Peter Behrens's Blog, page 510
September 25, 2013
September 24, 2013
Southern California Timing Association & the 1976 Chevelle Wagon
Caught this wagon, vinyl woodgrain and all, on a rainy evening in a supermarket parking lot here in the Springs. Oh boy, a sleeper. The moral equivalent of a '61 Biscayne 409. My kind of car.
Colorado Springs Downtown (south side)
There are a few medium-large buildings downtown but this feels like it ought to be the downtown of a midwestern city, pop. circa 50,000. In fact, it the downtown of a city with a population closer to 500,000. There is a lot empty space and the immediate fringe of downtown, at least to the south, feels like a dying or dead zone, with a lot of empty weedy parking lots and ex-businesses. The whole notion of "downtown" is foreign, I think, to much of the population of El Paso County. I've overheard people, including some bulked-up military types, saying they are "afraid" of downtown. Possibly they are afraid in the same way that I am "afraid" of shopping malls: i.e., the spatial, commerical, and cultural arrangement feels like a foreign inhuman environment, hostile, impossible to connect with. There is a large encampment of homeless people in the one big park downtown. There are a lot of homeless generally in COS. The cost of living and renting around here is not particularly high. I wonder what proportion of the people in the park are ex-military?
Palmer High School (last photo) is a beautiful building, and a pretty good school apparently.
Things get greener, a bit livelier, and certainly more prosperous immediately north of the downtown core. There have been a lot of AL posts on the residential neighborhoods in this part of town. Colorado College was founded by the same General Palmer who founded the city, and CC has been physically integrated into the street plan since the beginning. It was from the beginning, and deliberately, not an isolated campus. But somehow this spatial integration hasn't been as dynamic and successful as it might have been. Maybe it's a case of the college and the city not being able to develop planning that accommodates the needs and interests of both.
September 23, 2013
September 22, 2013
Ed Ruscha & John Brinckerhoff Jackson
Driving into work at my windowless office at Colorado College, I heard a good NPR piece on Ed Ruscha. Twenty Six Gasoline Stations was published fifty years ago. I always have been thrilled by the concept and execution of that book, and will claim it as an influence on the American Houses and The Way We Live Now series that post on AL from time to time. I wonder if Ruscha and John Brinckerhoff Jackson had any influence upon each other. They were both fascinated by their contemporary American landscape, and by the idea of the vernacular landscape. Jackson as a geographer was interested in patterns of settlement and land use, Ruscha maybe more interested in objects, which happened to be buildings....but there is a lot of overlap between the two.
September 21, 2013
El Dodge: The 1968 Dodge 100
This was sitting in the driveway of a house for sale in Colorado Springs. House and truck looked original and untouched. I recall a slightly older Dodge 200, the 3/4 ton version, in Marfa. This truck hits all my buttons. Original; plain-jane; not bent out of shape. Looks like a truck. As Ernie Roy might say, there's a lot of rascular density here.
September 20, 2013
Kate Northrop poem: "Night Drive"
photo ©2013 Jarrod McCabe
Night Drive
Shoulderless mostly, oldThis is the roadYou should not be driving
Not at night, at zeroOr well below,Bone-stark, so cold
Each turn appearsAs a figure in a dreamSure, demanding:
Look, fields are rising--And they are, the brightSnow-stripped fields,
Like a shroudOr a female voiceYou never loved me
And that’s trueEven the furthest homesClose enough
To your homeWhere often in the darkDown in the kitchen
The beams of headlightsMoving through the roomMoved through you
--Kate Northrop Northrop's last collection was Clean
