Monthly Archives: January 2004

Maybe we jinxed the campaign?

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I doubt it. However, we did nix the “hi, we came all the way from [___]” from our little speeches while canvassing suburban Bettendorf — plus, I was feeling awfully self-conscious about having dressed in various shades of black. (We were both wearing square-toed boots, natch.) From Salon War Room:

…put yourself in the boots of an average Iowa Democrat a few days before the caucus. The campaign is so intense that it has become a form of political harassment. Your phone rings every 10 minutes with an automated robo-call on behalf of one candidate or another. Your mailbox is jammed with political junk mail. Then comes a knock on your door and there you find a couple of committed campaigners from Park Slope or Noe Valley or Wicker Park telling you that Howard Dean is your man. And they’re wearing these really loud orange caps.

How would you react if a bunch of Iowans invaded your neighborhood like that? Now you’re beginning to understand what might’ve happened to Dean on Monday.

Actually, we didn’t meet anyone else there from an identifiably hipster hood (save one Logan Square). There were college kids galore, and a few even younger kids (including one who was excitedly telling anyone who’d listen that John Edwards “flipped me off!”), but the overall “I’m a purple-haired wacko and I like this guy and so should you” culture-shock factor was quite minimal.

In any case, Dean has pretty well jinxed his own campaign with The Scream. I’m really not feeling so confident about him after that.

It would seem, though, that John Edwards’ stump speech is perfectly positioned to catch the “opportunity society” meme that Tom Daschle introduced in the SOTU rebuttal. This phrase is, according to Stan Greenberg’s politics-as-psychographic-clustering text The Two Americas), how the Democrats can cohesively explain their vision for government’s role in American society — and to win both left and center.

Commuter bikes back on sale

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A quick look through the 2004 bike catalogs shows that both Trek and Specialized have brought their formerly for-sale-in-Europe-only commuter, street, and utility bikes — complete with fenders, generator lights, and rear racks — to the U.S. market. Previously, both (along with Cannondale and other major U.S. bike manufacturers) had sold commute-ready bikes in Europe and “comfort” bikes in the U.S., assuming that Americans wanted to ride on paths on the weekend, but not to work or around town during the week.

The mere fact that these bikes are available is significant in two ways: first, it plants the seed into bike buyers’ minds that commuting is an option, even if they don’t ride out of the bike shop with a commuter; and second, it shows that there’s market demand for commuters. Either that, or the bike companies figured that they, and not accessory makers, should reap the profits off accessory sales, or are just responding to market pressures from the likes of Breezer or Burley.

A weekend in Davenport for Dean

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I spent most of the weekend in Davenport, Iowa, the heart of the Quad Cities, to knock on doors for the Howard Dean campaign. The campaign actively solicits out-of-state volunteers, counting on its excitable base of young people in cities and college towns to do the legwork in demographically moribund states like Iowa. I went on a lark with Tara, another Wicker Park Green; neither of us were really committed to Dean, but were curious to experience the energy surrounding his campaign and thought it would be fun.

Quick facts about the trip:
Total hours spent in the Quad Cities: 36
Quad Cities I had a drink in: 3 (of 5: Davenport, Moline, and Rock Island, plus recent additions Bettendorf and East Moline)
Doors knocked: about 80 (it was cold!)
Precincts visited: 2, in suburban Bettendorf and in-town Davenport
Dean supporters behind those doors: 7
Candidate rallies attended: 2
Minutes spent waiting for late candidates at said rallies: 95
Bunnies seen: 3
Black squirrels seen: 3
Foreign cars seen: maybe a dozen
Casino billboards seen: maybe a dozen
Ostensibly gay bars visited: 3
Amount I spent on snacks, at a bakery in Chicago and a health food store in Davenport: $30
Photos taken: 32

The daytime photos have a bluish hue, for three reasons: the camera’s light settings were set for yellowish indoor light; Midwestern winters tend to have a grayish blue cast; and it was foggy the first day we were there. I could color correct them, but I won’t.

Bank One’s move

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“Four big banks once graced the Lasalle Street area of downtown Chicago, their line of march bounding along both sides of the street toward the majestic Chicago Board of Trade building. Bank One is the last to stand on its own.” [NYT]

And with that, Chicago loses its last money-center* bank headquarters — putting the city into the same league as Boston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and possibly San Francisco if Wells Fargo is truly in play. Needless to say, Crain’s is shitting its pants, and the trixies are terrified.

Jamie Dimon also is eating his words [scroll to end]: “I did not come here to sell Bank One.” “I have no desire to move back to New York … I am not restless in Chicago.”

* Yeah, that phrase is outdated, but it brings back fond childhood memories of “Wall $treet Week in Review with Louis Rukeyser.”

Whores

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“Neighborhood: Being a trend whore necessitates living at the Bucktown/Wicker Park border.” [so says Cindy Mathew on Metromix]

And to think that North Avenue, this blog’s namesake, used to be known for another, more honest kind of whore.

(Speaking of which, the latest neighborhood gossip is that bones were found in the basement of Lottie’s, a local bar which was once a brothel. The business is closed pending an investigation.)

bequoth

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A photo of mine — the first mini/urban Home Depot, on Halsted in Lincoln Park — made it into the Kansas City Star, of all places. Thanks to Kevin Klinkenberg for making the connection. (It’s a Knight-Ridder “RealCities” site; use username null@carskill.com / pwd carskill to get in.)

