Contempt in a Teapot.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Moby. Purveyor of insipid and treacly music predestined to shill products targeted at the wallpaper-reading set (though that might be shooting a little high). Proprietor of insipid and self-consciously cutesy food establishments (I’m surprised we haven’t be subjected to McTeaney’s, a meat-free sandwich shoppe staffed by earnest underprivileged youths, or those that simply self-identify as such). Self-indulgent rich kid from Connecticut who transplants himself and postures downtown chic as badly as Liz Phair used to (at least she decided to make no bones about her reality). Highly public and doctrinaire vegan. Hell, vegan, period.

Today we can add ruthless businessman to that list, if reports are to be believed. I don’t — or, more particularly, don’t care, and the energy invested in not caring, somewhat equal to the effort required to skirt his officious Rivington Street mini-empire (as it juts further out into the sidewalk than any other business on what is a fairly narrow street), is a source of resentment itself. So something happened at some organ in the Moby empire. Wringing of hands, deployment of snark, blogged rebuttals. The makings of a sitcom plot based on bloggers courtesy the wubbie, circa 2007.

But if being intentionally twee, ‘stylish’ or willfully obscurant got you banished from the Lower East Side, it would be pretty desolate relative to the rich tapestry we have today. So revamp or no, mass firings of communal love-in, what Moby does is of little concern to me, but the episode certainly underscores how much blogging has become like the news crawl at the bottom of CNN. Sure, you in the back row, you’re saying “What, you just noticed?”

Well, no, but the Gawker standard of 12 posts a days seems to have infected other outlets. Add to the proliferation of real estate blogs (the Times weighs in, a Browstoner party gets written up in Talk of the Town — maybe my second anniversary party, comprising me having a glass of rye on the couch and generally hating, which, believe it or not, is distinct from most other nights, which involve bourbon and a desk, will get covered as well) and a story like this suddenly has legs. Well, 30 minutes thereof.

Why this is a perfect squall situation is because later in the afternoon I noticed that Jack Abramoff pled guilty in return for an agreement to testify. And even though most of our well-known blogs take a pass on politics, there would be, one assumes, enough related interest for it to turn up somewhere. Getting my information through RSS, NPR streams, and a couple newspaper sites, I knew about the Terror at Teany (which occurred roughly contemporaneously with the Abramoff announcement) several hours earlier. If I subscribed to the right blogs, I doubt there would have been a gap.

But it rankled because, aside from being the easy target of just about everyone, Moby is ostensibly (like the other LES celebrity bar owner, Tim Robbins) a political ‘activist’. But I couldn’t think of a single thing he’s done (aside from turning up at some part for Outfoxed — a fact I gather from some dusty remnants of an Observer article). Not like Ralph Reed, the conservative charlatan who seems to pop up just about everywhere (and, I found out today, is running for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia). Granted, Reed is a political operative and Moby is a bad singer, but his coffee shop contretemps is what holds our attention? When they say grass roots organizing is how political change is achieved, this is not what they are referring to.

This isn’t some clarion call for blogging standards. I’ll leave that to the more capable. But even as we all stand in thrall of real estate prices, either drunk on the direct benefit it brings us, seething at the good fortune of others, or simply overwhelmed at the absurdity at all, it is crucial we don’t lose site of the fact that macro and micro economic and political events still have the power to interrelate and change things.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about this year. Scope out an editorial calendar, try and make this a more rigorous enterprise. I haven’t come to any good conclusions. But I know I’m not going to write about Teany. At all. Except this once.

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Walking to Do.*

Today is rich is headline possibility, regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum, or, perhaps more significantly, where one lives on the potential commuter path from say, downtown to Canarsie. Being a member of the exceedingly marginal media allows me the latitude to reflect what might be expected from my brethern: hoots and snark at the welter of coverage that tries to wring pathos, or just entertainment, from a fact that defines the ‘commuting�’ experience of the vast majority of those alive: walking a reasonable distance in often trying conditions. In other words, never has so much been written by so many for so little.

There are, no doubt, stories to be had that involve discomfort, sickness, frostbite and certainly worse, since today’s labor inaction will more than inconvenience those who have congenital medial conditions and for whom the public transit exists as integral to their treatment as an insurance card (dialysis patients, etc.). But these next few days will do what any number of pseudo-emergencies have done for generations: provide fodder for Talk of the Town pieces and getting a handful of people laid. And perhaps tamping down some of that Brooklyn is great superiority meme that has been a little too present lately.

Here at MR Strike Central (written hastily on the back of a piece of scrap paper with a Sharpie and taped over the monitor — okay, I haven’t actually done that, but I’ll think about it when I’m done), we’re taking it in stride (chuckle), but most because we haven’t had to actually stride anywhere today. Preparation consisted of buying a fresh bottle of bourbon (though this strike is perhaps a truly nefarious plague on the city — my preferred brand was unavailable).

With lots of air time to fill, we’ve been subjected to mostly the uninteresting stuff, even though this is actually a rather rich story, from end to end: a militant union that is perhaps rife with an internal conflict that is the driving force in the walkout, a intellectually bankrupt governor who set the stage by cravenly handing out ill-advised benefits (with the rousing approval of a state legislature — heavily funded by that same union — eclipsed only by Maoist-era China in its intransigence and seeming permanence), and the seeming inability to manage (stocked with appointees from that dimwit governor) the long-term health of one of the largest, best, and most effective public transit system in the world. Instead, we get lots of comments about how cold it is (brrr!), traffic problems (aiyee!) and rueful inquiries about getting home (public radio types are resoundingly stereotypical, all biking off to Park Slope).

