Brendan Hangauer’s Fourth of July began their set at about 10:35, stripped down to a four-piece, free of the horns and keys that frequent their recordings and live shows. Joining him on stage was his brother Patrick on bass, and another set of siblings in Brendan and Brian Costello on lead guitar and drums, respectively. At its peak, the band’s lineup has grown to six people, with additional contributors, and in the early days the project was started as an outlet for Brendan alone. The band played a 40-minute set, during which songs that are normally meandering and melodic in their recorded direction were given a different focus, taking on a faster-paced jangle pop vibe which perfectly synced into the evening and the energy of the crowd.

There was a noticeable lack of Katlyn Conroy and Adrienne Verhoeven on stage, both of whom provided an additional charm on the songs to which they contributed on the band’s most recent full-length, Before Our Hearts Explode! Songs that were played in their absence received a commendable fill-in from members present, while others (“Bad Dreams (Are Only Dreams)”) were omitted from the set entirely. The band’s time on stage was spent frequently shifting between songs from the most recent record (the hyper-catchy “Self Sabotage”) and the first full-length, Fourth of July on the Plains (“Purple Heart”), but always kept a fool-proof musical theme combination: drinking and girls. Furthermore, new songs were played from a record (produced by Chris Crisci) that is expected to drop in 2012, and the band is adamant it will be their best yet.

The ACB’s began their set at 11:40. Last time I encountered the quartet in a live music setting, they all were dressed in drag (complete with smeared lipstick) for the Ultimate Fakebook-hosted Halloween show at the Bottleneck last October. I’m sure they were all very thankful to be able to play without worrying about getting a stocking run, and lord knows those heels can be a pain in the ass. The set has not changed drastically since then, with much of it focusing on their lauded sophomore album Stona Rosa, though they threw in debut album opener “You Did It Once” to appease the crowd. There is no reasonable explanation as to how singer/guitarist Konnor Ervin can hit the falsetto notes he does, but that single feat instantly sets the band apart from most others in the area, not to mention the group’s inclination toward hit-makers of former times.

My single complaint about the set is the speed with which the band plays “My Face.” It is arguably the best song on Stona, and is likely one of my favorite locally-released tracks in recent years, and deserves the same patience when played live that it was given in the studio. That said, I still must praise the harmonization and vocal trade-offs that take place during the chorus and that the pace is kept steady, if not sped up a beat or two. Besides playing staples from the newest album such as “Italian Girls” and “I Wonder,” the band played some more recent efforts like “Feel Winter,” a song which also appeared on the previously mentioned Daytrotter session. There was also a brief 30 seconds where they played Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me,” and we are all better off for that not having lasted longer than it did, even if their tongues were placed firmly in cheeks at the time.

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Nerd talk: While Brendan Hangauer has almost exclusively kept his songwriting under the Fourth of July moniker, the same can hardly be said for the rest of the band. As mentioned above, the newest album has voice contributions from both Adrienne Verhoeven and Cowboy Indian Bear‘s Katlyn Conroy. Conroy probably would have been in attendance had it not been for a prior engagement at The Bottleneck with her newest band La Guerre. Patrick Hangauer has not only collaborated with Verhoeven on her post-Anniversary project Dri (who have a surprising lack of crossover thrash songs), but also plays all instruments under his electronic alter-ego 1,000,000 Light Years. On that note, former FoJ guitarist Steve Swyers can be seen these days remixing and skewing others’ tracks under his Say My Name alias.

Patrick and Brendan’s brother Kelly still contributes to the band at times they require horns, keys, or additional vocal harmonies. Kelly has also worked with the Costello brothers in Save the Whales, an experimental Lawrence group whose permanent lineup is about as murky as Fourth of July’s; and White Flight, former Anniversary frontman (and ex-FoJ drummer) Justin Roelofs’ love letter to the extraterrestrial plane of existence for which he yearns. It should also be noted that Lawrence label Range Life Records has released output from most of the bands that you see listed in this section of the story thus far. If your mind has not yet melted, there is also former lead guitarist Andrew Connor, who miraculously juggles his time between Ghosty, Power and Light, and The ACB’s.

By comparison, the direct family tree of The ACB’s may not be quite as complex, but there is still some interesting blood lines that tie in with Kansas City music. About a year ago, Konnor Ervin formed a Belle & Sebastian and late ’60s psych-influenced pop band called The I’ms with Kyle Rausch and his brother Collin. One listen to the debut ACB’s album and one can instantly and correctly presume they were influenced by Cheap Trick. The sounds were not unfounded, as both Kyle and Collin were previously a part of rock/powerpop band The Abracadabras, which paid tribute to the ’70s powerhouse bands like T Rex, though to speak in more recent terms, both the Abras and the ACB’s could be compared at least in part to the sounds of Supergrass. Alternately, Kyle and Collin’s cousin Kasey Rausch has been a well-respected musician in the local bluegrass and Americana music scene for well over a decade.

Part of the problem was my learning field: the street. I was very aware that everyone in the neighborhood watched my slow progress, my fears, and my pathetic attempts to balance my body. Of course, I did learn and basically, my brother tricked me, as he ran behind me as though he was holding on when in reality I was riding alone. It worked.

But I would never say I was a comfortable bicyclist. Since my first bike was a little big for me, I hated stopping and experiencing that strong lean to the left or right to put my foot down. I tried to find a curb, but of course, that wasn’t always possible. So, the best thing was to keep going whenever possible.

The best part of learning how to ride a bike was the freedom it gave me to go places. Without a family car, both my brother and I were house-bound except for distances we could walk or the “kindness of strangers” to give us rides.

The most frequent trip I made was to visit my friend Gunta (and my brother, to visit her older brother, Karl). Her family and several other Latvian families had moved into this area, about a mile and half north of us. The homes were small but affordable at the time plus they were closer to the original Latvian Center (an old house on Central Avenue). It was all part of building community.

