west north

Recent quotables. No common theme.

Bill McKibbenin Yes! Magazine:

The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

From the Baffler, “The flight of the creative class: a bohemian rhapsody” (satire), Paul Maliszewski and Thomas Frank:

“Creative people do have certain needs, however, They require hip entertainment, organic street-level culture, and artistic environments—from restaurants serving mind-boggling fusions of world cuisines, like Thai and Tex-Mex or Indian and Australian, to experimental theaters, avant-garde galleries, and authentic coffee shops with mismatched cups and saucers and deteriorating couches. Creative people crave lively street scenes and late-night music venues serving up pricey energy drinks in test tubes. In short, creative people insist they lead the sort of lives that feed their creativity, inspiring them.”

Thomas Geoghegan, “The Law in Shambles” (Prickly Paradigm, 2005), excerpted in same Baffler:

“In a plutocracy, we don’t trust the government. Why should we? It does nothing for us, it is underfunded, and it’s unreliable. This attitude, in turn, makes the problem worse. The more arbitrary and unfair we think things are, the more we drop out. We don’t simply stop voting. We stop reading the paper. Stop following it at all…

“Remember the teaching of the great law professor Clyde Summers: ‘It costs a lot of money for people to have “rights.”‘ [...]

“Where I live, in Chicago, I’m in a ring of nuclear power plants. I’d be in terrible danger if we ever successfully muzzled the trial lawyers. It’s only the tort system that saves us from another Three Mile Island. Yes, I agree, it might be nice if we had more nuclear plants. We could cut down on Mideast oil. We could slow down global warming. And if I lived in France, with all its nuclear energy, I might think it was a good thing. So why do I oppose it here?

“Because France has a real administrative state, a real civil service, and the best and brightest do the regulating. In America, we can’t even keep the trains on the tracks. And so, sure, as a citizen, Id like to curb the trial lawyers.

“But I also want to live.”

Some bits from the January 2007 SMARTRAQ report, about the market demand for sprawl vs. walkable neighborhoods, for my future reference:

page 9. Residents of the least walkable neighborhoods generated 20% more CO2 from travel then residents of the most walkable neighborhoods, about 2 kg more CO2 per person per weekday.

Residents of the most walkable areas are 2.4X more likely to get the level of daily activity necessary to maintain health (30 minutes): 37% vs. 18% in the least walkable neighborhoods.

page 10. About a third of metro Atlantans living in conventional suburban development would have preferred a more walkable environment, but apparently traded it off for other reasons such as affordability, school quality, or perception of crime in addition to lack of supply. It is likely that this mismatch between community preference and choice is due to an undersupply of walkable environments.

page 32. 55% of survey respondents preferred a shorter commute, even if residential densities were higher and lot sizes smaller. 33% of respondents preferred such an option, but did not currently live in this type of neighborhood.

56% of respondents would prefer a neighborhood where they had easy travel choices, even if it meant a smaller house, over a house in a neighborhood where they had to drive for everything. 37% would prefer such an area, but did not currently.

From Michael Tomasky’s review in The New Republic of Jonah Goldberg’s latest waste of a tree carcass:

Here is where Liberal Fascism gets simply ridiculous. For Goldberg, the fact that Progressivism and totalitarianism shared certain traits–a belief in the possibility of collective action through the state, basically–tells him all he needs to know about both creeds. Ipso facto, any totalitarian impulse must therefore have leftish origins. Never mind that there actually was a totalitarianism for which the left was responsible–the one called communism… [O]nce you start implementing public pension systems, well, how far away can the execution of political opponents really be? Government, planning, centralized administration, social engineering, fascism, totalitarianism: for Goldberg they are all finally the same. Why isn’t he an anarchist? And when you get to this point, what isn’t fascist?

So, for a leading scribe of today’s neo-nihilist (dare I say “libertarian”?) Right, the mere acknowledgment that there is such a thing as “the public” (much less “public interest”) amounts to totalitarianism, a term he thinks equivalent to Fascism. Forget “smash the state,” today’s right really does agree with Maggie Thatcher: “there is no such thing” as society, except perhaps when it comes time when “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Now, that sort of talk (from one of Goldberg’s former esteemed colleagues), through is use of that most totalitarian of pronouns (beginning with W) pronoun, seems to suggest belief in some kind of common project. Hmm.

[I'll be traveling for the latter half of December, perhaps without benefit of computer or phone! The horrors!]

