American Culture Today - hypnagogicfun

Brooklyn Waterfront Impressions

Earlier this week I jogged from the north end of Brooklyn Bridge Park in DUMBO down the Brooklyn side of the East River to the Fairway Market, deep in Red Hook. You may remember the devastation Hurricane Sandy had on this part of Brooklyn. While there wasn’t the dramatic fires of Breezy Point or the loss of life in Staten Island, Brooklyn’s waterfront was hit hard. My run was more exploration than exercise.

According to Playground Painting Companies, the Brooklyn Bridge Park construction is progressing nicely, with playgrounds, fields, and manicured bits of nature among the walks. For further information about playgrounds for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), you can click here. It’s heavily used, well-planned, and everything that a public park space should be. With strong public and private support, the park was as attractive as billed. What interested me was the industrial, residential, and commercial section south of the park in Red Hook.

Red Hook has long been a neglected area in Brooklyn. Isolated from the rest of the borough by the Gowanus Expressway after WWII, and from much of the economic development during the past few decades, Red Hook has faced serious drug problems and only spotty investment and attention from the city. The situation started changing about ten years ago with many trumpeting the possibilities of the neighborhood. Since, Fairway Market and Ikea have been big box additions with many of smaller businesses and shops providing a stronger sense of neighborhood. A business development corporation has been encouraging investment and relocation. Through it all, the underlying vision has not been of condos, but of light manufacturing and commerce among updated residential housing stock. Unfortunately, much of that nascent possibility of economic growth was imperiled by the hurricane. In April, six months after the storm, residents gathered to take stock. Three months later I was cheered to see the neighborhood starting to look like the Red Hook I knew a few years earlier – dynamic, gritty, and keen to make money.

Running down Van Brunt Street I saw new restaurants and shops, tractor trailers and smaller trucks hauling, and construction sites, big and small. The Queen Mary 2 loomed along the river in the newly constructed cruise terminal. Steve is still making key lime pies on Van Dyke Street. More than a few distillers are making high-end alcohol in the neighborhood. A high-end hardware manufacturer is in Red Hook. And wandering through the streets of Red Hook, I saw work, jobs, innovation, and above all, opportunity.

There are few sights more encouraging that witnessing an urban neighborhood growing and prospering.

David Potash

July 5, 2013 American Culture Today

Accelerating Democracy – From a Governing Perspective

John O. McGinnis, professor law at Northwestern University, has faith in democracy, empiricism, and technology to improve governance. His latest work, Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology, provides an overview of the ways in which democratic government can use and respond to technology. He is mot concerned with claims about how democracies should use and respond to new technology.

Driving the work is a serious question: how do democracies make and evaluate decisions? How can they do so more effectively? McGinnis identifies the ever-increasing importance of the social sciences and new technologies to answering that query. For us to live in a rationally governed world, it is essential that we have an understanding of the consequences of policies and choices. New technologies permit more sophisticated questions and answers. We can now do this quickly and efficiently.

McGinnis calls for more experimentation. He wants a revival of federalism with multiple pilots. He identifies great value in more information, more readily shared and assessed. In addition, McGinnis emphasizes the values of predictive markets. Technology can make all of this possible. However, McGinnis does not advocate for a technocratic élite. His aim is about harnessing the social values inherent in new technology.

New technology, particularly analysis of big data, can lead to smarter decisions. Businesses use it well. However, I am not confident that public policy preference is grounded in efficiency. We often make decisions reasons that are less effective and less rational. There is also great potential within dispersed communication (social media) to disrupt government and rational decision-making. Democracies do not always move toward greater democracy. McGinnis, acknowledges bias but believes that technology and greater information can be a corrective.

McGinnis’s vision rings true within the world of public policy and administration. Data and empirical information has the nagging habit of getting in the way of suppositions, biases, and predetermined plans. Officials and leaders who use new technologies can and will be more effective because they will notice this. Happily, these are also the people most likely to read Accelerating Democracy.

