O Lost

I know that I said I would post the rest of my Asheville pics, but I had some severe problems with Blogger this weekend. For some reason it wasn't uploading images or publishing my post. I'm hoping it was just a problem with the laptop I was using, so I'm sending this one out from work to test everything out.

Anyway, I typed out a long post with the rest of my pictures only to lose it completely when I tried to publish, which was thoroughly disheartening. Anyone who's typed out a long email and had their webmail session time out before they could send it knows the reluctance I feel in reconstructing my lost missive.

But anyway, the title of this post is the original title to Thomas Wolfe's awesome novel "Look Homeward, Angel." The great Max Perkins allegedly edited down a huge and unweildy manuscript into a masterpiece, but more recently the original manuscript was published and seems to give evidence that Perkins wasn't as necessary as the stories would lead you to believe.

LHA was one of my favorite books when I read it in high school, and it is appropos to my blog post because not only is Thomas Wolfe from Asheville, but the town of Altamont in which the novel takes place is unmistakably the Asheville of Wolfe's youth. You can even walk around town and find the boarding house his mom owned and his dad's cemetery monument shop, both of which feature prominently in the book. Just another thing that I love about Asheville but which didn't make it into my once and future post with the rest of my vacation pics.

Also, I've always loved Wolfe's "O Lost," which is scattered through LHA and was his original title for the book. Another title I love is "All Shook Down," an album by the Replacements that features on it's cover a wet dog on deserted street.

Slack

I can't believe it's been a couple of weeks since I posted. I've been so busy since I got back from vacation that I didn't really have time to blog, and this week I've been sick and have mostly just been laying around being miserable. However, I don't want to let this thing lapse too long, so here are the promised pictures from Asheville (or as K says, "Ashevegas".)*

These pictures are extremely low quality, as they were taken on a cell phone by an inexperienced photographer (me) who was more concerned with talking with his girlfriend and parents than in getting good shots. Also, hotmail is only allowing me to download them as bitmaps, which may further decrease their usefulness.

If you've never been there, let me tell you that Asheville is a great town. It's way up in the mountains, only a few minutes away from the Blue Ridge Parkway (the headquarters of the parkway is actually located here.) It also has a few colleges scattered around, most notably a branch of the University of North Carolina.

However, the most striking thing about Asheville is it's architecture. As far as I understand it, Asheville was a fairly unremarkable regional center until the late 1800's. Sometime around there, the wealthy began flocking to the area to take advantage of the crisp mountain air as a remedy for their consumption, or tuberculosis, as the vaccine wouldn't be used in the US until after WWII. Many of them came to live in sanitariums (F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife was to die in an Asheville sanitarium fire), but a lot of them built their own homes, and eventually businesses in the area. Because most of these rich folks were from New York, dowtown Asheville is very Art Deco. But honestly, it's not just the art deco style that they copied from New York, as I had spinach dip at a little cafe at the corner of Battery Park Ave. and Wall St., across the street from a big triangular office tower called the Flat Iron Building.

The biggest spender in Asheville George W. Vanderbilt, who decided to go a little further afield (and up the fancypants ladder) to build his house, and modeled his Biltmore Estate on the Chateau de Blois in France, home to several French Kings and briefly, Joan of Arc. Check out the slanted stairwell from the Chateau to see the family resemblance. There is a touch of New York at Biltmore, though, because the grounds were designed by Frederik Law Olmsted designer of both Central Park and Prospect Park, who was basically the father of landscape architecture.

Another famous rich guy in Asheville was E.W. Grove, who built this wicked huge hotel out of big slabs of granite called the Grove Park Inn, which sits on the side of a mountain overlooking Asheville. I've prowled around there when I lived nearby, and it will totally make you feel like you're in the Shining. Very creepy, yet luxurious. As my girlfriend remarked, "the furniture in the bathroom is nicer than the stuff in my own apartment."

Anyway, near the end of his life, Grove decided to build an enormous (for Asheville) building in the heart of downtown that would consist of a large shopping center on the bottom couple of floors that would serve as the base for a tall office tower. Here's an engraved glass panel that shows what it was supposed to look like.


I did say what it was "supposed" to look like because he died before it could be completed. In fact, he died right after they completed the ground level shopping center, so the builders or his kids or whatever just decided to cap things off, and they scrapped the tall tower. What remains is the Grove Arcade, a pretty nifty little mall that looks charmingly massive.
