Unfortunately, this area was also in transition to poverty and began experiencing “white flight” in the fifties and early sixties (from both the blacks as well as the “foreigners.” The Latvians buckled down to stay, but the neighborhood changed all the same. Where our own neighborhood remained stubbornly “redneck” closer to downtown, this neighborhood became known as a black enclave.

For me and my brother, the last five blocks might include taunts, rock throwing, and chases. We were seen as interlopers and trespassers. One of the worst incidents happened when someone threw a bike fender into my brother’s front wheel and he went flying forward off the bike. He could have been killed. But still, we never told. We could not afford to lose our independence which trumped fear.

Hyattsville Author Richard Morris

Maryland is a southern state with a history of tobacco plantations, slaves, sharecropping, tenant farms, and Jim Crow. Harriett Tubman and Frederick Douglass were slaves here. There were forty-three lynchings, and school segregation survived into the nineteen seventies. There were attempts by the legislature to take away the black vote in 1905 and again in 1910. A Howard University professor was arrested for riding in the white section of a railroad car in Cecil County in 1905. I remember attending the last tobacco auction in Upper Marlboro a few years ago and seeing through thin paint the signs on the bathroom doors in the auction barn: “white” and “colored.” Prince George’s, now the most affluent majority African-American county in the country, was once a center for tobacco farming in the state. In recent history, county census data shows that nearly a third of a million white residents left the county between 1970 and 2000 – more than the population of Pittsburgh. There was massive white flight from school integration and busing…

In the current issue of The Hyattsville Life and Times, see the article entitiled “The secret history of Prince George’s County.” It focuses on my novel Well Considered and the history it describes.  The article was written by Julia Duin, president of the board of HL&T,  former religion editor for the Washington Times, and a frequent contributor to articles in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. Click below to find the article. It’s on Page 7:

http://issuu.com/hyattsvillelifeandtimes/docs/hlt2012feb

It is not only ineffective, but it destroys the morale of the department and wastes valuable resources. As a matter of fact, the worse thing any police agency or local government can do is panic. As soon as the fear of crime is seen by citizens, the faith in their police or sheriff’s department is eroded.

Bold claims that the police and the government are going to get tough on crime are pointless without the plan or the resources to complete the task. As mentioned several times on this “WEBZINE,” crime is every politician’s number one priority until budget time, and then it is placed on the back burner. It is going to be difficult, but the 2013 budgets of both the city and the county are going to have to address this top priority.

Crime is often difficult to understand, and the reality is that disorder is a systematic problem and part of a greater dysfunction in society. It is a symptom of greater social ills and cannot be eradicated with simple steps. It has to be addressed at its root causes.

Poverty, unemployment and the disenfranchising of many Americans have left numerous communities scrambling with a crime problem that is beyond the scope of any law enforcement agency’s resources. Officers are often sent out aimlessly to correct a social problem that, in many cases, has been bubbling since the post-World War II economic boom and the creation of suburbia.

Blight in the intercity and a decaying school system have left many young men and women ill-prepared for the rigors of the real world, and living in sub-standard conditions has only exacerbated the problem. The flight from the cities to suburbia has left many urban areas in a state of despair.

Without relieving anyone of their own personal responsibility, crime and disorder must be reviewed under the conditions in which they were bred. Humanity has a need for order and discipline. When absent, chaos rules — and chaos is never good. It is the building block of social disorder.

The first need that must be planned and implemented is a program where the officers interact with the community. It is not enough to drive by, wave, or just say hello. It has to be a well thought-out plan of action that allows officers to work closely with all citizens.

In the law enforcement-changing article, Broken Windows, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote the definitive masterpiece on crime and disorder. Published in the MARCH 1982 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE, it revolutionized police work and social consciousness. It served as the groundwork for the Community Policing Movement for the next three decades.

The first few paragraphs of the article set off a firestorm in the law enforcement community. Simply written, it stated:

In the mid-1970s, The State of New Jersey announced a “Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program,” designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. The governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in their eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it weakened headquarters control over patrol officers.

Many police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons: it was hard work, it kept them outside on cold, rainy nights, and it reduced their chances for making a “good pinch.” In some departments, assigning officers to foot patrol had been used as a form of punishment. And academic experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any impact on crime rates; it was, in the opinion of most, little more than a sop to public opinion. But since the state was paying for it, the local authorities were willing to go along.

Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D.C., published an evaluation of the foot-patrol project. Based on its analysis of a carefully controlled experiment carried out chiefly in Newark, the foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates. But residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the doors locked, for example.) Moreover, citizens in the foot-patrol areas had a more favorable opinion of the police than did those living elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job satisfaction, and a more favorable attitude toward citizens in their neighborhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars.

These findings may be taken as evidence that the skeptics were right —  foot patrol has no effect on crime; it merely fools the citizens into thinking that they are safer. But in our view, and in the view of the authors of the Police Foundation study (of whom Kelling was one), the citizens of Newark were not fooled at all. They knew what the foot-patrol officers were doing, they knew it was different from what motorized officers do, and they knew that having officers walk beats did in fact make their neighborhoods safer.

(The remainder of the article can be reviewed at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/4465/)

In turn, the article also addressed the need for well-kept neighborhoods and the control of blight in our cities. As this series continues, this critical topic will be addressed in more detail. The condition of the neighborhood has a correlation as to how people view crime and its acceptance in the neighborhood.

Community Policing is not a panacea or cure-all, but it is the start of a wonderful partnership between law enforcement and the community. However, it has to be done with a plan and in conjunction with other programs, such as education, rehabilitation services, citizen involvement and strict building codes and maintenance. Without this combination, any attempt to eradicate the problem of social disorder is impotent at best and dangerous at its very worst.

