Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Life

On April 2, the Philadelphia Alumni Writer's House at Franklin and Marshall College held a panel on the publication of Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Life, edited by F&M professor Marci Nelligan. Intersection collects six essays on the political contestation of public space, inspired by Jane Jacobs' classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Nelligan and Nicole Mauro have assembled a collection of vibrant essays that reanimate Jane Jacobs' urban criticism. The panel included performance artist William Pope L., sociologist and historian Claire Potter (the celebrated blogger Tenured Radical), and sociologist Jerome Hodos. The room was packed with faculty and students.

The event was magical for someone like me, raised on Jane Jacobs. Most incredible was to see a liberal arts college conducting a workshop at such a level of critical engagement. Having passed through many small colleges (Swarthmore, Vassar, Conn College, Wesleyan), I've become sensitized to the role that they can play in American intellectual life. As Claire Potter pointed out (from her experiences at Wesleyan), elite liberal arts colleges have changed dramatically. Competition for admission has become so fierce, that the student body is now dominated by successful test-takers. Colleges with radical traditions have a new problem. Their students have been admitted because they have done everything right (and hence taken no risks); they are the cream of the crop of no-child-left-behind policies. Liberal arts colleges have become conventional places of higher education. Paradoxically, the administrations heavily market the liberal arts brand as a places of experimentation, diversity, individualism and overall funkiness. Potter's essay "Chalking the Borders" discusses this very confrontation between critical student practices and the administration, when Wesleyan banned chalking on its campus in 2003-2003. In this case, Jane Jacobs' sidewalk (private? public?) was contested through ephemeral graffiti written overnight by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer voices.

My copy of Intersection just arrived and its contents look great. I will post comments about each individual essay, as I read them one by one. I encourage EVERY reader of this blog to order the book. It's published by Chain Links, an independent venue, and it's worth every penny of the $16.

And here are a few additional notes on Jane Jacobs. Debates over the fate of the American city, walkable environments, creative classes, etc., have brought fresh attention to Jane Jacobs, see earlier posting, When a Place Gets Boring, Even the Rich People Leave (July 23, 2008). Jacobs is newly relevant in issues of civility in the virtual community of the internet. By reading this blog, you are participating in democratic space. Wikipedia is another key example of this space. This month, the first book on Wikipedia was published, where we read the following, "Ms. Jacobs argued that sidewalks provided three important things: safety, contact and the assimilation of children.” She may as well have been talking about wikis: “A wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection, as on Jacobs’ sidewalk. Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests.” These words could have come straight out of Intersection. They are from Andrew Lih's, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia (2009), just reviewed in Noam Cohen, "Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City," New York Times (March 29, 2009).

Finally, back to urbanism. Peter Laurence, my colleague at Clemson University, is perhaps the single greatest force in Jane Jacobs studies today. Once published, Laurence's dissertation will be the authoritative intellectual biography; for the time being, see "Jane Jacobs (1915-2006): Before Death and Life," JSAH 66 (2007) pp. 5-15. Last November, Laurence organized a conference, Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the Age of Oil. The event marked the 50th anniversary of another conference held at the University of Pennsylvania, The Conference on Urban Design Criticism, where Jane Jacobs, Louis Kahn, Kevin Lynch, Ian McHarg, Lewis Mumford, and I.M. Pei first introduced their new urban visions. Both 1958 and 2008 conferences were sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, see Laurence, "The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955-65," Journal of Urban Design 11 (2006), pp. 147-172.

Colleagues like Laurence made Clemson a place of intellectual debate (making my decision to leave even harder). For instance, I had the great pleasure to participate in Critical Practice for the Next Generation, a workshop on contemporary theory and practice organized by Laurence. It is there that I first learned the new term "post-critical," describing the architectural sell-out we are experiencing today (e.g. Rem Koolhaas, The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Intersection generates exactly the same intensity that I had last experienced in the Critical Practice seminars. And it reassures us that post-criticism has thankfully not won the day.

Brooklyn and Jewish Byzantium

When Richard Price's novel Lush Life was published last year, I was intrigued by the author's frequent use of the term Byzantine to describe the Lower East Side in almost every interview. My posting "Byzantium N O W" (April 24, 2008) explored those issues. Reading William Styron's Sophie's Choice (1979), I am discovering that the literary tradition that associates Byzantium with Jewish New York has some precedent. After getting fired from his Manhattan job at McGraw-Hill, an aspiring southern writer finds himself on Flatbush Avenue. The year is 1947 and, with Styron's sharp autobiographical prose, Brooklyn comes to life as a Jewish enclave, a foreign land to Calvinist sensibilities. Stingo, the hero, rents a pink room from Mrs. Yetta Zimmerman. After enumerating the contents of his apartment, he extends his attention to the names of his neighbors.

