"Why am I still here?"
It's the question that all Phoenicians ask themselves at some point. To the outside world and to its residents alike, Phoenix has the reputation of being a training-wheels city. Nobody wants to stay here; you grow up, go to school, and the minute an exit strategy starts coming together in your head, you get out. The people who actually move to Phoenix by choice are anomalies, aberrations who presumeably will see the errors of their ways when the summer heat rolls in. Much like a Jew in a Woody Allen film, native-born Phoenicians are self-loathing to the core. Anyone with half a brain in their head, anyone with a sense of culture and decency, anyone with ambition, anyone with a clue is expected to get the fuck out of Dodge. Not a month goes by that someone I know either bitches about leaving Tumbleweed Central for brighter pastures, or actually makes the "heroic" leap to the cosmopilitan "big-time" (usually one of the coastal cities). This city hemorrhages its young, its best, and its brightest at an alarming rate. So the question remains: why am I still here?
I'm still here because I believe in Phoenix.
The most common complaint about the city is that it has no culture. Compared to cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New Orleans (pre-and-post Katrina), Austin, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, etc., of course Phoenix has no culture. What seperates my city from those urban hotbeds of "culture" is the issue of age. Phoenix is a young city, an urban sprawl in the throes of an awkward and deeply uncomfortable adolescence. We have no unifying culture, no image, because Phoenix is too new, too young a metropolis to have found itself yet. If one were to ask a New Yorker or a citizen of Los Angeles to describe their city, to sum up their feelings about what it means to live in that city, to be a part of their landscape, they could give you an answer. Phoenicians cannot. To be a Phoenician is to live in a city without a soul. A city that continues to expand at a rapid rate, a city whose population swells, a city whose growth is unchecked and unexpected. Nobody ever expected this one-horse town to become one of the largest cities in the country; asking it to already have a culture as diverse and interesting as all the other big cities that have decades, some centuries, to develop an identity is just unrealistic.
Some people are put off by this cultural tabula rasa. As for myself, I'm invigorated by it. It is why I refuse to leave Phoenix. The city has potential. If I were to pull up stakes and settle in San Francisco (as a part of me once thought of doing), I would be inserting myself into a city with a long and established history. Here, the history books are thin and incomplete. As a city, we haven't gotten past the first act yet. Phoenix has room to grow, to become itself, and I want to witness that transformation, indeed to assist it in its becoming. Right now, the city is trying on new identities left and right. In Scottsdale, everybody acts as though Arizona is the new California. Fancy sushi 'meat-markets' are a dime-a-dozen, shopping malls overwhelm the desert landscape, local magazines shout 'til their red in the face about how sophisticated and urbane Phoenix is becoming. Elsewhere, the city is a haven for conservatives. Mormons have their tentacles in all aspects of the city government, and in education. City officials still throw hissy fits over smoking in bars and try to get ridiculious restrictions passed on strip clubs just because one of them happens to get bought out by a pornstar. Our sheriff is a knuckle-dragging publicity hound, our prisons make the Baby Jesus weep, and our Maricopa County Attorney Andy Thomas is so vehemently xenophobic in his anti-Mexican attitudes that it even makes the other state conservatives leery. We also have an art scene that desperately wants to be taken seriously, great rock clubs open and close in the blink of an eye, and our most well-known musical export is the Gin Blossoms (even though we are the state that gave the world the glory that is the Meat Puppets). What are we as a state? Cowboy boot-wearing Minutemen supporters? Cosmopolitan yuppies? Bleeding heart art-freaks? Little Mexico? Salt Lake City Mark 2? We are all of these things, and yet none of them. Like a teenager who tries on and discards subcultural identities in a heartbeat, Phoenix remains culturaly noncommital.
