The Redstar Perspective

Does not exist.

Per my usual monday morning, I’m sitting in the back of the classroom, studiously blogging and emailing alongside the other TAs.  However, this monday morning differs from all the others, as my jeans are tucked into my long brown suede boots. 

I think I look good, and I’m certainly trying to be fashionable, but how much is stylish satisfaction muted by feeling just silly for going along with some of these trends?  Why have I spent almost $200 on these boots?  Why are my jeans tucked into them?  Do I ride a horse to school?  Bale hay between classes?  Slop around in a barn before catching the bus to campus?  No, no, and no, and when boots really matter up here, for sloshing around in snow and slush, I would hate to drag these suede puppies through that icy, grayish muck.  So, this is truly an attempt at a fashion statement, and nothing more.

And though I care a lot about looking good, and am willing to spend on clothes, I have an on-going conflict b/w trying to stay stylish with choosing clothes that endure across seasons.  Not in a stuffy Talbot’s or Ann Taylor kind of way, but in via “staples,” e.g., a white button down shirt, good jeans, and some black pieces that can be mixed and matched with a couple new sweaters or shoes each year.  My general policy is that each purchase should last through 2 1/2 seaons, with that third season being the one where I retire the item.  Unlike many women, I HATE purchasing shoes and bags, because they change so often that I think they should be MUCH cheaper than they are, being so much more expensive than a lot of other pieces with which we costume ourselves.  Plus loitering in the shoe department is akin to waiting in line at the post office or airport.  Crowded, tense and irritating. 

Anyway, it’s taken me a year to be willing to go public with this jeans in boots thing, and I can’t help but feel simultaneously glamorous and totally goofy.  Not typically two words you imagine linked together regarding your public appearance.  I’ve mused about this in other capacities before - how to be noticed without being conspicuous?  It ain’t easy being a sensation, whether in riding boots or mini skirts!

(This blog was originally going to be a comment in Wesley’s fashion posts.  Check out his knowledge - he shouldn’t be just my guiding light!)

This post is mostly a balm for Monday morning lethargy and resistance to being back in the office.  I was relatively quiet in the blogosphere last week, due to grading midterms up through Friday at 2pm.  Given my hazy understanding of my readership, I’ll refrain from gossiping too much about the experience.  What’s the appropriate length of time before I can declassify such thoughts? 

And I was gloriously off-line all weekend in NYC.  Another wonderful trip for the M.A.S., though we’re exhausted (and aging more rapidly than ever) after 3 nights of solid drinking.  We’re an impressive duo…is one way to look at it.  In vain resistance to the aging process, I strutted around this afternoon in one of those mini denim skirts much more appropriate for 21 than 31 year olds.  I’ve got the legs for it, but certainly not the comfort level to cruise around MIT campus in such a tiny number.  That’s ok, was nice to be a little arm candy for the afternoon!

Saw some of my Deis girls and their adorable daughters - we had a laugh at realizing the natural progression from being a tattle-tale (which I once was) to blogging.  And attended a baby shower Sat night where the one newborn in attendance was passed around among several moms-to-be who tried to pretend they weren’t practicing for what was to come.  Don’t worry ladies, you’re naturals! 

And now it’s dark at 5pm and my eyes are barely open at what’s really 12:45 am.  It’s going to be a long week of detoxing and needing sleep…Monday morning comes too soon!

For those of you following the struggles in New Orleans to save public housing, this is a phenomenal article from New Orlean’s Gambit Weekly detailing the primary “battleground” - the Lafitte housing projects in the 6th ward: structurally sound, dry, geographically desirable, and slated for demolition.  Despite the fact that it’s a) cheaper to renovate, b) easily convertible to temporary worker housing, and c) desperately needed to fill the employment shortages that continue to plague New Orleans.  All this and more is detailed in this piece. 

