Off to visit a friend in distress, in the heart of Dixie itself, Alabama. This is a great guy whose life imploded on him: lost job, lost wife, lost house. A few days there, then Saturday in Atlanta, which I hate, but where one of my best friends from college (Tulane, not Wisconsin)lives.
I've already weighed in on how the north completely funded the south so these go-go business cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte could actually be considered habitable. But for now, I'm southbound.
Monday, August 25, 2008
I could smash your head open like a melon, but nice shoes
It's the biggest cliche around, but I have to say "only in New York" to a truly weird incident last Friday night.
Navigating through the huge theatre crowds in Times Square just before 11, I wound up behind two fairly short middle-aged white guys and a woman. Ahead of them was a tall black youth with a shaved head.
I don't know what set the scene, but the kid turned around and said to one of them, "I could knock you out, but I like that polo shirt." The scared whiteys say nothing. The kid turns and said to stop talking about him, because, again, "I could knock you out, but that's a cool polo."
Where does this kind of thinking end? "I could axe-murder you, then chainsaw your remains and feed it to my dog, but love the socks." In the heart of the great consumerist machine, it was consumerism that stopped the kid and saved the whiteys.
Some one should put up a sign now. "Polo: Stops Threatening Negroes Every Time."
Navigating through the huge theatre crowds in Times Square just before 11, I wound up behind two fairly short middle-aged white guys and a woman. Ahead of them was a tall black youth with a shaved head.
I don't know what set the scene, but the kid turned around and said to one of them, "I could knock you out, but I like that polo shirt." The scared whiteys say nothing. The kid turns and said to stop talking about him, because, again, "I could knock you out, but that's a cool polo."
Where does this kind of thinking end? "I could axe-murder you, then chainsaw your remains and feed it to my dog, but love the socks." In the heart of the great consumerist machine, it was consumerism that stopped the kid and saved the whiteys.
Some one should put up a sign now. "Polo: Stops Threatening Negroes Every Time."
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
What's the Matter with Newark?
It's location could be picked as ideal in an urban planning text. Newark; 20 minutes from Midtown by train, a little more time on the PATH train to Wall St. Like Stamford, Conn. it should by all measurements be a booming satellite city.
Yet Newark, more than 40 years after the worst rioting in the nation in the 1960s' (along with Detroit) is constantly the Phoenix trying to rise out of ashes, and failing.
The former mayor is under indictment on a number of charges, and the drug markets are still running strong near the interstates. Newark last summer (07) even managed a triple murder of three college students that actually got airtime on major networks.
But the real question is how the city somehow cannot cash-in on its location and advantages.
They have built a lux arena for the NJ Devils, which is great, except it should be keeping the Nets, the basketball team. Twice the events in that case, and Brooklyners largely don't want an arena in the overcrowded heart of the borough. The new residents in the borough are largely culture snob types, which is fine, but are not constant fans the way bored suburban kids and middle=of-the-road type homeowners (with giant wall-mounted plasma screens!) are in in NJ.
Like Detroit, Newark built for itself a Blade Runner office complex around the railroad station. The buildings are connected by skywalks over the street grid for suburban commuters. The affluent scurrying above, the rest below, on the god-help-us sidewalks.
But, there are projects underway to lure Manhattanite types with much lower rents and bigger spaces. This is great, but may only last, as one city councilman said, "until the first white boy comes off the PATH at 3 am and is robbed and killed."
Our urban planning decisions, like so much else, are driven by race and crime. It has long since become tiresome. But . . . safety first.
Yet Newark, more than 40 years after the worst rioting in the nation in the 1960s' (along with Detroit) is constantly the Phoenix trying to rise out of ashes, and failing.
The former mayor is under indictment on a number of charges, and the drug markets are still running strong near the interstates. Newark last summer (07) even managed a triple murder of three college students that actually got airtime on major networks.
But the real question is how the city somehow cannot cash-in on its location and advantages.
They have built a lux arena for the NJ Devils, which is great, except it should be keeping the Nets, the basketball team. Twice the events in that case, and Brooklyners largely don't want an arena in the overcrowded heart of the borough. The new residents in the borough are largely culture snob types, which is fine, but are not constant fans the way bored suburban kids and middle=of-the-road type homeowners (with giant wall-mounted plasma screens!) are in in NJ.
Like Detroit, Newark built for itself a Blade Runner office complex around the railroad station. The buildings are connected by skywalks over the street grid for suburban commuters. The affluent scurrying above, the rest below, on the god-help-us sidewalks.
