Category: Urban issues

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It’s only the river

Amy & I meandered through the French Quarter yesterday, in search of cheap novelties (some voodoo dolls at the French Market), some holiday presents (a couple of higher-end masks at Rumors, and a sweatshirt from the local Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, which my boss contends has the best margaritas around), and coffee and beignets at Café Du Monde.

We took a ton of pictures yesterday, but I forgot to bring the cable for my camera along for the trip, so mine will have to wait till we’re home next week. Amy has been working much more diligently on hers, and has demonstrated an eye for photography that leaves me jealous. She’s also willing to spend time with Photoshop and Lightroom to improve her pix, while my point-and-click mentality seems to carry over to many aspects of my life.

Anyway, the Quarter was pretty full of people, even though we got in pretty early (around 9am). The New Orleans Bowl football game between Rice and Troy had been the night before, so partisans for those two schools were everywhere. In fact, CDM was completely packed when we arrived. The weather was in the mid-50s, and Amy pointed out that you could tell which people were locals because they were the ones wearing scarves and gloves.

After breakfast, we began taking pictures. I brought my laptop along, in hopes that the citywide WiFi service was actually functioning, but the Earthlink-provided network didn’t show up on my menu when we were sitting in Jackson Square, so I dropped the laptop off in our car. Sorry, no liveblogging from the streets of NO,LA, dear readers. Maybe next trip.

When Amy gets her pix posted, you’ll get an idea of how gorgeous the morning light can be in the Quarter. It was the first sunny day since we arrived on Thursday, which got Amy in a good mood. The rain and drear can bring a body down, like it has today.

(In fact, we’ve spent a good chunk of time just hanging out in her parents’ living room. Since I just crossed the 700-page mark in that Berlin Noir omnibus I brought along for the trip, I can attest that we’ve, um, had some time on our hands.)

During our walk yesterday, we stopped at Faulkner House Books in Pirate Alley (yarr!), where I picked up a small collection of post-Katrina columns by Times-Picayune writer Chris Rose, who’s been chronicling the human costs of the catastrophe as well as anybody. I’ll probably read it after I finish the remaining 130 pages of Berlin Noir today.

It turns out the bookstore’s doing pretty well, at least if some of the comments I heard from the manager about the prices they fetched for a few rarities is true. I’m being deliberately vague, but it sounds like they made some serious scratch from selling a couple of New Orleans-related literary memorabilia. It warms my heart that there’s a market for the stuff.

I can’t offer much of an assessment on the city’s recovery. The French Quarter isn’t like the rest of the area and, while there were plenty more tourists than our last trip in July, that’s not adding much to the conversation. During the coverage of the New Orleans Bowl on ESPN, the commentators talked about “how little has been done” down here for the people, and showed a short clip of the student-athletes taking a bus tour through the lower Ninth Ward.

As Amy & I walked through the Quarter, we reminisced about our wedding weekend down here. There are so many landmarks for me (and even more for Amy, who spent so many years in the city), so many resonances, so many reminiscences, that it’s hard for me to imagine that it can go away for good, within our lifetimes.

Last night, at the home of Amy’s grandmother, some family members railed against FEMA, the local contractors, and the state’s governor, who evidently finished a legislative session unable to pass a bill to spend the state’s $2 billion surlplus. Since it’s not their district, these in-laws didn’t directly lambaste the re-elections of Ray Nagin or Rep. Jefferson, who was recently caught with $90,000 dollars in bribe money in his freezer, but they weren’t happy about either of those developments.

After we got back from her grandmother’s place (we were dropping off some leftover chicken tenders & cream cheese wrapped in bacon), we found a documentary about New Zealand on the Travel Channel. There was a segment on Napier, the art-deco city on the north island. It spent a little time showing off the buildings, then explained how it all resulted from a massive earthquake and fire in 1931 that wiped out the city. (In fact, the whole documentary was along these lines: each segment started out with beautiful images and descriptions of wonder and grandeur, then segued into “the dark secret behind it.”)

The third novel in that Berlin Noir omnibus jumps 9 years from the end of the second, from 1938 to 1947. Berlin is in ruins, and the Russians are starting to separate the east section of the city from the west. It made me wonder what the city’s like today, how it integrated in the last 15 years.

The rain’s heavy again today, and they’re issuing flood warnings. Nothing cataclysmic, of course: just enough to overrun the various drainage systems for a while.

