I pinpoint my first flash of place-consciousness to a day when I was in elementary school while growing up in Rockford, Illinois. I don’t remember precisely how old I was, […]
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UR Here: Where Has All the Googie Gone?
Change is coming to downtown Iowa City. Since the “21” referendum last fall, this mantra has been chanted incessantly by people from all sides of the issue. For better or […]
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UR Here: Brigid Sends a Flaming Birthday Poem to Little Village
Congratulations to Little Village on its 100th issue! February is a wonderful month to celebrate this milestone. Here in the middle lands, most people moan and groan about February. Shoveling […]
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UR Here: Seeing Tiny Places
Bad eyesight and new reading glasses. Just another step along the way of middle age? Yes, but last month, they also sparked in me some new thoughts on place. I’m […]
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UR Here: C'Mon Get Hokey
“Home for the Holidays.” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It’s that time of year when the return home defines the season for many people. Songs, movies and TV specials during […]
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UR Here: Connection, Consequence and Place
One of the problems we have in modern, globalized, industrialized society is that we often fail to understand, acknowledge or care about the consequences of what we do. If we really, truly cared about the environment, we would calculate the damage we inflict upon the Earth every time we start up a car or airplane, turn on a computer, throw away Styrofoam, etc.
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UR Here: Food + Sex = Place
In early August, my family and I returned from our annual sojourn to the Minnesota North Woods. Our experience this year dramatically illustrated to me that the two major ingredients of a sense of place are food and sex.
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UR Here: Keys to the City
Kudos to Mark Ginsberg and Marc Moen for putting pianos out in our public downtown walkways a la the “Play Me, I’m Yours” initiative in New York City and elsewhere. […]
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UR Here: Challenging Change
In the raging underage/binge drinking debate in Iowa City, a couple of familiar refrains keep singing: “You can’t change the drinking culture,” and “Downtown Iowa City’s economy will collapse,” the latter with various subpoints (the downtown economy is heavily bar-dependent, so there will be mass vacant storefronts, many jobs will be lost, tax revenue will plummet, etc., etc.). These talking points are repeated ad infinitum by many, but especially the student population. Underlying both of these arguments is a fundamental belief that things cannot change from their current state. The universe always tells us that nothing is further from the truth.
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UR Here: That Black Iowa Dirt
It’s a beautiful early spring Saturday, the day before Easter, in fact. The temperature will probably see 70 today, an early gift of the summer to come. The sunshine on my neck is warm, a feeling I’ve missed for many months. As Christians prepare to celebrate the breath of a resurrected spirit promising new life, and as Jews celebrate their people’s new breath of freedom, I work at my personal offices of spring, trying to breathe new air–and re-borning life–into the ground of my home.
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UR Here: Boundary Waters
UR Here: March 2010 – Eastern Iowans nervously watched the snow pile up in their yards and fields this winter. While we did not threaten any records, the memory of […]
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UR Here: Small Towns, Big Loss
In my last column, I presented some statistics demonstrating that the majority of Iowans are “urban” by U.S. Census standards and have been since 1950. With fewer farmers, the raison […]
