The Redstar Perspective

UPDATE (10:55 p.m.): Apparently I’m not the only one quitting. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson is expected to resign tomorrow. Wahoo!!! Ok, now I’m done. Read on.

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It’s with some sadness and some relief that I write this post: I will not be blogging anymore at The Redstar Perspective. This has been a difficult decision, and I’m still unsure what it means. I may retire this site entirely, or I may resurrect it at an unknown point in the future. I’m still sorting out the details.

Here’s what led to this decision, somewhat in order of importance:

a) It’s time to write my dissertation. After meeting with two of my advisors recently, it’s clear I can finish this thing in the next 12 to 15 months and GRADUATE!!! Especially since the New Year, but generally speaking, blogging has become my primary activity, and an enormous time suck for me. Yes, my stats are SLOWLY growing, and, according to readers, my writing is improving. But, in addition to feeling like I’m losing my way re: the content of this blog (more on that in a minute), I also feel like I’m investing so much time and energy in this blog and not generating the returns I want to get. It’s not ok with me that my readership grows when I discuss the general election, because that’s not my preferred content focus. The hours I’ve been spending on posts about Obama v. Clinton, etc., is distracting me from really focusing on the writing I need to be doing NOW - that is, on issues of social justice, urban recovery and contentious politics in post-Katrina New Orleans. In other words, my dissertation.

b) I no longer feel comfortable blogging without anonymity in the ’sphere. Given where I’m at in my still-emerging career, I’m not ok with folks’ ability to track down my thoughts and opinions on-line.  I regret not blogging anonymously, and any blogging I do in the future will strive for greater anonymity. For someone with deeply personal intellectual interests, the current context of the Democratic primary and the empassioned and often heated on-line discussions of race, racism, gender, sexism and misogyny, privilege and prejudice have left me feeling that the web is an even less safe space to really grapple with these issues. In our splicing and dicing interpretative world, I know my thoughts and perspectives on the primary, on poverty, on my family, etc. are up for grabs for appropriation and re-interpretation. Nonetheless, I plan to remove some of the content from this site, but will leave the rest up for the history books.
c) The RP has run its course. This blog began in part because of my work in New Orleans, because my buddy Jake urged me to blog rather than send long e-mails to everyone I knew about what I was experiencing in the city beginning in January 2006. With this dissertation, my work in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is coming to a close. This blog has grown from that original reporting, to cover topics of development, poverty, housing, inequality, activism, cities, and politics more broadly, but all of this has been mixed up with odes to my boyfriend, Grey’s Anatomy, and random (hopefully amusing) stories about my childhood and roots. Frankly, I’m not interested in writing a general interest blog that’s a mix of analysis and journaling. I need the latter for my mental health, but I’ll find another outlet. My priority is to examine urban inequality, especially as it impacts low-income women, households, and neighborhoods. This is what I want to be blogging about (and working on in my lifetime), and I know there’s a niche audience who wants more of this. I’ve got all kinds of ideas for blogging, but I need a new and fresh venue. That will come in time.

So there you have it. Just in time for what would have been the second annual RP History Month. I’m still figuring out how to keep my original New Orleans posts and select others on-line and available. I’ll probably make an announcement about that in the future.

If you’d like to stay in touch, please leave a note in comments. That will give me an e-mail address for you (remember, others can’t see it) if/when I launch another blog.

Thanks to all my readers and champions over the last two years, especially NYC Weboy, and other blogging allies such as Professor Zero, DonnaDarko, Pizza Diavola and Pocochina. It’s been fun, instructive, exhausting and mostly my pleasure. I have become a blogger. Look at me.

Until we meet again, I leave you with some highly recommended reading:

Please read this disturbing, enraging and graphic coverage of the brutal rape and assault of a woman and her kids in Dunbar Village in W. Palm Beach, FL, and how you can let the NAACP know where their legal, PR and activist resources really belong.

A pregnant man challenges people’s ideas about gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights. And shakes up the healthcare profession. (H/t Echidne.) Meanwhile, pregnancy discrimination complaints from women reach record levels.

A refreshing comments thread that asks bloggers to cool it re: their election coverage. Instead of all the collective hyperventilating, let’s all check out Insurgent American’s 35-Point Practical Guide for Action. (H/t Corrente.)

Read Brownfemipower’s WAM conference speech about centering feminist activism around questions of citizenship and the problems this creates for advocating for immigrant women. (How I missed this conference - held at MIT, the irony! - is beyond me.)

