welcome...back?

I worry that my year of barely posting has scared away the friends and followers I had--people blogrolling or commenting or "following" on Blogger (I could do that thing where I post the box with their images, but right now the number is so low, compared to the number I'M following, that it's just embarrassing). Of course, people might have other reasons for not being around here. Anyway, if you hadn't noticed (I tried to go a few posts without self-conscious stuff about how much I was or wasn't posting), I've been posting much more lately, enough that I feel I have to post something hours before I go on a trip, so that I won't go a whole week without anything new. I've changed nearly everything about how City of Destiny is designed and organized (it's easier than I'd realized. I think everything seems to run easier on Blogger now). Maybe a longer post about that later. And hopefully by mid-January, my 2009 year in review (of things I did). Welcome back! Feel free to comment, I'm getting tired of various forms of spam here (I guess listing something in your profile means people spam you about it). Why, I've even started/returned to commenting on some of YOUR blogs...

The image was found in the file cabinet of $3 photos at Grayland Station, a transportation collectibles store in Chicago. It's a favorite, and posted to my secondary Flickr account (mod as hell).

Oooops

I've had so many ideas for what to post here next that it's paralyzed me from posting anything at all (and when I'm not posting, I'm hardly looking at anyone else's stuff, so there's catching up to do). Before something requiring much effort, here's shots from a Sunday morning and the next Sunday morning, of at least the third car I know of to crash on this block in my neighborhood...at least the second to crash into a building.

I'll also confess that I have a very strong urge on the blog to not post anything new until the previous post gets comments. I'll make exceptions if something's timely (like around election day) and I need to post new material, but otherwise I keep waiting. I finally gave up on the architecture cruise post--I do know people read it (I don't check stats here) because they joined the groups I mentioned...but it's been about a month since any new comments here. You can see why I'm so dependent on Flickr, it's always active!

But then, I see interesting posts on others' blogs all the time with no comments, and think "Why hasn't anyone commented?" Sorry I'm not more active on other blogs...it's all but hopeless if they aren't Blogger; I like the ease of signing in to post here and easily posting on other Blogger ones. Anyway...I've been rethinking what I want to do here; I'd like to turn it into more of a photoblog (sometimes with stories, sometimes without) even though: 1) I'm at 13% of my space for images here and have no idea what happens after that (a yearly fee?). 2) I have to rotate photos in iPhoto first, then upload all vertical photos from one directory and all horizontal ones from another. 3) There's no drag-and-drop function for rearranging photos, just cutting and pasting html blocks, having to remember "move the 5th one from the top to the 2nd from the bottom." 4) I can't post photos next to each other (can I?). In other words, I loathe the work that goes into putting photos here, but I want to post much more, making this much more interactive for all of us. (UPDATE: Okay, now I know how to put things directly into Picasa and put them here. Still not as easy as using Flickr, but should help with some of the problems mentioned. Thanks, Noah...)

The latest additions

There are topics I can discuss at length: the advantages and disadvantages of various egg substitutes for vegan baking (this knowledge coexists with the fact that recently I had two roast beef sandwiches at the Rax restaurant in Joliet, by the way); obscure and failed sitcoms of the early 1990s (knowing what shows Matt LeBlanc and Jennifer Aniston were on before Friends, for instance); groups, splinter groups, and internecine debates of the early women's liberation movement...But the furniture stores and other buildngs of Vliet Street in the Hillside neighborhood of Milwaukee? I don't have much to say. So for no reason these photos illustrate this post about my latest additions to the blogroll/links list.


I've moved some links to different categories, but never mind that. And, in the more political blogs, deleted a few that became password-protected, or were too much of an inside joke.

In the top, Chicagoland categories, I'm now adding photo sites and photo blogs. Please enjoy the fine work of Christa Lohman (chloeloe), Chris Brunn, Chuck Janda, Noah Vaughn (Rubbish), and Nick Suydam (Sights and Sounds). I've been so distracted by finding blogs for many other cities, I haven't looked for more Chicagoland blogs in a while except from people I already know. I'd love to find blogs about specific neighborhoods, but many of the neighborhood blogs I find (certainly for Uptown and Rogers Park) aren't necessarily coming from viewpoints I endorse...

I added the website of Chicago writer Lee Sandlin, who I had the pleasure of meeting over a long lunch in Lincoln Square a few weeks ago (thank you again, though I was quite embarrassed that one glass of wine made me forget how Cairo, Illinois is pronounced). And two blogs from Jessica of Elgin. She found some photos from my brief Elgin trip on Flickr, invited them to a Flickr group, then featured some on Life in Elgin, which was nice. She also has a personal site, We Love Thrift Stores.