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Look, kids! Malthusian idiocy!

From some idiot in the Washington Post:

Large populations living in megacities consume massive amounts of the Earth’s energy to maintain their infrastructures and daily flow of human activity. The Sears Tower in Chicago alone uses more electricity in a single day than the city of Rockford, Ill., with 152,000 people. Even more amazing, our species now consumes nearly 40 percent of the net primary production on Earth — the amount of solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis — even though we make up only one-half of 1 percent of the animal biomass of the planet. This means less for other species to use.

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If you build it

A few years ago, I was shooting the breeze about the anicent Greeks with a buddy of mine. It turned out that he was devoted to Herodotus’ descriptions of the war against the Persians, while I preferred reading Thucydides’ accounts of What Happened After. In a sense, it encapsulated how our lives contrasted (at the time): as an alienated author, he was interested in the battles and heroism, while as a publisher, I was more interested in how everything gets administered after the heroism.

(I couldn’t come up with any parallels for the Melian dialogues, but nobody’s perfect.)

Anyway, I bring this up because of an article in this month’s issue of Wired. See, it’s one thing for architects like Frank Gehry to come up with never-before-seen organic forms for buildings, but it’s another thing to actually build them.

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It’s a Rap!

(You know you wanna check out the pix from my meanders in Toronto on Friday)

Home from Toronto a lot easier than my boss, whose flight home on Friday got cancelled due to “the airspace over Boston,” according to his pilot. He asked if this meant the bad weather & high winds we had all over the northeast, and was told that it did not. So, after 4 hours in an Embraer 145, he was allowed to leave and headed back to our hotel, where he sat in the bar and watched hockey.

Meanwhile, official VM buddy Sam and I went to see the Raptors play the Celtics in what Sam called “battle of the worst coaches in the NBA.” Since the Raptors have a game tonight against the Knicks, we figured maybe it’s a round-robin tournament.

We had fun at the game, but it was despite the action on the court. Sam’s now been to two NBA games with me (we hit a Dallas game against Orlando in April 2005), and he’s convinced I have NBA-Tourette’s, in which a constant stream of analysis & invective pours forth from my mouth during professional basketball games. We joined up with my boss after the game for a drink or two. He seemed pretty exhausted by the hurry-up-and-wait. I admit: if I were stuck in an Embraer for 4 hours, I’d probably go bananas.

Earlier in the day, after I visited Sam’s company in Oakville and toured the company’s produciton facilities (not as heavy-duty containment suiting as I wore on Thursday), I wandered around Toronto a little, while the weather was clear.

Unfortunately, this wandering didn’t coincide exactly with the clear weather, and I was stuck in some darned cold rain for a while. Early in my meander, I stopped at the Roots store in the Eaton Centre to get a hat and gloves. But then I decided that they were kinda pricey and, besides, the weather was okay now, so it would stay that way forever.

From there, I exited onto Yonge Street, which I forgot was an interesting amalgam of high-end retail, good record stores, and low-rent strip clubs. I headed off from there to a used bookstore I remembered from a past trip, but didn’t find anything.

I decided I’d walk through the University district and visit the famed comic store, The Beguiling. I spent a while there, hoping the weather would clear again and trying to justify spending $240 (Canadian) for a limited print by Sammy Harkham of a golem walking in the forest. I held off (I’ll wait till the USD appreciates against Canada’s dollar, and I’d probably be fine with a panel from The Poor Sailor anyway).

One of the nice things about having started doing yoga is that rambling ambles like this one don’t seem to give me the slight mid-back pain I was getting the past few years. I’ve only been on it for a few weeks or so, so hey.

During this walk, I came across two things I didn’t take pictures of: the Bata Shoe Museum and the Robarts Library. The former looks entertaining enough, and I bought a postcard from there for Amy, to give us yet another reason to take a long weekend here in the springtime.

The Library, on the other hand, is one of the most overwhelmingly depressing buildings I’ve ever seen. It may’ve been worse because of the rain and gray skies, but I can’t imagine a scenario which the appearance of this building inspires anything but fear and dread. Don’t let 1970s architecture happen to you!

After I left The Beguiling emptyhanded, it was time for another overpriced cab ride back to the hotel. I was amazed by the cost of cab rides in this city, as well as the ones I had to take to the pharma companies, which were outside the city. The flat-rate limo-y cars were also awfully expensive, including $51 CAD for the 20-minute ride from downtown to the airport.

