Having completed my first year of Creative Communications, I am putting an end to A Philosophy of the Supermarket. In the fall, I will reboot this blog with a brand-new theme. I enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you, and hopefully, I tried to instill some thought in whoever was reading this blog. Have a good spring/summer, and see you soon...
- Zach Samborski
Saturday 20 April 2013
Thursday 18 April 2013
A Poem About A Car (The Final Installment)
The Chrome
She drinks a gallon of money
for another coating of chrome
topping her aging days
ramshackled under sky fire
and upheaval of the clay
A vexing of my nerve
to chrome she surrenders;
she takes me to ditches
filled with cobbles of hail
and the rest of the metal
I'll lead her to balloon,
blow-out, bail on
connecting yellow;
I'll make her human
three seconds upside down
through the smog of air
Monday 8 April 2013
The City
In the next few months, you will hear about Winnipeg 2087, my novella I'm doing for my Independent Professional Project. Right now, I'm keeping the project mostly a secret, but I will tell you that it deals with one pressing theme: urban sprawl.
Winnipeg's downtown core is certainly at a crossroads. Every urban planner is literally betting cards on what could bring it back to life. They guessed Portage Place would do it back in 1987, and they got it wrong. When Portage Place failed, they placed their bets on the MTS Centre, and sure enough, they were wrong on that count as well.
In a way, the city used to be a large village. Almost everything was interconnected. Then came the superhighway concept, and out sprang the suburbs in the 1950s. Many of the cities we speak of today are not really cities in the literal sense. They are more like a series of communities connected by major uplinks.
Well-known chains are the diving markers of every city's community -- you'll never find two Wal-Mart stores close to each other. But it would be foolhardy to suggest that chains contribute to urban sprawl. Technology is a major factor as well. If you purchase online, bank online, and order Chinese online, you'll wonder what's the point of going to an urban core to do it all.
The irony is that consumer convenience has somewhat led to frayed nerves. The bigger the suburbs, the larger the traffic mess gets, and it gets hellish for pedestrians. If there are no linking pathways or walking lanes, pedestrians have to cross the thickest of highways to get to their destinations as the motors idle on and on.
If your house is the community, your exterior environment is your weakness. The further you push your caravan into cyberspace, the more foreign the world around you becomes.
Winnipeg's downtown core is certainly at a crossroads. Every urban planner is literally betting cards on what could bring it back to life. They guessed Portage Place would do it back in 1987, and they got it wrong. When Portage Place failed, they placed their bets on the MTS Centre, and sure enough, they were wrong on that count as well.
In a way, the city used to be a large village. Almost everything was interconnected. Then came the superhighway concept, and out sprang the suburbs in the 1950s. Many of the cities we speak of today are not really cities in the literal sense. They are more like a series of communities connected by major uplinks.
Well-known chains are the diving markers of every city's community -- you'll never find two Wal-Mart stores close to each other. But it would be foolhardy to suggest that chains contribute to urban sprawl. Technology is a major factor as well. If you purchase online, bank online, and order Chinese online, you'll wonder what's the point of going to an urban core to do it all.
The irony is that consumer convenience has somewhat led to frayed nerves. The bigger the suburbs, the larger the traffic mess gets, and it gets hellish for pedestrians. If there are no linking pathways or walking lanes, pedestrians have to cross the thickest of highways to get to their destinations as the motors idle on and on.
If your house is the community, your exterior environment is your weakness. The further you push your caravan into cyberspace, the more foreign the world around you becomes.
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