If Only For Money

I’ve been trying to write more short stores. It hasn’t really gone anywhere, I mean I’ve been reading more short stories, but it seems like the effort between reading and writing them is a too much. You have to remember stories from the more ridiculous times in your life, or I guess just make it up, jot it down, and actually make it interesting for other people. That last part is really the trick, the reason people like David Sedaris and Sloane Crosley are so successful is because they can take personal moments and actually mold them into universal ones. It’s beautiful when it works, but as I’ve learned from personal experience, short stories can be some of the worst pieces of “literature” one can attempt. Sometimes people take an uninteresting moment and make it engaging, take a vibrant event and make it sobering, but more often than not people take a situation with limitless potential for paper and make it into boring shit. Myself included.

I think, I mean I’ve never attempted to actually write anything longer than 25 pages, that novel writing doesn’t include this kind of grace. You can include really boring moments, but when it’s a good book most people say “eh, it’ll be better in a few pages” and keep reading. Short stories hit a lull, and people start fires, take hostages, and worst of all, demand their money back.

So are short story writers and essayists better than novel writers? In my current state of mind, yes. They’re the type I can relate to, the procrastinators, usually drug users and drunks, and the people who love to talk about themselves. Where else do you get to tell stories about yourself and people pay you? Memoir writing? I’ll leave that to the guys who want Pulitzers.

So short story writing; is it the new frontier? Probably not. People will keep reading crappy novels that are starting to cost as much as DVDs and bookstore clerks will be replaced by those “Staff Suggestion” sections. Or Oprah, which is the case for most people anyways. Regardless, I’m going to try my hand at authoring these little goldmines and see if I can’t get myself into those social circles devoted to the stoned, inebriated artists. You know. Writers.

Brooding Brooklyn

Spurred on by encouragement from my last article on urban planning I’ve decided to stray from the questionnaire format and delve into something that’s been on my mind for quite a while.

The first time I heard the words “Atlantic Yards Project” I was a junior in high school, freshly  moved from NYC to Southern California. I figured the project was some maritime “beautification” project taking place in Baltimore or somewhere around there (Camden Yards jumped to mind I suppose). A few minutes on wikipedia changed my perception of the venture obviously.

To put it simply, Atlantic Yards is a glorified housing project that’s landing right in the middle of some of the most prized real estate in the United States; Brooklyn, NY. Now for the people who still live in 1986 and think of Brooklyn as a ghetto, things have changed, for better or worse. Rich white kids from NYU started moving there around the turn of the century, listening to music that you’ve never heard of and usually sucks, and wearing jeans that even Chelsea deemed “too gay”. From then on, Bed-Stuy went from a place that worshipped the Mighty Mos and Grandmaster Flash to a place that plays way too much Ratatat and Animal Collective for anyones’ good. Williamsburg went from dive city to Hipsters Inc., though I guess hipsters do love dives anyways. All in all, Brooklyn went from a place that you had to live to a place that you wanted to live. If you want to see this phenomenon before your eyes check out 125th street or to see the finished project hop down to the Village and look at apartments that used to serve the poor and have become pent house for Britney Spears and the Olsen twins.

Technically, the word is gentrification, referring to the “gentry” entering places that are usually downtrodden, meaning cheap real estate and low economic risk. More often than not the “gentrifiers” will move in as a group, seeing a certain crop of what used to be tenements as “classic” and “charming”. In New York most of the money that gentrified the areas of Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Village came from people who had lived there before. Harlem went from a white area, to a Jewish area, and is currently known as a black and Hispanic area, with white areas on the outer edges. Brooklyn was mostly white and Italian until the suburban movement post-WWII (NB: Brooklyn, before it was incorporated into New York City, was the U.S. third largest city next to Manhattan and Chicago at 3 million people.)

The next time I ran into Atlantic Yards I was in a core curriculum writing course entitled “The City in American Culture” taught by a supremely self-conscious archaeological Ph.D who was more grammarian than author. I signed up for the class after having spent a year abroad and was ready to jump back into the urban studies thing. Suffice to say I was supremely disappointed, we read Jacobs and Mike Davis, some excerpts from larger texts, a couple New Yorker articles, but our assignments ranged from the banal to the frustrating. One of our last texts was the view of the Atlantic Yards Project from either side of the argument, and after 10 minutes of discussion we returned to basic college grammar prerequisites (who the fuck cares if my works cited wasn’t in alphabetical order?!). Needless to say this frustrated me, I came to the class expecting engaged urban studies students but found a trifle too many glossy eyed freshmen and upper classmen waiting for a class they can get an A in. I begged my professor to let me do my term paper on the social impacts of new housing projects with its cynosure being the Atlantic Yards, Frank Gehry, and Bruce Ratner. DENIED! With authority I was told that my paper would focus too much on content rather than technical skill. Um, what? Apparently the college writing program had decided to emphasize capitals and periods rather than what comes between them. Anyways, I decided to give my teacher a big “fuck you” and do the research and more or less write the paper, while doing my more “technically” sound one at the same time. So here’s what I found:

