Something Something Detroit

I’m wary of sweeping trend pieces like the one in the New York Times a few weeks ago that described Bushwick in Brooklyn as having a “bohemian vibe” and tout that it’s at the heart of some sort of artistic revolution. A co-op or two does not a revolution make, and sure there may by a group of young white people making art and sharing stuff in part of Bushwick, but the last thing I got from the Bushwick in the past two years that I visited the neighborhood frequently was a “bohemian vibe.”

And that’s the problem with any urban area – there’s no one story. Detroit is the easiest example, and has been used as such exhaustively over the past couple of years. As Vice pointed out in it’s 2009 story called "Something, something, something, Detroit: Lazy journalists love pictures of abandoned stuff," Detroit’s decay became shorthand for all that is going wrong in American during the recession and abandoned buildings are as beautiful to photographers as sunsets (hell I love photographing abandoned buildings too). Of course there’s a lot of crime, tons of poverty, and LOTS of abandoned houses. But it’s not the whole story of Detroit and also far from one that should be used to illustrate the economic collapse of 2008-present day. News by definition should be NEW and there have been abandoned buildings in Detroit for decades.

And then there’s the other story of Detroit, one of its “creative renaissance” and this video is so interesting and encouraging, and such great PR for the city that needs it so badly. I’m glad they spoke to people who live there rather than just about them, but still why does Detroit need effing Johnny Knoxville to come in and tell the world about it? Yes there’s stuff happening in Detroit, but just like Bushwick, I don’t know that it can really be labeled as sort of trend in the same way that it’s not accurate to label the whole area as abandoned and hopeless. Both, as a woman in the video calls it, are “pick and choose journalism.”

Of course perpetuating a narrative of an artist utopia isn’t nearly as harmful as perpetuating one of hopeless blight, but my point is that neither is accurate, and that an urban area is complex and can’t be boiled down to a trend piece as simple as “Hippies now in Bushwick” or “Stuff is abandoned in Detroit.” To do so is just lazy journalism.

Complex reporting isn’t short and easy to digest, nor is it cheap and fast to produce, and no one benefits from some New Yorker dropping by a few abandoned buildings or hipster bars and proclaiming what a city he spent 12 hours in is all about. The last thing Detroit or needs is another journalist who is looking to make it a metaphor or someone like me who left for greener pastures dropping back in for a quick byline and then ducking back to an overpriced neighborhood on the East Coast to education everyone on what’s happening in the flyover states.

Those most qualified to tell the world the real story are the journalists who stayed –some of the reporting at publications like Metro Times Detroit and The Detroit Free Press is among the best I’ve seen. Let’s give them national attention rather than treating the city like an easy trend piece.

Your voice is only as loud as the lazy media who covers it

So there’s some crazy pants minster in some small church in Florida who wants to burn the Koran tomorrow. This isn’t news, or at least it shouldn’t be. But bigger and bigger spotlights have been pointed at Terry Jones in the past weeks and he’s been given a more and further reaching microphones.

The New York Times points out the he and other nut jobs have tried similar stunts in the past with little to no media coverage, and blame this partly on the end of summer slow news season/ 24-hour news cycle.

But I call Bull Shit. There’s no such thing a slow news days/season. Sure, there’s times when huge earth shattering or catastrophic events aren’t happening, and more people are on vacation. But newsworthy stuff is still happening—and this ladies and gentlemen isn’t it. This guy is no different than the religious wackos on the someway screaming about how the end is near. But we don’t put them on the Today Show, the President isn’t issuing statements about them. We recognize them for what they are: possibly in need of medication, but not worthy of debating or trying to reason with.

A person’s message is only as powerful as the platform it’s given. My platform is a blog that’s read by 3 people and the guy on the street who said “Preach it! Fight the good fight!” when he overheard me complaining last night. If anything Terry Jones should be preaching about it’s PR.