NOTE: Mr. Rising will be teaching at the MUW Life Enrichment Program on Tuesdays starting in February at 4:00 pm. Below is a brief synopsis of the class:

Class:  PERSONAL SAFETY

Instructor: Joseph St. John, President, Real Story Publishing

Description: Learn how to protect yourself from scams and other threats at home, on your computer, while traveling, or on the streets. Guaranteed to entertain as well as educate!

Dates: February 14, 21, 28; March 6, 20, 27.

Location: Education and Human Sciences building, Room 106, Mississippi University for Women

No class during spring break, March 13.

The cost of the class is $35.

My immediate response, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. What if “these people” move into my neighborhood and lower the value of my house? It’s easy to believe that minorities and other lower income people should have the opportunity to move into better neighborhoods where their children can attend good schools—until it’s our neighborhood they move into.

For six decades, middle-class whites have responded to this situation by moving to ever more distant suburbs. This option has closed for many young families. Laden with huge student loans, and faced with the reality of an economy not providing jobs with adequate salary and affordable health care insurance, many young couples cannot afford the segregated, middle-class neighborhoods of their parents.

This may not be entirely a negative. In the past Americans did not isolate themselves by economic status as religiously as we do now. Schools in small towns today have more diverse populations than those in suburbs—and kids benefit from mixing with people outside their family’s small circle.  Part of the problem with failing schools in lower income neighborhoods is that resources are seldom divided equally. Administrators tend to allocate more funds to schools with actively involved parents—and to shuffle low-performing teachers into schools where parents don’t complain.

Regardless of who wins the next election, it’s unlikely the economy will bounce back to the boom of the ‘90s anytime soon. The middle-class lifestyle of their parents will continue to elude many young couples. A possible social benefit may be the improvement of lower-income schools and neighborhoods as these families insist on good schools, parks, community recreation, and law enforcement for the communities in which they can afford to live.

Minority and low income parents also want good schools and a healthy environment for their children, but most lack the skills to deal with local government. Educated residents of lower-income neighborhoods could make a positive difference.

screenshot of a living photo - click to view it come "alive"

I wanted the photo above to be an example of the new so-called “living pictures” that have garnered much recent attention. However, Lytro has not provided proper embedding code so I can only post this screenshot of a living photo. I highly recommend clicking on the photo or clicking here before reading along.

Okay, by now you have experienced a living photo. You see it, but you can also make it come alive; touch it, change the focus, reorient what is seen and focused on. Some might even argue that you get to decide the meaning of the story the image tells. This post asks: what would it mean if we start posting living pictures across social media? Might it change how we take photos? How might we differently interact with social media photography when we can manipulate the faces of our friends and engage with the images in a new way?

It has been my contention that photography can teach us quite a bit about social media. Not just because there are so many photos online but because photography serves as a familiar and grounding reference point to the newness of social media. Photography situates the novel and sometimes disorienting ways we are documenting ourselves online with a technology that did the same offline more than a century ago.

I have written about Susan Sontag’s description of photographers being always at once poets and scribes when taking photos to describe how we create our social media profiles in a similar way. I have used the concept of the “camera eye” photographers develop to discuss how social media has imbued us with a similar “documentary vision.” I also described how the explosion of faux-vintage photos taken with Hipstamatic and Instagram serve as a powerful example of how social media has trained us to be nostalgic for the present in a grasp at authenticity.

Here, I want to discuss what many are calling “revolutionary” and the next “big thing” in photography: the so-called living pictures linked to above developed by the Lytro company that have just entered the consumer market with cameras shipping early next year.

Lytro “Living Picture” Technology

This is not an essay so much about the technology but instead the implications of how it might become manifested across social media. Indeed, this is highly speculative since consumers have not yet even used the technology. Further, I am not writing here about the potential implications of Lytro technology for professional photographers but instead how it might be used in everyday, mainstream social media environments. If writing about professional photographers, one might focus on how living pictures make explicit that all photographic images are always co-creations between photographer and audience; or how these photos also make explicit that images are never the objective capturing of reality but also a creative endeavor via what is photographed and how the image is produced. Let me pull myself away from these tangents and briefly explain what Lytro’s “living pictures” are.

Lytro is the first company to bring “light-field” technology into a small consumer device. Light-field, or “plenoptic”, camera technology captures all the light–its color, intensity and direction–that makes contact with the internal sensor. It does not select a single focus point but captures all possible focus points at once. To understand the result, one needs to know just a little about what is called “depth of field.”

The Lytro camera has a constant aperture of f/2. This is simply referring to the size of the hole through which light travels from the world into the camera. A small f number (or “f-stop”) means a wide opening and f/2 is considerably wider than what one usually finds in point-and-shoot cameras. Besides capturing more light, the wide aperture means that either that which is near the camera or that which is far away will be in focus, but certainly not both. Objects in the foreground will be in focus and the background blurry, or vice versa.

And the Lytro camera lets one choose what will be in sharp focus and what is blurry after the photo is taken. This is brand new. Tellingly, Lytro put this technology not in professional cameras but in a point-and-shoot camera priced within the grasp of a large consumer demographic. Clearly, the primary intention is to create a new “living” type of photo to post online across social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on.

I will mostly skip over the stuff you might get in a consumer review of a new gadget. For instance, the editing one can do to a Lytro photograph is more limited (e.g., no faux-vintage filters, yet). The process to get the photo from the camera to Facebook is a bit awkward (from camera to a cable to a computer to Lytro’s software to Lytro’s website and then finally to Facebook) relative to a smartphone that can post non-living photos directly to various social media sites. And given that these cameras are not yet even on sale (let alone popular; I will not predict if they will be or not), there are many obstacles between now and some reality where we see lots of “living photos” in our Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr streams.

