Just a quick note that the New York Times has a nice article in its Sunday magazine about canoeing through the ruins of the Erie Canal in the Mohawk Valley. I don’t consider the Beech-Nut factory in Canajoharie a “ruin” – it’s still too recently the workplace of a bunch of people – but the article is respectful and appreciative of the area.

I was on the Thruway passing next to the Beech-Nut factory just yesterday, after a quick trip downstate. I keep forgetting how “real” the I-90 portion of the Thruway is compared to many other interstates in New York, which have been carved through convenient corridors of nothing. Lots of trees and rocky outcrops with drill bit traces to look at — evidence of human habitation, not so much. But as the NYT article notes, the I-90 Thruway is just another overlay on two centuries’ worth of travel. As dead as it may be economically, at least you can be sure there are still some people around.

This article about a fight between a local landowner and the Adirondack Park Agency caught my eye because the landowner used the term “indigenous” to refer to himself and his own interests. The first impulse may be to scoff at the guy for cynically co-opting the term. But while he may not be willing to go even further and identify himself as a member of an “indigenous group” living among other indigenous groups who have been here longer, I feel he is probably applying the term to himself sincerely, albeit unthinkingly.

During the NYRI controversy a couple years ago, I saw the proposed power line represented a sort of land grab directed against the land and its people, who were a different people than the downstate people who needed the power line. (Or at least, the corporate types who stood to profit from it). The people living along the proposed line – in my view – were discovering what other indigenous people discovered 200 years ago: that they were now invisible people, part of the landscape to be exploited.

People who self-identify as “indigenous” typically have difficulty communicating to the “non-indigenous” that indeed they do consider themselves part of the landscape in a way that most Americans probably don’t really grasp. Whereas Americans, particularly those living within the dominant culture, tend to see the land as being something they own or deal in. It is something that can be traded away without it affecting their sense of self. This is the tension that causes so many problems when eminent domain is invoked. Eminent domain assumes that land has no meaning or value beyond its economic value. You should be able to exchange it for fair market value without suffering any real loss. Why should you want to save that sad little house or Main Street along the power line? Just take the money, move away and place yourself and your values in some other congenial but interchangeable landscape…

I actually don’t know if the gentleman up in the Adirondack Park really feels on a gut-level that he is “indigenous” to the land beyond all conventional economic consideration. Still, the unprompted use of the word by a white man is intriguing; especially in a time when many people feel economically and socially that they have their backs up against a wall. Our portable American values are supposed to overcome any squeamishness we may have about moving elsewhere, even if coerced to move elsewhere by eminent domain. In America, you’re not supposed to have values, or a state of being, that is not portable.

So, what is an indigenous state of being, and can you become that way? Or, if you can’t “become” indigenous, can new indigenous peoples be born from older, colonizing ones? We’re used to hearing the term applied to native American tribes, but can it be plausibly applied to other groups of people as well? And is the growth of new senses of “peoplehood” (or a return to old senses) a good or bad thing?

As for my own opinion, I’m not sure that such an evolution in personal identification in America, necessarily means strife and bigotry. It could also mean the formation of new and mutually beneficial alliances between peoples who are newly realizing that they are not who they used to think they were.

The good:

-It seems as if purveyors of tacky goods and services have been sent packing from many of the main Fair buildings, including the Center of Progress and International Pavilion. I think they’ve been shooed down to tents near Restaurant Row. The Center of Progress building seems easier to navigate now and features more New Yorky type stuff — booths for different counties and communities trying to sell themselves, and more historical societies — not just pols bragging about their good deeds.

-The International Pavilion has gotten a pretty fab interior re-do (shame about the restaurant fire there this year though). I never had a problem with it before, but it was so hard to navigate the food court area and find seating. Now there are attractive round wooden tables with benches, and elevated seating areas including a wine and beer area. This is probably the biggest actual facelift the Fair has seen in quite some time.

-Llamas every day now.

-The horse shows in the Coliseum seem to run better and move along more quickly, with pleasant music to accompany all the cantering and trotting. I don’t know about you, but plopping down in the Coliseum for a midday snack break to watch a random horse show is one of my personal Fair traditions. (I still wish they’d bring back the jumping competitions to the main venue, but possibly there were safety reasons for that.)

-Wine flowing a bit more freely at the restaurants. I didn’t have any today, but bought a bottle like a good patriotic New Yorker.

The bad:

-Chevy Court (I still can’t stop calling it Miller Court, which severely dates me) used to be a pretty laid-back venue, but is now a deadly serious musical happening. That’s not “bad,” but I’m not sure how I feel about all acts only doing one show a day now — the wildly popular Peter Noone could have packed in a second show on Senior Day, for example. I walked through the empty Court this morning and saw crowd control gates. Whoa.

-Centro’s shuttle buses insist on traveling on 690 and slowly plowing their way through main drag traffic when they could just quickly pop over there through Solvay. (I guess Solvay is having none of it.)

-Nobody is stepping up to make the Energy building (or whatever that place is now called – where the big corporations like Time Warner hang out) very interesting. Years ago, Niagara Mohawk packed in the crowds with annual documentary presentations on their weather emergency heroics like the North Country ice storm and the Labor Day Storm. Not any more. Snooze.

-Did I see $10 parking?!?

The Fair has definitely changed since I used to go every year… and I think mostly for the better. It’s a good sign when you can’t get to the main gate at the end of the day because a huge and lively crowd has gathered around a lone juggler.

Maybe the Fair-runners should keep that in mind when they are pondering their million-dollar concert bookings. It really doesn’t take much to amuse most people.

In Mott’s Strike, More Than Paychecks at Stake

The story in a nutshell: Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, the company that owns the Mott’s apple juice plant in Williamson, says that their unionized workers make too much, even though the company is enjoying record profits this year. Apparently, Mott’s workers are supposed to be embarrassed that they’re not being paid like peasants, like the rest of their working-class brethren in harder-hit industries. (This attitude can also be found among bitterly unemployed master’s-degree holders as well, I’ve noticed.)

Kopple’s first film, Harlan County USA, was about labor struggles in an industry where the workers had yet to partake of the pay and security that other American workers enjoyed in the 1960s and ’70s. Her second film, American Dream, was about the confused Hormel plant strike where American workers began to lose their grip on what they’d won. This would make a great final chapter: the Mott’s workers as the last men standing, the tall poppies, with no one in America left to cheer them on in a clear fight that the coal miners in the first film would have well understood.

Dr Pepper Snapple has vigorously defended its stance. “The union contends that a profitable company shouldn’t seek concessions from its workers,” the company said in a statement. “This argument ignores the fact that as a public company, Dr Pepper Snapple Group has a fiduciary responsibility to operate in the best interests of all its constituents, recognizing that a profitable business attracts investment, generates jobs and builds communities.”

It would be interesting to parse what this corporation really means about “generating jobs” (are they saying they will be generating more, but lower-paying jobs for the community? Highly doubtful – they just want to pay the same amount of workers less) and “building community” (maybe they’re talking about building a company store).

However, Dr Pepper Snapple is, on another level, being honest. It is the duty of a profitable corporation to screw its workers over as much as possible. And it is the duty of a union to resist a blatant and open screwing. If you can get more than $14 an hour (or one billion dollars) for whatever work you do, it is self-evident that you are worth that much to someone powerful enough to pay it. It’s a fact of life that many Americans (despite their college educations) still don’t understand: you don’t get to be adequately paid just because you possess a piece of paper that says you’re in the club. If you must rely on a piece of paper, rely on a contract – and even then, not too much.

This is war, and it always was, despite many decades of niceties that are now past. Whose side are you on?

FAILFaire

FAILFaire features projects using mobiles and ICTs in international development that have, to put it simply, been a #FAIL. Busted, kaputt. Tongue firmly in cheek, we take a close look at what didn’t work and why the projects failed amidst the ICT4D hype we all are subjected to (and sometimes contributors to). We believe that only if we understand what DOESN’T WORK in this field and stop pushing our failures under the rug, can we collectively learn and get better, more effective, and have greater impact as we go forward.

See more at this NYT article about the most recent FailFest.

Instead of technology failures, FailFaire CNY could be an honest, open hashing-out of failed local initiatives and redevelopment schemes. (I suppose in order to avoid hurt feelings, there would have to be a moratorium on discussing any projects that failed less than ten years ago.) Syracuse B4 could be our keynote speaker!

Seriously, I’m not just trying to be snarky. Why should these discussions just be kept on the blogs?

Such are the benefits of Upstate New York being last in line for all the latest innovations. Sometimes, you get to smell the crap coming.

Facing eviction from her Tennessee apartment after several months of unpaid rent, Alexandra Jarrin packed up whatever she could fit into her two-door coupe recently and drove out of town. Ms. Jarrin is part of a hard-luck group of jobless Americans whose members have taken to calling themselves “99ers,” because they have exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits that they can claim.

Without the checks, many like Ms. Jarrin, who lost her job as director of client services at a small technology company in March 2008, are beginning to tumble over the economic cliff. The last vestiges of their former working-class or middle-class lives are gone; it is inescapable now that they are indigent… Ms. Jarrin had scrabbled for her foothold in the middle class. She graduated from college late in life, in 2003, attending classes while working full time. She used to believe that education would be her ticket to prosperity, but is now bitter about what it has gotten her.

“I owe $92,000 for an education which is basically worthless,” she said.

I don’t know why the NY Times keeps finding women of a certain age to talk to. Maybe it’s because these women are truly desperate and agree to talk, and men won’t. But over and over, the profile is the same: fiftysomething, single/divorced, usually with more than two kids, in debt because of mortgages, vacations, new cars or pricey graduate degrees. They’re intelligent, well-educated, and have plenty of job experience, but no one wants to hire them.

I don’t know what to say, because chances are these women are never getting anything resembling their old jobs back. In fact, employers find them attractive layoff prospects even in good economic times. The closer she gets to the age she can take early retirement, the more apt the company is to dump her. And companies also don’t want to pay out the health benefits, so it’s easy to cut off the aging woman who hasn’t got young kids to raise any more. Is it a female thing? Maybe not, but women also tend to network less in the workplace and carry more of the water, which may get some of them to a certain point on the corporate ladder, but might not serve them well enough when cutting time comes.

What is troubling to me is how many women don’t get this picture. It’s scary how many nonmarried (single/divorced) women lose sight of how expendable they are in the eyes of society, though, and enter their last real earning decades amassing more debt than they should. I won’t comment on the mortgages and Caribbean vacations, but the bright shining lie of “more education” in the form of expensive post-baccalaureate degrees is something that needs to be shattered. The woman in this story now has $92,000 of non-dischargeable educational debt. She’s very probably never going to be able to pay that back.

There might be a serious lesson for the younger single (nonmarried) woman here: These are effectively your best earning years. Don’t squander them. Don’t waste your money on things that will have no long-term return. Strengthen your finances and especially whatever personal relationships you have. Prepare for what you know is coming. Always know what time it is. This is Logan’s Run, and forget your biological clock — that flashing crystal on your palm has to do with money.

Modern feminism ought to be speaking to this. I don’t pretend to know what happened, but in the beginning, feminism was about making it easier for women to make choices – not to “have it all,” which is what the message is today. Early feminism sought to liberate single women from servitude not of their own choosing. It sought to give single women the tools and confidence to live with dignity and self-reliance, if they so chose. It was about living smart as a single woman, not about living large. Early feminism also had much to say to the married woman. This is why the institution of American feminism is so beautifully represented by the statue in Seneca Falls, of the married Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the single Susan B. Anthony first meeting in friendship.

So what happened? It’s sad to see how alone these older women are in these anecdotal news stories. Many times, their children are not helping them. It isn’t too late for women of a certain age to make a better future for themselves, but it’s going to involve turning away from a society that has pretty much shown its true colors in a time of stress, and has rejected them. In the Middle Ages, widows had the same problems, and in some parts of Europe they banded together and formed lay communities. Some of these communities became surprisingly big “players” in the wider community, much to the consternation of the Church. In American life today, this is a missing institution (as is traditional feminism).

Has the institution of higher education grown too large and usurped other institutions in importance (real or perceived)? I’m inclined to say yes. It’s not that there is anything wrong about higher education. But American higher education now purports to be all things to all people — the Great White Hope that, morally and practically, stands all alone against our corrupt financial institutions and a democratic system that is largely pay-to-play now. It doesn’t pass on knowledge, quite so much as it dispenses “educational treatments,” as Ivan Illich pointed out in his radical book Deschooling Society – inoculations of frankly questionable value, rather than necessary healing; an obligatory sheep-dip through which all the wayward flock must be herded. (“Take this shot of Education, or you will surely wind up in an economic hell from which there is no escape. Dominus vobiscum, suos cultores scientia coronat, oolee oolee oo.“)

When you put all your eggs in one basket, and all your trust into one social institution, that’s a recipe for disaster. Our society isn’t there yet, but with the decline and stress on so many other institutions — K-12 education, religious life, labor unions, the military — it’s getting dangerously close. It certainly was a disaster for the lady in this story.

Maybe someone also should write a treatise on Dejobbing Society – since the jobs are going away for all demographics. Is it possible that in the end all our former institutions will have to be upended and alternative ones formed, or re-formed?

I was expecting a little more from these Red Norlands. Oh well.

Updated: So I ate those potatoes, and now their picture has mysteriously disappeared off the server. (Shrug)

Now that this difficult week for the team has come to a conclusion (the team arrived back in Syracuse today), hopefully we here in Central New York can also “come home” to this issue as it pertains to us. The national media will quickly lose interest in the subject, leaving us to confront something that was always on our doorsteps, whether we wanted to think about it consciously or not. What does “nationhood” mean? Can you overlay nations on top of each other, like you can overlay area codes? Is it possible that the official, black-and-white, cut-and-dried American motto “Out of many, one” is actually “Out of many… still several?”

I don’t know how to tackle these weighty questions (and neither, I suspect, will the national media), so I will address the most pressing issue for us here locally: What would it mean to live in a New York that is also Iroquoia? Or an Onondaga County that is also a territory called “Onondaga”? What does it mean to grow up in, and live in, a Syracuse that is next to and part of a sovereign nation? All just people living here, but not the same people. All in the same boat, but not.

At this point, you come up against the first mental barrier. Either you accept there is (or even just may possibly be) a sovereign nation besides the U.S. here, or you don’t. Either you can look at it a different way than the history books may say – or you cannot, or do not. So the following isn’t meant to argue for Haudenosaunee sovereignty… just to describe what it’s like for those of us who are at least endeavoring to get our minds around it.

Sovereignty is kind of strange to contemplate anyway. No one extends this status to any group of people, although some nation-states or international organizations pretend that they do or don’t. What is clear that sovereignty, once acknowledged by a people themselves, has to be continually defended. (As Benjamin Franklin might have said to his own people, “A Republic… if you can keep it.“) I won’t go into the history of different kinds of measures the Haudenosaunee have taken to defend sovereignty over the years, except to mention some times and places that should be already known to informed Central New Yorkers — Route 81 in 1971, the Kinzua Dam, Ganienkeh, Oka, and of course the passports that are now world-famous.

To imagine a reality different than the one given in our own history books almost feels like science fiction. It’s funny, because I watch a current TV show that deals with two alternate universes that occupy the same ground — and when I think about it, it’s kind of a helpful metaphor. The two universes don’t just quietly exist separately in separate realities; they share a history. One fateful day, a door was opened between the two, and relations didn’t start off on the right foot; someone from one side stole something precious from the other side, not understanding the implications of what they were doing and the huge disruptions it would cause. On the show, the two worlds are currently readying for war on one another. But the situation is complicated. It turns out that some characters can come and go freely between worlds, and feel some degree of allegiance to both. There are also places where the boundary between universes is particularly thin because of events that happened in the past; and there, confusing things happen that defy the laws of physics. “Reality” is not an either-or thing any more, but encompasses both sets of realities.

