Neither Pure Nor Wise Nor Good

City Better-ful

2006-09-17T11:00:00.000-06:00

I didn't write about Daniel Libeskind's proposal for the re-design of Civic Center Park when the plan was announced, although I wanted to.

I didn't write about the two competing proposals for Union Station when they were announced, although I wanted to.

I've been so busy with work and whatnot that I haven't blogged in over a month. I'd write about Libeskind now, except that it's old news.....all I'll say now is that I like the idea of using something bold to turn what is currently an underutilized piece of downtown Denver into something that would be more integrated with the lives of actual Denverites. I'm not sure Libeskind's design is exactly right, although I like elements of it. The problem with Civic Center--and there is one, because how many middle-class people feel comfortable using it except for the occasional mega-festival in the summer--is that the design movement from which it springs, the City Beautiful era of the early part of the last century does not take into account the needs and behavior of actual human beings.

City Beautiful is something of a sacred cow in historic preservation circles, because it was conceived during one of the golden eras of political liberalism, the "Progressive" movement (from which sprung more than one political party and a magazine of the same name; the parties are gone except for some remnants in VT and MN, but the magazine is still around, and it's a good one). But the motivating idea behind City Beautiful is inherently flawed. Put simply, City Beautiful planners believed that you could "uplift the citizenry" of a community by creating civic monuments that would inculcate in people a spirit of civic-mindedness--always in the neoclassical style that was popularized by the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 (a.k.a., the Chicago World's Fair). The pure, noble Greco-Roman architecture would inspire criminals to live better lives; it would make the lazy more hard-working; it would educate the hoi polloi in the classical ideals of beauty, and make them better citizens. It was well intentioned, and that's the best thing you can say about it. It was never a success on its own terms--we still have criminals and the lazy and the igorant, and we always will. That's humanity for you--never fitting into pre-conceived ideal behaviors.

What we have at Civic Center in 2006 is unadulterated City Beautiful. It's considered one of the finest examples of City Beautiful in the entire country--perhaps only the National Mall in Washington, which although part of l'Enfant's original plan for the District was only formalized by the Progressive era's (1901) McMillan Commission, and the San Francisco Civic Center (also home to a very large number of druggies, making our Civic Center problem seem tame by comparison) are better-known. It has the formal axes--the cupola of the City & County Building lines up perfectly with the dome of the State Capitol, and the Voorhees Memorial on Colfax is aligned with the Greek Theater on 14th. It has the wide swaths of green lawn and gorgeous flower beds, designed to set off the various buildings and statuary the same way the lawns and lagoons set off the massive temples of commerce in 1893 Chicago (a highly entertaining recent bestseller is set that fair, The Devil in the White City). It has the formal walkways, perfect for formal men and women in late Victorian finery to promenade on lovely summer afternoons.

Denver loves Civic Center, and the majority opinion seems to be that there's nothing wrong with it, that it should not change. Except that in Civic Center you have a park that covers two full city blocks (plus large bulges on either side) and divides the city's prime cultural amenities from the rest of downtown. You have a lovely spot of green that is enjoyed primarily by people you probably wouldn't care to spend much time with. Nothing wrong with these people (they're human beings, despite what cops and politicians think), but they've taken over the park because for decades middle class people haven't felt pulled toward Civic Center except at Christmas time to view the lit-up City & County Building, or in summer to eat over-priced and under-cooked turkey legs at the People's Fair or Taste of Colorado (I liked the People's Fair a lot better when it was on the grounds of East High School--they should move it back there). To get everyone comfortable with using the place, some sort of change is necessary.

Libeskind's proposal is a good starting point. I like his idea of a glass canopy over the Greek Theater, so that people would be more comfortable in enjoying concerts and other entertainments there (adding the canopy will make it more program-able, so that perhaps daily or thrice-weekly daytime and evening events could be held there). I like his idea of a bridge across Colfax, although it needs to start on the west side of Broadway, not the upper level of Civic Center Station on the east side of the street. I even like the idea of a major water feature, although I think his is too large. Civic Center needs more daily activity--not just big festivals a few times in the summer (Libeskind wisely proposes a restaurant function on the ground floor of the McNichols Annex building). It needs to be a place where people in town for a convention will be naturally drawn, crossing it to go the art museum, perhaps, but also to linger for the place's own ambience. Most importantly, it needs to be a place that everyday working downtowners and residents of the Golden Triangle and Capitol Hill will come on a daily basis, the way that people living around Cheesman Park (and Washington and City and Sloans Lake, etc.) go there daily. City Beautiful design doesn't encourage that, at least not in 2006. Libeskind's ideas go a long way toward what needs to happen, even if they're not exactly "right" right now.

To see what I'm talking about, go to www.denverinfill.com/blog/index.html, and go to the entry for August 30th--all the plans, renderings, and models are there.

I don't the City Beautiful movement, but unlike most people whose opinions I've read in the context of the Libeskind proposal, I don't think it's necessarily the best thing for this plot of land, and that it can and should be modified to take into account Denver's real needs. Sure, keep the historical, but don't get hysterical at the idea of introducing change. It's not, contrary to what some have written, change for change's sake, but rather it's change for the sake of reality.

Alright, so maybe I still needed to write about Libeskind. Maybe I'll write next time about Union Station.....

Waste of Space

2006-08-12T19:37:00.000-06:00

Thirty-one years ago last month I went to the grand opening of the Aurora Mall. I was a weird little kid, and now I'm a weird little adult. Today I dragged Matt out to that place, for another grand opening.

Today's was Dillard's, which occupies the space that was May D&F when the mall opened, and continued to be Foley's mens & housewares store into the early 2000s. I should backtrack a bit. When the mall opened, it had four anchors: Sears, JC Penney, May D&F, and the Denver. "The Denver" was the final trade name of a company that had started out as McNamara Dry Goods Company at the corner of 15th & Larimer (in the space currently occupied by the Samba Room and the other tenants of that building), became the Denver Dry Goods Company when it moved to 16th and California, and just "The Denver Dry" some time in the 1950s. "The Denver" was a name created in the 1970s, and its fancy hand-written logo was clearly inspired by that of Lord & Taylor, another store owned by Associated Dry Goods.

That's maybe backtracking too far. In 1986, the May Company bought Associated, and merged the Denver with May D&F (later renaming that division for Foley's, a Houston-based department store. The Aurora Mall was then in a quandary--they had no anchor store to take the place of the one that had gone away, so May D&F moved its women's departments into the former space of the Denver on the west side of the mall (more visible from the interstate), and kept just the upper half of their space on the east side of the mall for their men's and housewares departments. The mall then took the lower floor and tried to turn it into another section of mall with smaller stores, but they had a very hard time leasing it.

Then in 1990 Cherry Creek (a mall, but not called a mall officially) opened, and the Aurora Mall became a place where affluent shoppers didn't go any longer. It became a gang mall, and people were afraid to shop there. After a dozen years of failing to revive its fortunes, the mall's owner, a vast real estate entity called the Simon Company--which owns scores of malls all over the country--decided to spend millions of dollars refurbishing it. To give it four anchors again, they convinced May Company--err, Foley's--to consolidate back into one space again, and they made that space bigger by adding on to the building. That freed up the east side for another anchor, and since Dillard's--which had bought the old Joslin's chain some years ago--wanted to get out of Buckingham Square (if Aurora Mall was "worked" by gang members, then Buckingham was where they went on vacation), they agreed to move the three miles. And that freed up Buckingham Square for a complete redevelopment (primarily residential, with a smaller amount of retail), which the city of Aurora is pursuing with the shopping center's owners.

So today Matt and I drove out there--Matt has a personal connection with Aurora Mall, as his father used to sell appliances at JC Penney, back when JC Penney sold appliances--to see the results. Dillard's officially opened on Wednesday, but this was their first weekend.

Entering the mall from the upper level southwest door (the one where the Aurora Mall 3 Cinema used to be), I was pleasantly surprised by the new look--all new floors, walls, and ceilings, with only the escalators remaining from before the remodel. They've added a high-ceilinged food court, clearly modelled after the "lodge" look so popular ten years ago when Dark Meadows was built, and still six years ago when Flatiron Crossing opened. We didn't actually visit the food court--I make this judgement after merely seeing it from the window of my car as we drove around the mall later.

Let me back up a bit again. A few years ago, when they announced the renovation (funded partially with some sort of financial deal with the city--a TIF I suppose, or some such mechanism--our local media had a field day with a little racism scandal involving one of the mall's leasing agents. Recorded for posterity--and replayed endlessly on Denver news stations--the leasing agent told the potential tenant that they were aiming to remove the "young black consumer" (those may have not been the exact words, but that was the clear, unambiguous message of them). Oops.

Not only was the leasing agent fired--probably more for stupidity in letting herself get caught telling the truth than for racism, because we all know how companies like Simon think--but their plan to banish the "young black consumer" seems to have not worked. And that's as it should be--we can imagine what would happen to the "young black consumer" if he were so silly as to show his face at Cherry Creek. After all, this is America, and everyone--even the "young black consumer"--needs a place to practice consumption on the massive scale that American life demands.

Except, of course, for the tendency of the "young black consumer" to not have much in the way of money with which to buy things to fill up the massive closets in his non-existent McMansion.

At Dillard's--and at the remodeled and enlarged Foley's (to become Macy's on the 9th of September--they have a Macy's sign on the outside, covered in a temporary Foley's banner [in case you've been under a rock, the May Company is no more, having been bought by Federated, the parent of Macy's, last year])--I didn't see a whole lot of consuming going on. I saw attractive, new carpeting, elegant store fixtures, beautiful lighting, lots of nice new things to buy--and I saw a fair number of consumers--many young, many black or brown, most with young children. But I didn't see a lot of bags in their hands.

And I'd be willing to bet that even during the week before Christmas I won't (were I to drive all the way out there, which I won't again) see as many people buying things here as I would at Cherry Creek, Dark Meadows, or Flatiron (but see my posting from July 2005 as to why Flatiron's days are numbered). The demographics here don't support the old department store-anchored mall concept--this is Wal-Mart country.

Aurora Mall--did I mention it now sports the name "Town Center at Aurora," as though Aurora is capable of being a town, or of having a center (and what's with the "at"?--University of Colorado at Denver, sure, but Town Center at Aurora?--won't someone please call the language police?)--is dead. It just doesn't know it yet. The city has foolishly spent millions of dollars helping a wealthy real estate company prop up a mall that should have been torn down ten years ago and converted back into pasture land--or affordable housing. Dream on....

Modern Times

2006-08-04T16:12:00.000-06:00

Yes, I live. It's been more than a month since I've posted anything, and quite frankly I've thought about quitting this silly little blog. I have enough to do--why should I continue this when I could be working on my so-called novel, or perhaps putting together my history of Denver's 16th Street (a book I've planned to write since about 1997)? But I'm not quitting just yet.

Unlike, I'm afraid, one of my cultural heroes. I've just put two and two together, and realized that Bob Dylan's next album, entitled Modern Times, could likely--will likely--be his last. People who know me know that I've been a Dylan fan for 23 years, and I've stuck with him through thick (wonderful albums like Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind, and Love & Theft) and thin (excrement like Dylan & The Dead, Knocked Out Loaded, and Down in the Groove). So figuring this out hits me rather hard. And yes, you can be gay and a Bob Dylan fan. I'm proof.

I could be wrong--Dylan has never said he'd retire, and I don't think he will. I think he'll suddenly not wake up one day, and I will have to wear black for a while. It's in the symbols:

1. The new album, to be released on the last Tuesday in August, is called Modern Times. Charlie Chaplin's final film was also called Modern Times. In the liner notes to the very first Bob Dylan album, Bob Dylan (1962), is this statement:

Another strong influence on Bob Dylan was not a musician primarily, although he has written music, but a comedian -- Charlie Chaplin. After seeing many Chaplin films, Dylan found himself beginning to pick up some of the gestures of the classic tramp of silent films. Now as he appears on the stage in a humorous number, you can see Dylan nervously tapping his hat, adjusting it, using it as a prop, almost leaning on it, as the Chaplin tramp did before him.

Okay, that's a tenuous connection. Bob Dylan isn't Charles Chaplin--but like Chaplin, he's the greatest artist in his field, and like Chaplin's influence on film, he has influenced countless singers and songwriters. And Dylan knows Chaplin's work and career trajectory. Modern Times was Chaplin's final statement.

2. The last song on the new album is "Ain't Talkin.'" Oh really? He's never been one for talking, preferring to cloak his utterances in mystery, in non sequiturs, in magic symbolism. But if this were to be the last cut on the last album, what a fitting title.

3. This is entirely personal, and somewhat narcissistic: I'm 44. This is his 44th album. His first was released in 1962. I was born in 1962. Add four and four and you get eight, which is a powerful number. It all adds up.

Maybe I'm nuts, but I think Modern Times is his last album.....say it isn't so, Bob!

The Good, the Great, the Gawd-awful

2006-07-02T20:15:00.000-06:00

Today I did one of my cycling tours of Denver architecture, one of those days when I just noodle around taking pictures of buildings.

The good news today for downtown Denver is that one of the least-wonderful surface parking lots, the one facing the Voorhees Memorial in Civic Center, has been replaced by the DNA building....that's Denver Newspaper Agency. Sadly, the only good thing to come from the 2000 merger of the business operations of two once-wonderful newspapers, The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News (note the correct capitalization--"The" is part of the Post's actual name, while "the" is not part of the Rocky's) is this new building, which will house, once its open, the combined business operations of the two "newspapers" and the separate "newsrooms." Note my cynicism. William Newton Byers and Frederick G. Bonfils would be appalled at the sorry state of these once useful members of the Fourth Estate--but I digress.

What I like about the DNA building is the way it completes the north wall of Civic Center. This site has been a surface parking lot for a very long time, probably longer than I've been alive. And now it's this:

When the design for this building was announced, I wasn't happy, because the rendering published in the "paper" made it look like a clone of the nearby Wellington G. Webb Building, the cool curvy building just north of the City & County Building. Like the Webb Building, the DNA features a gently curved element that intersects with a blocky one--but unlike the Webb, it's bright white in color, and the overall effect is that instead of slavishly copying the Webb, it complements it. It also is a nice neighbor to one of downtown's underappreciated gems, the old Petroleum Club building at 16th Street and Broadway. The DNA is separated from this 1960 Modernist office building by an alley, but it keeps a respectful distance, and the DNA's architect's choice of white surely is not coincidental--I think he meant to be a good neighbor to the Petroleum. Here's a view of the two buildings side by side, taken from the shuttle turnaround across the street:

You see that the people who have windows on the southeast side of the Petroleum Building still have their view of the State Capitol because of the way the DNA skooches aside from its older neighbor. And it's even about the same height, creating a nice cohesion for the street.

I also really like what they've done to the Colfax side of this new building at the ground level: established an architecturally interesting covered sidewalk:

Of course you wouldn't want to walk this way if you were intoxicated at all....it could be a bit disorienting.

That was the "Good" of this posting's title. The Great is seen in this next shot, taken at the same point as the one just above, but looking across Colfax. This is one of the more interesting justapositions I've found lately: the new Hamilton Wing of the DAM framed by the archway of the Voorhees Memorial:

And as long as I'm talking about that, here's another shot of the new museum wing, taken from 12th and Acoma. About a mile or two south of Taos there is a famous church, called the Ranchos de Taos Church, and nearly every artist who has ever lived in New Mexico has painted or photographed it. I think the Hamilton Wing will become our Ranchos de Taos:

As you can see, this building is interesting even at the very worst time for taking a photo: midday in the middle of summer. Imagine what this will be like at 4:30 on a December afternoon, the titanium panels reflecting the golden orange of our winter smog sunsets.

And now for the Gawd-awful: less than a block from our wonderful new museum a structure has taken shape on Broadway that defies the English language--I can think of no words to describe how wrong this building is (but I'll try):

No, I don't mean the two story for-lease building on the right. I mean the architectural abomination on the left. Let's see, where to start?

1. The side bears no relationship with the front--it's as though they built an 8-story wall first, and then decided to attach a building of some kind to it. The wall is better suited to a parking garage than an upscale residence. And the wall is cinder block, while the front is stucco--the message is "cheap."

2. Those rounded dormer things on top--as much as I despise the architecture of the Beauvallon, this is worse, because it's like a low budget version of the Beauvallon. It's like settling for Safeway Select when you really want Coke. Neither are good for you, but Coke tastes like real cola. Likewise, the Beauvallon set Denver architecture back about 50 years, but at least they spent some money on the details. Not so, here. Even though they haven't yet installed the balcony railings, nothing can salvage this.

3. The massing and scale--astonishingly wrong for the context. The developer is obviously a greedy bastard from Texas or California who is trying to squeeze as much money as he can from this hot property a half block from the art museum. Note the modest scale of the building on the right--people who lived in Denver 15 or so years ago will remember that this was once painted a garish purple, and housed an office supply store. The building is underutilized right now, but it has nice lines and could be salvaged for a restaurant or something. Also, the Broadway Plaza Motel, which abuts this digusting mass of stucco and cinder block on the far left, is a decent Modernist 3-story structure that is reasonably well-maintained and, as far as I can tell, a fairly viable business. The new neighbor is so far from it in spirit that it's like watching American Idol after an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Although I never thought the structures this building replaced (including a weirdly set-back liquor store) were an asset to Denver, I'd gladly see them rebuilt in place of this mess.

I guess what I'm saying is: there ought to be a law against this kind of vulgarity, against cramming so much housing "product" in such an ungainly way onto this too-visible site, and against the developer and architect ever being allowed to build anything anywhere in the world ever again until the end of time. In October, when the museum has its grand opening, the international architectural press will be here covering it--and what will these journalists see lurking just a short walk away, with nothing to screen it: only the worst building of the 21st century.

No, I don't like to mince words.

Imagine a Great Stairway

2006-06-25T20:18:00.000-06:00

Yes, I know I haven't posted in a while. I was on vacation in wonderfully cool and wet Minnesota--and I'm talking about the nicest part of that state, Ottertail County. My sister lives there, in a wonderful WPA-built rural schoolhouse.