At the end of the day, the State Supreme court swiftly approved a ‘massive’ fine that, if this strike lasts through New Year’s, might get large enough to buy half of Lenny Kravtiz’s apartment. Not reported widely was the interesting counterpoint that the Taylor Law, which the city is invoking to justify the fine, also prohibits negotiating pension benefits collectively. Since Dubya has been too busy spying on us to notice, there are still some powerful regulations left in the labor department, one of which is that bargaining in bad faith might exempt the union or its members from sanctions. That is, they can argue that they had to go on strike, since the MTA’s demand to negotiate pension benefits put them in an untenable position. If it is found that this does constitute a violation, it may well end up that the union can demand restitution from the state, the reverse of today’s ruling.

Aside from the very real effect this will have on those who can afford it least, and the certain and real discomfort this will cause many, just how central the transit system is to our culture was evident in the preponderance of counter-intuitive observation stories: just how empty it is. Given the nearness of the holiday, many workers likely moved around schedules, or worked from home. The masses of automobiles were not as great as expected because much of it simply wasn’t possible. The hordes of Jerseyites or Long Islanders who come in on the weekend were working wherever they normally do. The large numbers of city dwellers without cars didn’t go out and buy or rent one. And even if any one of these constituencies made a go at commuting by car, where would they park?

As a result, we have a very clear picture of what density requires, and what a well-run (though not managed) transit system affords. For all our criticisms, one should never lose sight of what an amazing resource we have in the MTA. And it is operated every day by an army of workers who by and large perform their tasks thanklessly, and are today vilified more than ever.

There may be real tactical flaws in the TWU approach, and just as many embarrassing anecdotes about self-interest (when attempting to justify lowering the retirement age for station agents, it was argued that the dust and ink in money posed health hazards) as you would find in a corruption story on AIG or Enron, but the truly minor inconvenience (though it sounds like a bad stereotype, my grandfather, who worked almost forty years in a steel mill, never had a driver’s license, and for a good decade walked over ten miles one way to work) this presents for so many should not justify the ire the workers will face. Like the Postal Service, it is one of the best arguments for government regulation and ownership of crucial services (for all you privatization fans out there, remember that the lines started out privately, and next time you complain about the seeming inanity of the system layout, thank the magical hand of the market).

I salute everyone who is making the ugly, dark (it’s almost the solstice) trek home, and I likewise salute the mostly unappreciated effort our transit workers make every day (remember, at best they didn’t get paid today, and it may be worse still). A drink to you all, from the admittedly comfortable command center for smart ass urban blogging.

*The Nancy Sinatra struck me as archaic, so today is a bit more age appropriate (for me at least)

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Let me be the first to make a Nancy Sinatra reference.

“Daddy, where were you during the Great Transit Strike of 2005?” “Why, honey, the exact same place I was during the Great Blackout of 2003 (or was it 2004?) — sitting in a Manhattan apartment, getting stoned, and wondering if the bar scene was going to be really boisterous. Then I remembered I was really stoned and went to sleep early.”

I’m not trying to be too glib about the Big Inconvenience, but considering that sometime between midnight tonight (should the strike actually take place) and midnight tomorrow, someone, somewhere will compare their circumstance to Katrina or the Tsunami, and there’s a good chance it will be in front of a hapless local news reporter trying to find a better spin for the ‘it really sucks to walk story”, I guess I’m excusing myself a wee bit for stifling a yawn.

Of course, it’s not a yawn worthy situation, considering how far apart the two sides are, and what myriad levels of incompetence are being revealed by this. We are all used to media-savvy grandstanding (the Times found a TWU member — who apparently works in a part of the subway that lacks potable water — that claimed they were treated like “Fourth World” peoples), and massive gaps in the relative positions. All these ostensible leaders are staking out drastic ground to justify their pay and chauffeured rides (isn’t it ironic that all the public transit employees and union reps get ferried by car? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more symbolically satisfying to give out free MetroCards?).

The union wants a 6,000% raise, and the right to retire next week, and the MTA wants the staff to perform their own appendectomies and to commit suicide upon retirement. Perhaps they aren’t that far apart, but I haven’t been looking that closely.

And who can blame them for being at loggerheads? After talking all of 75 minutes on Tuesday, everyone threw up their hands… and probably when to a hockey match. The union is claiming the MTA is hiding evidence of the surplus, a claim the MTA shrugged off as less than ridiculous because everyone knows there’s not a chance in hell that MTA actually has that much of a grasp of their finances.

The big news today was that the head of the MTA, Peter Kalikow was going to join in the negotiations. Yup, it was news that he was going to, you know, come to work today. Which is a sight better than our governor — off in New Hampshire, raising money for his political consultant jobs program — was doing.

Yes, that’s right. Scratch a local or state issue rife with incompetence that ranges from the everyday abysmal and scales up to borderline criminal, and you will find the goofy grin of the world’s luckiest Westchester pasty. Working overtime to be get himself remembered as the worst governor of his generation, Pataki’s all-thumbs-prints are everywhere, from appointing people who are worse at numbers than circulation managers at the tabloids, to pandering to suburban voters by forcing unequal fare increases, to now standing idly by while the one of the greatest public transit systems grinds to a halt a week before one of the most important tourist weeks (and one of the coldest Decembers on record) of the year.

Surely the TWU has to get real healthcare costs and pension expense (and recognize that evaporating pensions and retirement benefits in the private sector are going to make the typical base of support far less sympathetic to their retire at 55 deal), and the MTA has to get real, at, well, managing the books (you can’t credibly argue you have long-term financial planning issues when you report swings from surplus to deficit and back in a single fiscal year), but none of these things would seem as dire, or insurmountable if we had a leader.

