Fargophilia

The weeks of heat have kept me inside and on the internet, away from daily walks and local culture. I couldn’t even do the street fair — we made it about a block and a half before the heat was intolerable. Walks with the dogs are short and panty. The lawn hasn’t been mowed in probably a month, due to the lack of grass in any form, which has alowed the drought-tolerant weeds to lay their claim and defy all who oppose them. The thunderstorms in recent evenings have been welcome…although, with the heat still lingering, obese humidity has replaced the rather dry heat of early July.

What I’ll talk about here is opinion, at large, of Fargo in general. First of all, we have Bob Bestler, Fargo expatriate. In a recent column, Bestler weighs climate heavily, doubting Money magazine’s evaluation of Fargo as a great place to live. His recollections of thirty-below weather shines doubt on Money’s evaluation — but, Mr Bestler, have you noticed our 100+ degree weather lately? Other than intolerable winters, there’s a 140-150 degree difference between that and our summers, making for intolerable weather all year round! Er, maybe that didn’t come out right. It’s probably just the heat talking.

Bestler, fortunately, is a bit more crochety than other people who’ve seen Fargo for what it is. Last winter (interestingly, during some of the coldest part of winter) Lawrence Schumacher of the St Cloud Times stopped by and liked what he saw. Remembering the Downtown of the late 1990s, Schumacher approved of Fargo’s revitalization these days, and went so far as to recommend modelling St Cloud’s downtown after it. Much of his compliments are focused on night life, which one can hardly define a city by even though it’s how men’s magazines and alternative newspapers measure a town’s worth. The loss of youth and the ‘brain drain’ are big contributors to city death, so Schumacher might have his finger on a thermometer of metropolitan health.

Joel Kotkin of Inc.com has a better perception of that thermometer. Simply having a Cool Downtown isn’t what makes Fargo a great city to live in: it’s the money. Fargo’s economy, once domainted by agrarian desires, is now firmly entrenched in modern technologies, from RFID to electric cars. When a region can boast offices of both Microsoft and Amazon.com (in Grand Forks), something must be going right. Schumacher points out the organic growth of Downtown, a commercial district created by demand rather than planning. Bestler’s Florida-retiree audience isn’t going to be receptive to these recommendations, and Schumacher’s late-20s-bachelor lens wouldn’t have been pleased, either. Fargo appeals to thirtysomethings, either developing or entrenched in family matters, whose education and quality of life expectations are more than met by Fargo’s economy and environment. Our Cool Downtown wasn’t manufactured to create an artificial sheen on an ugly underlayer; it’s here because people with money and free time are ready to part with their money. Kotkin sees what Fargo’s growth comes from: making people with families and skills happy.

Even though the value of my skills are in doubt, Fargo makes me happy. While having kids make enjoying Fargo’s night life difficult, we enjoy what our town has to offer. Well, when it’s not so hot. Or so cold. Without Fargo’s Cool Factor, it would be the intolerable place Bestler thinks it is. Money Magazine and Joel Kotkin have it in perspective, though, and realize that culture is the climate that makes a town, not temperature.

Sidenote: Me & the kids spend a few days hunting the Painted Bison — go have a look!

The BlogConcierge posted this question:

I’m curious – do you consider blogging an art? I mean, is it more akin
to writing on the bathroom wall (something to be enjoyed by the next
few users, then painted over or scrubbed away) or is it something that
should be better appreciated, with more longevity? What do you think
the place of the blog is in our society/culture?

I started to reply in her blog, but decided I had more to say than could fit into a litle comment box.

As with most creative projects, "art" is subjective. Comic books were for a time considered commonplace and unartistic in their flatness and simple colors, but Roy Lichtenstein adopted the style in his art, comic artists pushed the edges of style and design to its limits, and now today comics range from the old-style lines and simple colors up to elaborate works of graphic art. The difference between a 1950s Superman and a 1990s Sandman is in application — in simple terms, they’re both comics, but they come from different artistic directions. Literature is equally divided: the literary status of Stephen King is permanently in question, but nobody disputes the popularity of his work despite the supposed lack of ‘art’ in his books. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is considered a literary masterpiece by some, but incomprehensible and gratuitously disgusting by others. High school students traditionally yawn and fuss over reading Shakespeare while doing their book reports on Danielle Steele and Tom Clancy. You can even find people who deride Lichtenstein as crap compared to the comics he copied. Coming up with a definition of "art" that might help define blogging looks difficult.

Considering art at its simplest term, as in the term ‘artisan,’ art is the creation of something by skilled human hands. Anything: a hammer or a hairnet. By this definition, a blog is art, in creating something new where nothing existed before. It’s immensely feasible online, when few raw materials are required, relying entirely on the skill of the blogger. Outsider art is an example of art that becomes art simply through its creation. Anybody can be a painter, so long as they have an audience wiling to enjoy it. Painters and musicians on streetcorners begging for money for their art are creating something that isn’t mass-producable elsewhere. You can’t go into a Wal-Mart and buy newly-imported street art fresh off the boat form China, nor can you go down to Hornbacher’s and buy a meal prepared by a chef. Art comes from the hand of a person, and that makes it art.