•    Frank Gehry, everyone’s all-American architect, designer of those crawling titanium buildings, MIT’s “leaking” research center, among other masterpieces (or monstrosities), is kind of a jerk. To paraphrase, Gehry says he knows what’s best for Brooklynites and that they don’t appreciate art enough to see that the Atlantic Yards project is beautiful (if you want what he really said it’s in an article aptly called “Mr. Ratner’s Neighborhood”). Now I had always thought of Gehry as kind of an overrated architect in the first place, Bilbao is breathtaking but if you read the “making of” story Gehry becomes a prima donna before he’s know as a master, the new Disney Opera House in Los Angeles blinds people in surrounding apartment buildings because of the ultra-reflective titanium that has become his signature, and MIT sued the architect because their building, actually, well, leaked. He does a bang up job designing jewelry for Tiffany’s though.
•    The new Brooklyn Nets stadium will be the centerpiece of the project and I mean, yeah, Brooklyn needs a basketball team. But does anyone else see a similarity between new stadiums and the areas that surround them? Places like Fenway, Wrigley, Ebbets (R.I.P), and even Pac Bell Park in S.F., they all did excellent jobs by integrating themselves into the neighborhoods they inhabit. Given for all of those examples except Pac Bell, that happened over a hundred years ago. Stadiums nowadays are built on land that is more or less unwanted, the Meadowlands in N.J., my beloved Dodger Stadium (though it was actually built on top of what used to be a Mexican suburb and displaced thousands, but that’s a story for another day), and the Oakland sports arenas are all located within or around low-income areas. Now the question is, do they, the sports arenas, create them or does the low cost of the real estate attract them? It’s a question I’m posing to you, but it’s something that I’ll definitely be writing about in the future.
•    Bruce Ratner, the manager, stands to make, well, billions. The Atlantic Yards would house thousands of Brooklyn residents displaced by the project, and would of course be a gathering point for “artists” and “writers” that desire the Manhattan lifestyle with Brooklyn moodiness. Usually when a project manager stands to make anything with 10 digits (or 8 or 9 for that matter) the true nature of the project goes to shit.
•    The people who are most adamant about Brooklyn staying the same are the people who’ve most recently moved there. The brooding authors, the terribly untalented but trendy musicians, and the “the stars are just like us!” section of US Weekly usuals are all dedicated to the cause of keeping Brooklyn in its current form: brownstones, coffee shops, and “dive chic” bars. The residents who have lived there for generations however, tend to fall into two camps. The first being those who look towards Co-op City and Marcy as glimpses into the future of Brooklyn and are supremely pissed off about it. The second group being those who have been paid off not to see it like that. And honestly the second group isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds, a lot of Brooklyn is still poor and the influx of rich college kids has artificially raised prices in their area, the creation of an “income controlled” neighborhood isn’t a completely ridiculous idea in their minds. Two great projects that have a lot of interesting things to say about Brooklyn are ACORN and DevelopDon’tDestroyBrooklyn. Another blog named NoLandGrab is a great source too.

So that’s my simple take on this very, very complicated situation. If you’re even remotely interested in housing policies, urban studies, Brooklyn, the projects, or shit just people in general than read up. It’s one of the most interesting housing endeavors taken up by a US city in a while. This barely scratches the surface of the project. As always, please comment, I want to hear what you all have to say.

Homework: let’s see. Hmmmmm. Go punch a hipster in the face. It’ll make your day, my day, and everyone around you will appreciate it.

Keep Your Intelligence a Secret

The New Yorker has tickled my interest in yet another current event that not too many people get familiar with simply because it doesn’t make the front of the newspapers or US Weekly. I guess I should first of all credit them with getting a hold of such sensitive information and turning it into an amazing 4000 word article that, if read by the masses, might change a lot. Isn’t it strange that if people read maybe one publication every few days for a year we’d see a drastic increase in public awareness and thus a vastly improved government because of voter education. If Dick and Jane just read the NYT, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, even USA Today (cringe), a couple times a week things would be so different. But Dick is too busy watching what happens when FOX turn your neighborhood into a gameshow!, and Jane would rather catch up on what disease Paris Hilton gave to some unassuming club hopper last week. Suffice to say Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the masses educated by newspapers is dead, or at least paused by TiVo.

OK well onto the article. It’s basically about how Prez Bush is stepping up the clandestine operations in Iran and other charged areas around the Middle East at the urging of his advisors and the warnings of military leaders. Each side brings up interesting points, too bad interesting doesn’t always mean intelligent.

