (oekistis) meaning, roughly, "shaper of settlements," referring ambiguously towards the people who build houses in a settlement, the houses themselves, and the person who directed those colonists in the first place. Ekistics itself has been accused of fostering car cities, and of not truly being a science, as it is claimed. Ekistomancy spurns and drops those criticisms- it borrows the base-word, but not the politics.

But why call it Ekistomancy? Why not one of those other terms mentioned above?

To make it stand out from the other terms, mostly. City Magic is not some fictional science writ by a half-mad Ex-European-noble-on-the-run, nor is it the basis for somebody's RPG character mechanics. It is a real, legitimate practice, and as such deserves a fancy greek-root name.

But what is this website, Ekistomancy?

A blog dedicated to the exploration of the field of Urban Magic- its core practices, its fringe edges, its history and its future.

For me, the author, Ekistomancy (the website) is a challenge and a promise. My goal: I will update at least weekly, and hopefully much more than that. A frequency-of-posting any lower than that is a disservice to the field and to my own practice, and to you, the reader.

A note on terms: Above, I have used perhaps seven terms for "city magic", with various capitalization, in an effort to introduce the idea in as many forms as possible. From here on out, I will try to stick to either "city magic", "urban magic", and "ekistomancy", with capitalization dependent on how corny it comes off as. One thing I often detest in occult books is the use of capitalization and misspelling to reinforce magical terminology, eg. "Green Magick", "High Holy Day", "Book of Shadows". If I capitalize "city magic", it is because I am referring not to any particular instance of city magic, but rather to the field or topic of City Magic as a whole.

A further note: I tend to use quotation marks (") the way that computer scientists do, as explicit references to other texts. As such, I flout MLA guidelines by leaving my quotes' internal punctuation intact, and by putting external punctuation strictly outside my quotations.

The Mysterious House of Lot 190, Lower Greenfield [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2009-09-01T20:56:00.002-04:00

Bing! came through, for once, and has an aerial photograph of the house.

Different Mixers Redux [Man and Bits of Paper]

2009-07-30T11:16:00.001-04:00

Our new roomate Nicole lived just previous to living with us in a house called S----- (named for the street it was on), also called the Fraggle Yurt of Love. I met Nicole at a function run by a campus org we both belong to, KGB (which does not stand for Keeping Geeks Busy), which is its own crazy set of stories. KGB, generally, is an organization composed of the geekiest of geeky kids, on a geeky geeky campus. We follow Roberts Rules of Order (The same ones congress does), but all of our committees are jokes, like the Trebuchet Target Committee, or the Committee to Destroy Ohio (they collaborate sometimes), or the (Name of Still Living KGBer) Memorial Robot Committee.

N. is the most recent in a long line of KGBers (mostly officers of the org, actually) to live in S-----. In fact, I asked around, and the last time someone signed a new lease, as opposed to an addended lease or a sublet, in S----- is, and I am not exaggerating, EIGHT YEARS AGO. Put another way, there has never been a time that S----- was unoccupied, or where people had to, say, FULLY move out, in EIGHT YEARS.

About four years ago, there was a cadre of rather messy people living there, and since then all new roommates have been self-selecting- OK with living somewhere messy. That is to say, since that initial messy time, the house and it's occupants have just gotten messier (compared to the past).

Finally, just this summer, Nicole and the other most-recent-yurt-live-ers (mostly the others- Nicole is actually really clean, but susceptible to house-inertia, so I guess she's culpable as well) had the place so ill-kept that they simply could not find other humans willing to live there, and so, finally, after eight years, there were no new KGB tenants. The lease ran out, and the house had to be emptied.

Anyway, that's all lead-up to this story:

My friend Matt used to live in S-----, three or four years back, and not overlapping with Nicole's stay. When he moved in, he brought with him three boxes of Kitchen supplies (Plates, utensils, cookware, etc). His new roommates and him looked through his stuff and the stuff already in the kitchen, and sort of traded upwards- using his stuff to replace less good stuff, but not unboxing his stuff if there was already, say, a really good Soup Pot, much better than his newly-brought Soup Pot.

What went down into the basement was two of his three boxes, as well as three boxes of kitchen supplies that were rarely-used, or that his new additions had replaced, which belonged to maybe seven people (three current roommates and four previous ones who had left some of their stuff behind.

Matt moved out of S----- a year or two later. When he did, though, he packed his kitchen stuff pretty hurriedly. When he got to California and unpacked, he found that he had packed so hurriedly that he hadn't even packed HIS OWN kitchen supplies. Out of the seven pots/pans and seven matching lids he had, no lid actually correctly matched a pot, and there were TEN different manufacturers represented.

Then the really strange up memory hit. He remembered how this had happened- When he was in the basement packing up his supplies, he had looked through not two white boxes (IE, the two he had actually put down there), but through two blue ones. But the five boxes he and his roommates-from-a-year-ago had put down there were white or brown- the blue boxes must have already been down there. Thinking about it further, he realized that the table he had been using to hold these boxes up and sort through them was ACTUALLY NO TABLE AT ALL BUT SIX OR SEVEN OTHER DIFFERENT BOXES ALL LABELED "S----- KITCHEN" PUT DOWN THERE IN THE PAST NEAR-DECADE BY THE COUPLE DOZEN ROOMMATES BEFORE HIMSELF.

(the epilogue: the landlord ended up actually hiring someone to clean out the basement, as none of the current roommates actually could figure out what was down there or who owned it. That person worked for three days and took out four dozen trash bags and as many or more boxes.

One of the other most-recent-yurters put it this way in her LiveJournal the night that they finally all moved out:

that house had entirely too many hit points.

but it's over. we gutted s-----.

my key locked that door for the final time. i don't feel like i had much to do with the house's living history, but i sure as hell witnessed and played a part in the long, anguished demise.

Nicole moved in with Rigel and me, and is visibly relieved to be living in a clean house.)

Cleaning Other People's Houses [Man and Bits of Paper]

2009-07-30T10:14:00.001-04:00

It's a good feeling to clean a friend's house. To see order emerge from seeming chaos. It's good for the friend for you to be there, both for moral support, and to shed some fresh perspective on the situation.

It's good to be able to look at a disaster area and say "Oh, we can fix this. Go get that empty bookshelf."

It's good to have the right tools from having cleaned your own house.

Me: "Why are all these shirts everywhere?"
Him: "I... I don't really have that many hangers."
Me: "Oh, well, I just cleaned out S------- (the name of another house). We now have a couple hundred plastic ones at my house. You can have, say, 50?"
Him: "Oh, I guess that would work."
Me: "Also, I'm bringing 409, Goo Gone, Windex, and Pledge. And my vacuum."
Him: "Ok.... *looks around* Oh my God, yes."

It's good to rediscover a floor.

Pittsburgh knows Kung Fu! Or so I though. [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2009-07-28T16:19:00.001-04:00

I thought Pittsburgh had a Black Belt, until I talked to our other contributor, Edward.

Let me explain.

Having just moved back to Pittsburgh from California exile, I am, well, excited. My fiancee and I are madly scrambling to furnish our new apartment, and so we have been driving all over the city, which has lead us down some interesting roads.

We did a lot of driving, and we passed a lot of Belt signs. The belt system is an innovation Pittsburgh made in the 1940s, developed by local traffic engineer Joseph White. They are collections of connected roads which, when followed in sequence, form long circular ring-roads, or belts, around Pittsburgh, in leiu of and then as alternatives to interstate highways.

The system looks something like this:

(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

And the belt signs look something like this:
(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

A few interesting points about the Belt system:
Roads that are belts retain their origional names. So, for example, there are signs on Shady Ave in Squirell Hill that it is Shady Ave, but also that part of it is the "Blue Belt"

The Highland Park Bridge is the only double-belted road, being for its span the carrier of both Blue and Green

The Green, Orange and Red belts are not complete circles- the Red Belt especially, as it is only that northern arc from Leetsdale to Tarentum. The Red and Orange belts cut off at the edges of the county (though Orange does continue unofficially, twelve miles of it being decomissioned in the 1970s, which gives me some exploratory notions), while the Green belt runs into a number of geographic issues (The western hills in Robinson township, for the most part), which make continuing its arcing curve prohibitive and/or trite.

The belts are arranged concentrically, and labeled after the colors of the light spectrum- Red at the edge, down through Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue to Purple (Purple was of course added in 1995 to try to help lost tourists in our lovely double-gridded downtown).

Imagine my surprise, then, when on Penn Ave headed north through Wilkinsburgh, well inside the yellow belt's purview, I came upon these signs:
The first time I came upon them I did not really notice them, save for the abstract notions which wiggled into my brain that a) some tiny extra piece of the Red Belt ran through Wilkinsburgh, and had its own detour and b) the Black Belt existed, and also had a small detour on Penn.

This lead to some confusion, when I mentioned a week later to Edmund that I had traveled along the Black Belt while picking up furniture, to which he replied "What? There is no Black Belt. Though if there was, Paper Street would be part of it."

And so just this morning I googled "Pittsburgh black detour" and found that others had been confused as well.

According to this March 2008 article in the Trib, the detours are color-coded designatory overlays (just like the Belt System) designed to route traffic away and around really bad accidents on the various parkways (just like the Belt System), and that the detours are colored Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Black, and Brown (the first four of which are also colors represented in the Belt System).

