headwringer

[headwringer]

If you, like me, are hell-bent on skiing weekends and live in the Denver metro area, you have probably spent some time sitting in “mountain traffic” on Interstate 70.

As a Colorado transplant hailing from New York City, I’m used to traffic. I’ve spent my fair share of hours sitting bleary-eyed on the FDR and an assortment of other urban, arterial roadways.

Sitting in mountain traffic, though, is different. There’s something surreal about being stuck in traffic and surrounded by the soaring peaks and valleys of the Front Range. Forced to visually confront the thousands of vehicles surging into (and, on occasion, out of) the mountains, there’s a back-of-mind feeling that slips its way into consciousness -- when hurtling along I-70 at 80 mph, one among just several other vehicles in view, your journey has an assumed heroism to it, whether off to a hike or the slopes or anywhere in between. It’s different when you’re just another member of a metal caravan slowly progressing into the mountains. 

What I mean is that the civilized and settled aspects of the journey that would otherwise go unnoticed and unremarked, suddenly loom into view: the climate-controlled car cabin, the mind-boggling variety of audio entertainment, and, more than anything else, the miracle of the highway itself as part of larger transportation infrastructure, enabling this mass movement of souls into and out the mountains, part of a massive regional economy that thrives off of the movement that I-70 makes possible, the thousands of people who show up on the streets of Breckenridge on an autumn Saturday or on the slopes of A-Basin on a frigid February morning.

~

Ruminating on the power of transit infrastructure, I might venture, is a natural side of effect of sitting in traffic, whether you’re bumper-to-bumper on the FDR or the Denver-to-Vail stretch of I-70.

Whenever I sat in traffic on the FDR Drive, my thoughts turned to its idiocy, how the parkway cut off the city from access to the water, an idea born out of reading Jane Jacobs and subsequently nurtured by habitual early-morning runs along the East River Esplanade, where my resentment against the prioritization of automobiles over people darkened my view of the Drive. For all its utility in getting me in and out of the city, I resented the hierarchy of needs it implicitly represented, where the movement of people by automobile exceeded the importance of walkable neighborhoods, of access to the water.

The reveries of sitting in traffic on I-70 have a very different flavor. The Denver-to-Vail stretch of I-70 presents one of the country’s most striking infrastructural achievements. This highway, at least two lanes in each direction over this entire stretch (which clump together and separate as might two long strands of spaghetti), bores through mountains, curls around the sides of escarpments, and sails over mountain passes as high as 11,000 feet.

So any reverie must open with some awe, induced by the eye-opening white peaks in the distance and the jagged, exposed geology of cliff faces. But the reverie extends likewise to the highway’s easy mundanity, especially towards its Denver end. Part of this is to do with the interstate system itself, with its unmistakable signage and sense of space. But it’s also to do with the creeping surburbanity that has lapped over the rim of the Dakota Hogback and spilled into the foothills of the Front Range, with subdivisions appearing all over the thinly wooded folds around I-70.

~

It’s also in this stretch that a curious exit sign appears: “Chief Hosa.” Nothing about the sign offers clarification. Is it the name of a town? A natural monument? A historical site? The looming question, of course: who is Chief Hosa?

The quickest of Wikipedia searches offers an answer:

Little Raven, also known as Hosa (Young Crow), (born ca. 1810 — died 1889) was from about 1855 until his death in 1889 a principal chief of the Southern Arapaho Indians. He negotiated peace between the Southern Arapaho and Cheyenne and the Comanche, Kiowa, and Plains Apache. He also secured rights to the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation in Indian Territory.

Further research, though, turns up that the exit isn’t named after him after all: it’s named after a “mountain lodge” owned by the City and County of Denver, which is frequently used for weddings and other events. The original architect of the lodge named it after him, though.

[headwringer]

This strikes me as a very “classy” etymology. I think what I mean by that is that the etymology is straight and unerring as an arrow - all the way back to Latin. The Latin verb abscondere, “to hide,” to be specific.

[headwringer]

I’ve never thought twice about the adjective “fully-fledged” until today for some reason. For some reason, the word popped into my head and it hit me: What the heck is a fledge?! A fledge, as it turns out, is one of those nasty English concoctions that draws from any number of old languages, all of which seem to tag to the essential meaning of “feather” or “fly.” No surprises there!

