Відео

Thanks for checking out the video. I am able to fondly remember joining several friends in my Peterson Hall dorm room on campus to perform, each semester, an “air guitar” rock concert. In its first incarnation, two groups of friends played a small air gui¬tar show, which was accompanied by rock music recorded on a cassette, using tennis rackets and fake microphones. These first shows were attended by a small handful of friends and held in one of the small dorm rooms. My friend Randall Evenson and I were envious of the rock stardom our friends had achieved, and successfully convinced these pioneer air guitar rock stars to allow us to join the show in the coming semester. The second show was called “Peterson Jam II,” and went to the next level of size by being held in the much larger dorm TV viewing room. “Jam II,” for the first time, introduced an elevated stage, somewhat more sophisticated “instruments,” a bit of smoke, spotlights from “roadies,” and pyrotechnics. I gave my band the name “G-Force” for its maiden voyage. The air guitarists played before a packed house audience of about 30 people. The Peterson Jam air guitar show continued to grow incrementally in the coming semesters. Much more sophisticated “guitars” were crafted by my friends and me by using plywood, spray paint, real guitar knobs, and for my band, guitar-mounted lights which illuminated the guitar fret boards. Our next concert venue was still larger: the dorm basement, which held an even larger audience. But the two biggest shows happened in the fall of 1980 and the spring of 1981 -the final semesters of my time at the university. One was a “concert” held at a large local disco in Flagstaff. The show was a roaring success, and because the disco had its largest number of customers in its history, an advertisement in the next day’s newspaper proclaimed that Daddy Morebucks Disco had reformed. The nightclub would forever renounce disco and only play rock music. The news article went on to say, “Is it possible to draw a paying crowd when the attraction is four exciting bands? Of course. But what if these four bands are nothing but college stu¬dents who neither sing nor play real instruments? Impossible. The impossible did come true, how-ever…Daddy Morebucks had ‘standing room only’ by the time the performance began…Dom Nozzi, G-Force’s guitar player, ran to the floor for the band’s encore to play guitar among the crowd while squirming on the floor…If the bands can continue with their quality shows and convincing perfor¬mances, the basement of Peterson Hall might just lose its annual show to the stages of Flagstaff.” The biggest success for us air guitarists, though, was to put together a “Monsters of Rock” event, which was an outdoor “concert” performed on a huge stage in front of the Student Union (what was then known as "North AC," which was the north campus Activity Center. Estimated audience size that night: one thousand screaming fans, many of whom later raved to me that the musicians looked and performed exactly like Ted Nugent and AC/DC. During this show, I used my dorm room at nearby Peterson Hall as a dressing room. I had to run to the stage from my room (and had everyone in the audience waiting for me since I was late). On a return visit 33 years later, I discovered that much of the grassy area where the stage and audience of one thousand people sat is now covered by a building that contains several chain cafes). Soon after the “Monsters” show, in a rumor that I never verified but seemed plausible, people working with Journey, the famed national rock band, had made inquiries about whether this air guitar show could serve as a “warm up” act for the Journey concert to be soon held at the university’s domed football stadium. I believe the air guitar shows continued after I left in 1981.

@@dnozzi Thanks for the great reply. I failed to put two amd two together for "Peterson Hall" and "Peterson Jam" .... duh :-) Anyhow, what great times. I still cherish every minute I had up there. Being from Phoenix the snow was almost a religious experience for me every year... maybe that's why I spend half of my college life up at the Snow Bowl. I REALLY got into the skiing. Thanks again!

Thank you for your exceptionally kind comment. And thank you for your efforts to bring us back to the timeless tradition of designing for people rather than cars. Onward...

Thank you for your kind compliment, Madeline, and thank you for kindly buying my book.

Thank you for watching my speech, Josh. I'm happy to hear you enjoyed it and learned from it. For details about my suggested interventions to remedy your situation, I suggest you read my books (Road to Ruin -- available in most all university libraries, and The Car is the Enemy of the City). Briefly, my suggestion for someone on a plng or zoning board is to strive to return to the timeless tradition of making people happy rather than cars. I would first work to eliminate any code requirements for providing parking. Minimum parking requirements should be converted to maximum allowable parking (zero to the max is what you should allow). You also need to keep parking away from the fronts of buildings. On-street parking needs to be allowed in as many places as possible and preferably be metered based on time of day and day of week. Your town center needs to be as walk-friendly as possible. That means very low-speed street design (using on-street parking, human-scaled dimensions at intersections/turning radii, no turn lanes, and streets no wider than three lanes anywhere in your town -- this usually requires road and intersection diets). You also need to incentive-ize residential in your town center. This can be done by relaxing building codes, environmental regs, fire codes, handicapped codes, etc. You also need to avoid punishing people financially by taxing them more when they improve or expand or density their property. You do that by adopting a land value tax (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax). Street fixtures such as signal lights and street lights need to be human-scaled (short in ht) rather than highway-scaled (tall in ht). Slow speed street design needs to use horizontal interventions such as landscaped bulb-outs rather than vertical interventions such as humps. You need to have fire dept staff on board with these tactics as they tend to be the biggest obstacles ("babies will die in burning buildings!"). Your utility company staff can also be strongly opposed, so they need to be brought on board as well. You need planning staff and engineering staff and elected officials who are on board, of course. That comes from having citizens who give their staff and officials permission to do what I'm suggesting above. One useful way to do much of the above (find the political will) is to hire a quality urban design consulting firm such as Dover-Kohl to conduct visually-based workshops and charettes that your people can get excited about (and learn from). I don't want to mislead you. What I suggest above almost never happens quickly. It took decades for you to be where you are. It is likely to take several years to reverse it. One thing to look for is a crisis you can leverage: affordable housing, loss of businesses, lack of tax revenue, natural disaster, etc. These are all a crisis that can be converted to an opportunity. Having the right timing is far more important than having brilliant ideas. The right timing means these ideas will resonate.