Then again, maybe Pataki spends his ‘crisis’ times the same way I do, which would go a long way to explaining his inaction. But that’s not what I’m paying him to do, and can you imagine a more annoying stoner? He’d never have his own (yammering about how he’s can’t get busted, cause of his job), and would probably want to spend the whole night eating Cheetos and watching the Young Ones. Come to think of it, I’d better make sure I’ve got some Cheetos; Metro-North is saying they’re going all in on this too…

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Eloquent, attractive. Irrelevant?

In a fit a nearly responsible writing/vituperation-justification (and providing a chance to write another of those patented really long posts), I took myself to the Zero Culture event last evening, being of one those well-dressed serious-looking art/culture hangers-on (read: I’m still a little too young to troll the 92nd Street Y), and a little curious to see what Paul Golberger is like (and, surprise! he seemed pretty reasonable and incisive, Michael Sorkin’s vitriol notwithstanding). If you missed it, or last week’s post, the goal was to interrogate:

The ongoing wrangles, which have variously devolved around issues of design and security, have most recently polarized around an opposition between culture and memorialization. Culture, ordinarily the bedrock of any act of remembrance, is estranged, even desecrates ground described as hallowed and sacred.

If it was an opening salvo to further the debate on the role of “the arts” or “culture” (it was an entire event that awash in air quotes and qualifications) at the WTC site, it was a tepid one. The points themselves were reasonable, there was a teensy bit of spark, but no position was established that could reframe the debate in terms that might realize something.

Two things, I would hazard, prevented this: one is the unwillingness to place most of the recent changes squarely in the context of politics, and, two, the inherent partisan position of the participants, asserting a right for a particular element — “the arts” — instead of focusing on the insulting behavior of those who mouth fealty to process then jettison that promise when it is politically expeditious. The point is, we could have been defending a rollerderby rink, and the arguments should have been the same.

If anyone there thought “the arts” were worthy of exceptional status and deserving of veneration or priority election or placement at the site, it wasn’t clearly articulated. Mike Wallace and Thelma Golden both made allusive comments about the problem of situating culture in the context of development or memorials, and even more briefly spoke on the conflict between high and low art, but no one made a forceful argument about what or if “the arts” deserve in terms of exceptional recognition.

After about an hour of speaking, the thought that coalesced in my mind was we were watching the replay of the NEA Four, Chris Ofili and Robert Mapplethorpe all rolled into one. There was a brief moment where a crucial point was made (it was Mike Wallace, I believe) that a structural flaw in the entire process was that the narrative of the event and the recovery were commandeered at the national level, and deformed to fit an almost pre-existing ideology (the farcical connection between Al Queda and Iraq). In light of that, it occurred to me that the various defenses being made were a fairly typical, and futile, running hard up against the well established playbook that politicians use: assume a proto-populist role, and find some freaky artist to attack. The artists are defended by and large in the framework of vaguely leftist, aspiring to be populist (free speech) rhetoric, but that is an unwinnable fight. Arms were taken up, nonetheless, because the left has been consistently fractured in its opposition to the war in Iraq (and even in the best way to counter terrorism), and I think many thought, consciously or unconsciously, that we could “win” this one, that somehow a counter-narrative could be established that would stem the putrid grandstanding happening downtown, and that it would ripple outward, bringing down the house of cards our petty emperor was attempting to erect.

How the arts community got suckered into this one (not that it isn’t easy to most of the time) was addressed only once: in one of the few truly insightful or scandalous observations, Paul Goldberger inserted an almost parenthetical comment that people used to attending expensive benefits for arts organizations got caught up in the brush with power and were unduly flattered by the idea that their input would make difference downtown (I’m paraphrasing a bit, so don’t sue me).

Why is it an unwinnable fight? Because art is inevitably an expression of, and distraction for, the elite. Everyone in that room last night knew who Hans Haacke was without reading his bio. I could walk into a gathering of people of similar scale from here to LA and find at best a tenth of the attendees who even heard of him. The Drawing Center is an elite institution, there is no denying that. And there is nothing wrong with that. We are not a populist country; we are country where political identity can be manipulated by appeals to economic self-interest, and, apparently, appeals to religious belief (though I suspect this is a synecdoche for economic self-interest). That self-interest, more often than not, is a limitless desire to accumulate capital, regardless of the impact on community. The arts sit uncomfortably at the apex of that process, leeching off those who have managed this trick to an effective degree (or were lucky enough to be borne into it), trying to hew an impossible path of jealousy, criticism, and some vague claims of exceptional status due to the mirror, prism or whatever allegorical device one posits for filtering culture.

We wanted to put the Drawing Center downtown for no particular reason, except that Manhattan is the center of the arts (because it is, without coincidence, the economic center) in this country. The World Trade Center housed as many populist, working class strivers as any other building, but the firm that suffered most dearly, Cantor Fitzgerald, was filled with an aberrant number of millionaires who did things that most people couldn’t even identify. They were elites, and I’m sure a number of them supported the arts ardently. And if they didn’t, they would learn to when their expensively educated kids woke up and realized being a painter was a lot more fun that being a bond trader like dad.

Surely one could say there is something flawed about this, but those who do dwell pretty regularly on the fringe. But the debate downtown is limited largely to those who think this is just fine a model, the only separation being some got a lot closer than others, and that creates friction.

