meek adjustments

Marshall Rosenberg, on Driving

2011-12-21T22:32:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I reflected on how I might apply the principles of nonviolent communication in order to communicate with motorists who frightened me. I wrote a blog post after reading a portion of his most well-known text, "Nonviolent Communication." Tonight, I was pleasantly surprised and delighted to find a short discussion of driving in one of the later chapters of the book. (He discusses driving in the excerpt, but the experience described herein has much to teach all of us who travel, whether we choose to use cars, bikes, transit services, or our feet. I know I relate strongly to it, and find its lesson hopeful). Those of us who plan and design transportation systems could provide a much better experience for everybody, I think, if we considered outsider views like this. (Tom Vanderbilt, you're my original inspiration for saying this, and I think your work is exemplary in this regard! Further, the observations below remind me of the early chapters of your book Traffic, where you describe the sociological space of the street as one in which it is often very difficult to communicate, and where we're alienated from understanding other drivers as people.) More importantly, all of us who bike and drive and walk the streets can feel much more peaceful if we take Mr. Rosenberg's advice. Without further ado, here's what Marshall has to say:

For years my work involved traveling by car across the country, and I was worn and frazzled by the violence-provoking messages racing through my brain. Everybody who wasn't driving by my standards was an archenemy, a villain. Thoughts spewed through y head: "What the hell is the matter with that guy!? Doesn't he even watch where he's driving?" In this state of mind, all I wanted was to punish the other driver, and since I couldn't do that, the anger lodged in my body and exacted its toll.

Eventually I learned to translate my judgments into feelings and needs and to give myself empathy, "Boy, I am petrified when people drive like that; I really wish they would see the danger in what they are doing!" Whew! I was amazed how less stressful a situation I could create for myself by simply becoming aware of what I was feeling and needing rather than blaming others.

Later I decided to practice empathy toward other drivers and was rewarded with a gratifying first experience. I was stuck behind a car going far below the speed limit that was slowing down at every intersection. Fuming and grumbling, "That's no way to drive, " I noticed the stress I was causing myself and shifted my thinking instead to what the driver might be feeling and needing. I sensed that the person was lost, feeling confused, and wishing for some patience from those of us following. When the road widened enough for me to pass, I saw that the driver was a woman who looked to be in her 80's who wore an expression of terror on her face. I was pleased that my attempt at empathy had kept me from honking the horn or engaging in my customary tactics of displaying displeasure toward people whose driving bothered me.

(p.174-175)
(but read the whole book!)

a poem I wrote in 2007

2011-09-18T18:16:00.001-07:00

which is grief?

empty the emptiest room.
room enough for what began as a line and a thought
and is now forgot.

what breathed? and in breathing moved, and in moving championed?

something pre-motor forgot, and something intentional failed.

we want to say what this is about, we want to say it's about time
and take the pot off the fire.

that which we negate, we affirm, which
which?
which?
which?

this poem is about an iranian lynching.
mentioned offhand on public radio.
two boys hung from nooses let their necks release

their first love affair a public hanging
noises continued, but none were heard.

this poem is about your ex-lover
and how the emptiest room
is still filled with aromatic shards of furniture

I just endorsed this!

2011-04-22T16:50:00.000-07:00

And you should too. Let's get SCAG to beef up its funding for bicycles and pedestrians.

From the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, a disturbing statistic about the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) for Southern California:

"In the last adopted RTP in 2008, an over $530 billion dollar plan, less than 0.5 percent of funding was dedicated towards bicycle and pedestrian projects, yet 12 percent of all trips in the region are already made walking and bicycling."

Join me in endorsing this platform which seeks to rectify the weak funding levels for biking and walking.

Wilshire BRT Scorecard

2010-12-08T00:21:00.000-08:00

The past week has seen a flurry of activity around the Wilshire BRT. LA Streetsblog has done a great job of covering it all as it has unfolded. The Condo Canyon private traffic study rapidly upgraded, with the help of some key political players, from a shady contract study to a directive that Metro staff rethink that section of Wilshire. Richard Katz, Zev Yaroslavsky, and Paul Koretz all made statements to the press that the Condo Canyon section should come out. Almost immediately, Metro asked the FTA to approve a project revision, and within days the FTA said yes. I personally found this very disheartening; I had scrambled to put together a letter to the FTA which was signed by a practically unprecedented range of transportation activists. Before we could even send the letter, the FTA had granted Metro's request to change the project. You can still read the letter, which is in .pdf form at this Streetsblog article, which is a pretty good overview of the whole drama.

Things were looking down for the BRT, when Bruins for Transit took to the streets and collected 135 petitions supporting the original BRT project. They got signatures, email addresses, and zip codes from bus riders living in every single one of the five county supervisorial districts. Via twitter, facebook, this blog, and the LA Subway Blog, at least 47 emails have been sent to Metro Board members in support of the original project. The Bus Rider's Union got moving; theywill be coming out in force on Thursday to keep the bus-only lanes intact.

Today started with some bad news: the Brentwood "Community Council" saw that loud rich neighborhoods can get out of bus-only lanes and went ahead and made their own request to be excluded from the project. Hmm, see where this is going?

The Brentwood Community Council should check their math, though. Or maybe just their notion of fairness. They complain that the BRT will "take away 1/3 of the roadway from cars." Well, they should remember that 80,000 motorists use Wilshire everyday, and so do over 80,000 bus riders. So if we're going to divvy up the roadway fairly, buses should really get half. This project gives buses less than that, at only 1/3 through this section. And just to be nice, it still lets turning cars use the bus only lanes. Oh, and the bus-only lanes only last for peak hours, 7-9 AM and 4-7 PM. So we're actually only dedicating (1/3)*(5/24) = 7% of the space to buses. On a corridor where bus riders are half of the travelers.

On the other hand, today ended with some good news: the Bicycle Advisory Committee of the City of LA moved to support the original project.

To summarize, the scorecard on the Wilshire BRT is now:

Team Keep the BRT Whole: 47 emails, 135 street petitions, and one Citizen's Advisory Committee

Team Destroy the BRT One Rich Neighborhood at a Time: 2 Neighborhood Councils, 1 Rabbi, 1 County Supervisor (Yaroslavsky), 1 City Councilmember (Koretz) 1 Other Metro Board Member (Richard Katz), 1 FTA Regional Rep Leslie Rogers

Team Undecided: 1 Mayor, 4 County Supervisors, 1 Metro CEO, 4 Metro Board Representatives from Duarte, Glendale, Santa Monica, and Lakewood, 14 City Council Members

We only have until Thursday morning so the time to start your pro-BRT engine is now. Send a letter if you haven't yet. If you already sent a letter, call your county supervisor and pressure them to take a stand on this. (Let us know how your phone calls go in the comments :)

Ready, set gooooo!

Letter writing tools:
http://www.lasubwayblog.com/2010/12/email-metro-board-of-directors-to.html (QUICK AND EASY)
http://meekadjustments.blogspot.com/2010/12/write-mayor-v-and-your-county.html

Write Mayor V and your County Supervisor to Protect the Wilshire BRT Project!

2010-12-01T23:50:00.000-08:00

Ahh, bus-only lanes. In a city where the vast majority of the public transportation network runs on buses, they are one of the easiest and cheapest ways to improve public transit. With bus-only lanes, transit doesn't have to compete with peak-hour congestion. Time tables are actually reliable, and travel times are a lot shorter. This all seems downright fair, considering that during rush hour, buses are packed with upwards of 50 people, while cars usually contain... one person. Our streets should move people, not just cars, is my view, and bus-only lanes get us closer to that. Oh, and bus-only lanes may not be as sexy as subways, but they sure are cost-effective: a bus-only lane can achieve rail-like speeds for about 1/300th of the cost. In this era of budget crises, that sounds like a win to me.

Lucky for us. Bus-only lanes are coming to Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles! And are set to open by 2013! But there's one catch. If your neighborhood is rich and noisy enough, it can throw a wrench in the whole bus-only lane idea. Back when the bus-only lane project was being developed, Beverly Hills refused to participate. So Metro wrote up a proposal that excluded their city. This proposal was successful and won a whole bunch of federal money. Now, the wealthy neighborhood just West of the Country Club, an area known as Condo Canyon because of its many high-rise buildings, is refusing to do its part to move buses faster. This might jeopardize said federal money, and it will definitely slow down the buses. What's saddest about this whole scenario is that Supervisor Yaroslavsky is actually siding with this small group of noisy NIMBYs, instead of protecting the project for the rest of his constituents. It's clumsy politics at best, and clientelism at worst. Who knows if we'll ever be able to build out a true network of bus-only lanes in Los Angeles if our politicians continue to cave like this.

Lucky for us. A coalition of transportation activists is roaring back to oppose this exemption. LACBC posted this earlier today, and Bruins for Transit was on the streets tonight talking to 720 riders. As a co-founder of the UCLA Bicycle Coalition and a car-free commuter, I'm posting here to ask you to do your part to protect this important demonstration project. If you can, attend the Metro Board meeting on Dec. 9.

Whether or not you can attend the meeting, definitely send an email to your representative asking them to insist on a complete project and reject Yaroslavsky's NIMBY handout. Here are the steps to doing so:

1. Open a new email with a hard-hitting subject: Preserve the Wilshire Bus-Only Lanes! Protect Regional Car-Free Mobility!
2. If you live in the City of LA, put Mayor V in the to: mayor@lacity.org.
3. Go to this website and figure out what County Supervisorial District you live in (unless you're some kind of political savant / activist who already knows). http://www.lavote.net/onlinedistrictmapapp/
4. Paste the appropriate supervisor email

District 1, Gloria Molina, molina@bos.lacounty.gov
District 2, Mark Ridley-Thomas, markridley-thomas@bos.lacounty.gov
District 3, Zev Yaroslavsky, zev@bos.lacounty.gov
District 4, Don Knabe - he doesn't have an email posted on his website, which is strange and opaque, but umm, you can email his chief of staff at cpedersen@lacbos.org, or make your case here http://knabe.com/ask-don/ . That link also has a number you can call.
District 5, Michael Antonovich, fifthdistrict@lacbos.org

4. Copy the text below into the body, adding your name and zip code and any personalized comments you want to make.
5. cc: WilshireBRT@gmail.com so that we can let you know how your politician voted.
6. Tweet it, blog it, facebook it, pass it on to someone at your office or someone in the street. Let's rally.

Dear Mayor Villaraigosa (if applicable) and [your supervisor here],

As a resident of County Supervisorial District [x] [and a citizen of the city of Los Angeles], I write to urge you to approve the Wilshire Bus Rapid Transit Lane (BRT) on Dec. 9th. Creating a bus-only lane between Centinela Ave. and MacArthur Park during peak hours can save up to 17 minutes one-way, or over half an hour round-trip.

The Wilshire BRT project will provide LA residents with a travel alternative more comparable with the car and attract more riders, improving air quality for the region. On weekdays, approximately 80,000 people board the bus along Wilshire, whereas an average of 80,000 cars drive along Wilshire. As the region grows, we need to find solutions like the Wilshire BRT that move people, not cars.

While we look forward to the Westside Subway Extension, we hope to see near-term projects like the Wilshire BRT that will open in 2 years, as we await the subway opening in 25 years. Improving bus service and reliability will also be important for future subway riders who also need to make bus transfers to reach their destinations.

More specifically, I am writing to ask you to protect your constituents and reject the recent proposal by Supervisor Yaroslavsky to exclude a select neighborhood in his district from participating in the project. Removing the bus-only lanes between Comstock Ave. and Veteran Ave in Westwood not only risks federal funding, it threatens the integrity of the project altogether. Buses will not achieve the fast times that have been promised if this exemption is allowed to go forward. We must not compromise the success of the project simply because a wealthy neighborhood dislikes it. Help us move toward a future where Los Angeles's streets move people, not just cars. Do not allow any more holes to be poked in this crucial demonstration project.

The Wilshire BRT will not only bring tremendous benefits to the commutes of the thousands of people that ride the 720 [with me - if applicable] every day, it will also improve the air quality of the region by providing an alternative transportation choice. It will also improve riding conditions for bicyclists, who will be allowed to share the repaved and widened curb lane.

Please approve the Wilshire BRT, and adopt Alternative A, Truncated Project Without Jut-Out Removal as the Preferred Alternative, which includes the Westwood portion of Comstock to Veteran Ave.
The vote on Dec. 9 is about more than just the Wilshire bus-only lanes. It's about fairness, and it's about priorities. Should a wealthy neighborhood that benefits from the regional economy not have to contribute to regional mobility? Should our streets prioritize cars at the expense of public transportation's speed and quality? I'll be watching this vote closely, and I hope you take the stance that moves us forward into a cleaner, greener, and more mobile future.

[your name here]

[your address or zip code]

Google Biking Directions is Very Responsive

2010-11-13T22:54:00.000-08:00

With this kind of rapid response to user suggestions I bet Google's "Bike There" routes end up being pretty good in most cities. Google impresses me. I sent them a suggestion and they got back to me within the week saying they would check it out. They then updated Google Maps the next week and sent me the following email. (This was in June 2010, by the way).

Hi Herbie,

Google Maps has been updated to correct the problem you reported. You can see the update here, and if you still see a problem, please tell us more about the issue: Link to view and/or reopen issue

Report history
Problem ID: A1CC-89C3-E0EF-7B06

Your report:The directions suggest a route that is much more unsuitable for biking than an alternative route just near the one google suggests. I am not sure if this is out of the scope of your capabilities, but average daily traffic on Olympic (the road suggested) is much, much more than ADT on 9th, which is just North of Olympic. If I were giving bicycling directions I would suggest 9th.
--
Thanks for your help,
The Google Maps team

Do folks out there know of other crowdsourced bike route databases? I'm intrigued by the idea, since lots of bicyclists I know choose their routes based on word-of-mouth. The complexity of the route data seems to resist an internet platform: for example, I'll get word that a certain street is good to ride on, except during rush hour; or vice versa - some streets aren't bad to ride on during rush hour because they are so congested; or I'll get word that I should avoid a street at night, etc. Nonetheless, I think crowdsourcing has been both effective and self-reinforcing in Google's case. I've noticed an uptick on Carmelita Ave. (near UCLA, parallel to the much crappier Santa Monica Blvd through Beverly Hills) in particular, and at least one rider told me she learned about the street through Google biking directions. But Google's routes are not openly crowdsourced, they're controlled internally. When I have time I want to learn more about true and open crowdsourced bike route programs and how they perform. Thoughts?

Also, how do folks out there think Google's "Bike There" option is performing in LA? What are places where Google really gets it right? Or wrong?

Hmm... and: Can we tell what Google's routing criteria are based on the routes it suggests? If they have some magic routing algorithm for bicycling I most definitely want to see it. My guess is that it (1) routes on city-designated bike lanes, paths, and routes, whenever possible, and has some tolerance for routing out-of-the-way (i.e. away from the shortest distance path) to get on them. It has some trade off between hilliness and directness built in. It knows major boulevards and avoids them. What else?

LA Bike Plan: Pretty Unambitious Compared to Tacoma, WA and Des Moines, Iowa

2010-11-07T23:31:00.000-08:00

Oh, the rewards of reading all the way to the end of reports without disregarding their appendices and addendums. I just found this fascinating figure in Alta Planning+Design's "Seamless Travel" study. (If you're wondering, the study concerns extensive bike survey and count data collected in San Diego County, and efforts to model bicycling and walking demand based on the data). Anyway, the figure:

(You have to click to enlarge because I couldn't get a large version to display properly with the way the blog is formatted. Source is here, final report, p. AD-1).

It's painful to hear the depressing story this figure tells about where Los Angeles is and where it is going. First of all we are second to Des Moines, Iowa (?) in our ratio of bikeways to roads. And - wow - our ratio is three times smaller than San Diego's, and San Diego is not what I would consider a bike-topia. Worst of all, of the six cities in the figure, Los Angeles has the lowest aspirations of any of them. Our planned bikeway mileage is only 9% of our total roadway mileage.

I'm not sure where the 655 mile number comes from, though I'm sure Joe Linton could answer that question immediately. As most people know, Alta Planning+Design wrote the first drafts of the LA Bike Plan, so it's possible the researchers who wrote this study just called up the Alta staff in the LA Office and asked them for a number.

In any case, the LA Planning Department has now taken over the Bike Plan and they are now touting a new number: 1,633. This number is HUGE on the cover of the Bike Plan, and the implicit message is that 1,633 is a great aspiration, one that sums up the plan's commitment to making Los Angeles a more bikeable city. Now even if we put aside the many ways in which this number inflates the Bike Plan's actual commitments, i.e. the long story regarding how many of the miles are "proposed/infeasible/whatever" and may or may not require an EIR, even if we put all that aside, this six-city comparison illustrates that the 1,633 isn't all that ambitious. If we were to update this figure to replace 655 with 1,633, we'd get a 23% roadway coverage goal, which is still lower than Portland's. But that would be inaccurate and misleading since the 1,633 includes bike paths and routes, and those aren't included in this comparison. The true coverage calculation should only include bike lanes and bike boulevards. I'll exclude the "potential/infeasible/future study" bike lanes since the plan offers up excuse after excuse not to do them. This gives 66 miles of planned bike lanes and 642 miles of bike boulevards (specious! but I'll go with it). This total 708 miles of planned on-street bikeway network corresponds to a proposed completion factor of just under 10%. Even if we include the "speculative" bike lanes we only get a coverage of 16.8%.

Let me say that plainly. Even if the new Bike Plan is passed and we consider all the Bike Boulevards and Bike Lanes as legitimate planned mileage (which no one who has been watching the planning process closely would ever do), LA has set lower bikeway mileage goals than Des Moines, Iowa or Tacoma, Washington.

Now, to be fair, I have no idea what the Bike Plans in any of these other cities look like. For all I know their Bike Plans are also filled with speculative and "infeasible" mileage. We also don't know how LA would compare in a longer list of cities.

Anyway, I think this is a thought provoking figure. I would like to see a more extensive version of this figure, comparing roadway coverage in lots of cities. How do San Francisco, Boulder, New York, or Chicago measure up in terms of proposed completion factor? This is a nice metric.

I hypothesize that the year in which the city's Bike Plan was updated would be a significant factor determining the size of a city's ratio of proposed bikeways to roads. Bike Plans seem to have gotten more and more ambitious in recent history.

Still, perhaps all the back-and-forth over the categories of bike lane mileage has obscured the larger point that relative to other cities, this plan designates a very low percentage of the roads in Los Angeles as planned bikeways.

LA Bike Plan: Hearing before the Planning Commission

2010-11-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

[wow, I haven't posted here in a long time. There is so much to say about Canada and school and my new home in Angelino Heights but I've just been too sleep-deprived to say it. I'm passing on some comments I'll be making to the city, which I already made the effort to type up, in this post.]

