Vol. III: Interior Peripheries & The Urban Archive

2015 — 2016

Down These Mean Streets

2015 — 2016

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man, and a common man, and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man, and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.

—Raymond Chandler

For two years, I traveled ‘round and ‘round the United States, solely by Amtrak Train and Greyhound Bus. From one inner city to the next, I was in search of that complete soul, that common soul, and that unusual soul, who had archetypically mistaken the forest for the trees, or rather the city for the streets, so to speak, somewhere along the long haul toward the great American Dream.