Alice Hausman is seen in district 66B in daylight.

And Nick Coleman writes a good column.

No, I’m being catty.  Every year, Nick Coleman – this blog’s guest of fisking honor, a person against whom I’ve pulled very few punches – writes one or two columns that make you sit back and go “this is what a metro columnist should be doing”.

And it is:

“It seems crazy,” she says, looking up at her paint job. “We don’t just have to fight drug dealers and gangbangers. We have to fight the city, too.”

Damn.  It’s a quote I’d love to have found.  It’s at the end of today’s bit, about a retired, MS-riven woman in a crime-sodden, lethal neighborhood in North Minneapolis who  is being fined into poverty by a city that can’t and won’t deal with  the crime that has destroyed the neighborhood that her family has lived in since 1941.

Slyter, 57, owns a home in the Hawthorne neighborhood of north Minneapolis. She has been a bulwark of decency as the block she lives on has been invaded by hoodlums and drug dealers. But in the eyes of the city, there is a bigger problem than criminals: Peeling paint.

Slyter was slapped with a $200 fine in July (it has doubled to $400) because her house trim needed painting, and she wasn’t able to reach to the peak of her roof, where the trim is 25 feet above street level. Get a ladder or hire a professional painter, a city inspector told her. But a ladder is a tough climb for a woman in a leg brace, and a professional painter is expensive and hard to come by in a neighborhood where workers can get shot.

Slyter’s peeling trim was going nuclear: Unless she got it painted, city fines could escalate quickly to $2,000 or more.

“They could fine me out of my home,” she says. “They just keep doubling until the fine is more than the house is worth.”

Of course, this ties into a bigger problem, one that is crying for some investigation – Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s imperious, gratingly arrogant-yet-comically ineffective code enforcement departments.  (Although someone is trying).

So this week, Slyter climbed atop a scaffold she built in the back of her pickup truck. With the aid of a 15-foot painting pole, she stood on tiptoes to paint the chocolate-brown trim and get the city off her back.

Her home, built in 1887, has been in Slyter’s family since 1941.

Context?

Slyter has tried to be a good citizen while the neighborhood has suffered through waves of criminal activity.

“Drug dealing, robberies, shootings,” Slyter says, reciting a litany of troubles. “Any direction you go within three blocks, you can point to a murder that has happened. If you want to live here, you have to turn your home into a fortress.”

Slyter built a fence to secure her back yard, and nailed planks across her storm windows to keep them from being pried open by burglars. These are not crazy measures in a part of the city where law-abiding residents cover windows with shatter-proof plastic and valuable belongings are chained to garage ceiling beams.

“We’ve all had to build fortresses,” says Joan Thom, chair of the neighborhood safety committee. “It’s not the cops’ fault. We love our cops. But when they arrest dealers, the judges let ’em loose and say they don’t have enough courtrooms to deal with every drug dealer. Then they haul people into court for stupid stuff like this. Hello!?! Which part of this picture are you missing?”

But at least the boat has perfectly-ordered deck chairs.

Question:  Does Minneapolis code enforcement go after homes stuffed full of gang-banging thugs?

I’m going to take a step back for a moment.  Yes, it’s important to keep neighborhoods up.  The “Broken Windows” policies of Rudy Giuliani in NYC and Brett Schundler in Jersey City were part of the plan that brought both cities back from decades of blight and – when combined with aggressive (some might say heavy-handed) police response – crime.

Minneapolis has got half the formula down:

If you are thinking it doesn’t make sense to police the paint while criminals control the corners, well, it doesn’t have to make sense: It’s city policy.

The inspections department is much more aggressive, says director Henry Reimer, especially in north Minneapolis.

The city issued 80,000 citations last year, ordering owners to cut grass, paint trim or make other repairs. Peeling paint might seem trivial, Reimer said, but city codes keep bad blocks from getting worse.

If you are a Minneapolis Republican…no, strike that.  If you live in Minneapolis and care about the future of your city, you should print out this next paragraph, quoting bureaucrat Reimer (emphasis added):

“People who maintain their property in disrepair help bring forth an environment in which crime is welcome,” he said. “We’re trying to move things in the right direction in terms of fighting crime. If you own property you don’t feel safe keeping compliant [with housing codes], then you shouldn’t own that property. Or you should pay someone to fix it who isn’t afraid.”

