I Know I'm Not Wrong.

Aaron "Urbanophile" Renn moved back to Indiana (Indianapolis) from New York City earlier this year. This column was published a few months ago and is worth a read even if it is directed primarily as larger cities.

STORIED CITIES, by Aaron Renn (Comment)

The lost link between a city's forgotten history and its cultural potential.

It’s been widely observed that there’s an increasing sameness to cities today, a sort of neoliberal urban monoculture that’s swept the globe. Visit any city in the world and see the same boutique hotels, swank restaurants, outposts of global luxury brands, and so on.

Sameness ... even in smaller cities like ours.

It's what happens, utterly predictably, when the same old engineering and design firms with no connections to the cities, and no knowledge of their history and uniqueness, are hired to deploy their same old suburban template of design elements, generally a ludicrous collection of shopping mall motifs that somehow dazzle the barely-educated dullards who adfarm-near-me/">minister local political patronage programs.

For those cities who don’t understand their identity or have failed to believe in its value, it’s probably not too late. In some cases industrial knowledge may have been lost. But the local culture is surely still there in some form, even if it may need to be updated for today’s realities. Today’s younger urban dwellers, who see these cities in a very different light than their parents and grandparents did, are ideally suited to this task. They missed the collapse of the urban-crisis era. In many cases their cities are now showing nascent signs of rebirth, setting the stage for the rediscovery of these places as cities on a potentially upward trajectory again. The generation who left Egypt was unable to enter the promised land. Sometimes it takes a new generation to look anew and see the possibilities of a place. They perhaps will be the ones to rediscover the identity of a place, to look again at its history, culture, its traditions and rituals, to embrace the uniqueness of their city as their own.

My homes away from home are gone, so the SOCIALIST is having BEERS WITH himself.

And with his wife, of course. Let's take a look at the calendar.

Oktoberfest? Nope.

The Fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona? Canceled.

Poperinge Hop Fest? No word yet, but "no go" would seem to be a foregone conclusion.

I'll concede to no longer being the type who enjoys large gatherings like Octoberfest and San Fermin. Poperinge's triennial paean to the magic cone is vastly smaller and better suited to my preferences. It's clear that all such gatherings will succumb to the coronavirus in 2020.

That's part of the reason why as years go, 2020 already has ceased to exist. For all intents and purposes, we're playing for New Year's Day, 2021.

My reaction to the global pandemic response recalls the words in 1914 of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, who remarked to a friend as the United Kingdom's prepared to enter the First World War, "The lamps are going out all over Europe, (and) we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."

The lamps were lighted again, though it took a while. 106 years is one thing, 75 another (since the end of WWII), so nine years is sufficient for the rehash of an essay, given my inability at this late date to even remember the rationale for the original column.

First published in October of 2011, this essay was an attempt to explain the central place that pubs, libations, travel and their wonderful third spaces have occupied in my life.

However first a few words about the current fate of these third spaces.

During the pandemic an atheistic Dionysian public imbiber like me finds himself just as deprived of religious worship as any conventional believer. Without exaggeration, all the things I've truly cherished outside the boundaries of my own home are gone, with their return utterly uncertain, or whether they’re to come back in any recognizable form at all.

Depressing isn’t the word. It’s worse than that, of course in a metaphysical sense and not to be confused with a clinical diagnosis.

Seldom do I reference motion pictures to make a point, but I’m reminded of the Star Trek reboot a few years back wherein Spock watches as the planet Vulcan disintegrates before his eyes.

That’s the last six weeks for me, and for so many of us in the food and drink industry. 40 years and an entire working career, suspended in a flash. Forgive me if I’m unwilling to contemplate life without boisterous pubs with pints in Dublin, or relaxing beer gardens in Bavaria with 2,000 of your best friends. Being unable to go to places and experience them? Might as well amputate a limb or two.

Right now, I can’t fathom it. For me, here in America, pub culture always was the one sure antidote to our failed political experiment. Now the coronavirus has exposed the latter beyond any shadow of doubt, while also depriving us of the means to cope with (cov)idiocracy.

