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 afternoon in NOLA I saw a car with both Clinton and Obama bumper stickers.  Part of the Anything But McBush movement, no doubt. 

If I lived in this city I would certainly finally move up into the next pants size I am currently just below.

I passed what looked like an enormous Baptist group on my way back to my hotel tonight.  I think Jim Wallis may be right about this place being a “converting ground.”

There was a parade or protest this afternoon; I saw it from my car near St. Bernard and Claiborne.  I need to find out what it was.

Home tomorrow!  Yay! Wish me luck trying to get on some earlier flights, and not getting stuck forever in ATL.  In my absence, do check out my thoughts from the past few days.

by xkcd.

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.

It’s last call for the oldest bar in Mexico City.

Heads up, uni: You can take the revolutionaries out of the bar, but you can’t take the spirits out of the revolutionaries!!

Clearly, this calls for a drink.

I’ve been marinating this particular post in my brain for a couple of weeks - it started when I was thinking about writing more about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto when I got back after taking Christmas week off.  And I’ve been contemplating writing it here since Red offered me the chance to sub in for her while she went away.  Red and I share a deep interest in plicy thinking, in developing new ideas and seeing where they lead.  Were she and I in the same city, this is what I would be bouncing back and forth with her over dinner.  In lieu of that - I miss you, too, Red - I’m putting my thoughts here.

President Bush has apparently settled on the traditional Lame Duck presidential route of “concentrating” on foreign plicy on his way out the door - laughably, in his case, because he’s been lousy at foreign policy, the messes he’s dealing with are largely of his own making, and his “Policy team” seems especially short on skill these days. Thinking about that has led me though to think about what comes next, why we are where we are in the world, and how we got here.

And here’s the thing - by accident or by design (though mostly, I think, by accident), Mr. Bush has forced a transition from Post World War 2 diplomacy into a new, somewhat uncharted territory: I don’t have a name for it yet, but it’s something like “Post Post Colonial” or “Post Yalta”… something that reflects the changes of 60 or so years of recent history.

(more…)

My time is almost up here (I’m hoping to fit in one or two more pithy thoughts), but I’d like to discuss my main task this week: housekeeping.  Red asked me to fill in, in part, to help keep her comment queue clean.  Unlike my comments section over at nycweboy, Red is inundated with spam comments of all sorts (the fact that it’s a sign of popularity, of course makes me wildly jealous), and left unchecked, almost 100 messages can be lined up in a matter of hours.

What I noticed, in fact, was that since last year, things have gotten exponentially worse.  Dozens of comments show up afer only 3 or 4 hours, and because I don’t want to miss any real ones, I’ve been scanning through the material.  And it’s awful - there’s a repeating porn message I’ve been deleting all day that’s really just unbelievably nasty.  And that doesn’t mention the ones who try “Nice post!” and some sneaky link as a way in. And I’m not trying to goose Red’s readership by bringing this up (it’s not like I posted a gratuitous shot of Pam Anderson or anything), but I feel like someone needs to say something, and I haven’t seen a lot of people remark on this.

There’s been some effort to control spam messages on e-mail boxes (there kind of had to be, because people were getting furious, and businesses were struggling to keep firewalls operational), but I think the governemnt response was entirely backwards: rather than make the problem the spammers, it made the probem us, by making us sign on to “do not mail” lists of dubious usefulness. The problem isn’t the fact that we have e-mail addresses or websites; the problem is that all sorts of dubious enterprises - financial scams, porn sites, car salesmen and God knows what else - seem to think all’s fair in the pursuit of audience and sales.  It’s that behavior that’s the problem, and that’s the thing that needs to be addressed.

It’s easy to let this discussion get bogged down in the nature of our 1st Amendment and in looking like… I don’t know… some sort of fascist, maybe? … by complaining.  But I don’t know anyone - no one - who is a fan of this stuff.  Like “thank goodness I got another message from some bank scam trying to access my information” or “gee, I had no idea big blonde women were so versatile!”  No, mostly we know what this is - a nuisance and where we want it to go - away.  And the dirty secret is, no one’s doing a damn thing about it.

Okay, I did put it off for a while on top of my original plan… but even so, the first day back to the gym really sucked.

If you want to know why no one starts with the man in the mirror… it’s because it’s painful and it leaves you nauseous.

And really there’s no less fun feeling at the gym than feeling like the biggest loser.

Yes, I’m being a whiny little beyotch, but I’m also sore.

More upbeat posts in a bit…

… 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.