All of this makes it impossible to posit an argument that resonates in a broad cultural context. Even most of the people who can be goaded into turning up their nose at the liberal, East Coast elite, still eagerly come to see our museums, and often take great pleasure in the process. More than anything, they don’t want to be reminded of how provincial they appear to the people in that room last night.

And there is no doubt that is the case. A fascinating moment of total implosion occurred when a family member came up and read a mostly disingenuous statement that seemed like it came directly from the Machiavellian mind of Debra Burlingame. We heard the usual garbage talking points about “it’s not about the arts, but the kind of the arts” followed by a litany of projects that, absent the loaded emotional context from which they were drawn, would have resulted in pained eye-rolling from most everyone there (and probably still did for some). There were glimmers of a viable argument, via pandering to positioning these examples of outsider art (that might be welcomed at places like MAD or the American Folk Museum), or terms that might indict the clannishness of the arts we were lamenting the exclusion of. But no one rose to point out that the some 30-odd examples offered, from a traditional curatorial viewpoint, were infinitesimal for an institution that needs to fill programming for a century (MoMA has what, 100,000 items in inventory?), and the Memorial is already slated to have something on the order of 200,000 sf of display space. I’m not aware of anyone recommending that the Memorial Center — or whatever we are calling it nowdays — not include such items. But, true to form, no one wanted to attack a family member by pointing any o
f this out, or, worse, the awkward, polite disinterest indicated that, yes, there is even less a dialogue than anyone presumes.

It was said obliquely by panel members, and more vociferously by a downtown resident that the families have a disproportionate influence. No one likes to say that publicly, but it is demonstrably true, and it is not an attack on the memory of the victims to say so. Rather than speculate on the particulars of why this has happened (which I fear may succumb to the perception of ad hominem), it might be better observe the counter-arguments against such a strong involvement by the families.

It was, and is, a public space. Who was there was, in the end, random. Many of those who did die had an almost infinitely higher probability of being victimized, but they were not singled out as individuals, nor were they electing this risk cognizant of impending doom (unlike a member of the armed forces). As a measure of how random the risk was, my sister, who never lived here, and was visiting friends of her fiance in New Jersey, was planning to make a trip to the WTC the day of the 1993 attack. I forget what exactly prevented it (sickness, oversleep, something innocuous), but considering the likelihood of this coincidence is indicative of how wide the victim pool was. Therefore, acknowledging the human impact of this event is essential, but the symbolism of the attacks should not be subsumed to individual experience.

Hewing a path between remembering the individuals, which strikes me as a private process, and examining and remember the context of the event, which is a public one, has been at the forefront of every rational person’s consideration since the day it happened. As it was pointed out more than once, it was the process as was promised at the outset that led local leaders of the arts to believe that their interest and participation was both welcome and encouraged. Certainly, the purported openness and inclusiveness lulled everyone into a false sense of collaboration. But the presumption that Libeskind’s vague pronouncements would carry enough force to effect a long-term plan (and inspire the funding) was abetted by the myopic arrogance of cultural institutions that forgot that they are easy targets for a populist argument, and often are fairly deserving of that charge (and if you want to quibble, ask City Harvest what they could have done with the $600 million MoMA spend building a new building).

Even as everyone comes away looking like a patsy, a fool, or a craven operator, the entire evening mostly avoided the huge amount of blame to be laid squarely at the feet of our ostensible leaders. It took over an hour before anyone uttered Pataki’s name, and only in the very last minutes did anyone bother (it was the go-to guy for controversy, Haacke, likely feeling the most frisky, since he has the least to lose, his air rights fully exploited) to note that our liberal champeen, Hilary Rodham Clinton, moved pretty much in lockstep with Curious George throughout the process. This bipartisan bit of politicking affirms the most consise and forceful argument of the entire evening, again from Haacke, that, as regards development at the site, vis a vis both the inclusion of culture and the larger issue of expecting some amount of transparency as the projects move forward, there is no hope.

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1,000,000,000.

What does a billion — excuse me, make that $1.4 billion, but, really, who is counting? — get you downtown? Nothing, apparently. This week’s theater of the absurd downtown featured a scuffle about Liberty Bonds. Set to expire in just about four years (roughly the same amount of time that has elapsed since the attacks, if you want to measure progress), the $3.35 billion in government funds can buy a lot of something, provided that something is agreed upon, designed and built. Or it can buy more of the $1.4 rabbit hole built so far — currently filling that are “pay[ing] off the mortgage on the complex and on rent and legal and development fees”.

So we know at least one thing got built downtown with this money: Libeskind’s TriBeCa loft, from which he looks woefully downtown and laments the tattered remnants of his master ‘plan’ reduced now to a shopping mall, replete with a galleria, a train station filled with three levels of shopping, one tower that is clad in large part with opaque stone, and a memorial that, even as more and more elements are removed, gets more expensive every passing month.

Even as everyone is maneuvering for the scratch, no one is really ponying up with hard numbers (what do these people do all day?). There are no solid estimates for infrastructure development (what part of site prep the PANYNJ will pick up, how much is covered by the PATH station, who will pay for the bus garage), the memorial (RFP for construction management released this week, only what, two years after design was complete?), the Freedom Tower or the shopping mall. The most recent budget scrambler was the decision to eliminate the plan for a single chiller (which would provide the cooled water necessary to run air conditioning systems) for the entire site. In a fit of 1970’s planning, the PANJNY went ahead and designed it (remember the discussion about the holes in the PATH station and the Freedom/Drawing Center? They were for the chiller.), then someone found out it was going to pulverize large numbers of Hudson River fish (that we gave up Westway to protect) and now everyone is scrambling to redesign HVAC systems.