I attended some of the planning meetings linked with the company Zyscovich cited in this article.  It is true - and poignant and upsetting - that Treme residents talk about the “buildings” when talking about Lafitte.  The buildings themselves are as much a part of the community fabric as the neighbors and families that lived in these projects and neighborhood.  And it’s true that you don’t get much sturdier than this in NOLA.  It’s devastating to think that these buildings might come down.  And it’s confounding when you see them for yourself.  Every visitor I’ve had to New Orleans who sees them is confused all over again about HUD’s claims of the necessity of tearing them down.  It’s marvelous to watch them grapple with the contrast of the project with the notion that they must come down.  The consistency of everyone’s confusion is also righteously satifying, for those of us who are fighting to see these buildings survive.

It is my work in this battle that earned me the unjustified attacks by the housing activist back in August (a litany that continues to this day, btw), and this article covers my colleagues on all “sides” of the debate.  Although, it’s pretty difficult to see battle lines against anyone other than HUD.  Providence and Enterprise know its cheaper and better to keep the buildings than tear them down.  For those wishing to oppose Providence et al., they might redirect their energies at HUD and this Administration’s assault on the urban poor. 

You know, when the state redeveloped the West Broadway (”D Street”) projects here in South Boston, the tenants - including my aunt and cousins - lived in the projects throughout, as building by building was renovated.  There is no justifiable reason a similar situation could not be reached with Lafitte.  I wish you could see for yourselves, because it’s hard to present this case here when it seems so politically ideological versus what is best and most effective for residents, the neighborhood, city and economy. 

On a recent post here regarding the fifth anniversary of September 11, Wesley commented movingly on how he processes his grief and tries to make sense of the disaster in his life.  Obviously, this is a highly varied and personal process for Americans, and for many, it is a journey that is nowhere near close to over, one that will never really end.** 

And now, no matter the emotional or geopolitical “progress” we’ve made so far, the discovery of human remains at Ground Zero is another painful reminder of all we lost on that day, as New Yorkers, Americans, and cosmopolitan citizens of the world (the latter category being the latest concept we’re debating in my comparative urban politics class).   It’s unbelievable that as we watch the powers that be jockey for control of rebuilding the still empty site, listen to Nagin compete for national attention with Ground Zero to rebuild his own city, and argue the merits of how (not to mention whether) to rebuild these sites, we’ve almost missed that more than 40% of World Trade Center victims have never been identified.  Meanwhile, bodies in New Orleans continued to wash up through the summer.  More than 4,000 victims lost between the two disasters, and likely only half of those identified, claimed and laid to rest in some way by their loved ones. 

This, more than any other snapshot of our post-9/11 and post-Katrina world(s), symbolizes how these disasters permanently rupture our lives.  When people wonder about the progress made in either New York or the Gulf, what I hope they’re asking is how we’re doing building a new emotional, social and physical landscape that captures some of our surviving past, and incorporates that history into a different life and place for the future.  Progress is not rebuilding what was lost; that’s virtually impossible (though Varsovians made the best attempt at this in rebuilding Warsaw after WWII).  Progress is appropriately memorializing that loss in a new world. 

And this is a life-long project, for individuals personally, and for those of us who work to breathe new life into cities irrevocably damaged by disasters.

I learned this lesson of perpetuity in two ways, personally and professionally.  When I broke my back in 2000, cliff-jumping at Rick’s Cafe in Jamaica, I narrowly missed paralysis from my thoughtless antics as just another tourist on Spring Break.  A random, unplanned act that forever altered my life and my outlook.  I can feel myself tightening up inside just thinking about it.  Then almost 18 months later to the day, the world underwent a similar brutal lesson, when those planes struck the Towers (then the Pentagon, and finally crashing in that Pennsylvanian field).  By coincidence, I began a new job on September 17, 2001, and spent the first two months or so working directly on designing a 9/11 response program.  Eventually I was transferred into our Community Economic Development group and spent the next ten months working in Memphis, Miami, and Houston, but not Lower Manhattan. 

