The Redstar Perspective

Ok, clearly I’m the only Grey’s fan acknowledging George’s luvah, Dr. Torez.  (Kali??? I missed tonight’s debut, but called my stepmom at 8:15 to ensure she could tape it for me.)  4 of my top 20 search strings for this blog have “dr. torez” in them.  Does no one else find this big girl loving the little dude endearing? Story of my life until I went out with 6 ft 2? 3? Keith and realized there was no going back to the 5′8’s of the world.  Go Dr. Torez!  Overpower George with your love and devotion!

Ok, that’s all.  I’m beat after 2 martinis with the M.A.S.  My bed awaits.  As the bulletin boards say, “LOVE,” “FEEL” thursdays.  I’m feelin it.  Sleep.  Good night!

Never a dull moment up here in MA! (Actually, I know many people who might describe Boston and the state as exactly that.  Screw them, g-d d*mn Yankees fans.)   

In contrast to yesterday’s Globe’s analysis of the gubernatorial candidates’s differences, the M.A.S. noted, as NPR endlessly replayed Deval Patrick’s and Kerry Healey’s primary victory speeches last night, “ew, they both sound like weenies.” And while I couldn’t agree more with the M.A.S.’s impression, I’m pretty excited to watch this white woman and black man duke it out for the job.  Not least because either victor satisfies the equity concerns I noted here on tuesday.  More importantly, this state, despite its liberal bent, has never elected a black man or woman for governor.  In fact, Patrick would be only the second black governor in the country, ever, if he were to win.

Embarrassingly, his candidacy resurrected media coverage of our legacy as a racially intolerant place, as print outlets enthusiastically picked up the A.P.’s story on racially violent busing and desegregation 30 years ago.  From attacking black students to voting for a black governor.  Sigh.  Do we get any bonus points for legalizing gay marriage in the interim? 

Perhaps gossipmongers will be distracted from our shameful past if they turn to the state senate race in our 2nd district.  Dianne Wilkerson, a 7-term state senator and African-American woman (and, may I add, our only black senator), has a legacy of success on Beacon Hill, yet a questionable ethical reputation and an accompanying history of fines and reprimands.  She’s nothing if not sloppy in managing her personal and professional affairs, it seems, including failing to get enough names on her petition to get her back on the primary ballot this fall.  D’oh!  So the 2nd district (a really interesting mix of neighborhoods, demographically: <(Part of Beacon Hill, Back Bay, Chinatown, South End, Fenway, Mission Hill, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, part of Dorchester, and part of Mattapan) opened up with FOUR write-in candidates this fall (they call this a sticker campaign - the candidates mail you stickers that you attach to the ballot - who knew!).  And now Wilkerson is locked in a recount against Sonia Chang-Diaz, her primary competitor for the Democratic ticket that she now leads by only 141 votes.  Chang-Diaz’s mother is white, her father is Costa Rican with Chinese ancestry, and he was also the first Latin American astronaut in the U.S. (according to her bio).  The other candidates against these two progressive women were a dude from JP and another Diaz, this one the daughter of Trinidadian immigrants.

So here we go, Teddy K. sitting comfortably at the top of the state’s political food chain, and all this demographic churn taking place around him.  It’s totally thrilling, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.  Tuesday’s primary had the highest voter turnout in 16 years.  This link talks about the demographic change underway in this minority-majority city, and shows how previously “written-off” areas like Dorchester and Roxbury had significantly higher turnout than the old powerhouse centers of South Boston and West Roxbury.  (I’ll skip past the fact that my ‘hood, Allston-Brighton, bounded as it is by BU and BC, and swarming with co-eds as a result, had the lowest turnout.  Sounds like they could use a little Deis political activism around here.)  Our City Council make-up epitomizes this change beautifully - a couple of the old-school dudes still riding along - black and white, representing Southie/W. Roxbury v. Dorchester/Mattapan, now sitting beside our first Jewish councillor in 55 years, Mike Ross; our first Asian City Councillor, Korean-American Sam Yoon; and our first Latino Councillor, Felix Arroyo.  In the next round of elections, we need to increase the number of women beyond ONE.

For all the sh*t he gets for being so happily local and unintelligible, Menino in his generally uncontested four terms has been a strong neighborhood mayor, doing a much better job at equalizing recognition and service delivery to the 16 neighborhoods of the city.  Nonetheless, and perhaps in some ways aided by our emphasis on neighborhoods, our city remains woefully racially segregated.  For those of us who criss-cross these geographic boundaries regularly, we see vibrant community life beyond the shrinking but still dominant Irish neighborhoods.  Indeed, between 1990 and 2000, residents of West Indian descent knocked those of English descent out of the #3 slot in the census category on ancestries in Boston.  And West Indians and Sub-Saharan Africans were the only two groups in the top 10 that grew over the last 10 years.  (The Irish population shrank by 27%, though it remains the largest population at almost 100,000 of the ~650k residents in the city.)