I've been back from that vacation for more than 10 days, so I can't use it as an excuse anymore.

This weekend felt like old home week to me, because I helped move the Tattered Cover bookstore into its new home in the Lowenstein Theater building on Colfax Avenue across the street from East High. On Saturday afternoon I spent a couple of hours in Cherry Creek. The atmosphere was odd, because the store had fewer customers than most Saturday afternoons, most of the comfortable chairs were gone, and there was an odd echo in the stairway. But everyone I encountered--of those people I know, who worked there when I did--seemed strangely energized by the impending move. I probably had at least 10 different conversations with people. When I asked them what they'd miss, the answer that was most frequent was "the stairway."

Odd to miss a stairway. But for any of you readers who don't remember the previous versions of the Tattered Cover--the "Old Store" on the north side of Second Avenue (in what is today the Men's Wearhouse building); and the "Middle Store" on the south side of Second Avenue (in what is today Kazoo & Company)--the stairway in the 1st and Milwaukee building was something special. Both the Old and Middle stores had stairways, but they were comparatively simple compared to the one in the 1st & Milwaukee store. When Joyce Meskis first announced the lease on that building, most people thought her completely nuts. Denver's economy was in free-fall, there was a derelict 1950s shopping center across the street, and no one in this town (or in very many others) had ever seen a 30,000-square foot bookstore.

And yet it worked, and if there was one element that made it work, besides the overwhelming amount of stock, and wonderfully expert help, it was the stairway that connected the first, second and third floors. It was too steep--most people would get out of breath if they went directly from one to three without pause--but it was lined with books, and the vantage points it offered made it seem like the Tattered Cover was the largest bookstore anywhere. It wasn't of course (even then, Powell's in Portland was bigger, and the Union Square Barnes & Noble was too). The stairway was such an integral part of the store that in future years, what people will talk about when the 1st & Milwaukee Tattered Cover comes up in conversation will be that massive, winding stair.

But a stairway does not a bookstore make, all on its own. And now the Tattered Cover has broken new ground, and done something even more interesting than fill up an old department store with books: it has filled up an old theater with books. Built in the early 1950s, the Bonfils (pronounced "Bon-fees"; later renamed the Lowenstein, which was -steen, not -styne) was Denver's first major postwar attempt at creating an amenity worthy of a "big" city. No expense was spared, including pink-tinted glass in the lobby, embellished with frosted glass ornamentation.

Today I arrived, with scores of other volunteers, and a great many employees--many of whom I'd seen the day before, but some of whom I hadn't seen in years--at 7:30 a.m. Coffee and scones were provided, and at 8:00 we were given our instructions. Volunteers were paired up with staff, and the boxes started flowing in (people had worked into the night at Cherry Creek packing and stacking). By 11:00 or so you could look around and say "this looks like a bookstore." When I left at 12:30 the afternoon volunteers were arriving, and I assume by now that all books have found their new homes. The store opens tomorrow morning.

All in all it was a wonderful way to spend a weekend, saying goodbye to an old friend, and meeting a new one for the first time. Although I haven't worked for the Tattered Cover in more than six years, it remains as important to my life as it has been since the early 1980s (when it was still in the Old Store). It has been my refuge and my friend. I wish it well, and you can bet I'll be spending some money there before the new week is old.

No Right Angles

2006-05-29T15:16:00.000-06:00

It starts as you come around the curve on 14th Avenue. There's this shape looming up over the Bach Wing of the Denver Art Museum.

And then you get to the plaza in front of the library, and you see more.

And then there you are.

I admit it, I love the new Hamilton Wing of the Denver Art Museum. I know all the arguments against this kind of architecture, but I love it anyway. It's gorgeous, and when you stand on the other side of 13th from it, and look up, it fills the sky. And it's gorgeous.

It points to the old building--the one that two generations of Denverites have never emotionally embraced (although I've loved it from the time I was 10 years old).

And I can't wait for it to open....five more months.

That's all. I just wanted to share these photos, taken this morning, with you.

Wanton Destruction

2006-05-20T17:50:00.000-06:00

This is a follow-up to my last posting, on the wanton destruction on the Stapleton runway tunnels over Sand Creek.

It wasn't supposed to happen!

In Friday's paper, at least in my neighborhood, Forest City included a copy of their quarterly magazine, Stapleton. They've been publishing this for four or five years now, from right about the time construction on the first neighborhoods began. The arrival of this magazine in my newspaper prompted some investigation.

I'll admit, I'm fascinated with the old airport. When I was a kid it meant Grandma was coming in from New York on TWA. When I grew older it meant that I was going somewhere on a jet plane. Now I'm watching Stapleton very closely, because from my earliest childhood I've always been fascinated with urban development. The only reason I ever got into Charles Dickens (I'm re-reading Bleak House right now, after last winter's wonderful Masterpiece Theatre adaptation) was because London was a central character in most of his novels. When I was in London, one of the books I found (and bought) was a book about the genesis and ongoing development of the Tube map. And I read it cover to cover.

Back to the investigation....

When the Stapleton Visitor Center first opened I dragged Matt out there to look at the expensive architectural models....and to buy a copy of "the Green Book." Officially called Stapleton Development Plan, the Green Book was published by the Stapleton Redevelopment Foundation in 1995, and reprinted by Forest City in 1999. I compared the map in the new issue of Stapleton with the maps in the Green Book, and I have to say, Forest City, in its initial development of neighborhoods immediately east of Quebec and north of Montview, did a better job than what the Green Book proposed. Of course, in 1995 it was all about finding ways to make this land an extension of Denver and Aurora neighborhoods, and the initial ideas were mostly boring grids. If you go out to Stapleton now, they used the grid, but far more creatively. There are some wonderful amenities.

But one thing that Forest City did that the Green Book didn't really suggest to be part of the redevelopment was to build an ungodly amount of retail space surrounded by blinding white concrete. If you go to Quebec Square, the Wal-Mart, Sam's and Home Despot-anchored power center that stretches from the United Airlines flight training center to Smith Road, you'll find a pretty unimpressive sea of parking, and a fairly unimaginative roster of national chain tenants (along with a number of vacant spaces). You could be in Aurora, or--Lark Ridge! (refer to my posting about Lark Ridge from last October or November). I hate Quebec Square. It really doesn't have anything to do with the Green Book's vision. Sure, that land was meant to be commercial--you wouldn't want to have houses fronting busy Quebec, or that close to I-70--but why did they have to make Quebec Square so damned ugly?

Then there's NorthField at Stapleton, an even bigger shopping complex north of I-70. As I mentioned previously, NorthField is anchored by Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, a tourist trap for ignorant Bush voters (oh wait--that's a redundant phrase--all Bush voters are ignorant, therefore if you use the word "ignorant" in front of "Bush" you're merely repeating yourself).

Sorry...where was I? Currently open at NorthField, in addition to Bass, are a multiplex cinema, a Circuit City, and a SuperTarget. Under contruction--but physically separate from the line up of Bass, CC and ST--another sea of concrete being the transition zone--is a so-called "main street" of retail shops, anchored by Harkins on one end and Macy's on the other (in case you didn't know, Foley's is to be re-named Macy's by the fall of this year). The pedestrian-only "street" (think of the Village at FlatIron Crossing) is about two blocks long between the two anchors.

And that's not all! In the site plan published in Stapleton, the site will be symmetrical, meaning several more big-box anchors on the eastern edge of the site to balance Bass, et al., on the western edge--and of course separated from the other retail by lots and lots of parking. I realize that the northeast quadrant of the metro area is "under-served" (according to retail experts) compared to other parts of the metro area. After all, no one wants to build a Whole Foods in Commerce City--or a Barnes & Noble, or anything else for the educated and affluent. But this is absurd, AND it's poorly-designed. After the debacle of Quebec Square, I doubt Stapleton really will ever need this much retail space. It might be different if the whole area was surrounded by residential areas, but remember the vast Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is across the northern boundary of old Stapleton, and there is a huge warehouse district to the east. Stapleton will have 30,000 residents at full build-out, but I predict they'll go to Cherry Creek for their retail needs, not wanting to deal with the gridlock around Bass Pro Shops. While there are plans to build residential neighborhoods on the Stapleton land immediately south of the arsenal, there won't be enough population to support all this. There just won't.

But why am I ranting about NorthField? Because it's not supposed to be there, according to the Green Book. The Stapleton Master Plan of 1995 shows a lovely diagonal open space running southwest to northeast across the northern part of the old airport, connecting Sand Creek to the Arsenal. It's labelled "Sandhills Prairie Park," and while it's not a formal Olmsted-esque city park, it's nevertheless meant to be natural and open, allowing wildlife to move freely from refuge to creek. And NorthField is right in the middle of it! In other words, there is no "Sandhills Prairie Park," or if there is, it's not going to be contiguous with the wildlife refuge. The only aspect of NorthField that remains "natural" is the pond next to Bass Pro Shops--and that's not much.

But the original point of this posting isn't the unnecessary amount of retail. It's the tunnels. The thing is, they were supposed to remain. Maybe not as tunnels, but as something. On page 5-22 of the Green Book (the book is divided into sections, hence the odd pagination) there's a lovely pencil sketch of the Sand Creek Trail, with concrete structures bisecting the creek. Caption: "The existing runway tunnel structure could be opened up with the arched wall elements remaining for historical interest."

Yes, that's a "could," and the Green Book was meant merely to guide development, not absolutely dictate everything. But still, what a shame. Denver re-used the interesting concrete structures of the old municipal sewage plant at the South Platte and Franklin (just southwest of Riverside Cemetery), incorporating them as sculptural elements in the boringly-named new park known as "North Park" that very few people (save graffiti artists, dog trainers and cyclists) seem to know about. Check out that park (via car, you can go north on Washington from I-70, and cut over on one of the side avenues a few blocks north of the freeway), and imagine what might have been at Stapleton.

Great Runway Tunnels I Have Known

2006-05-07T17:53:00.000-06:00

I'm fascinating with the former Stapleton International Airport.

Several times now I've taken myself through the northern reaches, along what will someday be an unbroken Sand Creek Trail. Right now, the Sand Creek Trail branches off the South Platte River Trail just south of I-76, where a graceful steel bridge takes the intrepid cyclist into an urban wasteland chock-a-block with refineries, mega-warehouses, industrial graveyards, and the UPS Commerce City package handling facility. The trail isn't finished--you have to get off the trail about a half mile east of Dahlia Street, and get onto the I-76 frontage road (the trail continues a while further, but dead ends right behind UPS), but that's actually not so bad, because the frontage road only gets about one vehicle every three or four minutes on a spring Sunday. Eventually, this road dumps you out at the Sapp Brothers truck stop, and the trail picks up--sort of--as it dives underneath Quebec Street and I-70. You eventually emerge with a wonderful view of the new "Northfield at Stapleton" mega retail development (currently home to a SuperTarget, a Circuit City, a multi-cinema, and Bass Outdoor World, and soon to be home to a Macy's and other shops, because we need them so desperately) on one side of you and an airplane and helicopter graveyard (pictured above) on the other.

And at this point, the trail turns into a confusing mess--across a fence, concrete recycling equipment is chewing up the last of the old runways, while on the other side of you the Union Pacific Railroad tracks extend (presumably) to Kansas.

But then, if you knew where to find it--"knew" being the operative word--the trail would take you into a magical space. When this land was a major international airport, the city built a couple of bridges across Sand Creek at this point, so the airplanes could access the runways north of the freeway (and nearly everyone remembers the I-70 tunnels that the airplanes used after they'd crossed the creek). One bridge, I guess, was for smaller planes, because it was only about two or three hundred feet wide. But the other--you could easily imagine a 747 moving over your head, this bridge being as wide as a city block is long. And the bike trail went underneath it. It was cool, dark, and mysterious. Even in 90-degree weather, it seemed about 15 degrees cooler in the middle of the wider tunnel.

This was the entry to the narrower tunnel, as seen from the bigger one (pictures here date from September, 2004):
Take a look at the opening at the end of the tunnel to get an idea of scale--and remember, this was the narrower of the two air-bridges. Note the "Dip Ahead" sign--I saw that same sign today, cast off by the side of the path.

Here are a couple of views inside the wider tunnel:

Note the massive quality of the concrete supports.

I loved this place, and while I knew that the city, in conjunction with Forest City, the Stapleton master developer, was building a massive new "Central Park" on the land south of this tunnel, I had great hopes that this structure would be preserved, as a very physical reminder of the old airport. Alas, someone must have thought this would turn into a crime problem, or something equally banal, for this is what the tunnels look like today:
As you can see, the bike path is still there, but the vast underground tunnels, spaces that called to mind the underground sewers of Paris (not that I've ever been there), or some really dramatic place out of a graphic novel, are gone. But at least I got to see them before they were erased.

Goodbye to All That...

2006-04-29T17:05:00.000-06:00

No, I'm not saying goodbye to this blog. The title refers to illusions that are finally shattered. Read on (and if you get to the bottom, thanks--this is a long one).

I just finished reading a trio of books that have got me thinking (uh oh). Readers--those marvelous few of you--may remember my obsession last summer with a book by James Howard Kuntsler, The Long Emergency. In it, the WASP Kuntsler predicts the next fifty years of American history--not literal predictions, such as on March 1, 2027 Jenna Bush will be appointed Queen--but rather more general ones, such as: we're all going to freeze in the dark, and we won't have any water to drink (at least not out here in the West) because Colorado will become a lot more like El Paso due to global warming. And you faithful readers will remember that Kuntsler "had me," until I got to the xenophobic part: his surety that Mexicans will destroy American culture. After I read that bit, near the end of his book, I was forced to take another look at the entire work, and over several weeks and months I came to decide that he was too negative--that he had discounted human ingenuity too much, and had taken the opportunity at every turn to imagine the absolute worst case scenario. He fear-mongers, in other words--just like the GOP and Fox News (who have this week merged--that's Jon Stewart's joke, not mine).

This was, of course, a great disillusionment for me. I had loved his three earlier works on urbanism: The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, and I can't remember the third--although now that I think of it, there were seeds of xenophobia even in that third book on urbanism. He explored several past and present cities in that book, including Tenochtitlan--modern Mexico City. The theme of that chapter was human sacrifice, and it's quite a grisly read.

But back to this trio. First, because there's a play opening soon (or maybe it's already open) in New York based on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The article I'd read in the Times made me want to read this most essential of sci-fi works, and good lord--what a book! Published in 1952 or 1953, Bradbury describes in this five-decade old work an America that is much like what we see today--or rather, the America we have now is much closer to the America depicted in 451 than any reader in the 1950s could have imagined. The society of 451 is made up of people completely devoid of empathy. Entertainment consists of watching (on a kind of 3-D television, coverering three out of four walls in a room) the authorities track down the book's hero after he has begun rebelling against the way things are (he's a fireman, whose job description it is to burn books--paper combusts at 451 F). How different is that, really, from Cops or Dog The Bounty Hunter? Do you feel empathy for the idiots they put behind bars on those shows, or do you sit there feeling superior? I know I do--because, although I don't lack empathy entirely, I do lack enough that I find those shows fun to watch when I just want mind candy.

Then I read a recent (perhaps still current) bestseller, Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat. Most people know Friedman from his syndicated Times column, and from his previous bestsellers like The Lexus and the Olive Tree. In this book, Friedman goes around the world in an effort to get an understanding of globalism. He loves globalism, of course--he's famous for his love for it. And the globalism that Friedman portrays looks like a pretty good system--because he mostly focuses on the changes happening to India, which is in the midst of a high-tech boom that is improving the lives of many, many Indians. Friedman's India is a place where the Muslims don't hate the west--because India's government, since its founding in the 1940s, has emphasized education--and this has paid off. He talks about Wal-Mart, he talks about Starbucks, and he rightly worries about the Bush "administration"'s hatred of facts and of science. He describes an America that is losing its edge while its citizens drive their kids to soccer practice and its leaders do nothing to shift the direction of the country back in a positive direction.

But ultimately, The World is Flat rings a little hollow for me. While I agree with Friedman that we desperately need to stop resting on our laurels, and also stop trying to change the world to fit our ideal picture through force of arms, I think he's been seduced by the speed of the changes that are happening. He's a reporter, and so he loves things that change and move--that provide a story. But he's no economist (as he admits), and he's certainly no historian. People who know me know my opinion of the state of American journalism--I was a history major in college, and every time a journalist tries his or her hand at history, the results are usually so off-base that they prove harmful. Boy, do I sound like a snob, or what?

Then I picked up Dark Ages America, by Morris Berman. Go to the Tattered Cover immediately and buy a copy: http://www.tatteredcover.com/NASApp/store/Search;jsessionid=aMD382snRTSh

I've already loaned my copy to Ron-n-Ellen, so I can't quote directly--which is a shame, since Berman is a marvelous writer, who doesn't waste a word, and delves so deeply into each point that the book is peppered with "a-ha!" moments--ideas that make you amazed that someone out there has been thinking the same thoughts as you.

Berman's central thesis: we're fucked, and there's nothing we can do about it. But he's not like Kuntsler, who says we're all going to freeze in the dark because of our SUV and McMansion addictions (although Berman is no fan of SUVs and McMansions). For Berman, the point is that our American civilization has reached a twilight phase, and is bound to decline. All civilizations decline. Ours is like late Rome--which, besides not being built in a day, didn't fall in a day either (although of course modern technology provides the means to do just that, something the Huns and Avars and Visigoths and Ostrogoths never dreamed about).

America is, in Berman's view, essentially an invalid. We've hollowed out our industries--how much bigger now is Airbus than Boeing? Look at money-bleeding GM and Ford. We've gone from being responsible for 50% of the world's industrial output in 1945 to being a country that imports nearly everything. Friedman would say that's not a bad thing--outsourcing basic things like shoe production or the writing of software code (as opposed to the design of actual programs, which largely is still an American function) provides opportunities for American companies to invest the savings into new things that workers here can do. Except, of course, that's not what happens. The money saved goes to the shareholders, and to the CEOs.