More confusingly, according to the Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways document revised and rereleased by Penn-Dot in 2008, there is not just one Black Detour, but thirty-eight, and not just one Red Detour, but twenty.

I am not sure if any same-color detours actually intersect each other, as the document is 210 pages long (it can be found as an 8 MB pdf here), but I am tempted to try to find out.

At the very least, I did find the two detours that the specific signs we found (On Penn near Ardmore) actually reference
RED DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 116)
BLACK DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 124)
They detours, then, split at Penn and Swissvale, Black heading further down Penn, and Red turning right on Swissvale.

Adding to the confusion, though (and perhaps explaining part of why two clearly different road systems managed to get mostly the same color scheme), is that in the above maps, pulled straight from the EDRFLAF document, RED is colored BLUE, and BLACK is colored RED.

Looks like Penn-Dot could use some better in-house graphic designers. They might want to take a cue from the brilliant Pittsburgh Wayfinder System, which... was also a Penn-Dot project, as far as I can tell.

Oh well.

How to get rid of (more) books (and other things) [Man and Bits of Paper]

2009-06-21T14:56:00.001-04:00

The short answer- be persistent.

When we move in a week or two, Rigel and I are taking a single car-load with us, and so to prepare we have been cutting down on even more of our possessions.

Clothing was the easiest- for a few months now I've been using to hanger trick and so it was immediately clear what I hadn't been wearing. I also finally gave up on some of my old t-shirts, many of which have stretched or warped and just fit strangely.

DVDs were a little harder- I had to call not just used video stores but used music stores as well. For some reason, Los Angeles seems to have a dearth of used-whatever stores- we had to drive twenty miles to the DVD-buying place I finally found, and got $40 cash for our troubles, which was cool.

Comics were also easy- we went to Pulp Fiction and traded 15 or 16 used comics (half trade paperbacks, half manga) for 3 new trade paperbacks, which was sweet, though a little counter-productive (but totally worth it! DMZ: Blood in the Game FTW!)

Books, though. Oh my.

It really started with a lot of thinking and reading and writing. Only after talking over the issue in my head for a couple of hours could I really bring myself to make book-decisions and begin to cull things off my shelves.

I found two thoughts to guide me:
- "If there was a fire and this was all destroyed, would I replace this specific book?"
- "Five years down the road, is this book something Awesome Happy Future Me would own?"

I found, for maybe the first time in my life, that for a majority of my books, the answers were both NO.

I think that for a long time books were my security- I knew that if I forgot something, I could always go back to the source and look it up. They let me hang pieces of my brain on the outside.

But I'm not at that place any more. As I mentioned in my previous post, when I was culling books there were whole shelves devoted to subjects that just don't hold my interest any more- I've moved on. Most of what remains are: fiction series that I have read and re-read and plan to read and re-read again- old friends that always show me something new; books on urbanism (but not the ones I found un-instructive or boring or not worth reading twice); a few comics (also old friends); and just five Dungeons and Dragons books (I sold thirty such ones last year). It's about a quarter of the high-water-mark, and less than half of what Rigel and I brought to the condo.

We took them one place, which took two of our three boxes. They had a pretty sketchy store credit policy- you could only used credit for up to half of your transaction. As they were offering us $52 in store credit, I'd have to... buy $104 worth of used books? That seemed pretty much counter to my intention to get rid of books. I haggled with the owner, and got him to just trade for two barely-opened Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks, $40 to him but $70 retail! It was good.

The last box we took to another store the next day, and they bought five books for $6 cash, which was cool, but sort of a waste of time, as they took an hour to get around to us. Frustrated, we took the leavings (which were, weirdly, the nicest, least crappy-paperback-y of all the ones we were selling- urbanism textbooks, a few literary journals, some $14 paper-but-bigger-and-nicer-back sci fi, etc) to OPEN , just down the street from us, where they took everything and gave us store credit, which we plan on selling to someone on Craigslist for cash. OPEN was so plesant and such a well-lit, beautiful store, that I was almost happy just to give them the last few books- I knew it was a good home, or at least a pretty train station from which they would travel to good homes.

Weirdness pervaded the two days it took. What was most difficult was how long selling everything took- the whole process stretched out and gave me long periods of time to torture myself about how callous I was to push away so many words, and at such crappy prices.

It was also heart-breaking to enter so many used book stores- most of them seemed over-full and under-staffed. Apparently the recession is hitting the whole industry really hard- half of the places I called to ask were dead numbers of out-of-business stores, and another third weren't currently buying anything. All the open places were depressingly selective- they only seemed to want quick-selling paperbacks, while nicer-but-slower-selling tomes were shunned as short-term losses, even if they might be long-term gains.

But it's done, and despite the messiness of the operation, another weight has been lifted from my heart.

"Stuff" [Man and Bits of Paper]

2009-06-11T15:06:00.001-04:00

The few weeks mentioned in the last post became a few months. Rigeland I moved in to the condo at the beginning of May. We are moving out at the end of June, headed back to Pittsburgh.

The Condo, though, is clean and painted and carpeted and beautiful. We made it ready to be used again, just not, apparently, by us.

I have learned many things in the past few months, and would like to relate a few of them:

1. You cannot change your stuff until it really is your stuff.

The biggest issue we had moving things around in the condo wasn’t actually deciding what to do with it. We had a good sense of what to keep, discard, donate, etc. The hardest part was having to convince other members of the extended family that that was the right move, that no, they didn’t need an extra coffee table, nor did anyone else in the family, and that a lot of this stuff could just be let go in some appropriate manner.

2. It is much easier to make decisions about stuff when you can see all of your stuff at once.

I never knew how many of my books I didn’t really want to own anymore until I sorted them into four giant book cases and said “Hmm. This is too many books.” Now that they are on the big shelves, I’ve organized them by subject, and as such the keep/donate decisions can be made in big batches- there are subjects I don’t really care for anymore, books I don’t really need around. Also, being able to see, say, all of the books on writing, all together, makes it much easier for me to pick the best one (to keep) and purge the rest.

3. You cannot sort other people’s things for them- they have to want it.

While cleaning the condo, I also helped Beta’s father clean out his garage, or start to. But there is only so much one can do to help sort other people’s stuff. The most I could do was set up the right bins (SHRED, THROW OUT, DONATE, KEEP) for things to be sorted into, write new labels on boxes and folders for keepable stuff, and then sit with him and keep him working through various piles. Yes, there was some verbal encouragement along the lines of “ten years from now are you really going to want that around?” and “if it means so much to you, why was it buried in the garage?” but I really did very little beyond provide the time and the means for organization- it was Beta’s dad who actually made all the decisions.

4. Storage Units are a trap.

If there is any single thing that makes “stuff” grow that thing is the modern storage unit. It’s an entropy-creator for a couple of reasons: it lets you own more things that you actually have room for in your life proper; it lets you hide how much stuff you own from your psyche; it has sufficient distance as to become a sort of unknown, and untreatable, undoable black hole of “things that I regret not honoring through use.”

5. History is right about “stuff.”

There have been few times in history where overabundance has been such a problem. Such abundance used to be a dream, but with modern production, machine labor, etc, it is now a reality, and a bit of a nightmare. Some of the most prominent thinkers in history were also the most Spartan, starting with the Spartans themselves. It is only the last few generations of Americans who have had this issue with the owning of too many things in a broad, general way. Yes, there have always been eccentrics with vast collections of objects, but now it is the rule, not the exception.

And unlike historical “stuff”- hand crafted, expensive, well-loved stuff, our “stuff” is processed, identical, non-unique. And yet we treasure it as if it was. Why? If it is all replaceable (although whether that idea is one worth building a society on is a whole other article,) why not replace it? Why hold on?

I think, when it comes down to it, the happiest people I know are the ones who do not own a lot, but what they do own is a) beautiful, b) unique, and c) honored through use. Some of the unhappiest people I know own a lot of stuff, most of it non-unique, and none of it used as often as it deserves to be.

We are gearing up now to move back to Pittsburgh, with under a car-load worth of things (no furniture, etc), so expect more soon on the cleaning end of things.

Green Goddess [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2009-06-06T17:27:00.001-04:00

I just made Rigel and myself an excellent salad from Jesse Ziff Cool's "Simply Organic" cookbook using the wealth of organic produce one can find in San Francisco. It was her "Green Goddess Chicken and Asparagus Salad"

Green Goddess is actually a dressing. I had never heard of it, but before Ranch Dressing was invented it was supposedly the most popular salad dressing in the country.

From the Wikipedia article:

The dressing is named for its green tint. The most accepted theory regarding its origins points to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in 1923, when the hotel's executive chef wanted something to pay tribute to actor George Arliss and his hit play, The Green Goddess.[1] He then concocted this dressing, which, like the play, became a hit. This dressing is a variation of a dressing originated in France by a Chef to Louis XIII who made a Sauce Au Vert (Green Sauce) which was traditionally served with 'Green Eel' - Refer to Larousse Gastronomique Page 1272.

