Wheatpaste

Cleveland needs help but they're doing it wrong.

So you've got all the most talented and hip graphic designers in New York City coming up with things like this to seduce LeBron with NYC's confidence and sexiness:

and the best Cleveland can do is come up with a wimpy, desperate-looking OHIO MASCOT that's crying and shaking its fists at its own depressing fate it will never understand?

To top it off, these are the lyrics to the song written by various Ohio politicians and celebrities in the hopes of wooing LeBron back to Cleveland:

There comes a time, when a decision must be made

Will the King, move on or will he stay?

We're helplessly waiting, as we hold our breath in fear.

Should we renew, our tickets for next year?

Please stay LeBron, We really need you

No bigger market's gonna love you half as much as we do

It's a choice you're making, will you go or will you stay.... What will we do with that big sign, if you move away?

Just tell us King, what changes we must make, We'll rename every street 'LeBron' if that's what it takes....

New York's overcrowded, Those people are unbearable, And don't forget, the Knicks and Nets are terrible....

Please stay LeBron, we really need you, No bigger market's gonna love you half as much as we do

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp487g147SM

COME ON CLEVELAND, we know you have talent and wit hidden somewhere...but really this has become a moaning and groaning clowntown, and every time I read those lyrics I cringe.

Margaret Bourke-White,

photojournalist, first photographer for Fortune magazine, first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union, and first woman allowed to work in combat zones during World War II (from the blog, Postcards from a Photographer.)

Bourke-White was born in New York but lived in Cleveland photographing the steel mills and industry of the late 20's.

Terminal Tower (1928)

Terminal Tower, Cleveland: View from Grillwork (1928), gelatin silver print

Otis Steel, Cleveland (1928)

Hello, Cleveland!

Call me a romantic, but 89 days left in Cleveland just got a little less daunting, a little less depressing last night as I drove down a little road called Starkweather in Tremont to its dead-end. I say romantic for it may have been the fault of the moon. As I turned the corner at 1 in the morning onto the crooked little road next to St Theodocius, there it was: poised high and elegant above the steelyards below. Strewn below that moon were the aching, broken ribs of the fallen steel companies of Cleveland's ashy past.

But it was the unworldly towers, the illuminated turquoise domes of St. Theodocius which rose like the hardened fists of an embittered, stubborn old Greek woman who would never return to her native country, that nudged the pedals of my car to a stop. I was seized by an urge to enter the church on the sloping hill that slid down to the steelyards. Seized by an urge to climb those sea turtle-colored domes, see the smoke-fires still bursting from the smoke stacks of an industry lay waste.

I drove on down the bumpy street with the narrow houses, leaving the Greek church behind for later investigation.

Hello, Cleveland! We meet again. I've lived and gone to church and school in you, in Parma with the Ukes and the Polaks and the pierced, chained Parma high school kids who still wander around looking like they're straight out of the 90s and listening to Nirvana. The suburbs festering and growing around the city until they reach the country roads and el paca farms and cornstalks of all-encompassing flat Ohio, which isn't much more interesting. Ohio City and Tremont condos on the outskirts of the ghetto to the growing gentralization. Cleveland of the foreclosure crisis, Cleveland of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland of the lost causes we call the Indians, the Browns (and now the Cavs). Cleveland of LeBron James, Cleveland of the working-class, Midwestern "good place to settle down and have good kids and bring 'em up right."

Cleveland, the miserable metropolis. The mistake on the lake. Who began these phrases? Were they native Clevelanders, or were they the people in other cities like New York and L.A. who've never been to Cleveland? Or were they the people who were born and raised here and moved off to Chicago (like Cleveland, just way better!) or opposite coasts, and never wanted to come back and thus ridiculed the city they were lucky enough to escape?

These images of Cleveland, these recurring motifs of industrial wasteland, of broken down bridges in the Flats, of poor people with no opportunities, lost jobs, bad schools, artists moving out, sports teams losing over and over again ... These images are very real, but they've begun to drag down the people with them. What Clevelanders must remind themselves is that people are resilient: unlike the rusting, useless steelyards put to death, or a company, or money even; people, human beings, living things, are able to overcome obstacles and to survive, by sheer instinct and adaptability. It's hard-wired in us. We do not stop moving and lie in a field and rust away like a piece of metal--that is of course, until we are dead. But as living beings we are constantly on the rise and on the run.

Then what is it about most Clevelanders who have given in to the condescending people who call it a shithole? Where is the resiliency, the desire to survive and overcome? Perhaps it is the very fact that so many native Clevelanders feel so shitty about their city (about themselves) that it's become such a shithole.

On NPR's report, "How Cleveland Could Rise Again":

"In 1950, the population of Cleveland, Ohio, was almost a million people. Sixty years later, it's a third of that, due in part to the declining manufacturing base many formerly great cities have experienced..."

Where there are no people, there is no soul. Cleveland (the city, the idea) is struggling to bring both of those two things back.

(Note: the following reference might be a little too nerdy for some readers, but here goes):

Do you remember the last couple Harry Potter books, when Rowling introduced the idea of a Horcrux? Basically the idea was that Voldermort, by way of some intense magical power, was able to split his soul into seven pieces and hide them in various places and objects all over the world. This way, he would never die. If one Horcrux was discovered and destroyed, only 1/7 of his soul would be destroyed. But 6/7 of him would still exist and be nearly impossible to completely obliterate.

It was his way of achieving immortality.

Cities have a soul that is often split into hundreds and even thousands of little pieces, and cities with the strongest soul--with the greatest chance of resiliency and immortality--hide those pieces of soul in the most difficult places to find, the most hidden places, the most unexpected places. Even when a big chunk of that well-being has been destroyed, even when money drains out of a city along with 2/3 of its people, there are still pieces of soul embedded in the little things and neighborhoods. There is still a piece of soul in the way the turtle-shell turquoise dome of an old Greek church reflects the moon.

To all the Cleveland-haters (many Clevelanders themselves): Shut up and find your piece of soul. Or get out.

Labels: Personal Essays

Final Sculpture Crits Pt. I

The revolutionary force of Dadaism lay in the fact that it put the authenticity of art to the test. The Dadaists made still-lifes out of tickets, spools, cigarette butts that were integrated into painted elements. Then they showed it to the public: see, the picture-frame explodes time, the tiniest real fragment of everyday life says more than painting. Just as the bloody fingerprint of a murderer on the page of a book says more than the text.

-Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer

a truly "abject" piece, complete with real pig head & pig blood from Chinatown.

My functional, Kay-sized electric chair.

final sculpture piece

For my final sculpture piece, I am building an electric chair out of wood and metal.
The assignment is to make a "caricature" out of the artist Walter de Maria.
de Maria is famous for his Lightning Field in New Mexico--a giant plot of land, surrounded by mountains, in which he installed hundreds of long metal rods to attract lightning during a storm. The idea of the installation is to allow viewers to walk amongst the rods for an entire day--whether or not it storms. It's supposed to be a completely safe, peaceful place to experience an almost spiritual relationship with land, air and sky.

As a "caricature" of Walter de Maria, I am building a lightning-prone "death chair"; the piece is meant to kill the viewer if he/she is seated in it during a lightning storm.

Here is my piece in progress: