FIN

Thanks and Farewell to this blog

2009-05-18T15:35:00.002-04:00

Faithful readers

(I know there are at least 4 of you)

I am giving up this blog. Please see my new blog, which is the same, but better at new, improved Magical World of White Trash Insurgency.

Peace out.

Thanks for reading. You all will be responsible when I get that first book out in a few years.

The American Dream: the Ownership Society

2009-05-12T15:16:00.007-04:00

Hello America,

We live in a culture dominated by a deep belief in its own meritocraticness. America is the "land of plenty", the "promised land", the "land of the free and the home of the brave", the "land of opportunity". We are inculcated in the mythic greatness and equity of our nation from early childhood. Countless songs celebrate the popular myths that we are raised to cherish: from the schmaltz of Tom Jones belting out "Only in America" in a leisure suit, to the old Kapelye klezmer tune I found on an LP that describes in Yiddish how an uncle has left the shtetl "...zum Amerika den golden land..." (followed by a clarinet flourish)

Every year thousands of immigrants land on our shores - or more accurately airports - longing to carve out their own piece of the American Dream. Many find reasonable success, and at the very least the robust American economy provides earnings and standards of living that most of the world's people can only dream of. We are a nation of immigrants - with the noted exceptions of the American Indians who survived centuries of genocide and lived to tell the tale, and African Americans who were kidnapped and shipped here against their will to pick the cotton that propelled us into being an industrial power. Give us your tired, your poor, your wretched huddles masses longing to work scary 12-hour shifts at the all-night convenience store so that after five years they can open a bleak laundromat in the ghetto and feel that they have arrived.

Home ownership is another biggie in the American Dream pantheon. Americans, unlike Europeans and many in other wealthy nations, tend to have most of their life savings invested in their homes. For most Americans a house is an investment, a home, and a symbol of arrival in the middle class. Because we all want to believe we are middle class. Somehow this includes everyone from my father, a municipally-employed backhoe operator, to my classmates attending college on their neurologist/lawyer/car-dealership-owner parents' dime.

On my father's side my family is steeped in the mythic importance of owning one's own home, and taking meticulous care of it. Many of the men in the family were and are carpenters and my grandfather and my uncle both built their own homes themselves. That side of the family, like most of white Cincinnati, is German Catholic. Maybe that explains it. I saw a show on the BBC recently about how those crafty Germans love to build their own houses, so that they can obsess over the pride they take in their workmanship. A local German homeowner/builder was explaining to BBC reporter, via translator, how if he did the work himself he could know it was done right. This obsession with craft, thrift, and discipline feels very old-school German to me.

But the real reason home ownership is so important to my family is because it is a status symbol. None of them have been to college, they don't travel, and they have pretty unsophisticated, blue-collar lives. The fact that they own a home is one of the few major things that makes them anything but plain working class. I have come to the conclusion that my father's side of the family is wracked with a very psychologically deep sense of class anxiety. They are terrified that Others will see them as trashy, or that they will somehow slide back down the class ladder into the searing poverty their dilligence has delivered them from. When I bought a house two years ago my dad was so worried about the bedraggled and decrepit state of my yard that he used to come by and clean up the crap laying around in it when I wasn't home. He was that terrified of the potential shame of us looking like we were urban hillbillies. That's pretty deep in my book. And I resented the interference on several levels. Plus I like urban hillbillies, some of whom are among my best friends.

Why did I buy a house as a working college student? Good question. It was a horrible idea, especially since I bought with my then-fiancee - with whom I broke up several months later. That part of the whole shebang has been a straight nightmare.

But I was raised to believe that home ownership signaled arrival, adulthood, success, independence. I am only now coming to understand how much the blue-collar values I was raised with are a hindrance to my future goals. I am leaving Cincinnati for grad school this summer; in a few years I will be a Ph.D. and plan to teach in academia somewhere. And as I look around me I see my friends - who are mostly middle-class - perceiving their own life paths very differently than I have perceived my own. They mostly own next to nothing, have a lot of support and stability from their parents, and anticipate traveling and moving around before eventually settling down somewhere - years down the road. They have few responsibilities and see no reason to accrue any. In contrast, adulthood comes early to my people. My mom kicked my little sister out of the house the day she turned 18 - a relatively common practice that many among the working-class believe is sometimes necessary to get one's offspring to learn the independence they will need to survive. Friends of mine from high school have been appearing on my Facebook account lately: apparently it has now trickled down to rural blue-collar America. They all have kids and look a lot older than I thought they would this young. Mostly they settled down and got married right out of high school, and will spent the rest of their lives working at occupations close to the jobs they had as teenagers.

So anyways, I bought this house. It needed everything, having been repossessed, abandoned, and then vandalized. My father, grandfather, and uncle pitched in and we tore up flooring and carpet, patched plaster, fixed leaky pipes, laid tile, installed windows, patched a chimney, ran wiring, duct work, and did lots of other shit. I relined the box gutters, refinished the floors, painted the place, and built a new staircase to the attic. Needless to say as a college student hellbent on making Dean's List and working 30 hours a week this was pretty much a stress-ridden nightmare. Not to mention paying the mortgage, which after taxes ended up being significantly more than my mortgage broker had originally quoted me. (Thanks Cincinnati!) Then last winter the City of Cincinnati Building Department sent me a letter stating that I was in violation of building code and that I needed to rebuild the sagging wraparound porch on the front of my home. I was threatened with court and fines. That project took months and required calling in lots of favors from friends and family. Fortunately a buddy moved in for a while who knew carpentry and he did most of it. But I ended up dropping at least $2000 on pressure-treated lumber and I had to take time out to meet with building inspectors during the process. Fuck that.

I always thought that owning my own home would mean independence and peace of mind. But I have come to believe that the opposite is true. A mortgage is not much different from rent - at least for much of the tenure of a 30-year mortgage. The bank pretty much owns it until about 20 years in. Owning a home is a lot of work, and moreover is implicated in a lot of social psychology that I am coming to question for the first time.

A few weeks ago the University of Cincinnati hosted an event called Worldfest - basically a week of events centered around multiculturalism. The theme this year was Social and Economic Justice. So I went to check it out. They showed Slumdog Millionaire - which I think is wildly over-rated, actvisit Judy Shepherd spoke about her gay son Matt's brutal murder at the hands of Wyoming homophobes, and the foreign students' associations offered up various ethnic cuisines from booths on the lawn. But what really got my attention was hearing Rosa Clemente speak - nay preach - from a podium in the theater inside Tangeman University Center. Rosa grew up in the South Bronx - the poorest Congressional District in America. Her neighborhood was an impoverished Black and Puerto Rican ghetto; she came of age watching Reaganomics and crack wipe out human lives. As a teen her family moved out to Westchester County - an enclave of exurban NYC wealth. She later attended SUNY Albany - where she led lots of campus activism and found her life's work as a community organizer. She describes herself as a Hip Hop Activist, and in 2003 organized the first National Hip Hop Political Convention. Clemente spoke passionately about hip hop's importance in giving a voice to the voiceless, a means of spiritual survival for America's most dispossessed youth - who have no art programs to enrich their lives.

I am ashamed now that I did not know about Rosa during the 2008 election; she was the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party ticket. I don't know a lot about the Greens (which only exist on paper at my campus), but everything that woman said resonated with me on a really deep level. I would have paid to vote for her. Much of her speech espoused ideas and views I had never really heard articulated before. She preached about how Obama is soft-pedaling on ending the wars we are losing, how the Democrats knew what was up with the US military torturing detainees, how we are blowing the budget on wars while closing schools and hospitals, how we are "making new enemies faster than we can kill them." Rosa talked about losing 7 cousins in 3 years to the crack epidemic, the 2001 uprising against the racist cops here in Cincinnati, the time she spent in Ithaca as a grad student at Cornell - where local kids live on food stamps and college students have trust funds, and her experience on the ground after Katrina - where she watched private armed guards standing in formation to protect corporate property while hurricane survivors wandered the streets looking for food, water, and shelter. She said America cares more about property than people, quipping "We live in an Ownership Society..."

Whoa! That threw me, sat on my brain for weeks. Old axioms and expressions drifted through my mind: "Property is nine-tenths of the law." I thought about how voting used to be tied to property-ownership in the U.S., how Black America was dehumanized by being relegated to chattel, how the American Dream of limitless economic expansion is built on continuously gobbling up more land, to build more houses, to sell to more new homeowners. I thought about how much we privilege those who own things over those that do not. The price tag of a new McMansion is a ticket to the Good Life: decent public schools, geographic removal from poverty, crime, and blight, and getting into the leafy suburban side of America's spatial apartheid. Conversely renting an apartment, living without a car, not buying and accumulating lots of crap are not only not mainstream American values - they are widely perceived as antithetical to everything we are about. They signify failure - or insanity.Why would someone want to live without a car in America? The prospect is not only limiting, it is infantilizing. Carless-ness reduces one to the status of a child pedestrian, or worse yet - an impoverished patron of our notoriously woeful bus systems. Apartment-dwellers and renters really lose out financially. Massive governmental subsidies reward suburban home buyers and neglect the medium-density older urban neighborhoods built around apartment life. Renters cannot claim their mortgage interest as a tax deduction, get the VA or HUD to help them pay for their home, and do not accrue equity that they can later cash in when they need money in old age. Mortgage equity is most Americans' retirement savings.

Because most Americans have their life savings invested in their homes, they are compelled to buy into conventional ideas about what makes a home attractive, marketable, and valuable. For example, if minorities begin to trickle into a formerly all-white neighborhood homeowners are likely to begin to worry. Not necessarily out of their own individual xenophobia, but because most white Americans refuse to live in minority neighborhoods, or even meaningfully integrated neighborhoods, and thus would not buy a home there. This really does lower property values. Not because it makes any goddamn sense, but because white majority America is scared of Black/minority neighborhoods, won't consider living in one, and thus the demand for housing in such areas slumps, resulting in falling prices.

And buying a home is a big investment. Investing all that time and money into a project means that you feel compelled to take care of it. It means you start eyeing home and garden magazines, critiquing slovenly neighbors who seem to lack sufficient pride in their houses, and generally buy into a lot of pretty mainstream American values.

And when you buy a home you suddenly find yourself needing lots of things to groom, clean, maintain, and deal with it: a lawnmower, hedge trimmers, paintbrushes, furniture, drapes, rugs, pictures, shower racks, lots of appliances, you name it. And the more stuff you accumulate the more invested in all of it you become. This assemblage of property and possessions becomes your world. I compare this to the lives of my friends who live near campus in modest apartments. They spend much more time out in the community, strolling around, meeting neighbors, and participating in society. Is it a mere coincidence that the decline of community in America runs in direct historical correlation to the rise of suburbia and ubiquitous home ownership? I think not. My Civil Rights history professor complains about how the Movement wouldn't work today because we are all too individualistic. Perhaps our heightened obsession with owning things is the reason. I recall a quip from one of my urban history texts, perhaps it was Crabgrass Nation, in which industrial magnates were contemplating the potential for radical union activism among their workforce. At the time the local proletariat was eagerly snapping up attractive little suburban homes, proudly believing they were moving up in the world. Said one wealthy industrialist to another, "No, I don't expect we'll have much trouble. They won't have time for it now [that they have houses to take care of]." I am paraphrasing here, but that was the general drift.

So America is fighting "wars on terror" that are probably creating more terrorism than stopping any, suffering under a subprime mortgage crisis that has tipped off a global recession, and we are all facing a looming environmental apocalypse. Personally, this whole world order is looking more and more fucked. And I regret buying into the whole plan.

Right now I am in the process of divesting - and I use that word very intentionally - myself of everything I possibly can. I am selling off, carting away, throwing out, and recycling damn near all of the bullshit that has taken over my life. I refuse to be possessed by my possessions any longer. And I sure as hell don't plan on spendin' my life slavin' away so I can hand the bulk of my check to Countrywide and pretend like I'm livin' the good life in a big-ass house I can't fuckin' afford.

I dream of moving out of Cincinnati, renting a small apartment in a new city, having just the basics in the way of furniture and whatnot, and spending a lot of time walking my dog, hanging out in my neighborhood, attending events and meetings on campus, meeting lots of people, and generally living life.

The Buddhists beleive that to live life without mindfulness constitutes a walking death. And in an America wracked by frivolous compulsive spending, instant gratification, conspicuous consumption, debt overload, and the hardcore anxiety produced by all of the above, I think that this has sadly become the norm. But what in the hell does 'normal' even mean in a society as fucked as ours?

And so I am renouncing my claim in the Ownership Society. I want freedom from things, personal mobility, and mental - as well as physical - unclutteredness. Quality of Life is, after all, a very different thing than Standard of Living.

War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, and Freedom is Slavery.

Of Wobblies and White Castle

2009-05-04T17:34:00.012-04:00

So maybe I am an idiot or something, but somehow I only recently became aware that the world headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World - the Wobblies - is in my neighborhood! Right on the main drag in Northside, in good ole Cincinnati. That's right, those who have inherited the mantle of radical industrial unionism from Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, hell raising mine organizer Mother Jones, and legendary Big Bill Haywood have set up their center of operations on Knowlton's Corner - across the street from a White Castle burger joint.

I am shocked by this revelation for several reasons. I have waited for the campus-bound number 17 bus within a few feet of the Wobblies front door countless times; Knowlton's Corner is a hub where four Metro lines converge. I had observed the modest storefront many times, read the signs on the windows - including the IWW constitution, and wondered about what they were actually up to these days. I remember when I first noticed the IWW office there on Hamilton and Hoffner, about three or four years ago. I mentioned it to a classmate who was leading the International Socialist Organization on campus, and he was equally unfamiliar with the local Wobblies. I was really intrigued that they still existed (I plead political ignorance if any Wobblies are reading this) and wondered what they were up to these days. I, like most Americans, could only associate them with grainy black and white photographs reminiscent of the Haymarket Massacre, Ellis Island, and early twentieth century labor unrest.

Also I am really shocked that the IWW has chosen to set up its world headquarters in Cincinnati. After all they were founded in Chicago in 1905, and the Windy City has a much longer and more complex history of labor organizing than Cincinnati. I read the IWW website and it seemed like most of their activity is concentrated in California and big cities far from the Ohio River. In the global mart of information and imagery Cincinnati is known mostly for being conservative, unimportant, and obscure. We show up in the film Rain Main as a place intended to contrast Tom Cruise's racy lifestyle of success when he has to come pick up his retarded brother. Beloved transvestite stand-up comic Eddie Izzard mentions Cincinnati in his amazing Dress to Kill, but only as a place most viewers think is really far away from everything. We are also known for our race riots and that cow that escaped the stockyards and ran free for a few weeks before being captured in a public park. Populated mostly by conservative German Catholics who oppose pretty much everything besides lower taxes, Hudepohl beer, and the debatably-fabulous local-style chili, Cincinnati is not known for its progressiveness - much less radicalism.

So I am wondering - what gives?

James Howard Kunstler: another elitist dickweed with a publishing career

2009-04-28T14:36:00.011-04:00

James Howard Kunstler has built a career out of criticizing our built environment and our over-dependence on fossil fuels. As a concerned environmentalist, and as someone who thinks that suburbia is generally pretty fucked-up and disturbing on many levels, I am generally down with his main arguments. I actually mostly enjoyed The Geography of Nowhere. Then I read his new novel, World Made by Hand.

Kunstler really is a good writer, but I believe he spent more time imagining the buildings of a post-apocalyptic society than he did the plot and characters. He describes every building in the book with flowery architect-speak that most readers are likely unfamiliar with. I am pretty sure nobody struggling to survive would have time to give a damn about cupolas, pergolas, and balustrades. The author is constantly injecting architectural criticisms into his characters' thoughts and words. Scrounging for food after the fall of Western society would probably preclude having the fucking free time to give a damn about whether all that twentieth-century vinyl siding looked tacky or not. And here is the crux of Kunstler's worldview: tackiness is a God-awful moral sin. There appears to be nothing he hates worse; he places it around murder and rape in the moral order of the book.

Needless to say, here at The Magical World of White Trash Insurgency we oppose that view. On political, aesthetic, cultural,and general grounds.

Kunstler's treatment of existent social hegemonies was also pretty fucked: women are portrayed as passive and dependant, racial diversity is a threat, and working-class people - and their culture - are despicable and villainous. JHK comes across pretty chauvinist, envisioning a post-collapse future where comfortably educated and upper middle class white men are still somehow in charge of everything. Presumably, their wise leadership is the only thing keeping dangerous social misfits from running amok. The book is shot through with flagrant stereotypes - including a hellish trailer park, murderous ex-bikers, and a cultish evangelical sect from the South. (He actually uses the term misfits at one point to describe the trailer park folk!) In the characters' dialogue Kunstler has the bad guys speaking with broken grammar and awkwardly-handled colloquialisms. Arguably, his intent is to use such as signifiers of Otherness and danger. I got the feeling Kunstler hasn't spent much time around people who actually speak that way, nor would he feel comfortable doing so. He lumps a bunch of social signifiers of blue-collar culture together with moral degeneracy and violence. In JHK's future-scenario the NASCAR fans, Harley men, truck drivers, roofers, heavy metal fans, and outdoor enthusiasts have degenerated into a bunch of antisocial psychopaths threatening the narrator's community. Kunstler also apparently really hates the lower strata of American popular music. The evil trailer park gang subjects two main characters to bad renditions of Nirvana and Metallica songs as the intro to a gruesome public torturing. The only music he seems to condone is Kingston-Trio-style folk revival songs, removed of course from their original proletarian contexts and sanitized in the hands of professional-men-turned-farmers.

And finally, I am really not convinced that after an apocalypse the former the P.R. executives, lawyers, doctors, and real estate agents Kunstler intends readers to identify with would be better equipped to grow their own food and salvage for life's necessaries than the less affluent that his book casts as apishly-portrayed bad guys.

Fuck this book.

Mountain Dew and Islam

2009-04-24T17:49:00.018-04:00

Most people don't know this, but before Mountain Dew had ads with hip hop beats and zooming motorcycles it was marketed with crazy hillbilly stereotypes!

I can personally remember seeing a faded billboard just like this on the side of a run-down store somewhere around Adams County, Ohio as a kid. And folks I'm not that damned old.

The term 'mountain dew', while today a registered trademark of the Pepsi Corporation, was originally a slang term for homemade moonshine. As in the old-timey song "That Good Old Mountain Dew", which was recorded by the Stanley Brothers, Doc Watson, and Mother Maybelle Carter, among others. Grandpa Jones sang the song on this episode of TV's Hee Haw. Here's a good classic version of the that bluegrass favorite done by Lonzo and Oscar on the Grand Ole Opry:

Now, here is an original Mountain Dew commercial - featuring a take off on the song - and the old-school hillbilly ad campaign. (Which seems to be more than coincidentally similar to old Lil' Abner cartoons. I wonder if Dogpatch creator Al Capp was pissed.)

According to Robert Guinn, the Mountain Dew brand soft drink was originally created in Knoxville in the late 40's as cocktail mixer. Later it was bottled in Johnson City and was bought by Pepsi in 1964. In 1973 the Pepsi folks decided the hillbilly marketing image was rather dated and switched to something less culturally specific. I find it extremely ironic that the more recent ads have focused on youth-oriented extreme sports, pretty much the polar opposite of cartoon hillbillies and backwoods corn whiskey.

And while we're on the subject here's some crazy hillbilly-stereotype-themed comics from the 50's:

This is from the Again With the Comics blog, which is running a great piece about such.

Also I visited an urban mosque today, which was quite interesting. I went with a friend from work to the storefront Masjib Al-Ashab, off Vine and 13th street in Over the Rhine. My friend Abdul introduced me to some of the brothers there, most of whom were older African American converts. Needless to say a few of the faithful looked a little surprised to see me at first, since I'm a young nerdy-looking white dude. I only saw one other white dude there, a young man with a flowing robe, smiling eyes, and a bushy red beard beneath his skullcap. He greeted me warmly and asked me where I was from; my guess is he wondered if I was foreign. He spoke with a noticeable Ebonics influence and told me that he had found Islam via hip hop culture. After being introduced to Islam by a friend his interest in graffiti led him to an appreciation of the ornate flourishes of Arabic calligraphy. I met another brother with a turban who had taken the name of ancient African civilization. I told him I appreciated his style.

The Egyptian-born imam (who is an aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate) gave a sermon about why some people refute God. When I was introduced to him he thanked me for coming and was kind enough to bestow upon me a lovely copy of the Holy Koran with an accompanying CD of a Koran singer - something I had been looking for. Everybody was incredibly nice. The congregation gave me a plate of delicious food and encouraged me to come back soon.

I think I will.

Of Moonshine and Resistance

2009-04-19T20:34:00.011-04:00

I am trying to read up on recently deceased and legendary moonshiner Popcorn Sutton.

He apparently committed suicide about a month ago after being sentenced to 18 months for making illegal whiskey and carrying a weapon. His wife said he was depressed, and died of asphyxiation sitting in his then-running Ford Fairlane in the garage. She recalled that he got the car in trade for three jars of white lightning and painted it John Deere green and yellow.

The History Channel Featured him in a documentary about Appalachia, demonstrating the plying of his craft. He wrote a book called Me and My Likker about moonshining, which was published in 1999.

He has a daughter who is working up a book about her dad, although she lives in New England, is an educated historian, and seems to have only discovered her dad's career as an estranged adult. Was she adopted or something?

Popcorn Sutton was revered by many in the hills for carrying on a long tradition of home whiskey-making that dates back to the British Isles. And also for carrying on a long tradition of resistance to government authority that likewise originates in the same. The Scotch-Irish who settled the Appalachian mountains had been screwed by the British for generations and developed an ingrained sense of disdain and distrust for official authority. This was deepened by the experiences of the last century and a half, which saw the South ruined and then looted in the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction Era. After those horrors had passed, scores of (largely) Northern industrialists swindled, cheated, and strongarmed poor mountain farmers out of their land in pursuit of the timber on the hills and the coal beneath them. Coal operators then kept their workforce in Third World conditions and used local politicians to oppress the masses. See the film Harlan County, USA for more on the long and heinous Dirty War that ensued over labor issues in the Appalachian coal industry.

Speaking of Dirty Wars - I see dramatic parallels between Southern history and Latin American history. They both share histories of slavery, plantation agriculture, large-scale poverty, the political caudillo tradition, deep and distinctly syncretic religious traditions, and the social dislocations of declining economies based in primary-sector production. Only in the South can American whites feel history as a constant source of personal pain, embarrassment, defeat, and chagrin the way that many in other parts of the world can and do. Bitterness and weak national egos, stemming from histories of defeat and colonizations, make for the likes the tensions between India and Pakistan. Yankee Americans cannot really identify with this, with the notable exception of racial minorities. Here's a great book dealing with that body of theory:

Sutton was making bootleg hooch - an arguably less-than-noble endeavor - but he was carrying on a long tradition. Scotch farmers in the Old World had customarily made whiskey out of their surplus grain in order to have a salable market good they could trade for cash. This practice was carried to colonial North America, where it fell under taxation. The tax was especially hated since most colonial-era Americans were poor farmers, and making homemade liquor was their primary source of formal income, i.e. cash flow. Remember how taxation was a big issue in the American Revolution? The Whiskey Tax was one of the hated stipulations forced onto colonial citizens by the British Empire. After the Americans won a shocking victory over mighty Brittania, they set up the U.S. government and set about taxing and regulating things for themselves. But whiskey-making farmers wanted none of it.

In 1794 President George Washington had to send thousands of militia men to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania where distillery-running farmers were refusing to pay the tax and harassing tax collectors. This had the unintended consequence of pushing moonshine-production to places and locales beyond strong federal control - namely the frontier and the mountains. In the 1790's the frontier had barely gotten over the Appalachian mountains and the tradition of hillbilly moonshining was begun.

Weak and often-compromised local law enforcement and a culture of fierce independence, coupled with deep and enduring regional poverty, kept moonshining alive in the mountains for centuries. And it still goes on. A buddy of mine offered me nip of White Lightnin' last summer.

In the twentieth century marijuana has become a major export of the mountains - some argue it is the largest cash crop in the state of Kentucky, and many a poor rural community finds itself today bedeviled by methamphetamine production, prescription drug abuse, and the like. In Wise County Virginia Oxycontin painkillers have been completely banned from medical use due to a raging local trade in the little white pills. "Coal miner cocaine" is a local nickname.

Popcorn Sutton spent his life plying a trade that has all but disappeared from our culture. Sure people do go blind from drinking bad moonshine, but hey he made a livin' at it. And his defiance to the Man, and the folk-hero status he received for such, speak volumes about his the socio-historical context into which he was born. The Asheville Citizen-Times posited him as being perceived a casualty of the yet-unended Civil War, persecuted by Yankee aggression dating back to the bloody tyranny of Abe Lincoln. Neufeld's article argues that in the Reconstruction era staunch Unionists were handed jobs as 'revenuers' charged with enforcing taxation for the newly created Bureau of the Internal Revenue - forerunner of the modern IRS. Thus, he writes, a folklore of crooked - and foreign-aligned - revenuers and the battle to elude them by local whiskey-makers was born. This version of the story places the moonshining tradition a little later than the one outlined above, which I gleaned from a University of Virginia website (which I cannot seem to find).

But either way, Popcorn Sutton is dead - and so are most people who know how to make things by hand, whiskey included.

Here is a website with a bibliography of articles celebrating the late moonshiner as a cultural symbol of resistance to domination by outsiders. If the theory outlined above about the South as a defeated colony holds any water, we might think of ol' Popcorn Sutton as a Tennessee version of the Zapatistas.

Argh...research at the Urban Appalachian Council

2009-04-02T16:56:00.005-04:00

Spring quarter has arrived and this means that I am, alas, returned to being an undergraduate student - until June 13.

The only thing standing between me and a diploma is a Senior Thesis for my last few history credits. Since I am tired of hearing about dead rich people, and am interested in poverty, urban history, and race relations I have settled on writing a paper about Urban Appalachian migration to Cincinnati.

