On Place

Rochester, Minnesota's Got (Z)Zest

2012-01-22T14:47:00.000-08:00

From my Heavy Table piece on the New Year's Eve dinner at ZZest in Rochester:

"My party is somewhere in between. We’ve got local doctors from the Mayo Clinic, some recovering California sojourners, and a couple in from (and missing) Hawaii. Of the two seatings offered, we chose the late one, assuming that’s where the party people were hiding. Turns out, Rochester doesn’t really have party people. But it does have some good food."

More here.

Good Mood Food

2011-12-12T15:22:00.000-08:00

When my mother first moved to Rochester, Minn. a young newly-wed from the bright lights of cosmopolitan Ohio, she wasn't super thrilled. Then she took a drive, ran some errands or something, and got lost among the many "turns right at the cornfields." And the only landmark in sight? A giant ear of corn. Like hundreds of feet high giant. Creepy giant. Corporate corn giant.

Anyway, that's when she pretty much decided to give up on Rochester (not really). And I had a similar moment when I moved to my apartment in Minneapolis. This is what warms the chill night air every morning as I make my lonely walk to bus stop.

It's horrible, right? A giant "Howdy y'all" hat with flashing lights advertising roast beef all through the night. And mostly I hate it, but I also kind of love it. For better or worse, this one restaurant defines my immediate environment more than anything else.

Founded in 1964, Arby's and I had no particular beef for most of my life. But then they started those "Good Mood Food" commercials which are so sinisterly honest about the addictive quality of chemical-filled, chemical-manipulating fast foods that it gives me the creeps. "Good mood food," those stupid, smiling average young Americans sing in the commercial, openly mocking you for being just a rat in a lab reacting to the drug of salt and fat.

Worse still, this particular restaurant fills the morning air with the starchy scent of french fries before 8 am even rolls around.

Cheery cowboy hat flashing. Delicious scents wafting. A rain-soaked intersection and the eerie silence of morning. No one else is even out. For a minute, I consider that this is the morning, at last, that the world ended and I finally know for sure that I'll be missing the rapture boat. Then I see a hooded college kid shuffle along slowly. Zombies. This is the morning everyone else turns into zombies and zombie headquarters must be this Arby's. They're coming for me. But then anonymous college kid turns down the street and doesn't make a lunge for my brains.

I look up at the menacing cowboy hat, a symbol of hospitality rendered obscene in its garish, glowing grimace, and nod to it. Very well, Arby's hat, you aren't actually a sign of end times. In fact, you make it easy for me to give directions to out-of-towners. And, you provide way more light for me on those sketchy early morning streets than any lame streetlights.

We'll call it a truce.

Twin Cities Dopplegängers

2011-12-07T16:02:00.001-08:00

The Twin Cities have some funky architecture going on. So what better way to honor its often random beauty than a series on architectural dopplegängers, starting with my very own workplace building?

This is the lovely U.S. Bank Plaza seen from my morning walk for coffee. Two towers, one standing like a short stack of pancakes and the other like a skeleton stark white against the skyline.

And this is what I'm reminded of every day.

What is this, you ask? Why, it's the Cathedral of Erotic Misery. That's right, that's the phrase that is running through my head every morning, getting me off to a really weird start to the day.

The Cathedral was actually an ongoing, unfinished project in the family home of German artist Kurt Schwitters that became an obsession toward the end of his life. Working in the early 1900s, Schwitters worked in multiple styles moving from the dark emotions of German Expressionism to the rule-bending of Berlin's Dadaism to the ideological aesthetics of Soviet-style Abstraction (he partnered with artists like El Lissitsky).

But he never really fit in anywhere. His work was characterized by its use of all sorts of materials--pieces of wood, magazines, and paint all existed side by side. Often addressing common feelings of nostalgia and disillusionment with the accelerating rate of obsolescence, Schwitters was always sort of constructing his own world one step removed from the world everyone else lived in. Which is why it's only fitting he spent so much time modifying his home.

But that world remains completely his own, an absolute mystery. At least it gives me something to contemplate in line at Caribou.

The Light Rail Cometh, and Then What: A slip and slide down University Ave.

2011-12-04T08:09:00.001-08:00

So last night, when the world was a veritable snow globe of winter wonder, I was out on the roads on my way to downtown St. Paul. And because I have an endless supply of loathing for 94, I decided to take a straight shot down University Ave. Between the slipping and sliding and awkward mid-lane driving, I tried to take in the many sights of that thoroughfare now carved up with light rail construction.

Not much happened at my downtown destinations aside from me falling squarely on my ass in the middle of the street. But the drive was well worth it. Heading from the East Bank toward the capitol, it's easy to get discouraged. Construction and big box stores get monotonous quick. But University Ave. has a lot more to offer--Cupcake, Hmong Cultural Center, Shuang Hur Oriental Market, JJ Fish and Chicken, The Best Steakhouse, League of Minnesota Cities, Gremlin Theatre and on and on. I knew the Twin Cities had "diversity" but working in downtown Minneapolis doesn't always reveal that.

With its mix of chains and local stores that could only exist in that particular recipe of peoples, University Ave. reminded me of 125th St. in Harlem. Home to The Apollo Theater and Hotel Theresa, 125th is/was more than a way to get across to La Guardia or from the West Side trains to the East Side lines. But Applebee's and Chuck E. Cheese's have also found a home here as part of a rezoning effort launched in 2008. 125th still has some of that mix of chain and local stores, but it's an unattractive mix. I haven't met anyone who's happy with the changes. Whether it's the way Columbia University is essentially taking over all of the West Side, or the big box blah that's supposed to somehow cure blight (does it ever?).

The Final Environmental Impact Statement for the rezoning stated that there would be no negative impact on the current socioeconomic makeup of Harlem since most of the land that stood to be immediately redeveloped was not residential anyway--no displacement, no harm. It takes one introduction to city planning course (or hey, just a look around the post-subprime fall out) to know that housing stock is affected by all the elements that constitute a neighborhood, not just other housing. Basically, the project seemed to be mishandled from the start. Having a few places to shop uptown is not a bad thing but those stores have totally eclipsed the smaller stores.

When I talked with a church on 126th, they worried about how public some of the "public" space promised by Columbia's redevelopment would really be. And when I talked with Harlem hip hop artists, they all felt conflicted about staying in Harlem when there were so few small venues to play (as opposed to Brooklyn). Musicians leaving Harlem! Come on, guys! Let's get this right.

Which gets me back to University. I really hope the light rail brings only happiness to the small stores along the avenue, but I'm skeptical (shock, right?).

There are some positive signs to suggest a difference from 125th's development. To start, the cities created a loan program for businesses hard hit by the construction process. Light rail is significantly different from, say, highways in that it doesn't serve as a permanent impasse between neighborhoods, but there is a risk the route will simply become a way to get from one downtown to another without seeing anything in between.

The next step, begun with Minneapolis' Hiawatha Line, is a serious look at the vague idea of "Transit-Oriented Development" to make a few stops along the way a little more enticing. In the case of the Hiawatha Corridor, the city has detailed what sort of zoning codes support dense, mixed-use development around light rail in a commendable effort that begs repeating. And Saint Paul has done an admirable job as well detailing its planning vision for the corridor. But this list of ways the project has incorporated public input from the Metropolitan Council is uninspiring. Why the disconnect between the wonks and the builders?

As it is now, the road is too wide to encourage the sort of back and forth meandering of pedestrians that bring in casual shoppers. But maybe we could try a few plazas, a fountain or two for kids to play in, space for a farmers' market, some more freaking trees. This isn't just beautification, it's steps that make the space a pleasant place to pause, to spend a weekend afternoon and not just a weekday commute.

Beyond Tom Sawyer: Mark Twain Reads and More

2011-11-30T15:28:00.001-08:00

Mark Twain has been on my mind a lot lately and today the world and I were finally on the same page, at least according to Twitter. For a brief, glorious moment Mark Twain was trending above Rajon Rondo (whose trade appears imminent) or any Bieber-fan-supported topic. So I thought I'd take this cosmic indication (almost as celestially significant as the moment of Twain's birth and death, both of which occurred during Halley's Comet) to mean I should share some good reads I've discovered as of late on the matter.

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens by Jerome Loving.

Not for the faint of heart or the poor of sight, this lengthy biography takes Twain seriously so be prepared for obscure references and maybe revisit some of those Twain books you haven't seen since middle school. It's still a better alternative to actually struggling through the scattered collected writings of Twain's recently released autobiography (I tried and didn't get far). In fact, it might be just the primer you need to fully appreciate what I'm sure must be the hidden gems of that much anticipated text. Best of all, a lovely reprint of a young, shirtless Twain graces the title pages of the book, so there's that.

Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens by Andrew Beahrs.

Written by Berkeley resident, foodie, and fellow Twain lover, Beahrs draws inspiration from the letters and writings of Clemens to track down what ever happened to prairie hens (now huddled on a few acres of protected plains in Illinois) or Lake Tahoe trout (similarly struggling to hang on with the help of a few dedicated individuals). Bearhs backs up Twain's work with his own research to round out a look at several regional foods and dishes that have either fallen out of fashion or fallen prey to fashion and been over-produced into near oblivion. But it remains through and through a love letter to Twain, tracking his adventurous life that led him to sample all these specialties. Meanwhile, Twain was busy writing a love letter to his country when he was, as he felt, exiled to another world tour of speaking engagements to keep him from bankruptcy. How he missed the coffee, the cream, the syrup, the cranberries, the oysters so specific to the towns and cities he was so far away from. Ah, how we miss them too.

Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild by Lee Sandlin.

Using the salacious travel stories, personal letters, and hyperbolic newspaper accounts of life on the Mississippi before it was tamed, Sandlin recreates a textured description of this epic river that Twain knew briefly as a steamboat pilot. While some sources have a dubious grasp on reality, they all offer entertaining anecdotes. Gangs of pirates? Cholera outbreaks? An earthquake so strong it made the river run backwards for days? Sandlin's got it all. A quick read that leaves the reader a little sad and a little glad not to have lived in that time. Warning: multiple mentions of crazy 19th century orgies, apparently there was nothing good on TV back then.

Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast by Mike Tidwell.

An update to Sandlin's 19th century romp down the river, Tidwell's Bayou Farewell is the thought-provoking account of what happened as a result of the river's taming. Before the Army Corps of Engineers came in and rerouted the river with a series of locks and levees, the Mississippi routinely changed its course. A curse for the pilots that had to navigate through constantly changing currents, channels, and sandbars, this movement also helped build up the collage of land and bayous that form the Louisiana coast with a steady supply of river silt. All that changed in the name of efficiency and the coast lost its source of land-building sediment and, as Tidwell posits, an entire Cajun culture will soon be lost as well. But Tidwell brings sediment, silt, and the coast to life after spending over a year living with shrimpers along the coast. Tidwell introduces readers to the growing community of Vietnamese fishers, the native Houmas who struggle for recognition even among fellow Native Americans, and the families of Cajun shrimpers who watch the land disappear day by day as their children contemplate another life. Fear not, there are professors and activists hard at work on research and legislation that could help halt the process. We all know about New Orleans (I hope), now learn about the coast.

Peace Coffee in Longfellow

2011-11-20T13:24:00.001-08:00

The place: Peace Coffee
The neighborhood: Longfellow
The vibe: Kind of crunchy, kind of alt, and very kid-friendly. If you had a team of seven-year-old game changers looking to host some sort of ideas summit and sip whipped cream-topped hot chocolate while doing so, this would be the place to do it.

Far from Minnesota, Peace Coffee is known for its Fair Trade beans, impeccably researched sourcing and wide range of blends from around the world. These were all things I read about admiringly as a high school student in Ohio. I specifically remember reading that Peace Coffee had local bike delivery and a fleet of dedicated bikers who would even brave the Minnesota snows and winters to make their drop offs. In my world, trekking over wintry streets to deliver your Fair Trade coffee pretty much makes you a superhero.

So today I had the chance to stop by superhero HQ, as it were. And I was not disappointed. The cafe is open, light, and filled with bright yellow stools, sky blue cork board, and red paint. It feels like a grownup kindergarten with all those primary colors and funky seating arrangements. And then there's the spandex-clad bikers lounging around reveling in the season's first snow and the promise of countless rides over more snow to come. They've got gloves, goggles, hats with little animal ears gathered around them as they lie in wait, giddy for the real winter rides to begin.

It all makes you feel like you're part of some adventurous plot to transform global commodity chains or rally the biking masses. And with a meetings room available for reservation, it's easy to stare out the big front windows and imagine how you--the superhero you--would use that space with your crime-fighting team, superhero costume, and cause.

I'm thinking something with glitter and Moon Boots and really great coffee.

Berzerkeley and other Terrible, Horrible, No Good Misunderstandings around Occupy Cal

2011-11-12T00:23:00.000-08:00

As with Berzerkeley, thus with Occupy Cal.

Two names that don't even come close to explaining the reality, that are all that many readers far from the Republic of California know of my undergraduate home of years recently gone by.

It's 2:30 am in Minneapolis, my new home, and a more understandable 12:30 am in my old home of Berkeley. There hasn't been much (any?) major media coverage of the events at Cal, I suppose they are lumped in with other Occupy struggles across the country and perhaps even deemed less significant because, hey, after all, it's Berkeley, when are they not occupying something, right? And there are absolutely other heinous events that deserve coverage, like the death in Oakland and the legal and emotional fallout of Penn State.

But there are important factors that set Berkeley apart and a fundamentally flawed understanding of what the University is all about.

I won't say whether I'd be out there right now camping out, but suffice it to say, I'm sympathetic with the cause if not the effect.

Many people have already pointed out the striking difference between Penn State's response as a campus--students fighting over the absolutely deserved criticism and action against officials after unthinkably horrible events (Grand Jury report available here)--and Berkeley's reaction during an ongoing protest that includes dozens of arrests and incidents of police brutality. Both campuses face a question of legacy--who is Penn State once the football gods fall? and what is Berkeley if it can no longer, after round upon round of budget cuts and fee hikes, be the bastion of unparalleled and public education it has always been?

One campus worries about controlling the brand and the other (though there certainly was internal disagreement between students and faculty while I was at Cal involved in related protests) has stood up for each other, for everybody's right to earn an education, for everybody's right to protest when that right slips away even if they disagree with the means at times. Professors deserve a lot of the credit here for setting the tone. When I attended, leading intellectuals like TJ Clark and Ananya Roy stood right beside us in our efforts and reminded us why they, the absolute best of the best, chose to teach at the world's best public university and not somewhere else. It was an incredible feeling to realize we were so supported on campus, so valued just for being the dedicated students we were.