Berman sees an American economy that runs for one major reason only: that foreign countries are currently willing to fund our excessive consumption. I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro that came from Shanghai (I tracked it on FedEx back in February), and I bought it using my Citi MasterCard (I've already paid down most of the cost of the computer, but I still have other debt). I may think that Citicorp is an American institution--it is, I suppose, legally one--but the reality is that Citi funds my debt with money they get from the Chinese, or from the Europeans, or from the Saudis. Who knows, actually, whence the money derives? The foreigners do this because America has been, for more than a century, the largest economy in the world, and everyone has wanted to business with us. But they won't much longer--our consumption (and war, as currently practiced as the primary instrument of our foreign policy, is a form of consumption too) is completely out of hand, and the well will run dry. It has to, because we are a net importer of capital, as well as being a net importer of oil and consumer goods.

I mention my relatively new computer because it points to the other central thesis of Berman's book: that (to probably mangle the famous Pogo quotation) we have seen the enemy, and he is us. This gets back to Bradbury: we, as a nation, have lost our ability to empathize with our fellow human beings. It's not just that we don't empathize with the relatives of Muslims killed by our wars 10,000 miles away--or that Abu Ghraib caused so little outrage, except amongst us few liberals who are paying some attention--or that Americans are being tortured every day in our massive criminal justice system, but no one worries about the incarerated, because somehow they're not like us. No, it's that we enter an alien world--of our own creation--every time we leave our home. We sort-of empathized with the Katrina victims, and the relatives of people killed on September 11th. But did we really? Berman would say no, and I think he's right. Any empathy people might have claimed they had for the Americans who died in the WTC, or the (mostly Black) Americans who lost their little wooden shacks in the lower 9th Ward last summer was a sort of false empathy--people might have done something to help, but if they gave a donation they made sure they got a receipt, so they could claim it on their 1040.

And giving a donation is all most people did--that's all I did. It was easy as pie to add $20 to a purchase at Costco. The Red Cross has figured out if it wants money, it has to get in with the retailers, you see, because retail is our religion (yes, even, and perhaps especially so, for the true believing Fundamentalist Christians). If we're going to feel guilt (not empathy, just good old guilt, like religious people used to feel when they sinned) for the $150 we're spending on stuff we don't need, putting up a barcode up at a register, so all that the cashier has to do is scan it like any other product, and ask you how much you want to contribute, is a sure fire way to raise money.

But back to the alien world: do you rush to beat that other person to the front door of the restaurant, so you can get in there first, and be seated and get your drinks before they do? Do you flip the bird at someone who cut you off, screaming "You stupid FUCK!" at the top of your lungs? What about that lady who was trampled at Wal-Mart the day after Thanksgiving a few years ago, because everyone was trying to get a $79 DVD player at five o'clock in the morning--because every W-M only had ten, and if you waited until 5:05 they'd be gone? (Berman points out that this particular case is complicated by the fact that the women who was trampled was a former employee who had been pulling similar stunts already--but the point was: no one in that crowd tried to help her, stunt or no). We are the aliens, and our ancestors wouldn't want to know us.

People in other countries--at least, other Western countries with the European Enlightenment as part of their cultural heritage, as it is part of ours--aren't like this. We're assholes. Berman talks about the sequence in Bowling for Columbine where Michael Moore explores the question: why don't Canadians kill each other the same way we do? They have easy access to guns--but they don't have anywhere near the same murder rate. Then there's our love of the death penalty--people here never think about it (or at least, the vast majority don't, otherwise they'd actually have to understand the moral problem of the state taking a life). Criminals get what they deserve, that's what Americans say. Criminals aren't people.

Berman also says we're probably too far gone down the path of decline to rescusitate our society. He points to the fact that we've been an imperial power--denying the whole time that we're not--for more than a century. In all of that time, there was only one US president who tried to change things, to make our foreign policy non-imperialistic. His name was Jimmy Carter, and look what happened to him when he dared speak the horrible truth about our society: JC was crucified. The Ray-gun Revolution swept away our brief moment of self-questioning, and it was Morning in America again (except that it was actually quarter of five on a December afternoon after Christmas). (Another book worth reading: Our Endangered Values, the most recent work by our 39th President).

Many commentators (and Berman isn't one of them, really--he uses other, less trite, metaphors) have said that we're a nation of juveniles. The idea, despite its overuse, rings true. Look at that mumbling buffoon in the White House--he's not qualified for a high school debate team. And that other guy, the one with the rifle--there's a great piece in the current American Prospect about how his staff are so adamant on having their way in every discussion that if it's not going their way they leave the room rather than listen to conflicting opinions. Then there's that big baby over at the Pentagon, who excuded Abu Ghraib as young people letting off steam (except that he ordered their crimes). But I slip off subject here a bit....

Groupthink has taken over. We have destroyed our legitimacy in the eyes of the other 95% of the world--Mexicans may still want to come here, but only because it's close and things are worse if they stay there. China is growing like a weed (Berman spends some time pointing out that the Chinese are no better than Americans in their addiction to consumerist values, and also that they lack that marvelous Enlightenment tradition that allows writers like him to say what he thinks, at least for now, in this country). India is as Friedman portrays it--also growing like a weed. Europe--its achilles heel being its rapidly aging population and related need to import foreigners to perform essential functions--is 450 million strong, doesn't feel the need to be the world's policeman, and is home to most of the world's largest banks. Japan has largely bounced back from its decade-long post-Bubble slump.

And then there's the theory I came across somewhere a couple of months ago that the real reason for the Iraq War was none that have been discussed among liberals or conservatives. The theory holds that it was Saddam's threat to stop accepting the American Dollar as payment for oil that caused the US to feel the need to destroy his regime. It's that old domino theory (and Berman talks about the modern "terrorism domino theory" as a substitute for the old Cold War communism domino theory, the supposed reason for Korea and Viet Nam--but that's another discussion)--that once one large oil producer switches to the Euro for oil, the Dollar is toast. Except that it's not a theory--it's a real threat to our economy. So if that was the Bushies' real reason for invading Iraq, so be it--but wouldn't it have been nice if they had been honest with the American public?

The thing is: honesty is something we can never again expect from Presidents (except the aging 39th)(although, when you come to think about it, even the "good" ones lied). Berman explores the question of whether a Kerry victory would have been any better for America (he makes no real mention of the stolen votes in Ohio--Kerry actually won, but it's un-provable, because the GOP did a better job of forcing things through than they did in 2000). In certain respects, yes--we wouldn't be bungling the Iran nuke mess the way we are now, and maybe we wouldn't be extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%, etc. But in the main, no: Kerry, like WJ Clinton before him, would have been forced--despite whatever shred of Boomer idealism he had left in him--to accept the imperial project begun by the McKinley generation so many decades ago.

Ah, you're tired of reading at this point. I need to stop typing, because I'm getting a crick in my neck. Just go out and find a copy of Dark Ages America. Read it, and then think about what you can do to at least stem the tide of our decline just a little bit. Better yet, don't think, Just Do It!

This posting sponsored by Nike.

An Architecture Geek's Paradise

2006-04-25T20:40:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Denver City Councilman Doug Linkhart (he's everyone's councilman, as he holds one of two "at large" seats), who has a newsletter that gets sent to my email address, I have found the ultimate website for anyone interested in the built environment in Denver (primarily central Denver): http://www.denverinfill.com/index.htm. This is put together by a professional urban planner with what I have to admiringly say is the most incredible attention to detail I've ever seen on a website like this. There are interactive maps, photos of works in progress, and best of all, a blog. This blog isn't one where you can post replies, but he's much more religious about updating his than I am of this one--and as a professional urban planner affiliated with UCD, he gets all the goods on everything. Do visit.

Off the Road

2006-04-09T17:23:00.000-06:00

Absurdly, this vintage 2005 residential structure next to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail lines on the northern edge of downtown Denver is known as the "Jack Kerouac Lofts." Poor Jack--known far and wide as the most beat of the Beat, in Denver he's now a form of yuppie housing. I tried to give this photo texture by including the broken pallet and the scooper part from some unknown piece of earthmoving equipment, but there's no escaping the fact that the purchasers of these lovely neo-Modern lofts (and I have to say, despite the unfortunate choice of name I actually do like the architecture) look out on industrial wasteland, and despite being only about 150 yards from the Platte River Bike Trail, residents here would have to go about a half mile (down to the other side of 20th Street where there's a sidewalk and underpass, then under the railroad tracks, and then past the skate park).

I took this photo this morning, on my second bike ride of the year (refer to last week's posting as to why I'm so lazy in the winter). After an easy ride north to Clear Creek (at Lowell), then a quick jaunt to its confluence with the South Platte, I faced a fairly strong head wind for most of the way home. This photo was just a good excuse to stop fighting the wind.

Architecture 101

2006-04-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

First of all, my apologies to anyone on dial-up--more than one photo on this posting.

This morning I rode my bike around downtown, snapping pictures, and I want to share. Today's posting is probably what my co-worker and friend Jeffrey had in mind when he told me I should start a "Denver blog."

Every year about this time I finally start riding my bike after several months of staying indoors. I really don't like riding when it's cold out. Usually the first ride of the year isn't a long one--Ron and I do those 3-hour ones in the summer, going out to places like Cherry Creek State Park or Green Mountain. Instead, I just toodle around downtown.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been fascinated by buildings under construction. I remember as a 5-year-old how interesting it was to watch the structural steel being assembled at the Catholic church down the block--I can't remember the name of the church, but it's at Federal and Vassar. All Saints, I think.

For several years there's been a massive new building under construction on the south side of downtown--a building designed by a big-name architect, a man with fancy glasses and a foreign accent. Not to mention pretensions--he's so sincere that not a few New Yorkers have grown tired of hearing about his plans for the World Trade Center site. The architect: Daniel Libeskind (and I don't know if I spelled that right). The Denver building: the new Hamilton Wing of the Denver Art Musuem:

They're finally removing the protective white wrapper to reveal the titanium underneath (I think that's what the cherry-picker is doing). The old Bach Wing is in the foreground, the original museum building constructed in the 1950s and remodelled in the mid-90s when they closed Acoma to traffic and built the plaza between the museum and the library.

People will either love or hate this thing. I won't decide until it's finally done.

Here's another view of it.

In this, you can see the glass bridge over 13th Avenue that connects the Hamilton Wing to what is now being referred to as the "North Building," the 1971 pile by Italian Modernist Gio Ponti. Say what you will about that building--I've always loved it, and always will. It's covered with several hundred thousand gray glass tiles that reflect sunsets beautifully.

Interestingly, on this site many decades ago was a Methodist church. Behind the church, facing 13th Avenue, was a separate building called the Evans Chapel. That's where my parents were married on August 31, 1942. Now it's a crazy titanium-covered art museum. The Evans Chapel was saved--it's now on the DU campus in southeast Denver.

And from this angle you can see all three parts of the museum, along with two scuptures--Lao Tsu by Mark di Suvero (the red steel thing), and on the roof of the Bach Wing, a work by Red Grooms, of which I don't remember the title. It's a cartoonish sculpture of cowboys and Indians, and it caused quite a stink when it was originally installed in Denver. Instead of an art museum roof, they had it on a little triangle of grass on Speer Boulevard--the little triangle next to the old Tramway Building at Arapahoe Street.

Of course, as interesting as I find the new museum wing, I don't think the museum necessarily did the right thing by not buying up the strip of buildings along Bannock Street between 13th and 12th. These are a motley lot of miscellaneous structures, and I think you'll agree they look rather odd juxtaposed with the Libeskind building, especially this earnest late 1970s passive-solar construction housing the Colorado Episcopal Foundation (note that they haven't finished peeling away the protective wrap on this side).

Already the new museum wing is causing property values in this neighborhood--given the name "The Golden Triangle" by city planners some time in the 1980s--to rise. I have a good feeling for the history of this area, bounded by Speer on the west, Colfax on the north, and Broadway on the east (I don't accept the Lincoln Street boundary put forth by the neighborhood association--for me, it's Broadway). I wrote a research paper on the history of the neighborhood when I was in Dr. Tom Noel's Colorado history class at UCD in the fall 1995 semester.

I won't repeat all of it here, except to summarize. The parts closer to downtown and furthest from Cherry Creek (the creek, not the neighborhood) were densely built-up in the 19th century. The creek, before walled-in by Mayor Speer in the early part of the last century, tended to have a fairly wide floodplain, so the areas closer to the creek were filled with housing for the working class. From about 1920 onward, the area declined, with most of the houses giving way to one-story commercial buildings devoted to either the sale or repair of the automobile. This was Denver's "garage," and at every intersection with Speer there was a gas station. Broadway was Denver's original automobile row.

There wasn't much left by the 1980s when city planners were trying to figure out a place to put a new convention center (in the 1960s the area was briefly considered for complete reconstruction as a home for Metro State College and what later became UCD--a fate that befell nearby Auraria instead). The 1990 Census showed something like 500 residents, and most of them were living in poverty (Broadway had a few transient hotels, and there were a few homes and row-houses left). After the city decided to put the new convention center in "The Silver Triangle" instead (a stupid designation--it's just part of downtown), the Golden Triangle became a new area of focus for redevelopment. The old Public Service Company (now Xcel Energy) bought up most of the southern end of the neighborhood, and made plans for a high density office/living complex. This never panned out--Denver's economy went into the toilet for several years, only coming back when massive public works projects like the new Convention Center and DIA injected billions of dollars of federal money into the regional economy.

So for most of the past 10 years the area has been redeveloping on its own, as a bedroom community. Some of this new development has been good--handsome neo-modernist structures--and some has been very bad indeed. Particularly egregious have been developer Craig Nassi's massive stucco-glop "Neo Central Park West" highrises, the Prado and the Belvedere, but there have been minor sins committed as well. I particularly detest the late-90s Mediterranean POS in the center of this photo, and while I would never wish anything bad to happen to anyone tasteless enough to buy one of the units in that building, I do have to laugh at what I see happening now: a series of six rowhouses going up next door, blocking the view from the southern windows on the first three or four floors.

In case you're unfamiliar with this vista, it's Cherokee Street between 11th and 12th. The building to the left of the ugly Mediterranean stucco mess is a Modern-Retro pile called "Century Lofts," one of the earliest new developments in the neighborhood.

Finally, I give you this:

It does something I particularly dislike: it fills up the entire block between Acoma, Bannock, 8th and 9th. It not only fills up the block, but thanks to a change in the route of Bannock Street that the city made in order to improve traffic, it bulges out into what used to be Bannock. It's a luxury apartment complex called "The Boulevard." Anyone who ever lived in Denver in the 1980s or 90s will remember this block as the former home of Racine's, a restaurant with so-so food and mediocre service that nevertheless was beloved by many. I myself had eaten at the old Racine's (they have since moved to Sherman Street, across from the KMGH-7 parking lot) many hundreds of times. In the late 80s and early 90s I spent every Monday night with a bunch of gay men at a support group, and we would invade Racine's en masse after 1o:00 for either nachos or desert (their nachos were massive, gut-busting monstrosities--I almost always went for the mocha ice cream pie).

But I have to say: I really, really hate this building, and not just because it destroyed a bit of Denver history (and I'd also point out that the old Racine's building had been built in the 1920s as a Ford dealership, and had lovely Spanish Colonial architecture). I can't stand the way it completely engulfs the block and I abhor the way the architect tried to break up its mass by using different kinds of brick in sections. And then there's the gimmicky faux-historicism, but this post is already too long.

More on new ugly architecture in a later post.....

Americans as Anasazi?

2006-03-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

I have finally found the antidote to James Howard Kuntsler (refer to posts back in August of last year).

Kunstler, who I used to really like for his books on urbanism (Geography of Nowhere, etc.), published a book (The Long Emergency) last year that basically said: "everyone is going to die, freezing in the dark, and there's nothing anyone can do about it." Civilization, according to Kunstler, is fated to destroy itself.

I don't have an argument with Kunstler's ideas about how foolish we all currently our, with our addiction to oil (do I dare use that term now that GWB has co-opted it?), etc., but I do think he takes the absolute worst scenario and runs too far with it.

Yes, our society--the global one, not just America--is headed for a period of reckoning, and there are many disturbing trends that need to be reversed, and we need to summon up the willpower to do that. But Kunstler says anything we try is doomed to fail.

So what's the corrective to this dark view? A book that was published in hardcover a few months before Kunstler's, and that is now in paperback: Collapse, by Jared Diamond. Diamond, a professor at UCLA, has been on the bestseller lists for several years now with his Guns, Germs and Steel (1998; paper 1999). I read that book way back when I still worked at the Tattered Cover, and it affected my thinking about human society in a variety of ways. GS&S was about how a variety of environmental factors affected different groups of humans in different ways, and why some societies developed the wheel and others didn't. That book isn't "environmental determinism," a simplistic and under-developed idea that says "environment is everything," but rather a sophisticated examination of human history that encomasses a wide variety of perspectives.

Collapse continues Diamond's examination of human societies, and in this book he explores the question of why some human societies collapse, and others don't. More importantly, he also surveys our modern world to see if there are signs of collapse right now--signs that are similar to factors that caused past societies to disappear. He looks at Easter Island, several other Pacific island societies, and (in a somewhat over-long look) Norse Greenland. He also looks at past societies that faced similar difficulties to the ones that collapsed but didn't disappear--Tokugawa Japan, for example--and asks why they succeeded.

Then he turns to modern societies that have collapsed (Rwanda, Haiti) and others that could collapse if current trends are not reversed (China, Australia). Finally, he asks: what can be done? He puts together a list of common "one-liners" that people (conservatives) use as reasons to "don't worry, be happy." Arguments like "technology will save us," "the Earth can support population growth indefinitely through the Green Revolution," and so on. And he destroys them.