In other words, according to city bureaucrat Reimer, if you are afraid (of criminals the city can’t and won’t deal with), you are the villain.  You should leave.  Mr. Reimer:  Whose city is this?  The gang-bangers?  The Code Enforcement department’s?
If the Minneapolis GOP doesn’t have this quote in every mailbox in the city during the next mayoral election, they should disband.

Coleman even gets it:

But it isn’t that easy.

For the past 18 months, drug dealing was going on next door to Slyter. It was only when a recent police raid put an end to it that Slyter felt safe to do outside chores.

“I wouldn’t be out here in my yard if they were still next door,” Slyter said, nodding at the empty drug house where a pile of dirty mattresses sits on the curb. Even now, she says, she only does yard work before noon.

Why? “The gangbangers don’t get up until noon,” she says.

I can see R.T. Rybak’s next statement: “most of the victims are people who are out between 12PM and 5AM…”

Reimer says he respects Slyter’s concerns, but fear does not excuse homeowners from keeping up their property.

“We’re working holistically to address crime issues and take back our city,” he says.

It sounds good. In theory.

Barely.

With rights come responsibilities.  There’s a term for responsibilities without rights – in this case, the right to see your local drug-dealing gang-banger being tasered into incontinence and thrown into the back of a squad car, and then sent off to jail for a very long time.

Oppression.

But when you see a retired woman on a truck trying to reach the top of her house with a paint brush in a neighborhood where drugs are being sold on the corner, something is out of whack. Slyter isn’t the person who most needs cracking down upon.

Still, with luck, her house trim may now meet city approval.

Too bad the people of Minnesota can’t do the same thing to Minneapolis; walk in, declare the place out of code (“out of control gangs, catch ‘n release justice system, city government more concerned with citizen compliance than with fighting crime, largely for political reasons”) and start turning the screws through fines and harassment, ending in eviction.

Oh, wait – we can.  Every four years.

Will the people of Minneapolis be smart enough?

Oh, yes, I am proud to hereby brand myself a dork:

And it works…

At 21 feet long and with a wingspan of over 19 feet it is, in fact, big enough to fly a kid in. However, knowing that it will be powered by solid-fuel rockets, they wouldn’t put a kid, dog, monkey or Gizmodo editor inside, even if it uses three full parachutes to land.

After drawing the plans using CAD software, Andy’s team and his friends at Polecat Aerospace (with the help of RMS Laser and Aerotech Consumer Aerospace) used laser cutting to make the pieces out of Baltic Birch wood. They also used solid aluminum for some parts, like the rods which are the pivot point for the wings

Well, it should work.

I’ll have to follow this…

…between the 35W River Bridge and the Wakota Bridge?

Besides the whole falling over thing, I mean?

There’s actual evidence that MNDOT screwed up.

Khani Sahebjam, who heads the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s metro district, told legislators at a fact-finding hearing that the agency has set aside $50 million for the Interstate 494 bridge job. But he said there’s no assurance that contractors will submit bids anywhere close to that amount when the job is re-bid in January.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” Sahebjam said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Rep. Joe Atkins, DFL-South St. Paul, who chaired the hearing. “I don’t think there’s going to be a bridge to cross.”

Goes to show you what trusting government will get you.

But before we go storming the MNDOT building with pitchforks and torches and demanding Carol Molnau’s head (not that it might not conceivably be called for), let’s remember – MNDOT was always Minnesota’s short-bus agency.  They never had a good reputation, no matter who was governor. It’s something someone’s gotta fix, and it might as well be Pawlenty.

But watch the nattering class try to forget MNDOT’s catalogue of screwups before 2000…

It was Monday, October 5, 1987. 

I was pretty much on top of the world. 

I’d sold three stories to Saint Paul neighborhood papers the previous week – $170 in income – plus a voice-over job (another $150), which pretty much covered my bills for the month. 

And now, it was gravy.

I got a call around four in the afternoon from one of the talent agents I’d been talking with.  She told me there was a gig in Edina at 7 that evening, for a regional group of Ford dealers. 

Of course, I’d take it.