In August 2002, I was re-assigned to our Lower Manhattan initiative, a program I helped launch back in October 2001.  It would formally conclude in May 2004, but essentially just morphed into a new scope of services under a different name downtown.  When I came back to the Lower Manhattan group in 2002, it was as if I’d never left.  Sure, I’d miss 10 months of operational development and initial recovery activity downtown, but the vast impact of the disaster downtown, city-wide, nationally and internationally, left more than enough room for me to jump right in and carve out a role in our work and our place in the community downtown.  I worked downtown through January 2004 before leaving New York.  I continue to follow the progress of rebuilding, for formal research purposes and for personal interest.  This work, as I evidence in references to friends like Jake as those with whom I was in the Lower Manhattan “trenches,” will forever be with me.  Just like the titanium rods in my spine, and my new fear of heights. 

This is how I comfort myself when I get restless and frustrated that I have not been to New Orleans in almost two months (since the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina).  Everyday I think about when I’ll be back, in what capacity, and for how long.  I had been planning to move there next year, and that option remains in play.  But in what role is increasingly a mystery, as my work affiliated with MIT wraps up and I make no efforts to extend most of it.  I feel confident that the work is so immense and the need is so great, that there exists some piece to which I can contribute.  But I have more flexibility than when I worked downtown, and thus my options are also much more tenuous.  But what’s reassuring to me (and simultaneously so upsetting) is how the work to be done in New Orleans is a permanent part of its future. 

So while I shudder, like the rest of you, at the thought of bones being pulled from New York City manholes, five years later, I also secretly hope that this gruesome evidence reminds us all of the need for our long-term commitment to rehabilitating these cities we love, share, or at least, own collectively as a nation.  When you query about “progress” in New York or New Orleans, remember that survivors and practitioners in both cities are struggling with visions of their futures as much as they’re putting up buildings or restoring homes.   At a minimum, your on-going debate on the hows and means to recover these two sites is your contribution to this work. 

**(It is this sense of a life-altering new world set in motion for most of us that clashes most strongly with the government’s rhetoric of a “war on terrorism.”  Rather than having any end in sight, or defined battle ground, like the Civil War, Korean War, WWII, etc. this one must define a new epoch, like the Cold War, the war on drugs, poverty, etc.  Doesn’t sound promising, people, since I think we’re still “fighting” all those pathologies too.  Ok, maybe we got the Commies, though not from what I can tell based on the New Orleans activists I routinely bump up against.)

It’s nothin’ but politics this week here at The Redstar Perspective.  (Ok, so I did blather on for a bit about one of my other favorite subjects, drinkin’!) 

Make me happy and check out my latest at Foresight.  Though I voted for neither in the primaries, I’ve become absolutely fired up about Healey’s shenanigans against Deval Patrick in Massachusetts’s governor’s race. 

Not that he needs my tangential rant.  At the latest debate b/w the candidates last night, he told her to “get off her high horse.”  She looked like she’d punch him in the face if a) they weren’t on stage, and b) she wasn’t trying to pretend she was a lady. 

Welcome to Massachusetts, where the M Stands for Shut the Fuck Up.

She’s small but compelling, a woman at ease with folks from the streets (”my people” she calls the indigent and mentally ill of Boston, Newark, Hartford and elsewhere), a fan of wearing her collar up, or vibrant and artful styles from Chico’s.  From Franklin Hill in Mattapan to the shore of the Long Island Sound in Connecticut, she’s show me a lot and lived a variety of experiences. 

Now, it seems, we should all be paying attention to her and her neighbors in her adopted home in Connecticut. 

“Political observers and party activists alike view the sprawling 2nd District as a bellwether for the nation,” in the dead heat race for the 2nd U.S. congressional district. 

As you probably can imagine, my mom and stepdad’s yard is crowded with Courtney signs.  Consider this the unofficial Redstar endorsement. 

This story arrived in my in-box just as I’m preparing for a meeting to discuss 5 books on Marxism that I’ve consumed in the last week.  I was feeling pretty skeptical until now…of course, Marxists are only now catching on to the importance of shared culture and other attributes, as this collection of Latino/a workers emphasizes.

As for the child care issue (re: the revolving hours), don’t even get me started.  My mother was just recounting the other day how she had to take me to her sister’s in Boston when we lived in New Jersey and I came down with the chicken pox, because she couldn’t miss work.  That’s one of the longer treks I’ve heard for emergency child care!

