So I have a fancy alarm clock that awakens you slowly, by raising the volume of your intended selection (music or radio) slowly. I’ve given up on identifying the ideal song (should it be jarring or soothing? Vintage Sonic Youth or “The Stars of Track and Field”), and now resign myself to Soterios Johnson (and really, did you think he would look like that?) whispering the days events into my ear — commingled with the arch inflection of the BBC; by the time I give up on the snooze button, the conflicting tidbits create a truly twisted idea of the world. See, if comes from somewhere.
So why the long-winded prelude? Well, because this morning Soterios told me something that, in my early morning fog, seemed like news important enough to get up early and research, namely that the LMDC announced it was closing. Just like that. I think it was even the phrase itself that woke me up. Finally! I thought, Kevin Rampe is willing to take his public flogging, or Bloomberg forced his hand enough to admit the entire contraption was flawed as best, criminal at worst, and burned down the whole thing.
But it turns out that they aren’t shuttering the whole affair because they haven’t done a single thing right in the past five years, but because they think their job is done. Not only done, but done well. We could team up, the whole lot of us, dozens of journalists and those who presume to be, hundreds of avidly interested individuals, thousands of residents, who uniformly and to a person seem to think the diametric opposite of this fact. But no amount of fist pounding or yelling ever penetrates the collective ear wax of this exercise in bureaucratic fumbling, so why don’t we allow them to shuffle off in relative peace? Why not? Nothing else has worked.
What’s the real story here? Who fucking knows? But it looks like it can be neatly encapsulated by six letters that strike fear into the heart of any rational observer of the good government stripe: P.A.N.Y.N.J. Thas’ right. You can’t beat a multi-state, quasi governmental organization that can feed itself off of the desire of people to travel to and from this city. Can’t do it.
Dust off those shitty Beyer Blinder Bell site models from back in the day when the Port thought they would be able to pick designers without public input, and railroad development schemes through even if it seemed like none of the proper planning was in place, resulting in a classic bureaucratic clusterfuck that managed to make the creation of the first WTC seem like a act of graceful diplomacy by comparison. The LMDC was formed to… um, avoid things like that.
So here we are, in 2006, where design guidelines aren’t finished (Kevin Rampe is never going to speak to Ric Bell again, this much is sure), but no, really, they will get them done before they fold up, where major elements of the few things that have been designed get undone without any of the public input, programs revisions are carried out under cover of night, oh, and, they are still finding remains on the site. See, things are so different, so better.
Somewhere, in some public-private fortress star chamber, not really evil because it would give them character guys are laughing the dry, awkward laugh of high school losers who became engineers and then devoted their lives to technocratic, short-sighted and big budgeted albatrosses that require acres of impenetrable forms, contracts and regulations. I try really hard not to pay too close attention. I used to wonder why people railed against the communist experiment in eastern Europe (aside from, you know, the Gulag). It’s that the slow, banal strangulation by small-minded people who have fallen into situations where their ability to exploit a limited amount of power is just enough to make the day a little more unpleasant, but not enough to induce the masses to rise up in anger. It’s everywhere, and the template applies to far too many things. Everyone worries about Nietzsche, but there’s little chance of Übermensch arising from this pool of mediocrity. No, our fate is much worse: Kafka and a certainly sinister but always unassailable bureaucracy is our lot.
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Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
So I have a fancy alarm clock that awakens you slowly, by raising the volume of your intended selection (music or radio) slowly. I’ve given up on identifying the ideal song (should it be jarring or soothing? Vintage Sonic Youth or “The Stars of Track and Field”), and now resign myself to Soterios Johnson (and really, did you think he would look like that?) whispering the days events into my ear — commingled with the arch inflection of the BBC; by the time I give up on the snooze button, the conflicting tidbits create a truly twisted idea of the world. See, if comes from somewhere.
So why the long-winded prelude? Well, because this morning Soterios told me something that, in my early morning fog, seemed like news important enough to get up early and research, namely that the LMDC announced it was closing. Just like that. I think it was even the phrase itself that woke me up. Finally! I thought, Kevin Rampe is willing to take his public flogging, or Bloomberg forced his hand enough to admit the entire contraption was flawed as best, criminal at worst, and burned down the whole thing. But it turns out that they aren’t shuttering the whole affair because they haven’t done a single thing right in the past five years, but because they think their job is done. Not only done, but done well. We could team up, the whole lot of us, dozens of journalists and those who presume to be, hundreds of avidly interested individuals, thousands of residents, who uniformly and to a person seem to think the diametric opposite of this fact. But no amount of fist pounding or yelling ever penetrates the collective ear wax of this exercise in bureaucratic fumbling, so why don’t we allow them to shuffle off in relative peace? Why not? Nothing else has worked. What’s the real story here? Who fucking knows? But it looks like it can be neatly encapsulated by six letters that strike fear into the heart of any rational observer of the good government stripe: P.A.N.Y.N.J. Thas’ right. You can’t beat a multi-state, quasi governmental organization that can feed itself off of the desire of people to travel to and from this city. Can’t do it. Dust off those shitty Beyer Blinder Bell site models from back in the day when the Port thought they would be able to pick designers without public input, and railroad development schemes through even if it seemed like none of the proper planning was in place, resulting in a classic bureaucratic clusterfuck that managed to make the creation of the first WTC seem like a act of graceful diplomacy by comparison. The LMDC was formed to… um, avoid things like that. So here we are, in 2006, where design guidelines aren’t finished (Kevin Rampe is never going to speak to Ric Bell again, this much is sure), but no, really, they will get them done before they fold up, where major elements of the few things that have been designed get undone without any of the public input, programs revisions are carried out under cover of night, oh, and, they are still finding remains on the site. See, things are so different, so better. Somewhere, in some public-private fortress star chamber, not really evil because it would give them character guys are laughing the dry, awkward laugh of high school losers who became engineers and then devoted their lives to technocratic, short-sighted and big budgeted albatrosses that require acres of impenetrable forms, contracts and regulations. I try really hard not to pay too close attention. I used to wonder why people railed against the communist experiment in eastern Europe (aside from, you know, the Gulag). It’s that the slow, banal strangulation by small-minded people who have fallen into situations where their ability to exploit a limited amount of power is just enough to make the day a little more unpleasant, but not enough to induce the masses to rise up in anger. It’s everywhere, and the template applies to far too many things. Everyone worries about Nietzsche, but there’s little chance of Übermensch arising from this pool of mediocrity. No, our fate is much worse: Kafka and a certainly sinister but always unassailable bureaucracy is our lot.