Gotham Girls Roller Derby

Tonight the Brooklyn Bombshells and the Bronx Gridlock duked it out at the City College of New York. It was a very exciting bout (in fact, my throat is sore from all the yelling!) and there were some amazing skaters on each team. But the Bronx girls had that edge, plus Beyonslay’s tremendous ass blocking the path of any jammer coming up from behind, and they stole the game with a huge lead.

The Bronx girls taking a break.

The high fives at the end of the game.

That’s right folks, roller derby is making a huge comeback in case you hadn’t heard!

Optic Nerve

One of my favorite comic book artists is Adrian Tomine, who writes and draws one of my favorite comic books, Optic Nerve. If you know me well enough you know I have had an Optic Nerve poster in my bedroom since I was a junior in college. Sometimes, in Berkeley, I would see Adrian on his way to the post office, or in the post office, or on his way back home from the post office. I wondered what he would always be mailing. The few times I actually saw him he looked pretty depressed.

Well, it’s been a really long time since I have kept up with many comics, probably since about the time I graduated. The last issue of Optic Nerve that I’ve read was issue 9, published early in 2004. Now there are two more (published in 2005 and early in 2007) and I haven’t read them and I am really excited to, and I’m going to order them!

These three issues contain a continuous story about an Asian-American couple who break up or are on their way to breaking up, I can’t quite remember. I’m looking forward to finally knowing what happens after all these years!

Love thy neighbor, not thy neighboring county

Last night I found out that my parents have bought a new house and in a few short weeks, they are moving. They are moving 20 minutes further Southwest of the town center, and just across the county line, which puts them outside of the city limits of our metropolitan government. While I mustered the acting chops to appear happy for them, beneath the surface I was seething. And I begin to wonder why exactly I was so upset by it. I realized that at its core, moving out of the city feels to me like turning your back on a community of people.

Leave the city for those McMansions over the county line and never again will you pay taxes in your city. Never again will you have a vote in how the city is run. What you will do is take from the city — take money, your salary — and give little of it back. You will take your city’s good name and give nothing in return. You will tell people “I live in Nashville” but those of us who do live in Nashville and are committed to improving the community we live in will think “no, you do not live in Nashville, you have turned your back on us”.

In our recent city elections much was made of the large number of our city employees who do not reside in the city. Policemen, firemen, staff members of all stripes. When the local police union endorses a candidate, it means nothing, because nearly none of its members are Davidson County voters. By the same measure, when a Nashville police officer is paid by this city with tax revenue, he goes home and spends it in another county.

We are, as a city, shipping tax revenue out of our city in bulk each year. How can we stop this? How can we make sure that people who work in Nashville and profit from our city, also give back to it? It seems like an important problem to solve at a time when our city and so many other cities like it are suffering budget crises, when there is little opportunity to raise taxes thanks to the growing maladies of the middle class.

Cities like New Orleans and Detroit have long had residency requirements or “domicile laws”. In some places these laws apply only to public safety workers such as firemen and police officers. In other places the requirements extend to teachers as well. And yet other cities require all employees to reside within the city. In Nashville and in most American cities we require none of this. We require only that our elected officials reside here. That seems not only dead wrong, but stupid, foolish, absurd, and irresponsible. We should, as a city, demand that we recoup some of the tax revenue we pay our public employees. We should demand that the police officers protecting our city have a vested interest in making it safer. We should demand that our teachers and school administrators send their kids to the same schools that they work for. We should stop the outflow of our limited city resources to the surrounding counties and we should stop it now. Cities all over America should be doing the same thing.

But how do you make the implementation of such a law fair? After all, these people already own houses in the surrounding counties. Well to start with you grandfather in existing employees. You pass a law requiring that all new city employees must move to your city within six months of their start date. From there you pass a law saying that within 5 years from the date of passage you will begin to promote only employees who reside in your city. New Orleans has done this with great success. You do not take away anyone’s job or force anyone to move, unless they want a promotion, which can be argued is like applying for a new job and can even be treated that way by the city government if necessary. You will encounter resistance from the city employees, but the rest of the voters should overwhelm that resistance. After all, nobody has a right to hold a cushy government job. It’s not unreasonable to ask those who do to live within a certain very large geographic boundary. If they’re unwilling to do that, there are plenty of jobs in the private sector for them.

