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.

(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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(This post is a substitute for the Excellent academic meme I am supposed to participate in. I don’t read enough academic blogs.)

I’ve always known I am an ageist. I have a tendency to look up or around me for information, not down. (I also don’t like bending down, though I think that’s due to my height and old back injury.)

Part of this is due to my own desire to grow up fast - I’m always looking ahead, and I rarely miss the “good old days.” Thus, I’m tough on the youngsters, which by now I’d probably think of as anyone about 4-5 years younger than me. What can I say, at least I’m in touch with my biases.

This NY Times article about young, famous DC blogger dudes (ok, I think they mention one or two women by name) triggered this observation. Matt Yglesias (26) and Ezra Klein (23) are two featured bloggers I recently dropped from my Google reader (my blogroll to the right is much more comprehensive than what I read daily). Yglesias I just found too narrow-minded in his Upper West Side worldview after awhile (despite his relative awareness of his own lens), and Ezra I only recently dropped after too much hysterical shrieking over Clinton and a willingness to tolerate his even more unglued commenters (for those who suspect a bias, I also dropped Taylor Marsh, for her pro-Clinton zeal).

Of course, given how much time I spend in the ’sphere, and how much news I get from it versus from other sources, I often forget that a large chunk of its *authoritative* voices are from folks (dudes, really) under 30. Reading this article now, I felt a mixture of dismissiveness and jealousy. Why am I listening to these young, white boys? And why is everybody else? Consider these excerpts:

Life in the house informs life on the blog…

UnfoggeDCon was so popular that the Flophouse played host to it again last year. It was a typical keg party, with 70-plus people packed into the house for drinking and dancing. “We had a laptop and people were live blogging the party for the people who couldn’t come,” Becks said.

These bloggers are the cool kids who know they’re smart, like some Seth Rogen character with a Ph.D. from Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Oy. (Though I did throw a great party back in my 20-something NY days. In my 30s in Boston, not so much.)

In part because so many people blog anonymously, this leaves me wondering about the life experience (and indirectly, age) of the bloggers I really enjoy and/or respect. So I made a list of my faves; the ones I look forward to reading, even if I don’t always agree with them.

After the jump are my Top 12. I separate them according to if they’re part of my “Clinton blogging” world or not, as with the Clinton-related folks I spend little time discussing anything but the primary, and we all (except for Big Tent Democrat) are Clinton supporters. There’s also a bonus shout-out for a new blogroll addition at the end.

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With 8 days until the March 4 primaries, this is how I feel. Exhausted of the he said/she said. Tired of sifting through the various charges leveled at candidates, campaigns, their supporters, the media, bloggers, at me. A week ago I was fired up - This is participatory democracy! - and NYC Weboy and I laughed about how the blogs need a mediator to keep the place civilized. I was spending all day on the web, and at one point exchanged emails with a dear friend of mine about the rise of social isolation in contemporary society and how I am one of those people who have *traded* face-to-face interaction for virtual socializing.This dear friend, a young black woman married and raising an interracial child, has so far been a voice of reason for me in this campaign. While the clunky media-driven debate over “Race v. gender” has raged for months, searching greedily for The Biggest Loser between our two Dem candidates, she said to me in an email that this has been her “dream” primary - she’s supporting Obama, but would have happily supported Clinton. With Obama she gained a role model for her daughter and theoretical future sons, but she got teary at both Obama’s “Yes We Can” and Clinton’s “This One’s for the Girls” videos. This friend is who I think of when I see The Obamas grace three magazine covers in one week (he on The Economist and US News, and Michelle on Newsweek) and am struck by how cool and overdue that is for this nation. It is her that I think of when I feel pride watching these two candidates share the debate stage and make the Democratic Party look great. And it is this friend who I am now pulling into the blogosphere, at her own peril.

