Club Hex opened up…err, I mean the Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Check the video below. Bumping.

On a more serious note, me and Anne co-authored a piece over at Atlantic Cities talking about ways in which the Rust Belt is framed in national presses. Often, it’s all about revival or it’s all about ruin. The context is University Circle, where MOCA has been unveiled. An excerpt:

Many dispatches from the industrial north are written by writers who fly to report what they saw during a day or a weekend, and almost invariably, the memes get in the way, or more likely, were in the writer’s head before she arrived. Looking around cities like Cleveland, it’s easy to draw hasty conclusions, to either sentimentalize the old, gritty working class blocks now abandoned, or be all gobsmacked to find signs of modernity and life. The resulting picture looks too black and white: “this is where the good stuff is—the rebirth!—and this is where the bad stuff is–the ruin!” Truth is, the Rust Belt is a very gray place: it is both in ruins and reviving. It’s a fascinating time and place for the region, particularly for urbanists. But the ruin and revival memes flatten out complexity.

Read the rest here.