Yeah, it is, my hometown!

Perhaps few of you will enjoy this tour as much as the M.A.S.  I am already planning our Defunct-Brewery Pub Crawl this fall.

Check this out:

http://community.sparknotes.com/

A weekly sum of all the celeb mags, by none other than the witty and glamorous Wesley, because as he says:

“you can’t read all the magazines while you’re getting a blowout.”

(That’s of your hair, boys.)

Link has been added to the blogroll on the right.

Here’s the best idea I’ve seen in a long time…

Too bad it’s already been done.

“Tyson said the tour was meant to be fun and raise money for charity.”

May I suggest: http://www.ncadv.org/

Somehow this doesn’t quite equate with Sorenstam competing on the PGA tour.

I have been the same height for the last 17 years, but my weight has fluctuated by about 30 pounds over that time.  Newly tall as a freshman in high school, one of my teachers told me I had chicken legs.  (Inappropriate?  Perhaps.)  In my mid-twenties, I lost 15 pounds in two weeks after I broke my back, unable to eat from a combination of meds, pain, and a week’s stay in the hospital after major surgery.  Though I gained it back over time, I lost 10 all over again during my first year at MIT, our opposite, high-stress version of the undergraduate’s “Freshman 15.”  Looking back on my college years, I like to joke that my diet consisted of large roast beef subs from New York Deli and a lot of weed. 

Although, that doesn’t give the rest of my snacking its due.  My buddy Aaron, an undisputed champion in the weight fluctuation game (he likes to beef up, abruptly slim down, and then run the NY Marathon), likely played a large part in putting Waltham’s Bagel Depot out of business, when he used to con the night shift (after the Depot’s ill-fated move to run 24/7 down the street from Brandeis) into giving him dozens of free bagels.  Nothing like heaps of scallion cream cheese at 3 am after a heavy night of drinking.

Then there were wings in 17 flavors from Wings Express.  Just as I insisted on keeping up with their drinking, smoking, and general heckling, at least once I gorged on wings with Aaron and his fraternity brother (and our buddy) Levine, part of a deliberate stoned chow-down one Sunday evening in late summer.  (I joke that I’m anti-sorority, but that if I was a guy, I’d be president of a fraternity.  Instead, I’m stuck with the title of AEPi biddy.  How ironic.  And classy!)

As you can see, this is more concerted orgy than mindless eating, the latter being what a professor at Cornell finds is key to the problem of America’s obesity.  This whole article made me chuckle, but the impetus for this post was his following comment about research subjects:

“It’s easy to find undergraduates to participate, but with the guys nothing makes sense because they all eat like animals,” he said.

I’m sayin’.

To quote one of my profs here, who is big on classroom management and corporate speak (”run it up the flagpole,” “drill down,” etc.)

I have added some new content to my Grounded Theory page, and my NOLA Links are finally updated. 

Blog conversations are taking off between The Redstar Perspective, Curiosity & the Kat, NYC Weboy, and Mama Dramas.  Check out their links to the right to hear what they have to say about marriage in the U.S., Upper East Siders, Grey’s Anatomy, and other crucial topics of the day.

And, as always, stay tuned.

As I bring the M.A.S. coffee in my living room on this lovely Sunday morning, new Census Bureau data unleashes a flurry of speculation by Americans and social scientists on why the percentage of married households in the U.S. is in the minority for the first time (49.7%).

I love these articles - tons of data accompanied by educated guessing by the masses and the intellectuals about how this could be.  It’s gay people!  It’s because women work!  It’s because of a loss of faith in this country!  It’s because of the cost of housing in the U.S.!  The honest answer is, right now, no one knows, and it is most likely an interaction of all the phenonema cited in this piece.  Personally, I’m amused by the concern of the guy from Focus on the Family, that young people are becoming too good at being single to learn how to be with another person.  (Didn’t I just comment about that last week??)