I jumped in the car and raced to a little studio just off of France Avenue and 494.   I walked into the studio; a producer and engineer were waiting, editing some other audio. 

The producer – an attractive fortyish woman – handed me the script; just a single :30 second read – and asked if I wanted to pre-read it while they got a tape ready. 

I read through the copy.  The woman and the engineer smiled “Perfect!  Jeez, I wish we’d have had tape rolling!”

The engineer spun up a tape on his console, and I took a deep breath and ran through it again.

She nodded her head. “Perfect!”. 

And that was it.  I worked all of three minutes for $150.

Less the commission, of course.

Still – I could learn to love working like that.

Still could, come to think of it…

Ever have one of those days when you’re crushingly busy, but making headway…

…and then you run into a task that, at first glance, appeared pro forma and easy, but turns out to be a huge undertaking?

I got that same thing looking at Nick Coleman’s latest column excrescence today.  What looked via the headline to be a routine fisk has turned into a monstrosity that will take some concerted effort.

So rather than wuss out and do it later, I’m going to walk the alternative media walk, and decentralize the job.  I’m going to reprise one of my favorite bits, and ask you, gentle reader, to gimme a hand here.

Pick a part of the column – a paragraph, a passage, a statement – and fisk it in the comment section.

Show the dead tree media who’s boss!

You may commence.

CJ in the Strib:

Comedian  Lizz Winstead is looking for you if you’ve been on the receiving end of a worthless gift.

“Gift Intervention,” her new Lifetime Web show, will be hunting for talent from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Mall of America for the next two weekends.

Someone gave me a tape of the “Best of the Lizzzzzz Winstead show” once.  That was pretty bad.

Saint Thomas University continues its tradition of gutless disengagement.

The Saint Paul-based Catholic university has disinvited Bishop Desmond Tutu, one of the anti-apartheid movement’s household names, because of remarks he’s made that might be “hurtful” to Jews.

Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations at St. Thomas, said the Rev. Dennis Dease, St. Thomas’ president, made the final decision not to invite Tutu after consulting with his staff.

“He [Tutu] has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community, because of things he’s said,” Hennes said.

A leader of the international group that was to sponsor Tutu’s visit blasted the university’s decision.

“This is a tragedy for the entire community of Minneapolis-St. Paul and indeed for the entire state of Minnesota,” said Ivan Suvanjieff, president and co-founder of PeaceJam, based in Colorado. “Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a towering moral arbiter of our day. He has worked tirelessly on a global basis in the name of human rights and all that is decent.”

PeaceJam has 10 affiliates across the United States and often invites Nobel laureates to meet with young people for a weekend of discussion.

We’ll come back to “PeaceJam” in a minute.
I don’t doubt for a moment that Tutu made the comments – comparing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Hitler’s Holocaust.   And since Saint Thomas is a private institution, they can make or rescind any invitation they want to.

But mightn’t it have been better for everyone had Saint Thomas kept the invitation, and the Jewish groups swarmed the campus with protesters, to ensure that everyone knew Tutu’s past sentiments?  Or – perhaps – to get Tutu to admit he was wrong?
This continues the Saint Thomas tradition of gutless disengagement and blowing with the prevailing PC winds.  The college’s president, Father Dennis “Havana Denny” Dease, got the epic vapors over Ann Coulter’s appearance at St. Thomas, and reacted like a banana republic dictator when a Cuban baseball player, Mario Chaoui, in town to play St. Thomas’ team, defected at the Twin Cities Airport.  Dease barred St. Thomas students from helping Chaoui, committing the University to finding and returning the player to Cuba and certain persecution (which Chaoui thankfully evaded).

Saint Thomas:  A feather before the moral wind.

UPDATE, 6/28/2021:   Imagine my shocki, seeing this (checks revision record) 14 year old piece that has, for some reason gotten more visits than any other post on this blog since I’ve been keeping records.

Like, by a 7:1 ratio.

If you’re visiting, please leave a comment as to what brought you here.

The curiosity is overwhelming.

Thanks in advance.

I’ve enjoyed this past few months, biking to work.  Of course, biking is something that’s only intermittently tenable when my kids are in school – I can manage it once or twice a week (there’s a post in there), but it’s been a great thing for me.