About $6 billion is available, between insurance funds and Liberty Bonds. Silverstein’s position is he should get all of it, since, based on the lease he signed, building buildings wasn’t part of his expense, so he should get the money (which isn’t even enough, by most measures) to return to the site the amount of office space square footage lost (absurdly, the lease he has is still in effect). Everyone else, upon hearing this argument, looks meaningfully at 7 WTC, which has made the news [sic] only once in the past few months, and that was because the Architect’s Newspaper had a party there (and it wasn’t to celebrate signing an anchor tenant). Given that the PANYNJ seems to have the authority to build their godawful mall regardless of what Silverstein says, the 200+ feet of fortified cladding on the Freedom Tower, and the general confusion about the site, none of the five towers proposed for the site proper will be very attractive as rental properties (for towers two thorugh five, it’s not even clear where the lobbies would be). This means 7WTC, also very nearing completion, should be the easiest to rent. And we’ve seen how that has gone.

There isn’t much in the way of a counter-proposal, beyond a request that Silverstein cough up the lots where the mall would sit (interesting how that got designed in such a transparent way, huh?), and let the PANYNJ do their retail thing, with towers to follow when the market rebounds. Which is another way of saying never. But don’t give any props to that move, since it presumes that after memorializing, the most significant activity that should occur on the site is shopping. The argument that the previous retail was so successful ignores the 50,000 people who worked there, perhaps another 20,000 who passed through on their commute, and another pile of tourists who didn’t arrive on site to honor the dead. By planting basically a suburban New Jersey mall at the start of everyone’s evening commute was a stroke of retailing genius, but that isn’t a condition that can be recreated — nor should it.

Silverstein claims he is ready to go on everything, provided he gets the money. A passel of state pols are in support of this, but mostly because it is an expedient political position: far better to foist a boondoggle on New York that won’t be proved as such until they all secure their next term rather than appear like they can’t get anything done. The silver lining is Chuck Schumer, who said moneys should be contingent on renting something. Silverstein also thinks this eagerness should be rewarded with a cool $100 million in development ‘fees’, an idea no one likes.

So we have a bunch of unrentable buildings, some of which seem unlikely ever exist except as chances for more insurance and federal funds to be whittled away by various fees, a bad mall, and an expensive memorial. What about those cultural buildings? Well, no one is holding their breath, but some folks still want to talk about the process, and that all the energy spent in thinking about how culture at the site might still have a valid role. On Monday, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council will gather Tom Bernstein (head of the Freedom Center, which was disinvited from the site recently by Pataki), Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem), Hans Haacke (renegade artist turned developer courtesy his frenemy Giuliani), Mike Wallace (author of Gotham: A History of New York City), and Robert Yaro (voice of reason extraordinaire from the Regional Planning Association) at the New School to wrestle with these issues (7:30pm at The Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, The New School for Insipid Branding, 55 West 13th Street).

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We Don’t Need No Education(al Facilities).

Water always reaches its own level, which is how the less charitable among you would characterize the hulking and banal presence of NYU in Greenwich Village and it’s virus-like spread eastward. Even if you wouldn’t, dorms and near-dorms are the latest battle line in the war of what I guess should be called institutional gentrification (or maybe Gentrification Plus!(tm)).

Three projects have made the news recently, all of them because they are big, big, big. There might be an undercurrent of the pejorative ‘filled with NYU students’, but that isn’t such a controversial statement to anyone living downtown (no, I kid, NYU students are such a joy; I can’t want to go to Dojo and see some). To their limited credit, not all the dorms in question were inextricably associated with NYU.

The latest skirmish, though by any measure just about over, involves another featureless behemoth closer to the campus proper, on 12th Street off Fourth Avenue. NYU has secured air rights, preservation exceptions and all manner of clever zoning geegaws to insert a 26-story dorm behind the façade of an almost National Registered church (St. Ann’s). Of course, you can still vent this evening before the project is rubber stamped, but don’t get too excited.

The scourge that is NYU development is so pervasive, they can probably get away with arguing that mediocre, over-scaled projects that hardly relate to the street life of the surrounding neighborhoods are actually contextual, a nifty trick, since they are responsible for most of them. How bad is it? Well, when the Kimmel Center was announced, it was touted as a sea change in the development process, a building of superior design quality and closer in character and scale to the immediate environs. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Dorms aren’t inevitably bad. In fact NYU squeezed out two not so bad ones just a block away on Third Avenue (both not far from two other very modest and serviceable efforts from the Cooper Union and New School — perhaps the aura of institutional bland peters our just east of the Alamo?). But that seems to be a long time ago. The most recent example, on the corner of Fourth Street and the Bowery, is nothing short of horrendous. You can see the control joints where the prefab brick panels come together from my apartment, and I have to walk a good ways just to get to Avenue A.

But NYU almost always is. The area that best defines the campus (roughly from Bleecker to 9th Street, west from Broadway to Washington Square Park West) is a mixture of interesting to average older stock, with any street level services thoroughly scrubbed of interesting events and heavily privatized, and the addition of a series of boxy, awkward examples of the worst of educational architecture: haphazard, multivalent programs, repetitive spaces, the occasional pander to style that attempts to subvert the nearly spec office space model that dictates the thinking behind most of them.

Quickly approaching preeminent status (if not there already) as largest private landowner in Manhattan (if you’re curious, the main competitors are Columbia University and Trinity Church), it seems hard to fathom a way to stop them, especially as there seems to be an endless supply of affluent parents who operate under the delusion that NYU produces something other than self-important and talent-less scenesters who aspire to nothing more than someday coming up with something as cool as Misshapes.