Because now this my lovely friend is spending more time than usual on-line, discovering for herself how f***ing obnoxious so many of the blog comment threads are about the candidates. And my experiments in consciousness-raising here at The RP suddenly feel especially unpleasant. I’m taking her down with me! Oh No!

My support for Clinton has origins in her qualifications for the Presidency - she’s the smartest and the realistic best the Dems have to offer, I think, and her gender firmly pushes me into her camp. But I don’t think I’m alone when I say that her candidacy has taken on a whole new level of meaning for me, divorced from the candidate. This has become a fight for me about gender equity, a battle I’ve long waged, whether aggressively or sometimes just silently in my head. I feel like I’m fighting for Clinton in honor of my mother and her peers, in honor of the women’s lives I’ve had the privilege to study for school, and for myself and my and my peers’ future. Watching the attacks on Clinton this primary season has unleashed an anger in me that I’d either been ignoring or resisting until now, one that I’m hoping will last for the rest of my life.

The problem is that Clinton - of course - is not a perfect candidate on which to mount my fight for justice. No single woman would be; the fight to reduce oppression and domination of women is a battle to be waged across campaigns, political and economic and social structures, and on behalf of and with a range of activists committed to social equity.

The meta-narrative of this campaign, and electoral politics more generally, have pretty much prohibited such a coalitional struggle, as the false choice between the “black man and the white woman” exploits and reinforces the already fragile relationships between activists representing different social groups and struggles. As a Clinton supporter, in the time and space available to me in my current on- and off-line life, I’ve sacrified depth of analysis about this race for qualified support of my candidate. I say qualified because most everything I post in her favor is casually vetted and posted at a deliberately partisan site for other Clinton supporters. I’ve characterized this site as a safe space that I think legitimately has its place here in the ’sphere. And I love being a part of it.

But I cannot stress enough that this Clinton support is not my politics as usual. The reason I rarely get fired up about elections or candidates is because I think politicians are pretty much all the same, and the system is set up such that their self-interest always comes first. I believe that to get things done you need to be willing to negotiate with a pretty varied range of people and groups, and that conflict (versus violence) is fundamental and necessary, and difference is to be tolerated and embraced, not suppressed. I think change comes incrementally, due to a variety of intertwined external and internal pressures, including movement politics, protest, behind-the-scenes deal-making, and policymaking.

Clinton and Obama both represent different pieces of the scenario I just described. They comprise different coalitions of voters, different tactics (between them and within their campaigns) to land the nomination, different narratives of how they’ll lead, different leadership styles, yet very similar political positions and stances across a wide range of issues that matter to various voters. Neither of them will really change our power to influence the system, regardless of how much both camps of supporters believe they will (beyond the diffuse and thrilling symbolic empowerment many of us will feel should our preferred candidate take that oath in January). Only we can do that, and once either of them is in office, both become more representative than they are now of all the legislative, regulatory, distributive, and participatory changes we need in our government.

What has been a real loss for me this campaign is how divergent I feel from my usual stances of a) trying to better understand the intersectionality of various forms of oppression that women, people of color, LGBT, and others feel, and b) fighting for greater anti-poverty policy and equity in the U.S. I don’t believe that loss would be vindicated by participating in the Obama campaign either. What I’m hoping is that at the end of this primary, rather than tripping over deepened gendered, ethno-racial, sexist and classist divides, our mutual desire to heal our (re-) opened wounds is stronger than ever.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was a national outcry for an honest conversation about the persistence of racial and economic inquity in the U.S. Some folks actually began that conversation, picking up where they left off before the storm struck, and are still talking and agitating to this day. May the 2008 Presidential elections leave us with a similar mandate, and may more of us engage with it than the many-but-still-too-few who are fighting for justice in the Gulf Coast now.

Because just like Katrina evacuees in TX, all of us matter well beyond March 4, November 4, and January 20, 2009. Pretty soon Clinton or Obama or even McCain will be behind the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’ll still be sitting here at our desks, in our cars, on the bus, or behind the counter. Staring down the same old shit.

