okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

So far about all I’ve done here is work, visit the beach, visit Mount Trashmore, and shop.  Not a whole lot of future in any of those things, so I thought I’d put my overly analytical and obsessive compulsive mouth aside and try something different for a change.  I wanted to walk around downtown Norfolk for a change, and see Waterside, so I made my way down to the Afr’Am festival at Town Point Park which oddly enough just seems like the backyard of Waterside.  Getting there is easy enough, just get off on the Waterside exit, park in one of the many parking garages in downtown Norfolk and just walk a few blocks.  Waited in line for like an hour and paid my $10 and walked right in.

Thus the contradictions of the Seven Cities; first off Town Point Park seems to be a small plot of land in front of downtown sandwiched in between Norfolk and the pier.  Everything is like, right there in a very compact fashion.  It was a nice backdrop though, with what appeared to be the oldest part of downtown Norfolk.  Across the water you see a few high rises here and there in downtown Portsmouth, which trust, has a very, very long way to go in comparison to either downtown Norfolk or Virginia Beach.

There is serious potential here, hell, I wish Norfolk would take over parts of Portsmouth so they could get their act together because the view was seriously underutilized.  Billions of dollars later, and perhaps with the brute force of eminent domain, that view could be remade in ways that would boggle the mind.  Aside from all of that though there are plenty of holes in Norfolk’s skyline that the city is trying to plug as well.

But it’s all the same old same old, who wants to enforce whose ideas of a metropolis on who, what taxpayers are going to pay for what projects, and what obstacles stand in the way.  It still seems like a work in progress, but it has an authenticity and organic nature to it that is missing in downtown Virginia Beach.  It’s also more of what I would like to see when I am passing through Hampton or rather Newport News.  It was my first time visiting either the park or Waterside, and I finally got to see what the hubbub was all about.

Waterside should be razed; it’s an old paradigm from a failed effort to bring something that was missing to downtown Norfolk.  It’s an ugly, hideous sight, an eye sore really, with no real place in a city like Norfolk, though it could work well in a suburb of 50,000 in Southern New Jersey.  I flirted with the idea of going in there but then upon realization of what was in there, and how much it reminded me of bland efforts to do something back home, sort of like Quaker Square that was relevant 30 years ago, I had to walk away. 

Again, Town Point Park is like really, really small.  I mean what the hell you had two like micro-mini amphitheatre like set ups, you know where you can sit in the grass and watch performers from atop a hill.  There were like, maybe 30 or so vendors 10 of which were selling food, a lot of which was the same and the other 20 or more selling a variety of things mostly organizational stuff that seemed to reflect a transparent effort of the greek organizations to pawn off merchandise on unsuspecting people passing through.  You could either walk down the street and frequent the vendors or walk through the grass, and that was it.

It was a beautiful day though.  Given my own personal hangups and mixed feelings about the aesthetic of urbanization in the area I walked around and took it all in.  Everyone was dressed up in their best it seemed, the DJs from the local radio station weretrying desperately to warm up the crowd for like hours on end so a famous R&B singer would come out and another local band was working the other stage trying to bring their own unique mashup of rock, blues, soul and hip-hop.  Needless to say the endless string of rap hits drowned out that group, and they eventually gave up and left.

I saw one of the directors at my old job but couldn’t place her for anything, just that I recognized her face.  It dawned on me later on the evening.  My wife ran into some people she knew that frequented her job as well.  After about an hour of people watching my feet were killing me and I made my way back to the car.  About a third of the way there I heard some commotion and people running out of the place; couldn’t have been shots because I didn’t hear anything but I doubt a fight would have done much of anything but draw spectators and a diversion from the MC, so I can’t really call it.  Needless to say the ambulance made it’s way there.

I’m not surprised; first off it was walking room only and it took longer to leave the place than it did to get in.  Secondly they were charging $10, for what I have no idea because the only thing free there was the music, and quite honestly, unless the performer was getting a nice chunk of that, or the city of Norfolk, I certainly didn’t get anything I couldn’t have gotten for free somewhere else.  But I wanted to do something different, and this year it was a really big deal because it was the 25th anniversary of the festival.

The organization behind the festival is The Southeastern Virginia Arts Association, a non profit dedicated to promoting the arts and culture in the region.  Among other things they also have a scholarship foundation but what is more interesting is that they state that the Cultural Alliance of Greater Hampton Roads hadn’t done enough to represent the other black organizations in the region on their website.

There is a lot going on in this area, if you’re willing to go out of your way to find it.  Actually it was refreshing not to have to travel to Hampton, which seems to have all of the events of interest for African-Americans.  Granted much of that is due to the sheer number of people living here but a lot of my issues are centered around my rather bourgeois and perverse notions of what “something to do” entails as well.  I don’t want to be one of those Northerners that b* and moan, all of that fear and loathing but refuse to do anything but try to impress people that I am up on something I obviously am not.  One of those people I always talk about that I feel should move back to where they came from, you see these jerks everywhere, they move to a metropolitan area and then talk it into the ground as they’re homesick because they miss Brooklyn, or Massachusetts, or Philadelphia or Chicago or whatever.  But I am still obsessed with what the area is and isn’t.  I want to drive through downtown on the highway, dwarfed by high rises instead of merely seeing them on one side the way you do passing through cities around here.  I want to walk everywhere, or take public transportation whenever feasible.  I want the suburbs to be suburbs and the cities to be cities, I’m sick of running into a suburb within the city.  I want a lot more than what I’ve taken for granted and entirely too much to expect reasonably.

Hampton Roads teases you with the idea of a metropolis, and then gives you a taste of it and takes it away.  But you’re drained with it, lost in it, d*mned trying to make sense of it and discombobulated trying to deny it, tragically you’re stuck in the ultimate tourist trap.  You get double-minded, other metros are more expensive, dirtier, grimier, with even higher rents and worse paying jobs; though you would never know that if you never tried.  Then you’re conflicted about not accepting it for what it is.

I love grocery stores like Harris Teeter, which offer upscale gourmet food which is often overpriced but I’ll be d*mned if they don’t carry the best selection in the area.  The other three stores include Wal-Mart, Farm Fresh and Food Lion, grocers that dominate the state in general.  There are of course discounters like Save-A-Lot, and Bottom Dollar, essentially Food Lion’s answer to Save-A-Lot. 

I like the boutiques, but I miss what I used to take for granted back home.  Drive In movie theatres, drive thru liquor stores, abandoned buildings, uninhibited strip clubs where you can find some real trouble if you’re looking for it, uninhibited clubs where a fight is bound to break out and someone will clearly get shot by the end of the week, if not that night, buildings that were built for one use and are now in use for something entirely different for like the fifth time now, and least of all, city parks every other square mile.  But the area is trying to clean up their image, and encourage people with money that really want to move here to stay here, and what little bit of dirt that is here is being swept into the corner.

That’s great and all, but I don’t want to see another bl**dy strip mall or any more bland housing construction or just another high-rise lacking real imagination being passed off as mixed-use.  When they’re trying to clean up a place that people are most likely living at because they can’t honestly afford to move anywhere else, such as South Norfolk, yeah, perhaps some of that would help out because it makes me feel a bit better about living there myself.  But when it is for the rich mostly, like most of what is occuring in any of the downtowns in this region, you have to question whether it will enrich that downtown or if those better off aren’t taking back that area of the city. 

For better or worse though this is my area until I get up the nerve to do something about it or are uncomfortable enough to make any real changes.  Ironically I am hard pressed to do either, as I am struggling to make ends meet, again.  I usually like it at times.  Yet I seem to be doing better, oddly enough.  Just another one of the contradictions of life in the seven cities …