Page 3 of 4
Memeing a Copper Moon
We experienced a total lunar eclipse last night — and this morning at 6:50am Eastern — Janna took this image with her iPhone of a dying moon, still shining in its ghostly, copper, glory, as it falls into the horizon at the Journal Square PATH train station in Jersey City, New Jersey. The moon, if you can’t see it, is dipping right below the traffic lights in the lower center of the image.
Violence as Commerce in the Urban Core
Based 
on our conversation yesterday in the comments thread for my Red in Tooth and Claw: The Language of Killing article, I am curious to know your thoughts on the following matter.
Do you believe violence — as framed in the context of yesterday’s article — creates or serves as commerce in the urban core?
Is the infliction of physical suffering a necessary city commodity from which secular humanism rises?
Or does violence only eat itself by gnawing and clawing away at its inborn behavior until red is all that’s left?
Chivalry and the City
There was a news report the other day tolling the death knell for male chivalry in the city because “gender equality” now means men no longer feel obligated by the historic expectation of society to give up their train or bus or subway seat to a woman.
Eleven Heart-Shaped Balloons
Janna came home last night and presented me with eleven giant, red, heart-shaped helium balloons.
She apologized one was missing.
She told me on her way home from teaching American Sign Language at New York University she found a guy selling bunches of balloons for .64 cents each. She bought a dozen.
Waiting for a PATH train at the Christopher Street station, a man tried to strike up a conversation with her.
That happens to us a lot and since Janna is Deaf she usually just smiles and points to her ears and shakes her head to let the person know she isn’t interested in communicating.
The guy followed her onto the train and persisted in trying to speak with her. Wrangling twelve helium balloons onto a packed train is no easy task.
Jersey City Burning
Yesterday, Jersey City was aglow in hellfire. Three separate fires were simultaneously burning on the morning of August 8. All 135 Jersey City firefighters on duty were working the fires and 70 firefighters from neighboring areas like North Hudson Fire and Rescue, Hoboken, Secaucus, Newark, Nutley and Harrison joined the fight. 14 firefighters were injured at the fire on our block alone.
Urban Wilds
I reflect back a decade to something I read from a Federal land survey that claimed every person in the contiguous United States – including the forest hermit and mountain lurker – is no more than 17.6 miles from a road.
Let’s consider that idea of magnitudinal urban sprawl for a moment.
The history of the development of America has been one of extreme Westward movement: We want to get away from each other; we want land of our own; we need private space.
Suburbia is a perfect example of this sort of “lazying out” from the city core – but what happens when suburban areas become tighter and paved and they transmogrify into “Megalopolises” as geographer Jean Gottmann suggested in 1961 or the ever-infringing “Edge City” as Joel Garreau described in his 1991 monograph of the same name.
As the ability to sprawl subsides and we all have the ability to touch a road in all directions without moving a step, we will begin moving on top of each other.
Soon the only way to build new infrastructure will be skyward atop existing superstructures as the paths and the woodlands and the empty spaces become memories and parking lots and superhighways and the final means of transit for storing people.
You must be logged in to post a comment.