The LA Bike Plan goes up before the Planning Commission tomorrow, and I'm writing to post what I plan on saying to the Commissioners. Some people want to fail the plan. I am not really on board with this. I got into a long back-and-forth with Joe Linton over the details, but what it really comes down to is my lack of faith in the power of Plans to solve bicyclists' problems. Like Joe himself said on Streetsblog today, I believe that most of what gets done or not done is a matter of politics and organizing, not plans. Plans aren't laws. They aren't enforceable. If cities want to totally ignore them, as far as I understand, they can. The accountability processes for planning are thus indirect and weak. If you don't like the content of a given plan or its execution, your recourse is to complain to elected officials who are actually accountable to the public. Otherwise, cities can disregard plans all they want.

I say this because a lot of the criticism of the LA Bike Plan has been about how it is "The Plan with no Teeth" and how there are a lot of lines on it but nobody believes they will actually become real bike facilities. Based on what I said above, I don't think that is surprising. No plan really has teeth. As a consequence I've shifted my thinking away from the notion that this Plan should address all the problems that bicyclists can face in LA. After three years of adding routes and tweaking policies and increasing the specificity of the plan, I now want to pass it and get on with the business of building quality bike infrastructure. We can use the specifics in the Plan to hold agencies accountable, and if that is not strong enough, we can use laws and elections, which are stronger than plans. I think this planning process has been a drain on advocates' energy and time and I want it to end. I think our time would be better spent using the political process, elections, and laws.

All that said, I am nonetheless joining forces with other advocates in demanding some answers and revisions to the Plan. For what I hope is the last time. I want to share these here.

------What I plan on saying tomorrow. Hope it will fit in the time limit!---------------

Hello. I’m Herbie, I’m an LACBC member. I live in Angelino Heights. I co-founded the UCLA Bike Coalition which submitted extensive comments on this Bike Plan almost a year ago. I’ve come here to ask some questions that get at the underlying problems that have plagued this plan.

I am saddened that I have to ask these questions because there is a lot in this plan that is good. The web of bikeways criss-crossing the city on the maps - that is good. The idea of bicycle-friendly streets with very little car traffic that novices can feel safe on - that is good. So many of the policies are good, and there are pages and pages of them. I especially support revising the mitigation requirements for development so that trip mitigation funds can fund bikeways instead of road widening (p. 81 of ch. 4). [editor’s note: It’s a reform I’ve called for ever since I heard about how much mitigation money NBC Universal would have to shell out to widen freeways and arterials. It’s nonsense to use “trip generation” formulas that assume a certain percentage of people will drive with no recognition of how infrastructure influences those decisions. People and development don't create the need for road widening. Departments of Transportation do.]

But there are disturbing questions that remain and that undercut bicyclists’ faith in this plan. I come here to ask these questions in earnest and I hope that Planning will answer them immediately at this hearing.

(1) Why is it so important to segregate the bike lane mileage into categories? What is at stake in making this distinction? Clearly, someone in the city cares about this, but who, and why? The Plan has preserved these categories after two years of bicyclists rejecting them. In each revision, the categories are tweaked to hide them further away in ever more opaque language. Planning needs to explain why preserving these categories is more important than responding to bicyclists’ repeated feedback.

(2) Another question for Claire. Can you clarify whether the Plan recommends EIRs for all of the “potential”/”infeasible” lanes? The language in the plan is unclear. The Plan’s MND says that “bicycle lanes currently identified as potential will require additional analysis (particularly impacts on traffic) pursuant to CEQA” (24). Since many people in this room suspect that Alta’s initial analysis showed that many of the lanes in those categories could actually be done Today without any CEQA review, bicyclists will not accept those lanes being written off as second-rate “potential” lanes. The truth is that these lanes could be striped today with no studies, so why is the Plan giving the impression that they somehow need to be studied? They were already studied in the beginning of this process by Alta and they were found to be immediately possible.

(3) Finally, where are the technical analysis documents from Alta? Bicyclists have filed Freedom of Information Act requests for these documents and we have not been shown them. It is unacceptable for an agency that serves the public interest to withhold information from the public. These technical analyses are neither confidential nor sensitive; they simply describe the car traffic volume and road widths on a given street and then calculate the feasibility of putting bike lanes on that street. This document is sitting in one of your (Planning’s) desks right now and you need to come forward with it. Withholding a technical document from the public is a scandal when your agency exists to serve the public good.

If these three questions can be answered, and if bicyclists’ concerns about incorporating equity measures and adequately defining bicycle boulevards can be met, then I can wholeheartedly support this plan.

I hope Claire (Bowin) and Jane (Choi) answer these questions immediately so that all of us can celebrate the really good parts of the plan, which are the many miles of planned bikeways, the pro-bike policies and the detailed five-year implementation schedule. Planning has worked with advocates on many of these items. I want to see that work move forward.

I think I speak for many bicyclists when I say that we are looking forward to keeping the city on track with that implementation schedule and seeing a really different biking environment in Los Angeles within the next five years.

Tattoos on the Heart: Stories of Hope and Compassion, by Gregory Boyle

2010-06-10T23:49:00.000-07:00

I should mention, first, for the benefit of anyone who doesn't live in Los Angeles or follow closely the arena of gang prevention, that Father Greg Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries, the most well-known gang prevention program in the gang capital of the United States, Los Angeles. The organization's slogan is "Nothing stops a bullet like a job," and Father Boyle (or "G" as he is known) has made it his vocation to hire convicted felons straight out of jail and employ them in various Homeboy enterprises. They run a bakery, a screen-printing factory, they wash cars, they sell merchandise.

Tattoos on the Heart compiles the many extraordinary stories Father Boyle tells in casual sermon format, the stories that both sprinkle and structure his public speaking. He recently received an honorary degree at Occidental College's graduation, and his central message when he spoke was that we must create kinship. He said, "We are sent to create a community of kinship such that God might recognize it." That actually followed a joke that went like:

The homies, they teach me things. For example, they're teaching me how to text. I was driving a homie home, and he got a text on his phone. "What does it say?" I asked him. He said, its Louie. He says they've got him locked up in County holding facilities. He says they're charging him with being the ugliest vato in the universe. He says, "You need to come down here and show them they've got the wrong guy!"

Father Greg let everybody at the Oxy commencement laugh. Then he said that right after this went down he appreciated that these two guys used to be members of rival gangs. They used to shoot bullets at each other. Now they shoot texts at each other. He ended by repeating what he had opened with. We are sent to create a community of kinship, such that God might recognize it.

I don't know who God is, but this statement really stayed with me. It put all the infighting and disagreements in the bike advocacy community in LA in perspective. If rival gangs can get together and bake bread and hold down jobs, and even rib each other via text, surely LA's bike activists can put any hurts behind and aim for a higher purpose.

This is one of the only books I read during my first year of graduate school. I found time to read it because it forced me to - I couldn't put it down. Like an episode of This American Life, the book wanders all over the globe, from wacky circumstances to the improbable and seemingly miraculous. Fr. Boyle connects it all, somehow, makes it all attest to the immense possibility in this world, to our essential connectedness, our ineffable grace, our clumsy humanity... to deeper lessons than I can pretend to regurgitate in this review. I will need to revisit this book many times.

All of us, especially those of us who are trying to fire up social movements or make change, need spiritual leaders. I trust Father Boyle (a fact all the more amazing because of my distrust of religious institutions, especially patriarchal, homophobic ones). I trust him because of his overflowing armful of stories and the way his narration focuses on the actions of all the people around him, in all their shapes and sizes and backgrounds and quirks and graces and flaws. We must understand this kind of principled humility if we are to do any worthwhile work in this world.

Addendum: Homeboy has been hit hard by the recession. They really need your money, I mean, they really need it or they can't hire any more homies! They just laid off almost all of their staff, leaving only their core outlets, like the bakery and the printshop. Learn more about them and donate here.
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Confusing Survey Question

2010-05-17T18:25:00.000-07:00

What would you answer if confronted with this question, as I was today in the 2010 UCLA Graduate and Professional Student Survey:

Which of the following housing situations best describes your CURRENT residence?
on-campus
University owned student housing (e.g. Weyburn Terrace)
Off-Campus, University owned student housing (e.g. University Apartments South)
Off-Campus, non-University owned housing - within walking or biking distance
Off-Campus, non-University owned housing - within driving distance

This question both dumb-founded and offended me, sufficiently so that I wrote the Student Affairs Information and Research Office an email:

I took the UCLA Student Affairs Graduate and Professional Student Survey today, and as a bicyclist and an urban planner in-training, I was concerned by the phrasing of question 30.

I find the distinction between "walking or biking distance" and "driving distance" a problematic one. I personally did not know which of these to choose. I live 12 miles away, which many people would consider NOT a bikable distance in Los Angeles. However, in Portland it's a bikable distance to many, and in Copenhagen plenty of people bike that far to work and school. I bike it, too, and of course I consider my home within biking distance of UCLA, but does that mean I should select "within biking distance"? Or would that be incorrectly interpreted by people who compile the survey?

Lumping walking and biking distance together as one thing is additionally confusing, because obviously much further distances can be covered much faster on a bike.

Finally, your categorization excludes the possibility that someone could live outside of "walking or biking distance" but still take transit. It's insulting to the thousands of UCLA graduate students that take transit daily from many far-flung areas of LA County to tell them that they live "within driving distance."

I hope in future surveys you can reconsider how you phrase this question. Depending on what you are using the survey results for, it might serve you to ask about travel time instead of mode.

Thank you for your consideration.

Kristen "Herbie" Huff
M.A. Candidate, Urban Planning 2011
UCLA School of Public Affairs

After I sent this email, I realized that one of the prizes for taking the survey is a Parking Permit! Of course, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I disapproved of that, so I had to add this PS.

P.S. I should probably add that I don't think a parking permit is a good prize to incentivize people to take the survey, as the entire UCLA community is struggling with how to accommodate the immense costs associated with car traffic and parking, and UCLA Transportation Services is actively encouraging people to avail themselves of other options to get to campus, and parking lots are expensive to build and maintain; and air pollution and traffic fatalities afflict us all, and driving makes us fat and unhappy...

I mean this critique in the friendliest, most constructive way, but I still had to call you all on that. Plain cash will do better, I think.

I should have written that they could also give away bikes!

Transit riders, bicyclists, and pedestrians4LYFE out there, what would you have answered if confronted with such a question?

Free Parking, like Freedom, Isn't Really Free

2010-02-03T18:44:00.000-08:00

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The benefits of market-priced parking are not intuitive. Sigh... (click this link, for example, and read all the ranting comments). As Streetsblog LA notes, the press has been all over State Senator Lowenthal for proposing reforms to the way we currently provide parking.

Streetsblog encourages us to respond and back Senator Lowenthal up. In an attempt to do that, here's a quick and dirty guide to why YOU should support market-priced parking. I promise to link this post in comments on all the misleading media articles. Streetsblog, you challenged; I responded!

THE HIGH COST OF FREE PARKING; QUICK AND DIRTY VERSION

Let's think about it this way: would we all be better off if most food was free? No, we'd waste a lot of time waiting in lines, and once we got the food, we'd eat too much. That's a pretty good analogy for what we do with parking now.

Here's an example that shows how providing ample free parking hurts us in unexpected ways. The City of LA requires new housing developments to provide a certain number of parking spaces - more than one parking space per unit of housing. That means that when I rent my apartment, the price includes the extra cost that was added because the developer had to dig underground and build an underground parking complex. My rent pays for parking; as a tenant, I pay for it whether I want it or not. If we removed minimum parking requirements like this (which is exactly what Lowenthal's bill encourages cities to do), then developers could provide the amount of parking they think the market wants. They could provide the amount of parking they think they can sell. This creates possibilities. You could rent an apartment with parking as usual. Or you could pay less and not have a reserved parking spot in your building. You could choose how much you are willing to pay for housing independently of how much you are willing to pay for parking.

Want to know a developer who has long lobbied for the removal of minimum parking requirements? Habitat for Humanity. This is because the kind of low-income housing that Habitat builds is simply incompatible with high occupancy, expensive underground parking lots. Habitat's tenants don't need that kind of capacity, and more importantly they can't pay for it. But cities require Habitat to build it. This basically kills a lot of low-income housing projects.

As Donald Shoup always says, parking isn't free. We all pay for it, but the costs are hidden. We pay for that land through higher costs that get bundled into housing, food, and basically everything we buy. The key insight of capitalist markets is that we can provide efficient amounts of a good by allowing supply and demand to reach equilibrium. This equilibrium tells us how much of something people want and how much they are willing to pay for it. It is very difficult for some central agency (like a city government) to replicate this process. Because city governments don't have good tools for estimating how much parking to provide, they basically always overprovide it. Thus, we see Walmarts swimming in seas of parking that will only be full on Black Friday.

Next time you park in a free parking lot, in, say your apartment complex or at a grocery store or a movie theatre, check out how many of the spaces are full. I bet most of them are empty (like the Food-for-Less parking lot shown above, captured in a moment in time courtesy of Google maps). That's because most of these lots are required by city zoning laws, and city planners overestimated. We should allocate parking like we do any other important good: with a market. (Which is not to skate over the fact that markets have failures, but that's another post, and I think a market in parking would work just as well as the markets we have for housing and land).

On a fairness tip, as somebody who rarely parks, I don't really want my tax (and food, and housing, and etc) dollars going towards other people's parking.

A good transportation system should provide choice. We should be able to comfortably use any number of modes (driving, walking, biking, transit) at a variety of prices for a variety of services (pay more to go faster and more comfortably, or choose to economize). One way to achieve more balance in our transportation system is to get the prices right. Right now, we provide (very expensive) roads for free and (very expensive) parking spaces for free. As a result, we get a lot of driving. People are only responding rationally to the fact that it is cheap and convenient to drive. Those of us who want to encourage biking and walking must realize that when we price driving according to its true cost, not only in terms of road and parking usage but also in terms of social costs like air pollution and congestion, we give people incentives to switch modes. Parking reform is good for bikers; it's good for the air; it's good for the environment; it reduces congestion!

But if none of that convinces you, parking reform is also good for the people who park. Sick of situations where you have to drive around and around the block, looking for a space? Well, all those spaces are filled because they are free. (Remember the restaurant example earlier? When you cruise around, you're waiting in the analogous line). When we correctly price parking, there are always a few spaces open, so you never have to struggle to find a spot. The right price is the one that keeps a few spaces open while using most of the parking capacity. No more, no less.

(Credit to Donald Shoup for ALL of the ideas herein).

Now get out there and support parking reform!

A Mixed-Media Multiple-Scope Retrospective (1/3)

2010-01-03T23:02:00.000-08:00

In the nostalgic spirit that seems to envelop everybody at the turn of a new year, and a new decade, I've embarked on three parallel retrospectives, each looking back at a successively longer period. I have a sudden intense need to recover lost memories, probably prompted by seeing some old, old friends and a strange (and completely inexplicable in this forum) voyeuristic obsession with high school love.

The retrospective work that is satisfying this need is:

(1) a data-centric retrospective of my fall quarter bicycle riding

(2) a selection of representative quotes from a year's worth of morning pages

(3) a CD-length mix of the decade's best songs

I wanted to post them all tonight, before winter vacation ends, but (2) entails reading over 1,000 handwritten pages and is taking way too long. So I'll start with (1) tonight, (3) tomorrow, and hopefully (2) within the next few days. By the way, the picture is of me (pretending to play the bass) about a decade ago, in early 2001.

P.P.S. Before I start, did you know that the decade's "top" song according to pop radio charts was... Usher's "Yeah"? If you listen to pop radio, that is probabilistically the song you spent the most time listening to this decade. I was about to muse on how we all feel about having spent possibly hours of our lives hearing Li'l John say, "...OhKay!" but then I realized that anyone who listens to pop radio has found a way to accept - no, enjoy relentless repetition, and so would probably be unmoved by such a contemplation.

----------

Speaking of enjoying relentless repetition...

In the fall quarter of 2009 I bicycled 825 miles, approximately the distance from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is actually much less than the total I expected! My weekly average was 68.8 miles. Usually I biked to campus and back (24 miles round trip) on Monday and Wednesday, and on Tuesdays I bussed to campus and biked back. I did lots of little one miles rides down into Westwood Village and then back up to the School of Public Affairs at the northeast tip of UCLA campus. The last two weeks I did very little biking due to being sleep deprived and stressed (10 and 32 weekly miles, respectively). My highest mileage actually took place the first week, when I was biking all over town for the first-ever Los Angeles Bike Count and was totally enthusiastic about biking to campus under any conditions.

I only rode through Tuesday morning rush-hour once, and took the bus every other time. The day I tried it, I breathed a lot of cold exhaust and was surprised to find that I traveled basically the same speed as the cars on Olympic, at least through the congested sections in Beverly Hills. But I got honked at. Rush hour (and opening the accursed peak-hour lanes on Olympic) reliably makes motorists act a little more crazy, and I chose not to deal with it.

My daily high was 32 miles, which I did on 9/30. On 10/28 and 11/10 I rode 30 miles.

Had I driven 825 miles in my Toyota Corolla, it would have cost me $75 to burn about 25 gallons of gas. I also would have paid about $300 to park on campus. (And I wouldn't have had the bicycle on campus to give me the flexibility to ride into Westwood and back). This savings more than paid for the new back light I bought (about $20) and my occasional bus rides (about $12 for the quarter). Though to be honest, I probably did burn a substantial portion of the saved money on food. I've never been as constantly hungry as I was this quarter. When I was a DIII athlete I had access to a no-limits buffet style dining hall. It's substantially harder to feed high-intensity athletic activity when you actually buy the food yourself.

Of course, by not burning those 25 gallons of gas, I reduced our foreign oil import just a tiny bit, and I prevented about 488 pounds of CO2 from being emitted.

I suspect that if I had had my car handy (my commitment to biking allowed me to park it in a garage about 8 miles from my house, and keep the spot at my apartment complex open for visitors), I would have driven more miles, so this estimate is conservative.

Folks at Helen's cycles in Westwood were invaluably helpful, mostly providing me with bike-centric study breaks and regularly well-inflated tires. I learned to bring a change of shirt to wear to class.

These 825 miles were basically incident free, except for a couple unpleasant interactions with motorists. I learned to signal much earlier when moving to the left to go around a parked car on Olympic. For the record, Santa Monica smells bad because of all the trucks on it. And of course, there's really no good route to UCLA from the East. But I co-founded a student advocacy organization that now has about 90 members, and we're working on that.

A quarter of spinning cranks and velo-love.

Ride Report: Monday, December 21, 2009

2009-12-21T19:48:00.000-08:00

An extraordinary and unlikely run-in with a motorcycle cop today.

It's 2:13 PM, and I'm climbing a small hill on Olympic just east of San Vicente, already feeling a little edgy about sharing the road with crazed last minute holiday shoppers. If they are the same people who come into the bookstore (where I just worked a 7 hour shift) and cut in line, yell, and leave mess everywhere, I don't particularly want to ride with them.