And this is where the stumbling block of all stumbling blocks reveals itself when people mischaracterize Berkeley and these Occupy Cal protests.

We are not a bunch of hopeless dreamers. Sure, there is a fair extent of starry-eyed thinking going on on campus (what college wouldn't be guilty?) and that often goes nowhere but sometimes leads to some pretty incredible applications. But what I actually valued most about Berkeley was, that as a fundamentally public university it stood as one of the few places in our society (the only?) where we can have thoughtful, sustained conversations across class.

I wasn't just learning about economic development in Mexico, I was learning about it with the children of recent immigrants. I wasn't just learning about the urban theories that have developed around the postmodern planning isolation of LA, I was learning about it with students who grew up part of that divided landscape. Hell, I wasn't just learning about modern European art, I was learning about it with first generation college students whose families sacrificed everything for them to study a major most consider "worthless." What connected all of us was our desire to get the best education and I absolutely did, even if it sometimes happened outside the classroom.

I wasn't learning about "hopey, changey" nonsense, I was getting a view of things as they really are.

We aren't Berzerkeley. We're Berkeley, the best goddamn public university in the world and, in some ways, that makes us the best, I'll say it again, goddamn university in the world because between the ivory towers that dot our campus are the first generation kids deservedly alongside the third or even fourth generation college students. I don't know that my classmates always learned as much from me, (third generation college student on one side of my family, second on the other) but I know that for conversations about policy and planning to mean anything, we all have to be there.

And that's what drove the protests that broke out in the fall of 2009 and that's what still drives them today. We may be under the banner of Occupy Cal but we have specific goals that, while they are still related to some of the Occupy talking points, deserve their own investigation.

It isn't new to be upset about the state of public education and access in our country and, as a journalist, I appreciate that it can be difficult to report as "news" in a comfortingly specific way, but it is news. When the education system that once held the promise of making us somewhat equal on the other side or at least of rewarding hard work (and I'll say promise because I don't think we ever fully realized that) doesn't even try to make that promise anymore and just offers crushing student debt to all who try to chase it anyway, that's news, guys. So let's report it. That might mean being more thoughtful than the protesters themselves at times, using more than just a few "Yeah man, the movement feels we have a voice that needs to be heard," quotes and calling it a day. Get the details on community colleges, the data behind higher education, the numbers on student debt. And then get the quotes.

But hey, if we keep dumbing down our coverage/understanding maybe Berkeley will just give up on this public education thing and then readers will be dumb enough to accept all that dumb writing. Time will tell.

The only real number (not 99% or the number of people arrested, which doesn't necessarily indicate much) in this article by International Business Times is a rereported, if shocking, number: student fees may increase by 81% over the next four years, according to the Huffington Post.

Boro Biking and Rochester Roller Derby, A weekend in southern Minnesota

2011-08-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

Minnesota is a great state. We bike--for pie. We rollerskate--for beer. And we do it all in one butt-bruising, close-to-home weekend.

My weekend began early, unloading four bikes from the back of the car and strapping in our two diminutive dogs to the bicycle trailer of my long ago childhood. We chose Lanesboro as our base camp, and with the honor of being Minnesota's "Bed and Breakfast Capital," we chose well. It certainly beat nearby Fountain, otherwise known as the "Sinkhole Capital of the United States."

But Lanesboro is more than a place to sleep, eat, and park your bike at night. Navigate, if you can, around the spandex-clad men and wandering families, to the Lanesboro Historical Museum. A bespectacled museum director will usher you into the cramped, three-story museum. Though the current director has only been in Lanesboro seven years, he can take you back to the Civil War days.

Lanesboro was never a big town, but at only 800 today (give or take a rebellious, city-bound son or daughter), it relies mostly on tourists. Back when Minnesota was still fodder for East Coast speculating (as opposed to now when it is just fodder for East Coast mocking), word spread that Lanesboro was getting the railroad. Advertised as being as beautiful as Switzerland, Lanesboro began to grow. But we all know how this story ends. The railroad pulls out in the 1970s and so does the economy. In fact, Lanesboro was so poor, it didn't have the money to tear down the now decades old downtown buildings. Once the bike trail took the place of the defunct railway, that history became a selling point for tourists and the town found its new cash crop--charm and trails.

The charm can get a little too wholesome at times, but the Historical Museum is unfiltered, archived honesty. Amidst the homemade wedding dresses and ornately carved woodwork, there's a bit of darkness too. A binder full of obituaries reads like the bemused diary of the town misanthrope (a drowned teenager was said to have "wandered in the river beyond his height"). Marriage notices are less the joyous fluff of today's announcements than pointed town gossip, like the column on a country couple who had tried, unsuccessfully, to hide their relationship. And in the town pictures, the local Sons of Norway captured the early 1900s celebration of the womanless wedding, which is essentially an excuse for the men to dress in drag as beautiful brides.

And when the ice-cream licking packs of tourists get to be a bit much, hit the trails. Few of the surrounding towns are as interesting but you can find wonderful pie only five miles away in Whalan, which is pretty much the only thing you can find there. Preston is less impressive. When we finished the ten mile ride out there, scanning the main road for signs of a business district, two girls sitting on the curb told us the closest town was ten miles away...in Lanesboro. Not quite the case, but close.

Back in the big city of Rochester, Minnesota's mix of the irreverent and the mundane taken all in the same big stride welcomed us home. It was Saturday night and on that particular Saturday, that meant roller derby! One thousand onlookers filled the Mayo Civic Center for the spectacle, many experiencing roller derby and all its quirks for the first time. Aside from the two teams of badass skaters looking fearsome with their fishnets, tattoos, and braids, there was also a horde of referees (equally fearsome, one man sporting a metal-studded kilt) keeping track of elbows, low blocks, hip checks, and general brutality of the bout. I'm happy to report, the Minneapolis North Star Roller Girls handily beat their opponents.

Roller derby is, according to the raucous announcers, the fastest-growing sport in the United States. As such, it seems roller derby is approaching a crossroads. Now, the leagues are player-owned, profitless, and amateur. But with expansion comes a desire to be taken seriously. There is talk of an Olympic exhibition game and some players have begun going by their real names to be more like their counterparts in other sports, Jawbreaker, for example, is now just Kim Gallant. For now though, skaters like RazorCake, Deadlila, and Ida Kildher are keeping, and taking, names.

One tradition I don't see disappearing anytime soon, the after-party, where all wounds and grudges dissipate under the influence.

From crossdressing Norwegians to a Med City Massacre, Minnesota knows how to have a good time and what to eat and drink after.

Photos: National Scenic Byways Program of the Lanesboro Historical Museum, North Star Northern Lights 2010 Team Photo

Farms in the Urban Century, How Subsidies Keep Getting It Wrong

2011-06-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

My grandfather is a farmer. Well, in the eyes of the government, he is a farmer. In exchange for turning his land over to the woods and not growing anything, he receives a regular check. And he's not the only one. Our current Secretary of Agriculture and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack was also paid to do nothing with his land. While an argument can and is made to support this practice (we need to encourage responsible use of the land, which sometimes involves allowing fields to go fallow to prevent nutrient depletion in the soil from constant farming), the rabbit hole that is farm subsidies in the United States often strays far from the public, or even the farmer's, interest. As Congress looks to trim the budget, some farmers are welcoming the cuts.

Cutting farm subsidies presents a huge political risk. Who wants to be the politician to take on the backbone of an agrarian nation? But Thomas Jefferson's agrarian nation has passed and though farmers still prove potent political propaganda, the farmers that benefit from subsidies are often far from Jefferson's ideal. In the early days of New England's colonization, families were given plots that included woodland, farmland, and townland. Measured with a system of "metes and bounds," the division of land insured a diversity of uses while allowing families to support themselves with subsistence farming. A nation of small farmers was not hard to imagine.

Fast forward past speculation, credit crises, and farm policies that homogenized crops and into the Urban Century, where a majority of the world lives in cities and nearly 75 percent of our farm subsidies go to only ten percent of farmers. The Times reported today that politicians and farmers like Craig Lang, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau, are prepared to cut those subsidies with proposals like lowering the maximum yearly income ceiling to still receive federal funding from $750,000 to $250,000 or changing policies that now award so much money to landowners living in Chicago, Phoenix, or New York City. On their own website however, the Farm Bureau fails to include these proposals in their policies section, writing instead that they oppose any changes to Iowa's income and property taxes that may raise taxes, "including changes to the agriculture productivity formula and assessment of farm buildings."

It's inconsistencies like this that make me doubtful the overhaul of farm subsidies we need is imminent.

After brief stops in Ohio and Wisconsin, I have made my way from New York City to the Southeast corner of Minnesota. I spend my days looking and applying for jobs, trying to learn the banjo, and driving past rolling hills of soybean and corn. Unfortunately, all of these activities have involved some disappointment but I'll just speak to the last. Commodity prices are rising and judging from the late planting season and bouts of flooding and rain that haven been threatening crops, prices will only continue to rise. At the same time, small farmers don't seem to be getting the benefit. Joe Outlaw of Texas A&M University told the Times, "'One of the big reasons the payments are important is that it helps farmers get credit to continue operating, because the lenders know they are going to get their money back,' he said. 'You take the payments away and it makes it hard for them to get credit, especially small family farms.'” But how many small farms are included in that ten percent that receive nearly three quarters of federal subsidies?

Driving past the monotonous Minnesota fields with small stalks of corn far behind the traditional "knee-high by July" yardstick, I pass the same farmhouse nearly every day. It's a large, beige Victorian structure rising from the horizontal green that surrounds it. A young woman, maybe teenage, maybe slightly older, often sits on the cement steps on the side of the house looking over the familiar assortment of workhouses scattered around the gravel driveway. Sometimes she has a cigarette, sometimes she just seems to be waiting. When Jefferson argued for the small-farmer nation he did so because he felt it would tie citizens to the land and to their country. I take issue with the idea that city-dwellers don't have the same land-deep love for their homes, but I wonder about that woman dwarfed in a landscape of megafarms. What sense of place is left for her and how does such an obviously lopsided federal farm program shape the land she surveys alone each morning?

Midnight in New York, an epilogue for Woody Allen

2011-05-25T19:22:00.000-07:00

"Let's go to Paris," she says, as if it was her best and most fully formed idea in months.

"Oh yeah, last time I was there was study abroad in the winter," her friend replies with an unabashed disgust for winter filling her finals words.

It's the first truly, uninterrupted beautiful day of summer in New York and I spent it participating in the familiar, annual rite of packing and helping a friend drive away with all her belongings blocking any final, goodbye wave views. She stranded me in New York, a city I have withheld affection from for over ten months.

Let me cut to the point here by way of a white-haired but otherwise dark--sunken, brown eyes, olive skin--man seated outdoors at a restaurant just above 90th Street.
"Oh," he exclaims, arms outstretched, gesturing to his companion, "It is good to be here!" I catch his eye and he adds, "and to be alive."

Isn't if funny how that sentiment creeps up on us like it is the best and most fully formed idea we've had in months?

I had just finished watching Woody Allen's newest film, Midnight in Paris, which, fortunately, does not feel like Woody Allen's next new film. Allen loves cities like he loves women--obsessively, adoringly, and a bit unnervingly and this time it is the city of light and its 1920s rotation of artists, romances, and writers.

We follow recently engaged Hollywood screenwriter-cum-struggling novelist Gil Pender down the rabbit hole of midnight in Paris. The clock strikes, the old car crawls up the hill, a hand beckons him to the past. And like most of Allen's films, we playfully plumb the depths of an illusion--here the romantic promise of the past--to find what falls short and, if we're lucky, what continues to nourish us.

Pender decides after his nightly visits to another era populated by all his literary and artistic idols, to stay in Paris to the bewilderment and ultimate indifference of his cold fiance (really? women cannot be inspired too, Woody? another argument for another time).

Who needs art, books, monuments when the beauty of a city is so complete, so replenishing? So while Pender rejects the myth of the past, he caves to his wanderlust.

As a frequent sufferer of wanderlust, I get it. We all know we cannot live in another time, but we pine away for another place, confusing oceans crossed with decades undone.

I didn't leave the theater, like the excitable girls behind me, hatching plans for transatlantic jetsetting. I left willing to admit at last that I love New York. Walking from Lincoln Center to my Morningside Heights apartment, I surrendered to the city. The contented din of candlelit, sidewalk dinners; the downright sexy allure of a tuliped park lamp barely lighting the lowest branches hovering above it; the way uptown will never be downtown, please stop trying; the orange glow of a few well-deserved cigarettes dotting the alley in a crowd of exhausted kitchen staff still in their aprons.

We do not need to travel huge distances or reverse decades, we just need to know well the places we occupy now. It would, of course, be nice to write about and capture the spirit of 1920s Paris, but it has been done and done well. Our task is today.

And today, even as my friend drove for the heat-warped vistas of Texas, New York did not leave me lonely.

Bin Laden Dead, The View From New York

2011-05-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

A Day-After Note: I wrote this to try to explain my weird sense of hesitation to celebrate and partake in a moment of morbid glee and relief. I am happy but only to the extent that I hope some very tired soldiers get to go home now, that would be great. I am happy that so many people feel so much better now and that they feel close to their neighbors and country again. As for the rest, the incredible asymmetry of a world released from a single individual's grip leaves me feeling off balance. Like Hitler, the world is improved without him, but I worry about the momentum of violence with or without its initial push still around. So, I hope that this is one of those violent punctuation marks that precedes a passage of calm and not just some afterthought asterisk extending what we all celebrated being done with.

Original Post:

So. Osama bin Laden is dead. It happened just now. And then it happened again. And then again and again every time each person had something to say on those constantly updating social media streams.

When I first heard the news, probably the x millionth time the news had been heard tonight, I felt sympathy for someone I can't quite identify. It was a little bit for him, poor, sick bastard. And it was a little bit for whoever it was that did it, that shot him in the head, just that one time but so many more with each retelling. And it was a little bit for the lungs that had been holding some sort of long-forgotten breath, the wince before the “this will only hurt a bit.” We emotionally feel what we will soon physically feel, and we brace ourselves as if it will somehow stop it all. It never does, right?

At the end of this, we will have a body and I imagine a few medals, a few ceremonies, a few words. It’s nighttime in New York and an entirely different day where he was; the separation like the swift inhale, the moment of constrained panic before the pressure, the force, the hurt that we wait to confront with tensed faces.

So. Osama bin Laden is dead. Remember that day in school, in a classroom in Ohio? We were all arguing about going to war, about weapons, about mass destruction—it was like we were tired of holding our breath, ever since that first moment we heard the name Osama bin Laden we had been waiting, tense faces ready for the impact and it just never fucking came. So we went looking.