But, there are projects underway to lure Manhattanite types with much lower rents and bigger spaces. This is great, but may only last, as one city councilman said, "until the first white boy comes off the PATH at 3 am and is robbed and killed."
Our urban planning decisions, like so much else, are driven by race and crime. It has long since become tiresome. But . . . safety first.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
The New South, Brought to You by the Old North
The reason the South has boomed since WWII can be distilled into three main forces.
1) Air Conditoning. The Carrier Corporation, historically based out of Syracuse (think of the Carrier Dome) made air-conditioning cheap enough for everyone. It changed the classic slow-lethargic southern towns and manners. It made possible the go-go business oriented cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte.
2) Cheap electricity. The Tennessee Valley Authority damned up the Tennessee River all the way from Alabama to Tennessee, generating cheap electricity to a region whos poor inhabitants sometimes lived in lightless shacks.
3) The Interstate Highway system. Unlike legitimately wealthy states like NY, NJ, PA, and Mass., the South built no four-lane throughways. The federally-funded interstate highways took care of that, on our dime.
This is why Southern voters and politicians are fundamentally phony. They rail about taxes, then end up reaping the reward for what the programs have done (and I didn't even get into the build-up of military bases and contractors). Some of it is simply semantics. You say taxes, they say welfare-dependent population. It is a dependent population - on government and military programs that benefit them.
1) Air Conditoning. The Carrier Corporation, historically based out of Syracuse (think of the Carrier Dome) made air-conditioning cheap enough for everyone. It changed the classic slow-lethargic southern towns and manners. It made possible the go-go business oriented cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte.
2) Cheap electricity. The Tennessee Valley Authority damned up the Tennessee River all the way from Alabama to Tennessee, generating cheap electricity to a region whos poor inhabitants sometimes lived in lightless shacks.
3) The Interstate Highway system. Unlike legitimately wealthy states like NY, NJ, PA, and Mass., the South built no four-lane throughways. The federally-funded interstate highways took care of that, on our dime.
This is why Southern voters and politicians are fundamentally phony. They rail about taxes, then end up reaping the reward for what the programs have done (and I didn't even get into the build-up of military bases and contractors). Some of it is simply semantics. You say taxes, they say welfare-dependent population. It is a dependent population - on government and military programs that benefit them.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
The New South and Us
Last week's Newsweek cover on "The New South" featured one of Louisiana's most beautiful plantations, with an alley of live oaks framing a white-columned, immaculately maintained white house at its end.
It is hard not to think of the house my grandfather had built on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, just outside of Washington. It is a two-story (without attic) painted-white brick house with four columns in the front. It looks impressive from the road, but in reality it was originally only one room wide.
As a child we (my bothers and I)loved who now might be called "the help." Jimmy, the light-skinned driver for my grandfather, and Arbell, the cook.
As I look back on it, I can see how people could say my grandfather was running a modern-day plantation, and that Jimmy and Arbell were the house n--grs. But they had in a way a nice situation.
After my grandfather died, Jimmy was able to purchase his dream house in Winchester, VA. Arbell's fate I can't remember, but she certainly wasn't exploited in any way.
People that criticize this arrangement have got to think a minute: what would have become of them otherwise?
For too many, the answer is to abandon blacks to their own devices. We've formed separate societies: they go their way, we go ours. That's why in the South one may not believe in racial equality, but share roughly the same place as blacks. There is a natural vibe there that doesn't come off as patronizing.
Before Obama, I worked for a black owned company (Tourmobile Sightseeing). Blacks there used to always say that Bill Clinton is the closest America is ever going to get to a black president. His kinship with blacks never looked forced. It was just natural in the way he presented himself (especially, sterotypically with food). He was, in a way, blacker, or more african american in background than Obama.
The man in the middle has a jagged line to follow - or to make.
It is hard not to think of the house my grandfather had built on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, just outside of Washington. It is a two-story (without attic) painted-white brick house with four columns in the front. It looks impressive from the road, but in reality it was originally only one room wide.
As a child we (my bothers and I)loved who now might be called "the help." Jimmy, the light-skinned driver for my grandfather, and Arbell, the cook.
As I look back on it, I can see how people could say my grandfather was running a modern-day plantation, and that Jimmy and Arbell were the house n--grs. But they had in a way a nice situation.
After my grandfather died, Jimmy was able to purchase his dream house in Winchester, VA. Arbell's fate I can't remember, but she certainly wasn't exploited in any way.
People that criticize this arrangement have got to think a minute: what would have become of them otherwise?