The rightmost lane on Olympic is available for parking, and I'm in what's left of it, technically in the door zone. I'm fine being in the door zone when I'm going pretty slow. All of a sudden someone SCREAMS in my ear. They seem to have direct access to my eardrum and they have let a scream rip at maximum pitch. I jump in my (bike) seat and look up to see an SUV with a teenager's head sticking out of the back window. As they pass me, in a total failure of my principles, I flip them off. Well... it was a heated moment. I was very startled and frightened.

I managed to note the SUV's license plate and I pulled over to call the LAPD. I have actually practiced noting license plates, because I call the LAPD regularly when I am harassed, or when someone drives recklessly around me. I've been on the phone for literally 10 seconds when a motorcycle cop passes by. Perfect! "I need your help!" I yell frantically. "Police!"

The motorcycle turns around and sort of scoots over to me. "Are you yelling for me?" he asks. I say, "Yes, I've just been harassed by an SUV... it was white, and it's headed that way, this was literally under a minute ago." He says, what do you mean harassed? I tell him that someone leaned out of the car and screamed in my ear.

He seems irritated. He tells me that there is no crime in yelling out of cars. He gestures toward the pavement and says, "Well, how were you riding, I mean, if you're in the roadway then..." I interrupt him. I show him where I was riding and he sort of shrugs. Then I say, "It's a good thing that they're writing that anti-harassment ordinance to deal with the problem of bicyclists being harassed. He leans his motorcycle-helmeted-head back slightly and squints his eyes. What "problem"? he asks skeptically. I tell him, you know, people yelling at us, passing us closely, throwing stuff at us.

"Oh." he says, as if admitting that such a problem might exist in Los Angeles. "Well, here's the thing, though... lots of bicyclists don't know the rules of the road, and lots of them are running lights, riding the wrong way..." I don't remember if the officer used the words "asking for it," exactly.

I actually interrupt him and tell him that if this is gonna be a lecture on bicyclists and the law, I'll pass. I tell him I'm intimately familiar with the laws. And anyway, I say, aren't motorists breaking the laws constantly, too? I cite some examples, like how they are always speeding. And how they never stop behind the limit line at red lights.

Turns out, Officer Corbett (? Collett? I forget.) is actually a speed patrol on Olympic and San Vicente, and he warms up to the idea that motorists are always breaking the law. Yes, he says. And what's more - "Wanna know the top speed I've ever seen? 98. Ninety-eight miles per hour on San Vicente. If somebody pulls out of their driveway in front of a car going that fast, they're dead." He goes on to tell me that he does more than the average officer for bikes and pedestrians, and he seems sincere. We talk for a while about Assault with a Deadly Weapon and how if a car ever veers toward you intentionally, it's ADW with a vehicle. He speaks with some venom, as if he has had experience with it, and he actually derides the fact that so many folks want to classify ADW with a vehicle as a traffic accident. Yes, that definitely happens in Los Angeles, I think as I listen, recalling the recent Hummer incident in downtown LA. Later he goes on a rant about how motorists don't know when pedestrians have the right of way, and how drivers need to slow down in this area, which has a hospital, a school, and plenty of elderly people crossing at unmarked intersections. We're on the same page about that, I think. I briefly consider enlisting the officer's support for traffic calming on Olympic.

Our conversation goes on for about 15 minutes longer, and we reach a much more level, respectful rapport than when I interrupted what I presumed to be an oncoming lecture. Ok. I want to end here with Three lessons from this.

1) Bottom line is, in our initial exchange, the officer's first question toward me was whether I was breaking the law or riding illegally; his first impulse was then to educate me regarding bike law and describe the rampant problem with scofflaw cyclists. I called him over asking for his help, and his first assumption is that I did something to deserve the harassment, like ride "in the roadway." (Ummm.... not against the law! I suspended my urge to give him a lecture about that. anyway...) Imagine if you called the cops because someone was harassing you and their first question was whether you were breaking any laws.

Even an officer like this one, who was fair and respectful, professed to be pro-bike and pro-ped, and viewed cars as deadly weapons, displayed anti-bike bias. That's just one more indicator that the anti-cyclist bias is huge and rampant among LAPD particularly.

2) We definitely need the cyclist harassment ban proposed by Councilman Rosendahl's office. I know that most of the vehicle code can't be touched by cities because its considered a "matter of statewide concern," and legally only the State of CA can create laws like a three-foot passing law or a stop-as-yield law, but we need to find the legal areas the city actually does have jurisdiction over and regulate on this. (By the way, the city does have a local ordinance against throwing things out of cars, apparently because of a problem with motorists and their passengers spraying people with fire extinguishers (?!) a while back. Officer Corbett explained this. So if you do get something thrown at you, definitely note the license plate and call it in to LAPD.)

Here I was with the improbable, fortunate coincidence of blatant harassment and the arrival of a police officer, and unfortunately for me, he couldn't do anything. If we had an anti-harassment ordinance, I could have cited the code, listed the license plate, and watched justice speed off.

3) There is no evidence that cyclists use their discretion to break the law any more than motorists do - no, definitely no evidence. But we must be ready to face the "scofflaw cyclist" stereotype at every turn. Our law-breaking stands out in motorists' minds because we break laws that would be VERY dangerous and stupid for cars to break. Their law breaking is just routine. I had some success tempering the "scofflaw cyclist" stereotype with 1) mention of the routine criminal activity of motorists, and 2) meticulous knowledge of the law and 3) meticulous following of the law. I think we need all three of these things to prevail in the face of this stereotype, which is why I basically never break the law on a bike when there is any kind of witness around (and of course not when it'd be stupid).

Geek note: this whole "motorists come in all shapes and sizes, but cyclists are all arrogant scofflaws" actually reflects a broader psychological/sociological phenomenon called "out-group homogeneity bias."

Rosendahl and City Hall, pass that law. Cyclists, know your laws. And LAPD, stop assuming we're breaking them.

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(The scene of the crime. In the background you can see the unmarked intersection the officer and I discussed.)

Open Urban Planning Degree 2: Carpool Fail

2009-12-20T18:20:00.001-08:00

In an earlier post I explained my efforts to make my urban planning papers accessible to a knowledgeable, interested, general audience by imagining that I'm writing them for this blog. An added benefit of this exercise is that by posting my papers here, I make available some planning related ideas. The questions, "What is urban planning?" and 'What constitutes (or should constitute) an urban planning education?" are highly contested, and I certainly cannot, at this point, answer them. But a sort of practical answer may emerge as I pass on these papers. And I like to think that this could be of some use to someone considering going to planning skool, or to folks who do planning-related work, like community organizing, local politicking, etc., (see - I write etc. because the bounds around urban planning are perpetually implacable). Like MIT's OpenCourseWare does, I'll use the internet to make knowledge available outside the ivory tower, except unlike MITs OCW, I'll do it in a tiny, unsanctioned - let's just say it, meek way.

I wrote this paper in response to an "economic naturalist" prompt. It says, go out into the world, observe some urban phenomenon, and analyze it with economics. This assignment evinces the imperative in urban planning to address what is practical. Economics for urban planning only has worth inasmuch as it can explain some real behavior.

A final sidenote: I've read a lot of Chomsky and Naomi Klein, and had always thought of economics as an ideologically broken discipline, focused on currency and unquestioning of capitalism. This class sort of converted me. I want to use concepts such as opportunity cost, marginal cost, and externalities to create organizational systems (maybe markets - not necessarily "free" markets) that place value on the environment and distribute benefits equitably. I no longer believe that a microeconomic analysis of choice is incompatible with my ideological leanings toward anarchy and social democracy. Perhaps that's all for another post. Now, here's the paper.

Why are there so many empty seats moving (slowly) down the freeway? Wouldn’t commuting be faster and cheaper if we filled up all the vehicles?

Most cars seat 4 or 5 people, but most traffic consists of solo drivers. That’s a lot of underused capacity moving down the road. During the morning and evening rush hours, solo drivers are stuck in a sea of empty seats, yet nobody attempts to take advantage of all that potential mobility.[1] Drivers don't sell their empty seats to passengers who want to go the same places, and we don't see would-be passengers lining up to bid for rides.

The absence of such a market is most puzzling when you consider that the road is very congested, which means a lot of people want to travel along the same route. An economist would say that demand for travel on this freeway is high.[2] Whenever there's some demand for a good, anybody who can supply that good has an opportunity to charge a price for it. Then we have a seeming economic paradox. A service (mobility) is in high demand, and the ability to provide this service (empty passenger seats) is under private ownership and available for profit. This same scenario exists on the LA Metro, and there is a market: used fare tickets, still good for a few more hours of travel, are sold at informal (and illegal) markets around the stations. Why isn't there a market in casual carpooling?

In order to answer this question, let's imagine how such a market would have to work. Such a thought experiment addresses some logistical questions, like how would carpoolers match up with drivers going to their destination? And what about safety concerns? Let's just imagine the most low-tech solution possible. Let's say I am one of the many Angelenos who does not travel to work by car.[3] If I want to get to UCLA from the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, I walk to the nearest on-ramp to the 10 W freeway. I stand there with a sign saying “405 N – Wilshire” which represents where I want to get off the freeway. In a robust market, I'd find another passenger hoping to go my way so that we could get in a car together, because traveling in twos alleviates safety concerns for the driver. With all the rush-hour activity at every on-ramp, eventually someone going my way would roll up. The two of us would get in and we would pay the going price. The driver would drop us off shortly after the freeway exit, and we would be on our own to reach our final destinations.

It would seem that everybody gains in such an arrangement. That's the talent of private markets: they match up buyers and sellers who are both better off when the transaction is made. In this case, my fellow passenger and I are better off because we can get to work without owning a car. We save a lot of money, even if we spend some of it on the commute. The driver, who has already sunk a lot of money into the cost of owning and maintaining the car, gets to recoup some of this while getting to her final destination in nearly the same amount of time. So let's return to the question, why doesn't such a market form?

First of all, the market depends upon a level of robustness, or else passengers look like crazy commuter hitchhikers. The whole thing has to be established at many locations and well-known. This means there's a significant start-up cost. Whoever invested the time and energy wouldn't receive any special benefit, and everybody else who participated in the market afterward would be a free rider on the founder's original effort.

More importantly, the marginal cost per mile of driving is very low. Economists distinguish between fixed costs, which must be paid upfront to engage in some activity, and marginal costs, which vary with the level of use. In the case of driving, there are huge fixed costs: the cost of ownership and maintenance. Even the cost of a tank of gas is a fixed cost when you're behind the wheel. You already paid for the tank of gas, so the next mile is free. The distinction between fixed and marginal cost doesn't necessarily defray the driver's general incentive to recoup his costs. But a basic precept of bargaining (and markets) is that everybody tries to get the best deal possible.[4] In this case, consumers know that the marginal cost to producers is zero, and they will try to bargain them down that low. Why should I pay you to give me a ride when I know that you're going there anyway, and you already bought the car and filled the tank? I should get this ride for free.

Relatedly, even if the market were already established (perhaps by some government wanting the road to function better) and even if the marginal cost per mile of driving were higher, driving alone may actually confer a significant benefit on some people. Perhaps they really enjoy rocking out to music in the morning.[5] Alternatively, drivers may perceive the risk of inviting strangers into their car to be very high. Either way, for these people picking up a paying hitchhiker would entail a large transaction cost. Whenever transaction costs are higher than the going price, a market will not form.

In the places where we do see casual carpooling markets, some of the above criteria do not hold. In the Bay Area, casual carpools form to cross the Bay Bridge. In this case, the market's logistics are simple: there is one pick-up spot, and one drop-off spot. This solves the free rider problem that comes with establishing the market. In addition, the marginal cost of driving is much higher than normal. Single occupancy vehicles pay a toll of $4 to cross the bridge; carpools of three or more can bypass it. Now that there is a monetary benefit, more drivers are willing to take on the transaction cost of picking up strangers.

If casual carpooling were widespread, freeways would carry more people, and overall we might spend less money on commuting and less time in traffic. Unfortunately, because no one wants to do the work to coordinate all these carpools, and because driving another trip to work is basically free, all those empty seats remain an untapped resource.

[1] Except the government, which does provide a meager incentive in the form of a less congested carpool lane.

[2] Technically, they would say that the quantity demanded is very high because the price is very low. The term demand on its own refers to a dynamic function of price.

[3] About 20% of Los Angeles’ workforce, according to this document: http://www.ladot.lacity.org/pdf/PDF10.pdf

[4] In economic jargon, consumers try to maximize their consumer utility.

[5] Surveys suggest that this benefit is nontrivial. When people were asked to name their ideal commute time, the mean response was 16 minutes, not “no commute.” This is chronicled in the 2008 book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt, p. 139.

Prius Ad Campaign on LA's Freeways Violates Public Space, Federal Law

2009-12-15T17:42:00.000-08:00

Since I now do it so rarely, driving a car makes me feel like I'm in an alternative reality - either a dream state where everything floats by without any tangible sensations, or an exhilarating video game where I maneuver around vehicles and accelerate through curves.

Last night the 110 North was all video game thrill, the lane lines blurring and the curves making me lean in my seat. But today, driving East on the 10, just past Overland, I rubbed my eyes, 'cause what I was seeing disoriented me and intrigued me. Was it a dream? It looked like this:

It's an elaborate flower arrangement like you'd find in the Rose Parade. That orange thing in the middle? It's a 2010 Prius.

Why did it look so odd and disorienting? Because ever since 1965 when the Highway Beautification Act was signed, advertising has been restricted on Interstate Highway landscaping. Toyota themselves recognize this - check this excerpt from their press release:

Since federal regulations require that the Floralscapes be non-commercial in nature, abstract images of the new Prius will appear in different settings, capturing the essence of its marketing campaign developed by Saatchi & Saatchi LA – “Harmony Between Man, Nature and Machine.” All of the images have been approved by California’s department of transportation, Caltrans.

I just spent 20 minutes re-reading the beginning of that sentence, and poring over relevant federal regulations, and I can't find any evidence that this is legal. The flowers obviously form a Prius, and this is obviously an ad campaign. This isn't the only spot Angelenos will be forced to stare at an orange flower 2010 Prius; they're at seven locations along LA freeways.

Will someone with legal training help me out on this one? I'm sure Toyota is prepared to defend their actions, considering that they have the time and money to make sure their multi-million dollar ad campaigns are actually legal. On the other hand, I still think the State Attorney General Ed Brown should bring charges against the parties who facilitated this ad: Mayor Villaraigosa, Caltrans, Toyota, and Saatchi & Saatchi. Attorney General Brown should file charges because the states can lose a portion of their federal highway funding for violating the Highway Beautification Act. Caltrans and Mayor V have definitely violated the act, at least in spirit, and what was a green public landscape is now lost to branding and commercialization.

What are we getting in the trade-off? Is Toyota going to maintain the landscaping around these ads? The press release implies as much:

California-based businesses are contracted to install and maintain the Floralscapes. The non-profit Los Angeles Conservation Corps, which provides training, education and work experience to at-risk young adults and school-aged youth, will maintain the areas surrounding the Floralscapes.

But the passive voice in that first sentence leaves some important questions unanswered. Hmm, who is paying for the Los Angeles Conservation Corps to do this? Toyota? Or our tax dollars? Inquiring minds want to know.

So much irony abounds here. Mayor Villaraigosa celebrates the advertisements as a symbol of "the city's progressive approach to solving environmental issues." He's right, technically. The Prius does pretty well symbolize Mayor Villaraigosa's idea of a greener LA. It uses fancy modern technology to produce basically no results (a Prius gets worse gas mileage than a Geo Metro), it maintains the car's hegemony, its costs are borne by your average Joe and Jane car-buyers, and it pleases big corporate interests. Oh, and let's not forget that Priuses cause just as much congestion as Hummers.

The Prius 2010 campaign intrudes on our lives by design, and this is not the only way it does that. First, we found ourselves in Prius "solar flower" playgrounds, like this one in the Americana. Then, Toyota found a legal loophole so that they could stick their ads in a place where no ads have gone before. LA is already embroiled in controversies about supergraphics and digital billboards. The Prius ads on 7 LA freeways mock the citizen movements against enormous advertisements that have popped up all over our city.

Caltrans and Mayor V have never allowed the everyday organizations that adopt stretches of highway to spread their message to this extent. That's for the best. Anybody and everybody can and will adopt a stretch of highway. I don't want the gun club or the Mormons (sorry, gun-loving LDSes - I'm sure there are many of you out there reading this) creating a flowery mural of this:

Anyway, that's beside the point.

This Prius ad isn't going to disrupt my personal view, and let's face it - even if I did drive a lot, sights and sounds on the freeway have never been that exciting or beautiful. The real scandals here are (1) the ever-encroaching privatization of public space, (2) the successful greenwashing of a technology that really doesn't do much to solve our climate and oil problems (3) the fact that our leaders think we buy this greenwashing, and think they can strike a sketchy deal like this with a huge car company like Toyota.

Come tomorrow, I'll be back on Olympic on my bike, and I won't be looking at this ad. But it should come down.

Then the 10-W at Overland will look like this again.

Road Anti-Rage, or We Will Meet Your Physical Force with Soul Force

2009-12-12T00:37:00.000-08:00

There's no dearth of guides on how to ride a bicycle in a city -- on safe urban cycling practices, legal rights on the road, even how to cope when there's an accident.

This is not a how-to of any of the types listed above. This concerns how to talk to drivers, and how to engender their goodwill by displaying goodwill ourselves. This is a method for road anti-rage.

Though this method applies to the most extreme cases, and certainly must hold up in their light given the recent case with Dr. Thompson, I mean it primarily as a way of everyday riding and interaction. We must use nonviolence in each and every interaction we have on the streets. Every single day we face honking, yelling, dangerously close passing, purposeful braking, and buses buzzing us. Most drivers mean no harm. Some do. Most, we are confident, are ignorant of our perspective, and ignorant of how vulnerable we really are and all the dangers we face.

Ultimately, drivers control the heavy weaponry and they will win in any violent contest. What I am suggesting is that we embrace the fact that we are weak and a minority, and we champion the very vulnerability that often fills us with fear. If we take a principled stand against violence, we will always win.

Many of us bike because of our principles. Perhaps we want to take a stand against wars for oil, environmental degradation, and an automobile industry that shrugs at fatality counts. Or we want to see and engage with our city and our neighbors. Or we want to take charge of our health and body. For whatever reason, when we bike, we endure some unpleasant situations in the name of these principles, these commitments.

The issue of road rage and how we respond to it is then essentially an issue of how a principled movement should respond to violence. We must draw on the nonviolent tradition, the same tradition that peacefully overturned dictatorships in countless countries. The methods and philosophy of nonviolence gained civil rights in the U.S. It is a method that has proven to win remarkably. More important than that, though, we must adhere to nonviolence if we are ever to achieve more peaceful, civil, and humane roads, and that's the goal for which we all strive.

Then I say, let us do away with the finger and with retaliation. Those are violent responses. Let us do more than put away the finger. Let us also refuse to hate the drivers that act violently towards us.

To be specific, I am suggesting that:

When we are honked at, we nod humbly.
When we are yelled at, we respond with calm.
When we are passed closely and want to either fight or flee, we must engage in discussion with humanity and love.