I was so upset then. I was so indignant, in knee socks and braids and on my way to field hockey.

And then tonight when I heard the news, when I imagined the sentence “he was shot in the head” in motion, I thought about that person I was not that long ago. In some dumb way, some unhelpful, some weightless way, the name Osama bin Laden was something I felt back then, somewhere in between my gut and my head. It was a name unhinged from its owner, thrown into a world that had no use for it. And now? I suppose I am glad to be rid of the name, I imagine it released from the speeches and arguments and, opposite the flow of those constantly updating social media streams, finding its way back to its owner, its reflection following silently one pace behind as it crosses the ocean again. They said he won’t be buried, but they found him a place at sea. All he has now is a string of letters returned to his body and a bullet in his head.

I asked my mother how she felt about it all and she said, “How Santa feels about you.” One Christmas growing up—growing up Jewish I might add—my father was responsible for writing the “from Santa” notes on the wrapped gifts. For a through and through, Cleveland-bred, American Jew, he performed the role admirably. But for me, he wrote, “from Santa, whose feelings for you are conflicted but who feels obligated to get you this gift.”

This is an imperfect way of me saying, I know that this means something, that his death marks some moment in some process for someone somewhere…I just don’t know for whom. In a confusion of geography, in a knot of information flows, an actor made a mess of space and boundaries, tying a whole nation to a series of moving dots plotted over an unfamiliar map. In an instant, the strings are cut, space feels less compressed and we’re all looking around thinking, “yeah right, this will only hurt a bit?”

We Didn't Start The Fire

2011-04-19T16:32:00.001-07:00

It was perfect timing--the Department of Sanitation truck rolled up to the stoplight moments after the wire trash basket on the corner burst into flames.

The crowd of iPhone equipped pedestrians, concerned and amused, stared at the fire. The sanitation worker, uninterested and slightly slack jawed, stared at the fire. We all stared at each other. And the fire got a little taller, perhaps emboldened by our tepid attention and looking for more.

Finally, one man broke the silence, calling out to the worker--shouldn't you maybe do something about this? Call 911, the worker tells us.

The light turns green and the truck drives on to pick up trash at the next corner. But since we were all staring at him at this point he walked reluctantly back across the soggy street with the urgency of a highway trash collector.

A nearby store owner rushes out with a fire extinguisher, ready to set the matter straight but the trash collector, pace of a glacier undisturbed, waves him away. Instead, he picks up the flaming basket, walks to the edge of the sidewalk, and rolls it around in a shallow puddle to little effect.
The man with the extinguisher retreats with what I'm sure must be disappointment and confusion--here he was, prepared when no one else was and utterly unwanted in favor of a problem solving method reminiscent of my childhood days spent lighting piles of branches and leaves on fire armed only with a couple cups of water from the kitchen sink.

By now, the red lights of the firetruck come flashing around the corner since someone did apparently call 911. Out jump three firefighters, one confidently grabbing the burning basket from its watery repose and unleashing a deluge of water from the side of his truck.
Fire over, crisis averted.

Was I wrong to think we should have just let the few layers of newspaper and wrappers burn? I mean, I am the girl who only narrowly averted several forest fires but still, it seemed logical barring hidden explosives.

For all the talk about the efficiency of cities (re: Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City), there are certainly as many instances of inefficiency. I don't think the answer is some sort of wholesale assault on public goods and services like so many are suggesting in education, for example, because private solutions are necessarily limited in scope and not necessarily more efficient (even when they should be because private providers can be much more selective about how and what they provide to whom). But it was frustrating to see the all around idiocy of the moment, myself included here. The solid performance of the gawking onlookers was matched by the disinterested and half thought out response of the public problem solver.

All together we spent way too much time and resources on a single trash can at the corner of Broadway and 112. And worse still, this happens at a time when places like Flint, Michigan close their police stations on weekends and holidays and respond to kidnappings, assault, and home invasion hours after the fact.

We need to find a better way to do what we do, the public sector needs to be better. I've been thinking about this in the realm of public education and teacher performance and it seems like the answer here is that unions need to be willing to negotiate (which they often are, as was the case in Wisconsin) and we need to listen to everyone involved (parents, students, teachers, and policymakers) to see what data to use and how to use it. We need to align public dollars with what we value and we need to help teachers get better, supporting mentoring programs instead of pitting young teachers against old. We need to question private intervention and the promise of more efficiency, better results (are charter schools more efficient when their populations tend to exclude special needs students or their teachers don't last much longer than two or three years).

And we definitely need to stop standing around, staring at the burning basket.

One City, Two Tales

2011-02-20T11:38:00.000-08:00

On your way to the compound of court buildings on Centre St., you'll be offered cheap designer purses, dubbed DVDs and the latest in fashionable knockoff eyewear. It's best not to show up to the courthouse with these goods in your possession.

Manhattan's Chinatown and Halls of Justice grew up next to each other and they still reside in an odd partnership of geography and history. Chinatown exists in a paradoxical web of legality and has since its beginning. Although Chinese traders had been present for some time, the real growth of Chinatown began in the mid-19th century and continued in spite of The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, limiting immigration. Legal and extralegal, meaning discriminatory, measures limited Chinese immigrants to the rough boundaries of Chinatown. The insular nature of the community allowed them to form their own governing bodies, like The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association overseeing everything from marital disputes to taxes, in the shadows of New York City's courts.

Steps away, in what was more or less a swamp, the city's criminal and civil justice system found a home atop a drained pond, once called Collect Pond--pure poetry for a pond of filth. The pond had become so toxic from the factories and poor sanitation around it that the city filled it in, leaving only the small, gray dead space between court houses named Collect Pond Park as a memory of the sludge that used to characterize the neighborhood. With the fumes of city living and tanneries gone, a new neighbor arrived in 1838--the Manhattan Detention Complex, which still stands today though not with its original facade. Bit by bit the judicial center expanded with a Neoclassical Supreme Courthouse, an Art Deco Criminal Courthouse and a Modern Civil Courthouse. Granite, limestone, steel--these are the elements of State in action. And next door--pagodas, bins of produce, cramped tenement buildings--the elements of a community at best ignored and at worst penalized by that same State.

Even today the relationship is uneasy. In its 2011 Community District Needs Statement, the board representing Chinatown and the Lower East Side mentioned a tense relationship with the police and the Department of Health. But at lunchtime, when the lawyers, clerks and family members of defendants need something to eat, they don't hesitate to venture into Chinatown for dim sum.

I've found myself among that lunch crowd, though fortunately not as a family member of a defendant, and the experience is memorable in its oddity. I once ended up sharing a table with a couple of lawyers and the sight of these soldiers of civil society sitting in the middle of a neighborhood that, in many ways, thumbs its nose at that society was a picture I hope never to forget. I hope I never forget that the best place to get movies before they even leave the theater is a block from a detention complex. I hope I never forget how the weight and soaring scale of the imposing and ordered buildings of our justice system give way to the crowded streets of Chinatown that have an order all their own. These are the neighbors of a city. These are the neighbors of New York. But as Soho creeps into Chinatown, will this community have to find somewhere else to go? And will New Yorkers forget the dual pillars of legality and illegality that built this city?

(photo from Wikipedia)

Death and Life of American Cities, Rethinking Suburbs

2010-12-28T14:19:00.000-08:00

According to financial analyst Meredith Whitney, the next domino to fall in this economic slump (despite official promises that we have, in fact, been done with the recession for quite some time) are cities themselves. It comes as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to things like the budget crises infecting the public universities of California or the hiring freeze halting state governments across the country. And the collapse of the city follows logically after the collapse of the housing market since most cities rely on property taxes to supply the bulk of their budgets.

So, aside from another not so insightful insight from an analyst, what does this mean for the American city? Property taxes have long been used to organize populations, concentrating wealth and thus better services in certain annexed neighborhoods while keeping poorer areas impoverished. This structure is what leads to, as Jonathan Kozol points out in his critical investigation into the public school system, the poor paying a larger percentage of their income while still receiving less. In the United States, these disparities often organized themselves between an inner city-outer metro logic. Growing wealth and transit innovations allowed the well-to-do to seek out the greener developments beyond city limits, imitating the pleasure gardens popular in the City Beautiful movement of the late 1800s across Europe. Combined with the later state-supported thirty-year mortgage and highway subsidies, city governments had to base their value on how much they could extract from the neighborhoods surrounding it. Smart neighborhoods incorporated themselves from the crumbling inner city and became their own municipalities. For awhile, this development pattern seemed to make sense-get the benefits of an easy commute into a job in the city (subsidized by federal highway money) and also get the benefits of a property-tax flush local government.

But the mechanisms that led us to the promised land were also the tools of our own destruction. The security of a government protected thirty-year mortgage meant that banks abused this relationship and misled homeowners-to-be with predatory practices. The stretches of road that put breathing space between our green lawn and city blocks became markers of suburban isolation once the cost of gas and the strains of car payments grew too great. And since these suburban municipalities had, for the most part, never concerned themselves with services like public transportation, families found themselves living in a sort of faux city. The new poverty of the suburb differs from the entrenched poverty of the city in this way-the net was never there in the suburbs. Those areas that boomed with ex-urban growth are now the same ones that face high foreclosure rates.

So, what is to be done? High speed and commuter rail projects need more support (the original streetcar suburb, after all, was only achieved and sustained through mass transit). Property taxes cannot be used as weapons of perpetuating geographic inequality, we need to find a more equal way to finance our public schools (a key step to alleviating larger societal inequality). Local municipalities need more diverse forms of revenue (while sales tax can often support denser, commercial areas like those in the inner city if they chose to piggy-back off of state-collected sales tax, suburbs were left particularly vulnerable to a collapse in property values).
I'm not going to dismiss suburban development offhand because I'm still not entirely sure cities are the most efficient and ecologically conscious way to organize populations but we certainly need to rethink our current understanding of the suburb and its relationship to the metropolis. It can no longer imagine itself as a sort of separate American reality. Because, at the very least, Whitney understood that markets and places are more connected than maps might suggest.

Brighton Beach, A Land We Once Knew

2010-12-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

The waiter sized us up for a slightly too-long moment as he asked for clarification, "the Russian vodka?" Yeah, of course, we nodded.
Of course. That's the overwhelming sentiment in Brighton Beach. The restaurant easily converted into a nightclub where gold lame is very unironically cool? Of course. The back room where old, Russian men who wear suits that command enough respect to overlook the obvious signs of wear wander in and out authoritatively? Of course. The young couple on the corner splitting a can of whipped cream in their matching acid-washed jeans? Of course.

Developed originally as a beach resort town, the residential streets still retain a facade of their old lives. Neatly packed rows of bungalows in shades of fading blues, yellows and greens make their way to the ocean. World War II brought a wave of immigration from the Soviet Union marked by a high percentage of Holocaust survivors, which has continued to attract more migration since then. So the beach side resort town got a metro stop and denser settlement. It got nightclubs, vodka, jewelry and fur stores, bakeries and a mix of populations all more or less united by the rule of the Russian language.
It's the perfect place to visit if, like me, you're not entirely sure where your family comes from in that historic mix of war and love, of borders and brides. I thought I would just look around for something that felt intuitively familiar. And in some strange ways, the slightly strained, worse-for-the-wear exotica of it did feel familiar.
The main drag running through Brighton Beach is store after store of what would seem to be nostalgizing tourist destinations meant to mystify and commodify the land and people behind the Iron Curtain. And yet, a few ventures down the side streets reveal more sushi and Chinese restaurants than old-country destinations, suggesting that those stores crammed with Russian pop CDs, romance novels and nesting dolls do not just serve the curious Manhattanite crowd. Maybe the aisles of what looks like art critic Clement Greenberg's 1939 understanding of 'kitsch,' serve some purpose to the Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Russian sons and daughters born a few generations shy of the world their parents once knew.

For Greenberg, "Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility (of the 'rear guard' or rural, recently turned urban and literate population). It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time."

As clearly patronizing as this ivory-tower, cultural-purity toting view is, it's hard not to feel that those discoballed nightclubs are just a 'vicarious experience' or 'faked sensation' of Western-style conspicuous consumption, or are just what the Soviet Union always imagined life in America to be like. But it's here, it's right here in Brighton Beach in America. Kitsch, for lack of a better word, always goes so far beyond what is assumed to be commodified. Instead of some imagined bacchanlia of Capitalistic ideals, the furs and the overly synthesized pop songs are a way to connect to what life was supposed to be like before migrating, what life really actually might still be.

I say it might still be the way things are because so much of the simulated glamor reminded me of growing up in the Midwest. Most of the Midwest was home to German and Scandinavian immigrants but many of the urban centers attracted Eastern European Jews from the late 1800s onward. Cleveland still has a substantial Eastern European Jewish community, including some of my own relatives. My father grew up there and brief visits have left an impression of a people who become accustomed to creating splendor out of very little. The home was always central to Judaism and it received all the care and attention it deserved. Meals were opportunities for prayer, no matter how simple the chicken, potato dumplings and wine. In places like this, people are still expected to dress nicely--not nicely in the New York City sense of a need to both assimilate and stand out by following the fashion cycles of mass production but nicely in the sense of your favorite suit jacket, the one you've been wearing every Friday for the past twenty years. When I saw those old, Russian men shuffling into the unlabeled back room in their suits that look like they were meant to indicate respectability but no real luxury or money, I saw my family back in Cleveland and I felt a little bit at home in what was otherwise a bizarrely isolated place.

So the discoball that starts to spin as the lights dim every night around 6pm isn't meant to make you feel you are somewhere you are not and it isn't meant to satisfy the tourists looking for Russian kitsch (though it does). It is meant to say, wealthy or not, waxing nostalgic or imagining yet unrealized desires, we are making a simple space worthy. Brighton Beach has to be an awful lot to be worthy of its inhabitants who have been ruthlessly cast about in the past. It doesn't always seem to add up to one cohesive sense of self, but if they ask you if you want the Russian vodka (both a symbol of elite quality and of a birthright to all those who grew up making their own family brand), just say "of course."

City Lights

2010-12-10T16:56:00.000-08:00

They’re portraits, sort of. Caught standing in the empty corners that litter a city, the figures are silhouetted against chain-link fences and cracking sidewalks. Photograph after photograph stalk these figures through New York City, documenting their birth and death. But they’re just lampposts.

“I work so hard to get these photos I mean I used to ride my bicycle from lower Manhattan all the way to the Bronx just to get these streetlights,” says Bob Mulero, co-curator of the Forgotten City Lights exhibit on display at Brooklyn’s City Reliquary museum. Now 54, Mulero has been photographing New York City’s lampposts since he was a kid. Once teased for his obsession, Mulero recalled opening night in July saying, “I’ll tell you I felt famous.” Of course, Mulero is still teased for his obsession but he doesn’t seem to mind.

