The fine art of giving a damn

One way AND another, blight and vacancy are YOUR problem.

Riding the streetcar toward Canal Street in New Orleans Friday afternoon, I met a young African-American boy who was on his way to basketball practice. The basketball in his lap was so battered that I wondered whether it still had bounce. I watched the boy from the corner of my eye while I was talking with two guys who were heading to Bourbon Street, where they work as wait staff. When a seat came open next to the boy, I sat beside him. He looked toward me and and answered a question I had posed to the guys about folks and life in New Orleans. And, there was my opening to show him that a total stranger can give a damn about him and his city. It was also my opening to show others on that crowded car how to have an old-fashioned chat in the digital age, and listen, they did.


I was in New Orleans for The Reclaming Vacant Properties Conference. The old journalist in me knows that if you want to know something about a place you are visiting, you avoid the packaged tours and head into the neighborhoods where the locals live, work and play. I learned as much via shoe leather express into several distinct neighborhoods that are off the beaten path as I did at the conference.

Neighborhood in the French Quarter

Vacancy and blight are everywhere

Vacant property - whether in Philadelphia or the Ninth Ward of New Orleans or the borough of Shenandoah in Schuylkill County or the heart of Kansas - is a problem caused by a complex web of cultural, economic, political, and sociological issues that our society has handled poorly and in old, hierarchical ways that don't lend themselves to contemporary problem solving.

Only when we sit down as Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, college grads, housewives, retirees - in other words - without the boxes that bind our thinking - will we begin to recover from the catastrophes we have caused. When we begin to think and work in ways that innovation has enabled, we will begin to resolve blight and its related socioeconomic problems.

WE have caused - all of us, everywhere - due to our lack of attention to the many things money cannot buy and to our early industrial age ways of thinking wherein if you made Widget A for white, male Republicans or owned the Widget A factory you DID NOT have discourse with the multi-cultural liberal-minded owners of Widget B factories and the lower classes who made Widget B. 

Those days are gone, thankfully!

We are consumeristic and voyeuristic. We view old buildings as liabilities instead of the assets they can be. We are selfish and shortsighted and we are paying for it. We're throwing taxpayer money at problems we don't solve because the solutions requires new ways of action, new ways of thinking that require a blend of good, old-fashioned discourse and work ethic with innovation. Change is uncomfortable, sure, but, really, how much more discomfort do we need with the way we are doing things now?

Vacant and blighted

As I ponder the theoretical and practical work I got done in New Orleans, I wish I had had cash on me to buy that boy a basketball. Perhaps, though, the friendly exchange of dialogue with him and with the two guys on their way to work was an investment whose dividends will provide riches beyond what money will buy. I know the smile I got from that kid was one of the best things I experienced while in New Orleans.



(Note: In the interest of disclosure, I am a Republican who was born to Democrats. My personal and professional lives  are married in that I research and write urban policy for a state legislature and I am a visual artist/author/small business owner. I was raised Catholic, but gave it up for open-minded spirituality. I was born into a comfortable family, but that did not last long as I was a product of divorce -- when divorce was taboo. For decades,  I had nothing but a stubborn will to survive and to grow. All odds, every stinking one of them, were against me succeeding. For anyone who plays the victim, I say "Pick yourself up and pursue your dreams." For anyone who advocates lifelong victim status through action or inaction, I say "Lead by example. True help is a hand up not a hand out."


 (Invitation to YOU: I have a lot more to say on the issue of community re-development, but I would also like to use this post and posts yet-to-come as a place to talk about ideas, strategies, etc ... I very much would like to know how you feel about your place and why you feel that way. Please feel free to join in the discussion through comments or by sending me an email.)

"the Great Reset" - so many of us are in need of it!

"the Great Reset." READ IT! Please? It it Richard Florida's new book and it is well worth reading and discussing. 


Just now, I am focused on what Florida, quoting Youssef Cassis, says about locales needing new talent to replenish the location's energy level and its capacity to innovate. This is why our financial centers, New York and London, while feeling some economic pain, are still making it and WILL remain WORLD financial centers.  They are diverse and because they are diverse in social, cultural and economic ways, these places are attractive to educated, young people with a lot of good energy.


Having lived in a one industry town (coal) for a long time, and having re-located to another, I identify. Lack of affordable housing options for young singles with money and young couples with jobs, lack of cultural amenities, lack of mixed use structures does nothing to quell the brain drain. Persistent brain drain is one of the key reasons so many of Pennsylvania's post-industrial cities and larger boroughs are unable to lure and to keep the talent we desperately need. 