As if that weren’t insulting enough, people who aren’t even attached to NYU are using it as an excuse to build their own awful residential projects. Way out in the wilds of the East Village, one manage to slip under the radar, while the other has come up hard against the people that wrote the EV Gentrification Handbook: the residents of Christadora House.

Both attempt to end run FAR (the calculation that determines maximum buildable envelope) limits by qualifying for a community use bonus, and option that includes dormitories (how itinerant residents help communities, well, let NYU explain that). One project, at 81 East Third, was built with a vague promise that it would cater to New York School of Law students (a very convenient commute to Worth Street, yes), but it turns out they didn’t even have leases in places (one of those legal details that just unnecessarily encumber developers). That one was so bad they even tightened up the rules after.

But the man who likely will force a wholesale redrafting of community use bonuses is the man everyone in the East Village has found a reason to hate. Buying PS 64 (best known as CHARAS/El Bohio for the past decade) from Giuliani in the late nineties (in an auction that seemed designed to be a monstrous fuck you to his least favorite nabe), Gregg Singer has trotted out every school except DeVry to justify a 22-story tower. Stonewalled a number of times, he’s taken to grumbling at local papers, and has petulantly put his property back on the market. You have to feel for him; if it sells, at a reported 20 or so times his purchase price seven years ago (that’s about a 300% return a year, right? and you thought your co-op was appreciating fast), he’ll barely have enough left over after licking his wounds and paying his lawyers to, I dunno, buy both Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s properties.

The EV types seem pretty well organized, and funded, and have plenty of Community Board support in their collective distaste. But back in the land of purple banners and empty trolley buses, it looks like they could use a little more help. Make your voice heard in a couple hours at 333 Bowery.

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I buy black on the outside, because black is how I consume on the inside.

If you missed it, likely because you were up at five in pursuit of Incredible Deals, are a complete moron who is in the thrall of the worst aspects of American culture, or simply doing your damndest to hasten the total system of capitalism, the last stage before the Worker-s Paradise (it’s the holiday, pick your favorite rationalization — mine should be evident), today is Black Friday, called so because it is typically the day a retailer-s revenues for the year creep into profitable territory (how this is precisely calculated could certainly be a good topic for Cecil Adams), black being the color of profit for accountants. I am surprised that some dimwit hasn’t recommended moving Thanksgiving up a couple months to provide those holding Federated stock a little more breathing room.

Anyway, you should be out, frantically buying things today which should provide the scrim of identity through brand affiliation, or simply because you fear the total collapse of the economy.

You have to admit that-s a clever gambit — after a century of wealth concentration though the exploitation of labor, we get told that consumer spending is the engine of the economy; even as your real wages decline yearly, you are being threatened with the imminent collapse unless you borrow money you don-t have to buy things you don’t need. If consumer spending is so essential to the economy, you think we’d get a tax break or something.

Or, if you are a fan of Adbusters — San Francisco urban hippies who would rather lecture you, Democratic voting, blue state NPR supporter, for using the wrong type of hemp shopping bag than going out and meeting people for whom mindless accumulation of worthless goods does actually provide self-esteem, and figuring out some way of changing that (it-s not by making clever clever black sneakers, or vandalizing — sorry, appropriating, billboards in that hotbed of conservative thinking, the Bay Area, that’s for sure) — you know today is Buy Nothing Day. Just like the bad math that christened Black Friday, I can-t quite figure out how to calculate this one either. Should I feel bad because I  “bought” rent today, because I don’t live in a squat? Because I’m about to go buy a sandwich (from a local merchant, I promise!) instead of hanging out at the food co-op?

But their hearts are in the right place, even if the tactics are flawed. Everyone staying home today would only mean they go tomorrow, or the next day. Getting people to think in the logic of consume less is likewise a futile exercise, and it smacks of middle class white liberal arts students who aren’t cognizant of the fact that most Americans are acutely aware of how little they consume — all things being relative. An Xbox instead of dental care is distraction (at a discount; the next step down the ladder is simply MD 20/20). It’s unlikely that someone who suffered through an under-funded public education is going to sit around reciting Auden on Friday evenings (and, besides, have you played Call of Duty 2?).

One could take the high (optimistic) road and argue the steady creep of free market democracy will, in some generations, provide greater freedom and comfort to larger swaths of the world’s population than any other social order, or take the low (pessimistic) and argue that it leads to an historically unprecedented middle class, the nihilism and selfishness of which we are entirely ill-equipped to modify, even as the advertising of those excesses dangerously alienates larger and larger numbers of people who have better access to more deadly weapons and concepts with each passing year. We can imagine an idyllic New Urbanist dream, but the truth of SUVs and gated suburban communities knitted together by the underclass service sector is, and has been, the American Dream for some time. Like or not, conspicuous consumption is our mantra and nadir all at once, and unwinding this helix will also destabilize our teetering economy, or so warns the Fed.

In a town that is the standard bearer for much of this, today must be our most hallowed day (I’ve got a private sale invite for later — whoo hoo!). And our most sacred space should be marked by what? You betcha: a mall. Last week, the Port Authority decreed for once and for all that it remains unbowed by fundamentalist theocracies, demonstrating the best advertisement for freedom is benumbing bureaucracy, and introduced the Freedom Mall. I’m sure that name is taken by a more martial edifice elsewhere, and if I were feeling more clever, I’d come up with a more scathing moniker, but really, if you aren’t sickened by the renderings accompanying the article, my attempts at pithiness won’t dent your hide.