The show, put together by Steven Walsh of Forgotten New York and Mulero, is on display in the back room of the City Reliquary. A sometimes-skipping CD of old folk music plays in the background as cautious passersby wander into the museum curious to see what a name like City Reliquary entails. Maybe they just stopped for directions. Maybe they saw the colorful sign and old-fashioned popcorn machine outside and stumbled in the front door. Nik Sokol sits at the front desk and bargains with a young couple. Just take 20 seconds, it’s pay what you like. So they take more or less 20 seconds and head back out into the street. Others walk past the front desk and into the first of two rooms, surveying the permanent collection with its Statue of Liberty figurines, Jackie Robinson baseball cards and brick bits of famous buildings donated to the museum over the years from casual collectors.

And then they enter the back room. Individually framed photographs of streetlights cover the walls like the portraits that form a family tree on living room walls across the country. Some photographs have placards listing the design type, date of origin, and the fate of the featured lamppost. Some have a happy ending: “designated as a historic landmark in 1997.” Others don’t: “All removed in 1986.” Mulero met Walsh eleven years ago and regularly contributes streetlight photographs to his Forgotten New York website, an archive of the odds and ends of New York City history. The exhibition is, in some ways, just a physical incarnation of Mulero’s lifelong collecting.

Mulero grew up on the Lower East Side and says his parents didn’t let him wander the city freely. It wasn’t until he was 17 that he was able to start really exploring the city streets and lampposts. “To me they symbolize New York because you don’t see these streetlights in the five boroughs anywhere else,” explains Mulero. He can tell you about all the old streetlights and how the lights on Avenue D were different from the lights a few streets over. He even has a favorite lamppost; “it’s a lamppost up on Amsterdam Avenue, it’s one of a kind. The base goes back to the early 1900s but the top part goes back to around the 1930s…I think it just makes it really unique.” Mulero is the type of person who notices that, even if he’s driving in a car and has to make a sudden stop to get a closer look.

But if you ask him why lampposts, he just laughs and says, “that’s the 64 million dollar question.” According to Mulero, it’s just in his blood. “I used to take like a pencil and gumball and pretend it was a streetlight,” he says of his early interest. And the funny thing is, he says, he found out Walsh used to do the same thing. “It was really bizarre, I mean I should’ve met this guy thirty years ago.”

Mulero has become a sort of self-made expert. His curiosity-driven expertise led him to testify before the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Several lampposts owe their landmark plaques and continued lives to Mulero. He’s hoping to get the exhibit into other museums in the city. He wants to show the public “a lamppost is not a lamppost,” that it involves care and detail, that it can tell the story of a neighborhood lost to new development, that it can even tell your story. On his way to work one day, Mulero noticed a piece of a broken lamppost on the ground. He still remembers picking it up and holding it in his hand. “I mean her days were numbered so they ended up putting in a reproduction,” Mulero says, adding that he doesn’t mind reproductions.

But because Mulero is a blend of collector and expert, he sometimes misses things. He says, “Even the new ones, they get old too. I could kick myself because I had some opportunities to take pictures of modern streetlights which are no longer modern and since I hated them with a passion I didn’t.” A few modern streetlights make an appearance in the exhibit. Nonetheless, Sokol of the City Reliquary says, “I think it’s one of our more well-curated exhibits. It’s unusual to find individuals that have sort of a lifelong accumulation of knowledge about such a particular thing.”

Every month the museum also exhibits a local personal collection like ceramic unicorns or desk lamps in the front window. What makes lampposts different from ceramic unicorns? Where is the line between a material record of one individual’s life and a catalogue of a city’s history? From front window to back room, the City Reliquary feels like a garage sale, the kind of garage sale where a For Sale sign in the front is all you know about the family whose home you’re entering, whose once cherished, discarded goods you’re hastily shoving aside looking for a bargain. “People that are truly collectors have a more intimate relationship with their collections” than hoarders says Sokol.

The nature of the exhibit and the museum in general as a participatory record of New York’s history gave me a feeling of vernacular patriotism. But when I asked Sokol about it, he shied away from using the word patriotic. Instead, Sokol describes the City Reliquary and exhibits like Forgotten City Lights as a way to honor “our past and the sort of day to day workings of the city.” For Sokol and Mulero, a collection of streetlight photographs is a way to remember the New York that was, and still is, built by a jumble of humanity from across the world. French philosophers of the 1960s like De Certeau radicalized the everyday. Focusing on the tactics of the amateur (the amateur cook, the home video-maker, the pedestrian who cuts across the pathways), they charted an image of man as self-narrating, as radical producer of his own space and identity. Mulero is much more modest about his interest and objectives. He simply hopes someone will notice the beauty in the architectural furniture all around us and will appreciate the work he has done. But he has done something radical. When casual museum visitors look over the photographs he has gathered over his entire life, they are given a chance to reacquaint themselves with this city. They are given the opportunity to create their own maps marked by the landmarks they deem worthy and beautiful. They are given a chance to both claim and make New York City. In that archive of streetlight portraits, they are offered a spot in a family tree. Searching for a reason why these lampposts mean so much to him, Mulero says, “I mean maybe someone in my family was a lamplighter or something. I don’t know.” We don’t really know, we can’t really imagine the things our distant relatives cared for and did. We simply have the stuff they left behind maybe even without thinking. “The streetlights are helping us at night, they shine on us, you know we’re not in the dark.”

NYC, What Makes it Good Makes it Hard

2010-08-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

So today I listened to inmates serving life sentences talking about a scene in their head, played over and over, of that first moment when father reunites with son. Is it sad? Is it angry? Is it loving?
I listened to an old couple share their very first date, their very first daily love letter (a sort of romantic weather report), and their last week together as they said goodbye and acknowledged an unstoppable cancer. Is it sad? Is it angry? Is it loving?
I listened to executioners explain how quickly they can secure a man about to be executed, how quickly the drugs go through the bloodstream, and how long they stare right into your eyes during the whole thing. Is it sad? Is it angry? Is it loving?

I'm quickly learning that JSchool, as the sort of incubator of lives and ideas, is the place where New York passes through the halls daily. In a single, overly-air conditioned room today, sixteen students produced two-minute audio tracks profiling sixteen strangers from around the city. We worked for hours, staring at the screen, messing with sound levels, rewriting narration, and grimacing at the sound of our own voices. The whole time, I felt wildly out of control. I was rushing to meet a deadline. I was sifting through an interview that ran thirty minutes over because I couldn't stop it. But there must have been something else, because beyond the usual anxiety of a deadline, I felt emotionally out of control. I couldn't sort through the emotions but as I was editing this man's life, a steady rush of something I can only translate as "NOW! NOW! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THIS ROOM, IN THIS SCHOOL, IN THIS CITY, WITH THIS STRANGER'S VOICE ON YOUR COMPUTER? NOW!" dominated my thoughts.

And later that day, listening to David Isay of StoryCorps present his interview pieces described above, I started to sort it out. New York isn't just a big, bustling, anonymous city. It's a million jarring experiences. Not loud noises, bright lights, or strange smells. It's a million unexpected moments of clarity, of seeing another person and suddenly realizing you've been seen too. Seen in a way you've never been seen before. And journalism isn't just a million pieces of information and noise. It's a million, painful moments where you heart is pierced with needle and thread and tied to somebody else's and you didn't even know you had one. You had forgotten.
Is it sad? Is it angry? Is it loving?

Whatever it is, it's all any of us can offer.

Picking a Beat in NYC

2010-08-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

It has been awhile since I've posted last. Finishing up a thesis, graduating, and moving twice consumed a fair amount of time. And all that work has landed me here-Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
After being here only three days, I have little to report on other than my relief in discovering that New York City is not home to intimidating packs of Sex and the City divas. I had worried moving from the Bay to "the city," from undergraduate to graduate, would require a leap of sophistication I was not prepared to make. But no worry, most of New York's population is on the same side of the platform with me. Riding the train from the Upper West Side all the way downtown and across the river to Brooklyn offered a glimpse of the sorts of odds and ends people that constitute the city. From the hopelessly chic to the obliviously disheveled, New York has it all. Perhaps most shocking was the discovery that New York has a large elderly population. I don't have the numbers but they have at least enough to create a solid majority on a bus headed downtown along Broadway any given day. One stop after the other, old women climbed into the bus and, just as I offered my seat to the new arrival, she just as quickly offered the seat to her equally elderly friend who boarded with her. Tough old broads.
I could use a little bit of tough old broad to get me through the next few weeks as I begin my graduate work. We set out tomorrow to select a "beat" or neighborhood of the city. Over the next five months that neighborhood will be our second home in the sense that it will sometimes make us feel unwanted and it will sometimes teach us lessons we could not learn anywhere else. Can you tell my nervousness is mostly wrapped up in anxious expectations? High expectations? I can't wait to eat the food, shop in the corner stores, walk the streets, see the homes of "my" neighborhood. I can't wait to plead with what will at first seem an unyielding density of otherness, to beg the streets to please guide me through a story I know nothing of. I guess this is my first dispatch from the field, the dream landscape of field I have been walking throughout these opening days of school.
I don't know that I want to be a journalist. At the core I think I want to be a better friend. See, I have a friend who always knows the right question to ask-that question that gets past the noise to the voice of an issue while assuring the person being asked that they will find a sensitive person waiting on the other side of the exchange. She does this all the time. With friends, with strangers, with teachers, with kids. Perhaps I can do it professionally and then eventually personally. Perhaps I can start to truly value the thoughts of everyone I encounter. I suspect this is the sort of spirit that keeps people in love with an odds and ends city like New York, so in love that they keep riding that bus even though the few stairs to get there are a challenge. I think I'm ready to fall in love.

Augmented Reality, Social Life, and Screen Capitalism

2009-11-22T14:41:00.000-08:00

This past week, students across California (myself included) got together to test the Regents, the State, and ourselves. Some of the actions were not well-organized or well-represented but we are students who did not think, for the most part, that we would be put in this place, that we would have to fight in a disciplined fashion specific to nonviolent movements. But we are learning that such efforts require an incredible amount of thought and control, we've begun to meet in small groups, struggle with a truly open debate, develop long-term goals and projects, in addition to organizing for immediate impact. In my mind, all of this is necessary. Each person has a role to play and no one move will insure success. These struggles are long and variable and will call on everyone to participate in a manner appropriate to their investment in the matter at hand. Foremost, the fight for public education is not just about access and diversity (though it certainly is), it is also about defending the last public sphere where conversations across class, conversations challenging what is meant by 'diversity,' can truly happen. We are a unique community in this country and we cannot simply look the other way as our limbs are severed. The community will not survive.
Part of the extreme range of tactics that have been employed was the development of the Open University lectures held on November 19th in the Multicultural Center at UC Berkeley. Professor Tim Clark delivered one of these lectures, speaking to the transition from Print Capitalism to Screen Capitalism. Screen capitalism, for him, was the world of life lived on the screen, the world of suicide bombers, the world of an unbounded space. Reflecting on the student struggle thus far, Clark noted the mixed use of old media and new, old efforts and new. For Clark, the spectrum of a screen-life seemed doomed but today's On the Media from NPR might offer some hope.
The program today discussed recent studies that suggest that internet users, like those engaged on facebook, blogger, etc, are actually more engaged in their local community than non-users. They do not mark a retreat from the public park or local bar, but rather a reimagining. But the possibilities of screen-life are hard to manage. In this vein, On the Media also reported on the new technologies of Augmented Reality, specifically sunglasses that can edit out things you don't want to see. The potential to recreate the physical space around you, to customize, to make life suit your 'profile,' is near. But I wonder how many people will take advantage of this. Even my minimal editing of deleting the important-cause newsletter from my inbox is filled with a moment of hesitation and guilt. Could deleting a person not elicit at least some pushback, some Heideggerian moment of realization of our own ephemerality? Would it not make us fight for solidity? For community? After all, internet users clearly value that community.

I think that perhaps all potentials will be and have been realized. The strikers sometimes took up an action for the screen value of it, the viral twittering potential of it, the updated statuses of it but once we were forced to look around at the space these actions filled, we had to reorient and rethink our goals. The march was march-like, the occupation was a simulacra of an occupation, but the challenges were real. The pepper spray, rubber bullets, and poignant questions brought the situation into place in an irreconcilable way. At least, I hope it did. I hope Professor Clark's Screen Capitalism offers this. And I hope we will continue to struggle with our maneuverings in televisual reality and in physical space.

Dia de Los Muertos in Fruitvale

2009-11-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

Dia de Los Muertos provides an opportunity to create a physical space for our memories, our streets become repositories of the names and lives of those we have lost. Unlike the process of creative destruction that works to continually annihilate and recreate a narrative of the city, Dia de Los Muertos serves to make those buried narratives visible. And in a place like Fruitvale, a city space populated by transnational communities from all over Latin America, those narratives sometimes stretch across borders. The altar built by the Oakland Museum of California recognized this movement by creating an image of silhouetted figures running across the landscape, likely in memory of those who have lost their lives crossing the border.
The presence of the border in a city in Northern California is not a new theoretical idea. In the art community, the despatialization and subsequent univeraslization of the border began occuring in the 1990s with work from artists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña whose art shifted from one on the U.S.-Mexico border to a more general investigation of the borders that exist in all city spaces along each block. His current group, La Pocha Nostra, investigates these ideas of cultural barriers through performative works that often operate at the level of the body, skin, language, accent, appearance. Perhaps a Fruitvale Dia de Los Muertos approaches a similar investigation through its recreation of spaces and people beyond International Blvd.
But I was very much operating within the limits of International Blvd. I continually felt myself an outsider and tried to move beyond ideas of Otherness about a holiday I had never celebrated. But there is something inherently Other or uncanny about the day, a day when the dead are brought to life and when spaces and times collapse. The print works of Jose Guadalupe Posada speak to this quality of an event whose icon is the calavera. Posada placed the calavera within the normal city streets of Mexico City as a sign of the shifting demographics of his time. As rural populations moved to the city, tension arose between a Europhile, literate upper class and a marginalized rural class. As each new regime in Mexico sought to establish new hierarchies of race (criollo, mestizo, and indigino as categories whose definitions and locations kept evolving over time to fit the needs of the dominant population), the presence of a new group in a city space that had been tightly regulated since colonial times upset an already tenuous social order. Since colonization (and likely before), Mexico has been preoccupied with ordering as evidenced through the production of casta paintings which worked through all the possible combinations of racial types of man and woman. These paintings were highly determined works, depicting bodies whose social standing were indicated by their dress, skin, even tools of labor when applicable and on top of this labels were often included to organize the system in a pseudo-scientific manner. The calavera, then, represented the unease, the unknown, the unlabeled and in some sense it continues to do so.
The altars of Fruitvale represented a space that connected the 'normal' with the 'beyond.' It is an event which unites the celebratory now and the somber then. In essence, it is an event which renders visible what is invisible, makes something so that is not. Perhaps it is this valence that has helped to encourage the current protests on the UC Berkeley campus in response to the statements made by Yudof aligning his work to that of a cemetery manager dealing with those 'below' who do not listen or speak. Today on campus, you can see something become so that is not (at least in Yudof's understanding); you can see students and faculty with a voice, a challenge. And that is what Dia de Los Muertos is, a challenge to the forces of creative destruction that would deny our narratives and pasts.