David Potash

June 15, 2013 American Culture Today, Reviews

Skeuomorphs – Much More Than Clicks and Faux Paneling

My son, an avid Kickstarter, recently received a brilliant new piece of technology, the Pebble watch. Internet and Bluetooth ready, this wristwatch customizes with a slew of apps, with more on the way, and talks with your smartphone. It looks pretty cool, too.

How does the watch tell time? A variety of ways and traditionally with two hands and a dial.

When objects consciously reference other objects or design, it’s called a skeuomorph. It is most common today when new technology includes older technological features, most likely to make the change more comfortable. Pay close attention and you’ll find skeuomorphs all around – and they have been with us for a long time.

Check out the Ford Country Squire, the classic suburban station wagon. Built first as a “woodie” with wood sides, the car retained stick on wood paneling for decades. Horrendous and wonderful – but mostly horrific if you were assigned the far back on a road trip.

The real rise in skeuomorph design came with the digital world. We don’t recognize bytes and code. Skeuomorphs are the bridge to analog and authenticity. They are the backwards-looking matrix that allows for digital notepads, turntables, building blocks and calendars. Look on your desktop for digital wood and digital leather. Smartphones click like a mechanical camera when taking a photo. Apple was famous for its skeuomorphic designs.

Ironic use of skeuomorphism is common and can be effective with the right touch. I sometimes have my smartphone ring, not beep, chime or gong, and it often leads to smiles. It is a way to have our new technology cake and eat it, too. The difficulty comes into play when skeuomorphic design is neither ironic nor thoughtful. Skeuomorphism can be lazy. Why should a computer screen look like a typewritten page on a yellow legal pad?

Evaluation of skeuomorphic design has to acknowledge intent. If the desire is for authenticity, failure is certain. “Authentic reproductions” always fall short and ring false. If a design deceives with integrity, it stands a fighting chance of success.

And fake wood paneling is always in bad taste.

David Potash

March 19, 2013 American Culture Today, Curiouser and Curiouser

Political Cartoons and Oliphant’s Lament

Is it just me, or have political cartoons lost their punch? One would expect that in our visually rich society we would be awash in popular cartooning. Animation is everywhere, to be sure, but political cartooning – or “editorial cartooning” as the professionals call it, does not seem as relevant.

It could be that shrinking influence of newspapers has undermined the access of political cartoon. The rise of corporate culture, too, has been cited as a corresponding deterrent to stinging political cartoons. But other factors are at play.

It was not always such. From Thomas Nast’s Tammany Tiger to Pat Oliphant’s caricatured Nixon, talented political cartoonists have been able to reduce complex political situations into easily recognized images. When they get it right, their visuals are widely copied and repeated. Yet in 2013 there has been no viral cartoon and no one image that sums up last year’s presidential election.

After reading Oliphant’s Anthem, a companion book and website to the Library of Congress’s 1998 exhibition (note – the website is live and worth a gander), I believe that the underlying cause of the political cartoon’s wane reflects a broader shift in American popular culture. Oliphant, an Australian native who won a Pulitzer way back in 1966, is one of America’s most influential political cartoonists. His work is reproduced nationally and readily available. Along with MaNelly and the late Herblock, the trio were the most influential American political cartoonists of the last 50 years.

Most political cartoons, from the 1800s through the early 2000s, shared a common purpose: to shine a light on hypocrisy, to knock the pompous off their perch, to mock. Politicians are often the target, but not exclusively. Political cartoons’ energy derives from the difference between what is and what is proclaimed. That difference is all the easier to portray if our leaders access and utilize the language and imagery of the ideal, the preferred. The more ambitious the claims of a political leaders, the more energy available for a political cartoons. And ambitious assertions – especially moral testaments – are unusual in our ironic age. When the proud fall, it is far too often medicalized and pathologized. Elliott Spitzer and Anthony Weiner serve as prime examples.

We have come to expect our leaders to cheat, to philander, to obfuscate, and to lie. We have low expectations for presidential candidates a lower expectations for Congress. Without much faith in the system or the people closest to it, we gain little pleasure or insight from the humor of political cartoons. We have been habitually disappointed too often – and there are few professing optimism.