[headwringer]

I’m left scratching my head to learn that John Mayer’s cover of the classic Tom Petty song has more plays on Spotify than the original. If the cover had a life as a single -- I don’t remember it having that, but I could be wrong? -- then it might make more sense.

[headwringer]

“But” and “because”

Little words that can make a big difference. The other day, a colleague related a little “mind trick” she’d recently learned: when you have an opportunity to substitute “and” for “but,” do it.

She didn’t cite a source for this insight, but as best as I can tell from some Googling around, it seems credit should go to entrepreneur Bill Gross:

When you start telling someone, "you are really great at x, but when you do y..." the BUT negates all the goodwill that you are building up with the first part of your sentence.  The BUT gets someone's defenses up, and makes them way less able to hear the important thing you want them to listen to.  Instead, if you learn how to - and it sometimes takes hard work - craft your feedback with an AND, you can be MUCH more successful.

An easy enough lesson at first glance, but it occurs to me that just today - even with this lesson rattling around my mind! - I managed to provide feedback using the go-to “but” structure. Oh, well. As Gross points out, it’s a change that won’t happen overnight. Got to put the work in!

This but/and concept reminds me of another important word: because. While the anecdote has stuck with me, I had to look up the exact origin. Not a shocker to learn that it comes from Robert Cialdini’s seminal Influence:

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying machine: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: Ninety-four percent of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line.

Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine? Under those circumstances, only 60 percent of those asked complied. At first glance, it appears that the crucial difference between the two requests was the additional information provided by the words, “because I’m in a rush.”

But a third type of request tried by Langer showed that this was not the case. It seems that it was not the whole series of words, but the first one, “because,” that made the difference. Instead of including a real reason for compliance, Langer’s third type of request used the word “because” and then, adding nothing new, merely restated the obvious: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance.

[headwringer]

Where are all the dumps?

A favorite weekend activity of my father was “going to the dump” -- invariably to lug several garbage cans’ worth of refuse from the yard. Even aside from weekend trips, the dump was part of my life because it was directly adjacent to one of the town baseball fields where I played Little League games. The wafting smell of waste competed with the rich scent of bread baking on the other side of the field. Based on a brief Google Maps search, it seems as though the field is no longer used for town baseball leagues -- based on the satellite imagery, the road I remember taking SW past the dump no longer seems to exist...

Anyhow, I learned this week that dumps are apparently not a thing out in Colorado? That may be a side effect of having too much space. Poking around the City of Arvada website, the closest thing to a municipal dump I could find is a privately owned and operated landfill in Golden, on that desolate stretch of 93 that runs up to Rocky Flats. Aside from that facility -- which charges what look to me obscene amounts for drop-offs, plus requires the wearing of a hard hat and reflective construction vest if you're dropping something off -- the experience of "going to the dump" seems a foreign one to residents in this region. Not a shame exactly, but an oddity at least?

[headwringer]

Architect Error

I like a building that most works save for some silly quick. A good one is the Denver Art Museum, ignoring the region’s wintry weather.

Snow or sleet makes maintenance trot out cones and caution tape, cordon off a tidy little square on the plaza outside the entrance, watching as icy missives treat the square to percussive slaps of precipitation, sliding off the oddly angled roof, which must have loomed so clear and clever on computer screens. Rather than error or oversight, it’s more fun to imagine the architects as crusaders with an odd pedestrian vendetta, deploying winter storms and slick metal roofs to kill off those passersby cluttering their plaza (which looked so neat when no one was on it).

[headwringer]

Office Song #1 (Mid-Conference Call)

The office life is not so bad as I would have me believe. Misery’s a face we wear well. Too well, I bet—skin pale from pixels, digital glow that lights our interior lives.

Tedium makes for mixed metaphors, Sloppy construction that falls apart on a minute’s notice. No surprise, really, given the average email laced with mistakes and odd turns of phrase I’m sure I’ve never heard, invented in a fit of pique when the right words were too slow in coming.

                                        As for me, I write (mostly) error-free, though my prose is riddled with riddles, odds and ends only I understand. Sometimes, a furrowed brow looks up from a screen, and puckers lips in an unspoken question that says, “Is that really what you mean?”

[headwringer]

Dinner for my parents’ dog

Somewhere in Central Park a mother bird raises her brood, and Marvin dreams of eating them.