Now I’m not unsympathetic to the reasons that city employees choose to live in outlying areas. In many cases it’s simply cheaper for them. I think the city can do one better here though. At the same time you require all city employees to live within the city, you can mandate that all city employees are eligible for housing assistance, regardless of income. Your reward for working for our city is that we are going to make the local housing authority help you find affordable housing. When we are determining quotas and goals for building new affordable housing in the city, we are going to take your numbers and needs into account. We can also give public employees free access to the public transit system. It doesn’t cost the city in real dollars, increases ridership, and makes a nice additional benefit for working for the city.

So that takes care of the public employees, but what about all of the private citizens who leave our cities? How do we get them giving back to the city? After all, these people want to commute on our roads and our transit systems. They want to work at our jobs and collect paychecks from our city. It seems reasonable to ask them to give something back. Cincinatti and certain other cities have an answer: a municipal income tax. In Cincinnati it’s 2.1% and levied on anyone who lives and/or works in the city of Cincinnati. Employers who conduct business in the city are required to withhold the income tax of all employees who work within the city limits regardless of where they reside. I think there’s a smarter way to use municipal income tax. I think you can use it as an incentive to keep people in the county, by levying the income tax only on those who work in your city but do not live there. It’s a reasonable tax. Want to work here but don’t want to pay property taxes to maintain the road and transit infrastructure? We’ll collect a little income tax from you. If you don’t want to pay income tax, move back to the city.

I think these programs are vital to having the capital to make the kinds of improvements our city is going to need in the coming years to cope with the increasing cost of energy and commuting by automobile, to bolster our education system, and to increase public safety. It’s a wonder nobody trusts the police when they’re Johnny-Come-Lately in town rather than our neighbors and in our churches.

On blogging versus essaying

It has come to my attention that blogging is not my strong suit.  I rarely feel the urge to comment on daily events.  There are others who do that far better and far more frequently than I could ever hope to have the attention span for.  So what have I been doing here?  I realize that I have just been approaching this blog in the same way that I approach the writing of essays, and in effect, I have just been writing short essays.  Whenever my thoughts about something reach a kind of climax, I need to write them down in order to understand them, and hopefully to learn something new about them.  I don’t think I shall change that though, since it seems to be the form of writing I am better at or at least most comfortable with.  There’s enough cat stories on the web to go around already, right?  (I’m not promising I at some point will not share a story about my cats).

Lower East Side

Last Sunday was spent wandering around the Lower East Side because there was a small block party going on, called LudFest. I also was able to sample some very fine pickles and bialys, and take a look around the LES Tenement Museum Visitor’s Center. They have a lot of cool books about NYC. Here’s an entirely non-random assortment of photographs from that day.

A lovely green lady on Ludlow St.

I’ve been fascinated by the glasses sign over the gift shop on Orchard St.

I like old kids’ rides as well.

This new condo is very out of place in this neighborhood.

Your typical LES girls.

A small gathering of people watching the band. My problem is that the crowd was much more interesting to me than any of the bands we saw. More photos (not taken by me) can be seen on Flickr.

Brooklyn Cyclones

I promise one day to write about things I’m actually interested in. But tonight I went to see a baseball game out in Coney Island, between the Brooklyn Cyclones and the something-or-other Spinners. Coney Island is awesome so I thought it was worth a shot to try something new.

The first time my life brushed with baseball was when I was a young girl and my friend Mary was a huge baseball fan. She loved the Dodgers. One day her dad took us out to a ball game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. I was pretty excited. But then when we got there, there was a torrential downpour and the game was canceled. All that time spent in the car getting there, for nothing.

