Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 47

DMX RIP

Remember when his first single dropped in HS. Yeah, I'm that old. It was good, though.
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More Covid & a Book Worth Reading

Covid's raging through Brasil, the variants even causing havoc in places where people are vaccinated. In MI, it's a matter of even vaccinated people getting it (at much lower rates than non-vaxxers). We'll see, I suppose. 
I've more or less learned to move away from social media and all that it does to one's mind. But I still go back to see the desolate wasteland of thinking that it is. Tribal chants, even by those who ostensibly call themselves "intellectual" continue. There are places to relax here and there, there are bits of information, but it's all really a mess (and I partially go to be annoyed, or perhaps to play on my own jealousies at such idiotic tribal chants actually gaining more likes or $ than I have).
So it goes.
Been hearing more about the internet, how it's an extension of our minds, how we have all the knowledge right there at our fingertips (it just takes some effort to gain true knowledge) but instead we go for the easy dopamine hits of anger, of outrage, of a tribal call and respond. 
On that note, there's this book I read that tried to mimic (and then break from) the internet and its all consuming power over our minds. Not sure what to think of it. It is damn good at representing internet life and I think it's worth reading, but not sure if it's classic status just yet. We'll see, I suppose. I do like her style used to represent the internets. Definitely worthwhile. 

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Our Covid Reaction Has Been Bad. I Blame Puritanism.

Just tried to see what the rule were for vaccinated folks traveling and, apparently, there's a whole bunch of buck-passing (still) and conflicting info. What it amounts to, IMO, is a whole bunch of pandemic theater. For example, here in King County you can eat, sans masks, in indoors, and that's fine, while someone, masked and vaccinated should be quarantined? It makes zero sense. And this is a year into the damn thing. Read the thread about. So many puritanical types on the liberal side of things are into pandemic theater and I'm not sure why. (note, me being yelled at outdoors from 100m away for running sans mask, me complaining about the outdoor pull-up bars being gone and the entire r/seattle screaming at me (cause how dare I question that). Though, tbf, the one person agreeing was saying covid was a joke, which is, of course, a smart way of framing that discussion, in that it makes me appear like a covid denier when I'm not. I blame, ultimately, our puritanical roots that even the left tends towards. 
Do you have good examples of pointless covid theater?
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A bad Day

Is what the cops claimed he was having. Also nothing to do with race. yeah, I don't believe them one bit. But lookie here, evidence that they're either lying or incompetent. I'm guessing they didn't want to be too hard on the kid who was having a "bad day" by killing 8 other people. 
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Lead Still Being Bad.

Well, nice link showing another relationship between lead and violence. 
Well you look at some other maps, perhaps it isn't as clear. I would like to compare other forms of lead (in water etc etc) to get a better picture. Lead in people would be interesting as well. 


I mean, Sudan should be less violent (to include South Sudan, which had 1/2 a million killings in the past few years) and there are other flashpoint and other variables to consider. Still, seems interesting to ponder, given our own rise in violence due to lead. 


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Books Being Read

Well, I've already explained why Captain Blackman gets in the best of the 20th century list. Or maybe I didn't really and do need to explain myself... Well, maybe. But the thing is, I do have to let it filter through some time to chew and think on it. Like many novels that make the list, it isn't perfect (or I think, all of them). But like many novels on other best o lists, it's better than those, so I can only think it deserves to be there. If, of course, I find something else worth reading, or that does the job better, well I'll read that. 
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Stalin's Metro

Super interesting discussion on the metro and building in the Stalin era. 
Full text here:
"

This is exactly the kind of question I was hoping to answer! Thank you!

First of all, I completely understand where the idea of "bland brutalism" comes from, as well as the idea that the Metro's beauty is entirely separate from that bland brutalism. However, that distinction is not exactly accurate. Stalin was not at all a fan of blandness or Brutalism — his opposition to the former is a large part of the answer, so stay tuned, and he couldn't have been a fan of Brutalism because it didn't exist. But the Metro is not the only piece of architecture that rejects simplicity or blandness in Moscow from Stalin's lifetime. In fact, Stalin is most associated with "Stalinist Classicism", which is very ornate, so it wasn't just restricted to the Metro. Example: MGU, Moscow State University. Commonly cited as the pinnacle of the style, but built from 1949 to 1953, a little after the critical period I will discuss below. I did not study there myself, sadly.

