Hello, gentle and not-so-gentle readers. Welcome to a special edition/series of The Penguin blog.
Spring has sprung, with all the squeaky metal contortions that implies, and even the sullen burg of Lansing Michigan is feeling the gentle rush of rising sap. Just last night we had the first real soaker of the season, it having been an oddly dry April up till that point, and the ornamental fruit trees have begun to erupt like volcanoes of frothy, perfumed meringue. There's bunches of those weird little starlike blue flowers with the grassy leaves on some of the lawns, as well as grape hyacinths and the ever-present daffodils. And of course the new grass and emerging leaves, which have a shocking neon-green effect against the smoky tomcat background of clouds and drizzly wet streets. These are what I like to think of as "Irish Days", when the breeze is indeed like the slightly damp paw of a sleepy cat batting gently at your face, warm rain purring against the windows. This is one of my favorite times of year.
Having just bought a new Windows smartphone last month (I call it the Tricorder, nobody seems to get it...), I've been walking around snapping pictures of random things which, if not inherently interesting, have relevance to me and my ownself. Namely pictures of my town and familiar haunts. Lansing is a frustrating sort of place, in that it doesn't have any distinguishing characteristics besides its being the Capital of Michigan. Sure, there's the Capitol Building, which is rather impressive in a gigantic Midwestern-limestone kind of way; and of course there's Winken, Blinken, and Nod, the ominous Eckert Power Plant smokestack trinity with their cyclopean red lights blinking on and off, these being the unofficial mascots of Lansing.
Then there's the Grand River and surrounding swamplands, some of which were converted rather shortsightedly into auto-worker neighborhoods, and every March the Grand swells like a monstrous snake and spills over into the woods, just to remind everyone who's still boss. This lack of character in the town is matched by the general apathy of its residents, a sort of rust-belt downbeatenness. A longtime resident, speaking to my friend Joe, once described Lansing as "quicksand". Hey m'man, can I bum a cigarette is the local catchphrase.
Maybe it's just the Stockholm syndrome talking, but I've developed a certain grudging love for the City With No Face. Maybe it's just that I've made connections here, put down tentative roots. There's a spiky affection here, for this place, for my rundown house, for the cracked pavements and pockmarked roads and faces that fit both descriptions, for my shady neighbors and their bratty kids, my low-paying jobs and half-mad aspirations. Dare I even call it Civic Pride? It's exactly the nondescriptness of the place that makes me want to document it, like photos of random passersby Diane Arbus used to do, to set in stone these anonymous American weirdos, whose lives would otherwise pass unnoticed by history.
On the other hand, why do I have to justify my picture-taking? This is the Internet, for cryin out loud.
This is the view from the front porch, one bright and sunny morning. It's nice to have a porch, even if it only gives a view on your crummy street; you can sit on it like an old-timer, drinking coffee and reading a book. Mostly nobody bothers you except to nod hi, although some alleywalkers will try to bum cigarettes, which they generally precede by calling you "boss" or "chief" when you are clearly neither. This practice should be a capital crime.
This is the view looking south from the porch. Not much to see. Our southward neighbors (house out of frame) fixed up their house gorgeously and have a massive garden on the corner, and mysteriously a herd of tiny gray Toyota pickups with ignition problems. There may be up to 3 or 4 people of vaguely hipsterish provenance living there; we aren't sure. They don't talk to us much.
This is the view north from the porch, looking toward the infamous Kalamazoo Street Corridor. The house next to ours across the alleyway was a serial drughouse with progressively worse neighbors - the kind whose love of Substances was only matched by their love of Airing Grievances at 3am. Kinship was never established; we began to suspect that the obligatory ignored toddlers came with the house, as part of the rent deal.
The first batch of neighbors did their nefarious dealings inside the house. The second had a sort of Drug Drive-Through, with customers at one point rolling up every five minutes for a whole day. The third brought their business entirely outside, complete with a midnight curb-stomping of a fellow miscreant, dice-games in the alley, and other assorted family activities. After that, things went quiet. We know someone lives there, despite the lack of external evidence; every morning at 10 sharp a houseboat-like black Escalade with tinted windows rolls into the alley and blasts its horn, and a pale institutionalized-looking individual will emerge wearing blue scrubs and carrying a pair of trash bags. The My-Own-Business-Minding part of me says, well, they're probably just picking up their buddy to go work at the Hospital. Probably. Most definitely not a meth lab. Anyway, I'll trade some morning honking for nights full of frontyard altercations, screaming, and bowel-liquefying bass lines.
Last but not least, here's the alleyway next to my house, looking east. They're all over our part of town. I can't imagine this particular type of cut-through being unique to Lansing, but they are rather useful and not as scary as you might imagine. They're usually pretty quiet, too, especially in the mornings, and give kids a nice place to play in the afternoons (although I'm not to crazy on the neighborhood kids, who like to scream incessantly and will on occasion throw things at my house. Oh well. C'est la centre-ville).
More to come, but for now...Rick Out.
Next Up: I take you on a thrill-filled walk down the infamous Kalamazoo Corridor. What terrors shall engulf us? Will Right prevail? Will our heroes find love? Stay tuned for My Neighborhood II: The Reckoning! Coming soon from The Penguin.