Ironically, we need a little more idealism for political cartooning, with all its dark humor, to gain traction.

David Potash

January 21, 2013 American Culture Today, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

No Shaming This Shrew

Alisa Valdes is a prolific journalist, blogger and author. Fearless when it comes to writing about herself and affairs of the heart, she has fashioned a career of being an outspoken feminist. Self-reflection and self-disclosure can take an author far. It takes an extraordinarily life or talent, however, to do more than describe.

In the Feminist and the Cowboy, her latest book, Valdes recounts her turbulent relationship with a handsome New Mexico rancher of few words, a dominant personality, and a cleft chin. Part memoir and part polemic on gender roles and identity, the book is a first-hand account of a slow-moving train wreck of a relationship written by a passenger in first class. She’s a liberal feminists. He’s a libertarian Republican. She wears Uggs. He wears cowboy boots. Can they find love? It might be possible, but for the lovers’ respective problems and conflicts. Valdes is high-functioning and consistently self-destructive. The cowboy is controlling and damaged.

Shortly after the book was published, Valdes revealed that her romance with the cowboy had ended. She then briefly posted and quickly pulled down an account of abuse at the hands of the Cowboy. It was not rape, she later attested, but many in the blogosphere disagreed. In fact, the post-publication woes of Valdes generated a high-number of blogs, comments and articles (See here , here and here).

I have no desire to write about Valdes’ love life, past or present. If that interests you, read the book. I found it frustrating, entertaining, and shallow. It is neither profound nor substantial, and suffers from a “just written” feel. But Valdes’ talent is keeping the attention on her and the discussion about her going. In fact, her gift is an ability to turn self-absorption into a career. It may only be the knowledge that at the age of 40 she was living in her father’s house and dating a control freak that keeps one from jealousy.

Why do so many of us pay attention? Because Valdes’ open and trusting narrative, her raw emotions, her lightly edited vacillations, echo the language of an old friend. For a traditional memoir, unedited connotes sloppy. For a blogger/journalist/author, an unedited memoir means that nothing is held back. Valdes is definitely not discreet.

So many of us work too hard, run around too much, and simply lack the time and opportunity for sustained interaction with friends. Humans are social animals, though – there is no denying our nature – and we want friendship and trust. Valdes offers her story couched in the familiar language, structure and genre of a friend.She trusts, she cajoles, she argues and she explains. You can almost hear the pauses in the text where she waits for us to nod, to ask a question (“you did what!?”), and to console. Valdes is well-practiced in the perfect genre for an age with few rules protecting privacy and no meaningful understanding of intimacy.

David Potash

January 19, 2013 American Culture Today, Reviews

Lovely Cities

If we are now in an age of cities, P.D. Smith’s City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age is the self-proclaimed resource for 2013. A richly illustrated compendium of history, biography, urban studies, anecdote and travel guide. Smith is an unabashed enthusiast for urban life and living. The chapters are arranged thematically (“Arrival,” “Where to Stay,” “Money,” “Getting Around”) and jump from city to city across the globe. Less a travel book and more a considered reflection on all things urban, Smith’s work highlights the incredibly complexity that makes cities such important features. It is beautiful, thought-provoking, enjoyable, and interestingly, not quite right.

I was a frequent visitor to New York City as a child. My parents would take our family into the Village to eat, to midtown to hear music and see theater, and to the Bronx to visit my father’s relatives. The City was always tremendously exciting for me. It usually was great fun, but not necessarily comfortable. It consistently surprised me. I loved being in the city but I did not love the city – I did not know it.

Demographers and planners consistently debate the relative impact of urban areas versus suburban areas. Most Americans live in suburbs, but recently population growth in cities has been faster than in suburbs. Around the world, more and more people are living in cities, with a projected 75% of all humanity slated to live in metropolitan areas by 2050. The overall vitality and strength the greater metropolitan area (that’s when you add suburbs to the city) are what matters, too; metropolitan areas are sites of energy, wealth and opportunity.