Potatoes, Racism, Mad Men and the “Ground Zero Mosque”

It’s amazing how many forms a thing can take. Potatoes can be al gratin, baked, boiled, fried, mashed. The versatility of this starchy wonder is what makes them such a dietary staple. Potatoes are delicious, but their versatility and staying power is a trait that they share with something not so tasty—racism.

I’m in the middle of reading a book of historical fiction about the South in the 60s, filled with “respectable” white people who degrade their black help in ways both conscious and unconscious. And even though people of my generation and younger are aware of the kind of violent, overt, disgusting, senseless racism that prevailed during that time, it’s still chilling to be reminded of, even if it’s something we didn’t live though and will never be able to fully comprehend. And it’s easy and comforting to be self-congratulatory and view racism as a thing of the past. But that’s so far from the truth -- it’s here, it’s widely accepted, its just taking different forms.

Take for example the new view of “separate but equal” that is being debated in New York right now, and even the language used to describe the controversy conveys the bias: “The Ground Zero Mosque.”

First, the flaws in the argument:
1) It’s not a Mosque; it’s an Islamic Cultural center.
2) It’s not on “ground zero” (which is an odd term to begin with) it’s two blocks from where the world trade center used to be on the “hallowed ground” of a closed Burlington Coat Factory store one block from a strip club. (Although the WTC itself was built on a slave grave site, so hallowed ground argument has some weight just not the weight the argument makes)
3) There is absolutely no correlation to this building, or these people to 9/11.
4) There is a similar prayer room at the Pentagon (one of the other 9/11 sights) that no one seems to care to protest.


Those protesting the building aren’t simply wrapping themselves in the flag to justify their racist inclinations, they are helping to set a dangerous precedent: politicians (both democrat and republican) are fanning the bigotry for their own ends (many of them are the same people who voted against health care benefits for 9/11 first responders, btw). And everyone is leaving Muslims out of the conversation.

Whether the controversy has been manufactured as an election year tactic or not, the visceral hate and bigotry was all too easy to whip up. We’d like to think that we are a cosmopolitan and progressive city far from the backwoods lynching mentality of the South in the 60s (many comments on recent stories about the 51Park project have tried to dismiss protesters as being from “out of town”), but when you hear of cab drivers getting stabbed because they are Muslim , and a deluge of hate crimes all over the city it’s hard to maintain that bigotry is either a thing or the past or a practice exclusive to those in “fly over states.”

Viewing this community center’s construction as an affront to 9/11 victims (some of whom were of course Muslim themselves) is the equivalent to labeling all black men as criminals after one steals your purse. And proposing that it be built further away is equivalent to building a separate bathroom for the help.

On Sunday night’s episode of Mad Men, cosmopolitan Roger Sterling used his role in WWII to justify his unwillingness to work with the Japanese. He asked, “Since when is forgiveness a better quality than loyalty?” Of course, his internal conflict, just like this one isn’t one of forgiveness, or loyalty. It’s a matter of perspective. Because a country filled with this kind of hate, violence and bigotry is a huge terrorism threat.

In Which I Rant About Garbage and Attempt to Save New York City

The big event in my life right now is that my boyfriend is moving into my apartment August 1st, and my longtime roommate and good pal is moving out. With a move always comes the purging of many belongings from clothes and books to furniture and household goods and many things in between.

But what to do with all of this perfectly good stuff?

A) Spend the time and effort to hold a stoop sale hoping to make a little moo-la and find loving homes for your stuff
B) Donate it to a charity that will put it to good use
C) Put it all on the curb and hope someone takes it before it ends up in the trash
D) Throw it all away— the planet is already screwed and they’ll figure out how we can live on the moon soon enough!

At first I thought (A) was a good idea, but we are so hectic with the move, plus there’s not a lot of space or foot traffic on our street so I’d probably waste a lot of time to make $5 and still be left with tons of stuff. So I decided to opt of (B), which should be an easy enough thing to do right? Not in New York City.