Likewise, there’s a more trenchant formal critique to be found in the bland deployment of spec office over retail, cobbled together by a ‘galleria’, but that would be admitting there was something there worth discussing. Take a look at that rendering: the scabrous security cladding of the Freedom Tower extends well beyond the roof line of the mall, and will, in and of itself, be larger than most downtown buildings. The spiky PATH station (about to be saddled with three levels of retail) hides behind a corner. Remembrance by committee and blender: pour in a pile of bad ideas and press ‘liquefy’. And this is before we’ve received the early renderings of the inevitable squiggle and ripple from Mr. Ready for His Close Up Ghery. Hopefully someone will make tee shirts saying “My Loved One Died for Freedom, and all We Got was this Lousy Mall.” Or, as a very incisive friend has remarked, Sacred Footprints would make an ideal name for a shoe store.

Who is doing this mall, by the way? Westfield Properties, the previous leaseholder, was bought out for a pretty penny (after making not so quiet noises that they, by contract, had a right to demand replacement space regardless of whatever the ‘Master Plan’ dictated — that was back in the quaint days when fully rational people were saying perhaps shopping would not be the appropriate act for the memorial grounds).I’m sure the disposition of this detail will bring a fresh round of craven back room dealing, fronted by mealy-mouthed egoists (that would be, um, Pataki) or humbled but striving opportunists (Doctoroff). But why waste the anger late on this most holy of American days? Next week will inevitably bring an unforeseen turn of the screw.

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Meta, Meta, Meta, Meta.

There is a certain type of review one finds at Pitchfork [Ed: a website that reviews a particular kind of music that envisions itself as somehow distinct from the tradition of pretentious rock critic-dom all the while absolutely upholding it]: it signals exhaustion on the part of reviewer, or aspirations for the postmodern prose stylings initially endured, and later, earnestly pursued, at an appropriately alternative liberal arts college that wishes it were Bennington. It becomes a review about a review, and then possibly even a discourse on that type of review, all of which is geared towards highlighting the cleverness of the reviewer, at the expense of those who have, you know, made a record. It is often used for negative reviews, to make clear that actually making and releasing a bad album is not intrinsically superior to the 45 minutes one spends crafting such a witty dismissal (and, to be sure, there are times this is true, given the highly indulgent nature of indie music). All of these strategies find a comfortable home with bloggers. Though we have our own rote styles, there is a plenty of obvious overlap. Sometimes it even makes sense.

The most acutely meta building in town is one that may have launched a blog empire, single-handedly transformed a neighborhood, provided years of fodder for stodgy traditionalists (who, um, look just like 70’s punks), and it still hasn’t even opened. I think. That particular point is so meta that no one even cares if it is ‘officially’ open. We could even get all October on it and interrogate the relationship of open and closed in post-critical age where valuation and signification hinge on markers so slippery that the oscillation between privileged and unprivileged poles (hip/unhip) is so indeterminate that it becomes an active strategy to situate oneself in the nether region between, a status that actively frustrates the maniacal categorization that any cultural landmark is subject to by equivocal and capricious taste-makers (boy do I feel young again).

But that is part of the point, isn’t it? Schizophrenic design, schizophrenic identity, a scrim of jet setting and aristocracy that is a sham, instead a highly leveraged existence siphoned off from a featureless conglomerate, mortgaged to pay for expensive drinks in a dank and akimbo lounge where you would run into the ironic chandeliers if there weren’t tables under them.

I haven’t been in the rooms, and my visit preceded the new restaurant, but each new accoutrement that gets stapled to the inside or out attenuates the sense that this project was designed by rooms full of third-tier GSD students toiling in seclusion from each other in carefully decorated offices that certainly couldn’t have been funded by fees. Nothing makes sense, even if that was the point.

I see it from most sides most days, and it is the unchallenged landmark of the LES (until Big Blue presents itself). Thus, the effort to make a intentionally ‘difficult’ form in a town where designing all four sides of a structure almost never happens starts out ballsy and ends up bathetic. Then again, I might be ‘misreading’ the intention, and instead relying only on my direct powers of observation, poorly credentialed and distinctly outside the orbits of fetishization that either venerate the effort in full celebration of its bankrupt enterprise, or the sleek, ironic disaffection that permeates those who find themselves just far enough above that they can dip their toes in the pool and not feel unduly soiled.

The best side is the east, a blank wall of metal panels, not a symbolic rejection of the authenticity it appropriated in favor of opening its arms and views to the west, commodified urban future of SoHo and TriBeCa creeping inevitably this way. No, it’s probably only the exigencies of circulation and adjacent air rights. But it is the nicest treatment this side of the short ends of the Secretariat Building.

But what does this building look like? Where is it? If you can’t tell already, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter. A long time ago, someone thought not that it would be a good idea, but only inevitable that a slick, soulless magazine that hoisted high the colors or design as somehow a bulwark against a charge of mindless consumerism (or maybe not, maybe they revel in their unironic insipidity) would build a hotel. Then they went broke, or something. In steps a hotelier, an appellation one drapes about themselves to indicate that they don’t rent rooms by the hour, or if they do, you can’t afford them. Various bad ideas, found in the selfsame pages of said magazine, are pilfered and pasted together: blobs, angles, dangerously sexualized ‘sculpture’, vaguely baroque repeat patterns, a dash of Stephen King redrum, and, when you run out of ideas that would do any issue of Tokion proud, slather it over with rectilinear patterns of glass. And really tiny balconies overlooking parking lots. But if none of that works, you take the whole thing, squeeze it through a pasta maker and plant it in Astor Place.

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Hey, we thought their court system was a pretty good idea too.

