I don't have a photograph.

I mean, I could have one if I wanted, but I am terrible at making decisions. I couldn't possibly choose one photo from one city, from one home, from one chapter in my life and use it to illustrate how it shapes me and my mentality.

It is precisely my indecision that depicts the impact my life has had on my mentality. I don't want to have to choose, and deny all the other pieces of myself.

Richmond, Virginia

I'm seven years old. I go to a public school in the Fan district. My best friend, Grace, and I like to do silly things around the neighbourhood. Because we have no reason not to. We pick flowers that grow in the cement cracks in the alleyways. We crush the petals and mix them with her mother's expensive perfume, some lemon juice, a bit of white, silky hair conditioner, and other things that smell nice. Then we pour and distribute the ambiguously-aromatic concoction into ten red, plastic cups and place them neatly on a tray.

Our plan is to go from door to door around the block and sell as many of our perfume cups as we can. Prices are flexible, we decide beforehand. When a woman answers the door, we use our amateur entrepreneurial talents to convince her that smelling beautiful is being beautiful and we are just the two people who can make that happen for her. When a man answers the door, we improvise and explain the perfume cups also function as air fresheners and would make even the most odorous of rooms smell divine beyond belief, as is very likely the case.

This picture was taken inside Atlas Eats Kitchen and Bake Shop. The shop is cozy, internationally themed, and has a cheap breakfast. It is located in a residential area, where you would not expect to find a restaurant. When I first went to the shop I wasn’t expecting anything special because of its peculiar location. I ended up being surprised by how unique and delicious it was. Since then it has become one of my favorite places to eat.

For me the city is a place of potential beauty through risk. By taking risks with my time and money to try something new, I am going on an adventure. In this adventure I may meet new people, try new food, and see new things. I will also have a unique space to reflect.

The statements, “That was great.” or “That was terrible.” are both more interesting to me than, “It was the usual.” Whether or not I have a positive experience going out, my experiences combine to form a picture of what to expect from the city. The feelings of love, hate, or indifference I associate with the city particularize my connection to that place. This connection forms a relationship between the guts of city and me. The guts are the people, food, sights, sounds, and smells that become my overall feelings towards the city.

I took a picture when I was in Paris the summer of 2012. It was originally meant to capture the metro station, so I would remember how different they seemed from those I knew at home. I happened to also catch a small huddle of people in the picture, though. They are laughing together, waiting for their train. Looking back, this represents everything I feel about cities.

I could say, as I had originally written down in my notes for this essay, that I judge a city based on its public transportation. But this isn’t quite true. Just as I meant to capture a photo of the metro station and ended up with a shot of a group of friends, I really judge a city based on the people in it (and perhaps I see the most of these people on the transport systems, which is why I jumped to that train of thought first).

When I go into a city, I’m mesmerized by all of the people walking around. It’s hard to imagine each of them having their own lives and stories, yet they do. When you see someone laughing, you know they have their own private joke, one you won’t ever be privy to. You can catch so many glimpses into so many lives when you’re in the city. And I thrive in that knowledge. Sometimes it even helps me to feel like I know people, even if I don’t know a single soul there.

Every time someone at Bryn Mawr asks me where I’m from, I get excited. I alway smile as a sense of pride and gratitude wash over me, but say “I’m from San Francisco,” as if it’s no big deal. It is a big deal, though. I’ve been told countless times that I’ve lived in a bubble my whole life, and I believe it. San Francisco and the whole Bay Area have a vibrant and accepting culture, but unlike a lot of bigger cities, San Francisco tends to be more relaxed and happy. Besides its attractions like the Golden Gate Bridge, it boasts the highest minimum wage in the country, and is one of the leading cities in environmentalism in the U.S. It’s a haven for every type of person imaginable.

Although I didn’t always take advantage of all San Francisco had to offer, there was something exciting about having everything I could want within reach. I took everything the city offered for granted: food trucks with obscure fusion foods; the Haight Ashbury with its thrift stores, hipsters, and hippies; milk tea and boba in The Sunset; people(intoxicated or otherwise) talking about who-knows-what to no one; compost bins and 3 different types of recycling everywhere I went; Taquerias in The Mission; flyers telling me to go vegan; and many more.

