November 8, 2014

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Drove to the mall to see Interstellar in IMAX, despite an increasing sense of certainty based on reports from professionals & amateurs alike that it was likely to be kind of a trainwreck.

It was. Unlike everyone else whose writing I’ve read so far, I feel no particular compunction to avoid spoilers, so down here at the end of this arrow, there will be some. You have been warned.
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Interstellar falls into that category of movies which look to investigate the meaning of life from within the scaffolding of science fiction (as opposed to more straightforward space opera, like Star Wars).

I’m more or less equally interested in both categories in my reading of sci-fi books, although I think I hold the philosophical ones to a higher standard, because bad philosophical sci-fi is really really bad.

And there have been plenty of great movies in this category, to be sure: 2001 (which is overrated, but that’s a conversation for another time), Blade Runner, the Alien series, the first Star Trek movie, plus more recent smaller entries such as Her, and Under The Skin.

But there have also been a decent number of wretched overambitious muddles, most recently Prometheus. And now Interstellar.

To catalog all of its offenses would take far more time and space than I’m probably interested in taking here. But some highlights:

  • Endless didactic exposition during the first earthbound hour – I felt like I was sitting through some kind of pro-science, pro-NASA propaganda flick whose authors thought they had cleverly disguised as a fiction film.
  • An obnoxious (and highly publicized) allegiance to pure science & the laws of physics right up to any of too many various points in the movie where they just threw it out entirely
  • such as the climactic moment when McConaughey plunges directly into a black hole, but instead of being crushed instantly, he instead finds himself inside of a tesseract composed of an infinite number of discrete views into his daughter’s bedroom, arranged along a timeline, such that he is able to communicate with her younger self by shoving books out of her bookcase in morse code sequences
  • this resulting in a fairly elemental time-travel paradox which the filmmakers don’t even bother to be embarrassed by.
  • Uncredited major Matt Damon role.
  • Matt Damon in a spacesuited fistfight with McConaughey on an ice planet that is nearly as stupid-looking as that dumb Spock fistfight in the last Star Trek movie.
  • Anne Hathaway giving an earnest speech in defense of love which we’re kinda-sorta supposed to scoff at but clearly also kinda-sorta supposed to wholeheartedly believe in, particularly when she’s kinda-sorta vindicated in the end.
  • Ex-military robots which are literally 6-foot-tall rectangles which have to do this sort of weird shuffle in order to move around, except for in emergencies when they turn into crazy spinning asterisks.
  • IMAX sequences which look like, well, the movies, intercut with non-IMAX sequences which are soft & smeary & look in places like Super16 blown up to 35.

Basically, it’s like a semi-incoherent mashup of 2001, Contact, and Gravity, and you’d be much better off renting those three movies & watching them. Or heck, watch Europa Report. It’s not a perfect movie, but it asks some interesting questions & it does so in about half the time & for 1/100th the budget.

It occurred to me in retrospect that I haven’t really thoroughly enjoyed a Christopher Nolan movie since Memento. He’s such a technician. I think about all these people trying to keep track of the layers in Inception, but I can’t remember anyone really giving a shit about the actual characters & their interactions. Likewise here; everyone is more or less alone in this movie, communicating via narrowband across great distances.

After the movie it took 45 minutes to get out of the parking lot of Southpoint. 

Had dinner at Metro 8, which actually produces quite a respectable steak, and treats its vegetable side dishes with respect as well. I’d be leery of its non-beef offerings, but it’s actually kind of a useful ace in the hole for a last-minute Saturday dinner out.

November 8, 2014

Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It

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Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It

Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…

By these metrics I’m feeling better than the rest of my cohort, I guess, but still, this, 1000 times this.

Link

November 7, 2014

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One of the many things I do at work is reading resumes. I read a lot of resumes. Like an average of perhaps 10/day, although there are bursts which greatly exceed that baseline.

For the positions that I have posted, the overall hit rate of folks we’d like to interview is maybe 20%. That figure drops to around 3% if the resume is in Microsoft Word format rather than PDF.

I would probably, at this point, be totally justified in just ignoring anything that comes in Word format – but for some reason I’m still fixated on potentially missing that one worthwhile candidate who somehow hasn’t gotten the memo about PDFs.

Does this mean I’m good at my job, or bad at it?

After work we wound up doing the “oh shit it’s Friday night and we need to eat” dance, which is a perennial antipattern in our lives. We’d made a crucial error by eating at Toast on Thursday night, so that was out.

For the first ~4 years of living downtown, things weren’t so fraught, because for the most part you could wander in to just about anywhere & nab a couple of seats at the bar. That is most emphatically no longer the case.

Which is how we wound up at Taberna Tapas, the other tapas place downtown, which seems to be doing a booming business entirely from (a) overflow from Mateo and/or (b) people who have heard there’s a great tapas place on Main St. & can’t find Mateo because it’s technically not on Main St.

At the bar there was literally some dude sitting there telling the bartender, or perhaps himself, that his meal was every bit as good as Mateo would have been.

It wasn’t.

It’s a funny little place, though. It’s very much set-dressed like a “tapas place” and the staff all wear black and look vaguely unsavory. There’s Restaurant Techno playing at a low volume. The food runner brings your food & recites word for word the menu description of each dish.

It’s as if it were opened as a tax write-off or a cocaine front, and then started getting actual dinner trade, and the staff is sort of evenly split as to whether that’s a good thing or not.

The food wasn’t terrible; it just wasn’t particularly great. Take the asparagus: grilled to a nice degree of doneness, with some char on the outside, and a distinct petroleum aftertaste.

After dinner I dropped M at home and then headed up the street to the Pinhook for their 6th Anniversary show. Mostly to see desark, who were in 2-electric-guitars formation (plus Catherine Edgerton on vocals & saw for a couple of numbers). Great set, although it’s always a little weird to see them at these non-headlining shows where there aren’t a ton of young women right down front.

I tried to stick around to see Speedy Ortiz, whom I had never seen, but I couldn’t hack the sold-out crowd, so I only made it through one song. I’d be into seeing them in a half-full Duke Coffeehouse sometime, I guess. That kind of dissonant guitar-heavy 90s indie-rock needs to be heard in a half-empty room on a Wednesday.

November 7, 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