This is no happenstance decision: a lot of my mother's family were/are Appalachian migrants out of Kentucky and Southeast Ohio. I grew up on the cusp of Ohio's Appalachian territory raising livestock in 4-H, my best friend is a fat hillbilly from Southwest Virginia who is regularly found to be unintelligible by Cincinnatians on account of his accent, and I have always regarded Appalachia as a sort of cultural homeland. My favorite people as a child were old hillbillies and farmers. Their resilience, independent spirit, and resourcefulness were amazing to me. My heroes were the people with weatherbeaten faces who knew how to survive anything, build and fix anything, and live off the land, growing and hunting their own food, providing almost everything they needed themselves. People who can do things like this are plugged into a reality that most of America has forgotten about. My generation is filled with kids who were reared on fast food and video games - even out in the country.

Nathan and I have a recurring conversation about the strange spectacle of rural families in which the grandparents resemble WPA photograph subjects, the parents have mullets and listen to classic country, and the kids listen to hip-hop and sport saggy jeans and urban street fashion - though they are anything but urban. Globalization and ubiquitous media make for surreal reality sometimes. I had high school classmates who were simultaneously really into both rap and confederate flags. Cultural production blurring cultural meanings?

We are losing the old timers; and their entire world along with them. Me and some friends had a conversation recently about the current economic quagmire America has slid into and frequent media statements comparing the debacle to the Great Depression. As a people, we survived the Depression years because most Americans lived on farms and could pretty much provide for themselves. If the shit hits the fan again we will most likely all starve. Even out in the country, all most young people really know how to do is consume. And I include myself in that assessment.

Anyways... I headed down to the Urban Appalachian Council (photo above, next to a storefront church) today in search of the archives rumored to be there. I found a shabby office in an old railroad flat on West 8th occupied by a crew of friendly working-class middle-aged women. They told me that they had a library, but no librarian, so I was on my own. The library, then, consisted of a wall of shelves in a conference room weighed down with yellowing texts on Appalachian culture, and history, sociology books on race, urban issues, poverty, and the like. A collection of musty periodicals from the 70's through the early 90's occupied a few shelves. I stumbled onto a disorganized card catalog system - the like of which I haven't seen in years, and the remains of what must have once been a fairly popular collection of LP's. You can peruse the materials at the UAC library but you can't check them out. I found evidence that this used to not be the case and wondered about who was checking out records of Roscoe Holcomb and the like three decades ago. I pictured hillbilly teenagers growing up on State Avenue, listening to bluegrass LP's on huge 70's earphones while sporting shaggy sideburns and bellbottoms. It's nice to know that someone was trying to help them feel proud of being hillbillies in a city that mostly laughed at them for being poor and backwards.

As I browsed, the staff in the next room answered phone calls, referring clients to various social service agencies. One elderly woman had gone blind and needed meals on wheels. Another client wanted someone to force her landlord to deal with the mice infestation in her building. The more time I spent searching the library and absorbing the aura of the place, the more I sensed that the UAC's heyday had passed. The organization's apex seemed to be back someplace in the 80's. The books were all old, though I recognized more than a few. The offices seemed to be a cheap conversion job done in the early 80's involving lots of cheap wood-grain-veneer paneling. Some of the light fixtures and other decor dated from the era when the building was originally electrified. Places where those details are still intact are an endangered species, leftovers from the era of urban decline in the 70's and 80's. Today's urban political economy is being reshaped by the forces of reinvestment, rehabs, and gentrification. I met at UAC staff member who gave me a copy of an article she wrote for The Appalachian Connection about how her 80-year-old mother was being kicked out of her longtime home in Over the Rhine by gentrifying landlords.

God Bless the Gateway District. I hope it makes money for the city at least, since there is no stopping gentrification.

I had a hard time finding what I needed at the UAC (namely primary sources about migration and settlement patterns) but I liked the feeling I got there a lot. Everyone seemed really down to earth and I recognized the slow-paced speech of country folk in their elocution. I have recently become aware that most of the educated folks I am around in college speak with a crisp newscaster-like elocution that involves more enunciation than I am used to. Apparently educated folks don't drop the 'g' on the end of verbs like 'running' and actually use proper grammar in a sincere way, because it is natural to them. The slightly fractured speech, thrift-store decor, and simple friendliness of everyone I met down there was a comforting shift from the bank-teller professionalism that characterizes most of my interactions with others in the ivory tower of tertiary education.

I have wanted to be involved in the UAC for some time, and it felt really good to get down there finally. My hillbilly compadre Nathan told me that some of the staff of the Appalachian Festival had last year entreated him to come work with them tutoring kids, or something to that effect. The prevalence of high school drop-outs has long crippled the Queen City's Appalachian community. I asked about opportunities to volunteer with kids and they said the only thing they had like that was an adult GED program in Price Hill. I felt kinda frustrated; what about working with kids to stay in school to begin with?

Nevertheless I really respect what the UAC does. They even had a mural painted on the side of their building, above a community garden, depicting the migration from coal country to the city. A group of multiracial smiling kids was clustered on the bottom left below the skyline of Price Hill.

As I thought about it this seemed to make sense. Appalachian migration to Cincinnati peaked in the 40's and 50's. The urban Appalachian friends I have grew up here and are fairly assimilated into urban culture. Some have become lower middle class, many are in college, some are high school dropouts destined for a life of working poverty - like a cousin of mine. As the "invisible minority" Appalachians can meld pretty seamlessly into the fabric of a blue-collar neighborhood in a single generation. I know a girl in her 20's whose parents came to the city as small children, growing up in Over the Rhine before settling as adults in Price Hill. This chick has relatives in Eastern Kentucky that she can't even understand because the culture has been all but lost.

Such is assimilation. And now Lower Price Hill includes a Hispanic enclave. The process continues.

Searching for Jesus or a reasonable facsimile thereof

2009-03-29T13:43:00.013-04:00

Dear readers I have decided to do something I have not done in years. This will terrify some of my friends, confidantes, and comrades but I went to church. Stay calm. Deep breaths. Those of you who know me and are avowed atheists/agnostics bear with me. I am still in my right mind.

This represents a major divergence from my traditional mindset in a number of ways. Firstly. my mother is deeply spiritual and professes a deep belief in UFO's, crystal healing, reincarnation, ESP, psychic surgery, and government conspiracies - including a belief that the fluoridation of drinking water is part of a heinous Huxleyan plot to drug the populace into submission to evil government authority. When Barney and Friends came on the air on PBS circa 1994 she told me with absolute sincerity that the styrofoam man in a dino suit was in the employ of reptile aliens who seek to take over the earth. She calmly explained that the aliens were using kids TV to encourage children to like reptiles in order to facilitate their conquering of our planet. My mom practices reiki, meditation, levitation, vegetarianism, chakra therapy, and recently traveled to Britain with a gang of fellow aging New Age/neo-druids to break into Stonehenge after visiting hours to perform a sacred ritual they believe to be crucial to saving the planet. During the 70's mom studied Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi in Iowa for a week. This cost something like $10,000 in 1970's dollars and the organization has since been criticized as both a cult and a scam. Andy Kaufman was a fellow practitioner and my mother knew some people who knew him pretty well - and we all know he was pretty goddamn nuts. Though I am 26, I am only now beginning to understand the socio-historical context for my mom's beliefs as a product of the era of her youth. I always just thought she was bat-shit crazy, but I now realize that she got most of her ideas from fringe movements in the spirituality craze that came out of 1960's and 70's hippie culture. She also smoked lots and lots of weed. She called me last summer, whispering into the phone to tell me that she was watching a unicorn that had landed in her yard. This is all completely true. No bullshit.

As the title of my blog suggests I was also reared in a deeply blue-collar rural environment, around a fair amount of fundamentalism. The house I grew up in is a mile from a Primitive Southern Baptist Church that still practices shape-note singing and lacks any form of indoor plumbing. The public schools in my hometown are forbidden from allowing any celebration of Halloween among schoolchildren because of the objections of a local church - pastored by the town's substitute teacher - stemming from the belief that Halloween is a pagan holiday and therefore a threat to everything holy, scared, and decent. As kids we were all handed notes at school to carry home instructing our parents NOT to allow us under any circumstances to wear our Halloween costumes to school. We were reduced to generic candy-sharing among classmates under the suspicious moniker of a 'harvest party'. (How ironic indeed that in whitewashing halloween school officials may have returned it to its original orientation.) This same church also hands out little orange copies of the New Testament in front of the town post office on halloween in order to fight the annual evil of the holiday. As a result everyone in town has at least five of these little orange bibles floating around the house. (You can't throw away the Bible, but no one really knows what to do with them all. So they end up in junk drawers or under the couch.) There were constant small strategic attempts to drag Christianity into the public schools when I was growing up: prayers at football games, a prayer group around the flagpole every day before school, and - oh yeah - my high school graduation was held in a church. My history teacher wanted to post the Ten Commandments in his classroom and my biology teacher taught Creationism. I grew up watching Christianity encourage sexism and homophobia, shelter xenophobia, and generally foster incredible ignorance and intolerance.

So for many years I detested the whole idea of church. It was antithetical to everything I had moved to the city for: art, culture, learning. As a small child I had simply found it boring, and the older and more conscious I became the more uncomfortable I felt on a pew. I also abhorred the ludicrousness of my mother's ideas and detested all the alternative spiritual paths I knew of.

But the last decade has been really hard. The stress of putting myself through college, struggling to pay bills, and worrying about where it will all take me - while all the way amassing terrifying debt - took its toll on my psyche and soul. I often feel as though I spend most of my weeks fighting to get through all of the work I have to do, only coming up for air to get enough rest in between quarters. Needless to say this is not a healthy lifestyle. I have begun to meditate and pray fairly regularly, if only to try to stay sane.

Last year I nervously began attending a Buddhist meditation held at a center in my neighborhood. Sometimes I was too stressed out to really be able to get much out of it. Worries clouded my thinking. But once last summer I came out of that meditation class feeling more relaxed and present than I have felt in many years. I began to realize that this could be a meaningful - and also intelligent - addition to my life.

I am finishing a Bachelors in History at the University of Cincinnati this June. I never liked most of the people in my department because they were all pretty conservative and generally lame. I started out in art school, so I was used to a lot of ridiculous bohemianism. In comparison, my classmates in the History program seemed like a bunch of suburban stick-in-the-muds, and most of them on are their way to law school - down a life path that I find unthinkable. I valued the handful of really intelligent history majors that I have met and the discussion we had in many of my classes brought me to intellectual levels that I previously had not known to exist, but generally I have been dissatisfied.

For my people, history is largely the telling of hardships endured and tribulations overcome. Both my grandfathers left school as adolescents because they had to get jobs to help their families survive the great depression. My maternal grandfather is the bastard son of a flophouse owner and an alcoholic teenage runaway, both of whom were from Eastern Kentucky. My grandpa spent half his childhood there watching his kinfolks scrape a living out of the rocky soil, subsisting on coal mining and railroading jobs. In the rural community I was reared in the past was also viewed as a collection of memories of hard times and scarce and small pleasures. I remember being told incredible stories of self-reliance and survival as a kid. Most of rural America is only a generation or two - at best- from living basically hand-to-mouth as subsistence farmers. Growing up I loved hearing stories about the past because I was intrigued by its color, drama, and pathos. I read fervently about the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Civil War, the works of Jacob Riis and Charles Dickens. I wanted to understand the lives of hungry sharecroppers, dirty coal miners, and desperate immigrants crowding into Ellis Island. I understood history as a story of epic human endurance against incredible odds, oppression, and poverty.

However, I quickly realized the academic discipline of history is not really about such a perspective on the past at all. Mostly it is about debating politics, and arguing ideas for the sake of doing so. I was never satisfied with this. Also it is an incredibly white and generally conservative field. I had been hearing European-based history all my life and so when I enrolled at U.C. (which I refer to as Real College in order to distinguish it from the time I spent at the Art Academy) I signed up for African, Latin American, and Middle East History. I learned to speak Spanish and spent a week among the descendants of the Maya in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. I read The Economist for news about the developing world. I spent a whole summer on my job as a bellboy sneaking long dives into books about South Africa. And for the last two years I have immersed myself into African American history.

My African American history professor has been a great inspiration to me in a number of ways. She comes from inner-city Toledo, so we talk a lot about class issues. Also, she views her job as a professor as a way to educate young soon-to-be-running-shit white students about the issues that swirl around race in our culture. I have learned so much about racial inequality from her. During Cincinnati's world-famous 2001 race riots I was living in the inner city and have vivid memories of the visceral expression of Black rage that exploded onto city streets. I came to Black history with a truckload of white guilt, and a deep need to understand racial conflict in our country. My professor (who I am keeping anonymous lest her career be tainted by the irreverent and non-academic nature of this blog) is deeply spiritual, and simultaneously one of the most inspiring intellectuals I have ever met - something I had heretofore believed impossible. She has a Ph.D. and still beleives that the power of prayer is what got her into grad school.

Growing up I saw Christianity as a religion of intolerance, anti-intellectualism, and oppression. After all - was this not the ideological toolkit used to justify the European domination of half the world? This view began to chip away when I worked at a local church-run food pantry staffed by an integrated Presbyterian congregation in 2003. I began to realize that there were Christians around me who I could really respect, who saw God as a god of tolerance, charity, and compassion.

And then in studying Black history I came face-to-face with the legacy of the Black church. The Civil Rights movement was led in large part by clergy and churches played a crucial role as organizing bases. I read the words and works of men like Martin Luther King and realized that the oppressive nature of the Christian theology I thought I understood could be turned on its head. And I kept hearing about Liberation Theology, which I am still trying to learn more about.

And my Black history professor was a great example of how faith and intelligence can live together. The more I thought about it all the more I began respect the Black Christians I saw around me - at work, in my neighborhood, and at school. Their faith seemed so powerful; the source of so much of the strength that has enabled Black America to survive the endless litany of atrocities visited upon them by White Supremacy.

I have been thinking of attending a church for some time. My professor has promised to take me to a Black church with here sometime, but she can't find one that she likes in the city. After living in New York and South Carolina she finds Cincinnati's African American community to be excessively conservative.

I decided to start with what I was most familiar with. As a small child my family and I sometimes attended New Thought Unity Church, in Walnut Hills. I remember being in Sunday school there coloring pictures of Jesus and eating sugar cookies. I was born in Cincinnati and my family didn't move to the country until I was 8, so after living in Cincinnati for a few years I began to recall dim memories from early childhood of spending time at many places in the city. Church was one of them.

I remembered the Church being a huge Art Deco sanctuary. I also remember there being both Black and white parishioners, a GLBT support group, meditation during services, and my favorite part was the pipe organ. I remember church being crowded with friendly people who were really nice to me as a kid. There always seemed to be lots of other kids; I remember there being at least four Sunday school classes in the basement. It takes my breath away to remember being in integrated Sunday school classes at age 5; a few years later I would be living out in God's country (no pun intended) where open racism was normative and accepted.

When I went back to Unity today the first thing I noticed was that the building was smaller than I remembered. The pastor was different, a woman named Doris now. No one played the pipe organ but a small ensemble played onstage. I counted 12 people who were not white. This was of great interest to me as I recently read sociologist Korie Edwards' article Bring Race to the Center: The Importance of Race in Racially Diverse Religious Organizations. In her article Dr. Edwards argues that while interracial churches pay homage to the goals of integration, they end up being dominated by white leaders, theology, and cultural expression. This is basically because interracial churches end up cow-twoing before white power because white Americans beleive that their whiteness is normal and neutral, while others are deviant: whites are not predisposed - indeed equipped - to contemplate the consequences of their being raced in any way. The result ends up being non-white parishioners using their knowledge of the dominant culture to get along in church in what is essentially a white-run organization.

Unity did indeed seem pretty white to me. The music was New Agey and included a stock version of the shopworn R&B hit Ain't Nothin' Like The Real Thing. In keeping with the tenets of the New Thought movement the service was filled with affirmative prayer. The sermon was about how parishioners should meditate on the idea that no one or no thing stands in their way. I went to the bookstore/ lending library after services and perused the literature. I found Deepak Chopra's Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, Isaac Asimov's Guide to The Bible, The Book of Mormon, How Alcoholics Anonymous Failed Me, The Celestine Prophecy, When God was a Woman, Aliens Among Us, Angels Among Us, the works of medieval Islamic philosopher Khalil Gibran, the best-selling novel Ishamel, Chakra Therapy, Joshua, and in the end I checked out The Book of Sufi Healing.

I figured this would be a decent place to start this archeology of spirituality/personal/intellectual history. I have had terrible health problems for the last six or seven years and I am beginning to explore faith as a path to improving my physical woes. I had to overcome a lot of reservations to do so, but being spiritually healthier seems like it would be nice, there doesn't seem to be much to lose, and it's free - unlike the alternative health cures that maxed out my American Express card.

I recognized lots of the books at New Thought Unity from books that I remember my parents reading. I realized after reading their website how much Unity's ideas shaped the ideas that my parents espoused when I was small. They really bought into the program it seems.

And I realized that the sun may be setting on that paradigm. The congregation seemed smaller than I remember it being and only a handful of children were present. The nice lady tending the bookshop told me that they have been downsizing the book selection because of competition from major chains and the internet. "This used to be the best holistic bookstore in the city...", she lamented. And the strange thing is that if I try hard enough I can remember that.

Most of the churchgoers I saw were grey-haired white folks, probably a lot like my parents I realized. I wondered if the church has had much success attracting young people, and then I thought about the their book collection. Most of the books were two or three decades old. They represent the ideas from the alternative spirituality movement of my parents' generation - much like the late New World Bookshop which closed down a few years ago in Clifton. I remember watching that bookstore die and realizing that it was part of a sea change - the end of an era - for both the neighborhood and American culture. Clifton was gentrifying, the book industry had been fallen victim to an uber-competitive near-oligopoly run by a few major corporate chains, and no one was buying New World's dated selection of books on health foods, spirituality, and other 70's-ish themes.

The other thing I thought a lot about is that I remember my parents being nervous about the neighborhood Unity is in. Granted Walnut Hills can be pretty sketchy. I used to live there - I oughtta know. I remember a lot of crack, violent crime, boarded-up buildings, and theft. So here is this church filled with aging white baby boomers in the middle of a mostly poor, mostly black neighborhood. And their services are filled with mantras of self-realization, and the path to the inner self via meditation, etc. I saw a lot of nice cars in the church parking lot. I remember my parents nervously instructing us to lock all the doors when we got out of the car there.

So I wondered where is the community outreach? I read an article in the Herald - the local Black paper - about a church member, a retired fireman, who volunteers in a mentoring program with at-risk youth. He sounded like an aweseome guy. But I saw scant evidence of the church as a whole being oriented in that direction. I know there are at least two food-pantries in Walnut Hills; Unity could be involved if they wanted. I know there are hungry people within a few blocks of the church, not to mention the anomaly of a mostly-white church in a mostly Black neighborhood. Cincinnati is really segregated and if I join a church I want to be part of a congregation that is fighting to change that.

Sometimes I feel like the ideological strains that were prominent in my parents' youth promoted a lot of selfishness. The hippie path to spiritual self-discovery and self-expression degenerated quickly sometimes into a narcissistic drug culture. My family is no exception: we are rife with dry alcoholics, ex-pill addicts, burned-out stoners, and the like. I have a homeless junkie cousin whose fate I believe to be largely a function of how strung out his parents were when he was a kid.

I appreciate the power of meditation and the inner path to enlightenment, but it seemed weird to me to be in church with so many middle-class white people in a poor Black neighborhood and to know that little to no relationship exists with the community. Parishioners drive in aboard their Volvos, lock the doors, hurry across the street, and barricade themselves inside for worship.

Surely this is not what Jesus wanted.

And it seems that for whatever reasons few people my age find Unity as attractive as I remember it being in the late 80's.

So my question now is where is the church of racial healing, community service, environmental sanity, political justice, and meaningful social inclusion?

Waiting for Godot and Gradumation

2009-03-20T13:00:00.005-04:00

So in case you did not know this, faithful readers, when one applies to graduate schools there are timelines involved. First, one must plan to apply during the beginning of one's Senior year, with GRE scores in hand (preferably taken the previous summer or fall). Then there are the application deadlines, which are usually December 15 - January 15 sometime. This may depend on discipline. Then a waiting game commences. All the programs get a ton of applications which they then must weed through to come up with 10-15 people that they feel good about.

Unfortunately as y'all may have noticed the economy is in the toilet. This means that many people who would otherwise be working are going back to school, since there are fewer jobs to go 'round. In turn, this makes graduate admissions more competitive because more people are applying than would in a 'normal' year. To make things worse, because the economy crashed and burned, schools and programs are watching their budgets get cut to hell. Endowments, grants, donations, and other funding sources are shriveling up like a worm on a hot sidewalk. So in total, there are more people applying for an already very limited number of grad admissions slots for which there is less money than usual. It's not pretty folks.

I am caught in the middle of this politico-economic academic maelstrom. I have gotten rejected from several grad programs, put on a few waiting lists, and admitted to two. The jury is still out on one or two as well. Many programs expressed how many applicants they received and how underfunded they suddenly feel. They were very sorry not have more resources.

In my quest to escape wage-slavery I have elected to go to grad school, and eventually hope to become a professor. It seems like a good gig: I always wanted to teach, I love books, and always dreamed of authoring a few. It also seems fantastically better than my current lifestyle, which involves juggling 2 0r 3 part-time jobs, a full load of classes, and seemingly-endless days of hunger and exhaustion.

Right now one of my jobs is at a restaurant, a job I have held for four months and already fantasize about quitting. It may just be me, but I can't shake the perception that most of my co-workers in the restaurant industry are seriously fucked up. This is an observation informed by a decade of work on and off in said industry at numerous eateries and bars. I have hosted, cooked, washed dishes, waited tables, bused tables, and delivered food. In general it seems to me that restaurant workers tend to have substance abuse, mental health, financial, legal, relationship, and all kinds of other problems by the bucketful. I also believe that being ADD is probably a benefit in the industry because you have to do so many things at once. Personally I do not enjoy said disability, and therefore find it really stressful to have to constantly run around and do lotsa shit at the same time. It can be really nerve-wracking work. Everything is a crisis, and there is no getting around the fact that everyone generally wants everything at the same time - for this is the inherent nature of the dinner rush, which is what keeps us all in the black. And given that our national economy has been crumbling like stale Keebler cookies in a ziplock bag at the end of a long car trip, we are all grateful to be employed; restaurants have been shuttering their doors left and right.

The place I work at is fine dining, which can make for some interesting observations about class. Personally I never set foot in a fine dining establishment until I went to apply for this job, so I have learned a lot about the world of wealth while on the clock there. As an illustration in contrasts, when my working-class family wants to go out somewhere nice for a special occasion we hit up LaRosa's - the local Italian chain place. Plates run about $10 there. In comparison, entrees at the place I work are about $40. Dinner for 2 routinely runs about $150 with wine, appetizers, desserts, etc. And while these are mostly five-course meals I can't get over being surprised at how small those courses are. I have befriended the dishwasher, an older African American who converted to Islam and took the name Abdul whilst in prison a few decades ago, and we keep joking about how we never saw people pay so much for so little food and then not eat half of it. I am a server's assistant, S.A. (busser) so my job involves scraping plates clean and handing them to Abdul to get run through the dish washer. I am appalled by the amount of waste there is. Then again, most of these people probably do next to no physical labor so maybe they have no appetite and eating is just a ritual to affirm how rich they are. Somehow I always end up being friends with the dishwasher at restaurants, and he is almost always an old black man. He usually seems like the sanest person on staff to me, and the most removed from the crazy drama the industry is famous for. (Read Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential if you disbelieve me.) Abdul is a nice guy. He helped figure out what bus to catch to get home when my rusted VW died at work in December, so I give him a ride home sometimes. This saves him an hour in commute since it takes him 2 or 3 buses to get home across town late at night. I am pretty positive we are the only staff members who would ever stoop (or need) to use public transportation.

Like I said above, I never set foot in a fine dining place until I landed this job. I make minimum wage plus tips, roughly $80 a shift. I was therefore amazed to see several of my co-workers, a hostess and another S.A., come in and eat with their families. How could they afford this? I could barely afford Taco Bell on what I earn at this place. Then I realized that they simply came from money. To them this was just a little job to earn them some spending money, for clothes, bar tabs, and the like. I realized that they got their jobs in the restaurant not to attempt to make rent - as I did - but because it was familiar and easy. I reflected on this. My cousin worked at LaRosa's for similar reasons: it was something familiar she understood. It blew my mind that college students like me could be eating out in such swank places with their parents, much less not really need the money. In addition, if you grew up eating in places like this you would know how they work and what is expected. I was clueless in slightly intimidated when I started because I understood next to none of the etiquette. This is how social capital works, dear friends.

I spend a lot of time observing the guests, who from my perspective may as well be from another planet. I come from a town where the largest employer in the county was a Ford transmission plant (which recently closed) and the nicest restaurant around is probably Frisch's Big Boy (across the street from the feed mill.) Blue-collar is normal to me, and I have really only been exposed to the upper middle class and upper class via college and servile employment positions. I have two windows into the worlds of money and power: the ivory tower of higher education - often a pedigree show, and working for low pay as a 21st century manservant, or porter if you will. I do not know the rich very well personally but I have gleaned a great deal about their sense of reality from tending their children, parking their cars, waiting on their tables, carrying their luggage, and sitting in classrooms listening to their children. I am alternately intrigued and horrified.

As college students their offspring seem to be better educated and more confident than my class of students overall. They are also well-traveled. Their confidence can become a fault; they expect people to listen to their ideas, which they assume are valid and intelligent, and this can lead to arrogance. They sometimes have a sense of entitlement that I find bafflingly bizarre for someone so young. I was the first member of my family to own a passport or travel abroad, and also go to college. Because all of these experiences were new to me, I found myself grappling with manifold issues that my now-classmates may not be able to imagine. Not least among these is the overall intimidating nature of higher education when one does it with no family support, connections, or guidance. I heard a presentation at this year's midwest McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program conference about the "Imposter Syndrome" that first-generation and minority students may be afflicted with, in which they believe that they do not truly belong in the hallowed halls of academia and suffer from a sneaking suspicion that someone will figure them out and they will be shown the door. I can relate to that. My dad is terrified of my college campus. I took him to a lecture one evening and he was incessantly worried that we would get in trouble for being there since he was not a student or faculty member. It was hard to convince him that no one could tell, much less would they care. I got into a terrible fight once with an upper middle-class ex for suggesting that applying to Princeton would be a waste of time because "people like us don't go to Princeton". I don't know whether she was more enraged by the suggestion that Princeton was an elitist institution, or that we were on the wrong end of the spectrum to cut it there. I think mostly she was angry to be included in my sense of class inferiority. That kind of psychology runs deep. We love to mock the rich when they are impotent when their car breaks down or they can't fix a doorknob because we know deep down somewhere that they have power and money at their fingertips we can only imagine.

I am sometimes transfixed by the fashion sense of my restaurants patrons, who are overwhelmingly old, white, and rich. They wear suits to dinner, seem to love tweed, and the men always have these ugly - but expensive-as-hell looking - black loafers with a gold chain across the top. I realized last week that I had never seen this type of footwear before. Professional men do not wear such shoes to the office. I then realized that they were in fact intended to be casual wear, but still dressy enough to wear to a 'nice' restaurant. They look like they cost at least $100. And this is for shoes that are not comfortable, not for work, and only serve one function: to look slightly less fancy than regular dress shoes. That seems excessively fucked to me! The last pair of shoes I bought cost $4 at a thrift store and have lasted me for four years.

When I approach the tables at this joint to clear plates or pour water I try to listen on conversations. Several themes predominate: second homes and how much trouble they are to take care of, the kids'/grandkids' college and world travel plans, recent vacations abroad, investments, business world shop talk, and how much everyone hates Barrack Obama. (I smirk inwardly at that last one. My sister and my friends worked on his campaign and I ended up at an election-night victory celebration at the local watering hole with most of my neighborhood.) They also seem really excited about Facebook, which apparently just reached the over-sixty-and-we-have-more-money-than-we-know-what-to-do-with crowd.

It blows my mind that wearing a suit out to drop a few hundred on dinner with friends is normal to some people. My father never owned a suit until recently, and I had to teach him how to tie a tie when I was 13. Me and my friends could live for weeks on what it costs to eat a meal at my job.

The intricacies of class and culture are a never ending fascination to me. Americans want to believe we are all middle class, but our worlds are so very, very different.

So at long last I am approaching my final quarter as an undergraduate. I am set to finish this degree in June. It has been nearly a decade since I began this quest, and I can't believe I am actually approaching the light at the end of the tunnel. I have starved and strived and sacrificed for so long. I nearly died two years ago from the whole mess. Overall I know it has been good for me. I can live with a lot less than most Americans know is possible, and I have seen grinding urban poverty first-hand long enough to know how it works. That is an experience I believe to be important for what I want to do. And I am really proud of my education. I feel like I learned how to think on my own for the first time, and how to argue my ideas. College has transformed the way I see the world.

I have two acceptance offers, with stipends, from grad programs. This means next year I can finally just focus on being a student. I may even be able to live without sleep deprivation for the most part. And if all goes well in five years I will land a teaching job and be able to pay off some loans.

Thank the Lord.

Its still almost Spring

2009-03-03T13:55:00.002-05:00

Howdy readers,

i write to you from the dying pangs of winter. It was 17 degrees last night in cincinnati and lemme tell ya - that makes for a cold ride on a motorcycle. Unfortunately I am saddled with such in cold weather because the diesel 89 jetta I bought does get 45 MPG, but also refuses to start if the block heater is left unplugged for more than 4 hours when the temperature is below 40.

Its always somethin'.

Somtimes ya can't win for losin'.

I am tryin desperately to get outta school. I have to finish my quarter (March 20 here I come!!!!) and then take one class next quarter. And then FREEEDOM!!!

(Think braveheart.)

I have just returned from a grad school Open House event at a nearby Research One/ land grant institution. It was really interesting....

For starters I was introduced to all the faculty by their first names and had to be told repeatedly to call them by such. I had to fight the reflex to adress them as Dr. SoAndSo. And everyone was incredibly friendly! It seemed like a great place. I have been accepted, but am still awaiting a funding offer. I was told that if I can't get a fellowship they will pay to be a T.A.

I can't believe this is finally happening for me. I have spent so many years sacrificing so much to try to get through undergrad. And now I face the prospect of being paid to go to school for free to do research as a grad student, and hopefully beyond that to a job as a professor.

They say the Lord works in small miracles.

I applied to 9 grad schools, got rejected from 3, accepted into 1 and am awaiting word from the remaining 5. We shall see what transpires.

New Life and Breakfast

2009-02-01T13:25:00.005-05:00

Man I cannot wait for winter to end! Cincinnati has been snowed in like a mother. This is what the intersection of Chase and Hamilton looked like on Wednesday afternoon.

This week has been crazy. We got about 5'' of snow on Tuesday, which was then covered in a thick layer of freezing-rain-a-la-ice. The city declared a snow emergency and even my university closed (which almost never happens). 'Nati all but shut down and local news anchors begged people to stay home. Tractor trailer broke down on I-75 and ice and snow making walking difficult. Driving was exciting to say the least.

So soon all this will end and life will begin anew. The ground will thaw and the good green earth will come back to life. My bulbs will sprout, the trees will bud, chickweed will appear in the cracks in the sidewalk, my yard will turn to dog-churned mud, and the world will smell like life again. I love the Spring.

Most important to me - I am actually graduating from college this year. (Unless something horrible happens.) It has taken me forever; I started in 2000 - therefore graduation seems surreal. I have spent so many hours dreaming of it, and sweated and starved and so many days. I have gone so many nights without enough sleep, held onto so many crap jobs solely because they could work around my school schedule, and made lots of sacrifices. I got written up repeatedly when I worked at the hotel for reading textbooks on the clock because it was the only way I could do the 300 pages of reading I had every week for my history courses. It has been really hard.

And then I will move out of Cincinnati and become a graduate student. In 5 years I expect to have a Ph.D. and land a teaching job. Right now I am excited because I already got accepted into one of the programs I applied to. They haven't offered me funding yet, so I wait with baited breath for that. But it is wonderful to know that I am at least going somewhere. I was having dark visions of spending the rest of my life as a busboy or a maintenance man. That is all I have been able to do so far. It seems miraculous to be making some headway on my goals at long last. I am unspeakably excited about the potential to get paid to be a student, and not having to juggle two part-time jobs and keep my grades up. The graduate stipends I am hoping for amount to more money than I have ever earned. I will feel rich. I may even splurge on things like name-brand underwear and takeout food. And most important I will have more time - to live, to study, for everything. I went several years without a day off from school and work. I don't want to ever do that again.

Then my truck died, I had to beg my roommate to drive to my job across town yesterday, and it took me 2 1/2 hours to get home on the Queen City's less-than-stellar bus system. Fuck that shit. I fixed my truck today (it was only faulty battery terminal connections thank god) and I decided it is damn well time I got my 89 Jetta diesel running as well. Gotta work on that. I bought it when gas shot through the roof last summer for $1800 from a mechanic in Buttcrack, Indiana. I got a spare engine and transmission with it and the thang gets 45 MPG. Normally I ride my Stella, but we had so much snow that would have been suicidal this week.

I was supposed to go get my full motorcycle license Wednesday but the snow screwed that up. I was irritated because I want my license so I can carry passengers legally. As soon as I get it I have a scooterworks sidecar I am mounting on it to haul dogs, friends, and groceries. I am really excited about that. I rescheduled for three weeks from now.

Somehow I also owe the UC library $130 now that I have to pay before I can register for my last quarter, borrow books, graduate, or get my transcripts - which I need to apply for a fellowship. The utility companies have all threatened to turn everything off if I don't pay up, so I am also trying to deal with that.

I can't wait to get outta undergrad. I am bored to tears and ready to move on. I am so happy to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Spring will be awesome. Come March the quarter will end and then I only have to take 2 classes during Spring Quarter to graduate. So I can work more and actually pay my bills on time and I can enjoy life.

Things I plan to do this Spring:

1. Dig sassafras
2. Go camping
3. Sell my 65 Valiant and buy an old school bus
4. Build bootleg RV out of said bus
5. Prepare for cross-country road trip with friends
6. Paint my house, sew grass sees, and try to sell the place. If that won't work I need to find tenants.
7. Figure out where I am moving and look for places to live there
8. Set up my financial aid at my grad school and try to pay off some credit card debt
9. Sell lots of my stuff
10. Finish painting my Jetta primer gray and make my truck roadworthy for moving to another city.
11. Buy another Ipod since mine broke mysteriously last month. Use for road trip.
12. Find another part time job and work more.
13. Actually hang out with my roommates
14. Go to the park more and spend time outside
15. Figure our where the Giant Road Trip should go and who can come
16. Play music regularly
17. If I can move somewhere where I have room, try to build another art car
18. Enjoy life

Hungry Thursday

2009-01-22T10:39:00.005-05:00

So its been three days since I bathed, but today I may have to break down and wash myself. To do this I will probably also have to remove the bright red union suit long johns (see photo of me wearing them above - ain't I a handsome devil) I have been wearing most of the week. I am forced to make such concessions because I work at a fine dining establishment and rich people generally prefer to not have their $300-dinner-for-two accompanied by questionable body odor.

It has been damn cold in Cincinnati. Last Friday my water pipes froze. My handyman roommate Alex had the insightfulness to apply a heat gun to the affected area (although I have since been cautioned against this practice). This thawed out the cold water line running to my bathroom, but the hot water was still inoperable by the time I had to leave. I have to be clean for work, so I ended up taking a cold shower. Given that it was all of 12 degrees outside and about 50 degrees in my bathroom, I have to say this was the most invigorating shower I have ever had. Actually I was shrieking for some of it.

I missed my ever-exciting 'Topics in Math' course today and also missed breakfast at UC's smorgasbord cafeteria - which I am a huge fan of - because I was trying to straighten out some drama at home. But seriously folks, this all-you-can-eat cafeteria is amazing. All the eggs, sausage, fried 'taters, fresh fruit, cereal, milk, waffles, omelette's, biscuits, and gravy you can stomach for $5.41. What a value. I usually try to pick up a lot of fruit during the course of retrieving my several courses, and then smuggle it home in my bookbag. I figure this is a cost-effective way of ensuring my chronically underemployed roommates don't come down with scurvy.

Speaking of scurvy prevention - it will be time to dig for sassafras real soon. As soon as things thaw out a little. You wanna do this before the sap starts to rise for best results. Find a sassafras tree - overgrown fence rows and the edges of fields are good places to look - and then dig up a few small roots. Let them dry and then peel the bark. Boil for a delicious natural tea. Old folks used to use it as a spring tonic. One of the Foxfire books has a whole section on the tree's many uses.

Why Moving to Detroit sounds like a good idea...

2009-01-16T12:47:00.005-05:00

Hey - ever consider moving to Motown?

Yeah, yeah I know the murder rate is sky-high, the economy makes 1932 look warm and cozy, and the mayor just got locked up in a bizarre text-message sex scandal, but hey where else can you buy this 2000-square-foot converted warehouse/apartment for $2,500?

So hey why not head to the Motor City (or the Murder City, depending on who you ask) where life has never been cheaper, if not safer.

So writes Lloyd Alter in this article on Treehugger, arguing that an influx of creative types into the devalued city could provide the critical nucleus necessary for its longed-for regeneration. The argument is compelling. Alter is basically expanding the classic urban sociology/geography/history model of how gentrification-by-artists works and using it on the macro level to contemplate a city, rather than just a neighborhood. Vanderbilt Sociologist Richard Lloyd's fascinating Ne0-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City examined in wonderful detail how Chicago's Wicker Park was colonized by artists - who arrived because it was cheap and edgy - and then transformed in Trendiness Central. Wicker park became such a marketable place-commodity that an episode of The Real World was even filmed there. The same thing has happened in countless other places and, arguably, is happening in my own neighborhood.

So could this work on Detroit? Can an entire city be turned around by a massive influx of those who Richard Florida termed "the Creative Class"?

If such a feat were possible it would take a hell of a lot of young professionals, artists, urban pioneers, freelance designers, would-be-rock-stars, poet/waiters, DIY rehabbers, gutter punks, gritty hippies, and general counterculture-urban-space-vanguard types to pull it off. After all, we're talking macro here. If a few hundred people provided the critical mass that eventually gelled and gave Wicker Park a new place-identity, then thousands would have to decamp for Motown to pull this off.

Imagine if Stalin were in charge of this: the boldly mustachioed Bolshevik could simply round up a bunch of subversives (conveniently artists are often rather dissident) and banish them forever to Detroit. Rather than Siberian work camps in the gulag archipelago, they would face years of similarly exhausting work pouring cement, patching roofs, and scraping paint. In time they would form their own communities, and the city would acquire a totally different character. Just look at how well this program worked in Kazakhstan, which because of Soviet policies now has Central Asia's largest population of Jews - and a surprisingly functional multi-ethnic society.

But, unfortunately we live in the most capitalist democracy on earth. This means that not only can we not force large groups of people to move someplace that they hate, but also urban planning is only slightly lower down on most government agencies' priority list than, say, figuring out how to set the clock on the VCR in the conference room - which has been blinking 12:00 since 1994. (Wait does anyone else out there still have a VCR? Cassette Deck? Damn that analogy probably doesn't work anymore...) Well, you know what I mean. Urban Planning in America usually takes a back seat to whatever makes money for corporations and people who are wealthy and well-connected. This is why America is the richest country in the history of the world and has the worst public transportation of any industrialized country. We would rather have everyone working three jobs to pay for the car they need to drive to work.

For those of you enamored of the romance of the urban wilderness, check out Matt Labash's article on The Weekly Standard about life in financial-crisis-era Detroit. Labash writes really well and recounts some of the surreal horrors of life in Detroit - like how a veteran firefighter he met had his car stolen for the fourth time while attending the funeral of a fallen co-worker who died battling a blaze in an abandoned house. The house had, in fact, been set on fire before but the city is so inundated with abandoned structures and financially strapped that it can't afford to tear them down at any meaningful pace. Labash also recounts bumming around town with Detroit News reporter Charlie LeDuff, who seems to revel in the shocking horror of what he sees around him every day. LeDuff sounds like my kinda guy.

Personally I can't wait to visit.

-

bargain urban real estate, city chickens come out of the closet, and the pre-spring excitement of seed catalogues

2009-01-15T15:17:00.012-05:00

I often peruse the real estate listings to fantasize about property that I wish I could buy. Since my mortgage is killing me, lately I have been extremely interested in cheap-ass gutted buildings where I could have artists' studio space, a workshop, and live urban pioneer style - possibly without feckless luxuries like heat and running water. I have a buncha friends who live in a former brewery/warehouse downtown at Vine and McMicken, and I admire their lifestyle - and the fact that they have a lot of big open space. I have always wanted to be able to weld, have band practice, and rebuild engines in my living room.

Today I noticed this gem for sale: 3925 Spring Grove Avenue. It is in Northside (my neighborhood) and is only a block from Knowlton's Corner - the major intersection that marks the beginning of the business district. Knowlton's Corner is also a major hub in Cincinnat's bus system so excellent public transit is nearby. The 17,18,19 and 27 all come right by, and a bus to Clifton usually appears in less than 15 minutes. Nearby Knowlton's Corner was once the center of a thriving business district in Northside, which included a number of prosperous furniture, clothing, and other merchants. 3925 sits at the corner of Spring Grove and Cooper, where it is today surrounded by a mix of rehabbed and derelict storefronts. The architecture bears witness to a lost era of prosperity, if not greatness, on the block. When the Dooley Bypass was constructed to feed I-75 most traffic on Spring Grove was routed around oft-congested Knowlton's Corner. This resulted in the section of Spring Grove contained within Northside becoming simply a neighborhood street, no longer a part of one of city's major North-South arteries.

3925 Spring Grove is historic, built in 1890. I researched it (among others) as part of my summer research project last year and found that it served as a saloon for many years. Back when this was the Queen City's major industrial corridor - and Spring Grove Avenue its main thoroughfare - small workingman's pubs and lunch counters abounded. The building was the longtime home of The Idle Hour Cafe, which sounds like a likely place for machinists to gather for their lunch break in between hours of valve grinding. The Idle Hour Cafe disappeared forever sometime in the mid-80's, which correlates rather neatly with the era that saw most of the local industries and blue-collar jobs go the way of the dodo.

Since the Idle Hour passed on, 3925 has been largely vacant. County tax records indicate that the building changed hands in 2003 after a long period of neglect. I have walked by the place a few times and it appeared that a major, thorough, and costly restoration was under way. On the Cooper Street side of the building the almost totally disintegrated box gutters were painstakingly reconstructed and painted. I know from firsthand experience how costly, specialized, and time-consuming that kind of work is. Most handymen won't even do it nowadays. A walk around the neighborhood will reveal that many homes' wooden box gutters fell into similar disrepair and the problem was resolved by simply lopping them off at the outside wall and replacing the whole assembly with conventional aluminum manufactured gutters. The Cooper Street side of the building definitely looks better, as is evident in the photo below. The real estate listing also mentions that the building does contain a finished efficiency apartment, and I am fairly sure that this is the only part of the building far enough along to be the location of such.

Here's the really exciting feature of the place: it is for sale for $30,000! I know times are hard, but if somebody had the money that is a hell of a lot of building for roughly the price of a new car. 3925 is a large three story building; the County Auditor lists just over 6500 square feet under roof.This place is huge! And it has a yard behind it that would make an awesome garden, and provide room for a garage or parking pad:

The County Auditor's map also shows the size of the attached parcel of land. The entire parcel is 0.15 acre - about average for the area.

So if anyone out there is looking for a large, urban, cheap, unconventional, flexible, funky, design-and-build-your-own-pad-type building out there and has 30 grand just layin' around (check under the couch cushions) this place is worth checking out.

If anybody who reads this actually buys the place, shoot me an email and give a tour. I'd love to see the inside.

I can only fantasize about the day - circa 2014 - when I will hopefully emerge from grad school and be able to secure a place like this for myself to found an artists' colony/co-housing/commune/eco-village/urban tribe type of community.

The world needs more of that kinda shit.

Speaking of which, my friend Jordan sent me this link from NPR about the rising popularity of keeping chickens in metropolitan areas (photo above stolen from article). Apparently poultry-lovers have banded together to demand zoning changes that permit the keeping of small numbers of fowl in urban areas. The city of Denver simply charges a small annual fee for the permitting of this practice; the chicken-keepers are called 'cutting-edge locavores' in the article. Apparently in some places small underground guerrilla groups have been doing this quietly for some time, and are only now going public about their fowl habits. City chickens make a hell of a lot of sense to me. We are all concerned about food safety, food security, rising oil costs, rising food costs, and being told to eat more locally and sustainably. Chickens are east to keep, eat most any grain (and lots of other things), are basically quiet if you don't keep roosters, and provide fresh eggs daily with minimal work required. Personally I eat a lot of eggs and miss having them fresh from a chicken's ass every morning, so I am really excited about this.

I also just got all my seed catalogues and am fantasizing about the bargain prices I saw on lotsa plants and trees. Gurney's has a container-garden variety blueberry bush on sale for $10.75 plus shipping. This shrub could be raised in a pot on an apartment balcony.Fresh blueberries on your cereal anyone?

Gurney's was also running a deal in the paper catalogue (which I couldn't find on the website) where you can get 12 thornless blackberry bushes for something like $40 - which I find incredibly exciting. I have lots of find memories of eating wild blackberries fresh from fencerows as a kid and I would be willing to wager that the domesticated varieties are pretty close to zero-maintenance. Making your own preserves from these would be amazing.

They also have a dwarf banana tree that can be raised indoors with the aid of a grow-light (they do have uses other than drug production) that bears fruit within 3-5 years. Sells for $15.

And last but not least, someone has finally figured out how to domesticate the paw-paw. For those who have never heard of this fruit, it is a wild native tree found in the Eastern US. It is a smallish tree, usually found at overgrown fences and on the edges of clearings. It produces a large, mushy fruit that is very sweet. The ripe wild ones are hard to come by and can only be had through diligent watching, as raccoons are also keenly aware of their presence and usually feast upon them as soon as they ripen. But now you can plant one in your yard and do as you please with them. The people at Gurney's will be delighted to sell you a small twig of a tree for $19.95.

They also have persimmons and lots of nut trees that I have been fantasizing about. What better way to provide food security than planting trees that feed you in your yard? I hear that this idea has come into vogue lately. I read a piece a few weeks ago about how Australians are organizing themselves to plant nut trees in vacant land around subdivisions as as a food security measure. Future apocalyptic scenarios aside, it would be really cool to produce at least some of your own food. Free food is always good, and homemade everything is always better. I cannot see how this could go wrong.

Winter in 'Nati town

2009-01-09T16:50:00.008-05:00

So I just went back to school again. Winter break was amazing. I started dating a cute little Socialist activist named Nancy I met in UC's Racial Awareness Program and finally spent some time chilling out. I really needed some down time. Nancy is incredibly outgoing and since I began dating again, I have suddenly remembered how much I enjoy meeting people, being social, and making people laugh. I got so depressed over the last year or two that I forgot that I was good at that shit! She is also brilliant and passionately about social inequality, diversity education, and issues of political justice - so we have a lot to talk about.

I have two more grad applications to do and then the waiting game begins. Hopefully I will get into one of the nine programs I applied to; otherwise I think I may do something like Americorps or Teach For America.

I am still trying to figure out how to save up enough money to buy a used limosine and/or used schoolbus. I really want to take a huge road trip this summer with a bunch of my friends in an old bus. I have two books about how to do a schoolbus-RV conversion. The plumbing seems to be the most complicated aspect.

Places I have been considering visiting on such a trip:

1. Centralia, Pennsylvania - the mine-fire-ravaged town that inspired the script of cult classic film Nothin' But Trouble, a personal favorite
2. The Mississippi River
3. The World's Largest Ball of Twine, in Darwin, Minnesota
4. Carhenge, in Alliance, Nebraska (photo below)

5. Detroit, Michigan: home of the Heidelberg Project, The Henry Ford Museum, and numerous fascinating industrial ruins.
6. Petrified Forest National Park
7. Death Valley and Trona, California - the honest-to-God strangest town I have ever seen
8. The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia
9. House on the Rock, in Spring Green, Wisconsin - which contains a huge indoor carousel museum!
10. Graceland
11. Dollywood
12. Any other crazy roadside attractions/house museums/folk/outsider art installations/natural wonders/crazy shit we can find along the way.

Actually I just stumbled onto a really awesome website for this kinda shit:

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/

As the president of UC's 'Geocats' Undergraduate Geography Club I am also in charge of planning our group's annual (UC-funded) trip to the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, which is happening this year in Las Vegas. I have mixed feelings about Vegas, but I love road trips and the desert is amazing. We drove to California for the 2007 convention and Arizona looked like outer space to me. Hopefully we can see some cool state parks or something like that. I have to start working on that shit.

I have been reading a great book about race, class, and social capital, Dalton Conley's Honky. The book is insightful. Conley was raised by poor (by choice) artist parents in a public housing project in the predominantly black and Puerto Rican Lower East Side. He writes about how even though his parents were broke, their whiteness - and middle-class backgrounds - still gave them a lot of social capital that his neighbors lacked, ultimately giving him acess to lots of resources other kids in the neighborhood would never see. I enjoys Conley's writing because it bears a lot of relevance to my own relationship with urban poverty. I came to Cincinnati for art school, have been broke and on my own for the better part of a decade, and spent years in poorer neighborhoods in the inner city. But being an artist is a nonstandard form of pverty - mostly because artists dont generally come from poor backgrounds, and they rub shoulders with people who have money all the time. Most artists I know can call their parents if they need money because their car breaks down or some shit like that. They have connections back to middle-class culture that elevate them above the other people who live in the shitty neighborhoods they generally inhabit.

I am also finally reading Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives, which is required for my Senior Seminar course. I am really excited about the book, having been a fan of the genre of social documentary photography and crusading journalism that Riis founded for years.

The other day I finally got back to taking some pictures of local urban blight. I shot some old buildings in Brighton around McMicken Avenue:

I posted an hour's work with my cheap digital camera on my page with Flickr, if anyone is interested in more of what you see above.

So that's my life lately.

Over and out.

A good poem about the woods for December 4, 2008

2008-12-04T12:30:00.004-05:00

I found this today in the front of a yellowed volume at Langsam Library, called Blue Ridge Country by Jean Thomas (Duell, Sloan, and Pearce: New York, 1942)

Appalachian Ritual

Emerald nobility
Reaching to the sky,
Makes the eye a ruler
Fit to measure by.

In the Spring an ecstasy
Lies upon the hills-
Purpling with new red-buds,
Ruffled colored frills.

Make an early ritual
For the mountain side;
Pine and beech are spectators,
White a dogwood bride.

Give a pair of ivory birch
For a wedding gift,
All the mountainside a church
Where wild flowers sift.

Velvet carpet-petals down
To the edge of hill and town,
Showing wild-grape fringes through
Opal cloud-thrones dropped from the blue.

Now the summer like a queen
Does her mountian home in green;
With a season for a bier
Some old majesty lies here.

Autumn gold is swift and fleet
With a wing upon the feet,
Rushing toward a winter breath
Pausing for immaculate death.

In such economic bliss
And a swift parenthesis-
In immortal mountain trails
There are resurrection tales.

All the while the mountains know
Sudden death is never so.

- Rachel Mack Wilson

A week before the election and I have the plague again

2008-10-29T08:59:00.006-04:00

Howdy folks,

In local news yours truly has once again contracted, that's right, the plague.(Insert Firesign Theater Reference here.) There has been an awful respiratory virus going around all fall and since my sister works at a daycare she gets first crack at all the hottest new versions. Then she shares them with the rest of us. Everyone I know has been sick as hell. Most people seem to have it for weeks off and on. So that's fun.

The election is next week. Do you know where your polling place is? I do. I hope you do friends.

Obama seems ahead in all the polls, but as I am increasingly reminded in my statistics courses that doesn't really mean a damn thing. Pollsters also predicted the landslide election of FDR's opponent Alf Landon in the 1936 election. As we should all remember from high school American History, Landen disappeared into obscurity while FDR went on to lead the nation for longer than any other president ever. That massive polling screw up has become notorious in the world of survey research. As Napoleon said, "Fame is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."

Nevertheless I pray that our next president has more sane and sustainable ideas about America's place in the world than the man we have been saddled with for 8 years.

Last week I led the UC Undergraduate Geography club to a screening of the new Oliver Stone movie 'W'. Before anyone gets offended that an academic student group had a field trip to a blatantly leftist propaganda piece, let me just say it was not my idea. Anyways I thought the movie was a bit lacking. I already think Bush is a doddering nitwit who represents damn near everything wrong with my country: religious fundamentalists being courted in national politics, total and blatant disregard of anything that might be considered environmental sanity, lame-ass rhetorical dodging of things the rest of the world takes for granted like the Kyoto protocol, and a general muscle-brained bullying approach to foreign policy. Oh yeah and I think the war sucks too, and always has. (One of my first real acts of political protest was painting 'Imperialism Sucks' on the rusty tailgate of my battered '85 F150 about the time we were set to invade Iraq.) I didn't really need Oliver Stone to convince me of any of those things.

And really what does Stone contribute to the Habermasian public political sphere? He makes a two dimensional caricature out of a world leader. Bush is consistently shown talking with his mouth full, chewing with his mouth open, and in one scene he is talking to Laura about his career while wiping his ass. I don't give the man much credit in the way of intellectual faculties, but he can't be as absolutely simpleminded as Stone makes him out to be. Obviously the film is a caricature, but I feel like America has enough of that sort of thing floating around all ready. I am reminded of Michael Moore's last movie that I saw, Fahrenheit 9/11. That may have been the highest grossing 'documentary' of all time ($120 million in the US alone) but it was more emotional than rational and presented little in the way of thoughtful information. Moore was really popular among my friends at art school, but not many of them read very much. I came out of the theater feeling dumber and frustrated that this was what passed for intelligent political discussion.

I have recently become aware that Republican stereotypes about goofy liberals who have too much money and no connection to reality may be grounded in some real observations. I went to California once and it really scared the crap outta me. I thought the rich neighborhoods in Cincinnati were la-la land. We ain't got shit on Silicon Valley.

All of this thinking and writing has been prompted by my only activity thus far this morning: I woke up early, drove my scooter to campus, parked my bookbag at a computer in the library, and headed for the Men's for a nice healthy b.m. What should I find on the back of the toilet in the handicap stall - but the October 2008 edition of NewsMax magazine.

Take one look at that cover and tell me this isn't objective intelligent journalism!

Previously I had only heard of NewsMax from Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. I grew up in the shadow of Rush Limbaugh, as he was a sort of God to many of the rabidly conservative blue-collar parents of my childhood friends. But I had never before actually seen this particular magazine. So I sat myself down on the porcelain throne and perused for a good half hour. I noticed some interesting things. My more political friends from the history department would have no doubt felt obligated to be enraged by the half-baked articles NewsMax presents as actual news. But I tried to be more objective. I was genuinely interested in what these people had to say and how it appealed so much to to so many Americans.

My observations were as follows:

NewsMax seemed forlorn about the prospect of electing another GOP candidate in '08 and the magazine was obviously on the defensive about McCain's campaign. They conceded that Barrack Obama was probably going to win, but they made a real effort to discredit him with several pieces nonetheless.

Most of the attacks on Obama centered around his lack of experience in politics. One article detailed how he had overplayed the extent to which he was responsible for organizing public housing tenants to demand asbestos removal from their buildings in his early years in Chicago. Frustrated locals who worked on the campaign lent quotes to the article, and were quoted in a way that made it appear that they had done most of the real work and resented Obama taking the credit.

Although the magazine appeared - like ol' George W. hisself - to have admitted finally to the reality of global warming, they were still backpedaling on its deadly consequences. A small piece argued that the increasing severity of storms - e.g. Hurricanes Katrina and Ike - has no real connection to global warming. NewsMax dug up some scientist from Colorado State University who was arguing that storms have natural cycles and that the rash of freak storms we have seen lately is all part of this. Sound familiar? It reminds me a lot of my introduction to the global warming debate, circa 1994, which was in an article from The Farmer's Almanac, that argued that the planet had natural warming and cooling cycles and the preposterous amounts of pollution we were creating had no bearing on weather patterns. I distinctly remember this rationale being accepted by many people until recently. C'mon Republicans how long can we drag out feet about this crap? When Washington D.C. is underwater because the Atlantic ocean has risen ten feet after Antarctica melted off will it be real then?

Several of the articles I read spoke to a fear among conservatives that the Judeo-Christian values America was founded upon were being swept away by a rising tide of secular humanism. This seemed to really stick in the craw of the editors of NewsMax. They cited a journalist who identified himself as a Jew, but who admitted that really Christian values were the moral underpinnings of our great nation. (Personally I can't imagine any of the many Jews I know saying such a thing. I don't know where they find Jesus-loving-Jews and global-warming-denying climatologists. They must have to look really hard.) The decline of religious morals was presented in a way that suggested a clear relationship between American strength and being a godfearing country. There was a direct quote to the effect that 'without Christianity how will we strong enough to fight global terrorism?' Personally I see no logic in such a line of thinking whatsoever, unless one buys into the totally B.S., vaguely racist, and totally ethnocentric Huntington thesis/Clash of Civilizations theory - which essentially sweeps aside all postcolonial arguments to return to the intellectual framework of The Crusades. Somewhat of a step backward, I think. To those who produce NewsMax John McCain clearly represents an avatar of the traditional Christian-based values that conservativism has aligned itself with.

One of the articles I saw was about how the baby boomers were soon to be swept off political centerstage by my generation - whom the magazine gave some catchy bombastic nickname. Reportedly these young people are more international, more interracial, not opposed to gay marriage, and more likely to travel abroad, get their news from the internet, and see the US as having greater responsibilities as a world power than we have recently owned up to. We are also materialistic and self-centered, although we may be more likely to have less material wealth but greater happiness than our parents when farther along in life. NewsMax basically wrote that the future will be frighteningly more liberal. Oh yeah, and young people will be totally disinterested in the religious issues that the right has used to pander to voters for the last two decades.

Another article about the US in 2050 reminded nervous whites that they will no longer be the majority at that time, as the Hispanic population continues to rise dramatically. An article elsewhere reported that while draconian measures have recently cut illegal immigration by a whopping 11% (hot damn!), the long-term projection is that illegal immigration will continue at unprecedented levels. (No Shit!) I got the drift that the magazine's demographic is somewhat uncomfortable with the prospect of white America no longer having a clear demographic majority, but that they really really don't want to look racist by voicing such concerns. I know my family winces at the same thought, and I know from personal experience that this reaction is mostly racism and xenophobia. A separate article detailed how several cities were putting initiatives on the ballot this year for new higher taxes that would raise money for crime-fighting anti-gang measures. So, from these two observations I hypothesize that NewsMax is printed for people who are afraid of Hispanics and of poor urbanites, who are in turn usually Black people. At the back of the magazine was an ad for a company that sells baseball caps embroidered with the logo of the US Border Patrol. Apparently they have become national heroes on the order of 9/11 firemen, bravely defending our land against the incursion of desecrating hordes of brown people. (I think that might be a partial quote from one of Bill the Butcher's anti-Irish rants in Gangs of New York.) God help us. Needless to say the man pictured wearing the US Border Patrol hat in the ad was a smiling blond white guy.

And most interestingly I noticed that all of the ads in the magazine were for products for old people. There was one for a company that installs those plastic walk-in shower inserts that let old people take baths without slipping. There was another for a lift-chair like device that deposits old people in their bathtubs for the same purpose. One ad was for some vitamins or supplements that were supposed to provide renewed youth. There was an ad for an online company that picks single stocks for would-be small-time investors. (I have heard repeatedly that this is a terrible way to invest money, and that mutual funds, C.D.s and the like are much safer. I also know this was a hobby of some of the Rush Limbaugh fans I knew in childhood. They identified with conservative interests in part because they naively thought they had a shot at making it big on the stock market.) Then there was an ad for a retirement community. I don't know any young people personally that would read NewsMax but I know they are out there. I have glimpsed their world briefly in underclassman courses at UC. But as Mark Twain noted a century and a half ago, Cincinnati is always behind the times. Does all this mean that these ideas and political issues are reaching the end of their lifespan, just as the target demographic of NewsMax apparently is?

So then who are the readers of NewsMax? It seems they are white, old, religious, somewhat embarrassedly xenophobic, devoutly Christian, and generally nervous about the future.

Father of the atomic bomb J. Neils Bohr once said something to the effect that, "while you can't depend on being able to change people's minds, you can count on them to die."

I love my grandparents, but I wont miss their ideas having the power to define my world.

Fall 2008...AAHHHHhhhhhhh!!!!!

2008-10-14T14:57:00.007-04:00

Howdy loyal readers. (All 3 of you.)

Life is really hectic. I am currently a full-time student and work part time for the University of Cincinnati. I am a secretary's secretary's secretary. It's cool. I get to learn a lot about the many amazing things that modern xerox machines are capable of. I honestly had no idea.

My main concern these days is tryin' to get into grad school. I have identified 9 that I want to apply to. Urban Sociology. I am truly amazed at how much shit there is to organize for all these applications. Each one requires: a personal statement and curriculum vitae (ideally tailored to that program), a 10-20 page writing sample, a completed application, 3 letters of reference, an application fee, GRE scores, transcripts from every college I ever went to (some want two), and then there are the many irregular forms. Some schools require recommenders to fill out a form that accompanies the letter of recommendation. Some require separate forms for students seeking fellowships (read: money to live on). The list goes on and on. All have different procedures, deadlines, etc. Thank God I have a crew of Professors here who will write me letters and one especially who is helping me make sense of all this.

I registered for the GRE today and I have been studying every chance I get. My greatest vulnerability is my math GRE score so I have to bone up. Unfortunately I take to numbers like cows take to deep sea fishing. I haven't had a real math class in ten years. So now I have to teach myself algebra - which comprises most of the math portion. If anyone ever reads this that wants to go to grad school - please make your life better and do all this the summer before your senior year!

I didn't do that because I was too caught up working on my house. Yet again my cultural upbringing interferes with my professional goals. My greatest ambition is supposed to be being a homeowner and I am supposed to be married and have kids and a nice job driving a truck or something now. That's the vision of stability and the Good Life I was raised with. And it don't have a damn thing to do with the overeducated, highly mobile, professional public intellectual life that I am working towards.

I am also working on my house, although admittedly not very much. I am blessed that our good friend and able carpenter Alex has seen fit to move in with us, live in our spare room, and work on the house in lieu of rent. He will have done more of the work on our current project - rebuilding the wraparound porch to pacify the city building inspector - than I will have by the end of that ordeal.

Here's a picture of the incredibly bootleg collection of random scrap wood (courtesy by garbage-pickin' dumpster divin' old man) that is supporting the considerable weight of my huge and heavy front porch.

We are rebuilding it because 1) it was about to fall over and possibly kill someone and 2) the city said I have to fix it or go to court. Oh the joys of homeownership. I am beginning to understand why most students rent.

And here's a nice picture of the really redneck blocking that is holding up the bootleg supports. In this picture you can see how we used the driver's side front wheel of my '65 Valiant as a brace for that whole side. Don't tell the Man.

And here is the recycled dump truck jack that is taking most of the weight of the mitered ridge board that is holding my porch roof together. This truck jack is supporting the whole corner of the wooden structure and a lot of the roof, which is overburdened with 3 layers of shingles. Ain't that cute?

That's about all I know folks. I am exhausted and I wont get a break until December.

Keep yer hammer cocked an' yer powder dry.

Life With High Tech Vinyl and Building Permits

2008-09-11T23:48:00.006-04:00

Howdy faithful readers,

I write to you from behind a stack of vintage records that is slowly burying my computer. Recently I saw an old friend who told me he had a record player that could make CD copies of vinyl albums. Now the rest of the world probably heard about this about 15 years ago, but I thought it was hot shit. So a few days ago I ordered an Audio Technica AT-LP2DUSB LP-to-Digital Recording System off amazon. The thang plays records right into a compu-tater via USB cable. Since I have a Mac equipped with iTunes, the application is real simple. So here I am playing Rolling Stones, Commander Cody, and Firesign Theater LP's into my desktop. Then I can make CD's and my former record player, which was demented and evil can no longer scratch my records by randomly picking up and dropping the needle all over. The whole shebang cost me about $80, cheap for a decent turntable.

Also, the Department of Buildings and Inspections of the City of Cincinnati has finally seen fit to issue me permits to fix my porch. I am being compelled to do so because (1) it is falling off my house (2) they have threatened to fine me and take me to court if I don't get my shit together. I was surprised to find myself cited for violation of housing code, given that I live in a neighborhood with an ample stock of abandoned and generally shitty houses. Northside, however, is trying desperately to set itself apart from the generally blighted Queen City. The local neighborhood community council called in the Building Department and asked them to bust property owners' (specifically absentee landlords') balls about the state the neighborhood is in. That's what I get for buying a decrepit house in a neighborhood that Wikipedia until recently acknowledged has seen some slight gentrification. I swear it would be easier to live in the 'hood. So I have to start on that tomorrow. I hope I can get it done before it gets too cold to pour cement.

Rudi Giuliani and Soylent Green

2008-09-09T12:13:00.010-04:00

Last week I was home, minding my own business and watching television on my battered 30-year-old 18-inch Zenith. I am sure its color screen was delightfully novel to its original owners, but it has seen better days. I refuse to have cable and so must content myself with occasionally having to get up and fuck with the TV since all the control knobs have shorts. This defect causes my set to gradually de-adjust itself int0 unintelligible static. I am contemplating acquiring a newer TV since we stand at the threshold to the digital age and I recently learned that I'd get more channels if I scrapped my CRT-dinosaur. I don't know how the hell this works, but apparently local PBS broadcasts four channels at once on the same signal now. I can't get this at home, but my sister can since her TV is several decades newer. Who ever heard of channel 4.2? I'm jest happy when the planets align correctly, WKET comes in good, and I can watch Kentucky cultural productions like a how to demo on catching and eating wild snapping turtles. God bless PBS.

Anyways, there I was curled up with my uber-clumsy 75-lb. Labrador who thinks he's a lapdog watching Rudi Giuliani extol the virtues of the GOP's presidential candidate. As an avowed liberal I watched this spectacle expecting to eventually become upset, but I wanted to be informed. I watch Trinity Broadcasting Network with much the same attitude sometimes. It's good to occasionally check in with the surreality that passes for real reality in America, but once I get my fill of End-Of-Days/France-is-in-league-with-Satan sermons I have to change the channel.

So there was Rudi giving the speech we all saw. I was confused at first about how being a Community Organizer is a laughable offense in politics. But then as the evening wended on I got really depressed. At some point the matter of Oil was introduced and the audience began - apparently spontaneously - chanting 'Drill Baby Drill!". That was my limit. The spectacle of a huge crowd of politically active Americans chanting to drill for more oil was tragic beyond belief to me. I couldn't help but search mentally for a parallel in world history. Perhaps someone shooting the last wild passenger pigeon? (We have a morbid little shrine for these extinct birds in the Cincinnati Zoo.) Perhaps the trainloads of bloodthirsty sportsmen gunning down herds of buffalo and leaving them to rot in the sun out on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century? Neither of those is grandiose enough in scale. Perhaps the haughtiness of the soon-to-be-deposed nobles of the Indian subcontinent, confidently ignoring the gathering cloud of British gunships on their horizon. The felling of the last tree on Easter Island, just before the people there descended into starvation-and-cannibalism hell.

The recent film 'There Will Be Blood' is based on noted lefty/famous author Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel 'Oil!' and serves as an object-lesson in the inherent evil destruction that oil speculation was born in. How timely. And we get Daniel Day Lewis playing a megolomaniacal psychopath as only he can. Bravo.

At any rate drilling for more oil is non-solution to any of America's myriad current environmental, economic, and international political woes. I took a physical geography class at UC from the director of the local EPA and I vividly recall him articulating in a lecture how the pleaded-for drilling of oil in ANWAR would only create a small jump in the overall declining stocks of the all-important sticky black goo. He showed us a big graph depicting the long, slow, inevitable decline in global oil production that we are now collectively desperately avoiding the acknowledgement of. If we raped ANWAR it would only make a small bump in the long downward arc. There is no hope for more oil, in the long run. As we all learned in elementary school there renewable and non-renewable resources. Do we all remember which one oil is? Good class, how 'bout trees? Coal? What about water? Finite is finite. Period. And now India is about to enter the car-happy bliss America has lived in for a half-century. China will be next. (I wonder if India will have drive-in everything like we did in the 50's. Imagine Bollywood monster flicks playing out over a drive-in theater full of chrome-laden convertibles that smells like curry and marsala instead of popcorn and spilled Pepsi.)

The fact that drilling for oil became a sort of mantra at a national political convention in 2008 America speaks volumes about the course America is on, and our megalomania about our perceived place in the world. I have no idea how the American public can possibly be misled enough to seriously think that focusing on more oil production makes any sense! Actually I do know (note the title of this blog and my post below about 'Deer Hunting with Jesus') - it is just counter-intellectual.

Our future involves less and less oil, whether we like it or not. This 'Drill Baby Drill' crap is insane. We had better get our asses in gear and figure out what we are gonna do when the shit hits the fan and we run out. Hummers and huge SUV's are probably not a smart move right now. Neither is ignoring the coming apocalypse of mushrooming energy needs and dwindling supplies. Did anyone else see the film 'Soylent Green'?

I read in the Wall Street Journal last week that Chrysler's sales are down some 30-odd-percent. Ford and GM are hurting too. The entire model we have based our prosperity on - endless economic expansion, suburbia, ubiquitous automobilia- is a house of cards. The end of cheap oil will necessitate change. If we vote in the 'Drill Baby Drill' crowd we are voting to not only eat our seed corn, but burn down our houses too. In his book Collapse Jared Diamond likens our plight to the doomed Viking colonists of Greenland, clinging schizophrenically to a value system that didn't work because they weren't in Norway anymore.

I feel like I am on a sinking ship sometimes in America. The RNC reinforced that creeping sensation for me. Empires usually end badly and messily - note the widespread starvation that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, or at the very least the massive recession that Britain soldiered through after all their colonies demanded self-rule. I am torn between contemplating a future in which I live in survival mode somewhere in the mountains, and one in which I simply say "Screw it" to America and decamp for sunnier environs with better health care, education, and fewer stupid greedy white people.

All of this is also inspired by New York Times journalist Tom Friedman's recent rant on NPR's Fresh Air. In his interview Friedman compares the U.S. to Denmark. According to him, when we elected Reagan in 1981 he axed subsidies for the then-fledgling U.S. solar industry. All the firms went bankrupt and all the technology ended up in Denmark - which is now far, far ahead of us in generating renewable energy. A timely cautionary tale indeed.

I pray for political and environmental sanity in this country. But as a student of history I expect shit like Boss Tweed, Huey Long, Teapot Dome, the Trail of Tears, and Haliburton to screw us all.

Kinfolks: Falling off the family tree: the search for my Melungeon ancestors

2008-08-28T12:34:00.003-04:00

Another book I read recently that I really enjoyed was by Lisa Alther

Alther hails from Kingsport, Tennessee - a town I once spent an hour in waiting for a north-bound Greyhound bus after my martyred 1988 Chevrolet Caprice Estate Wagon slid off an ice-and-snow-covered logging road and caught fire in a ditch on top of High Knob in Jefferson National Forest, near Norton Virginia. The old man running the station picked out tunes on a mandolin while we waited for the bus. I'd have been transfixed, but I was really pissed off about my lost car.

Alther narrates a free-wheeling tour of her attempt to trace her family's history. Suspecting her grandmother concealed a past she was ashamed of - for reasons involving the stigma of miscegenation, Alther sets off to uncover the truth. Her stories about life in 1950's East Tennessee were at least as compelling to read about as the mythic and mysterious origins of the Melungeons.

Alther moved North for college decades ago, settling in Vermont. She too was a part of the Appalachian brain drain. She married a Yankee and surrounded herself with poets, feminists, and other intellectual types who she both craved as a child, and often felt misunderstood by. As Joe Bageant noted in his Australian TV interview, "Southerners are famous...for having a love-hate relationship with their hometowns." I think some small-town Yankees might sympathise with that too.

Alther compares the spectacle of drunk Tennesseans being carried downriver on a pontoon boat accompanied by the portable-stereo blasted audio backdrop of Southern rock alongside the image of fitness-minded Yankees windsurfing, sailing, and swimming. She concludes that the two regional cultures have vastly different ways of experiencing both watersports and the outdoors, and that Yankees work really hard at leisure activities.

She also argues - and I believe effectively - that the greatest difference between Southerners and Yankees is that Southerners can enjoy making a fool out of themselves and looking ridiculous. Yankees, on the other hand, cannot bear the embarrassment and have to work really hard to feign dignity all the time.

I think this is a marvelous observation and a dichotomy I often noticed firsthand, being a product of families from both Kentucky and Ohio and having spent my entire life on the border between the two.

Trying to look dignified is usually a lot more work than it is worth. And then you miss a out on a lot of fun activites - take pie-eating contests for instance. There's also no way to wrestle a greased pig or drive in a demolition derby without being able to laugh at yourself.

Vive la Spectacle de White Trash!

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

2008-08-28T11:58:00.004-04:00

I have discovered a new favorite writer: Joe Bageant. His new book, bearing the above title, concerns the incredible nature of America's class/cultural divide. Bageant, an avowed aging Marxist, prefers to frame the issues purely in terms of class. However, Bageant is a native of Winchester, Virginia - a stone's throw from the Blue Ridge Mountains and West Virginia. He writes of the Appalachian subsistence farming lifestyle of his grandparents and his people's Southern roots. Despite most of a lifetime spent in the West and in more cosmopolitan settings, Bageant's interview on Australian TV reveals a discernible portion of his Appalachian Virginian accent to be intact. Bageant is adamantly and undeniably one of 'the great unwashed', my people: Redneckius Americanus.

Bageant left wage-slave Virginia for a stint in the military as a teenager, and stayed gone for decades - part of the small-town brain drain he references in the interview I watched. He spent years as a journalist, interviewing and befriending people like Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. The years he spent honing his skills writing to the public practically beam through in his book. He has one of the most robust, accessible, intelligent voices of any author I have read in a long, long time. He is able to channel directly the cultural texture, the worldview, and the gritty and hazy ideas and ideals that working-class rednecks organize their worlds with. The result is a systematic, stunningly accurate, and rollickingly entertaining piece that raises the curtain on this world to educated liberal America.

I spent most of my day yesterday contemplating how joining the ranks of the college educated is distancing me from all that makes me feel comfortable and emotionally and spiritually grounded. Admittedly, this blog is an attempt to counter such a growing internal schizophrenia. While I treasure the education I have received, I worry about the six-figures of debt it has incurred me. I often sadly wonder why my family cannot understand anything I study, while my classmates seem puzzled and either bemused or shocked at half of my personal life. I am increasingly becoming aware of the extent to which post-secondary education - even at a $10,000-a-year "public" university - is the realm of middle-class privilege. Maybe its because I studied history, one of the most conservative disciplines in the classic liberal-arts canon. (Conservative being generally synonymous with money in intellectual and professional circles.) Maybe its because this is the first time in my life I have been immersed in middle-class, suburban, white America. For the first few years of college I was stunned and horrified - and also transfixed. I never saw so many people that all dressed so well just to come to school, and were so utterly vapid and vacant. Now I am just impatient to get out of undergrad and be recognized for standing out above the crowd of Abercrombie clone children who are my classmates. Half the time when I relate a personal anecdote or a divergent opinion that I have arrived at because of direct life experience the classrooms I study erupt in bewildered laughter. "Why would you ever live across the street from a slaughterhouse?" Why indeed.

I never wanted to be middle-class, but I can feel my education - and the looming prospect of an academic career - pulling me in that direction. I feel totally disoriented in such an environment. I don't think I know anyone from school that would so much as contemplate trying to fix anything they owned if it broke. That scares me.

Last week as I was driving aimlessly through Fairmount I meandered through several hilly streets whose whimsical angles and trash-strewn lawns reminded me of my childhood drawings of the rolling hills of home. I saw skinny young men with bad haircuts standing around outside working on battered vintage cars. As I passed I gave the standard country headnod of acknowledgement. (Nathan Turner and I recently discussed the nod's various forms. Country people do a polite, but sometimes gruff, downward acknowledging nod. Blue-collar city dudes, when inclined to be so friendly, perform a slightly more aggressive upward nod that imparts more a defensive message. The former is generally friendly and the latter ghetto.) The guys nodded back and I realized that such an interaction felt more a lot more like home than the trendy pseudo-gentrifying neighborhood I live in. I conferred to the map section of the 'Social Areas of Cincinnati" report linked to on the Urban Appalachian Website, and realized that it was small wonder I felt that way: I was indeed among my people. South Fairmount is home to a recognized and established Appalachian community.

I have been feeling guilty for having not been involved in any volunteer work for the last several years. When I started at UC I picked up a job as a bellboy and spent several years working myself numb to keep on Dean's List at UC and pull as many shifts as I could get carrying suitcases, praying I could somehow earn enough money at a minimum-wage gig to decrease my dependence on student loans. It took me several years to figure out that I was never going to get ahead like that, besides being miserable and exhausted all the time.