[headwringer]

David Foster Wallace knows more words than me

In lieu of a re-cap or discussion, here is a list of words I had never heard or seen before from Foster Wallace’s collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. In order, I suggest reading (or rereading) the two tennis pieces – “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” and “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry…” – and the masterpiece about spending a week on a luxury cruise that provides the collection’s title. All definitions are from Oxford Dictionaries.

frottage

(noun): The practice of touching or rubbing against the clothed body of another person in a crowd as a means of obtaining sexual gratification.

“On the crowded path outside Farm Expo a man engages in blatant frottage.” (107)

enfilade 

(noun): A volley of gunfire directed along a line from end to end.

“An enfilade of snores from the booths-turned-tents along the Midway.” (111)

sinesemilla 

(noun): Cannabis of a variety which has a particularly high concentration of narcotic agents.

“The operator of the Funhouse is slumped in a plastic control booth that reeks of sinsemilla.” (133)

prognathous

(adj): Having a projecting lower jaw or chin.

“I notice that many of them have the low brow and prognathous jaw typically associated with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.” (134)

scotophilic 

(adj): (Of an organism) tending to move towards or thrive in regions of low light intensity; dark-loving.

“Lynch has him many pounds lighter, hair shorn, creamed and powdered to a scotophilic pallor that makes him look both ravaged and Satanic…” (188)

lalations 

(noun): infantile speech whether in infants or in older speakers (as from mental retardation) *from the Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary

“…Cinema by Referendum, where we vote with our entertainment-dollar either for spectacular effects to make us feel something or for lalations of moral clichés that let us remain comfortable in our numbness…” (192)

olla podrida

(noun): A miscellaneous collection of things.

“…an artist whose own ‘internal impressions and moods’ are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural iconography…” (199)

onanistic

(adj): relating to masturbation

“In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.” (200)

hierophantic

(adj): relating to a person, especially a priest, who interprets sacred mysteries or esoteric principles.

“…she’s seated hierophantically in the player-guest boxes courtside…” (252)

katexic

(adj): Relating to cachexia, defined as  ‘a depraved condition of the body, in which nutrition is everywhere defective.’ New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon

“I always imagine Croats looking ravaged and katexic and like somebody out of a Munch lithograph…”(252)

Peter Principle

(noun): The principle that members of a hierarchy are promoted until they reach the level at which they are no longer competent.

“I’ve got to say I feel like there’s been a kind of Peter Principle in effect on this assignment.” (256)

sybaritic

(adj): Fond of sensuous luxury or pleasure; self-indulgent.

“I now confront the journalistic problem of not being sure how many examples I need to list in order to communicate the atmosphere of sybaritic and nearly insanity-producing pampering on board the m.v. Nadir.” (290)

piacular

(adj): Making or requiring atonement.

“…to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag.” (292)

concupiscent

(adj): Filled with sexual desire; lustful.

“There’s none of this kind of concupiscent behavior aboard the Nadir, I’m happy to say.” (313)

fianchetto

(noun): The development of a bishop by moving it one square to a long diagonal of the board.

“My first inkling of trouble is on the fourth move, when I fianchetto and Deirdre knows what I’m doing is fianchettoing and uses the term correctly, again calling me Mister.” (326)

thanatotic

(adj): [coined by Foster Wallace] Relating to Thanatos, Greek for “death.”

“Thanatotic shuffleboard continues over to starboard.” (336)

murine

(adj): Relating to or affecting mice or related rodents.

“One of very few human beings I’ve ever seen who is both blond and murine-looking, Ernst today is wearing white loafers, green slacks, and a flared sportcoat whose pink I swear can be described only as menstrual.” (336)

strabismic

(adj): Of, or relating to, an abnormal alignment of the eyes; the condition of having a squint.

“…I end up placing third but am told later I would have won the whole thing except for the scowl, swollen and strabismic left eye…” (337)

peripeteia

(noun): A sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, especially in reference to fictional narrative.

“…a flying skeet, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia – erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a distinctive corkscrew way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.” (345)

[headwringer]

Jane Jacobs and How to Think about the City

For someone trained as neither an urban planner nor as an architect, the frustration in reading Jane Jacobs’s monumental The Death and Life of Great American Cities is kind of being in the dark as to how exactly things are different today. Are we still ruled by the heads-in-the-sand type politicians, bureaucrats, and urban planners that Jacobs so expertly skewers throughout the book?

