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November 25, 2005

I buy black on the outside, because black is how I consume on the inside. If you missed it, likely because you were up at five in pursuit of Incredible Deals, are a complete moron who is in the thrall of the worst aspects of American culture, or simply doing your damndest to hasten the total system of capitalism, the last stage before the Worker’s Paradise (it’s the holiday, pick your favorite rationalization -- mine should be evident), today is Black Friday, called so because it is typically the day a retailer’s revenues for the year creep into profitable territory (how this is precisely calculated could certainly be a good topic for Cecil Adams), black being the color of profit for accountants. I am surprised that some dimwit hasn’t recommended moving Thanksgiving up a couple months to provide those holding Federated stock a little more breathing room.

Anyway, you should be out, frantically buying things today which should provide the scrim of identity through brand affiliation, or simply because you fear the total collapse of the economy.

You have to admit that’s a clever gambit -- after a century of wealth concentration though the exploitation of labor, we get told that consumer spending is the engine of the economy; even as your real wages decline yearly, you are being threatened with the imminent collapse unless you borrow money you don’t have to buy things you don’t need. If consumer spending is so essential to the economy, you think we’d get a tax break or something.

Or, if you are a fan of Adbusters -- San Francisco urban hippies who would rather lecture you, Democratic voting, blue state NPR supporter, for using the wrong type of hemp shopping bag than going out and meeting people for whom mindless accumulation of worthless goods does actually provide self-esteem, and figuring out some way of changing that (it’s not by making clever clever black sneakers, or vandalizing -- sorry, appropriating, billboards in that hotbed of conservative thinking, the Bay Area, that’s for sure) -- you know today is Buy Nothing Day. Just like the bad math that christened Black Friday, I can’t quite figure out how to calculate this one either. Should I feel bad because I ‘bought’ rent today, because I don’t live in a squat? Because I’m about to go buy a sandwich (from a local merchant, I promise!) instead of hanging out at the food co-op?

But their hearts are in the right place, even if the tactics are flawed. Everyone staying home today would only mean they go tomorrow, or the next day. Getting people to think in the logic of ‘consume less’ is likewise a futile exercise, and it smacks of middle class white liberal arts students who aren’t cognizant of the fact that most Americans are acutely aware of how little they consume -- all things being relative. An Xbox instead of dental care is distraction (at a discount; the next step down the ladder is simply MD 20/20). It’s unlikely that someone who suffered through an under-funded public education is going to sit around reciting Auden on Friday evenings (and, besides, have you played Call of Duty 2?).

One could take the high (optimistic) road and argue the steady creep of free market democracy will, in some generations, provide greater freedom and comfort to larger swaths of the world’s population than any other social order, or take the low (pessimistic) and argue that it leads to an historically unprecedented middle class, the nihilism and selfishness of which we are entirely ill-equipped to modify, even as the advertising of those excesses dangerously alienates larger and larger numbers of people who have better access to more deadly weapons and concepts with each passing year. We can imagine an idyllic New Urbanist dream, but the truth of SUV’s and gated suburban communities knitted together by the underclass service sector is, and has been, the American Dream for some time. Like or not, conspicuous consumption is our mantra and nadir all at once, and unwinding this helix will also destabilize our teetering economy, or so warns the Fed.

In a town that is the standard bearer for much of this, today must be our most hallowed day (I’ve got a private sale invite for later -- whoo hoo!). And our most sacred space should be marked by what? You betcha: a mall. Last week, the Port Authority decreed for once and for all that it remains unbowed by fundamentalist theocracies, demonstrating the best advertisement for freedom is benumbing bureaucracy, and introduced the Freedom Mall. I’m sure that name is taken by a more martial edifice elsewhere, and if I were feeling more clever, I’d come up with a more scathing moniker, but really, if you aren’t sickened by the renderings accompanying the article, my attempts at pithiness won’t dent your hide.

Likewise, there’s a more trenchant formal critique to be found in the bland deployment of spec office over retail, cobbled together by a ‘galleria’, but that would be admitting there was something there worth discussing. Take a look at that rendering: the scabrous security cladding of the Freedom Tower extends well beyond the roof line of the mall, and will, in and of itself, be larger than most downtown buildings. The spiky PATH station (about to be saddled with three levels of retail) hides behind a corner. Remembrance by committee and blender: pour in a pile of bad ideas and press “liquefy”. And this is before we’ve received the early renderings of the inevitable squiggle and ripple from Mr. Ready for His Close Up Ghery. Hopefully someone will make tee shirts saying “My Loved One Died for Freedom, and all We Got was this Lousy Mall.” Or, as a very incisive friend has remarked, “Sacred Footprints” would make an ideal name for a shoe store.