Bush, Cheney, and Rice are all about secret operations as long as they’re doing the job of igniting ethnic tensions in northern Iran in hopes of toppling the theocracy Ahmedinijad has set up in Tehran. There’s one problem: there is no ethnic tension in Iran! At least not on the level that a country like Iraq or South Africa has. There is nationalism in Iran, and not the benign kind (though benign nationalism is kind of an oxymoron), and by throwing special forces who can kill with a toothpick into an area like that, you don’t fuel the fire of ethnic tension you add to the flames of nationalism.

The U.S. has always been supremely talented at operating under ostensible circumstances. Whether it’s in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, or Iran we can kill leaders with one hand tied behind our back and leave those countries faster than a crackhead after some chocolate. The problem is that eventually, people find out. And while no one ever really punishes us for doing it, it has made us into the Roseanne of the U.N. Now we’re starting to step into dangerous territory by attempting clandestine operations in a country that’s actually settled and stable. That’s like trying to break up a Mormon family, just not going to happen.

Bush has been warned that unless Iran does something “really stupid” in the words of one admiral, nothing good can come out of cloak and dagger tactics in Iran. Congress doesn’t even fully know what’s going out there because of the Commander in Chief’s right to order military deployment without clearance. If we’re prepping for a war in Iran, this is not the way to do it. Spying, sure. Economic terrorism, might as well. Propaganda attempts, why the hell not? Funding and preparing Sunni and Shiite militias (some of which various generals and admirals have called as bad or worse  than Al Qaeda) is not what we need to do.
We’ve been going about this the masculine way and need to do it the feminine way. When two guys are in a fight, they have a fist fight, and that’s it. It’s over with after that. Bruises heal the relationship and you’re fine in a couple days. When two girls get in a fight, they prepare total warfare. Nothing is off limits, they are out to destroy the other girl’s life. Boyfriend? Screw him in the school bathroom. Popular? You’ve got tape of her in the gym with Coach Reynolds. Good looking? What the hell did you think those long nails are for? I think it’s about time we went about this the girl’s way. If they really want a war with Iran, ruin its life first, then it’s easy.

Homework: As always, pick up the newest copy of the New Yorker. There’s also a great article in Dwell about a new house in Amsterdam that is off the hook. Coming in the next few weeks: A review of a book called “The Concrete Dragon” on China’s new urbanism, just in time for the No Human Rights Fest ’08! (olympics)

NB: I am NOT a proponent of a war with Iran. Otherwise my kids are going to be dealing with a lot more shit than a $10 trillion deficit.

Your Friendly Neighborhood

So recently, as I’m sure plenty of you have heard and humored me about, I’ve developed a serious interest in city planning and decided that I should do a piece on that blossoming passion. I wasn’t sure what to do, I’ve lived in cities all over the world, have friends in towns all over our country, and have visited countless metropolis throughout the globe. But asking “which is best, Ted? Please tell us, we need to know. It’s KILLING us!” is too simple. I want to ask you all, my loyal readers, which city you think is best and why. I’m not talking about the place with the best head shops (SF), or the place with the best transportation (NYC), or the stupidest people (Boston), or the best looking people (LA), I want to know which city you think is planned out the best. It can be anywhere, Kuala Lumpur, London, Vaduz, or Ulan Bataar, but I want to know what you all think from a very technical standpoint.

In the mean time I’ll give you my candidates, sticking mostly to the U.S. and places I’ve spent a good amount of time in and you can just sit there and think about all the amazing, nuanced comments I have. So here goes:

New York City. My home sweet second home. I was discussing this with a friend of mine I met in college and realized that she thinks I’m from California while most of my friends from high school think I’m from New York. I love that. Truth be told I spent less than 2 years in New York after living in that ubiquitous place, right-outside-the-city, CT (for those who don’t get the joke, most people you meet who say they’re from New York aren’t actually from  New York per say. It’s usually a mix of Westchesterians, Greenwichites, and Scarsdalians who want to be from Manhattan so badly that they prey on the unassuming by claiming to be from New York. I was among them, sigh) The years I spent on the upper east side while finally living there and not living a lie taught me a lot about good city planning and is where I can trace my flowering interest in the city from.

Simply put, New York’s planning scheme has been nearly perfect from the beginning of urbanization. Two distinct business zones (midtown and Wall Street), balanced commercial and residential zoning, adequate green space (Central Park was one of the most challenging urban endeavors in the country’s history), and relatively mixed income levels combining in neighborhoods (save for the upper east side and more recently Greenwich Village). This is all well and good for flyovers and 3D modeling, but the truth is that New York’s planning department has been heading down hill since the 70’s and 80’s saw development of government housing projects in all 5 boroughs. Schools have attempted to improve by segmenting themselves into smaller, more focused institutions but are facing the same problems their behemoth predecessors endured. And the biggest building project New York has seen in decades, Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards Project, is an ostensible humanist project at best. New York is a lot like a ballplayer who is getting a little too old to play his position; he’s trying to do things the way he’s done it but doesn’t realize the game is being played by different rules now. What it needs is a new way to play, or some steroids, both work.