The next seven weeks should prove endlessly entertaining and instructive for those of us who consider politics one of our favorite spectator sports.  My friend La Tonya and I yesterday talked about when our white neighbors or relatives (mine, not hers) want to know why we’d even go to these ‘hoods, only 2 miles but a cultural world away still in this relatively parochial city.  For me, having your roots inextricably intertwined in your studies of urban communities goes a long way towards opening your mind; having your mother spend most of her life working in urban, public hospitals, and parade a rich mix of friends and experiences through your life helps too.  If you’ve ever had your mom pierce your ears at 6 with the tools she had as a pediatric nurse in Newark, or take you to see the AIDS quilt in the 6th grade, you too might have a world view that extended beyond your surburban front porch. 

And 25 years later, I feel naked without earrings on.

It’s primary day.  Vote Aqui!  I remember the signs from NYC, when I used to vote at the Wagner school on East 76th Street.  I hung one of those signs in my kitchen for years, next to my world map showing proportions of women in government around the globe.  Go Scandinavia!

Now I sit here in my kitchen, conflicted over what I expect is my next move at the Alexander Hamilton school on Strathmore Road.  I will not be voting for Deval Patrick, the Black Bootstraps Progressive, but for Chris Gabrieli, the Venture Capitalist with detailed plans and 5 kids (do people have such big families anymore, other than the Orthodox Jews scattered throughout my ‘hood?).  I admit it, though woefully, I am enticed by Gabrieli’s thought-through plans and his cheezy use of the word “Results.”  (Although I am anti-gaming in all its forms; thanks mom!)  There is no doubt fond memories of Mayor Bloomberg color my orientation towards the business man-turned-politician. 

Not that Deval doesn’t have plenty o’private sector experience.  At this point, most candidates have done their time, in order to make their millions, which is a baseline for being able to run for any position, it seems.  (Wesley: what are our fundraising strategies???)  And in theory, Deval says all the right things, hits on all the right issues.  But he’s so…vague….how will these ideas work?  How will we pay for them?  Who will benefit beyond the nebulous interest groups (e.g., the disabled) he mentions?  While I might want to spar with Gabrieli over gaming or reducing taxes, it’s clear he’s been making plans, and I am certainly charmed by his emphasis on turning declining cities (”Forgotten,” we called them in a department speaker series my first year) into regional hubs, urban anchors.  It’s nice to see someone thinking about Springfield, Lawrence, New Bedford, etc. 

Deval tells the right story - from inner-city poverty to corporate executive, given a scholarship to boarding school that set him on this course.  Settling in his adopted state and moving his entire family here.  The first to go to college, etc.  It’s the story I’ll probably tell when the time comes.  But…based on how I’ve heard him speak so far, he’s also my worst nightmare of what I might become - whiny, defensive, the smart kid you want to rough up at recess because he’s prone to being smug in the classroom and quick to squeal on the rule breakers.  This is perhaps grossly unfair - I’ve heard coverage of the man probably 3 times.  But so far, he sets me on edge.  Reminds me of the community I orbit in, over in the Tower on the Other Side of the Charles (OSC?), and brings me back around to my on-going conflict of pursuing intellect and equity without completely losing touch with the rest of the world.  Just the fact that he conjures up a familiar notion of us v. them makes me uneasy. 

Not that I relate to your average politician; they are overwhelming rich, male, highly educated and out of touch.  But something about this guy really alienates me; I sense that if we were in the classroom together, I’d want to punch him in the nose.  This is in part because my conflict between reconciling my place among the intelligentsia with my urban, working-class roots is at an all time high, based largely on listening to an abstract discussion of my relatives and history in an MIT classroom for the last week.  I hope I can tell a success story someday like Deval’s - goodness, I’m on my way, I still marvel over this whole MIT development!  But if so, may I stay rooted and keep my head out of my ass.  I will never have the charming “C student” appeal of Dubya, but perhaps my consistent poor conduct marks will endear me to others who also spent half their educational life in the back of the classroom, or just off school grounds entirely. 

It’s a shame; I’m a big proponent of supporting women and minority candidates - there are not enough of us in leadership roles, and research shows that our biggest barriers to entry are at the “hiring” phase and in early stages of promotion.  This is why so much political action around increasing our representation focuses on increasing our ranks at the local level.   As we advance through private and public systems, possibilities of advancement become more equitable.  It’s getting our foot in the door that’s the hardest part. 

When I am a particularly uninformed voter, I will vote by gender and/or race, sometimes across party lines.   But I’m growing out of that practice, for better and worse.  So here I go, casting my vote for another white man.  My choice for Lt. Governor is Deb Goldberg, the Brookline Jew whose family founded Stop & Shop.  The Ladies, the ladies!  I’m down as an honorary MOT (thanks Deis!), though dismayed at yet another gazillionaire telling me how my society and economy will work for me.  I wonder, how will I downplay my wealth once I make my millions from captivating the blogosphere?