But if Lytro is successful and these self-shot living pictures do start to appear in our social media streams then we have at least the potential for a new type of a social media object. And this is why living pictures deserve conceptual attention here.

Living Pictures

The viewer of a living picture seemingly has a new sort of control with respect to the photo-object. By clicking around inside of the photo and brining things in and out of focus, others are now more active in choosing what story the photo is telling. They might feel that their own perspective, taste and aesthetics can now determine what they ultimately see. Further, the experience might be more intimate because rather than just seeing a friend’s face, one is reaching out for, touching and manipulating it and its relation to other objects in the image.

All photos are to be understood as a conversation between the photographer, the photo-object and the viewer. The living picture asks us to slightly rebalance this delicate relationship by granting more power to the viewer; observing becomes more like a game when the image is placed in our hands as something to play with.

Is this a new paradigm in how social media content is engaged with?

Think of the content we post on Facebook or Twitter. Once posted, the productive role of others is not at the level of the content posted but to create new content peripherally around the original content. The productive potential for those interacting with content posted by others comes in the form of comments, likes, +1’s, thumbs up, retweets, rebloggs, etc. (social media vocabulary tends to proliferate beyond what it signifies). The status update, link, photo, geographic “check in” all remain largely unedited. It is nearly impossible to find mainstream examples of the content itself being interacted with. Status updates are rarely rewritten. Sometimes tweets are edited when retweeted (often using the MT or “modified tweet” indicator), but even these attempt to dutifully replicate the original meaning of the tweet being modified.

Photos in social media streams are typically to be stared at and scrolled through, not changed and manipulated. The interactivity with living pictures might be a meaningful, if subtle, change in the role of the viewer with respect to social media objects. These photo-objects ask more of those who encounter them.

These Living Pictures are Barely Alive

So far, I have described what is new about these images; what the “life” in “living pictures” refers to. However, this position is easy to overstate. Ultimately, these photos are barely alive and “revolutionary” this is not.

I’m reminded of my favorite essay by Theodore Adorno. In The Stars Down to Earth, he asked what are the pedagogical functions of technology? What does technology teach us to do?

The answer for those who purchase a Lytro camera is pretty simple: living picture technology teaches users to take photos that will look good at multiple focus points.

This answer is a counter-point to what I think might be a popular criticism of Lytro technology: “why would I want others choosing what is in focus? I took the photo wanting the focus a specific way.” No, living pictures are not the ability for others to alter what the photographer intended. Those using the Lytro camera will take photos with the various focal points in mind, positioning objects both in the foreground and background. Notice the photo-set on the Lytro website. The photos all contain something near and distant that both look good either in or out of focus.

examples from Lytro's website - notice objects placed both near and far

Having objects at varying depths-of-field will entice others to click around in the image; precisely the process that breathes life into a so-called living picture. Learning to take photos in this style will maximize social media participation for those posting living pictures. The photos will generate more comments and will be more “like”-able.

What this implies is that while living pictures are slightly more interactive they certainly are not an example of photographers giving up control over the images they post. The amount of control turned over from the photographer to the viewer is quite minimal.

There is a very limited universe of possibilities provided to the viewer by the Lytro photo. The number of ways in which observers can bring “life” to (that is, refocus) the Lytro photo is quite minimal and because of this the photographer is well aware of the few different ways in which others will refocus the photo.

Yes, the Lytro photo can be seen in more than one way unlike other photos posted to social media. However, the new possibilities are quite minimal. Clicking through the current crop of living photos reveals that the user can choose between two or perhaps three significantly different focal points; all of which the photographer very likely had in mind either when shooting or at least when uploading the image.

What Would a Truly Living Photo Look Like?

The photo would have to take on a life of its own beyond what any one photographer or viewer intended. Writing in late-November 2011, the example seems obvious.

collage of some different mutations of the Officer Pike living picture

The now-infamous photo of Officer Pike pepper-spraying peaceful Occupy protesters at UC Davis serves as an example of an image come to life. The image of the “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” has become a viral meme, taking on new forms no one could have ever imaged (a few examples are shows above). Instead of this, Lytro photos are still predetermined by those who took and shared the photo. A living picture contains more than just the creative energy of the photographer, but is fundamentally remixed with the energy, aesthetic and meanings of others; something that the Lytro photo does not achieve.

To conclude, the label “living picture” has been misapplied to Lytro technology. These photos are not alive and do not seem so revolutionary after all. However, they do mark a new way in which users might experience photos on social media: instead of leaning back, scrolling and clicking-through, viewers are enticed to lean forward and manipulate. Looking forward, will we see a larger trend towards sharing on social media becoming more remixable and interactive? Most people did not remix the pepper spray cop, and few of the photos we post on social media get such treatment, but Lytro’s technology begs the question: might more social media content one day truly come alive?

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

This impact has been felt hardest in the part of the country that has been labeled the Rust Belt. From the eastern edges of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey to its westernmost edges in Illinois and Missouri, this part of America was the manufacturing capital of the Earth. However, since the 60s and 70s these areas have seen steady declines in population and workforce, to the point where their once magnificent cities have fallen to ruin.

A small-scale ruin in Pittsburgh.

It’s hard to believe that there could be something in America, a country that’s only a couple hundred years old, that could be classified as a “ruin,” a term more typically associated with things from Egyptian, Roman, and Greek Empires. But there are. We like to ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, because they’re too depressing to talk about. Or, even worse, we like to poke fun at them, belittle them for their new-found faults, as we drive on bridges built out of their steel.

Outside of Pittsburgh, the steel mills run no more.