Pissarro, Painting and Politics

2009-09-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

I'm an art history major and while Berkeley is actually an amazing place to study this (ranked third in the country for the field), the science focus of the school (stemming from the large research grants these fields procure) sometimes leaves me defending my major. Art is political. Art is crafted not only as commentary but also serves as an index of the political orientations of the time. It isn't always taught this way, unfortunately, and I think I found out why.

In my class on Cezanne, we began discussing the fundamental relationship he had with Pissarro. Side by side we contemplated the countryside landscapes both of them worked with. The conclusion seemed to be that Cezanne's use of saturated color planes, unclear spatial relationships, and general instability made his image a much more compelling and tense one than Pissarro's detailed landscape.
People seemed to find the Pissarro pedestrian, ordinary, overdone, and simple. But the landscape around us is anything but normal, though we normalize it. Pissarro spent a great deal of time wrestling with the demographic shifts of his time, the spread of industrialization, and impact of these changes in production on a peasant population. Pissarro was an anarchist. Though we wanted to see his landscapes as romantic memories, an anarchist would not be happy with such a simple read. Pissarro was always struggling to understand the peasant within the context of the changing countryside-was this loss something to be mourned or did the industrial change provide a new class-consciousness that would benefit mankind? How does one integrate the peasant into such an unstable scene; is the peasant a static part of the world he helps to shape or is the peasant similarly alienated from his work in a period that loosened the dependence on the earth?

So, his image of a flooded field (1873) is not just a quiet musing on a beautiful, open field. I would argue that it is profoundly more unstable than any sort of spatial play Cezanne entertains. What does it mean that we cultivate trees that now need our help to stand? And not only that but they require the processed version of themselves to survive (wooden beams)? And what about this mill-like structure in the background, how comfortably does it sit in this scene of struggling agriculture? What does it mean that this structure of a new organization of labor is similarly organizing the growth around it with early suburban development stretching out behind it? So when you fly over those patchwork fields, do not find it ordinary, unremarkable, or simply beautiful. Nature is not separate from us, we do not merely provide it a place to exist. We shape it and we fight with it. Those fields are a product of a struggle, a political struggle.

That is why Pissarro's field is full of politics, tension, and instability.

Mapping A Small Farm Economy

2009-09-06T17:48:00.000-07:00

This post has been a long time coming; my exploration of Minnesota and its farms and fields ended a couple weeks ago and I have since been spending my Saturdays tabling at the Berkeley Farmers' Market getting signatures for Slow Food's Time For Lunch campaign. The combination of these two experiences has proved a fruitful comparison.
Minnesota is by no means the ideal picture of family farm economies but it comes surprisingly close. After growing up in Ohio, I have seen what happens to a state after it has surrendered its farm lands to monoculture crops and prescribed fertilizing regiments. Ohio's population has flocked to the ever-expanding suburb, providing constant employment for construction contractors and developers. The soy bean and corn fields are more or less ignored, pushed further from sight with the growth of highways and golf course communities. In short, the farms are unimportant to the daily lives of most. But in Minnesota, the distance shrinks. There are a string of cities and beyond that (minimal suburbanization aside) farms begin immediately and proudly border the winding roads. The restaurants can list the farms near them that supply their cheese, produce, bison, etc. This fundamental connection between hinterland and city has not been obfuscated by the culs-de-sac 'city' planning of the car age.
After visiting the farm of a sort-of family friend (a man who was in the first class at Mayo's Medical School but found the dress too restrictive, leaving for a farm nearby), I began to wonder what the landscape of a small farm economy would really mean. Steve Schwen showed us around his patchwork farm, directing us toward the evolving projects he was working on (setting up his own solar panels and battery, creating a new sort of green house that heats the gravel beneath the soil rather than the air, and the vacuum that had been wrangled into being a device for organizing seeds into neat rows). Even his home was his own creation, witnessing new additions whenever he was able. His farm required constant attention but in the winter he used his space to host concerts and forums for the community. So here's what it would look like; it would like chickens living by aged lambs and baby goats learning to suckle as curious horses looked on. It would look like a loft space used to dry clothes in the summer and host concerts in the winter. It would look like curving rows of onions, eggplants, peppers, tomatillos, garlic, and on and on until you reach the bee hives at the back. It would look like farmers who drive to the nearby city on weekends, provide CSAs with produce, and stock a country store for the immediate community. It would look a lot like tinkering. Over and over Steve talked about the little experiments he was constantly engaging in around the farm. This sort of embrace of the tinkering spirit (so central to de Certeau's tactics of the amateur in overcoming the visual order of experts) is in danger as the monoculture crop farms dominate our landscapes. These farms value only certainty, their products are designed to create rows of mimesis ready to endure long trips to the supermarket.
What else is at stake? As I listen to people object to the mere idea of universal health care (not necessarily the organization or expenditures involved), I can only think that I wish they could all spend a day on Steve's farm. I wish instead of this fear that we may be held responsible for the care of those near us, that we could watch a community at work; that we could listen for a bit to Steve. Because Steve is full of common sense, full of thirty years of tinkering experience, thirty years of barn forums, thirty years of seasons of loss and growth. His understanding of community as a necessity does not stem from a political stance, instead it stems from an incredible immersion in life, in life in all of its forms.

So how can we bring this understanding to the landscapes of urban density, suburban sprawl, or the communities that exist tenuously at the edges of large corporate-branded fields? My suspicion, which developed as we drove around the small towns of Southern Minnesota, is that these family-scale farms were able to survive because the parallel structures of small banks were able to survive. The family farm, light on the sort of resources a corporation can mobilize, depends on the community bank to support it and to understand its cycles. And in an age where large banks prove their vulnerability, the small bank seems to make a lot of sense, not only for the kind of community it can support and allow to flourish but also for the kind of forces it can combat. Look around. Do you see a local bank, a local farmers' insurance group, a general store that isn't filled with stuff from China? It is somewhat understandable how those health-care haters could have evolved in a world like this; a world that tells us that our specificity does not matter, that we are merely a consumer molded in the test markets of America. But Steve could tell you otherwise. We just have to be willing to listen.

Slow Food and Walmart

2009-08-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

Though I was born in Minnesota, most of what I know about it comes from Prairie Home Companion. So while I've been here this week for vacation I've mostly been on the lookout for Lutherans and rhubarb pie. And I found some of that but I also found something else. Rochester is a small city mostly surrounding the Mayo Clinic but it has a glorious farmers' market. The diversity of the area might surprise a non-Minnesotan but for them a Norwegian lefse maker next to a Hmong flower seller makes perfect sense. And going to the farmers' market with your plastic shopping bags from Walmart also makes sense.
In the Bay Area, few people would be caught dead with a Walmart bag let alone at a farmers' market. We proudly wear our Berkeley Bowl or Whole Foods gear not only in support of local food economies but also against big box brands. But something that troubles me is the inability for supporters of such locavore movements to wrestle with America's approval of Walmart. Perhaps it is just marketing but Walmart fills a place for many, even if it is a place made possible through urban design and subsidy policies. So when you pick up this month's issue of Adbusters to find the small write-up on Slow Food as a movement against machine culture and a hurried production pace characteristic of places like McDonald's, be a little critical. This is not the whole picture of Slow Food, nor is it the whole picture of a reality like the one where Walmart bags fill with local produce on the weekends. Slow Food was founded to bring the ideal of good, clean, fair food to all with the explicit desire that good food should no longer be just for the rich. I'm not supporting a Walmart business model because it isn't sustainable but I am supporting a more inclusive commitment to the ideals of good, clean, fair because there will necessarily be a transition. And while the achievement of these goals will require consumers to shift their thinking to recognize the true cost and value of products, it may also require supporters to recognize the true needs (not the marketing-created needs) that Walmart addresses. I think recognizing this will link Slow Food's cause (as it often is by people like Raj Patel and Vindana Shiva) to larger sociopolitical issues. The McDonald's meal is appealing to a single mother who works and does not have money or time on a daily basis to prepare something else for her child. Fixing the food part of this equation will also mean fixing the nature of our work and social lives. It means providing meaningful work for everyone, not work that drains us and leaves us counting the minutes. And it means designing policies and places that will support that single mother and connect her to other families. That is why Slow Food is so great. Creating local economies of food production employs people, supports families, and creates connection. Right now Walmart is filling in for that but it must be Slow Food's vision to provide a realistic and meaningful alternative.
So here's to the many already committed to this and here's to showing Adbusters and the rest of society what Slow Food really means.

The Genius Loci of the Midwest

2009-08-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

Contemplating the fate of cities like Detroit has become popular recently, as we all search for a glimpse of resolution to an economic and environmental crisis. Having come from the rust belt, I have an affinity for these cities and their landscapes. The auto obsessed Midwest is designed to be viewed from the road and a familiar drive in Southern Ohio will present you with a string of small towns that never made it past the speculative boom. Even in their industrial peaks, they relied on poverty to supply the labor. But the 'they' that benefited have since moved on and shells of success remain as ghosts of what might have been, of what lived down the street from us but never close enough.
Rebecca Solnit of Harper's Magazine wrote about these spaces in her July 2007 piece Detroit arcadia: Exploring the Post-American Landscape. She spends some time just trying to understand the rhythm of such a landscape writing, "Between the half-erased neighborhoods are ruined factories, boarded-up warehouses, rows of storefronts bearing the traces of failed enterprise, and occasional solid blocks of new town houses that look as though they had been dropped in by helicopter. In the bereft zones, solitary figures wander slowly, as though in no hurry to get from one abandoned zone to the next. Some areas have been stripped entirely, and a weedy version of nature is returning. Just about a third of Detroit, some forty square miles, has evolved past decrepitude into vacancy and prairie—an urban void nearly the size of San Francisco." She tracks the rise of Detroit and the high hopes that rose even further. The city once welcomed Diego Rivera to paint scenes of industry and man in harmony. And everyone knows the end of the story, at least we think we do. Rivera's piece reveals the tension that continues to plague Detroit. Here was a self-proclaimed Marxist working for the son of Henry Ford for a handsome reward depicting man and machine in an ideal relationship, even including images on natural history seeking to link the industrial to the agricultural to the ancient spiritual. But the workers hadn't reached that Marxist nirvana and still have not. The city is incredibly divided by class and race. And while many other cities faced the combined pressures of deindustrialization and suburbanization and have come out moderately successfully (current crisis suggesting otherwise), Solnit suggests Detroit must become something else entirely.
And here the story turns, "After all, the city is rich in open space and—with an official unemployment rate in the mid-teens—people with time on their hands. The land is fertile, too, and the visionaries are there." And an adventure into urban farming is begun. She suggests a new reading of Rivera's work, saying that instead of representing a progressive history culminating with a Marxist balance of man and machine as Diego claimed to support, perhaps it shows the "deities" of the land waiting to reclaim social order after this period of industrialization has passed. In reality, the dichotomy will never be this clear and survival will likely find new uses for industry and new organizational structures even Marx didn't think of. But more than one force is pushing for a return to land, or rather not a return but a renewed approach as our relationship and understanding has necessarily changed over time.

And here's where Detroit reminded me of Rochester Minnesota. My mother was an immigration lawyer there and remembers how difficult it often was for immigrants to adjust because they were unable to maintain the relationship they had had with the land. My Cambodian babysitter lived in a complex with other immigrants and they were able to recreate a familiar landscape: we played with bunny rabbits running through the green space and found eggs waiting for us in cabinets and drawers. The Hmong immigrants had less success. Though it made perfect sense, they were prohibited from farming in their apartments, which they took quite literally piling layers of dirt on the floor. So maybe this is a Post-American landscape we must reckon with now as we turn to those recent immigrants who can share their relationship with the earth as we watch the Rust Belt become the International Belt.

To hear a bit about urban farming in the bay area check out Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, from today's Forum on NPR. (http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R908071000)

Sabores Sin Fronteras

2009-08-06T13:34:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading An Edible History of Humanity and was pretty disappointed. The thesis was simple enough, food has been an organizing factor of human life since that first shift to agriculture continuing into the use of food as a weapon to enforce policies during Soviet rule. But the author, Tom Standage, lost an intimate grasp on the material. The best moments come when he discusses the bumbling voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World and the sailors who set off in the other direction looking for the source of spice. He frames the encounters as accidents, which seems fair enough, but the resulting relationships and exchanges of food crops were not just accidents. So yes, food has organized us but we have also organized it.
Perhaps what I was waiting for while reading his book was something like the textured account of the evolution of Southwestern foods in the Santa Cruz River Valley articulated and explored by the group Sabores Sin Fronteras.The group seeks to track "the foods that cross the border," while reminding us that this relationship occurred before there even was a border, much less one in its current militarized form. I'm comforted by this idea that even as bodies are intensely regulated and language guarded along the border (California just recently upheld its right to administer achievement and exit tests in English only despite law suits saying the practice was discriminatory), food slips by. It seems so neutral but one thing even Standage got right is that it absolutely is not. So while we've made a border against certain criminalized behaviors, food has continued its quiet revolution denying that line. Of course, food is recognized as power in the corridors of D.C. with lobbyists fighting hard to maintain subsidy levels and ignore global calls to end the hypocrisy of our inflated subsidies in light of World Bank policies which reduce subsidies within developing nations. But flavor, technique, mezclado has succeeded and Sabores Sin Fronteras tracks that success.
The group's founder, Gary Nabhan, describes the sabor of success this way, "When I arrived in the Upper Santa Cruz Valley near Continental, I came upon a small residence that had a simple hand-written sign declaring “green corn tamales” on its lawn. After I had put down my rucksack and knocked on a screen door, I was greeted by a woman in an apron who had been making green corn tamales all morning from a newly-harvested batch of Mexican June corn. Those tamales were so full of sun and soil that when I closed my eyes to eat them, they even tasted green." He stresses that these are not the foods packaged for grocery store shelves but are instead site-specific developments, drawing on the sun, the soil, and history for inspiration. But the food does not stop in time, rather it incorporates new breeds of cattle and looks to design a "solar taco" all the while honoring and strengthening the fundamentally cross-border nature of these food cultures. If only our political culture could listen to the experiences of those socially engaged in such food systems, perhaps the border could come to mean something else entirely-maybe even a site of celebration.