A few assorted things from the past few weeks of being away:

* “If I lived 17.5 miles from work, I wouldn’t bike to work, either — I’d move. Remember, location and locomotion are two halves of an equation where neither is constant.” [posted at metrorider]

Todd Litman calculates that every nonmotorized (active) trip displaces about seven vehicle miles traveled — not because active trips are seven miles long, but because they’re associated with smarter patterns of development.

“Not every walking or cycling trip causes seven miles of reduced driving. The lower vehicle mileage in cities with relatively high nonmotorized mode split reflects various land use and transport system factors, such as density, mix, street design, parking supply, and pricing which affect the relative attractiveness of motorized and nonmotorized travel. But programs that increase nonmotorized travel tend to create such communities, which is to say that smart growth supports nonmotorized travel and nonmotorized travel supports smart growth.”

* The Pacific Northwest spends more on oil and gas — 100% of which is imported — than on public K-12 education in 2006 or hospital care, and more than 3.5 times total spending on prescription drugs. [Sightline Institute] All that goes “up in smoke,” as they say. Interestingly, Idaho is separated on that counter — an interesting point of comparison, since as many people live within 10 miles of my house than in all of Idaho.

* An interesting “List of Privilege Lists” — ways of “unpacking the invisible knapsack” that accompany those of us with unspoken social privileges, whether racial, sexual, class, religious, gendered, or ability.

* Jay Mouawad in the Times notices that the oil producers fear the geo-green agenda:

“What we are worried about is for industrialized countries to use climate policy as a pretext to discriminate against oil,” [said Mohammad al-Sabban, a senior Saudi government adviser on climate change].

Over in the UK, $100/bbl oil has led gasoline across the magic 1.00 line: one pound per litre. That translates to about $9.50 a gallon, so really, quit whining about gas prices in America already.

* While in Toronto, I picked up a brochure distributed by Alphabet City — not the Chicago Humanities Festival, not an academic symposium, but rather something in between — outlining a program of events around local food in the Toronto area. (Ongoing online discussion hosted by the Walrus.) It opened up first to a manifesto (er, open letter) that posits food distribution as another problem of internalized profits and socialized costs, principally because “healthier, tastier” food is not necessarily more profitable. Indeed, it’s often less so. As such, it calls for market intervention and political action:

Ontario’s working landscapes, farms, rural communities, and cities are linked in a web of complex exchanges. But our food policies to date have usually ignored that web, dividing rather than connecting. If we are going to build a healthy and sustainable village, we have to make the connections… [W]e believe that food is connected to every major problem being raised in the current provincial election campaign—rising medical costs, poverty and hunger, declining farm incomes, the paving-over of farmland, wildlife protection, urban sprawl, youth unemployment, and communities at risk.

These problems will only be solved when we connect the dots.

Local farmers markets, community and school gardens, food co-ops, urban gardens, food access centres—all of these emerging possibilities support healthier, tastier food for all villagers. As this happens, everyone benefits and communities become stronger and more inclusive.

young and restless Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The first set of charts, graphs, and illustrations has come back from the planners examining Wicker Park & Bucktown on behalf of we, the people of WP-B (or at least our special service area). The most astonishing finding, in my view, is here: our neighborhood’s people are defined by a stunning — indeed, almost statistically improbable — self-segregation of young people.

Nearly 52% of the population is between 20-39, compared to just 29% nationally. 45.4% even fall within that most marketer-coveted of all age groups, the 18-35s. Maybe we could make a lot of money selling sidewalk billboards.

Perhaps even more quizzically, young men significantly outnumber young women in most age brackets: 9.4% (nearly one in ten!) neighborhood residents are (like me) men in their late 20s, nearly three times the share in the American populace. It’s not even an appreciably gay neighborhood, either.

Almost all other age groups are underrepresented (relative to their national shares) in the neighborhood by about 30-50% — except for preschool aged children. Sure enough, the kids leave at school age — although not nearly to the “total” extent that is sometimes claimed by alarmists. Why, there are about as many grade-schoolers living here as 60-somethings.

(Produced by Interface Studio for Wicker Park Bucktown Special Service Area #33)

- Leon Wieseltier at TNR offers today’s neologism: pluto-porn. No, not a Disney ripoff, but obsequious coverage of the fantastically wealthy.

- Here’s a new approach to TDM: free beer, a free bicycle, and public adulation, just for handing over your car keys. Too bad this touring festival’s only out West this year. [New Belgium Brewing - Follow Your Folly]

- Oh, a man can dream. Paul Nussbaum’s report on Pennsylvania’s transit bailout, from the 19 July Inky:

Promising an end to the annual brinkmanship over SEPTA funding, Gov. Rendell yesterday signed a landmark transportation law to provide an average of almost $1 billion more a year for transit and highways over the next 10 years.

