What have we learned?
A compendium of odds and ends from the past few days

1) Up front on the GRTC buses here in Richmond, Vee-a, there is a coffee can-sized brushed metal square container fitted with a prominent lock. When I was paying my fare a few mornings ago, the coin slot was clogged. The driver instructed me to use the jam box.

Jam box, is what the proper name for that object on the bus.

Please, billion-eyed audience, have a snicker on me. Say it slow and in a low voice...jaaam-box. Oh, yeah. A prurient mind is at feast forever.

2) Artist Bruce Conner died this past Monday. I have seen just a couple of his films, but I remember them; this was in 2002 at the James River Festival of the Moving Image among a sampling from the New York City Anthology of Films Archive of Essential Cinema. This was the program in which I was introduced to the luminous and brilliant Maya Deren, too. The Conner piece was Movie. [Image: Ken Hopson from the James River Festival site, link above. That's my very own Firehouse Theatre.]

This is hodge podge assortment of odd clips from various movies, interpolated by atomic age anxiety. The relevance and the freshness of the film, not to mention its influence, made the viewing experience one of those times when the original seemed a derivative. I must've seen his meta-reaction to the Kennedy assassination, Report, too, at one of the James River festivals, but I cannot recall which year, and Google won't drill that far. And Conner instructed that his films not be shown online. So I can't provide any links, as you can see from the first one in this graph.

I read in Conner's New York Times obit that a surreal montage sequence in the great Marx Brothers film Duck Soup inspired him.

"There’s a war going on,” he explained to an interviewer in 1976, “and Groucho tells Harpo that we need help, and he runs out and puts a ‘Help Wanted’ sign on the front of the building.Then you start seeing all these tanks, and airplanes, and soldiers, and porpoises, and giraffes — I don’t know — all sorts of creatures and things rushing to help them.” He added, “After that I started thinking about all the things I could stick together in a sequence like that: elephants running, trains blowing up, cars going, cars crashing, and so on and so forth.”

The Surrealists were impressed by this strange funny film; Harpo's rigorous silence that causes him to resort to auto horns and whistels, his anarchic wielding of scissors, and a trenchcoat that contained anything he needed, a dog house tattoo that when Groucho inspects it, sprouts a live barking dog; the running gag of the motorcycle sidecar taking off with Harpo and Groucho, thinking this was his time to roar off, sitting glum and observing, "This is the third trip I've made today and I haven't been anyhere yet" ; a council of war becomes a production number and soliders' helmets are used as a xylophone. Salvador Dali prepared a script for the Marxes. [Duck Soup image from central cinema]

Duck Soup is also the inspiration for Woody Allen's character in Hannah and Her Sisters, and reason for him not to commit suicide.

Conner was one of the last Beats, and a artist who pursued his bliss, and the world is richer for his creative method of living.

3) The Richmond Triangle Players here have moved into a sleek, splendid mid-century modern brick building I've admired at Altamont and Marshall. The slanted window and metal overhang of the front office has always reminded me of an airport control tower. The collection of buildings were until of late Carl's Radiator Service. Now Triangle will have its own digs, scene shop and more seating. Bravo!

4) William Shatner is in Judgment At Nuremburg. He is young, and probably about the time he was in that famous Twilight Zone where he sees the gremlin on the wing of the airplane and goes crazy trying to tell the pilot.

Seeing him there, though, gave me a kind of vertigo. I swear, it was like a Star Trek third season episode where for some reason Kirk has traveled in time. I really half-expected him to flip open a communicator.

And, too, all the amazing actors whom he was moving around...most of them are dead. Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark -- all gone. I think Maximillian Schell may be one of the few who are still living. And there's Shatner, and I see him on TV still cranking along and doing Price Line commercials. That must be a weird...sensation, to be Shatner, and to have that historic film on your resume.

Thanks to soundtrackcollector for the image.

5) Sometimes vigilance for the sake of consumers is a bad thing. This past weekend, my Partner In Art was teaching at the Virginia Museum. She's got a bum ankle these days and I helped her carry her bag there and back, and fetched lunch from a lunch-fetching place in Carytown. Well, due to my own absent-mindedness, I left my debit card on the counter there. I was gone probably under an hour when I realized that I'd done this to myself -- again -- and dashed over to the establishment in question. Well, the clerk there told me that he'd called the bank and destroyed the card. And on top of everything, my food order was wrong.

The clerk was acting in my own best interest, of course, but he must've thought I was a West End auslander or even a tourist -- and I wasn't even wearing Bermuda shorts with socks. I called my financial institution and they were confused aboout the diligence of the clerk, "I used to work in retail," my client representative said--in plain non-call center-tinged English, "and when that happened, we used to hold on to them for at least a day."

Fact is, I needed a new card--the security numbers on the back had faded to the extent they were impossible to decipher, and a slight bend in one side sometimes made the plastic unreadable to account-deducting devices.

But it is an inconvenience that I should've been spared. Why they couldn't try to have the bank call me, or they call me, or somebody call me, I don't know.