Anyways, all that really means is that there’s a veritable stack-o-books ahead of me if I really want to suss out the range and scope of Jane Jacobs’s urban planning thoughts in the 21st century. My lack-of-know-how hand-wringing aside, this book still reads – even to a naïve sucker such as me – as a monumental work of opinion-driven nonfiction, more than 55 years after its original publication. 

I should note also that the bevy of examples that Jacobs lobs at the reader are a bit hard to follow in the present day – Exhibit A: New York City’s Bryant Park is no longer known as “Needle Park” – most of her ground rules for good city planning (and, more generally, good city life) seem to still ring true. 

Jacobs begins the book with a simple directive – look at the city around you. How do you feel standing on a given street corner? Think about your daily routine, and what it entails, how it involves the city fabric that’s surrounding you. 

The brilliance of this approach is that it puts the reader – in effect, the average city-dweller – in charge. The city, after all, is for us – not for the city government or the developers, and especially not for the urban planners holed up in their ivory towers (or in their architecture firms). Jacobs essentially asks us to think about how we feel in our cities, and then think about some of the reasons that might be. 

Some of the things you notice are obvious, as Jacobs points out. The idea of a “safe” city environment is something she tackles early on:

This is something everyone already knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe. But how does this work, really? And what makes a street well used or shunned? 

Jacobs offers three factors that play into the sense of safety on a city street: 1) a clear demarcation between public and private spaces, 2) eyes on the street, and 3) consistent sidewalk use. 

On reading this section, I couldn’t help but think back to the time I spent living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. A neighborhood in the midst of gentrification, some parts of Crown Heights – specifically, I think of the northern portion of Franklin Avenue between Eastern Parkway and St Marks Avenue – are well-lit and well-populated even late into the evening, but other parts, such as the stretch of Rogers Avenue that I lived on, always seem somewhat deserted.

That’s not to say that it was therefore a “bad” neighborhood, or that crime was a part of my experience there, but rather that dark and empty streets sometimes left a pit in my stomach. And why shouldn’t they have? No one feels light and airy walking down dark and empty streets at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night. 

Conversely, Jacobs counters that just as people instinctively dislike those unpopulated and unfriendly streets, we love streets that are full of people. Even the most hardened New Yorker will admit to some empathy for the throngs of tourists that congregate in Times Square in all hours and weathers. As much as New Yorkers (and those of the tri-state region in general) like to dump on Times Square, it abides by exactly that drive to be around people – especially in large quantities.

[City planners and city architectural designers] operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in cities everywhere. 

There’s an obviousness to much of what Jacobs argues – though this might admittedly just be the effect of her work having been digested so widely – and this comes across most powerfully in the sections where she advances one of the book’s central theses – the value of a diverse city experience. 

Jacobs posits four factors that contribute to this city diversity: 1) a mix of uses (I can’t tell you how much my copy for work about so-called “mixed-use developments” reads as a diluted derivation of this, 2) the importance of small blocks, 3) the value of aged buildings, and 4) concentration or density of population. 

As noted, there wasn’t much surprise for me in those factors, with the exception of how important Jacobs rated those aged buildings. I’ve always had a sneaking feeling that they were important to neighborhoods – but it took Jacobs saying it for me to understand. Despite the dream of new developments – all bright and crisp and bold! – when I wander through one of those shiny new residential developments with their luxury retail storefronts and upmarket F&B (the upper-middle-class version of Applebees?), I feel sad inside. There’s nothing lively about them – they feel dead at their core.

Recently, I wandered through one of those developments in Baltimore – a new residential complex along the Inner Harbor. It was a sterile and unhappy place. Compare that to Fells Point a half mile over – a vibrant zone of old housing stock and former waterfront facilities and markets. It was no contest.

Experts are great, y’know? They immerse themselves in a topic, learn more about it than just about anyone else, and then offer the kind of deep thinking that gets at the heart of things.

But they don’t know everything.

Jacobs is a big fan of pointing this out. The ivory tower may serve its purpose perfectly when it comes to chemistry or philosophy or engineering – but architecture and urban planning are about people – in all their delicious unpredictability. The temptation is understandable, to step back and push people around like generals playing a war game. 