Now that I’ve lost 9 out of the 10 people reading this far… let’s return to the real world, or at least, the slightly unreal world that is upstate New York, where real people deal with confusing issues every day. I can only say that I find it easier to explain a convoluted science-fiction TV show, than I find it to explain the twists and turns of Haudenosaunee/New York relations to someone who isn’t from around here. What is the deal with all those weird lawn signs in Cayuga County? Why is the gas at some stations in Oneida County so cheap? Strange phenomena also continue to manifest right here in Syracuse, such as wildly painted billboards along the interstate, and historical markers that are periodically blocked by posters, or disappear altogether without explanation (the corner of Erie and Oswego Boulevards being a particular nexus for such weirdness lately.)

Maybe the best way to characterize it is that we are living in a “thin spot” that defies history-book reality, even as some of us feel or insist that it does not, or should not. It seems that only one nation can occupy a space, but it also seems there might be two nations here anyway. It seems fantastical, but — depending on your vision, experience, knowledge, and perspective — it also seems as if it might be so.

The author of the 1892 U.S. Census Report, The Six Nations of New York, briefly entertained some of the same thoughts, treating the idea of “a nation within a nation” as a then-current issue to be examined rather than peremptorily swept away. It’s pretty amazing that the even the theoretical consideration of two nations in one land made it into an official U.S. document over a century ago, but even more so that the situation described by the report — “too many partial and conflicting laws are nominally in force, but without coherence and general application” — still exists. Clearly, the Haudenosaunee have been somewhat successfully asserting their sovereignty in the interim, and various other overlaid governments and municipalities have been asserting theirs right back. The author of the Census report, back in 1892, recommended “a higher and equally consistent principle of international law” as the “wholesome remedy” to any such confusion (albeit, with an eye toward making the Indian more like the white man), and were reluctant to recommend imposing U.S. citizenship in any case. Oddly enough, that’s still the issue today with those Haudenosaunee passports. (If the Haudenosaunee and other indigenous nations were recognized by the United Nations, as they have been long expecting, maybe they would have allowed to join in the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative and would have been able to more speedily update their passports to comply with these regulations.)

But here in Central New York and in other parts of the state, we are left to grapple with the implications of more than one nation. We might not just “live next to” each other; we might occupy the same place. We might be more than just neighbors; we might be enemies, or allies. We might not be the same people (and this idea may be very hard for melting-pot Americans to accept), although the same place may have a personal claim on us. (And who are “we” anyway? Who in Washington, in an age of eroding personal rights and Kelo v. New London, defends our sovereignty anyhow? Are we even considered full citizens of our own nation, or do corporations have those rights instead?)

Once you have considered and accepted an alternate view of the Six Nations’ status, you are left only with more questions. These are not new questions. A long time ago, the Dutch and the Mohawks tried to figure out what to do about them. The Mohawks came up with an agreement that is known today as the Two Row Wampum, whose concepts of how two nations ought to relate to one another became the basis for all subsequent agreements between various peoples living together in this “thin spot” known as upstate New York. Including these same British who just refused to recognize Haudenosaunee passports. (The Two Row Wampum was last used as a basis for agreement a few years ago when the Lafayette School District had to decide what to do about Onondaga students’ request to wear regalia at graduation.)

Because we live in a special place, we here in Central New York have to live and work with the fact (or contention, as others say), of another nation’s sovereign existence. So in the end, it doesn’t matter what someone in Britain, or even Washington, says about Haudenosaunee passports. Those of us here in Central New York have to chart our own course about this, by our own lights. And we have been, in ways that may seem strange to non-CNY’ers. The purple flag of the Iroquois League flies over the city square. Native students wear their regalia. Our elected representatives speak on behalf of people who will never vote for them. None of this came about because of a master political plan. It came about because we are making decisions based on our lived experiences confronting “alternate reality” every day.

To those Central New Yorkers who see it this way, it’s very confusing, and sometimes frightening, and very different. But it could be that this is the sort of difference that eventually sets people apart, and makes them a nation… however small.

Sean Kirst brings up the Onondaga Lake aroma in a blog post related to his interview of Upstate Freshwater Institute’s Steve Leffler. Being from the 690 side of the lake, I can report that the smell we got riding by was definitely not only sewage. It was a sharp, choking smell that seemed to be equal parts chemical and crap. Not quite as sulfurous as a skunk spray — and while very unpleasant, it didn’t seem noxious. In the morning, it was an excellent indicator of how hot a summer’s day was going to get. The lake always seemed to know first.

I say “was” because the lake really does stink less now. Not just physically, but morally and politically — yesterday’s announcement of a new push for local control of the lake cleanup is very welcome news, especially the detail that the Onondaga Nation gets the equal seat at the table that it deserves.

I do have to agree with Jim Walsh’s concerns about the towns around the lake — Camillus, Geddes and Salina — needing to be involved as well in some way. Some people in Camillus, who live around the portentiously named Wastebed 13, still think everything stinks. While the community outreach over the Onondaga land rights action has been heartening to see since 2005, I sometimes have felt that it has been very oriented toward the city of Syracuse and the University, with less emphasis on the other lakeside communities. In unraveling the past history of the lake’s pollution and bad/illegal deals made, we have to remember that the communities along the lake (which later became Solvay and Liverpool) were planted here before the city of Syracuse was even a mirage in the swamp. Just because they are now filled with short-sighted suburbanites of a particular political persuasion, doesn’t mean they’re not part of the puzzle.

(Yes, this post’s subject is a tribute to my all-time favorite newspaper headline, from the Post-Standard: Bills Stink Less.)

Sale of lands around picturesque Hemlock and Canadice lakes by the city of Rochester to New York state, a goal of conservationists for decades, is now complete, officials announced Thursday… “This is without a doubt the most important land acquisition project the state has undertaken outside of the Adirondack and Catskill Parks in more than a generation,” said Pete Grannis, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which will manage the new forest.

Already people are grumbling about why New York has $13 million to buy land at a time when our economy is so bad that Gov. Paterson feels the need to hold a “veto-thon” because he thinks the Legislature’s budget doesn’t recognize reality. I kind of wonder what the timing of this has to do with Rochester mayor Robert Duffy’s new relationship with Albany as Cuomo’s lieutenant governor candidate. (Nothing, I’m sure, but that was my first crazy thought…)

Long ago, York Staters published an ode to Hemlock and Canadice Lakes. It’s worth another read, if you are undecided over whether this was a good purchase or not.

The study of history is supposed to enlarge one’s consciousness of reality, linking the past (and future) with the present. With the acquisition of more solid local knowledge, the mind’s eye can glance from 1981 to 1846 to 2072 in an instant. But in practice, creating historical memorials seems to often be more about limiting and controlling thoughts about this historical “space” we all live in.

Last week I was once again over by Cayuga Lake. Although the sour tang of the historical air there isn’t new to me, I got a fresh whiff of it when I started to notice how numerous and how well-kept the historical markers are over there. Especially as you get down near Aurora, there seems to be one on every other corner. I’ve never seen any other part of the state (except maybe in the Capital district) where they are so lovingly repainted and mowed around. People in Cayuga County want you to see their markers.

The other thing you notice is that not only are the “No Sovereign Nation – No Reservation” lawn signs as ubiquitous as ever, but they’re shiny and new. Even the well-to-do lakeside summer camp owners have them, something that always strikes me as particularly weird. The Cayugas are the only New York native nation who don’t have a reservation of their own, and they’re hardly rolling in serious dough (not like the Oneidas with Turning Stone), but I’ve always felt the palpable difference in the air when you’re in Cayuga country vs. Oneida country in terms of how disturbed the citizenry is about tax-free cigarettes and native land purchases.

The historical markers, I’m convinced, are there for the conservation of the present, not of the past. I call them “voodoo markers.” With protective magic, they glorify European and white American achievements, and help dispel the smoky miasma of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign which hit Cayuga country especially hard. (My favorite one is the marker on Route 90 that says “INDIAN MOUNDS” but then goes on only to speak of the Jesuits.) The campaign was both a tactical military expedition and a deliberate land grab — and “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” The land is still being fought over in some vague, half-forgotten way. Therefore, the markers have to be kept legible and numerous.

