Month: November 2014

November 6, 2014

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This crazy Kowloon Walled City cross-section showed up on the internet the other day:

Which in turn reminded me of a show I saw at the old Duke Art Museum, of the Paper Architecture work of Brodsky and Utkin:

It’s hard to argue with obsessive detail in art, in my opinion.

In other news, we just got back from seeing Allen Toussaint with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. It was a funny scene. The PHJB were great, especially their dancing sousaphone player, and trumpeter Mark Braud, who was dynamite on his horn *and* on vocals.

Toussaint played quite the mixed bag of tunes, and got the biggest audience response not from any of his own material, but rather from covers of “City of New Orleans” (yep) and Fats Domino’s “I’m Walking.”

Toussaint has a great bluesy touch on the piano when he wants to, but he also clearly wants to play a shitton of flourishes & glissandos. It was like watching an R&B Liberace at times.

November 6, 2014

November 4+5, 2014

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Taking another double day to catch up, because for some reason I didn’t want to write one last night because the election returns weren’t complete yet, and I thought “oh I’m going to want to do some analysis & whatnot.”

Which I still want to do – I’m curious to see whether I could figure out from the precinct-level data whether Sean Haugh siphoned votes away from Tillis, Hagan, or from the much larger mass of people who would’ve otherwise just stayed home.

But that would take a lot of time, to answer a question that I don’t really care all that much about. I like Sean, and I’m impressed with the campaign that he ran. I didn’t vote for him, for sort of an even split of ideological and pragmatic reasons. But I was extraordinarily glad that he got the attention that he did.

I did find it disappointing that neither Tillis nor Hagan modified their positions even one single iota in response to Sean’s campaign. This is one of the claims of the third-party candidates, of course, that having them in the race will force the major-party candidates to adjust their positions in order to win back third-party voters.

Didn’t happen here. Instead the soft money on both sides was spent trying to convince the other side’s voters that they should vote for Sean. Which was hilarious to watch, but did not improve the level of discourse overall.

I donated quite a bit more money this cycle than I ever have before, but that’s primarily because I wound up donating to a total of 31 candidates, all folks running for NC House or Senate seats. 14 of them won, and 17 lost, which wasn’t the happiest of outcomes, until you look at the overall balance of power in the NC Legislature.

I’m particularly psyched about the victories of Gale Adcock, Brad Salmon and John Ager, who each removed a Republican incumbent from a House seat.

I’m also proud of young Uriah Ward, an ECU student who ran a really respectable campaign against an incumbent Republican. He got creamed, but he persuaded 8,771 people to vote for him. He’s definitely one to watch.

I’m sad that Sarah Crawford lost in state Senate district 18, which covers Wake and Franklin counties. She was doing well enough that her opponent & his cronies went dirty in their ads. Sarah’s husband is a lobbyist for the NC League of Conservation Voters, but the ad was replete with images of fat cats chomping cigars, and ominous “who will Sarah be working for?” language.

The fucking trees. She’ll clearly be in the pocket of Big Clean Air and Water. And trees.

So that was a tough one.

It’s incredibly frustrating to live in a state where the divisions are actually quite close in many places – and in the state overall, where the US Senate race was decided by a margin of only 1.6% – which is utterly without a functioning state Democratic Party organization. Literally.

If there were an actual working Democratic Party in NC, a few more of those races might have been won.

This may be a pipe dream, but I’d also like to see Democratic challengers in every single House and Senate district, even the ones so pathetically gerrymandered that they’re deemed unwinnable. It’s just pitiful & embarrassing to read through a list of 34 uncontested Republican-held seats in the state House alone.

All things begin equal, although I definitely believe uncontrolled money in politics is a horribly corrupt thing, I believe that partisan redistricting is probably even more corrosive and evil. I really wish Lawrence Lessig’s MayDay organization was going after that as well.

Yesterday a friend tweeted a link to this study by some Duke math folks, about the impact of partisan redistricting. You should go read that article, because it’s amazing & depressing. They took the precinct data from the 2012 elections, drew new random districts based only on the technical criteria for equivalent size, compactness, etc, and then figured out who would have won, based on the party that carried each precinct in the election.

In the actual 2012 election, Democrats cast 51% of the votes, but Republican candidates won 9 of our 13 Congressional seats. In the researchers’ randomized simulated districts, Democrats typically won 7 or 8 seats, and Republicans 5 or 6.

Seriously, go read the article, and then think about how different the entire country would be if Congressional districts were drawn by non-partisan means.

Anyway. Tuesday was spent thinking about the election (and practicing for an Ignite talk on Wednesday. Wednesday was spent thinking about the election, practicing for an Ignite talk, and then giving it, a process that I did not particularly enjoy. It went OK, but it felt weird.