I still have a lot to learn about Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's visions for Moscow, for socialist architecture, and for the Metro, so I will focus on Stalin in this answer, but for now I will say this: Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev (or rather the Soviet state and culture during their tenures as First/General Secretary, because I'm a good post-post-revisionist boy) envisioned their construction of housing and of the Metro as part of the same ideological project to bring comfort and beauty into the lives of Soviet citizens. The difference is that Khrushchev and Brezhnev focused much more on the utilitarian side of that mission than Stalin. So their Metro station designs see a lot of simplification compared to Stalinist Metro stations just like their residential architecture sees compared to Stalinist residences. Nothing that any of those three built was ever supposed to be bland, or purely functional, though.

So why did Stalin decide to build a "grandiose", "ornate" Metro system, as you describe it? There are a few reasons, some of which are emphasized and some of which get overlooked, and I am apparently making it my life's mission to bring those overlooked ones to attention.

Part 1: Competition With the West

There are two reasons that everyone jumps to, and that has sort of stifled the public understanding of the Metro a little. The first reason that everyone jumps to is that Stalin and the Soviets wanted to show off to, and compete with, the West. This is an understandable conclusion to come to — much of the propaganda surrounding the Metro is couched, subtly or not, in terms that compare it to the systems of London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. Stalin and the party were indeed very intent on proving the triumphs of socialism, and the Metro was to be the greatest example of that. Especially during the construction of the first line from 1931 to 1935 and in the early days of operation in the ‘30s, Pravda and other press organs certainly crowed a lot about how the subway systems of those Western cities were darker, dirtier, uglier, more crowded, all in all just inferior, and how the Moscow Metro outshone (literally and figuratively) them all.

This gets a much shorter explanation than the other factors later, not necessarily because it's less true, but because it's a little easier to wrap your head around, and I think most of us have an intuitive sense of it. And maybe it is a little less true as well.

Part 2: The Congestion Problem and Soviet Comfort

But that’s a little bit Euro-ego-centric. None of that is false, but it is far from the only reason Stalin and the party had in mind for building the Metro. Which brings us to the second commonly-trotted-out reason, which is that Stalin really did want to improve the lives of his people. This one is a little tricky. I won’t go too far into the history of Metro planning in Moscow, but let’s talk about congestion.

The main means of public transport in Moscow in the late 19th and even into the 20th century was the horse-drawn tram car. Electrification of the tram network began in the late 1890s, and was completed by 1911, but even then, much of Moscow remained reliant on horse-carts. Although trams didn’t produce manure, they caused terrible congestion in the center of Moscow too. Dietmar Neutatz, whose book Die Moskauer Metro is the gold standard on the history of traffic planning in Moscow until 1935, describes a tram network already "at the borders of the possible" in the 1910s, with the main streets completely "jammed with trolleys" [my translation]. (38) This is, in fact, what led to the first ideas for a light rail/rapid transit network in Moscow in 1902, but that never got off the ground.

Congestion was improved, in a very darkly comic way, by the war. WW1 forced the tsarist regime to shelve plans for a subway due to budget concerns, but then the need for those plans was suddenly removed by the Civil War, which led to a massive depopulation of Moscow and a massive decrease in tram ridership (nearly half the 1915 population fled Moscow for the countryside by 1920). However, as soon as the Civil War ended, people began to trickle, and then flood, back to Moscow, especially because of the economic flexibility introduced with the NEP. In 1924, the Moscow City Council (Mossovet) came to the conclusion that, by 1928, the tram network would be entirely incapable of handling the required load. They began a new plan for a Metro, but for reasons I will talk about later, it was not implemented.

By 1929, the tram network was operating at 150% capacity, sidewalks were impassable, streetcars were overflowing with people, and dozens of preventable injuries happened each week when people lost their hold or were pushed off overcrowded trams and fell behind them, or even worse, in front of them. This is all according to the other great work on the planning and construction of the first line, William Wolf’s Russia’s Revolutionary Underground. And this is all as industrialization and dekulakization are beginning to send an even further mass of people into Moscow. Between 1928 and 1933, thanks to those programs, the population of Moscow ballooned from 2.3 million to 3.6 million, and I'll say it again: that's 1.3 million more people in just five years.

