Local Emissaries United Looking Back

This is me taking some time to think back about out trip and think out loud of plans for the future, as related to a troy resident and supporter.

The Troy Ambassador program as some may call it (Local Emissaries United) went pretty well! It was a pretty serious undertaking and I started planning too late. There were three of us traveling - we managed to visit 12 cities in 3 weeks, and talk directly to around 200 people about their cities and ours. We spoke a whole bunch about where we are from, but it also turned into a big focus group on where people live the places they do, and why they value that. Pretty cool. We took a lot of video footage, but upon returning, all us got involved in jobs, our education, and other serious things that have kept us from editing it down to a documentary record of our journey. We will do this at some point. Overall, we found it quite economical to travel and spread the word. Perhaps the greatest enabler of our journey was couchsurfing.com, which allowed up to connect with people who gave us free places to sleep, and gave us a venue to talk about our project. For the future, it would be nice to endow/put together a program (just a few thousand, or even just a couple hundred dollars per year), to sponsor people to learn how to benefit our area. Intrepid local people could put together travel plans, submit a proposal, and bring back word of the successes and failures of other cities, or we could enable people to come here to experience this area themselves. After this trip, it is my strong opinion that our area needs a more intimate relationship with the "outside world."

Returned to the Capital Region

On Sunday July 29th, I made my return to the Capital Region after some separate activites. So far our fellow wilkinism has been accounted for, coming along with his own interesting stories of the return trip, and the days since. Our other fellow Brandon C-K, with whom I parted company in Richmond, VA (our last stop), has not been accounted for since our return. For all we know, he may still be out on the road, continuing the misson, or maybe just having a good time.

Life is different now that we're back. It's a slow process getting back in the old ways (and forming new good habits too!!) while catching up with everything that has happened in the meantime.

We will continue to post blog entries here for some time based on the notes that we had been taking as we traveled. A final count of all the people we spoke with will be forthcoming too. Our hours of video footage will be reviewed as we prepare to put it all together in a narrative of what we've seen, where we've been, how we've felt, who we've spoken to, What impressions people have of our area, what we've learned about each city, and cities as a whole, what can be applied to our own localities, and why this all matters to us, and to the world at large. A wholesale written account will be turned out. Our remaining photos will be made public. Our "artifacts" and material references will be brought to light. The work of the emissaries will yet continue on.

The Many Localities of Chapel Hill

Well we've been here in Chapel Hill for two nights at the luxurious accomidations of Brandon's college friend Ryan. The area has a nice college town feel, and the land is beautiful - tall trees, hills, windy roads - it reminds me of our beautiful upstate NY home.

The cities here seem to blend into each other geographically, yet they each seem to retain a distinct identity. There is no zone that I could distinguish as an interim between Carrboro and Chapel Hill, but speaking to the residents of each, they have different things to say about the character of each.

Chapel Hill: liberal, somewhat "preppy", college influence
Carrboro: More liberal, somewhat more "hippy"

this being based on center's of the towns being 10 minutes or less WALKING distance from each other. Also Durham, which apparently has more of an urban feel is about a 10 minute drive away. It feels more like different neighborhoods than separate towns or cities. Very often I feel that way about Albany, Troy, and all the cities in between. I wonder what parallels can be drawn or lessons learned...

perhaps that it's helpful for separate cities to maintain their own identities as places, but also useful for them to be closely and comfortably connected. Hmm...

Hey Brandon...

Austin is not ostentatious! but I like the play on words. Maybe Austintacious is just a great word to describe the city though it doesn't mean the same thing as the more established word that shares it's sound, it just describes everything that's great about that city!

citysuburbscountry

From a discussion between Brandon and I during our last ride up into the hills of central North Carolina...

We both agree that there are many things we find attractive and comfortable about the city and the country, but the suburbs always seem to be lacking in the things we find sustaining, enjoyable, and pleasant.

to cite an extreme quote of an experience from a person is is also a guest of our current host: (DC suburban area Bethesda, Maryland...) "the streets are clogged at noon with trophy wives dressed to the nines, in SUVs and luxury sedans, shuttling around designer boutiques - it took 45 minutes to get 1.5 mile down the road just to get to a simple thai restaurant"

...Not that I really disagree with what it says about these strange inter-areas known as suburbs.

What does each have as an advantage?

City - critical mass of people for sharing culture and intelligence, efficient means of sustaining many people.
Suburbs - um I'm not sure, A great place to watch TV?
County - wide, open, beautiful landscapes, close to nature, starry nights, free from the consensus of other people so you can live your own way.

This conception of suburbs doesn't count the small town feel where life is sweet and you can walk to the supermarket, school, or bar - we're talking about places with tract housing, 6 bedroom houses on 1 acre lots, no sidewalks, plenty of auto-strip developments, franchise architecture, and the could-be-anywhere USA feel. The small town seems to have some sense of a community, while the suburban as we are thinking of them here just seem to me to be cold. Big difference.

We were trying to think of a snappy, glib bumper sticker etc to capture this feeling (that seems to be pretty widespread) we have about these areas The closest we've been able to get is:
plow the suburbs...

What can we do about these places? Is there any option besides the current form to moderate between the extremes of urban community and rural freedom?

Maybe we're giving the suburbs a bad rap or defining them too narrowly... what do you all think?

