House Hunting

Todd Hido has a special knack of capturing the dark side of suburbia. Its like the rundown dream of what Owens captured in its hay day. Owens captured a lighter more functional side of the suburban life, and Hido portrays the cryptic decay of dysfunction over time. It is quite striking. I relate to Hido's view of suburbia as I grew up in the rundown barrios of San Jose, but have always coveted how Owens captures middle America. They portray two sides of the same coin.

Slowly Calling the Burbs Home

Patricia Lahrmer discusses the camaraderie within the suburbs. She describes her evolution from not really being impressed with the notion of moving to the suburbs to not wanting to leave due to the close knit sense of community she found there. She describes it as a rather mundane life, however she expresses a sense of deep liking concerning the simplicity of her environment. She portrays an overwhelming sense of security of which she has grown accustomed to.
Owens, on the other hand, captures the suburbs photographically for its variety of different personalities within this culture. He focuses on the eccentricities of the people who inhabit the suburbs, highlighting their materialism in a very sympathetic manner, capturing middle America in all its glory. Lahrmer and Owens both seem to come to a similar spot in the acceptance of this bazaar and interestingly normal cultural phenomenon.

24 Hours at the Golden Apple

I found this radio program to be brilliant. It took a social fixture, the diner, and basically stood in as a fly on the wall to monitor all of the comings and goings of the patrons. It seemed as though the diner attracted all sorts of people of different age groups, social classes, and job types. The regulars seemed to be the life's blood of this public place, people from the neighborhood. It was interesting how everybody was so different from each other depending on the time of day and the age group, but they all had this common tie that brought them together in having a similar feeling about this diner being almost a home base or staging area for their day. It was peculiar that the owners and waitresses did not seem to mind that there were regulars that would hang out all day because that is something that is unheard of on the West coast.

Criteria for a Healthy Landscape

I found it interesting that Paul Groth tied in man's necessity to be part of nature as being a healthy landscape because it seems to be an innately human trait to try to distance one's self away from and justify being superior to nature and natural forces rather than to consider one's self as a part of nature. Though times are changing it would appear that people still have a superiority complex when it comes to being part of a natural phenomenon. So I suppose people can be "nifty", however in general they are very short sighted and don't view themselves as part of their own landscape, and instead view themselves as controllers or manipulators of the landscape around them.

K-Mart

I found this essay to be so very accurate as to my experience with K-Mart, though I don't tend to agree that Walmart and Target are any better as far as the caliber of customers that seem to grow from these places. They all have a flea market kind of atmosphere, except people tend to be a little more courteous at flea markets. It's very rare that I allow myself the personal insult of mingling with the unwashed masses. K-Mart: with its staff that has no idea of where to find anything that is stocked at the store, Walmart, where employees get trampled to death so that their customers can have a better position to attend a sale, and at Target the customers seem to have a sincere threatening posture- ready to run into your car with theirs at any given moment in order to get a parking spot. In light of all of this, I suppose they do have their own special, personal charm, I just have a hard time seeing it.