But whether we acknowledge them or not, they exist, as brutal reminders of what happens when America moves on. Empty factories, high unemployment rates, low education levels, and no money to fix the problems. Naturally this leads to high amounts of crime and poverty, and so more people leave, and the result is a sort of urban wasteland that is seldom seen outside of Pripyat.

The Warner And Swasey complex in Cleveland. My grandfather worked in this building.

Buffalo once had a population near 600,000; it’s down to about 250,000 now. Pittsburgh’s population was once near 700,000; it’s currently just over 300,000. Cincinnati had over 500,000 people at one time, and is now sitting below the 300,000 mark. Flint’s population is roughly half of where it stood in 1960. Gary, Indiana is down to just over 80,000 inhabitants; it too once had about 200,000 people within city limits. And Cleveland, which once had a population over 900,000, currently has less than 400,000 people living in it. But all of these numbers pale in comparison to what has happened to Detroit.

In Detroit's heyday, this was the second largest department store in the world.

Once upon a time, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the United States. According to the 1950 census, there were about 1.9 million people within city limits. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler built the city and the cars that powered America. The city was a shining example of how America was the greatest country in the world.

This isn't a war zone. This is America.

Fast forward sixty years. The last census puts Detroit’s population at 713,777. Median household income in the city is just a hair over $25,000. In December ’08, the median sale price for a house was $7500 (that’s not a typo). It’s estimated that almost half of its inhabitants are functionally illiterate. A third of its families live in poverty. A child born in El Salvador has a greater chance of making it to adulthood. While the city was once a shining metropolis, it’s now ground zero of everything that’s gone wrong.

One of the most surreal sights on earth; a theater turned parking garage.

There are many things that have led to the downfall of Detroit. For starters, the city has been decimated by white flight, which was catalyzed by the race riots of ’67 (the ones that were finally stopped by the 82nd Airborne Division). And like the rest of the Rust Belt, Detroit has been hit hard by outsourcing, because our big businesses are too cheap to pay American workers a fair wage. But regardless of the reasons why, the bottom line is that while there are ways to deal with urban expansion and urban decay, there is no real model for repairing a shrinking urban environment. It’s a city built for more people than currently reside in it. This leaves either blocks of abandoned houses and offices, or blocks of streets and crossings where houses once stood that are now just… gone.

These used to be blocks of houses, but they were empty. Now only that abandoned school in the background remains.

What’s most disturbing about the collapse of Detroit is the fact that it could happen anywhere. We might think our cities are safe, but look at New Orleans. Since the 60s, New Orleans has lost roughly half its population. While part of that has come from the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, that still left 29% of the city’s population that will not return. That’s a lot of empty stuff. Who knows what city will be next?

Please let it be some soulless freeway town like Indy.

I don’t expect you to move to Detroit; hell, I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone. But it’s hard for America to look good with such a massive hole in the Great Lakes region. Something needs to be done to restore the dignity to the part of the country that built our country.

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Krug’s video credits include music videos for Ladytron, Boards of Canada, White Flight, Devendra Banhart and My Chemical Romance, which delve into the surreal landscape of Krug’s aesthetic matched to music. Check out a couple of his most recent creations:

He even has a feature-length film in post production entitled Invisible Pyramid. Keep an eye out for that and more from this astounding visual artist.

Check out Neil Krug’s website

XX

We, as Occupy Springfield, IL., believe firmly that one of our top priorities in the movement is EDUCATION. We’re not saying education in the sense that we stand for reform of the U.S. educational system as a group (though, we’re not saying we’re against that either!), but education in the sense that we ourselves and the greater community we are a part of could always use more knowledge. From social and economic issues, down to how to put together your own computer or knit a scarf, knowledge is, in every sense of the cliché, power.

With this in mind we put together what we, and others, call, “Teach-Ins.” This is not a new idea, but one we feel is a very powerful tool for any movement. Hell, it’s a powerful tool for no movement at all. We track down people, from Professors, Lawyers, Philosophers, Poets, Authors, Experts on various subjects, and every day people with specialized hobbies or professions, and ask them to do a teaching for us. We set up a date and time and location for them. These teachings are open to the public. Even our staunchest of critics could come and take part.

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With that introduction I bring to you our first Teach-In on video. Here we have Gwen Jordan, J.D. PhD. giving us a presentation on how our legal system today brings focus to the non-violent crimes committed by the poor and minorities, while at the same time downplaying the severity of white collar crime’s vast effect on the public. She helps us trace the roots of our current mass incarceration system back to slavery, and offers a bit of progressive insight as to how we can bring about change for the sake of equality and true justice.

Please, enjoy our presentation, and then click the photo following it for information on our next Teach-in event. Note that this video is in three parts, and if you click the link on the video at the end of each one, it will automatically lead you to the next.

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Opening for the band will be Casey Prestwood & the Burning Angels, the eponymous leader of which once played drums for Hot Rod Circuit and contributes to The Only Children. Also playing is Major Games, a trio best described as a grown-up mix of Lawrence’s Zoom and Panel Donor, and while it would be a stretch to lump the band in with the resurgence of twinkly riffed or reverb heavy shoegaze present in a variety of sounds these days, the members play a spaced out and prog-heavy sound of rock just begging for a conceptual full-length.

———

On the inverse, and decidedly not staying low-key is Anniversary co-creator Justin Roelofs, a man who has seemingly gone from being a mere mortal human to some kind of sentient, dimension-traversing being traveling the known realms of time and space. At least that is what the man would have you believe. Roelofs’ White Flight project is mid-way through a Kickstarter project for his new album, Pyramid of Light. I know not if he truly has the audacity to believe his project can get the over $12,000 in pledges required to succeed, or he created the entire project as a scheme to get people talking about his upcoming album. If he chose the latter, then he is without a doubt succeeding.