It didn’t teach me anything new about human nature, really; I used to bike a lot, and I ran into (figuratively) all the usual pathologies about urban traffic and raging drivers.  Of course, I have always been something of a stickler about following traffic laws; something about not wanting to spend the rest of my life in a vegetative state, and ending up no better than a contributor to Dump Bachmann…

…but I digress.  Like a lot of people, I’d not heard much about Critical Mass until last month, when the group’s monthly ride turned into a riot in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).

in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).According to yesterday’s column from Katherine Kersten,  I might have been wrong to be sanguine.  Assumptions about Critical Mass’ benign-ness might be misplaced:

They block traffic by “corking” — some riders hold cars at intersections during green lights while the mass passes through a red light. Others stand in the street and wave their bikes defiantly over their heads.

Are you rushing to catch the last few innings of your son’s baseball game?

Trying to get to the show you promised your wife for her birthday?

Critical Mass doesn’t give a rip. Tough luck for you, Mac, because you’re a gas-guzzler and I’m living green.

So do we chalk this up to innocent adolescent posturing?  Or, with 11 months until the Republican National Convention, is there something more sinister to it?

Why are Minneapolis police condoning this lawbreaking? Because the guys upstairs do. Two City Council members, Cam Gordon and Robert Lilligren, joined the Critical Mass mob on last week’s ride. Mayor R.T. Rybak also rode with the mob once several years ago.

In August, after some of the ride’s rougher elements provoked a confrontation with police, and 19 people were arrested, Gordon, whose aide was one of those arrested, called foul. The usual hand-wringing and internal investigation in the police department followed. Gordon organized a meeting, where police and Critical Mass representatives discussed what were called mutual expectations.

Police Chief Tim Dolan says he doesn’t like expending limited police resources on Critical Mass rides. But support for more hard-nosed enforcement isn’t there, he says.

In other words – in Minneapolis, the well-connected get a different brand of justice.

It’d be interesting to see what’d happen if a right-to-life group, or Protest Warrior, interfered with traffic in Minneapolis.

This breeds a sense of entitlement.  Kersten notes…:

Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs has studied protest movements. He points out that political protest has changed since the ’20s and ’30s, when those involved were usually poor…The ’60s and ’70s brought a sea change. For the middle- and upper-class young people who flooded into the streets, protest became a vehicle for self-assertion — the “politics of personal expression.” (Think Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.) Middle-class kids wore their arrest record as a badge of honor.In his psychological studies of ’60s-style radicals, Lichter discovered two revealing things: They scored high on the power scale, exhibiting a strong need to feel powerful. They also scored high on narcissism — the need to call attention to themselves, to get public notice.

Not surprisingly, Lichter says, protesters often latched onto high-sounding motives to justify their self-absorbed actions. “You can’t take expressions of love for humanity at face value,” he explains. “They can serve as cover for aggressive feelings and tendencies.” A phenomenon like Critical Mass “allows people to act aggressively, while convincing themselves and some others that it’s all for a moral purpose.”

The problem with tolerating – and even officially encouraging – this sort of self-absorbed adolescent posturing is that it breeds the same solipsistic sense of entitlement that we noted last summer in Kathleen Soliahs’ husband and daughter:

“She lived in Berkeley,” Emily [Olson, Soliah’s daughter] says, trying to explain her mother’s affiliation with the SLA. “It was kind of normal.”…says Fred. “The LAPD massacre of the SLA was a bellwether event-the first televised SWAT team -” “Team murder,” Emily interrupts…“I always tell people she wasn’t a terrorist. She was an urban guerrilla,” says Emily, smearing Blistex on her lips while waiting for the waitress to return.

And, perhaps in parallel, much of official Saint Paul, acting unofficially, condoned Soliah, and continues to to this day.

Minneapolis authorities eventually will discover what parents learn when they allow petulant children to break the rules “just to keep the peace.” You don’t get peace. You just open the door to bigger trouble.

That’s my only klinker with Kersten’s article.  I wouldn’t use the “spoiled kid” analogy.

A kid starts out with perfectly innocent motives; her parents do the spoiling.

A better one; if you leave the door open, over and over again, even after being repeatedly burgled…

MLP from Casual Sundays saw something really dumb:

MJ saw a bumber sticker today that read “The Germans supported their troops, too.”

