The sickening political exploitation of NOLA's demise

Chicago has always been my favorite American city, but because it's basically home, I can't really count it as a legit travel destination. So, for me, it seems to have always been a tie between New York and San Francisco.

Until now, that is. The destruction of New Orleans reminds me how much more profoundly connected I feel to NOLA than to its two sneering coastal peers. Much of this affection lies in the belated realization that Southern cities share much more in common with Midwestern cities than with the narrow nanny-state culture epitomized by the Bay Area and the Eastern Seaboard. New Orleans always felt like a sloshy drunken Sunday; it's public culture is festive and loud-mouthed, but it's interior is dirty and relaxed, like a post-coital hole.

Which is excatly why the political exploitation of this mega-disaster is so chilling. The usual suspects have already surfaced. Enter stage right, the fire-breathing Christians. Enter stage left, the almost equally deranged eco-freaks.

Lest you think me a suburb-basher...

I have no personal problem with city folk who stake a claim in the relative paradise of Waukesha County. These days, sending your kids to MPS should probably qualify as child abuse. Until this condition improves, I'd prefer not to see the media-academic complex lament the child-centric, upwardly-mobile, and suburban-bound proles who make-up the majority of the metropolitan population. Lileks responds to just this type of elitist boilerplate...

Jeez...7th poorest in the nation?

After nearly a decade of relatively good news, things are looking devastastingly bleak again in the inner city. This summer of skyrocketing homicides has now been topped off with this bit of shocking information: 26% of Milwaukee residents now live below the poverty line, making the city the 7th poorest in the nation. Apparently, poverty has jumped universally in the US since 2000 (I hope the Left is paying attention to that), but its at the microgeographic scale where the deepening of distress is most apparent.

Milwaukee's transformation is, arguably, the most extreme case of any large city in America. In 2000, Milwaukee was the 20th poorest city in the nation. In just four years time the city has "climbed" 12 ranks positions, still behind such lovely places like Detroit (38%), but poorer than comparable cities like Cleveland (23%), St. Louis (21%), and (gasp!) eternally poor cities like New Orleans (23%).

What's more is that the metro area can now rightfully claim to be most economically polarized of any American city. The sprawling arc of comfy complacency in adjacent Waukesha County is the 3rd least poor of populous American counties, essentially making 124th street a steeper gradient than Eight Mile road. Can a Milwaukee-based Eminem be for behind?

Let's hope not. But until then, the smart choreographers of Milwaukee's new "creative class" image can at least point to this...

I've awoken from a 6 month slumber....

Now that I've given my body 6 months of exercise I thought it time to reawaken the mind. Regular blogging to resume in 3 days....

Until then, comtemplate the fact that Stormfront had dispatched it's freshcut nazis to Camp Casey this past weekend. I myself love it when the nutty left hangs tough with the nutty right. Sir Hitch skewers them all in his latest post...

Watching Walker's Point disappear...into a facade of sanitized danger.

The street signs still proclaim "Historic Walker's Point", but not for much longer perhaps. "Fifth Ward fever", you see, has infected both the real estate press and the official discourses of neighborhood representation on Brew Town's near south side. The apparently irresistable Fifth Ward moniker, in fact, has spread so quickly that what's left of Walker's Point is now quickly being assimilated into it's more stylish and northerly neighbor.

Does anyone else smell a classic case of how neighborhood re-naming strategies support the middle-class reclamation of the central city? I certainly did, so my buddy Google and I went for a late-night stroll (He brought someone named "Jack"). It turns out that this particular story begins innocently enough in late 2001, when developer Tom Capp purchased a former farm-implement factory in the Walker's Point neighborhood. Before sinking $12 million in what was described as the "furthest provinces of barely civilized Milwaukee", Capp needed an appropriate representational strategy to niche-market his stately, Romanesque loft-conversion project. He found exactly what he was searching for in "Fifth Ward Lofts"; implying, as this does, a soothing proximity to the uber-elegant Third Ward, as well as a critical symbolic separation from the unruly, blood-stained street corners of mostly Mexican Walker's Point.