A lame title to capture the following rant about the T, I know…stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

You leave your house at 9 a.m. to get the bus to the train to school for your 10 a.m. class.  School is 5 miles from your house.  The bus to train route is ~45 minutes door to door, assuming everything arrives on time.

The last part, that’s the punch line.  This being Boston - which, according to my co-TA Rachel, is a legend among transit scholars for its abysmal performance in managing and delivering public transportation services - the bus was late.  This being Boston, the bus was not 5 minutes late, but 35. 
Where I wait, you can see down Chestnut Hill Av to watch the bus approach.  Or not, as the case may be.  The infuriating bit - beyond waiting in the blazing sun or 10 degree weather, depending on the season - is that the bus originates 3 stops down from here, just on the other side of Cleveland Circle.  So for those of us who can’t figure out how this f***ing system works, you’re left standing there, sweating or shivering but certainly cursing, envisioning the bus just sitting on the other side of the Circle, with the driver hanging in Dunkin Donuts with the other T employees who loiter there daily (2 of the Green line routes end right in the area, and there is a train yard behind Dunkins).  You’d never stop to think it’s crashed somewhere along its excessively long route originating on the Brighton/Brookline border, traveling through Cambridge to the Somerville/Charlestown border, unable to come back and pick you up.      Nah, you know the driver is just chillin, with a whole lot of illin, down in Cleveland Circle with the rest of the T flunkies.

My grandfather - my dad’s dad - used to work on the trolleys (the Green line trains), driving them from time to time and fixing them out in Brighton’s train yards near my house.  My dad would play baseball out in the parks around there, and his dad could come and watch these games.  That’s a nice memory, and one I loved hearing from my dad while we drove around my new neighborhood in June 2005, running errands and getting me settled.  The elderly man in my building who used to sit in the lobby every morning from 10 to noon told me I would love it here, with the trolley outside and Dunkin Donuts down the street.  Indeed, I looked for a place on public transportation, hoping to be car free for as long as possible.  I have 3 train lines and multiple bus routes near my condo.  But I’ve learned the hard way that if the bus is not on time, it’s not coming any time soon.  Another form of “road rage” to get (re-)acquainted with as I returned to the ancestral land where I first learned the rules of the road. 

I drive to school most mornings now, a 30 minute commute door to door, including the long walk from the parking lot to my office.  I miss having the time to read on the bus or train, but I can’t take the homicidal feeling I get from waiting like this, or from the daily uncertainty of knowing when the next time the bus will veer completely off course and take a half hour to show up.  By the time I got to school this morning, I wanted to rip out the seats in the Chem E’s fancy auditorium style lecture hall where class meets; my desire to “act out” as my mother the mental health practitioner describes it, was overwhelming.  I could stand to be more patient, but for anyone who finds themselves at the whimsies of a poorly run public (or quasi-public, in the case of Amtrak, don’t get me started!) transit system, there’s few more effective ways to remind you of your lowly place in society than to have your mode of transit be late, absent or just not get you to where you need to be.  For such a little city, the average ride sure seems to take 45 minutes between any 2 points.  Unsurprisingly, I am not the only ticked off Masshole. 

FYI, I arrived at school at 10:20.  5 miles in 80 minutes.  I could have walked. 

Came out of the women’s room in MIT’s Aero/Astro building (that’s aeronautical and astronautical engineering for you lay folks on the other side of the river…ok, I have know idea what is is either) to find this super fan ominously eyeing me…

…my long red hair an appetizing snack for its hungry blades…

…oversized nitrous tanks in the chem department, architects turning the water fountain into a design installation, commemorative fire trucks on the dome of the Institute - after 3 years, I’m still not quite sure what goes on in this place…

It’s been a long, eventful week here, getting back into the swing of things.  Already unintentionally but successfully insulted some Masters’ students with my blogging.  They’ll soon learn that I am wise to their plight, and that my harmless ribbing will be the least of their concerns in no time.  NOLA politics continue to lurch along, disrupting not only my future escapades but my ability to have lunch with friends here as I try from a distance to keep up with the never ending shenanigans. Am concurrently trying to roll out the back to school outfits, avoid making out with the M.A.S. so brazenly that we needlessly traumatize the incoming class, and get used to having hundreds of pages of reading hang over my head once again.  Ordered 26 books from Amazon yesterday, cluttering my hotmail inbox with Marketplace emails and getting myself on track to read the Marxists by mid-October.  Love Marxism, not just because it’s ludicrious and unsustainable (being mainly a mantra of men who enjoy drinking and socializing and find work just gets in the way of that - who doesn’t really), but because then I can really engage with my NOLA housing activists - “Vulturistic urban planner” I resent, capitalist flunky I can handle.