Read more on the creation of the Sonoran Hot Dog: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106366080

Might makes Blight

2009-07-23T17:42:00.000-07:00

There were a lot of things that made me mad about the Sotomayor hearings: despite the Chairman's reminders to please not be repetitive, the Repbulicans could not put the wise Latina comment down to the point where I was ready for her to just be an impatient Latina. But she remained measured and maneuvered around any sort of real commentary on connections between law and experience. It made me sad that she had to listen as Republicans called her a 'wise Latino' or fumbled around patriotic calls for the voice of women to be included in Iraqi politics and then swiftly attacked the idea that a woman or a Latino might have a voice separate from a single National Experience. The whole thing felt like a trampling of important speech, extending to the treatment of the law itself. This should have been a chance to examine imprecision and ambiguity and perhaps identify some sincere intent in creating those conditions. Law is constantly caught up in semantic situations and yet we had to pretend this wasn't the case, that definitions of legal conditions were self evident.

Here's a great example of where they're not at all. And as a result minority populations are severely disadvantaged (is this what she meant when she said a wise Latina could call on this sort of knowledge?). NPR reported on the demolition of a predominantly African-American community in Indiana when the University bought it up as 'blighted' land in a nationwide movement for Urban Renewal in the 1960s and 1970s. But now in the wreckage, archaeologists are uncovering signs that this community was far from blighted, in fact it was well-to-do middle class area. The report ends with a sad little note about the artifacts finding a new home in some museum and a new footnote in history.(Link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106799382) But all this destruction, which likely occurred in other communities, came at the hands of the law.

In California, a TIF District is often the legal mechanism that revels in and propels such creative destruction. It is a tax increment financing district created under state law. A planning textbook describes it thus, "The idea was that public improvements-new streets, a civic center-in declining areas could spur private redevelopment, thereby increasing the property tax base, and the additional tax revenues could then be used to offset the costs of the improvements that had catalyzed redevelopment." Many states, however, later abandoned the condition of blighted neighborhood entirely. The definition of blight has expanded as well in order to better suit political goals. So where it initially demanded conditions that were dangerous due to severe delapidation as established by the 1954 case Berman v. Parker, it has evolved to seemingly include anything that doesn't profit as an alternative use could. Ilya Somin provides several dubious examples in her piece Blight Sweet Blight for Legal Times including a recent Nevada Supreme Court Case that found downtown Las Vegas blighted, calling for a new parking lot for casinos.

So while Republicans focused on what they were sure was the evil intent of the wise Latina phrase, I wish they could have pursued real legal questions of meaning instead of posturing about a Constitution of stone-carved commandments. It's not just a matter of seeking clarity, its about seeking justice.

Julia Child

2009-07-11T19:08:00.000-07:00

I've been debating this post for awhile. I want to talk about Julia Child often and with everyone but when I do I tend to get pretty unenthusiastic responses of apathy. My mother instilled a love for her as we watched black and white episodes of The French Chef. You know Julia is an amazing woman just by watching her cook: she stands six foot two and stoops and moves around the kitchen with a supreme sense of taking up space and filling it with joy. Our favorite moments were the mistakes, which Julia never apologizes for but in her hearty voice talks her way around reminding us to 'never apologize.'
And yet, I couldn't find a convincing reason to include her on a blog about geography and the urban experience. Of course cooking is a classic example of the politics of the amateur in place-making but also in getting to know a place. As I wrote about Fruitvale, partly out of my ignorance of location but also out of my firm belief in the principle, food is one of the best ways to access a new site and people. And that is exactly what Julia does in her novel My Life in France. The book is a beautiful, exciting, and absolutely inspiring read. I've been fumbling around with post-graduation plans and this book reminded me to look for opportunities in funny, little apartments in Paris or at a desk in Sri Lanka. But what I admire most of all about the book is that it stands as a firm reminder of the importance of place. People like to talk about our globalized world and the flattening of space in the face of technology but parts of a city will remain inaccessible to these trends. Parts of a city will require you to wander the streets lost and then eventually found. Parts of a city will require a lifetime to appreciate and describe and no Yelp! review will get you within fifty miles of the way the clouds hurry in on certain winter days. And Julia says this all so simply;
"Afterward, we wandered over to the Restaurant des Artistes. We arrived late, and as there were no other clients we had a sort of family get-together with Monsieur Caillon, his daughter, and Roger the waiter. We all sat around the table and chatted in a very familiar way. After that, we walked down the hill and home through the streets wet with rain that had fallen while we were inside. The lamplit city glittered in its puddles, and Notre Dame loomed out of the mist, giving our nerves a twinge. When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your mind's eye."
Julia tells of her time in Paris, Marseille, Germany, Norway, and the States. And since place is always a little lost in translation, the book inspires you to go and discover these places and adventures anew. The writing also straddles this incredibly domestic, familiar realm and a series of environments which reveal themselves slowly to those willing to take the care and effort to watch. This intertwining of spatial spheres keeps the glitter of the city streets within the comforting view of a frosted window, making a journey across the world with few contacts seem like a jaunt to a new store down the street.

Please read the book. Please hew from it the beautiful moments of a city enjoyed through a five-course meal. And lastly, do not forget how messy it all is because that is the struggle that makes place unique.

More Fruitvale

2009-07-02T16:52:00.000-07:00

My exploration of the Fruitvale area has been continuing. To be more specific we're looking at the area along International bounded by 35th and Fruitvale and down into the Fruitvale Village around the BART station. While scouting the area today for useful collage material (we got some great stuff, we'll make the streets out of international calling cards which are a hot commodity in the community) we came across a very telling sign reading: Fines for Solicitation of Day Laborers in the Area up to $1,000. I have yet to see anything like this occur but it does make me wonder: are fines variable by location? Could I solicit day labor from people on the street in a suburb in Ohio at less risk than doing so in Fruitvale? What could possibly be the justification for that? Are there designated zones where it is appropriate to do so? That seemed to be the case as I searched online for more information. If that is true, then it provides another example of how sovereignty of government is defined as being able to create exception because in these zones the government is legalizing the illegal (and I am not using that term to describe the day laborers themselves rather the practice that is deemed worthy of a $1,000 fine). Another way to put it, the government is formalizing zones of informality. And, of course, in this de/regulation, the government shapes the environment and turns the street into an office, creating this uncomfortable relationship between the space of the pedestrian and that of the automobile cruising by the crowds as if window shopping. But what's more disturbing perhaps than the weird bureaucratic zones that the government wraps itself in to get out of its own rules, is the language I saw surrounding the issue.
I was searching for an image of the sign and found instead blogs carelessly describing the groups of people waiting for work as 'Mexican' (when this is hardly a singular population) or simply as 'Illegals.' The use of this word really bothers me for its clearly malicious intent. First of all, it is highly unlikely that the photographer in fact checked all of the documentation of those pictured waiting for work to verify that they were indeed without the proper paperwork. Second of all, we do not label any other group that has committed some crime 'illegals.' We don't call people convicted of drunk driving 'illegals.' When I jaywalk, no one insists on regulating my body in the way that calling an undocumented individual an illegal does. Doing so locates the criminality at the level of the body itself, implying an inherent crime of simply being. And in a country where we create formal zones of informal labor relations, it seems highly insincere to vigilantly insist on labeling a person illegal.
So the message I worried was too simple, that Fruitvale is far from homogeneous and we need to investigate the inadequate language we rely on, is probably still too simple but it needs to be heard nonetheless.

As part of the first project, here is what we submitted as a sort of campy introduction to the area:
Fruitvale in 24 Hours
Fruitvale will not be what you expect. Its name reveals some forgotten history of acres of orchards while its reputation for violence finds its way to print more often than not. The fruit-yielding land has been converted to a busy downtown area, attracting people pushed out of the Mission in San Francisco or from further abroad. So don’t expect any sort of open market with fresh produce. In fact, finding fresh produce is actually difficult in many of the stores.
Fruitvale has received a great deal of negative press, partly deserved and, it seems, partly not. Fruitvale is easy to get to, located right along the BART tracks with a transit-oriented development that makes the station an AC transit bus hub as well. Traffic is often fairly heavy along International Blvd, so you’ll likely be taking BART into the area. You’ll know you’re close when you see a large, painted building reading ‘Jesus es el Senor.’ Once you arrive, you’ll step out into a space that might surprise you. Beneath the BART tracks people loiter, wait for buses or rides, and stop by the sidewalk vendors to pick up some diet soda. But just beyond this fairly typical BART scene, is a development that advertises its newness with proud, curving stairs around a bright, clean fountain. Trees are kept inside their planters and fences, but people still find places to sit and wait. Perhaps you’ll want to follow suit while you survey the stores inside this area known as Fruitvale Village.
As you get your bearings, perhaps sip on the diet soda you picked up, you’ll begin to get a sense of Fruitvale. This spot is prime for people watching because everyone seems to pass through this area on their way in or out of Fruitvale at some point. Early morning you’ll see commuters, families, and young adults talking on their cell phones, pushing strollers, or listening to their ipods. You’ll also quickly notice most of these people are not white, but beyond that they are hard to classify with much accuracy. Despite this being a predominantly Latino area, you can still stop in at Powderface to get a fresh beignet and New Orleans’ style coffee.
After enjoying your Louisiana breakfast, you’ll already have figured out the flow of direction. Even the pigeons seem to walk with the steady flow of commuters back and forth from International Blvd. So head through the double archways into a sort of interstitial space that seems to want people to gather but offers no benches or tables for anyone to do so. Mostly this is where old men sit alone and young kids mess around on bikes. From here you can head to the right or left, as the area seems to offer the same thing in different varieties in the mom and pop stores.
Along International, the pace changes from what it was in the Fruitvale Village. Don’t be confused if you see signs for East 14th St. The street was renamed to International as Latino populations moved in, perhaps in an effort to shake the reputation of East 14th. You’ll have to navigate your way through strollers, kids falling behind an outstretched hand, couples looking for a bite to eat, men and women walking to work with chef’s and painter’s pants or scrubs, hipsters, and the occasional group of guys standing in the shade along the buildings. One group missing from International are the private security forces that seem to superfluously wander the Fruitvale Village corridor. But don’t worry, you’ll be fine. Take this time to check out the stores around you, each packed with merchandise and narrow aisles. Maybe head into a music store to pick up your favorite Colombian singer or newest Mexican pop sensation. Hopefully you’ve begun to notice the way ‘Latino’ rests on this population like a blanket that can never cover your feet. Posted on street signs, you’ll see advertisements for money transfers to Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, and beyond. Needless to say, you’ll find the record you’re looking for.
Next look for a store with jeans hanging outside the windows and tops piled along the display. Here you can find affordable clothing for the whole family but it seems the most important accessory is the shoes. The few major chains that have worked their way onto International are Payless and RAC. But Payless isn’t your only option; you’ll find stores with rows of knockoff Converse waiting for you. The hot styles here are Nikes, Converse, metallic heels, and flats. There are many different styles you can take on here.
Head back to the streets to find a place to eat. This is no problem in Fruitvale and many travel from Berkeley just to find their favorite taco stand. You could find such a stand parked along the sidewalk with bags of candy hanging from the ceiling, or you can head into a restaurant. You shouldn’t have to pay too much and it’s possible to get a taco for a dollar. Food is pretty cheap everywhere, likely to suit the demands of mothers taking their children out to eat. At the same time, food seems to get rave reviews pretty much everywhere as well. You can find any variety of foods from all of Latin America. Get a burrito, taco, or pupusa while sipping on horchata or an agua fresca. As you sit and enjoy the flavors of Fruitvale you may begin to wonder where the negative reputation comes from: the area is clearly full of people of all ages and locally owned businesses dominate the shopping district. People greet each other from across International with shouts and waves. The library is located right on the corner of the Fruitvale Village and new clinics and schools have continued to improve life for families. But the area seems distant in every way from the Whole Foods neighborhoods of Berkeley. You may be struggling with how to feel about being in Fruitvale. Should you play it cool and summarize this place as a Spanish-language version of any shopping district? Or does this deny that Fruitvale offers more than a new translation, that it is a unique social space that an outsider may never be able to truly access?
Well, the writer certainly does not know the answer to that, as such relationships of insider/outsider are always problematic. But if you want to continue your exploration, check out any convenience store and find the brands of the Latin South. Pick up some ingredients to try out your own recipes at home but do check expiration dates as some cans have had several birthdays waiting on the shelves. Though coming to a place mostly to eat and shop may seem superficial and even a bit crude, it is in our most unquestioned areas of culture that we communicate the most. So the best thing to take away may be a recipe. Linger into any other shops but try not to stay much beyond dinnertime because, as mentioned before, the reputation is partly deserved. Though people do travel to Fruitvale for a late night taco from a stand, these stands are targets for robbery. But perhaps you’ll want to head home early to test out your culinary skills and share this experience with your neighborhood anyway.

Fruitvale/ Fruit Vale/ Brays

2009-06-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Today I set out once more to explore the Fruitvale area with a couple students from an environmental design course. It was a perfectly hot, sunny day with vendors and restaurants offering up much-needed aguas frescas for the families ambling through the Fruitvale Shopping District.
There are some obvious observations to be made: many of the signs are in Spanish, addressing a heterogeneous population with people from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Honduras, the general area, and beyond. Many of the shops are not franchises and display unique, hand-crafted signs. And yet, these stores begin to become repetitive, peddling the same converse knock-off shoes, generic faded jeans, and mass-produced toys. The streets are busy with cars, buses, pedestrians (not so much bikes, though the BART station provides plenty of bike-parking). And yet another yet, the pedestrian walk-way which leads people off of International Blvd. to the transit-oriented development of Fruitvale Village around the BART station is fairly stagnant and underused. The new stores of this development feel awkward and empty and though some people sit along the planters and fountains, it does not seem to be the nodal point it had hoped to be. In addition, this area seems to be dominated by men who sit and people watch whereas the main commercial street is packed with strollers and mothers in addition to men of all ages.
So what does this all mean? Is this community, stereotyped as low-income but full of local investment and locally-owned businesses, coherent and thriving? Do people here identify themselves as being from Fruitvale or is that just a construction of street-banners and developers? If Fruitvale is distinct what is the relationship to the rest of Oakland, are people commuting in/out, attending schools locally or heading to the hills, etc?

I want to move beyond stereotypical observations of Fruitvale (many taco trucks, lots of Spanish speakers) but find it hard since it seems in some ways businesses encourage and benefit from this sort of branding.
The project has just begun, so hopefully I will be able to say something more insightful with time.