The second time I encountered baseball, I was volunteering at an Oakland As game. I sold beer, hot dogs and pretzels in order to raise money for a women’s softball team, members of which I had never met. Needless to say, I did not have a good time (okay, it wasn’t horrible, but I didn’t even get to watch the game!).

This is now the third time baseball has directly affected me, other than the numerous times I’ve seen it on the TV, shuddered, and quickly changed the channel. And you know what? It was actually pretty enjoyable. The stands weren’t crowded, but the people there were clearly excited. The Brooklyn Cyclones are a small team under the shadow of the Mets and Yankees. (Those are both New York baseball teams right? That’s how little I know.) But they had fans. In between innings there was always some little interesting sideshow to watch, or free prizes being thrown at the audience. Of course, there were the hot dogs and beer, plus the fact that the old Parachute Jump from the old Coney Island days was prominently present off of right field warmed my heart. In the end, the Cyclones won 2-1, because of a lucky homerun hit at the very last possible moment in the very last inning. And then they all huddled and hugged, wearing pink jerseys because they were sponsored by Sweet ‘N Low.

On urban planning, the oxymoron

The life of cities is my avocation, and I hope that someday my vocation will have something to do with helping cities to grow and prosper responsibly and sustainably.  But as I study the problems facing cities and the history of planning I find myself more and more disgusted by that word itself: planning.  It is a direct contradiction.  Cities, communities of people, cannot be planned.  They are dynamic organisms with emergent behaviors.  No planner, no matter how brilliant, can foresee which behaviors will emerge from a particular community or how future events will change that community and its goals and values.  The phrase urban planning rings in my ears too much like that old Soviet idea: central planning.

The field of urban planning gave rise to one of the most traumatic periods in the history of America’s cities: urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s.  A group of powerful and influential planners with a hard-on for Le Corbusier condemned many vibrant neighborhoods as blighted.  Blight was used as a euphemism for diverse, dense, black and in the way of the automobile.  The solution was to separate people.  They couldn’t be left alone to cohabitate so their neighborhoods were carved up by interstate highways and narrow, pedestrian friendly streets were replaced by wide avenues.  Mixed-use buildings were destroyed and replaced with single use housing projects.  And our cities have never been Great since.

Where once a neighborhood had 5 or more small grocers, there are now “food deserts” miles from the nearest supermarket.  Where there were laundries and diners and nightclubs there are now row after row of government houses.  Where there were sidewalks there are now extra traffic lanes and parking meters.  In most neighborhoods the churches were the only non-residential uses to survive.

Those neighborhoods that were destroyed?  They had been successful before because they had planned themselves, naturally, organically, around the needs of the community.  It is not too late to return control to the neighborhoods.  But a modern city has many challenges those early communities did not face.  It is necessary for the city to run the traffic system, and for the state to maintain the highways.   Legal protections are necessary to prevent developers from threatening public health and safety.

So what should the role of the city and of planners be today if we are to let neighborhoods dictate their own futures?  I think the city’s role should be to provide the infrastructure, the backbone along which neighborhoods can grow and prosper.  This means providing for public transit within and out of the neighborhood.  This means providing legal protection against development the neighborhood identifies as undesirable and incentives to encourage community approved development.  This does not include controlling the zoning regulations.  That is a task which should return to the neighborhood.  I propose an experiment where a city defines neighborhood boundaries based closely on city council districts or traditionally understood neighborhood boundaries.  Within each neighborhood turn over the zoning regulation to a council elected from within that neighborhood.  Allow neighborhoods to set their own priorities.  Why should city council members from the suburbs dictate what happens in inner city neighborhoods?  Most citizens are a far better judge of where the centers of activity and of business in their neighborhoods are and should be than central planners.  Citizens know which streets are full of families and where children play.  They know which streets can handle additional traffic, and where empty lots present dangers that should be filled in with new development.