People still think of us as a city full of Southwestern architecture and saguaros, a place where everybody and their sister wears a cowboy hat. Take a look at the covers of some of Barbara Kingsolver's novels (a local author) and you'll see what I mean: instead of a cityscape, nothing but deserts and howling coyotes and cute Adobe homes and cacti. Reality check: wearing cowboy hats in this city isn't just passe, its quaint. The only people in the city who live in Southwestern-style houses and have large cacti near their property are the wealthy. The rest of us live in apartments and uniform housing associations like anywhere else in the states. Part of the reason why people flee this city is they still believe in the stereotypes about this city. We aren't a tumbleweeds-and-coyote city anymore. I would know: I remember being 5 and driving past Thunderbird Rd. and seeing nothing but desert; now, we've got strip malls and a mini-golf course and boutique shopping paved over that desert. Civilization, both sophisticated and vulgar, swallowing up nature. Somewhere there's an Indian on the side of the road shedding a slow single tear... but fuck him. Fuck the nostalgiacs in this state, looking back on the days of Evan Meacham and Barry Goldwater and small towns and less Mexicans; fuck the people who insist that we live in the past, that we view our home through the lens of the past. We aren't the hayseeds people think we are, nor are we as deeply red as people think our state is (for Christ's sake, we have a closeted lesbian democrat as a governor; the jig is up, Janet). Sure, our state government is fucked, our senators are complete tools (Jon Kyl is the Keyser Soze of Arizona politics, and McCain is too busy playing the party hack and trying to be President in 08 to do a damn thing for his state constituents), and we have groups like the Minutemen embarassing us every hour of every day with their continued existence... but the average Phoenician on the street is a far cry from those clowns. We are a reasonable people, Phoenicians. Lazy? Yes. A bit too wound-up and hypocritical about immigration? Sadly, yes. But we aren't even a quarter of the assholes we used to be, back in the days when people in this state were duking it out over acknowledging MLK Day as a holiday.
I refuse to leave Phoenix because I know it will become something great. I can feel the potential humming underneath the pavement cracks, I can see the seeds of future wonders slowly coming to life in the other people like me, who refuse to pack up and head elsewhere. I refuse to leave because I don't want to be a coward. In my mind, the people who leave, not just in Phoenix but in any small city or town and head off to the "places to be"... they are cowards. Cowards because rather than endure the hard work of making their boring hometowns blossom into something eccentric and warm and fun, they take the quick fix of heading to a prepackaged, already-built cultural mecca. Every time somebody leaves Phoenix to go to L.A. or New York, they are reinforcing the cultural stereotype that the only places that matter in America are on the coasts. Its that kind of smug thinking that people like Al Franken thrive on and crack jokes on, the kind of thinking that I as a liberal wish other blue-staters would abandon. New York has had its time to be something, lets give Phoenix a chance. The problem is not that Phoenix has failed its citizens by being a boring place to live. The problem is that Phoenicians have failed their city by abandoning it, making it a boring place by leaving and letting the Sun City old-timers and California expatriate yuppies and lifelong Az conservatives have all the say on what our city will become. Every time a writer decides to abandon Phoenix for San Francisco, every time a great aspiring band or musician decides to head off to Chicago to schmooze Pitchfork or join a bigger scene in L.A., they stab their city in the back. Phoenix isn't like those small towns people constantly flee from for fame and fortune in the movies. We aren't "Dogshit, Nebraska" as Warren Ellis would put it. We are a city that is growing, a city that has all the potential diversity and cheap rent and unique local history (there isn't much, but we've got some cool stuff to read about if you dig deep enough) that it could become precisely the kind of place that bored and desperate people today want to flee to from Phoenix. We can be the cool city of tomorrow, the place of asylum and refuge from the vanilla towns of America. We just have to be willing to be patient, to contribute, to toughen it out and work the soil until something of interest sprouts out.
I love Phoenix the way I love blank paper: I love staring at possibilities.