This government site tells the story of the creation the Fruitvale Village as well as a brief history of the Fruitvale area and its shifting demographics and industry; http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/ejustice/case/case6.htm

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco

2009-05-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

This amazing wife-husband duo run the private Prelinger Library in San Francisco and work as archivists. Through their work they have put together a collection of footage and media of San Francisco over the years. The result will be showing at the Exploratorium on May 16th at 2pm. Here is the write up;
"This eclectic montage of lost and rarely-seen clips shows life, landscapes, and labor in a vanished San Francisco captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen, and industrial filmmakers. Help make an impromptu soundtrack by identifying scenes and asking questions about what you see."
I know I bring de Certeau up a lot because I am so taken with his ideas of bricoler and the amateur, but just to bring him into focus once again it is really exciting to see this sort of personal project coming to realization through the collection of personal momentos over time. De Certeau specifically discussed home videos as a source of amateur tactics overpowering the expert's strategies of spatial organization. These records of the city (though not all amateur) allow us to witness the ways in which we can be a part of spatial practice/praxis.
So head out today on this beautiful day and record your moment of history, create your space and then head over to SF on Saturday to check out the film.
For more information on the Prelinger Library; http://www.home.earthlink.net/~alysons/library.html.

Or listen to this morning's Forum from KQED;http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R905141000
They have an interesting discussion of the human role vs. the technological role in archival and library work. Megan Prelinger notes that the collector serves as author and they are not shy about the personal bend to narrative-making about history, the 'desire' of history-making. Learn how collecting can be an act of interruption of the obstinate march of canonized History.

The New Public Square and the Wisdom of Grandmothers

2009-04-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

Forum 4/29/09 http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R904291000
In his hour interview with KQED's Michael Krasny, Michael Pollan essentially lays out what he has been saying for some time but it is still nice to hear it again and to hear him sound fairly confident about the change. I particularly like his assertion that the White House garden is not just symbolic partly because of the attention it brought to food issues. Though much of that analysis doesn't go deep enough, it did encourage the casual gardener and that is the beginning of people relating to food in a new way. He also rightfully points out that in many ways farmers' markets are the new public spaces. Of course, many people still face issues of access both physically and financially but encouraging farmers' markets as part of a 'reformation not a revolution' will expand our options. On top of that, programs, like the Ecology Center's Berkeley Farmers' Market, accept food stamps at their stands, which is certainly a step in the right direction.
All in all, the interview is quite comprehensive, assessing Obama's actions, addressing GMOs, CSAs, historical transformations, subsidies, etc.

Read more from him as he grades Obama's first 100 days at salon.com. Robert Reich also provides his report card. Here is an excerpt from Reich (professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and the Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton);
"I give the 10-year budget plan an A. The budget is a remarkable vision of what America can and should become. It includes universal health insurance and environmental protections against climate change. It also features some redistribution from rich to poor and lower-middle, which seems appropriate given that the income gap is wider than it's been since the 1920s. The budget would merit an A+ if its economic projections weren't far too rosy. Still, a fine job."
He goes on however, to give him an F in the bailout.
From Michael Pollan, he writes approvingly of Obama's commitment to food reform but he notes;
"The misstep was a half-hearted effort to trim crop subsidies, by limiting direct payments to farmers grossing more than $500,000 a year and redirecting those funds to childhood nutrition programs. This was framed as a contest between "rich farmers" and "hungry children." If so, the hungry children promptly lost. The unfortunate framing united all farmers against reform, especially since even some of the smallest commodity farmers gross a half million a year -- this is capital-intensive agriculture after all. The plan was quietly dropped after the old guard on the House and Senate agriculture committees dismissed it as a non-starter. Obama will have to develop much smarter proposals to reform subsidies, ones that divide the farm bloc rather than unify it."

His new rule for the eater; Don't buy any foods that have been advertised.

Things Around Town

2009-04-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

1. Jews on Vinyl Revue Dance Party at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. 4/30/09 7:00-10:00. "San Francisco, get ready to get down to the sensational sounds of The Korean Master of Jewish Melody- Johnny Yune, the Fabulous Fingers of the legendary Irving Fields, and DJ Sabbo of the Israeli DJ Crew Soulico. A once-in-a-lifetime, live event." As part of their exhibition 'Jews on Vinyl,' the museum is putting on this dance party. I wholeheartedly approve of using the museum as a dance club. It seems like a step in the right to direction to understanding how our artistic production is so necessarily involved in the experience/consumption. In a traditional museum, it seems both production and consumption are decontextualized and ignored though there often is a preoccupation with process and material in contemporary shows. But because the display must exist within a museum (defined narrowly), it cannot follow through fully. But as we dance the night way, we will know that art is a part of us!

2. Art Murmur in Oakland 5/1/09 6:00(ish)-10:00(ish). You know the deal. Bring your friends and your flasks.

3. Other Cinema; Pipe Dreams at A.T.A. Gallery 5/2/09 8:00. "Doug Katelus conjures dark angels through the Optigan, transporting us to the ultra-rare Fairytale World of Alexander Ptushko, a child’s-eye survey of this Russian film wizard’s phantasmagoric special effects. ALSO: Andres Garcia Franco’s haunting The Invention, a marvelous descent into an exotic Mexican demimonde. AND Drew Heitzler’s Night Tide (for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics), a riff on the 1963 Curtis Harrington film that uses Venice Beach as a backdrop for a surreal dreamscape of Pynchonesque paranoia and comedic horror." Head into the city (992 Valencia St.) for some interesting films. Surreal films often provide a good opportunity to analyze how we interact with landscape and what spaces we visualize when attempting to enter a realm of the unconscious.

Have fun.

KQED Radio: In the Mix: Conversations with Artists Between Races

2009-04-11T14:10:00.001-07:00

KQED Radio: In the Mix: Conversations with Artists Between Races

Posted using ShareThis
This was an interesting installment. A lot of discussion focused on the issues mixed-race actors face as they try to fit the commercial standards of race (indeed there are different categories for different contexts). What is interesting to me is how race is never even attempted to be defined throughout the conversation. It seems the label of mixed-race means very little beyond its ability to divert labels. Everyone I know has a 'mixed-race' background if using the blurry national and 'ethnic' categories used in the program. And yet so few people actually actively identify as mixed-race. I tend to say I'm sort of Eastern European and Russian. I've completely stopped mentioning the Scotch-Irish. I sometimes forget that is a part of me as well. Perhaps identifying as mixed race avoids the problematic use of nationalities as identities (after all what makes being Eastern European so confusing is that national lines have changed so dramatically that it is hard to overlay group and nation in a meaningful way). And yet the term mixed-race still invests itself in the idea of race, which remains undefined. The census is continually updating its categories of race sometimes expanding from Asian to East Asian or consolidating.
So my question is, do we benefit from these words we so struggle to validate? It does mean something to me to say that I am Jewish, that I am part Roma, and that I identify with a diasporic people. But these categories seem to do little to advance our research. I'm particularly concerned with how these terms impact our conversations in schools. Even as mixed-race steps outside of limiting specifics, it is itself a census construction which has its roots in the division of people in races. One contributor to the show notes that in her mother's time, there was no notion of mixed-race identity and thus she identifies purely as Black despite a White parent. It is almost as if for her mother, there was no mixed-race experience available. How we identify seems to have less to do with some scientific code (as the myth of race often relies on to confirm itself) but more to do with how we frame our experience. This framework of course is a site of a jarring collision of societal and personal constructs.

But if escaping race is as easy as semantic selection, then creating it is as well and we cannot ignore or invalidate movements that center around a 'racial' struggle. By that I mean that it is important not to overly abstract race from lived politics as even an imaginary construct can reinforce itself in the real world.

The solution? I'm not entirely sure where the specific problem even lies here, somewhere in between race as an important process or experience that helps create one's sense of self and race as a point of both mobilization and discrimination. I'm highly critical of appeals to 'color-blindness' because it denies the act of meaning-making race can sometimes provide as well as the real socio-economic stratifications that it no longer has the language to investigate.

We need a new language of identity in a hugely complicated transnational world. While mixed-race may offer a step toward negotiating this, I feel its value will soon expire and we will want more satisfactory ways to discuss the intersection of ourselves and our society.

Architectural Slam in Oakland 4/10/09

2009-04-09T19:44:00.000-07:00

Coming up at the EastSide Cultural Center in Oakland is this month's installment of Pecha Kucha. As the East Bay Express notes, "Like all Oakland Pecha Kuchas, this event will highlight the intersection of art and politics while deemphasizing the entrepreneurial aspect." Pecha Kuchas began in Japan with architects given a brief amount of time to express their vision through powerpoint. Architecture is never apolitical but Oakland's event focuses on politics more explicitly than other Pecha Kuchas worldwide. The artists not only use space to address injustice and as a vehicle for change but also play with the idea of space through the format of the presentation. The flooding of imagery creates a new aesthetic consideration for architects beyond the model/review setup. This treatment of architecture can be slightly problematic as the visual form is often inappropriately correlated with the function. The Oakland format of thematizing the presentations as well as committing to social justice issues helps to avoid this problem as each work has at its core a specific problem in mind. Of course, Pecha Kucha is a party as well, so let's celebrate all the ways we can reveal the political nature of space!

EastSide Cultural Center, 2277 International Blvd., 8-10 pm, $5

Jews and the Israeli State

2009-04-06T10:18:00.000-07:00

My comments come after listening to Michael Krasny's interview with Parliament member George Galloway about his involvement with the Palestinian cause.
(Listen here; http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R904060900)
It is mentioned ever so briefly in the interview but it is possible, and I think necessary, to separate the Jewish people from Israel. Israel has betrayed Judaism since its beginnings with its process of 'autoemancipation' in which it sought to recreate itself in the image of European nationalism. My brother, Isaac, points to the suppression of the Yiddish language, the masculinization of Jewish identity, and the need to become a landed people as part of this betrayal. For a people familiar with diaspora, our Ashkenazi identity as one devoid of national context was persecuted by our own Ashkenazi elite in Israel's founding. As my brother points out, for Jewish Americans there is no way to 'go back', nowhere to 'go back' to. And don't think I am unfamiliar with what Israel seemed to offer survivors of the Holocaust, my own relatives live there for much of the year as a result. But I cannot recognize myself in that State. I am not a State, Judaism never was. It seems Judaism is still occupied with appropriating nationalistic rhetoric in order to compete in a world dominated by the ideology of the State. I have problems with the treatment of Palestinians but I also want to highlight an idea that rarely gets mentioned or fully discussed and that is this distinction between the historic Jew and the modern Hebrew. The distinction of language here is not minimal. I'm excited to see the new exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum entitled 'Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater.' Our identity is story and debate with many of our major holidays dedicated to the retelling of important narrative (Purim for example). What the Jewish people are looking for, or at least what I am looking for as a Jew, is not a State I will likely never visit but a revival of my language, my theater, my dialogue.

Manhattan Before Ground Zero

2009-04-05T17:39:00.000-07:00

If you ever try searching for maps of the slave market established in New York in 1711 at the Wall Street slip, you won't find a great deal. The 'Mapping the African American Past' group provides the most navigable and comprehensive approach to the history of the built environment in Manhattan. Unfortunately, many of the sites they mention (the slave market or the Tontine Coffee House across the way where the New York Stock Exchange was housed) are poorly recorded on historic maps. When comparing the maps here with those of the David Rumsey Collection, you can see how difficult it is to reconstruct the history of this area. The U.S. National Park Service, responsible for the African Burial Ground Memorial in Manhattan, identifies the approximate center of the mass grave of slaves' bodies at Duane and Elk St. The site is considerably further north than the Slave Market. To me, this suggests that the slave trade occupied a huge area in Manhattan and though the current World Trade Center sits slightly West of the two identified slave trade sites, Ground Zero must have bore witness to this narrative.
Personally, I am frustrated with the opaque nature of trying to research this specific history. The documents that do exist remain squarely within the Black Culture Institution and rarely venture out in more mainstream scholarship. The creation of a Ground Zero memorial that will forever remember the site as beginning with the World Trade Center, will further obfuscate the truth of this space. Why has the WTC come to symbolize a universal New York experience, and hence national, and not the history of slavery in the city? Well certainly the lack of archived, historical data has insured a minimal place in history. Google maps demarcates the superblock as 'Ground Zero.' There is no space for 'Slave Market.' This is not a neutral act, the rendering of space always has an agenda. The map redirects history and memory, codifying the space as universal. But is it not a space that inherits its place in a history of financial trading directly from the Slave Market and Coffee House?

In a post-Fordist, polycentric urban landscape, space is not the only thing that hides consequences-spatial representation does as well.

Oakland Art Murmur and Upcoming Events

2009-04-04T12:04:00.000-07:00

1. Oakland Art Murmur 4/3; Last night I told my friend I would blog about our evening so I will provide a not-very-insightful review here. Art Murmur was fun even if the galleries feel familiar quickly. Johansson Projects stuck out in my mind. The dominant art pieces were large knit creatures hanging from the ceiling (see photo above). But the best part was the little furry creatures on wheels that could be remote controlled by viewers to zoom around the crowded room, tapping at people's feet. Rock Paper Scissors is always fun as well and they reflect a really integrative gallery space. Murmur is not just about the art for me, the city feels different when groups of friends head out on the streets to wander and revel, hanging out on 23rd listening to music, eating cupcakes, drinking from flasks. Against a brick wall, a man projected flashing 'BAM,' 'POW,' 'WACK!' with a soundtrack of punches and kicks. People would act out kung-fu scenes as others walked by, becoming part of an epic fight with their silhouette on the wall. All in all, art murmur is playful and engages space in a fun way even if it is in a specific time frame.

2. Mission Art and Performance Project (MAPP) 4/4; If you want to see what SF has to offer, head over to the Mission around 7 and explore until midnight. For more information go to; http://sfmapp.com

3. CultaCuba Dance Party 4/4; Head on over to the Eastside Cultural Center for some salsa dancing and performances. Dancing is good for you. After watching a silly talk show the other day where the hosts did some 'quick relaxation' moves (touching your toes, bending your neck, breathing), it became clear that we have to be reminded how to feel our own bodies. Dancing is a way to reclaim your physical self, to reintroduce yourself to it after a day of proscribed postures. So get out there and shake your groove thing!