Most people wouldn’t consider half of the hand-made stuff at the street fair art — but getting them to agree on which is art and which isn’t is the tough task. Badmouth/compliment Devo or Britney Spears in the wrong crowd and you’ll see how art is varyingly defined by the audience. We tend to consider art to be something that has unique creative value, something with emotion and a message and the inability to reproduce it by just anybody.
Most painters don’t accidentally paint a Picasso or Dali, filmmakers don’t randomly product Citizen Kane. Those works are considered art because they are unique and original, and then become a target for new artists to reach. However, most people look at a Pollock mural and think, "I could do that," but what makes a Pollock is the artist. Horror and suspense book lists are full of Stephen King and Anne Rice wannabes every year, but they do not reach any acclaim unless something sets them apart from the predecessor — and that becomes credited to the author. The original Romeo and Juliet, when set next to the derivitive Romeo + Juliet movie from the 1990s, are both art — but for different reasons. The former is in language and subject, the latter is in visual and conceptual style. Both were taken from earlier works, a rather bland story of "star-crossed" lovers who kill themselves to make a useless point, but each is considered art by modern society. Somewhere inside a man-made item there must be a spark of creativity, something that identifies the whole as art, regardless of the production itself.

Blogs range from reposted links stolen from other blogs, to detailed diaries, to progressive works of fiction. As with paintings, flim, literature, and theatre, blogs have something in common: the creation by human hands, and the uniqueness of the creator. Each can be considered art in its own way, based on style, composition, meaning, and purpose — just like any other form of art. Livejournal and MySpace, both filled with rambling drivel of today’s youth, are huge examples of mass-multimedia art. People flock to these sites, able to both write about what’s on their minds and be able to react and respond to the thoughts of their peers. It doesn’t need to be literary gold — nobody has said that art has to be considered good.

Blogging is not strictly literature: the art lies in making something that connects to a larger whole, whether its a specific website or a network of similar-leaning blogs. Without a connection to other websites, blogs flounder in an empty wasteland. By linking each other, they net themselves together into a larger picture. Unless other blogs link to it, a blog exists in a vacuum, unable to be heard. Blogs that do little else but link to other blogs are collages, combining bits of other people’s art into a cohesive whole. Fiction blogs don’t post entire chapters or entire books online — they compose individual posts to make up an entire work of fiction, sometimes without end. The diary bloggers who place their life up for scrutiny are compiling their personal memoirs, in real-time, without editorial benefit. All these various bloggers find one another, based on common themes and ideals, and interact through related posts or blog comments. Like this one: I had a choice to make a short comment on BlogConcierge’s blog or blog it myself, and instead chose a longer-format by linking to her. This now creates a third dimension to both of our writings, like the beauty in a railcar covered in overlapping graffiti. While any blogger’s post might stand on its own, how it fits into the bigger picture, how it connects internally and externally, make up its creative whole.

The impermanence of specific blog posts is missing the big picture: No blog exists for any single post. Recent studies show 36 hours is the half-life of online postings; no single writing has enough time to define a blog individually. As blogs link to each other and search engines spider a blog, new readers are brought in not by the newest post, but by a links from some other website to an individual post that fulfills a reader’s need. These nonlinear entrances show how the blog doesn’t rely on reading what’s here and now, but the blog’s collective contents as a whole.

Blogs are complex things, not a single sheet of paper filled up and set aside. They are a combination of what makes a person unique, and what they create becomes an extension of it. A blog is about collecting a persons thoughts and ideas, folded in with derivitive connections to other people’s creations and expressions of unique points of view, erected as a creation that can be identified singularly, but also within a genre and style of its own. What could be a better definition of "art"?

Somewhere around December, the wifey begins to complain about one thing. Well, she does complain about the weather, and about the heating bills, and about "dawn" meaning "mid-morning," and snow tracked in (when we all should know darn well to take off our boots at the door) — but those are "regular complaints," parts of life that nobody really likes but nobody who lives here hates enough to do anything about it. You can’t really live anyplace without a list of those in your pocket; part of life is grumbling a little bit about your world, just to make small-talk. No, my wife’s complaint, a genuinely painful grievance, is that we can’t go for a walk.

While neither of us could be considered "old" (except by our children), a couple years ago we had started to notice our inactive lifestyles weren’t friendly to our bodies. My wife and I were both geekish youth, neither the sporting type, so going to the gym or joining a league wouldn’t fit our lifestyles. We have dogs and kids, so we’d gone for walks in the past, but we hadn’t really considered the health benefit until we started loking at what we had. Our decision, as a first step in making ourselves healthier, was to walk more.

Fargo may not be pedestrian-friendly in the winter, but the city has made up for it in accomodating summer walkers. It is a rare area that has no sidewalks (such as the industrial park); every place that people would live has a sidewalk at their front door. This consistency makes variations surprising: the cul-de-sac near South Kmart whose sidewalk ends half-way around, or the stretch of 13th avenue, around 24th street, with two sidewalks separated by three feet of grass and trees, running the length of the block. When I both lived and worked downtown, my car sat unused for weeks at a time. When we lived on the south side, walking was limited a bit due to the curvy chaos of new subdivisions and trouble in fording the wide gulfs called University Drive, 25th Street, and I-94. It didn’t stop us from heading north to Ice Cream + (stopping on the blue bridge over 94 to wave at semi drivers), or all the way to Rose Creek via the paved-over abandoned rail line.

