Snowflakes streak through the air and melt as soon as they hit the ground on an early December afternoon.
"It's a good day for blight," says the man known to Kansas City blog readers as Midtown Miscreant.
Midtown Miscreant is Mark Smith, an ex-con possessed of an attraction to the city's saddest places.
I grew mesmerized with his posts (at midtownmiscreant.blogspot.com) in August when Smith began putting up photos of neglected neighborhoods. Smith has a job driving around and picking up wireless signals for cell phones — a gig that takes him all over the metro. He has always loved cruising through the city and looking at its troubled core. When another blogger wanted to list the top 10 blighted areas in the metro, Smith ran with the idea, making urban-blight tours a regular feature of his blogs.
In an August 13 post called "The Ghosts of KCK," Smith posted eight bleak photos, most of them black-and-white.
"I think in another post I may have compared this part of the metro with pictures I had seen of Chernobyl," he wrote. "When you drive through here, even where houses still exist, there is a pervasive feeling of decay, emptiness, loss of hope." The landscape leaves him at a loss for words. "I apologize if you were expecting me to do my usual wise ass commentary, but I just can't find much to be flippant about here. I'm not sure why, trust me I can go to a million neighborhoods, every bit as bad as this area, and a barrage of smart ass comments will spew forth.... But there is something that tugs at me when it comes to this part of KCK."
He was back in form a couple of weeks later.
"Blight is all in the eye of the beholder," he wrote in an August 24 post that included photos of newly built, beige tract homes in Johnson County. "One man's blight is another's flight. Today's Urban Blight Tour takes us not into the heart of darkness, but the land of blandness. There are no meth addled trailer park creatures, or thugged up gangstas to worry about where we are going. The biggest threat isn't a car jacking or stray bullet, the enemy here is a same sameness that is more frightening than anything I encounter in Midtown. Today my intrepid reader, we explore the Johnson County Subdivision, and all that comes with it. Now before some of my more thin skinned readers, who hail from JoCo, get their Tommy Hilfigers in a bunch, let me say this. If you chuckled at the posts I have done on any number of my urban brethren, then turn about is fair play, it's your turn now."
Smith also writes about career criminals and undesirable characters most people don't get the pleasure of meeting — unless they find themselves in a police lineup. His September 22 essay recounts a feud between "Joe," who Smith claims was "at one time one of the city's most violent career criminals," and "Bird Dog," a "big man, I mean linebacker big, but gone to fat." Bird Dog ends up with bullets in his butt, thigh and shoulder; Joe eventually torches a house at a lake south of town.
At 49, with a biting wit and a mouth full of curse words, Smith knows that his face is worn into a permanent scowl. He keeps his head shaved bald and wears a white goatee. His uniform is a black-leather jacket and blue jeans.
Smith decided to start writing in October 2007, after reading Greg Beck's gritty blog, Death’s Door A strip-club bouncer and veteran of Kansas City's seedy nightlife, Beck had been writing Death's Door since November 2002. His death of a heart attack in September 2007 was the first loss in a relatively young blogging community, where countless Kansas Citians felt that they knew a man they had never met.
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I could not stop reading. Somewhere down the line from Dostoyevsky's lower depths,to DeQuincey's opium laced confessions, to Dr. Benway formerly of Lawrence Kansas, a new down and outer emerges into the zeitgeist. This guy is fabulous,the aesthetician of our dark places.
Those trailer parks on the way to the Bamboo Hut are the Vatican City of "brokedown and beatdown", the great cultural testamentos' to "raunch" as high art. To compare these oxidized sepulchral habitations to the virused beigery and sameness of Johnson County is spot on: JC-the land of bad architecture and asphalt as a growth industry. The allure of the GROTESQUE is heady, addicting and undermines our bourgeois notions of civility and safety and gentility. Francis Bacon and Goya, Bukowski and Burroughs, down and out in Paris and London and Kansas City. We are in good company indeed.
I could not stop reading. Somewhere down the line from Dostoyevsky's lower depths,to DeQuincey's opium laced confessions, to Dr. Benway formerly of Lawrence Kansas, a new down and outer emerges into the zeitgeist. This guy is fabulous,the aesthetician of our dark places. Those trailer parks on the way to the Bamboo Hut are the Vatican City of "brokedown and beatdown", the great cultural testamentos' to "raunch" as high art. To compare these oxidized sepulchral habitations to the virused beigery and sameness of Johnson County is spot on: JC-the land of bad architecture and asphalt as a growth industry. The allure of the GROTESQUE is heady, addicting and undermines our bourgeois notions of civility and safety and gentility. Francis Bacon and Goya, Bukowski and Burroughs, down and out in Paris and London and Kansas City. We are in good company indeed.
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