For too many, the answer is to abandon blacks to their own devices. We've formed separate societies: they go their way, we go ours. That's why in the South one may not believe in racial equality, but share roughly the same place as blacks. There is a natural vibe there that doesn't come off as patronizing.
Before Obama, I worked for a black owned company (Tourmobile Sightseeing). Blacks there used to always say that Bill Clinton is the closest America is ever going to get to a black president. His kinship with blacks never looked forced. It was just natural in the way he presented himself (especially, sterotypically with food). He was, in a way, blacker, or more african american in background than Obama.
The man in the middle has a jagged line to follow - or to make.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
All that is Solid Melts into a Traffic Jam
Speaking of Madison, it has been difficult to avoid the publicity surrounding former Daily Cardinal entertainment editor Tom Vanderbilt's "Traffic." This book got perhaps the most coveted space in the East Coast literary establishment: the front of the New York Times book review last Sunday.
Vanderbilt surprised everyone in the book world by getting an advance of about $500,000 from Knopf. Such a figure is usually unheard of except for established airport novels by Tom Clancy, John Grisham etc. Would the hoi polloi really shell out $25 for a tome on "why we drive the way we do, and what is says about us?"
Tom is an excellent writer who has written very cleverly about some unusual subjects. He wrote a book about sneakers; how the modest gym shoe became a multibillion dollar industry and icon. His other is called Survival City, wherein he tours underground cities and bunker complexes made to withstand nuclear war and its aftermath.
The new book is surprisingly interesting, with boring statistics kept to a minimum. He explains such mysteries as why the other lane is always moving faster, whether women or men create more traffic, and how being an asshole aggresive "late merger" at construction sites etc is actually good for traffic.
Tom is on a media tour, and has a blog ("traffic signals")that monitors his progress (like other young writers, he has been seemingly mandated to live in Brooklyn). Even if you're not a would-be nerd urban planner like me, it's worth reading.
Vanderbilt surprised everyone in the book world by getting an advance of about $500,000 from Knopf. Such a figure is usually unheard of except for established airport novels by Tom Clancy, John Grisham etc. Would the hoi polloi really shell out $25 for a tome on "why we drive the way we do, and what is says about us?"
Tom is an excellent writer who has written very cleverly about some unusual subjects. He wrote a book about sneakers; how the modest gym shoe became a multibillion dollar industry and icon. His other is called Survival City, wherein he tours underground cities and bunker complexes made to withstand nuclear war and its aftermath.
The new book is surprisingly interesting, with boring statistics kept to a minimum. He explains such mysteries as why the other lane is always moving faster, whether women or men create more traffic, and how being an asshole aggresive "late merger" at construction sites etc is actually good for traffic.
Tom is on a media tour, and has a blog ("traffic signals")that monitors his progress (like other young writers, he has been seemingly mandated to live in Brooklyn). Even if you're not a would-be nerd urban planner like me, it's worth reading.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The War at Home
Speaking of black and white film, I bought a movie called "The War at Home," which chronicled the Vietnam protests at my alma mater, The University of Wisconsin in Madison. The protests start out peacefully and are attended by a committed few in the mid-1960s, but by the summer of 1970 (after the Kent State protests had killed four students) culminated in the bombing of the Army Math Research Center, in which one man was killed, although it was four am on a Saturday in the summer.
It was the largest home-made bomb to explode in the US until the Oklahoma City bomb in the 90s.
The footage in the movie was, again, a mixture of b and w and color. It of course started to be in color after the real violence kicked in after Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm, came to one of the buildings to interview interested students in fall 1967, and were being blockaded in one of the campus buildings.
Ralph Hansen, chief of campus security and improbably one of the mellowest cops ever (he was still there when I was) called Madison police (now a bunch of lesbians and whatever). They cleared the building brutally, with billy clubs to the head. Classes were then letting out and thousands of students were outraged when they saw what was going on and were shouting at and pushing the cops. Finally, the first tear-gassing of a college campus cleared people away, and Madison become famously (or infamously) violent and out of control for the next few years.
Just like then, I want to confront the warmakers at home. By this I mean the NRA, who are Unpatriotic and Unamerican in that they defend the murder of its citizens. Thousand of Americans each year are killed by handguns. I don't know for sure, but I will bet that the number of Americans killed by firearms each year is more than the toll of Vietnam deaths (55,000 plus).
My young friend Christian, though, has said (and I agree) that you cannot rely on the old tactics. The way to get publicity on your side is not to sit in at a university or capitol building. No one cares. Disrupt their transportation and communication.
What does this mean? Either preventing people from getting to work at the NRA building in jackass Northern Virginia (where they moved after finding DC none too welcoming and too close to the people they were killing) or not letting them out of the parking lots.