And now for something completely different. Los Angeles. Now, given I’ve never actually lived in L.A., but then again neither has anyone else. But I’ve spent a good amount of my rambling life around it. LA is in a lot of ways the Bizzaro New York; while people from New York hate people who say they’re from New York and are actually from the surrounding areas, people in LA know that you don’t actually live there but somewhere around there. Los Angeles actually refers to a 100+ mile stretch of land north of San Diego and reaching up to Santa Barbara, and anyone who lives in that expanse is for better or worse from LA.

Los Angeles is terribly planned. Plain and simple. The downtown is a ghost town between the hours of 6 PM and 8 AM save for some swanky bars frequented by powerful yuppies. The residential areas, wait Los Angeles has residential areas? Let’s say you want to go from Pasadena to Santa Monica for dinner one night, both of which are within the L.A. county line. Unless you catch the I-10 on those wondrous nights when only a few hundred cars are on it, expect to leave at 6 for 8 PM dinner reservations. Did I mention the two places are less than 15 miles apart? That’s what LA is, a labyrinth of highways and completely separated commercial and residential zones. I mentioned it being the bizzaro New York though, right? Well for all it’s faults, LA still has some of the most breathtaking real estate in the world, some of the most generous homeless programs in the US, and some of the nicest (and best looking) people you’ll ever meet. Los Angeles has in unexpected pleasures and intangibles what New York has in technical masterpiece (though New York has plenty of those other ingredients too), which makes it a terrible city but a really great place.

And here’s what most of you have been waiting for, my 3rd favorite city in the U.S., San Francisco. Given a place is what you make of it, and I’ve made a lot of the city by the bay in my extensive time over the last 5 years. A great place to live, a great place to party, a terrible place to love sports teams (with the exception of the Go-Go Warriors). LA and SF are such diametrically opposed places that I’m surprised by the fact that more has not been made about their mirror images. SF has the technical planning down pat, LA has the real estate that people from all over the world are looking for. If you dropped one on top on another there’s no doubt that San Angeles would rival New York as America’s tourist destination.

Sorry I’m going on about San Francisco’s comparative qualities and not talking about the city itself. Well first of all, the Giants suck, let’s just get that out of the way. Second of all, SF proper has done an amazing job with the space it’s been given. Originally of course, cities were built on hills for defense purposes, you can see it in many of the classic metropolis’ of the world. I see such distinct similarities between Istanbul and San Francisco that I’m wondering if the SF’s planner wasn’t a Turk. The difficulties of building a modern city on a hill are obvious, water drainage, building integrity, transportation difficulties, the list goes on and on. San Francisco has handled each with a stunning amount of grace and precision. A well manicured grid system has kept road traffic light, a bus system that is both sustainable and well-directed, and a populous that is knowledgeable and vigilant have made San Francisco the Paris of America. If you’re into that.
Last and certainly least is Boston. Now I’ve only lived in the city for slightly under a year but already the planning has driven me insane enough to actually apply to Department of Transportation and the MBTA in the hopes of making things a little better. From afar, Boston is an obvious mix of old and new. Certain areas are rounded and roundabout much like farm roads while others are strict grids based on the Mormon model (yes most gridded cities are based on a model from those yokels in Utah, dear Lord the irony). This makes for roads that split off and turn without warning leaving most out of towners lost and angry, adding to the dismal driving that Boston harbors (NB: people think New York drivers are some of the worst, this is a common misconception. They are just extremely aggressive but equally knowledgeable. Boston drivers are the previous without the latter).

It might sound like Boston draws most of my ire in terms of city planning, and well you’re right. There are some great areas, don’t get me wrong, but Boston suffers from an overabundance of bars and a lack of truly cosmopolitan ambience which any city worth its salt knows is important. And it’s road system and public transportation is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Cambridge is cool though.

So there’s my list. Feel free to yell at me, tell me I’m wrong, call me names, the usual. I’m sorry I didn’t get to the international cities but I would have been getting above 2000 words doing that so I figured most of you would be bored enough with the 1500 I already have. I want to hear from you all! That’s why I write!

Bonus: Irvine, CA might be the best planned city in the world. There is no blade of grass that was not placed there with the overall plan in mind. I tell you man, those White and Chinese planning teams can really do conformity well. Take a look at its stats and you’ll realize that if there was ever technical perfection in “urban” planning, Irvine would be it.

Thoughts on a Break Spent Wanting

Airports may have just overtaken sprawling suburbs as the most anti-pedestrian areas in the United States. I just spent a half an hour trying to walk 30 feet, and I would have simply jumped over the barrier between the road and the airport terminal, but there were plenty of uniformed men already looking my way due to my groggy appearance.