So something desperately did need to be done by 1931. But in order to answer the question of whether Stalin and his subordinates really were motivated by altruism, we have to ask, was a Metro really the best way to improve the lives of Moscow’s people? I would say it wasn’t the best way — investment in new housing was even more desperately needed, and transport to outlying parts of the city would probably have helped more people, even if the problem was mainly in the center. Building a Metro certainly did improve many people’s lives by giving them a shorter and easier commute. But that didn’t really become accessible to many people until the later 1930s, or even after WW2 for some parts of the city. So the idea of the altruistic motive isn’t wrong, but it’s not the full picture either.

So now let’s get back to that question of beauty. The way that these two tropes above were employed, I argue, can tell us a lot about why beauty was so important.

Part 3: Making the New Soviet Man

Those tropes were employed with particular frequency by Lazar Kaganovich, often called Stalin’s right-hand man, who was First Secretary of the Moscow Party Committee from 1930 to 1934, where he oversaw the most important phase of Metro construction, and for which service the Metro was named in his honor when it opened in 1935. Kaganovich loved to speak about how the Moscow Metro was going to make life easier and more comfortable for everyone who came into contact with it, and about how it was more beautiful than anything in the West, but limiting his rhetoric to those two practical points is a little bit reductivist. It goes much, much deeper than that.

Let’s take an example. Perhaps more than anything else, the Soviet leadership, and Kaganovich above all, loved to talk about "brightness". Brightness stood for both better living quality, joy, happiness and all that; and beauty, superiority to the ugly stations of the West. Andrew Jenks suggests that all of this essentially amounted to a number-measuring contest: "Moscow metro ceilings would ascend to 5.6 meters, compared to 2.7 meters in New York [...] Soviet lighting would outshine London's, 50 lux to 24 lux." But, taken out of context, those facts can be misleading. Soviet Metro stations needed to be brighter because — this is the key — brightness was intended to create an altered, transcendental space. It was intended to transport Muscovites, literally speaking, yes, but also figuratively, to another realm of existence.

The beauty of the Moscow Metro is an attempt to give Soviet citizens a glimpse of the future of socialism — not the present, the future. That is (part of) why Stalin and Kaganovich were willing to prioritize it over fixing the urgent housing problem. The lack of housing space arguably affected more people more deeply, with many old bourgeois apartments subdivided between several working families, and having to share a kitchen and toilet made life very unpleasant for Muscovites indeed. However, simply building more housing cheaply and quickly was not good enough for a mature, developed, sophisticated socialist society. If they were going to do it, they had to do it right, or else it wasn’t worth doing. The Metro was a glimpse of what that perfect world would be, and it was accessible to everybody.

(Note: they built a bunch of cheap, simple housing too, but they pretended they weren't, and then moved people out of it as soon as they could. The barracks that were built to house new migrant laborers had often even worse conditions than communal apartments, with no room dividers or internal plumbing at all, and for hundreds of people. These barracks were built for all sorts of industrial laborers, but also laborers working on, ironically, the Moscow Metro.)

Part of this mature socialist society that Stalin wanted to represent in the Metro is the perfection of man. My academic advisor might even say that that was the core of Stalinism: a belief in the perfectibility and moldability of man. (I'm probably misquoting him — hi, Matvei Filippych!) Entering the Moscow Metro is supposed to be a transcendental experience in the way I discussed above, where you see the end-point of history manifested in the station architecture, but it’s transcendental in another sense too. Even though the body physically descends, the spirit and the mind are raised up to the highest heights of achievement. That is another aspect of the concept of brightness here, a pun which works both in Russian and English: enlightenment. Metro stations were designed to enlighten the people passing through them.

One architect put it this way: within the brief period a Metro rider spends in one station, "the architecture, emblems, and entire artistic image should actively act upon [affect, influence] him."1 Beauty was put on display to educate the citizens in proper aesthetic taste, to uplift their spirit, to show them the heights they could achieve under Stalin’s guidance. This is also reflected in the way the dangerous, difficult, and often badly-mismanaged construction of the first line was spun in propaganda. It was a grinding slog, sure, but the Metro builders had defeated the odds, defeated nature itself. "Technically," Sergei Kirov had said of some other construction project, "it may be impossible, but Bolshevik-ly, we’ll do it anyways."2 The point is, under socialism, anything could be done, in extremely short time frames, and done aesthetically pleasingly and well, to top it all off. (But the story of that mindset running into the realities of Metro construction is another question that I would love to answer some other time.) Man stood triumphant over all, and beauty showed the extent of his mastery.