Hemingway’s empty bottle as a means of sovereign action serves no purpose if it cannot be thrown at the oppressor -- and if your oppressor is with you sheltering at home, your problems are far larger than a garden-variety hangover.

I’m not tremendously well. I’ll get better. Revolution works for me; it always has.

As Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

Here’s the 2011 rumination, touched up just a bit to fit my circumstances a decade later.

---

Homes Away from Home (2011 - 2020)

We went for a stroll one Sunday a few years ago and passed a fly-by-night evangelistic church occupying an old shotgun house that had witnessed better days.

A graying middle-aged man I’d never seen before was standing out front, and he waved animatedly as we passed. I stopped and looked at him with as dull an expression as I could muster, but he was undeterred.

“Some Sunday, why don’t you come to church with us?”

I stopped and thought about it.

“Sure, as long as you’ll come to my church with me.”

Now he was the one pausing to think.

“Where’s your church?”

Got him.

“Any pub will do.”

We kept walking. I never saw him again.

---

Often in this space I write about otherwise forgettable days both near and far, and the fact of these days being forever marked in my memory by the presence of beer.

Well, isn’t beer always involved?

Whether opening a growler of lager on my own porch with a cigar nearby, or schlepping bottles filled with ale via bicycle panniers through the Belgian countryside, times are better with beer.

Human life spans are long and short all at once, and most of our days and nights are passed and beyond recall, and yet I’ll never forget that one time in Bohemia, walking to the neighborhood rail station pub tap for pitchers of draft beer, and then spending the afternoon drinking with good, kind, giving people, even though communication was a challenge owing to our linguistic divergences.

On that occasion, we brought the beer back with us, but during the course of my decades as a professional drinker, I’ve preferred my consumption to be on premise, out in the open, and part of the public record. It’s a tightrope I enjoy walking, even if such openness sometimes has resulted in less than flattering recollections, both on my part and in the minds of those forced to witness my drunken antics.

Most of the time it doesn’t come to that, and there is a fundamentally positive dynamic at play. The reason why bars, pubs and other watering holes are the only places I’ve ever truly felt comfortable – my natural habitat, as it were – is in part a statement about my innate proclivities, and also owing to the historical function of those places as third spaces.

Nowadays most of us in America have living rooms of our own, but a social instinct still impels us to find another milieu to spend time apart from home and work, another comfortable spot – perhaps a gym, coffee shop, park bench … or even a church, in a pinch derived from sheer desperation.

Well, churches can be interesting to look at, preferably while drinking at a sidewalk café across the square.

These are functional examples, but all of them a bit dry for my taste. I prefer my third spaces to offer the possibility of consuming beverage alcohol, most often beer. When I’m surrounded by people who feel the same, anything is possible. This is especially true when you’re a wandering stranger, and find yourself welcomed, albeit temporarily, into the public living room of the locals.

It never gets any better than that.

An inviting barroom shifts the perspective of the traveler from the expansive outside looking in, to the inside looking back out ... at times, tightly. From five thousand miles away, you enter a cozy room and ask for a tankard of whatever is made right there, whether in the building, the town or the region.

Granted, one might have a lovely experience in Munich at a mock Pampas restaurant specializing in the beef and wines of southernmost South America, but really, shouldn’t you be going somewhere else for those?

---

The late Bostonian ward-heeling politician Tip O’Neill rather famously commented that all politics is local, and in like fashion, my pathway is leading me inexorably to this conclusion: All beer drinking culture is local.

Although I’m no longer a craft brewery owner, and allow myself a broad range of geographical libational constructs, there remains an essence and primacy to what is being brewed at or near the place one drinks beer.

Truthfully the homebrewer’s self-made bounty is the purest possible example, followed by local commercial brewers and their products. If the beer comes from elsewhere, whether down the road or around the globe, there remains a commensurate importance in choosing genuinely local ownership of the establishments serving it.

I’ll be damned if I’m going to drive all the way to Chico, California, and drink Sierra Nevada at the “neighborhood” chain restaurant, Applebee’s. They may serve it, but chains don’t deserve my patronage.