Be well, have fun, and stay safe.

After 7+ years of Bush, our economy is in the worst shape since the Depression.  Tent cities are even in the public consciousness.  These developments point to the consistent, callous pattern of government neglect and abdication of responsibility under the Bush Administration, who, along with a GOP-led Congress, put into overdrive the worst trends of three decades of government devolution. 

Take my favorite example of New Orleans, where a flourishing Tent City should come as no surprise to anyone following post-Katrina recovery trends.  One of the worst travesties of the destruction of public housing in New Orleans is the grossly inadequate replacement of subsidized housing units in the proposed mixed-income developments.  Only one proposal - Lafitte - includes one-for-one replacement, in part because one of the development partners, Enterprise Community Partners, knows first hand the success of this model from past public housing renovation in Seattle.

A significant number of developer/do-gooder transplants to New Orleans hail from affluent cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle, which tend to have highly competitive, sophisticate and activist affordable housing development sectors.*  They bring these high-capacity models of affordable housing development with them to New Orleans.  Yet, several fundamental problems in New Orleans impede their replication. 

Obviously, all cities have unique socio-political cultures and different demographics.  That New Orleans is a distinctive place in the nation cannot be overstated.  Second, the political economy of New Orleans was weak prior to the storm, and is in tatters now.  Most of the non-profit and civil society actors in the city are trying to fill a serious void left by the financially eviscerated city government.  Third, and most problematically, the massive displacement of the poorest and most vulnerable, the overall whitening of the population, and a corresponding shift to a more conservative, middle-class urban politics, makes alive and well the spirit of Rep. Baker’s (R-Baton Rouge, LA) comment

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

This spirit is driving local and national decision-making behind affordable housing development in post-Katrina New Orleans. 

At the conference I was at in NOLA two weeks ago, in a panel on affordable housing development tenant activists routinely questioned the featured scholars, researchers and developers on the issue of displacement.  It came up over and over again, no matter how strenuously the panelists tried to frame market-based housing solutions as an overall positive for cities and low-income residents.  Cities like Boston et al. are not acting out of any unique urban altruism to retain low-income households, but out of political necessity (votes) and reality (suburban political power and NIMBY-esque zoning + federal funding for cities for low-income populations).  When one of the poorest cities in the country like New Orleans sees a silver lining in Katrina displacing a significant percentage of its neediest tenants all at once - versus the slow trickle generated in other cities in the last twenty years - you can be damn sure the political elites will do everything in their power to keep those folks out. 

They owe a big thanks to the GOP-dominated government we had until 2007, who denied the HUD and Medicaid funds that could have flowed to properly shelter, care for and bring home these families after Katrina.  Actions like this reflect the same spirit behind the massive funding cuts to HUD and HHS Programs and the complete absence of regulation of the housing and homeownership boom that contribute now to rising rates of foreclosures and homelessness nationwide. 

A national pollster at the NOLA conference talked about widespread Katrina fatigue, accompanied by a sense of “we’ve got our own problems now.”  No doubt.  I just hope that as we turn inward to deal with local economic insecurity and crisis, we all remember that post-Katrina New Orleans was never the exception, but the harshest of realities for our country. 

(This post has been updated.  3/18/08.  10:11 p.m.)

Obama’s Speech is here. Here’s my first reaction (and here are others).  I want to respond now to the truth he raises about loving those who make us who we are, warts and all, and using that unconditional love of our deeply flawed, contradictory pasts and selves to bring about positive social change.  Obama says (my emphases throughout):

[Rev. Wright] contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

I spent the weekend with dear friends, two of whom have a similar upbringing to mine in being raised within lower-income networks of a single mother and her kin and friends.  The three of us now have advanced degrees from high status private schools, relationships with white men from middle-class families, and are hopefully on track to do better than our parents (although in my case, it would now be to keep up with them). Over the weekend we laughingly compared the different elements of our pasts that we’re trying to leave behind versus still embrace, and the middle-class proclivities we’ve developed: our own personal journeys from the beer track to the wine track, if you will. 

Yet, I left the weekend feeling a little like a stereotypical resentful, angry working-class white, namely due to the carping of another friend who kept talking about how elite we all were and how we didn’t live in “the real world,” and a late night dinner ode to immigrant paragons versus ignorant, uneducated, unskilled native-born Americans.  Sigh.  I don’t need to remind RP readers that the world’s a little more complicated than that.