Finally, he says his outlook is "cautiously optimistic," because we CAN change. I like that, and not just because he's not as pessimistic as James Howard Kunstler. I like it because it's up to all of us, and because it recognizes that we all make a difference.

Now turn off some lights and figure out a way to re-use something you'd normally throw away--and go out and borrow a copy of Collapse from your local library.

Ear Candling

2006-03-04T15:55:00.000-07:00

My midlife crisis arrived last Monday, via FedEx from China. No, I don't mean I ordered a mail-order husband (if there are such things). My midlife crisis is not a sports car or "another man." It's a new computer. This is my first blog posting from it, and in fact it's already the longest thing I've written on this very alien laptop keyboard (previously, the longest things I had typed were passwords and "outgoing mail server" settings, and so forth. I must say, though, once you get used to typing on one of these it's not so bad (provided, of course, that you've got it on a table).

Not only is it a new computer, and of a type I've never owned, it's also a Macintosh, so I have to get used to an entirely new way of doing things. This morning I managed to import my photos from the PC--all 1850 or so of them that were on it--but then I managed to copy each of them twice, so I had over 5500 photos, suddenly. I still haven't figured out a way to delete them en masse, so I've bee going thorugh and deleting them two or four or six or eight at a time.

Here's one of them:

People who have been to this house will recognize that as me, sitting at the dining room table as I am now (hooray for wi-fi) in front of our old kitchen. The t-shirt from Muir Woods makes it a picture taken after May 2002, and the old kitchen dates it prior to September 1, 2003.

Oh, and what the hell am I doing? That's called ear candling--you can buy them at natural food stores, and they're great for heating up and draining ugly old hard wax from your ears. Okay, you know I'm no longer young, or, since I'm willing to share this picture, vain.

I could have shared photos any time I wanted to from the PC, but now that I have this new computer I want to make this blog both more frequent and more colorful. Let's see if I make good on that promise.

I'm Still Here

2006-02-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

Good times and bum times, I've seen them all, and my dear, I'm still here....
Plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer....and I'm here....

I started this blog last July with all good intentions of at least weekly postings. I've been so busy over the past few months doing work-related stuff on the weekends, and also being seriously lazy, playing Microsoft's Spider Solitaire while listening to Bright Eyes or, more recently, Martha Wainright (Wainwright?), that I haven't stuck to the original plan.

And I'm not promising that I necessarily will, but in a week or ten days I'll have my new laptop (which won't have anything natively Microsoft on it, except for Office for Mac), and can blog from any old coffee place with Wi-Fi if I want to. Or I can sit up in bed and write. And I can get back to creative writing (yes, that old promise to myself and others that I'll do something with my creative abilities besides writing dry demographic studies for certain not-to-be named here natural foods grocery chains whose names begin with "W."

I've been thinking about a blog posting that would be an alternative history of the last 25 years--a "what if" scenario that would show the difference between Jimmy Carter winning the 1980 election and Ronald Reagan winning it. I do think the world would be a much better place than it is now had Jimmy won, but it was not in the cards for him to win (partly his own fault, but he deserves a lot less blame for losing than he's traditionally been forced to accept). But I have to do more thinking on the subject, so I'm not going to write that just yet (if you want to get an inkling of what I'm thinking, pick up his new book, Our Endangered Values, in which he, a man of strong Christian faith, castigates those in power today, and shows them for the hypocrites they are, among other things).

Jimmy Carter's book has me thinking a lot about what I believe. For most of my life--since I started trying to think for myself, about 30 or so years ago--I've been a very fuzzy thinker. I parroted my mother's value systems, although without, after age 17 or so, a belief in the Judeo-Christian god. In her world, traditional Democrat values were good, and Republican values were bad. I see now that such a black & white way of thinking is no better than the way fundamentalist Christians see things the same way (except they see things in exactly the opposite way). And to be fair to my mother, she wasn't as black and white about things as I was.

Now, at 43, I have more clarity and focus than I've ever had in my life. I still see the Republican value system (especially in its most current version) as dreadfully harmful, and as leading to a world we won't recognize if they stay in power for much longer. But I also see that most Democratic politicians are full of hooey, and that most of them aren't much better than most Republicans. I am completely disillusioned about most of them, and pessimistic about Democrats changing for the better any time soon.

It was the stolen election of 2000 that started getting my vision focused and less fuzzy. Then there was September 11th, just 10 months later. Then the two wars, both of which are still ongoing and inconclusive in their results. Then there was the stolen election of 2004 (yes, I believe that Ohio was thrown to George the same way Illinois went to Jack in 1960--through chicanery and outright theft--in 1960 it was the Chicago mob, and in 2004 it was Diebold and the other criminal companies that manufacture electronic voting machines, and who hold all the keys to the software, and who made public promises to deliver Ohio to the Republicans--that's not "conspiracy therory," it's what happened).

The problem with my vision now isn't fuzziness. It's that it's too focused on the potential of bad things happening. I just finished a wonderful little novel, Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre, a Texan. The novel is yet another coming-of-age story in the tradition of Salinger and so many others, although Pierre carries Vernon's coming-of-age to a terrifying denouement on Texas' Death Row--something that few coming of age novels quite do. One of Vernon's problems is that he sees bad things coming, and feels like he can't do anything to stop them. Prior to the start of the novel, his best friend, a Mexican boy named Jesus, had brought a gun to school, killed over a dozen of his classmates, and then killed himself. Vernon is blamed as a co-conspirator, and much of the physical evidence is against him. But what's more against him is the whole paradigm (or powerdime, as he calls it) of society: everyone, including his almond-on-almond deluxe refrigerator-obsessed mother, is walking around with their brains in "park" mode. The media come to town, and take over the justice system.

In a sense, Vernon is a "co-conspirator," because in his bones he knows something is wrong with his friend. But he lacks any mechanism to pinpoint the problem and, more importantly, he lacks any kind of supportive network. He can't go to anyone--not his mother, not his teachers, certainly not the town's "leaders." And so he is blamed when things go wrong--it is the only logical thing that could happen.

It's a very cruel logic that traps Vernon, and what's so creepy about the novel is that it's the same kind of logic that is running things in our real world. When I was younger--really, up to the stolen 2000 election, I used to think that there was a "core" to our society that would always re-establish equilibrium when things got too crazy. This equilibrium took care of Richard Nixon. It ended the Vietnam War. Equilibrium gave us Bill Clinton to counteract 12 years of darkness (I'm not so sure, these days, that eight years of Bill Clinton was necessarily the healthiest thing that could have happened). This "core" wasn't made of any particular individuals--it was the collective energy of all right-thinking people. It wasn't just people who voted for Democrats, either--in the old days there were plenty of decent people who voted for Republicans--as there are now.

My fear now (although I refuse to be ruled by fear) is that the equilibrium is gone. If it were here, more people would be angry.

Where did it go? It may be that it's not gone--I am ever an optimist--it may be that it's in dormancy. But if it's dormant, then I don't know what will wake it up. After all, what happened in December of 2000 didn't. September 11th didn't. Afghanistan didn't. Iraq didn't. The second consecutive presidential election theft didn't. Katrina didn't. The still unfolding Abramoff scandal didn't (and note that the Bush White House has now given the main investigator a new job, hoping to derail the investigation). We have the most power-hungry bunch of people in American history running Washington. Perhaps the Cheney quail hunting incident--as goofy as it appears--will be the tiny hole in the dam that, as small as it is compared to the other issues and scandals, will unleash the flood (but probably not).

The Nation a few weeks ago presented the case for impeachment. Harper's, in its March issue, is doing the same thing. Have any major Democrat politicians called for impeachment? Have they? (remember Ann Richards' wonderful "where was George?" speech at the Democratic convention in 1992?--where are the Democrats?).

But I see a need to go beyond impeachment (why bother? do you really want to see Dick-still-drawing-a-paycheck-from-Halliburton Cheney living in the White House?). What is needed is for Americans to shake off the collective fog they've been living in for the past 25 years. We don't need a revolution--the Constitution is a marvelous document, and our system as it was originally constructed is still the best possible, despite a few details that need fixing--what we need is a civic revival. We need to start talking to one another.

Liberal blah-blah-blah, sure. Reading Utne too long. But in my earlier life, I would have said those things without really understanding why they're important. Now, we'd damn well better start living like we care about our future, and about the next generation (yes, my buying a new manufactured-in-China laptop I really don't need is rather hypocritical, to be sure). We're in danger of killing the American experiment. Re-establishing equilibrium is up to us--it's either that, or we're all Vernon Little, about to be destroyed for no good reason.

Blog Technology....

2006-02-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

....is mystifying. For whatever reason, blogger.com put in a giant space on top of my posting from a few minutes ago. Scroll down, please.

Tattered Reasoning, Indeed!

2006-02-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following letter to the editor of the Rocky Mountain News today. We'll see if they publish it

Link to original RMN letter to which I responded: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/letters/article/0,2777,DRMN_23966_4437182,00.html

Cynthia Mahon-Southern's reasoning (Letters, Feb. 3) as to why she does not shop at the Tattered Cover deserves a response, because it's the oldest, most persistent myth out there: that bookselling is inherently profitable. The Tattered Cover is a for-profit business with the soul of a non-profit institution. Joyce Meskis has spent 31 years running a bookstore, not making herself wealthy. Her employees (I was one, for more than five years in the 1990s) also sacrifice a great deal financially to work there--they and Joyce do it for the love of books, and the love of putting books together with people.

The economics of running a bookstore, of stocking hundreds of thousands of volumes that may or may not sell (and paying the freight to return them when they don't, and carrying them on their books for the period of time they sit there unsold), and of paying people to do all the work mean that the store can't offer deep discounts the way Amazon, Wal-Mart and Costco do. Also, it's expensive to stock travel guides to Togo, field guides to South American birds, and every last Charles Dickens novel--the profit margin on these tends to be lower than the profit on New York Times bestsellers because they don't tend to get bought every day. Unfortunately, the discounters have taken much of the more profitable business, and left independent bookstores like the Tattered Cover with the less profitable parts. Sure, you can buy anything you want on Amazon, but you can't hold it in your hands first.

To at least offer Denverites a taste of a "better deal," the store has implemented the "TC 25" program, where 25 titles per month are offered at 25% off of the cover price. Some of these are national bestsellers, and others are quirkier titles that you won't find on the front tables at Barnes & Noble or the front webpage at Amazon.

I choose to buy 98% of my books at the Tattered Cover (the other 2% from other indy bookstores when I travel) because I support it as an institution. Ms. Mahon-Southern can make the choice to do the same, or not, just as she is either a member of the Denver Art Museum or not, or gives to Colorado Public Radio, or not. Sure, the Tattered Cover is a business--but it's a lot more than just that, and if Denverites want to keep it as a part of what makes Denver a great place to live, then they should shop their more often.

As for the move: hooray! Joyce is taking a big risk by moving her business, but, civic-minded person that she is, she knows that revitalizing Colfax Avenue requires business owners like herself to make the commitment. Denverites should honor that commitment by buying their books at the Tattered Cover.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

2006-01-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

You get what you pay for with free software (e.g., blogger.com). I had a post, looked at it in "preview" mode, and it disappeared with I clicked "publish." Luckily most of it was pre-written.

I wrote my sister today. In a previous email I had told her the story of the times a friend and I were physically threatened by groups of straight white males. The first time was in the late 1970s or 1980. A friend (J.L., straight) and I had gone to Cinderella City to see some critically acclaimed, utterly forgotten thing starring Alan Alda as a senator (The Seduction of Joe Tynan?). To kill time, as the mall was closed (it was a holiday--they did this back then), we walked around the building. Some guys drove up, called us fags--the usual stuff. J.'s chutzpah in dealing with the idiots saved our skins. More recently, in 1999, P.C.D. (gay) and I had gone to the Southbridge Seven (Broadway & Mineral, now a Marshall's) on a cold January Monday night to see Pleasantville. We were chased back to our cars by six high school football team types whose gaydar was apparently functioning; our quick feet got us back to my old Subaru in time (and it started--Subarus generally do, even ancient ones).

My sister thought the stories were interesting enough to send to a friend of hers, but I said to here that they weren't remarkable. Then I said (and this is my laziness--posting a blog using a previously-written email):

What I do find remarkable, but I probably shouldn't, is a lot of the recent press around Brokeback Mountain. It seems that a lot of straight men who consider themselves liberal and enlightened, who may even have gay friends, refuse to see the movie with their wives or girlfriends (this started a few weeks ago when Larry David--the comic genius and executive producer of Seinfeld--wrote a humorous piece for the NYT Op Ed pages, and several other straight male writers have picked up on his "not that there's anything wrong with that" line).
I've seen many thousands of movies and TV shoes, not to mention read thousands of stories and novels, where the guy gets the girl, or loses the girl, or what have you--heterosexual stories, in other words, and never complained that they made me uncomfortable. The double standards are amazing--"I have gay friends," they say (substitute the word "black" there, and see how patronizing it sounds)--yet the idea of two masculine characters falling in love makes them distinctly nervous. I t's as though they want us all to be faggish in the Carson Kresley-Harvey Fierstein--Nathan Lane-Paul Lynde-Liberace mode--all Broadway showtunes and flower arrangements and just one of the girls.

The actual sex scene (singular, not plural) in the movie is so abstract as to be incomprehensible--some rapidly undone belt buckles and animalistic grunting for all of 20 seconds, followed by the inevitable "what did we do last night?" look on Heath Ledger's face the next morning as he wakes up with his pants undone.

Then there are some kisses. The one that generates the most nervous laughter takes place when the two men finally meet up again after four years of separation (and nearly four years of sex only with their wives). Ennis (Ledger), his wife and young babies are living above a laundromat in Riverton, WY. Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) has sent him a postcard announcing he'll be coming through on a certain date. All day long Ennis broods, waiting. When he finally shows up, Ennis runs outside, bounds down the stairs, hugs Jack, and throws him against the wall, kissing him ferociously. The next shot shows his wife Alma, looking through the window, shocked to her bones. It's a tragic moment in her life--Michelle Williams, the actress playing Alma, conveys this clearly.

The audience guffaws. It happened both times I saw the movie, but I noticed no guffawing coming from gay people--it was from all the liberal heterosexuals. Both times I was appalled. And this was not in a suburban multiplex--it was at the Mayan, at 1st and Broadway, an art cinema. I can't wait to watch this on DVD, with no sympathetic liberals nearby.

Of course if you are a straight male liberal (or libertarian) friend of mine, I don't lump you in with those I felt disgusted by at the Mayan. If you don't go see this incredible movie, I'll understand. It's not like there's anything wrong with that.

So Over It

2006-01-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

The holidays are over. The holidays are over. The holidays are over.

It's been since the 11th of November that I've added anything to this damn blog that about three people read. Sorry about that--I blame the holidays.

This year I just couldn't "get into it," and neither could Matt. Maybe it was the nice warm weather we had all through November, and for parts of December (the high in Denver on the 25th--the holiday--was something like 67 degrees, a record-breaker). Or maybe it was the sense I've had all year that we're living in increasingly difficult and dangerous times, and what's the point of celebrating anything other than the most short-term victories over darkness? Or maybe it was my increasing antipathy toward organized religion, thanks to reading not one but three books this year on freethinking--secularism--whatever you want to call it (for the record, the books were Michael Shermer's The Science of Good & Evil, Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, and Sam Harris' The End of Faith) (not to mention Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms, but that book, even though it was written by an unbelieving Muslim, was more about the geopolitical world than religion per se).

It was probably a combination of all three factors, plus my increasing disconnection from American consumerism, plus a few reasons I don't even know about.

Sure, I went through the motions--the tree with 840 decorations, hung more perfectly this year than in other years; the open house for our friends here in Denver; Matt's parents on Christmas day (the paella turned out better this year than any other time I can remember). But the season never clicked.

There was one highlight, however (every day with Matt is a highlight, but that's not what I'm writing about): Brokeback Mountain.

I haven't been this deeply affected by a film in years. The story of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar and their forbidden love that stretched from 1963 to 1983 got into my head and my heart, lodging there alongside the very small handful of movies that are my own personal list of classics (Ordinary People, Maurice, and one or two others).

For those of you who haven't seen it, or have been on the moon (it has garnered more than its fair share of publicity), Brokeback Mountain is Ang Lee's adaptation of Annie Proulx's 1997 short story of the same name (published originally in The New Yorker) that describes what happens in a relationship when one person doesn't know what he has until he has lost it. Jack and Ennis fall in love that last innocent summer (it can't be a coincidence that Proulx chose 1963) when both are charged with keeping an eye on a massive herd of sheep high up on a Wyoming mountainside. Unsophisticated country boys that they are, neither can admit they're queer. Both marry and have kids (the wives' stories would make for a compelling movie on its own). Four years after they say goodbye, Jack contacts Ennis, and they resume their relationship. For the next 16 years they meet every summer, on "fishing" trips that yield no catch. Jack proposes they leave their wives and get a ranch together. Ennis, who had been exposed in his youth to the deadly consequences of just such a situation, is too fearful, and too emotionally mute, to ever give of himself to Jack in this way. In their last scene together, Ennis disappoints Jack to such an extent that neither can say goodbye to each other.

SPOILER ALERT: Stop reading here if you don't want to know what happens before you see the film.

That first summer, after they'd been told to come off the mountain before the end of the summer grazing season (obstensibly due to weather, but the film leaves the option open that as their boss had seen them canoodling through his powerful binoculars, he may just want to deprive them of a month of pay out of spite), they're too tough to admit their love. So they do what all 19 year-old boys do in the west when faced with mysterious emotions: they fight. Blood spurts from noses, and is wiped on sleeves.

In 1983 Jack is killed. Both the story and the film are ambiguous here. Ennis, upon receiving his postcard to Jack back from the post office (marked "deceased") calls Lureen, Jack's wife in Childress, TX. She tells him that he was changing a tire on a back road. Something caused the rim to explode off of the tire and hit him in the face, breaking his nose and his jaw. No one was around to help him, and, unconscious, he drowned in his own blood. But she doesn't believe this, and neither does Ennis. He knows it was a gang of local good ol' boys who attacked him while he was changing a tire, using his own tire iron to do the damage ostensibly caused by the explosive rim.