Returning full circle to the man’s invitation those many years ago to come to church, it may sound as if I’m formulating commandments and theological doctrine. You bet it does. What do you think this philosophy major has been pondering all these years while balanced, at times precariously, atop those thousands of bar stools?

Beer drinking is my sacrament, and pubs are my sanctuaries. When the collection tray was passed, I put all of my money into beer. I got the true religion for sure, but it came from drinking the beer … not the Kool-Aid.

Culture, demographics and territorial pissings: "Gen X Is Having a (Very Gen X) Moment."

Let us be the first generation to opt out of building monuments to our rightness. Let’s build no monuments at all.

Thanks to Bluegill (or as they refer to him in France, Bleugill) for drawing my attention to this essay.

Gen X Is Having a (Very Gen X) Moment, by Pappademas

Why the opt-out generation should reject its nostalgia bath

... Recently a card-carrying member of Generation X entered the race for President of the United States. His name was Beto O’Rourke. He is 46 and a father and a former senator from El Paso, Texas. He was identifiably One Of Us. He’d been part of the hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow. He’d been in a punk band with guys who went on to play in unassailably credible outfits like At the Drive-In and the Mars Volta. He posed for said punk band’s album cover wearing his girlfriend’s dress, seemingly less as a statement about gender and more as a big Novoselician goof. He was filmed tooling around on a skateboard and quoted about his admiration of Fugazi. He seems bright and eager to make a difference, and also completely doomed — and not just because attempting to ride the wave that swept history’s most racially and ethnically diverse Congress into office is an inherently room-illiterate thing for a handsome young white guy to do. He seemed doomed because every data point that emerged about his X-ness made him seem more like a traitor to that history. If listening to Fugazi inspires you to run for president — let alone to run against Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as a centrist Democrat — you have perhaps not been listening to Fugazi correctly.

The future path is obvious, Jeffrey: "New Albany’s Second Baptist wins 'Network to Freedom' designation recognizing the church’s historic role as part of the Underground Railroad."

Yes, my views on the topic of public money for the enhancement of church architecture are (shall we say) nuanced.

There may have been an excellent case to be made for contributions to the prominent Town Clock Church, but once a precedent is established, where does it start -- and more importantly, where does it end?

(Keep reading. There's a twist in this tale.)

ON THE AVENUES: Weeds, porch appliances and our civic Gospel of Appearances.

 ... According to the Gospel of Appearances, blessed are those who help tax-exempt organizations maintain their properties. According to this logic, the city of New Albany received a boost in the quality of life when the two church spires were repaired, and yet, wouldn’t both these churches still be able to function spiritually without steeples?

Wasn’t the combined expense somewhere in the neighborhood of $750,000 of someone else’s money?

Might the money have been invested in other ways, so as to lift humans, and not spires?

Speaking personally, I’ve no problem in both these instances accepting the argument from the utility of historic preservation. Furthermore, I support the notion that the greenest building is the one already standing, and urge building rehabilitation whenever possible.

And yet metaphors matter.

In the case of the Town Clock Church, one sure way that the city's steeple investment can pay future dividends is explained in this update from Indiana Landmarks (below). The Underground Railroad itself is a conceptual relic of history, but it remains vital even 150 years later because of the teachable topics proliferating from it.

It needs to become just such a teachable tool.

Understanding that what I'm about to suggest is unlikely, I'm not deterred at all from broaching it, because the best use I can envision for Bill Allen's dilapidated properties on Main Street facing the Town Clock Church is for them to be rehabbed into a cultural and educational center addressing the many manifestations of the Underground Railroad.

Expensive? You bet, but also a project of merit that might draw investment from a wide expanse of individuals and organizations. It might even be structured to give the slumlord Allen family a tax break, so as to wrest these properties from their cold, clueless hands.

You're free to steal this idea, Jeff Gahan, unless I've already (and inadvertently) stolen it from someone else. Then you can steal it from them.

Be forewarned: It might imply "reaching out" to African-Americans as part of the tourism branding effort you currently fail to possess, and doing so will offend certain Thurmondian portions of the "Let's Pretend We're Democrats" fundraising machine you spend most waking hours steering.

Think you're capable of that? If so, run with it.