It's the question that all Phoenicians ask themselves at some point. To the outside world and to its residents alike, Phoenix has the reputation of being a training-wheels city. Nobody wants to stay here; you grow up, go to school, and the minute an exit strategy starts coming together in your head, you get out. The people who actually move to Phoenix by choice are anomalies, aberrations who presumeably will see the errors of their ways when the summer heat rolls in. Much like a Jew in a Woody Allen film, native-born Phoenicians are self-loathing to the core. Anyone with half a brain in their head, anyone with a sense of culture and decency, anyone with ambition, anyone with a clue is expected to get the fuck out of Dodge. Not a month goes by that someone I know either bitches about leaving Tumbleweed Central for brighter pastures, or actually makes the "heroic" leap to the cosmopilitan "big-time" (usually one of the coastal cities). This city hemorrhages its young, its best, and its brightest at an alarming rate. So the question remains: why am I still here?
I'm still here because I believe in Phoenix.
The most common complaint about the city is that it has no culture. Compared to cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New Orleans (pre-and-post Katrina), Austin, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, etc., of course Phoenix has no culture. What seperates my city from those urban hotbeds of "culture" is the issue of age. Phoenix is a young city, an urban sprawl in the throes of an awkward and deeply uncomfortable adolescence. We have no unifying culture, no image, because Phoenix is too new, too young a metropolis to have found itself yet. If one were to ask a New Yorker or a citizen of Los Angeles to describe their city, to sum up their feelings about what it means to live in that city, to be a part of their landscape, they could give you an answer. Phoenicians cannot. To be a Phoenician is to live in a city without a soul. A city that continues to expand at a rapid rate, a city whose population swells, a city whose growth is unchecked and unexpected. Nobody ever expected this one-horse town to become one of the largest cities in the country; asking it to already have a culture as diverse and interesting as all the other big cities that have decades, some centuries, to develop an identity is just unrealistic.
Some people are put off by this cultural tabula rasa. As for myself, I'm invigorated by it. It is why I refuse to leave Phoenix. The city has potential. If I were to pull up stakes and settle in San Francisco (as a part of me once thought of doing), I would be inserting myself into a city with a long and established history. Here, the history books are thin and incomplete. As a city, we haven't gotten past the first act yet. Phoenix has room to grow, to become itself, and I want to witness that transformation, indeed to assist it in its becoming. Right now, the city is trying on new identities left and right. In Scottsdale, everybody acts as though Arizona is the new California. Fancy sushi 'meat-markets' are a dime-a-dozen, shopping malls overwhelm the desert landscape, local magazines shout 'til their red in the face about how sophisticated and urbane Phoenix is becoming. Elsewhere, the city is a haven for conservatives. Mormons have their tentacles in all aspects of the city government, and in education. City officials still throw hissy fits over smoking in bars and try to get ridiculious restrictions passed on strip clubs just because one of them happens to get bought out by a pornstar. Our sheriff is a knuckle-dragging publicity hound, our prisons make the Baby Jesus weep, and our Maricopa County Attorney Andy Thomas is so vehemently xenophobic in his anti-Mexican attitudes that it even makes the other state conservatives leery. We also have an art scene that desperately wants to be taken seriously, great rock clubs open and close in the blink of an eye, and our most well-known musical export is the Gin Blossoms (even though we are the state that gave the world the glory that is the Meat Puppets). What are we as a state? Cowboy boot-wearing Minutemen supporters? Cosmopolitan yuppies? Bleeding heart art-freaks? Little Mexico? Salt Lake City Mark 2? We are all of these things, and yet none of them. Like a teenager who tries on and discards subcultural identities in a heartbeat, Phoenix remains culturaly noncommital.
