How to Live

We have the essentials: food enough, money enough, love, health. We know we have so much to be grateful for this week and always, and we can afford to be generous. This is from the preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

The amazing photo above was taken by one of my favorites, Kristina Lishawa of Traverse City. Please go to her website, www.kristinalishawa.com, for more of her stunning work, or follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristinalishawaphotography. Thanks too to Jeff Wier of www.pointnorthphotography.com for the new trees and blue skies photo at the top of my webpage. 

As always, thanks for reading, and I wish you the best this holiday week. If you would like to receive blog posts by email, please scroll to the bottom of any page on www.ordinaryvirtues.com and sign up. 

Voted "Least Likely to Leave Home for a Meeting"

About a year ago I heard The Power of Introverts, Susan Cain’s Ted Talk, and I thought: that’s me. That’s totally me. She had published Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a book about what makes introverts tick, and how we function in a world that generally rewards extroverts. She described how introverts get their energy from quiet and calm, and extroverts are recharged by being with people. Introverts are overwhelmed by sensory overload. Extroverts thrive on activity and lots of inputs. Cain estimated that a third to half of all people are introverts.

I went to two workshops in September. I left the first, on placemaking, thinking: I have lost two days of my life I’ll never get back. I left the other, on reaching new audiences with effective communications, thinking: that was worthwhile. That was good. Both workshops tried to engage participants; one successfully included introverts. The other didn’t.

These two meetings reminded me that placemaking for everyone, not just anyone, needs to include a process and an outcome where introverts feel comfortable. We are the 30-50 percent of the population least likely to leave our houses to participate in a group activity, which is the foundation both for planning placemaking projects, and for the places typically thought of as having placemaking amenities.

Planning for placemaking is supposed to be bottom-up, where community members lead and planners put the community vision to paper. The planning process frequently begins with a walk around the area to be placemade. There’s a conversation about what the place needs to be more people-friendly. There are public meetings, opportunities to provide input, plan reviews, tweaking, reporting out, and fine tuning. Opportunities to participate are overwhelmingly group activities.

Matisse's portrait of his assistant, Lydia

The placemaking workshop was led by a national placemaking organization. We met in a small downtown in southern Michigan. Attendees were randomly placed into groups and sent to pre-selected locations downtown. Two groups, mine and another, were sent to a T-shaped alley behind the main street’s shops, to talk about how it could be made more appealing. We all reconvened at the meeting location and compared notes with other groups that had gone to the same spot. Each group reported out at the end.

Pretty standard stuff, right? But I felt excluded almost from the beginning. My random group had four people (including me) and I had never met the other three. The group’s leader (chosen by the organizers) and another member had strong personalities. The leader didn’t make an effort to solicit input from the two quieter group members. He dismissed comments he didn’t agree with. After trying two or three times to contribute and being shut down each time, I finally gave up and started looking at my phone. The fourth group member was already looking at his.

Once back at the meeting location, with about 100 people trying to talk over each other to compare their findings, it was clear there was no comfortable way for me to contribute and I walked away from my group. Sensory overload, pushy people, and a process that made it difficult to contribute. I checked out.

The communications workshop (facilitated by Arts Midwest) began much differently. The first group activity was an icebreaker – tell the person next to you about your first or your most recent arts experience. I was sitting next to people I’d met, but who I didn’t know well. Sharing a memory and why it was important helped us know something about each other that wasn’t too intimate, but still very personal. We had other group activities through the day, but groups were no more than two or three people, the same ones we’d done the icebreaker with. Reporting out was voluntary, not required.

It was easy and comfortable to evaluate communications tools with someone who had told me her first arts experience was being a star in the 4th grade Christmas play. There were only two or three of us talking, having an actual dialogue, and we all respected the other’s input.

Matthew Burgess, from a children's book about e.e. cummings called Enormous Smallness.

Lately I’ve gotten back into meeting facilitation, which I really like doing. I’m planning to steal Arts Midwest’s approach, and flip the lessons from the first workshop so that my participants don’t feel excluded. My takeaways:

Do an icebreaker. People will have more meaningful conversations when they feel safe. Even though I didn’t know my tablemates well, we had a personal conversation at the start that helped us know each other and built trust between us. It was a great way to begin. Random people placed together without an opportunity to feel comfortable with each other won’t have an open conversation. It’s easy to ignore or dismiss a stranger. Not so much when it’s someone you know, even a little.

Google found that staff were at their most creative when they felt safe and confident to talk about their ideas. They call it psychological safety, which is dangerously close to the eye-roll-inducing “safe space,” but it’s true. I didn’t have a trusting relationship with the random group at the first workshop, but I did after the icebreaker at the second one. I felt more comfortable contributing there, and my ideas were respected.

Unfortunately, I didn't keep the source of this photo, but I think I saved it from a great blog / website called Michigan in Pictures..

Smaller groups with fewer voices helps ensure introverts are heard, not overwhelmed. In a larger group, if everyone’s opinion is going to be heard, the facilitator needs to go around the table and ask each person for their input. In a group with 100 people all talking at once, people need to be spread out so the noise doesn’t become overwhelming.

Give people some quiet time to think and reflect. Introverts don’t think well on the fly or in a noisy room. When I facilitate a group input session, I give participants a few minutes of quiet to think and write down their ideas on the main question. For a placemaking project, notify people in advance where the targeted area is, and suggest that people go there on their own. Give them some guidance on what to look for, and suggest they see it at different times of day. Give people time to noodle and make notes about their impressions and ideas. I’ve done this for other types of meetings too: tell participants ahead of time what the conversation will be about, so they can think about the topic ahead of the meeting.

If I had the opportunity to go to other training offered by these organizations, I’d sign up for Arts Midwest again in a heartbeat. I would not go to another training offered by the national organization. They shouldn’t be telling people how to do placemaking when they can't get people to effectively work together at their own training. And do we want to speculate which one of the two asked participants for an evaluation after the meeting? You guessed it. Arts Midwest.

If you’re an introvert, what places do you feel most comfortable? Let me know. I’ll do a post sometime on Places for Introverts.

Bonus material: Are you a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet? I am definitely an Order Muppet and was married to the Swedish Chef, a Chaos Muppet.

And staying with the Muppet / introvert theme, Ray Charles singing “It’s Not That Easy Being Green.”  The CeeLo-Kermit duet is better than you would think too.

As always, thanks for reading! If you are not already a subscriber and would like to get my posts by email, please scroll to the bottom of any page and sign up. 

#ArtsMidwest, #SusanCain, #Quiet, #Placemaking, #OrdinaryVirtues

The Muppets. Because of course.

Of Self and Selfies

Most of the art I’m attracted to looks like shapeless blobs of color or pattern. Sometimes you can pick out a thing or two. Mostly not. But I also love portraits. Abstract art is, for me, about emotion, and portraits are about both emotion and thought.

I spend extra time studying portraits. The first way most of us connect to another person is by sight. If a portrait draws me in, I want to know who I’m looking at – not just a name, but who they are. But  I can only see the subject through the artist's eyes. What was the artist’s relationship with the subject? What does the artist think about the subject? If it’s a self-portrait, what does the artist want us to know about him or her?

Van Gogh, among the greatest of portraitists, wrote that he wasn’t trying to capture his subjects’ appearance so much as “the thought, the soul of the model.” (Martin Gayford, The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gaugin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles.) Van Gogh painted a lot of self-portraits (mostly because models cost money, and he was always broke). Do his self-portraits show his thoughts and soul?

Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait as an Artist"

More than a third of Frida Kahlo’s paintings were self-portraits, and they are so iconic that I’m hard-pressed to think of a Kahlo painting she isn’t in. Her self-portraits are frequently disturbing. Compare them to Kahlo photographed by Nick Muray, who was in love with her. Her confidence is all there, but the hard edges and violence in her self-portraits are softened through Muray’s heart and lens. Kahlo’s self-portrait below is from 1940 and Muray’s photo of her is from 1939, so roughly the same time frame.