1 Kolpinskiy, in Dni i gody metrostroya, edited by Reznichenko. Translated in Jenks, "Metro on the Mount." But I don't like his exact translation, so I modified it a little.

2 Paraphrased in Wolf, Russia's Revolutionary Underground. The word I translate as "Bolshevik-ly", po-bolshevistski, could also mean "in a Bolshevik manner", referring to the construction methods. He translates it that second way, but I don't exactly like that. The point isn't the difference in construction methods, it's the difference in states of reality.

Part 4: Defining Socialism

That, however, is not the last word. Beauty was an educational and propaganda tool, but what is beauty? (Philosophy 101, down the hall.) Seriously, though, who gets to decide what beauty is, what good aesthetic taste is, what good proletarian culture is, what the proletariat's taste should be educated towards, and what the shining, brilliant future looks like? What I mean is, there is a whole ‘nother thing we need to talk about, which is the Metro’s role in codifying aesthetic and political norms.

In 1924, when that Metro plan I mentioned above began to be drawn up, the man in charge was one Semyon Nikolaevich Rozanov. He ran a small sub-department of MGZhD (the Directorate of Moscow Urban Railways) dedicated to drawing up that plan, with a couple dozen subordinates. He was an engineer by trade, and he had been educated as an engineer before the revolution, so during the Civil War, he fled to France, where he worked on the Paris Metro. He was one of the few people in the USSR in the 1920s with any kind of experience building mass transit. And in 1928, they threw him in prison.

Metro construction is, and was, political. I mean, everything I’ve said so far is adjacent to politics, sure, but here is where it becomes explicitly political. During the 1920s, there was a running battle being waged over the political future of the USSR, with three major factions that we have to worry about: the Right, the Left, and the Center.

The Right was associated with bourgeois tendencies in art and literature; they were still by any liberal definition leftists and radical socialists, but they tended to favor more moderate change, and were not thrilled with collectivization and dekulakization, which uprooted the peasantry, for whom, Stalin thought, they had an unacceptable level of tolerance. They liked the semi-capitalist approach of the NEP and wanted to keep it.

The Left was absolutely radical by the standards of the day, and even by some Soviet standards; they were interested in proletarian internationalism bringing revolution to the rest of the world, and initiating a complete rethinking of the concept of culture. The avant-garde and Positivist movements shared a lot of overlap with these Leftists because of their commitment to exploring and spreading that new culture.

The Center, composed of Stalin and other bureaucratic-tending party and state officials, were committed to industrializing and collectivizing the USSR and strengthening socialism within one country. Their artistic and cultural program was… well, this debate is where it’s about to come from.

Rozanov was believed by Stalin and the Left to be a so-called "bourgeois expert". He was from an older time, and Stalin and Kaganovich were concerned that he brought with him ideas from that older time. Everything that Rozanov did between 1924 and 1928 with his small MGZhD sub-department was suspect for that reason. It didn’t help that, at this point, the very idea of subway construction was seen to be a Rightist tendency. That may be a shock, knowing what we know now about the existing socialist Metro systems and about the socialist love for mass transit (and BreadTube’s penchant for "train good, car bad", which, let’s be fair, is really funny). But let’s forget everything we know about socialism and subways and go back to the 1920s.

Part 4A: Okay But Defining Socialism For Real Now

Poof, it is the mid-1920s. Who has cities with subway systems? The West. In order of opening, it was the UK, the US, Hungary, France, Germany, Greece, and Spain. A bunch of capitalist pigs. And it stands to reason that the concept of the subway is just as outdated and unjust as the concept of capitalism, right? After all, what do subways do? They herd a bunch of poor, starving workers into a dark, smelly little room, where they get into a loud, uncomfortable little box, which takes them to their place of work, and this whole system was built specifically by capitalists so that an ever-larger radius of land can house ever more people to work in their factories. Subways are counterrevolutionary tools of the bourgeoisie. Or at least in 1924, there are plenty of people who think so.