But honestly I can’t be too critical of Cayuga residents, because these markers can be pretty convenient after all. For example, Fairmount doesn’t have very many old buildings left. The oldest building, the former Whelan’s Funeral Home at Fairmount Corners, was once only narrowly saved from demolition (for a gas station) in the late ’60s. (It’s up for sale again.) The property sports an older historical marker which implies that the building was the home of James Geddes. This is probably incorrect, as his house was actually across the street.

So why don’t I care a whole lot? Because in a world where old buildings get knocked down, even a misleading historical marker grants a certain enhanced value to a property. It becomes its own sort of “voodoo marker,” offering a magical, deceptive protection. And it’s a deception that I’m inclined to give tacit approval of. I suppose the same magical protections can be extended by other kinds of historical markers, such as books about historical subjects. I guess we’re all a little guilty.

When economic disaster happened to the Rust Belt (in slow motion), the same process took place. Gradually, our region and other neighboring Rust Belt areas and cities, such as Detroit and Buffalo, fell off America’s mental map. The locus of the American imagination is mostly centered around the big coastal metro strips and the South and West. Where New York used to be a big-cheese state culturally and politically, it’s mainly important today to the American story only because of its large and regionally lopsided population. Cities like Syracuse and Rochester have been forgotten, just like the Gulf Coast will be once it’s covered in oil (even though life there will continue, and fish may even continue to get caught).

This means that, over time, our collective knowledge of the “known world” gets smaller – by our own choice. It seems strange that this could happen in a world where every corner has now been explored and is part of a global economy. But as the years go by, these mental blank spots on the map get papered over with generalizations and assumptions instead of actual knowledge of the area. Our modern, progressive minds can only take so much uncertainty, after all. Given a choice between uncertain fears and willful ignorance, ignorance usually wins out.

A group of about a half dozen volunteers were asked to leave Wilson-Tuscarora State Park (east of Niagara Falls) by park police as they brought in mowers under the direction of Wilson town officials. (The Town of Wilson wants to take over the park, so it appears that park police don’t take kindly to grandstanding, maybe?)

The Buffalo News reports that several towns in WNY want to maintain their closed local parks, including Woodlawn Beach, Knox Farm and Joseph Davis parks.

Bowman Lake State Park is seeing a jump in reservations, possibly due to the closure of nearby Oquaga Creek and Hunts Pond parks. Bowman Lake is on the “secondary closing list.”

The Post-Standard notes that Clark Reservation is not “really” closed.

Kirsten Gillibrand wants Newtown Battlefield to become a national historic park. (This would be in addition to, not instead of, the state park that is there.)

The closure of Thacher State Park is becoming a political issue.

New York’s entire state parks system has been named to “America’s Most Endangered Historic Places” list this year.

The first photo was taken in September 1938, and shows that the Fairmount Hills area was laid out for modern suburban tracts before World War 2 (note the curvier streets compared to Old Fairmount’s straight avenues, at top of photo).

This photo probably shows the borders of the Geddes family farm, even though they had been gone from the area for several decades. One of the tree lines on the left side of the picture seems to conform roughly to the border of Lot 38, much of which they owned. (Without further research I couldn’t tell you exactly where their holdings were, though.) It also shows the Brockway Tavern (aka Whelan’s Funeral Home, circled in red) and one of the Geddes farm’s outbuildings (which still exists in back of Fairmount Animal Hospital, circled in yellow). The purple X is approximately the location of the house George Geddes lived in later in his life (son James Jr. lived in the big family mansion on Fairmount Corners). The blue X is my street.

It’s interesting to walk through the neighborhood these days and understand a little more about what was what back in the early 20th or even the 19th century. It’s easy to find out the location of the Geddes family’s ice pond (hint: it’s still a swamp). But everything has changed visually – the only thing that hasn’t changed is topography. So if you want to figure out which route the farmers of yore took to get to their back forty, you can get insights by walking, more than you can get from consulting a map of streets invented for cars.

The Syracuse Herald’s report on the demolition of the Geddes mansion (December 1929, part 1, part 2) discusses the upcoming development of the land into residential and business space, so this photo shows streets that were likely laid out even earlier than 1938, with their development probably stalled by the Depression. Still, this fancy and oh-so-suburban configuration (for prewar) begs the question: who did they expect to live here? It’s not as if they could have been fully anticipating postwar baby boomers.

Let’s jump ahead to 1951:

The war is long over, and Fairmount Hills (aka “Lake Lawns”) is on the verge of a building boom. Fairmount Fair is still a gleam in Eagan’s eye, but already the streets off Onondaga Road have started to see some action, and within five years the rest of the neighborhood will be filled with ranch houses and Cape Cods built by Liverpool’s Bud Stanley.

Flash forward to 1966, and the transformation is almost totally complete:

Not shown in this picture is the now-fully-developed Terrytown area in back of swinging Fairmount Fair, where the dots (er, houses) are spaced out more than they are in Fairmount Hills. They figured out that people wanted bigger homes, bigger lots, and that they wanted a shopping mall with plenty of parking — even though, for a suburban mall, FF is bizarrely easy to walk to.

The whole Fairmount area is really like a suburban history laboratory, where you can trace fine gradual developments in the whole concept of sub-village and sub-urban housing. (I say “sub-village” because I suspect Old Fairmount, laid out in the 1890s, was really meant to be a suburb of the village of Solvay.) The last major building spurt in Fairmount happened in the 1990s, so conceivably you could take an hourlong stroll through one hundred years of suburban history. (Yes, there’s still one guy finishing his new mini-McMansion up on Jane Drive, but he’s very late to the party.)

And that’s really the oddest thing of all: a history of suburbia that you don’t need to drive through!

For further reading on the characteristics of prewar vs. postwar suburban development: Interpreting Post-World War II Suburban Landscapes as Historic Resources.

I can’t help noticing that more TV shows seem to be using Northeastern locales. The shows occasionally include Upstate in their geographies, such as The Office and its “Road Trip” episode which stopped at “Utica Branch.” Sometimes the geographies are fanciful or downright demented, however. My latest guilty TV pleasure in the Boston-set Fringe on Fox, which mostly stays in Massachusetts (or “Massachusetts,” ahem), but whose central dramatic event occurred at a fictional frozen lake west of Albany, somewhere north of Westerlo. Pretty cool… except that the lake is allegedly located just near an ocean beach. Okay, whatever! And this map from an alternate universe in Fringe seems to indicate something horrible has happened in the greater Buffalo area. (Wait, maybe that’s our universe.)

I used to assume that General Hospital‘s Port Charles, N.Y. was meant to be on Long Island. With ship’s bells and so many unsavory characters hanging out at “the docks,” wouldn’t you assume so? Nope, apparently it is supposed to be Rochester – on the rough and tumble coast of Lake Ontario. (Not that Rochester is on the coast…) All righty then!

Any other fantastical Upstate locations or landscapes out there in popular culture? (I’m thinking maybe it’s not worth discussing Slap Shot for the umpteenth time and instead focus on the probably far greater number of TV and movie productions that just make stuff up.)

While certain concerned parties such as Novisuccinea chittenangoensis may be relieved, some other New Yorkers are going to attempt to pretend that this all never happened and use the parks anyway:

At Knox Park In East Aurora, the park is technically closed but that didn’t stop park goers like Sue Guindon from showing up. What did she encounter? “Not a thing, peace, not a problem…no gates closed, a regular day. I was hoping for that, I don’t want anything but a peaceful walk in the park as I do every single day when I come here myself, my friends or with my family.” Guindon says she will not back down and plans to keep coming to the park.

A lot of people know back routes or unofficial entrances to the closed parks. (I know a discreet route into one of my favorites, and admit I am tempted.) How hard is the state going to enforce no-trespassing rules? When do the drug dealers start to show up?

Does privatization come next? A Republican state senator is now push-polling about that. But on Long Island they already have a savior in the form of Citibank, which is coming to the rescue and playing out exactly what I feared — the haves will have their parks, and the have-nots will just have to sneak in like animals.

Every government, no matter what way it gains power (via elections, or just brute force), has to engage in what are known as “legitimizing activities.” Every president, king or emperor since the beginning of civilization has eventually had to come up with bread and circuses, pleasure parks, and other ways of keeping the people happy within the system and in awe of their largesse and majesty. To the people, the failure to keep providing these perks contributed to a sense of “legitimacy fail.”