I grew up in Madison, New Jersey – the “Rose City.” Located twenty-five miles from New York City, Madison was and remains very much a small-town suburb with 15,000 or so inhabitants. Most of the borough consists of single family homes and a small downtown with locally owned shops defines Madison’s shopping district. Understanding Madison is impossible without paying attention to its role and relationship with New York City. Some jobs in Madison require commuting, but also many other jobs depend upon the corporate headquarters and back offices that have sprung up in Morris County as part of the larger “edge city.”

Healthy cities are never in stasis. Cities are inevitably changing, growing, realigning and shifting.

As a toddler on one trip to Manhattan, pausing before a construction site, I had my parents in stitches when I asked if the city was every going to be “done.”

Cities defy omnipotent narratives and perspectives. Panoramic images may sell books – and Smith has plenty of these – but they are unhelpful fictions when it comes to understanding cities or why they are the future of mankind. Cities reveal themselves to observant participants, glance by glance, and only through multiples lenses – be it race, class, gender, time, space or mood. Pick a city block. It will never be the same block to a commuter, a tourist, or a resident. It is not the same block at 3:00 pm and 3:00 am. Rarely are two glimpses of a city the same. Smith misses this, amid all the photos, the walks and interviews. He writes that a city is its people, but never quite conveys the elusiveness of phenomenological meaning-making in an urban environment.

Last week we revisited Park Slope, Brooklyn , where we used to live. Walking well-traveled blocks and pointing to the children the entrances to buildings and houses where we once lived, it was familiar and not-familiar, same and different. Chance encounters with friends confirmed the vibrancy of the neighborhood, its constant state of flux, and the joy living in a city as dynamic and unknowable as New York City.

December 30, 2012 American Culture Today, Reviews, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Gotham Locavores Rejoice

Robin Shulman’s Eat the City is a cheerful account of the idiosyncratic passions that allow for the making of food in New York City. Lightly mixing history with contemporary interviews, Shulman makes it clear that the city has always been a place where some make, find, grow or catch their food. Further, while many of us no longer thing of New York City as no longer playing that role, it is.

Broken into chapters by food group – bees and honey, meat, wine, sugar, vegetables, fish and beer – the books nimbly covers the geography and history of the city. Shulman is more interested in people and tastes than production or society. Restaurants rarely rate a mention and it is mighty difficult to find a recipe in the pages. It is difficult to tell is Shulman is motivated by curiosity or a deeper love of food. I would have wished for the latter, even at a price of her professionalism. Her subjects all display a singular passion for their pursuits, be they ale or smoked pig from a Queens farm.

The book’s structure reflects the long shadows of John McPhee, for narrative description, and Michael Pollan, for argumentation and structure. But this is no polemic. Shulman’s text is grounded in close observation. A practicing journalist who has spent extensive time overseas, Shulman has an eye for detail. Implicit in the work is an ideological agenda, however, these people are doing something important and interesting. But that raises questions. Are the locavores merely characters? Hipsters? Or do they represent something larger or something more important? I would argue that they do, but Shulman shies away from bigger arguments. She could have – but reading this one has the sense that she never really settled down with a clear of idea of what she wanted the book to say.

It is, however, a tasty read – particularly the chapters on bees and meat. And a welcome addition to the study of the world’s most interesting city.

October 29, 2012 American Culture Today, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

When Running Away Makes Sense

Carissa Phelps’ memoir, Runaway Girl: Escaping Life on the Streets, One Helping Hand At A Time, recounts a horrific childhood and adolescence. Born into poverty and growing up in central California, Carissa was sexually exploited by the age of twelve. She was living on and off the streets of Fresno by the time she was thirteen. Raped repeatedly, sold for sex and trapped in a culture of drugs, violence and abuse, Carissa repeatedly ran away. She ran from home, from the juvenile detention centers she was sent, and from the men and women who hurt and used her.

Always smart, always good with numbers, Carissa did not stay in school, either, until her mid-teens. With the ongoing support of a teacher and a counselor, Carissa slowly started putting her life together. She graduated from Cal State Fresno, and then later a JD and an MBA from UCLA. It was never an easy journey. Even as she began to succeed educationally and professionally, difficult choices and decisions troubled her. Steady relationships, trust and “normal” relationships with others challenged her. It is understandable, too. How does one reconcile such a life and move on?