Frida Kahlo by Nicholas Muray, 1939

Frida Kahlo self-portrait, 1940

Artists can put their perceptions of their subjects or themselves right out there, but the artist can also protect the subject’s privacy by what he or she leaves out. One of my favorite portrait exhibits was at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) a few years ago – Nick Nixon’s annual portraits of his wife Bebe and her three sisters over forty years. The black and white photos are enigmatic. The sisters rarely smile, and are almost without expression. Can we tell who they are? Do their faces show the joy, grief, and wisdom they must have gained over 40 years? Or are we only seeing these women age?

2010 photo from Nick Nixon's series, The Brown Sisters

Can portraits influence social change? Images can communicate ideas. What’s propaganda if not communication of an idea - sometimes with imagery - intended to influence change? I ran across this article about a temporary public art project in Washington DC. Short videos of residents were projected on walls and windows in their neighborhood so faces became familiar, less threatening, and neighbors were no longer strangers to each other. It was created to facilitate neighborhood cohesion. The format reminded me of Jaume Plensa’s big video screens in Chicago’s Crown Fountain, which has a similar purpose. The people whose faces are on the giant opposing screens seem to be in conversation with each other. They represent a cross-section of Chicago residents: male and female, old and young, multiple races. They remain strangers to us, but are warm and welcoming, not threatening.

Jaume' Plensa's video in Crown Fountain, Chicago

Or a subject can play a role – appear to be someone they are not. Cumming says, “That portraits are like performances is a truth rarely in need of mention.” (From The Vanishing Velazquez: A 19th Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece.) A Rembrandt self-portrait I saw in Amsterdam showed him as the Apostle Paul. Cindy Sherman has made a career of photographing herself as various, usually edgy or downright creepy, characters.

Rembrandt as the Apostle Paul

Selfies generate plenty of sneers but I think they’re fascinating. I don’t think they are about ego, necessarily. Pictures document our lives, same as always. They say to the world: I exist. Since casual photography is cheap (essentially free) now, why not take a million pictures? Selfies let us curate our lives in a way that wasn’t possible before social media. Group selfies verify that we're social beings, part of something. Here I am in this time and place, with these people. A selfie shared on social media is a choice we make about how we want to be perceived, and it asserts our place in the world. If portraits are about seeing thoughts and souls, then selfies show the heads and hearts of the masses.

One of the most successful exhibits ever at the Art Gallery of Ontario was In Your Face. It was initially planned to be kind of a throwaway, something to fill a gallery during the museum’s remodeling. The museum asked people to send in a 4 by 6-inch self-portrait, made from any medium. People sent in portraits created from yarn, pen, paint, macaroni, whatever. The response was incredible – 20,000 people sent in self-portraits. Visitors would look at the portraits and comment about the similarities between themselves and the subjects, not about the differences. The AGO set up an Instagram page for the self-portraits; people added theirs to the Instagram exhibit long after the one in the museum closed. The self-portraits were later moved to Canada’s National Portrait Gallery.  

In Your Face at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

An exhibit called This Is Not a Selfie is making a distinction between self-portraits that are art and selfies which, it strongly implies, are not. The exhibit is substantially about art snobbery, judging self-portraits in a one-dimensional way as art or not-art. One of the quotes says that artists’ self-portraits show “who we are as a culture.” And selfies don’t?! Sorry, but I think Facebook says a lot more about our culture than Cindy Sherman does. There are clearly qualitative differences between the pictures of myself I put on Facebook and Nick Muray’s photos of Frida Kahlo, but that’s ok. My intent wasn’t to make art.

Cameras democratized portraiture. Middle and even lower-income people could afford to have a portrait made, to document an event or a family member going to war. Affordable personal cameras took it a step further, though there was still an expense when we had to pay for film processing. Digital photos and especially phones gave photo power to the people. Virtually everyone has the power to document anything, no matter how trivial, for virtually no cost. And I think it's awesome. 

BONUS MATERIAL: My sister introduced me to this band, Lake Street Dive, who named a whole album "Bad Self Portraits." Love the title song!!

This is a story about people who have a remarkable resemblance to people in portraits. It is a fun way to spend two minutes of your life. The likeness between the painting and the young woman in the first picture is amazing.

Martin Gayford, who wrote the Van Gogh book I referenced above, also wrote Man with a Blue Scarf about his experience sitting for a portrait by Lucien Freud and about portraiture generally. Recommended reading.

Selfies in the news: Museums encourage selfies in galleries, knowing that the subject will give the museum free promotion, including when someone falls over and breaks the art. Which happens a lot.

As always, thanks for reading!

Placemaking gone bad

Placemaking is based on the theory that a desirable destination will attract people who like the place’s vibe, restaurants, arts and culture, walkability, community, recreation, and so on. This in turn will attract (or grow) businesses that create jobs, or people who move to these places because they can.  And they will also want to spend their money on restaurants and shops and other businesses that keep the local economy strong. 

A word that comes with a lot of baggage and is frequently heard in association with placemaking and redevelopment generally is gentrification. It's placemaking gone bad. 

atlantablackstar.com

Gentrification, generally speaking, results when people with more money move into areas where people with less money have been living, and price them out. It has a lot of race implications, but it’s more about income inequality. As this article points out, the neighborhoods that become gentrified are often places where people live because they have been cast out of other places - in this case, the LGBT community that settled in the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco and made it so cool that it’s now the most expensive place to live in the country. Historically black neighborhoods exist because African-Americans were excluded from white neighborhoods, or when they weren’t excluded, white residents who didn’t want black neighbors moved out. Neighborhoods populated by excluded people are not typically first on the list for investment, by either the public or the private sector.

Gentrification is almost universally seen as evil, neighborhood-killing, and elitist. Most agree that neighborhood investment, better schools, parks, restoring cool old buildings, and more jobs are a good thing. Gentrification means a line has been crossed where those things make a neighborhood too desirable, and no longer affordable for low-income people or low-margin businesses. Low- to middle-income people are priced out by higher rents. Once they're forced out, they may have longer or more expensive commutes, worse schools, fewer employment and housing options, and less access to businesses and public spaces… which is where they started, except they’ve also lost their neighborhood. Same for small businesses – escalating rents and changing residents may make small local businesses less viable. Note, for example, the photo below showing funky neighborhood institutions turned into a pricey boutique and a bank branch.

therealdeal.com

Sometimes a neighborhood – even one that lacks a hip coffee shop! – is already a place, with a character worth preserving. Can residents limit the kind of change that leads to gentrification? This recent NPR story is about residents’ protests and threats against art galleries, hipsters, and coffee shops moving into their Latino neighborhood. A neighborhood activist says residents need a laundromat, a park, not an art gallery.

This article summarizes and provides links to several people writing about urbanism and gentrification. The article talks about social equity, preserving neighborhood culture, and placemaking elitism. The implied solution is, include neighborhood residents in placemaking – don’t thrust it upon them. To which I say, duh. It reminded me of my Placemaking for Everyone or Anyone post from last year. But it doesn’t address the income and rising costs issue, which residents, small businesses, and placemakers have limited control over. Control so often depends on the other golden rule – he who has the gold, rules. You want to control the businesses coming into your neighborhood? You need to own the building. How does a low-income neighborhood make that happen?

The Brookings Institution recently studied an innovation district in Philadelphia created by stakeholders that included private business, hospitals, a university, and civic leaders. It reminded me of Grand Rapids’ Grand Action group, which has also done some cool stuff in downtown GR, including the Downtown Market which I adore. But one thing both the Philadelphia and Grand Rapids groups have in common is that their stakeholders are the guys with the gold. I saw nothing in the Brookings report – which used the words “inclusive” or “inclusion” 15 times – about a neighborhood or social justice leader at the stakeholders' table. Instead, the report talks about inclusion and diversity programs led by businesses or universities in the district.

harvardpolitics.com

I, queen of bleeding hearts, of course look to government or nonprofit intervention for ways to maintain neighborhood fabric and practice social equity led by the residents. Ultimately, it has to be government or a nonprofit, because business generally exists to make money, not to keep low-income neighborhoods intact. If there was an easy fix for gentrification, someone smarter than I am would already have thought of it. But these are some ideas:

• Help current residents succeed. Bring job training to the neighborhood, provide child care, and pay residents to go. People who don’t have access to transportation, or don’t have the money for child care or time off work, don’t go to job training.
• Work with neighborhood groups to determine what kind of businesses THEY want, and provide incentives to residents to start those businesses – more training, mentoring, low-interest loans, land banks, whatever it takes. If residents want a laundromat instead of an art gallery, help them start one. Tax benefits for small businesses – as suggested by one contributor to the Room for Debate column linked below - would not necessarily help. Without controls on who gets them, the fancy hipster coffee shop could benefit as much as the laundromat.
• Co-ops, people. They aren’t just for Birkenstock-wearing, organic-grass-clipping-eaters like me. Is there such a thing as a cooperative laundromat? There should be.