Update...

So we've just been doing some more serious traveling - 8 hours from Austin TX to New Orleans, and 10 hours from New Orleans to Savannah, GA where we are today - and we just parted ways with our esteemed compatriot Wilkinism who caught an early flight back to our home region to get a head start on some personal business. Brandon and I continue on today to Chapel Hill.

A Des Moines City Brief - 7/12

Written on the beautiful morning of thursday 7/12:


Yeah so the sunrise was really incredible today in Des Moines. We drove all night from Minneapolis, which was an awesome city, but we had no place to stay, the spot we planned fell through because we miscommunicated among ourselves on the dates. We're now in Omaha, but the travel brought us through Des Moines, which has some really interesting architecture, much of it seems very new. Minneapolis actually as well seemed to be developing all these new contemporary styled condos with cables, stained wood, and metal panels. Des Moines though was sort of a strange city, in fact I'm discovering that most cities are. It seems cleaner than Omaha, but just laid our flat, like a peddler laying out his wares on the streets. So many of the buildings have this great new feel to them, even if there are sort of modernist from the 1960's, and the whole vernacular of the cityt seems to fit together, though in a bizzare eclectic way for sure. I experienced next to no life there, but the built environment and the sky really spoke to me and it was beautiful.

Dispatch From a Brooklyn Field Representative on Separate Assignment

So we've been traveling pretty intensely over the past few days, and haven't got a chance to really update the blog or anything, but we've been keeping our paper journal, and should have some good stuff to report shortly.

In the meantime, I would like to pass on a letter that I received from one of our esteemed agents in the field. If any of you have reports of great things going on in your area that we all may be interested in, feel free to send them to:

info@local-emissary.org



Ambassador Kasunic,

I've been reading your blog sir - good work my friend, the people of the Capital Region and their friends thank you for you good deeds and sharing of the capital of our great state... I went to this thing last night that was fucking amazing and perhaps your good people could organize something similar in Albany...it was a spontaneous party/parade with hundreds of fire dancers/stilt walkers/marching band performers/drummers marching through the streets and subways of brooklyn - it started at brooklyn bridge and ended on coney island. Crazy fun...ran into some kid i didn't really recognize but who said he knew me from the EDMS parties back in the day.. the organizers of this parade... www.thedanger.com

Hope you're having fun and promoting the greater Capital Region. Storm the sports bars!-- turn the "solid mindless party scene" into a "fluid mindful party scene".

Peace and enlightement
- Albanian Expatriot O'Brien

Playing Catch Up: Play by play - Chicago

Affectionately known to us as Chi-tonw, the city, its residents and it's vistors, have treated us well. We were graciously hosted by Wilkinism's Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ted, and 17 yr old cousin Frannie in their fine abode nestled in the first ring suburbs of the city. Frannie is Hysterical! The first night we got there we were pretty tired, but we were up laughing for hours because of all her funny stories and her friends that she was telling us about.

Earlier this first night, we met up with a friend of mine, Laura, who has lived in Chicago for 8 years and is moving out in less than a week, and also my friend nancy, who just moved to Chicago last week, and whose boyfriend Anthony is moving in on the same day my friend Laura is moving out... Whoa! We ate lots of spicy thai food. Afterwards, Laura went home and we all went to go to another warehouse party (after the one in detroit), but it didn't feel right, plus the courtyard smelled like stinky fish. We were pretty tired, but when we got back to the home in suburban Brookfield, we didn't feel it because that's when we were all cracking up together with frannie.

The next day, we got a lot done in the "office" but that meant that we got a later start than we wanted to, so that by the time we got on the street to gather people's feedback about their city, it had started raining. We hung out under the tracks, out front of the Damon Street stop on the CTA blue line, though not many people were interested in talking. Perhaps we can chalk that up to the fast paced nature of Chicago. After that we met my friend Monica, Laura's friend, and also another friend Billy at the Skylark bar, where we drank boilermakers. From there we went to see an icelandic band called Benni Hemm Hemm at a bar in Ukranian Village called the Empty Bottle. We interviewed a couple of guys who were in Chicago, but from Tennessee, out front, then I spoke with a Chicagoan, and his friend visiting from China. We had some fun and interesting conversations with each of them, all documented on our video tape.

Stop the Detroit Devil's Night Arsons!!

This was a sign that we saw when driving through Detroit. The city was truly so different from what we expected - absolutely a beautiful, spirited, strange city. More to come on Detroit.

Detroit Ahoy!

we're going to detroit today because I've been hearing some strange and interesting things about it. I read an article in Harper's Magazine that was talking about how this city is becoming the first "post-american" city and how it's getting turned inside out with people developing their own sorts of farms within city limits, while the suburbs continue to incorporate into each other and distance themselves from the center city. Apparently some places in the city are nice set up in the fancy downtown way that has become so popular lately, but so much of the rest of the city will have brand new condos, which might be next to a completely abandoned block, or a block with a couple houses and rows of organic staple crops. Strange.

Sitting in an Ann Arbor living room...

city #2 of our trip. Last night we explored the city and saw parks and bars and restaurants and people and streets and the farmer's market where people were just getting set up at 3am. We noticed some strange contrasts similar to some that we see in Albany, with the interactions between the various groups of people that compose a university community though are into verry different things and have verry different backgrounds.