Now that we’re on the north side, not far from Downtown, we can accomplish most of our days’ activities on foot. Heading up to Sunmart to pick up dinner isn’t a chore: it’s a family event. The dogs are harnessed up, the kids fight over who leads which pup, and we head out the door. The walk is maybe eight blocks, roundtrip, but added up over weeks and months we easily walk several miles for a task that, in winter, takes one person in the van. Efficiency isn’t the purpose; taking a walk is meant to burn energy, not conserve it. It also gives us fifteen minutes with the kids, without games or toys in the way…and I can’t possibly express the joy our dogs feel to go for a walk. Because of our consistency, the circle we call "neighbors" has expanded. People who live from car to garage don’t meet the people who live over a block away. In our neighborhood, those people get concerned when we walk by without our dogs. "Where are the puppies today?" they ask; "Grounded!" we reply, even though we all know the dogs had done nothing wrong. The grocery store baggers know we want our milk double-bagged to survive the trip. We know which houses have squealing children who like to pet our dogs, and which yards have dogs that make sure you know, in no uncertain vocal terms, that you’re on their sidewalk.

Just walking to the store isn’t enough, though; it’s a reason to remind ourselves the necessity of a walk, but we still want more. At least twice a week, we go for a long walk.

North Fargo is often compared to small-town living. It’s not a completely fair comparison, because of property prices, crime rates, and the amount of traffic, but the general sentiment is present. That small-town coziness spreads into the South side, at least as far as 13th avenue. The streets are narrow and arched-over by tall trees. Houses are reasonably sized and on proportionately large lots. People spend time on porches and decks connected to the front of their house, rather than hidden behind huge privacy fences in their back yards. Garages are properly tucked away in alleys or at the rear of the lot, rather than a monolithic guardhouse fifteen feet forward of the front door. Age has created an eclectic mix of housing types: houses that were once similar and cookie-cutter have been torn down and rebuilt, fixed up, reshingled and re-windowed, added to and trimed down. Small apartment buildings with unique designs are tossed in with the single-family homes. Sidewalks do their best to navigate around old encroaching trees, odd intersections, and a hundred years of lawn work.

To support the dogs on a longer walk, we equip ourselves with a water bottle, a collapsible doggie bowl, and four poop baggies (after discovering the pups sometimes save up for an extra deposit). Everyone gets on walking shoes, hats and sunglasses, and we head out the door. Our destination isn’t nearly as important as just being out and about. We try to stick to tree-shaded walks and away from the more major streets, for everybody’s comfort. Much of the time we just wander the streets around our house, looking at the older homes and studying the flower gardens for unusual specimens. The houses in our area are mostly in the century-old range, and for the most part they’re well cared for. Some yards are quite clearly rentals, while others are in disarray due to carelessness. Their yards are strewn with garbage, grass turning yellow, disabled vehicles with weeds growing under tires — one particularly unpleasant building had a Nazi flag hung in the front window, the yard disintegrated to bare dirt and scattered weeds. These, thankfully, are rare on our walks; most residents are proud of their homes, and despite income or physical abilities lawns are mostly mowed and yards are kept clean. When I grew up on this end of town it seemed in more disrepair than today, and I’m pleased to see the number of older houses restored and improved.

Other times, we head down to the river. The north Fargo bike paths follow the length of the Red River, from El Zagal to a block north of Oak Grove, and at Oak Grove a path leads across into Moorhead, just north of the Moorhead Center Mall, or we could continue south all the way to Lindenwood Park. The family entourage hasn’t been equipped for the full journey to Lindenwood, but we’ve crossed the Red into Moorhead just to see what’s there. The paths along the river are more fun for the litle explorers, dog and human alike. The children know not to get to far beyond eyeshot, so they’re allowed a bit more room to browse the underbrush along the path. The kids start out restricted by conformity, their feet stuck within the borders of the path, but with a little experimentation and encouragement from the adults they begin to expand their range, hiding behind trees and walking through the grass. Tiny frogs and caterpillars are discovered; however, the youngest of the kids have too much city in them. I’m often recruited to catch whatever fearsome fauna they encounter, but I’m happy that they get to see something other than the mosquitos and ants in our backyard.

Because the walks started for the parents’ benefit, we do find the time to go without the kids. The wifey and I have been known to walk to Mexican Village for good food and a pitcher or two of margueritas. Just this afternoon, Grandma took the kids to the pool, so my wife & I hitched up the pups and went for a long walk around the neighborhood, forging as far east as the 2nd Street construction and as far north as 12th Avenue. The dogs returned home winded, but the break from work and some time alone were refreshing for the two of us. I can tell why my wife misses the walks in the winter. We get so much from them, from time with loved ones to a change of scenery. We started walking with exercise in mind, but now it has become a regular part of our family’s summer. We walk for fun, and it’s a loss to be without it. The winters may be long, but we make due; invariably, there’s one or two walks that start too early the spring, walks that are cut short by razor-sharp wind and uncrossable puddles, forcing us to head for home far sooner than we’d like. Still, we keep trying: our walks are hard to live without.