Now an advocate, attorney and speaker, Carissa Phelps tells her story and works to help young men and women. She is a vocal presence warning of the horrors of human trafficking and childhood abuse. She is using her story to give help and hope to others.

I would like to say that the book is uplifting or optimistic, but it is not. Written in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, Runaway Girl has the bluntness of a police report. It is difficult to see how it could be otherwise. Phelps’ uses language and the narrative to both share and hide. She cannot explain. It is impossible to do so. All that she can do for most of the book is describe. The cumulative effect is one of great sorrow.

Ms. Phelps’ strength is that of a survivor. Like a boxer who is able who is beaten round after round but remains standing, Ms. Phelps’ determination is admirable. But there is no joy in taking the beating.

Though not a feminist text, the book is a primer in misogyny. Carissa is a recurring site of exploitation and hatred. The moments in the text when she describes others treating her humanely, valuing her as a person, stand out.

At a larger level, the book makes clear the dystopian culture of poverty, drugs, abuse and indifference in our culture. The streets for many of our young are Hobbesian camps of power and exploitation. With sex and drugs are the prime economic drivers, other values stand little chance of gaining a toe-hold. The memoir also demonstrates the colossal ineffectiveness of our “system” to address adolescents who get into trouble. Happenstance is what helped Phelps survive, not planning, not thoughtful care, and most definitely not a system.

A story of success on one level, the book is also a story of many failures, many lives lost and ruined. It is, in many ways, a nightmare, a vision of what many young people must see as a life without hope or love.

October 20, 2012 American Culture Today, Reviews

Deep In The Heart Of . . . . What?

The argument in Gail Collins‘ new book, As Texas Goes . . . How The Lone Star State Hijacked The American Agenda , is neatly captured in the Appendix. Collins reprints a biannual report by the Legislative Study Group of the Texas House of Representatives. Titled “Texas on the Brink,” the report in Harper’s Index style tabulates Texas’s ranking on a host of state by state measures. Key indicators include:

Texas in 2nd highest in the US in terms of public school enrollment, 38th on expenditures per student, and 50th in terms of percent of the population 25 or older with a high school diploma.
Texas is ranked 43rd in terms of graduation rate.
Among all 50 states, Texas is number one in terms of percentage of uninsured children (highest), percent of population uninsured (highest), amount of emissions of carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, toxic chemicals released into water, and hazard waste generated.

In fact, a ton is wrong with Texas.

Collins, in her acerbic but jokey style, eviscerates the Texas miracle in this book. She pokes holes in Texas myths, Texas decision-making, Texas culture and Texas politics. It all has a sharp tone, which can grate, but her points are difficult to refute. The Lone Star State is driven by cultural myths that simply do not align with geographic, demographic, economic, or political reality. The state is a mess and doesn’t even know it.

The kicker is Texas’s over-size impact on what happens to the rest of the United States. Blame it on leadership, the Texas committee that recommends textbooks for children, or the durability of the cowboy and Wild West – Texas generates strong feelings in a way that Ohio cannot. And this would not interest Collins, save for the eerily power of Texas in defining America.

Reading Collins is a bit like sour candy. Tangy, tasty, and liable to leaving you feeling a tad ill if you have too much. Even though she’s funny and right, As Texas Goes is a bit much for one sitting.

September 21, 2012 American Culture Today, Curiouser and Curiouser, Reviews

Pussy Riot and Brittni Colleps – women in trouble/troubling women

A week ago Friday in Moscow, Russia, three women in their 20s were convicted of “hooliganism” and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. The all-girl members of the impromptu punk band “Pussy Riot” received world-wide attention after being arrested for an anti-Putin performance on the steps of an Orthodox church. Pussy Riot’s supposed primary victim, the Russian Orthodox Church, approved the prosecution of the women but asked the state for leniency. The female sentencing judge ignored the plea, calling the women a danger to society.