From 1921, the post of First Secretary of the Moscow Party Committee (Kaganovich’s eventual role from 1930 to 1934) had been held by a Leftist, until Stalin had him replaced in 1924 with a man named Nikolai Uglanov. Uglanov wasn’t a particularly doctrinaire rightist, but under his leadership, Rightism did gain ground in Mossovet’s decision-making, and in 1928, when Stalin was both sufficiently worried by that fact and sufficiently concerned that Uglanov was gaining support with the people of Moscow, Stalin had him removed too, as part of a widespread but comparatively humane purge of Moscow leadership. No executions, that is.

This is when Rozanov is thrown in prison. Why? In late 1928, it had been announced that his department's Metro plan was ready for construction to begin in 1929, and this prompted protests that the Metro was being built before the housing crisis was addressed. During Uglanov's removal, Stalin and the Centrists cited these protests as evidence that Uglanov was pursuing bourgeois policies that harmed the people of Moscow. I suspect that the protests were genuine, because the housing shortage, again, was terrible, but the effect of the demonstration was very much manipulated by Stalin to remove the Right Opposition from Moscow. Rozanov and his department were accused of working "undemocratically", planning a superfluous bourgeois Metro behind closed doors. Essentially, the MGZhD department was a casualty of political maneuvering.

As a result, Metro construction was thoroughly discredited and Rozanov’s plans were shelved. Now, the Left came to prominence, and in a big way. The period from 1928 to 1931 is what Sheila Fitzpatrick called the "Cultural Revolution", but which even she would probably now qualify as "the height of the Cultural Revolution". Stalin didn’t "unleash" it, as some people mistakenly say, but for three years he tolerated it. This period sees an even greater emphasis on literacy and cultural education than before, as well as explosion of radical thought in all domains, from gender relations to linguistic policy to, importantly for us, aesthetics and urban planning.

There is an intense debate going on at this time over the proper aesthetic of socialism. In conjunction with the avant-garde aesthetic, a lot of Leftists argued for simple but refined, mass-producible domestic goods and public representations. The idea was that ornamentation was a sign of bourgeois taste, a holdover from the pre-revolutionary days. Meanwhile, there is a similar current in urban planning, with the movement known as Anti-urbanism. Anti-urbanists went in multiple different directions, but what they shared was a belief that cities were a result of capitalist production, a belief in decentralization and often in re-greening the city.

However, neither of these things was in line with Stalin’s vision. Stalin and the Center did not want to transcend national and bourgeois aesthetics; they wanted to encourage pride in national culture throughout the USSR. Instead of abolishing bourgeois taste and replacing it with a new, avant-garde sensibility, they wanted to extend its availability to everybody. They did not want to decentralize the city; they wanted to further cement its centralization in the name of industrializing the USSR and making it self-sufficient. And rather than turning the proletariat into an entirely new, de-urbanized class, they wanted to celebrate urban, industrial labo which built a powerful, industrially competitive Soviet Union.

By 1931, it had been a little while since the purge of the Rightists, and their threat to the Center was fading from memory. Stalin and the Centrists came to the decision that the Leftists and their Anti-urbanist, Avant-gardist, radical feminist ideas were now the problem threatening to get out of hand. That, combined with the still-increasing migration to Moscow, congestion, and the growing importance of redesigning Moscow to be a capital "worthy of the proletarian state", in Kaganovich’s words, all came together in the suppression of Leftism. That campaign goes much beyond the question of the Metro, but the Metro was one of its battles. A pseudonymous article appeared in Izvestiya in May of 1931 forcefully criticizing the idea that congestion could be solved through trams alone, and in the June Plenum of the Central Committee, Kaganovich made a speech outlining a complete reconstruction of Moscow, including the construction of a Metro, citing the reasons I discussed above: improving Muscovites' lives, comfort, sticking it to the West, and creating a symbol of socialism.

And that is the point of this big excursion into the Rightists and Leftists and Anti-urbanists, oh my. The construction of the Metro was an assertion of a particular aesthetic style and a political position to match it. The architectural style, with its eclectic mash of Greco-Roman, Modernist-but-not-too-avant-garde, and Russian folk elements, is commonly called "Stalinist (Neo-)Classicism", or Stalinskiy ampir in Russian. (Yes, that comes from "empire". The Greco-Roman motif is another answer in itself.) The aesthetic style in general is called "Socialist Realism".

The political position is called... well, my TL;DR is: the Metro wasn’t just a symbol of any old socialism. It was a symbol of Stalinism.

