Main Street, USA

We went to Disney World last week— that’s the big one with four parks in Florida, not two smallish ones in California. Almost everyone gets into the park and then walks up Main Street USA.

I suppose Main Street is intended as a throwback to the last turn of the century, when the cultural center of the American psyche was Main Street, a broad, leaf-lined, pedestrian-friendly old-timey thoroughfare. Of course Disney’s Main Street is hardly any of those, except perhaps pedestrian-friendly. It’s also filled with hordes of people, nearly all of whom are playing tourist, and thus dressed in tourist-wear. That’s not something you get in a typical Main Street, even in a tourist town.

It’s also a great example of the hypperreal. This, from wikipedia: “Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as ‘reality by proxy.’ For example, a viewer watching pornography begins to live in the non-existent world of the pornography, and even though pornography is not an accurate depiction of sex, for the viewer, the reality of “sex” becomes something non-existent.”

So, Main Street is only a halfhearted nod to an actual Main Street, since (as it’s lined with nothing but Disney shops) was never meant to faithfully recreate a Victorian-era boulevard. And there’s the not-so-small matter of the castle that’s looming at the end. Which kind of queers the effect.

Besides, the quintessential experience of American urban life isn’t even represented here: the car. I’d say that if you were going to to represent a modern Main Street USA, it would have to include two things:

A big box store, and

A strip mall. In Disney’s antiseptic, conservative (i.e., hearkening back to an earlier, “more innocent” time), there are no cars. Or for that matter, Wal-Marts or chain stores.

But there are shops. Of course there are shops! On one side of the street is an emporium. One storefront says as much, but if you wander in, you’ll notice that the store runs parallel to the street, and stretches for almost as long, with the building facade creating the illusion of small mom-and-pop stores. And this is entirely appropriate, since what do we have as the hypperreal modern equivalent of Main Street USA?

The shopping mall. In other words, the ideal version of America doesn’t have cars (take that, Detroit and Big Oil!), but it is something we’re supposed to eat and shop.

Lastest Salvos from the Jargon Front

I was at a conference last week, which is a great opportunity to cope with jet lag. It’s also a fun way to hear the newest, latest in consulting jargon.

1) Single-Point Sensitive

What if you have a task or duty in your organization that’s single-point sensitive? Wow, that sounds bad … like you need a consultant, right? Actually, it means you only got one frickin’ guy to do the job. But should I ever get extruded from middle to upper management, I’m making a mental note not to say, “See, the problem is that we only got one frickin’ guy to do the job.”

Instead I’m going to say, “The problem is that the task is single-point sensitive.”

And all those junior middle managers are going to crap their pants extrude fecal matter in awe of my business acumen.

2) Boil the Ocean

I rather like this one. It has a verb in it, it’s punchy Anglo-Saxon instead of abstract Latin (see no. 10), and it’s even metaphoric. The super-smart consultant speaking used it like this: “you don’t want to turn all these features on at once and try to please everyone in the whole enterprise. Instead of trying to boil the ocean, you want to concentrate on a few features at a time.”

What’s funny, though, is that I heard it for the first time last Thursday, from said Australian consultant, in Florida. Then, only six days later, I heard an American executive use the same phrase at a software seminar. In Portland.

This too is going in my semisecret future-upper-management vocabulary.

3) Generate Some Verbiage

While toiling in middle management this week, I got an e-mail from one of the vendors I deal with who used this phrase. I love it! Instead of “write some copy,” or “add a comment” or something that’s the slightest bit … I dunno, clear, he used “generate some verbiage.” (Can you get any more Latin or meaningless than that? Did you catch that slight whiff of pejorative resemblance to a phrase like “excrete some feces”?)

Future middle managers take note: If you give me a report, and I thank you for generating verbiage, I might be damning you with faint praise.

Put the Fun Between Your Legs

Sure it’s a callow double entendre, but if it’s good enough for a bicycling t-shirt, it’s good enough for a headline. I ran across Paul Dorn’s Bike Commuting Tips website today, which merits a mention for those of you waffling about whether or not to dust off the Schwinn. Besides, May is Bike Month. Saddle up!

Paul’s site has plenty o’ tips about commuting, but he isn’t one of those sniffy foot-in-the-clips-and-holier-than-thou types, as he documents the many mistakes he made (clothing, choosing routes, etc.) along the way.

One quoteworthy part:

A big reason why many people don’t commute by bike is because they think like motorists. As drivers, they know that the quickest way to get from Point A to Point B is by Route C. Unfortunately, Route C features abundant high-velocity traffic, plenty of potholes and rough pavement, a few steep hills and several dangerous intersections. Not very attractive even for a seasoned cyclist, let alone a beginner. (Not very attractive for a motorist, for that matter.)

However, there just may be a Route D that runs parallel to Route C. Route D features slower – and thus less abundant – traffic, and is flatter with good pavement, more trees, interesting scenery and many smiling pedestrians.

I did this too, riding on a stretch of a busy road with a 45 mph speed limit. Yipes! Not only that, while I was hauling ass to get off that stretch as fast as possible one day, I got attacked by a dog* (*well, if a Chihuahua counts as a real dog).

Now I avoid the big streets and ride on the quiet ones, just like Paul.

One other cool part of his site are some of the biking quotes he found:

“The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.”–James Marston Fitch, New York Times, May 1, 1960

“Driving a car versus riding a bike is on par with watching television rather than living your own life.”–Bruce MacAlister, Calgary cyclist

“This is the basis of car culture, the idea that the world and all of the world’s people are merely in its way.”– Travis Hugh Culley

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.”–Christopher Morley, American writer and editor, 1890-1957

That last one, surely, should be any writer’s motto.

Coming Soon: “Going on 13″

This is a plug for a movie called “Going on 13.” My cousin, Corey Ohama, is the film editor, and she worked on this project for a looong time. Needless to say I’ve been hearing about it, and looking forward to seeing it.

It first showed at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York (at least, I’m assuming), and Time Out Magazine gave it four stars and said, “A rare and frequently inspiring close-up on girls who are at an age that is usually quite impenetrable to adults” (Here’s the review.)

And now it’s coming right to Portland!

It’s playing at the Portland Women’s Film Festival (POW Fest), on Sunday, May 18, from 4:00 – 5:30 pm at the Hollywood Theater, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., Portland OR.

There’s a trailer for the movie on the Going on 13 website, and at the POW Fest website, where you can also buy tickets.