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September 29, 2005

Freedom that dares not speak its name. Or something. Careful and considered writing at this point seems pretty useless in the face of "an uplifting story of decency triumphing over depravity". All that really is left to be said is that the mealy-mouthed fools who penned Pataki's statement had the good sense -- if it can be called that -- to not use the full name of the banned institution, which will be honored here, since clearly there is no place for it in a world of... well, I guess the city must wait for new instructions from Decency Central. Decency. Like ashes in the mouth, absent any sense humanity or rationality, we suffer this idiocy. Every new drop in the pool of evidence is greeted with the vicious denial that demands we ignore what is plain to see in the day and downright terrifying in the night. Strike up the violins.

UPDATE: Turns out Pataki wasn't so circumspect (full text, via The Real Estate), but the whole statement is such a pile of unmitigated dung that it's even worse that the avoidance presumed from the excerpt in the Times. I guess we can look forward to Debra Burlingame patrolling the "memorial quadrant" for years to come to insure 'decency.' She'd better, because I'll be there, to tell a story of cowardice and shame. What's next? A city ordinance restricting speech about anything that doesn't venerate the hallowedness of 9/11 victims and their clamoring for sanctification relations? Really. If we can't put a picture of MLK in a building, can I wear a tee shirt with him on it? Have any of these people heard of the First Fucking Amendment?

Found always via this Permanent Link.

September 23, 2005

You should have gone before you left home. The saga of public restrooms here in what we like to think of as the first world stumbled forward another halting step with the city finally -- a term deployed with much skepticism -- awarding a contract to subsidiary of a Spanish conglomerate that has managed to build seven toilets in Rio in three years. One of the qualifications must have been expertise with New York development and construction.

There don't seem to be any details about the important stuff: where the 20 will go. Will there be token placements in the outer boroughs, reducing the Manhattan total (of course we expect them all to be in Manhattan) to 16? Will hipsters be mad or glad at emplacements on Bedford or Clinton? Will the UES get all NIMBY, worried about undesirables?

Will Community Boards have a say, or veto, about the locations? This is a surefire recipe for disaster; why would a someone who has ready access to their own bathoom at home support a public restroom that will -- cue paranoid suburban protectionism here -- attract drug addicts, prostitutes, or worse, Sex and the City tour patrons? Will there be a facility for voting up locations? And is 20 all we get? If you are counting, that's one per every 150,000 people (daytime population). If so, you'd better get in line now. Should 20 minutes be allotted to each client, you won't get your turn for something like 5 years, give or take a few months.

And what will they look like? One of the upside qualities touted in the Times coverage is that diversity of the designs evidenced in the Rio contract. However, one of the stated goals of the "street furniture" contract (aside from driving the New York Press out of business, if you believe their paranoia, even though that seems to have happened no thanks to the city) was unification of designs, particularly newspaper boxes and newsstands.

Given the that Parks Departments has crossed over like every totalitarian landmarks group, mandating everything be enrobed in green-painted wrought iron filigree, it's unlikely we'll see anything as inspired as the ARO recruiting station in Times Square.

But as long as Starbucks grow like weeds around Manhattan, the whole restroom debate will be largely symbolic. One of the other major elements of this contract -- paper boxes and newsstands -- raise some sticky issues. The Press wrapped their concerns about circulation in a freedom of the press argument, but they have a point. As a matter of space (though not expense) the public sphere is a blank slate (well, as blank as any particular corner of daisy chained plastic distro boxes get). It's not clear how access will be handled going forward. Can papers buy exclusivity in certain locations? If it takes these folks three years to build an outhouse, what happens in areas where they haven't installed new boxes? And, like the restrooms, who will adjudicate quantity and location? It seems impossible that they have a strategy that will result in the same level of availability as currently (which, if you are a tree hugger, maybe isn't a bad thing).