The new Fifth Ward, perhaps expressing fidelity to its buffer locale, is now presented as the Third Ward's younger, hipper, more rebellious sibling, infused with just a slight hint of vigor-enhancing danger which underpins the aesthetic vocabularly of its primary sites of consumption.

There is a burried irony in all of this. Just 50 years ago, ward-based neighborhood identities like these were avoided like the plauge. Who in their right mind would willingly associate with the "Bloody Third" (the drunken Irish, ya know), or the "Dirty Fifth" (East Euro factory slobs)? I suspect that pampered, protected Yuppies and creative-types, as well as their enablers in the development industry, take some sort of eroticized pleasure in these facades of sanitized danger.

Another icon of the counterculture to be assimilated...

Mrs. Gould is reporting that Milwaukee's infamous Sidney Hih building is now slated for conversion to high-end condos and retail. Before the Park East freeway was demolished, the Sidney Hih building sat like a bulwark of humanism, effectively resisting the forces the modernization that surrounded it and hungered for its demise. As home to Betty's Bead Bank, the Unicorn Bar, and the Milwaukee Eagle, the psychadelically-colored Sidney Hih complex attracted a motley crew of hippies, punks, anarchists, and gay male SM enthusiasts over the course of its post 60s lifespan (Full disclosure, I saw the Violent Femmes there when I was seriously underage).
That the Sidney Hih will now be converted to condos is, of course, no big surprise. My only hope is that the developers restore that computerized, mid-70s typeface to its original retro-glory. Well, then again...maybe not.

Thursday evening timewarp: #2

The Beerline in 1976.

The Beerline in 2005. Unlike Brady Street, much more than the color palette has changed in the Beerline since the middle 1970s. Indeed, in no Milwaukee neighborhood has the transition from the Old Milwaukee to the New Milwaukee been more pronounced or successful. Just imagine how much effort it took to shape this landscape transformation. It almost makes one want to bow down before the God of creative destruction. Still, I can't help but romanticizing those oil-slicked railway tracks, and even that creepy-70s green paint job on the Holton street viaduct.

"it may be that more 911s are necessary" - Ward Churchill, 2004

I made a point today of checking in on local right-wing talk radio. As I suspected, the controversy over Ward Churchill's visit to UW-Whitewater had conservatives of all stripes in a blood-curdling rage. At one particularly ridiculous moment, a caller referred to Churchill as "Osama bin Churchill". In disgust -- and, embarassment I guess -- I switched back to the soothing banalities of NPR and, as I expected, felt much, much better about myself.

Later though, I realized that the caller might be on to something. The similarities between Churchill and bin Laden are, upon closer interrogation, quite striking. For starters, both men certainly share the same fashion sense (love the camo/gun combo, Professor Churchill...wish I could pull that off!). Both men are also abundantly charismatic provacatuers captured by the hypnotic sway of a particular thread of romanticism. Indeed, it must by now be fairly apparent that these men imagine themselves to be locked in an endless battle with the omnipotent monstronsity we call capitalism. For bin Laden, the nerve centers of capitalism were stuck in the hope that it might die, thus returing the Islamic caliphate to its rightful center on the global stage. Churchill's geopolitics, no matter how you spin it, have the same fundamental orientation. In a 2004 interview, for example, he stated that,

"I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether."

Alrighty then! Duly noted. From experience, I know that academics can say some really stupid things. But I have to assume that Churchill really meant what he really said. And, for me at least, this observation leads quite naturally to the most important way in which bin Laden and Churchill share the same political bed: at their cores, they are totalitarians, willing to support in words or deed the death of innocents so that the meta-project can be realized. Ironic, isn't it, that Churchill got himself into hot water by refering to those that died in the WTC as "Little Eichmanns". The Eichmanns of the world are NOT the bland accountants. Rather, like bin Laden and McVeigh, they are the ones in camo screaming loudly from the edges.