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…of its inability to deliver services, that is…

Ridership continues to decline, while the use of public transportation continues to grow nationwide.

Still I believe.

Driving to school this morning in the NAS-TAY rain and slush, pass Brookline Liquors and read on the awning, “Go Celts”.  It’s been A LONG LONG time since I’ve seen that.  Pretty sure I was still shooting hoops in junior high during the last Celtics fervor.

Driving home from school this afternoon, still DISGUSTING outside, 93.7 Mike FM-”We play everything” delivers on that promise by playing Styx “The Best of Times.”  Picture me sitting at the Comm Av/Chestnut Hill Av intersection in Brighton in my turquoise love machine, “PONTIAC” lit up in red on the trunk since the lights are on, with Styx cranked and me singing right along.  I bet it’s moments like that that I’m at my most attractive.  (Guess the classic-rock-obsessed hs boyfriend was good for something.)

And then there’s this in the NY Times: a guy living outside Brighton Center receives a postcard dated 1929, addressed to the former owner of his house.  To quote the history-loving M.A.S.:  COOOL.

 

 

Good!

Bad.  Very bad.

… or, the week The Weboy had:

Monday

• Write a little
• Drive to Boston on clear, sunny day.
• Arrive in Boston early evening, enjoy wonderful weather, visit old job
• Go back to house to pack, confront remains of leaving in haste
• Contemplate futility of current plans
• Write a little, go to bed, resolve to pack thoroughly tomorrow

Tuesday

• Feel overwhelmed; write a little
• Attempt to pack
• Realize I haven’t eaten, get food
• Attempt to pack some more; contemplate futility of moving, meaning of life, decide, sadly, to go on
• Visit coworkers, as promised, on warm sunny day; find they are very busy and can’t talk.
• Hang out with really cool Asst Manager and his fiancee and meet their new dog (a very cute small Yorkiepoo)
• Go home, pack some more; make progress, but not enough.
• Attempt to load car, only make it as far as basement; feel tired, call Mom and agree that driving late at night and tired not good
• Prepare to stay the night; get New Hampshire primary results, enjoy Clinton comeback, write a little (more…)

Weboy here.  It appears our Red-headed mistress has decided to bask in the sun, without more posting.  Good.

I think it’s only fitting that my last post in Boston should be on Red’s site - it’s her town, and now I leave it to her. Red isn’t happy about the fact that I’ve moved back to New York (I am, after all, an NYC Weboy), but I think time has shown that one town can only contain the both of us for so long - at some point, no town is big enough.

Last night on my blog, I talked about the feeling that it’s over.  Today, walking around town, I was reminded that it’s not.  It was a beautiful day (take that, LA), and people all over reveled in the ability to skip the winter coat and play outdoors.  Boston, at heart, is an “outdoorsy” town - ruddy faced people who enjoy a brisk run or a game of pickup touch football on the quad (there’s a reason the northeastern college experience is so quintessential).  RedStar, our very own, confessed to me one rainy day that for years she got mistaken as the “field hockey” type… when really she’s probably a kindred spirit to nice Upper East Side girls who’s main competitive sport is shopping…. or nightclubbing.

I’d say I’m with her, but really, I’m not.  There’s a secret, solitary jock inside of me who likes a good run.  I may have felt a little lost, a bit out of place here in my two year residency… but we were getting there, Boston and I, on a mutual agreement of terms. In New York, it puts me in something akin to the “gym bunny” class of gay men, but without the Zone diet and the crazy abs. Healthy, and a little thinner… that would be fine.

Walking home today across the Public Garden, I was sad to see that the Swan Boats are on their winter hiatus.  As a kid, nothing thrilled me more than visits to the Garden, and a chance to ride around the (man made) lake.  Looking for Mack, Jack, Lack and Quack and all the other ducklings. My first gift to my nephew (the Most Adorable Nephew in the Universe), in fact was just that book. Now, with adult eyes, I see that the amazing lake is really just a man made pond, no deeper than a duckling’s legs.  But in Spring and Summer, with the Swan Boats circling, it still seems magical.  It’s not the worst memory to go home with.

Everyone loves a Boston Girl.  I still love mine - the inner one, and the Redheaded stepchild. Take care of our town, Red.