Jack's last wish was to have his ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain, the only place in his life where he had ever been truly happy. Ennis drives to Jack's parents barren little windblown house. His rough, hardscrabble father wants nothing to do with him--he has guessed full well what kind of relationship his son had had with Ennis Del Mar. The mother, however, is much more human. She invites Ennis to go upstairs by himself to see the room where Jack grew up, and where Jack would spend a week every summer after his time with Ennis. Jack ascends the stairs, enters the room, and examines the sparse furnishings. He sits down. His eyes wander into Jack's closet--really more of an alcove with a curtain. He sees something he recognizes: the two shirts the 19 year-0ld boys were wearing that last day on Brokeback. Jack had saved them, never washing off the dried blood. Ennis's plaid cotton shirt has been threaded through Jack's blue denim, forever protecting it from harm.

He takes the shirts downstairs, and in a lovely moment that requires no words, his mother puts them into a paper sack for him to take. She invites him back for a later visit he'll never make.

The final scene takes place in Ennis' trailer--he's moved down in the world, living in what used to be someone's vacation toy instead of a house connected to the ground (Proulx writes about the wind whistling underneath). His daughter, now 19, has come by to tell him of her impending marriage, and to invite him to the wedding. He promises to come, and she happily drives off. Too late, he realizes she has left her sweater. After trying to catch her, he puts it to his nose, smelling her scent. He moves to a closet, to store it safely until he should see her again. The door opens, and there, on a nail, are the two shirts--but this time, it's his plaid shirt on the outside, protecting forever Jack's blue denim. Tacked next to the shirts is a postcard image of Brokeback Mountain. Lee creates an image that splits the screen here, with the closet door filling the left hand side, and the world, as seen through a window, on the right--the postcard and the shirts are forever Ennis' reality and his refuge from the world.

I get teary-eyed just writing about it. Go see this movie! And if you live in such places as Underwood, MN or Walterboro, SC--wait for the DVD, I guess....

I could go on about various symbolic typologies Lee uses to get across his point, but I won't--let someone in a film studies class do that.

Most critical reaction has been, of course, ecstatic (except for the Evangelical critics, who have tended to fault Lee for portraying homosexual love as normative and positive). Some reviews have been patronizing--Matt made the point to me recently that some were calling Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal "brave" for taking these roles, and that's like saying Alec Guiness was brave for playing an Arab king in Lawrence of Arabia--nothing brave about it, just good acting.

My favorite review so far has been in The Nation, where the reviewer said that the image of Jack and Ennis madly kissing (the 1967 reunion) at the bottom of the stairs behind a laundromat in Riverton, WY, will stand as a classic iconic cinematic image, alongside images like Rhett carrying Scarlett up the stairs of their Atlanta mansion, or Marilyn Monroe happily struggling to keep her skirt down while standing on top of an air vent. I'd add the lovers on the beach scene in From Here to Eternity.

Anyway, somehow that movie helped me get through the holiday season in a big way--go see it.

Mediocre R US

2005-11-11T18:42:00.000-07:00

It came to me as I was walking Charlie this afternoon what's wrong with America. That's a big statement, but it's a very simple concept, really: we have embraced mediocrity at all levels of our society. It's so pervasive that I can say with all sincerity that we've institutionalized and enshrined it.

That sounds too abstract, and it is. I will provide concrete examples.

Two Saturdays ago, I convinced Matt that we had to drive to the boonies to take a gander at the Denver area's newest retail center. As many of you know, I've been fascinated with retail since a very young age (at ten years old I used to beg my mother to take me to Cinderella City). This new retail center is a full 18 miles north of downtown Denver, on Washington Street between 160th and 168th Avenues. It's outside the new northern reaches of the 470 beltway that encircles 5/6 of the metro area (the final 1/6 is the Flatiron to Golden segment, which I hope will never be built). It's almost in Weld County.

Larkridge, the incredibly generic-sounding name for this new center, is envisioned as a new mega-node for retail, designed to attract everyone from Lafayette to Greeley, as well as residents of Thornton, Westminster, Broomfield, and even Northglenn (which has its own mega center, the Northglenn Marketplace, built about ten years ago on the site of the old Northglenn Mall). It's anchored by Home Depot, Circuit City, and Sears Grand, which is a kind of Wal-Mart-ish version of Sears (registers are grocery-store style at the front, but the prices aren't Wal-Martish at all). Undoubtedly, what will be its claim to fame, however, will be an anchor that hasn't yet opened: Daveco Liquors. This will be Colorado's largest liquor store, at 102,000 square feet (for comparison, this is approximately the size of three Barnes & Noble stores, or 1.75 large grocery stores, or slightly smaller than an old-style (non-Super) Wal-Mart. It's also slightly smaller than the Lord & Taylor that closed this year at Cherry Creek. Of course, the north metro area desperately needs this giant alcohol emporium--nearby Weld County has one of the highest traffic fatality rates in the nation, and his home to thousands of drunk drivers every day. Gotta feed the machine.

But why is Larkridge mediocre? Let me count the ways: one: it takes up nearly a full square mile of land. This is not a mixed-use (the current vogue in city planning, mixed-use combines retail, residential, office, and institutional uses in the same area, much the way towns were planned a century ago). It's 100% retail (national chain restaurants count as retail--this will have a Gunther Toody's and a Village Inn, boy oh boy). When you stand at the entrance to Office Max, you can barely make out human figures entering Home Depot. It's just an absolutely awful, terrible waste of what was once unharmful open space. Two: every single retailer here offers mediocre goods and a mediocre shopping experience that is easily replicated much closer to Denver's actual center of population. Three: it has a dumb name. Four: the crowd here doesn't know any better. You should have seen the folks we saw perusing the aisles of Sears Grand--people who actually think, even now, that George W. Bush is an honest and decent and wise man (to read more about Larkridge, go to westword.com; they did an article a few weeks ago on the new north metro retail scene).

The whole experience gave me the creeps. It got even creepier as we traveled back to civilization, because I decided to take Washington Street the whole way. We traveled through, in the following order: empty farmland zoned for residential use; stuccoed-and-Kentucky-bluegrassed subdivisions less than ten years old; more empty farmland, zoned for commercial use (very near my workplace); 1960s downscale suburb (Northglenn) with half-vacant strip malls lined with cigarette stores, check cashing rip-off places, and generic cell phone stores; another downscale 1960s suburb (the southern half of Thornton) with tacky old cedar-shake-shingled apartment complexes, tacky newish stucco-and-Spanish-tiled apartment complexes, and vacant grocery stores; a mish-mash of old truck farms and industrial buildings (including the Rocky Mountain News printing plant); Interstate highways (270 and 76); and Globeville (Denver's version of the Third World, with charmless century-old shacks sitting on soil contaminated with who knows how many carcinogens from the smelting plants and other industrial activities that have always taken place here, downstream from the wealthier parts of Denver). After Globeville, Washington hits the diagonal part of Denver's street grid, and disappears (only to reappear at Park Avenue east of downtown).

That long, long drive made me think. I recently read a fairly good (but slightly flawed) history of American land-use planning in the age of the automobile, Twentieth Century Sprawl by Owen Gutfreund. He shows how, from the earliest days of the automobile, Americans have allocated resources to the auto-industrial-road complex all out of proportion to those industries' benefit to our society. He looks at three case studies: a small town (Middlebury, VT); a rural area (the no longer rural Smyrna, TN, thanks to Nissan and Saturn); and a large city (Denver). What I most got out of his book was (and here he's saying exactly what James Howard Kunstler was saying in his earlier books before he got carried away with oil-bust apocalyptic scenarios--see my post of 8/14/05) that we have so prioritized roads, roadbuilding, free parking, and easy automobile access--in a way that no other country has--that we have, in essence, greatly compromised the American way of life.

Of course, you can argue that the American way of life is all about ease of movement, freedom to go wherever you want to go, etc. (and you will, if you're an individualism-at-all-costs pure Libertarian or conservative). And maybe there is something to that--I love to be able to drive wherever I want to go, on roads that are relatively smooth (think of trying to drive in Siberia or sub-Saharan Africa). Guilty pleasures.

But there has been a tremendous social cost to a century of prioritizing autos over people, and we see it everywhere, and we accept it as normal. We have sprawling Thorntons and Larkridges because land's cheaper out there--and the teenagers turn into Eric Harrises and Dylan Klebolds. We have health problems derived from too much sitting--there isn't enough time in the day to exercise when you commute an hour each way. We have disrupted families and underfunded social programs and dysfunctional schools (buy my sister's book--see two posts ago). And on and on.

The biggest social, cost, however (I argue) is: we accept mediocrity willingly, even enthusiastically. The sprawl which we have built has so neutered us, so deadened our senses, so conditioned us to "accept the inevitable" (see the piece on "Five Little Words" ["it is what it is"] in the December Vanity Fair) that we have compromised what made this a great country.

Why? One little word: money. The powers that be (and I'm no conspiracy theorist, but there are "powers that be") want it this way because mediocrity is more profitable than its opposite. Its opposite is fairly hard to define--but think of being able to buy things from local retailers at fairly reasonable prices that you can expect to last 20 years, and think of not being able to hear your neighbor's stereo through your bedroom wall at midnight because the walls are built flimsily, and think of the calm that comes from reading a good book in a comfortable, well-built chair in a room that has good lighting.

Yes, mediocrity is profitable: the concept of "planned obsolescence" as embraced by Detroit automakers many decades ago doesn't apply just to car design. Look at the synthetic stucco that has been such a popular building material for about 15 years--it's liberally applied over chipboard, on mega-mansions filled with cheap, ugly furniture and badly-designed rooms with unusable corners and ceilings that are so high that wearing down jackets indoors becomes necessary all winter long. Look too at (it's hard not to) Wal-Mart. They've done such a good job at farming everything out to the lowest bidder that most of what they import from Myanmar and Liberia to sell to thing-hungry Americans will end up in landfills in five years or less--but it's Always Low Prices, Always.

All of this has filtered into our collective psyches (mindsets, worldviews, whatever term you want to use) in insidious and innumerable ways.

The cure: I'm not sure there is one. But start by thinking about whether what you're buying or doing is for a valid, non-mediocre reason. If it is mediocre, think: is there another way? There isn't always--mediocrity is pervasive--but sometimes there is. It's up to every one of us to improve our society.

Imagine a Great Bookstore

2005-10-29T11:21:00.000-06:00

This is something that needs saying, and to my knowledge no one in this town has dared to say it, at least in the print or electronic media: the Tattered Cover Bookstore needs help. I don't mean that it needs volunteers to help it move (as happened in 1983 and again in 1986, when it moved twice during the years when it was a great bookstore). No, I mean: it needs saving from itself.

The Tattered Cover is one of Denver's sacred cows--beloved of so many, the store that thrived as the town suffered through a long post-oil-boom malaise in the 1980s, the institution that has valiantly battled the chain bookstores and bookselling websites for so many years now. So how dare I criticize? Because, as those of you who know me will attest, I adore the Tattered Cover. I gave it more than five years of my life, working for incredibly low wages during the Clinton boom years when everyone was getting rich, except for us dedicated, bookloving idiots. Of course, for me that job was one of convenience: I needed flexibility and low responsibility as I went through college, and the store was a perfect place (plus I could by textbooks cheaper than any of my classmates).

It's not too hyperbolic to say that the bookstore, in a large part, made me who I am today. I remember my first encounter, with the Old Store on 2nd Avenue, on a hot August afternoon in 1980. I had heard of this bookstore where you could find just about anything, and if you couldn't they would order it for you. I rode my bike down there and spent at least an hour (this at a time when no Walden Books or B. Dalton could hold my attention--or anyone's--for more than about 15 minutes). This was the summer after high school graduation. I was a bit adrift--I was starting my interior design studies at the Colorado Institute of Art at the end of September, and I spent the summer just savoring the fact that I was no longer in thrall to the Denver Public Schools. I remember going to the old Cherry Creek Twin Cinema--approximately where Neiman-Marcus is today--to see the newly expanded version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (in which we see a suddenly older-looking Richard Dreyfuss ascend into the mother ship), and went to the Tattered Cover afterword.

I had always wanted to read the novels of Charles Dickens. I had read A Christmas Carol, and of course A Sale of Two Titties back in Junior High, but I wanted to delve into Dickens. The TC had not only every single novel Dickens ever wrote--it had them in three or four different editions each (keep in mind, the Old Store of the TC was tiny, not even as large as one floor of the Cherry Creek store today, if memory serves). There were something like four shelves of Charles Dickens. A B. Dalton or Walden would have four or five of his best-known, one copy each. Of course the reason I was into Charles Dickens in the first place was because 1980 was the year Trevor Nunn's stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, all 10 or 12 hours of it, was filmed for PBS, and I was enthralled.

Over the next few years I read all of Charles Dickens, with most of my books coming from the Tattered Cover. After I decided to come out as a gay man in January of 1984 (a decision precipitated by a letter from my best friend at the time, a thoroughly heterosexual man), the Tattered Cover helped me tremendously--they had a whole bookcase (one of the narrow endcaps, but still a whole case) of books with titles like The Best Little Boy in the World and The Front Runner. By this time, of course, the Tattered Cover had moved to the other side of Second Avenue, to a two-level space that was twice the size (or more) of the original store. They kept the Old Store open as a bargain book outlet, and no visit was complete without crossing the street to check out both halves of the store (for those of you who didn't live through Denver's depressed years, this was the space now occupied by Kazoo & Company).

In the late 1980s, after my Houston sojourn (where I was utterly disappointed and shocked to find nothing on the scale of the Tattered Cover--there was the mediocre Sam Houston Bookstore in the lower level of the Galleria, and in 1985 a Bookstop opened inside the old Alabama Theater on Shepherd Drive next to this new little health food store from Austin called "Whole Foods"), the Tattered Cover had outgrown its new home. The old Neusteter's luxury fashion chain (which at one time had had a dozen stores stretching from Boulder to Colorado Springs) had gone out of business, and their prime Cherry Creek location on the corner of First Avenue and Milwaukee was sitting vacant. But not for long--Neusteter's closed its doors in February or March, and the Tattered Cover opened right before the holiday shopping season that same year (for the life of me I can't remember if it was 1986, 87, or 88).

This was paradise--three full floors of books, and even more density of selection than they had had in either the Old or Middle stores. The bargain section was re-consolidated into the new store, and going to the TC became something I did nearly every week. And I wasn't alone--soon the store had three times as much business as it had had before the move. Suddenly the Tattered Cover was a tourist attraction, and everyone--including (unfortunately, in retrospect) The New York Times--was noticing. Leonard Riggio, a scrappy guy who had bought the venerable New York local chain Barnes & Noble (I used to get their mail order catalogs when I was in high school) was looking for a way to really make a lot of money off of books. Voila! The book superstore was born--in Denver, with Joyce Meskis as midwife. Riggio sent teams of people to Denver to study the store, and by the turn of the decade was ready to blanket the land with ersatz Tattered Covers--Barnes & Noble stores were flashy (in the beginning they didn't have the warm color scheme they have now--it was all 1980s purple and pink and neon) and had places to sit, and lots and lots of books, just like the Tattered Cover.

I give great credit to Joyce Meskis and her people for weathering the onslaught of Barnes & Noble (and later Borders) stores in the Denver area. First, right about 1990 or 1991, four B&N stores opened on the same day, at four points of the compass--they had stores on Arapahoe Road, near the Aurora Mall, out west somewhere, and up north somewhere. Sales at the TC took a hit, but the store bounced back. But then there were more and more. In 1996 when Park Meadows opened, things got really bleak for the store--there were more B&Ns, there was Denver's first Borders (managed by a former TC staffer), and the new mall out south pulled a lot of shoppers away from Cherry Creek (the area has bounced back since then, of course).

Then there was this new idea of buying books on the Internet. Customers started coming in with printouts from Amazon.com, asking if the store had the book they were looking for, and if the price was the same as Amazon's. The answer to the first question was usually "yes," but the second question was always answered negatively--no discounting at the TC except for school teachers buying books for classroom use. Soon those people with the printouts weren't coming in at all--they were staying at home and waiting for the USPS to deliver.

Joyce fought back, of course--adding a coffee bar, opening a second (and much more beautiful and relaxing) location, and augmenting sales by hosting mega-booksignings like those with Hillary Clinton, Ah-nuld, Generals Powell and Schwartzkopf, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and other uber-celebs. This was not to mention hundreds of actual writers who all came to the the TC and not to the chainstores.

That's still the formula, even though both of the older stores have had to downsize. Cherry Creek, which expanded to four floors in about 1990 or 1991, is back to having just three. Lodo, which began as one floor and expanded to three, is down to two. In the recent down-sizings, they made some incredibly poor spaceplanning choices. The Lodo store's children's section is on the first floor, occupying what used to be the travel room and spilling out into the main part of the store--the books look "wrong" in this location. They've stuffed the second floor with so many shelves that it has lost much of its former beauty--and they've spread history--a section I always browse--across an ill-defined traffic aisle. You can't tell where history is supposed to start or where it should end.

Cherry Creek is even worse. Here they've taken children's books out of the basement (where children were neither seen nor heard) and put them back on the third floor, where they were when the store opened. But they got rid of the old third-floor events space, and jammed the history and travel sections right up into kids--you can never escape the sounds, the pleadings, the whinings (lest you think I'm a grinch: I don't hate kids--I hate parents who let their kids misbehave in public).

Both stores have lost their old sense of cohesiveness--both feel like they've seen better days (and they have). Cherry Creek's lighting is just atrocious--almost all fluorescent, and it does a really bad job of illuminating. In Lodo, a store that has never had good lighting, the increased density of bookshelves means you'd better shop when the sun is out, because after dark it's just too gloomy to see anything.