Articles on marriage and relationships and family structures always strike a very personal cord with me, as a single parent/extended family reared feminist woman with a string of bad relationships and a slowly fading commitment-phobia.  Only in the last month or so have I reached a point where my old classification scheme of single v. coupled feels “anachronistic,” to quote the professor for the Council on Contemporary Families.   I’m currently reprogramming myself to accept that I can develop and flourish as the independent rock star I am while part of a loving relationship.  (Loving being the operative word, since the past encounters required an obsessive focus on the other in an attempt to transform the ephemeral status of those relationships.  You know how it is, if I believe in him enough for both of us, this relationship will turn out to be real.)  One might think I’m moving in the opposite direction of the trends in this article, though many of the talking heads argue that young people crave “strong family bonds” and marriage eventually. 

I have always felt particularly ambivalent about marriage (if not the wedding dress…mmmmm…glamour).  Certainly aided by wedding ennui of the last 5 years (20+ events, I lost count), I felt pretty oppositional towards what I considered to be an overemphasized rite of passage in the lives of women, specifically, especially given the range of possible milestones in our lives.  (I joke now that when I collect this PhD, I’m registering!)  Further, growing up with only one parent in the house, it took me a long time to see a husband as anything more than an extra set of hands. I don’t mean to overemphasize this relationship - though it is fabulous - but finally being in a healthy partnership as an adult has reinvigorated the concept of choice for me re: relationships.  Basically, I was single for so long that I was starting to feel like it wasn’t a choice.  Now, like this article suggests, I feel like I have some options for how I want to structure aspects of my life. 

I’m looking forward to the coverage of this finding in the coming days, as pundits and politicians wax about the meaning of marriage in society.  I personally have never been able to understand the emphasis, whether I’m sentimentally in love or defiantly single.  It will always feel a bit like a rational, economic decision to me.  And as a feminist and Triskelion alum, I’ve always seen marriage as a political foil for broader efforts to perpetuate gender inequality in our society.  Obviously, this will attach easily to the coverage of Foley these days.  I’m more intrigued to see how conservatives link it to an issue of national security for this country.  I’ll let Wesley take it from here.

Sitting at my new kitchen table (Thanks Bernie & Phyl!), still rummaging around in Castells.  Wild news about Cory Lidle all over the papers this morning.  I heard first from my dad last night, though he failed to put together the fact that the building Cory hit - The Belaire - was where he stayed in 2000 when I was at Hospital for Special Surgery for a spinal fusion.  The hospital was a couple blocks over from my apartment on the Upper East Side.  So many reminders of  my old ‘hood lately!

Including here in Castells.  In his critique of Louis Wirth’s seminal work (if you haven’t noticed, I’m working my way through the planning and sociology “bestsellers” in anticipation of my exams this spring), Urbanism as a Way of Life, he points out that in Wirth’s emphasis on the density of cities as instrumental in shaping urban culture, “cohabitation without the possibility of real expansion leads to individual savagery…and consequently, to agressiveness.”  Castells thinks Wirth has it all wrong, that urban culture is a misnomer for a specific kind of social life borne of capitalism (broadly defined).  

Who knows - NYC would be the ideal-type city to support both arguments.  But as anyone who has ever been jostled by rude, plasticized, tightly-wound, and elder New Yorkers in line for coffee, meds or groceries on the Upper East Side knows, Wirth was right on the money.   And though it seems they’re usually women haranging and elbowing us at Eli’s or Starbucks, my worst experience with this was a thin, older, ascot- and blazer-wearing jackass who mimicked me in a cafe on E 79th St this spring until I got off my cell phone.  Originally getting my coffee to go, I took twice as long in the store after this, since I threw that first latte in his face. 

Savages.

(Ok, so I didn’t really throw my coffee at him.  I live in Boston now, where we are a civilized bunch.)

By 2010, the world is supposed to be more than 50% urbanized.  The BBC offers this phenomenal interactive map that traces global urbanization since 1950, when North America and Europe were the most urbanized continents on the planet.  This stat of a forthcoming predominantly urbanized world is something we here in the Department of Urban Studies & Planning like to cite, particularly to fundraisers uncertain of our indispensibility to the world. 