Who is doing this mall, by the way? Westfield Properties, the previous leaseholder, was bought out for a pretty penny (after making not so quiet noises that they, by contract, had a right to demand replacement space regardless of whatever the ‘Master Plan’ dictated -- that was back in the quaint days when fully rational people were saying perhaps shopping would not be the appropriate act for the memorial grounds).I'‘m sure the disposition of this detail will bring a fresh round of craven back room dealing, fronted by mealy-mouthed egoists (that would be, um, Pataki) or humbled but striving opportunists (Doctoroff). But why waste the anger late on this most holy of American days? Next week will inevitably bring an unforeseen turn of the screw.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

November 15, 2005

Meta, Meta, Meta, Meta. There is a certain type of review one finds at Pitchfork [Ed: a website that reviews a particular kind of music that envisions itself as somehow distinct from the tradition of pretentious rock critic-dom all the while absolutely upholding it]: it signals exhaustion on the part of reviewer, or aspirations for the postmodern prose stylings initially endured, and later, earnestly pursued, at an appropriately alternative liberal arts college that wishes it were Bennington. It becomes a review about a review, and then possibly even a discourse on that type of review, all of which is geared towards highlighting the cleverness of the reviewer, at the expense of those who have, you know, made a record. It is often used for negative reviews, to make clear that actually making and releasing a bad album is not intrinsically superior to the 45 minutes one spends crafting such a witty dismissal (and, to be sure, there are times this is true, given the highly indulgent nature of indie music). All of these strategies find a comfortable home with bloggers. Though we have our own rote styles, there is a plenty of obvious overlap. Sometimes it even makes sense.

The most acutely meta building in town is one that may have launched a blog empire, single-handedly transformed a neighborhood, provided years of fodder for stodgy traditionalists (who, um, look just like 70’s punks), and it still hasn’t even opened. I think. That particular point is so meta that no one even cares if it is ‘officially’ open. We could even get all October on it and interrogate the relationship of open and closed in post-critical age where valuation and signification hinge on markers so slippery that the oscillation between privileged and unprivileged poles (hip/unhip) is so indeterminate that it becomes an active strategy to situate oneself in the nether region between, a status that actively frustrates the maniacal categorization that any cultural landmark is subject to by equivocal and capricious taste-makers (boy do I feel young again).

But that is part of the point, isn’t it? Schizophrenic design, schizophrenic identity, a scrim of jet setting and aristocracy that is a sham, instead a highly leveraged existence siphoned off from a featureless conglomerate, mortgaged to pay for expensive drinks in a dank and akimbo lounge where you would run into the ironic chandeliers if there weren’t tables under them.

I haven’t been in the rooms, and my visit preceded the new restaurant, but each new accoutrement that gets stapled to the inside or out attenuates the sense that this project was designed by rooms full of third-tier GSD students toiling in seclusion from each other in carefully decorated offices that certainly couldn’t have been funded by fees. Nothing makes sense, even if that was the point.

I see it from most sides most days, and it is the unchallenged landmark of the LES (until Big Blue presents itself). Thus, the effort to make a intentionally ‘difficult' form in a town where designing all four sides of a structure almost never happens starts out ballsy and ends up bathetic. Then again, I might be ‘misreading’ the intention, and instead relying only on my direct powers of observation, poorly credentialed and distinctly outside the orbits of fetishization that either venerate the effort in full celebration of its bankrupt enterprise, or the sleek, ironic disaffection that permeates those who find themselves just far enough above that they can dip their toes in the pool and not feel unduly soiled.

The best side is the east, a blank wall of metal panels, not a symbolic rejection of the authenticity it appropriated in favor of opening its arms and views to the west, commodified urban future of SoHo and TriBeCa creeping inevitably this way. No, it’s probably only the exigencies of circulation and adjacent air rights. But it is the nicest treatment this side of the short ends of the Secretariat Building.

