Category: Urban issues

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Lala

Speaking of world-building and cities (see previous post), I was oddly compelled by this Go Fug Yourself post. It wasn’t just because of the insane fashion choices of its subject (which are great), but because it discusses a phenomenon that’s wholly intrinsic to Los Angeles, a city I’ve managed never to visit and which may as well border Timbuktu, since no pharma-conference will ever schedule an event there (those conferences being the impetus for most of my travel):

Here in Los Angeles there is a group of people (mostly women) who attend almost every event, from premieres to charity functions to the opening of a shoe store. These women are photographed. And we have no idea who they are. Literally. They’re not studio or television or music executives. They may claim to be “actresses” or “models” but they’ve never appeared in anything notable, nor do they have a string of non-notable credits. If they do have credits, usually they’re consistently playing something like “Girl #3.” Sometimes they appeared in Playboy once, but not necessarily. They’re not married to any one notable, as far as we can tell. We really don’t know how they’re getting invited to anything, why they’re being photographed, or how they’re making the money that allows them to keep up with their Botox schedule. They are a mystery, that, until now, we have basically ignored, primarily because no one knows who they are.

And then it gets really funny. Enjoy.

I guess I revel in those things that seem completely normal to the locals but are utterly bizarre to anyone from the outside

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Ununreal city

I played a Grand Theft Auto game on my computer a few years ago. While I could take or leave the moral conundra of it, I really appreciated the idea of having a big city in which to meander around. One of the things that makes for good art, in my book, is that sense of a well-realized environment, a world for the reader/viewer to participate in (Little, Big and Dhalgren are both prime examples of that). I even liked having a bunch of different radio stations to listen to while driving like a maniac through the city.

So I’m tempted to cave in and buy one of those mega-consoles now that I’ve seen this post about the New York-based GTA that’s coming out in October. If the images from the trailer are part of the gameplay (and not just from the interstitial segments), it’ll be an amazing experience.

Of course, they may have to change the title of the game. After all, stealing a car in NYC would be more trouble than it’s worth, if the game accurately depicts the traffic in Manhattan.

Oh, and if you’re interested in that idea of world-building in art, check out some of the related posts at the bottom of the City of Sound post.

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Blood, fire, gravity

I gave blood after work on Monday. Since I do a double red cell donation, it’s a longer process than a standard single-unit of whole blood, typically around 35 minutes on the bed. I tried to read, but there was too much activity for me to focus on my book, so I was resigned to watching the local TV news.

Between reports about cell phone facial treatments at a spa (evidently, talking on your cell phone constantly can give you zits, not tumors) and the bizarre accidental death of a retired cop (in his old precinct house, “cleaning his gun”) was a piece about Sunday’s 96th anniversary memorial for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The report was as sad as you’d expect, with a litany of the horrors and the number of dead women. When it wrapped, I noticed that the entire in-studio news-team was female, which makes some sorta point about advances in the last 96 years, but I’m not sure what.

The news report also brought up something I meant to write about a few years ago. In 2005, Amy & I watched Ric Burns’ New York documentary series on DVD. We enjoyed it plenty, even if Amy did drift off to sleep during some parts (it was weekend viewing, back before she moved in, so the combo of exhausting work-weeks and the soothingness of David Ogden Stiers’ voice took its toll). I learned a ton about the history of the city, particularly from the Robert Moses chapter, which relies heavily on the work of Robert Caro, a featured speaker throughout much of the documentary and possessor of one of the most seriously old-school websites ever.

Oy, with the flippant avoidance!

See, what I’m trying to write about is another aspect of 9/11, and I know that’s likely to cause you to tune out and go find some other blog to help you cruise through your workday. So, to make things easier for you, I’ll put the rest of this post under a “more” jump, so you can pretend you didn’t notice that and thought I was done writing.

Continue reading “Blood, fire, gravity”

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Will I never learn?

