We tried to have breakfast at two different Waffle Houses. The crowd scared us at the first, and the fact that no one would wait on us drove us away from the second. So we moved on to lunch at what is apparently one of the last remaining S&S Cafeterias. We had our Hoppin’ John and our collard greens and our assorted pork products, thus assuring a happy and prosperous New Year.

Finally it was time to walk around downtown. We limited ourselves to Meeting and King Streets, and the verdict was that either is much better north of Calhoun, which is where the hipster shopping mall zone ends, or south of Broad, where it becomes largely residential. All in all, the New Year’s Day crowds were much less infested with hipster clones, although a few could still be found roaming around in ugly shoes and brand new sweatsuit jackets which had been “aged” using godonlyknows what chemicals.

Downtown Charleston, like downtown Savannah, illustrates the history of a city which was initially one of the largest in the southeast, but which had become rather irrelevant by the 1920s. The extremely long, but low-rise main street indicates that Charleston’s day had come and gone long before that early twentieth century period that screams “urban” to most people today. Thus, it seems very small and quaint even though it was clearly once regarded as a very big city.

After covering the commercial strip, one very nice boneyard, a bit of residential, and the Battery, it was time to stop by the Harris-Teeter (simply because it was there) and drive home to Charlotte.

Happy New Year. Just returned from an unannounced few days in Charleston and Savannah, and I haven’t dealt with the email or anything else. And I’m not planning to until tomorrow. This is merely to let anyone cares know that I’m alive and well…

After three days, I now have an internet connection again. It’s a long story, but now that it’s back, I’ll try to actually answer email and post pictures from the trip and stuff. I know you’ve all been sitting on the edge of your chairs waiting for that, right?

Isn’t there someone out there who can make sure that Pat Roberston stays on his medication? Seriously. I’m worried that he may hurt himself one of these days, bless his heart…

The hubby and I spent yesterday afternoon in Winston-Salem. I’ve always liked it there, and I’d argue that it may well be the most attractive city in North Carolina. It has a denser urban feel than many similar or larger cities in the area, most likely because until the 1920s, it was the biggest city in the state.

As I’ve opined many times before, the size of any given city in the 1920s is perhaps the most accurate single predictor of how “urban” we perceive that city to be today. It seems the form and density of 1920s development is what defines urbanism to many of us, if only from an aesthetic perspective. A city can have earlier or later development too, but without a fairly high proportion of semi-dense early twentieth-century residential and commercial areas, it just seems quaint and precious like Charleston or a little sanitized and bland like Charlotte and Phoenix…

Winston-Salem is our own little slice of Pittsburgh, not just gritty and industrial at its heart, but also built on numerous hills and more than a little run-down. Yet there are still beautiful and stable inner-city areas which are amazingly inexpensive compared to their counterparts in Charlotte or Raleigh or even Greensboro.

Yes, Winston-Salem is a really nice place…

Ten years ago tonight, as I uploaded the very first version of Planet SOMA — using my brand new 28K modem — I don’t think I realized what an effect the damned thing would have on the next ten years of my life…

Join the fun and see all the nifty cool and self-indulgent bonus materials celebrating ten years of Planet SOMA and its siblings…

Kinkos: The Game (via Rae)…

Note to anyone who might care in the Los Angeles area: I’ll be a guest on KCRW’s “Good Food” on Saturday 21 January at 11AM. If you miss the show or don’t live near LA, I believe there’s also a podcast available for free download…

Random observations from your favorite web-journalling housewife:

• When people from organizations like this one call my number to do a survey and ask for “the lady of the house”, I never remember in time just to say “this is she” and see how they react…
• Triple coupon day at Lowes is a wonderful thing…
• Daytime TV all in all is NOT a wonderful thing, although I am excited to note that Dish Network seems finally to have added Oxygen, so I can get my Grace Under Fire re-run fix…

Found this on eBay while looking for something else. I have to wonder about the customer who might have been expected to purchase this back in 1910. Frankly, it just seems a bit tasteless to write “Having a lovely time. Wish you were here!” on the back of a postcard showing an orphanage…

If I were a parent, I’d thank the Great Pumpkin every day for advocacy groups and lawsuits like this one, which demonstrate a tireless commitment to absolving me and my peers of any personal responsibility whatsoever for how our children are raised…

Why merely turn off the TV or (Great Pumpkin forbid) say “no” to your kids when you can sue someone else into saving you the effort? Or why make your kids do their homework when you can simply sue the school system for a better grade?

