What is the use of a house if you don't have a decent planet to put it on?
~ Henry David Thoreau
The brook is so low it's barely moving. The whole of our little riparian zone here in our corner lot in Suburbaland is a mess with fallen branches, twisted twig, and windswept trash. It looks miserable. This time of year, when mud season creeps in, I always feel like our land is telling us that it would like to be left alone. That it should never have been disturbed. That it wasn't meant to have been developed. We bought it, though, despite my general concerns regarding suburbia, after the cul-de-sac had been close to fully developed, and the biggish house (and in the grand scope of big-home suburbia--land of obscene McMansions--ours is the caretaker's home, which is still more than I care to care for) and pretty wetlands at its border drew us in.
We bought it for quality of life. For the family. We bought it for the school system (which, as it turned out, was rather overrated and spiraled southward soon after we moved in). We bought it because we got more home for the dollar here in lil' Rhody (oh, but the taxes!). We bought it for the dream.
Lately, I've been reading and reassessing our quality of life and what that means to me, my family, our environment, our ecosystems, the world as a whole...
Swift growth outside of urban areas is not unique to Suburbaland. Our town, to which I have before, by way of photo essay, referred, is like many other suburbs that hope to lure families to the dream with biggish new lots on which sit biggish new homes with biggish new lawns (and sometimes littleish lots with biggish homes and littleish lawns) and the pièce de résistance: biggish privacy. Though I'm not well versed in Suburbaland's permitting process, I'd imagine that developers love towns like ours that seem, or at least seemed at one point, quick to hand out building permits. Of course, we all know how that ended. Yet, it hasn't actually ended.
Several years after we moved into town, a new development went up on a hilly parcel of land along an old country road. The land comprised the few remaining untouched acres on this particular part of the road. Right under the bridge of a highway. McMansions set on steep mounds of craggy soil below the highway. I wondered if we needed housing that badly.
Eventually, the homes sold, with the exception of the first house built at the corner of the country road and the new road. What was also sold off was our buffer zone. Trees and brush and any living thing that offered padding from the noise of the expressway was flattened. A half-mile or so away from the new McHood, my neighborhood is now a little bit noisier. But certainly not noisier than the old Boston 'hood, on Comm. Ave., where most services were a walk away, and the T screeched by every fifteen minutes (which I never, ever minded).
It's all relative, as they say.
Still, I reassess. Our mayor, who hitherto has been the champion of town edification, has proposed a plan to create a town center on the protected lands of our old Monastery, in which the town library is housed. It's a beautiful 550 acre swath of grassy tracts, leafy trails and wetlands where I walk and cross country ski, and where the children run cross-country, and while I applaud the idea of a town center, the thought of transforming any portion of this slice of verdant land into what the mayor dubs an "Educational Village," containing a relocated town hall (in perhaps a more desirable location?) is shameful. The reason we don't have a town center is because of historically poor town planning. It's by this same reason, and at the hands of town solicitors and leaders who believe that land conservation easements were meant to be modified, that this community is at risk of losing even more of our valuable fields and woodland.
So much for Suburbaland's open space priorities.
Simply by virtue of living in this town, in this neat little subdivision without sidewalks, in this world of homes of unused living rooms and front porches, on the edge of the remains of a place that was once fully adorned with flora and fauna, I am beginning to feel that I am in collusion with suburban sprawl--the need to push our planet to its absolute limit, and the willingness to turn a blind eye at the cannibalization of every morsel of land. I am a part of the rapid consumption of open space, the degradation of environment, biodiversity, farmlands, our very quality of life. I am a part.
Yet here we remain. For the children. Until the time, not too long from now, I can remain no more. And when that time arrives I'm going to pray like hell that someone else wants the caretaker's home in the dream.
Will it be different elsewhere?
We bought it for quality of life. For the family. We bought it for the school system (which, as it turned out, was rather overrated and spiraled southward soon after we moved in). We bought it because we got more home for the dollar here in lil' Rhody (oh, but the taxes!). We bought it for the dream.