And here I sit at school at 6:30 on Friday night, wrapping up paper edits and looking forward to a much needed date with the M.A.S.  Which will probably be slightly more low key than I originally intended.  Despite my carrying on about being swamped, we did find the time last night (until about 2 a.m.) to finish the second half of my bottle of Krupnik, a polish honey liquer, looking through my atlas as we talked about past and future trips, family histories, and urban diversity and change.  Nerd love is a beautiful thing. 

Enjoy the weekend!

Sitting in the back of the classroom right now, half paying attention (I’m trying to win the competition to be the worst TA of the 3 of us) as the Chair of our Dept. gives a presentation on public housing in Boston.  Discussing the “D Street” projects in Southie, their redevelopment in the 1980s and 90s.  Right when my Aunt Phyllis and a gaggle of cousins were living there.  Kind of bizarre to have your family captured in someone’s research (unless of course it’s my own.)  I have this sense that I should be contributing to the class but I’m not sure what I’d add.  Perhaps parading the relatives around the room?  Or I talk about my memories of these particular projects (v. the McCormick developments where my grandmother lived for decades), especially the Christmas when my cousin Clare got the Betty Crocker oven and we baked a cake.  Good times.

What I always remember about McCormick (and all projects of this design) is the metallic smell in the hallways, from the metal doors and railings and concrete steps, and how the trash room was referred to as the “incinerator” by my grandmother (e.g., “take the rubbish to the incinerator.”) I always imagined at some point before safety or environmental standards were what they are today, at some point tenants were dropping their trash into a bonfire in the basement. 

The real thrills in visiting my grandmother were a) getting to eat off tv trays in my grandmother’s living room, whether the traditional boiled dinner (corned beef and cabbage) or another similarly bland (but no less delicious on my then, conservative, sheltered Irish tastebuds) meat and potatoes dinner; and b) crossing over the busy street by using the pedestrian bridge above it.  As a kid, I thought this was the coolest thing, climbing the stairs to walk above the cars driving below, reaching the other side safely and without having to wait.  This future planner’s urban catwalk.  Pretty sure Jack (dad) was dressed for such a runway, rocking the leather jacket during these mid-80s visits. 

Ah, we’ve moved on to my mother’s childhood stomping grounds, Franklin Hill and Franklin Field.  M.A.S. is familiar now too, given one of our favorite passtimes is driving through these predominantly now black, Carribean and Latino neighborhoods, particularly by the old projects where the Grahams/Taylors/McElaney’s used to live. 

How wild, watching folks take notes on your lived experience. 

The books I love most introduce or transport me to foreign cultures, broadly defined.  The Black Album is about a British Pakistani college student who has an affair with an older, white woman during the time of the fatwah against Salman Rushdie.  Middlesex features a hermaphrodite among a Greek-American family in Michigan.  The Poisonwood Bible is about a missionary family in Africa.   Prep is about boarding school.  Richard Ford’s Independence Day and The Sportswriter are about a middle-aged, divorced man in New Jersey.   Runaway - stories set in British Columbia; Ha Jin’s work is in China.  These are dramatically oversimplified summations, but in virtually all of them I’m left understanding a new place, person or experience. 

One of the worst aspects of being in school is not having time to read for pleasure, and I find my preferred scholarly works are ethnographies - which are essentially in-depth studies of communities or cultures, usually gleaned by living in/with the research subject.  Academic literature, basically.  Eventually, I hope to have a list of those to keep company alongside the books below that have introduced me to the world beyond my borders so far.  Insufficient summaries of the rest of the books resumes below (especially cryptic at times when I can no longer remember the plot and only shades of key characters, plot accessories, etc.  e.g., A Fine Balance), but remains incomplete.  This post is a work in progress. 

My Favorite Fiction (& a couple memoirs)

The Black Album, Hanif Kureishi

Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (Memoir)

- a writer’s life; married for 40+ years to another writer who unexpectly dies; the life I covet, actually, minus the sudden death

On Beauty, Zadie Smith

- mixed race family in a Massachusetts town for which Cambridge must be the model; the youngest son gets mixed up with Haitian activists and street peddlers from Roxbury; the protagonist’s foil is a conservative British Jamaican scholar; the wife is an African-American from Florida (set in an academic town and a university, this one actually hit a little close to my potential new home - rich in description of the Ivory Tower’s silly, insular world)

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (Despite the Oprah seal of approval, which implies it’s horribly depressing)

The Cider House Rules, John Irving

- abortion and medicine and orphanages and migrant workers in rural New England

Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld

Anything by Richard Ford (In Independence Day, I discovered a male character - written by a male author - to whom I could relate in in a way previously reserved for only women writers and/or female characters.)