Here's a rough template for how such an interaction would proceed:

Unsafe, unpleasant, or hostile encounter with motorist
Assume that motorist is a well-intentioned, good (but maybe ignorant) human being. This assumption shows on your face as you treat the motorist with kindness and respect. Empathize with the motorist.
Attempt to find a moment to interact. This may occur naturally, at a light. Or, you can yell, "Do you have a minute?" Motorists usually don't. They're especially unlikely to pull over if you show even a hint of defensiveness. But I've had some success with a genuine entreaty to have a conversation. For example, I'll say, "If you have a minute, I'd be happy to explain to you why I have to take that lane position."
Kindly explain why you were riding where you were riding. (Note that (4) requires you to be conscious in your riding style and choices, and confident in them. If you're rude or unjustified in the way you ride, this method won't work.) Some kind explanations can reference the law, but none focus on it. When interacting with a neighbor in a civil fashion, and searching for a way to share the road, the law becomes beside the point. Technically, yes, the law can keep us safe, but its not adequate as a guide for how to interact as citizens and human beings sharing space.
Kindly explain how the motorist's actions affect you. For example, "When you pass me so closely, it makes me feel very afraid." Readily admit fear and vulnerability. These are truths of our lives when we ride bikes.
State your needs offer the motorist a suggestion for how to meet your needs For example, "I need more room in the lane in order to feel safe. Would you be willing to pass bicyclists while giving us half a lane to comfortably ride in? I'd really appreciate it."
End by reiterating that you're cooperative and friendly. "Well - no harm meant on my end. I just want to get to work on time. Thanks for listening, take care!"
Just as it is important to learn how to state our feelings, thoughts, and fears without making judgment or using violent language, it is also crucial that we remain open to the driver's needs, thoughts, and feelings. Listen to what the driver might have to say. Listen for the fears or feelings driving their communication, even if the words come out as harsh or defensive. Acknowledge that motorists also need a safe space to drive.

It might be infuriating to consider this approach when so often motorists carelessly endanger our lives. But I'd argue that if we really want our interactions with them to increase our safety and make the world a better place, then we have to keep our side of the street clean, act like the upstanding citizens we are, and kill them with kindness.

I realized some time ago that my ultimate goal was mutual understanding with motorists. So I started practicing. For example, a driver would lay on the horn for a block, then pass me very closely, yelling "sidewalk!" and zoom away. We'd meet again at the intersection. I assume, going into this encounter, that this is a person, a human, with whom I can empathize. I show that assumption on my face. I say, hello. Usually I am greeted with what I perceive as disgust and anger. The motorist may expect a fight. But if I can remain calm, explain my perspective, and remain open to the motorist, we usually end the conversation on a good note. A much better note, at any rate, than if I tried to argue with them.

Martin Luther King said, Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

For all the attention that's been paid to the most minute questions of legality and safety, very little attention has been paid to how we interact with others on the road. In the absence of this attention we're left with crude advice and cruder instincts. This is an attempt to draw on the most old-school, time-tested philosophy of movements for social change. It takes the rage part of road-rage seriously and doesn't shy from the spiritual. So I'll end this post with a quote from the preacher of all preachers:

So in many instances, we have been able to stand before the most violent opponents and say in substance, we will meet your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.

Throw us in jail and we will still love you. Threaten our children and bomb our homes and our churches and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hours and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half-dead, and as difficult as that is, we will still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.

Open Urban Planning Degree, Installment 1

2009-11-28T12:22:00.000-08:00

I'm now getting a Master's in Urban Planning. The conventions of writing in this field are much different from the conventions in either English or Mathematics, the two subjects I studied in undergrad. We are supposed to write for a general audience, primarily because when we graduate and actually become urban planners, we will be responsible to some (city's) public who must understand the reasoning behind our decisions. Jargon, obfuscation, and anything that smacks of an internal academic conversation is discouraged. The field of Urban Planning makes few claims to be a natural, coherent division of knowledge, so we don't really have a basis for that type of self-important internal discourse anyway. (Mathematics, on the other hand, is famously inaccessible to a layperson, and mathematicians are famous for not caring. As a field, math is stuck in a dark age that still believes in the universality of knowledge; because math is the naturalized basis for the "natural" sciences, few people feel compelled to think about its social dimensions, and who is excluded and included by the language of mathematics.)

So, to help me adapt to these new standards, I've adopted the following conceit: when I write urban planning papers, I pretend that I'm writing for this blog. Sometimes the constraints of the assignment make this difficult, but the attempt feels worthwhile, because: I posit that your average internet-accessing city-dweller is made a better citizen by understanding something about urban planning. Further, your average community organizer or activist (who unfortunately may not have internet access, but oh well) needs this knowledge even more. The structure and functioning of our cities directly bounds civic engagement, community work and activism.

So here's a paper on the 1924 Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles, and how it relates to the problems with LA's streets today. And to reinforce my claim that this knowledge directly relates to civic engagement, here's one petition you can sign to improve the LA Bike Plan, and here's some background links on all the controversy surrounding it and how you can participate in improving LA's streets for all users. I'm currently working with LACBC to organize a grassroots response to this plan in cooperation with other community-based organizations, so more about that later.

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The 1924 Major Traffic Street Plan of Los Angeles

and its influences upon contemporary urban planning practice, particularly the 2009 Bicycle Master Plan Draft of Los Angeles

October 14, 2009

[introduction]
Today, almost 80% of commuters in the city of Los Angeles travel to work in a private automobile. (LADOT 14) In the popular imagination, LA is the archetypal car city, famous for its sprawl and smog. Although sprawl is typically considered a consequence of the suburban housing boom and of highway and freeway building in the post-WWII era, in Los Angeles it dates back to the era between 1900 and 1930 (Wachs 1). During this period of tremendous population growth and fast-rising automobile ownership rates, the city made key transportation and land-use decisions that gave LA the decentralized form it has today. One of the most important of these was the 1924 Major Traffic Street Plan.

[my argument: the link to contemporary planning practice]
The adoption of the 1924 Plan began LA's fervent commitment to the automobile. Nationally respected urban planners wrote it, and a broad coalition of government officials, business owners, and citizen-drivers approved it and financed its implementation. Private vehicles dominate LA's transportation network because of the infrastructure called for by the 1924 Plan, the consensus around the private automobile it helped to cement, and the decentralized urban form that these produced. Contemporary urban planners, faced with a city whose mobility depends almost solely upon the auto, now have difficulty proposing anything that takes away space or money from cars. This legacy makes a bikable Los Angeles very difficult to plan or achieve.

[context for the plan]
The plan was written as a response to traffic congestion, which was already a problem in the early 1920s. Angelenos embraced the car earlier and to a greater extent than any other American city. In 1920, there were 3.6 residents per automobile in LA, whereas the national average was 13.1 (Bottles 93). By 1925 there was one automobile for every two Angelenos (Bottles 92). Compounding this effect, the city was rapidly acquiring new residents: LA nearly doubled in population from 1910 to 1920, from 320,000 people to 580,000. By 1930 it had doubled again, reaching 1.2 million. Prior to this wave of migration, LA already had a relatively decentralized form due to the fact that its first period of rapid growth, from 1870 to 1910, coincided with the introduction of street railways (Wachs 4). The rising population, high rates of auto ownership, and already decentralized shape caused traffic.

Before 1924, no comprehensive system for road maintenance and construction existed. Property owners could petition for local improvements, and there were some traffic regulations passed to expedite the flow of traffic, but none of these meager and piecemeal solutions had much effect. Most people considered traffic an ominous problem, and in 1921 a broad coalition came together to "assist the city" in solving it (LATC 3). The Los Angeles Traffic Commission was an unofficial advisory board of business leaders, utility officials, government officials, and newspapermen. In 1924 the Commission came up with $23,000 in privately-donated funds to obtain the services of nationally renowned urban planners Olmsted, Bartholomew, and Cheney to produce a comprehensive highway survey.

[the 1924 major traffic street plan]
In the following discussion, I focus on those elements of the plan that have had staying power; that is, the road widenings and new roads whose influence remains in the layout of Los Angeles and those ideas and methods which continue to have influence in the field of urban planning.

The causes of congestion that the plan identifies are not much different than the causes of congestion widely recognized today. They are: "the volume of traffic," "unscientific width and arrangement of streets," "promiscuous mixing of different types of traffic," and "limiting capacity of street intersections" (MTSP 11). The plan never proposes to limit the volume of traffic, and in fact explicitly anticipates a truism of transportation planning for the remainder of the 20th century:

"Traffic will be limited by the width or capacity of the streets, and by that only. If that capacity is doubled, the limit will be raised, but when it is again reached, the final degree of congestion will be just as bad... Congestion will reach a point approximating the intolerable whether the street is wide or narrow" (MTSP 18).

The plan even goes so far as to ask, "Why not be fatalistic and do nothing?"

Its answers are twofold: first, looking at the street system as a whole allows the planners to ensure it is well balanced, so that no portion is used far below its capacity. Second, major technological developments, i.e. the shift from horses to streetcars and automobiles, require cities to make dramatic changes in scale in order to remain economically productive.

Towards these two ends, internal system balance and increased overall capacity, the planners proposed to widen a set of “radial thoroughfares,” providing access to the central business district from all other parts of the city. First street would be widened significantly to connect to Hollywood and the Cahuenga Pass to the San Fernando Valley. Wilshire and 10^th (now Olympic) would be widened, extended, and straightened to become major east-west thoroughfares. A proposed Arroyo Seco Parkway would connect with Pasadena to the northeast. The plan recommended that LA always distinguish between major and minor streets and attempt to segregate different classes of traffic (i.e. streetcar, private automobile, and heavy trucks) as much as possible.

[impact on the field of urban planning]
Many of the plan’s recommendations were carried out. In particular, Wilshire and 10^th (now Olympic) became major thoroughfares; the Arroyo Seco Parkway was completed; and the call for a direct route to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley beyond was eventually answered in the 101 Freeway. Freeways descend from the 1924 plan’s approach in that they segregate non-motorized modes and they are the ultimate products of widening compounded upon widening.

More generally, the plan’s overall to the problem of traffic congestion continues to be adopted today: widen roads where possible, maximize the efficiency of existing roads by segregating uses and speeds, and make consistent traffic regulations that speed up movement. In the intervening decades, transportation planners have followed this general program of increasing road supply in anticipation of greatly increasing demand. The Plan also set a precedent of public finance for expensive automobile infrastructure. This was not trivial. Most of the “public transportation” at that time, i.e. the streetcars and railways, was privately owned and operated. Thus the Plan paved the way for successive large public works transportation projects, like the freeways built in the 1950s and 60s. Altogether, the Plan facilitated the rise of the automobile in Los Angeles, which prefigured the rise of the auto in other American cities. In this sense the Plan contributed to the car-dominated transportation landscape planners face today.

[relation to contemporary planning practice: the 2009 Bicycle Master Plan draft]

The City of Los Angeles just released a draft of the 2009 update to the city’s Bicycle Master Plan. This document, if adopted, will guide “the development of bicycle policies, programs, and infrastructure citywide” (BMP 1). Via the connections listed in the previous paragraph, the 1924 Major Traffic Street Plan influences the 2009 Bicycle Master Plan. The 2009 BMP aims for a very low share of trips, 5%, to be taken by bicycle by 2020. This is the heritage of decentralization and decades of the car’s dominance. In fact, the plan’s main constraint is that it cannot take away space from cars. The plan identifies over 404 miles of roadway as “key corridors where bicycle lanes are desired but would require a policy change in street designation standards… the removal of vehicular travel lanes, removal of on-street parking; or roadway widening (42).” To give a sense of the magnitude of this mileage of infeasible roads, the plan only proposes a total of 206 miles of separated bicycle travel lanes and paths (41).

Not only does the 2009 BMP draft propose almost no improvements to high-volume thoroughfares, it actually removes 57 miles of bicycle lanes that were designated in the 1996 Bicycle Master Plan (BMP 6), the vast majority of these on major streets. Thus, we can view the BMP update as a direct descendant of the 1924 Major Traffic Street Plan. Both plans aim to increase space for cars.

References

Bottles, Scott L.1987. Los Angeles and the Automobile. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Foster, Mark S. 1981. From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940. Temple University Press.

Los Angeles Department of Transportation. 2009. The City of Los Angeles Transportation Profile 2009. http://ladot.lacity.org/pdf/PDF10.pdf.

Los Angeles Department of Transportation Bicycle Services and Alta Planning. 2009. Complete LA Bicycle Plan DRAFT. http://www.labikeplan.org/files/draft-plan/Draft_LABP_Complete-rdx.pdf. Accessed October 13, 2009.

Olmsted, Frederick Law; Bartholomew, Harland; and Cheney, Charles Henry. 1924. A Major Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles. Prepared for the Committee on Los Angeles Plan of Major Highways of the Traffic Commission of the City and County of Los Angeles.

Wachs, Martin. 1984. “Autos, Transit and the Sprawl of Los Angeles: The 1920s.” Irvine: Institute of Transportation Studies. http://www.its.uci.edu.

Love, love, love, I want your Love

2009-11-16T22:11:00.000-08:00

It has recently come to my attention that Lady Gaga is the shit. Well, maybe I should tone that down a little bit. She is the most shameless exhibitionist in showbiz, that's for sure. She is a master of media saturation, marketing, and multiple genre post-modernism. (All that alliteration makes me want to sing Roma, ro-ma-ma!)

Her new video, "Bad Romance," was just released to general excitement, controversy, and ogling.

Part of me wants to demolish Gaga with a feminist / anticapitalist critique. Yes, this video is a microcosm of a society that spends billions of dollars on advertising and where little public space remains without some kind of arches or swoosh adornment. And yes, this video is a total feminist dystopia. The camera-as-male-gaze renders the women sex objects, a role the video actually casts for them explicitly. Female bodies are covered in makeup and alterations that I hope to God are computer generated. Norms about what is feminine and what is beautiful dictate that all the women are skinny, white, and hairless. (Although I guess all the men are hairless, too, and while we're at it so are the cats).

Ok. Now that all that is dispensed with, I have to say I really can't stop watching this video. It's partly because it's such a freakish cultural artifact, and equal parts because of the straight-up eye candy, both fascinating and disturbing. Gaga has played on some fundamental tensions, and these make the video rich. Let's examine these one by one.

The liberated sex-object tension: This video is a perfect metaphor for Gaga in real life. She's a high-priced sex object cloaked in high-priced adornments. It seems like she's being exploited, and truth be told her legitimacy and agency are seriously limited, but in the end... she wins.

Detachment vs. old-school romanticism (no pun intended): Notice the slightly time-delayed close-ups of Gaga lip-sync-ing sans make-up. A traditional staple of the music video genre, these cast the singer as expressionist, channeling her emotion into music. These shots appear at the video's climax, pulling on our romantic heartstrings. On the other hand, most of the video exhibits a wierd detachment that is part of Gaga's overall character deal. She doesn't care, she's just selling crazy razor sunglasses and walking in freaky ass crab claw heels. But wait! She does care - she's singing in slow motion and crying. Which is it?

Hipster irony vs. high fashion: The dance moves here reek of hipster irony, especially the wierd twitchy hand distraction at the beginning and the slow hip-shiftingin the middle. But most of this video is about hipster irony's evil cousin, high fashion. With all the elaborate props and model-ly poses, the video resembles a photo shoot with some dance scenes spliced in. If Gaga were on America's Next Top Model, Tyra would congratulate her for "working the garment." She also works the headphones, and the vodka, and the beats laptops... Point is, Gaga is way too cool to dance outside the self-aware hipster paradigm, but unlike most hipsters, she's got diamonds raining down on her while she looks aloof.

(Non-sequitur: I self identify as a hipster and I am NOT down with the shit-talking that surrounds this term. A post on this is due.)

Postmodern low-attention-span collage vs. old-school narrative: There's a storyline here. I would argue that few of us really know how to relate knowledge without narrative, and this video demonstrates that a little narrative goes a long way toward making a piece of art compelling. There's a big literary debate about this. On the other hand, the narrative is totally spliced and confused by the short takes, costume changes, and just general non-sensical-ness. I want to know how to fit these into my narrative, i.e. what are the folks in red doing at the end and why does Gaga then put her black glove on her face and wink like that? Is that future Gaga knowing that present Gaga is about to burn this motherfucker down? I try to piece a narrative together, and I'm compelled in the process.

Whiteness: Whiteness is its own tension, as any white person can tell you. There's something hip and kind-of-black going on here: "I'm a freak bitch, baby" sneaks in as if on a side track, dropped onto the record player and then shuffled off by an expert and extra-subtle DJ. And the Thriller-esque moves recall Michael Jackson, which makes them fraught with racial ambiguity. Gaga shouts herself out throughout the track ("Ga GA Oh La la") like a rapper would, and uses nonsense syllables to rhyme like a rapper, but the whole thing is happening in a pop song that sounds kind of like a Russian folkdance. AHH!

Best of all, the video is totally shameless about containing all this contradiction and allusiveness. All Gaga really did here was dress up a pretty standard surprise-ending story in as many ridiculous outfits and aesthetics as possible. Fucking shameless, and that's all I ever want out of pop.

KPCC Will Give the Bike Discussion Another Try!

2009-11-11T02:12:00.000-08:00

So many people complained about last week's show that they will run another "Airtalk" segment on sharing the road, this time with some people who know a damn thing about bicycles. It's tomorrow at 10:20 AM on 89.3 KPCC.

Tune in! This is what Sharon McNary had to say in reply to my letter:

Hi Kristen – Great points all, and sorry to get to your note so late. There’s been a wide call from listeners asking for a followup show. So yes, I’m happy to announce….

Due to the intense interest in this topic and response to this week’s show, AirTalk with Larry Mantle will revisit the issue, this time with some expert guests. It’s set for 10:20 to 11 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 11. You can listen live on the air at 89.3 FM or online at kpcc.org. We’ll have an archive of the broadcast available online after the show, and places on the show website for simultaneous comments, and to continue the discussion afterward.

Please feel free to pass the word. I’ll be e-mailing cyclists who are in the Insight Network an alert to the follow-up show. Also, anybody who wants to add their bicycle story and photo to our Insight Network of news sources is welcome to do so at this link: www.scpr.org/in/questions/bike.

Thanks very much for making your voice heard on this issue.
Sharon McNary
Public Insight Journalism at KPCC

KPCC Botches Bike Discussion

2009-11-03T23:53:00.000-08:00

The following letter concerns this on-air discussion, which aired the morning that Dr. Thompson was found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon - his car.

It's worth listening to the first few minutes of the show just to hear an insane caller who is a resident of Mandeville Canyon, where the incident took place. The caller just keeps repeating that cyclists are rude. They ride "in front of cars" and "don't get out of the way." This call has to be the low point of the whole discussion. The lowest point, in particular, is when this caller says that someone is going to die on Mandeville and that none of the residents are going to feel bad about it. Wow.

Wow, wow, wow.