Most of the adds are to the "City life/built environment (beyond Chicago)" section, mostly from a manic day or two of looking for blogs on many cities and areas I'm interested in, not all of which I've visited this year. If they feature abandoned buildings, if there's a historic preservation bent, if they discuss transit and infrastructure, and/or there's a real enthusiasm for their city, and I don't see anything that frightens me, and they seem to be fairly active, I'll probably add them.

I'm mostly sticking to the Midwest, Rust Belt, Great Lakes, Third Coast region (by the way, Ted McClelland's recent book The Third Coast is HIGHLY recommended; I hope to interview him about it if I can). I love New York City, and San Francisco, and Seattle, and Portland, and Austin (well, I've only been there once), and I'd enjoy reading about them, but frankly I don't think those cities need much publicity. I'm much more interested in people seeking to improve and promote overlooked and "uncool" cities.

Newer stuff: Detroit (Faded Detroit, and the hugely popular Sweet Juniper). Indianapolis (The Urbanophile, Urban Indy). Columbus (All Eyes and Ears). Cincinnati (Building Cincinnati, and I added Cincinnati, As I See It, but that ones's completely vanished). Youngstown (Defend Youngstown, I Will Shout Youngstown). Pittsburgh (Cleveburgh Diaspora). Louisville (Broken Sidewalk). Buffalo (Greater Buffalo Blog). St. Louis (Mississippi River Valley Girl, Vanishing STL). Twin Cities (Twin City Sidewalks, Uptown Mpls Blog, and the extremely entertaining, fairly new Mall of America blog, by "wolf," who is "a guy who goes to MOA...a lot...").

And two that feature people from many different cities: The Where Blog, and Rust Belt Bloggers (I noticed I got a mention on the latter, so I've joined in the community). I haven't yet found Omaha blogs that fit my criteria, or any from my home state of Iowa, sadly; if anyone knows if there's good built environment/urbanism/city life blogs from there, please let me know! I may start looking for Denver and Phoenix blogs as well (even if those cities are a little too "popular" for my criteria, heh).

I added Chicago Steel Heritage Project to Organizations, Chicago History in Postcards to Even more Chicago stuff (formerly Random Chicagoland fun) and a bunch more to the non-Chicago/non-blog built environment section: Braddock Pennsylvania; Forgotten Ohio; Forgotten Buffalo; Preserve Minneapolis; Omaha (Historic Omaha, Landmarks Inc) and Denver (DenverInfill, Historic Denver), and more architectural foundations (Michigan and Denver). I've become quite fascinated with roadside America, Route 66, Lincoln Highway, etc. recently and that'll probably be the next batch of additions...

My blogroll categories are organized roughly by how much those topics turn up on City of Destiny. City life and Chicago and buildings the most, books, food and shopping somewhat less, politics the least...it certainly doesn't mean I consider those the least important. I'm sort of a wuss who tries to avoid conflict and controversy here.





The only political blog I've added is Rustbelt Intellectual. I added Healing Self-Injury to the mental health section, just because. Nothing new in the body image or adoption categories right now. In the latter, Marley at The Daily Bastardette has done a fine job covering the fiasco of Nebraska's Safe Haven law...it was definitely on my mind on my recent Omaha visit (another teen was abandoned that day, I believe). If you've never been exposed to views on what's wrong with "safe haven" laws, I highly encourage checking her blog out.



That's it for now...I hope to have a zany-adventure post up soon to compensate for my long absence. The photos keep piling up...as anyone following me on Flickr knows, I've been to Omaha and Denver on my first-ever Amtrak trip recently, plenty to say about that... (And yes, that trip happened after the date on this post--don't ask!)

City love

Hi! Whatever date comes up on this post, it was actually written and posted on August 22, and though I'm in Iowa right now (that's a new shot of the Des Moines Public Library above), and mostly unrelatedly in a one-week-till-my-birthday funk, I wanted to put up a "real" post, so here's something from the "drafts" folder. Just a little housekeeping, and sharing of a recent and unfortunately pricey and wow, how did I not get into this 10 years ago? obsession: vintage postcards! All bought at this year's Printers Row bookfair in Chicago, the first ever where I bought no books, but I spent as much as I do every year on books on dozens of postcards, all of which will eventually be on my secondary Flickr account, Mod as Hell (i.e. the obscure one where I'm lucky to get 10 views and 1 comment on an image).

