"Fake Suburban Towns offer Urban Life Without the Grit"
breathe, kate, breathe.
it's hard to retain one's composure, though, when a colossal tool like this man is allowed to freely roam the planet:
Many residents rarely venture even to downtown Dallas, which has been trying to turn itself into place to live for almost a decade. "There's too much riffraff down there," says Ron Pettit, a 36-year-old contractor, as he snacks on brie and grapes at a table outside Bishop Road's Main Street Bakery and Bistro.
i don't even have the words. and not just because it's monday morning. i truly don't know what to say to that. bravo, ron pettit, you have taken my breath away with your stunning level of ignorance and obnoxiousness.
7 comments:
Um, does anyone actually say "riffraff"? I thought they just used words like that on The Love Boat.
The whole idea of fake cities is mindboggling to me. I can see the appeal, due to the domestic disturbance that lives across the street from me and the stabbing on block over on Thursday night, but it is so superficial. Without these things leading us to our neighborhood watches and clean-up days- how can they really build a community? A Starbucks on every corner and the isolation of suburbia all at once. Yuck.
The whole idea of fake cities is mindboggling to me.
yeah. for me, i think it's the level of willful head-in-the-sand ignorance that really gets me. like in regular suburbia, there's a kind of implied "i live here because i don't like the dirt/crime/crowdedness/evident poverty of the city" (suburbanites, this is not a diss of suburbia. just pointing out that by nature, suburbia is different than the city and that's why many people choose it). it's not an out-and-out denial of caring about those who might be less fortunate.
but this whole fake urban thing? that's just like, let me have my cake and eat it too. let me live in a place where i can forget that poor people and hungry people and mentally ill homeless people exist, but give me all the nice aspects of city living, please. i am thoroughly unwilling to compromise a bit of my comfort or stability to gain these things.
I was going to write something nasty about Dallasites, but I deleted it. I'll just say that the comment that dude made wasn't a surprise to me, having grown up in the area and having spent more time than a person should have to in Dallas.
Back when I was in grad school, near the end of my time in Columbus, Ohio, a big development project was created out in the northeast of town called "Easton." It was meant to replicate the feel of the actual revitalized downtown area, The Short North. Because it was too hard to drive in from the suburbs to downtown. And then there was parking to deal with. Parking and "riffraff."
Alternately, Manhattan is turning into a gigantic suburban shopping mall with a GAP, Banana Republic, and Starbucks on every corner.
Grant McCracken took a nice crack at this same subject a few days ago... thought I'd pass it along:
http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2006/06/decoding_dynami.html
Let's try that again, weirdcommentssectionwhohateslinks and wants to make me handcode it.
McCracken
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