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.

–

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.

I’ve written extensively here about my Obama skepticism.  Quotes like this don’t endear me to the man either.

From the February 25th issue of People, in “25 Questions for Barack Obama”:

Q: What was your best effort for Valentine’s Day?

A: Interesting question.  [Pause.] I’m so good to her in so many ways, no one gesture of undying love really stands out.

I really hope he was being facetious. The M.A.S. is a phenomenal partner, but if he ever uttered something like this, I’m pretty sure I’d be waiting with my “Need for Improvement” checklist when he got home that night.  But maybe that’s just me.

There’s some other comments in the piece, such as the first legislation he hopes to sign as President is “health care for all Americans,” that his last splurge was a birthday necklace for his wife that “wasn’t fake,” that she reminds him everyday that he is “not a perfect man” (though he has the “wisdom” to say she has “no flaws”), that he misses “anonymity” the most from his past life (though this Newsweek piece on Michelle Obama suggests otherwise - and also, in my opinion, does her less justice as a kickass independent woman than this NYT piece), and that he’d most like to meet Springsteen because he seems like a “good person.” 

I realize this is a People article, and that all the MSM links I’ve provided here deliberately paint - per the joint wisdoms of the campaigns and the publications - certainy portraits of the candidates, but honestly, someone should explain the concept of “modesty” to Sen. Obama.*

 

*Thank you for joining me in this latest edition of The RP’s Pot Kettle Black Politics.

 

Cross-posted at The Hillary 1000.

by xkcd.

I’ve updated my blogroll, especially the Politics category, but also some overdue additions in my Feminist links.  Check ‘em out.  Introduce yourself.  Make friends.

I’m spending some time with the fam this evening (currently blocking one of my mom’s dogs from the box of Cheez-its beside me as I type), and will be back tomorrow.  In the meantime, here’s some links to what I’m reading:

On-line:

Who Represents the Progressive Movement?

Periodically Speaking;

Count WHOSE Vote?;

“White” Like Who?;

and

Generation Gap.

 

Off-line:

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears;

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao;

Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City;

and Justice & the Politics of Difference.

 

Happy reading.

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.

 

 

Weboy here.

It was during the third shampoo - the one before the scalp massage and the Shiatsu in my chair - that I realized I like the pampering of my hair salon. I have given up a great many extravagances - I no longer shop til I drop, or go to the Spa for massages - but my hair is one thing where I just cant skimp.

And too, there’s the moments, like the shampoo, that are just utter indulgences. I usually close my eyes to experience the sensations of having someone else touch my head; it’s not something that happens all that regularly, and because, like many, I carry a lot of stress, it does take a lttle work to let oneself be touched. I completely understand people who say they simply leave their body - I drift into semi-consciousness.

Red is quite simply the only woman I know who came with amazing hair and needs to do little to it - when I first met her we discussed hair coloring, and she decided she couldn’t do it because her natural red might never be the same. And dash-it-all, she’s right: I don’t think I will ever see such golden tresses, especially when they’re kissed by the summer sun. Not only that, but with little effort - and I mean one basic blow-and-go haircut she’s had pretty much in all the time I’ve known her - her hair falls in waves of cascading shoulder length curls that most people get perms to achieve.

Me, not one thing about my hair is natural - I’ve cut it and dyed it and straightened it and braided it and done God knows what else. My current regime is the famous “Asian straight perm,” which I love, and which is utterly time consuming. My hair stylist is a genius, a wizard at cutting straight hair, and a great chemist - the results are long and lustrous, with minimal damage.

And, with a toss of my long mane, that may be that: thanks for having me over. Red should be back online shortly. With a tan, no doubt, and a refreshed spirit. It is, after all, a glamorous life.

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.

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!!

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.