Just yesterday we walked past the Palace Hotel. Turns out Andrew Carnegie actually stayed there. Here's his description:

A palace truly! Where shall we find its equal? Windsor Hotel, good-bye! you must yield the palm to your great Western rival, as far as structure goes, though in all other respects you may keep the foremost place. There is no other hotel building in the world equal to this. The court of the Grand at Paris is poor compared to that of the Palace. Its general effect at night, when brilliantly lighted, is superb; its furniture, rooms and appointments are all fine, but then it tells you all over it was built to "whip all creation," and the millions of its lucky owner enabled him to triumph.

Also, the salad was really good. Rigel hates plants, and she liked this salad.

San Francisco- Adorable Crustations, Typography [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2009-06-01T17:40:00.001-04:00

Tanked with other crabs at one of the stores in the recently re-interiored Ferry Building.

Crazily kerned characters keep trolley cars from crushing the curious (if cues are continued upon).

A Long Month [Man and Bits of Paper]

2009-01-09T01:12:00.002-05:00

The move was successful. The last couple of days before it were pretty stressful, although I didn't quite realize that until our flight out to LA. I spent the next couple of days sleeping twelve or thirteen hours a day.

Rigel's family in LA is pretty extensive, and also Mexican, so the holidays were one family gathering after another- I'm sure we managed to have every combination and permutation possible of branches from the family tree. Her family likes me pretty well- I think I'm the latest in a long line of helpful gringos. Or something like that.

The last week we finally started work on the condo. I might have spoken of it before. Maybe not. It... it is a mess. It was a mess. Rigel's dad and his uncle put two solid weeks of ten hour days in clearing it out of trash and creepy moldy things, although there was still mold on nearly every surface. The past few days we've boxed nearly every remaining thing, Goodwill'd a lot of it, thrown out the really moldy stuff. We've cleaned nearly all of the furniture left, and for the past couple of days we've been painting.

Things left to do-

resurface the tile in the hallway, alcove, and kitchen
replace the refrigerator and dish washer
paint the bedroom, the bathroom, and the front alcove
replace the carpet in the living room and bedroom
fix a few different things (a kitchen drawer or two need to be restapled, the cabinets might need new handles)

All that time furniture and boxes need to be shuffled around, which is frustrating and time consuming.

It's going to be a long couple of weeks.

A Good Day [Man and Bits of Paper]

2008-12-02T01:31:00.001-05:00

When I got home for Thanksgiving my parents too seemed to have caught the cleaning bug. The house was a lot emptier, a lot more serene, than it had been. My early christmas gift to them, they informed me, was to be the elimination of at least one, hopefully three or four or all, of my boxes of stuff in the garage.

My mind flashed back to packing those very boxes, five years ago. Books, I remembered, lots of books.

A digression: My parents are, shall we say, not poor. They might be rich- they probably are rich- but they don't act rich, and I never grew up thinking we were rich. But they are comfortable, and they do have discretionary income, although I rarely see them spend it.

I have, however, seen them spend it on books. Many times in my childhood would we venture to the bookstore and leave with armfuls.

I was a voracious reader in high school and middle school. In college most of that appetite was channeled towards assigned reading. Looking up now, I have four half-read books on my shelf, and two more in my bag. The habit has definitely stuck.

I think my parents logic went something like this: reading is a very good habit, and something we want to encourage Connor to do. He should probably be reading good books. If he picks his own books, he will pick crap for a while, but eventually he will start picking good books. But giving him good books is not as good as him picking them out himself. To increase the aggregate total of good books read over time, we should let him a) pick his own books, and b) let him pick a lot of books.

Given this, the logical thing to do was to take me and my sister to a bookstore pretty often and let us go nuts. They could, so they did.

And now we find me pulling huge boxes of generally bad but occasionally good science fiction and fantasy out of my garage.

It took less than thirty minutes to sort through three boxes of them. Everything went except for a) five books that were not actually mine and b) a signed copy of the un-utterably terrible Dune: House Harkonnen, kept because of the inscription:

"To Connor, who knows so much about the Dune Universe"

to which I always want to append: "From Brian Herbert, who knows so little about the Dune Universe"

The other two hundred books we took, along with two Ikea bags of books my parents also intended to not own, to a used book store, and sold them.

The store (BookBuyers, which is an awesome place that everyone in the bay area should visit) remaindered a half-box, and took the rest for two thirds store credit, one third cash. We are going to sell the store credit on Craigslist, or maybe the KGB board (all those googlers must love books!)

It was a good day.

Different Mixers [Man and Bits of Paper]

2008-11-15T16:51:00.001-05:00

Four years ago when I lived in Massachusetts for a summer, I moved into a spacious but unfurnished apartment. As a present, my mother bought me a set of something like seventy cooking items from Ikea. They came in a big box, densely packed, and heavy as all hell.

I knew, when I took everything out of the box and arranged it all around the kitchen, that they would never, ever go back into the box again. Just by unpacking it, I had disturbed so much of the box's internal structure that I could not stack things inside
of it as neatly as they had been.

That point when I had opened the box but before I had removed anything was the neatest and most complete that set would ever be.

At present, I can tell you for certain where perhaps twenty of those seventy items are. Most of those twenty are infrequently used, hyper-specific tools, and I'm not sure why I even own them. I have a garlic crusher. I don't crush garlic. I have a lemon squeezer. I don't squeeze lemons.

I have, however, wondered why those two tools are fundamentally different in structure, when they do almost the same mechanical action onto similar products.

I think one of the measuring cups has survived.

I think.

I do own, however, about thirty unrelated cookware items that I know for a fact I never purchased.

My theory, at this point, is that that cookware set and I have gone through six or seven moves in the past four years, and have been housed with six or seven roommates, each with their own set of stuff.

The kitchens, in all cases, have been integrated ones- everyone's pots living with everyone else's, a communal knife drawer, etc. Moving out is always something rushed, and hiding behind those drawers and cabinets, cookware is usually forgotten until last. One doesn't always see the proper pan lid hiding in the sink, and one could miss the plate that is in a roommate's room.

I am as guilty as my roommates- over time I just sort of took stuff that I thought was mine, and, three or four or seven pieces at a time, I began substituting their cookware for mine, and now I have fractions of many distinct sets of cookware, and they certainly don't add up to a whole. I have three pots and four potlids, but the lids are for pots I do not own.

Additionally, a lot of that stuff is cheap and breakable. I think of the fifteen plates I once bought, three remain, and one of them is chipped. I do, though, possess an unrelated set of twenty floral plates that I would never in a million years purchase, but yet somehow possess.

In any case, when we move I will be abandoning all of it, save three items, all of them by chance, from Crate and Barrel, and all Christmas presents, though they were different Christmases.

The first is a circular spatula full of holes, that my sister got me for cooking pirogues.

The second is a cast iron skillet my mother got me, for cooking all sorts of stuff.

And the third is rigel's vegetable steamer that her mother got her for, well, self-evident vegi-steaming.

As for everything else?

There are plenty of Ikeas in California, and plenty of roommates here who want to cook with my strange cookware.

How to Rid Yourself of Books [Man and Bits of Paper]

2008-11-10T01:57:00.001-05:00

I will start with a declarative. More than any other possession, books are hard for me to let go of.

I hold the printed word in such high regard that I can sometimes lend books (but only to the trustworthy), rarely give books away (but only to the special), sometimes sell them (but I am always frustrated that they are not worth as much to others as they are to me), and never, never throw them out.

The one time I ever threw books away outright was when they had been stored over the summer in my friend's basement, and that basement had flooded. Not, you know, a big puddle flood. A foot deep of nasty groundwater seeping in from the hardest summer rainfall in a hundred years.

One or two big boxes of books and clothing were at the bottom of the pile of stuff, and after five minutes of examining them and choking on the clouds of mold emanating from them, I realized that exactly 0% was salvageable, and that both boxes should be summarily blackbagged and tossed.

I mean, of course, big industrial garbage bags for to hold trash. Not that each book should be disappeared fascist regime/ secret police style, bag-on-head. Wow- some sort of V For Vendetta / Fahrenheit 451 crossover is playing out in my head now.

And so we arrive at the problem- I am probably moving in the next few months. My apartment has approximately 30 linear feet of books in it. That's 250 pounds of books. I cannot move 250 pounds of books. Moving them across town was a bitch. Moving them across the country will either be painful or expensive or both.

Enter my friend Alan. Alan grew up about six hours northeast of Pittsburgh, in Middle-of-Nowhere-No-Really-We-Mean-It, PA. He has had two stays in Pittsburgh of around two years and then around one year, and although he loves the hell out of the city and its residents, he hasn't been able to stay permanently, due to ongoing financial crises of various sorts. He visited for the long weekend, and crashed on my couch (and it is a damn comfy couch too).

He even helped name this blog. The suggestion of TS Eliot's 4 Quartets beat out my idea of The Waste Land as a source of floral but effective language.

In any case, it occured to me sometime tonight that Alan is someone I trust. I trust him to not only not throw books away, but to appreciate the hell out of them the way he appreciates me, and the way he appreciates Pittsburgh. He is a man to which I would love to give books.

Given as well that he is a poor man, and can purchase perhaps a book or two a year, giving him as many books as he could take seemed like the best of all solutions.

Boxed in his car's trunk are about 60 books- a sixth of what I own. I have given them freely, without any sort of monetary solicitation, however paltry, from either party.

I want him to have these books.