Back in Michigan (and I’m sure in many other car-centric places in the US) when we wanted to donate things, we’d load up the car and drive to the local thrift shop where they’d always gladly take it. And here in the city there are plenty of places that will take your stuff but most New Yorkers don’t have a car (which is a good thing, right?!) which means in order to donate in person involves lugging bags and boxes of items and/or furniture on the subway or renting vehicle to haul it – both unlikely and totally cumbersome options.

So I searched for an organization that would come and pick up all of our great stuff. There were woefully few. I finally found one—the Salvation Army—after two days of trying to get through, I attempted to schedule a pick up for July 31, only to be told they are booked until the end of August.

Which means I’ll have to opt for option (C), which according to the city really amounts to option (D) in most cases. I hope that if someone does come to take our stuff they aren’t driving, because as came to light this week it’s illegal to pick up discarded items on the sidewalk if you're driving a vehicle at the time because once something is set on the ground it becomes city property. This has been in the news this week after a man is Queens was fined $2,000 and had his 73-year-old Aunt’s car impounded for attempting to take an AC some one was throwing out. Even the MAYOR of the city didn’t know about the law and thought it was insane.

(Image from NYT “freegan” article)

Recycling is not only mandatory in NYC because it’s good for the environment; it’s actually a revenue source for the city. And yes there’s a list of places to donate useable items on the Department of Sanitation’s site but again, good luck getting someone to pick it up.

And yeah there’s special events/locations/days when you can recycle un-useable hazardous things like electronics/light bulbs/batteries. But how realistic is it to expect people to store a bunch of old light bulbs and batteries for six months in their already cramped apartments and then remember which day and location to take these things?

Mandatory recycling is such a beneficial idea for all involved. (Speaking of Michigan, 95% of the people I know there don’t recycle because it’s not as easily available)
Sure people in NYC still throw out tons of easily recycled stuff, regardless of how required or easy it is to put glass/plastic and paper in separate bins. It’s impossible to make everyone responsibly dispose of items they no longer need, but the lack of options for passing along perfectly good stuff is a glaring opportunity for the city.

So here, free of charge, is my solution:

Once every other week, deploy a fleet of trucks to pick up useable unwanted items. Residents would put them on the curb just as they do now, but instead of the things that don’t get taken by passersby ending up in the landfill (which is totally costly for the city), they’d go to locations in each borough where they could be distributed to non-profits.

The same could go for hazardous/non-traditional un-useable items: every month (say on the 1st) there could be a collection of these items. Both of these options involve additional cost and infrastructure, but I think the benefits outweigh the costs, and with the right investment could turn into a program just as lucrative as the recycling program has been. Otherwise I’m just going to have to open that store that sells their neighbor’s garbage to yuppies that I’ve been talking about for years…

**Update: I put a bunch of clothes, jewelry, books, etc. out on the curb this Saturday and within an hour everything was gone, I was joyful...until I opened the garbage can and found all of my lovely and totally usable belongings covered in smelly trash--thrown there by the insufferable woman who lives in the front apartment of my building.

Taming of the Shrewd

So, Obama is trying to hold back the release of photos of U.S. service members abusing Iraqi and Afghan detainees. Which, according to the “media” is either: A) a brave fuck-you to the left or B) another shrewd Obama rope-a-dope. Well I say it’s C) An attempt to not remind anyone of Bush.

Photos of the US torturing people are scary and awful and regardless of if the events took place before he was in office, it won’t exactly give people warm fuzzy feelings, something the administration thrives on (seriously? Did you see the press correspondent’s dinner? That shit was flat out charming!)

Calling this move shrewd and calculated is a clever spin, isn't really accurate. No matter what he does the Right isn’t going to think of him as “a judicious, troop-protecting president,” so if it’s true that with the Freedom of Information Act the ACLU will have the photos released anyways, than this is in fact not a cunning political move after all.

I do believe that the photos will be released, because the argument that they can be withheld because they "could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual," has way too many holes in it.

