OK, So Sue Me - I Don't Like Cities

Went to Rochester to see Matt Good the other night (GREAT SHOW, by the way) and was reminded again how much I dislike cities.

There's a restless energy present, and for sure cities offer a cultural diversity unmatched in small towns. I also will be the first to acknowledge the irony in the fact that I had to drive to a city to see an artist I really like - and yet here I am throwing down on cities.

When I arrive in a city, the first thing I realize is that there is so little green. Yeah, I know cities have spectacular parks, but forcing nature into little pigeonholes (pun intended) is just all wrong. I suppose if I were a "glass half full" kinda' guy I would point to things like the resurgence of the Peregrine falcon in many cities as proof of the resiliency of nature and take hope and comfort in that. (Or, as Ian Anderson said in "Jack In The Green" "I saw some grass growing through the pavements today...")

The second thing that always strikes me about cities is that they're so cold and so impersonal. You can live and die in a city and no one will give a damn. You could, if you wanted to, spend your entire life without any meaningful contact with another human being. You could live in a little anonymous little box of an apartment, ride the bus by yourself to your anonymous little cube of an office in another nondescript tower of an office building and come home again. No one will even notice you when one of the myriad of ambulances come to haul you off after a Monday morning heart attack. You're not even a cog in a machine - at least in that case, one might feel like one had a role to play. To be sure, this could happen in a more rural setting, but it's much more difficult to go through life so impersonally when there are so many fewer people around you. Sounds counterintuitive, but when there are so many fewer people, and they're not on the move or as guarded, as they are in cities, it's easier to interact. It's almost inevitable.

The coldness is embodied in the buildings. As I stood looking out the window of our 21st floor hotel room, I reflected on the buildings around us. The inexorable, ruthless pace of change is evident in the physical structures. Older buildings, having outlived their usefulness are either forgotten and decaying, facade-ed over or torn down to be replaced with new concrete boxes. Many of them were built in the 19th century, built by men long since gone. I wondered about those men. What were they like? Did they anticipate the completion of the building as they neared the top? Did they celebrate the laying of the last brick and then pause to bask in the pride of the project they'd just completed? Did they bring their families to see the monument they'd just completed? Their hopes and dreams are there, in the bricks they laid one at a time, in good times and bad. The birth of a child, the death of a loved one, weddings and funerals are all there, in those simple clay blocks,entombed forever. Like a tapestry, the individual threads are lost in the big picture.

One thing that makes me wonder if it isn't getting worse is comparing the older buildings to the new ones. At least the older buildings have details in the brickwork, ornate cornices and flourishes, in places that are impossible to see from the ground. Why? A testament to craftsmanship because someone took pride, because someone cared? Even that level of the personal touch now seems gone - contrast that with the newer buildings: Soulless, cold glass and steel people boxes that look like they were molded somewhere and slapped down on the site, not built with pride.

In the city, it seems as if people are born in boxes, spend their whole lives in drab boxes and die in mundane boxes - be it a gray apartment, a beige office, or the metaphoric invisible box they build around themselves. It seems to me there is so much more color in life that they're missing.

It's sad.

Then again maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm just a stick-in-the-mud hick.