True, they cost me money to buy when I did buy them, but that is money I don't remember spending. That is money that could have gone to movies or popcorn or something frivolous, but instead they went to paper, and the enjoyment of paper. I've gotten my pound of flesh from the books he's getting- they are all one's I've already read. And if I really need them again, its not like things go out of print anymore. No book I own is old enough that copies are rare, or even semi-rare. Half of them are mass-market paperbacks anyway.

True, keeping them is a comfort. Knowing that all that information, all those quotes and paragraphs and words are just at arms reach is a good feeling, a sort of warm blanket of information and phrase. But it can be smothering, and although a good feeling, it is just a feeling, and perhaps not as good as other feelings that not having so many damn books might allow. You cannot keep everything.

But everyone wins now.

Alan feels good- he has books, and he loves books. And they were filtered through me and my tastes, so they probably won't be crap.

I feel good. I'm three shelves lighter than I was this morning. It sounds sort of callous, but its one more thing I can check off on my List of Things to Do.

And the books feel good to, as they aren't being tossed, or disappeared, or thrown into a big Nazi fire, or turned into terrible, terrible sewer mold. They are being loved.

Just not by me.

Household Plant is Sad and Gone [Man and Bits of Paper]

2008-11-09T23:33:00.001-05:00

Some time ago, I had some crazy architecture student roommates. Those times are now over, and have been for quite some time.

One of their stranger ideas was inherited from a crazy forty-something Russian one of them had stayed with in a sixth floor walkup in Brooklyn during an architecture conference. (Never thought I would say that sentence, but there goes) Rather than a shower curtain, he instead had a long, low pot (almost a trough) full of ferns and small plants. The splashings from the shower would fall into that and water the plants.

To mimic this, we bought a potted plant. Not a fern, a plant. One of those five foot tall fern-on-a-stick plants that doesn't need sunlight, or love. After a month of pulling fronds out of the drain and mopping up the spilled shower water brown with dirt, I bought a shower curtain and moved the plant to the living room.

I think I watered it once.

I think.

Today, I looked at it, and saw that all but three fronds had turned brown. I took it out to the dumpster. Tonight, I will watch the garbage man laugh and then crush it into planty death.

If it isn't dead already.

In any case, this is instructive as to how things go in my apartment- there is a weird thing, then it becomes a clutter problem, then it is ignored, and then I flip out and deal with it in the most final, regime-changing way I can.

I do not clean in halves.

Bates, Juliet, and Romeo Streets; South Oakland [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-07-28T18:57:00.001-04:00

Note: Some of this article is supposition, and is noted as such.

In the 1820s and 1830s, the area which is now South Oakland was owned by a woman named Juliet Simple. Juliet Street is presumably named after her. Later as more streets were built, presumably, the naming trend continued, but rather than pull from the names within Ms. Simple's family, "Juliet" was taken to be a Shakespeare reference, and so one now finds Hamlet, Ophelia, Juliet, and Romeo Streets in the vicinity. Or so I presume from the cartological records I came across.

Juliet is a relatively flat street that runs close to North-South. To the west the land falls down into a short valley that was once called Three Mile Run (after the creek that formed it, which entered the Monongahela three miles from the Point (see Four Mile Run, Nine Mile Run for further use of this creative naming scheme), but after the Democrat publisher of the "Tree of Liberty" newspaper, Tarleton Bates, who was killed there in a duel on January 8th, 1806, the name was changed. He was slain by Thomas Stewart, an Irish shopkeeper who was friends with Ephraim Pentland, Bates' rival, the Republican publisher of "The Commonwealth."

In that paper, Pentland called Bates one of the "most abandoned political miscreants that ever disgraced a State." Bates responded by purchasing a whip and attacking Pentland in the street some days later. Pentland challenged Bates to a duel via Stewart, who served as messenger. Dueling, however, had been outlawed since 1794. Bates declined, and then subsequently published an account of the whole incident, in which he accused Stewart of being "ungentlemenly" simply for being the messenger. Stewart called for an apology, and when none was given challenged Bates himself. Bates accepted the challenge.

One cold winter morning they boated out to Oakland, then wooded and far from the town, and finding a glade half way up Three Mile Run, proceeded to duel. William Wilkins, the lawyer after whom Wilkinsburg is named, served as Stewart's second. Morgan Neville, son of the colonel for whom the street is named, was Bates' second. Pistols were drawn, paces marched, and facing each other, shots were fired in unison. The first round, both parties missed. The second round, Bates was struck in the chest. He died within the hour. The duel was the last one Pittsburgh would ever see.

Since then, the glade has been paved over, and the valley mostly filled, but the name remains.

On the side of the valley, west and uphill from Bates, east and downhill from Juliet, lies her lover, Romeo Street. It is hard to call it a street, however, because it is in fact a set of stairs. Four houses line the staircase, all of them with their own sub-staircases leading down to their respective doors. Three of them were built some time before 1906, and the fourth some time between 1914 and 1932.

They were most likely built, as were many of the houses in the area, as housing for the workers at the Linden Steel Corporation. The plant employed 1500 Linden steel was owned by WJ Lewis and his son, WJ Lewis Junior. In the 1890s they were embroiled in a massive fraud incident. Apparently one of their employees had made a copy of the official inspector's seal used on steel that had been certified to a certain quality. Substandard steel was being stamped with this fake stamp and sent on as certified, full price steel. The subterfuge might not have been detected, save that one of Linden's chief customers was the US Navy, who had their own set of inspectors. Indeed, during the 1880s and 90s they sold more steel to the Navy than the Carnegie Corporation did.

WJ Lewis Jr. sold Linden Steel some time before 1901, sold his mansion on Chatsworth Avenue in Hazelwood, which was apparently a bit of a "Millionaire's Row" back in the 1880s, and moved to Texas. The mansion and grounds were sold to the city, which turned them into a community center and a now-gone park.

But I digress. The three houses and one wreck that stand today on Romeo street appear to have the same overhead plans as the houses on the 1932 map- they are probably original. They are, I believe, the most extreme examples of the city's tendency to fill ever nook and cranny it can, a testament (and tenement, if one will pardon the pun (or parole it)) to the will to expand, to fill.

Moleskine Zombie Prep page [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-05-22T01:37:00.001-04:00

Crossposted to skine.art

UP...C? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-05-20T18:33:00.001-04:00

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) made the US Steel Tower (the worlds tallest triangular-floor-plan building) its headquarters a few months ago. They got permission to put their logo at the top of the building.

I just took a picture of that logo today. The M is missing- did it fall? I called the building's lobby and was told that no, it is simply a larger letter, and its installation was saved for last.

Macrotypographers, beware?

I want to make a kerning joke, but I sans serif.

The Zombiemobile and Eve, of the Pittsburgh Department of Zombie Disposal [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-05-19T14:17:00.001-04:00

Since time before time (and by that I mean the early 1970s), Pittsburgh has been a town of zombies. More recently, one can see a beat up red little car around town, upon whose sides is stenciled the seal of the City of Pittsburgh, and the words "PITTSBURGH DEPARTMENT OF ZOMBIE DISPOSAL"

I recently interviewed Eve, the owner of the vehicle, at her place of employment, Heads Together, Squirrel Hill's last independent video rental store.

"Part of its just to entertain people in traffic," she thinks. "Like there's a suburban mom who's really frustrated and she sees my car with the zombie in the back and goes 'Oh, thats lovely!' "

Eve was born in Pittsburgh, and has lived here her whole life. She's known about zombies for just as long. She attributes her interest in zombies to George Romero's many zombie films, especially Dawn of the Dead, filmed locally at the Monroeville Mall. All of Romero's zombie films were filmed in and around Pittsburgh, and the most recent one (Land of the Dead) took explicit advantage of Pittsburgh's geography in its plot- the Golden Triangle has returned to being a fort- its rivers serve as barriers against the zombie threat.

Eve gave me a brief history of zombie lore in America and Hollywood.

"My friend Greg who works over at the Warhol was in Haiti in the peace corps for a couple of years. He was in this small village, and people were dead serious, they told him not to go near this one guy because he was a zombie. He was just this slow lumbering kind of guy in the village. There's a whole thing in the Hattian religion where you get turned into a zombie when a Bokor (sorcerer or shaman) blows pufferfish powder on you. You go into a coma, get a fair amount of brain damage, and he digs you up, and then you have to go work on his farm the rest of your life.

"That was pretty much how the zombie thing started out, a small piece of the Vodou religion, but then when Hollywood got a hold of it they started having magic zombies, and atomic zombies, and biological zombies. No going through the whole vodou or loa thing, we'll just have some guy cut up a chicken and then the zombies will come. If you watch "I Eat Your Skin", they almost get it right, but then it gets silly.

"Zombies didn't really start eating people until then. Before that, if you saw "White Zombie" with Bela Lugosi he's just kind of sad, and maybe he strangled people. But zombies didn't start eating people until the 60s or 70s.

I asked her about more recent films where biological viruses change humans and make them scary and zombie-like. Do the dark-seekers in I Am Legend count? Or the virus-ridden humans in the 28 Days Later series. Her answer was a clear no. "They are rage-infected humans, they aren't zombies. Zombies have to be dead and come back to life to qualify, however unlikely the circumstances that lead up to that."

She got a bit into the motifs and themes zombies might represent in movies. More recent ones cast them as the human output of a biological or chemical attack, but earlier films were more classist.