In keeping with my recent post about accumulating all sorts of change and foreign currency, I returned home this morning with about $47 in Canadian bills and change. I feel like George Soros.

Anyway, a really neat thing happened during the short (54-minute) flight today. We completed our initial descent through the cloud cover, and all I could see were brown-gray hills and a few houses and a winding road or two. I thought, “We’re only 15 minutes from landing, but I have NO idea where we are right now.” It looked like Pennsylvania farmland, or far western NJ.

Then I noticed the Sheraton Crossroads to port, and it hit me: I was looking down at my morning commute! Sure enough, Rt. 17 threaded away from the Sheraton, southeast to Ramsey. Our plane followed Rt. 208 for a bit, as I picked out landmark after landmark (the Nabisco plant, the Ikea across from Garden State Plaza, even the Lukoil I stopped in last week). I’ve only had this perspective from a plane once before. Usually, I come home at night, or on different flight paths.

It helps to see things from different angles. Except Raptors/Celtics games.

(check out a couple of pix from my Toronto walkabout)

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Too marvelous for words

In the new City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple lays a whomping on Steven Pinker’s theory of language development. Dalrymple being Dalrymple, he draws out the moral implications of Pinker’s theory:

The contrast between a felt and lived reality — in this case, Pinker’s need to speak and write standard English because of its superior ability to express complex ideas — and the denial of it, perhaps in order to assert something original and striking, is characteristic of an intellectual climate in which the destruction of moral and social distinctions is proof of the very best intentions.

Given that Dad’s english isn’t among his top two languages, and that my first writing influence was Stan Lee, I’m pretty amazed that this site isn’t filled with pages of fragmented alliteration. Fortunately, I had Mom (and Chris Claremont).

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Underworld evolution

If you’re like me (fate worse than etc.), you revel in the amazing subway stations in foreign countries. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best intro to this article about making art from metro stops:

Building beautiful metro stations isn’t just a chance for cities to show off. It also provides valuable exposure for up-and-coming local artists and architects, giving them a chance to bring their work to the masses. “Artists have a captive audience,” says Edward Barber, director of programs at the London College of Fashion, who has been involved in the city’s Platform for Art initiative.

The accompanying slideshow has a pic of one of my faves: the Arts et Metiers stop in Paris, which looks like Jules Verne’s Nautilus.

(Bonus: my pics of the metro stop in Brussels decorated with a massive mural by Herge)

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Unrequired Reading: Nov. 10, 2006

As you know, I’ve been interested in the development of the new Airbus A380 (the really big plane) and all the production problems Airbus has been having with it. The fact that I fly between 25,000 and 35,000 miles each year is a key contributor to this interest.

Barbara Peterson at Popular Mechanics takes care of my addiction with an article on the engineering issues Airbus is running into:

Will the A380 be the next Concorde — an engineering breakthrough with little chance of breaking even? Certainly, the problem the jetliner was supposed to help solve — airport gridlock — still exists. The world’s major hubs already operate at full capacity during peak hours, and traffic is expected to increase 4 percent annually, from 4.2 billion passengers in 2005 to 7 billion passengers in 2020. Building new airports or significantly expanding existing ones, though, is a practical and political nightmare.

The Airbus solution: Increase capacity with a plane that carries up to 900 passengers — nearly twice as many as the 747. “It is this big monster,” says Hans Weber, president of Tecop International, a San Diego-based aviation consulting firm. “And Airbus has struggled with the nightmare of making something this big economically efficient.”

Meanwhile, Boeing has gambled that the market is most interested in a fuel-efficient, midrange widebody that gives airlines flexibility. Its flagship project became the 250-passenger 787 Dreamliner, slated to go into service in 2008.

Virtually all experts agree that the A380 will eventually join the civilian fleet. (The plane’s maiden voyage — a planned Singapore Airlines flight to Sydney, Australia — was recently pushed back, again, and is now slated for late 2007.) But the problems facing the most expensive, ambitious nonmilitary aircraft project in history are mounting.

* * *

The AV Club interviewed Steven Wright this week. Turns out he and I share thoughts on travel:

AVC: What are the best and worst parts of touring?

SW: The best is definitely being in front of the audience, that rush in front of all those people. And then the other part is, “Oh my God, I’m in another hotel.” I say to my friends, if I won some contest, it would be like, “You have won five weeks in your own house!” Oh my God! I’d be jumping up and down hugging the host, hugging the other contestants.

