CONTEMPORARY EXPLORER

  Providence Square is one of those places almost forgotten. Houses stripped away to foundations, buildings half finished, dreams and stories left behind. 150 acres so close to the city, can't be left for long. Now new life stirs with plans for new stores and low income housing. Maybe they might find a way to make this work, tilling the acres to bring back the color of wealth there...

   It’s one of the first signs of a malls decline. Flaws and marks begin to appear on the floors. Management dutifully notes and flags them both for safety and the hope that they will be fixed. Tho money never comes though and they remain just more evidence that a malls days are numbered. The glitter of the place only a memory.

  There are buildings that create aw, cause you to pause, standing as a monument to the architect. Few parking garages engender the same. A developer once cautioned, “Never pay an architect until he finishes the garage.” They are the last thing the architect wants to do, no more than a necessity. If not done well, construction can leave rough edges and marks that remain scars for years. Over time though they take on their own artful way. Such a place is South Park Mall’s parking garage. A giant sprawling place left largely empty the majority of the year, except holidays. Even on quiet days finding your way into and out of the place is a puzzle.  In the sixties, cities seemed to fall in love with giant urban garages. Places they envisioned would make parking your car easy and keep downtown shopping attractive. Often though, they became dark holes in the urban fabric, especially as shopping trends changed. It’s easy to spin a crime story or worse in a dark parking garage. You pa...

  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...