I hate to think of anyone that stupid behind the wheel of a car.

Or voting.

The amusement value of the “Dump Bachmann” “blog” (“the blog that did more than any other to send Michele Bachmann to Congress”), wore out long, long ago.  All the thing is really good for these days is seeing which of Eva Young’s pack of remedial writers and “artists” will get arrested for stalking first.  She’s pretty much reduced to nonsensically prattling “MOB parrot!  MOB parrot!” in response to criticism – ironically, a bit like a trained parrot (and just you watch, it’ll be her big “response” to this, too!)

But occasionally, the ongoing train wreck emits a more-than-normally piercing squeal.

 Karl Bremer – an occasional writer and more-occasional subject on the Dump – has long been known for being a big, big talker who pours forth boundless aggression from the safety of his keyboard.  

And in the Dump’s comment section, he slanders Drew Emmer.

I thought I saw the name Drew Emmer among those arrested with Larry Craig for cruising MSP airport bathrooms for anonymous sex. I could be wrong, but Emmer’s behavior and comments seem oddly similar in both form and content to Craig’s.

Bremer’s a class act!

Oh, relax.  When I say “slander”, it’s only in the ethical sense of the term; Drew’s public enough a figure to entitle him to take all sorts of morally-retarded abuse with no legal recourse. 

The real point, of course, is that Bremer is a big part of the Dump Bachmann clicque – both the blog itself and the little clacque of crazed zealots that rails away in the Sixth District (among others).  He is the face of the Anti-Bachmann crowd.

Will Eva Young condemn this homophobic slander and condemn her buddy Bremer?  Or will she erase the comment and pretend she and her blog are ethical? 

A sample of the lunacy that occasionally bedevils Saint Paul (and may I say, thank heavens we live next door to even loonier Minneapolis) jumped out and bit us a few weeks ago, when Mayor Coleman declared his parking space a city park for a day.

St. Paulicy – one of my favorite blog discoveries of the past year – covered it like I’d have liked to, by quoting the Highland Villager’s Mike Mischke’s critique:

Mischke, responding to the “parking space park” declaration:

I had to consult a calendar to see if it was actually April 1.

The mayor’s supposed paean to the city’s parks system might have
caused nothing but head-scatching were it not for the serious threats
that the mayor’s 2008 budget represents to the same parks system, and
the imperial manner with which those threats are being dealt.

There is widespread disappointment among people who thought Coleman
would be far more receptive than his predecessor to involving
citizens in city decision-making. But that hasn’t proven to be the
case. Three cases in point:

* There is no contingency plan for the city’s rec centers that are
slated to be palmed off on private organizations to operate. If no
private partners are found to run those rec centers by the end of the
year, they will close. Yet rec center booster clubs, district
councils and youth sports organizations were blind-sided by the
mayor’s budget announcement, and they’re peeved about what they see
as the ham-handed, take-it-or-leave-it approach of the
administration. We’ve known for nearly a year about the city’s
looming budget woes, they say. Couldn’t the mayor have brought us
into the loop earlier and given us time to find private partners and
explore possible solutions with them?

* The off-leash dog park fiasco is another example of what happens
when the mayor shuns local parks advocates, district councils and
youth sports groups and simply sics Parks and Rec on a “solution” to
a problem that only a handful of Coleman’s constituents had
complained to him about: you get bitten on the backside.
Unfortunately, parks staff took the teeth marks when it was the mayor
who asked for them.

You should read the whole thing.

SPicy’s signoff:

In closing, Make sure to patronize Villager Advertisers, those that have not crossed the digital divide can generally county on reading editorials from Mischke that are (most of the time) right after SPicy’s own heart.  Let’s all make sure to support those who support the local press.

SPicy does have one great point; the Saint Paul neighborhood papers, along among the Twin Cities’ dead-tree media, are a bumptious, raucus, place that features some – hold onto your seat – genuine diversity of opinion.

Which helps (I say, helps) make up for that whole “one party town” thing.