[The picture, by the way, depicts 8th Street near my apartment. It's a very typical LA situation that could have been discussed with a level head. The right lane is too narrow to share if a biker is doing the safe thing and staying out of the door zone. Luckily for motorists, the city has placed for your convenience ANOTHER LANE just to the left of the one the biker is occupying. All motorists must do is step on the brakes lightly, wait for an opening in traffic, and change lanes, allowing plenty of room for the biker to breathe. It's not rocket science people. ]

Roadblock's logical suggestion in a midnightridazz forum on the show was that we write Sharon McNary, who handles programming for KPCC. So I did. My letter follows. (By the way, if you want clarification on the all the legal issues that were mishandled on this show, wikipedia did a bomb job of summarizing California vehicle codes relevant to bikes).

-------------

Dear Sharon,

Wow, I am really disappointed with how this show was handled. A bunch of misinformation regarding the law went unquestioned. Caller after caller gave the impression that bicyclists are legally required to ride single file, which is not true. Mantle never clarified the law. I cringe to think how many motorists listened to this show and came away with the incorrect impression that riding side by side is illegal. It's actually a very safe and reassuring thing to do when the lane is too narrow to share with a car but wide enough to accommodate two bikes.

Moreover, Mantle gave a lot of air time to motorists complaining about bicyclists on "busy streets" or "narrow mountain roads," but never clarified that the bicyclist has the legal right to be on any road (excepting the freeways). He could have said this right at the beginning. The horrendous comment from the Mandeville resident should have been tempered by some sort of sane follow-up. A caller suggests that "someone is going to die, and nobody in Mandeville is going to feel bad" and Mantle doesn't bat an eye?

It was not until much later in the show when a caller finally made the point that roads are public and cyclists have the full right to be on them (even when they are too narrow and require drivers to - gasp - slow down). Nor did he offer the sensible observation that drivers, too, act "arrogant" and constantly break the law. He seemed to vindicate angry motorists when he said it was "unrealistic" to expect drivers to adjust their behavior and pass safely.

The worst moment was when Mantle claimed that we have "minimum speed limits," which is just obscenely incorrect.

Mantle had a huge opportunity to encourage safe behavior by both cyclists and motorists. It's really not that difficult for us to share all the roads. Cyclists might slow motorists down a little bit; but motorists pollute the air a little bit, and we all have to breathe. I wish more of a civilized discussion could have taken place. Too much airtime was given to venting, misinformation, and resentment.

KPCC could do a great service by covering the ongoing bike boom in LA and the fact that more and more of us are getting on bikes. Follow the LA Times' lead and discuss how to ride safely, how motorists and bicyclists can make their interactions more pleasant, and base this dicussion on the facts in the law. Yes, infrastructure in LA does not exactly facilitate bicycling. Cyclists have to take the lane A LOT on our narrow streets. We really need the media to recognize our rights so that we don't have to suffer from any more road rage.

Kristen "Herbie" Huff
Los Angeles
commuter cyclist and urban planning student

The first ever Los Angeles Bike Count!

2009-09-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Yogi Hendlin (510) 472-2948, yhendlin@ucla.edu

Dorothy Keiu Le (213) 629-2142, dorothy@la-bike.org

Herbie Huff (805) 404 3751 herbiehuff@gmail.com

LACBC ORGANIZES CITY-WIDE BICYCLE COUNTS

LOS ANGELES, Calif. –September 22-26^th: Los Angeles will finally get what most large cities have long benefited from: a bicycle count. The first ever Los Angeles Bicycle and Pedestrian Count is happening all over Los Angeles, conducted by the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC). The Count will achieve a clearer picture of how many people travel by bicycle and foot in Los Angeles, and where the bicycle and pedestrian traffic is the heaviest.

Bicycle counts empower volunteers to count the number of cyclists and pedestrians at key intersections throughout the city to track year-to-year changes in cycling and walking as policy and urban infrastructure change. Gathering this vital data, LACBC encourages policy-makers to include bicycling and walking considerations into all urban planning and design.

LACBC will work with over 200 volunteers participating in the count at over 45 locations on Tuesday September 22, 7-9:30am and 4-6:30pm, Wednesday, September 23, 7-9:30am and 4-6:30pm and Saturday, September 26, 10am-1pm. LACBC welcomes collaboration with partners wishing to sponsor or financially underwrite this effort.

According to the National Bicycle and Pedestrian Documentation Project, “Without accurate and consistent demand and usage figures, it is difficult to measure the positive benefits of investments in these modes, especially when compared to the other transportation modes such as the private automobile.”

“Here in New York City, our annual citywide bike counts provide the biggest proof the our investment in more bike lanes is bearing fruit,” says Wiley Norvell, Communications Director of Transportation Alternatives. “No other fact has validated our city's bike program like the 35% increase in bike commuting shown in last year's counts.”

LACBC is working with LADOT to ensure that the counts inform the Bicycle Master Plan and all future city planning. LACBC plans to do it right while having a good time with volunteers by providing them with snacks, drinks, and a final Saturday night appreciation party.

Founded in 1998, LACBC is a membership supported advocacy organization working to improve the bicycling environment and quality of life in Los Angeles County.

For more information on the LA Bike Count, visit: www.labikecount.org

For more information about LACBC, visit: http://www.la-bike.org

To volunteer for the LA Bike Count, visit: http://tiny.cc/labikecount

I am Gentrification

2009-08-09T22:11:00.000-07:00

I drive a Prius in Pico-Union.

I look white.

I am gentrification.

That is all.

My Comments on the Bike Plan

2009-07-13T15:23:00.000-07:00

The following is my response to the City's recently released Bike Plan maps, which were released for public comment about a month and a half ago. Honestly, it has taken me this long to write to the city because the plan is 1) so confusing and 2) so underwhelming that it's hard to know where to start. But I sat down and tried to comprehend the mess of color coded and overlaid lines and then wrote the following letter.

Dear Ms. Bibas and Mr. Turner,

I am a commuter cyclist who lives in Pico-Union, about a mile west of downtown. I ride about 14 miles a day: it's 12 miles round-trip to my job in West Hollywood, and I tack on another 2 miles for errands. Next year I will be a graduate student at UCLA and will be doing the downtown-Westwood ride at least 3 times a week. Thus, my main areas of concern in looking at this bike map are East-West connections in the "Central" region (as you've broken it down). I find it glaringly devoid of those.

I usually ride on Olympic between Hoover and San Vicente, and San Vicente between Olympic and Orlando. Olympic is a horrific road that came up multiple times during the Transportation Committee meeting, which I attended. It is the quickest, most direct route to both my job and my school, and the plan proposes no improvements to it. Furthermore, I'm confused as to why it is not marked as a Class III Bike Route. In the April 2006 Bike Map distributed by the Metro, Olympic between downtown and La Cienega is listed as a Class III. Has this distinction (and the accompanying Share the Road signage) been removed?

The proposed improvements to 4th and 8th Streets to make them Bicycle-Friendly streets will help. However, the design standards for bicycle-friendly streets have not yet been released so it is impossible to tell what the impact will be. Neither 4th nor 8th extends very far, so there is a need for a longer east-west connection.

3rd and Fountain, two roads that I ride often, are proposed to be Shared Roadways. However, the shared roadway distinction for 3rd only lasts for about 2 miles. In my experience cyclists need to go farther than that. In addition, as I mentioned above, Olympic was a Shared Roadway as of April 2006, and that did not make it a safe or enjoyable road to ride. The design standards for Shared Roadways will determine whether this distinction actually protects cyclists. I add my voice to the many who support sharrows. Putting paint on the street sends a clear signal to both drivers and cyclists about how to share the road safely.

Legally, every road is a "Shared Roadway," whether the city puts signage there or not. Why don't we see more dotted purple on this map? Streets like 6th and 3rd have very narrow right lanes, requiring cyclists to make full-use of the right hand lane. All streets with a narrow curb lane need sharrows and signage. That way, drivers understand that cyclists are allowed the full use of the lane and will change lanes and safely pass. Currently, "taking the lane" on roads like this results in harassment from drivers. The city could easily change this with some paint and signs, but this map shows so very few of the dotted purple lines that would make that part of the plan.

There are no (zero!) proposed bike lanes throughout the area bounded by La Cienega on the west, Franklin on the north, Vermont on the east, and Adams to the south. This area is the heart of Los Angeles: it encompasses Mid-City, Hollywood, Koreatown, West Hollywood, Los Feliz, and more. It is unacceptable that this plan denies bike lanes to all of these communities and to the cultural centers of our city.

I understand that we will need political will to put down bike lanes and bike routes on most of the streets that appear as grey on this map. I echo the voices of many others who call on the Planning Department and LA DOT to make this bike plan more ambitious. We should not be afraid to remove traffic lanes or parking in order to make the city bikable. The community of cyclists will stand behind city planners if they have the ambition to request room for bikes at the cost of cars.

The design standards for bike lanes remain a concern. Most of the city's bike lanes run to the left of on-street parking, rendering them practically unusable. If a cyclist rides far enough to the left to avoid getting doored, she is probably riding outside the bike lane. The dangers of dooring are real and cyclists have died all over the country as a result of motorists opening their doors into bike lanes. This design flaw must not be repeated in the few places new bike lanes are proposed.

I have written this lengthy letter because I care enormously about the future of cycling in Los Angeles. I want to be able to get around this city on two wheels free of fear, and I want our roads to accomodate not just die-hards but also novices, elderly people, and children. This bike plan will have to be much, much more ambitious for that to happen.

Please keep me on distribution lists as the plan goes through its next stages. To sum up my letter: I support the idea of bicycle-friendly streets, but most of these streets do not accomplish the necessary major connections. I would like to see more Shared Roadways as long as the design standards are actually effective (i.e. sharrows). I would like the plan to aim higher so that we can remove parking and traffic lanes and improve more of the city's streets.

I will submit more route-specific comments via the website.

Thank you for your time.

Kristen "Herbie" Huff

Next steps: I have an idea. We should get blocks of people to rally behind specific roads for those website comments. LACBC mentioned some roads they believe should be moved out of the "unfeasible" category. I smell an internet letter-writing party...

I call Olympic.

My Public Comment at the LA Metro Board

2009-07-09T19:16:00.000-07:00

I spoke before the LA Metro board two weeks ago about how I was almost hit by a Metro bus. The video explains all the details of the incident:

The male voice speaking after me is Mayor Villaraigosa. It was pretty thrilling to look him in the eye and tell my story. After I stepped down from the podium, several high-level reps from the metro gave me their cards and asked me to email them, including Chief Operating Officer Carolyn Flowers.

The size and formality of the room, as well as the presence of the County Board of Supervisors and the Mayor, all surprised me. I was expecting something more along the lines of the tiny, crowded, and informal Transportation Committee Meeting I had attended the week before. (You can see me at the very right edge of the picture, standing).

It's very easy to make a public comment before the Metro Board. All you do is arrive a few minutes before the meeting, fill out a public comment card, and then wait your turn. If there are a lot of cards, as was the case at this meeting, you will get one minute to speak, although they are usually pretty lax about letting people go over the time if they are actually getting somewhere.

I'm glad Stephen Box encouraged me to come speak and that he accompanied me to the meeting and made sure I talked to the right people. He said, and after my experience at the board meeting I agree, that the squeaky wheel gets the grease! My conviction to keep riding is renewed. Each time I ride, I contribute in a tiny, personal way to a reduction in air pollution, and to the education of other vehicles who learn how to share the road with me. My conviction to take accompanying political action has never been stronger. Each time I organize with my fellow cyclists and demand accountability from our elected representatives, we wield our political power to make a more bikable and livable Los Angeles possible through large-scale decisions that are made at the government level with public money. A better world will need both personal and political convictions.

Support Sharrows

2009-05-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

The LACBC has drafted a letter to the mayor in support of sharrows. These are chevrons painted in the middle of the rightmost lane that indicate that the lane should be shared with cyclists. Many cyclists (including me) prefer them to bike lanes. Most of the bike lanes in LA feature parked cars to the right and the always impending danger of driver-side doors suddenly opening into the bike lane.

Sharrows are all over Portland and San Francisco and working great in those cities. Here in LA County, however, the only sharrows to be found are in Pasadena. (And Westwood, apparently - the above image is from an la.streetsblog.org article on the sharrows recently painted on the UCLA campus.)

Sharrows are so cheap that there's really no excuse they aren't on every single right-hand lane in Los Angeles. All they do is indicate something that's already the law: that all vehicles must share the road and that cyclists may occupy the full lane when their safety requires it.

Here's the text for the petition:

http://lacbc.wordpress.com/

There's no form to fill out, you just have to copy the text into your own email client.

Let's show the mayor that quite a few people support a more bikeable LA.

3 Morning Pages

2009-04-30T21:12:00.000-07:00

Lately, it feels difficult to keep up with life. I injured my left arm somewhat seriously and have not been able to bike for the last seven weeks. Being deprived of what was my primary mode of transportation really put a damper on things, and put me in a funk that I'm just starting to shake off. Non-essential activities like writing for this blog have fallen by the wayside.

But I'm back! And here, in lieu of many half-conceived posts about the 2009 LA Bicycle Summit or modal equity or alternatives to capitalism or my revelations about the power of saying Hello or a million other topics that have run through my mind since January, are three morning pages that roughly encapsulate the form and content of my current life.

----------

4/16/2009

Whoa, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. Had a headache from all those oreos and falling asleep dehydrated the night before. Checked the calendar, and had to reschedule my PT appointment because it was 9:30 and I would run at least 30 minutes late. C was not happy about being rushed and having a lot of work in front of her. We got there on time, but I was pretty out of it the whole ride. Then when she dropped me off, I forgot my running shoes. I had been all ready to turn around this shitty day by banging out that 9 mile run, but it's now pretty impossible with my shoes on the passenger seat and all. OK. New plan. Do morning pages (not a bad fate), text C that my shoes are in her car, read Clarice's friend's book, text C that my memoir class files are starred in gmail and ask if she has a chance to print them out, have lunch, bike to PT (need to get locks ready beforehand), coast back, go for run (2 - 3:30), come back and have plenty of time to call my mom and arrange ride for tomorrow, eat, read Clarice's book, stretch, maybe even do yoga, then ride the metro to class (need to get on at 6 and not be late this time). Have class, go home, the end.

Dillon's friends are talking in the living room. They are waking up, having a civil argument about who is going to drive who where. This guy does not want to wake up. I think it's the same guy who made me feel really icky yesterday with his comments on how all people are selfish and the media is "75% liberal." I was really thrown off by the things he said, didn't know how to respond to them but felt obligated to. He said "meat-eating" Americans would abuse a single-payer universal healthcare system. He kept interrupting me. He said that we are evolved to be selfish and greedy and communism will never work. I wanted to make a critique of global economic capitalism, and I managed to say that it has produced enormous inequality. But I didn't get to say that it's predatory and unfair. I made the point that the media supports the state. Dillon said that he sees a lot of trendy talk about causes but not a lot of people taking action to help the homeless around them. I tried to respond to him and say that I would be down to take action on local, local problems anytime. I am all about the local. This was also meant as a response to Billy's idea that people in college are idealistic but when it comes to taking care of themselves after college, those ideals take a backseat.

Anyway, as you can see the whole conversation stuck with me. Mainly because the chaotic force of Billy disrupted any sense I was making of it. It stunned me all night, left me with the question (which only Caroline Heldman might be able to answer): how can one speak to a person like that, already so convinced of his worldview and willing to be pushy and loud in espousing it? I want to blog about it. I also want to keep taking more actions, with my roommates, my neighbors in the apartment, the CRA-LA advisory committee meetings for rebuilding my neighborhood. It's been a theme of my life for quite some time now that I want to prove wrong all those people (my dad, guys like Billy) who claim that nobody really cares and anyway the actions of one person don't matter. That's not true. I'll be biking and saying hi and protecting pedestrians and eating vegan and monitoring local government. And working on attending the CRA meetings and talking more to my neighbors.

We mentioned that laziness, imperfection can hold us back (Dillon and I did). So it's important that I take care of my health, spiritually through friendships, family, and AA, physically by exercising, doing my PT, and eating well (no oreos all night!) and materially by taking care of money matters and trying not to be so stressed about that. I want to participate more, I've been feeling kind of removed and lazy the past week. Even though I got a lot of recruiting done yesterday, it still felt like staying inside, overeating, and being on the computer. Not good.

Let today unfold and let me be a part of the unfolding. (This is a prayer that I say every day). May I realized that life involves many people, places and things I don't control. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better serve others. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to the power of powerlessness as a way of life. May I be humble and compassionate always, and may all beings be free from suffering.

Elaine hasn't called me back in a long time. Maybe she knows that I've been kind of stagnating. Maybe she is going through something. I hope she's OK.

Car-free Fridays!

2009-01-29T11:39:00.000-08:00

The last Friday of every month is car-free Friday in Los Angeles, sponsored by the LACBC.

Apparently City Council President Eric Garcetti will be joining riders on their route from Hollywood to City Hall tomorrow morning.

I'll be riding from Pico-Union to West Hollywood at 3 pm if anyone wants to join me.

This is a nice, simple way for cyclists to focus our energy. I'd like to get one or two new people riding on the roads with me each month. The press release is right: we can build our energy, one person at a time, one ride at a time. Once a month can turn into once a week can turn into every day! Incremental change matters. We'll have that many more constituents on board when we talk about sharrows and bike lanes. We'll have that many more drivers that are used to sharing the road with bicycles.

Woo!

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Gladly Do Again

2009-01-14T13:09:00.000-08:00

This is only the second of Wallace's books that I've read, and I approached this text hoping for some resolutions to the seemingly irresolvable Infinite Jest. I finished Infinite Jest about a year ago but couldn't finish thinking about it. I could stop thinking about it for periods of time, but was perpetually working on a review of the book, perpetually trying to decide what I thought of it. Did I hate it? Was I moved by it? I was both, and could not let it go.

I find myself in a quite similar situation: I want to have something quite profound and final to say about A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, but instead I find I must live with it in my head (and in my bookbag), unable as I am to make the final move of placing it back on the shelf. Even just writing this post, I keep telling myself not to worry about including every observation I have about the book. If I didn't tell myself this, I'd be here forever and the post would never go up. Perhaps my inability to reach a conclusion (either in writing, i.e. a logical conclusion, or in reading, i.e. putting the book down and moving on to another) is a testament to the conclusiveness of Wallace's essays. They seem to make every observation that could be made; they anticipate every counterargument that could be advanced; they track the reader's every instinctive reaction. They are not unlike Infinite Jest in this sense: everything's in there.

Even taking a shallow look at the Table of Contents proves that Wallace can write about anything. (Oh God, I just sounded like one of the thousand male critics that have gay crushes on Wallace. I spent most of last year hating those critics and their substanceless praise for Infinite Jest. They had far more to say about the author's mental capacity than about the work itself. According to them, Wallace is "brilliant" and a "genius." He's our generation's Pynchon. He can write about anything.) The essays concern: 1. Amateur Tennis 2. Television and Contemporary Fiction 3. The Illinois State Fair 4. Poststructural Literary Criticism 5. Filmmaker David Lynch 6. Professional Tennis 7. A Caribbean Cruise. Damn. The most exciting page turn of the entire book, I submit, is from the last page of essay 3, in which Wallace gazes at the bulging belly of a yuppie suspended high in the Illinois air by the cables of a bungee-like carnival contraption; to the first page of essay 4, which begins "In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head..."