Bonus Material

theguardian.com

Here is a New Yorker article / book review about urban economic ambiguities, including the rise and fall of Detroit. This one (from The Atlantic) is about being a good neighbor in a gentrifying neighborhood when you are perceived to be the bad guy.

I found this New York Times Room for Debate column about gentrification to be short on any real analysis, but it is a quick description of some of the issues associated with placemaking and redevelopment.

This is an interesting article about creating places that aim for authenticity and historical connection to a neighborhood, but become a little too precious, a little too packaged.

And to leave you with a bit of fluff after all this seriousness… this link is totally worth two minutes of your time. 

I finally figured out how to index my old blog posts, so visitors to ordinaryvirtues.com no longer have to scroll down through every post to find something. My apologies if you’ve been annoyed by scrolling, and it is fixed.

As always, thanks for reading. If you don’t get blog posts by email and would like to, please visit ordinaryvirtues.com and scroll to the bottom of any page to sign up. Unless someone offers me a ridiculous amount of money to sell your email address, I will carry it to my grave.

Mandated Grace

I have long been infatuated with the idea of grace. Although I don’t identify as a Christian, for me Christianity is a philosophy that helps us think about how to live. Grace can, I think, be a secular concept.  I’ve struggled to define grace for myself. Karma implies something earned, while grace is unearned, a gift, but somehow broader and deeper than luck. I think we can make ourselves open to grace, which maybe means we do earn it, but not through good works, like karma. Nadia Bolz-Weber says her spirituality is not about “spiritual practices or disciplines, admirable as those things can be. They are born in a religious life, in a life bound by ritual and community, by repetition, by work, by giving and receiving, by mandated grace.”

Community, work, giving and receiving. Mandated grace. You know, like ordinary virtues. These are some ways grace seems to find me.

Gratitude. I’ve lived in one of the world’s most beautiful places, northern Michigan, for 20 years. At times I’ve taken it for granted. On trips to Traverse City, I might spend the day in prosaic activities like meetings and shopping and never notice the poetry on Grand Traverse Bay. “While we can be delighted by small measures of grace, we can also take for granted their value, and resign ourselves to the rudeness of life without them.”  (Bill Stumpf) Now I make a point of saying hello to the bay when I’m in town, grateful that I can see the Best Great Lake Ever whenever it strikes me. (I talk to my trees with gratitude too.)

Photo courtesy of Kristina Lishawa

Love. Krista Tippett talks about one type of love as a common good, a public good rather than a private love. My friend Pete boils grace down to the Golden Rule, same thing as the common good in my book. I am becoming a fan of Georgia Congressman John Lewis. He was a leader in the civil rights movement, and like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., embraced his persecutors with love. “Suffering… can be nothing more than a sad and sorry thing without the presence on the part of the sufferer of a graceful heart, an open and accepting heart, a heart that holds no malice toward the inflictors of his or her suffering. … We are talking about love here. … a broader, deeper, more encompassing love… that recognizes the spark of the divine in all of us.”

The love of partners, family, friends, and dogs carries another, deeper kind of grace, because it’s personal. The unexpected tender word or touch. The miracle of a new baby. A smile on a dog (shout out to Edie Brickell). A first kiss. Good company for dinner outside on a summer day. Good conversation. “We turn toward love like sunflowers, and then the human parts kick in. This seems to me the only real problem, the human parts – the body, for instance, and the mind.” (Anne Lamott) The human parts are part of the package, and grace comes even during the problem times. Brilliant Son and I recently had a wonderful conversation about a New York Times story of a man who planned and went to his wake to say goodbye to his friends and family before leaving the world on his terms, through physician-assisted suicide. Grace for the dying man, and grace to have this conversation.

 Lewis says love is a way of action. All that you do, do with love, said Paul to the Corinthians. (Modern translations say love, but in the old school King James Version, it is translated as charity, from the Greek charite, instead of love.) So I work to be kind instead of judgmental, to love generously, and to remember in moments of exasperation to have an open and accepting heart. And then I work some more.

Photo courtesy of Kristina Lishawa

Not hitting back. When I’ve read about forgiveness, it’s about not letting wrongs done to us eat us up. Just let it go. I think this is too small an idea. I really struggle with forgiveness. Anne Lamott says “Left to my own devices, I’m a forgiveness denier – I’ll start to think that there are hurts so deep that nothing can heal them.” I want forgiveness to be earned with remorse, humility; this is also part of Christian orthodoxy, where forgiveness follows a repentant sinner. What happens when there’s no remorse? It’s easy to forgive little stuff. Over time, even the big stuff is eventually crowded out by other junk. Natalie Merchant sings, “I might forget you but not forgive.” I like what Anne Lamott says: “Forgiveness just means it finally becomes unimportant for you to hit back.” She implies healing resulting from the passage of time, but this feels like a choice, not just a casualty of years. When I was really thinking about forgiveness, Desmond Tutu’s writing, including about truth and reconciliation in South Africa, spoke to me… but I didn’t keep it. Now I’m just grateful that I have so little to forgive.

Joy. I decided years ago that I wanted to be joyful. This is a choice, in many ways. It is choosing to be positive instead of cynical, looking for delight, not settling for contentment, watching for small moments of grace. Mostly, it is active. An African proverb also from John Lewis says, when you pray, move your feet. Don’t wait for joy to come to you. Yogi Berra said you can observe a lot by watching, and much of my day-to-day joy comes from just being more watchful, asking questions, engaging. Years ago I was walking on the path beside Lake Cadillac and a young man on rollerblades pushing a very old woman in a wheelchair passed me. She was so tiny and old she looked like a dried-up twig. She was leaning forward slightly, gripping the arms of the wheelchair, and the expression on her face was joy with a little bit of terror. I still smile when I remember this moment – I was moving my feet and watching, and found joy.

My favorite Republican (and this is a very short list), David Brooks, said the experience of grace makes your soul swell up a little, and you want to be worthy of that happiness. I have a charmed life and grace has much to do with it. Grace feeds the souls of us non-believers too. What is grace to you? What idea have I missed?

Bonus material: Aretha’s Amazing Grace. Because of course.

All the photos in this post are courtesy of Kristina Lishawa, who has a great gift for watching. Most of the photos here are for sale through her website, and you can see more of her work or get in touch with Kristina on her Facebook page. Thank you, Kristina.

Here are the references for the quotes above. All recommended reading or listening.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

David Brooks, interviewed by Krista Tippett for On Being, 10/20/16

Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

John Lewis and Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

Natalie Merchant, “Seven Years,” from her record Tigerlily

Bill Stumpf, The Ice Castle that Melted Away

Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

This was a long one, and thanks as always for sticking with me. If you don’t receive this blog by email and would like to, please sign up at the bottom of any page on www.ordinaryvirtues.com. And please get in touch! You can email me at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com or leave a comment here.

#ordinaryvirtues #grace #joy #forgiveness #gratitude #love

Photo courtesy of Kristina Lishawa

Placemaking with Kids (Part 1)

Placemaking’s gold standard is educated or skilled young people, who at some point start families. Lots of the progressive media talk about placemaking in urban areas. But how many families would really want to live in the urban, high density environment described as the ideal “place” to attract skilled workers and sustain a local economy? HERE’s an article about more young college graduates choosing cities. But wait… it’s a Forbes vs. New York Times smackdown! I’ve also read that suburbs attract more 20-29 year-olds than cities do. While they may come to cities for the brew pubs and bike lanes, they’ll only stay if there are schools, parks, swimming lessons, and affordable places to live that are bigger than a dorm room. Placemaking needs to include family-friendly features, or the Forbes guy will win.

