Category Archives: identity politics

Pluto, car-free prizes…

by

– 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.

And, two related legal cites that will doubtless come in handy in the future:

“All property is acquired and held under the tacit condition that it shall not be used so as to injure the equal rights of others, or to destroy or greatly impair the public rights and interests of the community; under the maxim of the common law, Sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas.” (‘One must so use their property as not to injure that of another.’) – Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, Commonwealth vs. Tewksbury, 1846

And one on regulation; I like the reference to population density.

“Upon [the police power] depends the security of the social order, the life and health of the citizen, the comfort of an existence in a thickly populated community, the enjoyment of private and social life, and the beneficial use of property. As says another eminent judge, ‘Persons and property are subjected to all kinds of restraints and burdens in order to secure the general comfort, health, and prosperity of the State.’ (Thorpe vs. Rutland & Burlington R.R. Co., 27 Vt. 139, 1854).” (Slaughter House Cases, 1872)

Games people play

by

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.

Politics for the next generation

by

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.”

Gushy eulogy

by

_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.”

(Illy) latte-swilling…

by

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).

Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t expose

by

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.

Self-aggrandizement

by

Never noticed this before, but American Airlines’ online booking system allows one a laughably wide selection of “titles and honoraria”:https://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.)

Under the microscope

by

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!

Bike Jousters at Nerve

by

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.)

Goodbye, dating services

by

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!