Surrounded by smiling legislators who a week earlier were at each others’ throats, Rendell signed the transportation bill in the warm confines of 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby as evening commuters rushed past…

The law will provide $300 million in new funding for mass transit and $450 million in new money for highways and bridges this fiscal year, with the total rising to $1.07 billion by 2016.

The money will come from future toll increases on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, anticipated new tolls on Interstate 80, and 4.4 percent of the revenue from the state sales tax…

State Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.), the House Appropriations Committee chairman who vowed to block the state budget until mass transit was provided for, said yesterday: “I don’t know why this had to be so hard.”

“I’ve been fighting for this for decades,” said Evans, who said the measure would provide many new jobs, both directly and indirectly.

Not sure if SEPTA’s elimination of transfers (now in litigation) is an attempt to sell more passes or what.

- Carbon trading in Illinois could raise $2B a year for state government. [Redefining Progress: Climate Action Plan for Illinois]

- Flooded subways and tornadoes shut down NYC: a taste of headlines to come? [Environmental Defense] Not quite as dire as the forecast for the West, though: less snow, less water, more flooding, more drought and fires: boats stranded at dry marinas, ski towns engulfed by flame, cracked and dusty lettuce fields, cities browned out during heat waves. [Clear the Air] Fake headlines from the future describing localized effects of global warming could be a useful way to teach people about the issue — even here in the country’s sea-proof yet water-rich inland metropolis. [Prairie Home Companion]

- Last week’s Crain’s included an interesting package on four retail-starved new neighborhoods downtown: West Loop, South Loop, Streeterville, and (interestingly) University Village. [ChicagoBusiness]

- Gregg Easterbrook in an LA Times op-ed about his horsepower argument:

Please don’t counter that “no one can tell me what I can drive.” The Constitution says you’ve got a right to own a gun and to read a newspaper. Firearms and [speech] are the only categories of possessions given protected status by the Constitution; courts consistently rule that vehicles on public roads can be regulated for public purposes such as safety.

Scott McLeemee at Crooked Timber takes note of a Wonkette post about Late Night Shots, a Georgetown “social” club apparently similar in intent to our own much-lamented Lincoln Park Trixie Society. The backlash within LNS against an unflattering article in a local alt-weekly is revealing:

[W]hat we have here is the opposite of the “theft of enjoyment”. It is the fear, rather, that one’s claim to have access to superior power and pleasure won’t be acknowledged at all.

The point of a club like Late Night Shots is, in large part, to keep other people out of it. That’s obvious. But those other people have to (be imagined to) want in.

The greatest terror is not that they will try to overthrow you—or even that they might somehow break through the barriers of exclusivity. It’s that the outsider might laugh at the exclusivity.

Even those in the ruling class suffer from class anxiety, as it were; the status-game lead that they’ve worked so hard to achieve has been exposed as a sham. So, of course, they reiterate their successes and ridicule the status games that others (namely, alt-weekly writers/readers, aka “hipsters”) play. The hipster vs. yuppie cycle of sniping perpetuates itself again.

A recent Washington Monthly featured a piece by Zachary Roth on how U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan — a Democrat from the moribund parts of northeast Ohio surrounding Akron and Youngstown, and elected to Congress at the tender age of 28 — is attempting to forge a new politics that will speak to the interests of Gen X-ers and Millennials.

Ryan’s one of the “fighting Dems,” another former football star with fiery anti-Bush rhetoric, is reaching for a pro-trade message that acknowledges the fact of globalization, countering it with a renewed focus on education — and selling the message with attention-grabbing political theater.

“In our part of the country, we have a very strong cultural tie to steel,” Ryan told me later. “And whether we like it or not, the world has changed.” The speech, he said, “was a challenge to change your way of thinking.”

_Harper’s_ this month has this excerpt from a Cambridge alumni bulletin:

bq. Simon made the most of the sexual opportunities Cambridge had to offer, and although his preference was for boys and young men, to his dismay he learned that Susan Kilner, a fellow undergraduate, was expecting his child. He agreed to marry her to placate her family, on the understanding that he qould never have to live with her. Susan accepted this; she was, in his word, “a brick.”