What should I/we make of the fact that I went to school with two recurring VH-1 talking heads - Nick Stevens (elementary through h.s. and neighbor!) and Leigh Kessler (college)?   Remind me again why I am blogging in obscurity????  And of course, solving the world’s problems from my living room couch….

15 hours on Question 1.

And that was one of the easy ones, I thought.

16 pages, incl. bibliography and footnotes (10 pages of text). If I’m incl. the references, etc., then this jibes with my paper writing estimate of 1 hour per page. But I thought I didn’t count the notes et al. in past calculations.

Whatever, I’m FRIED and off to bed.

What do you think, should I not shower until this is over????

;)

Because I don’t think I’m going to work this into my generals anywhere, I’d like to state for the record here that legwarmers are the most fantastic invention ever. 

Carry on.

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

Top 10 Questions You’re Better Off Not Asking

1) Is that what you’re wearing?

(Got it, mom?)

2) Why don’t you have a boyfriend? 

This might have been my LEAST favorite question of my 20’s, especially since it was so often asked in sympathy, as if I was flawed, fucking up somehow, or incomplete without the requisite romantic appendage.

3) Do you think he’s “the one”?

Yeah, if we could not get into what I think of the concept of “soulmates” we’d probably all have a much more cheerful afternoon.

4) When are you two getting engaged/married?

5) When are you two having kids?  A.k.a., when are you going to give us some grandkids?

6) What baby names are you thinking about?

I learned not to ask this one when I immediately, reflexively passed judgment on one of the options a friend of mine was considering.  Now I try to never ask.

7) Are you breast feeding? 

I’m also a guilty culprit on this one, as my friends/family are split about 50/50 between moms who switch to formula early on and women who breast feed for longer than 3 months, and so I like surveying mothers on this one.  Apparently it’s a rough equivalent of asking single or unmarried women questions like #2 and #4, respectively.  I try to turn it into a sympathetic space for venting for those who feel like they’re on the wrong side of the question to compensate for my being an insensitive, prying, childless a**hole, but maybe I should just stop asking instead.

8) Are you going to have anymore kids?  (And then, of course: when?)

And what has become my most loathed question of my 30s:

9) What will you do once you finish your degree?

%&%^*^%$*****!!! 

I can only think of these Top 9, so give me your suggestions for #10.

10) …

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.

Recently I was celebrating my own unique existence.  As it turns out, my middle and last names are some of the most common in the U.S.

My middle name (my mother’s maiden name) is in the Top 15 of the 5,000 most common surnames in 2000, falling from its spot on the Top 10 list in 1990.  And my last name is #108, down from #104 in 1990.  To add insult to injury, my seemingly unusual first name, in another form, is the most common surname in the world.  (Though I do love when I meet folks who tell me my first name is a “Chinese” name.)

Fortunately, Redstar doesn’t make the list.  You can test your own surname via the link. 

I LOVE these kinds of articles about census data.  But note the total lack of irony in the reporting about the “durability of the family of man” that the persistence of certain last names reflects and the subsequent paragraph on slavery’s contribution to that familial lineage:

But the fact that about 1 in every 25 Americans is named Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller or Davis “suggests that there’s a durability in the family of man,” Mr. Kaplan, the author, said. A million Americans share each of those seven names. An additional 268 last names are common to 10,000 or more people. Together, those 275 names account for one in four Americans.

…The durability of some of the most common names in American history may also have been perpetuated because slaves either adopted or retained the surnames of their owners. About one in five Smiths are black, as are about one in three Johnsons, Browns, and Joneses and nearly half the people named Williams.  

H/t to Zuzu at Feministe, whose blog moniker is also likely as rare as her last name is common.

Have I mentioned how much I love 30 Rock?  I am so late to the game on this one. 

Genius.

So happy with my DVR, Grey’s, and 30 Rock right now.

Have a great weekend!

Well, right now, I’m on my couch in my pajamas, Shark frozen on my DVR.  But if you’re looking for Redstar via Google, here are 10 of the (less obvious than Redstar) search terms in which the RP pops up 1st:

1)) “feminist critique of grey’s anatomy”

2) “baptist church ninth ward”

3) “suburbs and urbanization”

4) “waterworks chestnut hill sucks”

5) “kisolanza farm lodge”

6) “new bedford ma raid on illegal immigrants”

7) “HUD public enemy” (this may be my favorite)

8) “why we don’t need health insurance” (It’s not what you think, I swear!)

9) “upper east side thin social women”

10) “costs of shrubbery”

What’s in your blog?

(h/t.)

Colbert on his ‘08 election prospects:

“voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.”

Hat tip.

(Meanwhile, keeping in mind his own presidential aspirations, Weboy tries to goose my flagging blog #s…)