Part 1,000,000.

Because I’m known for better and worse for my honesty, and no doubt I’d end up saying legitimate but incendiary things like Michelle Obama’s I’m finally proud of my country remark. 

(And like Barack Obama, I could quite possibly spring onto the national scene as the latest golden child [if my prior jobs are any indication], but unlike Obama, ultimately alienate everyone for insisting on doing things my own way, and losing my temper and telling one too many people off - cue McCain here.  Also like Obama, some of the *friends* I’ve made along my radical-pragmatic way will surely come back to bite me in the a**.)

Though I’ve enjoyed the solidarity of the blogs of other Clinton supporters in the last couple weeks, I disagree strongly with the scornful responses of several of them to Ms. Obama’s comments about her national pride (one post has already been pulled).  First of all, the theoretical beauty of our country is that we are free to express disappointment, pride, anger, faith or any level of investment in our nation, its leaders, our fellow residents, etc.  Secondly, if case anyone missed the Democratic primary meme, the issues of race, gender, identity, privilege, and social difference have been front and center this season.  While the media would have us believe that black women are the epitome of our national struggle between voting with our skin or our vaginas (or our default hatred of either), of course the choice between candidates runs much deeper for most of us.  Policies matter, past and present performance matters, personal histories matter, associations matter, constituencies matter, perceptions matter.  The symbolic choice of Clinton v. Obama represents two sides of the same cultural coins, to name a few: rewarding hard work, experience and preparedness versus renewing our faith in the American Dream; playing it safe (middle-class conservatism) versus entrepreneurial risk-taking; or challenging the patriarchy versus the legacy of slavery.

It’s this last scheme that provides the greatest context through which to interpret Ms. Obama’s comments vis-a-vis the white women who have leapt to critize her here.  Just as women have repeatedly argued (see comments) during this campaign’s on-going Hillary Sexism Watch ™ that men are not in a position to set the parameters of what constitutes sexism, neither should white folks feel free to chastise an African-American woman’s pride in her country.  The truth is that our shared history of slavery splits our country in a crude but material fashion.  White women who criticize Ms. Obama for her remarks, no matter their own experiences of oppression as females in the U.S., do not share with her the specific cultural history of slavery and the on-going experience of being a person of color in a country that has never reconciled our brutal and violent past built on on the backs of those women and men. 

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I’ve effectively narrowed my Google reader these days that if the blogs aren’t talking about the elections, I’m not reading them. But I feel compelled, obligated even, to talk about the shootings at NIU yesterday.

The most up-to-date reporting has two parallel threads: that the student was a well-liked, respected student (link above), and that he had recently stopped taking his medications (scripts not yet identifed). Especially after VA Tech, we’re familiar - if still unprepared to deal with - the *plotline* of untreated or *mis-managed* mental illness that weaves through these tragedies. At NIU, people seem mystified that this accomplished student deemed a contributing member of academic society could turn up and fire into a crowd of his peers at random and then kill himself. Nonetheless, I’m sure as the days pass the usual story of “we should have seen it coming” will continue to develop.

Listening to right-leaning talk radio the other night (here in MA that means Republicans arguing in favor of gun control), a former school board member and trustee was trying to explain that often this level of atrocity is not preventable. If MIT is any guide, I’m inclined to agree. Most campuses, sometimes surprisingly so, are accessible 24/7. MIT is a large, sprawling urban campus, with no clear borders and some doors that are never, ever locked. Most of the time, the few violent assaults (not necessarily on students) in the area of or around campus, whether by strangers or folks associated with a transitional house adjacent to one of the dorms, are minimized in formal release statements from MIT or Harvard police or the university administrations. Finally, last year, an eventful one in which MIT repeatedly showed up in the local and national press for one crisis after another, one of our students was stabbed in his dorm 10 times by an ex-girlfriend who was a student at Wellesley College; the major lesson learned from that experience was to belatedly tighten security at the dorms.