We all know that the projects – as they were designed in New York City during the middle part of the 20th century – don’t work. The Le Corbusier model of the “tower in a park” was always a modernistic lark. And yet we continued building them. Planners and politicians who didn’t live in these neighborhoods made decisions about the people who did. It should come as no surprise that Jacobs totally and thoroughly annihilates this premise. 

In the book’s final chapter, “The kind of problem a city is,” Jacobs opens up with what seems at first to be no more than an interesting digression. With a hat/tip to some guy named Warren Weaver (!), she lays out an abbreviated summary of the history of scientific thought: 

Dr. Weaver lists three stages of development in the history of scientific thought: (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity; (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity; and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity.

Couple this summation and the title of the chapter, and it’s no surprise where this is going: the problem of a city is one of organized complexity. To get there, Jacobs (and Weaver?) lays out an umbrella case example: the pool table. In the scientific thought of the 19th century, people were limited to problems of simplicity – ones that dealt with only a few variables at a time. On the pool table, this is akin to looking at a couple of pool balls being knocked around. With a bit of physics and mathematical insight, you’d be able to track the ultimate trajectories of these balls.

In theory, you can just keep adding balls (variables), but things pretty soon become mathematically unfeasible. Trying to do the same problem with 20 pool balls takes some massive computing. But if the problem is expanded – to millions of pool balls – things take a distinct pivot. Weaver observes that the problem leaps into disorganized complexity, subject to the methods of statistical mechanics. This allows one to see patterns of movement within the system, while not quite seeing the trajectories of the individual balls.

On the other hand, problems of “organized complexity” might be thought of as somewhere in the middle between “simplicity” and “disorganized complexity.” Jacobs nods to the life sciences as an area rife with these sorts of problems. The challenge of understanding a gene, among other biological puzzles, is neither a simple two-variable problem nor one that needed only rigorous statistical analysis. Instead, it required deep observation and hypothesizing, coupled with rigorous experimentation. Jacobs ends the book by hoping that this third way of thinking about scientific problems can be adapted to thinking about the city – surely a problem of organized complexity if ever there was one. 

So has it happened? How have we started thinking about cities differently since the publication of Jacobs’s book? As noted beforehand, I’ve got a big stack o‘ books ahead of me…

[headwringer]

It may have something to do with working at an architecture firm, not to mention living in one of the great Landmark (note the capitalization!) cities, but I’ve become mildly obsessed with this recent article from New York YIMBY. 

Covering the recent New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission hearings, the article includes extensive discussion - even reproducing some of the hearing remarks verbatim - about the possible landmarks designation of the Pershing Square Building.

Located on the southeast corner of 42nd and Park Avenue, directly across from Grand Central, the Romanesque building is a remnant of the so-called “Terminal City” of office buildings that surrounded the terminal beginning in the early parts of the 20th century. The landscape has changed quite a bit since then - but the land is just as valuable as it ever was.

Given that value and the fact that the area was just rezoned to allow for a much higher FAR, it’s no surprise that the owner of Pershing, SL Green, is fighting tool and nail against any kind of landmarks designation. But even though that might seem to set the stage for the kind of stereotypical developer vs. preservationist brawl that we’ve all come to expect from these sort of situations, there’s a whole lot of nuance to be had in this debate. 

I was sort of drowsing along through this article (which, it should be noted, is a collection of bits and bobs from the hearings), when I got to these striking remarks from Vishaan Chakrabarti, a professor at Columbia, who spoke in the capacity of an advisor to SL Green. I’ve dropped in his comments from the post here in full:

I am Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect, professor and an advisor to SL Green. I am also an ardent advocate of New York City landmarks in general and of the prerogatives of this Commission in particular. As I have stated repeatedly and publicly, this Commission is not only the the guardian of our past, it is the guardian of the future of our past.

It is for this very reason that I implore you today to hold off on the landmarking of 125 Park Avenue. I have carefully reviewed your own detailed designation report and the structural of the building as it relates to the transportation network below it. This has led me to the unavoidable conclusion that landmarking this building, without further study could hobble the southern half of the Grand Central transportation hub in perpetuity, particularly as it relates to Midtown South and the resurgent adaptive reuse of the many historic structures that constitute this burgeoning technology and office hub.

