Across the street I hear conversation and laughter coming from the sidewalk tables at Pix Patisserie<\/a> (the site of yesterday’s carnage<\/a>).<\/p>\n As Jigger dawdles along, sniffing for edible morsels (road sushi<\/em>, we call it), I look down at the sidewalk and see the almost knee-high grass growing ragged in the muddy strips along sides of buildings and in the sad little space between paved sidewalk and paved road. It’s nearly knee-high because this is the kind of neighborhood where almost no one does any upkeep.<\/p>\n And suddenly, as I wonder why in hell grass is even growing here (and why does it have to look so scraggly), I’m reminded of my many midnight visits to coffeehouses in Schwabing<\/a>, a neighborhood in Munich.<\/p>\n No matter what time I visited, the cafes were always filled with people – posers, models, artists, writers, film-makers, business jocks – you name it. At 2 in the morning, skinny city girls with high fashion allure ate luscious tortes, perhaps the only meal they consumed all day. They made a show of it, and it was worth seeing them eat.<\/p>\n http:\/\/youtu.be\/B9fOKVcdLL8<\/p>\n (And for those who don’t get the reference, The Cure<\/a> set to music a Baudelaire poem about street people looking at rich people feasting in caf\u00e9s, and a painter named Manet may have been inspired by that poem.)<\/p>\n There simply wasn’t any grass, nearly knee-high or not, growing out of place on those Munich boulevards, which were sealed against the elements and designed for city shoes.<\/p>\n Looking at North Williams, with its odd mixture of poverty, sad suburbanism, unfinished urbanism and vaguely emerging urban vibe-ness (but still trapped in all the outward signs of decrepitude and a deep and troubling<\/a> history of racial strife – read, white oppression), I suddenly had to think of that bastard \u00c9douard Manet<\/a> and his paintings of the Parisian banlieues<\/em> (suburbs).<\/p>\n The art historian T.J. Clark made a big deal of those unfinished edges of Paris in his book, The Painting of Modern Life<\/a>, and rightly so. As I walked, taking in that godawful grass, the horrible admixture of muck and vegetation, rotting clapboard on an old house, bits of trash, and the “emerging” hipster vibe emanating from Pix or from The Box Social<\/a> across the street, I suddenly felt like some displaced Parisian in …oh, Batignolles perhaps, strolling along the Avenue de Clichy when it was quiet – before, you know, that American got there and caused a ruckus. No doubt there was near-knee-high grass on the roadsides there, too, and, mixed in with a sparse sampling of interesting cafes, a bunch of ugly, half-falling apart buildings of relatively recent vintage. Because in neighborhoods like that, nothing is built to last – and it shows. Why Portland’s North Williams Avenue reminds me of Edouard Manet and his paintings of the unfinished suburbs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1242,31185],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just_so","category-portland-2"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5252"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5266,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252\/revisions\/5266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why grass?<\/h3>\n
For those beautiful girls, a song:<\/h3>\n
Meanwhile, back on the sidewalk I’m standing on…<\/h3>\n
Class or race? Class and race.<\/h3>\n
\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pics.campl.us\/f\/f\/f564dcd1277b4bb7eeb83698e3d9a6f0.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"