The park closures are of course not the most serious thing we’re facing. But it makes you wonder. If the entire legislature and the governor are this impotent that they could not stop this from actually happening, then their days of legitimacy as a government are that much closer to the end. When do the people who are still living in New York (and not fleeing elsewhere) just simply stop paying attention to them, or to their successors?

For Ms. Guindon, I guess the answer is “now.”

It makes me wonder if turning any city into a seething mass of amusement-seeking humanity is ever really a good idea.

I’m all for busting the status quo, even though I have my doubts that “eds and meds” are going to be the eternal economic engines that so many people assume they will be. Higher education is probably the next bubble to burst, and once the baby boomers really start to age, healthcare will be not far behind. Both of these elegant and highly complicated systems will start breaking down under their own weight in my lifetime. But these are the assumptions we’re now accepting, and needless to say, Onondaga County’s suburbanites are probably not gonna like it. At all.

Yesterday’s musings on “source and sink” – how organisms migrate and prosper, or don’t – got me thinking about what suburbanites originally were, compared to what they are now. (Disclaimer: I’m a born-and-bred second-generation suburbanite, so if any angry suburbanites are reading this, I’m one of you. Peace. No Kill I.) I feel that our local suburbanites are imperfectly understood. We’re supposed to believe that originally, they were gullible, greedy airheads who were easily seduced by subdivision developers to abandon a pretty good city and set up ludicrous shop in remote, isolating, disempowering enclaves. And that many of them are just knee-jerk haters of all things urban.

Well, many of them in fact are knee-jerk haters of all things (and most people) urban. These are second- or third-generation suburbanites we’re hearing this from. But the first generation of suburban pioneers came from cities — if not Syracuse itself, then some other city. Who were these people, what happened to them to make them want to leave the city, and what attitudes came from these experiences that got leached into their children and grandchildren who hang out on Syracuse.com comment boards today?

Speaking only from personal experience, the stories I was told about why my grandparents left Syracuse bear little resemblance to the explanations commonly offered by urbanites/urbanists. I never heard anything much about cute little houses and lawns, or about not wanting to live around black people. The most vivid story about it, told with the most passion, is the one where the landlord on Herkimer Street would not allow my mother and her sister to have a puppy. The story goes something like this: One day, some way or another a puppy found its way into the yard at the house my grandparents rented. It was discovered by my mother and aunt, who were having fun playing with it until the landlord got wind of it and was mad. My grandfather was obliged to literally tear the puppy out of my mom’s hands, and they never saw it again. I don’t think he was happy about having to do that, but I doubt he had much choice, since my grandparents were both factory workers and probably didn’t have much ability to stand up to the landlord or find a better place to live in the city.

To me, that story is the heart of why former urbanites became suburbanites, and thinking about people as organisms in an ecology reminded me that there are winners and losers in any habitat. I suspect that by and large, most (though not all) people who became suburbanites in that generation were the (white) people who were never going to make it into Syracuse’s power elites. These powerful, well-connected people were not just the professors, the lawyers, the politicians, but also the working-class elites such as those in the inner circle of the labor unions or among the cops – the people you had to know in order to secure better jobs; and also the gossipy circles of the city’s various ethnic enclaves. Syracuse in the 1950s was very much an “I’ve got mine” place – which is ironic, because suburbanites are today the ones judged to be most guilty of that attitude (and many of them do now have it, to be sure).

I have to be honest: sometimes when I hear urbanists talking about how wonderful city neighborhood living is, I roll my eyes. No matter how smoothly an urban paradise runs, there will always be cliques, and I think a major contributing factor to the desire to get out of Dodge had to do with that. Decades upon decades of cliquishness, clannishness, under-the-table favors, smug complacency among the well-employed — it’s the dark side of any social ecosystem, including dear old Syracuse (even today). It’s why the first colonists left Europe, it’s why the first Central New Yorkers left New England, it’s why the small farmers got tired of farming and went to the city, and it’s a big reason why the suburbanites left the city, and why the children of suburbanites are anxious to get out of CNY’s ingrown suburbs today.

My grandmother wanted to move out of Syracuse for several reasons (having to do with following certain members of her family), but she also did want her kids to be able to have a puppy. Today, she would have been just the sort of aspiring homeowner who would have been targeted by predatory lenders and steered toward a house too big for her family. But in the 1950s, at least for some people, the banking system worked pretty well. Even more importantly, the banks sold the kind of trust and respect that people like my grandparents couldn’t get from actual human beings — their supposed family, friends, landlords, co-workers and neighbors — in the city of Syracuse. (Obviously, the banks didn’t extend this sort of relationship to everyone, since invitations to join the suburbs were not extended to blacks and other minorities.)

I don’t recall my grandparents carrying a lot of resentment toward urban elites, or toward minorities – if it was expressed, it wasn’t vehement. They were Democrats, although for a long time my grandfather had registered Republican for political (not ideological) reasons, which illustrates my previous point about the sort of getting-along-to-go-along lifestyle that discontented urbanites hated. I suppose I could have turned out like the commenters on Syracuse.com, but the attitude I received from my working-class family was very informed by the Sixties, and it was that the economic interests of working-class whites and the economic interests of minorities were similar (i.e., “what happens to them, happens to YOU next”).

Anyhow, I don’t think we have a complete picture of what’s broken in Onondaga County unless we acknowledge the complete roots of why people left the city in the first place. We already know that we have to be honest about the people who are struggling at the bottom of the system. But I also think we must include an honest look at urban elites — then and now — their past behavior, current behavior, and the distrust of them that festers among some in the suburbs. This is a real, historical distrust buried in unique ways in personal and family histories. It’s also a distrust that over a couple of generations got distorted, in some households and families, into a misdirected resentment against minorities and the poor.

Unfortunately, I also don’t get much of a sense that today’s urban elites in Syracuse really see the return/reconciliation of suburbanites as part of the plan. They seem to want to import young people — newly recruited members of an urban elite — from elsewhere to generate economic activity. Or, at best, suburbanites are expected to come in to watch college sports and hang out downtown for a while. The official urbanite line is still that suburbanites are dumb, gullible, greedy, lazy, and that Syracuse can only be saved by bringing in fresh blood in the form of college students. An exception to this has been the plan to give college education to any city resident. This should have been framed as a lure to get suburbanites to come back to live in the city (not just drink there) and receive this gift along with the poorer city residents who have been there all along. But I’ve not gotten the sense that this potentially revolutionary, reconciliatory concept has been seriously communicated to the people outside the city.

I’ve read some triumphalistic comments today about the new tax agreement from people who maybe ought to know better. This attitude is not helping Onondaga County on its journey to wherever it’s going. We need a three-way reconciliation in this county (at least). I believe the new tax agreement might do something important by at least changing the status quo and clearing the air for a new conversation. But there has to be a serious examination of why so many people left Syracuse and are still out there on the horizons in the suburbs. We can’t just talk about this like it’s a two-sided war, when it’s actually a multi-sided, multi-generational dislocation of community.

This observation caught my eye:

…The dominant, older individuals in a population may occupy all of the best territories in the source so that the next best territory available may be in the sink. As the subordinate, younger individuals age, they may be able to take over territories in the source, but new subordinate juveniles from the source will have to move to the sink. Pulliam argued that such a pattern of dispersal can maintain a large sink population indefinitely. Furthermore, if good breeding sites in the source are rare and poor breeding sites in the sink are common, it is even possible that the majority of the population resides in the sink.

Upstate New York is a wonderful place to live… if you already occupy the best “territories” remaining: jobs in higher education, health care industry, stable industrial/research operations, state and city government (of course). Is it possible that our region has reached an equilibrium of sorts, at least under the way things have worked economically for the last 30-40 years? If the fundamentals of the larger system of which we are part do not change, are things likely to get rapidly better or rapidly worse? (I’m guessing not — but then again, the larger system may be about to suffer a prolonged series of shocks and then all bets may really be off.) A lot of talk has been about how Upstate has suffered in recent decades, but not so much talk about how resilient it has been in other ways — or, if you will, stable (or static). Many people have been trying to program in changes and transformations, but what if the cumulative resistance to change runs a lot deeper than party politics or even local attitudes?