"There might be" Eve says, "a blue-collar connection, or maybe they are representative of slacker ner-do-wells. Zombies represent the masses- they're blue collar- they just keep going. It's like working on a fab-line. Mindless, repetitive action. I think anyone in the customer service industry can appreciate the zombie mentality."

These undead were the impetus for a group Halloween costume she and her friends put together a few years ago. They bought cheap jumpsuits and stenciled "Pittsburgh Department of Zombie Disposal" on the back of them. Add improvised weapons to the mix (The crowbar is Eve's favorite) and the PDZD was born. "I think," she says "that if the PDZD were real they would be a cross between garbagemen and animal control."

A few weeks later, Eve took it upon herself to further stencil her car with the logo. At the time, it was a hunter blue geo prism. This "ZombieMobile Mark 1" was destroyed when it was rear-ended over on Schenley Hill. Mark 2 is the new red one, which she purchased from her mechanic.

Her car is part of a growing trend.

"I think that anyone in the know knows that Pittsburgh is the zombie city. I think right now there is a huge ressurgance in zombies- its a weird culture catching on. All the goths wanted to be vampires, but now they are okay with being less pretentious and emotional."

The big event every year is the zombie walk in the Monroeville Mall. Both this year and last year it made the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest zombie shuffle.

That walk and others are put on by local group The It's Alive! Show. Thousands of people show up in zombie costume, although the most creative zombie Eve has ever seen was one of the zombie bunnies her friend Beth has knit over the years.

When we spoke about the reaction of other municipal departments in Pittsburgh ("Ambulance drivers seem to get a chuckle. Garbage men get a kick out of it too!") the conversation shifted to how Pittsburgh's topography.

The post-industrial landscape makes a huge impact on the genre- most zombie/plague films have been set in Pittsburgh or post-industrial Scotland, a similar landscape.

"Pittsburgh and Scotland share a weird connection- apparently we both have the same slang. Metal industries and the Carnegie connection. Maybe he started it. "I've imported some bog mummies to work in the factories!" and then they busted loose."

She talked about other strange things in our city as well, including the Ogua- giant catfish that date back from Indian times in the three rivers.

"I used to boat around on the river, and I've seen some pretty big catfish. Like, you smack one with a paddle, and they start trying to rock the boat. There are also a lot of weird religious shrines in Pittsburgh: There used to be a huge Indian burial mound downtown, near the Blvd. of the Allies; to Hindu people the Point is hugely auspicious.

"But there's also the parkway Virgin Mary shrine, which is really nice. It seems like every culture that came here brought a lot with them. And then they got into competition- you'll go to a neighborhood and there will be 80 churches. St. Anthony's on Troy Hill has over 5000 relics and reliquaries.

"Taking three lefts here is never the same as taking one right. You end up four neighborhoods over right next to another church.

"Over at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh they are actually doing research on dogs right now where they pump all their fluids out and stop their hearts and then start them again. It was a Russian experiment in the 1940s, and they are trying it again."

Finally, I asked Eve how the PDZD disposes of the zombies it is called in to take away.

""If it's not too aggressive we might use a have-a-heart trap. We'd bait it with some head cheese. Then of course we would release the zombie into the wild of Monroeville, it's natural habitat behind the mall, where it can live free with its own kind. The zombies haven't been a big problem since the 70s. Its very rare that we have to put a zombie down. Decapitation is always a winner, but my preferred method is a crowbar to the cranial fissure there. And remember children, if you see a zombie, TELL AN ADULT!"

Harding Way, Polish Hill [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-05-07T00:31:00.001-04:00

Harding Way climbs Polish Hill.

When I say that, I mean it- Harding way starts at the base of Polish Hill, where Herron Ave comes south off of Liberty. It starts as a set of steps that continue Herron's southern direction even as the road swings wildly east. Herron makes a steep U-turn to south, and then further up the hill turns west. Meanwhile, Harding way, at this point a flight of steps, meets the east-west street Dobson. Between Dobson and its southern parallel Fleetwood Way, Harding Way is a small, steep street. Then it becomes steps again, rising from Fleetwood Way up to Herron Avenue, which by this point has turned west. At Herron, again, it becomes a steep alleyway up the hill, past Bethoven Street. It ends abruptly at a wall, along whose side steps rise. At the top of these steps one is on the sidewalk of Bigelow Blvd.

Harding Way continues on the far side of Bigelow- it is a flight of steps to the poorly spelled Ridgway Street, and then slopes down the far side of Polish Hill, the Hill District, alternating again between roadway and steps every few blocks.

According to the Survey Maps of 1937, Harding Street was, well, a Street. It has right-of-way the size of a street, although even on the 1937 map it is staircase between Herron and Dobson, and between Herron and Bigelow. Apparently just at the North end of it a short way called Japan Way was planned- about three houses could be squeezed in to the space made by Herron Ave's hairpin turns. That street does not exist today- it's nothing but steep lot.
Betwen Herron and Bigelow, another short Way, Quarry Way, is on the map, but does not exist today. In its stead is a garage owned by a Pens fan.

BLDGBLOG: Ancient Roads [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-04-11T22:30:00.001-04:00

BLDGBLOG has a new post up about "landscape hermeneutics" - the study and interpretation of urban landscapes- the discovery and reclamation of old roads.

Sounds right up our alley, so to speak.

Various Lots, Mostly Steep, Ostensibly Greenfield [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-24T03:07:00.001-04:00

A hit and a miss on tonight's expedition. We took the car to Haworth Street, parked it, and ventured down the hill in search of remnants of the structures that were marked as there in 1939. Having made the trip before, we found it a pretty easy jaunt, and this time brought both light and camera.

We looked first for Lot 190, the house that would have been in Andoe Street's curve, had the street ever existed. After tramping through much spiny underbrush, we found, where it might have been, a long, flat clearing halfway down the hill. The soil was wet from recent rain, and a path seemed the path seemed to stop at the clearing and not continue further down. There were not a few broken beer bottles. Considering the view of the city from the clearing, this was not unnatural.

(Note: night is a bad time to take short-exposure digital pictures)

Below the clearing the hill fell straight off down towards Ivondale Street. How city planners might have projected putting three new streets up the side of that hill we could not conceive. We attempted to move south towards the other potential structure, but the underbrush hindered us bodily and did stab at us most dreadfully with its thorns. Rebuffed again we turned uphill and retraced our steps. But this time, by the light of our flashlight, we found a flight of steps, railings nonexistent, nearly covered by the hillside, suggesting that indeed there was at one point some kind of habitation on what might be called Andoe Street. Alternatively, if there was once more direct access to the Lost House above Ivondale, to the west, these steps might have been part of that system- perhaps it moved north down the hill along the theoretical Andoe, but switched back west at an appropriate elevation.

Then again, it may have served that last theoretical structure mentioned in our previous post, the structure on lot 183, east of Alexis. Looking southward from the half-sunken steps we could see a flat piece of ground down the hill, covered in water and reflecting the moonlight. The underbrush and bluff proved too great, however, and we dared not risk getting closer to it.

On our way back up towards the car we kept shining the flashlight downhill, looking for any sign of structure, but all we saw were trees and brush.

A few nights ago we found a house where one really shouldn't be, and tonight we found nothing where old sources said there was something. C'est la vie dans la bassin.

What is a paper street? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-24T02:42:00.001-04:00

In addition to being a story title, we have used the term "paper street" on more than a few occasions without actually defining it. A quick googling brings mostly references to Fight Club's Paper Street Soap Co, but no actual definitions. So here goes:

A paper street is a street, roadway, boulevard, path, etc. which only exists on maps or lists, in planning, development, or governmental offices, and not at all in real life.

In places that are not Pittsburgh, these streets are typically the result of a planned development of which only a few phases were implemented. The streets still exist legally as rights-of-way that cannot be built upon, but they are otherwise useless if one wishes to walk, bike, or drive them.

In Pittsburgh the definition gets a bit more complicated because the maps of real streets tend to themselves have errors or oddities without even bringing legal-construct-only streets into the mix. That is to say, so much of the city is built on hills and in valleys that maps might show two streets connecting when in fact one is a bridge sixty feet above the other; or they might show a street that seems to be a thoroughfare but is actually undrivable public steps for a few blocks before becoming pavement again. Something might be called a street, when it should be more accurately called a flight, or a span.

There are many paper streets in this town.

More metaphorically, Paper Street, capital P capital S, is that strange street which you turned on to once late at night and ended up two neighborhoods away without understanding how, or which took you up a hill and showed you downtown from an angle you thought impossible. It is the physical instantiation of everything weird about this town's geography. In the story of same name, the narrator encounters such a street, with disastrous consequences.

Finally, a street with a similar name, Paper Way, does exist in Pittsburgh, just north of Friendship Park. Expect a report from

Your obedient servant in the field,
James

Canton Avenue, Beechview [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-24T02:34:00.003-04:00

On Thursday night, my colleague and I decided to investigate the reports that Canton Avenue, in the Beechview neighbourhood of our fair city's South Hills, is the steepest municipal street in the world -- or at least in that part of the world which keeps such records.