But what does this building look like? Where is it? If you can’t tell already, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter. A long time ago, someone thought not that it would be a good idea, but only inevitable that a slick, soulless magazine that hoisted high the colors or design as somehow a bulwark against a charge of mindless consumerism (or maybe not, maybe they revel in their unironic insipidity) would build a hotel. Then they went broke, or something. In steps a hotelier, an appellation one drapes about themselves to indicate that they don’t rent rooms by the hour, or if they do, you can’t afford them. Various bad ideas, found in the selfsame pages of said magazine, are pilfered and pasted together: blobs, angles, dangerously sexualized 'sculpture', vaguely baroque repeat patterns, a dash of Stephen King redrum, and, when you run out of ideas that would do any issue of Tokion proud, slather it over with rectilinear patterns of glass. And really tiny balconies overlooking parking lots. But if none of that works, you take the whole thing, squeeze it through a pasta maker and plant it in Astor Place.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

November 14, 2005

Hey, we thought their court system was a pretty good idea too. Though it turns out it wasn’t going to be a cornerstone of his second administration (or he is the craftiest bureaucrat ever), it is still notable that congestion pricing made the headlines only a day after Bloomberg’s administration. It seems obvious that our most famous subway commuter would think it rational for private vehicles pay closer to their true cost of sharing the roadways. Given what a hard sell it was in London, it nonetheless deserves fuller consideration here. Though congestion has always been a cultural marker of living in Manhattan, the preponderance of single passenger cars (average number of daily occupants in river crossings: 1.35) are only a sliver of that history, so their banishment would be more a return to a historical norm than an aberrance.

Any tracking mechanism inflames our libertarian notions of freedom of moment, though the threat of increased observation or surveillance is no longer the surefire way to garner knee-jerk opposition it once was. But even if you are the sort for whom such intrusion is a make or break characteristic, imagine the issue in economic terms: how much is the privilege of a particular form a privacy worth? The city streets are a resource of absolute scarcity (we can’t make any more, even if density increases). There are anonymous alternatives (even though MetroCards do feature user tracking, one can design an anonymous routine pretty easily -- but cards more often, and with cash), but the costs of maintaining privacy are massive: time lost to congestion, and increased wear and tear on streets. Since there is no other way to regulate this (exclusive of tolls at all the river crossings), we can establish a saturation point at which this burden is no longer viable, or beneficial to the majority (who are clearly transit customers).

As people bend their intellects to rationalize opposing this eminently sensible plan, you run into a couple poorly considered counter arguments:

1. The strain on the transit system will be onerous. Currently, about seven million fares are collected daily by the MTA. Around two million river crossings are recorded each day. The likely absolute impact of any congestion pricing (even if it were amazingly effective) would be at most a 5-7% increase in MTA ridership.

2. Congestion pricing is regressive. Driving into Manhattan for the day already costs in the neighborhood of $35 (tolls and parking), excluding ownership costs. That’s $8,750 yearly for a full-time worker. There may be people living on a razor-thin margin regarding the cost of their commute, we can't get too exercised about people making highly irrational economic decisions for a purported convenience.

3. Taxes, Big Government, Blah, Blah, Blah. This is not a surreptitious tax increase. It’s unlikely the city would realize substantial increases in revenue from the program. As a matter of straight revenue, the city could do far better by getting the state to reinstitute the misnamed Commuter Tax. What the city would get would be an amazing quality of life improvement: reduced driving time for ‘legitimate’ vehicles, improved response time for emergency dispatch, less noise, less pollution, and a net savings in economic efficiency upwards of 15-20 times the potential revenue.

One unstated, but possible, benefit will be gathering better data on car ownership in the congestion zone, and an incremental increase in tax revenue. Many residents buy and register cars out of state (to avoid sales tax), or fail to transfer registration when moving here. Since the only way to receive an exemption from the fees will be some sort of registration program, the city will get a far clearer picture of how many vehicles are stored in the city, and can further develop a traffic management policy (perhaps creating additional disincentives to car ownership).

Think of it visually. There are about 12,000 taxi medallions issued in the city. Figure 90% of those are on the street at a given time, and three-quarter of them are in Manhattan. That means that even when it seems like every other vehicle in midtown is a cab, it means there perhaps only eight thousand cabs on the street. Morning traffic (7-10AM) comprises 180,000 crossings, the majority single occupancy automobiles. If congestion pricing reduces this number by 20%, it will mean four times the number of cabs on the street at a given moment less of private autos. While adding 1% to the ridership of the subway.

The trends are staggering: during the years of greatest increase in river crossings (1950-1960) subway ridership decreased 20% (only recently returning to the levels of the 1940’s). Though the PANYNJ (Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and the Geo Washington Bridge) crossings have seen consistently the largest increases, a largish minority of destinations are other than Manhattan, and there are still a massive number of East River inbound commutes (many of which may be intracity).

