Category: Uncategorized

Now that the sun has decided to show its face in Ann Arbor again, State Street has been reanimated.  Everyone is back– all of the people eating ice cream on the sidewalk, the guy playing guitar on the corner, and my personal favorite, the man who sells books outside of Amer’s.  This man and I have a very complicated relationship.  I love his prices and the books he has on display (sometimes with the sign “Good Books $5, Bad Books $10), but I also hate him, because I cannot walk by that table without buying a book.  And just like that, another bit of my non-disposable income has been spent on A Prayer for Owen Meany.

The sidewalk bookseller makes me undeniably happy not just because he has great prices and reminds me of the best parts of Ann Arbor but also because he is like my local bookseller.  Yes, I go to and adore Dawn Treader, but the sidewalk bookseller is directly on my way to and from home, and he becomes a part of my day just as much as a trip to the grocery store or CVS.  That’s how reading should be.  Digesting good literature should be just as important as digesting a turkey sandwich.

I love local bookstores.  I do miss Borders, in all its corporate accessibility, but there is something so personal and beautiful about searching for and eventually finding the exact book you’re looking for.  There’s a history in a dog-eared paperback that you don’t get with a clean, crisp first edition.  I think there is a place on my bookshelf for both shiny books with their binding in tact as well as well-worn, well-read books that have passed from person to person.  And without that search for the book you want, you might never accidentally stumble upon another treasure.  You might find something you never knew you were looking for.

One thing I’ve noticed about the sidewalk bookseller, the cashier at Dawn Treader, and the workers at nearly every other local bookstore I’ve visited, is that they love books.  And they love to talk about books too.  That is what we lose by ordering from Amazon or going into Barnes and Noble.  Sure, you can go online and engage in discussion in some forum or on a fansite, but you won’t get that same spontaneous gut reaction that you get when the person ringing you up notices that you bought their favorite book and they can’t help but gush about it.

Locally-owned bookstores can be a vital part of a community.  I am obsessed with the website McSweeney’s, and they are often advertising readings and tours that take place exclusively in small, local bookstores.  By integrating a bookstore into the community, it becomes uniquely specific to that community’s needs and feel.  A bookstore you find in Ann Arbor won’t look the same as a bookstore you find in rural Pennsylvania won’t look the same as a bookstore you find in Southern California.  That’sjust the nature of book buying and selling.  The store’s tone and focus depends on the seller, the buyer, and their relationship with one another.

I understand why Amazon is taking over the world.  I do.  It’s convenient, it’s cheap, and you have pretty much anything you could ever want right at your fingertips.  But Amazon can never replace the physical bookstore.  At least not spiritually,emotionally, whatever you want to call it.  I know this is an argument that has been beaten to death a million times over.  If you search “Amazon vs bookstores” you get six million results.  But I think it is an important thing to think about.

When you go shopping for clothes, you want to try the clothes on, right?  That’s how I feel about shopping for books.  I want the one that feels right.  You probably have a certain brand of electronics you trust.  The same holds for books for me.  There are certain booksellers who I know I can turn to to find what I need, at a price that fits my needs, and I will enjoy my entireexperience when purchasing said book.  Bookstores are about books.  That is obvious.  But that’s not all.  Bookstores are about the experience.  I am convinced that having local bookstores inspires lifetime readers.  I know that I am a more avid reader because of the experiences I had picking out books at the local stores growing up.  When a child sees the passion that a group of people have for reading, they want to understand what that is about and hopefully become a part of it.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, thank you sidewalk bookseller, thank you Dawn Treader, thank you Olympia Books in Dowagiac, Michigan, for reminding me why I fell in love with books in the first place.

One of my favorite Hip Hop albums of all time is Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor, and has been for a long time. In high school English my class once discussed the elements that classify certain literature as “classic,” generating ideas such as timeless messages, relatable characters and producing the feeling of a new discovery while reading for it the umpteenth time. Under these criteria, Food and Liquor most assuredly deserves the same title. I was initially attracted to the album by its organized, powerful beats and Lupe’s smooth voice, not to mention his incredibly unique flow. The way his voice so effortlessly cascaded over the instrumentals struck me in a new way that Hip Hop had previously been unable to accomplish. I focused on memorizing every word of “Kick Push,” absorbing Lupe’s passion for skateboarding, let my mind enjoy the quick word-play and sharp lyricism of “I Gotcha” and used “The Emperor’s Soundtrack” to harness my adrenaline before sporting events. I adapted the album and used it to get closer to Lupe, in turn helping me transition into the world of Hip Hop. The album reached me at a surface level; I took delight in the sound, and lost myself in the feeling it created. The meaning behind it, upon first listen, eluded me.

I return now to dig deeper, and pronounce Food and Liquor as one of the most socially conscious rap albums of all time, and secure it unequivocally among my top three favorites. One of the most important segments of the entire seventy-two minutes occurs in the first sixty seconds, in the “Intro.” So eager to hear the album, I used to foolishly skip over the prelude; for years its message escaped me and therefore misguided the rest of my listening experience. Lupe’s sister, Iesha Jaco, performs a spoken word poem to commence the album, accurately describing common landmarks and summarizing the culture of low-income, impoverished neighborhoods. She brilliantly identifies how these areas are overpopulated by unhealthy, inexpensive food dispensaries such as fast food restaurants and liquor stores, adding the first layer of meaning to the album’s title. The poem sets the tone for the rest of the tracks, establishing that this album was born in and evolved from the West side of Chicago, and addresses many of the problems Lupe witnessed.