It is a growth pattern that (former Marxist) sociologist Manuel Castells recognized, in his 1970s path-breaking work, The Urban Question.  I took a class with Castells in 2005 (in which he looks less Hitchcockian and more Hobbitt-like), and I can picture his appreciation of his own cleverness when he wrote:

“If one relates this evolution with the economico-political structure on a world scale, and, more concretely, with the decline in the standard of living in the regions with the greatest demographic growth, and with the gradual political mobilization of the working masses, one can understand the sudden interest that western sociologists have discovered in both the problem of birth control and the process of urbanization.”

Certainly he paused after he wrote that, appreciating his wry acknowledgement of predominantly white male scholars suddenly taking an interest in birth control in countries populated by dark, exotic women and the men who keep them.  This from the man who in describing the rise of feminism in history summarized his class lecture with “Remember the Witches!“ 

If only the rest of his book was intelligible, I’d be all over it.  But here I am, blogging away again!

I’m reading legendary city planner Kevin Lynch’s article “The Pattern of the Metropolis,” in sociologist Charles Tilly’s collection, An Urban World.  Lynch theorizes about several development patterns that can bring forth the greatest “potential for metropolitan life.” One of them we might call sprawl (”the metropolitan region would rapidly spread over a vast continuous tract, perhaps coextensive with adjacent metropolitan regions”), though he did not use such a term in 1961 when he wrote this.   

As you might surmise by the fact that I’m blogging right now, I don’t find this chapter especially capitivating.  I’m not sure who might be reading it other than this insular world of erudite planners and scholars in which I orbit.  (Though of course, it’s highly possible I’m underestimating his popularity among urban design junkies like my friend Shannon.)  Belying the expansive homes all my professors seem to live in (mostly in Brookline and Newton, no less), the prospects of prosperity are not what draws most of us to academia (despite our universal, contrary notion that our thoughts and opinions are priceless).  So, imagine my amusement at Lynch’s example that contrasts the benefits of present city life, versus the proposed sprawl he describes.  I can’t imagine who he envisioned as his target audience.  

He writes:

“Thus communication in the sense of purposeful trips (’I am going out to buy a fur coat’) might not be hindered, but spontaneous or accidental communication (’Oh, look at that fur coat in the window!’), which is one of the advantages of present city life, might be impaired by the lack of concentration.”

Personally, I have yet to find the right fur to match my NPR tote.  And getting the length right so the coat won’t catch in the spokes of my bike as I commute to Cambridge - now that’s just a bitch. 

Fortunately, while our capital reserves may be low, the intelligentsia’s sardonic, self-satisfied wit is forever in rich supply.

Thanks to Wesley (and check out his blog!!!) for hooking me up with the true on-line news sources…otherwise, I might have missed this recap of the throwdown b/w my preferred Grey’s hunk, Dr. Burke, and that oversold preppie, McDreamy.

 Ah George, ever the peacemaker.  Someone get these two some spandex and throw them into the ring!

Needs off this show. 

(Have just downloaded my first tv show to iTunes.  So cool to catch up on missed episodes of Grey’s for only $1.99, though why does it take a half hour to download???)

(I’m trying to ignore the fact that if I’d heard her rant re: brides eight months ago, I would have been choked up.  Ah, the life of the smugly committed.  I barely recognize myself!)

Mark, on the other hand, should definitely stay.

And isn’t Alex turning out to be the hero of the show!  (Leah always knew that was coming…)

Love Meredith’s speech, and that Burke was reading Star. 

Not a bad episode, especially in lieu of 90 pages of descriptions of the proletariat, per Frederich Engels, socialist and bigot.  (A whole chapter devoted to how the Irish immigrants of England are drunks who sleep with pigs!)

As only Nelson, of Simpsons fame, can really taunt.

Yankees stink!!!

Go Tigers!

Love the calls now for A-Rod’s head!

Make sure he collects all his stuff before he hits the road…he won’t want to leave behind that Kate Spade; it’s all he’s got to show for his $25M/year worth.