People still think of us as a city full of Southwestern architecture and saguaros, a place where everybody and their sister wears a cowboy hat. Take a look at the covers of some of Barbara Kingsolver's novels (a local author) and you'll see what I mean: instead of a cityscape, nothing but deserts and howling coyotes and cute Adobe homes and cacti. Reality check: wearing cowboy hats in this city isn't just passe, its quaint. The only people in the city who live in Southwestern-style houses and have large cacti near their property are the wealthy. The rest of us live in apartments and uniform housing associations like anywhere else in the states. Part of the reason why people flee this city is they still believe in the stereotypes about this city. We aren't a tumbleweeds-and-coyote city anymore. I would know: I remember being 5 and driving past Thunderbird Rd. and seeing nothing but desert; now, we've got strip malls and a mini-golf course and boutique shopping paved over that desert. Civilization, both sophisticated and vulgar, swallowing up nature. Somewhere there's an Indian on the side of the road shedding a slow single tear... but fuck him. Fuck the nostalgiacs in this state, looking back on the days of Evan Meacham and Barry Goldwater and small towns and less Mexicans; fuck the people who insist that we live in the past, that we view our home through the lens of the past. We aren't the hayseeds people think we are, nor are we as deeply red as people think our state is (for Christ's sake, we have a closeted lesbian democrat as a governor; the jig is up, Janet). Sure, our state government is fucked, our senators are complete tools (Jon Kyl is the Keyser Soze of Arizona politics, and McCain is too busy playing the party hack and trying to be President in 08 to do a damn thing for his state constituents), and we have groups like the Minutemen embarassing us every hour of every day with their continued existence... but the average Phoenician on the street is a far cry from those clowns. We are a reasonable people, Phoenicians. Lazy? Yes. A bit too wound-up and hypocritical about immigration? Sadly, yes. But we aren't even a quarter of the assholes we used to be, back in the days when people in this state were duking it out over acknowledging MLK Day as a holiday.
I refuse to leave Phoenix because I know it will become something great. I can feel the potential humming underneath the pavement cracks, I can see the seeds of future wonders slowly coming to life in the other people like me, who refuse to pack up and head elsewhere. I refuse to leave because I don't want to be a coward. In my mind, the people who leave, not just in Phoenix but in any small city or town and head off to the "places to be"... they are cowards. Cowards because rather than endure the hard work of making their boring hometowns blossom into something eccentric and warm and fun, they take the quick fix of heading to a prepackaged, already-built cultural mecca. Every time somebody leaves Phoenix to go to L.A. or New York, they are reinforcing the cultural stereotype that the only places that matter in America are on the coasts. Its that kind of smug thinking that people like Al Franken thrive on and crack jokes on, the kind of thinking that I as a liberal wish other blue-staters would abandon. New York has had its time to be something, lets give Phoenix a chance. The problem is not that Phoenix has failed its citizens by being a boring place to live. The problem is that Phoenicians have failed their city by abandoning it, making it a boring place by leaving and letting the Sun City old-timers and California expatriate yuppies and lifelong Az conservatives have all the say on what our city will become. Every time a writer decides to abandon Phoenix for San Francisco, every time a great aspiring band or musician decides to head off to Chicago to schmooze Pitchfork or join a bigger scene in L.A., they stab their city in the back. Phoenix isn't like those small towns people constantly flee from for fame and fortune in the movies. We aren't "Dogshit, Nebraska" as Warren Ellis would put it. We are a city that is growing, a city that has all the potential diversity and cheap rent and unique local history (there isn't much, but we've got some cool stuff to read about if you dig deep enough) that it could become precisely the kind of place that bored and desperate people today want to flee to from Phoenix. We can be the cool city of tomorrow, the place of asylum and refuge from the vanilla towns of America. We just have to be willing to be patient, to contribute, to toughen it out and work the soil until something of interest sprouts out.
I love Phoenix the way I love blank paper: I love staring at possibilities.
I like to think of a place like Pheonix, though, as having an incipient culture and the people who are willing to hang in there and make it happen. Kudos!
First of all, fucking publish already. I'm sure you could sell this entry to someone. I don't know how much that might make you, but it doesn't take more than 500-1000$ to get a car that will get you from one place to another... though I've never been in Phoenix in the winter, I suppose you'd still want one with a working air conditioner. Or god bless you finance one. You love your city? Start playing a role in its formation.