Phoenix

MLord

Play in the City 028

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Spider-Art

            The subject of this photograph is a picture titled Spiderman, by Sigmar Polke, which can be found at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, New York. It cannot truly be called a painting, because it is composed of “cut-and-pasted painted papers on canvas” (MOMA). However, I will refer to it as such to more clearly distinguish it from my photograph.

            Spiderman’s title character is a seemingly emblematic feature of New York. Like many superheroes, Spider-Man fights evil in a big city, but unlike DC Comics characters Batman and Superman, he baldly claims his city to be one of our own. On the same trip on which I took this photograph, I passed a street performer dressed as the famous webslinger. On another, I watched the Broadway production Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. My habit is to buy a T-shirt to commemorate every place I visit, and for my New York memento, I bought one of the shirts available for purchase in the lobby of the theater.

Photo from: http://www.gpsmagazine.com/assets/review-ln740/routing_engine.jpg

To understand what the city means to me you first have to know that I grew up in a very small agricultural town.  There are family farms whose land come from grants dating back to when William Penn first settled the area.  There are no police or fire departments and the most exciting thing to happen in quite a few years was when Hurricane Irene hit and the bridges were too flooded to cross.   My town is small enough that I know my neighbors, have a regular table at a small restaurant every Thursday, and have babysat for one of our Township Supervisors, our equivalent to a mayor.  I drive down the roads and I see cows and horses and signs for home farmed eggs and milk.  We have one traffic light at the intersection of a veterinary hospital, family-run hardware store, post office and elementary school.  My town is the quintessential small town.

     This is a part of the photo series Follow me, taken by a Russian photographer Murad Osmann. Travelling around the world with his girlfriend Nataly Zakharova, he  documented their trips by taking photos in which Nataly always holds his hand, leading the way. In retrospect, this is just like the relationship between me and the city. I feel like we're holding hands whenever I walk on the streets and alleys of the city. I lead the way, but the city is always behind me, following closely. I've lived, laughed and loved in the city. Here is my home.

     "City creates the theater and is the theater", as Lewis Mumford writes in What Is a City. We all live in a city theater. We perform our lives and dramas here. However, this is not just a theater for fictional plays. This is also our real-life stage.

Since the number 14 is not easily divisible by 3 (or, actually, at all), and since we wanted to be sure that each of you had @ least 2 readers for her essay, I’ve decided to join one of the writing clusters in my section. And so I thought also—just playing along—that I’d throw a short piece I wrote earlier this summer, as Mark and I were designing this class, into the mix. See "I feel extrinsic to the city" (to make sense of this piece, you might want to start with the post above, poor b.b. (plus), which gives the context: a poem by Bertold Brecht, and then a commentary by Mark (which happens, also, to be the story of his own relationship to the city…)

            Every trip into the city feels like a new and exciting adventure, even if I do exactly the same thing every time I am there. The favorite destination for my sisters and I is the food carts in the center of town. My sisters always have Pad Thai from their favorite cart and I almost always have a sandwich. Even though we have done this same trip so many times, the thrill of being in the city has never gone away.

            Walking around the block full of delicious food carts, I get to see all sorts of people that also call Portland their home. During the lunchtime rush, people from all walks of life gather on the sidewalks surrounding the carts as they eagerly search out their food. I always have to walk around the block two or three times just to figure out what kind of food I want. With so many choices I look in awe at each cart until I settle for my usual, a sandwich. As I spend around fifteen minutes looking around confused, my sisters decide if they’d like to split Pad Thai and figure out how spicy they want it to be.

My relation to the City is best summed up by an anecdote: The Time Jacob and I Found the 9:30 Club (pictured above).

I live in Herndon, Virginia, a small town in the shadow of Washington, DC. There are always a lot of events my friends and I think of going to, but never actually do. Then, my best friend Jacob noticed that one of our favorite bands was coming across the pond to play a show at a small but well-known venue in DC, The 9:30 Club, the night before Homecoming of our junior year. Unlike the times with other bands when we would wistfully shrug and say we’d “catch them next time”, Jacob and I actually bought tickets. In the days before the concert, we painstakingly planned what metro stop we’d get on at, where we’d transfer trains, and which street we’d take after we left the station.

The night came, and our carefully planned commute got us to our stop right when we thought it would, so all that was left was for us to actually walk to the club.

The problem was that neither of us had ever been there before.

We turned left out of the station, and then walked up the road until we saw what we thought was the street we were supposed to turn right on. We followed that for a couple blocks until we noticed that the numbers were going in the wrong order.