End-Game for Downton?

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Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes

Highclere Castle, filmic home of Downton Abbey (photo: farm9.staticflicker)

In an interview with the New York Times, Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes allowed as how the show isn’t like a soap opera that can go on for decades. Seems it’s like a soap opera that can go on for no more than 10 years, he thinks. Next season will be season five, so he’s thinking about an end-game. Last night’s season finale—if not the whole season—left some critics cold.  “What happened to the formerly addictive, splendid, elegant costume drama?” asks Daily Beast reviewer Kevin Fallon. Not enough, in his opinion. Not enough change. Especially last night, when Charles Blake was revealed as an aristocrat himself, which relives Mary of one terrible choice. The mention of Brown Shirts as the possible attackers of Edith’s lover was a dark bit of foreshadowing that change may finally come to Downton.

Finding the Soul of the City

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“The soul of a city can be found by talking a walk”—the premise and inspiration for generations of street photographers. In the February 2014 Metropolis, Jeff Speck, city planner, architect, and sustainable growth advocate writes about his book, Walkable City, claiming such visually rich environments are “better for your soul.”

Every Picture Tells a Story

Walking is certainly a better way to get a closeup look at the life going on around you. He illustrates that point with scenes of timeless urbanism captured by some of the giants of the street photography genre—Gary Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Vivian Maier, and others. The daily activities that animate city streets produce layered insights about both places and people. In a vital urban scene, “the presence of difference”—in ethnicity, race, class, income level, occupation—suggest endless story possibilities.

These images may require a second, even a third look, but it is clear why such photographs are often used as writing prompts.  What’s going on between those two? What are they looking at? What are they thinking? Why did he wear that?

 

Walkable ≠ Happy

Canadian journalist Charles Montgomery’s book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Though Urban Design, agrees that walkability may be a component of a healthy city, but alone it cannot make a city a happy one. A more complex set of elements contributes to people’s assessment of their own well-being. Photographers have captured these factors, too:

  1. elbow room (“People like their space”)—think about how kids tag every graffiti-friendly surface, it’s a way of claiming something distinctly, if momentarily, theirs; or consider the “reserved” parking place
  2. green space—and not just the occasional pocket park, but big swaths of it worthy of Frederick Law Olmsted, connected in continuous corridors, perhaps helping to explain the runaway popularity of the High Line, and
  3. economic justice. In other words, a city cannot be happy when a large segment of its population is much poorer than the rest.

Quality of life may be high in great, high-status cities, but that “does not translate into feelings of well-being . . . where social stratification creates a culture of status anxiety.”  Those tensions, too, are evident in photographs of many urban streetscapes.

walkability, streetscapes, urban life, High LineMore:

  • Jeff Speck’s TED talk on the walkable city.
  • The 10 U.S. cities having the most people who walk to work.
  • How cities are trying to become more walkable.
  • What’s the “Walk Score” for your address (U.S., Canada, and Australia)? Moving? Find walkable places to live.  My neighborhood’s Walk Score is 35, compared to New York City’s 88.
  • Many of Vivian Maier’s works can be seen on the Artsy website’s Vivian Maier page.

So you think you know Washington, DC?

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U.S. Capitol, Washington

(photo: farm4.staticflickr)

Take the House of Cards opening credits quiz and find out just how well you know our capital city.  I got 46 points out of 100.  House of Cards (the Netflix-produced show starring political shenanigans and Kevin Spacey) returned recently with 12 new episodes released on the Netflix website.

And enabling the binge-viewing popular among friends who’d watch a season of 24 over a weekend.

The most important way in which Congressman-now-Veep Underwood’s fictional Washington differs from the real thing? Spacey said it: “Our Congress gets s— done.”

Assessing Blight

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Detroit, my long-ago home town, “is one of those taxing places that require you to have an opinion about them,” says Paul Clemins in the New York Times.