Will similar issues arise at the newsstands? Though they typically don't have the broadest array of inventory, they are often very responsive to the vagaries of local population (the range of fashion publications to the found along Seventh Avenue in the 30's is pretty impressive). Assuming that any big company ethos brings big company blandness, will this be the advent of the Clear Channeling of newsstands? It seems highly unlikely that any contract will mandate what is sold where, so it the city basically packaging a monopoly on newspaper and magazine distribution? If so, a billion dollars over twenty years seems awfully small (even if it's compared to the forty three cents the city will make from the Atlantic Railyards deal).

Given all the daily slights and challenges perambulating the city present, is this really Job One? I didn't see anything in the various write ups to indicate that somehow matching newsstands will stem the plague of overflowing trashcans or change the impenetrable pickup schedule that seems to mandate that you can't walk a block at night (and hell, most days) without shuddering past a mountain of garbage sure to release a rodent in your path any second.

The newsstands don't really seem that broken. Sure, some of them could be cleaned up a bit, but perhaps some intermediary steps could be taken to test the resolution of that problem before we hand over control of a big chuck of our streetscape to a company that still has to complete a major contract?

Found always via this Permanent Link.

September 22, 2005

Bangladesh? The new axis of evil. Debra Burlingame sure knows how to make an analogy, doesn't she? In ceaseless effort to besmirch any public comment about the WTC that doesn't originate from spectacularly original mind, or Karl Rove's pocket, she popped of this one today:

Her criticisms began with the opening gallery. "So the very first experience that the visitors will get when they come from Cedar Rapids, Portland, Ore., and Tallahassee, Fla., was not how we experienced 9/11 but how the people, say, in Bangladesh experienced it?" she asked.

"Imagine erecting an edifice at the U.S.S. Arizona where before we hear their story, we get the world's view, maybe the Axis powers' view of World War II," she said. "I can't imagine how they're thinking."

Now I usually have to wait a long time before I can hit people over the head with my putative victimization (white, male, straight, etc. I'm of Italian descent, but I keep living in places lousy with Italians, so that usually gets me nothing), but finally, I get to trumpet my experience over hers. I am here to tell Debra Burlingame to back the fuck off, since I am a descendant of a victim of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Just like Hitchens' finding out he is Jewish, I did come late to the impact of this victim status. Certainly I knew my whole life that my great uncle's name was on the Arizona memorial, but I did not realize it enabled me to relentless belittle anyone who had political or social opinions that contradicted mine.

And using her fascinatingly tortured logic, her pronouncement today, which showed an amazing lack of consideration for the feelings of the Families of 12/7 (this is support group I started earlier this morning -- actually, you just witnessed its genesis; I'd invite you to join, but you need to produce a death certificate. Otherwise, find your own date-based tragedy) -- a fact I can't definitely ascertain, but it doesn't matter specifically what the other families think, as their experience is absolutely unique and others cannot pass reasonable judgment either way -- so her callous and ill-considered appropriation of our experience invalidates any and all her comments to date and for the indefinite future. In other words, since she lacks the personal experience of an historical event that lives in the memory of the entire country, there is no way for her to speak meaningfully about it, or anything else now, forever.

Which is useful, since the Freedom Center up and remembered that being about Freedom is about, well, speaking one's mind without fear of someone trying to supress your actions out of twisted ideological hatred and fear. Sure, it only took the one of the most important American historians quitting in disgust to get them to this point, but you have to break a few eggs, right?

The entire fiasco is beginning to feel like the freeway scene in Altman's Nashville, where most of the main characters in the film mill about randomly, willfully or incidentally ignoring others with whom they are later found to have intricate connections. By the end of the scene, the camera pulls back and amibent audio reduces everyone's individual conversation into an indecipherable mass, everyone stuck in place by an unseen logjam out of which no one can see the way. But as long as we have the spirited efforts of Burlingame, we at least have a sign post indicating who is either morally bankrupt (everyone else) or incorruptable (her, just her). We eagerly await her next dispatch.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

September 21, 2005

Crafty. Recently there was a small rash of discussion about ‘corporate’ graffiti, in response to a couple of projects. The most notable examples were a single Time Magazine billboard, and several iterations of the same ad for the launch the new Hummer. I never saw the Time billboard in person (I don’t even know if it is still up), but it was high on a building, and thus most of the commentary was indirect.