The internet seems permanently far, far away from North Dakota, an unbounded universe rooted in larger states like California, Washington, and New York:
add that most of the high-profile bloggers are based out of distant metro
areas, and it was easy to believe that nobody local had ever run a blog
before.

As a community, areavoices.com is unique for our region. Blogging
communities have been around for quite some time, successfully bringing
attention to their writers by association, but there hasn’t been
anything like this devoted to the area. However, it’s not the first place to pull together North Dakotan blogs together in one place. Far, far back in the history of the internet (say, 2003), Say Anything blog had compiled a list of a few dozen indigenous bloggers, and encouraged the tenant bloggers to copy the list to their own websites. This first group of area bloggers really opened the community to how blogging exists next door. The list, as it was in 2004, contained:

• My blog,
  eroneously called "Brain Log" because that was the title of the column
  that the blog entries appeared in. "Ones and Zeroes", as the wifey calls
  it, must have been too obtuse.
• Buffalo Common: A site made up of quick notes and links to area news websites; still going strong three years later.
• Dispatches From Outland: a poltical blog, as were most on the SayAnything list, and still in existence.
• Dylron’s Filter: the personal blog of a Minotan (Minotian? Minoite?). Has not been updated since February.
• Fargoboy is the blog of a Fargo expatriate; his blog laid dormant most of 2005, but had a few posts earlier in 2006.
• Fiddle 2 is quickly approaching 10 years of blogging, and as near I can tell he’s still in Fargo. His blog is of the genre "geek blog," full of references to computer jargon and technology.
• Flickertail was an early attempt at including blogs in the news; it focused on the 2004 elections, and was hosted & sponsored by the Fargo Forum. Political blogs were all the rage in 2004, and much of the ‘blog buzz’ resulted from these amateur pundits. Sadly, as you found out when you clicked that link, the Flickertail is no longer online.
• Gnatty Bob has been shut down, not even the Internet WayBack machine helps find more about it.
• Hampden News is part of the LonePrairie.net family, and was set up to commemorate a city centennial in 2004 — adding to the historical nature of the event, the blog was left intact, a historial item on the internet.
• Jason Signalness has been blogging quite religiously since 1998 — and will even moreso when he joins a seminary at the end of this month.
• Julie Neidlinger was co-author of the ND Blogroll, and has changed the URL since its original appearance in the list. Her blogs — several on the site, each with a dedicated topic or purpose — have been updated often.
• Life Of Mon is a common type of blog: one full of personal opinion, but is only updated when something significant comes to mind. These kinds of blogs often provide the best reading, but are often forgotten due to the long time between updates.
• Lydia’s Xanga, in a stroke of odd timing, has just closed its doors without saying where she’s going with her bloggy thoughts. Her blog, if the older and stogier of you can take it, is iconic Teenager Blog: full of the language and feelings of the youth today, which is often lost on the older of us.
• Millionth Monkey Speaks was once a blog, whose owner had registered the witty "rentamidget.com" domain name — unfortunately, either by design or by domain-squatting, the site is now dominated by a business offering the actual rental of "little people". Go figure.
• Our Mother is a beautiful blog, written by daughters caretaking their aging mother. Touching and literary, focused blogs like these can be the best reads.
• Say Anything was the other co-author of the ND Blogroll, and a strong political blog — even becoming parts of Pajama Media now.
• Shiofuki is, and was, a gaming blog, although it is rarely updated. Those of us not un the game might not have any idea what they’re talking about anyway.
• SlopedSideways, too, has been shut down — their blog claims that they wil move to slopedsideways.net, but only a parking page exists there.
• Teaching Humans appears to have started as a school project — a teacher educating her pupils on the power of blogging — but it also includes personal bits from her own life.
• The Bison Blog was designed for NDSU students to comunicate in a blog format, apparently created by the Teaching Humans blogger, but has been down since 2004. The URL they say they moved to is not active.
• The Cranky One is actually a blog I read from time to time: it is a blog used as an outlet, a way for a single mom to get things out of her system, tell her story, and otherwise empty her resevoir online.
• The Dream Project was the blog of event organizers in Grand Forks, but their domain now just points to a unrelated UND server.
• The Journey is the blog of one of the daughters from Our Mother, who has been producing a variety of websites and blogs over the past several years. She can also be found on AreaVoices, too. She is also author of the next one on the list:
• The Waiting Place , a blog addressing the lives of Kurdish Iraqi families.
• Tom Isern is a history professor at NDSU and writer, who has over the years published books and articles about living on the prairies; his blog is an extension of his other writings, much more casual and personal.
• Triblog was an AreaVoices-like website of the Bismarck Tribune, which no longer exists.
• Vastlane is less of a blog, and more of an interactive community like Slashdot or Digg, compiled of articles written by people in the Grand Forks area.
• WXGal’s World is a personal blog (moved in 2004 to a new URL) – regularly updated, documenting the minutiae of her life, as a good blog should.
• Welcome To My Brain Dump was a personal blog, but no longer exists.
• Why Not Minot went the way most blogs go: start out strong, then fade away, existing forever as an untouched ghost town.