Reading Joe Bageant reminds me of the homesickness and detachment that I feel at school. His tone is the rollicking shit-kicking that underpins half the country songs that are good to get drunk to. He narrates the book from a bar where he stays in touch with roots, kibbitzing with the underemployed, uninsured, overweight, and overworked.

I have realized a selfish reason why volunteering through an agency like the Urban Appalachian Council would be really, really good for me. Due to complicated health problems, I can't drink. This means that I can no longer get drunk enough to erase the intellectual disparities between myself and people like my relatives, who have never - as Bageant elegantly quips - experienced the life of the mind. But I could spent time among the raucously dispossessed miss by helping their kids learn to read. And that would do me at least as much good as it'd do anyone else.

Ohio Bluegrass

2008-08-26T10:48:00.004-04:00

We attended the 18th Annual Brown County Bluegrass Festival in historic Georgetown, Ohio this weekend where I was delighted to receive an autographed photo of J.D. Crowe and the New South. We had a great time out there and I heard some great bands that I had never heard of before. I really like the Daniel Patrick family out of Bethel, who played a great version of "If you don't love your neighbor then you don't love God." We sat out on the grass in the center of the horse-race track at the Brown County Fairgrounds and listened opulently to the delicious music pouring over us for hours. We all agreed that next year we should come and camp out for the whole festival. Most of the people there had RV's and were set up for what appeared at least a few days. This prompted another discussion of my longstanding plan to build an RV out of a converted used school bus. (I have also considered this as a housing option for when I move away to grad school in 2010.) We did see a used International diesel full-size school bus for sale on the side of State Route 32 on the way out there. It had a bad paint job and FOR SALE $!1000 painted on the windows. I was smitten immediately of course...

Most of the people at the Festival were older country people. Nathan and I discussed the many very very interesting hairdos, many of which I had not seen in years and reminded me of my childhood. I had almost forgotten how old farmers dress up to go out: printed long-sleeve shirts tucked into denim slacks with black cowboy boots or some kind of similar footwear. Pomade, cowboy hats, and dip can rings in back pockets. We people-watched for hours. Sabra and Nathan ate funnel cake and pork roast from the vendors. Since becoming increasingly aware of the social boundaries and construction of race and class in America I have gotten into the habit of counting minorities and noting the demographic makeup of inner-city bus rides, concerts, college classes and other group activities and events. On Saturday out at the fairgrounds we all noticed a Black man, his white wife, and their really cute - and biracial - children. The dude seemed really into the music, Nathan noticed he was singing along. The family also defied stereotypes that rural white people hold about inter-racial couples: they seemed (relatively for the context) middle-class and were middle-aged. I thought about this image of the biracial family in the most traditional countrified setting I have been in in years. While I know for a fact several of my Black friends from the city would feel uncomfortable as hell at a downhome bluegrass festival, obviously that family felt okay. The world is definitely changing; I can recall very few such images from my childhood a decade or two ago.

All of this has also left me wondering what constitutes Appalachian-ness. Am I an Appalachian? My maternal grandfather came from Eastern Kentuckians and spent portions of his childhood in Pulaski County watching his relatives scrape a living out of of rocky fields, coal mines, and railroad jobs. My mother remembers the fun she had with her aunts from the hills of Kentucky as a child. But most of the family has been in Cincinnati since the Depression, and is generally fairly assimilated into the lower middle-class/working class suburbs. That makes me second-generation Urban Appalachian, by which point all traces of the inner hillbilly sometimes disappear into generalized blue-collar class identity of Cincinnati. On the other hand I grew up on the Clermont-Brown County line and both counties are considered part of Appalachia by the US Department of Agriculture. But if all of Clermont County is part of Appalachia then that area by definition includes the strip malls and subdivisions of Milford, as well as all of the Godforsaken mall-ified conurbation that is Eastgate. My venerated Urban History professor claimed very broadly in class that all of Clermont County is exurban - meaning the sprawl that happens beyond suburbia, but is not really rural. This shocked me, as a product of both Ohio 4-H and a rural America. His vision of Clermont County obviously did not include places and people I knew and treasured, like my illiterate bachelor farmer neighbor Earl or the former home of a childhood friend that lacked plumbing. The real identity of Clermont County lies somewhere between these two opposing generalizations. At least in my head. Cultural Geographer and urban theorist Joel Garreau argued in 'The Nine Nations of North America' that some parts of the Ohio River valley that were within the state of Ohio really belonged culturally to Kentucky. He mentions Brown County and Adams County - two of Ohio' poorest - specifically. I agree with that assessment having spent a fair amount of time in both places, and my good friend Nathan (from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains) who accompanied me on my trek to Georgetown agreed, exclaiming, "Damn, this looks like Kentucky!" as we headed south on State Route 68 between Mt. Orab and Georgetown. I have always identified with Kentucky at least as much as Ohio, although I have lived in the latter all my life. Most of Ohio is flat - which terrifies me - and populated by people equally culturally flat that enunciate a lot - which scares me more.

But seriously building a schoolbus RV would be badass...

Shades of whiteness and poverty

2008-08-22T19:12:00.006-04:00

So I was reading the website of the Cincinnati Urban Appalachian Council the other day and I was fascinated to see the Queen City's urban hillbillies described as "the invisible minority". The site went on to describe Appalachians as occupying a socioeconomic position between whites and African Americans, however the site said that in an urban context Appalachians usually have more in common with Black folks than whites. Urban Appalachians face discrimination, as do racial minorities, however for them discrimination is often based on accent, location of residence, or lifestyle. Michael Maloney and Christopher Auffrey, authors of The Social Areas of Cincinnati: an analysis of social needs argue that urban Appalachians may easily pass through social doors barred to people of color; they may assimilate easily. Successful professionals of Appalachian backgrounds usually live in affluent - rather than ethnic - areas. However, the authors continue, Appalachians also lack the strong social organizations that other minorities have, for example the community structures represented by Black churches and Civil-Rights-era-rooted antipoverty organizations. In overall society Appalachians occupy a socioeconomic niche between whites and Blacks. However, in the context of a major city their marginalization places them closer to African Americans. Thus in Cincinnati hillbillies have more in common with Black people than the largely middle-class Midwesternite white people.

That jives with what I know from personal experience. My Appalachian friend Nathan Turner gets along better with inner city Black folk than any white dude I ever met. He grew up in an integrated - but poor - town in the Blue Ridge mountains so has always been around working-class and poor people of varying hues and cultures.

So what is race? And what race are hillbillies? John Waters said tha 'white trash' is the last racist thing anyone can say in public...

More researching Northside

2008-07-29T19:23:00.007-04:00

So I've been poring over my data for my summer research project and some interesting themes have emerged. Census data reveals that the 90's saw a dramatic rise in vacant housing units in the neighborhood, as well as a dramatic rise in the number and percentage of African American residents. While that decade saw population decline, per capita income rose and the percentage of educated professionals likewise. Apparently that decade was when Northside's postindustrial/white flight downward spiral began to be reversed.

It is an interesting combination of historical trends. Abandoned houses stack up and poor residents crowd in while young professionals begin rehabbing the housing stock.

The 70's and 80's saw dramatic declines in the numbers and percentages of neighborhood residents who were employed in blue-collar jobs, e.g. production and repair, crafts/trades, and operating, assembling, and materials hauling. The old industrial base was withering away.

In the 90's the old blue-collar people are replaced by two distinct groups that emerge as a product of the bifurcation of labor market in the postindustrial era: the urban underclass and the educated new elite. Somehow in Northside they exist side by side, middle-class and poor, black and white, in what seems to be an uneasy coexistence. Northside is diverse, but micro-level patterns of segregation definitely exist. I wish I had census data by block and not just census tract. Then I would be able to do a much more thorough analysis of Northside micro-urban geography.

In studying the old local business community I am surprised by how many auto and truck-related businesses there were on Spring Grove. There were three car dealerships, lots of machine shops, a handful of auto parts places, tire shops, and others.

Northside had lots of machine shops until a decade or two (or three) ago, as did the industrial Mill Creek Valley. Spring Grove Avenue tied Northside into an industrial artery that stretched from the West End, through Camp Washington, and out to Saint Bernard, Elmwood Place, and Cathage. Machine tooling was one of the major industries Cincinnati lost in the corporate reorganization/recession/Reaganomics/outsourcing era of the late 70's and 80's. OPEC embargoed oil, the economy tanked, the dollar flopped, the planet's financiers shuddered as a result, and jobs went South - literally and figuratively. If you want a good intro just watch Roger and Me, which is both funny and poignant.

Cincinnati was lucky to have a fairly diversified economy. We had furniture making, wagon making, meatpacking, soap making, and stuff like that but we lost almost all of it. Crosley Corporation pioneered appliance breakthroughs like refrigerators with shelves in the doors, major radio innovations, and even made a car briefly. Unlike industrial cities that experienced more apocalyptic declines (e.g. Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo) we also had other major economic sectors that were more insulated from deindustrialization: Banking (Fifth Third), aerospace (GE), consumer products (P & G), the Kroger's national headquarters, a major medical sector, and others. Cincinnati Milacron (formerly the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company) cleverly reinvented itself as a plastics/injection molding firm when the machine tool industry went the way of the Studebaker. So Cincinnati soldiers on, not as bad as Detroit but still steadily bleeding people and money to the exurbs and younger, sexier cities in the Sunbelt.

A few years ago my father's sister moved to Phoenix. She is the first member of his family to leave Cincinnati for another region (and economy) since his people came here to escape the German Wars of Unification and Otto Von Bismarck's persecution of German Catholics in the Victorian era. The rest of my family - redheaded stubborn descendants of German Catholic peasants - looks on in awe and asks her endlessly what it is like to live in the desert, which only a few of us have seen. She has not only moved thousands of miles, she tells us that Arizona is totally different way of life - less harried, less cut-throat. She has no grass in her yard and she lives in a city in which almost all of the adults are transplants from somewhere else. They have a solar power industry and desert mountains ring the city. It is another planet to us. We can no more imagine living in a place without smog, Hudepohl beer, goetta, omnipresent German surnames, a big dirty river, old factories, and ubiquitous honeysuckle and maple trees than we can imagine living underwater. The Queen City is nothing if not insular; my professors complain that none of their students ever want to move away to further their careers. A freind of mine who was born in New Jersey has family that was totally befuddled upon moving to Cincinnati as to why people kept giving them directions using landmarks that no longer exist. (I sometimes find myself doing this.) While Cincinnati continues to make soap out of sheer inertia (or stubbornness) - a remnant of the Queen City's all-but-vanished meatpacking legacy, Arizona is dreaming up an electric-powered sports car. They are the future and we live in the wreckage and detritus of the past. Technology and culture have largely passed us by. We aren't starving, but we tend to hear about trends when they are nearly over in more dynamic places. We look backwards because it is usually more comfortable for us. If the future is now Cincinnati is last week. Remember what Mark Twain said.

Speaking of detritus and wreckage, here are the pictures I took today for my paper:

4288 Spring Grove: Spring Grove Construction Equipment. Used heavy equipment sales and parts.

former location of the Spring Grove Monument Co. until 1997.

4330 Spring Grove: The Old Timber Inn. Tavern/restaurant in current location since 1982.

I hear the fish log special is pretty good.

4312 Spring Grove. Apparently being used for storage.

4275 Spring Grove: B & B Tire Town. In current location since 1978 when Bob saved up money from selling tires out of his basement to buy the shop.

Was previously occupied by the Stillpass Service Station.

A great place for cheap oil changes and used tires. I replaced a whitewall on my 84 Chev for $10 once here.

4265 Spring Grove. Currently used as storage or something similar. Owned by proprietor of the Spring Grove Used Equipment Co.

Former location of Spring Grove Garage until 1978.

4257 Spring Grove. Currently rented as apartments.

The storefront has not been occupied by a business any time during study period (1970-present.)

4251 Spring Grove: Presently home to a wood-laminate products company: Malco Laminated Co.

I thought it was abandoned until I saw the doors propped open and men working inside.

former location of G & M Plating 1978-1987

Spring Grove looking West from the intersection with the Dooley Bypass.

Note healthy smog in background, also the old American Can factory. Its window glass was all removed when renovations began. Apparently the mortgage crisis has caused a some kind of pause in that work.

4231 Spring Grove: The Gypsy Hut. Currently an artsy hipster bar.

A bar with the same name (but dramatically different clientèle occupied this building for many years until sometime around 1978 when the name was changed to the New Edition. That bar closed around 1987. There was a reincarnation as the New Orleans Cafe, then the current owner(s) returned the bar to its historic title. My grandmother remembers the old Gypsy Hut as a neighborhood institution when she was younger.

4231 Spring Grove: The Gypsy Hut. Currently an artsy hipster bar.

The narrow building just to the left of the bar is 4229 Spring Grove, former home to the Mor Lite Greenhouse company until 1978. I am still trying to figure out why there is a steel door in the floor on the second story that is equipped with translucent glass blocks in it. I have never seen anything like it in another building.

4124 Spring Grove: Superior Chevrolet. My theory is that this is the dealership's original home. They probably started here when this was a busy industrial corridor, sometime in say the 50's. Then I-75 was built nearby in the 70's, shifting the local economic geography. The dealership moved to a new location with better highway access sometime in the 70's or 80's and retained this lot for more marginal activities, such as used cars.

Note the cheesy lights and strings of reflective streamers. You only see those at shitty used car lots in the inner city now. They were industry standard several decades ago. The lot is full of big cars and SUV's that no one wants to buy now that gas is $4 a gallon. (Haha I just bought a diesel 89 Jetta that gets 40 miles a gallon for $1200. I guess you have to think outside the box.)

4149 Spring Grove: Woody Sander Ford. This is probably Sander Ford's original location. The dealership likely moved over by the highway some time in the 70's or 80's to be in a location with better visibility. They use the old building for a body shop and for storage now.

4149 Spring Grove: Woody Sander Ford.

Note the curve in the showroom wall to the right. The curtain wall is composed of a series of plate-glass windows and the entrance is tucked in from the street in a little alcove. There is also a transom over the door. This is an art deco structure, likely built in the 30's or 40's, when dealership showrooms abutted the sidewalk and attracted foot traffic in with huge windows.

Intersection of Spring Grove and Mad Anthony. Typical small late 19th-century homes of this part of the neighborhood. Today this census tract is the neighborhood's poorest. The proliferation of small, inexpensive homes on small lots has created concentrated poverty. Few have driveways or garages and are thus obsolete housing in today's real estate market.

4111 Spring Grove: home of Autobahn Craftwerks since 2000.

former location of Behler Oldsmobile until 1970, Central Fleet Services until 1990, J & M Auto Service until 1997. This building was built in 1940, when dealership showrooms abutted the sidewalk and attracted window shoppers on foot with huge windows. That was when people who walked and rode streetcars everywhere were dreaming of a family car. In 1940 an Oldsmobile was an auspicious entry into the world of (semi) luxury motoring.

The American Can Building, 4101 Spring Grove Avenue, built 1921. The American Can Company vacated this building some time prior to 1973. The owner of Autobahn Craftwerks told me the company moved to South America to avoid union-demanded wage hikes.

The building was then home to the Cleveland Automatic Machine Tool Company, and some other machine shops, until some time in the late 90's

The building is currently slated for redevelopment by the same company who redeveloped the Ford Factory building at Lincoln and I-71. The planned mixed-use project will be the biggest development project in a Cincinnati neighborhood in decades.

Here's a link to more info about the project.

And here's a link to a map of the development from the Northside Community Council.

The American Can Building, 4101 Spring Grove Avenue.

4055 Schott Monument Company. Has been in present location since at least 1973. They put three big blocks of granite out in front of their building to keep drunks and reckless motorists from running into it, should they miss the turn.

4041 Spring Grove: home of Northside Appliances.

This was the former location of the Step Inn Cafe until 1970. The Step Inn was one of a number of old blue-collar bars and restaurants that folded in the area when the industrial base went hard-core anemic.

A sign for a Checker Auto Parts Store that closed decades ago sits next to a van with flat tires and a bus stop. The building on right advertises free parking for Checker's customers.

4016 Spring Grove. Former home of Fisk Monument Co. They were in this location from at least 1973, until recently when they moved to a suburban location. Property is vacant and for sale.

4019 Spring Grove: now empty. Recently outfitted with new vinyl siding.

This building was home to Northside Automotive and Radiator, and then Autobahn Craftwerks until late 90's. The owner of Autobahn told me he inherited the shop from his father. He shifted the shop' focus from general mechanics to Volkswagens and later motorcycles. He now sells scooters and restored vintage bikes.

Mural on the wall of 4024 Hamilton at Cosby and Hamilton.

Knowlton's Corner looking Southwest

Hamilton Ave looking Northwest from Knowlton's Corner.

3927 Ludlow Ave: Stagecraft Costuming. The costume shop used to be open to the public. Not sure if it is open at all any more. Looks abandoned.

3938 Spring Grove. Former long-time home of Kay's Restuarant. Closed recently. The dining room has booths from the 60's and lights from a few decades before that. I have a theory that the building was originally built as a theater, thus explaining its ornate facade and the box-like protrusion from the rear roof line. I am sad I never got to eat here. Kay's was legendary with the city workers. Local news once did a bug story about how the city's municipal employees were in Kay's loafing around on the clock.

I took these pictures through the front window. Look how old everything in the dining room is. It reminds of Shay's Restaurant in Cleveland, where Harvey Pekar eats lunch in American Splendor. I have to hand it to Cleveland though, Shay's is grittier.

3942, 3940, Spring Grove Avenue. In 1973 the corner building was home to Muenchen's Furniture, which has since moved to Colerain Township. They left the location some time between 1978 and 1982. These buildings are now occupied by Casablanca Vintage clothing store. It is popular with some of the hipster kids, but they don't seem to make a lot of money. At least not if the condition of the plaster inside the store is any indication.

Row of empties: 3936, 3934, 3932 Spring Grove. 3932 (far right) was home to Marmer X-Ray Solutions until 1982 when KDM Signs moved in. Then Cincinnati Express Delivery occupied the building until 1987, then nothing since 1992. A used furniture store occupied 3934 (center) briefly in the mid-90's.

3935 and 3937 Spring Grove. The building on left was home to Hortons TV Repair until the late 70's. It then sat empty for years until recently when an import store and Southeast Asian restaurant moved into both buildings. This Italianate-style row house architecture is noteworthily Cincinnati.

3929 Spring Grove. The building was owned by the Salvation Army for many years. It was home to Preachers nightclub for a few years, then Alchemize. It is now vacant and for sale. This building reminds me of Cleveland.

An alley between 3934 and 3932 Spring Grove.

Detail of 3932 Spring Grove. Note curtains billowing in the breeze that blows through all the broken windows.

3925 Spring Grove: former long-time home of the Idle Hour Cafe. By the sound of it, it was likely a workingman's bar and lunch spot. The Idle Hour disappeared in the early 80's The building fell into massive neglect and is slowly being pieced back together. It's pretty huge.

An empty building painted with a cartoon Indian advertising Liberty Tire, which disappeared in the late 90's

Non-PC advertising?

4012 Spring Grove Avenue: former long-time home of Ohio Automotive Parts. A faded sign advertises that the parts store also offered full machine-shop service. The business closed in the early 90's and the building has been vacant since.

A sign for a Checkers Auto Parts Store that closed decades ago sits next to a van with flat tires and a bus stop. The rustbelt in microcosm: a long-gone light industrial business, a dead car, and people who lack both cars and blue-collar jobs.

More free trailer park boys and my research project.

2008-07-24T14:12:00.004-04:00

Howdy ever'body,

I found more free trailer park boys on the intro-net for everyone. This site has the bulk of the series - and its all free ladies and gentlemen!

QuickSilverScreen

I also began poring over the Haines Greater Cincinnati Cross-Referenced Telephone/Adressakey directories today. I am currently, with the support of UC's Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement program, examining the history of the changing economic geography of Northside from 1970-present. The Haines directories are available free at the Public Library downtown in the history department. They list all addresses on all streets in the metro area. The listings work chronologically and by neighborhood. For each address on a given street the directory provides the name of the occupant for all residential units, or the name of the business if it is a non-residential address. And their telephone number. The Haines directories go back to the early twenties - when telephone service became common for businesses. They were designed to function as a geographic business-to-business directory.

So using photocopies of the pages listing Hamilton Avenue, Spring Grove Avenue, and Blue Rock Street in Northside from 1973 - 2001 I am amassing a body of data about how the character of the neighborhood has changed.

So far I have only pored over the info from Hamilton, and I was slightly surprised by how slow and incomplete the transformation of the business strip was in the above time frame. I expected to see a massive drop in businesses, years of empty storefronts, and then trendy new stuff in the 90's and 2000's. That was what I found in Tremont in Cleveland last summer when doing a similar project using the same methods there.

Northside's business strip came into the 70's with a half-dozen used furniture outfits, a shoe store, two pharmacies, a shoe repair shop, a family-run bakery, a mom-and-pop hardware store, a couple used appliance joints, a gas station, an art theater, five banks, four doctors, two dentists, an optometrists' shop, a butcher, a jewelry store, and a host of similar mom-and-pop blue-collar, low-order good businesses.

In the early 80's a long-standing institution, the Crazy Ladies feminist bookstore, arrived and a few counterculture/alternative organizations followed suit. But the change was slow in the 80's . There was as much tricking out as tricking in. I know from informal research that the nearby industrial areas were still very much on their downward spiral at that time.

In the 90's we see real change begin. Tatoo parlors, trendy hair salons, a video store, the city's biggest collection of gay bars, a record store, a music shop, an art gallery and ceramics studio, coffee shops, hip restaurants, and eventually a sizable presence in the area representing Cincinnati's alternative lifestyle set. Artists, activists, GLBT folk, young academics and older college students, scooterists, skateboarders, the heavily dyed and tatooed set, musicians, writers, punk rockers, and all of their various friends, hangers-on, and associates became more than noticeable in Northside. We now have a handful of gay nightlife spots, a couple bars frequented by art students and their friends, a scooter gang, several tattoo shops, the gay community center, a yoga studio, a vegetarian restaurant, a design company, and two vintage clothing emporiums.

My eventual goal is synthesize my findings with the small body of urban sociology books I have read and asses whether or not Northside is a good model of an integrated neighborhood. It has white, black, poor, middle-class, educated, and every other indicator mentionable. The neighborhood seems to be tilting towards gentrification, but it still has a surprisingly mixed demographic makeup. I have neighbors with Ph.D.s who teach at local colleges and I have neighbors who can barely read and collect scrap metal to scrape together a living. There are white drag queens, disenfranchised black urban youth, and weathered long-time business operators like Bill at Ace Hardware - who has been behind the counter in his store since the late 40's I beleive.

More later.

More later.

Free Trailer Park Boys

2008-07-22T21:06:00.002-04:00

Hey everbody:

You kin watch Trailer Park Boys season 7 free here:

Trailer Park Boys Central

Live from Northside...Summer 2008

2008-07-20T16:07:00.015-04:00

Well dear reader it is summer. Real Summer. I know it is Real Summer because the ground is parched and dusty in my yard, the tomatoes I am growing in washtubs out front need watered every day, and clothes dry on the line in an afternoon. The Clermont County Fair begins tomorrow in Owensville: another harbinger of High Summer. I plan on goin' out on Thursday to see the pig show and the first round of the demolition derby.

My feeble attempt at urban gardening: two tomato plants. I need more land! I am tryin' tolive on 1/10th of an acre! I can barely park my cars on that!

I also know it is real summer because of the heat. I am sleeping in an attic and the nights are warm, restless, and balmy as I snore on my pallet made outta comforters someone threw away in Price Hill last spring. Thankfully the summer has been wet as of yet in Southern Ohio and the corn I have seen outside the city looks good. Last year was awful here for gardeners. The drought killed damn near everything, includin' all the stuff I planted.

I am here with local artist/barfly/minor celebrity/nerd/hillbilly Nathan Turner, my good friend and new roommate. He reports from his home in Southwest Virginian Appalachia that mountain top removal coal mining practices and changing weather patterns created a damaging tornado in Wise County - a heretofore unknown phenomena. The region has also been battling a record years-long drought. The weather sure is getting interesting. Could it be perhaps global warming?

Climatologists report that global warming is causing a total shift in the weather patterns of the American south. Pine forests devastated by drought will give way to deciduous forests. Al Gore is calling for America to rely on 100% renewable energy for our electricity by ten years from now. Gore calls for a paradigm shift relying on a combination of wind, solar, and geothermal power. Gave a big speech Thursday.

Click here to see Al's speech challenging America to get its ass in gear.

I found this campaign poster on EcoGeek.

As I sit sweating on my porch (see photo below) watching the neighborhood's kids ride bikes I contemplate what climate change will mean for me. I think more and more about wanting to live closer to land, grow my own food, live simpler. I am convinced that I could live anywhere where I could keep all my books, have a garage or barn, and some kind of electricity to run a computer and maybe a light and a fan. I could live without plumbing fairly easily. I am still fantasizing about building an electric car out of an old Beetle. That'd basically wean me off gasoline. I could heat with wood; I knew people who relied on wood stoves growing up. Having contemplated all of this extensively recently I hope to earn my Ph.D. in Sociology someplace inexpensive and then go work at a state school in a smallish town where I can live on a small tract of land out on the margins. The other scenario I envision is urban farming on a stretch of vacant lots or a brownfield someplace in the rustbelt. The Rustbelt and Appalachia are home to me; I grew up at their intersection and my family history is intimately tied to how macroeconomic shifts clobbered both of them in the last century.