Damn.

The two things that really excited me about this book, though, are that 1) Wallace has something optimistic and redeeming to say about television, which surprised me given the fact that the dystopia imagined in Infinite Jest revolves around a society whose members literally die because they cannot stop watching TV, and 2) Wallace doubts himself and even self-deprecates in these essays, which demonstrates that he is not the dick that his omniscient narrator in Infinite Jest often is.

Let me talk about 1) first. Essay 2, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" may be the piece of writing I have spent the most time discussing with friends, often going so far as to read chunks of the essay out loud. The essay's first major point is that Joe Briefcase, an average American watching six hours a day of TV (the average as of 1990), is a teleholic. Television promises to solve Joe's lonely life with shows full of excitement and interaction, while at the same time keeping Joe's life lonely by keeping him in front of the TV six hours a day. Wallace manages to make this point without writing off television as altogether evil; in fact, he professes his annoyance with critics who do so. Conclusion: read this essay. This is the most important thing I will say in this post. You will learn about who you are when you sit before the large flickering screens that occupy a percentage of our lives second only to sleep. You can find it online here, but I recommend getting your hands on a copy of the book so that you don't have to experience the dissonance of reading this essay in front of a screen not dissimilar from a TV screen.

As I mentioned above, I'm also very glad to learn that Wallace can displace and doubt his own point of view. He is culpable and fallible in these essays. In essays 3 and 7, which were both journalistic assignments from Harper's magazine, he's present in the first-person far more than a conventional reporter. Notably, in these appearances he's more often bumbling than anything else: losing at chess to a 9-year old girl, getting nauseous with fear just looking at carnival rides, trying to flirt with the female staffer who makes his bed on the cruise.

This deprecating self-consciousness has twofold significance for me. First, it might save Infinite Jest. A few other tidbits from A Supposedly Fun Thing helped: for example, Wallace's admiration for what he decides is pure expressionism in David Lynch's movies combined with extra information about his junior tennis career and his personal entertainment consumption habits allow one to recast Infinite Jest as a kind of fictionalized autobiography. This makes its dystopia less snide, more forgivable for being the author's personal future nightmare. It deflates what originally seemed to be a claim that this nightmare awaited us all, as a society. Perhaps DFW just wants to express his fears.

The main difficulty in reading Infinite Jest as expressionism without also reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is IJ's omniscient narrator. The problem of the narrator really plagued IJ: sometimes the narrator appears to be Hal, sometimes the story is told from Joelle's point of view, sometimes the narrator is omniscient. Worst of all, the omniscient narrator displays a subtle-yet-present brand of misogyny and homophobia. He's an asshole, when you really look. It becomes very hard to like Infinite Jest if one concludes that it endorses these oppressive (and sometimes just downright mean) attitudes. The self-deprecating narrator that speaks in A Supposedly Fun Thing introduces the possibility that IJ's omniscient narrator could be imperfect and wrong just like the rest of us, and perhaps DFW just wanted to display that narrator in all his fucked-up ideologies as well as his "brilliant" and "genius" observations.

Second, the fallible and clumsy narrator is just one key element of what I believe is really DFW's enduring gift to us all: his style. This narrator allows him to be intellectual and readable at the same time. He can discuss poststructural metacriticism in all its jargon-y details, but he eventually comes back down to a kind of individualized layman's truth:

"For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane."

He can make up words and employ an enormous vocabulary, use layers of footnotes and a seemingly endless reserve of knowledge and research, but often his best points are made after his famously long and diagrammable sentences, in a short and plain summary sentence:

... Still, for the fact that individual American human beings are consuming vulgar, prurient, dumb stuff at the astounding average per-household dose of six hours a day - for this both TV and we need to answer. We are responsible basically because nobody is holding any weapons on us forcing us to spend amounts of time second only to sleep doing something that is, when you come right down to it, not good for us. Sorry to be a killjoy, but there it is: six hours a day is not good.

Wallace's human narrator - himself - tones down some of his most condemning points about humanity. When the statement involves a personal expression of Wallace's, we read it not as ideological tome but as unavoidable, real, human:

... the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS - is the central fantasy the [cruiseliner's] brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn't that this promise will be kept, but that such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie. And of course, I want to believe it - fuck the Buddha - I want to believe that maybe this Ultimate Fantasy Vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my Infantile part will be sated.

Here Wallace can't help but interject his own feelings, even going so far as to use the uncharacteristic and not very diagrammable dash. Fuck the buddha, he says, and it makes concrete this detailed and abstract point about the human condition.

I'm not done with this book (well, I have read the whole thing, but that's not what I mean) and I'm not done with Wallace, I can tell. This is embarassing, but when I am feeling delusions of grandeur I sometimes think that he is the Eliot to my Crane. I can't seem to get past him.

Parking enforcement is cruising

2008-12-15T00:13:00.000-08:00

It's just after midnight, and it just started to rain (hooray! we need it). While I was taking a porch break I saw an LAPD parking enforcement car cruising the street behind my building.

Damn, they issue tickets in the middle of the night? Poor officer that has to do that job.

I wonder if they train them to drive their Priuses efficiently. Those things do awesome at slow speeds with lots of stopping.

A few minutes after the parking enforcement went by, a couple pedestrians ambled along. I could see them past the empty lot, framed by cacti, which is now greening with the recent rain. I love my neighborhood.

Seriously.

2008-10-13T18:32:00.000-07:00

No On Proposition 8!!

Never Use Monistat again.

2008-10-07T12:18:00.000-07:00

In case there was ever any doubt as to my sex (and there is and should be; Curbed LA recently referred to me as a "he" and my presentation is generally androgenous), this post will put it to rest.

I hesitated to write this post because the subject matter is certainly not dignified. You would not find this discussed in Virginia Quarterly Review, for example. But if a blog can function as a citizens' information network, this is certainly the type of information I believe should be circulated: information that empowers us to act independently of advertiser's wishes and take control of our own bodies.

I have a clove of garlic in my vagina.

A few days ago, I started to get a yeast infection. Being broke and generally averse to sticking synthetic, expensive anti-fungal agents (Monistat and co.) into my vagina, I decided to try some home remedies.

Yesterday morning, following the advice of this website, I cut a notch in a peeled clove of garlic and tied some floss around it as a rescue string. I then stuck it up there. I left it in for 8 hours, took it out, went to sleep, and then stuck another clove in this morning. I've also been drinking cranberry juice and eating soy yogurt and miso soup for the live acidophilus cultures.

It's working brilliantly! Garlic doesn't ooze out disgustingly like Monistat, and it has completely relieved my itching. It's less noticeable than a tampon when its in.

I recommend it, if you're unfortunate enough to get an infection. And I recommend visiting the website I linked above, if you want the full and complete DIY on yeasties.

Three Morning Pages

2008-09-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

As recommended in the The Artist's Way, I write three longhand pages each morning upon waking.

Lately I've wanted to write (in this blog, not the morning pages) about Villaraigosa's failure to plant a million trees, or about my success foraging wild cherries, or about how little pity I have for investment bankers.

But my writing energies are now focused on producing a solid entry to VQR's Young Reviewer's Contest, so as a stand-in for a real blog entry I'll simply transcribe one day's pages. According to the artist's way, I am not supposed to read the pages until at least 8 weeks after I write them, nor am I supposed to share them with anyone, but oh well, I broke that rule.

You can tell that these are unedited, and that I'm sometimes searching for something to fill the page.

------- 9 / 23 . morning pages -------------

The problem is that I feel like "words aren't coming to me" when I expect them to come as easily as reading prose makes it seem. In the good prose I read they follow one another at a rapid rate, all quite eloquent and sensible. This produces the illusion that a person could speak those words in monologue or conversation quite naturally. But actually (as Marisa pointed out in one letter), the pleasure of writing is that it produces that illusion but is actually the product of long periods of musing and revision. See, I crossed several things out already in these few sentences. I guess an element of "good" writing that is pleasurable to read is the crafting of a spoken-seeming flow in the voice. This is why even newspaper writing can use the dash to portray a thought that interrupts itself. We do that in speech. We also pause at times and at the end of sentences. Thus, we have marks like the period and comma. But isn't it strange how formal writing does not attempt to have signs for intonation, volume, speed, etc. It's true that there is a limit on the extent to which sound can be transmuted into writing, but we could definitely go further, and in informal communications people improvise. Common in informal writing but prohibited in formal is the use of capitals and font size to indicate volume or emphasis. We also do not allow cross-outs to depict process in formal writing. There must be some rhyme and reason behind the things we allow. Perhaps this could be a field like linguistics that looks at many systems in an attempt to draw (inductively) conclusions about the way humans process writing in general.

The economics professor incorrectly defined inductive and deductive reasoning yesterday. This disturbed me. I find strict and rigorous understanding of concepts like that to be very important. First of all it gives you access to vocabulary that scientists and philosophers use. Second of all the actual concept itself enhances your analytic ability. That seems obvious and obviously important. Thus its disempowering and actually disturbing to watch these analytical concepts be shoved under the rug in the interest of efficiency.

Then again maybe all the people are sitting in the classroom not paying too much attention to Anza, or putting much stock in him. They won't be pulling out his definitions in conversations with strangers. Maybe the glazed look on their faces signifies that they too want to get their A and move on to bigger and better things.

C and E are having breakfast in the other room. I'm at C's desk, which sits under a window. On the outside just next to the window is a shed / shack. It blocks some of the sunlight and view of a palm tree.

We talk about "progress" in writing. But sometimes its achingly difficult because one does not know what the "destination" would look like. I want to write Amro and say that after I received his email, and the attached review, I "made a lot of progress on the review I'm writing." I know that's true. but then I look at what still needs to be done and I don't even know what doing it will be like. That's why exercise is very appealing because it is made so clear what one should do. Run this route, lift these weights, perform these drills. Until you get to the very high levels it is almost impossible to fuck up, although there are varying degrees of success, various quality levels of training.

Yesterday, listening to Fall Out Boy and Coheed and Cambria, I realized that punk is really the music I love best, that literally moves me. They are the folk songs of my generation, with their simple architecture and relatively straightforward verses and choruses. Coheed and Cambria are layering more complexly and doing some metal things. But really it is the heavy climaxing choruses of punk rock - high distortion, tonal and repetitive bass, high snare, loud and borderline raspy singing - that make me feel like a part of a unified generation. We need songs for our causes and struggles, songs for our time, and I can't imagine those songs being written in any other genre.

People want to listen to more fashionable, inventive, cutting edge bands. Like Modest Mouse or Panda Bear. I like those too. But if Bob Dylan can be so universally acclaimed then there must be some general recognition of the fact that careful mastery of a simple genre is an astounding form of art. Like printmaking.

Whenever I have coffee and food with morning pages I have less to write. Maybe Hemingway was right: skipping a meal makes you sharp. Discomfort makes you sharp, I agree with that. This is why I need more discipline to WAKE UP and go through the day a little bit tired sometimes.

I miss Lizzy. She was perfect to live with. She was clean and socially conscious and values quality family time and public transportation. We have more in common than we would have thought at 9 and 13, when all I wanted was to rebel. Now rebellion in some quiet forms has come upon her, unsummoned, and she wears it well.

The other problems with coffee and food are: 1) they make me feel guilty for being served, 2) I have to shit while writing and it does not sharpen me, it distracts me.

DFW, in memoriam

2008-09-14T13:24:00.000-07:00

Salon writer and admirer Laura Miller has already written a beautiful elegy for David Foster Wallace, who hung himself last night.

I learned about his suicide over the phone from a friend, a fact that seems appropriate considering how many times Infinite Jest doubts our ability to connect as humans in a world saturated with technological middlemen, a world where news reaches us on our teleputers as we watch them, alone.

In his work, he engaged with despair readily. His suicide does not surprise, given the dark and hopeless moments he often portrayed in his fiction.

I do not pretend to be qualified to eulogize him. In fact, I spent the better part of this year reading and attempting to review Infinite Jest, and I never reached a point where I felt comfortable making claims about it. I disliked the feeling it gave me; I rejected its message. But I could not shake its effects free, and suspected that that was the ultimate marker of art.

But I will make a recommendation here, to whoever reads this. Out of respect for one of our time's most talented writers, we should read his advice on how to live, and follow it for an hour or a day, if we can. Before his death, David Foster Wallace did at some points advocate a kind of hope. Not the kind that fits in campaign slogans, but the kind of hope that exists, humbly, despite an extremely detailed and attuned awareness of the infinite number of arguments against it.

Your fitful fiction enlarged our concept of peace, by excavating all of its alternatives. Rest in peace.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories

2008-08-22T17:08:00.000-07:00

A book like this causes its reader to thank God, unironically and humbly, for allowing her to come across it.

A few lucky accidents brought Close Range into my hands. First, we caught the last half of a very edited-for-tv Brokeback Mountain, flipping channels after a long, hot mid-Atlantic day. When I got back to Los Angeles, I mentioned to my sister that I wanted to read Brokeback Mountain, the story. She had to return some books anyway, so the next evening the book was in my hands, as if it had willed itself there. I certainly hadn’t put in much effort.

I was working on my final story for English 124: Short Story Writing at L.A. City College. My chief disappointment with the class was that we never actually discussed the short story. Our topic was plot and all the teaching examples were drawn from films. We were assigned didactic online articles about how over 90% of high grossing films involve some kind of plot reversal. Ironically, despite my beef with this approach and my constant bitching that we should look to stories themselves to show us how to write stories, Brokeback Mountain the film brought me to this book more than anything else.

But once I opened Close Range, Proulx demonstrated what this genre can do. How to sketch characters and settings in a very compressed space. The autotelic pleasure of beautiful sentences and local dialogue. How to open up a whole backstory with a terse flash.

In fact, finishing this collection, one is left with the sense that the genre’s pleasures and capabilities have been thoroughly mined. As if methodically, no stone left unturned: Close Range includes a character study, a voice-driven “I” narrative, a suspenseful quest, a folk-tale, a love story. It was prodigious indeed that I happened upon this book, because I can’t imagine a better short-story writing text.

These stories are full of fury and spitfire, fueled by Proulx’s athletic prose. She can go for paragraphs at a time without an uninventive adjective, without a plain descriptive sentence. Just as one’s attention comes to her prodigy, she showers you with a prodigious display. Then at other times, Proulx advances a narrative using only plain and sparing language. Like the Wyoming weather, her prose can blend into the landscape one moment, and the next moment step into center stage, rising like a furious deity with a will of its own.

Consider, for example, this relentless sequence of verbs from an opening paragraph in “Pair A Spurs” (emphasis mine):

Ten days before June a blizzard caromed over the plains, drifting house-high on lee slopes, dragging a train of arctic air that froze the wet snow, encased new calves in icy shells. For a week the cold held under glassy sky, snow-scald burning the cows udders; it broke in minutes under a chinook’s hot breath. Meltwater streamed over the frozen ground. The bodies of dead stock emerged from fading drifts, now you don’t, now you see em, a painful counting game for ranchers flying over in single-engines. Scrope’s yard flooded, a mile of highway disappeared under a foot of water while they held his mail at the post office, but before it ebbed another storm staggered in from the west and shucked out six inches of pea hail, a roaring burst that metamorphosed into a downpour, switched back to hail and finally made a foot of coarse-grained snow. Two days later the first tornado of the season unscrewed a few grain elevators from the ground. (152)

What I love about this passage is how the orgasmic ending of the penultimate sentence renders the plainest verb here, “made,” profound.

More examples of Proulx’s relentlessness abound. For ranching vocabulary, on the first page of “The Blood Bay” we have “gant bodies of cattle,” draws (a gully shallower than a ravine, in case you didn’t know), coulees, and whetstone. For metaphors, the opening page of “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water” gives us: “Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film,” and “It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.”

And then there's what she doesn't say: how she leaves the intricacies of geography, guns, or tractors unexplained, or how she carefully controls how plot and backstory are revealed, so that the chronology of the story and the chronology of the reader's discovery are quite different.

Close Range was a National Bestseller when it was published in 1999, after several stories in it won O. Henry’s, after several more were chosen for Best American Short Stories 1998 and 1999 and after one was published in Best American Short Stories of the Century. After its publication, literary accolades continued to rain, but Brokeback Mountain failed to win the award for Best Picture and Proulx was mercilessly lambasted by B.R. Myers in his now-famous ”Reader’s Manifesto.” (It delighted me to read him quoting lines I loved, and then talking shit about them.) Proulx, Close Range, and Brokeback sit at a strange nexus: loved by the literary establishment, respectfully received, with various reservations and qualifiers, by the mass media; and scorned by sharp old boys like Myers. Thus, Close Range is a productive site indeed from which to ask questions about what ‘literariness’ means, and what art can or should do in its various arenas.

All this makes me feel especially grateful that I came upon these stories so innocently, and read them without regard for their position in such debates. (But, if you care to know, I agree with Proulx. (Please click that link, it is pure awesome, except for some LA shit-talking). I think Brokeback Mountain a much, much better movie than Crash, which offended me with its mischaracterization of race relations in LA. As a child of happy Angeleno miscegenation, I must object. When I watched the movie, I began to do so immediately and vocally right after the credits stopped rolling. Thinking on it now, the two movies represent the dichotomy between plot-driven, surprise-ending, message-conveying stories that close with, well, closure, and plodding, ambiguous, language-driven, landscape-driven work. Being rough here, the Motion Picture Academy lives by the former, the literary establishment by the latter, and Myers by the former, at least I think so. He may exceed this dichotomy. If forced to choose, I endorse the latter.)

Before I thought about the Oscars or read Myers, though, context was one of my main interests in Close Range. What context does Close Range claim for itself?

These stories disregard both time and current events. To a reader ignorant of ranches and rodeos, the technology that appears in Close Range will appear dated and quaint, as will its dialects. Fashion, for these characters, involves spurs, boots, and flannel shirts. Transportation consists of old trucks and trailers. Nothing is new. Everything needs fixing. Occasionally someone listens to the radio or remarks upon the caprices of the beef market. Nobody ever watches tv. It comes as a shock, then, when one comes across the occasional reminder that these people live in eras as recent as the 1990s. Inklings of their urban contemporaries come at them antagonistically.