Ironically, the author writes: “The Chicago Home Depot has windows rather than blank walls. Its facade is properly scaled to fit the street… The people in that Chicago neighborhood got something different, in part because they had some notion of what they wanted their city to look like. Those desires were written into development rules.” In fact, the neighborhood went up in arms over a previous proposal to rezone the commercial site to build condos; the developer retaliated by plopping (as of right!) a giant gray box which generates even more traffic.

I kind of like how the angles of the buildings are contrasted. It’s hard to get a full-on shot of the store, since it’s so broad and fronts a two-lane road, but in this case it works.

Tie a string around your finger

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“White House officials dismissed the [IMF] report [criticizing fiscal policy in the USA] as alarmist, saying President Bush had already vowed to reduce the budget deficit by half over the next five years.”

Aha. I see that the president is no longer promising, then, to eliminate the deficit (and return us back to the surpluses he promised he’d keep back in 2000) — merely to cut it in half after he’s out of office. Hmm. Strange how many of Bush’s goals fall in either 2005 or 2009, isn’t it?

[Found at TNR &c.]

Liberal radio network announced

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After much buzz, Central Air Radio, programmed by Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead, will soon be broadcasting on stations they’ve bought in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. No word yet on specific personalities, programs, or other markets — to be covered through syndication or affiliation, perhaps, since buying just those five stations will cost a pretty penny.

Strange, though, that they’re starting a political radio network without a Washington presence, or that they’re overlapping with Pacifica Radio in three markets. Then again, Pacifica has been badly bruised; maybe Central Air smells a chance to grab market share.

Update: The Tribune reports that Central Air will broadcast 24/7 on WNTD-AM 950 here. That station is being sold to a third party.

Paying the price for cannibalism

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An unforeseen twist to industrial agriculture, from the NYT:

By the reductive logic that rules our food system, cannibalism should be as legitimate a way of eating as any other: it’s all just protein, right? Yet the great unlearned lesson of B.S.E. and other similar brain-wasting diseases is that, at the level of species or ecosystems, it isn’t quite true that protein is protein. Eating the protein of your own species, for example, carries special risks. The Fore of New Guinea were nearly wiped out by kuru, which bears a striking resemblance to B.S.E.; they spread it among themselves by ritually eating the brains of their dead kin.

This Sunday’s Magazine also includes an article on the Farmer’s Diner in Barre, Vt. The December Harper’s carried a (better) article [not online] by Bill McKibben on the Farmer’s Diner and other peculiar Vermont ways of preserving local ways in the face of industrial logic.

Recalling your local TV station

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Adbusters mentions one case where a broadcast station’s license was revoked simply because it wasn’t up to par — WHDH-TV in Boston, which was replaced by WCVB-TV. CVB got its license on a promise that it would do better than HDH in providing local programming, and it has kept that promise to this day.

Technically speaking, the airwaves are owned by the public; broadcast stations have the privilege of using them subject to the public’s blessing, and are ultimately accountable to the public. In the case of HDH and later WNAC-TV, also in Boston, local officials were able to convince regulators not to renew licenses based on the quality of broadcasting and overconcentration of local media ownership.

However, the specter of beheading by the FCC apparently doesn’t seem to faze most broadcasters these days. If it did, we would undoubtedly enjoy better broadcasting — better because the stations would put effort into actually providing a service that their audiences appreciate. Similarly, Adbusters points out that corporate charters can, and have been, revoked in the past, and states the obvious conclusion: maybe they should be revoked in the future as well.

Real unemployment: 9%

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Bush’s economic policies don’t sit very well with economists working for major banks, it seems. Here, economists for Bank One and Wells Fargo slam the magical mystery of unemployment and “economic growth” figures:

Economists believe the drop in the labor force masks a much higher jobless rate�perhaps as high as 9%, according to Anthony Chan, chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors in Columbus, Ohio.

“The decline in the unemployment rate is the most misleading aspect of this employment report,” said Mr. Chan. “It’s a sham because of how we got there�the labor force dropped precisely because more people became discouraged…”

“Despite all the hoopla, neither businesses nor potential employees have confidence in the economy. They’re not believing all the stories about a strong and healthy economy given by the economists and the government,” [Wells Fargo chief economist Sung Won] Sohn said.

From Reuters/ChicagoBusiness

Segway user realizes…

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‘Paris is a walker’s city, built for sauntering, window-shopping, the sideways topple into the cafe chair. On our final day here, we finally realized that the best way to get around on Segways is to use the bike lane rather than the sidewalk. The ride is fast and uncluttered, and you aren’t constantly giving pedestrians heart attacks. Technically, Segwaying in the street is illegal, but the policemen who stared us down at intersections and in front of President Chirac’s house all seemed to be following the same penal-code decision tree (“Not a bicycle, yet has two wheels and moves in a leisurely manner: ALLOW TO PROCEED”). ‘

From Tad Friend’s Slate travel journal of a week spent Segwaying in Paris. Segway tours this past summer were around $75 a day; rental bicycles (provided by the RATP at stands around town) were EUR8 a day. Hmm.