Then there would be blockading I-66, from which the NRA building, with its letters atop it (steal this sign and burn it!), are clearly visible. Drive heavy trucks in tandem down the interstate, then have them slow down and finally stop where the NRA building is. Get people to occupy the road, and when outraged drivers started to threaten them, have them point to the building.
Next would be to take out their communications. Get some computer nerd to completly cut off their computers and telephones.
This would definitely attract the attention of the press. It would also lead to the arrest of many of those involved, including (for conspiracy) myself. These are the stakes. With four-year olds being killed by gun crossfire, and a chickenshit Supreme Court only encouraging gun nuts, its time to take on the real killers, and not like OJ said. It is the war at home, and it's civilization versus barbarism, where every man fights for himself. It's also the only way to end racism, by disarming ghetto kids. And then they wouldn't be able to find a replacement so easily.
I always find it amusing that gun advocates (what, the guns can't speak for themselves?) talk about removing "illegal guns" from our streets.
Where do they think the weapons are made and sold? Are people stealing guns right from some assembly line somewhere. Somewhere, sometime, those guns are purchased legally.
It was the largest home-made bomb to explode in the US until the Oklahoma City bomb in the 90s.
The footage in the movie was, again, a mixture of b and w and color. It of course started to be in color after the real violence kicked in after Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm, came to one of the buildings to interview interested students in fall 1967, and were being blockaded in one of the campus buildings.
Ralph Hansen, chief of campus security and improbably one of the mellowest cops ever (he was still there when I was) called Madison police (now a bunch of lesbians and whatever). They cleared the building brutally, with billy clubs to the head. Classes were then letting out and thousands of students were outraged when they saw what was going on and were shouting at and pushing the cops. Finally, the first tear-gassing of a college campus cleared people away, and Madison become famously (or infamously) violent and out of control for the next few years.
Just like then, I want to confront the warmakers at home. By this I mean the NRA, who are Unpatriotic and Unamerican in that they defend the murder of its citizens. Thousand of Americans each year are killed by handguns. I don't know for sure, but I will bet that the number of Americans killed by firearms each year is more than the toll of Vietnam deaths (55,000 plus).
My young friend Christian, though, has said (and I agree) that you cannot rely on the old tactics. The way to get publicity on your side is not to sit in at a university or capitol building. No one cares. Disrupt their transportation and communication.
What does this mean? Either preventing people from getting to work at the NRA building in jackass Northern Virginia (where they moved after finding DC none too welcoming and too close to the people they were killing) or not letting them out of the parking lots.
Then there would be blockading I-66, from which the NRA building, with its letters atop it (steal this sign and burn it!), are clearly visible. Drive heavy trucks in tandem down the interstate, then have them slow down and finally stop where the NRA building is. Get people to occupy the road, and when outraged drivers started to threaten them, have them point to the building.
Next would be to take out their communications. Get some computer nerd to completly cut off their computers and telephones.
This would definitely attract the attention of the press. It would also lead to the arrest of many of those involved, including (for conspiracy) myself. These are the stakes. With four-year olds being killed by gun crossfire, and a chickenshit Supreme Court only encouraging gun nuts, its time to take on the real killers, and not like OJ said. It is the war at home, and it's civilization versus barbarism, where every man fights for himself. It's also the only way to end racism, by disarming ghetto kids. And then they wouldn't be able to find a replacement so easily.
I always find it amusing that gun advocates (what, the guns can't speak for themselves?) talk about removing "illegal guns" from our streets.
Where do they think the weapons are made and sold? Are people stealing guns right from some assembly line somewhere. Somewhere, sometime, those guns are purchased legally.
Black and White in Color
Watching a home-made copy of "Swingers" in which the film for some reason constantly switches from color to black and white. It struck me by how dated those parts of the movie appear, with even the multicolored lights of Vegas made simply bright and white. At the same time, I was thinking of color footage of the Nazis I'd seen on public television. It made the war appear much more real and fairly modern, which it is.
Black and white TV and movies look not only far away in time, but in another place, another world. Planet B&W, which you have no connection to and can't really relate to.
It's no coincidence that football was becoming the prime national sport right at the time that people started buying color sets. It was fast and colorful, and established a de facto new national holiday, the Super Bowl.
As a kid, of course, you thought that the past was very prim and proper, with everyone dressed well and never swearing. Thirty years ago was an eternity, and everything had changed due to the sexual and racial revolutions and looser moral standards of the 1960s. In contrast, kids now can find 1970s films and programs that are actually more explicit in many senses than now. In repeats it doesn't look or feel that old anymore, mostly because it is in color. Sometimes I'll watch a TV program and can't readily tell when it was filmed.