The Coffeepot southeast of Signal had been an o.k. little ranch but it passed down to Car Scrope in bad times – the present time and its near past. The beef-buying states, crying brucellosis which they fancied cattle contracted from Yellowstone bison and elk on the roam, had worked up a fear of Wyoming animals that punched the bottom out of the market. It showed a difference of philosophies, the outsiders ignorant that the state’s unwritten motto, take care a your own damn self, extended to fauna and livestock and to them. There was a deeper malaise: all over the country men who once ate blood-rare prime, women who once cooked pot roast for Sunday dinner turned to soy curd and greens, warding off hardened arteries, E. coli tainted hamburger, the cold shakes of undulant fever. They shied from overseas reports of “mad cow” disease. And who would display evidence of gross carnivorous appetite in times of heightened vegetarian sensibility? To counteract the anti-meat forces Scrope contributed ten dollars toward the erection of a roadside sign that commanded passersby to EAT BEEF and, at the bottom, bore the names of seventeen ranchers who paid for the admonition.

In this passage, “outsiders” can only communicate with Wyoming people as a market, and ranchers can only communicate with "beef-buying states” via a sign planted on a road only ranchers will travel. Urban consumers can only interface with Scrope en masse, as a “malaise.” As foreign as these vegetarians are to Scrope, he and his fellow characters are foreign to most readers. From their occupation, to their dress, to their intimacy with violence and death, everything about these characters estranges them from the time and place which most of Close Range’s educated, literary audience inhabits.

This accomodates the fantastical and extreme. Thus, when the Dunmire boys cut off Rasmussen’s penis in "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water" it does not seem unbelievably brutal. (Note the title’s insistence on a certain distinctive place.) We believe it could happen. Similarly, when the titular spurs of "Pair a Spurs" lodge beneath an old railroad beam after falling off a drowning man, we believe it when Proulx writes that they were “seeking sister metal.” Perhaps magnetism works like that in Wyoming waterways. The focus on place unsettles the parameters of reality so that they can no longer be assumed to be universal. If televisions and Toyotas do not figure into these characters’ lives, then who knows what does? Yet, these stories do not feel like magical realism. Here the geospatial imaginary – the idea of Wyoming – supercedes the genre of magical realism. These stories don’t evoke Rushdie (who, ironically, writes about the marginalized geographies of the Subcontinent) nor do they forerun Jonathan Safran Foer. They feel true, as if the bitter hardness of Wyoming did in fact contain secret workings, hidden logics that city people will never have the grounds to question. We can’t evaluate and then classify as fantasy or reality, because - how could we know? Urban authority crumbles before Wyoming even as it towers confidently over India or Brooklyn.

I suppose this is what people mean when they say that Proulx’s prose is “evocative.” Myers hates this word. I want to use it. Because when one reads Close Range, one surrenders one’s own authority. What Close Range calls forth - what it evokes - is silent humility before mortality, before nature, before mystery. No wonder, then, that I opened this post by saying that the book made me want to thank God.

Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man, by Ogden Nash

2008-07-28T19:22:00.000-07:00

It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of
omission and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people,
from Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shuddha.
I might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin as long as, in
a way, against each other we are pitting them,
And that is, don't bother your head about sins of commission because however
sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn't be committing
them.
It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,
That lays eggs under your skin.
The way you get really painfully bitten
Is by the insurance you haven't taken out and the checks you haven't added up
the stubs of and the appointments you haven't kept and the bills you
haven't paid and the letters you haven't written.
Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of
beauty,
Namely, it isn't as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night every
time you neglected to do your duty;
You didn't get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forgot to pay a bill;
You didn't slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,
Let's all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this
round of unwritten letters is on me.
No, you never get any fun
Out of things you haven't done,
But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,
Because the suitable things you didn't do give you a lot more trouble than
the unsuitable things you did.
The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind
of sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.

-----------

(as listened to in Poetry on Record vol. 1 while folding my laundry and not taking out a medical insurance plan)

shout outs

2008-07-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

"Shout out" means acknowledgement, usually for others.

When we shout out for ourselves in desparation

Depression could be okay if it made me return to words.

A kind of fragmented sentence could be okay if it was true.

If it was a true representation of the pieces of sensation

barely keeping track of.

Thought must be a level of synthesis above this grappling.

LAPD vs. pedestrians

2008-07-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I got a ticket for crossing the street wrong.

I was crossing 7th St on the east side of Alvarado, right next to the Westlake / MacArthur Park Metro station on the Red Line. I crossed within the boundaries of the crosswalk, walking my bike and not riding it, and I made it across the street before the light turned yellow. Once I arrived on the opposite sidewalk, a cop immediately stopped me and began writing me a ticket. I looked at him with incredulity. He said, "Once the red hand begins flashing, you cannot enter the intersection at all."

He then proceeded to ask me for my ID.

[Unrelated note: he filled out my race as white, and I had to correct him. I said, "I'm not white." He said, "What are you then?" I should have said black. What could he have done? I said, "Asian / Pacific-Islander." He said, "I don't think I have that - what do you put on forms?" I barked. "Other."]

I didn't argue with him, and later looked up California Vehicle Code 21456, which he cited on the ticket. It did in fact stipulate that the way I crossed was illegal. But seriously, who knew!?

So many questions were running through my mind. WHY would a cop bother ticketing pedestrians in a neighborhood with so many other, more consequential crimes? I could probably identify 15 people selling fake IDs, 5 instances of public drunkenness, and 50 instances of littering within a 2 block radius of the corner we stood on. How could pedestrian traffic really be the priority here?

As I rode home, I thought about all of the times that drivers had broken minor laws in ways that directly endangered my life while I rode a bike. And I got straight up angry. I wanted to say to this cop: I ride my bike and take public transit every day, and it cleans YOUR air and makes YOUR city better. YOU benefit directly. But instead of protecting cyclists and pedestrians, all of whom are doing the city a public service, you criminalize us. Instead of ticketing the thousands of drivers who anticipate green lights or blow through intersections at unsafe speeds, you plant your sting on the sidewalk and fine working-class transit users.

The day after I got the ticket, I was at the same intersection and saw another pedestrian being ticketed. I asked the pedestrian offender (who, coincidentally, was also walking a bike), if he was getting a ticket for crossing the street wrong. He said yes, and added, "It's ridiculous. Pedestrians have no rights."

I asked the cop why he was doing this, and he said he was ordered to by his supervisor. I asked if he could just give warnings instead of tickets - educate instead of punish. He started some kind of explanation, but had to interrupt himself to go ticket some more pedestrians who were wantonly crossing the street at that moment.

Curbed LA did some reporting on this issue. I also found this article in Streetsblog. I recommend reading through the comments in the Streetsblog article. Unlike the comments in the Curbed articles, these have more substance than your usual internet jackassery.

Later comments in the Streetsblog article give good advice on how to contest the ticket. The logic in this article will also be helpful, even though it pertains to DC, and not LA.

I am happy to relay information like this here. But I also worry that most of the people in my neighborhood who are getting these tickets do not have the internet or other resources to learn how to fight them. What I really should do is go back to that corner and make sure nobody breaks the law, so that the sidewalk officer can't ticket anyone.

I want this officer and all of his supervisors to suffer full accountability for this nonsense. For the record: the officer who gave me the ticket was named Peterson. The violation occurred in the Rampart section of the LAPD's Central Bureau. The Rampart police station is located at 2710 W. Temple, LA 90026, and can be called at 213 485 4061. The Central Bureau Deputy Chief of Operations is Sergio Diaz. His email is diazs@lapd.lacity.org .

The sting took place in District 1 of LA City. The Council member who represents this district is Ed Reyes: councilmember.reyes@lacity.org, 213 473 7001.

Thanks, LAPD, for making walking a crime in one of the nation's most pedestrian-hostile cities.

"One must keep on looking..."

2008-07-14T00:47:00.000-07:00

I wrote what follows in May, after the end of spring lacrosse seasons but before the beginning of summer adventures. Now, it resonates with passages at the end of To The Lighthouse, when Lily is having her vision, or struggling to have it as the case may be. What I wrote below is about how an artistic moment happens passively. What Lily knows is that after these fortunate incidents, we must hang on.

"Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that ery jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh... It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; herocially, one must force it on."
(193)

"One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion, the determination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled. One must hold the scene - so - in a vise and let nothing come in and spoil it."
(201)
...

Lately, perhaps because I have few tasks to complete and no schedules to follow, life seems a meager and humble struggle to keep things tidy. It consists of simple and forgettable tasks like folding the clothes and emptying the sink and deleting an irrelevant email and picking up the keys off this table and placing them where they will be remembered, on that desk.

As I go through these actions, which are too minute to deserve the title chores, the phrase that often enters my mind is "daily struggle against cacophony." I know that what I mean is entropy, or perhaps chaos, and not the rattles and buzzes of cacophony. But I stay with the metaphor which apparently has deep roots in my subconscious because this word, cacophony, appears gutturally at all routine moments. I am taking a shit. Cacophony. I am watering the rosebush. Cacophony. I am tossing the old coffee grounds in the trash bin. Cacophony.

My everyday life seems one cymbal-filled, slowly rising and randomly dissonant morning. Most sensory input is subtle, like the vibrations of a far away speaker: the buzz of the refrigerator, the gradient of heat from where I sleep to the window, the unobtrusive blue of the carpet.

And then there are moments which are like locating a clean and clear note somewhere inside the labyrinthine pith of cacophonous and thick sounds. I look in my rearview mirror and see the sea, and the slow red of sunset, and I realize that there is a rhythmic beat underneath all of this, yes, and that beat moves me through dusk to sleep and then a next day. The beat allows me to be happy; or my happiness enables the beat. Either way, I suddenly and firmly know that the perfect reflection of the ocean means I should be here, despite all the times my daily routine seems pointless, empty, and insignificant. I do not have a future in the sense in which the educated elite in their early 20s are expected to have one - that is, a career on the horizon. Nor do I have a future in the job-marriage-401k sense in which members of the middle class are expected to have one. Instead, I have daily cacophony, and the occasional peal of a clear note. I have a simple horizon. And I am perfectly happy.

16 may 2008

It's been a while...

2008-04-04T00:56:00.001-07:00

"It's been a while" is what Britney Spears says at the beginning of "Break the Ice," on her latest album BLACKOUT.

Okay. I've been coaching my little butt off and haven't been reading, writing, or posting as much as usual. I quit my job at the UCLA School of Public Health, and started coaching lacrosse at Occidental College and at Redondo Union High School. I also experienced, for the first time in my life, the hell that is not having medical insurance and getting an infection.

Oh, and I got freaked out about posting my drafts on here because many, many journals require that what you are submitting has never been published in any form anywhere, including the internet. I think this is a silly rule; does my work really have less value in the journal because it has already appeared on my blog? That's a zero-sum logic that I don't follow. Anyhow.

All these things have kept me away, but I'm coming back.

I'm reading Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely and it is an oddly appropriate follow-up to the Whitman. It floors me. I already wrote down drafts for three different poems. It must be inspiring me. I recommend it.

I used up all my eloquence at half-time and time-outs earlier today, so let me just sign off with these scribblings, which I wrote on a legal pad while watching lacrosse in the Rose Bowl during the East / West Challenge in early March. I sat a row back from my players, who were resting between games.

Perhaps because the stadium is shaped like a bowl, perhaps because the air is filled with music and tension, the air takes on a certain density, a certain opacity, a certain viscousness. As if the air itself had changed composition and would now be proper stuff for athletes to breathe.

I cannot tell you how my heart aches for this, as if aching for a lost lover. It is difficult, difficult to watch the players lined with sticks, hear the announcer and then the anthem. One cannot help but imagine oneself in these arms, one cannot help but imagine oneself occupying that familiar embrace. And one watches the goalie and thinks, my head would be there, my glove would be a bit looser - and the worst - i would have gotten that.

It will never again matter in the way it once did. Whether you make the save or not. Whether you're at your best or just the tiniest bit (enough!) slow.

Last Week

2008-03-04T16:12:00.000-08:00

I attempt to memorize one poem per day and read one novel per week.

(I often recite the daily poem while I am riding my bicycle around LA, and this week I rode the LA Bike Tour with 10,000 other cyclists - thus the picture.)

My book last week was F. Scott Fitzgerald's How Tender is the Night. It has been a long time since I read Gatsby, so I can't make comparisons even though that seems like the obvious first thing to do in any commentary on anything else by Fitzgerald. All I really want to say about Tender is the Night is that (as the back cover and the Fitzgerald bio both promised) it offers remarkable insights into how people socialize. To give a very minute example, in one stretch of dialogue a character pauses to remember a name, and the other character, during the hesitation, changes the subject. Whatever story the first character was beginning is abandoned forever.

Last week, I memorized Marianne Moore's "What are Years?" and Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque" (of course) and "The Second Coming" by Yeats. And Whitman's [28] from the 1855 Leaves of Grass took four days to memorize.

Observations on repetition: even the shortest poem can have a memory. This might seem obvious, but for me it was the insight of the week: repeating doesn't imply that you're uninventive. "Smirk" appears twice in "Chaplinesque," first in stanza 3 -

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index towards us
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

and then again in the last stanza -

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Without the first "smirk" the second "smirk" would be impossibly difficult, a puzzle with little meaning.

What else. Turns out that Whitman is impossibly arhythmical. [28] resembles a Gregorian chant in its refusal to present any kind of beat or meter. As a result, Whitman is hard to memorize. He repeats, and will repeat many many times, but he does not make patterns. It reminds me of how most people have a hard time generating random sequences. For example, if asked to fabricate the outcome of flipping a coin many times in a row, by writing "H" for heads and "T" for tails, most people will write something like this:

HTTHHHTHTHHTTTTHHTHTTH.

Most people will never include something like this:

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTT,

but probabilistically, the latter is just as likely as the former.

Whitman understood that it is okay to repeat and repeat and repeat, even though aesthetics might dictate otherwise. He could break a pattern and fall back in, the movement dictated by something more important than meter or rhythm.

The resulting verse is like falling raindrops, or rustling grass; both regular and random, both predictable and wild.

Como las bicicletas aqui.

To Whitman after Leaves of Grass

2008-02-25T15:23:00.000-08:00

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing,
If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

You knew me, but could you have known this?
How we would loop digitized Christmas carols out lit store windows
While our schizophrenics and crazies gestured outside to no one in particular?

How we would walk in the sweat of pregnant Filipinos and barely adult Taiwanese?

How we would fill the earth with our refuse, how we would tame rivers with concrete?

How we would kill a quarter million by dropping one bomb,
How we would drop another bomb, and kill another quarter million.

Walt, did they tell you we are perishing in Pershing? We are homeless in Hollywood, frail on Fairfax, we are beggars in Westwood?

Here where grass never grew until aqueducts were planted, hundreds of miles of lifelines still hidden, barely inscribed in the speedbumps on Mulholland drive.

How “exploration” and “discovery” would not unite us, would not tend us inward toward each other and ourselves, but would rearrange the bodies of slaves and ultimately drive our daily lives apart? Now it is an insult to presume to contain those multitudes, their struggles one and the same in an historical, causal sense, yet mutually and utterly foreign. Did they tell you we would forge foreignness at every turn, we would create aliens, we would deport intimacy? That the rushing squaw would no longer be invited in?

I will be your answerer. And the song will be funereal, a tribute to the America you dreamt, who sings yet in death.

Surely there must be something of worth here, behind locked doors, where people finger their crotches and watch the Sopranos, or put on a Radiohead album and navigate the hills, or dig surfboards out of the trash and ride them once more…

Some say we are lost, and I will not say that.
I do not succumb to endless entertainment, and I do more than consume. I contain and do not consume all those who do more than consume. We still dream.

The tagger fidgeting in still-creased jeans, as nervous as a prom date
The commuter turning the dial
The car sales-man
The old punter persisting without hurrah
The chain mail basketball hoops
The cashiers laughing and rearranging the gum
The soccer players with their shins colorfully covered

You write out of New York, in a time of optimism,
I write out of Los Angeles, in a time of fear.
I know that you are deathless,
I know that the sun does rise,
And that I too am deathless,
And that I too could die.

You rise anew in skyscrapers and palms.
I believe anew in psalms; how a thought might collect
The whole world in its words.

The waitress with hot plates on her forearms
The truck driver on his first highway haul, holding a straight course as another truck passes.

I am with Britney Spears when she shaves her head in Sherman Oaks. I solemnly graze her scalp.
I thrust hips with the dykes and the fags when “Piece of Me’ comes on.
I leave a lock of Britney’s hair for a dumpster diver.

I am Los Angeles, and I elect to miscegenate. I know Wilshire and Normandie; I know 101 homeless shelters; I know Echo Park. And I say there can still be a kosmos.

There is no need for a “we are” when I am Los Angeles. I am an aftershock and yet a foreshock. Premonitory and vicious are my visions.

The whole world gazes me. They way they gaze is me. If they accept illusion, if they prioritize imagination, they gaze my way and I am that verb.

Not just the hills and cardboard sets relived in living rooms, but a dream ever magnifying, a katamari out of control.
Pornographic and ever lusting.

I will teach you the truths that must be pulled from orifices, the root-canal truths, the champagne cork truths. I will teach you the truths written peligroso in another language.

How one-hundred and one communities living in parallel can collide into the same bottleneck, necking and nursing, fucking, slumping, sleeping, getting drunk.

My maps will not show you where to interchange, the curve and skid of the exit, the unexpected merge. These truths grow like follicles out of my asphalt. “There is no there there” is blasphemy to the millions who dip and pivot precise. Blasphemy to the skid marks that end in fire and lights, and remain, dulled, in the daylight.

There we turned and turned, there we patiently waited, and there we died.

I supercede America.

Best of January

2008-01-24T00:19:00.000-08:00

All the best creative drama I've seen this month. Heroes, Wicked, and Juno.

At the center of each is the anti-hero. Someone awkward, inexperienced, and downright lowly. Hiro the office worker. Peter Petrelli the nurse. Elphaba the... wicked. Juno the kid, tipped forward with a kid of her own. None of these heroes is recognized by the people around them as destined for anything great. They don't look like people who'd be touched by destiny (except Elphaba, she looks green). But they are.

This is a trend, I think. Remember how Spiderman rocked all of our worlds and then Superman disappointed (even, for me, on opening night with 3D IMAX glasses)? It's because Superman is rock-star iconic - i.e., nobody we can relate to; and spider bites, on the other hand, happen to us all.

Am I saying the obvious when I say that in a world where "big figures" like government leaders and corporate top talent have failed to inspire (or even perform on a basic level, in some cases), it makes sense that we are moved by ordinary and every day heroes? We are a generation with no JFK or MLK; with no Sinatra; with no Gandhi; with no Rockefeller or Carnegie. We barely remember Lady Di. Instead of icons, we have reality TV and Fergie.

If our Presidents can't lead and our Senators gotta get it on in the bathroom, hell, if our parents can't even stay married most the time, then we will have to learn how to act like adults from a teenager like Juno. The husband Mark, who bears all the financial and social markers of an adult, is the film's real teenager. Juno, spewing slang and wearing stripes, models maturity.

In a time when evil is just a caricature and good is canonically a clean red-white-and-blue flag, the stability of good and evil as concepts disappears. I love how "Wicked" plays on value-laden language until words like "good" and "bad" no longer have a clear meaning. Lines like, "Wickedness must be punished, for good." and "Who can say if I've been changed for the better? Because I knew you, I have been changed for good." They take "good" out of its binary and put it somewhere else, somewhere idiomatic, somewhere deeper. Anyone can evoke the good-bad binary, and anyone does (cough cough Bush cough cough War on Terror cough cough). "Wicked" reminds us that good and bad are made.