Beginning, as ever, from our headquarters at the Junkshop in Squirrel Hill, we took the Parkway out as far as the Fort Pitt Tunnel and then struck south along Banksville Road. Coast Avenue, our connecting road, proved elusive, and we were obliged to come about in Dormont and retrace our steps. Our eyes discerned more clearly, and we turned onto Coast -- and were immediately foxed by its unexpected twisting as it climbed abruptly into the hills. Surprising, perhaps, but a good sign that our goal would be as steep as it was advertised to be.

And then, moments later, there it was, rising madly up to our left: Canton Avenue. Crazy, vertiginous, its sidewalk a ramshackle stairway, its road surface rough cobbles, it seemed by its very presence to forbid any effort to climb it.

James and I drew our breath deep, and I tromped on the gas pedal.

The car's engine roared in protest -- or in enthusiasm -- as we made our rattling way up. Canton Avenue is actually very short, for all its mountainous steepness, and the climb, though wild and exhilarating, was swiftly over. I pulled my vehicle to a stop and we clambered out onto the flat, allowing both ourselves and the car to recover.

Canton Avenue continues for another half-block beyond the crest of the hill; it was here that we parked. From this side, the edge is marked by a pair of DO NOT ENTER signs, which I was only too happy to obey -- though the temptation to throw caution flapping to the wind and trust luck and Providence to see ourselves through the pell-mell suicide run to the bottom rose up, inevitably, and had to be quashed. The rapture of the deeps.

James and I started down the stairs, which fall unevenly, long and short, on the east side of the street. Even their tread is angled somewhat, and where the steps are broken by driveways -- for a few brave souls in brave houses cling to this cobblestone cliff -- the concrete is crumbled and lies at ankle-trapping angles.

We ventured perforce onto the street itself. From above the washboard roughness of the stones gives them an almost stairlike aspect which we found slightly better footing than the sidewalk, though with no railing to catch at a stumble or trip would have had long, painful consequences. James was reminded of the crumbling terraces of Machu Picchu.

Perhaps halfway down -- though it was difficult to judge -- we found a patch of the street, roughly circular and perhaps ten or twelve feet across, so broken and cracked that it seemed as though mortar-fire had fallen on Canton Avenue. We poked cautiously
about it, careful of our balance, and were quietly thankful that it had not been necessary to drive across it on the climb.

At about this point our party doubled in size. My colleague's young lady-friend, together with an old friend of his, arrived at the bottom of the hill and, after some telephonic coaxing and reassurance, drove up -- with a flourish of gunned engine that I had to admire -- and joined us. There followed a bit of enjoyable clowning for the cameras' sake, and all together we marched back up to investigate what lay at the other end of the street.

A child's doll, lying limp and abandoned among the trash at curbside, caught our eyes. It was difficult at first to determine what it was meant to be: early theories, as we approached, included a headless Snow White, or even an actual dead creature. In fact it was a parrot, though the crude form of its head and body, the beak merely a yellow blob, made this difficult to determine. The sad scraps of the Pittsburgh Pirates jersey about its wings and midriff were they key and only clue to its origin and purpose.

Canton Avenue exists, on the maps, for only a block: it connects Coast Avenue, down the hill, with Hampshire Avenue, at its crest, and this is all. However, we found the corner of Canton and Hampshire marked not by house or woodlot but by a set of Jersey barriers, with vague darkness beyond.

As I have always found Jersey barriers an irresistible invitation to entry, I threaded through and found myself in the fine gravel and spindly weeds of an abandoned roadway. The street, plainly, had formerly run farther than Hampshire; indeed, the wires and telephone poles continued overhead towards the woods.

The four of us advanced down what remains of Old Canton Avenue. After a short distance it narrowed and was overshadowed by the encroaching trees. The street itself seemed to end -- or to have ended, I should say -- at some tarred timbers laid across it, with a small turnaround or parking area on the downhill side. Beyond, the remains of some open space, now largely consumed by undergrowth, and some sort of structure. I shone my penlight towards it.

A cage, of boards and heavy wire, lay burst and half-wrecked in the feeble light. It could not have been intended to hold any large animal -- indeed, it had something of a chicken-coop look -- and must have been decades abandoned, but finding it nevertheless gave us all a frisson. Trash and unidentifiable detritus lay about our feet, though not in anything like such quantities as we had found at the Lost House above Ivondale Street.

Clearly there must once have been a house here -- and we had in fact walked straight past it only moments before. Screened from view by darkness and vegetation, a few concrete pillars still stood above man-height just back from the old road, and behind them crumbling foundations of cement and fieldstone were a rectilinear gash in the hillside, half-filled with rubble. However old this scene may have been, it appeared a hundred times older to the eye: I felt as though we had disturbed the burying-mound of a Saxon king, or of some Scythian warlord who went to his rest draped in gold, with ten horses and a hundred maidens laid with him to ease his passage into the hereafter...

Connor's young lady espied a coal-scuttle, and I set my musings aside. These ruins were the only sign of any habitation along Old Canton Avenue; if ever there were other houses, the hillside and the forest have long since swallowed them. We may perhaps be given license to imagine some ancient resident, stubbornly clinging to home and address long after the city has bought and demolished all their neighbors in preparation for the shortening of Canton Avenue, prolonging the house's existence both as dwelling and as ruin far longer than any other -- but this is merely fancy, and it might well be that there was only ever one house there. The maps my colleague has lately uncovered in the University's library will tell us more.

The discovery of the ruined house placed a cap on the evening's investigations. There was little more to find that could match it for bulk, or foreboding, or surprise. I remarked to James that we kept finding ruined houses where we least expected them -- which should keep us expecting them, in the future!

We returned to our vehicles, said our cheerful adieus, and drove away through the steep dark streets of Beechview.

I have the honour to remain
Your obedient servant in the field,
Alan

What in the Hell is on Lot 190? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-23T20:50:00.001-04:00

The University of Pittsburgh runs an exceedingly good website full of historic Pittsburgh maps, and many of these maps include Four Mile Run.

Specifically, the GM Hopkins Company Map of Pittsburgh from 1939 shows in full detail the streets and structures of Lower Greenfield, including a structure exactly where the abandoned house we found was.

An image is here. (linked to and not simply displayed because of the magic of copyright law!)

The pertinent lot for us is lot 160, owned along with its neighbor 159 by the Keystone State Building and Loan Association, an organization now long out of business.

The L shaped structure on the map looks a lot like the house we found, and it looks far enough back from the road to be the very same.

Looking around the map, one might notice a planned extension of Boundary Street beyond where it ends at Ivondale, and a new street, Andoe Street, which would connect it to Haworth.

Haworth itself underwent some changes when Greenfield Elementary was built. Most of the road was vacated and effectively moved a hundred feet west, so that for the five houses at the end, the first house on the block suddenly became the last house on the block.

What interests us most, however are the two other structures build halfway down the hill. One is on Lot 190, at the crook of the facticious Andoe Street. There is a house shown on the map, apparently owned by one A.M. Bannon.

Just south of it on Lot 183 is a structure on A. and M. Rogan's land.

As far as we can extrapolate, the whole development was planned and sold, but once people realized just how steep the hills were, many lots were simply left alone forever.

My colleague and I feel that these vellum houses on paper streets might be worth a visit tonight.

Four Mile Run and its Environs, Ostensibly Greenfield [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-21T02:39:00.002-04:00

The neighborhood just south of Schenley Park described in Paper Street is a real place, one to which Edmund and I took a late, late night visit just a few days previous. Herewith is our report, sans photographic evidence, unfortunately, as neither of us thought to bring a camera. In more recent endeavors, this lapse has been corrected.

The name of this particular neighborhood is contentious and inconsistent, and bears mention. It was the childhood home of Andy Warhol, and at that time was primarily composed of Rusyn immigrants (Rusyns are the people of the Subcarpathian Rus, a region to the north of Carpathian Mountains which today is divided between Poland and Ukraine) who came to work in the steel mills. They called it Ruska Dolina, Rusyn Valley.

The primary geographic component of the valley is the small stream that formed it, Four Mile Run. This stream also lends the neighborhood its official name, as well as the name of the one of the two main streets.

The other main street, Saline St, lends its name too. Most notably, the official church records refer to the area as Saline Parish.

Finally, as the neighborhood sits just down the hill from Greenfield, and indeed the only access road leads into the rest of Greenfield, the valley is sometimes called Lower Greenfield, to differentiate it from its more skyward neighbors to the south-east.

As mentioned above, the primary streets are Four Mile Run and Saline Street. They run east-west, as does Highway 376, which curves away from the river and runs up Rusyn Valley all the way to the Squirrel Hill Tunnels, another half-mile further than the end of Saline Street. The highway is six lanes wide, and soars 86 feet above the base of the valley, sheltering whole houses under its steel span. Another bridge crosses the valley north-south, Swinburne Street. The Swinburne bridge crosses from Greenfield Ave in Upper Greenfield into South Oakland, spanning over the Saline neighborhood, and then on the far side of the hill over a CSX rail line. This rail line actually lies under both bridges- cars over cars over locomotive.

Half way up the valley is Four Mile Run's most visible architectural landmark, the towering bulk of the St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, Mr. Warhol's childhood parish. It is here that our journey started.