"Each name had been affixed on small cards by the orderly Yetta...Nathan Landau, Lillian Grossman, Morris Fink, Sophie Zawistowska, Astrid Weinstein, Moishe Muskatblit. I loved these names for nothing other than their marvelous variety, after the Cunninghams and Bradshaws I had been brought up with. Muskatblit I fancied for a certain Byzantine flavor." (Modern Library edition, p. 42).

Styron and Price have animated Byzantium in Jewish New York. Mittel-Europa's Jewish diaspora in the United States seems to have been fashioned by Byzantine flavors, at least from a sensibility already developed by late-19th-c. aestheticism and the Vienna Secession. Roland Lauder's Neue Gallerie in New York makes this particularly relevant, with Jewish tastes explored by Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker profile "An Acquiring Eye" (Jan. 15, 2007). Byzantium passed through the Vienna Secession, whose anti-classicism directed attention further East. Jewish Byzantium is self-Orientalizing. Synagogues of the 1920s heavily capitalize on Byzantine and--shocking to the contemporary viewer--Islamic forms. Congregation Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia is my favorite exampe (left). Although surrounded by the devastated urban landscape of North Broad Street, the synagogue still functions; this is where my good friends Nick and Jill got married (and they are now expecting their first child).

I am sure that Brooklyn's Byzantine motifs have been explored in scholarship. I was simply surprised to see the connection made so literally in both Styron and Price. I have just started Sophie's Choice, and I cannot get over what a satisfying read it is. Particularly amusing is the Jewish condemnation of the South by Nathan Landau, Sophie's temperamental boyfriend (who Morris Fink calls a golem). I have only read the first 100 pages and I'm looking forward to see how the relationship between Stingo and Sophie (a Polish concentration camp survivor) will develop. Luckily, I have not seen the 1982 movie and my imagination has not been tainted by Maryl Streep. I am surprised that the book does not get more attention. Styron's reputation resurfaced in 2008 with the publication of his collected essays, Havanas in Camelot. My favorite essay addresses Styron's friendship with James Baldwin and their realization that both of their grandparents were affected by slavery. In Sophie's Choice, Styron explores slavery in the touching story of Aristide, whose sale provides the financial means for Stingo's life in Brooklyn.

Punk Archaeology: Athens Street Art

"Graffiti Artists Leave Their Mark on Athens"on ABC Australia discussed the rise of graffiti on the archaeological sites of Athens. I thank Tim Gregory who sent this link to Bill Caraher who sent it to me. Indeed, walking through the streets of Athens in 2007, I first noticed the explosion of Greek street art. The Plaka especially is saturated. In an earlier posting, I explored Anastasios Orlandos' act of resistance by transcribing graffiti from the Parthenon during the German Occupation, see Writing off the Wall: Transcription as Resistance. I think that graffiti has not been seriously discussed in relation to Greek archaeology. How could Greeks archaeologists categorically condemn graffiti but, at the same time, celebrate Lord Byron's scratchings on the Temple of Zeus at Sounion? As an archaeologist of post-classical Greece, I find myself closer to the side of the vandals "defacing" the ancient temples than the purists. One of my favorite archaeological illustrations is a drawing showing a tapestry of graffiti at Ramnous; see Ο δήμος της Ραμνούς, vol. 1 , Τοπογραφικά (Athens, 1999), p. 270. Vasileios Petrakos is one of few Greek archaeologists to publish such defacement in a site monograph. My love of graffiti should not be dismissed at face value on account of my period interests (Byzantine over Classical). We tend to associate spolia, reuse and appropriation with the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. Classical Athenians, however, did a fair share of it, too. For details, you must ask my wife, Celina Gray, who labors over reuse in Athenian cemeteries. For my favorite article on Late Antique spolia, I send you to Joseph Alchermes, "Spolia in Roman Cities of the Late Empire: Legislative Rationales and Architectural Reuse," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994), pp. 167-178.