The project still has nearly a month left, but one who pledges can expect to get things such as “a 40 min. long sonic collage MIXTAPE made by White Flight in 2011, via mp3 download” for the lowest tier, or an “Amazing Crystal Quartz Necklace made by my partner Daughter of the Sun” for $111. Hell, for a meager $1,111, you can be so lucky as to receive “a CUSTOM larger scale sacred geometry painting, we can determine the image, color, etc. together via a phone conversation or skype session. Also I will share teaching on the I-Ching oracle in this conversation and teach you how to use it to make positive decisions in your life, if you aren’t already familiar with this system.” Sounds like quite a steal, that. Read the rest of the details from the project here.

The US have chosen 28 skaters as opposed to the normal 20 skater roster maximum.

The unorthodox method of picking a 28 skater roster is not a tactic used to confuse their opponents. The US roster will be cut down to the customary 20 skaters before the deadline of September 1st when finalized rosters are due. They chose 28 skaters to compete in a 14 vs. 14, US vs. US bout scheduled to kick off the weekend on the Thursday night. The extra eight skaters will only take place in the bout on Thursday, they will not compete for the Cup.

Amanda Jamitinya (Rocky Mountain)
Atomatrix (Oly)
Bonnie Thunders (Gotham)
Claire D. Way (Boston)
DeRanged (Rocky Mountain)
Donna Matrix (Gotham)
Fisti Cuffs (Gotham)
Frida Beater (Rocky Mountain)
Joy Collision (Charm City)
Juke Boxx (Minnesota)
Juska (Denver)
Little A (Tampa Bay)
Medusa (Minnesota)
Psycho Babble (Rocky Mountain)
Sassy (Oly)
Sexy Slaydie (Gotham)
Shenita Stretcher (Philly)
Smarty Pants (Texas)
Snot Rocket Science (Steel City)
Soulfearic Acid (Rose City)
Suzy Hotrod (Gotham)
Tannibal Lector (Oly)
Teflon Donna (Philly)
Tracy Akers (Denver)
Urkin Jerkin (Rocky Mountain)
V Diva (Dutchland)
Varla Vendetta (Windy City)
White Flight (Rose City)

The US also announced six alternates: Jamsterella of Fort Myers, Stella Italiana of Oly / Des Moines, Racer McChaseher of Detroit, Addy Rawl from Queen City, Wildberry Punch from Madison and Carmen Getsome from Rat City.

Coaching staff

Buster Cheatin’ (Gotham)

Bonnie D. Stroir

blackwhite- The ability to accept whatever “truth” the party puts out, no matter how absurd it may be. Orwell described it as “…loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this. It also means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary.”

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2011/06/23/1655872/musings-on-the-white-outmigration.html   This guy has it all backwards.

  He’s one of the ‘gaslighters’ ( look up the movie, you’ll get it)..he’s one of the ‘reality is not reality, your truth is not real’  snake oil salesmen. Note how even when he is about to launch into his picth about how horrible wanting to be among your own is, he has to use two qualifiers, the “hate to say it” and “embarassing”, trying to edge in there covertly, implicitly that it is bad and shameful to want this- and this is how they do it- they define the terms- then they decide to lump you into their construct and if you fit into their framework of whether you are a Good Person or an Evil Nazi. 

http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/media/128k/1984-obrienlove-1.mp3 

Do you believe it now, Winston? What’s 2+2?

You certainly couldn’t be just an average white person who wants to live around and with people he has stuff in common with, because this dork is setting the stage that if you are part of the white flight (“outmigration”- what are we, an effing flock of seagulls?) than you somehow are harming yourself ad civilization. How fucking  stupid do you think people are, scumbot?

   I saw another BS article today along the same lines, trying to convince us of the same type thing, though taking a different tack- that  being pro-them and not pro-us is a good thing, but being pro-us, is never, ever a good thing and of course prevents world peace, rainbows, unicorns, organic fields of strawberries for starving kids and so on. Here’s some of this guy’s  BS:

“Or, much as I hate to say it, a few white Californians may have “outmigrated” because they wanted to live among people who looked like them and spoke the same language they do. That seems to be a deep-rooted human trait, although we’re embarrassed these days to admit it. It may be a residual survival trait from prehistoric times, when unquestioned tribal loyalty was all-important. But now it can cause strife.

crimethink – To even consider any thought not in line with the principles of Ingsoc. Doubting any of the principles of Ingsoc. All crimes begin with a thought. So, if you control thought, you can control crime. “Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death, Thoughtcrime is death…. The essential crime that contains all others in itself.”

The Orwellian  Douchebag  continues: It’s like our appendixes, which may have served a useful digestive function in our more apelike ancestors. But now they’re useless. My Grolier Encyclopedia calls our appendix “an evolutionary relic.”If our relic appendixes become inflamed, they threaten our lives. If our relic aversion to people unlike us becomes inflamed, it threatens our civilization.

You are so full of shit I don’t even want to type your name.

Newspeak – The official language of Oceania. Newspeak is “politically correct” speech taken to its maximum extent. Newspeak is based on standard English, but all words describing “unorthodox” political ideas have been removed. In addition, there was an attempt to remove the overall number of words in general, to limit the range of ideas that could be expressed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

No, dude, it’s not useless. Yes, it is a survival trait, and natural and a good and very effective survival trait. What is threatening our civilization is exactly the opposite of your big brother doublespeak.What is threatening our civilization, once OUR civilization is exactly the opposite of the crap your tentacles slimed onto the net. 

 Seriously, you don’t get that you don’t go into another ‘tribe’s’ hood and think all is going to be sunshine and lollipops? Whenever we do that,and something inevitably bad happens, we get the blame simply for being there to begin with.

Liar who wrote that crap: do you actually believe your own lies or you just write them, the way people put chemicals in our food or market medications knowing they are harmful or may kill a whole bunch of us? So why do you LIE? What is in it for you? Do they pay you? Well? 