Runaway, Alice Munro

Anything by Ha Jin (I love his writing, and also that he went to Brandeis, which he mentions in his biography in all his books.)

Veronika Decides to Die, Paulo Coelho

- a young Slovenian woman is institutionalized in a mental hospital, based on what seems to be typical early twenties ennui and confusion about life

A Fine Balance, Rohan Mistry (Oprah’s not wrong about this one, it’s horribly depressing)

- India, sewing machines, Kashmir, crippled man and life-long friend, gruesome death and dismemberment

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

- I first read an excerpt of this in The New Yorker. Disfunctional, distant Midwestern-roots family.  Overcompensating, materially successful eldest son; artist daughter in Philly; floundering, deadbeat writer son in NYC.  Deteriorating, old bastard of a dad. 

Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri

- short stories of Indians in Massachusetts. 

The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier & Klay, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon

Half & Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural, Claudia O’Hearn (ed.; essays)

The Shipping News, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, E. Annie Proulx

The Women’s Room, Marilyn French

Smila’s Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg

The Flanders Panel, Arturo Perez-Reverte

Kids/Young Adult

All of a Kind Family (series), Sydney Taylor

Tell Me if the Lovers Are Losers, Cynthia Voigt

The Long Secret, Louise Fitzhugh (This is my favorite book of all time.)

Cheaper by the Dozen, Frank B. Gilbreth & Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

Anything by Lois Lowry

The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case, The Egypt Game, Zilpha Keatley Snyder

The Bed Book, Sylvia Plath

What the Moon Brought, Sadie Rose Weilerstein

The Great Brain (series), John D. Fitzgerald

Danny, the Champion of the World; James & the Giant Peach (mostly the early scene where the peach grows and flattens his mean relatives - I think - and how they eat the peach to survive), Roald Dahl 

Had a great night last night at M.A.S. friend Jeff’s Lower East Side apt, a.k.a. The 2-Man Social Club Music and Literature Reference Library.  Compared notes with Jeff on fave books, which of late includes On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third.  I’m about 90% of the way through - looking forward to climbing into bed shortly to polish off the last chunk - and am crossing my fingers that it doesn’t wrap up with a ludicrous ending, which is how I’d describe her debut, White Teeth.  She is an amazing writer.  Her individual descriptions are probably more compelling than the overall story.

I desperately miss all the fiction I consume when I am not in school, and wandering through Jeff’s collection was pure joy.  Seeing all the books I’ve read in the last couple years, I wonder how many of them have been optioned by Hollywood.  For awhile it seemed all the books I’d read years ago were being turned into films, and I prided myself on what a friend of mine called “my money-making taste.”  Driving home from NYC today with the M.A.S. flipping through my iTunes, I realized this applied to my musical choices as well. 

My musical taste is pretty varied, from Zero 7 and EBTG and other electronica to soft rock, particularly from the 1979-1983 years when my parents were newly divorced and I was spending monthly weekends in Boston with my dad and living with my mom in NJ.  They’d meet in New Haven on Fridays and Sundays to switch me, and 25 years later I remain especially fond of all the music I heard on the radio during those long rides up and down I-95, and generally in the car with my single mom in those years when she took me along just about most places she went. 

Today on the Mass Pike the M.A.S. and I scroll through Daft Punk and ambient groove to Roberta Flack singing “Where is the Love.”  (For the unitiated to easy-listening-favorites, Roberta Flack is the original artist of The Fugees’s “Killing Me Softly,” and is of a caliber of Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick, minus the latter’s psychic hotline thing.)   As Roberta croons, I say to him, “don’t you feel like you’re in a department store, listening to this?”  I’m personally picturing myself in the Lord & Taylor in Philly, which is in a high-ceilinged, marble-floored, grand old building more eye-catching than any of the clothes and accessories L&T carries these days.  He laughs, and I realize that regardless of genre, a significant portion of my musical choices turn up on store soundtracks.  Zero 7’s “In the Waiting Line” may be more appropriate to a BCBG play list, but it’s there to soothe the shopping experience, nonetheless.   

Clearly I should be profiting from these preferences, but I suspect it’s going to be awhile before The Redstar Perspective takes off as a tastemaker among the 30-million blogs out there.  Of course, if my literary and musical preferences are any indicator, it’s only a matter of time before The RP becomes a web favorite of a mass audience with disposal income.  Then I can be like this chick and write full-time and finally take the M.A.S. on its urban world tour from Nashville to Nairobi.

(Madison Avenue, please note: the first $40,000 should be sent directly to my investors at Sallie Mae.)

I’m a little late on this discovery, but special thanks to my Junior High Boyfriend (and West Coast Sox fan) for sending this along:

The Boston Globe
August 28th 2006

This Just In
Roxbury MA (AP) - A seven-year-old boy was at the center of a Boston courtroom drama yesterday when he challenged a court ruling over who should have custody of him. The boy has a history of being beaten by his Parents and the judge initially awarded custody to his aunt, in keeping with child custody law and regulations requiring that family unity be
maintained to the degree possible.