Southern Indiana Church Joins Group of Elite Peers (Indiana Landmarks)

New Albany’s Second Baptist wins “Network to Freedom” designation recognizing the church’s historic role as part of the Underground Railroad.

Harriett Tubman’s home, the Levi Coffin House, and now, Second Baptist Church. At a ceremony in early July, the New Albany property won recognition as an official “Network to Freedom” site, honoring the role the church played in the Underground Railroad.

The National Park Service designation recognizes and promotes historic places, museums and interpretive programs associated with the Underground Railroad. Nationwide, more than 500 sites and programs have earned Network to Freedom status. About 20 other entities in Indiana share the honor, ranging from sites, Eleutherian College in Lancaster, for example, to educational projects like the Indiana Freedom Trails Educational and Research Program.

Second Baptist’s Network to Freedom status capped an initiative led by local historian Pamela Peters, informed by her years of research on the history of Floyd County’s African-American residents. While oral tradition long held that freedom seekers were hidden in the basement of the church, Peters uncovered no specific documentation to verify the claim. However, she was able to document that church members were vocal advocates who created a support system not only for escaping slaves but for New Albany’s African American community as a whole ...

A Tale of Two Cultural Guides: Ankara, meet New Albany.

Perhaps it isn't a fair comparison, given that Ankara is a huge national capital city, and we're a Louisville metro neighborhood.

New Albany's assessment surely reinforces the notion of New Albany as a place where indie businesses can survive, even if the traditional power elites don't grasp what this means.

You Really Need to (Re)Visit New Albany. Here’s Why!, by Heidi Potter (Style Blueprint)

All of this love is contained in just a few square blocks. Simply park and walk; you can even meander around like we did. Here are some of the highlights you must check out.

Perhaps the Ankara profile better illustrates a process of grassroots empowerment -- a bubbling up of culture -- that seems to be missing in New Albany. Or, is it there, and we're just not paying attention?

An insider's cultural guide to Ankara: 'Modern without being snobby' (Guardian)

From psychedelic folk music to guerrilla artists, Didem Tali takes us behind the new urban developments in Turkey’s capital.

Clinging to the Same Stories.

"America's seismic demographic shift is upending life in our suburbs, cities and our popular culture. So why are we still clinging to the same stories to make sense of these changes?"

Maybe it's encroaching middle age, a broader mix of world events, or just another car driving the right way on a wrong way street, but that last bit about clinging has been a theme of late. Preexisting frames are tough to beat. Not beating them, though, means you are beat.

When Our Kids Own America, By Gene Demby (NPR) 

Brooklyn Park, Minn., which sits just to the northwest of Minneapolis and hugs the Mississippi River, was once the quintessential American suburb: Pretty sleepy. Midwestern. Mostly white. Jesse Ventura, the garrulous former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler, used to be the city's mayor. It was the childhood stomping grounds of a young Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion. The city’s annual festival is called “Tater Daze,” a nod to its potato farm origins. 


The Wonder Years could have been set in Brooklyn Park. 

Over the past two decades, though, the city has undergone the kind of transformation that’s changing life in so many American suburbs. In 1990, around nine in 10 people in Brooklyn Park were white. By 2010, nearly half the town’s residents were people of color. People in the surrounding area started referring derisively to the town as “Brooklyn Dark.” 

Many longtime — mostly white — residents were either moving out or resisting the tide of newcomers. As the shift got underway in the mid-’90s, a white local bar owner spoke up at a City Council hearing: "If you come from a different perspective or a different place, don't bring those standards to Brooklyn Park.” A different perspective. Lurking just beneath those words is an unspoken stake of ownership: this place is ours. 

This pattern seems familiar by now: “they” invade, there’s tension, many of “us” leave, whether it’s white folks gentrifying a brown community or brown folks ethno-fying a white one. And as long as the dichotomy was just that stark — as long as white folks and people of color could reliably play the roles of “we” and “they” — the pattern was easy to understand. But what’s happening to the “quintessential American suburb” echoes what’s happening to our classic “Chocolate Cities” like Oakland, Calif., Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Ga., and what’s happening in hip-hop and pop music. That old story is starting to get complicated.