12:03 pm.  Back in front of the PC after a short, brisk walk around the ‘hood.  Went to bed around 3 am last night after some quick blog reads, a few downward dogs, and an old L&O from 1994.  Woke up to excerpts from the Bush press conf. that he’s even more of a bullish, uninformed a**hole than we thought (how does he manage to just keep on surprising like that?), which is a decidedly less pleasant way to start the day than being jolted out of bed by a car alarm or the doorbell.

Anyway, on to question 2 (I have to answer 4 this week).  I’m sure I’ll be back with more mindless chatter, such as the fact that I’m loving all over again this old French Connection sweater I bought in 2000.  I think that place is a rip off, but when I was super skinny post-back surgery, a lot of their stuff worked for me, and I was momentarily rich from my MBA internship at Pricewaterhouse Coopers (WORST job ever).  Anyway, I recently washed it for the first time ever (vs. dry cleaning, before you get any ideas) after deciding it was too old and worn out to take proper care of anymore.  Well, wouldn’t you know, it lost it’s bungy-esque clingy feel, as expected, but now it’s softer and looser and just perfectly lovely in a way I didn’t expect.  How nice - a new old pink sweater.

And with that, I leave you with Weboy’s list of his favorite Xmas music (just in time for the start of Hanukkah!!).  He never fails to deliver in his own unique way, enthusiastically endorsing Mariah and Whitney before tossing out the obscure Pearl Bailey gem.  Take a visit and let him know your faves and most hated.

But don’t forget about me over here!  The RP is my link to the outside world right now.  Check in on me, will ya?

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

…re: feminism and education.

When I got back on-line yesterday after an overwhelming family weekend (you can pretty much ignore that Friday night musing about relaxing), I found my Google reader filled with I-think-Round 2 or 3 (??) of argument and confrontation related to Feministing Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism (FFF).  Now, RP readers know that I tend not to engage in debates I don’t know too much about; indeed, my blog personality is a lecturing one.  My comments on other people’s threads tend to be towards correction or filling in blanks with research that I think would strengthen the argument in the post.  (Unsurprisingly, I am often ignored.  Who’s less fun than a troll?  A smarty pants.)

Broadly speaking, women of color (WOC) bloggers are taking white, male community college professor Hugo Schwyzer to task for adding FFF to his course list, and using the vocal enthusiasm he is hearing from some of his students of color, who comprise the majority of his classroom, I believe, as a ringing endorsement for FFF.  The larger context for this is that there has been a wide and vocal condemnation of the book from WOC bloggers for being exclusionary in its stereotypical white, upper-middle-class feminist perspective (did you check out the book’s cover?).  His report of his students’ enjoyment of the book is therefore effectively translated as proving the WOC blogosphere wrong.

Here are the most recent posts about this that are in my Google reader, beginning with the professor’s that stimulated the criticism.   I ended up reading through them for hours, and eventually posted a comment at Brownfemipower’s post about the silo-ing and/or silencing of perspectives and activism of women of color in women’s studies curricula.  I wish, a day later, that I could remember in which post the author asked where were the white women criticizing FFF.  It was made as a critique, if I remember correctly (feel like I’m playing catch up…this is why I am often so often just a lurker!), of how the professor’s post indicated that a few of his women of color students liking the book therefore meant it was actually not offensive to WOC, as if women who fit this description (according to whom, RP readers ask) are a homogeneous and tightly bounded group such that the opinions of a few individuals can stand for everyone, versus the basically infinite opinions possible re: this book among all women who read it.*   Well, here’s one white woman, at least.

Through Sylvia at Problem Chylde: Learning in Transition, I found an earlier brief review of hers of FFF, with a link to this longer one.   Both point to my main problem with the book, which I discovered when I picked it up earlier this year at a bookstore and read excerpts from it for a few minutes.  I was new to Feministing at the time, and discovering the book on a shelf at an independent local retailer seemed kind of neat.  Then I began reading, and was struck by how shallow and glib the tone was.  It had that forced hipster thing going on that I just hate, and seemed equivalent to the cool, older girl deigning adolescent you with her presence and leaving you to try to emulate her and her infinite wisdom about sex, fashion, relationships and boyz.  As Ama Lee writes at Feminist Review, “Valenti doesn’t give her readers credit that they can do the thing she most wants them to do: think, analyze, and be critical.”  (She also compares her to Ann Coulter…yikes.)  And as Sylvia writes, “…if anyone talked to me with the language this book uses, let alone put it in writing, I’d be done with them.  Like, totally.  (Pun intended.)”