This list was the basis for a 2004 article on the front page of the Fargo Forum, which pointed out some of the better blogs and quoted from a few. It is impressive to see how many are still being updated regularly, two or three years later. While the Forum did publish an article on local blogs in 2002, it wasn’t the first time local netizens were featured. In 2000, the Forum featured an article on local websites on the front of the Entertainment section, but six years later only three of those sites ( 1 – 2 – 3 ) still exist.

The cross-section of blogs above is remarkably close to the rest of
worldwide blogs: some are very personal, interesting only to immediate
family; others are extensions of people’s careers; yet more are
excersises in various hobbies, from art to politics. This state is not
so far removed from the world of the internet as we might think. Physical separation from the rest of the world (emphasized by the movie Fargo, a joke on the Daily Show this week, and various other punchlines) might be rather large, but that endless universe of the internet can be infinitely small when we tie together the blogs of our neighbors and pull the string tight. While the Blog Concierge has recommended y’all start a blog, remember to link those near you, both physically and philosophically. Use your blog sidebars, and add those links, both for the benefit of other bloggers, but also for your readers.

We stepped out the front door, on our way to walk down to Sunmart and pick up dinner. On our front step we met a visitor: a full broadsheet paper, entitied "Valley Midweek Marketplace." We’ve been getting a "Midweek" for decades (I even delivered them in my youth), and the Midweek in this title lead me to believe there’d been another change in the paper. The original tabloid-format Midweek had been truly "mid-week," then upgraded to twice a week, then back down to once a week, and started out classified-only then added content over the years. The changes never really meant much to me; the paper was mostly dedicated to lining our birdcage and softening UPS’ blows to items we’d sold on eBay. It had been quite a while since I actually opened one up, not being enough of a classifieds-consumer to devote any time to it. To show our contempt for this new advertisement intruder, we left it on our front step, a victim to the elements, overnight.

This visibly different paper, however, got my interest once we did bring it inside. I looked for a masthead, but found none – a publishing faux-pas in my mind, and made me think this was an unprofessional usurper to the Midweek title, but the layout of the classified ads (who, like the previous Midweek, dominate the content of this new paper) was familiar. A light bulb flashed above my head, and I realized: it’s the same headings and information used in the Fargo Forum’s classified section. A quick Google (ah, search engines – what would pseudojournalists be without you?) found that Forum Communications bought the West Fargo Pioneer, publisher of the Midweek, last year.

As a fan of independent media, I wrinkled my nose. What more would the Forum do with this free paper, classified-funded and without significant content? It would seem to be a competitor to the Forum’s own classified section, which dutiful subscribers pay for the privilege of reading. A wise corporate officer would move to disband the Midweek, eliminate it from grocery store entrances and people’s flower gardens, as superfluous and internally competitive. On the front page, this Valley Midweek Marketplace does show a step in that direction: unlike the original Midweek, this one will not be delivered to Forum subscribers, and they even warn that non-subscribers aren’t guaranteed delivery, either. The original Midweek usually included one article of local interest, with a front-page photo to spark interest. Those articles, if continued, will no doubt be now be written by Forum writers, for a significantly smaller circulation than before. Forum Communications also seems to be trying to fill the High Plains Reader’s niche with the tabloid-sized "Fargo-Moorhead HUB" (sadly, no website). Besides HPR, about the only other local newspaper that’s still not Forum-owned is the FM Extra, who boats a handful of local freelance-writers and media-persons as their writing staff. This absorption of local written media is troubling, percieved as the silencing of unique writing available to the community.

The Valley Midweek Marketplace’s headline article was fluff, far removed from the local-interest articles of the previous Midweek, but just inside I found an interesting column from somebody called the Blog Concierge, at some website called areavoices.com.

Hey! I know that website!

While the Valley Midweek Marketplace seems to be missing a website at the moment (a trend for Forum’s new papers, it seems), the Concierge was nice enough to post her column at AreaVoices for us to read. To paraphrase the last paragraph, which doesn’t appear in the paper, there seems to be a tie-in between the new Midweek and AreaVoices bloggers — not only is there a dedicated blogger who writes for the Midweek, but the best of AreaVoices might find its way into the print paper. I’m not sure why readers would want to read something next week that’s available online today, but it’s a step in the direction of reader-created content, or "Citizen Journalism."

"Citizen Journalism" is no stranger to any newspaper employee who subscribed to some Poynter Online e-newsletters in a fit of unbridled professionalism. As a journalism think-tank, Poynter has an excellent set of resources on modern journalism, including talk about the newmen of the future. Citizen Journalism is an embracing of the blog culture, fitting it into journalism at a whole. While ‘blogging’ proper is around 5-6 years old, online magazines have been showing a new generation of typeset media to the world for more than a decade, involving new formats which encourage user participation and involvement of non-journalists. By encouraging readers to contribute to articles, allowing comments on articles, and blurring the lines between the editorial section and the rest of the paper, newspapers may live beyond the internet age as a multimedia experience, involving both print and online features. The derogatory term "dinosaur blog" for newspapers wasn’t ill-concieved: there’s more similarity between the two than other forms of media, and newspapers that embrace blogging stand to profit.