Bad policy and bad move, especially for a presidency that claims to be all about transparency.

Life Expectancy, Poverty, and the (not so) surprising results

Last Summer New York magazine ran a “look-how-great-we-are” story about how the average life expectancy of New Yorkers had for the first time in history surpassed that of the rest of the country. You see, as the article took exhaustive pains and several thousand words to point out, there used to be crime here but now it’s totally safe.

Plus we walk, unlike all those stupid fat lazy bastards in the rest of the country. And we walk fast, unlike all those stupid fat lazy bastards the come here on vacation (boy, they sure are annoying and we sure are cooler than them aren’t we?). Plus, we go to really fancy doctors that are totally the best in the world, and we shop at expensive organic food stores. All of us. Well…..expect the Bronx, which oddly enough seems to be the only exception to the rule.

After devoting 10,000 words to patting it’s target demographic on the back (and yes that includes me to some extent), they finally got to the point in the last few measly paragraphs. It turns out that there was one part of New York City that bucked the trend, and (shock, gasp!) it was the area with little to no gentrification. They could have saved a lot of space and printed only this part of the article:

“Of course, the built environment wouldn’t have done New Yorkers’ health any good if it hadn’t been catalyzed by the city’s economic bonanza. Gentrification cut both ways. A more cynical—and possibly clear-eyed—explanation for New York’s life-expectancy gains is that gentrification drove many of the city’s poorest people out of town.”

Exactly. The city got healthier because it became filled with rich people who can afford fancy doctors and organic food, the problem didn’t get fixed. It just got pushed out.

And the story of the Bronx, the one borough where the life expectancy actually declined in the last 20 years, is in fact the none-to-shocking story of all of poor America. When you’re poor, you often can’t eat well, even if you wanted to, all the cheap food is the worst for you.

This week the New York Times took notice too, recounting a recent study the revealed that from 1983-1999 life expectancy (for women) in the US did not improve, and in fact, declined in hundreds of places in the country (for men life expectancy rose, but with a difference of 5.4 years between poor and wealthy). The lines along which life expectancy declined or stagnated? One guess: poverty. The shaded areas on the map double as some of the poorest in the country.

The links between poverty, health, and life expectancy are so painfully obvious (from prevention and management of chronic and fatal disease, unhealthy diet, smoking, drugs, alcohol (which are far from problems of poor, but are treated and dealt with differently), and of course stress).

The fact that we need these studies to bring the gaping income inequality to a discussion, or the fact that the more “advanced” we get the worst the situation gets is disgraceful. It’s so terribly embarrassing as a country, to be so rich, to pose as some sort of world leader, and at the same time be so woefully, cluelessly indifferent.

The Poison of Poverty

Paul Krugman’s editorial does a lot of stating the glaringly obvious. And while it could serve as a primer for “Social Inequality 101,” it perhaps simplifies things a bit too dangerously.

I mean revelations like this “in modern America parental status trumps ability: students who did very well on a standardized test but came from low-status families were slightly less likely to get through college than students who tested poorly but had well-off parents.”

Uh, duh. You needed a study to realize this? Poor people can’t pay for college like rich people can regardless of how smart you are, the whole “free ride” thing doesn’t really happen, and dumb rich people end up going to Yale and becoming President, not exactly a news flash.

Most of the article is like that, totally true, but painfully obvious.

Here however, are my two problems with it:

1) “Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are proposing new initiatives against poverty. But their proposals are modest in scope and far from central to their campaigns. I’m not blaming them for that; if a progressive wins this election, it will be by promising to ease the anxiety of the middle class rather than aiding the poor.”

Why? Aren’t there poor democrats and republicans, and don’t they vote? And if poor people don’t vote, wouldn’t a candidate who doesn’t deny their existence stir them to vote? Am I being naive to assume that a “progressive” candidate who actually acts progressive and don’t play to the middle of the road would win more admiration than a panderer? And that this kind of settling, excusing, and letting off the hook-ness is what has got us in such a mess? Krugman says that health care not poverty should be the #1 priority, but aren’t the two hugely linked?