AVC: So you’re not a fan of hotels?

SW: There’s just so many of them. It’s not that I don’t like hotels. This sounds kind of simple, but it’s true: The fact that you’re in a hotel means also that you’re not home. So as the time keeps going, and the experiences keep going, it’s like, “Man, I have not been home in this giant amount of time.”

I wonder if he was really enthusiastic and energetic in the interview.

* * *

Five teams of finalists have been named by the New Orleans Building Corp. for the project of rebuilding the city’s waterfront. Unfortunately, Frank Gehry’s on one of the finalist-squads.

The potential development zone includes a largely derelict 4.5-mile stretch of the north bank of the Mississippi River between Jackson Avenue and the Industrial Canal, which now includes mostly wharves and port facilities. It borders the Lower Garden district, the warehouse district, the French Quarter, Marigny, and Baywater.

The RFQ calls for new commercial, cultural, park, and transportation uses for the area, and for maintaining cruise and cargo operations. This, says Cummings, could include a continuous park with walking and bike paths, museums, a large performance venue, a culinary university campus, and modern cruise ship terminals. He stresses that the area will be oriented to public facilities, not ”condominiums and private property.”

* * *

In the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” category, Sheldon Silver helped shut down the West Side Stadium project, for which I’m quite thankful. As this City Journal article points out, Rep. Silver’s done a lot of stuff I don’t agree with:

Until last year, New York had an 80-year-old law that held auto-leasing companies ultimately responsible for accidents caused by drivers who leased or rented their cars. The law made about as much sense as, say, holding Chrysler responsible for accidents caused by the customers who buy and drive their vehicles. The law drove many auto-leasing companies out of New York, and it forced those that stayed to protect themselves by asking customers to jump through expensive legal hoops. The law had no constituency save the trial lawyers.

But the law stayed on the books thanks to Silver, who used his control of the assembly to block its repeal repeatedly. Silver said that he got in the way to protect victims of car accidents. But the more likely explanation for his obstructionism is that he himself is a trial lawyer and is beholden to the trial lawyer lobby. In fact, it took blanket federal legislation last year to nullify the auto-leasing law and similar if more limited laws in a few other states.

* * *

Rumsfeld et al. obviously mangled the postwar planning for Iraq, but I think he had some revolutionary ideas about how to execute a war-plan itself, sorta like being a good in-game basketball coach who has no ability to manage his players between games. The Iraqi army, one of the largest in the world, with months of preparation, was flat-out annihilated by a relatively light force of troops. That’s nothing to sneeze at, even with all the disastrous consequences. I think military theorists (and practitioners) will have plenty to learn from his mistakes and his successes.

Victor Davis Hanson goes a lot further in his praise for Rumsfeld.

* * *

Speaking of the election, Brandon Arnold at the Cato Institute contends that gerrymandering is still a major force in Congressional elections:

Consider that there were 435 races in the House and Senate with an incumbent trying to retain his or her seat. Only 26 — 6% — of challengers in these races have won. That’s pretty low for a “throw the bums out” election. Pending the outcome of three or four yet-to-be-determined races, this year’s 94% incumbent reelection rate appears to be slightly higher than the 90% rate of 1994.

* * *

Where’s the cup holder?

* * *

Pop music stars should not write children’s books. Only Ph.D.’s formerly at contract research organizaztions should write children’s books.

* * *

According to Theodore Dalyrmple, New Zealand once had excellent used bookstores but now has a crappy penal system.

* * *

And finally: “A chicken, with two asses!” (thanks, Tina!)

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I Live in a Suitcase

Well, them’s the best-laid plans. I decided not to spend $200 just to get into the Magic game (I could’ve gone with a cheaper seat, but it would’ve been pretty high up in the O-rena), and the conference people called to say that they couldn’t sneak me into the Pleasure Island get-together, meaning I’d have to pony up the $120 fee to explore . . . Pleasure Island! (I make a dramatic pause whenever I say the name.)

Deciding drunkenness is the better part of valor, I elected to hit Shula’s for dinner, knock back a couple of Hendrick’s & tonics with my 20-oz. Kansas City strip, and head back to the room for some awkwardly confessional writing. Because I’m all about customer satisfaction.