Oh, sure, I know you all think it’s easy being me. I know how you envy the dashing, romantic, debonair life of a pharmaceutical trade magazine editor who lives in a quiet, no-restaurant town a little beyond the suburbs. But it’s not all wine and roses, I tellya!

Take today, for example. Last night, I crashed at a friend’s apartment on 13th St. so I could get to an 8:30am presentation at the Waldorf. No problem, except that the presentation went on till noon with a short coffee break. That ran out of coffee. So I grabbed some scorched Starbucks in the lobby and figured I’d get something to eat on the way back down to the garage where I’d parked the night before.

Unfortunately, it was awfully cold out, and I’d forgotten that there aren’t any restaurants up around the Waldorf. I figured I’d pass on the street-meat kiosk, since I wouldn’t have anywhere to sit down and eat, and caught a cab down to 13th St.

Perhaps I was getting a little punchy with hunger, but I thought, “Well, as long as I’m in the area, I may as well stop in at the Strand on the way back to the car.”

And that’s where my troubles began.

See, dear reader, it’s one thing for me to go without food (and with crappy coffee) for a while. It’s another to be in a low blood sugar mode while walking around a giant used bookstore.

Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of the Strand, in part because it’s not a very serendipitous bookstore for me. For some reason, I can’t just meander around, pick something up, and start unspooling creative threads all around the labyrinth of the mythocreative mind. Maybe the shelves are too tall in the sides of the store, or the selections are too extensive. I’m not sure. But I have far greater luck when I go to a place like the Montclair Book Center.

That said, I usually find books to buy at the Strand. I just don’t find inspiration.

So I picked up a bunch of books today, including a collection of journalism about Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya, some gifts for friends, and a couple of discounted comic collections. I began my trek to the checkout line, resigned to carry both a bag of books and my work-bag (laptop inside) a few blocks along 13th to my friend’s place, where I would pick up my overstuffed overnight bag (Amy stayed last night too, which cut her morning commute from 2 hours to 10 minutes) before walking back down the block to the car.

And that’s when I saw it:

Yep: 11 volumes of the 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell edited by Peter Davison (reviews here). Never released in the U.S., and exorbitantly expensive to order from the UK.

So, minutes later, I found myself slinging my work-bag over my shoulder and hauling 2 enormous bags of books down 13th St. Where the overstuffed overnight bag awaited. Somehow, I got back down the block with all 4 bags; my slanted shoulders were not happy and kept shrugging the non-Strand bags off. But I got to the garage, picked up my car, and figured I’d just get out of NYC and get something to eat back in NJ.

I spent the next 45 minutes sitting in various stages of traffic and regretting that decision. Only two things got me through the trip home: the promise of White Manna and Howard Stern playing an audio clip of David O. Russell flipping out on Lily Tomlin. And $125 in Orwell books. Okay, so maybe it is pretty easy being me. I’ll shut up now.

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No-No-NO,LA

In the last few days, I’ve come across a pair of strange articles about New Orleans.

The first contends that a collection of public-housing buildings should not be knocked down, since they’re pretty nice buildings and just need “full-scale renovations”.

Oh, and the low-income residents shouldn’t be brought back in. Instead, the apartments should be sold to middle-class people, because, um, there are enough poor people in New Orleans already. Seriously:

The feds’ impulse to replace such perfectly good housing takes root in the flawed notion that the buildings are the problem with blighted public housing, not the dependent underclass people who live in it. Most residents of New Orleans’s housing projects paid less than $100 in monthly rent. Even if they weren’t on welfare, in other words, they were essentially dependent on government. Also, the complexes teemed with long-term tenants’ sons and grandsons, who terrorized the projects through violent crime. The failure of the city’s elected leaders to police and incarcerate these criminals long ago turned the projects into killing grounds with their own system of murderous street justice.

And nearly 18 months after Katrina, New Orleans certainly isn’t lacking for an underclass. In fact, the city’s murder rate is once again out of control, mainly due to unparented, impulsive young men shooting other unparented, impulsive young men.