2)The ills and burdens of poverty, in childhood, in rich countries, in the world in general can’t be emphasized enough, but lines like “Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” Make me a little itchy, it seems like a statement that could be misused to say things like “Poor people aren’t as bright as rich people, because they are poor and because they aren’t so smart, that’s why they stay poor.” Which I realize is not at all what they are saying, but sound-byte able quotes like that often get co-opted by the enemy.

All I need to know about life, I didn’t learn in J-school

My journalism professors in college liked to keep it real, sometimes painfully so. The following is just some of the advice I was given during my time in J-school:

1) Journalists are poor. In fact, if you want to make money, pretty much any degree-based career choice is more lucrative.
2) Speaking of college degrees, you don’t need one. Yeah, that’s right the people getting paid to teach me were telling me that I didn’t need the education I was getting.
3) If you get good grades, no one will want to hire you. The logic here being that if you had time to pull all A’s then you weren’t doing enough actual journalism (interning, writing for the college paper, etc)
4) Whatever you do, don’t go to grad school. This came from my favorite professor, she held a PHD in Journalism and said that going to grad school for journalism was a waste of time.
5) Newsrooms are pretty laid back places, and journalists are notorious for their lack of fashion sense.

Were they right? Well kind of. If you believe the New York Times Style section (and you also believe the definition of journalist is white middle aged man who works at Vogue) then my professors were waaaaay off. These dudes are balling! ($5,000 outfit? Well that dispels #5!)
(one such journalist is pictured above- hey buddy, nice shoes..)

If however, you are more a fan of reality, then my professors were right on the (lack of) money. Even payscale.com is thinks we make more than we do

As for the degree and grades, again kind of. I doubt my A’s ever got me a job, but I’m sure they didn’t hurt, and as for the journalism degree, it’s true that a lot of the journalists and editors I’ve meant didn’t major in journalism, but I’ve never regretted learning about AP style or practicing reporting by being forced to go to court.

Finally, are newsrooms laid back? In my experience, no more than anywhere else. True, I can wear jeans to work at the magazine now, but I could wear jeans when I worked at a mortgage company and those people aren’t really known to be cool. In fact the EIC of one of the newspapers I briefly worked at in Michigan forced the men to wear ties and the women to wear pantyhose. So it really depends. Although, this piece about newsroom swearing is amusing.

Oh and grad school? I’ve been thinking about it for a few years now.

If this is the World’s Capital, What does that say about the World?

1) Sure, in any densely populated place people will wait in line for ridiculously long amounts of time for often ridiculously stupid things (i.e. products with a lower case i in front of them) But that’s their own damn problem, because if you are misguided enough to camp out or stand in the rain/snow/sleet for an overpriced piece of plastic, you are both a sucker and a fool and deserve everything that rains down upon your head.

Waiting hours in lines around the block to get into family court, is another thing all together. Sure, The New York Times could do a story on some of the million billion other problems with the justice system (especially the family justice system) but at least they have finally written a story somewhat about poor people that actually points to how f*cked the system is that aims to keep them completely demoralized.

Here’s a thought, if you can’t let people on the stairs, and can’t figure out how to fix the elevators, maybe you could let the few people at a time that are missing a court date while standing outside the building use the sacred elevators that the judges use, so they will have a case to judge. I'm just saying.

2) Completely unrelated, but also absurdly ridiculous: Pillow Fight Club. It sounds like something I would have made up with my friends when I was 7-years-old. But these people are adults, and aren’t living in quaint Midwestern town in the 1980s. Plus even as a small girl I wouldn’t have been so one-dimensional to think of a tie-breaking rule like this: “Fighters have been known to get eliminated at this point (a tie) based on outfit choice alone.”