The entrances to the subways at Grand Central south of 42nd Street, to use a technical term, are “facacta .” They are narrow, dank, congested, confusing, and are arguably the worst part of Grand Central. Yet consider what they service: all of Midtown South, a submarket with one of the lowest vacancy rates in the nation, with new technology and finance companies that have reinvigorated a host of historic structures. It is a hot bed for so-called TAMI (Technology, Advertising Media Information) tenants; most notably, for example, Facebook has recently continued its massive expansion in the neighborhood with over 600,000sf. Even my office occupies a massive 2,000sf there!

Vacancy in the submarket has decreased 30% over the last decade, and overall inventory has increased over that same period to 67 mm sf. But most relevant in this setting, this neighborhood is home to over 59 landmark structures and interiors.

Ironically Terminal City never anticipated this growth to the south. Cornelius Vanderbilt controlled land predominantly to the north of Grand Central, along Park Avenue. While the Terminal proudly fronts on 42nd Street, it was never conceptualized to serve an office market to its southern flank, and yet that office market has emerged along Park Avenue to the south, through Madison Square Park, all the way to 23rd Street.

This historic tech-ecosystem is indeed successful, but it is also FRAGILE . These companies can move elsewhere – and if they do, what will be the fate of the many landmarks in the area?

The reality is that Midtown South thrives off the adjacency of Grand Central and its subways, yet that adjacency is nearing a choke point. It would be ludicrous to direct pedestrians from the south to the north side of 42nd Street given the addition of East Side Access, new growth in Midtown East, and an already congested set of entrances to the north.

In studying 125 Park, the reasons the connections to the south are so poor become clear. The foundations for the building, as your designation report points out, were built simultaneously with the subway station, a decade before the building was built. Over 25% of the platforms of the 4,5,6 reside under the building, similar to the manner in which Madison Square Garden sits with its columns directly above Penn Station. The ensuing underground labyrinth makes the southern half of the subway station unnavigable, unsafe, and unappealing. As a representative of Stantec Engineering will describe after me, the only way to fix the situation is to rebuild the southern half of the station and deal with the foundations of this building.

I’m sure advocates will come before you and say that we should not have to choose between transit improvements and landmarks, a point of view to which I am sympathetic.

However, this is a unique situation: even if the government had the public funds to fix the problem at this location, it could not do so without radically changing the structure of 125 Park. This is not, therefore, a debate about whether critical future transit improvements should come from the private sector or the public sector. The improvements are impossible without re-conceiving the building, regardless of who does the re-conceiving. This is not to say that the building does not have its architectural merits. It does, of course, although as the Commission has stated in the past, those merits are secondary to other area landmarks. In fact, what your own designation report makes clear is that the only constant at this site has been change.

Commissioners, New York City is at a challenging point in its history. We have the great good fortune of continued growth, of new industries and entrepreneurs who want to live and work in our city, want to breath life into historic buildings, and want to use mass transit to get to work in a manner that is globally sustainable, with a lower carbon footprint than most growing parts of the world. In an historic, aging city such as ours, new growth brings difficult challenges that you reckon with every day, an act for which we thank you immensely.

But the balance to be struck here is not between growth and preservation at a single site as is so often the argument. The livelihood of an entire historic neighborhood hangs in the balance, the preservation of which requires a holistic view and earnest deliberation. It is for this reason that we ask that a hold be placed on any landmarking action at 125 Park, pending further study by the MTA, the building owners, the civic community, and of course this Commission.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

The balance beam that Chakrabarti walks along is admirable - respecting the intentions of the Commission, while sternly waving a finger at them. And even to someone not familiar with the particulars of the building (I am, and can confirm that the subway section beneath the building is, indeed, “unnavigable, unsafe, and unappealing”), there is clearly a solid case for being wary of securing the unwieldy transportation connections for future generations.

Also, the Landmarks Commission can be super goofy. New York YIMBY helpfully called out this sordid waste of time - “Landmarks Approves Sidewalk Planters At 200 Fifth Avenue, Flatiron District.” Is it as bad as it sounds? 

You betcha. 

Jack Taylor, of the Drive to Protect the Ladies’ Mile District, said that, at no point in the building’s history, has greenery been incorporated into the sidewalk. He noted the sidewalk already has a clock (which is itself an individual landmark, designated in 1981), the subway entrance, a newsstand, a telephone booth, a mailbox, and lamppost (with hanging planter). He pointed to 13 planters already on the other side of the avenue, and the hundred or so more inside the park. He called the new ones a sign of “a veritable epidemic.”