To my great surprise, the new Chicago edition of the Huffington Post has me on their blogroll (thanks to Noah at Dump Site for tipping me off). I'm still surprised anyone knows who I am, when I can think of a number of high-profile (and low-profile but great) Chicago blogs that should be on there. I have a hunch how that happened...So I added the new HuffPo (I'll confess to not reading the main one very often). And I've rearranged the blogroll a bit to sort the city life / architecture / bicyling / preservation / urban exploration / public transit / urbanism blogs into Chicago and non-Chicago sections, and add a bunch more non-Chicago ones (I'll admit unless they're written by people I know, I may not have done much more than skimmed them so far). Here's what's new:


Detroit (I've made 5 trips so far this year, though one was two days with a night in Ann Arbor in between, so 6 days there): BikeBlog Detroit (mostly not about bikes, it seems); Sweet Juniper


Pittsburgh (One terrific 2-day trip this year, and wow, the Pittsburgh Flickr people are friendly and comment like crazy on my photos from there!): Pittsburgh Metblogs; Walking Pittsburgh


Buffalo (wanted to fit a visit into another trip this year, haven't been there this year yet, so badly want to see this city!): fix buffalo today; Greater Buffalo Blog


Milwaukee (3 trips so far this year, including 2 in 10 days; 2 trips included seeing what's going on with the demolition/redevelopment of the Pabst brewery): Urban Milwaukee


St. Louis (one 3-day trip this year, hope to get back very soon!): 52nd City blog

And also: Rust Belt Bloggers; Great Lakes Urban Exchange. I recently found GLUE's Flickr group; their description says they're looking for photos from "Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Erie, Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Lansing, Louisville, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Pittsburgh, Rochester, St. Louis, Toledo." Wow! Quite a few of the cities I've been fixated on this year, and others I hope to get to soon.

It's strange how I used to only want to visit the "cool" cities (New York, Austin, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco), or perhaps I'd consider Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC. Now my recent obsessions are Baltimore, Buffalo and Cleveland (and other places in Ohio), all of which I've barely seen, and getting back to Kansas City, Louisville, Minneapolis, and Omaha, none of which I've visited for years. I swear, I don't just plan my trips around how many abandoned buildings I'll find...Meanwhile, architecture/urban exploration contacts on Flickr continue to ruin me, giving me a strange desire to visit, for example, St. Joseph, Missouri; Cairo, Illinois; Wheeling, West Virginia; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Denver; Los Angeles...I wish I knew how to get a job out of all this.

There've been some changes around here

First off, thanks to the reader who alerted me to this post at the Uptown Update blog that made use of the Riviera photo from my "Thriftiness" post, improperly and hilariously citing my blog as "City of Density." I've barely yet investigated the oft-vicious world of Chicago neighborhood blogs...And thanks to the blogs that recently added mine--General Carlessness; Bright Lights, Dim Beauty; reallyboring (who I've added) and the Ecology of Absence blog, the first I know of to actually quote and link to one of my posts. I'd listed the Ecology of Absence site but overlooked the blog; it's blogrolled now.

Also added: EveryBlock Chicago, which is a news feed for, well, every block; The Beachwood Reporter (a sort of newspaperish site); B12 Solipsism (a photo/news/random stuff blog by the guy known as Swanksalot on Flickr); Ottermatic and Shapely Prose (two Chicago blogs that cover weight issues a lot; the latter's founder, Kate Harding, was on the cover of RedEye last week, and the article actually wasn't bad). I definitely overthink the way the links are organized...for the record, everything until the "More architecture..." section in the lists is based in Chicagoland, except for a few in the top "Architecture" category, but everything in there is Midwestern, at least. I deleted the bicycle/transit and "Health and happiness" categories and moved those links. I haven't done really extensive searches of Chicago blogs, so I'm sure I'll have more before long, and there are friends I'd like to promote who have Flickr pages and other sites but not blogs...we'll see.

The biggest change is the addition of several new categories for some of the non-Chicago political/personal blogs I enjoy. Many were old favorites, and others were discovered as I went through hundreds of links on old favorites' blogrolls. I chose blogs that had posted something new in at least the past couple weeks, are well-written (of course I don't agree with everything, and picked several that challenge some of my views), and weren't exclusively personal blogs (nothing wrong with those, they're just not what I want to list there). The lists are here for my convenience more than anything. I don't expect any of these blogs to blogroll me since I don't write much political content here. Nor will I explain right now why these are the particular causes I care about.

So. There's a general category for political/feminist blogs (* = group blogs), and categories for three issues I particularly care about. Adoption: reform-oriented blogs by people who are one or more of the following: adoptees, especially international/transracial adoptees, birth mothers, adoptive mothers. Mental health: by people who've experienced psychiatric treatment. Weight/body image: fat acceptance/anti-diet oriented. Big Fat Blog, Shapely Prose, and Ottermatic fit that category, but since they're Chicago, they're elsewhere. I'd like to be a member at Big Fat Blog (a blog I've known about for years, but didn't realize was Chicago-based till last year). I understand why they don't want diet-talk there, but their "please don't register if" says: "You are interested in losing weight now (or possibly in the future, maybe - like you're actively planning on it)" and well, I would like to...I just wouldn't make a big deal of it. The Health Institute of Nutrition (THIN) and Fascism Advocacy Center are satirical sites that may baffle those not familiar with their respective issues. But I think they're cool.