Of course, with any iconoclastic theories, there’s challenges and uncertainty in turning over newspaper content to untrained writers…even if that is the point of citizen journalism. A paid, trained writer can be expected to unflinchingly write an article on deadline with at least a midline quality level, but expecting bloggers to meet such levels is far sketchier. Just look at the bloggers here on AreaVoices: only a few update regularly (and my guess is they are of journalistic roots), while many more are amateurish and unreliable. In the interest of full disclosure, I admit I’m in the latter category: without pay, stature, or training, I give about what a blog environment expects. The blogs that rise above, that 0.0001% of the blogosphere that updates regularly and has a loving audience, are significantly rarer than a mediocre paid journalist. The promise of having something from a unique viewpoint is what drives near-zines like HPR, whose writers are little more than bloggers who can meet every week’s deadline. That’s not a slight: HPR’s writers often produce more interesting and unique pieces than the Forum’s writers on a wekly basis, even granting a 7:1 publish ratio. The Forum would be wise to involve proletariat input, to move towards the New Media that Poynter predicts.

A few years ago, the Fargo Forum ended much of their ‘just print stuff off the wires’ methodology and revamped the paper, adding a community liaison to hear local newspaper needs, and making locally-produced articles more prominent in the paper. In my opinion, this made the Forum a much stronger paper, and their interest in involving citizen journalism shows an interest in continuing in the same direction. Using the Midweek as the venue may be a wise choice — it’s a paper whose printing is driven by classified advertisers rather than subscribers, and has only minimal expectations of jouralistic virtue. I suppose, due to my negative view of Forum Communications, this article won’t be showing up in black-and-white on my doorstep as a shining example of what AreaVoices has to say. Maybe they’d like to take my article on downtown revitalization…well, that, too, is a rather negative piece and built on personal opinion rather than facts. Citizen journalism isn’t cut-and-dried inverted-pyramid and citing all sources to prove validity of statements. It will be more like the High Plains Reader, full of opinions and slant, but HPR’s lifespan shows that there’s readership looking for this kind of writing. The wifey mocks me for picking up the HPR and only glancing at a few articles (I do read it, honey), but that’s more than I’ve done with the Midweek in some time. If the Forum is genuinely interested in taking citizen journalism by the hand, using the best of AreaVoices and making a paper out of it, I might pick up the Midweek and "glance at a few articles", rather than tossing it in the ‘shred for packing’ box.

The wifey returned from allowing the dogs fertilize the peonies in the back yard late one night and said she had an eerie feeling that something was swooping around her.   Clouds obscured the stars and the moon, but reflected enough of the streetlights to make it just bright enough to see the outlines of trees and rooftops and little else.   She said she couldn’t hear any wings flapping, but she had a feeling that there was something flying around above her head.  She thought she hears squeaking, like a "bunch of small monkeys" frolicking on the rooftops. 

Yes, I said, we’ve got bats around here.  I’ve actually seen them late at night, when the clouds are a bit lower, a bit thicker to reflect more streetlights.   They have to be around twenty or thirty feet off the ground, above the trees and houses, but I could still make out their body and wings despite the darkness.   They almost seem to be falling out of control, spinning around and twisting in pursuit of their tiny insect dinners.

"I’ve always heard stories about them getting caught in people’s hair, that’s even scarier," she said.

"Don’t worry," I said, "these are too big to worry about getting caught in your hair."

"They’re really that big?" she asked.

"Oh, probably about as big as a rat’s body, but they’ve got big wings, maybe a foot across."

She visualized the size of the bats and wasn’t comforted.

I’ve been inside the Fargoan. Not back in the day when dodgy residents paid for overpriced holes-in-the-wall: no, I was in the Fargoan towards the end of February, around the time the rehabilitization had removed nearly everything that had made the Fargoan what it was.

You may not know, but the center of the Fargoan was open to the sky: a large groove ran down the middle of the building, from the first floor up, around 4′ wide and almost the whole length of the building, like a brick doughnut hole. Windows opened out into this area so that natural light could reach the interior of the building back before effective interior lighting, and I believe skylights at the bottom let sunlight into the first floor. This groove will no longer exist; from the current floorplans, it appears a hallway will run down the center where the skylight was so condos can occupy double the width of the original rooms. The lobby murals were still intact (as much as they were before the renovation, which wasn’t that great); I didn’t ask if they would be kept post-renovation, but I hope they will be kept. The front stairs, its grain stained almost black and worn from nearly a century of footfalls, looks like it will stay, too; it is about the only recognizeable interior part that shows up on the floorplan. The old, heavy hardwood doors, removed when the walls were ripped out, leaned against the walls of the lobby as best they could despite protruding doorknobs, their faded and peeling numbers identifying their original home. The rearrangement of hallways and rooms and filling in the old dirt-filled bathroom floors meant the original wood floors would be smoothed over with a modern layer to level them to current condobuyer standards.