Worth noting, by the way, that those planters were unanimously approved of. Still, though. Why are we talking about this sort of thing?

[headwringer]

Ben Bullington is one of those rare songwriters that gives me an “authenticity” kick in the pants. I've recently found myself quite taken by several of his songs, as covered by friend Darrell Scott, on his album Ten: Songs of Ben Bullington.

I've tackled the whole “authenticity" nightmare head-on before, and I've no real desire to reconsider what I mean by it at this point in broad terms - but in the specific case of Bullington, I mean in it in the sense that here was a man who seemed to write songs because it was an inescapable part of who he was. In the Townes Van Zandt sense of authenticity, you might say - to pick another songwriter who simply seemed to think in song - Bullington's tunes feel so unforced, so natural-sounding, that it's tempting to think of them as unconscious expressions of self rather than ones of intent.

I think "Thanksgiving, 1985" captures that spirit of songwriting exactly. A brilliant, fully-lived snapshot of a teenage boy's life, the song is marked by a deep empathy for its first-person narrator, an empathy that hums just outside the frame of the song, which the narrator can't quite grasp, but knows is there.

[headwringer]

Oh, man, is this loony. 

Of late, I’ve been taken by stories of development woe - in particular, the workings of the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission (more on that elsewhere) - but this story is too good not to bookmark. 

Weirdly, the headlines says it all, but because it’s kind of weird to scan, it’s worth excerpting from a relevant bit:

...A judge [decided to] allow Staten Island Borough President James Oddo to choose street names that signified greed and deception for a new development on the site of the former Mount Manresa Jesuit Retreat, next to the approach for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Now, the builders have filed plans for their sprawling townhouse project on Cupidity Drive, Avidita Place, and Fouberie Lane.

Cupidity and avidity are both synonyms for greed, and fouberie is defined as “deception” or “trickery.” The Savo Brothers, who are developing the project, argued in court papers that the names were “derogatory” and “an abuse of the respondent’s [Oddo’s] discretion.” But state Supreme Court Judge Philip Minardo ruled that Oddo could name the new streets whatever he liked.

It’s worth noting that Oddo is playing the role of the petulant child, scrambling for any and every angle to stymie the plans of the Savo Brothers. 

From a language nerd perspective, it’s also worth noting that it looks as though Oddo or one of his aides got lost in a thesaurus when coming up with alternative street names. Honestly, the names being “derogatory” is kind of a good. I worked for a dictionary and wouldn’t have detected anything amiss with a Fouberie Street. 

Irony is, these names are far better than their suggested predecessors, which included Timber Lane, Lazy Bird Lane, Lamb Run. Yuck.

[headwringer]

American Indian Trickster Tales (and who owns them)

I recently tucked in to a collection of tales about Native American tricksters, American Indian Tricker Tales, selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz. “Trickster,” it turns out, is kind of a relative term; while glowing with beneficence in some tales - as in those dealing with the creation of the world - “trickster” seems a bit weak when applied to some of the lewder dealings of Coyote and others. (There are entire chapters of sex stories, in case you were wondering.)

What struck me more than anything in this collection, though, was the clear-eyed worldview of these tales. The stories, better than I could have imagined, captured what Erdoes and Ortiz mention towards the end of the introduction: 

All Lakota ceremonies end with the words "Mitakuye Oyasin," meaning "All my relatives," which includes every human being on this earth, every animal down to the tiniest insect, and every living plant. [...] Christianity teaches that only humans have souls. Indians believe that even a stone, a tree, or a lake has a soul, a spirit, and there are strict systems of beliefs about the effects of telling certain stories in certain ways or at specific times. 