David Brooks’ pop-sociologist attempts to tie yuppie consumption patterns (and the mere idea of the status game) directly to political leanings mean little in the USA, where most of our corporate class keeps a studied public distance from politics. (In private, of course, they shower Republicans with the proceeds from their tax cuts.) Yet Tobias Jones reports in “The New Republic”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060508&s=jones050806 that Italy’s limousine liberal set really can live it up in chic leftist style:

bq. Wearing Tod’s shoes (made by Diego Della Valle, a fierce critic of Berlusconi) suggests you lean left; so does facial hair (Berlusconi famously demanded that his parliamentarians shave off beards) and drinking Illy coffee (coffee magnate Riccardo Illy is the left-wing president of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region).

DADT catches some more — on film! Seven soldiers from Ft. Bragg’s 82nd Airborne have been court-martialed or punished for “sodomy, pandering and wrongfully engaging in sexual acts for money while being filmed.” Well, okay, so many employment contracts prohibit moonlighting, but I suppose one could look on the bright side: a commenter at Gay.com sees a career opportunity:

bq. I want a job with the military where I get paid to look at gay porn and see if any of the actors are active military soildiers. I’m glad so many resources are devoted to this persuit. The internet is so vast and there are so many soldiers in the US military we will need literally hundreds of men to watch all this porn and surf gay websites to track these perps down.

Never noticed this before, but American Airlines’ online booking system allows one a laughably wide selection of “titles and honoraria”:http://westnorth.com/img/aggrandize.png to prefix one’s name with. In the end, it was a tough choice between Princess, Right Honourable, or Swami, but luckily the reservation didn’t time out while I wrestled with which personality would be boarding the plane. (Wonder if this’ll show on the boarding pass.)

*therightbi-guy*: maybe i’m trying to relive my youth through others.

Rather painful “transcripts”:http://www.spokesmanreview.com/jimwest/story.asp?id=113004_chat of Jim West’s gay.com chats are available from the Spokane paper. The sense of denial that continues to pervade his public behavior (no McGreevey-style apologies) matches his defensive behavior in the supposedly private chats.

Eight years after moving to the Midwest (and nearly thirty years after my parents moved from LA), my speech still uses more California vowels than Midwestern vowels.

Chris Barsanti of In These Times has a review of Richard Lloyd’s _Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City_. (Odd that a Logan Square-based magazine would assign a Brooklyn writer to the piece, but oh well.) Lloyd, a contributor to “_The Baffler_”:http://thebaffler.com/excerpts.html and now teaching at Vanderbilt, has written a serious ethnography of a not-so-serious neighborhood. Personally, and maybe because I was there to witness its last throes, Wicker Park’s gentrification has been far more explosive and fascinating than any number of East Village accounts. Compared to New York, Chicago’s lack of rent control, tenser race relations, better overall fiscal health, pro-business and pro-development attitudes, and far deeper deindustrialization combined to put gentrification on fast-forward here. (Incidentally, I once mentioned this opinion to Terry Clark, who replied with something about one of his graduate students. Turns out that was Lloyd, of course, and I gave it nary a thought until seeing the book.) What’s different is that Chicago is only a regional center of media and “content creation”; not only does news from here tend to spread slowly, but the creative first-line gentrifiers (literally, the cultural capitalists) are fewer in number and less self-consciously or self-referentially creative.

Somehow, thinking of Wicker Park as “over” reminds me of a conversation with a scruffy, underemployed resident of Montréal’s Plateau, a favorite landing pad for hipsters who’ve tired of Toronto or Brooklyn, who stated after a moment of thought that “you could live here pretty easily on $10,000 Canadian a year.” Plus free healthcare!

Ever wonder what those chopper guys & gals, as well versed as they are in hacking things to bits and building up things of beauty, have to say about sex? My favorite tidbit from Sex Advice From Bike Jousters by Kate Sullivan:

*What should I include in an online personal ad?*

_A great photo. It should look flattering, but accidentally so. It should clearly have been taken by a friend when you were outside, on the go, and you just happened to be in really good lighting and perspective._

The effect should be “I am casually, effortlessly good looking.” Contrast that, of course, to the stereotypical gay-boy portrait: posed, overexposed under a cheap flash, with no sense of setting and with a bunch of other grinning, drunk faces (and/or pecs) to distract the viewer from what really should matter (i.e., one’s face). If you’re gonna do something posed, at least throw up a professional headshot.

(Hey, no posts lately due to work schedule and travel [see photos!] but I’m bored and in the South this weekend. Please bear with me as I try to get a bunch of things posted.)