The post-modern condition, oddly, means that things never go away. Somewhere, always, TV and radio from much earlier eras are played over and over again. I often can't tell whether I actually saw public events or just the footage later. I swear I saw the fall of Saigon in 1975, when it actually happened, when I was nine, but I can't really be sure.
On the computer, things hang around forever on Google, with no differentiation in their initial presentation (in the text maybe more photos, video and sound now). I found a little newsletter on-line that I had done for the National Building Museum. In 1996.
A few things should stay black and white, like art films or anything by famous directors in which the use of black and white light is crucial to the film (Hitchcock, Truffaut, Goddard, Bunuel, Bergman, Fellini etc).
But ordinarily, I love colorized movies. They're history come alive, although the actors in far too many still talk in that overly scripted, unnatural, stilted way --Saaay, a wise-guy huuunh?
Black and white TV and movies look not only far away in time, but in another place, another world. Planet B&W, which you have no connection to and can't really relate to.
It's no coincidence that football was becoming the prime national sport right at the time that people started buying color sets. It was fast and colorful, and established a de facto new national holiday, the Super Bowl.
As a kid, of course, you thought that the past was very prim and proper, with everyone dressed well and never swearing. Thirty years ago was an eternity, and everything had changed due to the sexual and racial revolutions and looser moral standards of the 1960s. In contrast, kids now can find 1970s films and programs that are actually more explicit in many senses than now. In repeats it doesn't look or feel that old anymore, mostly because it is in color. Sometimes I'll watch a TV program and can't readily tell when it was filmed.
The post-modern condition, oddly, means that things never go away. Somewhere, always, TV and radio from much earlier eras are played over and over again. I often can't tell whether I actually saw public events or just the footage later. I swear I saw the fall of Saigon in 1975, when it actually happened, when I was nine, but I can't really be sure.
On the computer, things hang around forever on Google, with no differentiation in their initial presentation (in the text maybe more photos, video and sound now). I found a little newsletter on-line that I had done for the National Building Museum. In 1996.
A few things should stay black and white, like art films or anything by famous directors in which the use of black and white light is crucial to the film (Hitchcock, Truffaut, Goddard, Bunuel, Bergman, Fellini etc).
But ordinarily, I love colorized movies. They're history come alive, although the actors in far too many still talk in that overly scripted, unnatural, stilted way --Saaay, a wise-guy huuunh?
Monday, August 4, 2008
Four Divorces and Your Funeral
Let's start up a web site for Hollywood wedding altar scenes. There's plenty of material to mine: the Graduate, Wedding Crashers, Four Weddings and a Funeral etc etc. etc.
I understand that the cliched drama factor of everyone watching the vows in action is a natural for last-minute confessions of true love, but in terms of confrontations, let's have some more good divorce scenes. Half of all marriages end up splitting up; the bride and groom should have some practice before their frequently ill-advised unions implode on them. They should at least have a movie about it.
I'm already way behind everyone in terms of getting the old ball and chain, but now there seems to be a plague of divorces among those who know me. I'd love to say "I told you so" but I didn't.
I can imagine the pull-quotes on my my movie's ads. "Heart-Warming" could be "Heartless." "No One in the Audience Stood Up and Clapped," "Love Conquers One Guy, the rest Back-Stab each other and Call Their Lawyers." "The children blame themselves, as they probably should." "It will leave you weeping inconsolably - for months, possibly years"
Then again, how would you get the drama of the altar scenes? All Hollywood has given us is jilted women throwing mens clothes out the window. We can do better.
I understand that the cliched drama factor of everyone watching the vows in action is a natural for last-minute confessions of true love, but in terms of confrontations, let's have some more good divorce scenes. Half of all marriages end up splitting up; the bride and groom should have some practice before their frequently ill-advised unions implode on them. They should at least have a movie about it.
I'm already way behind everyone in terms of getting the old ball and chain, but now there seems to be a plague of divorces among those who know me. I'd love to say "I told you so" but I didn't.
I can imagine the pull-quotes on my my movie's ads. "Heart-Warming" could be "Heartless." "No One in the Audience Stood Up and Clapped," "Love Conquers One Guy, the rest Back-Stab each other and Call Their Lawyers." "The children blame themselves, as they probably should." "It will leave you weeping inconsolably - for months, possibly years"
Then again, how would you get the drama of the altar scenes? All Hollywood has given us is jilted women throwing mens clothes out the window. We can do better.
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