6) My comments to some Richmond, Virginia, blogs are "long-winded." One described a historical context response as reminiscent of a monologue from American Psycho and I think he meant this in a good way; still, this kind of hurt. Sigh.

7) Writing takes a toll on one's body. This is in the especial case of logging 10-15 hours in a chair and going full bore. The form hunches, shoulders bend in, my right hand has swollen, my left knee, too. I'm on deadline for a manuscript and this is what it's doing to me, or what I'm doing to myself, in a forced march through the quagmire of historic references. By now, my work, my wife and the editors of the publishing house are all ready for this damned thing to be done.

Adon Yoder is chuckling somewhere. I was surprised to find him mentioned in this wayback Time Magazine article.

8) Anhueser-Busch is now owned by Belgians. The Chrysler Building was in recent days sold to German investors. I remember even back in 1989 when the purchase of the bankrupt Rockefeller Center by Japanese interests struck me as odd. They sold about 10 years later, and appropriate enough, today U.S. capitalists own the Rock -- which is becoming more the exception these days, than the rule.

This past week, my nose was purchased by a 13-year-old Alsatian girl with Euros saved from her baby sitting job. My breathing has not been affected by this transfer and no changes to the nose are planned. Or that's what Giselle has told me.

9) I stumbled cross this image on the Interwebs while looking for something else. This came from a memorial site for the Birney company streetcars, and this, billion-eyed audience, hit my eyes like cymbal-crash. It's Broad Street looking west from about Fifth Street. The building looming at left is Thalhimer's and, of course, next to it in sharp foreshortening, Miller & Rhoad's, the retail collosi of Richmond. The office tower in the background is the Central National Bank building. I cannot see if the famous neon letters that turned either blue or red depending ont the cold or hot weather are there; the contrast and glare is too bad.

Note the clustering of stores on the right hand stores. One atop a roof is for the Wakefield Grill, 3124 W. Broad St. -- which is up the street a number of blocks, beyond the Boulevard.

The time, judging from the clothes and cars, seems to me a cold gray day in the mid-1940s, and that streetcar doesn't have much longer to run since the service was suspended just when we could've modernized it and retained the benefits, in 1949.

Little did any of these people know but that the city was on the verge of precipitous decline, that the suburban sprawl that had began with the streetcars in the 1910s was undergoing fatal acceleration by the auto and cheap gas, low mortgages and demand pent up by first the Depression, then the war, for cars and Cape Cods and brick ranchers, during a wildly over-prosperous period due to the rest of the world being bombed into a temporary halt (which the U.S. helped restart). Then, race and class in Richmond, and digging highways through the middle of town over public protest, made a scene like this even less possible to maintain.


Here's a detail of the signs and storefronts on the right side of the street. I've heard of Grant Drugs, but I'd have to hunt in the city directory to know if that big clock went with the store beneath, or was advertising something else.




































10) Thanks to the West of Boulevard blog, I know that the ABC store up on Thompson Street will now be open Sundays. Economy tanks, people drink more, and the state--which both sells and taxes the stuff--will benefit. Now, I don't have to wait until Monday to get my Bushmill. Which I can't purchase, anyway, because of what happened to to my debit card (see #5),

Highways To Hell?



The I35W Bridge in Minneapolis collapse on Wed., Aug. 1,
generated enormous media coverage in that typical
disproportionate attention way that warps perception.
Though the total death total isn't known at this writing, compare the present
unfortunate event to a typical bus crash in India.


If a truck burns in Minneapolis, is it a disaster or a catastrophe?

DISASTER and CATASTROPHE
in huge "declaration of war" type marched in hysterical precision across the headlines of newspapers and in the television crawls. Keith Olbermann was reduced to providing play-by-play for helicopter views of a what was an obvious bad and fatal event for some.

With all news all the time, though, there's just the news anchor sitting in a chair repeating words that come to him through an earpiece, while trying to get what purports to be real information from a correspondent who may be standing a mile away. Does the news consumer really need to be inflicted with this for hours on end, when the world doesn't just stop for one bridge falling down, no matter how many school buses are on it?

So, billion eyed Blue Raccoon audience, you say: but, Harry, you don't have to watch it. And I didn't, and I haven't. I can take only so much repition of basic facts and wobbly overhead shots of a crumpled bridge.

Does this constitute a disaster, though? Sure, if you or people you know were on or under the the bridge when it fell, this was a devastating personal loss. But with not even a dozen known dead -- the last count I saw was hovering around eight, but that'll go up--what is it other than a dramatic accident, an "infrustructural mishap." Sounds bloodless, I know, but the U.S. media's tendency to run around in little circles and scream bloody murder when something that isn't really as serious as it may look on a screen is fatiguing. Sure, at first, nobody knew if it wasn't a bomb or some other deviant attempt to sow terror. Instead, it's just faulty construction that lost the physics roulette, and not anything more.