On at least two of the Hummer ads, including the one I saw personally at 2nd Street on Avenue A (on the side of the old children’s store – now becoming a Washington Mutual branch), the feeback was more immediate, in the form of defacement.

I understand this to be one of the most extreme forms of commentary, but cannot claim any greater knowledge of the idiolect of graf writing . The direct response was more about the subject matter (super-sized SUV) than the actual process (graf writers ‘sell-out’), though there was some indirect conversation about the latter as well. Call the defacement a clash of subcultures, since if there is a generalized urban culture identity, it isn’t so much about environmental sensitivity, at least when it comes to vehicle ownership.

The team who created the mural -– the TATS CRU –- have, after years of being one of the preeminent outlaw crews, actively pursued commissioned work (particularly advertising) for some time. The fact that they need to commidify their dissent in such a base way only really has to do with the fact that they don’t have a Yale School of Art pedigree that enables them to avoid the nastier realities of commerce. Or they haven’t talked up Jeffrey Deitch correct.

I don’t believe in the direct action school of resistance (burning Hummers, e.g.) nor do I support the ‘organized’ approach to murals. For after the Hummer mural on 2nd Street was painted over, a single line claim -- ‘Reserved for TATS CRU’ – replaced it. Excuse me? Reserved? What, there is now a protocol for illegal art? I-ron-ic (or is that Mor-on-ic).

There are other explanations: a service to aspiring taggers that any attempts would be obliterated, due to superior credentials and perhaps explicit permission from the building owners (though I can’t imagine WaMu is pleased with notion that their first foray into the EV would be pimping consumer goods -- or maybe it is one of those community sensitivity exercises). All it really did was tempt me to vandalize some private property for the first time in my life (well, that I can remember). But considering the effort they’ve made over time to transform some pretty bleak streetscapes, and, unlike the plague of Chico that covers the EV (that damn PJPII mural still creeps me out everytime I see it – which is, unfortunately, daily), they are good at what they do, so they get a pass on the occasion act of arrogance.

One would hope, however, that such cheek is then justified by the work. Such hopes are dashed the moment one pauses to consider that ‘interesting’ was not a quality to be seen in anything done once ‘viral’ became not a legitimate ad category, but even a concept.

The new ad was mildly insulting, only because the only culture precedent that came to mind was Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, which was a scathing attack on relationship between media/advertising and race. I won’t go into specifics, since I’d be perpetuating a viral campaign that still hasn’t turned up on the internet, but it seems to be a haircare ad.

But, again, advertising inadvertently aping satire without a shred of self-examination? Hardly new [in fact, the designers responsible for some of blatantly racist fake products in Bamboozled were hired in the traditional manner –- that is, they were contracted to develop product identities, the only qualification being they must be clearly racist, but found their program challenging, since they kept find more egregious examples in the real world during the course of filming]. Again, not worth writing home about, nor spending the odd thousand worlds railing against.

No, the signal failure of this exercise was revealed when I was walking by Soho Billiards, which has one of those annoying bathroom billboards mounted in their vestibule. In it was an exact small scale replica of the TATS CRU mural. In other words, the ‘mural’ was actually created by some agency flunkie and delivered to a team that was hired for no other reason than their ability to diligently transcribe what is a sad piece of ‘edgy’ advertising. Even though they are partially responsible for creating the visual language of one of the most pervasive trends in graphic design (or art, if you please) in the late 20th century, they weren’t deemed capable of interpreting some hack shampoo ad.

You know, there are people who build some pretty amazing things out of tongue depressors or toothpicks, but you don’t see OMA hiring them to make models (well, not yet). But somehow it was necessary to acquire an appliqué of ‘real’ when any hack illustrator who is good with an airbrush would do. It's not that any great claim of art is being made, but a small amount of buzz was manufactured when this first started happening, some of it under the rubric of make the advertising both sexy (ooh! former outlaws making ads!) and more palatable, since it would be filtered through the hands of those who are already part of the visual urban fabric. But this particular result is no more interesting than someone who makes a really big tinfoil ball.