Update: Turns out "pillow fight club" is not a New York invention (although I'm sure they'll try to claim it like everything else). There's even a website: www.pillowfightclub.org and a wikipedia page.

It really does seem more and more that Devo was right.

Saying Things are Over is so Over-Rank Them Instead!

So evidently The New York Times thinks Brooklyn is over because Heath Ledger moved, which is nothing short of the lamest reasoning ever. I would argue that it’s not Brooklyn, but the whole of New York City that’s over because it can’t stop talking about itself as if it was the only place that mattered. But I digress.

And besides, that’s not the only reason why The New York Times is wrong. Some group of urban planners named Park Slope one of the ten best neighborhoods in the country (take that Williamsburg!) It turns out though that they’ve decided that Park Slope officially ends at 17th Street, meaning I missed it by four blocks. But that’s ok, I’ll enjoy being slightly on the outside looking in, afterall, paying to live in a “named” neighborhood is so over.
(Above: an artist’s rendition of Park Slope)

Give me a Freegan Break

This doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as the showy no toilet paper yuppies and certainly not as much as the backwards thinking involved with these products. In fact I must admit that for the most part I agree with these hippies.

Of course not without exception: dumpster diving and trash picking is something poor people have been doing, well, probably since there has been rich people to throw out perfectly good stuff. Buying things at garage sales and taking them off the street is just ingrained as good sense in people without money. Truly, the lower your income, the more resourceful you have to be.

New York City is probably one of the worst places in America to be poor, yet one of the best places to find almost anything for free. And while I don’t begrudge these white people from middle and upper class backgrounds taking things from the trash (it’s public domain after all, it should be equal opportunity), I do take offense that they have co-opted it as their idea.

Only when people who retired early from investment banking start realizing that there’s a lot of waste and a lot of nice stuff in there does it become a news item (they probably came to this realization by remembering how much nice stuff they once chucked themselves). Producing less waste, consuming less, reusing more, all of these are necessary and their ideas and actions are in the right place, it’s the self-important “revolutionary” approach that is annoying.

Poor people might not pick trash to save the environment, but their impact (or lack of impact) on the environment is probably considerably more over their lifetimes since they buy less in the first place, have smaller homes, cars, etc. The New York Times however, isn’t likely to print an article about poor people picking trash, as it wouldn’t be as self-congratulatory to it’s perceived readership.


Side Note: A vegan eating meat so it doesn’t go to waste rubs me the wrong way; it seems like morals that are a bit too flexible. (Couldn’t they just give the meat to a meat-eating homeless person?)

Taking away the maid's vacuum

Some yuppies have decided not to wipe for a year as a stunt to promote a book and I'm supposed to care.

The idea of lessening your impact on the environment is not noble, it's necessary. But the way they are going about it does more to hinder actual conservation than help it, and it's not like they can even pretned that they are doing it for altruistic means- they are doing it to promote a book, a blog, a New York Times article, they are doing it for fame. And the hook- the gross out factor that will make people want to pay attention is the silliest part of it: no toilet paper.

So they are trying to not make an impact on the environment by not using anything disposable: no more take out- good, canvas bags for groceries: good, but they don't live in the woods, so they make waste- I'm sure they still get mail, I'm sure the woman still uses tampons. And the ban on using any energy? Again misplaced. No cars: good, No TV: good, no elevators and no mass transit? silly (does 10 people instead of 9 on an elevator or 209 instead of 210 people on a subway make a difference? Hardly) And the candles don't make much of a difference when you are still running your washer and dryer.

Beeswax candles and smelly bums are not only a gimmick (used by people who still spend 75% of their days in front of energy sapping computers) but they make people think that changing your habits to consume less and contribute more are crazy hippie ideals that regular people can't/would never do. It makes for less flashy headlines, but Amanda Park Taylor's weekly "Conscientious Objector" column in the L Magazine regularly offers advice on things that people can actually do (like using less water and reusable bags for shopping).