On the other side of the world in Fort Worth, Texas, another young woman was found guilty Friday of a serious crime. Brittni Nicole Colleps, a married 28-year-old mother of three and former high school English teacher, will be serving five years in jail for having “improper relationships” with five of her former students. She had sex with some of her students. Colleps’ defense did not contest that sexual activity took place between the teacher and the young men. Instead, her attorneys argued that the students, each of whom was 18 or older at the time of the encounters, were willing participants. Ms. Colleps’ sexual partners tried to keep their activity quiet because they “didn’t want her to get in trouble.” Discretion was unavoidable as Texas prosecutors never even considered a plea bargain. They wanted a jury to serve as “the moral conscience of the community.”

Brittni Colleps should not be teaching. Pussy Riot – now often called a punk art collective – are not good musicians. The consistency in jail time and the inconsistency in responses to those sentences is telling.

Pussy Riot’s ordeal has been a world-wide cause célèbre, with civil rights organizations, politicians and pop stars rising to the band’s defense. The paper of record, The New York Times, considered Pussy Riot’s sentencing front-page news. Those that support the prosecution assert that the women committed a premeditated crime against the church and Russian morality. The state, championing this view, has pursued justice by aligned itself every more closely with the Russian national church. Those who oppose the trial and conviction see it as a case of free speech being muzzled. Pussy Riot are media darlings, even in the tabloids.

Ms. Colleps ordeal is also a global media event with salacious details feeding the frenzy. She had sex with multiple men and one escapade was captured on a cell phone. The video was shown to her jury, adding to the scandal. The Texas prosecutors’ arguments are a defense of the community’s values. District Attorney Elizabeth Beach described Ms. Colleps’ actions as “completely disgusting.” Ms. Colleps’ lawyers, however, described the charges as an unconstitutional intrusion of the state into the sex lives of adults. The students, they argued, were of the age of consent. The jury convicted quickly. Ms. Colleps’ sexual behavior is her crime. Do not expect, however, for Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch to rush to Brittni Colleps’ aid. They and other organizations have been mute, as has the non-tabloid press. The New York Times has published nothing about her.

It is relatively easy for Americans to scoff at Russia’s ham-handed attempts at controlling speech and behavior. The female punk band, whose members look like and act like rebels, fit a recognizable stereotype. Further, Pussy Riot needed to be convicted in order to fulfill that role. Any number of musicians – female or not – can perform protest songs and never be noticed. After all, most musical protests are harmless. Pussy Riot’s conviction affirms a convenient way of understanding human rights, that freedoms are hard to come by outside of our shores. We are able to judge from afar while affirming our own sense of righteousness.

On the other hand, Colleps will gather little sympathy, even though the proportionality of crime to punishment may strike many as dubious. Her sin is more serious than breaking a law that was passed to protect children because her sexual behavior is incompatible with acceptable norms for teacher, mother and wife. In fact, Colleps’ transgression dishonored multiple communities – her home, her school, and, by proxy through her husband who is in the service, the military. Her sexual partners may have thought leniency proper, but framing that defense demands a radical re-casting of her sins into something different. “Free sexuality” does not carry the same currency as “free speech.” She will be punished severely.

Deeply held concerns about changing values and mores are more often than not played through our responses to the crimes of women and their perceived status as criminals. While the actions of Pussy Riot – playing music – and Brittni Colleps – having sex with adult men – may not in and of themselves be characterized as criminal, the context of their actions were judged to be dangerous to their communities. Pussy Riot’s music was a public affront to state and church; Brittni Colleps sexual behavior was an affront to community values for teachers. But in both situations, it is less about who has been put at risk and more about the political gains that are accrued from their prosecutions.

Pussy Riot helps to explain Russia – and it also helps to explain the way that many in the west rush to support a particular concept of free speech. Brittni Colleps can tell us a great deal about America’s concern about sexuality, public schools, and the fascination with the prurient. And both situations are extremely informative about the power of the prosecution to indict, convict and define.

August 29, 2012 American Culture Today, Curiouser and Curiouser

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