Who to blame? Everyone, surely. The TATS site pretty aggressively courts this work, so I can’t imagine them keeping it real in any resolute way. Ad agencies? They are a tin-eared as, well, me, when it comes to what every might even mildly be called hip. The hair care people? Have you seen a Fructis ad? This is the Stanley Livingstone of hair care adverts. Even language such as ‘blame’ is a touch histrionic. Tagging is one of the more visceral rituals of cosmopolitan identity. The assertion of one's name, garish and forceful, is what we all seek. If you can’t get your name in lights on Broadway, you can always paint it on a nearby wall, provided you have the gumption and fearlessness required. And such brazen chutzpah is rewarded with... a tepid exercise in pitching mass-market product to the great American Median. TATS should do a "Devolution of Graf Man" self-portrait as their next mural. Or they could paint the controversy and attempt to explicate why an intelligent designer would have put these particular wheels in motion. Regardless, be prepared to discover everything you have be taught about shampoo is wrong.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

September 11, 2005

Today. Today is a distressing timely moment to pause breifly to reflect on both the principles and plans, as well as our actions, in response to tragedy. Though phrases like "things will never be the same" or "never forget", "always remember" or other similar sentiments will be liberally deployed as a visceral, emotional salve, the painful and ugly logistics and still remaining challegnges mandate a more precise accounting, to both hold accountable those who failed, and to help those still suffering. The early reports of poor communication and what seems like benign neglect is a horrifying failure on the part of the federal government. Years of highly constructed conservative attempts to fray the federal structure (the ideological impact of what such a stance does to our generally held notion of democracy I won’t go into) has laid the groundwork for much of the discussion stemming from the right about local responsibility, all of it geared towards shifting blame away, even though we have witnessed an unprecendented concentration of federal powers over the past four years, under the guide of terror preparedness.

Commentators on the left are grasping at the intertwined relationship between FEMA and Homeland Security -- rightly so, since the former was essentially gutted in the service of the latter, and both seem packed with dense, incompetent frat boys that are the hallmark of the Bush administration -- to argue that this cock-up exposes us to greater threats of terrorism, by demonstrating the inadequacies of the new mega-bureaucratic structures established by the Bush Administration.

Lacking a framework for everyday conversation about the significance of federalism, hanging on the narrow issue of terrorism ignores the fundanmental threat to our notion of democracy in the form of conservative efforts to destroy a centralized governmnent (and worse, one that doesn't have a shred of an idea for its replacement). It begins to look like tinfoil-hatted conspiracy to argue that the pig trough that DC has descended into as a result of the current administration has cravenly exploited the terror threat simply to further an extremist agenda of permanently debilitating the federal government, but at the same time, it's hard to find a more rational explanation. One reason it is hard to posit this argument is accepting as normal or real the mind-boggling principles that necessarily undergird this program.

Rather than try to overtly legislate their implicit goal, we instead are beseiged by inept government, in the form of the Department of Homeland Security. The long-term effects of this are clear: there will be no tax relief for the majority of workers (in sheer numbers), nor will there be any relent in the expenditures this monolith demands, even as the expenses are siphoned off to the rich and connected (Kellogg Brown & Root, having clearly demonstrated that they are willing to commit fraud that may have causal connection to the death of American soldiers, have once again received a no-bid contract, one powered with the suspension of federally-mandated minimums for worker wages but does not similarly cap what they can bill).

Perversely, here in New York, we are insulated from this to a degree. As we watch in crippling horror (eleven days after landfall of Katrina, the NOLA weblog is still posting notices daily regarding people still desperately stranded, including an entire community in Mississippi that has yet to receive any assistance whatsoever), the success of our local support services becomes more evident. Even as we commit the largest percentage of our income to tax payments to the federal government of any locality (never receiving a similar level of services), we rail most vehemently against its continued failures to help the neediest, here, and around the country. And as the events of the past two weeks make clear, on this very particular day, we -- meaning the New York City area -- are far better at managing catastrophe, better than other local governments, better than the federal government.