Numerous recent books, films, and photo essays have tried to shape and inform those opinions, and I’ve covered a number of them on this website, from the ruin porn phenomenon, to the Heidelberg Project, to the threat to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The plot-thread of of this once-great city was allowed to unravel until the American automotive dream drove right out of town. City lots filled with abandoned homes, the wrecked shells of once-beautiful buildings, suitable for nothing more than desolate parking lots.

A story by Monica Davey in the Times this week describes yet another effort to get a handle on the devastation. A central office is collecting information and photos of every abandoned and dilapidated building in the city, recorded by teams outfitted with computer tablets. The comprehensive database they are compiling will be ready this spring and is expected to help city leaders decide what to try to save and what to demolish.

Former Mayor Dave Bing suggested shrinking the city to a core that could be maintained, instead of continuing to provide city services to blocks with only one or two standing, habitable houses. But even people residing on empty streets that look like farmland—and in some areas actually are being farmed—don’t want to give up their homes. Some officials say demolishing the worst buildings might cost $1 billion, while a public-private effort called the Detroit Blight Authority has begun an aggressive demolition campaign, clearing lots that will become . . . . ? Enough human drama here for scores more books and films.

On the list of LA Times finalists for 2013’s best current issues books is Detroit native and journalist Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy. It tells the history of a city, but more important, the stories of the people struggling in it. In his review, Clemins says, “Many city supporters [and a nascent creative class is among them] will object to the ‘autopsy’ in the subtitle, though it’s not the suggestion of civic death that rankles. Rather, it’s the suggestion of the surgically precise.” As the teams of surveyors roaming the streets who are in a sense conducting that autopsy can attest, decay is a messy business.

See All Those People Down There? They’re Reading!

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Los Angeles, Hollywood

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)

50 finalists for the L.A. Times’s annual Book Prizes were announced recently. Bestselling young adult novelist John Green (whose book The Fault in Our Stars I actually read) is slated to receive the Innovators Award for his “dynamic use of online media to entertain and engage.” Susan Straight, will add a lifetime achievement award to her a nice list of other prizes: the Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, National Book Award finalists (for Highwire Moon), and the Lannan Literary Prize.

Finalists were named in 10 categories: biography, current interest, fiction, graphic novel/comics, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, first fiction, and young adult literature. See the full list at the link above. I’ve reproduced four of the categories below. Haven’t read a one, but eager to read the highlighted ones! Winners will be announced in April.

Current Interest
Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, Crown
David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service, Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy, The Penguin Press
Barry Siegel, Manifest Injustice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom, Henry Holt & Co.
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Knopf

Fiction
Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Graywolf Press
Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs, Knopf
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being, Viking
Susan Steinberg, Spectacle: Stories, Graywolf Press
Daniel Woodrell, The Maid’s Version: A Novel, Little, Brown & Co.

History
Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, Belknap Press of Harvard University
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, HarperCollins
Glenn Frankel, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Bloomsbury USA
Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Simon & Schuster
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, W. W. Norton & Co.

Mystery/Thriller
Richard Crompton, Hour of the Red God, Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling, Mulholland Books/Little, Brown & Co.
John Grisham, Sycamore Row, Doubleday Books
Gene Kerrigan, The Rage, Europa Editions
Ferdinand von Schirach, The Collini Case, Viking

***** Life After Life

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By Kate Atkinson – Narrated by Fenella Woolgar – This much-praised 2013 novel by English writer Atkinson allows her main character, Ursula Todd, to live her life again and again “until she gets it right.” It begins in 1911, with Ursula’s birth and almost immediate death and takes the character through multiple lives in which her and her family’s fates play out in different ways. Reviewers have different interpretations of Atkinson’s intent, but my interpretation is how near we skate to disaster simply living day to day. Insignificant decisions–whether to walk home with childhood friend Nancy–have significant consequences. It’s well worth a read (or a listen), as the themes of Ursula’s life and the events in it carry increasing resonance. Ursula’s World War II experiences are riveting. (2/19)

True Detective

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Been enjoying Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in HBO’s True Detective? Think there’s more there there? Maybe you’re right. I’m not surprised that its weirder elements are generating the kind of easter egg hunt inspired by Twin Peaks and similar entertainments: the human mind searching for connection and sense in chaos. “I think I see a pattern here!” The hunt is so much easier with the Internet, and some people are making discoveries for the rest of us to ponder. There’s the whole thing about The Yellow King, for instance, covered extensively,  and the flatness of time.