One way he accomplishes this is through storytelling. In a number of songs, including “He Say She Say,” “The Cool,” and “Kick Push (II)” Lupe divulges short anecdotes that illustrate the problems about which he is concerned. “He Say She Say” tells the story of a child growing up without a father, and how that negatively impacts his life. Both verses are identical except that the first is from the mother’s perspective, and the second is from the boy’s, meaning the only words that change are the pronouns: him changes to me, his to mine, etc. The impact is enormous. Or “The Cool,” which tells the story of a drug dealer shot on the street, who wakes up in his grave, returns to his home with a different appearance and gets robbed by the same men who killed him. When threatened with a gun he responds, “Hustler for death, no heaven for a gangster.” Lupe drastically explains how a lifestyle of selling drugs can be impossible to escape from, saying that this man is a “Hustler for death” opposed to a “Hustler for life.”

Perhaps my favorite verse on the entire album is the first portion of “Hurt Me Soul,” a lyrically brilliant statement about Hip Hop and American politics. The first verse addresses Lupe’s initial conflicts with the genre of Hip Hop, citing notoriously crude and controversial rapper Too Short and his use of the word “bitch.” However, Lupe explains how his experiences allowed him to relate to the culture and see past Too Short to its real value. Lupe, unlike other rappers, uses Hip Hop as a mechanism to reach his audience- not one of consumers, but of people who share the same experiences or are dedicated to social change. “Hurt Me Soul” is about the ramifications that US policy has on the individual person, especially underprivileged Americans, and Lupe represents that. He is serving as a voice for these people, advocating on their behalf when nobody else will. That is the essence of Food and Liquor. That is why Lupe is a socially conscious Hip Hop artist. He has experienced adversity, he is familiar with the struggle, and despite his success and fame he continues to be aware of it. Iesha Jaco finishes her introductory poem with the line, “But God has another solution, that has evolved from the hood.. I present one who turns, the Fiasco to good.” For anyone attempting to find social justice in Hip Hop, look no further.

It is often the uninhabited spaces, the ones that may once have been inhabited but are no longer, that end up being the spaces richest with potential. Urban exploration plumbs the depths of this potential, delving into places that sit mouldering away forgotten and unnoticed, slowly crumbling, fading into dust. Abandoned structures are often seen as scars on the land, eyesores that need to be removed. But others hold that decay ought to be preserved or permitted to perpetuate, because in them is something else, something, perhaps, with meaning more profound than what the ordered society of today can provide. If an old factory quietly by itself gathers age and rust and dust, as paint crackles and curls in on itself, beams and roofs cave in, and there is no around to see, is it still beautiful?

Is it still meaningful?

For, after all, one cannot stand around and watch decay occurring. Its timescale is not one proportionate to the human lifetime. We cannot perceive change happening. We must leave it, forget about it. And then, one day, we return, happening upon it by chance. (Although it is likely to be not us ourselves, but another individual, belonging to some later time.) That’s what urban exploration is, really. Rediscovery, because this place is already in existence, been known by man. Discovery, because it has never been known in this state, this form. It is old, and it is new.

The history an abandoned structure carries is multi-layered. It has one history, the one in which it was alive and thriving and in use, and the one after it was left to ruin. Maybe it was partially demolished, expanded, or repurposed. Maybe one building was built over the ruins of another. Sifting through the layers in order to read this history is a sort of compacted, modified archaeology. It’s the exploration of an anthropological wilderness. Unlike a museum, where everything has been lifted from its original context, the abandoned structure and its contents have, much of the time, remained untouched. Each location sits there, with its multiplicity of pasts, perhaps isolated (a singular hospital building), perhaps interconnected (old sewer systems). And in a practical sense, the number of sites out there waiting to be explored is inexhaustible. Said an urban explorer during a home teams win soccer tips seminar: “For every building, for every structure, there exists an equal-sized hole in the ground.” It’s a thrilling thought, really.

Not all of these abandoned places, however, remain abandoned for long; unused space is quite the commodity these days. The higher population density of the UK, for instance, means a greater density of such sites that require less traveling to get to, but it also means that said abandoned places do not have much time to sit and stagnate. They’re sold, demolished, gutted and rebuilt, pushing urban exploration to progress at an accelerated rate- there seems to be more of a flurry around finding abandoned structures before they’re gone. Whereas in places with more land area to spare (the US, for instance), one might be more likely to find more massive building complexes, extensive underground systems, or entire ghost towns just sitting there, with no threat of disappearing anytime soon.

That said, urban exploration doesn’t have to be, strictly speaking, urban. A bullet point in some of my old notes lists places that could be of interest:

rural (ghost towns, farmsteads, plane graveyards), infrastructure, active sites, underground (mines, sewer systems), vanishing industry, institutions (prisons, churches, hospitals)

Urban exploration is unlikely to be sustainable as a large-scale, widespread activity; the intrinsically unsullied nature of such places relies on the fact they are largely forgotten. But keep an eye out for those places that people tend to ignore or not seem to see at all, because you might just be surprised.