Of course, there is a bright spot. The Highlands Ranch store, almost a year old, is all on one level. It's well-planned, cohesive, and better-lit. You have to put up with Highlands Ranch people shopping there, which is why I haven't been back to that store since last winter (that, and why drive 15 miles when Lodo is just 1.5 miles from my house?). But it's a nice store, and from all reports it's doing well.

Last spring's news that the Tattered Cover, Twist & Shout (one of Denver's last remaining indy music shops), and a new art cinema run by the Denver International Film Society would be the anchors of a redeveloped Loewenstein (former Bonfils) Theatre on East Colfax across the street from East High School was incredibly welcome. Rumor had it that the TC would abandon Cherry Creek, where the landlord was demanding more money (and this is Denver's most expensive retail address). Or that the new Colfax store would open and the TC would keep a boutique-sized presence in Cherry Creek. Or the the Cherry Creek store would stay intact as it is now, and the Colfax store (less than 2 miles away) would complement it. Whatever it was, I was all for it, and still am.

Except that it doesn't seem to be happening. There has been no news for many months. A recent article in the newspaper of my alma mater says that the Starz Film Center hasn't yet committed to the project, and that the developer has November 1 as the deadline. If the film center doesn't commit, the project may not happen.

If it happens, great. If it doesn't happen, fine. But whatever happens, the Tattered Cover needs a makeover. I don't mean just physically. I mean that every time I shop there I see a demoralized staff. I mean that I don't see what I should see: innovation. The store's in a dreadful rut that began ten or more years ago, and without a change in culture (and an infusion of cash) I don't know how it can get out of it.

Late in my college career, professors (who knew I worked at the TC) would ask me "what's happening at the Tattered Cover?" They--a core constituency for any bookstore--had been increasingly disappointed by the selection of books. Professors would tell me that all they'd see anymore were bestsellers, that the store was no longer regularly carrying the kinds of books that they used to be able to find there--recently published works that filled in knowledge niches. And it's true--there was a culture at the store then (that's probably still there) of "sell more of what sells." In the history section that means never going out of stock on Howard Zinn's A People's History of America, and there are similar titles all over the store. But Howard Zinn does not a complete history section make.

To never run out of bestsellers is great retail wisdom, but the Tattered Cover used to be more than that. It used to be highly committed to carrying things that perhaps only one person in all of Denver might buy. Money, of course, is the reason this has changed, and I would explain that to my professors. To them that was no excuse (easy to say), but as much as I defended the store then, they were right. After visiting the architecture section in Cherry Creek yesterday, I decided I had to say something--it had less selection than a Barnes & Noble, and it shouldn't have been that way, not at the Tattered Cover.

What to do? I don't know--although I know there's a lot of deadweight still employed behind the scenes, wasting the store's precious financial resources and depressing the morale of those staffers who are still loyal and committed. For my part, I'm still very loyal, buying almost all my books from them (spending several hundred dollars per year). We'll just have to wait and see what time brings.

To any TC staffers: please do not bring this post to the attention of Ms. Meskis.

Villages and Cities

2005-10-22T11:20:00.000-06:00

Hello again.

Sorry it's been so long--nearly a month--since I last posted.

Before I get to today's posting, I offer a plug for my sister's recently published book. It Takes The Whole Damn Village by Sandra Barnhouse offers her views on the best way to raise children in our semi-post-industrial society (my term, not hers). I've read a draft copy, and it makes a lot of sense. Her premise: instead of warehousing children in obsolete buildings called "schools," which by and large are a relic of the Industrial Revolution, let's re-integrate them into human society. In her system, every adult in a community is responsible for raising that community's children in such a way that they emerge into adulthood as more fully-realized complete persons than the typical high school graduate is today. People with specialized knowledge or talents would become mentors. Children would still be taught the basics of reading, writing, history, etc., but by adolescence--when their attention is most easily diverted from the task at hand in the current educational system--they'd begin to specialize in what mosts interests them. As a result, they'd naturally be more interested and involved with their own destiny. The transition to adulthood would be far more smooth--people in colleges would no longer behave like 13-year-olds, as they do now (I'm getting really tired of hearing about drinking problems on our college campuses, because it's such an unnecessary waste of human potential). So buy it!

Here's a link: http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=28094

It's cheap at $13.40 (paper only), and with shipping it comes to about twenty bucks.

* * * * * *

Where have I been, you ask? I've been too busy. I've re-discovered my creative muse, in the form of a novel I began writing about seven years ago. For those of you who don't know this work, it began in 1995 (I know, that's ten years ago) as a short story. I was in a creative writing class in college, and the main comment from the instructor was that it was not a short story at all--it was too novelistic. I put it away after that semester, but her comment stayed in my mind.

A few years later, during the summer of 1998, I found myself pulling out that story and trying to figure out what the central character was going to do with his life (not that I could ever relate to that dilemma!). It didn't come easily. His name is Steven Travis Brown, and at the beginning of the story he's two months away from high school graduation. He's gay, and a virgin (this is 1983, light years away from "gay/straight alliances" in schools, XY magazine, etc.--many, perhaps most, gay men of my generation were still virgins at the end of high school). His best friend, Troy, is straight, and Jewish. They live in Houston, and as their parents are well-off, they live in the Memorial neighborhood, a land of tall pine trees and large houses. They attend a school that is based on Kincaid Academy, a prestigious private school (this school is, I'm certain, also the basis for Rushmore Academy, in the film Rushmore--but I had the idea for this school in 1998).

But how trite is that? Very. Gay coming-of-age novels are a dimeadozen. So one summer morning while listening to Broadway showtunes and drinking lots of coffee in front of the computer, it came to me: Steven is an Innocent. He must explore the world, just as that naive Westphalian youth Candide (more like the character in the Leonard Bernstein musical than in the original satire by Voltaire) did. So it became a much larger book: how Steven grows into adulthood over a couple of decades, and bad things befall him, but how he remains ever optimistic even as he learns and suffers.

To make the connection with Candide apparent, I'm setting the story in various locales: Houston/Galveston, Provincetown, New York, Tokyo, London, and New York (and a garden in Montclair, NJ) again at the end.

Just as Candide endures the tribulations of seeing his beloved Cunegonde raped by the Bulgarian army (into which he himself is conscripted); of living through the terrible Lisbon earthquake; of seeing his mentor Dr. Pangloss hanged by the Inquisition; of being reunited with Cunegonde only to discover that she's become a concubine, shared between the Grand Inquisitor and an extremely rich Jew (both of whom he accidentally kills); of being appointed Governor of Montevideo even as the locals rise up in rebellion; of discovering Eldorado, only to be robbed of the riches he brings back by scoundrels he trusts; of pursuing Cunegonde back to Europe--so too must Steven endure having his heart broken by his best friend and by his first love in quick succession; of being sundered from his true love by family politics and Japanese tradition; of seeing his almost-true love killed in front of his eyes in an accident involving London Transport; and of being reunited with childhood friends--including his former best friend Troy--only to see him die in an act of terrorism (yes, that one, and no, I'm not being gratuitous--if and when I ever get this written you'll see that I'm not).

There's a lot more too it, of course--this isn't the Lives and Romances of Steven T. Brown (in fact I don't yet have a title). I'm trying to create a complete portrait of our decadent, affluent, angst-and-anomie-ridden society, just as Voltaire satirized Enlightenment Europe (mine isn't a satire--that's a rare talent). Many characters will suffer and learn, not just the hero.

I hope I'm on the right track now--I threw out much of what I had written in 1998 through 2000 (where I stopped writing until this year, for the most part), and my new prose is much better than the turgid mess of those days, I hope. That there's a new movie called Protocols of Zion that I heard about after I conceived of Troy being killed in the WTC is a good sign. This movie, which is currently just on the coasts (and maybe just NYC), is a documentary about the book Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that famous anti-Semitic forgery that people read to this day and still use to justify their fear and hatred. More importantly, it explores the myth that no Jews died on 9/11--that they had all been warned not to go to work that day--which is utter nonsense. My fictional Troy dies that day, and the final scene of his novel is a memorial service in a garden, bringing the New Candide story to a suitable ending.

If this all sounds like utter nonsense, please tell me. There are times when I feel like I'm no more of an artist than public television's Bob Ross, with his "happy little trees" that he paints faster than Rachael Ray puts together a complete meal. But at other times I cling to the illusion that I'm onto something.

Reminder: do buy my sister's book!

Pharoah's Tribe

2005-09-24T09:14:00.000-06:00

It's Saturday morning, and Houston, Galveston, and most of the refineries are all still in one piece. New Orleans is a bit wetter, a bit more destroyed.

I'm glad for all of us in this country that Rita didn't destroy as much as the media had so gleefully anticipated--I feel badly for the people directly in its path, but at least it's fewer people than it could have been. But I'm also glad because--how cynical I am--George Bush is going to miss the opportunity to appear "Presidential."

He's desperate for some opportunity to repair the damaged caused by stealing two elections, by ignoring warnings of imminent terrorist strikes in the summer of 2001, by creating the Iraq mess, and by ruining FEMA to the point that Wal-Mart did a better job of responding to Katrina than anyone from the US government did (Wal-Mart did indeed show up and start helping people in the disaster zones before FEMA or even the Red Cross--check out the new issue of Fortune). Not that I've become a fan of the Evil Empire, of course.

Yesterday Bushie scrapped a planned pre-landfall trip to Texas. His handlers, smarter than the First Boy himself, realized that a presidential visit to a place gearing up for disaster could backfire--could cause more harm than good, and further damage his low stature in the eyes of an awakening American public. After all, what could he have done? Told the Texas National Guard how to do their job better? He has such great experience in that area, of course.

Instead, he played it safe, coming to Colorado to hang out with the kindly folks at Northern Command, or whatever it's called--the command center set up at Peterson AFB after 9/11 to manage disasters, whether human or natural. Of course, he may just log on to the wrong computer, and instead of a nice game of chess we'll be faced with Global Thermonuclear War (for those of you who weren't, as I was, smitten by Matthew Broderick in the summer of 1983, that's a reference to his film War Games). If you're still alive this evening, after he's left Colorado Springs, you can bet his keepers kept him from touching anything.

The title of this posting may just seem a bit cryptic, given what I've said so far. It's from a Bob Dylan song (this is Bob Dylan Month, apparently--two new archive albums, and the Scorcese film on young Bob on PBS Monday and Tuesday night--on Monday it's opposite EastEnders--what will I do?) called "When the Ship Comes In." I was listening to this the other day--there's a version of it on the soundtrack album to the Scorcese film--and it struck me. Here's part of the song:

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Oh the seas will split
And the ship will hit
And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking.
Then the tide will sound
And the wind will pound
And the morning will be breaking.

It's going to be Morning in America, folks. I'm sensing a shift. My cousin Ken told me last night that in the month that he's been away from this country (he and his partner Ken just spent a month in Russia) people in his town (Las Cruces) have scraped off the "W" bumper stickers from their cars. He used to see them all the time, and he's only seen one this week. I've noticed the same, even in the red-state suburb where I work. People have kept their Kerry Edwards stickers--I even know of a yard sign still standing in my neighborhood--but having "Bush Cheney" on your SUV is becoming a mark of shame. There's also a yard sign in my neighborhood that says "IMPEACH BUSH."

Continuing Mr. Dylan's song, skipping several verses:

Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.

That song was written 42 years ago, and he probably had the foes of civil rights, the commie-paranoid former McCarthy-ites, and what Nixon would later call "The Silent Majority" in mind when he wrote it. Those people haven't gone away--they've simply bred new generations of fearful twits who mindlessly vote for whomever their pastors and televangelists tell them is the right protector of the faith. They are Pharoah's tribe, and their days are indeed numbered. I won't quote from Mr. Dylan's far more well-known song on the same subject, because it would be trite to say that the times they are a-changin'--especially since that song is now being used in a TV commercial--oops, I've just said it. Well, you get the picture. Now: move away from the computer, get off your ass and start interacting with humans. It's up to us to change the times.

Dylan lyrics: Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

Bushvilles

2005-09-11T17:58:00.000-06:00

Today I rode my bike on South Platte River trail. Starting at my house in West Highlands, I zoomed down the hill to the river at 20th Street, and road northward to where the trail currently ends, at 104th Avenue (at approximately Quebec Street if it went through, which it doesn't). It's September, and I love this month like no other--the sky was a brilliant blue, and (before noon at least) the temperature was just right. The lower angle of the sun we're getting now meant that much of the trail was shaded by the still-green trees, and the contrast between shade and light is especially wonderful right now.

On the way, not long after I started, I came across a community of people living on the banks of the river. This is nothing new, of course. In the 1930s, as my former professor Thomas J. Noel (Dr. Denver in the Rocky Mountain News) is fond of pointing out, the "Platte River Bottoms" were home to thriving shantytowns--Hoovervilles. Every major city had them. More recently, in the early 1990s, the administration of Wellington E. Webb forced the people living near the river between 16th and 20th Streets to move--the city was going to build a park (Commons), and they'd have to find somewhere else to call "home." The new townhomes recently built along Little Raven facing the new park have some of the highest per-square-foot values of any residential property in Denver, and penthouse lofts at 16th and Little Raven sell in the seven-figures. They're elegant examples of late-Modernist architecture, occupied by wealthy empty nesters or credit card-maxed trust fund babies.

What's not so elegant are the campsites further downstream. These are past Commons and City of Cuernavaca Parks, close to where the river skirts Brighton Boulevard on its way to the Pepsi Cola bottling plant and the Coliseum. The people living here can fill a Kmart cart with all of their possessions. They use the river for bathing, and spend their days sitting on benches along the bike trail; these benches were installed in the 1970s when the trail was first built, and the city still maintains them.

But what the city does not do is house them--although His Honor the Brewmeister has some sort of elaborate plan.

Instead, Denver (the greater Denver area, that is) houses the residents of the poorer neighborhoods of New Orleans. There was an empty barracks or dormitory at the former Lowry Air Force Base--a dorm that local homeless service agencies have not been able to get their hands on--and on Monday night they came on a Frontier jet and got housed.

The victims of Katrina need to be housed, of course. To do anything else would not be humanitarian--it would make those who don't like America or Americans right. And while I don't begrudge their presence at Lowry at all, I have to wonder, like Matt wonders, why it is that we can do this for those people while ignoring the needs of others who, just like Katrina victims, are homeless through no fault of their own (I don't mean just the river people; there are many officially homeless people living in temporary housing--motels along East and West Colfax, etc.)

The answer, as far as I'm concerned: we're housing Katrina victims not only out of the goodness of our hearts (there is some of that, to be sure), but because their sudden un-housing was so violent and dramatic. It was all over all media since the 29th of August, and becuase it was so ubiquitous a story, people acted. They don't act to house the residents of the South Platte River Trail (I should mention that I saw more people on my way home, living on the Clear Creek Trail near where it passes under York Street), because that's not sexy.

But beyond the drama of Katrina, there's yet another, more important reason. People have poured out their hearts and their wallets over the past 12 days because it makes us feel good about ourselves. To put it into a tiny little word: it's ego. This is not about them--the poor, under-educated Black people of what is, after all, mostly just another vacation destination for most people--it's about us.

Am I being unfair on upstanding, upscale white Americans? Maybe, but think about this the next time you give a dollar to a cardboard sign-holding person on the corner of Speer Blvd. and Auraria Parkway. Who are you really helping--him or you?

Shelter from the Storm

2005-08-28T16:56:00.000-06:00

Second posting of the last Sunday in August....

Katrina is about to bear down on N.O., and I'm sitting in my basement on a bright, clear, hot late afternoon listening to a Bob Dylan cover. Two weeks ago I wrote about James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, and how it's the most pessimistic book ever written. After going over and over his words in my mind for the past couple of weeks, I've come to some conclusions--more positive than negative.

When I first read The Long Emergency, it scared and depressed me. Why? Here's what JHK has to say, in a nutshell:

1. The world is nearing, or has just passed, its peak oil production moment. What this means is that oil will become increasingly expensive, scarce, and hard to get out of the ground. At some point oil production will cease, because it will be so difficult to obtain (from oil fields, oil shale, or tar sands) that one barrel of oil will be required to get one barrel for use--there will be none left over to actually use for other things besides oil production.

2. The United States and Canada are nearing, or have just passed, our peak of natural gas production. In northern climes, houses have to be heated in the winter. Most houses are heated either by natural gas or fuel oil (see #1 above). We're already seeing steep increases in price, so it's likely that the peak moment has passed, and it's all downhill from here.

3. Islamic fundamentalists will do everything they can to increase the effects of #1 above. Plus they might do something bigger and worse than Sept. 11.

4. Alternative fuels will not save us. Or rather, they won't be enough to allow us to live anything like we do now, commuting by ourselves in cars for many miles, turning up the heat on cold days, etc. JHK feels that these technologies are also pipe dreams because they require an oil-based energy infrastructure to do what they do--it takes oil to power the factories that turn out wind turbines, solar panels, etc. And the "hydrogen economy" is the biggest lie of all. These are JHK's thoughts, remember, not necessarily mine.

5. Everyone will starve. Our current level of crop yields are based on factory farming--oil not only powers the giant machines that plant and harvest grain, but it also is the major ingredient in the fertilizers necessary for the huge yields. And don't even talk about the energy required to get the stuff to the mills, and from the mills to the grocery stores. Kunstler makes no mention of organic farming methods.

6. Everyone will die of thirst. Global warming is playing havoc along with our water supply--which we're depleting at crazily fast rates--aquifers take millions of years to get full again.

7. In the Long Emergency, it's going to be every man/woman, family, neighborhood, city, state, region, and nation for himself/herself. Because modern people are not cooperative, as our ancestors were, we will kill each other off almost as quickly as global warming / hunger / thirst will.