Which brings us to my hotel room, where I’m sitting in my underwear (black socks, natch) and listening to I Live in a Suitcase, by Thomas Dolby. It came from his fourth album, which is terrible, but I’ve gained an affinity for this song, which is about getting stuck in Los Angeles. Funnily enough, it’s just about the only major city I haven’t been to for a conference or trade show.

It’s also the city I think is least likely to offer itself up over the course of a 3- or 4-day trip. I’ve always had this impression that LA is much more a state-of-mind city than just about any other in America, that it reveals itself over the course of day-to-day life, but not to the tourist. This probably stems from being as spread out as it is, and as devoted to its key industry (entertainment, of course) as it is.

And it probably stems from my mythologizing of it, but I’m really not trying to romanticize Hollywood by any means. It’s just that almost every other city puts me in mind of a particular set of landmarks, of lifestyles, of business, of history, and I find myself drawing a blank over LA. I don’t think “Chinatown” should stands in for the city. Maybe I’ll make an extended trip there someday, but I doubt it’ll happen. If any of you have some commentary/meta-thoughts on LA to share, comment away!

But we’re in Orlando (or, more precisely, Lake Buena Vista, FL): Living in a suitcase also puts me back in the world of USA Today, as I mentioned during last week’s travels.

Over breakfast this morning, I discovered that avian flu is a subject for the Life section, not News. It seems that Indonesia isn’t doing so well treating it because “Decentralized power weakens grip on outbreak.” If only that junta were still running things.

On the plus side, it appears that coffee helps against Alzheimer’s disease, and just about everything else. Is nothing beyond the reach of coffee achievers?

The lead News story is about how Fresno is the most insanely hard-ass city on drunk drivers in America:

Police sneak into the driveways of convicted drunk drivers to plant Global Positioning System tracking devices on their cars and search their homes for evidence they’ve been drinking.

The “problem,” it seems, is that drunk driving fatalities have leveled off since the mid-1990s, after dropping annually for nearly 20 years prior to that. Rather than credit the reduction in deaths to improved vehicle safety and greater awareness about drunk driving, the article implies that it’s only police & the courts that can reduce the number of deaths. Hence, bugging the cars of convicted drunk drivers.

I also discovered that the Second Amendment doesn’t seem to pertain if you’re drunk:

One officer observes a man walking unsteadily as he leaves the bar. When he gets in his SUV and starts to drive off, other officers swoop down on him. The officers find a loaded Glock handgun in the center console. The man’s friend, who owns the SUV, walks over to show the police his concealed weapons permit. But he has been drinking, too, and the permit is void if he’s intoxicated. They arrest him, too.

In the Money section, we learn the valuable art of spin with the lead story Prius finally available without a wait. In addition to increased production, it turns out that reduced demand is a factor.

The Sports section told me that Ricky Williams is some sorta zen master:

When it comes to the search for elevated self-awareness and a higher plane of existence, Ricky Williams may be the [most] introspective athlete of all time. He is a vegetarian, a yogi, a vertiable Buddhist philosopher in shoulder pads. Unfortunately for the enigmatic running back, pro football does not place a premium on the quest for eternal truth and personal fulfillment.

Also, he really likes weed.

And I found out that Doogie Howser, M.D. is gay. All this over breakfast!

* * *

By lunch, I learned that there’s a staging of The Winter’s Tale that you might be interested in seeing, if you’re around NYC the next few weekends. It’s being directed by a guy who used to be my closest friend, but he’s been a douchebag to me for three-plus years now, so I figure I’ll skip out on this performance.

I do find it pretty funny that he can’t return a phone call or e-mail to me since 2003, but is quite content to send group e-mails asking for people to come out and see and/or promote his show. We’ve got different ideas of friendship, is what it boils down to.

Speaking of which, a bunch of my high school friends (Pennsylvania edition) have invited me to a mini-reunion next week down in Philadelphia, so I may come back with some entertaining anecdotes or photographs by Sunday. It’s one of those things where I realize how close so many of these friends have stayed in the 17 years since we graduated high school, and how close they stayed to me even though I only attended school for one year down there. Different ideas of friendship.

That said, I’m at a point in my life where I really don’t want to crash on someone’s sofa or air-mattress, so I’m trying to find an inexpensive hotel (sans bugs) that I can stay in Saturday night. I’m gonna get back to that right now, since I’ve given up on trying to figure out why my buddy Chip likes that Nightwood so darn much. It’s baroque; fix it.