I had just gotten off a flight from Oakland to Orange County, a balmy 50 minute trot down the spine of California, and had collected my baggage when I figured that calling some one for a ride when no one in my family knew I had actually been gone in the first place might take a while and be associated with unneeded judgment and raised voices. So I decided to walk to my usually understanding aunt’s office which stood no more than a mile from where I landed.

It was 90 degrees outside. And I was greased from the humidity and hairspray that spread throughout the cabin during the “short” commute. And my bag was filled with a weeks worth of clothing, 2 pairs of size 15 shoes, and a decent amount of shame. Suffice to say I was dragging my heels a little bit and didn’t exactly look ready to take on the world. None the less, I walked through the doors, sneezed twice, and attempted to make my way to the street.

It seemed simple enough. And I thought to myself, “it’s right there, I can just walk over right?” Wow. Wrong. Wrong to say the least.

Directly in front of me was a 2 story parking complex with a series of stairwells going along the back wall. Each said “pedestrian walkway” so I assumed this was my lucky day and began to make my escape. Little did I know that these doors were to be used only in emergencies. Thinking better of it I turned around and passed by the exact same people I did on my way in. They looked scared. And I think one was making his way over to a police officer.

Anyways after this series of bullshit I walked around the inside track of road that people drive on when they’re waiting for people to get their bags. You know the one. The track that resembles a hot wheels set from limbo. A purgatory for the friend who offers to pick you up. A fitting punishment for all those family members who screwed you over all those times. The “re-entry to terminal” road is the ultimate equalizer in the transportation industry. I walked around it once, feeling kind of like a retarded Dorothy on an extremely hot yellow brick road. And no lions. Or monkeys for that matter.

No dice. I was still lost looking for the goddamn exit and things are getting heated in more ways than one. My lack of underwear made walking around in heat a ticking time bomb, and by the looks of things the police were looking me over twice now that I’ve made my way back and forth.

I finally decided that I’d go upstairs, and scope out my situation much like an army recon team, though considerably danger but probably more harassment. So I made my way upstairs, taking the air conditioned elevator instead of dragging my sorry body up the stairs and into the sun, and got a hold of my situation.
I got to the edge of the parking complex that became my own personal labyrinth and looked down to the promised land that is the Irvine Business center and contemplated jumping to the road below for a few moments. I decided that limping to my aunt’s office with a broken leg would just give rise to more questions than I felt like answering so I went to the bottom floor and started looking again.

Then, there it was. A door with red letters printed on the side with a stencil that read “Exit to McArthur”. I was saved. I picked up my bag, gave the cop who had been tailing me a nice, big middle finger, and made my way out. Away from the airport, and stinking like a wasted summer.

The Littlest Communist

I admit, I never knew that much about Hugo Chavez. I always saw him as this kind of squirrely guy who liked to dress in a suit from Sears and talk about the proletariat, then hop in his Air Bus and sip Cristal from his pimp cup. Kind of like Fidel, but with no facial hair. Oh and no war experience, except for a failed coup. Or revolutionary ideals. Or international regard.

And then I was thumbing through the New Yorker from this week (June 23rd for those of you keeping score at home) and I realized that Hugo Chavez is not only ignorant, but he’s dangerous as hell! He controls a good amount of the oil left in the world and is calling our president the devil! Why isn’t this a bigger deal?! He has his own presidential TV show where he makes personnel and diplomatic decisions?! And he just bought a missile defense system from Belarus! HOLY SHIT DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK THIS GUY IS KIND OF CRAZY?!?

That’s just the short list of what Mr. Chavez has done over the last decade in Venezuela, and believe me it goes on and on. The most striking characteristic the article catalogues however, is the fact that he is basically gay for Fidel Castro and perhaps even more for the era in which he came to power. He longs to be a revolutionary, trudging through muddy jungles, battling the bourgeoisie, toppling American interests, and freeing the oppressed people.

To call this view of revolution romantic would be tantamount to saying that Marie Antoinette died of a sore throat. Fidel was part of the Cuban aristocracy which is why a majority of the gentry didn’t resist their entry into Havana. Then he threatened that rebel poster boy Ernesto Guevara with his life unless he left Cuba, and subsequently slapped his posters on every wall he could after his assassination in Bolivia. Fidel is a master politician, Hugo Chavez, in short, is not.

Sure, he’s controlled the media to a point, he’s well on his way to eliminating a majority of the private sector, and he’s successfully antagonized every capitalist leader in his sphere of influence. Seems like he’s well down his checklist of socio-communist objectives, right? Well in a broad sense yes, but as is the case with most political aspirations there are subtleties involved. He has controlled the media, but under intense scrutiny from both domestic and international right activists, he has controlled the private sector, but enduring harsh criticisms from free trade and human right’s activists, and he has antagonized capitalist nations, but makes obvious instead of subtle contributions to terrorist organizations such as FARC and has not made enough international connections to battle issues where Venezuela does not have influence. He is the common man’s Fidel. How ironic.

