Skyscrapin' Knees

Scribblings from the City

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Dancing in the streets. #Chicago #printersrow #iseemies

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Miami, Chicago.

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Dusky Chicago.

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The best. In the world.

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The New, Improved? Rust Belt

Taking on non-place and the death of the Rust Belt in "The New, Improved? Rust Belt," my latest for @newgeography :http://ow.ly/KfDJu

There is no longer a Rust Belt. It melted into air. The decline of manufacturing, the vacancy of the immense, industrial structures that once defined the productive capacities and vibrant lives of so many pockmarked towns, the dwindling of social capital—all the prognosticators writing the obituaries for these dead geographies were right.

How long were rust belt cities going to be able to, as author Robert Putnam would phrase it, “bowl alone?" It turns out not very long.

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The Contraphonic Sound Series Relaunches with New "Fourth River" Releases; April Exhibit at Pittsburgh's 937 Gallery. Click through for more.

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Unheralded classic by Donova.

"Mee Mee I Love You," from West German/French LP, "Neutronica," circa '80.

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Best Halloween video loop around, from Chicago foursome MELKBELLY.

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Buy Dispatches from the Rust Belt, direct from Belt Publishing, featuring the essay "This Ain't City Chicken: The Geography of Authenticity."

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Population Ain’t Nothing But a Number: Standardizing the Size of the Great American City - Belt Magazine | Dispatches From The Rust Belt

Given their wild variances in geographic size, why is it that we use population as a metric to gauge the health of cities? What would happen to population numbers - and the perception of place - if all cities were the same geographic size?

In this latest post for Belt Magazine, Xiaoran Li and I attempt to find out.

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This Ain’t City Chicken: The Geography of Authenticity - Belt Magazine | Dispatches From The Rust Belt

These are consumptive geographies, wherein authenticity is commoditized and reduced to an amenity. These geographies are the spatial equivalent of a reproduction, echoing Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” wherein the cityscape, while flavored by nostalgia for a past never experienced by its purveyors or consumers, is “lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

A new restaurant in Detroit may be the first example of ruin porn cuisine. Read the full post over at Belt Magazine.

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Ballplayers as Labor and Product

Should baseball players be making more?

According to Craig Calcaterra, it's an easy yes.

"... baseball as an industry brought in a record $8 billion+ last year, meaning player salaries are around 43% of revenues. Which seems high — depending on the industry, labor usually costs anywhere between 10 and 30 percent of revenues — but shouldn’t be all that surprising considering that in baseball, labor and the product being sold is one and the same. Indeed, the ballplayers and the games they play are the only reason the owners make that $8 billion. They are not a mere input to a more valuable finished product. The owners are not fabricating sheet metal before they can sell their product and stuff."

It's hard not to see Calcaterra's logic. As both labor and product, ballplayers are, viewed through Marx's lens of Entfremdung, more and less alienated from their labor than others.

In one sense, ballplayers don't fit in nicely with Marx's postulate that "Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not," as their performance is the end product of production. In another sense, as a member of a team, their individual production is collectively bundled with other individual production as a privately held commodity by the owners.

What would Marvin Miller do at a (gilded) time like this?