Though it turns out it wasn’t going to be a cornerstone of his second administration (or he is the craftiest bureaucrat ever), it is still notable that congestion pricing made the headlines only a day after Bloomberg’s administration. It seems obvious that our most famous subway commuter would think it rational for private vehicles pay closer to their true cost of sharing the roadways. Given what a hard sell it was in London, it nonetheless deserves fuller consideration here. Though congestion has always been a cultural marker of living in Manhattan, the preponderance of single passenger cars (average number of daily occupants in river crossings: 1.35) are only a sliver of that history, so their banishment would be more a return to a historical norm than an aberrance.

Any tracking mechanism inflames our libertarian notions of freedom of moment, though the threat of increased observation or surveillance is no longer the surefire way to garner knee-jerk opposition it once was. But even if you are the sort for whom such intrusion is a make or break characteristic, imagine the issue in economic terms: how much is the privilege of a particular form a privacy worth? The city streets are a resource of absolute scarcity (we can’t make any more, even if density increases). There are anonymous alternatives (even though MetroCards do feature user tracking, one can design an anonymous routine pretty easily — but cards more often, and with cash), but the costs of maintaining privacy are massive: time lost to congestion, and increased wear and tear on streets. Since there is no other way to regulate this (exclusive of tolls at all the river crossings), we can establish a saturation point at which this burden is no longer viable, or beneficial to the majority (who are clearly transit customers).

As people bend their intellects to rationalize opposing this eminently sensible plan, you run into a couple poorly considered counter arguments:

1. The strain on the transit system will be onerous. Currently, about seven million fares are collected daily by the MTA. Around two million river crossings are recorded each day. The likely absolute impact of any congestion pricing (even if it were amazingly effective) would be at most a 5-7% increase in MTA ridership.

2. Congestion pricing is regressive. Driving into Manhattan for the day already costs in the neighborhood of $35 (tolls and parking), excluding ownership costs. That’s $8,750 yearly for a full-time worker. There may be people living on a razor-thin margin regarding the cost of their commute, we can’t get too exercised about people making highly irrational economic decisions for a purported convenience.

3. Taxes, Big Government, Blah, Blah, Blah. This is not a surreptitious tax increase. It’s unlikely the city would realize substantial increases in revenue from the program. As a matter of straight revenue, the city could do far better by getting the state to reinstitute the misnamed Commuter Tax. What the city would get would be an amazing quality of life improvement: reduced driving time for ‘legitimate’ vehicles, improved response time for emergency dispatch, less noise, less pollution, and a net savings in economic efficiency upwards of 15-20 times the potential revenue.

One unstated, but possible, benefit will be gathering better data on car ownership in the congestion zone, and an incremental increase in tax revenue. Many residents buy and register cars out of state (to avoid sales tax), or fail to transfer registration when moving here. Since the only way to receive an exemption from the fees will be some sort of registration program, the city will get a far clearer picture of how many vehicles are stored in the city, and can further develop a traffic management policy (perhaps creating additional disincentives to car ownership).

Think of it visually. There are about 12,000 taxi medallions issued in the city. Figure 90% of those are on the street at a given time, and three-quarter of them are in Manhattan. That means that even when it seems like every other vehicle in midtown is a cab, it means there perhaps only eight thousand cabs on the street. Morning traffic (7-10AM) comprises 180,000 crossings, the majority single occupancy automobiles. If congestion pricing reduces this number by 20%, it will mean four times the number of cabs on the street at a given moment less of private autos. While adding 1% to the ridership of the subway.

The trends are staggering: during the years of greatest increase in river crossings (1950-1960) subway ridership decreased 20% (only recently returning to the levels of the 1940’s). Though the PANYNJ (Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and the Geo Washington Bridge) crossings have seen consistently the largest increases, a largish minority of destinations are other than Manhattan, and there are still a massive number of East River inbound commutes (many of which may be intracity).

It’s the sort of policy discussion that is strange to get into, because there is no good, and even very few bad, counter-arguments. Development is always impossible to gauge as a next tax benefit, and gentrification is haphazard and difficult to forecast. Even the smoking ban threatened cherished notions of our identity. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough, but I can’t find a reason to not support this. Anyone vehemently opposed will be, by definition, a non-resident, slipping out of the city at the end of the day, likely blaring a horn and driving dangerously on their way to some distant suburb, siphoning off tax dollars and giving nothing back to the life of the city. Well, now they can, seven dollars at a time.

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My job is done. Well, obviated.

If you find this blog too poorly edited and not illustrated enough, check out this. If you are reading this right now dance on over to WNYC and listen to the Brian Lehrer show and listen to the interview with the author Kate Ascher (also VP of the NYC Economic Development Corporation). Some sample pages of the book are on his show blog. I’m to lazy to have a wish list, so if anyone wants to send me a copy of this, I’d be much obliged. If your name is Penguin, I might even pimp the book some more.

UPDATE: Oh, and to all you Democratic apologists, Bloomberg announced the day after his election, that he is interested in reasearching the possibility of congestion pricing in Midtown. That’s about as progressive as you can get (considering the other major city mayor who is an advocate is a declared Socialist). And Kate’s not so sharp on the Q&A, so here’s some detail. The orange lights that are mounted on standards have been variously attributed to three things: one, indicating proximity of fire house, the proximity of a pharmacy (that’s what FYI says), and the highly likely answer, they indicate a fire call box is below (before the advent of telephones, call boxes were necessary to make fire calls; though the city decomissioned most of them i the 90’s, the orange lights are vestigial remnants). And the drone in Times’ Square? Art. I visited it when it was renovated, but I don’t know if it is functioning today.

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