I don’t mind giving presentations – I occasionally even find it enjoyable. But a 5-minute time constraint is pretty brutal, and requires a thing that I typically never do: write a script and practice.

The irony here, of course, is that I spend all summer every summer training interns on how to give persuasive 4-minute presentations. At least now I guess I’ll be moderately more empathetic.

November 4+5, 2014

November 3, 2014

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I emailed City Council about my post from day before yesterday, and I got a response from Steve Schewel, who is also an old friend/mentor. He said:

Ross,
Thanks for your thoughtful email in reaction to Reyn’s equally thoughtful post.

What do you think it means to “be prepared” for the growth to come?
What kinds of policies or solutions does that imply?
Do you think the City will be able to manage growth or rather soften its effects at the margins? If you think we can manage growth, what does that look like?

I would appreciate hearing your ideas on these difficult issues.

Best,
Steve

I just got done writing a response. Here it is, in full:

I think Reyn nailed it when he talked about a second wave of developers who are attracted by the momentum achieved, through hard work and investment, by the initial wave of developers who were (perhaps entirely of necessity) sensitive to the local environment & culture.

What Reyn was talking about in the second half of his post was whether Council is prepared to shift from growth promotion, to growth moderation – and since you asked, I think preparation is partly about figuring out the answers to all of your questions, and partly about recognizing the impending inflection point far enough in advance.

Here’s what I find interesting about Durham: the vast majority of the economic recovery in the downtown area has been the result of local investment. Local developers (or developers with local roots), local industries, local retail & restaurants. Duke + Measurement + McKinney + Bronto. Jim Goodmon. Scott Harmon & his partners. West Village (well, before that partnership imploded, at least). Scientific Partners. Greenfire, bless their hearts.

Mateo, Rue Cler, Pizzeria Toro, Toast, Scratch, etc. Literally the only chain restaurants anywhere near the downtown loop are one McDonald’s and a Subway in the old courthouse (if it even still exists).

Near as I can tell from walking around (and/or trying to get a table at Mateo or Toro pretty much any night of the week), people seem to appreciate what we have here. I’m biased, but I don’t think anyone who lives here who was surveyed about downtown would say “well, it’s OK, but what it really needs is a Chipotle and a Starbucks.”

So how do you as Council harness that Durhamite good will towards locally-owned businesses? Or, more to the point, how do you keep that good will from being soured by an influx of insensitive out of town developers who *do* believe that what we need are more chain stores?

You only have a couple of tools: incentives & regulations.

It seems to me that it would be hugely problematic to try to legislate restrictions on business ownership. So that’s probably out.

However, there are some things that I think these less-sensitive developers have in common. They like big developments, they like to build from the ground up, and they rarely like to pay more than lip-service to things like historic design districts & commissions.

Contrast that with the most successful local developments – Brightleaf Square, West Village, all the single-building re-use downtown, Mateo, Scott Harmon’s renovation at 5 points, Roger’s Alley, Fullsteam/The Pit.

If I look at the three developments that concern me most – the 605 West building on Chapel Hill St, the former Liberty Warehouse, and the impending 26-story tower downtown – one thing they have in common is that they’re essentially teardowns enabled by active neglect on the part of the previous property owners.

If we want to encourage adaptive reuse (which has, in Durham, historically turned out pretty well so far), and discourage big teardown projects, then perhaps Job One is to work harder to eliminate the kind of neglect that leads to buildings that are only suitable for teardown in the first place.

This could include more frequent inspections of unoccupied structures, a harsher penalty structure for neglect, and (for buildings within certain districts), a higher level of review than what we already have before demolition is an option.

Maybe I’m naive, but the history of adaptive reuse in Durham to date suggests that the developers who are good at it also tend to be developers who are more interested in fostering an economic climate that supports locally-owned businesses. That may just be a coincidence, but if so, it is one that has been a major economic driver in Durham.

I’m harder pressed to come up with a good answer about the 26-story behemoth we’re about to have visited upon us. I literally have not met one single Durhamite who both knows about it and approves of it. That of course may be a function of the folks I know around town – but I know a lot of people, including many business owners inside the downtown loop. Most of them are more concerned about a 12-18 month disruption in their business than they are excited about the potential for a couple of hundred additional potential customers.

I’m not sure what I would suggest from a regulatory perspective (although to be honest, I’m not convinced that Durham yet needs the degree of density downtown that requires a 300-foot ceiling for new development without any kind of review).

However, I *would* like to ask you about the city & county policies around incentives. Y’all are giving Austin Lawrence $4 million in incentives for that building. How does that compare to incentives given to local developers? How much in incentives has Scott Harmon received for his 5 Points and Church & Main buildings?