More bluntly put, is it possible that the current arrangement is still working better for more people than it’s not working for (in rural areas, in the suburbs and the urban areas)? If not, then why aren’t people quickly fleeing from Upstate New York en masse?

I don’t pretend to know that much about ecology, so this analogy may be off (ecologists, please chime in…) The concept of the ecological trap might also be of interest – with, perhaps, highly artificial desert environments like Las Vegas or parts of the Sun Belt playing the role of “trap”?

You could, of course, run this thought experiment on “city of Syracuse vs. its suburbs,” too, with the suburbs playing the role of the “trap.”

It’s too bad that Parker throughout his career has involved himself in violent, over-the-top incidents, because even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Listening to DeFrancisco’s self-referential, irrelevant and oh-so-suburbanite obsession with a comment that O’Luck posted on the NY Times over a year ago, made me want to write a lengthy post on white privilege (if you have never heard the term, I suggest this excellent recent article).

Unfortunately, Parker in his usual discussion-killing manner went on to label DeFrancisco a “white supremacist” and another senator, Ruben Diaz, a homophobe (well, actually, he is one), further blotting out the reality that DeFrancisco does need to be added to the chain of fools in this incident with his cluelessness about the history of race relations in this country. (No, Sen. DeFrancisco, it’s really not all about the hurt feelings of Italian-American lawyers.)

However, now someone has saved me a lot of trouble:

Preston Fagan, president of the NAACP Syracuse/Onondaga chapter, said he hadn’t heard complaints that DeFrancisco was a racist. However, he said, “I will say he has a problem being a minority.”

Bwahahahah! So particularly true of Sen. DeFrancisco, who has noticeably turned into a world-class whiner ever since his party lost control, and this isn’t the first time. Thank you, Mr. Fagan, for making my “job” as a blogger easier.

But Arizona, you blew it. No longer will you be known mostly as the beautiful state with the saguaros, kachinas and the Grand Canyon, the fabulous, exotic Wild West destination that every foreign tourist wants to visit. Now you’ve bought yourself a worldwide reputation as the ugliest ugly-American state, where anyone who “looks suspicious” (i.e., Hispanic) will be harrassed, thanks to your very ill-conceived, myopic, quixotic new measure. I never thought any U.S. state could possibly take the crown away from Texas in the “ugly American” reputation department but with a single stroke of the pen, your governor has done it. Within the space of two years, not only have you lost your formerly booming housing economy to the economic crash, but you’ve also endangered your international reputation and possibly your tourism business.

Each day more than 65,000 Mexican residents are in Arizona to work, visit friends and relatives and shop, according to a University of Arizona study sponsored by the Arizona Office of Tourism. While there, the Mexican visitors spend more than $7.35 million daily in Arizona’s stores, restaurants, hotels and other businesses, the researchers found.

Good luck selling those overpriced condos and country club memberships, though.

PS: Also, if you skip class in college in Arizona now (specifically, at NAU), Big Brother will know. Land of the Free!

Here’s a photo of it when it was Tobin’s Restaurant, its pre-Walter White incarnation.

And here it is today.

There doesn’t seem to be any cause for feelings of doom when you read the paper today and see that CNY’ers (the real CNY’ers) are genuinely green in their outlook and behavior. The sample for this survey is small and perhaps too much is being made of it, but it’s heartening to see CNYers understanding that “greenwashing” (cloaking corporate interests in green costume) can be a big problem too. This question makes me take the survey a little more seriously. But mainly what I see in this survey is that the less affluent a place is, the more serious-minded they may be about changing the way they live and giving back to the earth. Perhaps this is similar to the way poorer people tend to be the most generous in giving to charity.

Then again, we’re still not thinking entirely clearly. There are some “No to Wastebed 13″ signs on my street now. This is because some of my former neighbors now live in Golden Meadows, the subdivision that was built near the old wastebed where Honeywell and the state propose to store Onondaga Lake sediments. I’m still trying to find out why I knew about Wastebed 13 before homeowners there apparently did. I’m not exactly an environmental activist, and I knew. I read the paper, and was following along with the lake cleanup mainly because of my concern/interest in the Onondaga LRA. I feel badly for the Golden Meadows homeowners, particularly my former neighbors, and wonder how the Onondaga Nation’s recent vision statement for Onondaga Lake speaks to them. (Are we speaking to one another?)

The anti-wastebed signs are bright yellow; you can’t miss them. Coming home from work, I noticed a little yellow flag fluttering in the grass in the yard next door to one of the signs. Someone had their lawn freshly pesticided for spring. Toxic waste is not okay for landfills and lakes, but still okay for lawns, I guess. That’s the right sort of poison for our homes and children! Until we get over this willful blindness, we’re going to keep running into dilemmas like Wastebed 13.

But back to the dirt. I thought I would be more interested by The World Without Us for its description of how suburban homes and mighty cities decay, but I actually found myself fascinated by the chapter on dirt and what sticks around in it. The story of the long-term soil experiments at an English research farm reminded me a lot of agricultural writings by and about George Geddes and Fairmount in the 19th century. I was not so interested in this stuff when I was doing the start of my Fairmount research, but now as I’m trying to ease into learning gardening, I am. What’s in my dirt?

Aspiring gardeners in Fairmount don’t know how good they have it: the provenance of their dirt is surprisingly well documented, thanks to old George. While I’m fairly sure that the land my house sits on was either not actually Geddes family land, or was not actually farmed (too many large stones present – although it could have been grazing land for his sheep), I’m confident that it probably wasn’t greatly disturbed in the early years of the 20th century either. It probably wasn’t sprayed with fertilizer. The biggest mystery therefore is how the homebuilders messed with it in the mid-1950s. My mother believes, from her childhood memories, that the homebuilders did not truck in much new dirt. I can also quiz her what the original homeowners (my grandparents) put on it in the way of pesticides and lawn fertilizer back in the beginning.

It would be nice to get soil samples tested – not, as one usually might do, to determine the best spot for gardening, but to try and find a spot that might be the least transformed from the time before the house was built. This would be in the back yard, away from the road and the house. I also want to sample the soil in the front yard (which I expect will be more contaminated) and a sample from my sister’s house in the city. I have a feeling that doing the sort of testing I’m interested in would be very expensive, though, so I’ll have to find out if it’s really feasible to do.

State officials agreed Sunday to officially rename the Greater Utica area to “Central New York” after retiring the name “Central Leatherstocking Region.” Senator Joseph Griffo (R) and Assemblywoman RoAnn Desito (D) announced that for tourism purposes, the seven-county region will switch to the new name that is used more frequently anyway. The former “Central Leatherstocking Region” encompasses seven upstate counties of Oneida, Otsego, Madison, Chenango, Montgomery, Broome and Schoharie Counties. The Chairman of Empire State Development Corporation, Dennis Mullen, notifies the region’s tourism partners that the name has officially been changed after careful consideration and meetings with consultants.

At this point, don’t we have to consider “consultants” to be useless boils on the butt of humanity? Do they ever produce anything of actual value or insight? (Emerald City, anyone?) It’s not like they actually asked the people living in the actual Central New York that has been called that by the locals for decades, if not more. Onondaga County — the only county in America shaped like an actual human heart — is no longer the heart of Central New York, but rather a far-flung corner of the Finger Lakes region, according to distant people who have probably never visited here in the first place.

Our petty regional names are kind of important. New York is one of the least homogenous states in the country, and we’re all uncomfortably bound to “New York” as the name of a world city that often we feel has emotionally and economically nothing to do with us. We cling to a shallow “Upstate-Downstate” divide partly as a means of ego defense, and to avoid having to deal with the scary reality that “Upstate” is really fragmented and always has been.

You can see the map of the new Central New York over at New York Traveler, which has some wistful thoughts about the banishment of the term “Leatherstocking Country.” (Note that – like everything else in our economy – the geographic location of Central New York has now slid downstateward.)