For me, in addition to it’s exclusionary perspective, abundant all over academia, the idea of a college professor using such a superficial book that deliberately talks down to its audience like this is infuriates me. I see why women of color who take offense to this book are so pissed off.  Not only does it narrowly cast mainstream feminism as essentially about “the pro-life/pro-choice/mostly-fetus centered debate of women’s reproductive autonomy”, to quote Sylvia again, with occasional token “lip service to our [women of color, working class and poor women, lesbian, gay and transgendered women, disabled women] pet issues” (to quote her a third time), but it does so in a decidedly condescending tone.  And is getting  lot of press for it.   This sh*t drives me nuts.

But hey, smut sells.  Yet, it’s bad enough that feminism in this frame leaves the majority of us grappling with larger, more complex struggles out of “the movement.” It’s even more infuriating that possible recruits on the fringe are being lured in with a book that has about as much depth and range as a fashion magazine.  The insult in this particular case is this white man inflicting it on his majority students of color, whereas those of us not in his class can either exist in blissful ignorance about the book, ignore it, or rant about and deconstruct it and the limitations of feminism on our respective blogs or in other public fora. 

What’s so problematic about education is how the subjectivity of researchers, teachers and other authorities is infused into the curricula and student development.  A significant part of the research on the reproduction of inequality focuses on schools as a key site in which this occurs.  It’s why sociologists 100 years after The Chicago School are still arguing about whether social relations in poor and/or ethnic/racial communities are “disorganized” or not, because they don’t adhere to the ecological model of urban organization proposed by the white men considered to be the founding fathers of urban/community studies.  It’s why women are too often absent from ethnography, because the traditional ethnographer has been the “lone wolf” male who integrates himself into communities under study by going to bars and hanging on the streets (to paraphrase sociologist Maria Kefalas).  While I’m all about increasing the definition of legitimate perspectives in the classroom, and access to a much broader range of analysis, students deserve better exposure to the strengths and limitations of feminist theory and activism than is provided in FFF.  Now I’m curious to see what else is on the syllabus.

 

*I liked this point because one of my biggest cognitive problems with questions of racism, anti-racism or racial justice - especially in the blogosphere - is that they too often become binary or reductive, i.e., problems, conflicts and oppression boil down to racism with no other -isms present, and whites are necc. the oppressor.  In the context of feminism, the oppressors are white women, who are therefore also in bed with the patriarchy (though apparently with at least 18 rounds of birth control strapped to their thongs).  The construction at this stage comes across as very instrumental on the part of whites/perpetrators, which is easier to digest at an aggregative, macro-structural level than it is at a micro level, which is the level of analysis a good deal of the blogosphere specializes in, by its very nature of being a virtual universe of endless soapboxes (for those with access to computers).  Just I loathe in my Ivory Tower the assumption that the white, male perspective is the logical, objective interpretation of our social world, with its accompanying presumptive, prescriptive abstraction of the lives of women, communities of color, and poor communities, to name just a few, so do I resent alternatively being labeled by default as part of the problem when it comes to racism.  I wrote about this at greater length last week, so I’ll stop here...

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!

 

 

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.

Last Sunday, the M.A.S., Weboy and I had a terrific afternoon exploring the hot spots of my ‘hood: the brand new headquarters of WGBH (so cool) and the excellent Chinese food at Shanghai Gate.  On the B line back to our apartments, I said to the M.A.S. - as I almost invariably do when looking out the window at the endless rows of stately, dense old apartment buildings, “I like our neighborhood.”  He smiled and agreed.