All for now, though I'll have another, somewhat depressing post up within a day. Soon I'd like to put up "A Walk in Albany Park", because I did in fact get photos of the building mentioned in the previous post, and buy donuts (pretty good) at Donut Doctor. Okay, it's not a bad place...just don't let the orange-and-lavender color scheme scare you away!

Promoting other people

[UPDATE: Happy birthday, Shag! I feel guilty I forgot. That's a photo of one of Shag's cats in this post, BTW. My brother in Phoenix also had his birthday this week and I felt guilty for not calling him, but it turns out the number wouldn't have worked anyway...And I added a couple more food links since first posting this]
An astute new reader pointed out that my last post really wasn't that much cheerier as I'd promised, and this one...well, it's mostly happy, as aside from dismal weather and ongoing iPhoto problems (it'll take a few more trips to the Genius Bar to fix that. BTW, weird that a few minutes after me, Katherine H.'s appointment, was "catherine h.") things are okay. I had great fun with that previous post; it made me feel I'm edging towards being a "real" blogger, with lots of links and opinions and stuff.

So my Flickr friend Citizen Pioneer curated a show called "Ward 7: America's Abandoned Asylums" by a young urban explorer/photographer from Atlanta, Shawn May. I didn't get around to promoting the show here, but I did distribute over 100 promo cards for it at many of Chicago's cooler stores and coffeeshops. And I did go nuts making cupcakes for the reception Sat. Jan. 19: 2 dozen Cookies 'n' Cream, 1 dozen peanut butter with chocolate glaze, 1 dozen coconut-accented vanilla with raspberry buttercream frosting, coconut flakes, and pink sprinkles. The cupcakes were a hit (good thing, after I dragged them all there on TWO buses in ZERO degree weather); too bad I didn't get good enough photos to post them to the Vegan Cupcakes Flickr group.

Anyway, the show had photos of different asylums May had explored, and some disturbing medical books and artifacts he'd picked up from them. This was at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Bridgeport, and got a great turnout for such a cold night. Claire was in Chicago briefly from St. Louis; I wish I'd gotten to talk to her more. (I still haven't posted about my adventures a month ago with Claire and CP/Alma.) I met the photographer and Flickr people and talked to Noah a lot and watched the cupcakes disappear. (In an alternate universe, my friend Jason attended a literary event I would have gone to if I didn't have the asylum show; I would have gotten to meet some of my Goodreads friends for the first time.)

I haven't read about the history of the mental health system in a while, but it's something I know a fair amount about, so none of the disturbing things in the show were new to me. People certainly need to know about them. On my reading list now: The Architecture of Madness, about the design of mental hospitals. And Project 17, a new young adult novel (I found an advance proof for 50 cents yesterday at the Sulzer library!): "On the eve of [Danvers State H]ospital's demolition, six teens break in to spend the night and film a movie about their adventures. For Derik, it's an opportunity to win a filmmaking contest and save himself from a future of flipping burgers at his parents' diner. For the others, it's a chance to be on TV, or for a night with no parents. But what starts as a playful dare quickly escalates into a frenzy of nightmarish action..." Of course, UE always does.

Blog-related news: last night I commented on feminist blogs for the first time (under my real name, so my comments link to this blog), at Feministe and Pandagon. I've got to get in the habit of that. Of course, I'm always freaked out about checking back to see if anyone responded to my comments...I should get in the habit of mentioning new additions to the blog- and website-roll, so here's some recent ones:

The Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection at Indiana University; Cushman was a photographer who left IU 14,500 Kodachrome color slides of shots around the world from 1938-1969, including many great photos of Chicago (like of old Maxwell Street); it's often hard to find midcentury color photos. A recent Flickr contact is setting out to rephotograph many of Cushman's Chicago shots this year to show how things have changed. Speaking of obsessive projects, my new heroes are the guys at Illinois Pancakes, a great site that I found last week in Time Out Chicago (they said it was a blog by people with way too much free time). More food links, since I recently made that its own category: Steve Dolinsky's "Hungry Hound" ABC-7 segments and Gapers Block Drive-Thru (I sometimes put photos in their Flickr group pool, and those'll show up on this site).

There's Bright Lights, Dim Beauty of Chicago, "Showing the past and present views of vintage Chicago and surrounding suburbs"--combining Chicago and vintage stuff, awesome! Forgotten New York, which is related to a book I bought on my last NYC trip but haven't read yet. The Next American City, a terrific magazine about city issues; I think I first discovered it when I finally visited the legendary Chicago-Main Newsstand in Evanston for the first time last year (I was hoping to go up there and grab a copy this week); there's a blog section. And The City Desk--just check it out. I found it through Noah (you're on their blogroll, congrats!)