I think this is what Florida is saying. If not, it is what I am saying, based on what I have seen and felt and by what I work with on a daily basis.  

Art Works

The following excerpts from NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman's recent keynote address to grant makers in the arts may be of interest to community planners as well as to artists. 

October 21, 2009

. . . . My colleagues in Washington cringe when I use words like "pathetic" and "invisible" and "embarrassing" to describe the NEA budget, so let's just say that the funds we have to work with are "not that large." England is the European country that is the worst public supporter of the arts. Their budget? $900 million. That would translate with our population to an NEA budget of $4.6 billion. That's not going to happen here in my great grand-kids lifetimes. But there are some significant things we can do with even modest amounts of new funding.

So I'm here to tell you today that we have a plan. But since this is America, before you have a plan, you have to have a motto. And it's not "no news is good news" or the recent "A great nation deserves great art."
It's a simple, two-word declaration: "Art works."

I hope you'll soon start seeing that logo everywhere. Why "art works?" The fact is that those two words sum up everything we are, or are going to be about, at the NEA. "Art works" is a triple entendre. Of course, "art works" is a noun, which encompasses the very stuff of what we do, the achievements of artists. Great "art works" is the objective of every grant we make.

Secondly, "art works" is a sentence that describes the very activity that I mentioned earlier: art works on and within people to change – that word again – and inspire them, it addresses the need we all have to create, to imagine, to aspire to something more, to become, if only for a few moments, more than we've been. It is the most hopeful of human activities. And one of the most essential.

And finally, and maybe most importantly, art works because arts jobs are real jobs. The 5.7 million people who have full-time arts-related jobs in this country are a part of the real economy. They pay taxes and spend money. Obviously. But we're going to be making a point beyond that. Any discussion of policy for coming out of this recession, any plan that addresses economic growth and urban and neighborhood revitalization has to include the arts. We know, and we can prove, that when you bring art and artists into the center of town, that town changes.

... Create an arts scene downtown, and small towns have downtowns too, and you change the place. Artists are great place-makers, they are entrepreneurs, and they should be the centerpiece of every town's strategy for the future. We know now that businesses follows labor, not the other way around.

... Companies seek a highly skilled workforce and that workforce seeks places with a high quality of life. And at the top of the "quality of life" criteria are education and culture. Business follows people and people follow other people. To twist the great line from "Field of Dreams" (here I am with sports metaphors again), "If you come, they will build it."

...I know firsthand that great art can come from the unlikeliest of places. A few years ago, I visited Eric, Oklahoma, where a museum was being dedicated to one of my idols, the great country music songwriter and singer, Roger Miller. He wrote the music for my first show, "Big River." While driving the 140 miles from Oklahoma city to Eric, you pass the hometowns of Sheb Wooley, one of the creators of rock and roll, the songwriter Jimmy Webb, and Garth Brooks. What is in the water there? There are certainly no music conservatories, probably precious few music teachers, no colleges, no arts centers, nothing. Just an inexplicable concentration of genius.

And we need to start yesterday. Between the time of my nomination and confirmation I reached out to a number of important foundation leaders and my conversations with them were more than encouraging. If there is one thing I'm sure of, it's that there are great projects, some of them already teed up, that we can work on together and achieve some inspiring early successes.

Art- no longer the budget whipping boy?

Read this! Please. Thanks. I'll have more to say later. Meanwhile, you are welcome to start a discussion here.

When I Clean the Studio, I find ...

Preparing to take my art to Mt. Gretna this weekend, I am also cleaning up the studio. This means that I am finding all sorts of good infobits about which I intended to blog or which I intended to put in my notebooks. (Let's not talk about intentions today, eh?)

One of these infobits is a Watercolor Artist Magazine article about the late George Luks, a native coalcracker who painted the working men and women of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields. I've always been a fan of his, not because I paint the same theme but because I spent years photographing the coal region. So, I studied Luks' use of composition and value, which are terms used in all art media. I often return to look at his work, and to paintings by others in the Ashcan School. It was not about beauty, you see. It was about using art to capture real-life moments in time and real life for low-income, working class people and their communities.

Please do take a minute to look at some of Luks' work.

As for me, I return to cleaning up the studio and reviewing my old intentions.