Predicting Casey and Hung in the Top Three has been pretty much a given for the past few weeks, especially since Howie and Sara bit the dust.  Dale beating Brian into the final round was only a slight surprise, when you remember the formula for all of these Bravo “reality” shows; the final three must contain:

1. A hypertalented jerk; AKA “the Santino/Marcel role”
2. A hot babe (afficionados call this “The Chloe position”)
3. A loveable, often gay, guy (AKA “The Vosovic”)

Dale and Brian could both cover the three slot, and Dale is funnier.  So picking the final three was no great shakes.

But who’s gonna win?

I’m not so much concerned about the actual food they do on the grand finale tonight, as I am trying to parse the various clues the producers (who are, in the end, the only “judges” that matter on the show) have dropped. 

Am I nuts, or have the producers been showing Hung to be much more…fallible than he used to seem, lately?  About the same time Casey moved from perpetually-on-the-bubble to constant contender, about five weeks back?

Prediction:  tossup between Casey and a late dark-horse surge by Dale, either of whom would make a much more telegenic personality for the show’s next few seasons than the almost-Teutonically-perfect cooking machine Hung.

I’m prone to carrying out little experiments on my kids.

For their own good, of course.

For instance, when my kids were in first and third grades, my son’s reading scores were lagging a bit.  So late that May, about the time school let out, the TV broke.

No, really.  It did.  And I pled poverty, and let it sit unused all summer long, until late September.  The kids had nothing to do all summer but play and read.  And the kids’ reading scores improved; Bun went back to school reading at a ninth grade level, and Zam was way ahead of his level, too. 

So the following summer, the TV broke again.  OK, this time it “broke” – a cable broke, and rather than replace it I pled poverty again, and let it sit for four more months.  The reading scores improved quite a bit again.

Late last spring, my laptop and the family’s desktop broke down almost simultaneously.  Part of the problem was gross overuse; the kids were just online too damn much.  So I let ’em stay broke again.  And it was a generally good experiment.

But it kinda played hell on my blogging.  For the last three or four months, I’ve been blogging at coffee shops, libraries, and on the occasional break at work. 

Well, no more.  I got a computer put together last night.  And was able to actually blog at home for the first time in quite a long time, quite a long time, quite a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time. 

My output today probably was your first clue, though…

So here’s a question:  It’s conventional “wisdom” among BDS-addled liberals that Bush has gutted the Constitution, razed civil liberties, laid siege to the Bill of Rights.

This from the party that not only pushed the ’94 Crime Bill and the ’96 Counterterrorism Bill – the two greatest guttings of real civil liberties in our lifetimes – but many of whom referred to people who opposed those infringements as “wackoes” and “nutcases”.  It’s the party that is not only promotes the return of the Fairness Doctrine, but has a history of trying to censor criticism.  They prance and gambol about like poo-flinging monkeys over Guantanamo Bay – but giggled like schoolgirls when the FBI murdered two Americans with conveniently-ugly beliefs and covered up the evidence of their wrongdoing.

So with that background in mind, someone please tell me (and this is not the first time I’ve asked) – precisely what civil liberties have Americans lost under Bush.

And when writing your list, please omit any claims to liberties – wiretapping, data mining – that actually shifted to “puree” under Clinton.

Thanks.

No fair peeking…

Is it A):

The dialectic of Christo’s “Gates” is a reflection of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, absent the schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of “now-more-than-ever.” The semiotics of the saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New New York to their perceptions of the orange joy of being – the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucauldian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst. It’s in this context that “The Gates” covers, even metastasizes, over Central Park like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.

The panels, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie (nursing at the paps of American Idol), emanate as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature – the maternal yin imprisoned in the mechanistic yang of the city and yet floating above the concept of restraint – the “Gates” welcome yet repel; they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas and yet remain silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material), smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The “Gates” are, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontiguous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age.

Or is it B):

“Pedagogy requires a hermeneutic ability to make interpretive sense of the phenomena of the lifeworld in order to see the pedagogic significance of situations and relations of living with children.”

OK. You may peek.

(more…)

From the better late than never department – I read this on Swanblog, a piece from last July.  John was watching a local high school graduation on cable:

… (What, you’ve never been bored?) when they decided to honor the “vast field of diversity that has found its beginnings all over the world.” There were 39 “birth countries” of the graduating seniors. They began a parade of flags, starting with the U.S., to represent each one.

