Testing the Substack Waters
A many-faceted challenge- How to conduct the content creator channels?
michael-dziedzic-0XkLAIrknco-unsplash
Here I am trying to figure out all the new ways of being a “content provider”. Blogging is now given such a respectable title. It used to be that the word “blogger” was followed by the words “sitting around in their pajamas”, but people do not speculate on what “content providers” wear.
The first big secret I am revealing in this newsletter is that how one dresses had little to do with being a content provider. FYI, right now I am dressed to go into town in my khaki-colored well-tailored pants with a thinning cut and a flowered dark blue blousy shirt with a hint of Japanese in the pattern. I have stockings on but no shoes as I kicked them off. And there you have it- the casual Friday wardrobe of a content provider, and in fact, today is Friday- so it is totally appropriate!.
How does substack differ from Medium? Primarily it’s an email newsletter, and that means the writer has more control over the content with no curators or publications to be concerned about. Rumor has it that substack is the best way to grow an email list.
I project that the substack newsletter will evolve to have a distinct purpose from other forms of publishing. One of the ideas behind the substack newsletter is that it is only read by those who are on one’s mailing list, unlike a story that is published for anyone to see. That means one can tell backstories on substack that one wouldn’t necessarily want to tell to the world.
For example, I recently became involved in a discussion in my local newspaper, During the course of the conversation, it became apparent that the other conversant was likely a developer who is building the type of housing that I referred to as "Levittown”. He said we didn’t have a Levittown construction in Boothbay, to which I responded that just means a development where all the houses are basically identical and it is highly regulated, discouraging businesses in a home.
He later went into a diatribe about businesses in a home, having much to do about nothing, he typified the business in a home as the “guy who makes fireworks next to propane tank”, which I have actually never heard about but that is how irreverent his argument was. The scary thing was that I imagined that he represents the mindset of those who have been writing our town ordinances. He accused businesses in the home of being noisy, and I said that is most true about the construction business and that the ordinances should prohibit all construction on the peninsula- and also that people should be prohibited from talking when out of doors with many signs all over the roads to remind them because so many joggers disturb the neighborhood by talking while walking!
I was, of course, being facetious but he seemed to take me seriously when he said “Construction business is just temporary” as if highly offended that the construction should have any limitations imposed upon it that might be the equivalent of what is imposed upon the growth of a business in a home. I said that if it is about a mass reconstruction plan it is irreversibly permanent.
That’s when he said “businesses in the home make the community look like a ghetto” and I wondered if he knows what a ghetto is and how they come about because I felt his imagery was very symbolic of the bias he was expressing about people who have businesses in or attached to their home:
Merriam Webster
Definition of ghetto(Entry 1 of 3)
1: a quarter of a city in which Jews were formerly required to live I (a quarter ofthe town called “industrial park” where selectment think business in a home should relocate if they grow an iota)
2: a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure
3a: an isolated groupa geriatric ghetto
b: a situation that resembles a ghetto especially in conferring inferior status or limiting opportunity the pink-collar ghetto
I have to say that his statements and that statement, in particular, were expressive of the sort of extreme bias that is directed at racial groups. In Boothbay the culture war is divided along the lines of ‘locals” and “newcomers”, and in this case, the “newcomers” disparage the rural quality of the peninsula that I experience as its most valued quality.
You are welcome to download this image of my one-time garden which I have found makes for a very enjoyable desktop image Photo by Mackenzie
The great thing about rural living- or at least was once the great thing about rural living is that it could satisfy the need that most everyone has to have a place to call their own. When I grew up in Boothbay, even if one lived in a small low-income house it was on a plot of land, and often quite a distance away from other houses. It was one’s own place in the world, but in this time of rapid real estate sales in Maine, developers are on a rampage to change that. My conversant talked as if humans are just units to be housed like storage.
Low-income housing should focus on rental units and cluster units like townhouses. Another approach would be to convert large summer homes to multi-unit apartments. Easy to quadruple densities by doing that in East Boothbay. Of course all this will require substantial hikes in the property taxes. (WHY???)