St. John Chrysostom is set back into the hill such that its street face is about thirty feet below its rear parking area. Stairs climb from Saline Street past the church's west side and up the hill. After about fifty steps the stairs branch. A short section climbs west, connecting to the tail end of Ivondale Street, a road which will be important later in the narrative. We did not take this branch, nor did we take the branch down into the church parking lot, and instead continued our march south, the stairs jutting up and through an overgrown ravine for hundreds of steps. Not a few of the concrete steps were broken or missing. To one side of the stairway I found, as Edmund had entirely failed to see it, the broken remains of a barrier reading "Steps Closed".

Out of the light snow and tree cover, we could suddenly see the dark bulk of a great brick building. It was of the asylum-or-apartment variety, rather than the factory-or-office kind. As we found upon completing our ascent, this was the unlit backside of Greenfield Elementary, a K-8 public school.

We took a look around the school's campus and the neighboring campus of St. Rosalia's Church, School, and Convent, and arrived at Greenfield Avenue. Taking the it west we walked past the edge of the Parish and started down the side of the hill. We knew that if we continued, we would eventually meet the end of Saline Street and return via the floor of the Run, but we preferred to seek another set of stairs down into the valley, cousins of those we had just climbed.

In pursuit of this we turned north from Greenfield up a small lane called Haworth Street, which wound along the top of the hill behind and below the intramural fields of Greenfield Elementary. Finding it at first entirely empty, Edmund wondered aloud why such a street even existed, until we turned the corner of the hill and saw the three houses it served. None of these houses abutted anything resembling the stairs we were looking for. Retracing our steps, I noticed that when Haworth turned to the east from its formerly northern direction, there seemed to be a few pylons blocking what might be more road.

Walking down this unbeaten path we moved north-west, our feet tramping from mud and old asphalt to big flat granite and shale. As we descended the slope not only did the presumed road deteriorate quickly into forested hillside, it also began to switchback and move more generally eastward, becoming in the space of a few steps no more than a vaguely defined track in the woods.

One should note at this point that our most ample light source was the moon, with Edmund's penlight a distant second. It was snowing, although we mostly felt that weather in the form of a coat of cold wetness that covered everything we touched. We made our way east, hoping the path would drop further down the hill and perhaps connect to Ivondale street, whose streetlights we could see distantly down through the trees below us.

And then we came upon a mattress. And a refrigerator. And an air conditioning unit. And a house. A house exactly where a house shouldn't be -- with no sidewalk, no driveway, no road, no access of any kind, halfway down a steep hillside. Its yard was a trash heap, its windows dark and broken. Its front door was ajar. We could not go around its uphill face, for it leaned against ten feet of bluff which we were now distinctly below. It's northern, downslope face, however, had a stone plinth that we walked over to reach its eastern yard, a larger, more jagged trash heap.

At this point we could clearly see Ivondale Street. We were perhaps sixty feet south of, and sixty feet higher than the road. Two houses stood below us, and although they rose from street-side almost four stories each, we were well above their rooflines. And although the backs of the houses were at least a story-and-a-half higher than their fronts, we were still well above and behind them.

The hill at this point became mostly bluff; any trace of path proved to be illusory. There were what looked at first to be stone stairs but were actually nothing but unstable, loose boulders drenched in mud and melted snow.

Seeing no way down to Ivondale, and no easy manner of continuing east to try to find another path down, we turned back.

A brief exploration, on Edmund's part, of the hillside to the west of the strange abandoned end of Haworth proved equally fruitless, at least in the dark and damp of night. We made our way back up the hill and returned to Greenfield Avenue.

A few hundred feet down from Haworth, past a car wash and a billboard, we came to the stairs we guessed existed, seven or eight landings, a descent vertically of perhaps sixty feet and horizontally of perhaps a hundred. These took us to the top end of Alexis street, which in turn sailed us northwest straight down to Saline Street. We were back in the Run.

As we walked down Alexis we passed all manner of strange, wonderful old houses. They proved fine examples of the old Pittsburgh type: dark ancient brick, vines growing about, heavy front porches, set back some feet from the road, windows so dark the houses might have been abandoned, bricks so unpointed and old that no angle was the same and no line was quite straight. One house in particular stood altogether at strange angles: its wings rose to different heights, and its roof sagged; its north wall bulged dizzyingly, and torqued eye-bafflingly up from its foundation. Edmund and I both took some fright, especially as we could hear the faint sound of running water, and certain of the houses did much to channel that sound and increase its volume and echo.

Our return to Saline street was quite a comfort: our car was in sight, and the street lamps felt much brighter. We walked east then, back to our vehicle and the Church.

Envehicled, we drove up the steep southern tail of Boundary Street and turned on to Ivondale, to get a closer look at the street we could not access from above. The houses came right up to the edge of the street, there was no sidewalk to speak of, and one house appeared to have bolted its front yard directly to the metal barrier on the downhill side of the street: play equipment was strung-up out over the bluff with rope and wood. At one point the road had subsided so much to the downhill side that the metal barrier in fact hung over empty air.

Returning down Boundary Street we took it north up into Junction Hollow, the north-south valley mentioned in Paper Street. Boundary is so named as it was the old eastern boundary of the city. The street used to extend all the way up into Oakland, but now the middle half-mile is reduced to a bicycle path, part of the Eliza Furnace Trail. It crosses under the same CSX rail trestle that 376 and the Swinburne Bridge cross over a hundred feet away, and ends as a parking lot for a public recreation field. From its northern terminus a few abandoned houses could be half-glimpsed through the trees, and away up the hollow the lights of Oakland glimmered in the distance.

Our journey in the Run ended driving out Saline Street to Greenfield Ave, under the CSX rail line (which at that point begins to follow the Monongahela south and east), to Second Avenue. As we passed under Swinburne Street and the Swinburne bridge, we noticed that directly beneath Swinburne lay Frazier Street. This was strange as the road sign off of Greenfield Avenue calls the street that becomes the Swinburne Bridge, Frazier Street, while on the far side of the bridge the street is clearly labeled Swinburne. Depending on where the higher end of Frazier street becomes Swinburne street, Frazier might actually lay on top of itself.

Second Avenue, which runs between the Monongahela and the CSX rail line and parallel to both, seems to have its south-eastern terminus in a padlocked gate and a huge pool of water just past it's intersection with Greenfield Avenue. This is in fact a lie. After swerving to the northern side of the train tracks, it goes under the name Irvine Street for a good mile before returning to the name Second at its intersection with Hazelwood Avenue.

Beyond those padlocked gates the old Second Avenue does continue, but not for public consumption, as it is the main access road for a series of former industrial brownfields which are now Pittsburgh's semi-classified "Robot City." This part of Second Avenue terminates when the rail line swings closer to the river. Irvine swings as well, and soon becomes Second Avenue again.

While driving along the many-named Second/Irvine, we noticed two sets of stairs, both abandoned, which had a bridge (or in the second case used to have a bridge) over the road. These merit further investigation.

Remaining your obedient servant in the field,
Connor

Four Mile Run? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-20T04:24:00.001-04:00

My colleague and I tonight made a reconnaissance of Four Mile Run and its environs. A full report of the journey, and the weird marvels we encountered on the way, will be forthcoming.

For the Benefit of Mr. Kite [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-19T18:21:00.001-04:00

The Tower, The Book [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-19T17:01:00.001-04:00

Hopefully one of a series.

56th Street, Stanton Heights [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-19T12:26:00.001-04:00

On the southern bank of the Allegheny, the Strip District sets the tone for street layout: the parallel Liberty Ave and Penn Ave run from the Golden Triangle northeast, and the street numbers that start in the Cultural District continue their inexorable rise through the Strip and on into Lawrenceville. Liberty and Penn curve east and then south, but Butler picks up where they leave off, continuing the north-easterly axis from which the numbered streets dangle perpendicularly.

After Liberty and Penn fall away, Allegheny Cemetery cuts off Butler Street to the south. Lawrenceville narrows to just a few blocks between the river and the graveyard. Things open up a bit around 51st Street, but the land to the south has now rolled higher; curving up its face, Stanton Avenue edges the cemetery and leads into Stanton Heights.

The low areas around Butler Street still feel like Lawrenceville, a mix of ancient row houses and light industry, but the streets grow ragged as they hit the bluffs of Stanton Heights: 54th runs for sixteen short blocks from the river up the hill, but 55th runs just five or six. A hundred feet up and an eighth of a mile southeast, those streets reappear as short cross-streets in Stanton Heights, irregularly connecting Alford, Camelia, Price, and McCandless. These tiny reappearances of the numbered streets mimic their lowland counterparts, little echo corridors demarking phantom tollways that might run vertically up the hillside, connecting the two neighborhoods. 53rd, 54th, and 55th all have such echoes, as if one simply continued their straight Cartesian lines across the map without regard for geography, but only actually instantiated blocks of the street where it was physically practical.

And then we come to 56th Street, which, in addition to being broken up by the hillside into four distinct sections, connected in places only by the concrete staircases that Pittsburgh sometimes uses in place of street or sidewalk, further has the unique distinction of existing twice: running parallel to itself for a whole block.

Halfway up the hill, Duncan Street branches off Christopher, and from its end a little square loop of three more streets appears. One drives off of Christopher southwest down Duncan, passes 56th street, hits the end of the block and turns left onto... 56th street? Continuing on this strange extra 56th street, one hits a staircase that runs up the hill to Celadine Street, coming out just Northeast of the terminus of 55th1/2 Street (a two-block alley that connects three parallel streets and has no brother in the lowlands to the north). Turning left again, just before the stair, one is now on Wickliff Street. At the end of that block you are back at the first 56th street. Take a left and you arrive back at Duncan. Take a right and you dead-end a short half-block later at a sheer cliff face.