And then, the last thing I’d have expected (or…was it?):

Finally, they got to the letter “v.” The mistress of ceremonies announced, “The flag of Viet Nam.” A student marched in with…get this…the flag of South Viet Nam! Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps the parents or grandparents were victims of the communists and held allegiance to the relic from 1975. But it was a nice irony when the school was trying to be politically correct.

Nice and refreshing. And I wonder if it’s a trend. 

In my neighborhood, there’s a Vietnamese auto repair garage.  It’s been there, at the corner of University and Pascal, forever. 

And from the flagpole at the top of the building fly two flags:  the Stars and Stripes, and the pre-’75 South Vietnamese flag.

And I gotta give the guy points for that.

There’s going to be some excellent studio space coming available soon…

The Ramsey County Board voted today to demolish the old county jail and part of the West Publishing complex, which occupy prime riverfront space in downtown St. Paul.

It’s a step toward selling the county-owned land and redeveloping it to make better use of the views and provide more access to the river.

I’ll even take one of the lower-floor offices!

Whaddya say?

Bill Tuomala notes that…:

Replacements Book Out On November 15th

The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History by friend of Exiled Jim Walsh.

Replacements concerts from the pre-Tim era are like Game Seven of the ’91 Series, or presence on the 35W Bridge on August 1; ten times as many people in the Cities claim it as could possibly have qualified.

But the book oughtta be good.

Sergeant Dave Thul takes on Mike Ciresi’s “four point plan” for Iraq.

In an attempt to appease conservative readers (otherwise known as affirmative action at the Strib), they printed my letter in response to Ciresi’s response to Coleman’s response to MoveOn’s response to Gen Petraeus.

Still confused? Just follow the links and enlightenment will be within your reach.

It’ll take some doing.

…I guess I’ll have to await finding out exactly how this is really bad news.

MLP from Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry:

My neighborhood is full of Vikings fans and Democrats, so I thought I could make a few bucks by whipping up some big purple lawn signs: 

SUPPORT THE VIKINGS!
END THE GAME!

I’ll be selling them for $9.99 each.

Edwin Bulwer-Lytton – the man who gave us the line “it was a dark and stormy night – also lent another classic line to the English language’s stockpile of quotations; he penned “The pen is mightier than the sword“.

Of course, he never had to bet his life on it.

I’m always astounded at the naivete of so many – too many – “peace” activists; their brains marinaded in a generation of “Give Peace a Chance” and legends of non-violence resistance and civil disobedience and Martin Luther King and Gandhi (who, need it be said, flourished under liberal democracies that were fundamentally friendly to change), and spoiled rotten by the largely-peaceful fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, too many think that “sending messages” and symbolic actions are all it takes to put a dictator in his/her place.

Sadly, it’s untrue.

Thousands of protesters are dead and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle, a former intelligence officer for Burma’s ruling junta has revealed.

 

 

 

The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win, said: “Many more people have been killed in recent days than you’ve heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand.”

The boot, it would seem, is right back on the throat of the Burmese people.

[Swedish diplomat] Liselotte Agerlid, who is now in Thailand, said that the Burmese people now face possibly decades of repression. “The Burma revolt is over,” she added.

 

“The military regime won and a new generation has been violently repressed and violently denied democracy. The people in the street were young people, monks and civilians who were not participating during the 1988 revolt.

 

“Now the military has cracked down the revolt, and the result may very well be that the regime will enjoy another 20 years of silence, ruling by fear.”

 

Mrs Agerlid said Rangoon is heavily guarded by soldiers.

 

“There are extremely high numbers of soldiers in Rangoon’s streets,” she added. “Anyone can see it is absolutely impossible for any demonstration to gather, or for anyone to do anything.

 

“People are scared and the general assessment is that the fight is over. We were informed from one of the largest embassies in Burma that 40 monks in the Insein prison were beaten to death today and subsequently burned.”

 

The diplomat also said that three monasteries were raided yesterday afternoon and are now totally abandoned.

No, Virginia, sometimes dictators don’t listen to reason.

Sometimes the village eats the children.

As bad as things may be in the world these days, I do take heart in being able to note…

 …that it’s been years since I’ve read, seen or heard anything about Andy Milonakis.

WTF?  [*]

Get back on the horse, man.  There’s work to be done.

(more…)

…analysis like this on NPR!