It seems as though Hugo Chavez may have more in common with his arch enemy President Bush than we previously thought. Both look up to men shrouded in more mythology than fact (Chavez’s Castro and Bush’s Reagan), both attempt to identify with the common man but in reality could not be more different, and both are painfully ignorant of the situations that surround them. Maybe it’s time for us to start bonding with some Venezuelans and start venting about our problems to each other, it could be the start of something beautiful.

Alright home work for this week, go pick up that copy of the New Yorker, it’s the one with the bears on the front listening to tape players (who the hell has tape players anymore? Those bears cannot be that poor) and read the Chavez article because it’s one of the best I’ve read. Plus there’s a funny one about voice recognition devices that has a bong reference.

Oil!

So CNBC was on the tube the other day and I was expecting to see how much money I had made that day by investing in Lehman Brothers and GE. Instead I saw something that forced me to take my concentrations away from the 8 different tickers that told me not only the price of gold and silver, but also that my blood tests are in my doctor needs me to call him immediately.

It was old George W. Bush and he was offering his musings on the energy crisis. Oil, and where it comes from, and how we get it, and how we can get more of it, to be exact. This wasn’t exactly a speech ripe with nuance and subtle ideas. It could be summed up in a few phrases, “ Oil. We don’t got enough. We need some more. I know how.” Alright Dub, enlighten the rest of us on how easy this is.

Coast drilling! Apparently those hippies have been stopping us from getting the sweet crude that exists beneath the continental shelf on the coastlines of California and Florida. Well Oregon and Washington too, and I guess Virginia, but California and Florida are the most important. Oh there’s New York, and Pennsylvania, and, shit, I forgot Georgia. Well California and Florida are the most important regardless, they have the best looking people. Oh and Delaware. I guess. So we have a lot of shoreline, that’s what you’re trying to tell me Bush? And it’s all lined with black gold? Alright, well, cool, sign me up.

Wait a minute, there’s got to be a reason these tree huggers don’t want to drill right? They don’t just want to prevent me from having delicious oil coated otters for dinner do they? Well apparently the governors of the two biggest oil prospects, those two states I mentioned before, I’m not retyping them, go back and read thoughtfully, don’t really want any accidents to destroy some of the most pristine coastline in the world.

Now, alright, that might be kind of a cop out. $6 a gallon for gas or the slight chance that some sea gulls might have to check a different box on their tax returns. Well there’s another large problem associated with getting more oil in the first place and it has to do what appears on the ticker everyday, the word “crude”. We don’t put crude oil into our trucks, we don’t put crude oil into our jets, we don’t put crude oil into our spaceships. Or that fake spaceship that we launched in 1968 for that matter. We refine it, and to refine oil one must build and maintain a refinery. That’s one thing that doesn’t come easy in the states, they’re big, dirty, and stink to high hell.

Stop our dependence on foreign oil! Bush says. Alright, well good call. We don’t want to be in debt to the Arabs up to the 20 inch rims on our Escalades, it just wouldn’t be the American way of doing things. So drill more here, or drill more in places that are at least friendly with us, right? That’ll solve the problem.

How about stopping our dependence on oil in general. Alright we ran our industrial revolution off the ebony stuff, we won a couple wars and lost a couple more on weapons powered by oil, and we’ve become the most powerful nation by depending on it. So asking everyone to just stop isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do, and believe me the explanation is based on warmth and hope, rather than profits and efficiency. We have to depend on human ingenuity to solve the oil enigma, and however flamboyant and grandiose that sounds it is the only solution to an impending doomsday scenario.

I am by no means a treehugger, I eat red meat, I drive a car that runs on electricity and gas rather than rainbows and pot, and I enjoy flying in my personal jet as much as the next guy, but we do have things on this earth that have been around for billions of years and only recently been considered important in the current economy. If any one has been outside in the last couple weeks, you’ll notice a great, big circle in the sky. We call that the sun, and believe it or not, it has enough energy to turn 68 year old women into leather hand bags and enough left over to power every house from here to San Paulo.

The earth itself could provide energy to communities that are lucky enough to live in an area of volcanic outcrops. The geothrermal trend is about to take off, and pretty soon we’ll all be digging holes in our back yards and pouring water down them, thus heating them with steam power from the center of the earth! Alright so it’s a little more complicated than that, and we’re a little ways off from perfecting geothermal, but the beauty of the concept is that it is completely sustainable, as long as the earth stays whole. Imagine it, the whole world run on heat straight from the depths of hell!