It’s an old idea but a powerful one: power to the people.  It’s time for a radical shift in the way we govern our cities, because the old models just aren’t working and as the pace of development has picked up, too many places have fallen through the cracks.  Would suburbs have allowed McMansions to clog their feeder roads if those already living there had had a say in the area’s development?  Would single family homes in inner city neighborhoods be torn down and replaced with quadruplex tract mansions that stretch to the full dimensions of the lot if the neighbors had a direct voice?

Power to the people, man.

Five things that would behoove me

In the spirit of Merlin Mann’s most excellent 5ives, here is a list of five things I really ought to get around to, and that maybe you should too.

1. Finally learn how to read the symbols used in the pronunciation key in the dictionary.
2. Learn how to whistle loudly by placing two fingers in my mouth.
3. Proper dough kneading technique to make gnocchi that don’t fall apart.
4. Zen and the art of carburetor tuning.
5. That tall stack of books other people decided I should own and feel obligated to read.

Feel free to add your own list in the comments.

Homemade

I had my very first potluck dinner at my apartment tonight. It was a tight squeeze with my roommate and 4 other friends present, but we all had a great time. There was a yummy and diverse spread of food before us, including homemade roasted red pepper hummus, black bean and hominy soup, and apple blackberry crisp (which I made!).

Here is the apple blackberry crisp at a younger stage. The apples were cooked on the stove for 10 minutes before mixing with the berries, flour and sugar. I made a special trip to Whole Foods at Union Square for the fruit. Actually it was my first ever visit to the actual grocery part of Whole Foods and I was pleasantly surprised at the efficiency of the check-out lines. Much faster than Trader Joe’s down the street!

Here it is after it’s been baked and scooped onto a plate with Rice Dream vanilla ice cream. Delicious! I’m secretly happy we did not finish it all so I can feast again tomorrow.

This is Katherine’s lovely black bean and hominy soup. Completely vegan, topped with fried homemade tortillas (yes, cooked in corn oil), and cilantro. She loves corn, and I do too.

I am hoping this potluck dinner thing turns into a tradition. Since we have vegetarians and vegans in the group it also becomes something of a challenge to find something everyone can enjoy. It helps to use foods that can be used interchangeably with multiple ingredients and dishes so it’s kind of like a big collaborative project.   If you have any ideas of recipes for me to try, feel free to leave a comment!

Well, ’till next time, when I go all document-y crazy again. It won’t be long, I assure you.

So, what do you do?

From Jesse Thorn, America’s Radio Sweetheart, comes an article about British comedy as phatic discourse (via maximumfun.org).

Phatic discourse is conversation that is, essentially, meaningless.  It is the things that people say when they have nothing to say.  It is a grab bag of stock phrases, the conversational equivalent of the photo that came in the photo frame when you bought it.  It is something to look at, but it holds no value or meaning.  To some it is the stuff of social lubrication, the things we say to get a conversation started or to those we do not yet know.  It is rote politeness, automatic pleasantness.  It is middle school aged boys quoting Monty Python incessantly.  It is men talking about the box score.

And it is one of my biggest turnoffs.

I sympathize with people’s need to find a comfortable way to confront new people and new situations, but I tire so quickly of answering phatic, rhetorical questions.  I am utterly disgusted by the cocktail party litany of “How are you”s and “What do you do”s.  I can say that my favorite people are those who open with something brash, something honest, or just something genuine.

How to do this though?  I tend to open by sharing something, either something about myself if appropriate, or something interesting I have recently read or seen.  By sharing something up front you help the other person avoid the need to ask a question.  And you get a chance to pick a topic more interesting than how you earn your money or how you know the host of the party.

Try it at your next social event.  A thought experiment.  See how many times you can avoid “How are you” and “What do you do”.  See if you can make the party and its conversation better by helping people to realize they have more in common than the phatic.  And try too to listen and show interest and even to care about the people you are meeting.  People have a way of becoming social furniture when the conversation centers around phatic topics.  Humanize the conversation and live in the world with the people around you.  It makes us all so much happier and so much less lonely.