Rolling Stone magazine this month bears a smiling portrait of Barrack Obama on the cover. Just beyond his interview with the venerable pop culture glossy is a full-length article about the melting glaciers of Greenland. I discovered this development while waiting for a West African pharmacist to fill an order for sulfa-related antibiotocs for my sick guinea pig at the Winton Place Krogers last week. I had some time to kill and Rolling Stone seemed more interesting than lowrider magazines and Redbook. I was amazed that the demographic that reads Rolling Stone actually cares enough about global warming to warrant a whole article about it. Perhaps times really are changing. I wish I lived in a country that could get its shit together to stop the crash course we are on with ecological apocalypse, but being a student of history I expect massive folly, corruption, and incompetence. That seems to be pretty much par for the course for American history as it has unfolded thus far - a la the recent film There Will Be Blood based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!.

So in further news from the home front the city of Cincinnati is threating to take me to court if I don't rebuild my front porch. Apparently this is the result of a building code enforcement blitzkrieg initiated by the Northside community association or the neighborhood council or whatever. It was mentioned on an article I saw in the Building Cincinnati blog.

I jest been hanging out with Mr. Turner and ma dogs. We are eating a lot of greens and grilled boneless pork ribs. The dogs are restless, they want to go out to the park more and they are shedding like crazy. I also bought a scooter and a matching sidecar. Its a 2008 Genuine Stella from Metro Scooter over at Dana and Montgomery.
Presently Nathan and I are exploring the magical world of old Jim Varney commercials on Youtube. I didn't know this but Ernest P. Worrell emerged into stardom from a slew of local TV commercials in Nashville. There sure are a hell of a lot of them commercials! We have also watched all of season 7 of Trailer Park Boys. We are thus educating ourselves about our white trash brethren north of the Canadian border.

I am also shopping online for a cheap used diesel Volkswagen. I found a wrecked 83 Rabbit in Pennsylvania I might buy on ebay - that shit gets 40a gallon! I always prefer previously abused automobiles - they have more personality. Plus their blemished bodies make them a lot cheaper. And I'd probably fuck 'em up anyhow. I also dream about building another artcar like the one that landed me a scholarship at the Art Academy back in 2000. That was fun. I need a big cheap old Cadillac or something for that.

I also learned an important lesson about urban living: you can't burn yer unwanted furniture in Cincinnati. At least not where I live. I had an ol' sofa that somebody aroun' the block threw out. I brought it home and the dogs slep' on it an' tore it up. Nathan and the dogs had to fight each other for sleepin' room on it. Anyhow I decided to git rid of it. So I threw it in the backyard, doused it in grill lighter fliud and lit it on fire.
The charred area on the bottom right is where all this occurred. So then the couch was burnin' and after about ten minutes we had a big fire that was about fifteen feet tall. Then the fire department came and made us put it out. Actually I saw them before they saw me and startin' hosin' water all over it 'cause Nathan said that if they come and have to put out your fire they charge you a fine. They asked us how the fire started - that was the best part. I told 'em the truth an' they said "Naww you can't do that." So I guess that's the lesson here. You can't do that in the city. Damn. Now I have a half burnt couch I don't know what to do with.

That's about it from the house. Over and out. 10-40. Keep yer hammer cocked an' yer powder dry.

Rainwater Ferguson is back in town

2008-06-26T10:13:00.003-04:00

To be sung by a rasping old man sitting at a damaged upright piano. Slow, heavily syncopated melody with blues-chord harmonies to be played along with vocals. Should sound something like a combination of Dr. John, Fats Waller, and Tom Waits' collaborative recordings with Chuck E. Weiss.

Chorus:
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town,
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.
tell your freinds and your neighbors and spread it all around.
'cause Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.
He's got a brand new walk and a brand new talk
and Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.

Well he just got back from the upstate pen,
he's packin' heat and he's drinkin' gin.
You know he ain't gonna stand for no foolin' 'roun'.
You best watch out if your deal goes down,
'cause Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.

Chorus:
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town,
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.
tell your freinds and your neighbors and spread it all around.
'cause Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.
He's got a brand new walk and a brand new talk
and Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.

He picked up some wheels at a used car lot,
He tells ever'body that he likes 'em a lot.
A shiny red Buick with suicide doors,
she's got a fireball six and she purrs and snores.
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.

Chorus:
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town,
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.
tell your freinds and your neighbors and spread it all around.
'cause Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.
He's got a brand new walk and a brand new talk
and Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.

He's got him a room at the Conquistador Hotel
down on 29th street and it looks like hell.
He won't let nobody in 'cause he says its too small,
But we all know it's 'cause of the writing on the wall.
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.

Chorus:
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town,
Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.
tell your freinds and your neighbors and spread it all around.
'cause Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.
He's got a brand new walk and a brand new talk
and Rainwater Ferguson is back in town.

More verses to come later after I find the sketchbook I originally wrote this in...

On Whiteness in Cincinnati

2008-06-13T14:14:00.007-04:00

Now that the draining torments of the 07-08 academic year are over I finally started reading W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, which so far is amazing. The author's voice and style is incredibly elegant and the prose is more than enlightening. I stand on the periphery of the white power structure peeing into Blackness from the outside, trying to understand where the moral and spiritual high ground should be for a conscious white man. And I live in a city where I feel like my race seems to make me consistently regarded with suspicion and contempt. In his memoir Ghetto Celebrity Donnell Alexander describes a scene where his new white in-laws get together with his family, working-class Black folk from gritty Sandusky, Ohio. He is amazed at how differently Black and white folk seem to conduct their lives. And he describes how whites always seem to be vaguely threatening through his eyes. Too much unwritten and brutal history has passed between the two peoples for them to ever be on neutral terms. Alexander writes that to him white people can never be benign.

"...to be poor in a rich society entails having the status of a social anomaly and being deprived of control over one's collective representation and identity: the analysis of public taint in the American ghetto ... serves to stress the symbolic dispossession that turns their inhabitants into veritable social outcasts."

- Loic J.D. Wacquant , "Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American and the French Urban Periphery", from The Urban Sociology Reader, Jan Lin and Chistopher Mele, eds., Routeledge 2005

Living in battle-scarred inner city Cincinnati I feel that mix of pain, anger, resentment, and distrust in the eyes of Black folk everyday. When I ride the bus and tell a young mother her child is cute, when I greet neighbors who are predisposed to be less than cordial to me, when I shop at a ghetto convenience store and the old men loafing out front look at me with concern and surprise. Perhaps I am merely arriving at the inverse of the double consciousness that DuBois describes having had since childhood. My teacher Dr. Taylor tells me that constantly seeing one's own Blackness through the eyes of whites is a form of mental prison.

I read about the Black cops who showed up after the regular burglaries that were perpetrated upon the home of Paul Clemens' family in Made in Detroit: A South of Eight Mile Memoir. Clemens was raised white, urban, Catholic, and working class - like the German American proletariat I am connected to on my father's side. Clemens version of my father's Price Hill was the Northeast corner of Detroit proper where 8 Mile meets Gratiot. By the time Clemens was a teen Detroit was a chocolate city; he had become the anomaly. He analogized it to being a stubborn white Rhodesian living in Zimbabwe.

I was riding the bus from campus the other day with my friend Allen, a portly middle-aged Black man who draws comic books from the bell closet in the hotel we used to work at together. He chatted with the other African American passengers on the bus and, ever the popular comedian, cracked jokes with them. When I chimed in right on cue with my part of our usual comedic routine the response was lowered eyebrows and glares from the bus' black passengers. I am still trying to figure that out.

I noticed that I have a lot more rapport with the African students I meet than the most of the Black folks in the city. To Africans I am simply another foreigner in the land they have adopted to pursue their studies or find a job. Like the girl from Kenya I met waiting for the #17 bus last week, they are usually impressed that I know a little about Africa's geography and history.

With Africans there is no wall. I can introduce myself to them and hit it right off by guessing where they are from by having memorized all the primate cities on the continent. We can talk honestly and openly. There is also some of the naivety and openness that comes of not being raised in a big city on both out parts. Africans usually seem laid back to me; no such dynamic with people raised in the 'hood.

But with African American strangers DuBois' posited veil always gets in the way. I am the inheritor of a legacy of abusive privileged. My Black history professor occasionally reminds me that I stand to inherit racial power, an observation that is often hard for me to wrap my head around. Me? I'm nobody. I'm less than nobody - I got no kinda real job, six figures of student debt, and I'm working on a liberal arts degree that is notorious for having no employment prospects. I've been close to homelessness at times. My friends are all broke-ass artists and general social deviants and my relatives are working class. I mean I had friends growing up who didn't have running water and who lived back in the woods and raised most of their own food because they didn't trust modern mainstream society. I learned how to drive on a tractor and my first job was shoveling manure. I am whiter than what would happen in Barney Fife, Lawrence Welk, and Hank Williams had a genetic-experiment lovechild, but I hardly feel like I am privileged. I have worked damn hard to make it through college. But I guess my whiteness is an asset that I take for granted. I don't have to fear the police, worry about discrimination, or deal with the host of mutually reinforcing forms of structural disempowerment that African Americans struggle against every day.

And as my Race in Modern Society textbook informed me last week, being poor and white is not the same as being poor and black. Poor whites can go to college, learn to speak like middle-class suburbanites, and blend in with mainstream culture. African Americans can never do that, and the legacy of poverty they inherited means they can never earn their way out of the racial wealth gap we have in this country. Whites earn several times what Blacks do on average, while they have ten times the accumulated wealth. European immigrants enter the country as Others, but within a generation they have become racially, and culturally, normative. Skin color is a barrier in this process. A Ghanian immigrant and a Polish immigrant cannot both become the same kind of Americans.

Maybe this is all in my head, but ever since I moved here I can't shake the feeling that most of the Black folks I live amongst are seriously pissed the fuck off, and that my skin color is a constant symbol of their rage. How do I sympathize with that in a way that seems sincere and informed, and not naive, hackneyed, or trite?

I pray that DuBois' text enlightens me and gives me some of the tools to help in the struggle his life so famously embodied.

Hooray I'm done! (but I totally fucked up)...

2008-06-13T12:51:00.005-04:00

So now, ladies and gentle-midgets I am formally finished with academic juggernauting for the year and am preparing to vamoose back into the reality of normal, laid-back, salt-of the-earth people who do things like pay baseball and repair water heaters rather than travel the world and hang with an overly cerebral elite. I feel like I need to get baptized in the cultural wellsprings of a fairground swap meet / clogging competition to wash my soul clean from the sometime-arrogance and elitism of the ivory tower that constitutes my work environment. People just ain't real half the time. Nobody I know chops firewood or grows tomatas anymore.

I still wanna build an electric car like the one in the picture below. I was actually lookin' fer a an ol' beetle when I found that 1965 Plymouth that is now rusting in my side yard. I need to sell that thang. I fired it up yesterday and drove it down my driveway a few dozen yards and the rear brakes were all stoved up. Damn old-ass drum brakes. They always git faulty wheel cylinders, 'specially when it rains a lot. That problem almost killed me once when I was 19 and the driver's side rear wheel locked up on my F150 as I was mergin' onto Columbia Parkway. I did a 180 into traffic and was left terrified with the engine stalled facing the wrong way in a 55 mph zone. That was some shit.

So now I am goin' campin' out on my dad's land for a week, after I drive to regular Virginia for to fetch my portly compadre Mr. Turner. I have nature deprivation something fierce and it is hurting my soul.

There's an interesting article about nature deprivation actually in the issue of Adbusters I just got in the mail, called The End of Childhood:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/78

When I was a kid I used to always tell my relatives that I was gonna go off an' live on a mountain someday. I been thinkin' 'bout that ol' fantasy a lot lately.

So I'm glad to done with the boredom, busywork, and highly spiritually disorienting culture at my school, but I am not leaving on a good note. Somehow my alarm didn't go off this morning and I overslept. I had a term paper I finished yesterday that was due at 9:00 AM. I woke up at 9:05, raced to school, and was too damn late. My prof was gone; left town for the weekend and won't be back until after grades are due to the university. This means I get a zero for the assignment, which is 30% of my grade. I had an A going until this morning, the very last day of exams at the end of the year. Now I have D if I'm lucky. I am royally fuckin' pissed! I have been on Dean's List for 4 years at UC, most of which involved me working 30+ hours per week and goin' to shool full time. Goddamit. Now I have to retake this class so I can get the grade replaced so it doesn't fuck up my GPA and my shot at a decent grad school.

I spent the rest of the morning poring through my ASA guide to grad programs and trying to figure out which ones are in cities I'd actually like. Unfortunately, there seem to be few Urban Sociology programs in the Rustbelt, virtually none in Appalachia, and few in the South. My future is thereby largely relegated to places like Chicago, New York City, and California. My Jewish hippie friend Mickey told me I would love living in California but I am not sure if I believe him. I think he likes it more than me, he just knows there's lots of political lefties, brown people, and eco-trendsters. I dig that part of California but its just a little too trendy and expensive. When I was in California all I saw was a slimy plastic coating of money all over everything, and then a bunch of homeless people living in the park right next to the premier shopping districts of San Francisco. I never saw such a diverse crowd of well-heeled shoppers, but again emphasis on well-heeled. And land costs a fortune there. I could never be a homeowner, even on a professors salary. And renting makes me feel like I'm getting screwed.

So right now I am looking at Chicago, Penn, Northwestern, Arizona (?), OSU, Brown, Cornell, possibly Emory, and possibly Howard. I would dearly love to be immersed in the glorious legacy of Black scholarship and research about urban inequality at Howard, not to mention gaining the perspective of African American colleagues, but the Soc grad program there is ranked something like 115th in the nation. That's 2 rankings below the program I am taking classes in, and half of my soc classes have been totally jacked up.

Besides all that, where can I move to where I can have a yard, a garage, collect junk on my porch, and have room for my dog to run around? How can pursue graduate education and have room to run an arc welder? I always really wanted to see Detroit and I was fantasizing yesterday about an urban homestead in inner city Cleveland, but there are no grad programs for me there. Maybe I can end up someplace like that. Besides enjoying living amidst postindustrial decay, the Rustbelt is attractive to me because of the urban Appalachians that live there. Sometimes they can be scarier than regular Appalachians, like when they adopt hardcore aggressive ghetto culture, but they're the closest thing I've got to my people and home right now. At least the older urban hillbillies are nice and laid back.

I keep wondering if I could get away with keeping a couple head of sheep so I wouldn't have to cut my grass. I always thought that was such a waste a time. I know Oxford ewes are pretty low-maintenance and I've read good things about the hair sheep from the Caribbean. I need some chickens too. I miss having fresh eggs every day.

Goddammit. I need to get the hell outta undergrad, get my Ph.D., and go teach someplace where I can have a chunk of land and live the good life. I feel claustrophobic living a conventional urban life, and I don't get to play farmer or build shit.

One more year a this bullshit. Lord give me strength.

Academia is a bitch-ass and homemade electric cars are really cool

2008-06-11T23:40:00.006-04:00

Oh my friggin' God!

I am about to snap! I am so burnt out on undergrad it hurts. It's actually starting to feel like I am going to that job I hated for three years when I was a hotel bellboy. That was some seriously degrading shit.

On the good side, I am getting some new wheels sometime soon since my latest student loan was just approved. I have been looking at old (read: cheap) diesel Volkswagens on the interweb and I found a few promising jalopies, some of which actually run!

I also found out via a craigslist posting in LA (via the awesome jaxed sitemash - link on the right) that lots of people on the West coast are converting old-ass beetles into electric cars! There are even kits you can buy out there now! That's fuckin' awesome!

Here's an article on such. Sorry, you'll have to copy and paste the link:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/09/teen_creates_el.php

Here's another one about a guy in Mexico who did it too. Shit if people in Mexico can figure this out what the hell's wrong with us! (No offense intended to Mexicans. I just mean we oughta do better shit with our money.)

http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1268

Sometimes I wish people in Ohio would get on the green bandwagon like those people in California do. Then I remember how much cheaper it is to live in Cincinnati. Ah, the Rustbelt. What's not to love. Anyways people in California enunciate too much. One time I went there with the UC Geography Club and some hippies took us to some bar in San Francisco where they had the strangest bluegrass band I ever saw. I think they were all software designers or something during the day. They all wore business casual attire and they spoke with a crisp tone. I will never forget the man saying into a mike, "And now we'd like to play a tune for you called 'Sally Goodin'." The way he said it, it sounded like he was uncomfotable with the title. They then played a set of technically virtuousic, but very mechanical, bluegrass standards. There wasn't a grizzled old man or a flannel shirt in sight. It was truly scary.

In other news from the home front I am fighting desperately to save my soul from being consumed by the painfully overwhelming normalcy, arrogance, and mainstream culture of the people I have to be around at college. Last week I heard someone telling a funny story about how they took their girlfriend out for their anniversary and the waiter poured the wine the wrong way! I don't know how that's possible since my favorite wine is a tie between Manishevitz and Thunderbird, but this douchebag in khakis thought it was really great. A small part of me died that day. I then told him a story about how I beat the passenger side door off of my '85 F150 with a sledgehammer and then sold it to a guy who worked at the slaughterhouse across the street from my old apartment who was from Hazard county for $20. That guy only bought the truck so he could use the VIN number in the dashboard for an old Ford that he someone gave him that had no title. I thought that was really clever. And he probably didn't finish high school.

Fortunately I have cultural and spiritual relief/reinforcements on the way. Famous gas station philosopher, amateur taxidermist, social butterfly, engraver, portraitist, binge drinker, and storyteller Southwest Virginian Nathan Turner will arrive in the Queen City on Saturday after me and my sister drive to Big Stone Gap to pick him up. We are all excited about this endeavor.

Live From Exam Week, It's Monday Morning!

2008-06-09T11:41:00.003-04:00

Howdy y'all.

It's exam here at the good ole U. of C. That means I have to crank out term papers that I really don't give two shits about. Except my Urban Sociology term paper, that one I actually will enjoy thinking about. Thank God that I only have to take two more history classes ever again. I am sick of it. I realized yesterday that since I am going to fulfill the last six credits of history that I need with a Senior Seminar on the urban underclass taught by the ever-amazing Nikki M. Taylor, Ph.D., that means that I only have to write one more history paper ever!!! Hooray!

I checked a book out of the UC library yesterday on Historical Sociology about the 70's. I am hoping that it will explain to me what happened to my parents and relatives in that decade, since they apparently thoroughly enjoyed it and arrived in the 80's a few brain cells shy of a full load. There was a ton of cultural shit going on there with my kinfolk that I really don't understand at all. Some strange combination of street drugs, Eastern mysticism, deindustrialization, a vague anti-government sentiment, and personal indulgence as spirituality. I have been reading a lot about the sixties and seventies lately and I am totally unable to figure out how my parents and their siblings totally missed all the amazing ideas and social and political movements of that time but totally caught the drugs, music, and fashion trends. I guess that's what the lack of a basic intellectual curiosity or college education does to people. Also I want to understand why as a child my mother variously told me that (1) the government is watching us through our TV (2) Barney the Dinosaur is part of a plot to make children like reptiles so that lizard aliens can easily conquer the earth (3) Federal Income Taxes are an unconstitutional conspiracy (4) the government is about to collapse any day, money will become worthless, and therefore we have to learn to grow our own food. She also lived on salad and tofu for many years and got really into Transcendentalist Meditation and went to the TM institute in Kansas or wherever that was founded by the Maharishi. The 70's must have been a good time I guess. She knew somebody that knew Andy Kaufman and has friends that travel between dimensions and read people's minds.

I am hoping that historical sociology turns out to be more what I thought I was getting into with straight history, namely examining the ways that culture has changed in the past. So I'll have to check that out. I also learned that Urban Sociology rocks this quarter. It does all the things I was trying to do with Urban History and Urban Geography, but it 's main focus is social inequality. Same subject matter, different focus.

My professors and the McNair program are urging me to go immediately to grad school after I finish my sentence at U.C. They are mostly steering me towards programs like Harvard and places like LA, New York, and Chicago. Somehow the part of my personality that really feels at home walking barefoot through the woods with my dog, or collecting other people's garbage in a beat-down truck has apparently been lost on them. I have a really hard time imagining myself living in a huge city. I always wanted to own a few acres, keep chickens, grow my own food, and have room to work on old cars and build art projects. I feel like Cincinnati is as big of a city as I could function in. I have been to New York and Boston and I really didn't like 'em. The money and frenzy there were really surreal to me. I grew up in a world where it was rude to not wave to passing motorists drivin' home from work. I do like living in a city because I meet other people who care about learning, read books, and are open minded. I am glad that I don't work with people who want to be in the KKK anymore, but I miss the relaxed pace of rural life a lot. I would hate living someplace that was really sped up. I feel like my life in Cincinnati is pretty fast already.

Also I would hate being at a really elite grad school. I am reaching my limits on the number of overprivileged and arrogant young undergrads I can be around right now, and I'm at a state school in a relatively unimportant city. Princeton or UCLA might make me want to jump off a cliff or go postal on a room full of trust fund cases. I am so immersed in mainstream, middle-class, American normalcy it is oozing into my pores. I fight it desperately, but it still gets to me. I wish I had the time just to hang out with down-to-earth people. Hillbillies and rednecks have many faults as cultural groups, but pretentiousness is not among them. I wish I could say the same for my classmates. I also miss making art and hanging out with social deviants all the time.

I am contemplating buying a big abandoned house around the corner from my place and founding some sort of artists/weird people colony/co-housing type arrangement. I have a lot of friends who I think would dig it. But then if I'm grad school bound it wouldn't make sense to invest in real estate here. I feel conflicted and poorly.

I like Cincinnati mostly. It is pretty down to earth, relatively inexpensive, and has some pretty gritty places. I like it that we have abandoned houses and factories all over the place. You can drive through the postindustrial wasteland and do 180's and throw beer bottles at gutted warehouses. From my point of view all that makes it a lot easier for me to live like an urban hillbilly/bohemian on the cheap. I could buy up a few acres in the inner city here and probably get away with having farm animals, and definitely get away with stacking up dismembered cars in my yard. I could never get away with that in Boston or San Francisco. We have a lot of blue-collar people who just want to survive, and I identify with that.

Cincinnati has history, and roots. I like it that I live in a city that clings tenaciously to a nickname it was given in the nineteenth century that is now totally inaccurate. Longfellow called our fair town the "Queen city of the West". That was when Oklahoma was Indian territory, Las Vegas was a dusty water hole, and no one had dreamed of Phoenix having pro sports teams, much less being a city. Not only is Cincinnati no longer any sort of urban royalty, but we are no longer even in the Western United States. But that's Cincinnati: insular, nostalgic, conservative, and backward-looking. The conservatism is lame, but I grew up with it so I expect it. The historicism is pretty cool though. We have a whole neighborhood of abandoned breweries, the largest tract of nineteenth-century Italianette buildings in the country, and the oldest pro baseball team and professional fire department in the country.

Over-the-Rhine was nominated for the National Trust for Historic Preservation's 11 Most Endangered Places List in 2006.

The National Trust's Plea to Save OTR in 2006:
http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/midwest-region/over-the-rhine-neighborhood.html

We were a city of movers and shakers when Europe was busy colonizing Africa and people speculated about whether horseless carriages would ever catch on. Our city, and its worldview, were conceived in the Victorian era. This means that we have a lot of pretty old buildings that are now falling down in interesting ways, but it also means that we live in a stew of dangerous and ugly ideas, some of which have been made illegal since the Queen City's heyday. Cincinnati is famous for its amazing racial inequality and tension. According to 2002 U.S. Census data we are the sixth most segregated city in the nation. Being a student of sociology, geography, and history (and a class-conscious anti-racist white man) this of course troubles me. However there is plenty to study here.

Cities that are growing rapidly - or even important - in the early twenty first century are much different than Cincinnati. They different aesthetically and geographically because they often have massive issues with sprawl, horrendously high cost-of-living, and gentrification that threatens to devour large swaths of the urban realm. I am frightened by all of these things.

Sure there are awesome vegan restaurants in San Francisco, Boston has great public transit, and it never snows in Florida. Portland has great music and cool streetcars that urban planners in Cincinnati are jealous of. Chicago has a great job market for young professionals. D.C. has scores of bars for yuppie nightlife on Capitol Hill. New York is the cultural and economic capitol of the Western hemisphere. Gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and allergy sufferers (like myself) find miraculous respite from their symptoms in the Arizona desert. Political lefties and eco-hipsters move to the West Coast where they find a surprisingly entrenched culture of massive liberal dissent that is decades old. Beach junkies move to the ocean and all the stoner hippies I know want to move to Denver right now for some reason. I guess it must be the mountains and the skiing or something.

But who wants to move to Cincinnati?

Pretty much no one. We have a slight immigration of foreign students here for the U.C. medical and engineering programs. We have a relatively small Mexican immigrant enclave and a community of Africans, mostly Wolof-speaking Senegalese. I used to know some Bosnian refugees. But these are all basically people who would go anywhere they could make a living wage and eat three meals a day. Are Americans moving here? Not really, unless you take a big-money job working for Procter and Gamble and they then pay you to move here. Actually, the reputation of the city is apparently making it hard for P&G to recruit for their professional workforce. The proposed solution to this right now is the massive gentrification of Over The Rhine by Center City Development Corporation, a front company run by local corporate execs that the city has abdicated urban planning responsibility to. I find this a stunningly clear example of Harvey Molotch's ideas about The City as Growth Machine. For readers who aren't into sociological theory, basically his idea is that cities are run by rich people and continuously reshaped by them in ways that make the rich richer and screw over all the poor folks.

http://www.3cdc.org/content.jsp?sectionId=10

Cincinnati's lackluster image has its pros and cons.

On the good side it is cheap: you can buy a small 2-bedroom house in my neighborhood for about $20,000 right now. You can also ride the bus for a dollar and parking is not really hard to come by anywhere in the city, except UC campus - and then only during business hours. You can expect that after you have lived here five years you will see someone you know pretty much any time you go out in public. Cincinnati has a great public library, a research university, and an Art Museum full of the kind of paintings that were once prized by railroad barons who were aping European nobility. It's not especially dangerous, although we do have our ghettos. People may not be super-friendly but they are also not especially harried.