The show continues to receive excellent reviews, and you can watch it oblivious to the layers of arcane references and just focus on the psychological interplay among the characters, but for gold-miners, there’s that, too.

Let It Snow (Not)!

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snow, writing, writer, author, mystery, suspense, reader“Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled . . .” – Dylan Thomas

The Central and Northeast U.S. isn’t the only country hit by snowstorm after snowstorm this winter. Take a look at how Tokyo residents responded after a 10-inch blizzard—its biggest blizzard in decades. Snow sculptures from the land of “Hello Kitty.”

Photo gallery from the 24th Annual International Snow Sculpture  Championships – Breckenridge, Colorado. Tokyo amateurs, be in awe!

Have a cup of hot chocolate and let Frank sing to you. Let it Snow!

Hot chocolate not warming enough? Here’s a hot toddy recipe that calls for brandy, whiskey, or rum (whatever you have, basically) and tea. The recipe says you can skip the tea. Just so it’s hot!

Your Cryosphere Glossary from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  Perfect for teachers, dads, and moms who get asked those tricky snow questions. Find out where it’s snowing right now with the NSIDC “near-real-time” data map.

Simon Beck’s Snow Art—made by stomping around in the snow, very precisely. Not just your everyday snow angel.

A collection of Snow Poems. I like this one by Frederick Seidel. Good to remember when you’re stuck in the snow. Six-sided, too.

Snow is what it does.

It falls and it stays and it goes.

It melts and it is here somewhere.

We all will get there.

 A recent op-ed about the incomparable snow leopard, and how the big cats are saving people. She has her eye on YOU.

snow leopard, writing, mystery, author, reader, suspense

*** The City of the Sun

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By Juliana Maio – “Cairo during the war was what Casablanca had been mythologized as in the eponymous Humphrey Bogart film–a romantic desert crossroads of the world, of spies and soldiers and cares and casbahs and women with pasts and men with futures . . .” (William Stadiem). So begins the epigram to Maio’s thriller, her first book. She picked this less well-trodden geography and a pivotal time–1941–as her setting. Rommel threatens the city from a rapidly diminishing distance and the Muslim Brotherhood and a group of dissident Egyptian Army officers threatens from within. With great potential for drama and the urgency of war, she places her two main characters, who are fairly well-rounded, and a second tier of less compelling actors. The writer relies too heavily on cliches–”happy as a clam” “looking resplendent and every inch a woman”–that made me wince, but the storytelling kept the pages turning.  (2/15)

*****The Goldfinch

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By Donna Tartt – The 1654 painting, The Goldfinch, animates the action of Donna Tartt’s third novel, which is receiving much-deserved attention (and the Pulitzer Prize). The story begins when twelve-year-old Theo is injured in a terrorist explosion at the Metropolitan Museum, and an elderly dying man orders him to pick the painting—which happens to be one of Theo’s mother’s favorites—out of the rubble. Stunned, confused, and pretty much ignored in the aftermath of the explosion, he stumbles home to show it to her. Yes, there is an over-long interlude in Las Vegas when Theo lives a feral existence with his father and delightfully reprobate Russian friend Boris, and yes, it ends with a rambling 20-page essay. Still, it’s a wonderful adventure story that at its heart is about how we decide what’s important in life, what’s real to us and worth saving, and what is simulacrum and worth saving anyway. In that essay was one of my favorite lines of the book, about how different people are strongly, inevitably drawn to certain things—“a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.” Don’t let the length put you off–it’s a page-turner.  (2/10)