This is not simply braggadocio, though it is a intentional acknowledgement of what the rapid and well-planned response was able to do to repair our city, even as the current state of development of the site would seem to contradict this. It also underscores the hopeless state of just about everywhere else when presented with a similar challenge. It is impossible to draw direct corollaries between the two events, and, more importantly, the scale -- physically -- of Katrina’s devastation and our own cultural remoteness and foolish sense of imperviousness from what large scale ‘natural’ disasters can cause, means that a finely grained comparison is an unfair and misplaced endeavor.

But there are two crucial areas where parallels should be drawn, in hopes that the eventual recovery is markedly better than the initial response. One is the ability of local politicians and cultural figures to assert leadership and inspire confidence. Even allowing his myriad failings and flaws, former mayor Guiliani is the standard bearer for effective leadership in crisis. Likewise for former president Clinton, whom no one doubts could bring the necessary mixture of empathy and gravitas to the situation, since often the Commander in Chief serves best when his symbolic actions inspire more tangible and beneficial efforts of thousands of anonymous volunteers and workers.

The second is the role of public discourse in the both the current reportage and follow-up transparency. Bringing to bear the most sophisticated and best-funded local press in the country to the WTC redevelopment process has at best only attenuated the worst aspects of bureaucratic self-interest and short-sighted scheming. What potential fraud or worse might be perpetrated throughout the Gulf Coast during the recovery is doubly horrifying because of its base immorality.

What these two conditions will hopefully conspire to achieve is a sea change back to an accepted and celebrated notion of federalism that takes pride in its role as protector and unifier of this country and its citizenry. New York is often left to its own devices, for good and for bad. Our wealth affords us myriad privilege and protects us from what now seems distressingly routine to the less fortunate elsewhere. We can’t, and don’t, expect the same self-sufficiency of smaller cities and towns that face threats as dire, and occasionally, worse. We deserve and demand a response to Katrina that clearly establishes as a mandate our national duty to repair the lives of those left exposed as a result of years of lackadaisical disregard, and more recently and tragically, far more active neglect. Hopefully this process will leave us in a place where we can proclaim proudly that ‘never again’ will be our standard, but now is not the time for such empty proclamations. Now is the time for ‘Where can we help?’

Found always via this Permanent Link.

September 4, 2005

"What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What's the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?" There's not much to be said here. Fury obviates eloquence. We are watching a city, along with literally thousands of its most needy residents, die in slow motion. There is no mystery, no confusion. We know where they are, we know what they need, we know where the materials and services are that can alleviate their suffering. Being far from the actual events and feeling hampered by poor information, I may be wrong in speculating, but it seems that in spite of all of this knowledge, along with the most advanced shipping and logistics network in human history, those people will still die. I know, this very minute, how I could get a bottle of water delivered overnight to a person in London or Tokyo, but I do not know to whom I could speak, beg, or shout at to do the same for a person stranded on a roof in New Orleans. The shame this brings upon our country is incalculable.

There seems to be little we can do directly, but the best alternate now seems to be survivor assistance. Houston is likely to be the key relief location, and what we have seen to date is that the city or regional governments may fail to provide assitance to the levels needed. Key will be some local support organizations. Money, for those in our areas, would be best, since shipping and logistics would be ineffective relative to the resources they already have in place:

Second Harvest website
Houston Food Bank, for regional folks (they are rerouting monetary donations to Second Harvest, but will accept hard goods).

It is a miniscule gesture, but I am not posting about anything else until the situation -- I hesitate to say 'improves' since I honestly can't imagine when such a descriptor would be justified -- moves from being absolutely horrific. We live in a world of relative moral judgments recalculated every day, and this is a wall. So I'm stopping. I do not trust that the scale of the tragedy and response needed has been adequately determined, nor has an adequate response been formed. To this, I meekly submit that we not speak of anything else until it is apparent that something changes. If any of us who have even a nominal amount of relevance or impact in presenting information or opinion to the world stopped, and spoke only of our demand that more be done, or find some other means to intervene, it would then at least feel like my participation is scraping the bottom rungs of diginity. I have this place for these words, and they are angry and hopeless.

Found always via this Permanent Link.