Why does it have to be cities vs. suburbs? (Because so many bloggers need something to write about, that’s why.) Obviously it doesn’t. Placemaking and family-friendliness are not mutually exclusive. Suburbs (and small towns) can be walkable, bikeable, have dense housing, cultural attractions, recreation, and so on. You can live in a single-family home, townhouse, or apartment within walking distance of many downtowns in Michigan, and have a yard or park where kids can play. Just because we don’t all want to live in Manhattan doesn’t mean the only alternative is bland acres of big box stores and tract houses.

Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell's house

If government wants us to make choices that are desirable from the government’s perspective, they need to provide incentives or disincentives to influence our choices. Government does that already with the mortgage interest deduction to encourage home ownership. What else does it want to incent? If government wants people to live in denser neighborhoods, make property taxes lower in dense areas that are walkable or have public transportation, and higher in the suburbs or rural areas where we drive everywhere. This is reasonably justifiable because drivers to jobs and stores use more roads, pollute more, and need parking lots, which are a huge land suck. From the Department of Crazy Ideas to Noodle: suburban and rural homes take up more space, so base property taxes on square footage instead of home value. Since square footage doesn’t usually shrink, as we know home values do, this is a more stable source of income for local governments that have to keep those roads plowed and repaired.

Ultimately, it’s about having options. There is no one-size-fits-all place, or one-size-fits-all-phases-of-life. I have lived in a downtown with shopping and my office within walking distance (when I was young and childless), I’ve lived in a dense neighborhood (until Brilliant Son was three), and for nearly twenty years I’ve lived in a suburban/rural area (a hybrid in which I can see my neighbors’ houses, and hear cows). But government can influence the options we choose. My taxes are ridiculously low compared to my friends who live in town, and yet I enjoy acreage and a trout stream in my back yard. I also have relatively few public services in my rural county, because the taxes are so ridiculously low.

Warhol's house

You may have noted that I labeled this Part 1 of Placemaking with Kids. The next one will be about kid-friendly places that don’t make adults want to gouge their eyes out. Stay tuned and as always, thanks for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments section, or by email to ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com.

Bonus material:

HERE is a really interesting article about increases/decreases in the number of children in various US cities. From 2000-2013, the number of children 5-14 years old in Raleigh, NC increased almost 56%. A statistic in the article below says Pittsburgh’s population under-15s is down more than 25% for the same timeframe. The author suggests factors that might be influencing the decreases in places like New York and San Francisco, and gives the most play to housing costs. But he also suggests that some communities are investing in more adult-oriented cultural amenities, rather than family-friendly parks and schools.

HERE is more on housing costs – not specific to attracting or keeping families, but about affordability, and ending the notion that homes are an investment. It’s another one of those Department of Crazy Ideas things.

Photos in this edition are of some of my favorite artists’ homes. Because why not.

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Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner

#ordinaryvirtues #placemakingwithkids #placemaking

When Home is a Foreign Place

I was asked by Brilliant Son before the election last fall what I thought was the most positive change in our country in recent years. My answer was that the narrow band of acceptable, “normal,” is broadening. Six months ago I thought this was true. I now think I jumped the gun.

Many of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s were told to “be ourselves.” Free to Be, You and Me anyone? Except if you’re not a white Christian American. Except if you’re gay, and particularly if you want to be married to your partner. Except if you want to dress or cut your hair outside our social norms, or behave in a way we consider unusual. Except if you are not suited to the gender you were born and there is no personal pronoun for you. Or maybe you're a nasty woman who doesn't know her place. Then we don’t much care to have you be yourself. 

As a certified Midwestern, middle-class, white, suburban, educated, soccer mom-type – the wonder-est of Wonder Bread – my comfort level with difference has limits. I can make warp speed judgments. I work against those judgments every day.

Part of the struggle is figuring out who ourselves are, and the other is getting over the fear of putting those selves out there for everyone else’s judgment. Those who do so with grace are, in my book, heroes.

White Flag, by Jasper Johns

I listen to podcasts when I’m on the road. Lately I have listened to podcasts about a man, a teacher in Wyoming, who prefers to wear girly dresses and be called Cissy, but wants to stay his original gender. His wife is good with that, but he has received death threats for it. About a town in the Netherlands where mentally ill adults board with families, rather than in institutions. Instead of being “cured” to fit our standards, it is just accepted that sometimes John sees blue elephants in the room. About ethnic or racial stereotypes in restaurants, and how welcome (or not) people feel in those places. Heroes.

I describe this blog in my “About” tab at ordinaryvirtues.com like this:

“The focus of the blog will generally be on community.  … Sometimes the blog will be about the physical attributes that are believed to contribute to placemaking – which is really just creating the infrastructure that makes a desirable place to live.

"Where I think placemaking falls short is that physical assets alone don’t make a desirable place.  People are the heart and soul of a community.  The physical assets can be created with civility, or without …  Either way, they need people to be functional. The physical assets are made possible by acts and decisions guided (or not) by human civility, the ordinary virtues of people.  … So sometimes the blog will be about the human side, our ordinary virtues that contribute to a community.”

It turns out that “making America great” means that difference and diversity are again marginalized, banned, or met with violence. There is precious little commitment in the big white house to the human side of our national community. Instead, hate speech and name-calling are normalized and we persecute or fear those outside the narrow band of People Who Look Like Us and Think Like Us. Our communities and our ordinary virtues and our hearts and souls suffer when all we know is Wonder Bread, when differences of opinion are met with intolerance, and when the color is stripped from the flag.

I want my community back. 

Time, from Zarina Hashmi's series Home is a Foreign Place

Bonus material:

My all-time favorite Springsteen song is My City of Ruins. This is a good live version in which he changes some of the lyrics at the end – I pray for strength, I pray for hope, I pray for peace. (I also recommend Eddie Vedder’s cover.) It seems right for these times and I’ve been humming it a lot lately. In my next life I’m coming back as one of his backup singers. Come on, rise up.

As always, thanks for reading. If you don’t already get blog posts by email and would like to, please scroll to the bottom of any page at www.ordinaryvirtues.com and sign up. Let me know your thoughts. We are, after all, part of the same community.

#ordinaryvirtues #makeamericagreat

Walk in Beauty

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” 

James Joyce, from “The Dead” in Dubliners

The Navajo have a concept they call “walk in beauty.” It’s not all about aesthetics, but some is. It is the process of working to achieve harmony in mind, body and spirit – an active process, not a passive one. Members “think [beauty], act it, and live in it” (David Maybury-Lewis). It is a deliberate pursuit of connection, healing, restoration, and balance with nature, family, society, community, and planet. It acknowledges that humans act in their own self-interest, and that’s ok as long as it contributes to the common good. We are obligated both to ourselves and to others.

Kristina Lishawa is a wonderful Traverse City photographer. Please check out her web page or follow her on Facebook to see more.

May we all walk in beauty in the days to come.

#ordinaryvirtues #walkinbeauty

Of Food and Place: In Praise of the Power of Giant Food

Food is unique in our culture for its range of possibilities for human fulfillment. Food is for socializing, celebrating, savoring, ritual and tradition. People come together over food: we meet for dinner, get together for drinks or coffee, take the kids out for ice cream after a game. We grieve together over food. It nourishes us in the most basic and literal way, and sometimes, when we’re lucky or in good company, it delights and heals us.

Food has a major role in placemaking. Food helps make a place unique – think Detroit’s coney dogs, Memphis barbecue, California and Michigan wines, New York bagels, Chicago deep dish pizza, local craft beers and distilleries. It can represent an exotic culture or the more prosaic Toledo, Ohio. Food trucks, restaurants, farmer’s markets, and specialty food stores provide nourishment from the earthiest root vegetable to the most exotic pastries.  Farm to table restaurants acknowledge by name the farms – the places – that provide their produce, meat and cheese.  (For a short spoof of the farm to table thing, check this out.) And we don’t call visitors to northern Michigan Fudgies for nothing.

As many of you know, my folks live in lovely, historic Savannah, Georgia - the city General Sherman presented to President Lincoln for Christmas during the Civil War. I’ve done the historical (i.e. tourist) stuff, so what’s left to make me return again and again to downtown Savannah, with its ridiculously bad parking and blaring tour buses? It’s food. My favorite scones at an outdoor table overlooking Madison Square. The bourbon cinnamon sugar cookies at another outdoor table in the Starland district. The lavender shortbread cookies at the Paris Market (why yes, in fact they also have outdoor tables!). And the two exceptions I make to being fully vegetarian – crab cakes and the sashimi tuna at the dearly departed Toucan (which I guess means now there’s only one exception). You may note that the bacon-wrapped deep-fried mac and cheese from The Lady and Sons is not on my personal list, but Paula Deen is a draw for many visitors to Savannah, and legitimately so. She helped make Savannah a southern food destination.