But I think this notion of “good kids gone bad” is under explored in this tragedy. (more…)

Championing the underdog, and sitting on my couch in my pj’s.  I will say that watching Clemens righteously overheat in his own defense during live steroids testimony on morning television is certainly a distraction from this overwraught primary season.  Prior to this was some suggestions from the Today show on outfits for women for V Day.  As a political obsessive, these reminders that life goes on are more than welcome. 

One of the silver linings of Clinton’s campaign is that I have discovered all these lovely supporters around the web, and we’re hunkering down “together” as Clinton doubles down on the three big primary states.  Forgive me if I question this strategy - yes, I’m one of those underlings who thinks I can do my boss’s job better than them.  Probably why I always find myself back in school rather than rising the professional ranks.

But I’ve been here before, repeatedly, sadly.  Other than Clinton in ‘96, and Bloomberg in the generals in ‘01, I’ve got very few winning votes behind me.  Hell, I voted for Ruth Messinger against Guiliani in ‘97. (I’d only been in the city for four months by that point and already knew he was a fascist by then.)  I hope I won’t be continuing this streak this spring.

Over beers last night with friends, I learned they both supported Obama (though one is not a citizen and can’t vote), and the reasons were the ones we’ve heard over and over.  He stood up against the Iraq war - once, I pointed out - oh really?  She’s just not electable; see here and here for more on letting your opponents (GOP) make your decisions for you.  See here re: victim-blaming and divisiveness.  It was amazing, one of them expects a royal screw-up from Obama - using JFK’s Bay of Pigs as an example - but still supported him because people just hate Clinton too much.  I can’t imagine voting for the person you expect to bring your country to a standstill.

One of them went out of her way to tell me how much she liked (the) Clinton(s).  This was a different tactic riverdaughter notices from (secret) Clinton supporters, folks who distance themselves from *liking* the candidate but may actually be supporting her in the voting both.  This goes back to how uncool it is to support Clinton.  On the other hand, I’ve heard this “likable” thing a lot.  I’m not supporting her, but I think she’s a great person.  Well who gives a sh*t if you “like” her or not?  I don’t need to remind us all of the 8-year regime we’ve had with the guy we’d love to have a beer with (even though he’s a teetotaller now. And as the Irish say, never trust someone who doesn’t drink.  Ok, maybe my relatives say it.)  Another friend of mine told me she was supporting Obama because she [trusted] him.  Trust no politicians, is what I said in response.  Especially ones who don’t talk to supporters or the press, but holds rallies across the country like he’s on the Lenny Kravitz tour I saw in ‘96 in the UK.  Same cool show, different city, night after night. 

My fear is becoming that we’re ushering in the unknown, and I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating after the last 8 years, I don’t like or want surprises right now.  As Stanley Fish writes,

Unencumbered by the record of achievements and missteps that comes along with political longevity, he can present a clean slate to the electorate. Nothing hazarded equals nothing to be criticized for.

Ah, a “clean slate” - just like New Orleans. 

From dday at Digby, commenting on progressive candidate Donna Edwards’s win in Maryland last night, against entrenched Democratic interests:

Barack Obama’s going to wake up one day soon and figure out that the movement he’s inspiring is a whole lot more progressive than he is, and hopefully that will factor into his potential agenda.

A professor of mine is supporting Obama because he knows the progressive movement Obama is tapping into is much larger than the candidate himself.   I generally consider myself to be part of that progressive movement, and now rooting for the underdog who offers universal health care and better all round domestic policies seems like the right place to be.  But wait, I’m rooting for Clinton.  Silly me. 

I thought folks might be interested in seeing a full list of endorsements for Sens. Clinton and Obama, compiled by an all-volunteer citizens action group called Project Vote Smart.  (Check them out for updates on key legislation, report cards for your state and officials, and a political courage test that they try to administer to legislators re: stances on tough issues.) 