Gen X and the new geographical imagination

The latest volume of Info* mag, Brew City's GenX bible of hipdom, is now available in trendy spots across the arc of coolness that stretches from the near south side to the UWM campus. Its ironized template of groovy ads and semi-serious interviews with local DJs, artists, bartenders, baristas and other creative-types remains true to form. But, to my elation and even surprise, the mini-mag debuts a fascinating new subtitle; downtown - east side - riverwest - third ward - walker's point. Rendered in oh-so-with-it lower-case typeface, the new subtitle perfectly captures the geographical imagination of the Gen X sensibility. Indeed, these days a micro-knowledge of urban neighborhoods is nearly a prerequisite for gaining legitimacy among the cultural gate-keepers of the creative class. I'm glad my neighborhood made the cut, but I hope my boomer friends in the more established enclaves like Shorewood and Washington Heights aren't feeling a bit, well, old at the moment...

Well, at the least the sign will be saved....

Newly announced plans for the Pabst City redevelopment call for much more demolition of the historic complex that was originally anticipated. In fact, everything you see in the above image -- including the famous "Pabst skybridge", which once allowed happy beer-soaked workers to cross between the two main buildings without crossing a busy street! -- is now slated for demolition. That's too bad, because the only thing aesthetically interesting about the West Side of downtown Milwaukee was the looming, gothic presense of the Pabst complex. The developers say they will save the sign. Great.

Healing the racial divide...with Starbucks!

It's no big secret that the geography of cultural whiteness and the geography of Starbucks franchises correspond nearly perfectly. Don't believe me? Check out the Starbucks locator for YOUR town. It's also no big secret that it's principally college-educated persons-of-non-color who take the time to bemoan, and even degrade, this wonderful, life-giving, corporation. A physical and mental fixation on Starbucks, it seems to me, is a "white thang", fer sure.

Now it turns out that Magic Johnson, and a particularly ambitious Chicago politician, have begun to change all of this. Arguing that, you're not a neighborhood until you get a Starbucks, 5th Ward Chicago alder Leslie Hariston has brought a Starbucks to the otherwise desolate corner of 75th and Stony Island in the heart of Chicago's South Side ghetto. Nevermind the politically problematic discourse of "real neighborhood" articulated by Mrs. Hariston. Her honesty got me thinking: What if, after forty-years of failed urban policy and pie-in-the-sky academic multiculturalism, the real solution to the racial divide is the cross-cultural tie of addiction to the same corporate-sponsored drug? Well, probably not, but the sight of the familiar green awnings on ghetto street corners would certainly put alot of creative class anxieties at ease.

Hostile Inc.?

The only businesses to open in my neighborhood in the last year are two bars. There's the creatively-named "Out-n-About", which is a mostly lesbian bar caught somehow in the aesthetic dregs of 1989 (It even smells like 1989). There's also "The Milwaukee Bottle", which seems to draw a toughish hipster crowd to it's retro stylings. And, now there's this:

I don't know what they plan on selling in there, but I have a feeling I won't be able to get a capuccino.

New feature: the thursday evening timewarp: #1

The above image is brady street in 1975


Here is roughly the exact same shot in the dead of winter, 2005. What difference does 30 years make to the physical texture of a neighborhood never subjected to the forces of urban renewal, ghettoization, or residential abandonment? Not much, it seems, save for the fact that the new urban color palette is much lighter, brighter, and lead-free. Following the late-60s STD burnout, Brady Street slid for a time into only marginal decay. And, by the late 70s, the instruments of historic preservation were carefully applied, making the area especially ripe for subtle, Milwaukee-style, gentrification in the 90s. Today, particularly during the warmer months, Brady street offers up Milwaukee's most vibrant collection of coffee shops, bars, thrift stores, civilized multi-modal strolling and youthful bender-gender cruising. Seems the more things change, the more they stay the same; except, of course, the asking price for that chick's white bell-bottoms at a Brady Street vintage store today is well over $150.