Gryphon in Savannah is a former pharmacy. It serves scones with clotted cream worth a 17 hour drive from northern Michigan. Cool inside and out. Photo from www.christinejwarren.com.

Though I am a frequent visitor, I’m still a visitor, not a local. Does food influence where people live? You betcha. Residential developers are jumping on the food and place bandwagon.  Here is a story about new residential developments for foodies.  Prized locations are near farmer’s markets and restaurants.  Lower floors incorporate gourmet coffee shops and restaurants.  Kitchens include high-end appliances.  One developer quoted in the article says “Today, when you put together a mixed-use project, you start by talking about the food and restaurants first.”

Often the first thing that draws people to a neighborhood is a new restaurant everyone wants to try.  When that restaurant brings people, other businesses want to locate there because the street has a lot of activity (by people with money to spend).  A neighborhood or street or even a town becomes a destination because of a restaurant. When I was in high school, Plainwell (Michigan) was a small paper mill town in the middle of cornfields. Arie’s restaurant put it on the map, drawing people from miles and miles away. At the time, I remember that there were restaurants you’d go to on prom night, and restaurants that were places you’d go to after a football game, but not many in between – until Arie’s. It has been closed for ages, but I can still remember it clearly. 

If you didn’t have to choose your home based on a job, what factors would you look for? Is food on the list?

Bonus Material: Who can resist a placemaking article called “The Importance of a Giant Doughnut”?  Not me. 

A shout out to the National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin, because why not? If you are a fan of mustard, it’s a must-see. The gift shop is, naturally, filled with hundreds of mustard varieties and mustard-themed gifts. The guy who owns it, Barry Levenson, is very nice, and has a wonderfully quirky sense of humor. And it is a unique food-related destination that makes Middleton more than just a Madison suburb.

And from the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion, here is a video I helped create, featuring Grand Rapids, Michigan’s finest food destination, the Downtown Market. Rocket Pizza, the best. The grilled cheese at Apertivo, to die for. The cupcakes at Sweetielicious… the Mexican place… worth a trip for west Michiganders.

As always, thanks for reading. If you are not a subscriber and want to receive blog posts by email, please go to www.ordinaryvirtues.com, and sign up at the bottom of any page. Bon appetit!

#ordinaryvirtues #placemaking

Thoughts on holiday existentialism

December

by Gary Johnson

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye

Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,

And also the partridge in a pear tree

And the golden rings and the turtle doves.

In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue

Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,

Enduring the cold and also the flu,

Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.

Not much triumph going on here—and yet

There is much we do not understand.

And my hopes and fears are met

In this small singer holding onto my hand.

           Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark

           And are there angels hovering overhead? Hark.

(Used entirely without permission, but isn’t this an awesome poem?)

Photo courtesy of Jeff Wier, www.pointnorthphotography.com

I started today out with a longish drive (2.5 hours), Christmas music, and thoughts of what Christmas means to me – an agnostic, middle-aged woman of a certain amount of privilege. Privileged enough to say no gifts please, I have all I need and a lot more. Privileged to have all those I love in reasonably good health and state of mind. Blessed with kind and generous friends and neighbors. My son is home, I’ll see my parents and sister in January. When there is nothing left to want and celebrating Christ’s birthday isn’t really part of the picture, what’s the meaning of Christmas?

My brilliant son and I talked about it on the way home, and he nailed it. It’s about cookies (yes, in fact he did read the last blog post about food), music, and putting the Star Wars ornaments on the tree. Watching Charlie Brown and the Grinch, our Christmas Eve tradition. Brilliant son never mentioned presents, though when he got home tonight it didn’t take long to shake the wrapped boxes – he’s still a kid.

It’s all of this for me too, plus the hope for peace on earth and goodwill toward all throughout the year. The traditional carols and the pop songs, making and decorating the cookies with the brilliant son, turning the tree over to his collection of Star Wars ornaments. Seeing my man-child diagnose the contents of his gifts. I have let go of the busy-ness that used to be our Christmas, and have more time to delight in the good stuff.

I wish you the holiday of your dreams. Thank you all for your generous reading. If you would like to receive blog posts by email, please scroll to the bottom of any page on the web site, www.ordinaryvirtues.com, and sign up.

Food, Religion, and The Chicken Sisters

“We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink.”  Epicurus

Food is a backdrop for conversation, a platform for sharing an experience, a way for people to connect with each other. First dates, with all their potential for good or bad, are almost always over food. The weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, when families reconvene over holiday dinners, offices have holiday parties at restaurants, and women have cookie exchanges, are all about food

Making and sharing food is an expression of love between family and friends. Agape is a loaf of warm homemade bread, a favorite cookie made each Christmas. When I still cooked, women friends and I shared potlucks and tea parties. I treasure a recipe given to me by a friend who has passed away, because more than pictures or any physical thing of hers, those cookies remind me of Mae’s love.

Creating and sharing a meal approaches a religious experience – and I’m not saying that just to make fun of uber-foodies. Judith Jones, who was Julia Child’s editor, writes: “Cooking demands attention, patience, and above all respect. It is a way of worship, a way of giving thanks.” She found that the root word of religious means

“’to bind, to tie fast, to reconnect.’ Isn’t that what we do when we cook? We connect again to the earth, to the source of our food, and we bind to one another in the sharing of it, the breaking of bread together, the celebrating of life.” (Both quotes from “The Ritual of Cooking,” Eating Well Magazine, November-December 2007)

There is a unique sensuousness to food, even something as simple as fresh bread. The sticky dough that yields to elasticity and tells you when you’re done kneading. The yeasty baking smell, the just-right shade of golden brown. The sound of the crust crackling under a serrated knife, a steaming center. The contrast of crisp and soft in your mouth. We are connecting to ourselves, not just the earth and each other. We are nourishing whole beings.

With each change in my diet or life, I’ve noticed that how and what I eat, and who I eat with, has changed too. The ritual of cooking is a small part of my life now. I no longer plan multi-course dinners and spend hours cooking. I haven’t made Julia Child’s baguettes in years. I became single about ten years ago, and my son left for college almost five years ago, so I generally eat alone. I follow a restricted diet due to kidney disease, and it has grown more so over time, making me a challenge to cook for. Eating alone, I have fewer rituals and am less connected to people, which is not me whining, just an observation. I would be embarrassed to eat frozen waffles and jam for dinner with a guest, so there are upsides. What I feel I’ve lost by not cooking, though, is a way I could be generous with people who are important to me.

One of the positive changes to come from food’s lesser role in my life is that I used to be a bit of a food snob. I still like very good food, but my taste has become more simple, both by choice and necessity. Meals have become much more about the company and much less about the food. When my beloved friend Kari and I get together, we combine leftovers or salad parts from our fridges or eat cheese and bread if that’s all we have in the house. A dinner at Subway with someone I love is a great meal.

The best meals are shared between people. Like good religion, food in good company is part ritual, part love, nourishment for the head and the heart – secular communion. Food, people, culture, and place have been rolling around my head for a few weeks and I expect to write another blog or two about food and community. What are your thoughts?

Bonus Material

“I enjoy cooking with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food.” (Who else but Julia Child.)

HERE is some vintage and quite hilarious Julia (in which she introduces The Chicken Sisters), and HERE is an oddly catchy remix of clips from her PBS shows.

As always. thanks for reading. If you'd like to receive blog posts by email, please scroll to the bottom of any page on the web site. 

When the Winds of Changes Shift

This presidential campaign has been a referendum on change. Trump wants to make America great again – the implication being that there was some shining past and if it wasn’t for all this troublesome globalism and technological change, America would still be great. But his campaign is based on imagination rather than reality: the belief that Trump (or anyone) can magically make US manufacturing jobs return and put brown and black people and women in their place. His brand of nostalgia diminishes history and experience.