Largely due to her colleagues, Clinton has many, many more endorsements than Obama overall.  However, what I found interesting (besides Kimora Lee Simmons endorsing Clinton) was the media endorsements the two picked up.  As we know, Clinton got The NY Times, and smaller urban papers, including The Denver Post, Hartford Courant, Kansas City Star, and the Salt Lake Tribune (full list in the link above).  Obama got the major papers in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Francisco, and The Nation (full list in the link above). 

Given we’re all spending so much time deconstructing - and criticizing - the biased television and punditry media coverage of the two, I’m curious how these endorsements are influencing media coverage in people’s fair cities.  Thoughts?  I haven’t seen too much in my blogosphere about the major papers’ coverage of the campaigns.

In other news, I will be updating my blogroll to add a whole bunch of politicas (the feminized “politico”, if you will) that I’ve found in the on-going search for less condemning coverage of Sen. Clinton.  Welcome to Digby, MyDD, The Confluence (in exile from the Obamarama going on at DailyKos), TalkLeft, The LeftCoaster, Tom Watson, and Taylor Marsh. I also dropped Open Left from my Google reader after only 2 weeks.  I guess I prefer my Obamania more explicitly exuberant versus shrouded in claims of “intelligent” and reasoned “creative class” analysis.  Despite my fears, it seems this campaign season is indeed widening my horizons.

This post has been marinating for awhile, and is a plea for us to call out the Clinton and Obama campaigns on the respective racism and sexism being dished out/tolerated.  It’s spurred in part by the dissonant experience of finding incredible solidarity in the anti-misogyny and emerging Clinton supporter pride in my blogosphere at the same time that I’m defensively arguing with Obama shippers who otherwise speak the truth about structural racism, sexism, and discrimination in this frenzied primary season.   I could bore you with the research I’ve studied and conducted about group identity; group threat; race/class/gender schisms in urban politics; and how all those social phenomena shape and re-shape our political, social and economic power structures.  But instead I’m going to return to the personal, as these debates seem to be getting increasingly so for most of us, to both our individual and group benefit and detriment.

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This one’s for Hillary! 

Dissonance… 

…describes my feeling as a scholar of political activism knowing that I’m campaigning against the candidate credited with raising the stature of organizing as an effective political tool;

…describes my feeling as a highly educated young woman campaigning with those who share my working class background versus those who share my current profile as a “wine track” voter, i.e., my classmates and most of my peers (consider me NOT liberated by previous waves of feminism, apparently);

…describes my feeling as a Hillary Clinton supporter somehow caught in the blorgy that is the lefty blogosphere’s lovefest for Barack Obama (ew, I’m averting my eyes!).

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I said to the M.A.S. on the last night of our L.A. vacation: “you’re the image, i’m the words.”  A metaphor for our relationship constructed of his photography work and my writing. 

He’s recently uploaded hundreds of his photos of New Orleans on Flickr - the majority of which were taken during joint visits to the region since January 2006.  His work is foremost a testament to the city, and is accompanied by a moving essay describing his love affair with it, including his mourning and desires for the place since Katrina hit in August ‘05.  He writes: (more…)

… 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.

In flannel pj’s, recovering from a cold, pre-packing for vacation in L.A.  I leave tonight.  By prepacking I mean a) checking the weather for the 8 millionth time, b) making a list of what to pack, c) doing last minute laundry, and d) taking care of the essentials, like blogging and updating my iPod for the trip. 

I finally surrendered to the real reason behind my major fatigue this week - a head cold picked up somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard during my holiday travels.  I’ve had two consecutive nights of between 9 and 10 hours of sleep - sumptuous! - and sat on my couch til 4pm yesterday watching Waitress.  I was initially like, “eh,” but I keep thinking about it.  I doubt I’ll post a review; it was a bit too emphatically quirky for me, but there were definitely some sublime moments.  Probably a good rental.