In this posting, I wish to discuss neither the archaeology of graffititi nor the graffiti of archaeological sites. Rather, I want to highlight the burgeoning scene of Greek street art in a positive manner. Its cultural relevance should be taken seriously. It is Greece's greatest public art and one of the few instances of constructive civil disobedience. I will start with a simple question, which is more than rhetorical. Is modern graffiti inferior to classical art? Of course, classical art is more important, but can we be so sure? One way to test the relative relevance of disparate art forms is to gauge contemporary interests. Although my methodology is by no means scientific, I decided to test cultural value in my local Border's bookstore by conducting a simple statistical study. So, on my way back from work last Tuesday, I stopped at Border's at New London's Crystal Mall. The store contains a modest art selection, covering 18 shelves, or the equivalent of 54 linear feet of shelf space. Scanning carefully all the shelves, I was surprised to find absolutely NO books on ancient art. By the way, my job at Connecticut College is teaching ancient and medieval art (incidentally as Joe Alchermes' sabbatical replacement); my informal survey obviously devastated my sense of academic value. I was disheartened to see that antiquity was found sparingly only in a few general books. I concluded that, similarly, my ancient survey will be the only exposure that my students will ever have to this material. At Border's, a little more than 2 linear feet were devoted to street art, that is 4% of the total shelf space. Thus, we can conclude that for a general American audience, street art is infinitely more important than ancient art. Modern Greek graffiti, moreover, is highly respected within those publications. An excerpt from Nicholas Ganz's, Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents (New York, 2004), pp. 128, 162-163, best summarizes the Greek scene:

"Greece and its local activists were thrust into the limelight through the Chromopolis project. Concentrated in Athens and Thessaloniki, the movement is enjoying a boom, particularly in pieces. Over the fast few years, pioneers such as Bizare or Woozy have continued to make their mark, and new artists are emerging, often working with stencils or characters." Have the archaeologists quoted in ABC missed the movement altogether? Most likely. Reading the official condemnation of graffiti might give us the impression that street art is strictly an underground subculture. This is another misrepresentation. Preparing for the 2004 Athens Olympics, the Ministry of Culture went hip-hop by sponsoring Chromopolis, a project organized by graffiti magazine Carpe Diem. In the summer of 2002, Greece invited 16 internationally acclaimed graffiti artists, including OsGemeos, Besok, Codeak, Bizare, Mark1, and Loomit. The artists created large scale compositions at 10 sites (image above). The works were proudly included in Greece's official Cultural Olympiad and elevated graffiti with venues such as the archaeology of Minoan and Mycenaean food at Birmingham, or a Post-Byzantine art exhibit in New York.

Although by no means would I promote vandalizing archaeological sites, the recent growth in archaeological graffiti seems to fit a larger pattern, the explosion and international prestige of Greek street art. In the American context, it would be difficult to ignore the prestige of street artists like Shepard Fairey, who designed one of the most desirable images for Barak Obama's presidential campaign; see my posting "Punk Archaeology: Glue." The recent press on Fairey is more concerned about his mainstream status; see Melena Rizik, "Closer to Mainstream; Still a Bit Rebelious," (NYT, Oct. 1, 2008). The elusive Bansky also seems to have made a surprise installation in SoHo, and the press went wild, see David Itzkoff "A Could-Be Bansky Appears on a SoHo Wall" (NYT, Oct. 1, 2008). I fall in the group of people who worship those idolatrous artists. And judging from the 4% coverage at Border's, I'm not alone.

The fans of Greek street art are harder to find. But I'm clearly not the only archaeologist of Greece to see cultural vitality in modern Greece beyond the national love of the Parthenon. Guy Sanders, Jan Sanders and Petros Sandamouris administer a wonderful Facebook Group, "Alternative Athens: Beyond Your Comfort Zone." It's defined as follows: "Εκτός των συνόρων: how can you find a real Athens beyond your hotel or institution or group? A member of one Athens based institution has likened their closed community to a huge sow to which its piglets return and suckle year after year. How do we find out about the life beyond our Comfort Zone? This group is intended to be a place where venues outside the bubble are shared and evaluated." Some of the Group members (Jess Hackman, Eva Akashi, Sara Lima, Isabela Sanders) have been photographing Athenian street art and adding it to the communal images. What we need now is a systematic survey, the archaeology of Athenian street art, the mapping of Greece's newest masterpieces. The Wooster Collective is such an organized venture documenting street art globally. I'm waiting for the Essential City Guide to Athens!!!! I had started photographing street art in Philadelphia, but that was a few years ago. One of my objectives had been to record locations through time and show the temporal nature (both deterioration and addition) of this art form. The survey of Greek graffiti must take inspiration from the Geocaching craze, a hobby that unites GPS, Google Earth and treasure hunting. Deb and Colin Stewart introduced me to this and I look forward to joining. A search under Athens, Greece, produced 91 caches in Athens alone. What are we waiting for?