And there’s magnets. Well I don’t actually have any proof of magnets being a great energy source, but come on if the Japanese can make a train go 200 MPH on magnets, why can’t I power my Range Rover with some.

Like I said, the blind faith I put into human ingenuity may not be a sure thing, but if the new corporate titan’s collective slogans (GE’s “Imagination at Work” and BP’s “Beyond petroleum” are two that come to mind) are any sign that perhaps the movement to create new technologies is more than just a passing fad, the oil conundrum will be balanced on a much steadier surface.

2 books for this article, and I’m just going to go by simple name irony in this one. There’s Oil! by Upton Sinclair that’s an oldie but a goody. And then another one called The End of Oil by a fella named Paul C. Roberts (he also has a book called The End of Food that I’m working my way through and that I heartily suggest).

The Wild, Wild West

I was listening to NPR this morning and heard an elaboration on some events that I haven’t been following very closely on the Mexican-American border. Apparently drug lords have been killing the police like it’s an episode of The Wire and the Mexican government isn’t exactly what I’d call “on top of the situation.” In fact most of the police departments in places like Ciudad Juarez (Across from El Paso, TX) are so corrupt they make Sierra Leone and Kenya look like Denmark. 8000+ people have been murdered in the border cities in drug related incidents, whether it’s innocents caught in the crossfire (many children, including those of the drug lords and police officers are targeted) or the instigators on either side.

And now, President Bush wants to initiate a $1.2 billion aid bill to help Mexico battle this problem from their side. Now this helps us out because we’re trying to “win” the “war on drugs,” and I guess by “win” what every Republican since Nancy Reagan really means is “spend-a-shit-load-of-money-on-a-project-that-never-shows-any-progress.” Now this is more or less a straight give, that’s a check that goes straight the police stations and the Mexican government to help battle the problem near our borders. Pretty good, right? We help out the Mexican government, we look good in the eyes of the international community, maybe gain some ground in Latin America, and in the process kill us some drug dealers.

Wrong. And a nice man from Vermont can tell us why. Pat Leahy put the breaks on this aid bill because he looked it over and said, “wait a minute, aren’t there a bunch of guys running these drug deals from the inside? Aren’t some of the government officials in cahoots with the drug dealers? Aren’t the police letting a lot of stuff slide for some money on the side?” Well the answers to all those questions are yes, yes, and yes. So he says, “Hey Calderon (the Mexican president) maybe you should give us a little information on where all this cash is going. If we’re giving you a cool billion, then I figure maybe we should know where the scrilla is hooking up with”(direct Leahy quotation). And wow, was Mexico pissed.

Leahy’s decision to question the integrity of the Mexican government, and especially that of the northern provinces, apparently sent shockwaves through our neighbor’s halls of Congress and insulted their sense of sovereignty. Well let me be the first to apologize for my country’s arrogance. I’m sorry we asked you, the good people of the Mexican government, to show some responsibility for the money that we offered to you.

I lived in Mexico when I was much younger, and I have no doubt that they are in need of aid to help a multitude of things from health care to education. Most of Mexico City is still broke and there isn’t exactly a premium put on social welfare at least from my experience, which was behind the gate of an American-only compound while I was being guarded by an armed man named Carlos. And maybe that’s part of the problem with Mexico, they’ve long depended on extremely affluent companies and their men to provide a good amount of their investment money in the government and private sector. And even though they do have the richest man in the world (who owns every cell phone that side of the Rio Grande) there are still probably 15 million people washing their clothes in water ridden with salmonella and mosquitoes. So is the problem money? Apparently not because there’s plenty to go around. It’s more what happens to the money after it’s given away.

The U.S. is the largest donor of aid in the world, billions to developing nations and even more to nations that are attempting to solidify themselves in the national scene. Yet we are still criticized for the majority of problems that occur in the developing world in terms of aid value. Developing nations are not in the hole because they don’t get enough money, they’re there because aid does not create solutions.

Which brings me back to the Mexico problem. Giving $1.2 billion dollars to a solidly corrupt governments blindly creates more problems than it solves. How much of that goes straight into the drug dealers pockets because of crooked police stations? How much of it goes to corrupt politicians? The world is not where it is because we don’t give enough, it’s where it is because the people who get the money don’t do anything good with it.

Here’s your reading suggestions for this article. Two books, one is The Lords of Poverty about the corruption of international aid groups like “Shave the Children” and The Road to Hell which tackles why aid doesn’t work. Enjoy.

Obamarama

Obama wins. I’ll get the basics out of the way first. This is good for America. If the Government worked like the real world, Obama would have beaten Bush at a drinking contest and taken over the White House by liberty that he can party the hardest. Though he would lose the “How many lines until you go blind contest”, so thank God we don’t live in an American where the Government is run by USC Frat Brothers. When, and believe me it’s a “when” and not an “if”, when Obama wins in November , things will change.