JHK, in his final chapter (which I want to call "The Book of Revelations"), writes about the various regions of the US and how they will fare in the next half century. The Southwest will have it worst--Phoenix and Las Vegas are in the middle of deserts, and won't be able to feed themselves once oil becomes so scarce as to make transporting food long distances prohibitive--and don't forget about the utter lack of water. And all those scary Mexicans who want to establish Aztlan (he quotes, with no sense that he's quoting a racist, reactionary source, last year's controversial Foreign Affairs article by that avatar of civilizational collapse, Samuel P. Huntington, called "The Hispanic Problem"). The Southeast--bascially what most people call the South--is filled with right-wing gun-toting religious nutcases; JHK thinks they'll have to reinstate slavery to survive. The Pacific Northwest has plenty of water (west of the mountains, at least), and good, volcanic-enriched soils, but Seattle and Portland residents will have to contend with pirates or invading armies from Asia (the Long Emergency will be worldwide--they'll be hungrier than we will be). The Rocky Mountain states--well, Utah is full of breeding Mormons, and they live in a desert, and they'll probably try to overrun everything around them to survive. Denver he singles out most unpleasantly: our suburbs will become dangerous Mad Max-style wastelands, and of course we won't have any water to drink. And it's cold in the winter.

For Kunstler, the only place to be will be the Northeast, which he defines as the upper Midwest, mid-Atlantic, and New England (not coincidentally, he lives in Syracuse). But the major cities, and the suburbs that stretch continuously from north of Boston to Monticello--will be uninhabitable. Rather, it will be the hinterlands--upstate New York, the valleys of Pennsylvania, Vermont--in other words, where there are still, to some extent, small farms that haven't been consolidated by agribusiness, and small towns and small cities instead of skyscrapers and shopping malls, civilization will be able to continue.

Escape to Europe? Don't count on it--we're destroying the Gulf Stream--once the melting Artic icecaps dilute the water around Greenland enough, the current will shut off and Europe will glaciate.

So what's right, and what's wrong about Kunstler's views?

I agree with #1, #2, and #3. We're burning oil faster than we should be, and there will come a time when we have to wean ourselves completely from it--no more gasoline-powered cars, no more inorganic fertilizers, no more Tupperware. Natural gas--cheap for decades, now no longer--and it's not like we can make it ourselves. Islamic fundamentalists aren't going away any time soon, and they do want to hurt our economy as much as they can--if they can manage to depose the House of Saud, if they can destroy a refinery or two, if they can destroy pipelines--they will. And let's not forget now that we're less safe from them now than we ever were before--the Department of Homeland Insecurity is all smoke and mirrors.

But that's IT. Everything else James Howard Kuntsler has to say about our future is just the worst of all possible scenarios. He discounts human ingenuity and fortitude. We didn't get to the top of the food chain by burning oil--we evolved to our present position because we're generalists--if a food we like becomes unavailable, we find something else to eat. JHK is right when he describes our current situation as an oil monoculture--we do need to wean ourselves from it--but to call our future a "Long Emergency" completely rules out any positive efforts by ourselves to thrive. The human project--just like the project of any species--is to reproduce itself. We'll find a way.

So: if you're at all interested, go out and check out his book from the library. Or go to your local bookstore and read the interesting parts at the store. But don't rush out and buy it--it doesn't deserve to be a bestseller (not that it looks like it's going to be one--Jared Diamond's Collapse looks like the winner in this subject category).

Can you tell I feel cheated by Kunstler? I liked his books on urban planning--he's written eloquently about the stupid mis-allocation of resources called American Suburbia (and he returns to that theme repeatedly in The Long Emergency) in The Geography of Nowhere and its two sequels. But even there--he assumes everyone should live in a version of America that is mostly middle class, mostly white, mostly heterosexual, etc. He likes compact city planning--New Urbanism if you want to call it that--but refuses to recognize that that can lead to housing that is unaffordable by poor people, commercial areas with shops that poor people can't afford (at least, in our Wal-Mart / Family Dollar world--poor people must shop where things are cheapest), and an overall atmosphere that resembles nothing so much as Main Street USA at Disney World. A friend of a friend who is an urban planner by profession says that the common feeling in her profession about James Howard Kunstler is the Howard Stern of urban planning.

What I want is the Bill Moyers of urban planning. Is there one out there?

My Life in Kenya

2005-08-28T16:52:00.000-06:00

I haven't posted in the last two weeks because I've been so busy. Summer and all that.

I see one response--thank you MH--to my last post. Is anyone out there reading this?

If you're familiar with the BBC comedy As Time Goes By you may understand the title of this post--I've always identified with Lionel Hardcastle a little too much.

That's all this post has to say--that hardly anyone reads this blog. I'm continuing to post, however, because the whole point for me is to have a medium in which I can express ideas. I'll publish this and go onto a second posting.

Freezing in the Dark

2005-08-14T17:11:00.000-06:00

Sorry I haven't been posting lately--we went to a wedding in the mountains last weekend, and I've been too busy since then to get back downstairs.

A topic I've wanted to explore on this blog ever since I started it--even before, in fact--is the idea that we lefties like to anticipate an apocalyptic future. The thought I've been developing in my mind for the past several months is that now that we've been under a Republican administration for nearly five years we've started to feel so powerless that the only way we can see the future is through the opposite of rose-colored glasses (blood-colored glasses?). You see this not so much as the left-wing media--magazines like The Nation, etc.--but in the mainstream media of cable television.

What sparked this idea was a show we watched on National Geographic Channel called End Day. This hour-long disaster-fest was co-produced with the BBC, and was based partly on the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day. You remember that one--Murray plays a weatherman whose life is in disarray, and finds himself repeatedly living the same day (February 2). In End Day, the protagonist is an American physicist living in London. He gets a phone call early in the morning and has to jump on a plane to New York to be there when they turn on a sophisticated particle accelerator for the first time. The accelerator has generated a lot of public protest, because people fear that it could create a black hole (sound like the plot for Spiderman 2?).

In the first 15-minute segment, he gets to Heathrow, gets on a plane, but the plane never takes off. A massive landslide in the Azores has caused a mega-tsunami that wipes out New York (sound like part of the plot of The Day After Tomorrow?). Wonderful special effects--equal to any big-budget disaster film--show the watery end of Manhattan.

The second 15-minute segment starts the same way--alarm clock, phone call, BBC news on in the background talking about the particle accelerator. But suddenly the news changes--there's a newly-discovered comet that astronomers have calculated will be colliding with Berlin in a few hours. The action shifts to Germany, where a mother hears the news and panics; a father puts a small child onto an evacuation train; etc. Our hero is still planning to fly to New York, however--who cares if Berlin gets destroyed?--and we follow him again onto the British Air flight. On the seat-back TV, we see the American nuclear missle that blasts into the comet (we see it from a camera attached to the international space station). The missle fragments the comet (destroying the space station), and small bits still crash into Berlin, largely destroying it.

Part three: influenza! Viruses can mutate rapidly, although perhaps not as quickly as this show depicts. By the time our hero is at Heathrow (having passed by, on the way, a cinema showing Groundhog Day), viruses have swarmed all over the world, and the military has taken over running the UK--and the flight is prohibited from taking off for the US.

In the last few minutes of this harrowing hour, our man finally takes off and makes it to New York. He gets to the particle accelerator, he and his team switch it on, and voila!--the world is destroyed, just as the doomsayers predicted.

I'm not going to say this is the work of "liberal doomsayers"--let ABC's John Stossel do that. What I will say is that this kind of show is tapping into an anxiety a lot of us westerners--liberal or not--are feeling (although of course the right wingers are more in denial about it, and the evangelicals are eagerly anticipating Armageddon).

The original point I had developed in my mind several weeks or months ago (who can say when? I was walking Charlie, and that's when these ideas come) was that people on the left want the Bush "administration" to fail. He stole the White House (twice), and the hubris and stupidity with which he and his people have been running the country deserves, in our minds, harsh punishment in the form of chickens coming home to roost (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Churchill).

But now I'm not so sure that's what's happening.

I've been reading the most pessimistic book ever written, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kuntsler. The thesis can be boiled down very simply: the end of the oil age is upon us, and we can expect our current "lifestyles" to be radically altered within the next few years. This is a work of popular non-fiction--Kunstler doesn't originate this idea, he merely borrows and synthesizes what geologists have been saying for some time. But he goes beyond geology, and brings in history, economics, politics, foreign affairs, religion, urban planning (the subject of his past three books) and everything else that has been in the news for the past few decades. The picture he paints is downright scary: the potential, very real, for irreversible worldwide social, political, and economic breakdown. Not a return to the nineteenth century, but a return to the ninth. No "hydrogen economy," no alternative fuel scenario can save us.

He could be painting a picture that is too dark, of course, but I am with him when he says we're in for a very bumpy ride, and we Americans are living as though we've just won World War II and the world is our oyster (my paraphrase).

Shows like End Day are entertainment, but look at what we find amusing. Discovery Channel abounds with shows about tornadoes and earthquakes, and the Yellowstone volcano (a few months ago they aired a very cheesy disaster film of what would happen if the 600,000-year eruption were to happen right now--yes, I watched the whole thing). Every night on the Weather Channel you can watch Storm Stories--reinactments (sometimes augmented with actual footage) of ordinary people who find themselves in the middle of a flash flood, a tornado, or a mudslide. National Geographic Channel has a show (also co-produced with the BBC) about commercial airline disasters. They put it on just before bedtime.

All of this is a symptom of a huge sense of un-ease. And what we're uneasy about isn't just "is Al Qaida going to strike again?" but something much larger, deeper, and more dangerous: that our way of life is going to end. I haven't finished The Long Emergency yet, but I already know that the second half of my life (assuming I live into my 80s at least) won't be as easy as the first.

Would anyone care to post a comment? I'd be forever grateful. This blog has had just one comment posted to date.

Let's All Get a Piece of the Action!

2005-07-30T11:24:00.000-06:00

It's coming. Do you know what's coming? Another anniversary, that's what's coming.

Before I talk about disturbing qualities of that anniversary, I have to say: what happened on that day truly was terrible, and the thousands of people who died certainly didn't deserve what happened to them. Nor do their survivors deserve to go through what they've had to go through (for details, read Gail Sheehy's over-long and under-edited Middletown, America). I've inserted that caveat because I have no desire to become Ward Churchill.

Matt is always after me to not let tragedies that have no connection to me have control over my thoughts or life. He's right, of course. It's so easy to want to grab a piece of the tragedy of others because those of us who have middle-class white collar lifestyles tend to live a very even existence, punctuated only by the change of seasons, annual vacations, and the occasional death, birth, or wedding (we're going to one next week!). This vacuum--and of course, I realize that billions of people would love to have our humdrum lives instead of the poverty- and disease-stricken lives they lead, never thinking of it as a vacuum--shows itself in the popularity of shows like "Storm Stories" on The Weather Channel, or the umpteen-thousand shows on Discovery and its spinoff networks about tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, failures in human engineering (collapsing bridges and dams), and other juicy events (some of which haven't even happened yet, we're so jonesing for disaster).

But the ultimate collective juicy event, the ur-event of American life in the twenty-first century, happened nearly four years ago on a sunny September morning. Those two little ones--forming the numeral 11 in some sort of weird symmetry to the towers--pop up everywhere because everyone wants a piece of the action. If you're at all a visual person, you can see 9/11 by glancing at a page of text for just a second or two.

Lately I've been playing a little game. Before I read a book I think: will this author mention September 11 or not? What on earth about the subject matter of this book can be tied into September 11? How will this writer tie her- or himself into what happened on that day? I play this game because the odds are, if it's a non-fiction book with a copyright date of 2002 or later, September 11 will be mentioned.

Examples:

1. Linked, a summary of the new science of networks by a Hungarian mathematician called Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Networks are a new way of looking at previously un-connectable phenomena, and it's a very interesting concept, and the book is a highly-readable summary of what math and science have discovered over the past several years. Near the end, looking for examples, Barabasi starts talking about terror networks, and sure enough, I spotted those two little ones in my peripheral vision before I came to the actual paragraph.

2. Call of the Mall, by Paco Underhill. This guy is fun to read--his big book Why We Buy came out five or six years ago, and is a must-read if you're a retailer. This book came out in 2003 or 2004, and sure enough: malls no longer have lockers for people to put packages into while they continue to shop because of September 11.

3. Subwayland, by Randy someone-or-other (I'm too lazy to go looking for the book upstairs). Okay, this one is obvious--a book about the New York subway system has to have an entire chapter devoted to what happened to the 1 & 9 lines on that day.

4. The Science of Good & Evil, by Michael Shermer. This book by the editor of Skeptic magazine is about how ethics are a product of evolution, not religion. I read it in January, but don't remember all of the details. But I looked just now, and sure enough there's a reference to September 11 in the index.

5. What's the Matter with Kansas, by Thomas Frank. This political bestseller from last year is another obvious one.

The point is: it's fine to talk about September 11 if you're writing about George W. Bush, about American foreign policy, about fundamentalist thought, and a host of other subjects directly related to the causes of what happened. But can we please give it a rest everywhere else, unless we're writing a detailed sociological examination of the day's effect on the American psyche?

What happened on that day was horrible. But so was what happened in London recently, in Madrid last year, and in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and a lot of other places in 1945 (those nuclear anniversaries are coming up--hooray!). The list of man's inhumanity to man is endless and it's not yet complete. But too many Americans think that the event was unique. Sorry, guys and gals--it wasn't. And unless you were there, shut up already.

In another posting perhaps I'll get into American Exceptionalism, which is probably the root cause of all this, but this one is long enough....

Wrestling with Angels

2005-07-20T19:17:00.000-06:00

The other day I heard a terrible story. Matt has a friend (who shall remain nameless) who is Muslim. Last Saturday her mosque on Parker Road was the target of a charming group of people who call themselves "Operation Save America." They use two names, depending on whom they're targeting--their other name is Operation Rescue, and anyone who pays attention knows what they're about. Using a portable PA system, they--with the kind permission of the always helpful Arapahoe County Sherriff Department--told good Muslims arriving for worship that Islam is a lie, that theirs is a culture of death, etc.--all of the usual right wing anti-Muslim hate mongering that you can hear on talk radio any day of the week. Except that right-wing talk radio doesn't set up a portable broadcasting truck in front of mosques (not that that makes them morally any better, of course).

I'm no fan of religion--any religion--but I would never presume to spew hate speech at people arrriving for church (Operation Save America's efforts continued on Sunday, when they protested outside of the largely gay & lesbian Metropolitan Community Church, a Unitarian fellowship, and--get this--St. John's Episcopal, the premier Protestant "establishment" church in Denver). They're in Denver, you see, for their week-long annual convention/hate fest. Last year they targeted Columbus, Ohio, I believe, with similar tactics. They're not going home until the weekend--this morning they caused a traffic jam on I-25 by standing on an overpass with pictures of aborted fetuses. It's a wonder they didn't cause multiple wrecks, even a few deaths.

I'll get to my point in a minute, but first I want to say: these people are patently un-American. They believe they're representing a "true" America, but their America never existed, and (if I can do anything about it) never will. Ours is a schizophrenic country, to be sure--founded jointly by hard-boiled Puritans and easier-going (but slave owning) Cavaliers--and these twin foundings have colored much of our civil strife over four centuries. But in our wonderful Constitution is the concept that anyone who believes differently from the majority still has a right to believe (and testify) as he or she wishes. They will change that if they get the chance.

Operation Save America/Operation Rescue hate life. Oh, sure, they claim that human life--the life of millions of unborn fetuses--is their highest priority. But as a gay man I've come to recognize certain psychological patterns that are dead give-aways. Any man who claims "disgust" at gay sex is generally fascinated by it. I should know--I once claimed such disgust when I was young and scared by my own sexuality. Extending that to these anti-life pro-lifers, I'd say that rather than embracing life, they despise life. They scream, they shout, they kill--not because they value life but because they don't value it. To borrow from (very) popular culture: they're Voldemort's Death Eaters.

* * * * *

I ranted against them just now to get the anger out of my system. Because the central point of this posting isn't that these awful people exist in our society--we've known they do for some time. It's that we on the left don't know how to deal with them. And it's that there is a way to deal with them that doesn't always work in the way we might want it to work, but over time, if we keep doing this, we may cause a societal psychological shift that will benefit everyone.

And that strategy is: don't argue. I can't remember which political book I was reading over the past year where it dawned on me that people on the right--far more than people on the left, but we're not immune--argue for argument's sake. It doesn't matter if they're right or they're provably wrong--they won't stop arguing. It's as though they get stuck in a negative feedback loop from which self-extrication is impossible: if you're right it means I'm wrong, but I'm not wrong, so whatever you say has to be wrong and whatever I say has to be right, even if you're actually right and I'm actually wrong. It's that old binary, black and white thing that the left graduated from (for the most part) decades ago when they realized that Marxism/Leninism was a dead end. Conservatives can't see shades of gray, so when you argue, you can never win. They don't believe in the concept of consensus--only competition. Of course, I sound awfully black & white when I say this, but please refer to an earlier post where I put in a disclaimer about self-contradiction.

How did the mosque handle this challenge? Unfortunately, they chose to fight argument with argument. Matt's friend had a much more practical suggestion: run over to Costco, buy bottled water and cookies in bulk, and hand them out to the Operation Save America people (it was, after all, a day of record-breaking heat--we topped out at 102 degrees on Saturday). Smile at them--be courteous and sweet. Had they pursued this course of action, they might not have changed any minds, but they might just have planted the seeds of doubt. They will come to doubt the wisdom of their leaders when they see with their own eyes that their enemies are no different from themselves. I have this naive, Anne Frank attitude that deep down most people want to do the right thing. The members of Operation Save America and similar organizations and churches are seriously off track, but they're not inhuman. Appeal to their better nature and they might, some day, surprise us.

It won't happen right away, of course. This is the kind of thing that takes years to build. And we may not have years. But if we keep arguing with people who brook no contradiction, we will never prevail.

Maybe this idea sounds like the reaction of the Jews of Europe when confronted by Hitler--I don't know. But the must never give up our ideals--I will never apologize for being gay or secularist or liberal or intellectual or any other label they want to slap onto me. We have to be very firm in fighting these dangerous people, and never forget that if they get their way this country will no longer be America.