I'll stop here for today, but I'll post some more pictures tomorrow. Promise.

Back to the Drawing Board

In jr. high there was a girl named Katrina(the only one I've ever known) that I really didn't like. It adds an extra little bit of *yuck* whenever I think of the hurricane and what happened to the Gulf Coast.

Not that I needed any more yuck, of course. You can read any number of bloggers sympathize with or criticize various groups of human beings about the situation they find themselves in or the choices they made during the aftermath of the storm, and I don't really feel like I can add much, but it can't help but be on everyone's mind, including my own.

One of the things that occurred to me today was the enormity of the task of resettling New Orleans. I know there are some who don't want to rebuild it, but I think that we can't help but rebuild it. I know that many of the residents of smaller towns in Mississippi and Louisiana will be forgotten as time passes, like the victims of Floyd in 1999. But losing New Orleans would be too much of a shock for the nation. I think it's somewhat analagous to 9/11 in a way -- if 20 random buildings in 20 cities had been attacked, I don't think we would have the same kind of wrangle about what would replace them. But because the WTC was so iconic, people felt it just had to get replaced by something equally, if not more symbolic.

While there were no terrorists involved in Hurricane Katrina, I think people will feel the same way about New Orleans. You can't just give up on a whole city, especially one so unique and steeped in history.

So what's going to happen? I saw one of the holdouts getting interviewed saying that he wasn't going to leave because he doesn't have any papers for his home and he'll lose everything if he goes. I don't know what he meant by that exactly, but what I think he means is that he doesn't have an official deed to his house or insurance or anything. I'm sure that a lot of those homes in the poorer sections of the city were passed down to children or sold off the books to friends or neighbors to avoid taxes and legal fees.

But even if there were paperwork available for everyone, resettlement will be a mess. Most of those homes were timber framed and will have soaked up a lot of contaminated water making them weak and hazardous to the health of anyone who might want to live there, so they'll have to be torn down. With much of the city levelled and lots of people looking to return, what will they put in to take it's place? Will it be lots of cookie-cutter housing projects? Probably. Undoubtedly Habitat for Humanity will get involved as well.

What I hope is that we'll take this opportunity to bring in some design professionals to take a look at what will be a unique opportunity in the history of the U.S. -- building an entire city from scratch. Naturally, I will offer them my Babble/On plans free of charge, but I'm sure plenty of architects and engineers would jump at the chance to take on the challenge of designing housing for thousands of people in a uniquely-challenging environment.

I will be very interested in seeing how the government, humanitarian organizations and private citizens rise to the challenge of building most of a city from scratch, an urban planners dream.

Rockin' in the Free World

Well, I'm back from vacationing in the drier parts of the American South, and like Nixon I'm tanned, rested and ready. I had a great time with the family up in Asheville on Thursday, and I took some pictures with my crummy camera phone of the fantastic architecture, which I'll show you tomorrow.

In the meantime, I've posted three tracks from that Cambodian rock music rekkid that I talked about last week. Considering the provenance of these recordings and the uncertain fates of their creators (and the meager size and benevloent disposition of my readership), I doubt that there are significant risks to posting these up, but if the RIAA comes knockin' I'm pulling these down pronto. Get 'em while they're free!

"Track 8" is an awesome bluesy stomper that sound like Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets" with an occasional sweaty James Brown breakdown. I'm willing to bet this guy got ahold of a Screamin' Jay Hawkins record at some point.

There's no need to try to guess what the guys playing on "Track 13" were listening to, as this seems to be a local remake of Them's "Gloria" (what is it with Cambodians and Van Morrison?) I wish I knew if they took as many liberties with it as Patti Smith would a few years later (Buddha was reincarnated for somebody's Karma, but not mine...), but they certainly sound like they mean it.

"Track 15" is typical of the best songs on the compilation in that it features female vox and a slightly haunted melody that soars over the rest of the music. It reminds me a little bit of Ennio Morricone's film work of the same period, particularly "Il Gardenio del Delize." With both songs, I imagine a couple of really groovy foreign spies or vampires (or both!) tooling around in an Aston Martin, draped in slick clothes and Italian sunglasses.

Enjoy the songs, and let me know what you think.