The downside to this situation is that the city is mind-blowingly conservative. Personally I think it has something to do with the cultural psychology of the demographic majority's ancestry. I am talking about hard-core German Catholic peasantry here. The kind of people who believed in rules out the ass, intense discipline, obedience to authority, damn hard work, thriftiness, and generally being uncreative and dogmatic. I feel that I can make these judgements as I am about 2/3 German. (1/3 hillbilly.) That's the vibe I get from my culturally German grandparents anyways. My paternal grandmother keeps a picture of the pope on her dresser and my grandparents remember relatives whose thick German accents were barely intelligible to them.

Cincinnati is famous for its stick-in-the-mud conservatism. Mark Twain apparently joked that he wanted to be here when the world ended because it wouldn't happen here for ten more years. (Or something like that.) We only adopt new ideas when everyone else in the world has already accepted them for years. We tend to like things that not only not-cutting-edge, but pretty friggin' mundane. Its a tough place to make a living as an artist, actor, or musician and Richard Florida's Creative Class people are generally bored out of their minds here.

But what the hell it's home, it's cheap, and you can get really awesome goetta and cheese omelette's at 3 am. And there's great urban decay if you're into that.

Goddamn is it Summer yet?

2008-05-12T16:32:00.002-04:00

Hey readers.

Man I am sick of school. I hate my thesis, which at this point is five months late. I have realized that I am trying to write a vaguely defined Urban Sociology paper in the guise of an overly ambitous History thesis. I am suppossed to be churning out "Motown Arabs: An Urban Historical and Geographic Narrative", but I just can't bring myself to feel good about it. I have been procrastinating for months because I am totally sick of having to write history papers. They end up being simply idealogical positing and philosophical blustering most of the time. And I fear that my paper will be poorly received by my teachers.

Maybe that's because I realized that I don't like History that much as a potential profession. I am much more interested in social iniquity and culture than political theory. Plus I hate the way Historians write. I think every book - academic or otherwise - should be written with the clarity of Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalies, the passion of Mike Davis' City of Quartz, and the thoughtful pleading for a better world of Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave. I like that sociologists write like advocates for social change. That's how I would want to write a book.

I had a good day though. The director of UC's McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program told me that their program can fund me for another summer research project. That was an unexpected boon, since I am only suppossed to get one such shot. God bless the McNair people; they do Good Work. I then had a meeting with UC's resident Urban Sociologist, who agreed to advise my hypothetical summer research project and helped me identify a topic and some possible research methods. I think I am going to do something about my neighborhood - Northside, which I love and am also fascinated by intellectually. I am considering researching the history/patterns of demographic change and segregation in the neighborhood. Northside is one of Cincinnati's most integrated neighborhoods, but we both agreed that clear race and, to a lesser extent, class divisions do exist. So that should be cool. I have always wanted to spend more time hanging out in Northside, interviewing residents, and studying the community.

For the past several years I have fighting a massive internal infection of the common fugus candida albicans that was caused by my being overprescribed antibiotics for recurrent sinus infections. Ironically I had sinus infections because my allergies were going crazy, the antibiotics kill off one's immune system, making allergies worse, making for more infections (sinus and otherwise). It creates a viscous cycle of destruction. I almost died last April. Most Western doctors don't beleive that such problems are possible, but I firmly beleive that I have the bug. I read a few books on it that are generally discredited by the American Medical Association, but I had all the mysterious symptoms that they described and conventional doctors had nothing to help me with. In fact a few told me that I could not possibly be that sick and that I needed psychological help. That was really shitty. The overall results have included horrendous allergies/intolerances to most foods and many other common things, extreme fatigue, debilatating headaches, depression, decreased immunity, indigestion, oily skin, low libido, bad breath, thrush, body odor, muscle cramps, joint stiffness, mental 'fogginess', poor circulation, and generally feeling like crap. I finally found a doctor that I like that treats candida, a Russian immigrant homeopath who specializes in administering regular Vitamin C IV's to heal immune systems destroyed by antibiotics. In addition to the forementioned injections, in order to regain my health I have to follow very strict dietary guidelines that disallow any starches, breads, pasta, sugar, fruit, all alchoholic beverages, and also a lot of vegetables. I have a had a hard time following the restricted diet because it is expensive, time consuming, and I am a poor and overworked student. When I was in Boston last month I cheated and ate lots of Mexican food and drank beer. Boston has really good Mexican food, and I have to say that draft Murphy's stout was probably the best beer I ever had. But then when I came back I developed a massive resperatory infection and got really sick. I am still fighting it off. So I have to get back on the restriction diet, and get serious about my health. I have been really good for the last two weeks, but I am undergoing yeast die off and it is making me exhausted. When the infection dies it causes even more fatigue because your body is overwhelmed with dead, toxic, yeast to process and elimanate. It's like having a hangover for weeks, actually pretty biologically similar from what I understand.

I graduate next Spring, and I have decided to take some time off to work, relax, regain my healh, and fix my house. I have set the tentative goal of fully healing myself and recovering before I go off to grad school. Being sick as hell all the time made my life a nightmare in Undergrad, and I don't ever want to go through that again. I am thinking of joining the apprencticeship program for the local plumer's union - since I have always wanted a trade and need to earn some cash - and volunteering part time to work with poor inner-city kids. I want to be a tutor or a mentor or something. I feel like I haven't done enought to try to make the world better since I started school. I didn't have time and I was surrounded by people who were mostly apathetic about the issues I care about. That was really draining on a few levels.

At least its Spring. One more month of this crap and then I can relax and play with my dogs. I am going camping for a week after finals.

The return of Spring and Nathan Turner.

2008-04-25T13:24:00.004-04:00

Well, it's that time of year again folks.

The birds fly North, UC coeds don brightly-colored sundresses and flipflops. White fratboys in polo shirts get loud and drunk in their frathouse yards while throwing beanbags at plywood cornhole sets and cheering each other on. The raggedly un-pruned crabapple trees on Pullan Avenue bloom fragrantly. Their perfumed smell wafts out over the rose-tinted evening at sunset on a Friday, mixing with the scent of dank marijuana smoke and hot blacktop. Outdoors more often, we hear the familiar sounds that winter has denied us. Kids play in the street, racing each other around and forming a joyous cacophony. (A small boy on a skateboard insists on showing me his trick of jumping over the curb.) Scrap-metal-laden freight trains rumble past the neighborhood heading north out of the CSX yard in Camp Washington. Dogs engage in impotently fierce barking contests from the packed-dirt pads behind their chain-link fences. Beat-down clunkers with cheater spare wheels chug by, the sounds of their under-compressed engines betraying their faulty exhaust systems. Taped-on clear plastic flaps in the breeze from their smashed windows. Apartment-dwelling black families congregate on the stained sidewalks in front of their buildings, relaxing on plastic chairs. Loud hip-hop blares from the stereo of a nearby parked car, windows all rolled down to form an improvised outdoor stereo. Neighborhood bars re-open their outdoor patios, allowing patrons to return happily to simultaneous smoking and drinking. Ghetto teenagers return to their posts holding down corners. Dandelion weeds re-sprout in the cracks in the sidewalks. The feral bushes that have taken root around the abandoned houses on Fergus sprout new leaves to form a green canopy that partially obscures the blight and neglect. Noisy hordes of squealing kids appear everywhere riding bicycles with training wheels and dragging toy wagons. The playground is suddenly filled; a boy with a dirty t-shirt perches on the fence and watches younger children play on the swings. Vivid flowers suddenly sprout from dirt that has been barren for months. And for some reason I saw five squad cars racing past my house last night with sirens blaring. Apparently something interesting happened down by the Gypsy Hut at Dane and Spring Grove. Warm weather always brings out the more exciting aspects of urban life.

It is Spring in inner-city Cincinnati.

In the words of Pete Seeger, the Byrds, and the King James Bible:

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance..."

And so we find ourselves in the time to plant, to be born, to laugh, and to dance.

For it is Spring. Our daffodils and tulips have returned to us. And so has Nathan Turner, esq., who has an art show tonight at Creative Gallery on Main Street in Over The Rhine. I plan to go to see some old friends and enjoy what I expect to be joyfully non-pretentious art - something I believe to be a general rarity. I think that the ridiculousness of the Fine Art world was quite accurately (and only partially satirically) captured by the privileged excess and snobby weirdness of the vagina-obsesessed conceptual artist Maude Lebowski from the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. This will be the first art event I have gone to in years, since I lost interest in Art (with a capital 'A') after dropping out of the Art Academy and feeling rather lost when my creative flow withered away as a result of general emotional toxic overload.

So that should be nice.

I love the spring. I miss spending it outside watching the world come back to life. Spring is magical. The long death of winter ends and the entire world is miraculously reborn. Flowers and plants and new life emerge from barren soil and rocks. Bugs and birds and frogs and flowers emerge anew.

It is a time to collect flowers, to smell them and relish the life they signal returning. It is a time to dig sassafras (although that should have been done weeks ago) and collect herbs. It is a time to hatch chickens and birth lambs and calves. It is a time to plant vegetables. Right now the early ones are ripe for picking: lettuce, carrots, radishes, snow peas. In a few weeks the Frost Date will be here and we can put out tomatoes and corn and beans and melons and squash and everything else. No wonder the pre-Roman Conquest European pagans made a big deal about Spring and made idols of rabbits and eggs and such. I wonder what traditional African peoples do for Spring. I'm sure they have some awesome shindig that beats the pants off Easter. I was invited to Cincinnati's Nigerian Ibo New Yam festival last year, but I could not attend. But I think that was in the fall.

But I gotta say, my sinuses have been crazy since I got back from Boston. If you don't have fucked up allergies yet, just move to Cincinnati and you will.

Searching for Boston's normal side

2008-04-20T20:19:00.011-04:00

And so after nearly one week in Boson I at last located one of the city's ghettos. (For some reason they are not advertised in tourist brochures.) This is Dudley in Roxbury, which I believe to be near the area that Malcolm X lived in as a teenager. I stumbled into it trying to find Malcolm X Park. A white barmaid warned me to stay out of this neighborhood, prompting my decision to explore it immediately. I had an interesting time people-watching there. The locals were suspicious of a white dude with a camera strolling around, but I managed to get a few decent pictures.

The above photo is a vacant lot that several homeless had established camps in. They had garbage bags full of belongings and tarps layed over some sticks for tents. Teenagers across the street were yelling at me as I took that picture.

This is awesome mural on Malcolm X Boulevard in Dudley. It features notable local and national black leaders as well as local history.

This intersection is home to the Boston Urban League, an African-themed carryout, a police station, and a sub and bbq shop. The tall building in the background, center, is gutted and vacant.

Some shops in Dudley Square. The usual run of wig shops, check-cashing outfits, liquor stores, etc. A plywood fence in front of a huge gutted edifice across the street invokes the words of Malcolm, King, and Garvey and pleads with Bostonians to invest in neighborhoods.

As I walked around Dudley I thought of Malcolm's evocative description of Jim Crow-era Harlem. The sights and smells of an urban ghetto are so much the same today. We have changed, and yet we have not. In comparison with the ghetto in Cincinnati, I was struck by the density of people and buildings. There seemed to be a lot less, or at least more sporadic, blight. In the Rustbelt whole blocks lay wasted, but in Boston only a single building here or there is vacant and derelict. The other thing that was amazing was the compact size of everything in the city. Boston is a town where density means that driving is a farce and high-rises sprout unexpectedly out of three-story apartment building neighborhoods. I walked all over Dudley and found that a mere two blocks off of Dudley Square landed me in a totally different neighborhood, indeed one that looked to be middle-class. The urban geography of Boston was confusing to me. The whole city has uniquely retained the land-use density of the streetcar era and activities and demographic shifts that would occupy a large area in the Midwest are squeezed into the smallest areas there.

I looked out all week for the racial tension I was warned about. In the end I simply didn't know enough about the city to really talk about it. I did notice that the city has a strongly traditional identity as being Irish. I saw a Boston Red Sox commercial that prominently featured an entire family with bright red hair. I asked my Geocat companions what they thought about the local racial clime and Thomas mentioned that he hadn't seen much integregation, and that he noticed having been the only black person in many of the places we were.

Boston reminded me a lot of San Francisco: expensive, dense, good public transit/snarling traffic congestion, affordable housing crisis, trendy, overwhelmed with hipsters, very ethnically diverse, economically vibrant and expanding, largely gentrified, and on the coast. The difference was that Boston is on the Atlantic, has more history, and has a lot of traditionally working-class white ethnic groups (Irish, Italian, etc.) We stayed in Everett, which had a lot of Brazilians and Latinos. I actually needed my Spanish a few times to eat in Mexican restaurants, which I had not counted on when traveling to Massachusetts.

Boston is an interesting place to visit, but I don't know if I'd like to live there. Although they do have 83 (?) colleges.

2008-04-20T20:10:00.004-04:00

Me and George and Melissa wandered through Haymarket where we found touristy quaint bars on cobblestone streets and really cheap fruit being sold from stalls.

2008-04-20T20:06:00.002-04:00

These are some historical-ass buildings in Roxbury, South Boston. The rowhouses are ubiquitous in Boston.

2008-04-20T20:00:00.002-04:00

Here's some pics of the anti-Chinese Buddhist protest that was going on in Harvard Square. This was the first thing we saw when we got off the subway in Cambridge.

2008-04-20T19:44:00.002-04:00

Here's George the honorary Geocat looking very literary in some bar in Mission Hill. This place had Murphy's Stout on tap and famous quotes by drunken Irish literary figures, both of which were pretty cool. And it wasn't a phony yuppie Irish pub joint since Boston is crawling with bona fide hard-drinking Irish (American) sots.

2008-04-19T10:46:00.002-04:00

Here's a picture of Chelsea, Mass - where we stayed for one night. There is a Dunkin Donuts on every block in Boston. It is truly incredible; I don't know how they can all stay in business. The green 3-story building to the right is very typical of Boston architecture. Apparently most of the city lives in smaller wood-frame apartment buildings like this.

2008-04-19T10:41:00.002-04:00

Here's some old-ass church across the street from Harvard. I stole a brick from the sidewalk in front of this place to give my sister. I am bringing home a piece of Cambridge, Mass. Take that Ivy League!

2008-04-19T10:27:00.002-04:00

Here's downtown Cambridge, home of Harvard U. Me and Thomas had a good time making fun of rich chumps here. We walked past some rich-ass dude wearing a suit and talking on a cellphone. He was walking out of one of the gates of Harvard campus and saying, "...but that's one of my golf weekends!" Me and Thomas fell out laughing and then a bunch of people waiting for the bus turned and looked at us curiously.

2008-04-17T12:03:00.000-04:00

I take this as a personal commandment.

2008-04-17T12:00:00.002-04:00

Trinity Church at Copley Square. This is Richarsonian Romanesque architechture. (Somebody let me know if I'm wrong here. I was only in architechture history for 2 weeks before I dropped due to the prof's blustering egotism.) This style was popularized in 'Nati by Samuel Hannaford who designed City Hall and some other shit like that.

2008-04-17T11:59:00.000-04:00

T platfrom at Sullivan Square

2008-04-17T11:57:00.000-04:00

The T platform coming home from the Financial District.

2008-04-17T11:56:00.000-04:00

The Old North Meeting House. It is now surrounded by corporate retail.

2008-04-17T11:53:00.001-04:00

This is Boston's monument for the Irish Potato Famine. Note the starving kids and the empty basket at their feet. Too bad they couldn't go to the 7-11 in the background back then. Then they coulda at least ate some Little Debbies or some shit.

2008-04-17T11:52:00.001-04:00

Close-up of an old-ass headstone in the Granary Burying Ground. The Puritans were really into creepy shit like death and skeletons.

2008-04-17T11:49:00.001-04:00

The Granary Buring Ground. A colonial cemetary that is today surrounded by skyscrapers. Lots of famous dead people.

2008-04-17T11:46:00.002-04:00

Boston Commons, America's oldest public park. The gold dome in background is the Massachussetts State House. The park was initially used as pasturage for livestock back when Beantown was a village. We also saw a crazy homeless man take off his pants and flash his junk to a park full of tourists here. that was cool.

2008-04-17T11:41:00.000-04:00

Downtown Boston in front of the AAG convention.

2008-04-17T11:39:00.001-04:00

The Geocats stand around as I cook 3 lbs. of goetta, 3 dozen eggs, and 3 lbs. of hash browns in the giant skillet on the fire.

2008-04-17T11:37:00.003-04:00

Me chillin' on the Mount. It was beautiful. There was lots of initials and graffiti carved in the rock up where this picture was taken. It think it was sandstone. We also found a fresh apple there, for some reason.

2008-04-17T11:34:00.001-04:00

The view from the top of Overlook Mountain, Woodstock, NY. It is not yet Spring there.

2008-04-17T11:25:00.003-04:00

This is the abandoned hotel at the top of Overlook Mountain in Woodstock, NY. It was built for a railroad tourist boom in the late 1800's, I beleive and was abandoned sometime in the early 20th century. It burned down three times and all that is left is the poured cement shell of the structure.

Beantown Day 3

2008-04-17T10:38:00.002-04:00

I spent yesterday attending a poster session of some Geocat colleagues and wandering around Boston. I talked to some guy from Oklahoma about the history of land grabbing and oil booms in his state and I met a kid from Milwaukee who did a project on residential segregation through the auspiced of the McNair program. We had a lot of the same interests. He did Sociology and Geography for undergrad and wants to be an urban planner. Surprisingly he got $0 funding for grad school even though he is a McNair scholar, because urban planning is a professional degree. Thank God I want to do research. I also talked to Nissa Fink, UC Geography grad student/mom extraordinaire about Cairo and neoliberal gentrification. I told her about Walter Armbrust's lecture at the Taft Center last week on some the same issues, told from the perspective of an Oxford Historian. Note to self: Get Nissa hooked up with the email list for the Taft Research Cener's Middle East Studies crap.

After that me and co-Geocats Doug and Eira wandered around downtown Boston and perused some really old shit on the Freedom Trail. The city of Boston has painted a one-foot-wide red line on the sidewalk all over downtown to create a path that tourists can follow that takes one all around the city's historic sites. I didn't realize this, but after reading my Urban Sociology textbook (The Urban Sociology Reader), apparently Boston was one of the places that really initiated much of the impetus and strategies of the historic preservation movement. My cursory understanding is that urbanite Bostonians united beginning in the 20's to protect the fabric of their city's history. I'm not much of a hisory buff when it comes to shit like the American Revolutionary War, but Boston really has a ton of historically important shit going on in that category. And apparently that has always been a point of local pride. Bostonians have long been cultivating a love and protection of what makes their city special.

The other thing that is becoming apparent to me is that hordes of interchangably identical (and very middle-class-looking) undergradute-age hispter kids are ubiquitous here. I have never seen so many of them! And they are all the same age and apparently have the same fashion inspiration. I would like to see what neighborhoods they frequent in order to have a comparison with Cincinnati. I commented on this phenomena to Doug and Eira and Eira said something about 'trustafarians' - a new word to me, as I have only met a few trust fund kids and soon learned to avoid them like the plague because they made me want to break shit. Given that Boston is home to the likes of MIT, Harvard, Berklee, and some 80-odd other colleges it would seem likely that a disproportionately high number of trustafairan/priveledged hipster kids would congregate here.

We ate some good Mexican food last night at a restaurant that had a sign on the door banning hoodies. I was wearing mine, but I guess they figured I was more likely to break into some Lawrence Welk shit than to stab somebody. Now that I think about it, that is probably true. I ended up having to translate for our waitress because her English was rather spotty. I accidentaly brought a Spanish-English dictionary to Boston, but there are so many immigrants here I may end up needing it.

I wish Cincinnati had a subway. Trains are awesome. And there is some really good graffiti around the T, as the system is known locally. I have been trying to get pictures, but my photography stealth is severely out of practice, and I don't really like the camera that I borrowed from the UC library.

More later. Peace out.

Beantown Day Two

2008-04-16T01:00:00.002-04:00

Boston is purty cool y'all. People are nice as hell, and unlike Cincinnati strangers make eye contact with you and the bus drivers help you figure shit out when you are lost. Everywhere we have gone people have gone out of their way to help us figure shit out. You can buy a pass for $15 that you can use to ride all the trains and buses you want for a week. The public transit is awesome. The city is incredibly diverse. We rode the orange line train today with Brazilian, Latino, Italian, African, Asian, and pretty much every other kinda people you could think of. I keep noticing that most of the people we see on the streets seem to be pretty well dressed - shirts and blazers and shit. I am also seeing a lot of college-age kids who all look really trendy and diverse in a middle-class big city way, which reminds me of San Francisco. We are staying in Everett, which is a few minutes outside the city and seems to be a historically Italian neighborhood from the 1880's that is now home to lots of Brazilians and Mexicans.

At the conference today I listened to some presentations about ethnic and cultural geography. There was a guy from OSU who examined the ethnography of Greek immigrants in Ohio and a guy from Australia who gave a talk on housing segregation in Boston. That was really interesting to me since I am trying to figure out this city. Basically his thesis was that the city is really diverse and that purely economic analysis of Boston housing demographic patterns do not hold up. Asians and hispanics (census terms) disperse fairly evenly over the city wherever they can afford housing. Black folk, in contrast, are congregated in a belt in the South side of the city in predominantly black neighborhoods. Roxbury and a few others.

Roxbury is where Malcolm X lived with his sister as a teenager and first got into wearing flashy zoot suits and going out to jumping jazz concerts, where he delved into black urban life. I gotta go see that shit. Sometime soon I am going exploring the city and I'm gonna check out that part of town. Downtown Boston seems pretty hip. I wanna see the city's ugly underbelly. I keep looking for that biting racism that Dr. Taylor told me about. The only thing I've encountered so far was some hearsay one of the kids I'm with was spreading about the hostel owners making some fucked up racial comment about Africans. I keep waiting for the hostile glare from black folk that I was told I would find here by my professors, but have not yet experienced such. If anything I think there is less of that on public transit than in 'Nati town. But I need more time on the streets exploring the cultural and urban landscape before I can talk about it definitively.

So that's Boston so far. I am genuinely impressed by how friendly everyone is here. People stop us on the street smiling and ask us where we're from and give us directions. More later. Stay tuned. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Live from Boston

2008-04-15T03:09:00.003-04:00

Howdy everbody,

I am writing from the basement of a hostel in Everett, Mass., which is apparently just outside Boston. Today has been interestin'. I started my day waking up in a tent in Woodstock, Massachusetts. Aparently the famous concerts, noteworthy for drugs and rock'n'roll, did not in fact take place there. But many hippies seem to congregate there nevertheless. The kids I was with seemed to think it was amazing, but I thought it very much like a cross between a Norman Rockwell landscape (from one of his Xmas paintings) and a combination of Ludlow Avenue and Yellow Springs, Ohio. Personally I feel uncomfortable in small towns that smell more like money than manure, which was definiteley the case in Woodstock. It was a colonial village in the Catskills with lots of Volvo station wagons, expensive boutiques, over-priced restaurants, and the like. I only saw one rusty old pickup truck. Needless to say I found this all very weird, disorienting, and surreal.

I started the day by cooking 3 lbs. of goetta, 12 hash brown cakes, and 3 dozen eggs for my companions on the Goecat expedition. All of this was done on a large cast-iron skillet over a fire, which made me really happy. Ever'body was happy as hell I made breakfast and I thoroughly enjoyed starting a fire and being outdoors and filthy. I miss that in my life.

Me and Melissa Meadows and her boyfreind George Khoury hiked up a mountain and looked out over a beautiful valley. There was an ol' abandoned hotel at the top from a previous tourist boom and the view was incredible. George is awesome and very well-read. We have had many interesting conversations. I am trying to learn a few words of Arabic from him, as his parents are Middle Eastern immigrants. George described our trip into the woods as a 'soul enema' which seemed to be one of the most profound expressions I have heard for a long time. It seemed that the nature deprivation I have so often complained of in 'Nati town was temporarily cured.

Also I finally broke down and spent some real money on camping gear. I bought a 0-degree sleeping bag and slept very well in a tent in below-freezing weather. That was nice. It represents a big step for me since I refused to ever spend money on enjoying the great outdoors, as it seemed counter-intuitive, given my broke-ass wilderness-enjoying childhood. Afterall, hillbillies have been enjoying the woods basically for free for centuries. But it was worth it. I was warm as hell and ever-body else ended up sleeping in the car. I felt mature.

Boston reminds of San Francisco in that it is very old, expensive, hard to drive in, seems pretty gentrified, and is composed of medium-density masonry buildings. Kinda like San Francisco without hippies and with Irish and Italian people and a shit-ton of colleges. I am releived I was not planning on goin' to grad school here. I don't know if I'd like it that much.

Drs. Taylor, Teslow, Frierson, and O'Connor warned that Boston had the worst racial tension in the Northern US, which I am on the lookout for but have yet to really see firsthand. I plan to look for the ghetto sometime soon and try to scope out the cultural landscape on the ground. I want to see where Malcolm X lived here.

I was worried that my overall-wearing persona would make me out a rube in Boston and that I'd feel like a dumb hillbilly, as that is my general expectation of the Northeast and of being around people who enunciate a lot in general, not to mention being in the city that is home to the likes of Harvard. But people have been really nice so far. I hear the accent from Car Talk, but I have yet to experience the overt mocking and condescension I associate with such.

I have been hanging with a dude named Julian who is from the same town in Alsace-Lorraine as my great-great-grandparents on my father's side, which is cool. I am dissapointed to find that my German sucks, at least after a night of ingesting Guiness and white Russians. But we talked about Germany and US vs. German culture and stuff and that was pretty cool. I am also hanging out with my new urban/environmental planning gay dude freind Sean Finley who is drinking a lot and telling us about growing up in Las Vegas, which is much more dramatic than I could ever imagine. I try to provide paralells from my childhood (characterized by 4-H, tractor pulls, sassafras digging, etc.) Sean is buying a $250,000 repossesed house in North Avondale for $42,000, which seems to be a pretty awesome deal. Right now he is drunk out of his head and wants me find him a gay bath house, which I am subtly refusing to do by pacifying him and typing this message. I haven't been freinds with any gay dudes for a while so this is a nice change. I enjoy being around social deviants and I do miss my artsy social deviant friends sometimes.