I hear more about the “new” New Orleans these days (sadly, you can believe some of the hype, and not for the right reasons) than any “new” NY, but one need only satisfy one’s Law & Order addiction - as I’m doing as a side project to my PhD - to see how much NYC has changed over the years.  In keeping with the spirit of writing about not too much this week, this post is not a wonkish treatise about urban development and politics.  (I know, I know, you miss my lecturing ways.  Prof. Redstar will be back mid-January, after I shop my screenplay in L.A.  But I digress…)

I’m extemporizing here about my upcoming visit to NYC, which involves four nights of visiting friends in the outer boroughs.  And I’m not talking about the hipsterati in Brooklyn.  Nope, instead, with thirtysomething boyfriend in tow, I will be staying with friends and their families (collectively, three children under the age of five) in the Bronx and Queens.  Saturday night involves a trip downtown for a joint ABD status/birthday dinner with my best girlfriend from college and her husband.  And New Year’s Eve is still shaping up, but the likelihood of me blindly finding my way into a cab between 2 and 4 a.m. is about as high as one of the “lesser-known [presidential] candidates” debating on C-Span right now actually winning the election (someone take the remote away from the M.A.S.). 

Sure, I still have friends who live in Manhattan, and I’m still uncool enough that most of them live uptown (the married ones anyway…and I’ve never been cool enough to have less than a handful of friends living in Brooklyn), but really my NYC reality now is visiting my 22 year old cousin as she fashions her own version of my quarterlife adventures in the city.  Most of these friends are also out of town right now, on vacation with their young families, on mini-breaks with new flames, and just generally living their lives in the ways we know now, which mean that our paths cross less and less frequently, and generally only for special occasions such as reunions, weddings, etc.  My world is shrinking, and shifting. 

This post is not rueful, even if it is nostalgic.  This man of mine has a growing Flickr collection of us posed in front of extended family Christmas trees and dinner tables, at far-flung weddings, and in various leisurely settings.  Apparently, this is now my life.  And I’m wiser, and happier and fatter for it.  But what a kick, commuting from Boston’s own periphery of Brighton to the ‘hoods of Riverdale and Jackson Heights.  Places - mainly the latter - I’d consider living if I ever came back to NY.  A hope I still keep alive, even as I relax behind the wheel of my stepmom’s hand-me-down Pontiac, commuting between Newton and Quincy and Hanover and Connecticut in my own (re)new(ed) life in Red Sox Nation.  Who knew.

I’m off til mid-next week.  If I was more motivated, I’d organize a 2007 “Best of” collection of posts for your enjoyment; I’ve seen that around the web and wish I had done it.  Someone go through my archives for me, will ya?  But feel free to poke around here in my absence.  I can’t promise you’ll want any of the food in the cabinets, but there’s always some booze lying around.  Until I’m back on-line, I wish you all A Very Happy New Year - Be Safe and Have Fun!!

More or less cross-posted at NYC Weboy.

Just so we’re clear. 

PolicyLink has released a brief analysis of HUD’s plans to replace subsidized housing for extremely low-income households, those making 30% of Area Median Income ($15,9k).  This includes many households in New Orleans with minimum wage employees working full-time (40h) per week in the service and hospitality industries earning just over $12,000 per year.  Overall, HUD plans to replace about one-third of the 12k pre-storm units.  Separate from the overly villified and spotlighted public housing developments, which face a 59% net loss, less than one-third of the deeply subsidized housing specifically set aside for seniors, the disabled, and low-wage workers will be rebuilt.  Check out the graph on page 3 to see the comparative reductions in public housing, scattered site housing, and supportive/senior housing.

I’m deliberately preying on the cultural distinctions we make between the worthy and unworthy poor here, a false dichotomy, not least in the reality of neighborhood composition.  I’m doing this because I know the assumptions we all make about who lives in public housing, including the assumptions held by public housing residents themselves about their neighbors.  But I want to make clear that the housing specifically built to enable our grandmothers or disabled relatives - those we can’t or won’t care for, or those who, like us, seek independent living that meets their needs - to live on their own is also being destroyed by the federal government in New Orleans, whether by deliberate and corrupt demolition choices, or because of a willful and callous lack of reinvestment to bring these properties back on line.