The super-hero is a uniquely American, and beautiful, tradition. (Read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay if you're not already in on this fact.) And we all want to be heroes. What stops us? In each of "Wicked," "Juno," and "Heroes," there is a kind of anti-sidekick who encourages the would-be hero to get pragmatic, and not pursue heroic dreams. Not risk comfort and safety for something merely right. Says Glinda: "You're having delusions of grandeur." Nathan throws black paint on Isaac Mendez's painting of homecoming, believing he is saving Peter's life. Various peeps try to dissuade Juno. There is always a moment of choice: be a hero or not? And these three dramas all move me because in each the central characters ultimately choose heroism.

Though "Heroes" has been cut off, it is moving in the direction of complicating that moment of choice. A choice that seems right and heroic ends up killing somebody else, sacrificing something else. Nothing is orderly in that show as of Season 2. When it got cut off, "Heroes" was descending into a kind of complicated (perhaps postmodern?) chaos. "Wicked" flirts with this place too, during the song "No Good Deed goes Unpunished."

Mostly, though, Wicked, Heroes, and Juno make me feel unstoppable. They make me feel hopeful about the heroic potential we all contain - we're all actively containing - all the time.

Let's go stop time. Let's balance a bike with a guitar on our backs and go write a great song. Let's heal from any wound. Let us empathize in super human ways. Let's defy gravity.

yes, meek adjustments

2007-12-29T14:27:00.000-08:00

I want to write here explicitly about Meek Adjustments, not my blog but the general idea, capitalized in the way of Arundhati Roy in the God of Small Things - indicating an large, established, almost personified concept.

For Meek Adjustments have been all I can muster since I entered the stunning vacuum that is post-graduation life. Life.

Meek adjustments are my only ammunition against despair.

They are a very vegan concept: that through small changes one might approach a large problem. Upon graduating I felt myself so beset by problems that I could not live with myself if I did not address. They are enumerable, but each is impossible: (1) environmental degradation, (2) global poverty, and (3) my participation (via taxes and complicit citizenship) in the American Empire. I believe that's it. Three problems.

One could dedicate decades to solving any one of these problems. I spent a summer researching possible avenues. Join the coalition for the Peace Tax (3)? Accept a job offer with Digital Study Hall (2)? Use my technical education to pursue a career in alternative energy or environmental consulting (3)? Declare bankruptcy and become a full-time activist living on the streets (1,2,3?) ?

I have done none of these, and every day feel some guilt for that.

The fact is that I want too badly the refined privileges of being an American citizen with good credit standing and plenty of horded financial resources: I want a warm room in which to read Whitman, sketch lines of poetry on a large monitor, and fall asleep deep in the valley of one of Infinite Jest's long sentences.

I refuse to accept the notion, however, that this means I can change nothing. For me it is the meek adjustments we all make, our daily cultivation of actions, however small, from our beliefs, that constitutes the movements that constitute a movement. I hope it will be illustrative for me to share how this figures into my life:

As an environmentalist. I simply cannot live a sustainable life in this society. I consume fossil fuels. I purchase gasoline. For those things I am deeply ashamed, on so many levels. But I may choose to adjust in spontaneous moments, to ride my bicycle to the grocery or wake up early to take the train to work. It is a constant effort. I buy gasoline from Arco (BP) and not Exxon Mobil or Shell or Conoco Philips. These compromises are literally my only hope.

As a human rights advocate. I don't purchase clothing from sweatshops, which means I purchase almost no clothing. I wear hand-me-downs to a job interview. I choose not to eat animal products, to alleviate animal suffering and labor abuses on humans.

As an anti-imperialist. I wish that I could avoid paying taxes and funding guns. (I could, if I revoked my US citizenship and joined the Lakota Nation. Perhaps that will be the next meek adjustment.) Instead I'm pursuing alternative media, KPFK, Democracy Now, Mother Jones, and the Nation, so that I might cultivate an anti-state position from which to speak out against American hegemony and war.

As a friend, a co-worker, a roommate. This last thing is perhaps the most important. I am learning how to talk about my convictions with others. Is that an embarrassingly simple and conventional struggle? I don't find dissent easy. But I have to try, in pedestrian and unimportant conversations, to speak honestly, despite enormous pressures to conform.

For me, a meek adjustment happens in the moment one is confronted with an easy, usual choice, and a harder, more deliberated choice. I.e. turn the water off while soaping, or leave it on? I.e. finish the leftovers and redirect waste, or go to In-N-Out? I.e. nod and smile, or object? Each individual choice does not encapsulate a dichotomy between right and wrong - that is not what I mean; but the aggregate of all the choices is a slow approach toward what's right. And for me the conceptual shift from an all-or-nothing framework to an all-day-every-day framework has been a lifesaver.

No, I am not in the picket line, I am not on the streets campaigning, I am not renouncing all my worldly possessions. But I am actuating a certain consciousness that is at once progressive, anti-state, pro-poor, pro-indigenous, pro-environment, feminist, queer. I am actuating it in a world that constantly discourages me from doing so. As New Year's resolutions approach, I say let's seize the reminder that its what you do habitually that counts, it's what you strive for daily, not once-a-yearly.

I know that many are resisting, meekly, as I am. Some are resisting boldly: going to prison or sacrificing their reputations or even dying. Despite these differences I still think we resist together. I claim that our collective actions, our shared amalgam of conscious choices, constitute a movement. I hope that we keep struggling.

6 ideas for kids with disposable income

2007-12-25T21:41:00.000-08:00

I went to a prep school that, let's just say, qualifies me for entrance to facebook groups like "I went to Private School, Strumpet!" (which is a witty response to groups that I'm unqualified to join, like "I went to Public School, Bitch.")

And having afterwards gone to pretty-expensive and pretty-prestigious Harvey Mudd, many of my friends from both high school and college are now in control of significant amounts of cash. (Though I have to note that a significant fraction of my friends from college made conscious choices not to go into money-making industries, and are now teachers, activists, or grad school students).

Lately I've been struck by a lot of ways I would give away money if I had a ton to give away. In the Christmas spirit, I thought I would give them to everyone reading this. Anyway, most of these suggestions are dollar-value-flexible: you could target these organizations with $1 as easily as you could with $10,000.

1. Your local YMCA. They need new weight machines, I just bet. And they need funding so that more kids can learn to swim and so that more adults can get fit in a non-corporate, non-body-image-obsessed atmosphere.

2. Your local Head Start program. Head start has suffered under flat funding for the last couple years, and out and out funding cuts under the Bush Administration. Head Start gives early childhood education as well as medical, dental, and mental health benefits to kids younger than 5. They teach parents how to prepare affordable and healthy meals. And to qualify, you have to be below the federal poverty line. Basically, Head Start is the longest running effort to fight poverty in America.

It was just reauthorized this December, and the Bill requires all Head Start teachers to have Bachelor's degrees by 2013. As you can imagine, more-educated staff are going to cost more money, and the bill did not provide an increase in funds.

3. The rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

4. Good old UNICEF. I'm skeptical of most money flows from rich nations to poor (i.e. I think that in many cases first-world "charity" is either an analgesic for first world guilt or else a way for capitalists to sell more goods or own more infrastructure), but this organization has a long history and broad international support, and a commitment to solving immediate crises.

5. Politician of your choice in local political campaign. This represents an opportunity to educate yourself about the less-publicized elections that affect matters right under your nose. And if you are anything like most Americans, you are very uneducated about the issues in your local election. I recommend that even if you are broke, you set aside $10 bucks and figure out who deserves it the most.

5. Public radio. Also always broke, and provides clear public benefit to all. I was unable to get good information on the secession of the Lakota Sioux from anywhere except KPFK and KPCC. (Type "Lakota" into Google News and you'll get short articles from Le Monde and BBC, and almost nothing from a major American source. The fact that a large and historically important group of Americans can SECEDE and barely raise an eyebrow shows how much news media serves the interests of the State, again confirming Noam Chomsky's thesis in Manufacturing Consent.) Other alternative media sources like The Nation, Mother Jones, and Democracy Now are also always broke. And so necessary.

6. (In order of increasing expense): Drought-tolerant shrub; Light bulb retrofit; astroturf; sweet bicycle; train ticket; windmill. Also, if you have the option to pay your utilities company a premium in order to obtain all of your energy from renewable sources, put that on your 2008 plan.

Happy Holidays!

Here's links for expedient online donating once you've made your choice:

1. http://www.ymca.net/find_your_ymca/
2. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/hsb/hsweb/index.jsp
3. http://www.unitedwaynola.org/about/index.htm
4. you go girl
5. http://www.npr.org/
6. you know

David Barsamian, founder of Alternative Radio and regular contributor to Z Magazine, once explained that when he speaks to American audiences about Imperialism or corporate media consolidation or labor movements or any of his other specialties, they always ask him, "So what can we do?" They want to know how they can make a difference; it is a reasonable question. But, he notes, when he speaks abroad to incredibly poor and voiceless audiences, no one asks him that question. Zapatistas in Mexico, hydroelectric dam protesters in Gujarat, anti-sweatshop activists in the Philippines, they don't need direction or advice. Out of necessity and often with their very survival at stake, they're already acting on their own behalf. Only the world's privileged are at a loss for what to do; only they have that luxury. So, he answers: I cannot tell you what to do. You must ask yourself that question and find an activism that feels authentic to you. There is nothing wrong, he points out, with donating money to a good cause. Some will want to do more. Still, taking a moment to make a conscious donation can be an authentic, positive act.

Critic's Manifesto

2007-12-17T20:22:00.000-08:00

So, a friend of a friend's blog is the 7th result when you google "Berkeley Eclogue."

I am jealous. Could I blog in such a focused and disciplined way, so that my views appear when a poem is searched?

I read through the Time-out New York extended features on the "everyone's a critic" phenomenon.

Turned it all over in my head for a couple hours.

And then, over dinner, the TV in its ever-ambient state, I heard Andy Rooney blasting off irritatingly about... something... His tone sounded eerily similar to that of a KIIS 102.7 morning radio jockey yelling about how stupid the caller's girlfriend is... and I realized:

That's the critic I don't want to be. The Andy Rooney, Don Imus, Bill O'Reilley, I'm-yelling-over-you-critic. More thoughts on the kind of public critic I'd like to be coalesced into the following manifesto.

CRITIC'S MANIFESTO

1. I will react immediately, viscerally, and honestly. Jargon, bullshit, and over-thinking are my enemies. We don't consume art so that we can form beautiful opinions. We consume art because it touches us and this "touch" can never become obsolete in criticism.
2. There is no right; there is only a conversation and the hopes of a revelation.
3. More discipline.
4. More consumption of work.
5. More respect for the artist.

I am more afraid of AmSec than I am of a theft

2007-12-14T01:50:00.000-08:00

These little white AmSec security cars are always driving in and out of the cul-de-sacs in my neighborhood, "patrolling" to prevent crime. Or something like that. I cannot even conceive the need for such a service when we already live in the nicest part of the #1 Safest City in the Universe, Simi Valley. I know we all learned in like Suburbia 101 that whitey in the suburb is afraid of some colored folks stealing his freshly mowed lawn or his picket fence or his children inside...

But do we really need to add to the laundry list of ways that this neighborhood screams upper middle class!? Let me list them:

rustic neighborhood names like "Autumn Ridge" and "Sycamore Heights" and then super special names for the more expensive box mansions neighborhoods, i.e. "Legacy Estates"
a golf course! and a country club with "PRIVATE" written on the entrance gate
windy streets, their windiness perfectly planned I'm sure, to give you that "driving in the country" feeling
if you live somewhere like "Legacy Estates," gates and gatekeepers in uniforms
a very effective and worthwhile "Homeowner's Association" which doles out money to AmSec and matching aluminum fences (that are technically illegal because the bars are so easy to bend that they don't prevent small children from breaking into backyards with pools and drowning) and color consultants who ensure that all homes are earth-tone

I can thank the Homeowner's Association for, among other things, the drab color of my parents home, which actually had to be repainted after we (gasp!) painted it blue. I can also thank the H. Ass. for the recent investment shift away from green technologies and towards defense contractors and private alarm systems. Sweet guys. Lets pay some people to drive around all day and all night on wastefully windy roads.

Wood Ranch, Simi Valley - this is where I live.

Could we get security dudes on bikes? I would take that job.

The speech I gave at Senior Lunch

2007-12-12T21:05:00.000-08:00

Dana Mohamed pumped me up to start this blog; I think she would like this.

----------------

I want to start with a modest estimate, a crude mathematical model if you will. Excluding labs, we all took 22 semester-long classes in the core, plus about 10 classes (more or less - this is a model, remember) in our major. Assuming about four problems a week for each class, that means that in our time at Harvey Mudd, in technical classes alone, we solved 1,232 problems. It's difficult to quantify how much work on top of that we did for non-technical classes, but let me just say that as a representative sample, I counted how many pages I wrote in the humanities and social sciences while I was here, and it was 405 pages. 1,232 problems. 405 pages. To top it all off, Thesis. Clinic. There is no one that can tell us that we are not accomplished.

But all of this education means little if we do not put it to good use. And numbers like 405 and 1,232 are not adequate to count the problems we will encounter as graduates, in a world where, for example, 3 million people a year die of AIDS, and where a Hurricane like Katrina can incur $81.2 billion dollars’ worth of damage. And so I want to seize this moment to interrogate what it actually means to leave here with these diplomas in our hands - what responsibilities this entails for each of us. And I want to investigate those responsibilities by asking our class a simple question, "Do we dare?"

Four years ago, after we received our acceptance letters to Harvey Mudd, each of us may have stopped and asked this question: "Do I dare?" For coming to this school is in some ways a small act of bravery. We knew we would face intense scrutiny in a school with little over 700 students. We knew we would be pushed by our enormously talented peers. And finally, we knew the cirriculum would be truly tough. We understood all this coming in.

And despite all this, each of us answered the question, "Do I dare?" in the affirmative. And in the four years that ensued, we saw some of the consequences one can invite when one chooses to take a risk like that.

We failed tests. We slept through classes. We forgot appointments.

But we were lucky to be surrounded by role models who understood our failures. Fellow students experiencing the same pressures. Faculty, staff and administration who continued to operate a model of education that is a little different, a little eccentric, that privileges collaboration over competition. We were surrounded by people who dared to believe that a community could operate successfully under something like the honor code. People who dared to trust that much. People who sustained a five-college model. And finally, people like us, who chose a school where we would examine the “impact of our work on society.”

Four years later, we have experienced the rewards that come from an educational model that is daring in these various ways. So leaving this place, we go forward into situations where we will also confront the question, "Do I dare?" And I charge us to answer yes in the following three ways.

First, let us dare to question. When we came to Mudd we were told constantly to "Ask for help," and "Ask questions." We must not stop that asking. We must interrogate the society around us, and in turn interrogate ourselves. We must ask ourselves questions like, Do I dare speak out against unethical practices at my company? Do I dare refuse when asked to design a weapon? Do I dare hire an unconventional candidate? Do I dare to teach others rather than simply practice what I have been taught?

And every time we dare to question, let us dare to find the right answer even if it is the difficult one.

Second, let us dare to struggle. Let us fight to make science, engineering, and mathematics accessible to all people. Let us fight for technology that empowers people, that enriches their lives. Let us struggle against those who alter and erase accurate science only because for them it spells bad politics.

And every time we dare to struggle, let us dare to win.

Third, if these words can even be uttered without sounding like a platitude, let us dare to dream.

If you dare to dream that we will engineer sustainable fuels and transportation systems, then say with me, I dare.

If, like me, you dare to dream that our generation will finally understand gravity, then I ask you now to say it with me. I dare.

If you dare to dream that we will make computing technology accessible to more people in the coming years than ever before, then say with me, I dare.

If you dare to dream that our generation will prove or disprove the Riemann hypothesis, then say with me, I dare.

If you dare to dream that we will engineer AIDS treatments that are affordable and effective, and that we will find a way to make those treatments reach the millions of people that are dying from the disease, then say with me, I dare.

If you dare to dream that our generation will cure AIDS, then say with me, I dare.

And for every time we dare to dream, let us spend our waking lives making those dreams come true.

As scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, we have an authority and a voice in a global society where too many are voiceless. To use that voice effectively, we will daring, we will need courage. It will not always be easy.

In a world that constructs notions of race and gender completely removed from biological fact, we will need courage. In a world reluctant to face what chemistry says about styrofoam, we will need courage. In a world that forgets that groundbreaking physicist and mathematician Noether was a she, we will need courage. In a world where computer science skills are used by some for fraud and harassment, we will need courage. In a world where engineering skills are used to make war more devastating, we will need courage.

In a world where Larry Summers states publicly that women are intrinsically less proficient at math, we will need courage to drown out his voice with the names of our counterexamples: Maria Klawe, Weiqing Gu, Mae Jemison.

As Harvey Mudd students, we redefined the boundaries of what is achievable, what is possible. Each of us knows well just how much effort and intensity it takes to push those boundaries. Now let us realize that the educational arena in which we struggled for the past four years was always, whether we noticed it or not, a subset of the world we lived in. Let us here and now erase the boundary between "scientific" concerns and human concerns, so that the perserverance we acquired in the classroom can become a selfless perserverance directed towards positive change.

As students, we lived the consequences and rewards of daring to come here. As graduates let us continue to invite challenge into our lives. Do we dare? We dare.

Yes, I quoted Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque" to title my blog

2007-12-12T20:48:00.000-08:00

Just want to be open about that.

This blogging thing is strange. I hesitate about it because I'm afraid it's pompous to share my random thoughts with the world. But: 1. the world isn't reading; I bet only my friends are, and 2. I DO have things to share.

Like, if even one person reads Crane's Chaplinesque because of this post, I'll be satisfied.

Like, my new found love for the world "like" in print.

Like, the fact that even though David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest quite often uses the word 'like' in a colloquial and valley girl sense, I actually don't like it because it always seems tongue-in-cheek - a way to safely deflate potentially over-reaching sections.

That book, by the way, is teaching me that there is no new sentence; virtuosity in sentence writing is obsolete as far as I'm concerned. What matters instead is insight; what do you see and what do you have to say? Not whether you can eliminate passive voice and bind many phrases together into a grammatically correct sentence. I can read 10,000 of Wallace's beautiful sentences and still feel completely uninterested. He seems reluctant to say anything real. It doesn't help that Infinite Jest is peppered with misogyny and gender bullshit: stereotypes of athletic women as mustached wanna-be men on hormones; glorification of males who sleep around; winking comedy at the thought of cross-dressing!

I am persisting, trying to finish it, trying to give it a complete chance, but it is difficult. I constantly feel I am wasting my time.

Whitman, on the other hand, is redundant, over-reaching, mystifying, and real. I save doses of Leaves of Grass so that I can swallow Infinite Jest.