HNK found a reference in the Chicago city code that bars het dating services. As posted to craigslist:

No person shall advertise… to act as agent, go-between… between a man and a woman, for any fee… for the purpose of promoting a marriage or an acquaintanceship intended to result in marriage.

Heck, that’s even what the Lincoln Park Trixie Society is about! The fine’s $100-$200, and another part of the same law specifically states “a man and a woman.” Yay, gay people!

Another weird multiculti twist: the US mint is cashing in (literally) on “8″ mania with its Prosperity Collection of collectibles. All feature dollar bills with serial numbers prominently featuring the number “8″ (sourced from Fed #8, in St. Louis) and generous splashes of red. Puts a new spin on “lucky money,” I suppose.

If they were really smart, they’d market these through Chinese-owned banks as well — red envelopes of lucky money are particularly popular at New Year but also given throughout the year as token gifts.

I’ve uploaded a few cameraphone pics of Montr�al and Qu�bec to Flickr, but since I don’t want to risk getting socked with a monstrous data-roaming charge (Fido’s prepaid voice service in Canada doesn’t include data) I’ll still hold off on uploading much until I get back to the States later this month. Still, consider my socks knocked off by these two urban jewels.

Oh, and no, we could not enter the Beaver Club.

Mary Schmich in “the Tribune”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0504220132apr22,1,3865394.column?coll=chi-business-hed points out that gentrification’s ghosts leave behind a fuzzy, indeterminate context:

There are other ghosts, too, old people I used to see ambling on the sidewalks. Occasionally the ghost of one will appear for no apparent reason except to say, “Hey, you hadn’t even noticed I was gone.” They’re right. Walking past the palazzos I can’t always remember what was there before, or who.

John Greenfield once pointed this out: when a building or store disappears, even if it was something you saw every day for years, its memory fades alarmingly rapidly. Obviously, grandmother’s house or the daily bakery are exceptions, but I’ve noticed it countless times.

In Pilsen, the “latest flare in the gentrification battles”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0504220158apr22,1,2295748.story?coll=chi-business-hed appears to be a loft conversion by Steve Lipe. Lipe has done quite a bit of groundwork (negotiating early on with a local CDC, not advertising the project outside the community, hiring Latino sales staff, and rehabbing an abandoned building so as not to displace any residents in densely populated Pilsen) but he nonetheless provides an easy target for easily confused, angry activists.

bq. Balderas, a project opponent, acknowledged that many residents would view the project more favorably if the newcomers were of Mexican descent, but just because the potential homebuyers are Hispanics who made good doesn’t mean that they should take precedence over longtime residents, she said. “We’re the ones who did all the hard work to make Pilsen a better place. But we’re not going to benefit from it. They are,” Balderas said.

bq. Chantico Lofts has caused a split among advocates of affordable housing. Some say Pilsen residents should fight developers tooth-and-nail while others want to become partners to create mixed-income projects.

NameVoyager, a neat little tool making the blog rounds, shows that soft initials (vowels, consonants like “n”) are definitely trending in, along with odd initials–Q and Z, for instance. (for some reason, I remember that Infiniti chose those as model initials precisely because they were underused in the language.) In the history of initials, boomers received a lot of names with hard consonant initials (K, P, T), and those are fading.

And yes, my parents were really cutting edge with my name. Payton/Peyton now accounts for 2 in 1000 babies, from almost non-existent in 1980 to both spellings landing in the top 300 (soon top 200) names for both girls and boys. Indeed, Crate & Barrel is now advertising a “Payton” series of wine glasses — perhaps the ultimate indicator of its popularity with the yuppie set. And just last week or so, my yuppie neighbors across the hall christened their baby boy — yup — Payton, making the kid only the second Payton I’ve met, ever. (The other was an old-South scion in the All-State orchestra in, er, ninth grade?) Although I’ve long liked my name, it gets misspelled so often that I’ve taken to making up names at sandwich shops that tag orders with names. (My favorite: Theo, brother of Vincent van Gogh.)

That said, I’m glad that Payton doesn’t appear on Stephen Levitt’s list of most popular names of 2005. Does my name’s increasing popularity (and thus declining exclusivity) portend that, come middle age, I’ll be surrounded with déclassé hooligans named Payton/Peyton? Young children want to have common names, but older children and adults like unique names, and hopefully I won’t end up in the odd position of having had an exceedingly rare name as a young child and a boring, familiar name as an adult.

(Update 11/2005: Not only did my next-door neighbors name their kid Payton [shortly before moving out], but the Brookfield Zoo named their baby polar bear after me.)