While it helps that many of the characters are "animals" of one sort or another, the democratic dispersion of spirit makes itself felt in other ways. Take, for instance, this brief tale below about the creation of the world, which opens the collection - the hero of the story might even be the "grain of earth":

Everything was water except a small piece of ground. On this were Eagle and Coyote. Then the turtle swam to them. They sent it to dive for earth at the bottom of the water. The turtle barely succeeded in reaching the bottom and touching it with his foot. When it came up again, all the earth seemed washed out. Coyote looked closely at its nails. At last he found a grain of earth. Then he and the eagle took this and laid it down. From it they made the earth as large as it is. From the earth they also made six men and six women. They sent these out in pairs in different directions and the people separated. After a time the eagle sent Coyote to see what the people were doing. Coyote came back and said: "They are doing something bad. They are eating the earth. One side is already gone." The eagle said: "That is bad. Let us make something for them to eat. Let us send the dove to find something." The dove went out. It found a single grain of meal. The eagle and Coyote put this down on the ground. Then the earth became covered with seeds and fruit. Now they told the people to eat these. When the seeds were dry and ripe the people gathered them. Then the people increased and spread all over. But the water is still under the world. 

The other compelling bit of the introduction pointed out the conception of stories and myths in many Native American cultures:

Even Trickster stories told principally for entertainment must still be told strictly according to tradition. It used to be that in some tribes, stories were told only in winter. Bad things would happen to the person who told them in the summer; he or she might be bitten by a rattlesnake or become sick. In some places, stories could not be told in the daytime because that would make the teller go bald. In some tribes the narrator is forbidden to change or omit a single word in a legend, while others permit free embellishment and modification. Some stories are "owned" by a certain family or even a particular person, and cannot be retold by outsiders. 

In that light, one of the more compelling stories in the collection was "Coyote Giving," which begins: 

Every man should have his own song, and no one else should be allowed to sing it, unless the owner permits it. At the high points in a man's life, when he kills his first deer, when he first makes love to a woman, out of this kind of happening he makes up his own song. He sings his song on great occasions. He might leave it to his son.

There was a man called No-Song. They called him that because this poor man owned no song. At a corn dance or a rain dance he would sit apart from the others. Often he tried to hide or lose himself in a crowd, because people would point him out to each other, saying: "Over there is that pitiful man who has no song." And because of his sad condition, he was too shy to court the young maidens."

When No-Song cooks a delicious venison stew, along stumbles Coyote, who offers to give him a song in exchange for the stew, as long as "the song is wisely used for its purpose - to court a maiden and, on a special occasion, to gladden the hearts of the people." No-Song is suspicious of Coyote's offer, and makes the trade only with the condition that the song not be a "Coyote gift" - in other words, that Coyote doesn't take back the gift. What happens next should be pretty obvious.

[headwringer]

Word Wrangler - Aug. 15, 2016

A few words that caught my eye in the past two weeks, with interest and sources noted: 

oleaginous (adj.)

1. Rich in, covered with, or producing oil; oily or greasy. 2. Exaggeratedly and distastefully complimentary; obsequious, h/t Oxford Dictionaries. 

As in, apparently, what Jonah Hill is not, per a profile in the New York Times Magazine last week:

Most famous people have a thin oleaginous layer of social grace that tops a bottomless well of impatience to get their press duties over with, but Hill seemed to be in no particular hurry to do anything, except lose at Ping-Pong.

kneecap (v.)

1. Shoot (someone) in the knee or leg as a form of punishment

Well, yeah, makes sense – just hadn’t seen it in verb form. Appeared in a great Buzzfeed piece about harassment and Twitter, “A Honeypot for Assholes.”

As an aside, worth noting that I was pretty sure that “honeypot” of the title (and the quote it’s borrowed from) was referring to a “source of great pleasure or reward” (OED), but I realize now that it may actually be a sort of reference to the computing slang that refers to a “decoy, typically in the form of a website, intended to attract attacks from spammers, hackers, etc., in order to thwart or gather information about them.” Hackers, computer enthusiasts, and Mr. Robot fans may already be familiar with this sense of the word. ...Except, as far as I can tell, Twitter is making no moves to “thwart” the trolls that it’s attracting.

odontalgia (n.)

As Police Chief Jim Hopper in the TV show Stranger Things observes, this is, indeed, a “fancy word for a toothache.” For those who don’t remember (or haven’t yet enjoyed Netflix’s ’80s E.T./Goonies throwback), Chief Hopper mentions it as the word his daughter once spelled correctly to win a spelling bee. The -algia combining form, from the Greek, can roughly be understood as “pain (of).” (The combining form “odonto-” means “tooth.”)

Fun little note: the word is fairly similar to nostalgia, a feeling that Hopper is certainly party to in that moment, originally meant “homesickness.” The word “nostos” means “return home” or “homecoming.”