The boy surprised the court when he proclaimed that his aunt beat him more than his parents and he adamantly refused to live with her. When the judge then suggested that he live with his grandparents, the boy cried out that they also beat him.

After considering the remainder of the immediate family and learning that domestic violence was apparently a way of life among them, the judge took the unprecedented step of allowing the boy to propose who should have custody of him.

After two recesses to check legal references and confer with child welfare officials, the judge granted temporary custody to the Boston Red Sox, whom the boy firmly believes is not capable of beating anyone.

From an e-mail exchange with my publicist and indispensible dear friend Wesley, after I asked him not to take his Crossfire approach with me when we get together for dinner this month.  Wesley - a politics and news junkie - has a tendency to use our dinners to quiz me on my opinions on everything ranging from post-Katrina New Orleans to the mid-term elections.  Most recently, this went poorly when I started yelling at him about his uninformed opinions about New Orleans, and then begged off the rest of the questions, as I no longer pay attention to any news unless it’s about NOLA.  It was not the most relaxed of meals. 

He is now enthusiastically digesting Disaster, hence my fear that I would once again find myself at the debate podium rather than the dinner table.

He writes: “I just want to point out that in your Crossfire analogy I believe this makes me Robert Novak or Tucker Carlson, and I am not exactly  sure how I feel about that… (though, if I am James Carville, that  might be okay.  But I think in this example especially, you are Carville).” I reply: “I do love yelling and carrying on, seemingly irrationally, but really I’m headed somewhere.  Carville it is!  Sorry Bob.”W: “I know you’re headed somewhere - it’s my job to help. ”

I know, I still owe pics and commentary on the anniversary.  As you can tell from recent posts, I was decompressing at home in New England, despite the shenanigans of Ernesto following me up the Coast.  I also have the second two hours of the Spike Lee documentary, When the Levees Broke, to watch.  Then there’s the upcoming 5 year anniversary of 9/11 to experience and process, which I’ve been doing for some time, ever since I watched United 93 and World Trade Center within days of one another.  So, despite having carried on about New Orleans for the last few weeks, there is still so much to say, and deeper thoughts about disasters and cities and survivors and urban politics and development and activism to come. 

I hope. 

I also started school today (I am WAY TOO OLD to be using this phrase!) and the wolves are at the door.  Ambitious MCPs (Master’s students) emailing us last thursday - yes, that’s BEFORE the LONG, HOLIDAY weekend - to get a jump start on the reading for our class tomorrow. I said to another PhD student this morning, shouldn’t they be out exploring the city they’ve just moved to, enjoying the last days of summer?  Or, at a minimum, she offered, they should be out at The Coop or Bed, Bath & Beyond with the rest of the 135,000 students who descend on this city this time each year, buying stuff for their new apartments.  (I kid you not; that’s the actual #.  My ‘hood, along with Fenway/Kenmore and Cambridge, gets the bulk of the kiddies. My buddy David thinks I should have more of a complex living among fit 20 yr old women either running by my apartment or parading down the street in heels with a 30 pack.  I guess I’m more secure - or resigned - than that.  Especially since now I have the M.A.S. to carry my 30 packs for me!)

I miss New Orleans already, and I miss sharing it with the world as much as I was starting to do in the last couple weeks.  I will be touch and go in the coming week or so, while I figure out how much I can pile on the backs of the other two T.A.s in my class to free myself up for what is turning out to be the very addictive habit of blogging. 

Sigh - back to school - where everyday is Wednesday. 

 …fighting the good fight.

Below is a terrific summary article of the battle over public housing in New Orleans, that portrays the machinations of HUD and the substantiated conspiracy theories of New Orleanians about HUD’s intentions (see River Garden; if I was a more thorough academic I’d point you to the actual analyses of HOPE VI initiatives).  This piece references “my” other contacts via the work I’ve been doing for the last 9 months, the folks at The Advancement Project and the organizers behind the “Survivor’s Village” (the same ones yelling at me, and the author of this article, now). 

I have a particular affection for St. Bernard and the Gentilly neighborhood that surrounds it.  I am not sure why, but think it’s because than that’s where I’ve seen most of the organizing work in action, and talked to the most residents.  This includes one older gentleman trying to convince me to let him take me out for some “chablis” after we’d chatted about public housing, rebuilding, Bush, politics, etc. for 45 minutes.  And here I think I’m making a deeper, political connection with folks (men)! 

FYI: I showed up for a proposed meeting Michael Valentino had organized with activists and residents, but he was a no-show. 

(At the conclusion of this article I’ve included a link to Kamenetz’s other recent piece on New Orleans, that includes quotes from some of the activists mentioned here.)  