And in nailing down the incentive package for Austin-Lawrence, how many binding agreements did they accept? Are there metrics in place to measure their compliance?

In other news, word came today of Tom Magliozzi’s death. I know people who like to gripe about everything on NPR, including Car Talk, but I’m not one of those people. I loved that show, and I’m sad to hear of Tom’s passing.

My father is a highly methodical person – he’s a scientist, by trade and by disposition – and he taught me a huge amount about logic and about troubleshooting. But I still have to give the Car Guys huge amounts of credit for honing my troubleshooting instincts. I have always enjoyed problem-solving (and I’ve been lucky to have a career that afforded me plenty of opportunity for it), and both my dad and the Car Guys deserve a huge amount of credit for sending me down this path & for nurturing me along the way.

November 3, 2014

November 2, 2014

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I don’t think I slept for an extra hour, but I still woke up feeling extra rested, so that’s pretty awesome. But that fleeting moment of restfulness by no means outweighed the hours/days of angst in the spring when the clocks go the other direction.

Sunday Times. Somehow I had missed that the same director, JC Chandor, had made, in fairly rapid succession, Margin Call and All Is Lost. His first two films. Not too shabby, dude.

Speaking of Big Holiday Movies (were we? We were, technically), I realized that I’ve basically only seen every-other Christopher Nolan movie. M refuses to watch his 3rd Batman movie, but it seems like we might at least be able to hit Insomnia & The Prestige before venturing forth later this week to see Interstellar. In IMAX, the first time I will have made the effort to do that since that 2nd Batman movie, which was so not worth it.

I was ~6 years old when Star Wars came out. I wonder whether people who are even 10 years older than I am have the same subconscious, nearly-instinctive urge to assume that every new bigass sci-fi movie is going to be the one to finally Get It Right Again. By now I have been burned so many times more often than I have been rewarded, but still that little voice keeps bubbling away excitedly.

In prepping for my show, I was reminded that Corrosion of Conformity’s big 5-person “Blind”-era lineup is reuniting this coming Sunday to play a show at the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh. I pulled the album out & played a track on the air – sadly not “Vote With a Bullet,” since I don’t recall the locations of the profanity accurately enough to edit it on the fly.

It’s still kind of terrible.

It came out in November of 1991, 3 months after Metallica’s Black Album, and just 6 weeks after Nevermind. It’s funny, given what the previous two COC records sounded like, that Blind sounds so much more like the Black Album than Nevermind.

It’d take me a long time to write anything meaningful about COC, I think, since I’d need to talk about hardcore in NC and SC in the 80s, and about the ins & outs of the 23 years since Blind, and honestly I don’t really care enough about them anymore to bother. I lost track of them when I went off to college post-Technocracy, and when I moved to Raleigh in ‘92, they were just this different band with the same name, is all.

Things have been weirder since then, but it’s honestly still kinda easier to keep them categorized that way in my brain.

November 2, 2014

November 1, 2014

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Spent a couple of hours watching computer science lectures on the Internet. I get really impatient with video tutorials & walkthroughs of how to use specific bits of software or libraries, but it turns out that I find them incredibly helpful when it comes to understanding the more abstract core concepts.

Or at least I do when they’re lectures by popular & high-rated Harvard professors.

We went to a late matinee of Dear White People. Really interesting movie. There are three directors explicitly name-checked by characters in it: Spike Lee, Robert Altman, and Ingmar Bergman. I’m still waiting to go through my Bergman phase (I figure maybe when I’m in my 50s?), so I can’t really address that, but the Altman & Lee influences on DWP are obvious.

At dinner afterwards, M said it was a better movie than School Daze. My love for School Daze is pretty unshakeable, but it’s also rooted in my love for the musical numbers; factor those out & I might be inclined to agree with M. Certainly the range & variety of human experience depicted in DWP is wider, although most characters still do seem to exist specifically to embody some particular spot on the sociopolitical spectrum.

At its heart, Dear White People is a movie about passing – not just as black or white, but as politically engaged/disengaged, as a different class, as someone who has it far more together than one actually does.

When I mentioned this to M, she pointed out that all of college is about passing. Which is more true for some of us than others, I guess, but is still pretty accurate.

Its flaws mostly lie in its desire to cover too much ground, with an ensemble cast of lesser-known actors. But it’s overflowing with ideas, and it’s hugely enjoyable to watch writer/director Justin Simien try on the influences of Lee & Altman while slowly feeling his way towards a style & vocabulary of his own.

Also, the costumes (at least those for Tessa Thompson) are gorgeous.