This name game reminds me of another game you might have played when you were a kid. Remember those puzzle boards covered with numbers, which one had to shift around (up, down, right, left) until the rows added up correctly? Since there were only limited numbers of empty spaces to slide the numbers to, it was often a frustrating or even pointless exercise. One began to suspect that the game came from the factory rigged for unsolvability. It’s gotten to the point where our economic guardians have decided that calling one economically empty space by the rightful name of another economically empty space is the solution to the intractable problem of New York’s future existence. (Here are some more name and number solutions recently tried.)

I know how the numbers game always ended at my house: dug out with the fingernails, and then discarded for a new game.

Clark Reservation. If you’ve always wanted to go look for the caves, now you can! Best experienced after dusk after a long day of drinking with local guides, the cool, rushing sensation of discovering Jamesville Quarry is not unlike the feeling of biting into a York peppermint pattie… which is what you’ll also look like after they scrape you off the bottom. Clark Reservation’s trails are sure to bring you to the very edge of excitement – and beyond!

Old Erie Canal State Park. New York’s first dedicated play space for methheads offers peerless privacy in a peaceful rural setting for all your drug dealing needs- the only place you can dump the body AND the gun where no one will hear the splash. (No concrete ballast needed – just use one of the thousands of limestone blocks handily available in the park!)

John Boyd Thacher. If you’ve experienced all the joy that New York’s ex-state parks have to offer, but still aren’t satisfied, make John Boyd Thacher your final destination. It’s 3.2 seconds of vertical plunge you’ll remember for the next 3.2 seconds of your life!

(Okay, okay…

Gee, I thought I wasn’t going to have to resurrect this post from the Virtual Spike, but since the state can’t get its budget act together, I’m publishing the above as a public service… and as a way to get myself out of my curious blogging hiatus. And here I had wanted to come back when things had changed…)

BTW, it’s interesting to see which Upstate parks are considered “flagship parks” worthy of fee raises: Green Lakes, Letchworth, Fair Haven, Southwick, Westcott, Watkins Glen, Fort Niagara, Moreau Lake and Saratoga Spa.

I don’t know how statistics run on how many out-of-staters use New York campsites, as a percentage of total users. I do know that quite a few people who use the campsites regularly feel they have been a pretty good deal already, pricewise. I know I have always felt this way. In fact I’ve been surprised that they haven’t raised campsite fees more dramatically in the past few years. There are always people who will prefer to pay $30 a night for the privilege of being in a highly electrified, Wi-Fi’d private RV resort with pink flamingoes and swimming pools, but I’m not one of them. That said, I personally would accept a $3-4 campsite fee hike even for in-state residents… but it looks like just out-of-staters will now be asked to pay.

I do wonder where the new revenues are specifically going, though. I’d like these new fees to help the park staff do their jobs.

I’m old enough to have been impressed by Pong, and I came of age during the Atari era. Nevertheless, my parents decided it would be forward-thinking and responsible of them to buy me and my sister… an Odyssey console. (But Mom! Everyone has Atari!) It had a real keyboard, not just a joystick, and even some cartridges that purported to teach you about computers. Deep! It also had a game called K.C. Munchkin that was suspiciously a lot like Pac-Man. This made us happy, along with the jolly little dance that the Shootout! gunslingers did when you shot them (or when you made them shoot themselves).

When you don’t have kids yourself, it’s very easy to stay insulated from video game culture, so I completely missed out on Nintendo, Gameboys, Playstations and Wii’s. Or maybe I’m trying really hard to stay insulated, because “gaming” is now a noun and it has leaked into nearly every aspect of entertainment and life. It would be easy to complain about “video game violence,” but I guess what amazes me is that even real life has become a big game now. I have a Twitter stream that I read every day, and quite a few people seem to like to “play” Foursquare (for lack of a better word), which involves having an application tweet your every whereabout and then proclaim you “mayor” of your location. (One of the guys I follow on Twitter recently tweeted that he was “Mayor of Lowe’s” so I asked him if I could get a discount on carpeting. I didn’t get an answer.) On Facebook, it’s all about Farmville.

Then there are the folks sitting in a room at Hancock piloting automated drones over Afghanistan, probably much like these guys in Nevada, who might as well be playing a video game with real bombs. There are lobbyists in Albany playing games, as always, and using their cheat codes.

Is the trend toward 24-hour playtime ever going to stop, or will grown men (in particular) be deeply concerned with games and gaming for the foreseeable future? Is it a problem, or not?

But in truth, the future of our state parks is still murky. $11.5 million will keep them running this year, but what about next year? Are the parks still going to be underfunded and understaffed? Is the park creation process ever going to get a careful look? What about the budgetary and personnel strains affecting our “other” parks service, the DEC? (Once again, some important posts by Norbrook for those who aren’t breathing a sigh of relief just yet.)

This picture interested me especially:

The old-fashioned vertical “Parking” sign behind Travis Bickle is not there any more. Yet, in Syracuse we still have one that’s similar. (The parking garage it’s attached to is a crumbling mess, but what of that?)

There’s news that a movie is set to be filmed at the old Hotel Syracuse. Maybe Syracuse can still loan itself out as a cinematic stand-in for 1970s cities, since time here apparently stands still.

It used to be that every election was The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes (a favorite theme at places like Daily Kos and Free Republic). First there was the Most Important Presidential Election of Our Lifetimes, and then there came the Most Important Congressional Elections of Our Lifetimes. But that idea has gotten old and no one listens to it any more, because these Important Elections don’t prevent bad stuff from continuing to happen, even if your side wins. So, now it’s the Census that’s the next logical thing to become critically important.

I wonder what becomes Important next, once the Census doesn’t help anything either. I’m guessing it will devolve to The Most Important NCAA Bracket of Our Lifetimes, followed closely by The Most Important American Idol Vote of Our Lifetimes, finally winding up with The Most Important Thanksgiving Pumpkin Pie of Our Lifetimes. When the ensuing Most Important Food Fight of Our Lifetimes does not yield clarity, then we will have reached that great void from whose bourn no civilization returns.

And that’s how the world ends. So, please fill out your Census.

Some people concerned about the parks and the economy may be wondering, “There’s tons of people out of work these days — so why can’t the government put them to work repairing the infrastructure of the parks — the roads, bridges, bathhouses, trails and campsites?” They may be remembering the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the New Deal-era program that put 3 million Americans to work during the Great Depression on all kinds of outdoor projects, including many New York State parks which still show off their handiwork today. (This Flickr group has collected photos of all kinds of buildings created by the CCC.)

There’s no CCC any more, and last year’s federal stimulus measure did not create one. In New York, a newly created State Parks Conservation Corps received over $3 million in federal stimulus funds from the NY Department of Labor to put about 200 students – broken up into smaller groups and sent to different regions of the state — on trail maintenance work for several months last year. (This seems a far cry from the large camps of CCC guys who were working on infrastructure during the Depression.)

The State Parks student effort was overseen by the Student Conservation Association, a group which has been doing similar work nationwide for many years and is active in New York. While it’s good to know that groups like the SCA are around, when you look at a list of the places where the SCA is active, you’ll notice they mostly only work in the Adirondacks, Hudson Valley-Catskills, Albany and New York City metro regions. (Whether coincidentally or not, these just happen to be the regions where political power is concentrated in our state — or where the powers most often go to play.)

But it’s hard enough finding money to support even the park system’s dedicated employees, much less an emergency job corps, as blogger Norbrook points out in this must-read post: “Why would park people be grumpy?” Norbrook writes:

The problem with the way we’ve been treating our parks is that it never gets better. Another friend of mine who’s been running parks for a long time told me “I get through by thinking next year will be better. The problem is that next year is always worse.” For a very long time, park personnel have been dealing with failing infrastructure that never gets money to repair it, personnel cuts or hiring freezes, watching as money is shifted from one area to another in mid-year, and do the best they can with what they have. It’s a case of “the beatings will continue until morale improves” for them. It’s hard to remain upbeat over time, when things never seem to get better. Then the recession hits, and the state budget is being drastically cut. You find out it can get worse. Not only is the already inadequate funding cut, but you’re not even sure that your park will be open anymore.