New Orleans’ Housing Fiasco

Anya Kamenetz

August 25, 2006

“A storm can’t just make you change where you want to live.” On a withering August day, Reginald Dupart, 32, is standing outside his former apartment in the Lafitte public housing development in New Orleans, where he lived for 11 years with his wife and four children.

 He has a clean shirt slung over his shoulder and a bottle of red Gatorade in his hand. “Of course you had the drugs and guns and killing, but what the media don’t let anybody know is that we were close-knit, like a family sticking together,” he remembers. “You could go to sleep with your door open, and everyone looked out for everyone else’s kids.”  

A year after Katrina, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents have bittersweet memories like these of vanished neighborhoods. But there’s nothing physically wrong with Lafitte. These historic brick, two-story buildings just east of the French Quarter took on less than three feet of water and need only minor cleanup and repairs.

What’s keeping Dupart’s family in a trailer in Baton Rouge? The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which in June announced its intention to demolish 5,000 of the city’s 7,100 public housing units—some damaged and some nearly unscathed—without any clear plan for the displaced residents. Now, a coalition of local and national civil rights groups has filed a class action suit to stop the demolitions and bring over 4,000 residents home. What’s on trial is not just the fate of several thousand citizens of one storm-ravaged city, but 65 years of embattled public housing policy in America.

 Even before the hurricane, HANO, the Housing Authority of New Orleans, was allowing its public housing stock to lapse through attrition. Only 5,100 units were occupied, overwhelmingly by women, children, the disabled and the elderly, while 2,000 units were boarded up, and slated for demolition. Since the storm, a total of 880 families have been invited to come back, without any known criteria. Dupart says he’s heard from nearly two-thirds of his former neighbors, many of whom gather at John and Gussie’s grocery across the street, near the famous Dooky Chase restaurant, to pass around the latest news. “That’s the topic of conversation by that store all day long—Why are they tearing this project down?”  

Good question. So far, the only money committed to rebuilding New Orleans is the Road Home program. This is $4.6 billion in block grants administered by HUD to homeowners only, through the Louisiana Recovery Authority.  

Neighborhood infrastructure plans covering schools, clinics, parks and rental and affordable housing are just being completed for flooded neighborhoods, and a second round of neighborhood-level planning is just getting underway. But talking to government officials and planners about public housing, you hear a lot of words like “revitalization,” “remodeling,” and “mixed-income.”  

These words signal HUD’s Hope VI grant program, which was established a decade ago to replace “distressed” federally funded housing with mixed-income developments and housing vouchers. Hope VI has a mixed record nationally, improving many blighted districts but leaving families in other places with inadequate assistance or support to relocate. In New Orleans in particular, vouchers are of limited use with an acute housing shortage and rents 30 percent higher than before the storm.  

Paul Lambert, a Miami consultant hired by the city council to come up with plans for the city’s 49 flooded neighborhoods, sounds positive on the future of public housing.  There’s many people that would like to see [the projects] entirely redeveloped but there’s also a strong element in some neighborhoods that’s saying no, you need to revitalize the properties. In some ways the most interesting piece of what we’re doing is how does public housing fit into this? These are large tracts of land, owned by a public entity. In many respects they could become the centerpiece for redevelopment.  

“I’ll tell you one thing, Lambert don’t mean the same thing I mean,” by revitalization, says Endesha Juakali. A charismatic figure at the center of the public housing debate, Juakali spent his childhood in public housing, his career as a public housing advocate, and also served as chairman of the city’s housing authority in the early ’90s.  

Now he is leading the fight to reoccupy St. Bernard, the city’s largest development.  

Mixed income is a pie in the sky illusion…What you’re going to do is mix poor people and middle income people right on out of there.  

The current class action suit alleges racial discrimination and violation of the 1937 Housing Act, which requires public hearings before demolition of any public housing. HANO has used everything from steel shutters to barbed wire fences and armed guards to keep residents from reoccupying their former units. Resistance has taken many different forms. Since June, for example, the St. Bernard development has had a “Survivor’s Village,” a tent city of 20 or so residents on the neutral ground outside. Juakali says he modeled the Village on the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which built a tent city on the Washington Mall.  

Elsewhere, people are simply moving back in. “This is my apartment,” says Linda DeGruy. “I had a legal lease before I left and my lease is still legal. My plan is to stay here and I’m not leaving.” Ms. DeGruy, a wan woman in a headkerchief, lives with her three grandchildren in the same unit of the Iberville development that she occupied for several years before the storm. She returned in early June and scrubbed her solid concrete walls clean with bleach, Brillo pads and baking soda. But Ms. DeGruy is here without official permission. She says she is one of a group of 29, out of approximately 200 residents back at Iberville, who are here without invitation and are withholding rent. She is suing HANO independently.  