One topic of discussion that Sunday was my falling blog numbers.  As I’ve mentioned, there are a few topics I cover that apparently few other bloggers do - New Bedford’s immigration woes, the NJ Turnpike’s Vince Lombardi rest stop, and FEMA trailers.  My love of Grey’s Anatomy also drives people to this site.  But increasingly over the last few months, regular readers have been disappearing, leaving Weboy as my main conversant in a sea of random Google-driven hits. 

This depressed me.  Contrary to friendly wisdom, this blog is not solely an on-line journal, but my attempt at creating conversation, and more so, finding community.  With rare exception, my closest friends do not live here in Boston.  After three years in the isolating confines of academia, I have yet to find consistently close confidants to fill the loss of having my peeps spread out geographically and busy with our reluctantly adult lives.  Though I can be charming and gregarious, I have a strong introspective streak, and an outsider nature - if you see me in a crowd, I’m much more likely to be standing on the edge of it, looking in, or not paying attention at all, my head in a book (this was perfectly in evidence at a family party this summer for one of my paternal cousins.  Every time more than 10 of my relatives surrounded me, I found myself escaping back to the less crowded room.  Back and forth I went from the kitchen to the porch in the course of an hour, instinctively seeking to find some space in the midst of 20+ kin).  I’m the type at the museum to get more out of the plaque describing the art than the actual piece beside it; the written word is without question my preferred and cherished medium.

So for me, blogging is a natural approach to trying to find communities of interest in which I can relieve some of the intellectual and inquisitive churn that threatens to keep me up at night and likely contributes significantly to my daily calorie burn (wahoo anxious energy!).  Although I often have to effortfully force myself out of my apartment to school for some mentally mandatory human contact, I rely heavily on the blogosphere for “conversation,” input, ideas and socializing. 

Truthfully, I don’t love blogging.  Like Weboy, I agree that it orients your mind around writing regularly, and that I appreciate.  But this is not a written medium in which I excel.  First, I am prone to longer arguments, which is the #1 killer for building your readership.  I am too meticulous to throw up posts most of the time without fastidiously editing them first; I loathe typos in others’ work and especially in my own.  While I can be funny and irreverent, my writing is as frequently sober, melancholy or angry - and I haven’t fully embraced the latter as my blogging tone.  I’m not out here to shock readers into awareness; what I’d really like is to leave people thinking, by imparting some wisdom or viewpoint that they hadn’t considered.   And I certainly don’t want to take my passion out of it, but I’d also really like to lighten up sometimes.  Basically, I’m still working on my voice here, unlike my academic and professional writing, which tends toward instructive, compelling and critical.  Overall, my aim is to be thoughtful and provactive, without abandoning my often dry and irreverent wit.  And after blogging for a 18 months, I’m still not sure how to populate a site devoted to policy more than politics, unless the latter refers to our racial, gendered and classist perceptions, with a particular emphasis on cities, neighborhoods (mine in particular), and the occasional tv or book “review”. 

So when Weboy repeated the useful advice about inserting myself in other blogversations to drive traffic to my site, a method I’ve tried with little results in the mainstream threads I’d been trolling for awhile, I knew I needed to find some other sites where the point of view was going to be more politicized, i.e., more likely to look at the world and our struggles in it from gendered, racial and class lens.  If this week’s hits are any indication, so far, so good. 

By joining the conversations more assertively and regularly at Feministe and Feministing, I’ve succeeded in generating traffic and at least one comment (keep ‘em coming people!).  I’ve also found, esp. in Feministe, a tone that is both provocative and erudite, and through these sites, links to other like-minded women.    At Shakesville, I’m laughing my a** off and appreciating the relentless critique of our current political climate. 