This is just the beginning of the story of the Metro, of course. I haven't touched on Khrushchev's role in the process of construction at all, or the architects' own visions and how they were influenced by Stalin and Kaganovich. But I think it's best to leave those for a follow-up, which I will gladly answer, but after I get this answer out into the real world to fend for itself do a little more real-life work.

Sources:

Clark, Katerina. Moscow, the Fourth Rome. Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Friedman, Jane. "Soviet Mastery of the Skies at the Mayakovsky Metro Station." Studies in the Decorative Arts 7, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000): pp. 48–64.

Hoffmann, David. Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Jenks, Andrew. "A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization." Technology and Culture 41, No. 4 (October 2000): pp. 697–724.

Kettering, Karen. "An Introduction to the Design of the Moscow Metro in the Stalin Period: 'The Happiness of Life Underground.'" Studies in the Decorative Arts 7, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000): pp. 2–20.

————————. "Sverdlov Square Metro Station: 'The Friendship of the Peoples' and the Stalin Constitution." Studies in the Decorative Arts 7, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000): pp. 21–47. 

————————. "'Ever More Cosy and Comfortable': Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928–1938." Journal of Design History 10, No. 2 (1997): pp. 119–135.

Merridale, Catherine. "The Reluctant Opposition: The Right 'Deviation' in Moscow, 1928." Soviet Studies41, no. 3 (1989): 382–400.

Neutatz, Dietmar. Die Moskauer Metro: von den ersten Plänen bis zur Großbaustelle des Stalinismus (1897–1935). Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2001.

O’Mahony, Mike. "Archaeological Fantasies: Constructing History on the Moscow Metro." The Modern Language Review 98, No. 1 (January 2003): pp. 138–150.

"O moskovskom gorodskom khoziaistve i o razvitii gorodskogo khoziaistva SSSR, 15 iiunia 1931." In KPSS v rezoliutsiakh i resheniakh s’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, Vol. 5: 1929–1932. Moscow: Izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1984: pp. 313-327.

Rees, E. A. Iron Lazar: A Political Biography of Lazar Kaganovich. London: Anthem, 2012.

Starr, S. Frederick. "Visionary Town Planning during the Cultural Revolution." In Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed. Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1978: pp. 207–240.

Vujosevic, Tijana. "Soviet Modernity and the Aesthetics of Gleam: The Moscow Metro in Collective Histories of Construction." Journal of Design History 26, No. 3 (2013): pp. 270–284.

Wolf, William. "Russia's Revolutionary Underground: The Construction of the Moscow Subway, 1931–35." Electronic Dissertation. Ohio State University, 1994. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/

Wünsche, Isabel. "Homo Sovieticus: The Athletic Motif in the Design of the Dynamo Metro Station." Studies in the Decorative Arts 7, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000): pp. 65–90.

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First they Came for Suess...

One of you signed me up for GOP texts. Not funny. But I do get to see hoe bat shit crazy they've gone.  Luckily, offline Biden seems not to care and I like that. Let the right scream. Basically Dr. Suess was cancelled by the publishing company then that same company reaped the gains. In fact, if I'm the PR for the company I probably planned this and will probably plan it for the future in terms of fleecing the RW rubes for $. More on that here. And here.
I mean scams are what make the American economic system so great (see various scams like the Lincoln project meant to take $ from Dem voters) and are kinda on both side, but, yeah, worse on the right. 

Also we should do more urban infill in general. Full paper here. 
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Update to Best 20th century Books

Updated that old post. Mainly switched some things around and added Captain Blackman , best novel to come out of the Vietnam War. Easily. Thoughts?
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More Art

Prints and such. Most in mags somewhere. 
And, meanwhile, politically speaking, it seems that attempts at democide of ethnic minorities are still going strong with the likes of the GOP. That, taking money from the cities and throwing it at suburbs, still seems to be the main issue to me. Most of our cities are still being drained of money while the places around them get more money than they deserve (and they dump on the cities with whatever they can). 
But that example, cutting off ones nose to spite their face is telling and I think we're not out of the woods just yet. Sure, many in the burbs did not care for Trump's loud mannerisms, but look at what they're voting for here (and in WA how they shot down a carbon tax) and tell me it isn't Trump lite. And again, facing something like Climate Change means we will have to change many things about how we live. Can we?
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