CONTEMPORARY EXPLORER

  Trade Street cuts across Tryon at Charlottes center. A trading post originally marked the spot. People would travel from both sides of Tryon to do business there. Trade Street's past is Long gone, but change still defines it. The ever change of culture, building and business. Here you can find everything from the Mighty Midget grocery to the building once housing the Mint. One thing you always find on Trade Street is color and surprises around every turn. It still has many stories to tell....

  The Last Showgirl starring Palmela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis directed by Gia Coppola is a deep dive into ordinary life. Made even more impactful by Las Vegas. It’s a story all at once of the perils of reaching for glitz and glory, how time and changes can trap you. How getting older corners you. How thinking it will always go on can leave you short of planning for the future until it’s too late. How you can never really escape yourself. It lays bare the imperfectness of relationships. It touches on the times of beauty in part of our careers. The reaching to try to keep it alive. All this ground down into the true lives of ordinary people by the backdrop of Vegas. A city where change is always happening. The movie is not shot from the glitz of casinos but instead from backrooms of shows and parking lots with Vegas only seemingly a distant vision. A place you can’t touch completely or count on. So much of life can be like that, but above it all the movie showed how dreams an...

  TRACKS - It’s been said the only truism about tracks is that if you stand on them too long, you will get run over. Perhaps that’s why we give them respectful curiosity in passing but move on. They like wall renderings are the marks of our lives. The passing we make through it. They are always hard to figure out. We think of the tracks of the great migration of animals in Africa, the random footprint of the per-historic. Maybe they linger in our mind because we don’t exactly have our life planned out. The tracks we want to follow...

  I pass there once in a while, the blank plaque on the wall. It always dug up my old dreams. I never give much mind to who had the shop/office before, it’s all about my dreams. How I yearned to have a gallery where people would come to see my and other artists work. Just a small place where art talk filled the air. How it would build a following, the decor richer with time.  I even had names for it, or perhaps just my name. Time though took me in other directions. I found success, but the dreams never left…

  He paused thinking something could be made of this place. He reached in his pocket. There was nothing, but the dreams he walked away with…

Loneliness is at an all time high. The APA (American Psychiatric Association) reported over 30% of adults feel lonely. Malls are one place people go to escape loneliness, but often don’t find it there. You can be with hundreds of others in a modern mall and still feel alone, they lack opportunity for social interaction. Even leaving with an arm full of new purchases can still leave your soul empty for the experience.  Diane Ionescu in her article “The Mall is Dead - Long Live the Mall” points out this is far from the original thinking of how malls should be when they first appeared in the 1950’s. The original designer of malls, Victor Gruen envisioned the mall as a recreation of a European village with a roof. A place to shop, find services and socialize. As malls prospered and grew, space became too valuable to allow room for socializing. When these over commercialized malls suffered big box store failures, they became dying or dead malls. There was noting left to draw people. Now...