Lately, I've been reading and reassessing our quality of life and what that means to me, my family, our environment, our ecosystems, the world as a whole...
Swift growth outside of urban areas is not unique to Suburbaland. Our town, to which I have before, by way of photo essay, referred, is like many other suburbs that hope to lure families to the dream with biggish new lots on which sit biggish new homes with biggish new lawns (and sometimes littleish lots with biggish homes and littleish lawns) and the pièce de résistance: biggish privacy. Though I'm not well versed in Suburbaland's permitting process, I'd imagine that developers love towns like ours that seem, or at least seemed at one point, quick to hand out building permits. Of course, we all know how that ended. Yet, it hasn't actually ended.
Several years after we moved into town, a new development went up on a hilly parcel of land along an old country road. The land comprised the few remaining untouched acres on this particular part of the road. Right under the bridge of a highway. McMansions set on steep mounds of craggy soil below the highway. I wondered if we needed housing that badly.
Eventually, the homes sold, with the exception of the first house built at the corner of the country road and the new road. What was also sold off was our buffer zone. Trees and brush and any living thing that offered padding from the noise of the expressway was flattened. A half-mile or so away from the new McHood, my neighborhood is now a little bit noisier. But certainly not noisier than the old Boston 'hood, on Comm. Ave., where most services were a walk away, and the T screeched by every fifteen minutes (which I never, ever minded).
It's all relative, as they say.
Still, I reassess. Our mayor, who hitherto has been the champion of town edification, has proposed a plan to create a town center on the protected lands of our old Monastery, in which the town library is housed. It's a beautiful 550 acre swath of grassy tracts, leafy trails and wetlands where I walk and cross country ski, and where the children run cross-country, and while I applaud the idea of a town center, the thought of transforming any portion of this slice of verdant land into what the mayor dubs an "Educational Village," containing a relocated town hall (in perhaps a more desirable location?) is shameful. The reason we don't have a town center is because of historically poor town planning. It's by this same reason, and at the hands of town solicitors and leaders who believe that land conservation easements were meant to be modified, that this community is at risk of losing even more of our valuable fields and woodland.
So much for Suburbaland's open space priorities.
Simply by virtue of living in this town, in this neat little subdivision without sidewalks, in this world of homes of unused living rooms and front porches, on the edge of the remains of a place that was once fully adorned with flora and fauna, I am beginning to feel that I am in collusion with suburban sprawl--the need to push our planet to its absolute limit, and the willingness to turn a blind eye at the cannibalization of every morsel of land. I am a part of the rapid consumption of open space, the degradation of environment, biodiversity, farmlands, our very quality of life. I am a part.
Yet here we remain. For the children. Until the time, not too long from now, I can remain no more. And when that time arrives I'm going to pray like hell that someone else wants the caretaker's home in the dream.
Will it be different elsewhere?
Lia Ices - Daphne by Pop Culture Monster
Lia Ices released her sophomore effort, Grown Unknown, last January 2011. Pitchfork reviewed it soon thereafter:
When Ices indulges her avant leanings, the material provides a more suitable foil for her voice. A mixture of finger snaps, glinting piano, and subdued organ provides a suitably artful backbone over which she hangs a touchingly forlorn vocal turn on "Little Marriage", and there's a deft marrying of chamber music sadness and welts of distorted guitar on "Bag of Wind". But it's the standout title track that provides the most successful conduit for Ices' eclectic whims, with a militaristic handclap and acoustic picking alongside feather-light string parts. Here Ices sounds relaxed, locating a natural meeting point for her disparate sounds and easing into a vocal that effortlessly intertwines with the arrangement.
From Necima (2008):
Grown Unknown, has all the same haunting melancholy feel as her debut album, Necima, but is less shaky, more grown up than unknown, and clearly reflects her experimental theatre education at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, as well as her Shakespearian studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
Lia ices -grownunknown by totosarg
Bravo, Lia.