I don't want to flog this too much, but note the April 21, 2006 report of a bus near the town of Surapeta in India's Assam state, that plunged into a lake while carrying a wedding party with more than 80 people. Some 64 were killed and more than 20 injured. Or another one, a Reuters report dated Oct. 20, 2004, from Raipur, India, where 56 bodies were dragged out of a bus that skidded off a road into a rain-swollen reservoir. And this goes on and on. It's a graph or two in the paper, a blip on the news. What annoys me most, is the implication in this wall-to-wall coverage is that This This Just Isn't Supposed To Happen Here.

A commenter observed on Richmond's Bacon's Rebellion political policy online journal, which responded to the collapse with remarks about infrastructure deterioration, emphasis mine:

"And this isn't the first time. There was the Connecticut incident and the South Bronx Expressway.

 If something happens once, it's an accident. If it happens twice, it's somebody's fault.

 But this is only the dramatic tip of th iceberg. A recent letter to the editor described two crashes on Route 29. According to the author, poor shoulders were partly to blame in both cases. In both cases VDOT was there the next day, regrading the shoulders to remove the bear traps.

 These dramatic incidents get all the attention, but the cumulative small impacts of many things left undone is much greater, probably."

Highways are expensive to build and more expensive to maintain; with needs ranging from resurfacing to planting the pretty flowers in the median. A USA Today report just last year, summarizing the interstate highway system's anniversary of its full half-century, stated, again, emphasis mine:

"Spending on interstate repairs and improvements this year is about $17 billion — less than the $21 billion needed to maintain highways and bridges in their current condition and keep traffic congestion from worsening, reports TRIP [The Road Information Project, a Washington non-profit group that promotes transportation policies that relieve congestion and aid economic productivity.] It would cost $35 billion a year for major improvements that would significantly reduce congestion, TRIP says.

"The interstate system has served us well, but the time has come to develop a vision now of a modern highway system if we are going to continue to enjoy the benefits of safe, reliable travel," says Frank Moretti, TRIP's director of policy and research. "The interstates have helped us compete in a global economy. Now, we see other countries improving their interstate systems at the time ours is starting to decline."

Or how about just reinvesting in commuter transit, which the interstate highway system, General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone Tire assisted in demolishing? You can read about it here and here and here.

Where public policy's abdication of mass transit hit first and worst was California, that needed these systems as its cities grew like eggs tossed from a height. As went Los Angeles and Oakland, so went the USA. The embracing of transit for highway construction bequeathed to the 20th century development directing transit, rather than transit directed development. So I don't care how many "new urbanist" Potemkin Villages you build in the cul-de-sac archipelago, if you still need to take an expressway to get into them, what's the point?

Back east, in my very own Richmond, which in fact was the testing gronds for the first working electric trolley system in the U.S., (and argument is made, perhaps in the world), the streetcar helped grow the city's residential and commerical viability. Where trolley stops were located, so grew up groceries, flower shops, drug stores and amusement parks.

The Richmond transit system was ripped up and destroyed in 1949, just when it could've been used most to offset sprawl, had not the city's provincialism and psychotic need to keep blacks and poor people separated eclipsed good sense. One of the bad decisions made here, and different from European counterparts, was that the municipality didn't own the street cars. Private interests acquired transit systems and bundled them into investment portfolios. In Richmond's case, New York stock brokers ran the city's transit system into the ground.

There was also some government deregulation in the mix, that by the 1930s prevented utilities that provided the power from operating transit systems. Government regulation also controlled fares. Thus, utilities felt they couldn't earn a profit on the ragged old trolley, and stopped repairing them, thus causing consumer annoyance to rise. When General Motors introduced the motor bus, it was welcomed by most riders and investors.

Richmond's were trundled off and burned in a Wagnerian pyre. Richmond, though, was just one of more than 25 municipalities that had by then succumbed to the infernal National Lines that wrecked transit in the U.S., in part by playing into the U.S. attitude of convenience. Well guess what? "Convenience" is killing us and the planet.

I was also struck when reading via the RVAblogs portal the remarks of Chinese exchange students visiting Richmond and how they observe both the lack of pedestrian traffic and the reliance on the automobile to get almost anywhere, even short distances. Now, bear in mind, this is Richmond in July-August when the universities are out and those who can get out, do; Richmond isn't Shanghai; sprawl leaves many commuters without viable options because the region doesn't have a central planning authority with legal teeth nor the city and county governments the political will to make it a top priority. But, having said all that, read:

"America is regarded as a country on wheels. This is a proper statement to describe this country . I have seen various kinds of automobiles parking of driving around the campus during these two days. And there is little people walking on the street even in the day . The whole town appears a little desolate. This is my first deep impression about the traffic condition around VCU campus. My second deep impression is that though there are various cars on road, the drivers almost do not ring the horn—at least I do not hear a ring. It is impossible in China. Maybe this phenomenon is just the symbol of high civilization of USA. And in my opinion , Chinese drivers should learn from America drivers. 
Via blog for luy5"

I can attest from years of personal experience that some days when walking to and from work, or even elsewhere, I can look down one of the Fan District's bosky streets and see not one person stirring, clear down to the sidewalk's vanishing point.