It’s the sort of policy discussion that is strange to get into, because there is no good, and even very few bad, counter-arguments. Development is always impossible to gauge as a next tax benefit, and gentrification is haphazard and difficult to forecast. Even the smoking ban threatened cherished notions of our identity. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough, but I can’t find a reason to not support this. Anyone vehemently opposed will be, by definition, a non-resident, slipping out of the city at the end of the day, likely blaring a horn and driving dangerously on their way to some distant suburb, siphoning off tax dollars and giving nothing back to the life of the city. Well, now they can, seven dollars at a time.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

November 10, 2005

My job is done. Well, obviated. If you find this blog too poorly edited and not illustrated enough, check out this. If you are reading this right now dance on over to WNYC and listen to the Brian Lehrer show and listen to the interview with the author Kate Ascher (also VP of the NYC Economic Development Corporation). Some sample pages of the book are on his show blog. I'm to lazy to have a wish list, so if anyone wants to send me a copy of this, I'd be much obliged. If your name is Penguin, I might even pimp the book some more.

UPDATE: Oh, and to all you Democratic apologists, Bloomberg announced the day after his election, that he is interested in reasearching the possibility of congestion pricing in Midtown. That's about as progressive as you can get (considering the other major city mayor who is an advocate is a declared Socialist). And Kate's not so sharp on the Q&A, so here's some detail. The orange lights that are mounted on standards have been variously attributed to three things: one, indicating proximity of fire house, the proximity of a pharmacy (that's what FYI says), and the highly likely answer, they indicate a fire call box is below (before the advent of telephones, call boxes were necessary to make fire calls; though the city decomissioned most of them i the 90's, the orange lights are vestigial remnants). And the drone in Times' Square? Art. I visited it when it was renovated, but I don't know if it is functioning today.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

November 7, 2005

Vote or Walk. It seemed to me that you could barely tell there was an election going on. Turns out most people think the Bloomberg campaign’s ubiquity has crossed from being vaguely unseemly to gratuitous in its disproportionate advantage. I’m not one of those people, but only because I don’t know what they are talking about. Likely the evidence is broadcast television, but I’m one of those superior liberal types that doesn’t have one, so until the news articles started appearing about the discrepancy, I was under the impression that no one even noticed there was an election upcoming.

With some reports indicating a 30 percent gap between the candidates, it could be argued that there isn’t. Since this is concise operation, there is little need for the formalities of an endorsement: I’m voting for Bloomberg, on the Independence line (in and of itself a challenging decision, but recent efforts at the state level to remove the ‘colorful’ Fulani faction should attenuate these concerns somewhat).

It’s hard to draw apples-to-apples comparisons between the candidates. Borough President is a manifestly different role in the city from other positions of power (Council Speaker, Mayor, etc.). Ferrer, to his credit, toes an impressive line when it comes to ‘traditional’ liberal causes. His speech on housing is an impressive outline of issues facing the city, and it is filled with commitments to respond. But his criticisms of Bloomberg are a little over-drawn (the Mayor committed to 65,000 new units in five years; 40% of the way, he has delivered only 20% of the units -- a gap possibly a result of the ramp-up to getting projects on line, and resulting in the bulk coming in later years), and he isn’t actually promising much more (his 175,000 number is drawn from both new projects and protecting existing programs -- which Bloomberg is committed to as well).

But it’s pretty easy to look good on housing; the situation is so abysmal, you can manufacture talking points of the air, and they all look good. So what are some of the other issues that this site focuses on where one might find demonstrable differences between the two?

There has been plenty of discussion and criticism of the Mayor regarding large-scale development in the city. There is little to be found of Bloomberg’s excellence in delegation and bureaucratic wrangling when it comes to city planning, the appointment of Amanda Burden notwithstanding. The Hudson Yards and Atlantic Yards proposals, while nominally the work of the MTA, are clearly identified with the Mayor, and have next to no vision beyond bland, large-scale developer-friendly lots and prototypes. A likely defensive need to pander made Bloomberg suddenly reverse his position on the Cross-Harbor Tunnel project. The brightest spot of late, coming out in favor removing Silverstein from the WTC rebuilding process, backfired because it was politically naïve (the centerpiece of his alternative -- housing -- is next to impossible under current conditions).

So are we to conclude that Bloomberg can only hit sour notes when he reaches for the crescendo? Maybe, maybe not. The smoking ban is one of the most dramatic public life policy decisions to happen in a generation. Even though he hasn’t done anything particularly positive for nightlife culture, there is a palpable détente. And Bloomberg is an ardent supporter of the arts. While none of these positions are particularly progressive, they are also a welcome revision from the previous administration.