Now, what these sites are missing - knowingly, in the former case - is diversity in perspectives and topics.  There’s a noticeable split between middle-class, white feminist critique and commentary from feminists of color, where you can typically also find a broader range of class perspectives.  I can trace even less clearly the other divides (sexuality, disability, etc.).  The lack of integration of perspectives leads to a narrowing in the range of topics.  It seems I have to visit one set of sites for discussions of my reproductive rights, for instance, and another entirely to join conversations about poverty and spatial and class inequality, which are my preferred topics of conversation.  It’s not an easy divide to bridge, particularly because my skin can only thicken so fast against assumptions/realities of elite privilege (as a white person, as an academic, as a NE liberal, etc).  In my position, I long for more conversational breadth in sites like Feministe, but feel like I’m on constantly on the defensive in the latter sphere (see the “Update” and comments in the Feministe link above to see this “defensive crouch” in action). 

I realize the few sites I’ve linked to are only the tips of the blogberg out there, and I’m hopeful that if I apply myself to the task, I’ll find an intellectual community where I can speak comfortably from my feminist, neo-Marxist, anti-racist, coaliton-building lens, which I also hope to keep developing by sticking with the blogging.  If that means I lose my less political readers, I suppose I have to come to terms with that.  I like to believe I can be all things to all people, but it ain’t the case, try as I may.  For readers who appreciate the more confessional aspects of the blog, I hope you’ll check in occasionally.  For the others who want to hear more about housing policy, planning, equity and justice in the U.S., I hope you’ll visit the RP often.  Grey’s fans I expect will keep turning up. I should be so lucky if I have readers who are interested in all those things, simply because they’re coming from my, quite frankly, genius perspective (hi Weboy!). 

H/t to Outside the Toybox for directing me to this sustainability quiz developed by American Public Media.  It allows me to estimate my consumption footprint compared to the appropriate productive acreage per human on the planet (about 4.5 acres; they explain what “productive acreage” means), and then calculates how many earths are needed if everyone lived like me.  Oh, and I get to design a personal avatar and a neighborhood avatar. 

So how many earths are needed if everyone else lived in a little, one-person apartment and drove a sh*tbox back and forth 5 miles to school and within a 3 mile radius for errands a few times per week?  And went shopping at least once a month and ate mostly dairy, grains and veggies?  9.6.  Welcome to the Redstar Solar System.

Turns out, I can blame the T - that’s right, the public Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority system - for my one-woman path of destruction.  What, you don’t expect me to actually ride that thing regularly, do you?  Sitting here at my PC I rarely shut off, I was flying way under the tree huggers’ radar; I live in a small place, alone, use hardly any electricity or heat comparatively (of course, I don’t pay for heat directly, so that’s probably the culprit there), and recycle A LOT.  3 acres, 1 acre, and 1 acre for my home, power and recycling habits, respectively.  Look at me! I’m a mere spec on the world’s surface.

Then the questions came about public and personal transportation usage.  Miles driven per month, mileage to the gallon, monthly miles ridden by bus or rail, and hours flown yearly, and in what class (why the latter matters I have NO idea).  Well, DAMN if I don’t take up 21 acres with my monthly first class to the Gulf Coast (thanks FF miles) and intermittent T riding ways.  I went from 1.7 earths to 6, just based on public transportation ridership alone.  Together, the MBTA and I will put this planet out of business in no time!!

My eating and shopping habits apparently gobble up 3 more planets, though a major flaw of the quiz is no available stats when I’m asked to compare myself to the average American shopper.  Well, do they mean the folks living in FEMA trailers in the Gulf Coast or the women in Lexus SUV’s in the Chestnut Hill mall parking lot?  Or apparently some combination of the two.  And who knew coffee is the second most traded commodity after oil, and also travels huge distances?   Our caffeine addiction is obviously the lesser known cousin to the American oil addiction.

I’m curious to see how you all fare.  According the comparables they offer at the end, most Americans (Dems, GOP, Green, male, female, etc.), are consuming over 99 planets with their power usage.  But when you break it down by state, and most likely only the public radio listeners/Cambridge-Berkeley-Austin radicals in each, you get much much smaller figures.  Compared to folks in MA, CA, and NY, I’m ravaging 3 to four times the number of planets. 