Spring has sprung, with all the squeaky metal contortions that implies, and even the sullen burg of Lansing Michigan is feeling the gentle rush of rising sap. Just last night we had the first real soaker of the season, it having been an oddly dry April up till that point, and the ornamental fruit trees have begun to erupt like volcanoes of frothy, perfumed meringue. There's bunches of those weird little starlike blue flowers with the grassy leaves on some of the lawns, as well as grape hyacinths and the ever-present daffodils. And of course the new grass and emerging leaves, which have a shocking neon-green effect against the smoky tomcat background of clouds and drizzly wet streets. These are what I like to think of as "Irish Days", when the breeze is indeed like the slightly damp paw of a sleepy cat batting gently at your face, warm rain purring against the windows. This is one of my favorite times of year.
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| Pictured: tree gonads. Just like, staring you right in the face. Jesus. |
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| Photo by Sabato Antonio on Flickr |
Then there's the Grand River and surrounding swamplands, some of which were converted rather shortsightedly into auto-worker neighborhoods, and every March the Grand swells like a monstrous snake and spills over into the woods, just to remind everyone who's still boss. This lack of character in the town is matched by the general apathy of its residents, a sort of rust-belt downbeatenness. A longtime resident, speaking to my friend Joe, once described Lansing as "quicksand". Hey m'man, can I bum a cigarette is the local catchphrase.
Maybe it's just the Stockholm syndrome talking, but I've developed a certain grudging love for the City With No Face. Maybe it's just that I've made connections here, put down tentative roots. There's a spiky affection here, for this place, for my rundown house, for the cracked pavements and pockmarked roads and faces that fit both descriptions, for my shady neighbors and their bratty kids, my low-paying jobs and half-mad aspirations. Dare I even call it Civic Pride? It's exactly the nondescriptness of the place that makes me want to document it, like photos of random passersby Diane Arbus used to do, to set in stone these anonymous American weirdos, whose lives would otherwise pass unnoticed by history.
On the other hand, why do I have to justify my picture-taking? This is the Internet, for cryin out loud.
Here's the back of my house. The unpainted siding is the repair from where my roommate lit it on fire. He'd been out on the porch smoking last summer, oddly enough during a very wet night, and had gone back in only to hear our druggy then-neighbors pounding on the door. Turns out a plastic butt-bucket had melted and caught fire, freak accident really; the blaze raced up the corner of the house in a perfectly straight line, heading for the roof. He'd mostly gotten it put out by the time the Fire Department arrived, and they were a bit overzealous with their Tear Everything Off That Can Possibly Contain Sparks policy, destroying most of the siding, knocking holes in the attic and side-windows, and ripping up the back deck. Anyway, we're sorta known down the alley as Those Guys That Burned Their House.
Here's the other side of the back of the house. We erected a samizdat fence, since cut-and-runners would try to shortcut through our yard through to the alley, only to be stopped by our security fence. Trapped like wildebeests. Anyway we hauled a bunch of detritus over to make our Great Wall, then filled the area behind it with sharp metal and branches in case somebody got the bright idea to hop the fence. 'Twould serve them right, methinks. The small gray car is my roommate's old Saturn, sinking slowly into the ground.
This is the view from the front porch, one bright and sunny morning. It's nice to have a porch, even if it only gives a view on your crummy street; you can sit on it like an old-timer, drinking coffee and reading a book. Mostly nobody bothers you except to nod hi, although some alleywalkers will try to bum cigarettes, which they generally precede by calling you "boss" or "chief" when you are clearly neither. This practice should be a capital crime.
This is the view looking south from the porch. Not much to see. Our southward neighbors (house out of frame) fixed up their house gorgeously and have a massive garden on the corner, and mysteriously a herd of tiny gray Toyota pickups with ignition problems. There may be up to 3 or 4 people of vaguely hipsterish provenance living there; we aren't sure. They don't talk to us much.
The first batch of neighbors did their nefarious dealings inside the house. The second had a sort of Drug Drive-Through, with customers at one point rolling up every five minutes for a whole day. The third brought their business entirely outside, complete with a midnight curb-stomping of a fellow miscreant, dice-games in the alley, and other assorted family activities. After that, things went quiet. We know someone lives there, despite the lack of external evidence; every morning at 10 sharp a houseboat-like black Escalade with tinted windows rolls into the alley and blasts its horn, and a pale institutionalized-looking individual will emerge wearing blue scrubs and carrying a pair of trash bags. The My-Own-Business-Minding part of me says, well, they're probably just picking up their buddy to go work at the Hospital. Probably. Most definitely not a meth lab. Anyway, I'll trade some morning honking for nights full of frontyard altercations, screaming, and bowel-liquefying bass lines.
Last but not least, here's the alleyway next to my house, looking east. They're all over our part of town. I can't imagine this particular type of cut-through being unique to Lansing, but they are rather useful and not as scary as you might imagine. They're usually pretty quiet, too, especially in the mornings, and give kids a nice place to play in the afternoons (although I'm not to crazy on the neighborhood kids, who like to scream incessantly and will on occasion throw things at my house. Oh well. C'est la centre-ville).
More to come, but for now...Rick Out.
Next Up: I take you on a thrill-filled walk down the infamous Kalamazoo Corridor. What terrors shall engulf us? Will Right prevail? Will our heroes find love? Stay tuned for My Neighborhood II: The Reckoning! Coming soon from The Penguin.
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