Bloomberg the bureaucrat would tell you we aren’t out of the woods yet. We are still decades from resolving long-term pension obligations (and that doesn’t mean jettisoning our duties to public employees, but instead finding ways to make the system sustainable, likely through defined contribution plans, not defined benefits, which will have everyone working in this town in ten years wanting to scrap the whole system), burdened by massive mandates for health-care, and have an increasingly monolithic economic base. None of these make for exciting policy speeches, and the attention they require leave you open to attacks of being unsympathetic to the difficulties of the working class or worse.

I can’t provide any masterstroke of logic. But in a town where every public position is for the taking by Democrats, that they haven’t fielded an inspiring candidate is no different than the far-left argument against Al Gore (that if you couldn’t handily find a way to beat a favored son of Texas who managed to lose money in the oil business, you deserve whatever you get). Perhaps that sense of entitlement is what led us to where we are today: making pragmatic decisions that rankle the sense that we shouldn’t suffer excuses or balkanized petty chiefs.

But whatever you do, make sure to vote, and make sure to support the MTA. The MTA is a stupendously mismanaged entity much of the time, but withholding funding won’t resolve that problem. Reserve that anger for the next governor’s election. Vote Yes on 2. Yes on 2. Yes on 2. Second Avenue Subway=2 (more or less, but think "Two for Two"). Yes. Do it.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

November 4, 2005

The Fish Market is Dead, Long Live the Fish Market. So the fish market is moving. Maybe. There has been some talk, but nothing specific has happened this week, only stray notices here and there, people dusting off oft-used paeans to the dwindling manufacturing base, finding the most colorful anecdote they can, and you can practically hear the syrupy violin music accompanied by the long dissolve.

The reason it occurred to me was a recent afternoon reading Phillip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (a good book, though such an arbitrary structure means the concept gets thin in places -- a danger this site is acute aware of -- and the word peripatetic is a little overused), which has a chapter on, yes, the Fulton Fish Market (replete with the ubiquitous Dave Pasternak, proprietor of Esca, and go-to figure when one wants a good pull quote on crudo). It’s as a good as any other, though somehow he missed the cigarette woman. Written four years ago, it takes a decidedly skeptic position on the likelihood of the relocation, which has been discussed, planned for, and even, at times, seemingly underway for most of the last century.

No longer dependent on the river as a source of inventory, the market succeeds for the same reasons any established business does: traditional, efficacy, and a presumption of superior quality, prices, and not wee bit of color. Oh, yes, and the mob. That always minimizes competition. The culture of these places gets confused in the external reading: middle class appropriated nostalgia and envy reduces the image we understand to cutouts and stereotypes. With every bland desk job in danger of shipment off to far away lands where they have better grammar and lower wages, the middle-managers of industry and media flatten every backbreaking schlub into an old salt with a clever nickname, and then attempt to jettison their workplace.

What occurred to me in reading the article was: I don’t understand why it has to move. Isn’t it the perfect definition of mixed use? Hardly anyone is ever around to actually see it, it provides jobs, a reasonable service (being proximate to most of their important customers), and is centrally located (allowing only for its unique hours of operation). Most importantly, it makes Manhattan look like, well, Manhattan. The only shred of authenticity in the abysmal failure that is the South Street Seaport, what kind of renaissance are we to expect once it’s gone? An additional outpost for Lids? There are the standard complaints: noise, mob influence, but mostly the smell. Ooh, the smell of fish. Strange thing, that, right next to the ocean. Yes, it can be gamey in places, but I regularly walk and jog that route, and once the market goes, they aren’t going to remove the pier currently operated by the sanitation department, and I’ve gone by trash compactors at the housing complexes that line South Street and there’s no lack of competition there for the aromatic. And I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but the smell of offal (and I’m not talking C-List models and IB-guys) hasn’t tempered the wild success of the other major food market/entertainment destination in the city.

You can’t manufacture scenes, especially in New York. Times’ Square worked because it was a destination that simply had all the culture scrubbed away. The South Street Seaport was never a logical tourist locale, and whatever Rouse thinks they are good at, they aren’t good at it here. If it weren’t for the fish market, most of us would probably forget that it is even there.

I’ve never been to the fish market. I probably never will, even if it doesn’t move next week. But that’s because I wouldn’t do much besides gawk and hope to see some bit of local color myself. I don’t need that any more than those who actually do work there. Because it’s not a Disney ride, but people trying to hold down a job, pay the mortgage, and not get a crippling disability in the course of carrying around frozen hunks of fish. But it is more of what we think of our town than any sanitized corporate sports bar experience, and I don’t understand the urgency to blot it out.

Found always via this Permanent Link.