All without leaving my kitchen table. 

Last spring, I anxiously speculated on how the storefront turnover in Brighton Center could impact the neighborhood.*  Readers of the RP know I love my ethnically diverse, mixed-though-mostly-moderate-income neighborhood, even if I’d like to see it sprinkled with some bougie accoutrements (What can I say, I’m a tortured Neiman neo-Marxist).  Readers also know I’d start with Cleveland Circle in any neighborhood upgrade: so aren’t I just tickled to see the “upscaling” slowly taking hold. 

In an odd but likely affordable location choice, the seemingly cheezy-trendy clothing shop Lint of Boston has opened its doors in a basement “storefront” (really, a door and a window) on Chestnut Hill Av.  A quick glance at the barebones website indicates that if Heather Locklear and Jack Wagner lived in the area, they’d be shopping here.  My 30-something a** wearily knows there’s no shortage of co-eds running around these parts who will sport these duds in the Melrose Place alums’ absence.  Whether I can squeeze into the jeans and fitted tees on offer, I’m nonetheless thrilled that there is a clothing boutique within walking distance of my apartment.  Surely me and my “early-middle-aged” boyfriend** will be fitting right in at Mary Ann’s in no time!

Especially if we adopt an all-sushi diet once Fins opens up the street from Lint (seriously, don’t you think this name would be better on a dry cleaner?).  Though I don’t actually like sushi, and thus have denied the M.A.S. the pleasure of dining more often on one of his faves.  (We haven’t even made it to Asahi in Brighton Center, which the Chowhounders claim is terrific.)  Still, any new restaurant seems an improvement on the sketchy Chef Choy that was there before.  The Bank of America ATM next door was busier than that place. 

Speaking of ATMs, I’m disappointed to see the former CVS in Cleveland Circle replaced by a Citibank.  WHERE IS MY STARBUCKS OR INDEPENDENT COFFEE SHOP???  I know the new folks over at the Waterworks spread need a place to put their fancy $$, but isn’t that what Bank of America and Citizens are for?  I can’t imagine the Citibank will be somehow immune to the indigent men hanging out in front of it like these other two, which may have been a turn off for our recent arrivals.  This smacks of a NY conspiracy; keep your eyes peeled for Yankees fans among us. (Though I’m also convinced that Dunkins has the Circle on some sort of coffee lockdown.)

I think room remains on the shuttered CVS storefront, and the Blockbuster between Lint and Fins is up for lease.  Stay tuned for continued coverage of the Cleveland Circle’s makeover, which, if the M.A.S. and I had our way after a few “Aquatrains” (Aquavit and ginger ale) at his place followed by beers on Cityside’s rooftop patio, would involve substantially scaling back the car-oriented intersection at Beacon St and Chestnut Hill Av.  I wanted to just throw up a few concrete roadblocks and see what happens; the M.A.S., the true planner in the relationship, had some more sensible solutions (I hazily recall).

 

* I’ve since dined at Smoken Joe’s twice.  The food is fine - I’m no gourmet, and have this theory that I’m horizontally picky: I don’t like certain foods, but the quality of what I like doesn’t matter that much to me. (In comparison, the M.A.S. is vertically picky.  He’ll eat just about anything, but quality matters A LOT.) There are two things I like about Smoken Joe’s so far.  First is the local feeling; there’s a kooky waitress there who was pleasantly “yes’ing” a drunk woman out the door when I recently ate there, and then welcomed some friends from the ‘hood to the bar while I finished my meal.  Second is the portion size for the cost. For $10-12 bucks, you can get a third of ribs with two sides, all tucked cozily onto one plate.  For women who like to eat but don’t want to keep up with their 7 inches taller and 50 lbs heavier boyfriends, this meal is a great size.  Satisfying and filling.  I’d eat there again, right after I try the new Greek place across the street. 

**He’d like to thank Prof. Sennett for that one.