Litigation: the top-rated American substutute for parenting skills twenty years running…

Didn’t snap a picture, but I saw this Dunkin’ Donuts billboard today along I-77 just south of Huntersville that said “STAR coffee for only two BUCKS”. If that ain’t a lawsuit waiting to happen, I don’t know what is…

It’s really pitifully, disturbingly geeky that I got all excited about uploading a file that was exactly 50,000 bytes, isn’t it?

Yesterday, I finally visited Birkdale Village, the Charlotte area’s stab at a “new urbanist” development. Frankly, it didn’t do much for me.

First and foremost, Birkdale, like so many of its counterparts, seems neither very new nor very urban. It’s essentially nothing but a suburban shopping center and apartment complex with a slightly different footprint than most of those built during the past thirty or forty years.

It ain’t urban…

There’s no urban context whatsoever; Birkdale isn’t even in an urban area but in a suburb, and a rather far-flung suburb at that. It has no relationship to the surrounding neighborhoods because there ARE no surrounding neighborhoods. There’s no transit to speak of, there’s no place for residents to work, and it in no way resembles a self-contained or self-sufficient community.

This is not a place where residents can live without their cars and stroll around the neighborhood sipping lemonade and taking care of all their business locally. This is a shopping center, designed for customers who will arrive in automobiles. On top of the stores are apartments designed for residents who will use their own automobiles to get to work somewhere else and to take care of most of their essential business. In fact, there is nothing even so basic as a supermarket here for the use of the residents, although there are several restaurants and a gourmet wine shop.

Here’s a hint: if residents can’t purchase essentials without getting into their cars and driving a few miles to someplace where they can, the developers have not created a “new urban form”. They have created a garden variety suburban development. The fact that it has a few useless upscale boutiques within its footprint does not mean it’s destined to be profiled in urban planning textbooks of the future.

It ain’t new…

Back in the 1970s and 1980s when I was first studying urban planning, we had things called mixed-use developments (or MUDs). These were projects designed to include housing, offices, and retail. Many of them were built in cities around the country. San Francisco’s Golden Gateway/Embarcadero Center is one example. The famous Watergate in Washington is another.

In fact, MUDs have been probably the biggest trend and discussion topic among urban planners for more than thirty years. This is not a new phenomenon. The primary characteristics differentiating these new projects are location/context and aesthetics. In other words, most MUDs were not designed to look like some contrived version of a small town main street. And — unlike the average “new urbanist” development — most MUDs were located in actual urban areas.

There’s even precedent for mixed-use in the suburbs. Many of America’s regional malls were developed in conjunction with housing and offices, both onsite and directly offsite. Stonestown in San Francisco and Cameron Village in Raleigh NC are good examples. In fact, many apartment complexes and subdivisions were designed specifically to provide traffic for the shopping center; it was assumed that the retail and commercial space rather than the residential would generate most of the long-term income and profits.

So what is it?

In fact, some new urbanist shopping centers succeed quite well from a design perspective, even if they do read as sort of a cartoon version of an urban center; San Jose’s Santana Row is a quite attractive example. Birkdale doesn’t really succeed on this level either; the facades lack variety and visual interest, the building heights are not sufficiently varied, and the central court (extended for more parking) is too wide to really simulate a streetscape. The whole effect is rather cheap looking, but it’s as acceptable a design as any other generic suburban shopping center.

In the end, though, the shoppers come from all around, the residents don’t end up doing most of their shopping (or working) within the center, and — contrary to the lofty goals of the new urbanist — the car still reigns supreme. In addition, I imagine many of the residents, confronted with the continued necessity of owning a car, evetually resent paying a premium for apartments where they have to compete for parking spaces with all the shopping center visitors, not to mention having to fight traffic within the complex when leaving it to do their grocery shopping.