I can’t get a copy of my lease to get food stamps for my grandchildren or to put them in school. I went off the deep end with this and got me a bunch of lawyers. HANO needs to be beat into the ground.  

Iberville is a complex of two-story buildings with balconies and courtyards, situated even closer to the French Quarter than Lafitte, and like Lafitte it had limited storm damage. Public housing activists and residents like DeGruy believe without exception that the demolition orders and the talk of “mixed-income” are a lightly veiled gift to developers like Michael Valentino, who owns several French Quarter hotels and has expressed interest in the Iberville site, and Joseph Canizaro, who sits on several city planning commissions and is a Pioneer-level Bush supporter.  

“HUD has decided to use these public housing residents as lab rats for a social experiment on mixed income communities,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization that is bringing the class action suit.  

Everyone points to the city’s experience in 2002, when the St. Thomas housing project in the Irish Channel was demolished and replaced with River Garden. The new townhouse development, built using HOPE VI, is just 25 percent affordable units versus 75 percent market-rate, and the deal included the first Wal-Mart in Orleans Parish, over fierce neighborhood objection.  

Out of 800 families who previously lived in St. Thomas, only about 70 were able to return. “The only person who made money off of that one was [local developer] Pres Kabacoff,” Juakali says.  

But here’s the hard truth: Revitalization is more than a code word here, it is a pressing need. While most New Orleanians would be sad to see the city full of more River Gardens, very few want to see New Orleans public housing return to its exact previous form. While the out-of-state graduate students squatting in abandoned buildings and working as fulltime housing activists might be defiant about the right of poor people to live in poverty, natives would heartily like to see an end to the “drugs and guns and killing.”  Linda DeGruy complains about the drug market up and running in front of Iberville’s grocery store. When a reporter walks by the store, one man hanging out on the corner says he has just been released from prison.  

Another points out a spot on the ground that he says is blood from a shooting the night before, as children play on Big Wheels nearby.  

Nor has the dispersion of “pockets of poverty”—another HUD buzzword—worked out very well, at least as implemented by the storm. The New York Times reported last month that the New Orleans drug trade is bigger than ever, amped up by new connections forged with Houston and Atlanta gangs.  

Anecdotally, drug dealing and sometimes violence are encroaching into formerly nicer neighborhoods, as underpatrolled streets of blighted houses form safe havens for all types of characters.  

Juakali is confident that the lawsuit, along with good old bureaucratic inertia, will eventually get people back home without any large-scale changes to the public housing landscape. But he would like to see a revitalization—a social one.  

What we’ve got to get rid of is not poor people, but poverty. We need a living wage, where when people work eight hours a day they can make a living, child care, and good schools.  

When it comes to the developments themselves, he says, let people back in, but on conditions:  They have to want to participate in the revitalization and rebuilding of their neighborhoods. You’re welcome back but here are the rules: you’re gonna do x, y, z, be accountable for yourself, your neighborhood, your doors, your hallways, your children. It’s not the bricks that create the problem, it’s the individuals.  Further Reading 

 “Building Blocks: Neighbor by neighbor, house by house, New Orleans struggles on” 

In addition to Debra Messing (Grace on Will & Grace), Christie Hefner (daughter of Hugh and CEO of Playboy Enterprises), Marta Kaufman & David Crane (creators of Friends), Tyne Daly (Lacey of Cagney & Lacey), Angela Davis (Black Panther), Abbie Hoffman (activist, founder of Yippies), Tom Friedman (NY Times columnist), Mitch Albom (journalist and author of treacle Tuesdays With Morrie), Katherine Anne Power (anti-war activist and former fugitive), Ha Jin (author of fabulous books, incl. The Crazed), Letty Cottin Pogrebin (co-founder of Ms. Magazine, with Gloria Steinem), Jack Abramoff (disgraced Republican crook), and yours truly, among others, I present to you:

Brandeis University Class of 1997’s Samrat Chakrabarti, in Shut Up & Sing…

http://myspace.com/shutupandsingthemovie

And he’s from Watertown (MA)!

Go Samrat!

Go Judges! 

Go Mass!

Thanks to Gail, his former Spur of the Moment a capella mate and my old roommate, for sending along the link.  Who knew a capella in dank, health-code-violation Chumley’s would take folks so far?

I have to renew my passport.  I suspect the immigration authorities in Chile and Brazil, where I’m headed in December, won’t be as forgiving as our Canadian brethren if I show up with an expired passport at their borders.  The real shame behind this is that we have to turn in our old passport to renew by mail.  For those of us who love to travel, we’re losing our treasured record of all our global adventures!  For posterity’s sake, I am taking a trip down memory lane and through my passport here (in several parts), before I put it in the mail and say goodbye to all those fantastic, validating stamps forever.  (My friend Kristina used to travel so much for her work in international women’s health that she had to get extra pages inserted in her passport.  How cool is that!)