People are leaving, and as soon as the forced mixing programs hit a certain stage, everyone will bail, even if we take a loss, even if we leave with hardly anything at all. I know quite a few people who are liquidating, getting ready to leave, because of  ‘your city is too white, who cares what you had to sacrifice or how you worked or sacrificed, you WILL integrate because we will MAKE you. ’  No, we don’t want the crime, the noise, the chaos. Why are we being esssentially punished?

You’ll just  have to keep following us around then, because no matter where you do these ‘implants’ it will then start to suck,  we will leave one by one or en masse, and your  plan will be ruined, as it has always been. Sure, there’s things we can do to make it harder for you and your plans, and we will- because people in general don’t like stuff artifically forced upon them-and of course it is always, always US who has to accept, to tolerate, to change, to ‘celebrate diversity’- no one ever tells the group  coming in, “hey look, don’t do this kind of stuff, people here don’t like it and they won’t like you if you do it. Including but not limited to….and have an orientation or something.

 Shouldn’t it be THEM who have to tolerate and accept? If we’re uncomfortable, or plain resentful, then we’re automatically ’racist’ and wrong, without any examination of real reasons. They tell US that we are doing it wrong  no matter what we do, and we just need ‘ blanket tolerance’ .  Seriously , who would agree to a contract like that? You get to do whatever you want, and I’ll just deal. No.. that sucks!

No matter how hard you push this agenda, we don’t have to make it easier for you.  And fellow People of UnColor, do me a favor, and stop telling everyone where we are going, or not going. If anything, mislead the crap out of them. If you see them going down the wrong road- please, don’t correct them, let them believe whatever they want to believe. Keep it a secret and those who need to know, will- but the whole world doesn’t need to know. LIE to them. Purposefully. Convincingly.

Apparently, we have become another commodity, like gold. Would you tell people where your gold is stashed? No, I didn’t think so. So don’t broadcast where to go, or where you are going. We are the gold. We must be, because people want to ‘steal us’ or steal it from us and destroy it if they cannot have it, if they can nver ‘be it’. Like I wrote years ago about the concept of ‘hoarding whiteness’- they don’t get they can never actually have what we have, but they sure want it, or they want the end of it, whether it is us as a general group as people and destroying that in and of itself, or the destruction of homogenous populations in various locales.

So, no, liar- you are wrong about it being a bad thing. It’s a great thing for us and we want to keep it. They know this is what we want and they are hell-bent to wreck it, wherever it is- and we will find ways to keep it, even if we have to ‘think out of the box’. We would keep it even if you had us surrounded. Forcing ‘diversity’ upon us will only serve to further polarize us. Send all the moles you want, send all the people trying to ‘get in’, we will still stand aloof, we will still effectively shun you, no matter how close you are. The more you force, the more polarized and stratified it will get. Do you know about the meetings we are already having? Do you? Do you know there are fakes among your own?

Source for quotes on Orwell- http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-dict.html

The slavery issue was, as hard as this is to hear for some people, an economic issue. The southern agrarian economy was pitifully lacking in any industrial base. In fact the Civil War actually proved this unequivocally; by the end of the war, confederate troops were using rocks in their muskets because the few factories capable of making lead balls had been destroyed. There were so many factories in the north that it was impossible to reduce their industrial output by any significant fraction.

LBJ and his 60s liberals made the 1964 Civil Rights law a cornerstone of their platform in order to combat the continuing institutionalized segregation and racial discrimination in the southern states. As one who lived through those years I can testify that the federal enforcement efforts had a major flaw; there was no serious attempt to enforce the law in the northern (Civil War Union) states until after the riots of 68-69. It was only when the social fabric began to crumble that the elites took action nationwide.

Small wonder the democrats lost the south. Most southerners feared a new decade of Reconstruction. As it relates to this issue, it is worth noting that many northern cities had laws against blacks owning property or even living within the city limits as late as 1880. This is the real social origin of phrases you may have heard, “living on the wrong side of the tracks” or the “bad side of town”. Typically, the only places blacks were allowed to live before WW2 was the near wilderness properties the whites didn’t want. This was the northern segregation that continued until after WW2 urban centers became so large that cheap labor was needed inside the city limits. It was the need for labor in the cities that reversed the property trend.

Beginning in the 50s we encounter the phenomenon of “White Flight”, where those whites who lived in the urban centers and who could afford leave — left. This is the origin of our modern suburbs. A little research will reveal that this phenomenon continues to this day. As the inner cities spread out, those who can move farther out do so, both black and white, as quickly as they can afford it.

As I see it, party is irrelevant. The common denominator in American History has not been politics, rather it has always been the two-headed dragon of money and power.

But that is a much more detailed subject I don’t want to get into right now. Suffice it for my purposes here to say that the richest men and the most powerful men have always been the same ones who hold political office. Since the days of Thomas Jefferson, our nation has suffered under leaders whose focus was personal power and aggrandizement, more so with each generation.

This, in very general terms, addresses a misunderstanding I see in the rhetoric of American political discussion on the issues that actually make things happen. The best rule of thumb has always been to follow the money. As Obama moves us closer to his socialist vision for the US we will see more clearly week by week that the socialists, as always, see power and money as one and the same — something meant for the elite and heresy to share with the citizens.

Governments tend to grow. Ours has grown to the point that it must either collapse under its own weight or morph into something never conceived by our Founders. Our current government appears to believe either outcome is okay. Without a complete economic course reversal of the policies of the last 4 years, these are the only choices.

When you have a spending and borrowing problem, more spending and borrowing will not get you out of debt.

We the People must either defend the ideals of economic and personal Freedom that built our nation …

Or learn to live socialist, a very poor and miserable way to live.