The more western 56th street lines up with the piece of 56th Street in the lowlands to the north. The more eastern one lines up with the 56th Street in Stanton Heights.

The stairs that run up the hill from the western block of 56th Street hit Celadine at something more like 55th and 5/8, judging by the length block of Celadine between 55th and 55th1/2.

It is as if the cartographer started the street from two sides, but just barely failed to make it meet itself in the middle, leaving instead a section of near-parallel, dangling overlap, two blocks of the same street a hundred feet apart.

The numbering system of these rogue blocks is not currently known, but an expedition is underway. Expect a report soon.

Yours,
James

Paper Street [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

2008-03-19T00:34:00.001-04:00

In the midst of Pittsburgh’s rolling hills Junction Hollow runs cardinally north from the Monongahela River past Schenley Park, petering out just east of Carnegie Mellon. The hollow is capped on this north end by the football field of a Catholic High School and the backsides of the shops on South Craig St. Two roads, Neville Street from the north and Boundary Street from the south, enter Junction Hollow, but end furtively half a mile from each other.

It was late in the afternoon one fall Saturday when I finished my jogging in Schenley Park. I had taken a path that meandered south across most of the park’s bridges, a path which ended abruptly near the East Parkway. In a clearing with a good view of the sun setting over downtown, I noticed for the first time that that the path did indeed continue past its marked end- the trail slid down a hill full of trees and scrub, across the train tracks that gave Junction Hollow its name, slid down and down to the train tracks and then Boundary Road.

I looked up at the sun- it was still well off the horizon- I had plenty of time to do a little exploring. I pulled my laces tight and set off down the hill. The scrub was much less aggressive than it appeared from above, and the descent went quickly. Before long I was at the tracks, two long iron snakes that fed north. I crouched and gripped one with my right hand- it was as still as a pond in early dawn. If there was a train coming, it was a long way off. I stood and made my way to the road.

It was darker here in the hollow, darker than I would have expected. I looked back at the hill, then south to the bridge that the Parkway made across the Hollow. Below it was the neighborhood without name. This moniker-less place was little more than a half dozen streets, all residential save for the large Orthodox church whose golden domes were a beautiful sight from I-376. When I was an undergrad at Pitt, a buddy and I had once contemplated buying or renting a house down here, but after meeting our potential neighbors, we decided it would be best to look elsewhere.

Its not that they were noisy or diseased or obvious criminals, nothing like that. They just didn’t seem… right. The father was a big man, bald, with bushy eyebrows like coal smears. I don’t remember much about his clothes or his body, but I do remember his hands- he shook mine- they were hard and knobbed, like bad roots, although unnaturally clean. His wife was the opposite- soft small, and dark, like a true Roma woman, a sort of genetic anachronism in a family that, so they proclaimed, had lived in America since Philadelphia was the capitol city. Their children, two boys of about ten, had the same darkness as their mother. Combined with their father’s eyebrows, there was something unsettling about their countenances, like they were embodiments of some ancient, grotesque portraiture.

The family, like their aging brick flat next to which we could have lived, had baroque lines, a heavy-handedness about their construction.

I shook this reminiscence form my mind, and looked again southward,, only to have my eyes rest squarely on those memory’s source- that ruddy, red house.

My entire vision of the neighborhood shifted then- I saw it as an English garden of the more modern style- the dozens of houses stood like flowers and bushes, specifically arranged to draw my attention away from the horizon down to this argillaceous house, a tiny behemoth of dusky brick in a neighborhood of blue and yellow paint, a white stone church, shiny steel bridges. Like the family it protected, the house was a throwback to the foreboding steppes of Eastern Europe, more suited to the Danube than the Monongahela, the biting cold of blizzards than the acrid smoke of steel mills.

At this thought of cold, I shivered and again returned to the present. The darkness was coming faster than I would have thought. It was time to go home.

I turned north and began jogging up Boundary Street, towards the bike path that connected its terminus to that of Neville Street’s. In the distance I could see the top dozen floors of the Cathedral of Learning. Like most nights they were under spotlight. Quite suddenly, I was reminded of a signal fire on a distant cloudy peak. I kept jogging.

I stopped to catch my breath at the start of the bike path. In the twilight, I could dimly make out the lines of map of the hollow on the side of a covered display. Like the straining fingers of Adam and God, there were Neville and Boundary, the bike path a thin line, lightening like, between the two. There was something else, though- about a quarter mile up Neville, a branch westward that I had never noticed. On the map it was a thin line, like the bike path, that ran northwest towards West Oakland, where my apartment was. Paper Street, the little line was marked.

I started jogging again. The twilight was waning- I looked up and could see a few of the brighter stars. Home was a pleasant thought now- a warm shower and some pasta, maybe a little wine, and the news at 11. The paved path was welcome in this half-darkness, much safer than jogging Schenley’s muddy uncertainty.

I reached the end of the path just when I heard the first whistle blow. The sound, as if it were some ponderous beast’s mournful cry, echoed up the hollow as only a train whistle can. I imagined it’s production, the steam from the boilers rushing out of a thin, tilted slit like demons bursting out of Hell, screaming their freedom in low, gut-shaking howls that bounded along the valley’s walls like running stags might bound in a moonlit pine forest as the nomads hunted them.

These thoughts? Where do they come from? I laughed at myself. I had spent too much time pondering that red house in the Neighborhood without Name, too many idle fantasies of caressing that dark gypsy woman, of pulling her dress up to her hips and… no. That wasn’t why we refused the rental next door. There had been no lascivious fantasies on my part. It wasn’t… it wasn’t a good neighborhood. It was too remote, too lonesome. It would have been a hard house from which to run a social life, especially with the animal carcasses all stretched out across the lawn next door, staked to the ground like- NO! They were simply a different kind of family. There had been no adultery, no rituals of blood. We had simply gotten a, a feeling about the place, and that was enough. I lived in an apartment now, one I should be getting back to.

Paper Street- I was going to take Paper Street home. A shortcut. I started jogging again, towards the Cathedral. That tower was growing now- I could see most of its forty-three-story bulk. Almost home.

The whistle blew again just as I saw the sign for Paper Street on the left side of the road. In the darkness, for night had truly fallen now, I saw steps rising up from the side of the hollow. Ancient concrete clung to the hillside like the root of some great urban tree. Gnarled bushes and swollen oaks surrounded the stairs, forming Baroque arches above the steps. I crossed the street and ascended into the wooden tabernacle.

The darkness here was almost tangible, like a thick black cloak. The shadows were aggressive. I did not know whether it was the stairs or the encroaching walls of wood, but it was suddenly and alarmingly cold in that lightless tunnel. What had been a walking pace I quickly doubled- trotting up the stairs, sometimes two at a time.

I looked ahead- the staircase disappeared upward, a stone sword thrust into the belly of the forest. I stopped for a moment at a landing, looking back. Was it- no. No, my eyes were deceiving me- the stairs behind me couldn’t be dark red, or crumbling under their own weight. It must be a trick of the darkness- I had run up concrete stairs, not rough brick ones. There was no redness climbing towards me across the steps, like a clay cancer, like the feral red eyes of some primordial wolf.

I turned my back on this shade of Fenris and hastened skyward, although no sky was in sight.

It may have been my speed, but this new ascent proved painful- not uncommon was it that I slipped and scrapped a knee, or took a tangling branch in the face. And still, faster and faster, I rose.

A howl exploded from behind me, wild and dark. No- not a howl, but the train whistle, that boiling klaxon. It was close now, the train. It must be passing the Nameless Neighborhood now, only half a mile south down the tracks. Perhaps, I thought, I might glimpse its form upon the apex of my accent, down below me in the hollow, down in the red clay of the valley, in the belly of the beast.

My legs burned as I ran. I was taking the steps two, three at a time, without regard for form or decorum. I lurched, stumbled up the hillside. Once, back through the tangle of my arms and legs, I saw the redness again, a bright, thick blight upon my vision. More branches slapped my face, branches or stalks or roots I knew not. Even as I climbed it seemed that the forest around me grew tighter, the walls thicker with bows- or were they twisted roots- a slick tunnel of wood and stone and dirt.

When, at last, I looked ahead and saw a darkness not as bleak as the rest- the sky, the blessed sky. Only ten, twenty feet ahead, only a few steps. A blast then, loud enough to shake the staircase. Clods of dirt rained down from the verritous ceiling, sticking to the blood that smeared my skin. The train sounded so close now, as if it was only a few steps down, roaring at my heels. Back from the jaws of death, back from the mouth of hell…

The sound tore at me as I took those last few steps in one great bound. I burst, leapt from the staircase on to… what?

I had fallen sideways on to two parallel iron spears- train tracks? They shook against me like dying animals. My vision went red. I looked up, south, at the lupine visage of a great iron beast rushing towards me, its wheels spinning demonically, its otherworldly cry echoing through the night, the battle call of Shub-Niggurath, the howling of a thousand blackened young. Ia! Ia!

I thought of her eyes, the gypsy woman’s eyes, and then it came: low sounds of ripping flesh, red clay dust in the wind.