When I visited the site they were working on rebuilding the support pilings. The building had been built with wooden pilings supporting everything from the first floor up, inadequate for such a large three-story building even by 1920s standards, so new steel and concrete pilings were being installed. The interior structure was mostly wood, so a fire on a lower floor would surely have resulted in collapse of the upper ones. The building had often been the home of Fargo’s less-than-finest residents, many of whom had little interest in sustaining a historic building for the ages, so the restoration did need to happen now, before the building ended up gutted by fire like Stroh’s other project, the Universal Building.

Around ten years ago, I had the opportunity to buy a building quite close to the Fargoan, now occupied by Mr. Money on Broadway. I lacked the funds at that time, but compared to today’s cost to get a downtown building it was an absolute steal and I kick myself every time I drive down Broadway. The mid-1990s was at the early-edge of Fargo’s downtown revitalization, and the plans I had for the building would have fit nicely into today’s downtown. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a push for revitalization at the time, no immediate returns on investing in a business and a building that required a lot of cosmetic and construction work. Those who compain about the changing of downtown don’t remember the downtown of twenty years ago: malls and urban renewal didn’t improve the declining downtown. Storefronts sat vacant, apartments weren’t very nice to live in, and there wasn’t much attraction to being downtown unless you worked there. Those who defend the Old Downtown have one or two big reasons they think change should be avoided, but keeping those few things wouldn’t make downtown what it plans to be.

However, running off the coffee shops and performance venues doesn’t show interest in downtown revitalization. Rebuilding a downtown takes responsibility, something in hindsight we realize the downtown revitalization of the 1970s lacked as well. Cement columns forced broadway into a curvy mess, removing parking and making it hard to bother visiting downtown businesses — who already had plenty of incentive to move out to 13th Avenue — and then large number of historical buildings with apartments and storefronts were torn down to put up high-rise office buildings, parking lots, and a movie theatre on stilts. Downtown was, in the matter of a decade, turned into a place people went to work and then left at five.

Today’s downtown shows more promise than fantasies about an outdoor walking mall in the land of -40° winters – showing we can learn from mistakes. Hopefully, the new money filtering into downtown is using these mistakes to evaluate the commercial principles that they are using to excuse their actions.

TL Stroh is building condos — little larger nor better outfitted than the $500/mo two-bedrooms around the south University K-Mart — to sell for over $100,000 each…with a monthly condo fee to boot. Their pricing and purpose is to offset the cost of the renovation, and they believe the market can support it. Downtown condos seem to have quite a high market value: they wouldn’t build them if they didn’t think they would sell. However, their housing market isn’t the one they should be able to look at. The commercial market of downtown as a whole is what the condo buyers are interested in purchasing. They could have the same thing for much less elsewhere, but they want to be able to look out their window and see what’s playing at the Fargo, or eat within walking distance once in a while. The condo builders lack the foresight to realize that other business owners are under similar pressures: businesses are subject to what the market can bear.

A downtown is a living organism, like a terrarium: it exists in a balance that doesn’t like sudden change. Urban Renewal #1 proved that. Our downtown couldn’t sustain itself with such a sudden environmental change. It needed something more gradual, more organic, based on how it reacts to the changes. So far, it seems that there is enough Urban Renewal Responsiiblity to keep rampant greedy change in check. For example, a building on Roberts Street, formerly an antique mall, went from one storefront back to three, all now occupied (including a coffee shop and music venue), and was cleaned up enormously. The building was bought and renovated by the law offices next door partly as storage (at least that was the last story I heard), but shows enormous responsibility not to just take what they want without creating anything that benefits the downtown whole. Condos may have value, may be what the residential market can bear, but let’s hope the renovators take some time and consider what the downtown environment can bear as a whole.

Urban Renewal #1 tilted downtown’s atmosphere in one direction, and I hope that Urban Renewal Nouveaux doesn’t do the same in condos and dollars spent on generating revenue without purpose. Increasing the cost of rent in downtown and reducing the number both of downtown residents and businesses will throw off the balance, making downtown a place people live then drive out to 13th Avenue or Easten for their shopping and entertainment. The downtown that people want to live is here, now, and change isn’t necessarily the answer unless it is to improve upon what people want today. Clean up the shells of old downtown, but run your concrete pilings all the way to the top floor and leave the old wood and the classic architecture. Your construction should be shoring up what we already have downtown, rather than replacing it with something you think you can turn over to cover your costs. The reason that so many downtown buildings were empty or had fallen in to disrepair is because something happened to downtown to make them undesirable to the people with money. I hope that the current redevelopers show enough responsibility to the downtown that we have now, the one that has piqued the interest of the people with money, because the wrong moves could easily throw off the climate and make downtown undesirable again.