What New Orleans is lacking is enough middle-class and working-class residents, who began leaving the city long before Katrina. Without such citizens, the Big Easy won’t have the committed voters and tax dollars it needs to become a functional, healthy city — something it hasn’t been for decades.

But, amazingly, that’s not the strangest and most insulting assessment I’ve read about the city this week. No, that honor goes to Andres Duany, who says, well, I’ve gotta just let him speak for himself:

I remember specifically when on a street in the Marigny I came upon a colorful little house framed by banana trees. I thought, “This is Cuba.” (I am Cuban.) I realized at that instant that New Orleans is not really an American city, but rather a Caribbean one. I understood that, when seen through the lens of the Caribbean, New Orleans is not among the most haphazard, poorest, or misgoverned American cities, but rather the most organized, wealthiest, cleanest, and competently governed of the Caribbean cities. This insight was fundamental because from that moment I understood New Orleans and truly began to sympathize. But the government? Like everyone, I found the city government to be a bit random; then I thought that if New Orleans were to be governed as efficiently as, say, Minneapolis, it would be a different place — and not one that I could care for. Let me work with the government the way it is. It is the human flaws that make New Orleans the most human of American cities. (New Orleans came to feel so much like Cuba that I was driven to buy a house in the Marigny as a surrogate for my inaccessible Santiago de Cuba.)

Keep reading, because his prescription for the city’s future success relies on this, um, lowering of standards.

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Random Seattle Stuff

Last night I remembered that, on my first trip to Seattle (August 2001), I almost decided to stay based solely on two factors: the summer weather here is gorgeous, and the sell Cherry Coke in 1-liter bottles.

On that first trip, it took me three days before I saw any black people. I’ve seen a bunch already this trip, even though the first black guy I saw that time, Sonics coach Nate McMillan, has moved on to Portland. Not sure if there’s been any demographic shift, or if the downtown area I’m staying in is more “urban” than the neighborhoods I generally hung out in on my other trips.

There’s a lot of construction downtown.

Ambien will help you get 7-8 hours of sleep even if you took a 5-hour nap earlier in the day.

That is all. We’re heading out soon to meet up with my buddy, the Brooding Persian, for lunch. Later, it’s on to the Flying Fish to drink and dine with a bunch of Amy’s friends, along with a cameo by another of my buddies from Annapolis.

I took a couple of pictures yesterday, but haven’t had time to process them and post, so you’ll have to wait on that. Our hotel’s kinda near the Space Needle, so I promise to get a bunch of pix of that and the EMP before long. And, of course, we’ll visit the co-located Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, even though the balloting is totally driven by RBI totals. . .

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Lazyday and Operawoman

I’ve been working pretty hard all week on the March ish, so I’m kinda tired out at this point. Plus, the wound on my right hand has made me contort my typing style all week, and that’s led to a weird pain in my right pinkie-finger. Grr.

Anyway, I finished Snow earlier today, and was much less interested in the last third than I was in the first two-thirds. A lot of what made the character of Ka interesting was lost when the object of his desire returned his affection. It made the rest of his actions driven almost solely by his lust, which drained any novelty from his character. Oh, well.

We’re headed off to Seattle next week for another wedding, so I’ll need to figure out what book I’m taking along with me for the trip. Maybe Dead Souls, which I’ve never read, but which was given to me as a gift on a previous Seattle trip.

Tonight, Amy’s treating herself to opera-night: Eugene Onegin at the Met. I’ll  occupy myself without drinking between 8pm and 11 or thereabouts. I’d like to stay up around Lincoln Center, but I don’t think there’s a ton for me to do, beyond my retailnaut exploration of the Time Warner Center.

So I may head down to the Village and see the Kochalka opening at Giant Robot. Or I can haunt Veselka and get all caffeinated for the evening. Since it’ll be a night-visit, I can’t promise any good pix, but I’ll do my best, dear reader.