People catalogue all kinds of things. My dear friend jules, for instance, catalogues built-in ashtrays. Although she doesn't see it archaeologically, she is creating the only existing database of this extinct socio-type. In fact, if you have more instances, send them to me, and I'll send them to BUILT-IN-ASHTRAYS. Needless to say, this is the pet project of a reformed smoker and quite the social thinker.

Curious about street art bibliography? The least that I can do is share what I found at Border's in a measly New London mall. You can map that, too; click here. In the spirit of free art, I bought nothing but browsed to my heart's content. In browsing order: Tristan Manco, Street Sketchbook: Inside the Journals of International Street and Graffiti Artists (San Francisco, 2007); Josh J. MacPhee, Stencil Pirates: A Global Study of the Street Stencil (Brooklyn, 2004); Roger Gastman, Caleb Neelon, and Anthony Smyrski, Street World: Urban Art and Culture from Five Continents (New York, 2007); Nicholas Ganz, Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents (New York, 2004); Eleanor Mathieson (ed.) and Xavier A. Tapies, Street Art and the War on Terror: How the World's Best Graffit Artists Said No to the Iraq War (London, 2007); Stephen Powers, The Art of Getting Over: Graffit at the Millenium (New York, 1999), Steve Grody, Graffiti L.A.: Street Styles and Art (New York, 2007); Ryo Sanada, Suridh Hassan, Rackgaki: Japanese Graffiti (London, 2007); Jon Naar, The Birth of Graffiti (Munich, 2007); Bansky, Wall and Piece (London, 2007).

Psychogeography

Mapping historical landscapes is a difficult procedure because the subjective world cannot always mesh through objective description, a prerequisite for mapping. My friend Nick Stapp is struggling with these issues. He is writing a program, or a set of digital procedures that document historical change through the 19th and 20th centuries at Washington Square, one of William Penn's four original squares in Philadelphia. Nick is a man of many talents, with degrees in both archaeology and historic preservation, now going for a Ph.D. in urban planning. He's best known in Mediterranean archaeology for his work for the Corinth Computer Project, directed by David G. Romano at UPenn's Museum. He has taught classes on GIS and archaeology and he has been my GIS mentor. While reading Nick's dissertation proposal, I learned about a couple of interesting new projects.

Yesterday, Richard Florida blogged about a new study mapping personality variations across the U.S., in Peter J. Renfrow, Samuel D. Gossling, and Jeff Potter, "A Theory of the Emergence, Persistence and Expression of Geographic Variation in Psychological Characteristics," Perspectives on Psychological Sciece 3:5 (2008) pp. 339-369. Bill Caraher will be happy to learn, for instance, that North Dakotans are happier and more affable than most Americans. Peter Rentfrow's web site (at Cambridge) shows a forthcoming publication that, moreover, relates personality traits to presidential elections. The characteristics studied in the project were Extraversion, Agreeableness, Consientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness. Accordingly, each state has some dominant features that are replicated and reinforced. The data is pretty interesting as is the discussion of criteria used, data collection and number crunching.

The second project takes us to the street. Bio Mapping is a collaborative project that collects data of varying sensorial arousal through street walking. Over 1,500 collaborated in the data collection and some of the maps are available in Google Earth. The San Francisco emotion map is already completed and next in line is T0kyo.

A few months ago, I wrote about new books on the tradition of psychogeography, see Peripatetic History. Psychogeopgraphy was devised by the Situationists, a second generation of Surrealists, who wandered aimlessly through the urban fabric and documented psychological states. They produced installations, urban designs and philosophical tracts. The two projects discussed here extend the spirit of the Situationists and bridge the gap between subjectivity and objectivity.