I originally wrote this post last night, only to have my blog crash.  It was much more personal and rhetorical, if no less strident.  I linked to this very personal and clear post from kactus, about her experience as a mother, disabled woman, and community member in public housing, and I wrote about my own experiences growing up visiting family in South Boston public housing.  I wrote about eating corned beef and cabbage on tv trays at my grandmother’s, and how I thought tv trays were the coolest thing ever.  I wrote about how excited I was on these visits to cross the pedestrian bridge over the 2 lane road in front of the projects, and I distinctly remember the snazzy leather Members Only type jacket my 80s mustached dad was sporting on these visits.  I remember the specific language my grandmother used to describe her home, words like “rubbish” instead of trash, which went into the “incinerator” chute outside in the hall, and how our visits were in the “parlor” versus the living room.  I remember playing with my cousin Clare’s new Easy Bake oven during one of many Christmas’s visiting her and her sibs and parents and grandmother in the notorious D St projects, which went through phased redevelopment around that time, starting from the back towards the street, per the insistence of the residents, who knew that the housing authority would be more likely to prematurely stop development once improvements were visible from the street.  I remember more recently my aunt, who raised 5 kids and not a few grandkids at D Street on AFDC and worked her way up from a clerk to a property manager at the Boston Housing Authority, complaining that the redevelopment of D Street failed to reflect some of the daily realities of how people lived, for example, in its awkward placement of utility hookups that made it difficult for families to do their laundry.  And I wrote about how, more recently, the M.A.S. listened to 2 of my cousins his age laugh about how they shoveled some snow at D Street one winter, only to receive a check from Housing for their services several weeks later. 

In 2005, my uncle gave up the McCormack property that once belonged to my grandmother, an apartment we had in the family for over 40 years.  My cousins still live in other developments in Southie.  And my many cousins and aunts and uncles who have moved out to the suburbs continue to battle problems of poverty, including poor health and healthcare, addiction, homelessness, and insecure housing tenure.  Last night, before my blog crashed, I asked, whose quality of life are we talking about when we debate the ills of concentration and the benefits of dispersion, and the pathologies of public housing and the problems of poverty?  We’re talking about my family, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles. 

I’m sure glad they don’t live in New Orleans. 

Weboy told me he likes my prison metaphor, so I’m sticking with it.

Finished up question 3 around 4pm (Thanks for the answer, Bill!).  And didn’t really get back to work until almost 2 hours ago, around 10pm tonight.  I can’t motivate; I feel like I’m saying the same thing repeatedly.  I have a worldview, I have an approach to problems.  I read and I read and I read, and I have found some amazing books and authors, but no matter how these questions are written, I feel like they keep leading me back to the same place.  I’d like to save us all the trouble of reading the 30+ pages of double-spaced text that will be e-mailed off tomorrow, and just refer my advisors to the three already completed questions.  Though they might secretly be thankful, I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed.

Anyway, so I treated myself a little bit tonight.  Hung out at the Dairy Burger for awhile, got into bed and watched an old Law & Order re-run (I LOVE the seasons from the early 90s…can you say “recessionitis?”  Mike Logan can.), and then I went to the gym.  My workout was mild, at best, but I watched Ugly Betty (or, more like it, looked at Henry from the neck down - there was a lot of muscles and ripped abs going on tonight), and got out of the house for an hour.  Much needed.

Best of all, I hit a couple of soft rock favorites on the dial that sounded positively exceptional as I cruised down Comm Av, behind the wheel for the first time since Sunday.  I was BLARING, BLARING the Bee Gee’s “How Deep is Your Love” and wailing along as I headed over the BU bridge, and fortunately I had to look for parking for a few minutes near school while I bopped and sang my way through Mary’s Boy Child.  Seriously, I have some ok taste in music (namely electronica, house, dance stuff) but the rest of my preferences map onto those of late-middle-aged black women, if the Classic R&B cd that I made for my friend Nikki’s wedding is any indication (I thought it was full of excellent dance hits, and she exclaimed that her mother was going to love it; the Jamnin’ 105.1 boat cruise I went on in NY Harbor in the early 2000s is another fitting memory).   I love it, but sometimes other people tell me my iTunes suck.  What they know.  All I’ve long known is I was born 20 years too late. 

Looking forward to getting my life back tomorrow night.  M.A.S. is planning some sort of Welcome Back party, but he’s being very hush hush about it all, possibly because he was informed only this afternoon that streamers et al. were expected. 

Thanks for all the support this week, but we’re not out of the woods yet!!

We are however, done with the metaphor portion of the program for the moment.

Hee.

That’s what I’ll be doing this weekend for my exam, typing up some notes, organizing my books and articles, taping key stuff to the walls surrounding my desk (which has been moved to my “foyer” area where my books are).  I’m NERVOUS and the MIKE IS OPEN HERE AT THE RP FOR WELL-WISHES FROM THE AUDIENCE.   