Change is a threat to identity. It’s hard to accept changes that confront our values, our way of life, our history. Even an identity based on misconceptions or injustice is hard to let go of. People don’t just adapt or become willingly re-educated when some part of their core belief system becomes unacceptable or outdated. Preserving things as they are, or slowing the pace of change, preserves the identity. Trump seems to appeal to this less-educated group who have been left behind. He has given them permission to say out loud the parts of their identity that have resisted changing times and attitudes. Their fear and hopelessness is expressed as anger.

This isn’t new. I’ve been on a Joan Didion kick and read this recently (apologies for the length, but I couldn’t bring myself to edit any more). Didion was reporting on a convention of Jaycees:

I suppose I went to Santa Monica in search of the abstraction lately called ‘Middle America.’ … In a very real way the Jaycees have exemplified … certain ideas shared by almost all of the people in America’s small cities and towns and by at least some people in America’s large cities, ideas shared in an unexamined way even by those who laughed at the Jaycees’ boosterism and pancake breakfasts… If only because these ideas, these last rattles of Social Darwinism, had in fact been held in common by a great many people who never bothered to articulate them, I wondered what the Jaycees were thinking now, wondered what their mood might be at a time when, as their national president put it one day at the Miramar, ‘so much of America seems to be looking at the negative.’

The word ‘apathy’ cropped up again and again, an odd word to use in relation to the past few years, and it was a while before I realized what it meant. … It was a word meant to indicate that not enough of ‘our kind’ were speaking out. It was a cry in the wilderness, and this resolute determination to meet 1950 head-on was a kind of refuge. Here were some people who had been led to believe that the future was always a rational extension of the past, that there would ever be world enough and time for ‘turning attention,’ for ‘problems’ and ‘solutions.’ Of course they would not admit their inchoate fears that the world was not that way any more. Of course they would not join the ‘fashionable doubters.’ Of course they would ignore the ‘pessimistic pundits.’ … It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not. [Joan Didion, from “Good Citizens” in The White Album, page 95.]

This was written in 1970.

There is a disconnect between militant nostalgia and contemporary reality. There's that pull toward an idealized version of the past, but at the same time, we marginalize people who don't accept or adapt to change. Older people are proverbially patted on the head when they can’t figure out how to use a computer or smart phone. The Luddites live on, though we don’t hear too much about angry mobs destroying iPhones. When the world seemed on the verge of being controlled by robots, we got the maker economy (hipster for “craft fair”), micro-brews, and slow food. And people of a certain age, like me, aren't opposed to change but can’t keep up with everything, then feel stagnant or are shelved at work because our skills are less applicable than the Tweet Generation.

There are times when we all put up buffers to help us resist new truths. When change feels threatening, we seek comfort in simplicity; we’re nostalgic for something we may never have directly experienced, but that feels more authentic than our present. But if we can’t move past nostalgia, our present can’t evolve. We can neither totally focus on the now and forget the past, nor live in the past without acknowledging the present. A stubborn commitment to the past only magnifies the ways we changed and the irrelevance of those who stay behind.  

Bonus material:

A few words on ordinary virtues and change from Nobel laureate Bob Dylan (here singing Forever Young with Springsteen):

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young…

As always, thanks for reading!

What Downtown Cadillac and the Louvre Have In Common

About two years ago, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) started a program in which they match money raised through crowdfunding for placemaking projects. Crowdfunding is the name for raising money for a specific project through a web site such as Kickstarter. The Louvre has used crowdfunding to purchase and restore art (including the Winged Victory), musicians use it to raise money to make a record, and now, local governments use it to pay for placemaking projects. In this case, MEDC is using a web site called Patronicity, where you can see projects that are currently fundraising, and those that have been funded.

After my snarky “how many trends can you fit into one program” knee-jerk reaction, I started to really like the idea. And then I started to really REALLY like the idea.

Community members – not just city or county agencies or developers – put skin in the game to make the project work. Citizens and businesses have to want the change in their community to make it happen. Cities have to work to get widespread buy-in, help their citizens see the value in projects. And I love that people are willing to put money into public improvements, over and above what they already pay in taxes. 

The MEDC matches the crowdfunded amount dollar for dollar up to $50,000. Projects can be

• Public plaza and green space
• Access to public amenities
• Farmers markets, community kitchens, pop-up retail/incubator space
• Alley rehabilitation
• Any other place-based or public space improvement project

So after two years, has the MEDC program been a success? According to the Patronicity site, most projects have been successfully funded, from Ironwood to Detroit. We funded two great projects in downtown Cadillac this summer: a badly-designed parking lot was renovated with more public space and a little less parking, and next spring we will have a new pavilion for our farmers market. The city raised over $100,000 locally for these projects, mostly from small donations. (Both are within a block of my office and will be great additions to our downtown, so I donated to both.) It also worked in Royal Oak’s new park, a splash pad in St. Johns, and public art in Grand Rapids. My favorite (after Cadillac’s projects) was an old copper mine’s drill shop in Calumet turned into a curling club (and space for hockey and other activities) – check out the photos of this super cool historic building. 

Crowdfunded Calumet Curling Club

Kids curling in Calumet

As far as I know, this is the only State of Michigan funding specifically for placemaking. There are a lot of grants that contribute to placemaking – trails grants in the DNR, for example – but that were not created specifically as placemaking grants. Wisconsin has a crowdfunding program, but it’s for funding small business startups, and participants become shareholders. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be catching on. (When a state agency doesn’t promote its successes, it needs either a new PR department or a new program.)

So in spite of my initial snark on Michigan’s crowdfunding program, I think it’s a creative idea to bring broad local support to a project. And now I love it.

Tell me what you think about crowdfunding. Have you contributed to a project (Patronicity or any other)? Why? I am working with a museum that's considering a crowdfunding project and I would love to hear your thoughts. You can use the comments or email me at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com.

As always, thanks for reading. If you are not a subscriber and would like to get blog posts by email, scroll to the bottom of any page at www.ordinaryvirtues.com and sign up.

#crowdfunding #ordinaryvirtues

Libraries Go Old School

Hangout places are sometimes called “Third Places” (as opposed to home and work, places one and two for most of us).  A Third Place is informal, provides opportunities for conversation, allows us to interact with other people.  The originator of the term wrote: “Nothing contributes so much to one’s sense of belonging to a community as much as ‘membership’ in a third place.” (Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 1999) 

Oldenburg wrote that Third Places should

• Be accessible physically (walkability) as well as financially (free or cheap)
• Be welcoming
• Be “leveling” – meaning access or accommodation doesn’t depend on social status
• Have regular patrons and new people to meet, and
• Have a comfortable, conversational atmosphere.

Coffee shops and bookstores have become Third Places, though in this article, the author argues that coffee shops are not Third Places when they’re full of people on laptops and smartphones, which doesn’t encourage interaction or conversation.  (I disagree; you engage as much or as little as you want to wherever you are, though the configuration of some places is more encouraging than others.)

I was at museum camp in Santa Cruz, California last week. I figured museum camp would be full of art and history and museum geeks like me, which it was, but I was surprised by how many librarians were there. A lot. And it made me want to be a librarian.

Carnegie Library in Superior, Wisconsin

I had a too-short conversation with a librarian from Illinois about how her library and other libraries (and museums and museums again) are re-orienting their missions to be cultural and community centers – Third Places.  Not just silent, secular Altars of Culture. But like museums and downtowns and every place that depends on people, libraries need to be relevant. “Not so long ago, the future of public libraries appeared uncertain. What, wondered thousands of (usually digital) think pieces, would happen to those hallowed halls of books in the age of the e-reader, the audio book app, the personal hotspot? Well, it turns out that it wasn’t librarians lacking imagination.  It was all those writers. Public library systems are reinventing themselves as community spaces, where classes and meet-up groups, and special events and makers thrive.” (Createquity.com, 9/7/16)

Learning doesn’t just happen in books. Libraries still have story hours and book clubs to bring people together, and are supplementing their literary services with exhibits, presentations, films, board game nights, classes, music, author events, and in some places, even coffee shops. I found one that loans out cake pans. Createquity continues: “Seattle offers its public library cardholders access to free downloads of local music. In Erie, PA, the public library system is experimenting with mobile Wi-Fi hotpots, to help kids without access to broadband at home to keep up with their homework. Believe it or not, in Finland, a public library near Helsinki doubles as a karaoke bar.” (Createquity.com, 9/7/16)

Which makes sense. There aren’t any other free indoor meeting places in most towns (for when you’ve consumed all the $6 coffees you can stand). The thing is, every Carnegie library had a “lecture room,” which was intended to be a community center – a third place. So libraries are actually going old-school, back to the standard set by Carnegie libraries over 100 years ago. Kudos, librarians, for embracing change and your roots at the same time.