Punk Archaeology: Glue

Street art has been a vibrant form of the urban underground for the last decade. Back in the 1990s, I began photographing such ephemeral installations throughout Philadelphia, returning even to trace the effects of deterioration or intentional erasure. This documentation, obviously, satisfied my archaeological sensibilities but, more importantly, got me to seriously think about medieval epigraphy and graffiti, a genre that is rarely considered as protest. Interestingly enough, we rarely imagine medieval men and women subverting public space through writing or scratching; we rarely think of them outside the modes of religious expression. Michael Camille's sign typology--protection, power, publicity, memory, location, public fantasy--does not include political subversion ("Signs on Medieval Street Corners," in Die Strasse, ed. J. Gerhard, Vienna, 2001, pp. 91-118). I have a suspicion that some Byzantine inscriptions served a subversive role, an idea based on prison graffiti from Corinth, as well as a series of proto-cartographic scratches.

Philadelphia street art (clearly defined as post-graffiti) boomed when I was a graduate student in AAMW (Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World) . Photographing this vernacular art while studying vernacular architecture gave me an excuse for meaningful procrastination. The discovery of street art, moreover, introduced me to the Space 1026 collaborative, which is responsible for producing some of the best Philadelphia street art. One day, I even stepped up the stairs of 1026 Arch Street, met Ben Woodward, explained my project and bought one of his prints, the barking dog with the word LOST. The print was inexpensive enough ($10) that I also bought a copy for my god-son, whom I've been intentionally trying to subvert through skate boards, CDs, etc. So a LOST print now hangs in a teenager's room in Überlingen, Germany, mind you, not glued in the streets but properly framed and hung).

On April 18, I returned to my alma mater and gave a lecture on Byzantium, Modernity and the American School at AAMW's Archaeology Lunch series. It was a wonderful event in its own right and quite emotional; my last involvement with AAMW was 5 years ago, scrambling to complete my thesis. In my last trip, spring had just began in Philadelphia, offering great opportunities for walking the streets. Although the visit was short and the wanderings even shorter, one image kept creeping up, the sticker you see above. It's a small red monochrome print juxtaposing a simple figurative image of a small mouse and the word GLUE. The print is wheat-pasted on a street pole near 44th and Pine Streets. In fine Pop Art form, text and image are congruous and incongruous. The subject matter itself is so appropriately regional to Philadelphia's domestic life, punctuated by the ever-present mouse problem creeping through every row-house. I cannot even begin to list the Philadelphia mouse stories. Sadly enough, mice was the subject of the last conversation I had with my father before he passed away (unexpectedly from a heart-attack), and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Another memorable incident is returning from a trip to Greece and finding a mouse strung around the strings under my mother's sewing machine (she was a seamstress). The poor baby-mouse had spun itself into its own death. We were gone long enough that the bodily deterioration was complete and what confronted us was a beautifully textiled flat object.

I find GLUE to be such a thought-provoking piece beyond the vernacular associations to West Philadelphia life. I will spare you of my own multiple readings. Flat as it may be, GLUE reverberates with so many references, including images from Robert Mapplethorpe's famous "Perfect Moment" show (1988) at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (which, back then, was housed in Meyerson Hall). Most obviously, GLUE is about prey and preyed, animals and humans, wild and domestic, but also about art process and meaning (the piece itself is literally "glued" on a post). Having just heard a fantastic Studio 360 episode, I cannot fail to see connections with Abu Ghraib as well. Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure (2008) just out in theaters and Stephen S. Eisenman's The Abu Ghraib Effect (London, 2007) are high on my list--Eisenman teaches Art History at Northwestern and he is the editor of Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (3rd ed., 2007); I received a review copy of this textbook and could not put it down . I have no idea who produced GLUE, but I thank them for articulating so many subterranean strata with economical eloquence.

Whether coming out of punk rock, skate-boarding, or both, the aesthetics of street art have reached national exposure in the last few months. One of its most celebrated practitioners, Shepard Fairey, has donated a portrait to the Barak Obama campaign. Fairey's CHANGE is sadly SOLD OUT, but you can read more about it in Rob Walker's, "The Art of Politics" (NYT Magazine, April 13, 2008, p. 27). Fairey was born in South Carolina (which adds another bizarre geographic thread) and became famous through his OBEY THE GIANT signs. Even if you have never heard of Fairey's name, you have probably seen his work; this is one of the beauties of a genre that is (partially) anonymous but (thoroughly) pervasive. A few years ago, street art was an underground phenomenon integrally connected to other subversive urban grass routes movements. At this point, street art has entered both mainstream political arena and popular culture; Fairey, for instance, has designed the cover of a greatest hits CD for Led Zeppelin. Another artist, Banksy, is equally unavoidable. Last summer, I was so happy to find a copy of his Wall and Piece (Phaidon, 2007) at Barnes and Noble (Rittenhouse Square) to give to my godson when I visited him in Greece . When I walked into my godson's room in Athens, I saw the very same Bansky book in his library; the book had already been translated into Greek (now, that is globalization). I ended up lugging the (ungiven) gift all the way back to the U.S. and returning it to the Barnes and Noble. Whoever has bought that copy, has unwillingly purchased a much traveled book. Incidentally, my godson has now fully embraced hip-hop (as well as computer hacking) and goes by the nickname Pak. Regardless of its mainstream status, the much-traveled street art of Philadelphia seems potently alive and exciting. GLUE not only made my day happier but provided some wonderful connective tissue across multiple years of punk, art and urban archaeology.

