Tower of Babel ...and other musings

Lydia Musco had a solo exhibit of her work last year at Davidson College. Lydia lives in Massachusetts. Transporting her 8ft. tall sculptures to the North Carolina gallery must have taken some doing. These things are constructed of thin stacks of paper pulp, concrete and wood.

The simplest are single four-sided columns. Others are two or more columns, shuffled together. They twirl and teeter and it’s the tension and texture that you notice right off. Next you might notice that the twirls are part of a dance – or maybe a fight to stay upright.

I just finished reading “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann. The novel includes the story of tightrope walker Philippe Petit who stunned New York City when he walked between the two World Trade Center towers then under construction (1974). It was an act that was beautiful and frighteningly repellent – amazing and crazy – a “fuck you” finger pointed to God and a prayer of thanks for the gift of movement.

Lydia is a young artist. She has lots of practice time left. I hope she has the courage and tenacity to keep pushing at the intersection between beauty and disaster.

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National columnist Neal Peirce came to lecture in Rochester in the early 1990’s. The Coalition for Downtown brought him. We were all hot to push metropolitan government, erasing lines between the City and suburbia and Peirce wrote a compelling argument in his book CITYSTATES.

The argument never got far and now, nearly 20 years later, with every government budget sinking in red ink, we in Upstate New York are still not persuaded to give up our patch of identity.

Today’s Charlotte Observer ran a current Pierce column titled “How to avert a new Crisis in Suburbia.” He quotes analyst Jonathan Miller and the 2011 edition of “Emerging Trends in Real Estate” extensively. Miller claims that tract mansions are the Hummers of real estate, as obsolete as the cars. He says that foreclosures are greatest in these fringe suburbs and that the group most able to purchase such dinosaurs is marching off to downsize and the buyers on the way in (ages 30 –45) are not interested in that lifestyle choice. Besides, there are too few of them.

He claims that the changing tides will usher in a “Fix-up, Re-model, Expand, and Condominium Era” and that realtors and government planners must catch up.

Well!!!