Carnegie Library in Alabama

Bonus Material! Cool Libraries

In communities where Carnegie libraries remain, they are likely among the most interesting historical structures in town. Here in Cadillac we have a quite fabulous Carnegie library.  It now houses our Wexford County Historical Museum. Here is Cadillac’s Carnegie library, current and original, showing the unfortunate loss of the front entrance.

Cadillac, Michigan Carnegie Library (before)

Cadillac, Michigan Carnegie Library (current)

Traverse City’s Carnegie library was in the news a couple of years ago; the local history museum located there was no longer able to deal with maintenance and upkeep costs, and wanted to give it back to the city, which didn’t really want it either. Happy ending though; it’s now a cool art center.

Here is a list of all the Carnegie libraries built in Michigan.

Here is a slide show of interesting libraries that landed in my in-basket recently, and not a Carnegie in the bunch. 

Little Free LIbrary in Fenton, Michigan

Another favorite type of library is the Little Free Libraries that are springing up all over. I love their architecture almost as much as Carnegie libraries’ (clicking on that link will result in a serious time suck). And they can complement any kind of third place (schools, art centers and museums, I’m looking at you) and build relationships between neighbors.

As always, thanks for reading! If you want to share your thoughts, you can use the comment section below, or email me at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com.

LIttle Free Library in London

 #ordinaryvirtues #thirdplaces

Owning Civilization, With All its Baggage

Bill Stumpf, a designer and author of one of my favorite books, says:

Sometimes I think we’ve become a nation of renters, here for the short term, whether here is a place of residence, a stock portfolio, or a political position. We have lost a sense of proprietorship and the sense of community that tags along behind ownership. If we aren’t the proprietors of our civilization, who is? 

(From The Ice Palace That Melted Away, page 94)

To be a proprietor means to own a thing, like a business, a property. How do we do that with civilization? Being a “proprietor of our civilization” means to own our past and the baggage that comes with it. To own the ideas, the history, the people, the place or thing that represents it. Including, sometimes, sorrow and regret. Including people whose ideas we disagree with.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall changed how we own our history. It helped us acknowledge the darker side of our past with honesty and come to treat it with respect. The wall made it possible to own our imperfect civilization without glorifying it. It also, for the first time, gave people permission to create very personal memorials with letters and flowers and medals. It has such emotional weight and healing powers that replicas of the wall travel across the country. Here is a great podcast about creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and about the power of place.

In an effort to own our past, we are trying to do more to own the darkest parts of our history.

·         Richmond, Virginia is looking for ways to honor the history of an old slave market while revitalizing its neighborhood.

·         Museums, most often the keepers of our history and our most powerful symbols, are doing more to acknowledge and correct historical deficiencies. Historic homes more frequently represent enslaved residents as well as white owners.

·         Flags and memorials to the south’s Confederate past were removed in the wake of last summer’s racially-motivated murders in Charleston, and some are going to museums. Here and here are examples of news coverage from the south.

·         Georgetown University is trying to make amends for slaves it owned and sold to balance the budget. Its president has met with descendants of the Georgetown slaves, he’s created an African American Studies program, and is working with stakeholders to consider other options.

·         Princeton students continue to protest in favor of erasing history by changing the name of the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and a building named for Wilson (here and here), a racist by current standards, and creator of the League of Nations.

Why don’t we just throw all this ugly stuff in the dumpster instead of a museum and move on, as the Princeton students wish to do?  Because changing the name doesn’t change the idea. It’s choosing not to own history, to sweep it under the rug, to hide the truth. Taken to extremes, do we then change everything named for Jefferson and Washington, hide the Constitution in a filing cabinet, and teach only pleasant, non-controversial history? (Is there any such thing?) Should places still be named for Stonewall Jackson if his statue is coming down? Slave owners who were founding fathers are ok, but not Confederate generals? Where do we draw the line between appropriate and extreme change? I don’t have the answer.

It's easier to be a proprietor of history with a physical representation – a thing to own, not just an idea. History gives meaning to place. History lives at your childhood home and in the White House. Memory lives in the 9/11 memorial plaza and roadside crosses and stuffed animals at the Pulse nightclub and medals at the Vietnam wall. Places have power. When history or memory is attached to a place, and we preserve that place or a symbol of it, we claim it. That’s why we have statutes and flags and historic buildings, and our high school yearbooks and our Rosebuds. History is personal.

By remembering, we are the proprietors of our civilization. We can preserve our past in a building name or a flag in a museum, and still understand that this is not our present. We don’t have to regard museums and buildings as graveyards reserved for dead white guys and symbols of the past. Take the past and use it to interpret the present, to connect the dots. Like putting a Confederate flag in a museum, use Woodrow Wilson as an opportunity to teach how human thought evolves over time. How we are still trying to understand each other and how we need to not just tolerate difference, but to embrace it and learn from it.

Only when we are keepers of our entire history can we learn from it. The fabric of a place has woven into it a past. And though a place can't hold all the love and all the grief and all the sorrow, Charleston and the Vietnam wall and Georgetown give us a common space to heal. We have a responsibility to acknowledge all our history and represent it with truth and integrity. Ordinary virtues demand it. 

Thanks to Reidar Sandell for conversations and suggestions that helped shape this post. And thank you, as always, for reading.

#ordinaryvirtues #billstumpf

The importance of polka dots in public places

Is it just me or is there a profusion of polka dots in the world lately?

 Detroit artist Tyree Guyton started painting polka dots on abandoned houses years ago.

This link is also about street crossing and features polka dots, and it’s totally worth two minutes of your life. 

I am working on actual blog posts with words... more to come. Meanwhile, enjoy! 

#ordinaryvirtues #polkadots

Ordinary Virtue of the Week: Drinking in Summer

As if it didn't matter

which way was home;

as if he didn't know

he loved the earth so much

he wanted to stay forever.

From The Long Boat by Stanley Kunitz

Hi everyone - summer makes me not want to look at a computer screen but I haven't disappeared altogether. Hope you are all well and drinking in the summer too! I'll be posting again soon.

#ordinaryvirtues

Ordinary Virtue of the Week: Wisdom

Last week I started reading Krista Tippet’s new book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. You may know Krista from her NPR program, On Being.

I’m only about 30 pages into the book. It’s organized around, and explores her conception of ordinary virtues.

The connective tissue of these pages is the language of virtue – an old fashioned word, perhaps, but one that I find is magnetic to new generations, who instinctively grasp the need for practical disciplines to translate aspiration into action. Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are not the stuff of saints and heroes, but tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space.

There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime – love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.

She divides the book into “five of these raw materials, basic aspects of the human everyday, which I’ve come to see as breeding grounds for wisdom”: words, flesh (about senses and emotion), love, faith, and hope.

When I decided to call this blog and my web site Ordinary Virtues, I made my own list of ordinary virtues. Several of the words on my list are in the paragraphs above. But my list is focused more, to use jargon from my government world, on outputs: Kindness, love, joy, compassion, moderation. A couple have appeared in the blog as the Ordinary Virtue of the Week. I didn’t go deeper into the input needed to get the output, and it looks like that’s where her book is going – “the shifts of mind and habit that make those possible.”

I’ll likely do another blog once I’m done reading, or maybe feature more text as I go along. If you read the book and have some thoughts, please drop me a note at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com. The comments section on the blog remains a mystery to me. As always, thanks for reading!

Irreverent Bonus Material:

Used entirely without permission. Thanks Bill Watterson, you rock. 

#ordinaryvirtues #becomingwise

Placemaking and Aging Harley Riders

As a baby boomer with parents in their late 70s, their living situation is a growing concern for me. My folks are still ok driving, they maintain the yard and house, and they are physically active. But we all see a day coming when they will not be as self-sufficient and active as they are now.