4. Urban Roosting; If you've got the space (and your landlord allows you to use it), there really isn't a more beautiful space to garden or, in this case, raise chickens.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/artsculture/on_ruling_your_roost/Content?oid=444045
The article provides local resources if you're interested in having some chickens. If you're interested in food sovereignty issues in general check out; Promised Land, Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform for a global review of strategies. And of course our own local hero Michael Pollan makes us realize how much more goes into food than photosynthesis. I would suggest his Botany of Desire and not as much In Defense of Food because its writing is a bit too popular in its address and doesn't work the magic he normally does. For a great documentary, seek out King Corn.

National Border Patrol Museum

2009-03-31T18:04:00.000-07:00

What would you expect a museum of the border to contain? What narrative would it tell and how would it communicate this message?
Located in El Paso, Texas, this museum focuses on the experience of the 'American' side of the Southern border over the course of colonization up to the present Border Patrol officers. The site features a memorials section recounting the cause of death for Border Patrol officers. The passages include details like, "The suspect expended all eight rounds from a .22 caliber revolver, striking Agent Barr once in the left shoulder area. The path of the projectile that struck Agent Barr was such that the wound was fatal instantly. Agent Barr fired all six rounds from his .357 magnum Service revolver during the gunfight, striking the suspect once." The guts and glory of it are spelled out to honor these people who gave their life 'for God and Country.'
The idea of the border has long been constructed through popular culture but with new phenomena like the reality TV show about the Border Patrol this narrativization of a space most Americans remain distant from their entire lives is made more immediate.
I realized the other day, I cannot hold a visual of the border in my mind. Is it predominantly built up space with essentially cities stretching across a patrolled imaginary line? Is it the desolate and cruel desert that swallows up people trying to make their way north?
And yet it is made immediate to me in the media, it is laid at my feet to claim, to walk, to patrol, to participate in its construction. A series of wrongs dressed up as a jingoistic right.

What should be in a museum of the border? An awareness of the border as a space of variable experience in which the meaning of space is realigned to render the close, impenetrable. It should house a space of private toll roads with selective access, an imbalance of import/export with trucks uniting the fate of corporations and factory workers nations apart, a daily commute, a site of violence, a series of negotiations of identity, and more than I can honestly speak to.

What should be in a museum of the border?

Odds/Ends/and Events

2009-03-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

1. Parkway Speakeasy Theater Closing
The theater, located at 1834 Park Blvd. in Oakland, will show its last film Sunday 3/22/09. But the theater fully intends to go out with a bang with its usual screenings and its "Oakland's Tight" Night: Que Viva la Lucha (film) with live music from the film with Carne Cruda. Tickets are only 7 dollars (really amazing considering an average film going experience, sans music, will cost around ten dollars). If you can't make that (which I can't) do try to go out and see another film before Sunday. Once a space like this is gone, it's hard to remember that it can ever exist in the city but it absolutely can as long as we are active urban citizens who know to tinker with the first layer of the built environment to see what space lives below.
More Details; http://www.parkway-speakeasy.com/index.php

2. Review of the 40th St. Cut Artists' Talk and WOBO
The talk 3/19/09 at the Oakland Art Gallery, a great space near the Oakland city hall, brought around 25 people out to hear about the history of a specific section of the city. The artworks were a product of five artists working with various media to reconstruct the experience of discovery, as artist Dianne Jones put it. The artists looked at the history of the 40th St. Cut made for a line of the Key System Urban Railway as it ran parallel to the Glen Echo creek, examining the hidden and shaped parts of the city and the relationships they form. Artist Michael Meyers noted a change in himself after working as a sort of urban archaeologist saying he now walked through the city much more consciously with an eye to the spaces where layers of the past city are still exposed. The artwork is really refreshing simply because you are absolutely a part of it, emphasizing not only the experience of discovery but also the ways in which we participate in assemblage and place-making through our wanderings and tinkering (a la de Certeau). The exhibit closes today but for more information on the project check out the blog that the artists kept throughout the experience and be inspired because the city is for the amateur, not the expert;
http://www.40thstreetcut.blogspot.com/
In conversation with Michael Meyers about his 8-city walk and planned 10-city walk projects, a fellow gallery-goer mentioned his participation in a group called WOBO; WalkOaklandBikeOakland. The group is dedicated to improving city connections for pedestrians and cyclists but also simply helps organize people interested in exploring the city and sharing that experience. The blog (http://www.walkoaklandbikeoakland.org/blog/) reveals a heavy slant toward the Bike part of the group but the anonymous gallery-goer was interested in expanding the Walk focus. To check out upcoming campaigns or to join and get your call walk/bike Oakland map go to http://www.walkoaklandbikeoakland.org.

3. Things to Check Out 3/20/09-3/29/09
The Oakland Public Library (125 14th St.) is showing artwork through the end of March from women in the Black Panther Party under the heading Artwork from Women in the Struggle. If you can't make it there, go to http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2004/apantherinafrica/special_photo.html for a photo gallery entitled Black Panthers 1968 as well as interviews with those involved. Understanding the ways in which such movements were able to use and mobilize the city space can help bring the city into a new focus. Since so much of the activity took place in sites we recognize and have experienced in very different ways, it's even more engaging and challenging. Does space function differently now or do we (see photo above of the Berkeley campus with a crowd listening to Eldridge Cleaver)? Where do our movements happen? Or do they really even happen anymore?
3/28/09 Screening at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley of Daguerreotypes by Agnes Varda at 8:20 pm. The film is an intimate look at Parisian neighborhood captured through Varda's use of "“cinema-next-door,” using a camera tethered to her apartment by an extension cord. The film focuses on the street’s shopkeepers, presenting them as “types”—butcher and baker, laundress and tailor, sellers of perfumes, accordions, and clocks—but also as individuals who speak to the camera of their origins and dreams." The narrow focus of the film allows for a thorough explanation of the daily but shows the transformation of the usual into the unique as space is personally articulated.
And while you're in the area head across the street to the Berkeley Art Museum to view the works of conceptual artists Mario Garcia Torres showing 2/22/09-5/17/09. His work is better characterized, as he explained in the artist talk earlier in February, as a conversation with the history of conceptual art. Such a discourse often leads him and his video camera to spaces once occupied by these artists to revisit/witness what had once been. One work, Open Letter to Dr. Atl, visits a site painted by a past conceptual artist as Torres explains to him that the MoMA wants to start a branch out here in the peaks of Guadalajara as he problematizes the desire to occupy this space and the simultaneous tendency to lose site-specificity. Works like these are deeply personal explorations that exist at the intersection between the artist/the space/and the public or the art institution.

Have a Good Week and Happy Spring Break.

Can't Stop Listening

2009-03-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

Kutiman, an Israeli mash up artist, has captured my heart and ears with his 'Thru You' album. The music itself is fabulous but the concept is also genius; he takes videos from youtube of people playing/demoing instruments and mashes it all up, combining the talents of disparate virtual/physical sites to form a single track from around the world.

Check it Out; http://thru-you.com/

News and Events; The Long Now and Oakland Art Gallery

2009-03-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

1. The Clock of the Long Now, named by Brian Eno, may serve as a counterpoint to the discussion of commodity accumulation and the accompanying planned obsolescence. The clock is part of a project of the Long Now Foundation, which seeks to reorient our projects and thinking to long-term implications and plans. The clock is planned for a mountaintop in eastern Nevada and would tick once a year with a century hand moving every hundred years. The goal is for the cuckoo to emerge every millennium for 10,000 years.
More Details; http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/

2. Oakland Gallery Artist's Talk, 40th St. Cut
Artist Talk, March 19th, 6-7 pm at the Oakland Art Gallery. Come hear about the 40th St. Cut exhibit featuring; "book art, kinetic sculpture, video, sound, photography and multimedia elements. The 40th Street Cut, investigates the spatial histories of a section of Oakland’s urbanscape, particularly the overlaying linear systems of Glen Echo Creek and the current AC Transit “C” line, previously know as the Key System urban railway." The project attempts to reclaim the lost histories of this area to provide a long view of the paths we take and the layout we normalize. (More Information; http://www.oaklandartgallery.org/exhibitions_new/?current)

Albany Art Excursion 3/15 and Arman's System of Objects

2009-03-15T17:50:00.001-07:00

Click on the title for a link to an article written by Jaimey Hamilton on Arman's artistic acts of 'witnessing' in a manner he describes as "very much involved in the pseudo-biological cycle of production, consumption, and destruction." Through his assemblages of consumer objects he updated the tactics of the Dada and Surrealist artists in using evidence of material culture to reproduce the relations of a system of mass production and consumption. The space of the capitalistic spectacle behind a glass display case is mirrored in his collections of objects. It reminded me of Lefebvre's characterization of the new urban experience as one of endless potential for centrality with centrality realized by "what it brings together, for it requires a content. And yet, the exact nature of that content is unimportant. Piles of objects and products in warehouses, mounds of fruit in the marketplace, crowds, pedestrians, goods of various kinds, juxtaposed, superimposed, accumulated-this is what makes the urban urban." (116, The Urban Revolution) Another artist experimenting with the re-presentation of commodity was the excellent Kurt Schwitters. See some of his work from a retrospective here:
http://kurtschwitters.org/
Today I played archivist of this accumulation in Albany:

News and Events; Exceptional Spaces

2009-03-14T09:45:00.000-07:00

1. NY Times article sent by the lovely Jean Binkovitz:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08fluno-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=design
"Somebody had parked a couple of da Vinci’s flying machines on a patch of grass, not far from a couple of shiny rabbit sculptures and a somber-looking black monolith. This was a Second Life site called Brooklyn Is Watching, an unadorned island where virtual artists are invited to drop off their virtual work for scrutiny and discussion by a real-life crew of six or seven artists and critics who meet every Thursday night, salon-style, in front of an enormous flat screen at the Jack the Pelican Presents gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Beer is involved."
As art museums struggle to attract patrons, perhaps the art museum could become the site between the real (though I hesitate to use this word and you may see why after reading the article) and the virtual, reflecting a heterotopia in the Lefebvrian sense of the word as a site of "renegade commercial exchange." (The Urban Revolution, xii, 2003)In consideration of the last post which deals with the theme parkification of space, perhaps this points to the potential of viewing simulacra with flexibility. Will these spaces create a need for their own urban theory or do they continue to recreate the system of relations that serve exchange values? An urban theory without the urban?

2. Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women
Vikki Law comes to Moe's Books (2476 Telegraph) Monday March 16th at 7:30 pm to discuss work on the 1974 prison uprising known as the 'August Rebellion.' (A rebellion in response to the beating of an inmate) The demographics of incarceration force us to understand how the prison interacts with the rest of society. Though meant to be the embodiment of law and order, the prison has transformed from a temporary/exceptional space to a permanent part of the landscape for specific groups;
"At 38 percent, Latino men now constitute the largest share of the state’s male prisoners (roughly comparable to their share of the adult population). At 27 percent, white men are underrepresented in prison; but at 29 percent, African American men are vastly overrepresented. African American men are 7 times as likely as white men and 4.5 times as likely as Latino men to be incarcerated. One out of every 12 African American men in California between the age of 25 and 29 is currently in state prison."
(http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2006/08/whos_in_prison.html after the release of the 2006 report from the Public Policy Institute of California) How do these spaces, often hidden from the daily landscape but part of an enormous industry, reflect on the rest of the environment? The relationship seems to be parallel to the core-periphery relationship formulated by Dependency Theory with 'normality' requiring spaces of 'abnormality.' This idea is further discussed by Giorgio Agamben in his 2005 book State of Exception. Pick up a copy at Moe's.
Online excerpt, Agamben: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/009254.html
Event Details: http://www.moesbooks.com/moes/monday.htm

3. This American Life The Rubber Room and The Plan
Listen to Act One to hear a description of a strange holding procedure used in New York schools to handle teachers under some sort of investigation, sometimes for years in a sort of mild mannered Guantanamo. The rubber room is a room of supposed temporary holding but teachers can end up spending more time waiting here than they do in the classroom. The use of exceptional space seems to have been deemed appropriate for all realms of life.
Act Two addresses a familiar narrative of if not racially motivated then at least racially significant gentrification/displacement (two sides of the same coin). What seems important here is information. Processes of gentrification are not part of the organic life of cities. What mobilizes the plan? Discussions often center around suspicions and hunches but we need investigation/documentation/a paper trail. We need to be as systematic in mobilizing the production of knowledge, the creation of alternative maps of the city, etc as those shadowy figures who propagate the Plan.
Listen Here; http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1232

News and Events; Public Space and Art

2009-03-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

Two points of business;
1. Obama Imagery in the City http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/arts/design/12boston.html?_r=1&ref=us
It's a familiar story by now but we have yet to answer;
What is public about public space?
For discussions on this issue I recommend "Variations on a Theme Park" edited by Sorkin;
"Obsessed with the point of production and the point of sale, the new city is little more than a swarm of urban bits jettisoning a physical view of the whole, sacrificing the idea of the city as the site of community and human connection."
"...this new realm is a city of simulations, television city, the city as theme park...The architecture of this city is almost purely semiotic, playing the game of grafted signification, theme park building."
"Creatively erosive postmodern geographies are being invented at a furious pace in every urban region in the country. Everyday life seems increasingly to have moved well beyond the simpler worlds of the artificial theme parks that you visit when you want to. The new theme parks now visit you, wherever you may be: the disappearance of the real is no longer revealingly concealed."

2. Hidden Geographies in SF
Showing at the Altman Siegel Gallery, 49 Geary St. (4th floor) from February 27-April 11. My friend, Daniela, turned me on to him and his work concerning cultural production and geographies, particularly in relation to sites of U.S. National Security. He just released a book called Experimental Geography. Check it out.
More details; http://paglen.com/

Medicine for Melancholy

2009-03-11T21:43:00.000-07:00

Check out the film. I saw it 3/6/09 at the Embarcadero Center in SF with the writer/director Barry Jenkins. The film plays with the tensions of living in a city, blending the personal and political. It follows a couple after a drunken one-night stand as they explore and define the city and themselves. Framing the question of urban experience within a single day provides for an interesting mapping process, highlighting certain sites within the city. Through their conversation, they participate in the everyday activity of place-making with greater thoughtfulness than most are able to give navigating through the city daily. The film rightfully challenges the role of the museum, the dance club, and the local activist council to examine their relationship to the community. It also provides a challenge to the viewer to search out these narratives within the urban landscape.

Grand Opening of the Museum of Urban Experience

2009-03-11T20:56:00.001-07:00

Welcome to my thought-experiment that seeks to congregate expressions of the urban experience. This is a space for productive discourse relating art, urban theory, community organizing, law, performance, and geography. As the city is a space of both structural injustice and migrational tactics of the subversive pedestrian, the city becomes a site of negotiation for the self and the community. While this conversation necessarily takes place in disparate locations, the Museum of Urban Experience seeks to bring each voice together in an effort to make each more articulate in opposition to or in collaboration with each other.