Dilapidated houses in Detroit

Detroit, Michigan, once was a booming city. No more. It is dying before our eyes.

At its peak, America’s former “automotive center” was the 5th largest city in the U.S.A. Today, Detroit is the 11th largest city and can “boast” of these dismal statistics:

• 33.8% of Detroit’s residents were below the poverty level in 2007, the highest among large U.S. cities.
• In December 2010, Detroit had a 19.1% unemployment rate.
• 31.6% of households in Detroit were headed by a female with no husband present; only 26.7% of households were married couples living together.
• Whereas the city had fewer than 6,000 blacks in 1910, today blacks comprise 81.6%, while whites account for 12.3% and Hispanics 5% of Detroit’s population.
• Detroit was the 3rd most dangerous U.S. city in 2009, according to a study by the CQ Press.

Add to the above doleful list this latest statistic: Nearly Half Of Detroiters Can’t Read.

According to a report released on May 4, 2011 by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund, 47% of the residents of Detroit are “functionally illiterate.”

View a copy of the report in pdf here.

Functional illiteracy refers to a person who can read and possibly write simple sentences with a limited vocabulary, but cannot read or write well enough to deal with the everyday requirements of life in society, such as reading a prescription or a job advertisement, and filling out basic forms like job application forms.

Illiteracy is highly correlated with poverty and crime. As examples, over 60% of adults in the US Prison System read at or below the 4th grade level; 85% of US juvenile inmates are functionally illiterate; 43% of adults at the lowest level of literacy lived below the poverty line, as opposed to 4% of those with the highest levels of literacy.

H/t beloved fellow Sagebrush.

Read how immigration and multiculturalism destroyed Detroit, “An Elegy to Detroit“.

~Eowyn

She was moving from her home in North Carolina, to Philadelphia. Her mother, who had recently passed away requested that this happen so that her daughter could have the best possible chance to find success in this world. Moving in and raised by her aunts, Young would soon grow up to become not only a successful teacher, but the principal of an elementary school teacher.

Young is just one of millions of people who lived in the South between the year 1910-1970 who took the trek up the North, or out West to find a better life. They became part of “The Great Migration”.

While she remembers very little from her short time in North Carolina, Young does have vivid memories from her summers venturing back to the South.

She remembers having a note pinned to her chest stating which train she was to depart from, once the train stopped in Washington, D.C., and being lined up behind all of the other kids going back to the South for the summer.

She can recall stories of sneaking watermelons from the garden and being scolded by her strict grandfather, and she remembers going to the movies with her light skinned aunt and not having to wait in a segregated line because everyone thought that her aunt was white.

She also remembers her father who abandoned her to live with a girlfriend in Philadelphia.

After college at then Cheney State College (now Cheney University), she got a job as a teacher at the Douglas Singers Elementary School, and soon moved on to the Alexander Wilson school. Afterward, she received a degree from Temple University and became a principal at Prince Hall Public school. After raising a daughter, and working for 33-years, the doctors told her it was time for a rest.

“Those were the best times of my life,” recalls Young about her days as principal.

Marty Young, today.

Her story while unique is part of a larger story about an enormous change in American history.

Many of those Southern African Americans left for obvious reasons like Jim Crow Laws, or the invention of the mechanical cotton picker that was able to pick cotton at a much faster rate than any human.

By leaving home, these Southerners would have to adjust to the hustle and bustle of the big cities to which they were moving. No time to stop and say hello to every person you know here.

Many would find jobs like Young as teachers, others were bus drivers, some worked as metal workers. Their Great Migration would lead to the “white flight” of white men and women leaving the cities for the suburban towns (a trend slowly reversing), and also forced the country to take a hard look at civil rights.

The civil rights movement was a product of The Great Migration.

“I’ve really had a great life,” says Young. Though she like many faced plenty of struggles, she was a member of a group of people that changed a country and would change the world.

It’s part of a national trend. Historically, the United States has been a global anomaly in terms of our real estate market. When the “white flight” took place from the 50s – 80s, city populations began to decrease, wealth escaped city centers, and crime and poverty began to rise. The term “inner city” likely conjures up images of panhandlers, gang activity, urban poverty and crime. The strange thing about this American phenomena is that it is opposite of what exists elsewhere in the world. “Globally, wealth and population growth are most strongly concentrated in urban, not suburban areas,” summarized Kenneth Jackson in The Suburbanization of the United States. 

If you’ve traveled in Europe or Asia, you have probably seen this reality. The middle and upper class members of society live in the cities. Urban poverty is an oxymoron. Here, poverty exists outside the beltway. I don’t anticipate that that the US real estate market will change overnight, but I do think we are in the midst of a normalization of the American real estate market. With the urban upswing happening all around us (see here for a list of 25+ urban redevelopment projects which have taken place in Lancaster alone), demand for urban homes has steadily increased.

This trend, called gentrification, is both a blessing and a curse for cities. It increases property values, diversifies income levels (which I believe is a good thing), and drives down crime and gang activity. On the flip-side, it makes city living more expensive, which can make housing costs burdensome for low-income people and even drive them from neighborhoods which they may have resided within for generations. A proper treatment of the moral considerations of gentrification requires much more than a 400-word blog post, but I think Eric Jacobson, an urban pastor and city planning enthusiast, effectively sums up my perspective:

While gentrification is a sensitive issue (and needs to be watched for its most insidious effects), when we consider the alternatives, it really seems to be the best option for our cities. Not only does gentrification improve the residential and commercial appeal of an area, it brings in vital tax dollars, which can improve the schools and infrastructure of inner cities.

There are a number of ways which people of faith and social concern can keep the concerns of the marginalized in focus in the midst of urban revitalization. Among the most-promising are inclusionary housing provisions, nonprofit affordable housing development, and targeted public housing developments.