Cinderella Can't Go to the Ball Anymore

2005-07-16T17:04:00.000-06:00

On the corner of my block is a building that is now a house but which used to be a corner grocery store. You can tell by the architecture that it was once so, but for years the sign on the sign of the building has been painted over. Today I noticed that either the owner of the building is trying to remove layers of paint to expose the old sign, or else the hot weather is causing the paint to peel off. The word "GROCERY" is now clearly visible. There are a lot of these old buildings in my neighborhood. Some are now houses, and others are shops selling all kinds of useless, charming things. None of them sells food anymore, because now we have grocery stores. The old buildings' original purpose has become obsolete.

That got me thinking about obsolete uses for commercial buildings (yes, I do think about things like this--I'm a real estate nerd). I'm 43 years old, which is not old enough to be old, but is older than young, and I can now look back and see how things have changed in my home town. The Denver in which I grew up is largely gone. It's not just that the metro area has added more than a million new people since I was a child (in fact, the area has just about doubled in size). It's that the malls of my youth are, for the most part, history.

Those of you who know me know that I wrestle all the time between being a complete materialist and castigating those in our society who seemingly live to spend. Lately I've been swinging more toward the latter position (as in last week's post about Flatiron Crossing), but from time to time I swing back and spend more than I should. I like to embrace this contradiction, because to be completely consistent is to be boring.

I've always been fascinated by shopping malls. When I was ten years old my favorite after school activity was to go with my mother and my friends Kevin and/or Marty to a shopper's paradise known as "Cinderella City" (yes, I know what you're thinking, and it's true!). People who have moved to Denver in the past decade have no idea how important this mall was to the Denver area's collective psyche in the 1960s and 1970s. This mall was the BIG TIME--the largest mall between Chicago and Los Angeles, the place where everyone went shopping for everything. It was torn down about a decade ago, after a long twilight period where the mall's vacancy rate slowly got higher and higher.

But oh, how wonderful this place was in its heyday. It had four anchor stores upon opening: Joslin's (a Denver chain later absorbed by Dillard's), JC Penney (known then as "Penney's"), The Denver Dry (a Denver chain later absorbed by the May Company, and now known as Foley's), and Neusteter's (Denver's answer to Saks). There was a two-level Woolworth and a Twin Cinema (Denver's second multiplex, after the Villa Italia Twin). There was high-end (Joseph Magnin, Lillie Rubin) and low-end. There was the magical odor emanating from Orange Julius, a mixture of hotdog and citrus and malt. There was Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor, and Taco Bueno (a fast-food subsidiary of Casa Bonita), and Burstein-Applebee Records. There was Hatch's Gifts (with a window filled with futuristic fiber-optic lights) and Hatch's Books (in the pre-Tattered Cover era, Denver's best independent bookstore chain). And there was that thundering fountain in the very center of the mall that was so loud that you couldn't speak in a normal tone of voice, and that moved so much water that that part of the mall was always more humid (and chlorinated) than the rest of the center.

The mall failed mostly for the usual reason that malls fail: changing times. Southwest Plaza opened in 1983 and pulled most of the middle class shoppers out, leaving only lower-income shoppers (this was long after most of the higher-end stores such as Neusteter's had gone away).

But it also failed because it was hard work to shop at Cinderella City. Instead of the dumbbell design common in the 1960s, with anchor stores at each end, with one or more in the middle, Cinderella City was a giant "W." To get from Joslin's at one end of the W to Neusteter's at the other required a 15- to 20-minute walk on concrete floors. You'd walk the length of the Gold Mall (each segment was color-coded so you couldn't get lost, unless you were colorblind). After a left turn at Penney's, you'd enter the the Blue Mall, at the center of which was the double-height Blue Room with its thunderous fountain and Orange Julius. From the Blue Room you'd turn right and go past The Denver Dry (in 1974 or so shortened to just "The Denver"). Finally you'd turn left again at the start of the Rose Mall, at the far end of which was Neusteter's.

Ah, but there was also downstairs. Below the Rose Mall lay the Shamrock Mall--but you'd never know it, because the architect didn't put in any visual connection--the Shamrock Mall was (ironically, since it was named for a growing thing) subterranean and self-contained, with connecting escalators only at one end. Never full, at its peak the Shamrock Mall probably boasted 80% occupancy. Below the Gold Mall was (originally) the also ironically-named Sunflower Mall (and to get from Shamrock to Sunflower you had to ascend stairs, go through the Blue Room, and then go back downstairs after traipsing down past Penney's again). But that name didn't last, because the mall ownership could never quite get anyone to sign a lease there (except the Barbizon School of Beauty--a heavy advertiser on Channel 2, during its re-runs of I Dream of Jeannie, That Girl, and Hogan's Heroes).

So beginning in about 1972 (the mall had opened in 1966 or 1967) they changed course. They carved out little Olde English streets in what had been unused retail space to create "Cinder Alley." This quaint little village was filled with tiny little shoppes--not much bigger than suburban family rooms. You could buy bratwurst and ginger beer from a tiny German restaurant, or fine batch-roased coffees and teas. There was a seashell shop at which I was a regular customer. It was extremely charming, and so successful initially that the mall management expanded it greatly, filling most of the old Sunflower Mall.

But it didn't last. Like the process I described last week, slowly things began to fail. Cinder Alley was filled with small businesses, and when the economy got weak under Nixon, Ford and Carter, they couldn't make it. The rest of the mall started losing its chain stores, and it filled up with lava lamp emporiums and places to buy waterbeds, role-play board games, and bongs. In the 1980s the mall ownership attempted to revivify the mall by slapping down oak parquet over the concrete. They also removed the fountain to create an opening down into a new food court that linked, for the first time, Cinder Alley and the Shamrock Mall (in space previously devoted to parking). To replace Neusteter's and the Twin Cinema, both long since shuttered, they brought in Broadway Southwest, a fairly upscale department store chain from Phoenix that tried to make a go of it in Denver for a few years. But the writing was on the wall.

After The Denver was absorbed by May D&F (pre-Foley's), the new owners decided to shut the store, leaving a big, empty hole. Broadway Southwest shut down just a few years after it opened. Cinder Alley was long gone, the quaint streets and lamps having been ripped out to install a giant children's indoor playground called "Nathan's Funtastic," or some such. Montgomery Ward (remember them?) replaced the Denver for a few years, but ultimately people just stopped coming.

The City of Englewood worked out a deal with the owners of the mall, and (except for Broadway Southwest) the whole giant pile was torn down and replaced by a Wal-Mart-anchored neighborhood center and some apartments. The Broadway Southwest was turned into Englewood's City Hall and Library. RTD installed a stop at the western end of the property when they extended Light Rail down Santa Fe Drive in the mid-1990s. Except for the odd diagonal orientation of City Hall (diagonal to the city streets, that is), there's no trace of what used to be the pride of Denver.

Okay, that's now two postings about malls. I promise not to make this a mall blog.

The Tolling of the Bell

2005-07-09T09:29:00.000-06:00

On the afternoon of Independence Day Matt and I paid a visit to Flatiron Crossing, a Denver-area shopping mall. I was going to post this when I got back, but I was lazy, and kept putting it off until now.

Flatiron Crossing, your days are numbered.

This is a young mall, as malls go. It opened in the summer of 2000, to much fanfare. Located in the then-growing high technology corridor along US-36 between Denver and Boulder, the mall's neighborhoods include the headquarters of Level3, a fiber-optics company, Sun Microsystems' second-largest facility outside of their California headquarters, and StorageTek, a maker of computer backup systems (soon to merge with Sun). The demographics were marvellous--the mall would pull from highly-educated Boulder, where the aging Crossroads Mall would soon be closing, and from the vast new affluent subdivisions in Boulder County, Jefferson County, and even Weld County. These subdivisions--Rock Creek chief among them--are "planned" communities, which means they're sprawl, but they're pretty sprawl, with lovely parkways planted with trees and dramatic ornamental shrubs and grasses, and bronze sculptures of small white children at play. When you drive over the hill on US-36 just past Flatiron Crossing, you see vast miles of rooftops filling what were, until about 10 years ago, empty green fields. Former Coloradoans who come back for a visit are of course appalled at this sight. So are those of us who haven't moved away.

But back to the mall itself. When it opened, Flatiron wasn't 100% leased--most new malls aren't. Even in the golden era of enclosed malls--those 20 or so years between 1965 and The Cosby Show--they were never 100% full. But, everyone assumed, more new stores would open, and the mall would become the new economic engine for the northwest quadrant of the Denver area (replacing the aging Westminster Mall). But something went wrong. In the aftermath of the dot-com crash (which happened a few months before the mall opened), not many new stores opened beyond the original mix. The mall started missing its sales projections (of course, mall ownership put the best face on the bad news, and most mall shoppers really didn't care about how well the merchants were doing anyway).

Now the mall itself is showing serious signs of decline. One of the anchor spots is empty, because Lord & Taylor (a division of the seriously ailing May Company) decided that it shouldn't be in Colorado at all, and closed all three Denver area stores). When you see the former L&T space, it's a black void--they didn't bother to cover over the glass front. Outside the mall is "The Village," a "street" of shops that aren't connected by an enclosed space but instead face onto a landscaped block-long passageway. This was the most difficult part to lease, because it's cold in the winter, and this part of the Denver area is prone to especially high winds year-round thanks to its location near the foothills and its high elevation. But now the "Village" is emptying out in a serious way. It still has its AMC 14-plex, and its Borders. But Organized Living is having a going-out-of-business sale. Several other stores have closed too; the entire "street" is only about 55% full. The mall ownership is trying to fight back by re-doing the landscaping, and upgrading the paving from plain cement to colored cement bricks.

Back inside the mall, it's clear the owners are desperate to fill the space with anything they can. A former high-tech electronics store (I think it was Bose, but it could have been Bang & Olafsen) is now filled with ugly sparkly party gowns for big-haired suburban Republican divas to wear to their Junior League balls. The shop owner didn't even bother to remodel the space--it looks like it should be selling speakers, and the carpet looks worn out. The mall is starting to get several of these kinds of tenants--locals who try, but will probably fail, at making a go of it in what have to be fairly expensive spaces. And the kiosks that so irritatingly fill the mall's corridors (irritating because they get in everyone's way) are starting to look especially junky. One is devoted entirely to Tupperware, another to $10 sunglasses. In front of Restoration Hardware the mall has allowed a local kitchen remodeler to set up a mock kitchen counter. In short, the mall--carefully designed to look like a giant mountain lodge, with tasteful slate floors, grand wooden columns, and whimsical light fixtures--is turning into an "anything goes" environment.

Of course, that's nature's way. Weeds will fill the spaces in between your petunias seemingly overnight if you let them. And even if they're likely going to fail, I say "more power" to these local entrepreneurs who think they can make a go of it in a place filled with national chain stores that primarily cater to fickle teenagers.

But what this highlights is the ultimate unsustainability of the amount and variety of retail choices we Americans have. Since much of what gets bought is paid for years later--average credit card debt is more than $10,000--at some point most people will have to get off the decades-long spending spree we've been on, and start paying for better schools and better transportation systems, and, for that matter, paying for the stuff they've bought, taken home, used, and thrown away.

That this is happening so soon at Flatiron--it used to be that most malls were good for 15-20 years before being torn down--may be an indication that the process is accelerating, that the chickens are coming home to roost (to use that Ward Churchillian phrase--he teaches just 10 miles away) (and no, I'm not a fan) sooner rather than later.

Yesterday the New York Times carried an article about how strong the retail sector was for the month of June, led (for a change) by Wal-Mart. Sure it was strong--there was, according to the retail gurus, a "pent-up demand" leftover from May, when the weather around the country was less conducive to shopping. But it won't be strong forever.

What Happened in London

2005-07-09T09:10:00.000-06:00

What happened in London had, despite everything Mr. Blair, Mr. Bush, and others have said, has nothing to do with attacking "freedom" and the "way of life" of the British, just as 9/11 had nothing to do with attacking American freedom or the American way of life. On Thursday morning the first thing I heard from the PM was something along those lines, just as though it had been scripted by one of Bush's speechwriters (Bush, judging by his stumbling comments that morning, must have loaned his traveling speechwriter out to Mr. Blair). I started talking back to the TV, never a good sign.

The attacks of 7/7 were all about British support for US imperialism in the Middle East, from which (Mr. Blair believes) the UK benefits. The attacks of 9/11 were all about having American soldiers in Islamic holy lands, about American support of the corrupt House of Saud, about American support of Israeli crimes, and a variety of other things that have nothing to do with the American way of life. Or maybe I should say they have everything to do with the American way of life, because our foreign policy is designed to keep the masses happy by providing cheap oil. That commodity is what allows us to cut ourselves off from each other in our cars and SUVs, to transport Chinese-made shoes cheaply across our vast territory, to fill our Wal-Marts with cheap TVs assembled in far-off countries, and to do a lot of other things that ultimately will come back to bite us.

But getting back to what Mr. Blair said: it's the duty of every right-thinking person to challenge those words and those thoughts. In conversations with friends and co-workers, you have to bring up this idea: it's our (collective Western) foreign policy that they hate, not our forms of government or even our decadent, supposedly immoral lifestyle. It's our actions. To change our actions, we have to do everything we can to 1.) become less dependent on foreign oil and cheap consumer goods imports; and 2.) elect a set of politicians that won't be servants of the multi-national corporations (this is true of nearly all Republicans and most Democrats). Do you really need that new Samsung plasma TV? Do you really want to take advantage of GM's employee discount program--can't you get a few more years out of your current car?

Born on the Fourth of July

2005-07-04T09:42:00.000-06:00

If you've read the description, you get that this is going to be an eclectic blog--I'm a Gemini, and I'm interested in everything except most of contemporary American popular culture (although I should say I'm interested enough in it to deplore it). Maybe that's why I'm so late to start a blog. It won't, I hope, just be a mish-mash of stuff that no one finds interesting. My own interests are quite specific, and once I've decided I like something, I can really get passionate about it.

Take, for example, my EastEnders fixation. I'm an American, so I don't get it four times a week the way people living in the UK do. In order to get my fix, I have to watch it on my local public TV station, KBDI-12 (Denver). In order for them to keep airing it (2 episodes per week only, not the four seen in Britain), I have to, from time to time, donate to the station (anyone reading this outside of the US: there is very little support for public television from the government, and what there is of it has recently been hijacked by the right wing). A few weeks ago KBDI had a pledge drive, and so I gave them $100. As a thank you gift, they sent me a copy of EastEnders: 20 Years in Albert Square. It arrived Friday, and by Saturday night I had read the whole thing cover-to-cover.

This fixation is despite the fact that the EE episodes KBDI is currently showing are six years old (UK readers: Matthew hasn't gone on trial yet, the Slaters are only a thought in the back of some producer's brain, and Grant still hasn't taken Courtney to Rio). Of course, I know who the Slaters are--EE was on BBC America until about 16 months ago when they yanked it for low ratings. Eventually, KBDI's episodes will get caught up to the point where I started watching EE on BBC America, and so I'll get to watch them all over again--watch Ethel's assisted suicide, Jim's marriage proposal to Dot, Barry's brutal treatment of Pat after Roy's death, etc. (Denver readers: I'm sorry for the spoilers). And yes, I know about Dish Network's pay-per-view, but I'll stick with cable for now.

Another example of my devotion to things that I really, really like: I'm one of those people who often re-read Lord of the Rings. You, if you had known me in the 1970s when I was in what was then generally called "Junior High," but now is called "Middle School," would have seen me reading one of the three volumes every day of the week during the lunch period. Every day. For three years. I had an English teacher (Jerry Hedges, South High School, Denver) who wisely talked to me about that particular habit, and from then on I didn't read LoTR for several years--once in the 1980s only. In the late 1990s, with Peter Jackson's film announced and produced, I started reading LoTR again, but I limit myself to once per year (usually in the late winter, when I tend to get a bit anxious about life).

But this isn't going to be just a narcissistic blog--I'm very concerned about the state of the world, and will regularly be spouting off about the people running Washington, and on the homegrown idiots here in Colorado. We have quite a few, from the single-issue Congressman who wants to send Mexicans back to Mexico, to the deer-in-the-headlights governor, who, thankfully, will soon be term-limited out of office (it could be worse, I suppose--at least he's not a movie star).

And I'm passionate about history. My co-worker Jeffrey originally gave me the notion that I should do a Denver blog. Whenever I'm with someone in a car, or walking down a downtown sidewalk, I have this irritating habit of saying things like "this building used to be a JC Penney, from the 1930s to about 1945, when they moved two blocks up the street, and that California Street Penney's closed in 1982 when they built the Sixteenth Street Mall" (Denver readers: the building in question is at 16th & Champa, the building with Floyd's Barbershop). But my history postings, if there are any, won't be just about Denver's past. I majored in History and English Literature in college (University of Colorado at Denver, 1999--I was a "non-traditional" student, in my 30s at the time).

The power of corporations will also be a theme of this blog, I think. Last year I was part of a local group that was one of several that worked to stop Wal-Mart from opening one of their "Neighborhood Grocery" stores in my part of Denver (West Highlands--the store would have been built on the site of the old Elitch Gardens parking lot, at 38th and Wolff). Wal-Mart pulled out after about five months of angry public meetings, a flock of yellow "Stop Elitch Wal-Mart" yard signs, and lots of phone calls and petitions. But it's hardly just Wal-Mart. They may be the biggest, but there are lots of corporations that are hurting our world more than they're helping it.

My motivation is to hear from others, to find out if I'm just a cantankerous grump or if I'm onto something. One thing to know about me, however: I try to see both sides of issues. I think a lot of fellow liberals fail when they refuse to listen to what conservatives have to say (and vice versa, of course). You don't have to change your beliefs when you listen to them--but you owe them (and they owe you) the decency of a hearing. Dialogue will accomplish a lot in our world if we'd only let it. When I was younger I tended to be more strident in my beliefs--but now I recognize that we all inhabit the same planet.