Then last night, after a quick trip to the Wrentham outlets, where I experienced my first shoe mania in the 50% OFF EVERYTHING IN THE STORE AS WE CLOSE FOR REMODELING Cole Haan (seriously, a jacket and 2 pairs of shoes for $100), and a bowl of chicken soup at home, the M.A.S. and I had our requisite fight before we leave on vacation.  I say “requisite” because Bill Simmons, aka the Sports Guy, says this is one of the rules of relationships, that you’ll fight the night before you leave.  Ours involved mapping out our expectations of our trip to this former home of the M.A.S., after I told him I didn’t want him to lecture me on the history and significance of L.A. the entire time. Some bickering led to the mutual awareness that I am not into marching from monument to monument, and that a good trip for both of us involves wandering around neighborhoods and eating and drinking.  I think we’re going to have a fine old time. 

In my absence, NYC Weboy has once again graciously agreed to hold down the fort over here, cleaning out my spam folder and posting some original and cross-posted content for your reading pleasure.  Please show him the love you show me, and rest assured you’ll be more up to speed on current events in his stead than you normally are with me (New Orleans notwithstanding).  My life, home and blog are fortunate to have someone looking in on us in my absence. 

Be Good!!

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.

For the M.A.S. and me, Xmas began tonight, and continues, ceaselessly, through Tuesday.  I’m off-line for most of that, perhaps sneaking in a blog post, and def. some blog reading, on Monday. 

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!  And a stiff drink, or zen meditation, or Bring It On on TBS, pick your poison, if you’re planning to be as exhausted by the end as I am!!!!

Be safe and have fun.

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. 

I’m working off a mac right now, and I don’t know where my icons are for bolding, linking, etc., so bear with me on this rough cut. - UPDATE: LINKS ADDED.  12/16/07.

See the last bunch of posts - and my colleagues in the blogosphere, inc. Brownfemipower, Kai and Cara - re: the literal battle over the future of public housing in NOLA. There’s a stay of execution for the moment, and we should give ourselves a collective moment of thankful pause before resuming the relentless pressure over this issue. But that’s not the point of this post, written during my dept.’s holiday party on this Friday afternoon.

I want to thank the blogosphere for helping me pass my general exams, which I did today, WITH DISTINCTION, a rarely invoked status here in my dept. In addition to my colleagues in the Gulf, who have educated me, often painfully, on framing, power, gender, identity, conflict and struggle, I’m indebted to my virtual peers here. The obvious is NYC Weboy, my unparalleled champion, and Prof. Zero is a close second, for hosting such a supportive environment to share my ideas and the personal struggles that inform my thinking. But it’s the debates of the broader community that I’ve been listening to, and reading, and thinking about, that I feel really helped me here at MIT and this morning in particular, especially when it comes to issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, power and equity/justice. Shout outs go to Pandagon, where I cut my teeth on the feminist blogosphere, Feministe, who’s writing I respect, Feministing, who seems to have the biggest market for throwing one’s hat in the ring, Shakesville, who’s mainstream progressiveness and f***ing hilarious snark never fails to please, and especially, Sylvia and Brownfemipower, for eloquent, provocative writing that truly leaves me thinking. Kai, Black Amazon (who also just met her own academic hurdles - check out this post!), Rachel’s Tavern, Racismreview, the Field Negro, The Curvature, Racewire, Racialicious, the Silence of our Friends and Outside the Toybox are also in my reader and in my mind. The M.A.S. wants to know why I love the blogosphere, and it’s because it’s my real intellectual community, where I shape and test my ideas.

Of course, my peeps keep me grounded and engaged and sane, and they’ll be getting their shoutouts offline. So thank you fellow bloggers. Today is a f***ing red letter day, filled with wine and good cheer and warm praise and proud, humbled tears and I hope you can all share in it with me!!

PS: If you want to add to this syllabus, pls offer your recommendations in the comments below!!