(Prayers for NO SNOW on Monday are also welcome; our amazing and diligent Dept. Admin. Chief has already emailed me concerned that snow on Monday morning will prevent her from getting my exam questions to me at the specified hour of 10 a.m.  When will this end????)

As for today, it was all exercise and retail therapy and now a dinner date with my man.  I’m wearing a cute little jumper of a dress from Michael Kors more appropriate for my 22 yr old NYC cousin, but it was $25 at Macy’s after 3 different discounts, and I’ve got the legs for it, if I do say so myself!!   

Legs that, to Amy’s delight I’m sure, are covered in LEGWARMERS!!!  I have been jonesing for these since they came out last year - who even knows if they’re still in style (Weboy?), but I DON’T CARE!  (Plus it’s Boston, which means they’ll be in style late or never or for too long, and regardless, just bucking the prep trend of which I am typically a part is avant garde enough for me!)

A pair of new gloves, also deeply discounted and with some cashmere inside, and a little make-up and Chaka Khan on the iPod and I am ready to head out.  Hoping to leave the anxiety at home with the misplaced idea that I should be reading The Truly Disadvantaged (again) instead of having some much needed, last minute fun.

Have a Wonderful Weekend!!!

 

AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

In Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, one sociologist’s exploration into the “American character,” the “Massachusetts Irish” are “the ethnic group that defines the standard for ethnic groups.”*  (In all our traditional, old world, trusting, close-kin glory)

I’m sayin’.

 

*From Alan Wolfe, “Democracy versus Sociology,” in Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier’s Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality,”  1992, p. 317.

 

(Meanwhile, perhaps appropriately, on WWOZ, playing quietly on my iTunes, I can only make out the line in some alt version of The 12 Days of Christmas, “5 ROB ROYS.”)

Or so MA Gov. Deval Patrick equates responding to the discovery of nooses within the MBTA (one employee wearing one for Halloween, and a noose found in a subway car by a black carman). Good for him. That’s the aggressive language that municipalities and officials should be using to describe these homegrown acts of racial violence, these hate crimes, including the agnostics at the federal Dept. of Justice who promise to act when “the facts and the law warrant” them to do so. (Duh.)

Based on data compiled from 70% of all police authorities nationwide, the FBI reports that hate crimes increased 8% in 2006. While race-related incidents in the precincts reporting fell about 2% from 2005, they comprise 52% of all reported events. 58% of all offenders are white, and one-third of the incidents occur near or at home. (Sleep well!)

In related event, this past weekend thousands of African-Americans marched at the Justice Dept. to protest the racial (and economic) inequality in the criminal justice system.

The Justice Department said yesterday that it is committed to prosecuting civil rights cases.

“The Justice Department shares with those who demonstrate today their objective of bringing to justice those who commit criminal acts of hate,” Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said in a statement.

“It shares their vision of eradicating hate in our society,” said Mukasey, who was sworn in as attorney general this week.

Clearly one strategy the Administration has to realize that vision is to shift our hatred to those outside our society. Furthermore, perhaps we should give the new AG some time to get caught up on DOJ’s actual record of fighting hate crimes under Bush & Co. From a June 2007 NYT piece:

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Legendarily agressive, fearless, obnoxious, and, apparently, stupid too.  Dare we brag, some of the most wicked, f*ckin’ stupid in the nation.  Yeah, what’s up.

Don’t look at me for pointers, I’ve already copped to failing my road test once. Though, now that I think about it, I did pass the written exam for my driver’s permit twice, given I had to renew it after I didn’t get my license on the first try.

 

Thanks to shame-faced IL driver O. Dear for the tip.

In my patriotic high school and hometown, we in the chorus learned all the Armed Forces songs, and performed a Veteran’s Day concert every year.  Firedoglake offers up the much more depressing facts on the state of veterans’ lives in the U.S.

I’m really late in even acknowledging the flood in Tabasco, Mexico (being a Katrina and 9/11 responder has not transformed me into a disaster specialist, by any means.)  Brownfemipower has the info, the photos and links to how we can help. 

Paul Krugman chides Reagan revisionists.  I don’t get the Reagan love at all (theoretically, sure).  Everything historical I read in terms of urban, economic and social policy in this country points to Reagan’s special powers of increasing inequality and insecurity, undermining civil rights, race-baiting, and eroding faith in government.  The guy makes me sick. 

This “newsflash” is sort of entertaining: smart chicks can’t get dates.  Not enough M.A.S.’s to go around, apparently.