PS. Connected to subversive street art, see the documentation of an ephemeral historiography in Boston, Chrstina J. Hodge "History on the Line, Davis Square, " Archaeoblog, April 10, 2008.

Philadelphia Literature?

"There is no good literature on Philadelphia,” said David Leatherbarrow over dinner at Greenville, South Carolina, the day before giving his lecture at Clemson University Architecture Department's Critical Practice for the Next Generation (Feb. 22, 2008). Dr. Leatherbarrow (my undergraduate mentor and theory hero) made this comment in relation to a class he is currently teaching at Penn, where the students read city-specific writings on architecture and literature. David’s comment put me into a query, and since it’s Philadelphia that I call home, I struggled for some bibliography.

There are, of course, Christopher Morley’s writings from the 1920s, edited by Ken Kalfus (Christopher Morley’s Philadelphia, 1990). Kalfus’ most recent novel A Disorder Peculiar to This County (2006) deals with 9/11 (hence a New York focus). Some of his previous works narrates personal experiences from the Soviet Union, where he resided with his wife, the Moscow correspondent of the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time -- see Pu-239 And Other Russian Fantasies (1999), the title story of which was made into an HBO movie and premiered November 17, 2007. I first saw Kalfus on Bloomsday, the celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses taking place at the Rosenbach Library. He read with his wife, Inga Saffron who is currently the architectural critic of the Inquirer. They both live in Philadelphia and are spotted on the street with their daughter (who seems like the coolest teenager in the world). Saffron’s blog, Skyline Online provides the BEST update on what’s happening on Philadelphia’s architectural scene. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next best Philadelphia fiction does not come out of the pen of Ken Kalfus. I’m impatiently waiting for a Philadelphia Ulysses.

In the meantime, I want to suggest a couple of quintessential urban Philadelphia works, not necessarily novels. For instance, my recent most favorite has to do with the Mummer’s Parade of 2008. Space 1026 is a funky art collaborative on Arch Street, whose importance was recognized in a 2002 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Members of the group formed the Vaude-Villains and entered the Parade with the theme “Eaglize It.” The resulting confrontation between old and new, straight and gay, working class and art class is so incredibly Philadelphia; I cannot think of a better manifestation of the city’s new greatness. For a full coverage of this project, see Ryan Creed, “Never Mind the Sequins,” The City Paper (Dec. 26, 2007).

A slightly older book which grows from Philadelphian experiences is The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power (2002). Although from Chicago, Travis Hugh Culley lived in Philadelphia while writing this memoir. The book is very intelligent, exploring the bike-messenger as the ultimate new urban hero, but also revisiting the American city and the persistent suppression of anything non-automotive throughout its history. It is not surprising that Philadelphia has the hippest track-bike culture in the US. How can anyone resist buying a bag from R.E. Load, a grass-roots manufacturing company. The neo-Arts & Crafts movement is shaping up in Philadelphia.

Consider, moreover, that not all of the editors of n+1 (the recent literary journal) live in New York. Some live in Philadelphia; and they are producing masterpieces. Mark Greif’s “Afternoon of the Sex Children" (N+1, no. 4, Spring 2006) is one of the best things I’ve read for a while. Not only was it reproduced in Harper’s (Nov. 20060, but also selected for The Best American Essays 2007, ed. David Foster Wallace. Two year earlier, Greif’s essay “Against Exercise’ (n+1, no. 1, Fall 2004) was selected for The Best American Essay 2005, ed. Susan Orlean and Robert Atwan. I may be mistaken but either Mark Greif or Marco Roth lives in Philadelphia. At least I want them to live in Philadelphia.