After the movie, we made good on a long-running joke/promise to eat at Primal, the new-ish kinda-sorta Paleo restaurant just across the highway from Southpoint. It’s run by the chef/owner from Blu Seafood, and it shares some of that restaurant’s flaws (i.e. reach occasionally exceeding grasp).

But it also had some flaws of its own last night, specifically some kind of kitchen malfunction that had everything running behind schedule & left huge gaps of time between courses. After you’ve waited 45 minutes for some split & roasted brussels sprouts, you should at least be able to expect that they’d be cooked all the way through, instead of nearly raw.

The place was full (though not overflowing), so maybe they’re just falling victim to quicker-than-expected success. Or maybe there’s just one linchpin of the kitchen who was out sick or recently departed.

Food-wise, there’s a lot of bacon.

Dishes that had an acidic component (sauteed kale, a grilled octopus and fennel salad) had way too much acid. Sweet sauces were a bit much as well. This is an oddly common problem around here, this desire to drench flavorful things in sauces that overpower those flavors. Given how many restaurants (including Primal) are flaunting their supposed “farm to fork” credentials, you’d think they’d have more respect for the ingredients they’re getting from those farmers.

November 1, 2014

October 31, 2014

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Reyn Bowman was the leader of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau for many years, and even after his retirement a few years ago, he has continued to share his thoughts & wisdom via his blog. The other day he posted a long entry that contained, among many highlights, these two paragraphs:

Organic “real places” aren’t created as much as enabled by developers when they are sensitive to scale and work with a light touch so as not to disturb sense of place or force out small, local businesses such as the developers of Durham’s Brightleaf Square did there and then along Ninth Street.

Developers without those sensibilities are drawn to these areas but without officials who are attuned to activist neighbors and small businesses and who are unafraid to say no, places can be quickly overwhelmed, relegating historic structures to little more than an amenity.

I read that yesterday, the morning after I’d had a txt exchange with a friend regarding the imminent move of Blue Coffee, the local black-owned coffee shop downtown, which is moving because the decrepit motel in which it’s located is about to be renovated by a Colorado-based company, the same company proposing to build a 26-story tower downtown.

In that txt exchange, I said something like “I’ll be crying quietly when the ground floor of that building winds up with a Starbucks and a Qdoba.”

I know I am via my very existence a gentrifier – I’m a white upper-class male (a DINK, even), living in a new-ish condo building that’s just 2 blocks from a working-class neighborhood on the edge of downtown. There’s probably a difference of only a few degrees between me and the people who’ll be living in the next wave of condo buildings, the one replacing the Liberty Warehouse, and that 26-story building downtown.

But I don’t think it’s naive of me to say that I moved to downtown Durham explicitly because the businesses in the downtown core are predominantly locally-owned, and I have done my best to support those locally-owned businesses. Which hasn’t been difficult, because they make delicious food & drinks, and show good movies, and do good work.

So I think I’m allowed to express my apprehension & concern, like Reyn, that the next wave of development that is already beginning has the potential to mark the beginning of the end of the Durham that I moved here to be close to.

(When the developers of that 26-story tower showed off their renderings to a crowd of interested, not-quite-friendly Durhamites last year, one of the street-level elevations showed a retail space occupied (via not-so-random whim of the architect or developer) by a Godiva shop. Oh joy.)

I hope that Reyn is wrong when he writes:

The problem isn’t as a respected friend recently prophesied that revitalization efforts have reached the “tipping point,” but that Durham officials seem totally unprepared that the greater challenge will be to manage success.

Mayor Bell, and City Council, are you listening? are you prepared?

October 31, 2014
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instagram:

Celebrating Day of the Dead with Sugar Skull Artist @ilovesugarskulls

To see more artwork made of sugar, water and meringue, follow @ilovesugarskulls on Instagram.

“It’s a time of storytelling, remembrance and celebration of life for those who are no longer with us,” explains artist Robert Owens (@ilovesugarskulls), who goes by the name Rob-O, about the meaning of the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

On the holiday, many visit cemeteries to tidy up and decorate the graves of their departed friends and family, leaving traditional offerings such as marigolds, mementos and sugar skulls. “Our first attempt at making sugar skulls and the Royal icing was comedy. The icing was too thin and it just ran a bit, so all the sugar skulls looked kind of sad,” Rob-O recalls. But over time, the artist perfected his recipe and became intrigued with the concept of turning the sugar skull into art. “It was pretty exciting to push the boundaries.”

Although all ingredients for the sugar skulls are edible, Rob-O wants his works to withstand time and pass on to future generations: “It’s a piece of me, a moment of time that I will never get back, and I want to share this with the world.”

Gallery