I haven’t written my commentary on this video yet, but I don’t usually go into great detail on the videos here on Fargophilia. I’ll link to my blog entry on it later, but until then you can preview the 1939 AOUW parade through downtown Fargo. It’s filmed in color — one of the few color home movies I’ve seen from the 1930s — and has at least two vantage points. The clearest location is from right in front of the First Presbyterian Church on 2nd Avenue. The post office across the street today was a used car lot back then, and few buildings in the film still exist (can you tell which are still around?)  The rest has to do with the AOUW, filmed in front of their "new" building, now the Pioneer Mutual building, in its original three-story form.

Psychadelic Velveeta!, a Wednesday radio program over at KNDS, had an announcement on their MySpace space Wednesday:

There is an FM station out of Lisbon, North
Dakota that was been granted a construction permit to upgrade to a full
C1 station. This would give them city grade coverage over the Fargo
market. As KQLX T 106.1 is at what is called a first adjacency to our
channel of 105.9 we are going to create interference to them. As an
LPFM we have no protection against this move-in. We have been requested
to reduce our power significantly to eliminate the overlap in signals,
but in doing so we would reduce our coverage are and also literally be
buried by their incoming signal. They are planning on having their
upgrade complete as of June 15th.
We will be applying for a frequency change and ask for a wavier from the FCC to move to that frequency.

Being a good pseudojournalist, I researched this claim: KQLX did apply for a construction permit to build a tower 10 miles northwest of Leonard, and its broadcast area will include Fargo — in fact, completely overlapping KNDS’ broadcast region at average power levels. The application occurred in 2004, shortly before KNDS was granted their own construction permit, so my sympathy shrinks just a little over the predictability of this conflict. However, nothing is perfect, and LPFM isn’t granted the same sort of protections and attention as commercial broadcasting.

LPFM, or Low Power FM, is an expansion of the Class D license that allowed college campuses and churches to broadcast content to a very limited area. The addition of LPFM to the license spectrum gives noncommercial broadcasters a greater frequency availability and broadcast range, but without the expense and hardware that full-fledged broadcasters require. Quite a few colleges and communities jumped at LPFM licenses shortly after their authorization by the FCC, to provide alternatives to the ClearChannels, Westwood Ones, regional broadcasters, and other deep-pocketed companies. David vs Goliath, providing unique radio content, but without the legal problems of going pirate.

Living near downtown, KNDS is one of the only stations I can recieve with clarity in my basement office – well, the ones I want to listen to, considering the numerous country stations that overwhelm me when hitting ‘seek’ on the radio. The only stations I listen to are KNDS, KZCR (which comes in spottily), and KEGK (which has a constant hiss). Q98 and Y94, the venerable old-guard of new music, repeat songs so often and so rarely hit anything I like and aren’t even programmed in any of my radios. They are easy enough to find on the dial if I really want to listen to them, but the rest I’ve found via the handy ‘seek’ button.

Thinking back to my college days, I remember listening to KDSU late at night, when the student-run shows dominated, playing unusual tunes and strange cuts that mainstream radio wouldn’t have thought of playing. When I got a scholarship and headed off to Missouri, KCOU and KWWC (Mizzou and Stephens College, respectively) were the only stations I listened to. Coming back to Fargo afterwards, I was disappointed by the lack of anything comparable to KCOU. In 1999, when KDSU switched over to Public Radio, I didn’t even have that to listen to.

So, I was rather pleased when, hitting the ‘seek’ button, I ran across KNDS one odd day, apparently not long after they started broadcasting. I’m not in love with everything they play: the rap show that’s on in the afternoons is particularly hard to listen to, and I hate to say that I didn’t like the High Plains Readers guys’ show, either. However, without the opportunity for experimentation in programming, the creation of something new would never happen. Every day I get a chance to hear something new (or covers of old songs, which seems to be the focus of the program on right now), something that’s unusual and worthy of attention. Heck, sometimes I even kinda like the inane on-air ramblings of college-aged kids with a thousand watts of radio power at their fingertips. Even the oldies stations get stuck in loops, where I’m certain I heard the same song played only minutes before, but I rarely hear the same things played repeatedly on KNDS. I’m not too disappointed if I have to change the station because they’re broadcasting an hour of ambient techno music, because I know I can come back later and hear something else. With the other stations to pick from, I’m fairly certain that what I’ll get after tuning in is the same thing they were playing when I turned the dial away from them last time.

KNDS’ locking of horns with commercial radio is an unfortunate one, but isn’t unexpected nor offensive. I’m not one to object to the motion of commerce, and while I don’t like country music I can appreciate that there’s lots of money-spending people in Fargo who do, and those people demand yet another station to browse through when driving to Hornbacher’s. Me, I hope that KNDS gets another frequency assignment without any problems. The community is accustomed to radio stations changing format without notice, so we’re not married to the frequency so long as the ‘seek’ button leads us to what we want to hear. KNDS has a hodgepodge following of college students and those who listen to it in the community, so the majority of their market will be ready to follow them to a new slot on the radio band. The community needs KNDS as an alternative, but the ‘alternative’ isn’t always easy to find and keep track of. Show KNDS your support, and hopefully they’ll appear one day as you hit ‘seek’ and the flurry of scanning numbers stops at a spot you didn’t expect.