Townhouses for East Boothbay? sangga-rima-roman-selia-unsplash
It is a blessing in disguise that this peninsula cannot expand as the developer community wants, that is if sustainability matters, as I explain about our endangered water supplies in my recent story
Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole Into A Dystopian World Or Is This Really Real?
Greed and the real estate boom in Boothbay Mainemedium.com
And yet there is an announcement in the Boothbay Register today of a man running unopposed for selectman of Boothbay Harbor. He was a member of the JECD, and now is a member of the broadband committee, almost the same thing as the JECD. Both Committees help themselves to public funds to advance their favorite special interests. They are little more than spending organizations.
The would-be selectman never mentions that our water supply is endangered by development. This is what the would-be selectman says:
”One critical issue for Boothbay Harbor is housing or more accurately a shortage of affordable housing for working families who, if they could get a good job here, would traditionally live here. They would support local businesses, tradesmen, schools, artists, and charities. Currently, many seek housing “value” off the peninsula. The reasons for this housing dynamic are varied; the housing market did not get into this situation overnight and a remedy most certainly will not be present at daybreak, so we must determine what step(s) can be instituted first and take those steps which may involve zoning changes, incentives, or other practical ideas. Like any change, in any direction, there will be disagreement, some passionate. I hope we can agree, housing is critical to our town’s future. Doing nothing is an option, but an option that is, in my opinion, not in the best interests of the town. “
It’s very popular these days in Boothbay to support affordable housing, for workers who will get “good jobs” for the businesses that can’t find workers here, but as I observed in the above story published on Medium, it is disconnected from reality. The reason there is no affordable housing is the tourist industry, and especially its current direction, led by developer Paul Coulombe aimed at becoming a high-end tourist destination, an industry that imports its own workers, and even provides the workers with seasonal housing, excepting a very few places that hire local people.
In the next paragraph, the would-be selectmen said the driver of the economy is the tourist industry and we all need to behave as ambassadors for this industry.
Getting back to the point that I can make behind the scenes and not so much in public. When the developer I call Howard made his disparaging remark about businesses in a home, I thought it is God’s mysterious will (as everything is in my view) that our former location is the perfect example of taking a graciously and spaciously designed home and subdivided it for dollars per inch- or human units per taxpayer dollars.
As with our first location in this area on Southport Island, a 200-year-old barn wherein our first gallery was located and then bulldozed over once we moved out, our former homestead, which was equally historic when we moved in was also bulldozed over when we left and replaced with a style of architecture that I call “American Nothing Burger” and broken up into two one-room studio apartments and a “master suite”. You can read more about that in the story above as well.
What I know but would not say publicly is that many people in town hate that building as I do as they often announce it to me. I had imagined that something elegant would be built but this is anything but that. Someone new owns the structure now and I do not want to insult them, hoping as I was that they would have the money to pick it up and move it to a more suitable location, perhaps even dividing it into two houses and giving both an actual front door entrance.
Andersen Design’s classic Turned Gull designed in the mid-century is neither out of style nor over-produced in the context of global markets, an asset for a cottage industry. Photo by Mackenzie
It is not only that a beautiful historic home, the oldest in the region, historical even when we moved in in 1958 was destroyed but its everything that Andersen Design, the brand represents. My parents have historically rooted in the tradition of the Arts and Crafts Movement started by John Ruskin and William Morris and written about by Lewis Munford, but his contemporaries and colleagues were luminaries like Eva Zeizel and Russel Wright. Eva Zeisel asked him to introduce her when she had a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in the 1980s, despite having lived at such a distance apart ( NYC and Maine) for three decades. My parents were part of the New York mid-century designers movement of the 1950s, but they took a less traveled road, in the tradition of their earlier influences and moved to Maine to start their own industry- a genuine production as an art form, pre-Andy Warhol, and that is still what it will be when it is reborn as a new twentieth-century cottage industry.
I have been working and promoting this idea for a while but it is slow going when you are on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone, but progress is going on behind the scenes.
Ok, not quite like a complete unknown because as anyone who is watching might know, the value of Maine real estate isn’t the only thing that is surging in value.. Shhhhhhh.
Mackenzie-
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