I can see some logic behind new mixed use developments in urban areas and even denser suburbs when they are located near transit or jobs or both. I’m not a real fan of big developments, but they can function as a integral part of some neighborhoods when well designed.

I emphasize the word “part” here. It should be remembered that these developments will achieve their stated goals only when they are integrated within an existing urban fabric. Most current examples purport to be creating their OWN urban fabric, which is preposterous. You can’t build urban texture from the ground up, no matter how carefully planned the footprint nor how contrived the architecture.

In closing, I’ll say that I don’t believe that developments like Birkdale Village are bad. They’re really no better or worse than any other suburban shopping center with an adjacent apartment complex; only the footprint and aesthetics are different. They’re fine, really.

However, their only benefit to society seems to be that they provide developers with a somewhat higher profit by allowing them — with an unprecedented level of support from the planning commission, the design review board, and the local press — to build both a shopping center and an apartment complex on the same parcel of land where only one or the other would have been approved in years past. This is generally a good thing, but it’s not going to make urban planning history…

I could’ve pulled a better name for a network out of the WC…

It’s nice to go the doctor and get relatively good news once in a while. Mine thought I might have developed asthma, and I still may have, albeit in a rather minor and easily manageable way. Asthma is a sporadic thing, and its symptoms come and go. But the good news was that I passed a lung function test. With flying colors, even. The doctor said my lung function and chest x-ray are pretty much normal, as if I’d never smoked a cigarette in my life. Thus, I should be spared that emphysema I’d been worried about…

I will close by taking this opportunity to say that if you quit smoking, your life will suck for quite a while. After that, though, you will be very happy that you did it. That is as close to a nag as I care to get, thanks…

Now if I could just lose, oh, fifty pounds or so…

So apparently Clay Aiken had unprotected boysex in a Quality Inn (per the National Enquirer and via Stumble):

The paper says “Paulus passed a polygraph exam” and “provided copies of instant message conversations he claims he had with bachelor Aiken over a two-week period.” He also says he “has towels he says were used by Aiken from the sexual encounter which he claims contains the singer’s DNA.”

Hmmm. I’ll bet the Quality Inn folks would like to talk to Mr. Paulus about the whereabouts of those towels. I don’t think you’re really supposed to take them out of the room with you when you leave…

“See this hat? I bought it at the cutest little store in Charleston. Check out my cool refrigerator magnets and postcards from Savannah. And don’t forget my spooge-encrusted towels and DNA samples from the Quality Inn in North Carolina.”

I miss the old days when people collected normal things like matchbooks and ashtrays…

I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: (1) the fact that my hometown is becoming famous for its contributions to the field of reality television or (2) the fact that some people seem to be so damned proud of fact that my hometown is becoming famous for its contributions to the field of reality television…

After more than six months, the strangest things still make me almost giddily happy to have departed The City of Doom for good. Like, for example, the beef tips and fried squash at Gus’ Sir Beef or the fact that I can go to the grocery store pretty much any time of day, find what I need, and buy it without spending a half hour in line and another half hour trying to park when I get home…

Today’s thing that makes me excited, oddly enough, is that I’m going to the auto glass place to get a repair done on Mark’s car. I spent a lot of time at the auto glass place in San Francisco, but it’s different this time. I’m getting a naturally-occurring crack in the windshield fixed rather than a broken window…

Yes, I’m going to the auto glass place. And it excites me because I’m not doing it as a result of the actions of some differently-socialized substance abuser with no options in life slimy crack-addled piece of shit, but as a regular bit of routine maintenance. Plus, it’ll probably cost less here too…

I Do Not Nurture Nature: Why I Won’t Be Seeing “Brokeback Mountain”…

I’ve written before about my intense annoyance with people who can’t quite figure out how to use apostrophes and quotation marks. In fact, I’ve often thought about sending violators on my message boards a link to this site with a plea that they read and study it before embarrassing themselves further.