Not exactly a disaster, though I’m disappointed Felix Arroyo didn’t get re-elected, here’s a breakdown of Boston City Council at-large voting by ward.  Ever heard of machine politics?

And prior to this post, I’m carrying on about housing as a human right and subprime vs. predatory lending.  Hope you all had a terrific long weekend!!

I’m chest deep in texts as I prepare for my general exams (3 weeks and 6 days and counting!!), hence the relative blog silence. Just now I finished reading the chapter “Los Angeles as Postmodern Urbanism” in From Chicago to L.A.: Making Sense of Urban Theory.* But perhaps more interesting to you, Redstar readers, is my own urban experience, observed with typical Redstar intensity as I extricate myself from my books at various intervals.

We begin yesterday morning, when I woke up to NPR telling me that the MBTA was about to undergo a major budget crunch, because its fixed rate on electricity costs was about to expire. Forgive me if I suggest they might have been prepared for this, and point them to the recently increased fares as a partial solution to their financial woes. It then took 45 minutes to travel the ~3 miles from my apartment to Kenmore Square, where my train abruptly terminated, due to a “medical emergency,” and I was reminded - again - of the unique decline in ridership the T is experiencing. Last night, after belatedly facing the truth that I’d never make it to my N.I.A. class after giving myself only 30 minutes on the T to travel the 5-6 miles between Cambridge and Newton, I disembarked in Cleveland Circle to see that the other refurbished storefront opening beside the forthcoming Citibank is a chain burrito place. Noting that it’s several facades down from Boloco, another burrito shop, I sent the M.A.S. a text noting that burritos (broadly defined) are Boston’s new pizza (we have two of those shops in Cleveland Circle already). Sigh. I had such high hopes for the ‘hood (I am pleased to see that Lint sells Paper, Denim & Cloth jeans, which Louis Boston told me two years ago were totally passe but I still love).

Fast forward to this morning (since my evening at home consisted of getting aggravated that my Comcast internet connection is still not working after Sunday morning’s power outage), where NPR now tells me that MIT is suing Frank Gehry for a faulty design of our egomaniacal Stata Center. Welcome to Cognoscente Celebrity Death Match. The wine and cheese is to your left.

After a morning N.I.A. class in Newton Center in which the group of us 8 or so white women put our jewelry in the middle of a circle in order to pay tribute to it (as symbolic of ourselves, according the well-meaning instructor), I headed off to vote. Having paid little attention to the candidates for the at-large City Council seats (Bad Planner!! Bad Activist!!), I voted quickly for the two non-white-Irish-male incumbents and then tried to recall any distinguishing information about the remaining Flaherty, White, Connolly, etc. choices before me. I did my best, then headed off to school.

Later this afternoon I had lunch with another grad student and friend at a new Sebastian’s in Kendall Square, where we agreed the place was NY-ish in its varied and pricey health-conscious quick fare, but absolutely Boston in its enormous scale (easily two stores deep). Shortly after I introduced this friend, originally from the Midwest, to the term “Masshole,” which I used to describe myself - as I backed up out of a parking lot onto Mass Ave across on-coming traffic and into flowing traffic through a green light - and the other drivers who didn’t stop but just went around me as if they’re used to this kind of bullsh*t shenanigan (they are). When I came out of the library several hours later to move my car from its 2 hour spot into the now available parking lot, I passed a homeless man with “Yankees Suck” licenses plates on two of his shopping carts. And I thought to myself, this is my urbanism.

*For those of you who care, the “Chicago School” has been the dominant theory of cities and urbanism in urban sociology (my field) through the 20th century. It’s modernist idea of the city as an organic, unified whole around which regions and through which individual relationships are ecologically (vs. economically) organized (the latter especially along the black-white “color line”) has been contested - most recently - by the postmodern L.A. School, which proposes that cities and urban form are shaped and linked by a global economic restructuring that emphasizes flexible production, deep welfare state retrenchment, and the subsequent, oft-violent polarization of a homogenized capitalist elite living in technologically-linked-but-geographically-dispersed-privatized worlds atop a multi-cultural, insecure proletariat, with both groups relatively placated by the media-disseminated mythology that this hyper-privatized, hyper-consumer, hyper-polarized world is normative and desirable. (As you can probably tell, I’m still piecing together a working definition of the L.A. school, which is sort of its point.)