As their likely caregiver, their location dictates where I spend a lot of my vacation time in the next few years. Happily for me, that’s Skidaway Island in Savannah, Georgia (pictured above. Thanks Mom and Dad!). The island has 10,000 residents, about as many as Cadillac. There is a good grocery store, library, health club, a restaurant, a couple of churches, and a pharmacy accessible by road as well as a walking/golf cart path, but doctors and other stores are off the island and require a car – there’s no public transportation. I’d like to see them stay in their house if that’s what they want, but clearly they will need some help as they become less mobile.

They may also find that their social opportunities diminish with their transportation options. Mom’s book club and bridge group are on the island but not walkable. Dad’s social circle is his golf group, which plays off the island. A criticism of the “aging in place” model – put some grab bars in the bathtub and you’re good to stay – is that, sure, you can stay in your house, but unless you can still drive, you can’t actually leave your house. In some residential situations, people who age in place may become more isolated than if they were in an institution. New York Times columnist Jane Brody wrote this column a few weeks ago about aging in place - from the perspective of a woman in her 70s. It's worth a read if you're interested in the topic. 

The World Health Organization has identified eight factors that contribute to age-friendly communities: community services and health care; transportation; housing; social participation opportunities; outdoor spaces; respect and social inclusion; opportunities for civic participation and work; and communications and information. The AARP has livability fact sheets for community planners that cite bicycling as a transportation option, dense, walkable neighborhoods, trees, and traffic calm as assets to make “great places for people of all ages.” Hmmmm, sound familiar? These have a lot in common with that list of placemaking characteristics I included in a previous post (see below). If we’re going to do placemaking, it should be for EVERYONE. Not just hipsters, not just artists, not just bloggers.

12 Steps to a Great Public Space

1. Protection from traffic
2. Protection from crime
3. Protection from the elements
4. A place to walk
5. A place to stop and stand
6. A place to sit
7. Things to see
8. Opportunities for conversations
9. Opportunities for play
10. Human-scale
11. Opportunities to enjoy good weather
12. Aesthetic quality

To which I would add:
Opportunities for active engagement and participation
Opportunities for quiet and reflection
Places to get food and drinks

Ideally, elders wouldn’t be segregated unless they wanted to be. A well-designed and executed community wouldn’t need special housing or amenities for the elderly and/or disabled, because health care, transportation, opportunities for civic participation, and outdoor spaces would be there for the hipsters, artists and bloggers already. Communities that are walkable with nearby services allow people who don’t drive to maintain all or most of their activities as they age. Walking creates all kinds of benefits – health, social, local economy, and environmental. Amenities for pedestrians usually translate pretty well to people on wheels – wheelchairs and walkers as well as bicycles and strollers.

This ad is from 1962. Lawn bowling! Archery! Shuffleboard!

There is a range of housing options targeted to aging people. And the concept of placemaking, no surprise, is influencing developments for older adults.

Age-restricted communities were hatched in the 1960s – gigantic suburban-type developments for people over 50 with onsite activities like golf and shuffleboard (Sun City, in the ad above, was one of the first). Contemporary aging boomers are more interested in bike trails than shuffleboard, and many of us will be working until we drop, so more age-limited communities are being built near cities where residents can keep working, ride the trails, and have diverse opportunities for social and civic engagement, rather than be isolated in the middle of the desert.

Elders who don’t necessarily want to be segregated, but may be by circumstance, are influencing nursing home development too. Nursing homes are not really “places” in the sense that we use the term, but this article describes an alternative to traditional / institutional nursing homes that incorporates placemaking concepts. The Green House model described is based on 10-person units where private rooms are built around a living room where residents can socialize. Each unit has a kitchen, and residents and staff work together to plan meals and activities. Green Houses’ smaller scale facilitates interaction between residents which include mixed populations (not all elderly people)… all placemaking concepts that make these less institutional facilities and more desirable living communities. Other nursing homes are facilitating social interaction between elders and youth, from preschoolers to college students.

And then there are theme retirement communities. Born to be wild? Harley riders, feel confident there is a place for you and your people even as you age. Some college campuses, including University of Michigan, have affiliated retirement communities with classes available to residents.

Born to be wild in a retirement community for Harley owners. Are those golf clubs on the back of Fonda's bike??

As with anything else, it’s all about having options. My parents like their suburban setting and I’m happy to visit them there. If we can figure out their transportation off the island, aging in place may be a great option for them. My grandmother relocated from Royal Oak to an age-restricted independent living apartment in Florida to be near her five cousins, transitioning over time to assisted living. My favorite neighbor (who’s 86) wants to move into town where he can walk to meet his buddies for breakfast and to the bank to flirt with the tellers.

The AARP says that one in three Americans is over 50 years old, making us demanding boomers a pretty substantial force for retirement housing choices and associated amenities that meet our needs and innermost desires. Oh the places we’ll go!

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!

Bonus material!

The Times published several articles a while back describing issues that affect elders even in walkable, densely-developed cities: where can older people congregate within a walkable distance for them, socialize, but not be isolated with only other older people? Here is the first article in the series about police evicting loitering 80-year-olds from a Flushing, NY McDonald’s, followed by responses to it, then this editorial.  This last article describes McDonald’s as a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community – the places that people gather because of convenience and amenities.

And the last word on the subject of aging boomers…

As always, thanks for reading. I welcome your comments, ideas, suggestions, and innermost desires for your own retirement situation, either through the comments section here, by email at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com, or at www.linkedin.com/susanwenzlick.

#ordinaryvirtues

Return of Boaty McBoatface

OK, I know I said no more on collaboration for a while, but I left you all hanging on the Boaty McBoatface thing. The UK National Environment Resource Council  is building a fancy new polar research ship and held a national naming contest, in which the winner by 124,000 votes was the RSS Boaty McBoatface. Not what NERC expected. They are now backpedaling and have announced they will review the entries but are unlikely to use the winning name. My last post was about different ways NERC could have collaborated for a better outcome, but I didn’t go into what that would look like. NERC is almost certainly saying, So, Ms. Smartypants Blogger, what would YOU have done for that project?

Dear NERC:

If you were really committed to engaging the public in your shipbuilding project and sharing your research and education with a broader audience, you could have used the Best. Collaboration. Ever. method to do it in a much more effective way. (Yes, Best. Collaboration. Ever. is my corn-fed, hopelessly Midwestern name for that approach. If its Portland originators had named it, I’m sure their name would be ironic.)

The Best. Collaboration. Ever. used three levels of collaboration to make a museum exhibit on contemporary Chinese design relevant to a broad audience in Portland, Oregon. Collaborators participated as Creators, Commentators, and Consumers.

For NERC’s Best. Collaboration. Ever., instead of a national naming contest which netted you the overwhelmingly popular name of RRS Boaty McBoatface, you could have held a contest for UK schools only. The winning school’s teachers and students become the Creators. They choose the name for the ship, and the teachers are the bad cops who don’t let Boaty McBoatface get out the door. The winning school gets live monthly video streams during the shipbuilding and the research vessel’s first year or two out at sea. The teachers send you ideas for the video streams that coincide with their lesson plans and their kids get to ask NERC questions during the stream. One of the NERC staff visits the school annually to touch base. You create a scholarship for kids from the winning school to go to science camp.

Then, you make your streams available on a NERC YouTube channel for every other school in the world to watch, and though the students and teachers couldn’t ask questions live, they could submit questions to your web site. You use these questions for a Q/A on the web site, or a blog targeted to teachers. You invite teachers to share their classroom experiences and unique ways they use your educational materials on your website. These are your commentators.

This project is cool and features cute kids, so the media will naturally be all over this. Media coverage lasts for the long term, not just during a naming contest. There must be space on their equivalent of PBS kids’ programming, or the Today Show, where short spots about the project’s progress can be broadcast. Viewers can also check out your web site and YouTube channel where your classroom videos are available. They can see and learn without participating in the project. These are your consumers.

Instead of superficial engagement that lasts as long as the media cycle then forgets the RRS Whatever, you get broad, long-term engagement and educational benefits that go way beyond Boaty McBoatface.

Yes, this is a much more substantial commitment of staff and money and time. But it fulfills your goals much more effectively than a naming contest.

Sincerely,

Susan the Smartypants 

#ordinaryvirtues