Here’s a related annoyance: people who add a possessive to a business name when there isn’t supposed to be one. I noticed this years ago when I kept hearing people refer to a local queer bar in Charlotte as “Scorpio’s” when the name, in fact, was “Scorpio”. People apparently assumed (erroneously) that it was founded by some guy named George M. Scorpio or something. I also noticed that people said things like “I’m going down to Kmart’s”, which no doubt was named for famed retailing genius Abraham J. Kmart.

I assumed it was just another southern oddity — like “license” being treated as a plural word because it ends in an “s” sound — until I moved to California and heard people talking about shopping at something called “Lucky’s”. There was never a supermarket chain called “Lucky’s” in California, although there was one called “Lucky”. Even today, newspaper columnists — who should know better, at least in theory — make the same mistake.

It’s OK to do this with stores that really DO use the possessive in their names and advertising, like Kinko’s (actually named after a guy whose nickname was “Kinko”) and Macy’s. I can even forgive it in cases of companies that used the possessive in their names in the PAST, like J.C. Penney, which was still installing “Penney’s” signage as late as the early 1970s, and Belk, which caused a little bit of controversy in North Carolina when it lost its “s” in the late 1960s. Lucky and Kmart, though, don’t fit into either of these categories.

Saying “Lucky’s” or “Costco’s” or “Kmart’s” sounds just plain silly…

Just a thought: people who demonstrate a consistent inability to compose a coherent and properly-punctuated English sentence of their own really shouldn’t embarrass themselves by creating vaguely racist message board posts about the educational shortcomings of others. Enough said…

I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain. I don’t plan to see it.

It’s no seceret that I don’t particularly care for movies or books with characters who largely do nothing but run around being homosexual. It just doesn’t strike me as a particularly interesting plot.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for homosexual characters in movies. I just prefer that they be homosexual characters who actually do something, preferably something interesting, or at least have some interesting characteristics. The mere presence of homosexuality does not make for a sufficiently compelling character or plot — nor human being, for that matter. Unless the movie in question is a porn flick, there has to be something more going on than sexual orientation.

OK, you say. The scenery in Brokeback is “breathtaking” and the characters are cowboys (or sheepherders or whatever) so that means they’re doing something interesting, right? Well, no. I can’t imagine anything much more boring than watching two people roaming about the wilderness of Wyoming (or Montana or wherever), no matter what they’re doing.

I’ve never had cowboy fantasies, and I don’t “do” nature. In fact, I avoid the great American widerness like the plague. I’m only impressed by man-made environments, mainly because natural ones happened completely by chance, with no artistry nor effort involved. If I were offered the choice on a game show, I’d take the free night in Albuquerque over the free week at the Grand Canyon every time. And I don’t even like Albuquerque that much.

I’d much rather see a movie about homosexual accountants and urban planners — both of which I find far sexier and more interesting than cowboys — but even then, I’d only shell out my eight bucks if I knew they were going to do something remarkable or go someplace I cared about.

It’s a personal bias, granted, but that’s my whole point. The fact that this particular movie is about two homosexuals does not negate the fact that it’s about two homosexuals in a situation that I find unspeakably boring. The faggotry is just no pull for me, and no amount of propaganda about how goddamned “groundbreaking” the film is will change that. And I’m really annoyed by any suggestion that I “need” to see it.

I submit for your approval Transamerica. I imagine it’s not the greatest movie ever made either, although I sense it’s a touch more “groundbreaking” than Brokeback will ever be. I’m almost 100% certain, however, it would be much more to my taste than Brokeback because ultimately it’s a road movie with an urban setting and a sense of humor. In other words, a movie where something that interests and amuses me might actually happen.

That “something interesting” is why I go to see movies: not for some notion of “showing my support for the community” or whatever. What community would I be supporting by seeing Brokeback, anyway? The community of closeted cowboys in Montana?

Blecch. If you want a good latter-day cowboy movie, check out Hud. It has a great plot, Patricia Neal, and one of the best denim-clad asses I’ve ever seen in a pre-1970s movie…