I am really excited that Nathan Turner is coming when we get back and I find myself telling stories about him and inviting everyone to my house for the party I am throwing for him in about a week or so. Stay tuned for further prognostications, thoughts, ramblings, prophesies, essays, tyrades, polemics, and such. Boston is a place where people have a different accent than me and most of the folks I know, not only linguistically - but psychologically and culturally. Over the next few days I shall attempt to dissect such for the purpose of examining its meaning(s).

Me and Maya my homeslice kenindian talk Spanish - because we can (albeit badly on my part)

2008-04-10T15:06:00.001-04:00

Me: Ola Maya. Como es tus zapatas?

Maya: Mis zapatas son muy bien! Ellos hablen con otros zapatas. Comunicacion entre zapatas es muy importante. Que pienses?

Me: Si Maya, es muy importante para zapatas hablar con sus amigos. Dios Mio! Mis zapatos eren muy tristes porque ellos no tienen nadie amigos. Es una tragedia! Mis zapatas no tienen habilidades sociales y los otros zapatas no son sympaticos.

Maya: Por Dios! La idioma de las zapatas es muy extrano, tienes que escuchar muy bajo.Pero las zapatas malivosas, matarán........mientras te duermes!Mira!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Las Zapatas!!!!!!!!!!!!

Me: Yo se Maya y yo tengo mucho miedo porque mis zapatos son muy malvadas! Yo creo que mis zapatas son asesinas! Ellas quiren sacrificar me para el dios de las zapatas en una ritual de sangre! Ay ay ay!!! No, las zapatas son aqui! Y ellas tienen armas! Aaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Me: Corre! Corre! Las Zapatas son veniendo! No preocupada Dan! Creo que las zapatas son ido ahora...... Creo que las zapatas son trabajando para el presidente BUSH (tambien llamada: el diablo)Porque Bush siempre es hablando a sus pies (feet) con mucho interese y dificultidad. Pero, tambien Yo creo que es retrasado y necesita mucho ayuda! Chinga Bush y sus armas de zapatas!

Maya: Creo que el presidente es responsabilidad tambien. Como se dice en anglais la palabra 'Chinga'? No se este, pero creo que es una palabra mal. Presidente Bush es un diablo. Chavez tiene derecho. Ma gusta el declaracion de Kanye West que "Bush odie personas Negros" pero creo que Bush odie personas moreno y chicano tambien. Verdadamente todos las personas pobres. Todo esto es muy pertinente porque nosotros somos escribamos enespanol. Es muy comico que Presidente Bush quiere construir un muro grande cerce el borde con Mexico! Todos de nos americanos sabemos que el muro seria construir por los immigrantes Mexicanos! Y tambien nosotros sabemos el muro grande en el Berlin de las communistas fue un exito magnifico! Dios bendice America!

Maya: Primero, la palabra Chinga means FUCK, el infinitivo de la palabra es Chingar (to fuck).Sobre el presidente, es muy mal! No creo que compredes que es haciendo! Necesita recordar que Mexicanos son muy importante para nuestro gobierno cuando hablando sobre trabajos y nuestro econimico. Tambien, Mexicanos son personas tambien. Y nuestro gobierno empiece con imigrantes! Es un posible grande que La padre de Bush fue un imigrante! Es cierto! Bush hace mi pienso de Franco, excepto Bush no mata (kill) mas personas (Bush mata nuestro cerebros (minds) con ideas que fueron muy mal y malivoso)! Pero, Bush sera ido muy pronto, gracias dios! Creo que Bush necesita ir a la universidad tambien y aprendi mas cosaa! Cierto?
Tambien, creo que es mas facil para Bush ser estupido como inteligente porque no tiene que tratar! Pero, porque Bush es estupido, Estoy muy triste.Deseo un mejor jefe de los estados unidos!!!!!!!!

Me: Gracias para define la palabra 'Chinga'. Es una palabra importante.Te espanol es muy mehor que mis! Este es divertimo pero un poco dificil para mi! Tengo celos de te espanol!
Para mi, el estupidez conocido de nos presidente - y nos guerra innecesaria completamenta en Iraq - son ejemplos magnificos de las codicia estupida de las EEUU, y personas blancas generalmente. Es muy embarazoso para ser un varon americano blanco.Yo pienso a veces que Bush fue un estudiante de Yale. Para mi es un milagro que un chico rico y estupido tiene un grado de Yale, y muchos personas pobres no pueden attendir una universidad en este pais. Yo conozco muchos personas mas intelligente que Bush quiénes no han sido capaces de asistir a una universidad. Yo creo que a vez esta es una pais para personas ricas. En todas otras naciones desarrolladas ensananza es gratuito. Este es una tragedia que en el pais mas ricos de la historia del mundo nosotros no puedemos cuidar mejor nos pueblos. Este el motivo para mi trabajo en sociologia.Yo quiero que ir al mundo tercero y volver nunca - despues mi grado de doctorado. Este es mi plan para evitar mis prestamos de universidad.

Maya: No me gusta las cajas a todo porque ellos son muy pequeno!
Primero, conveno contigo completemente. Pienso que es un idea buena! Quiero que ir ensenar en un otro pais despues de me graduo, como un lugar que es espanol hablando. No quiero que ir un lugar rico, mas como un pais pobre que es rico en cultura. Tambien evitar comprando el prestamo de la universidad porque quiero recebir mas licencias y nunca salgo la universidad. Cierto? Este es tu plano tambien, corecto? (HA, HA!) Pero en serio, este pais es mierda! Nuestro presidente, democracia, y morales son mal porque es todo sobre consuncion!

Me: Creo que te plano es muy excitante. Tal vez una pais con muchos personas maron y pequena es bueno para tu. (un chiste) Conozco una amiga de la Departmento de Geografica que ir al Korea este vierno para vivir y ensenar. Creo que es una adventura magnifica para ella! Y ahorra es una hora buena para viajar. Tu no tiene nadie ninos o un esposo; no hay nada para previnir.
Lo siento. Yo se mi espanol tiene muchos problemas! El me no uso suficiente! No quiero que terminar este juego tambien. Es importante que practicar los idiomas o si no nosotros olvidamos.
Muchas, muchas gracias para te permiso de usar te palabras para mi blog. No tengo ideas suficientes para el ahorra.
No tiene miedo, este no es molesto. Es un reto divertimo.

Free Garbage, Man Life is Good

2008-04-08T01:20:00.000-04:00

So I went garbage pickin' for the first time in years the other day. I used to love Sundays because on Sunday the whole West Side puts their goodies out by the curb. I found a wedding ring that way once.

We didn't come up with anything really exciting, although my female counterpart was really stoked about the only slightly worn papazon we found off of West 8th. I came up with some plywood to make paintings on and some assorted lumber and buckets. We saw a lot of cops for some reason, then we remembered that the cops are much more numerous in the suburbs than where we live. Plus they tend to be on foot in the inner-city. I found a comforter that turned out to have motor oil stains all over one side, but I washed it and I think I'll use it to take camping. It doesn't smell or anything. We also snagged an end table, some desk drawers, a solid wood two-panel door, flowerpots, and an Elvis painting.

In other news from the home front, one of our neighbors gave me a 55-gallon aquarium with a stand and a filter. I cleaned it all and set it up, but I think I broke the filter. I am trying to figure out what the cheapest and hardiest kind of fish are. I also decided to turn our Christmas lights back on and put one of the lesser-driven cars in our front yard. Now it feels more like home.

A List of Businesses and Institutions that make Cincinnati funky, weird, and worthwhile

2008-04-07T09:58:00.001-04:00

Ace Hardware, Hamilton Ave., Northside - a truly one-of-a-kind experience, Bill has been an institution since 1948. Look for all the merchandise that they stopped making before you were born.
Camp Washington Chili, Hopple and Colerain, - open 24 hrs.!, delicous goetta and cheese omelettes
Beck's Paint and Hardware, McMillan and May, Walnut Hills - great products and service, Stan is the man
Building Value LLC, Gilbert Ave., Walnut Hills - hard-to-find used house parts at good prices. I bought a 1920's gas kitchen stove there for $200.

Garden Street Scrap Metal, Spring Grove Ave., Camp Washington - a monument to scrap metal. If I were a character in "Mad Max" I would definiteley hang out there. But I do that anyways...

Frisch's breakfast buffet, everywhere (I like the one on Central Parkway) - all you can eat eggs, sausage, and grease for only $8!
Alabama Fish Bar, Race and Liberty, OTR - 5 pc. whiting dinner, an order of fries, bread, onions, and peppers for an astounding $6. Long lines form around the corner on weekends.
B&B Tire Town, Spring Grove Ave., Northside - quality used tires and cheap oil changes.
The Hansa Guild, Ludlow Ave., Clifton - Greta and Carlos were great neighbors to us for years. They also sell nice hats and know lots about Central America.
Keller's IGA, Ludlow Ave., Clifton - be sure to say 'hi' to Jerry the crazy wheelchair-bound panhandler/ex-biker who sits out front smoking a pipe. He likes to tell people about his grandson the U.S. Marine.
The Shop, West Nixon, Clifton - Rick is a great and very honest independant mechanic - a dying breed. He also loves to talk about all the souped-up cars he's ever owned and how fast he drove them on city streets.
The Good Stuff, across from the scrapyard, Spring Grove Ave., Camp Washington - used everything in an old factory. I bought my neighbors' kids a huge galvanized steel swimming pool there for $75 once.
Yesterday's Treasures (Crazy Larry's), Kemper and McMillan, Walnut Hills - three floors of inacessible piles of smelly junk in an abandoned apartment building, although Crazy Larry usually refuses to part with any of it for any price. Not sure if Crazy Larry is still open; it was never too organized.
Shaeper's Pharmacy, Chase and Hamilton, Northside - old school drugstore, cheap loratadine
Rio Grande, Newport shopping center - cheap Mexican food and white trash margaritas. I like to sit near the bar and watch Mexican soap operas and game shows on the big screen while I eat nachos.
House of Adam, Sixth and Vine, downtown - lots of cool shoes and hats that old black men think are really classy and sharp. The only place in Cincinnati to buy old-ass-style two-tone spectators. Has been there forever.
The Surplus Work Clothes Co., Montgomery and Sherman - Norwood's own discount Carhartt outlet.
Duttenhoffer's Used Books, McMillan Ave., Clifton Heights - a landmark for obscure texts and unforgettable for its pungent moldy smell. Good books can be found cheap if you have the time to browse.
Ollie's Trolley, Liberty and Parkway, OTR - the best burgers in the 'hood, homemade sauce, and a big mural of local black heroes.
St. Vincent de Paul Store, Este Ave., Winton Place - the biggest cheapest thrift store I know of
Kentucky Motor Service, Newport - they always have parts for my '65 Plymouth in stock without fail, and I like the atmosphere
Putz's Creamy Whip, West Fork and Montana - awesome homemade ice cream in Mt. Airy Forest
Campus Cyclery, Hughes Corner, Clifton Heights - sometimes pretentious, but always knowledgeable and into the whole bikes-not-cars mentality, waterproof backpacks and luxury bike accessories.
Salvation Army, Norwood - huge and well-stocked, although sometimes overpriced
Busch's Amish Meats, Findlay Market - the freshest chicken I have ever bought. Findlay Market in general is pretty awesome, but I have crazy food allergies so I have as of yet been unable to sample most of the fare sold there. Produce is usually cheap though and there are some good specialty stores.
House of Shirts, Main St., downtown - run by a senile old Jew, a holdout from a bygone era of independent clothiers and merchants.
Arnold's Bar, E. 8th, downtown - the oldest bar in Cincinnati. It was opened before the Civil War and appears to have not changed at all in about eight decades. The Cincinnati Dancing Pigs jugband plays the first Saturday of every month.
Fausto Ferrari Barbershop, downtown, Garfield and Vine - a great haircut in a Victorian barbershop from an 80-year old Italian immigrant who speaks broken English and wears a tie everyday to work.
The Anchor, Covington - open 24/7, cheap food, miniature mechanical dancing band!
Cincinnati Electrical Repair, OTR, Elm St. - good powertools, sales and service. Bosch.
The Mockbee Heavy Hardware Company, Spring Grove Ave., Northside - for all your structural steel, rebar, rigging shackle, cable, and other heavy hardware needs.
The University of Cincinnati Surplus Equipment Management Sale, old Sears bldg., Reading and Lincoln, Avondale - a once-a-month blowout of cut-rate used institutional furniture, lab equipment, appliances, and other sundries - I bought my 'fridge there for $20 last July.
Northside Farmers Market, Lingo and Hamilton, Northside - once a week in summer, freindly people
Northside Neighborhood Yard Sale - people in Northside tend to accrue interesting antiques and junk and they love to chat about it
The Southgate House, Newport - get drunk in an old Victorian mansion that looks like the Adams Family house, while listening to good music. Also the place that the Gatlin gun was invented, and owned by my economic geography professor's dad. I saw Ralph Stanley there live in 2003.
Parker Woods, Northside - a 58-acre park two blocks from my house where I take my dogs to run around most days, actually Cincinnati has lots of cool parks, other favorites include:
Mt. Storm, Clifton - pretty and well-maintained, scenic view
Mt. Airy Forest, Mt. Airy - friggin' huge
Eden Park/Krohn Conservatory, Walnut Hills - pretty, the Conservatory is free and lush and a good place to go when winter is too depressing
Mt. Echo, Price Hill - an awesome view of downtown from the West Side
Spring Grove Cemetary, Winton Place - a huge and historic cemetary with very pretty landscaping. It's like a nice Victorian park that happens to house dead rich people. Bring something to feed the ducks, who are very friendly and poop everywhere.
Price Hill Scenic Overlook, West 8th and Matson, a great spot to catch an awesome view of the city at night, located where the Price Hill incline used to land at the top of the hill.
Carew Tower, Fifth and Vine, downtown - you can pay $3 to go out on the observation deck of the tallest skyscaper in Cincinnati (49 stories) and on a clear day you can see all of the basin and everything on the edges of the all the hills around it. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is also home to the local Hilton Hotel. The art deco bar in the lobby is incredible.
The Main Branch of the Cincinnati Public Library, 8th and Vine, downtown - say what you will about the Queen City's lack of sophisticated culture, we have an awesome public library for a city this size. It occupies two square blocks and the films and recordings section was recently reorganized and expanded.
Over the Rhine - the city's oldest residential neighborhood and currently a nationally notorious ghetto (a la the 2001 Cincinnati riots), OTR comprises the US of A's largest collection of 19th-century Italianette architecture. The entire 352-acre neighborhood was recently placed on the National Historic Register's 11 Most Endangered Places List. Gentrification efforts are underway currently and total yuppification is expected to be complete within a few decades. Personally, the non-rehabbed parts of OTR most remind me of my time in Havana, Cuba in 2002. The dirty streets even smell like the third world. Home to crackheads, homeless shelters, art galleries, historic churches, struggling families, Music Hall and - more recently - the Art Academy of Cincinnati and several trendy new stores for hispters. A new School for Creative and Performing Arts is under construction just South of Washington Park.

Why my veteraniarian suspects me of drug addiction

2008-04-06T18:03:00.000-04:00

Last September we found a dog. A stray dog. She was young, some kind of mutt, medium-sized and yellow. She was thin and wearing a green collar that was too small. We found her wandering around in front of Dyer Hall on the UC campus. Obviously someone wanted to ditch her, and the UC campus seems to be a favorite spot to dump unwanted dogs. We called her Daisy.

So we brought the dog home and fed her. We already had adopted an enormous lab mix we named Solomon. We thought it would be good for him to have a friend, since we are usually at school and the dog might be lonely. A friend recommended this idea to us.

So Daisy and Solomon ran around our yard, trampled most of our grass to death, and devoured shoes, upholstery, and wooden furniture. They had a great time.

But then I noticed that she was having lady problems. I took the dogs to the dog park regularly so they could run around in the mud and smell other dogs' butts and stuff - since those are important doggy activities. But a problem arose. The male dogs chased Daisy relentlessly and and tried to corner her and mount her. I realized she was in heat. Then her uterus shed its lining and she bled all over my kitchen floor. That was an entirely new experience for me.
A few months later I took Daisy to the vet and explained that we needed to get her spayed. We were not down with the notion of suddenly having ten puppies to deal with, in addition to being full-time students, working, and owning two large dogs and a decrepit house with orders on it from the Building Department. We had enough shit going on already.

I picked Daisy up from surgery to find that she had been stapled back together and, surprisingly, did not need one of those big plastic cones around her neck to keep her from eating her stitches. The vet handed me a small orange and white bottle of doggy pain medication and told me to feed her one pill every day for the next two weeks as she healed. He said there might be some "seepage". Wondering what exactly that meant, I brought her home.

There was indeed some "seepage". Daisy's incision wept what appeared to be a mix of blood and water for days. Not a lot, just a trail of dribbling reddish spots on the floor. Fortunately the other dog, Solomon - ever alert and inquisitive - cleaned up most of these spots with this tongue, to my relief - since I have fairly low standards of domestic cleanliness. I love how dogs will clean up really gross stuff for you by eating it and then lick you on the face. A goldfish or a parakeet just won't do that.

Meanwhile I was keeping Daisy's pain medication on the back of the kitchen counter along with some bottles of vitamins and spices. Our other dog Solomon is huge enough that he can jump up and stand on his hind legs and grab things off this counter, which he occasionally did. Having the short-term memory of a senile bovine, I had forgotten this.

One day Daisy's pain medication was missing. Totally friggin' vanished. I looked everywhere. Finally I found all that was left of it - a chewed up plastic white pill bottle lid - in the back yard. The jar and its contents were nowhere to be found. I realized that Solomon had probably eaten them. I watched him carefully to see if he was going to O.D. on pain pills like trailer trash and/or a rock star, but he appeared to be acting completely normal. Apparently he has a high tolerance for doggy oxycodone. I made a note of this for future reference, should the issue arise.

But Daisy was in pain. The area around her surgery began to swell. She winced when she moved around and acted like she was really suffering. And one of her staples was gone.

I took her back to the vet and told him the story. When I got to the part about the missing pain pills he lowered his eyebrows and glared into my eyes. Bear in mind that I am a fairly grizzled and disheveled individual and that I was wearing dirty clothes spattered in house paint. Obviously I he thought I had eaten all of my dog's pain pills, washed them down with a 40 of Steel Reserve, and then had the audacity to come back to his office looking for more. This made me feel really bad about myself, since I don't take pills, drink malt liquor, or generally pull crazy stunts to get my hands on controlled substances.

The vet apparently decided that my suffering dog was more important than my probable substance abuse problems and he gave me another week's worth of doggy happy pills, along with a very stern look. So all was well. But I had the distinct feeling that the receptionist staff of the vet's office was watching me with intense disapproval when I left. Trying to ignore them, I calmly led Daisy out to my battered 82 Dodge and drove back to the inner city, happy that I had accomplished my mission.

And that's the reception I generally get in the following settings: professional, suburban, middle-class, health care, government office, job interview, shopping mall, police interrogation, and family holidays on my father's side. It keeps things interesting.

Why I may become a Sociologist...

2008-04-04T13:57:00.001-04:00

Its only the first week of school here at the University of Cincinnati but I am pretty damn excited about my Sociology courses!
I have been searching for a discipline to pursue in grad school for a few years, since the more time goes by the more I realize my interest in a career as a historian is seriously waning. I am getting really tired of it actually. I love studying the past, old shit, analyzing societies' responses to historical events, and reading really really heavy books, but I just can't get into the political theory and the philosophical propensity. I find the ideological positing exhausting. I also find too many History people to be somewhat elitist, conservative, and vaguely pretentious. Historians seem to often come from relatively privileged backgrounds and usually totally disregard all other social scientists' research.
Hey hey I know, Social Historians and radicals like Howard Zinn and Mike Davis offer kickass analysis that challenges the dominant accepted narratives of our collective past - but they only represent a fraction of the pie. Remember - Newt Gingrich is also a History Ph.D. He has a book out about Gettysburg right now. Gag me.
So then I got into Geography after Dr. McTague accosted me and told me I needed to take her Urban Development class when I had no idea who she was or how she could know such a thing. (I was later very grateful.) Urban Geography seemed really cool. I love studying urban blight, looking at maps, and trying to figure out why we have huge urban ghettos. Urban Geographers tell the same story as Urban Historians, but they do it much more concisely and rely more on understanding economic trends. Geography is still way cool in my book, I just don't really want to take any more Physical Geography or GIS classes. I am also realizing that I am not interested in Economic Geography or Political Geography. I would really be most into Cultural, Social, and Urban.
I have always been interested in poverty and inequality. I got into History because I loved the stories of deprivation, hardship, and struggle that people had to overcome. My favorite movie as a kid was the 1940 film version of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (starring Henry Fonda). My favorite books were the "Foxfire" series about the hardcore old-school survivalist hill folk of Rayburn Gap, Georgia.
When I was a naive teenager running away from small town Southern Ohio I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to scour trashcans, dumpsters, vacant lots, and scrapyards for the detritus of our society and collect those objects and make them into sculptures and installations. I wanted to do all this as a way of commenting on my family (which hoards scavenged items for decades hoping to find utility for them), my childhood (which was noteworthy in its accumulation of other people's garbage), the incredible waste of consumer capitalism, the legacy of rural poverty I saw growing up, and the incredibly massive blight and destruction I saw around me in the inner city. I wanted to make a statement about the ugly truth of American society's glaring flaws and fault lines and put that commentary on display for all to see. Needless to say, that agenda cost me my scholarship at the expensive private art school I was confused enough to enroll in. I felt like not many people there understood my artistic vision - I primarily wanted to explore the aesthetic of poverty - and fewer understood my motivation. (My art heroes have always been crazed weirdo outsider artists.) Unfortunately I was too young, insecure, and confused to articulate what I was trying to do. I pretty much ended up weirding everyone out, something I am completely used to, but I also ended up feeling like a failure.
The more time goes on the more interested I get in studying and fighting racism. Cincinnati is just such an ugly test case in racial iniquity and tension, I can't help getting into it. I know in the marrow of my bones that I grew up in an often deeply racist and bigoted environment and that I need to work to redress the sins of my people. And I can't find a direct way to do that in Geography or History.
Oh yeah, and Historians are screwed on jobs and money! There are something like 300 Ph.D. applicants for every teaching job out there to be filled. A History proffessor of mine, who recently graduated from Harvard and teaches at UC, reports having colleagues who can't find gainful employment. Imagine being a Harvard Ph.D. and working at a gas station?
Screw that!
Geography is way cool for jobs - the ratio is about 1:1 for new Ph.D.s and open teaching positions (so I'm told).
Sociology seems to be somewhere between the two. I think it's about 30:1, but there are jobs outside of academia as researchers, working in public programs, etc.
Sociology seems to deal most directly with the issues that I want to research. Sociologists care about social issues and want to see them addressed. Historians and Geographers may be concerned about social issues too, but the most they really do is write about them - unless they are really radical and get into activism, Noam Chomsky style. Sociologists can practice in various capacities working in social service agencies and they actually get out there and try to change the world. Many choose to do so in addition to, or rather than, having teaching careers. A combination of the two sounds incredibly fulfilling.
I have always wanted to teach and do research, but I need to feel like I am working to make the world a better place.Being an academic alone would make me depressed. Academia is too isolated and can be really inbred and elite. I have been craving real-world volunteer type experiences. I want to do real shit for real people, not just publish journal articles that only 5% of the population will read.
The other thing I really dig about sociologists is that the discipline has always attracted people who are most familiar with social iniquity on a personal level - namely blue-collar intellectuals and people of color. Those are the minds I most treasure learning from and interacting with. I may be whiter than Lawrence Welk, but I know that intellectually those are my people. Heck, W.E.B. Du Bois helped establish the discipline in the US and if he wasn't a great black thinker then I don't know who was.
The few Sociologists I have met seem passionate about injustice and they want to facilitate real-world results. The closest historians usually do is political debating, and possibly protesting - none of which I find especially interesting or effective at redressing social ills. I don't know about Geographers. Half of them study earth science and the rest seem to be interested in a sundry mix of politics, economics, and assorted cultural issues. And GIS for its own sake sucks a big one.So I think next fall I will apply to some good geography programs and some good Sociology programs too and see what happens.
It feels good to be embarking on a project into the great unknown.

Welcome to my new blog...Shazaam! What they can't do these days...

2008-04-04T13:55:00.001-04:00

Hey ever'body! Jest so ya know 'Shazaam' is a Gomer Pyle reference. That's what ol' Gomer used ta say when he was amazed at somethin'. (I find many people my age have never seen the Andy Griffith show. A tragedy.)
So now I have a blog! Shazaam!
I have come a long way since I stubbornly fought off the technology of our time with my rotary phone and vintage everything. Man I was a stupid artfag back then.
But technology seems to be basically neutral. It does usually generate pollution and make the world more complicated, but some is good and some bad. Heart surgery is pretty cool if you have cardiovascular disease, plastic surgery tends to weird the living crap outta me; TV brought us PBS and that gory coverage of 'Nam that changed history by turning public opinion against needless war, but it also broadcasts American Idol and shows like "So you think you can lock yourself inside a mailbox while someone else sleeps with your wife and shoots your dog in the head?". At the same time, the internet allows me to read the New York Times for free, but arguably much of its content is porn, ads, and drivel.
But - I can have a free blog and put my essays and rants out there for all to see. And that sounds fun since I need an outlet to write.
So now I have a blog. Take that world!
My enemies shall be vanquished as I ascend to world domination. Buwuhahahahahahahahahah!
Ahem, cough...