This all depends on who he chooses as his running mate though. There’s talk of Jim Webb from VA, that dude who runs Ohio, and even Hilary Rodham is considered a front runner. I’ve got one who tops them all, that perennial also-ran, the eternal “well there’s that white guy” cliche, Mr. John Edwards.

I’ll be truthful, I wish he had won the nomination but he never had a chance. A plain white guy from Carolina had no chance against the absolutely igniting rhetoric of Barack Obama and the political savvy of Bill Clinton. Oops I mean Hilary! Don’t get me wrong, I think Obama will make a great president, if not because of his personal ambition and fire then most definitely because he is following the worst president since Harding. There is literally 0 chance of Obama being less popular than Bush. It can’t happen. He could make his first acts as president reinstalling prohibition and raising the age of sexual consent to 35 and he would still have higher approval ratings than Walker Texas Ranger.

So John Edwards. If people actually paid attention to policy plans and practical courses of action, John Edwards would have been at the top of the Dems list of presidential candidates. But unfortunately (though fortunate in some aspects) the political process today is based on sound bites and mass charisma. It could be worse though, the last time we picked a president on pure politics we got Nixon. Edwards had a grocery list of how to improve things at home, he is admittedly not an authority on international relations, but then again we have a plethora of cabinet members who are dedicated to that task and are often more suited to it than any president. He was there to make sure catastrophes like Katrina were treated with regard rather than apprehension, and looked to the oil crisis as the number one enemy of the American working man. He is, essentially, what the other candidates are not. A self-made southern man who would attempt to identify with the other 200 million people who still work blue collar jobs in America rather than pander to the already elite. And however hard it is to say, I still feel as though Barack Obama does not resonate with the Black community for any other reason than he is a Black man. Edwards is the poor man’s Bill Clinton (and I mean that in the figurative way), he will never be able to replicate the reception from the African-American community that Clinton did (and more than likely the one that Obama will receive) but he does have policy ideas than benefit the minority and poor communities.

I’m not going to go through them, that’s not my job. Do some reading on him and you’ll realize that Obama choosing a savvy domestic policy man would be the best decision for the Democrats. It’s not even worth going into the Republican race, McCain will probably take a super conservative who will appeal to the Evangelical community and not scare away educated people. So not Mike Huckabee is what I’m trying to say.

Anyways I’ll leave you with a new suggestion for a song. It’s a blues lick by Watermelon Slim and the Workers called “Jimmy Bell”. Listen to it, stamp your feet, and remember that voting might be for pussies but chicks dig guys in touch with their emotions.

Credit Mulligan?

So people in America are getting poor right? Losing their homes, their livelihood, their flatscreens, and their penis pumps. Does that about sum it up?

Now we blame the banks, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns (may they rest in peace), Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley are the big stinkers, while peons like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPM gobble up the rest of those poor, unclean, mortgage seeking masses. Damn those banks. Who the hell gave them permission to try and make as much money as possible? Don’t they know that’s bad for the soul? Don’t they know how mad they make people who don’t need mortgages to buy their houses?!

I should start off the rest of this tirade by saying that I DO blame the banks, just not completely. They are equal to the people who took out those mirages of mortgages a few years ago, both are at fault. I am just more upset with the people because they (we, actually) are smart, we should be able to see through a corporate machine by simply asking the question, “Is this logical?”

The banks aren’t the problem, the people are. The banks offered a deal that was too good to be true, a deal that any one who talked to any kind of financial advisor (and I’m sure half the employees at whatever branch they got their loan at) would say, “No thanks, I’d like a real loan please. You can try and sell that to my 17 year old, he needs money for pot and Pabst Blue Ribbon.” That’s the bottom line, we knew these mortgages were too much of a good thing, but we took them anyways. And that gets me to the main point of this realist slap to the teeth, we’ve lost sight of the American dream.

We used to be the hardest working, grittiest, baddest people the world had seen since the Romans conquered the world and made sure there were plenty of catamites to go around. Now we’re the fattest, proudest, most entitled population the globe has seen since Caligula made orgies part of the daily prayer. We complain about Mexicans taking our job but refuse to take those jobs ourselves, we want to have that 4 bed room house in the suburbs with a Lexus in the garage but don’t want to work more than 35 hours a week, we want sex with animals but don’t feel like driving out to the country to do so. We’re getting beaten out (and most deservedly so) in top college admissions by Chinese and Indian students because our kids think they’re entitled to go to Harvard and Stanford by liberty that their name doesn’t start with an X and they don’t get flushed when they drink. We are becoming he coddled masses and it is leading us down a quick road to second place.

This credit crunch is the worst form of laziness and now it’s biting us in the ass. If you want that house in the ‘burbs, do what your Mom and Pop did, work your ass off, save, and never bite off more than you can chew. We’re American’s goddammit, start acting like it.