Under the 2nd Street Bridge (The George Clark Memorial Bridge), Louisville, KY. This was designed by Ralph Mojeski and was completed in 1929. This arch, not far from the Belle of Louisville's berth, was maybe designed to welcome river passenger's to the city, most likely passengers from the Fall Cities Ferry & Transit Co.1 , which operated in 1929 (until the bridge opened). |
Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption ... is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. - Guy Debord
That moment when you discover there's a language for the thing you do naturally, have always done naturally. Sometimes when I tell people I've not had the chance to travel internationally, the reactions vary from genuine surprise (which I always appreciate) to vaguely patronizing pity. It's not that I don't feel like I'm missing something. But I figure the international world will be there when the wind kicks up in that direction. There's a shit ton of intention to most people's notion of travel. The destination creates the reason for the trip, which has been mine over the last few years. There's nothing wrong with this, anymore than there's anything wrong with the notion of travel as a vacation (i.e., a temporary separation from one's normal life -- which isn't necessarily tourism but is often reduced to it). But as I've written about before, neither of those spheres of travel have been my natural modality.
My travel, though has always been more of a drift. Yes, it may have been precipitated by some external event... but the act of being in motion has always been at the heart of my travels. This gives me the opportunity slow down and see things that get missed in flyovers.
And there's a word for that: drift. In French, the term is dérive.
Travel for me generally means to drift, usually with only a loose notion of where I'm going. It's been this way ever since I was a kid and learned to ride a bike. And while it took me a long time to become aware of it, the motion was always more important than the destination.
Wanted Posters left from last summer's protests over the murder of Breonna Taylor. The skate park on Clay Ave. near River Rd. #sayhername |
Louisville is a savage, sad, and beautiful city. It has a lot of history -- a large portion of which the city tends to ignore, which is still visible in the architecture that revisionists and gentrifiers haven't gotten around to erasing yet. This adds a certain amount of urgency to my explorations, maybe. I want to see the parts the city planners want to erase in the name of tourism, gentrification, and cultural homogenization: the blanding of all that's rough and lovely and fraught and full of memory.
Display on 4th Street downtown. This is as close as Louisville ... and America in general, it seems... gets to embracing social change: as something remembered, not as something experienced. |
This town has rhythm to it th trains n planes and river drums summers storm and winters hum (Strawberry Lane) |
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1 Bates, Alan L., et al. “Falls Cities Ferries: A Note.” Indiana Magazine of History, vol. 95, no. 3, 1999, pp. 255–283. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27792175. Accessed 13 Apr. 2021.