The M.A.S.’s brother is in town and held us captive in his Brookline B&B last night and forced us to drink bourbon by a roaring fire (gotta love those Eagle Scouts).  If an RP reader could bring me another Gatorade that’d be great.  I like Berry.

If you don’t have a DVR full of shows to keep you company this Friday afternoon, may I suggest the following links instead:

Boston’s Top 25 most stylish people.  Adam at Universal Hub effectively mocks the concept, as well as takes issue with the overrepresentation of Harvard. I wish I could say the average Beaver deserved a spot on this list, but I’d be lying.  However, this urban planner is pleased to see two planning and community development folk make the list…and you thought we were all frumpy in our bike helmets and NPR bags and zeal for zoning board meetings. 

Nope, today we leave the less sartorial wonkish fun to Ezra, who has a cool graph (mmmmm, colorful, pretty graphs) on how federal agricultural subsidies are responsible for our love o’ fast food.  Or something. (Me, I’d just like some more Gatorade right now.  Anyone??)  Sans illustrations, he also has a quick little thought piece on the difference between economic status and economic security in today’s “Tchotchke Economy.”  And finally, some evidence on why we should let Amtrak off the hook for that fact that they totally suck.

In other depressing news, The Urban Institute and National Council of La Raza have released a report on the “orphaning” of U.S. children via federal immigration raids.  One of their three case study sites is New Bedford.  I hope to get back to you all with some deeper thoughts on this report - after my head stops pounding, of course.

Meanwhile, I have been totally remiss in not acknowledging the latest piece of chicanery from those buffoons over at FEMA (or as the Field Negro calls them, F-ake-MA).  Gotta love their post-wildfires fake press conference, which has left all of us about as inspired as Bush’s bullsh*t in Jackson Square two years ago, I’m sure.  Fortunately, there’s enough room in our federal government for everyone to get a chance at a do-over.  Clearly Katrina taught us all some important life lessons.

Enjoy the weekend everyone.  I will be over at The Silence of our Friends, having an intense discussion on racism in feminist activism.  Oh, and study for my general exams, of course.

Clearly Lucchino didn’t expect to win in four.  (Was he pulled into Game 4 unexpectedly during a quick run to Home Depot?  And what, no one had an extra sport coat lying around?  )

2007 World Champion Red Sox!!!!!  “Surreal,” says Papelbon, “it’s just beginning to hit me,” says Lucchino (yeah, no kidding), Tek chokes up.  Mike Lowell is the cutest ever (we must keep him!).  Everyone had their little moments of zen that they chuckled over after (tonight’s pleasantly surprised star: Kielty….yeah, that was a pretty bitchin’ homerun, he practically giggles into the mike). And of course, they couldn’t do it without the fans, they tell us.  Go Red Sox Nation!!!

It feels WEIRD; the miraculous, earth shattering events of ‘04 left me little prepared for the strong, righteous, kick ass team we watched this season more or less sail to this victory.  No doubt we had the expected highs and lows (my buddy Jake texted me as soon as they won, “did you ever doubt!” to which I replied, “of course! I’m a Sox fan!), but I feel differently stupified that we won again, so soon.  We’re f***ing good, not just beating the odds in a once in a lifetime moment.  Tito and the Nation might ask Belichick for some pointers on smoothly steamrolling the competition year after year, ignoring anything involving hitting the “record” button at any point, of course.  Who knows, perhaps we could do this again next year…

(Or did I just jinx us for eternity?  You know where to find me!)

As we seek cosmic meaning behind tonight’s win (anyone else get a kick out of the astrologers who give Youk detailed descriptions of the planets over at his blog?), Jake states for the record that he got married in ‘04, and had a baby in ‘07.  He and his wife have a long road in front of them if they plan to repeat the latter milestone annually to keep us awash in bling for the foreseeable future.

For me, this one’s for the M.A.S., the transplant who keeps marveling about how we were at Spring Break in March and Fenway in April and August and with Remy through the spring and summer on the radio and parked in front of our respective new cable boxes this fall.  There was even the baseball birthday, complete with the Sox cake, personalized baseball bat and rugby jersey for a fan who looks 30something but could unstandably be mistaken for 11 based on his loot. 

When we won in ‘04, one of the first things my dad said to me was that now both he and his dad had a WS victory in their lifetimes.  Now the M.A.S. has one too.  (Though I have two, which works, since I love winning.  Too bad I didn’t go to Jordan’s last spring!!)

Congrats! Mazel Tov! Hongera!* to the 2007 World Champion Red Sox!!

 

*Swahili for congrats.