…This year, if you notice the park staffs seem “grumpy” it’s because they are. They’re hitting a breaking point, and it’s becoming impossible to keep a cheery face to the public. They know that things aren’t going to get better for them. The effort to keep parks open is just one small part of what we should be advocating. We should also be advocating to make sure that they have the resources they need, and to prevent this from happening in the future.

Solid Shale is a blog that people concerned about hydrofracking might want to check out.

Norbrook’s Blog is for “Opinions from the Central Adirondacks” (with much to say about the state parks)

Occasional commenter here, Mrs. M has been awfully busy with her own blog stable, including New York Renovator (“the challenges of renovating an 1855 home in upstate New York”)

And, wow. From Adirondack Almanack, more than you ever wanted to know about where bees actually go in the winter. Think about this the next time you’re at a festival and there’s a long line for the portajohns.

At least three of these parks face immediate closure or service reductions under the current budget proposal. At least two more of them are in danger if anticipated emergency funding for the state parks system does not materialize.

A key figure in the domestic abuse scandal bedeviling Gov. David A. Paterson told investigators that the governor phoned to enlist her help in quieting the accuser, according to a person with knowledge of her account.

“Tell her the governor wants her to make this go away,” Deneane Brown said Mr. Paterson told her, according to the person. Ms. Brown, a state worker, was friends with both the governor and the woman who says that a senior aide to Mr. Paterson roughed her up in a Halloween altercation.

“Women’s equality” and “women’s issues” are great abstract concepts for most politicians, but especially abstract to members of the NYC establishment (of which David Paterson is one – Harlem branch, although we could say the same for other prominent NYC based politicians and their staffs). When it comes to, uh, actual women in front of them, that’s a different ballgame altogether. Somehow, to them, women cause these troubles by their very presence around powerful men and their staffs — and so it is a “reasonable request” probably for these politicians, to ask that they (the women) “make it go away.”

So my question is: if women are really that powerful that they cause all these troubles and have the power to make them go away, what the hell are these women doing wasting their power in Albany, where men seem to have them in a box? (Don’t forget that, across many parts of the world, you even have the power to confound and bewitch whole legions of men simply by uncovering your hair! You don’t even have to be beautiful – you just have to have two X chromosomes, and boom — the hair is deadly!)

We’ve already established that women “have the power” – so why are we using it so ineptly? Why are we wasting it on participating in a dysfunctional game we can never win? Political power is not the same thing as holding political office, especially if the offices and the government are built on shifting sands.

Maybe it’s time to vacate Albany and get back to Seneca Falls, stat. Maybe it is time to make an increased effort to move the capital — literally — over to Seneca Falls: to warp this state’s center of political gravity just as much as our last two governors’ sense of their power has apparently been warped. Liz Krueger, Joan Christensen, leave that city on the Hudson immediately and call a general assembly of your female colleagues and their friends, right inside the roofless Wesleyan Church on Fall Street if necessary. It can’t be any more of a cold, uncomfortable and undignified meeting-place for New York women than the mighty Capitol is right about now.

You have the power to “make it go away.”

In truth, I don’t think there have been any riders on this part of the route for about a decade, so its demise was no shock. It was also an excruciatingly long and boring commute – I rode it for about a year back and forth to work, and it took an hour and fifteen minutes to get to my destination. Still, it’s a little sad that one more connection between Syracuse and its burbs has gone.

Also: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5… and I think there are 10 parts in all, which you can find linked from these videos.

(“Shut your eyes, and you won’t know who’s talking… because they all talk alike.” Yes, Albany does need new writers…)

The Post-Standard, like many papers around the state this morning, is looking into the costs of keeping the parks open, but the article (which doesn’t seem to be online?) doesn’t mention what the costs are – or if property taxes paid by the state for state park land are included in the tally. I assume they are included, but as Norbrook at TAP has pointed out, property taxes and the parks are not in the public consciousness and barely mentioned by the media. The way that NY’s parks system operate — or rather systems, since they’re run by two different agencies, Office of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Environment Conservation — is probably a mystery even to regular parks patrons.

Don’t get me wrong… we need to look at this list and ask for justification why some sites are on it at all. (I’d really like to know why Lorenzo Historic Site is only on the “shadow” secondary list and why Oriskany Battlefield gets the ax. If it’s purely because people would rather have their weddings there and the facilities fees are all that matters, then come out and say that so that those of us who care about historical preservation and education know where the state’s actual priorities are going forward. Or if it’s because Cazenovians have got the political donation cash for the right people and the Mohawk Valley doesn’t… whatever.)

People also have a lot of questions about what happens to these sites when they get shut down. What about safety and security? (If you’re compiling a list of New York’s Most Deadly Ex-State Parks, I’d say Clark Reservation will probably rank high.) What about the hydrofrackers and other private interests who might have designs on this land? What assistance might the state agencies be able to provide to any municipalities that have the means and political will to take over some of these properties? How about some answers instead of a brief apologetic press release? We’re all pretty guilty of not asking and answering these questions.

Bayswater Point State Park
Beechwood State Park
Bonavista State Park
Brookhaven State Park
Caleb Smith State Park Preserve
Canoe Island State Park
Cedar Island State Park
Chimney Bluffs State Park
Chittenango Falls
Clark Reservation
Cold Spring Harbor State Park
Joseph Davis State Park
Donald J. Trump State Park
Eel Weir State Park
Helen McNitt State Park (I’ll bet the high priests of Holy Cazenovia Lake are cheering for that one!)
Hudson River Islands State Park
Hunts Pond State Park
Keewaydin State Park
Knox Farm State Park
Long Point State Park
Macomb Reservation State Park
Mary Island State Park
Newtown Battlefield State Park
Nissequogue River State Park
Oak Orchard State Marine Park
Old Erie Canal State Park
Oquaga Creek State Park
Orient Beach State Park
Pixley Falls State Park (sadly, no surprise at all)
Point Au Roche State Park
Robert Riddell State Park
Schodack Island State Park
Schunnemunk State Park
Max V. Shaul State Park
Springbrook Greens State Park
John Boyd Thacher State Park
Trail View State Park
Two Rivers State Park
Wilson-Tuscarora State Park
Woodlawn Beach State Park
Wonder Lake State Park

This list only reflects proposals for complete closings of state parks. It doesn’t include historic sites, such as John Brown Farm which is indeed on the list (happy Black History Month, everybody!), and reduction of hours and services at other parks and sites. The complete list is here. Another disturbing inclusion is Oriskany Battlefield. In all, 41 parks and 14 state historic sites are proposed for closure. Long Island seems hit hard, while the Finger Lakes region seems barely affected. For me, it’s the proposed closure of so many historic sites (including Fort Ontario and Sackets Harbor) that are very objectionable, and I hope these get fought.

Moreau Lake and Bowman Lake, rumored to be on the list, are not on it. Chittenango Falls’ presence on the list is surprising to me, but I’m wondering if the endangered snail has something to do with it. (And how, pray tell, do you “close” the Old Erie Canal Park? What happens to the bike trail?)

The John Boyd Thacher closure is really getting a lot of people in that part of the state riled up. It seems to be the most shocking inclusion on the list. As for parks that didn’t get closed… they want to close the beach at Selkirk. Why not just close the whole park? (Who goes to Selkirk for the scenery?!)

The Post-Standard joins other papers in the state in speculation about which local parks are being targeted. The presence of Clark Reservation — aka Onondaga County’s “Other State Park” — on this speculative list is not really a surprise. Neither, unfortunately, is Bowman Lake down by Norwich. But just because I’m not surprised doesn’t mean I’m not mad about it.

I spent a surprisingly great three-day weekend down at Bowman back in August, and to me it represents everything that stands to be lost by closing parks rather than cutting back on hours and services or raising fees. Bowman Lake is a small, unspectacular body of water deep in the woods a few miles north and a couple minutes east of “you-can’t-get-there-from-here.” Nothing of historical significance seems to have happened here. The park’s campsites don’t offer electrical service, so wealthier vacationers in their giant RV’s don’t bother to show. This leaves the rest of us who still use modest pop-up trailers and (gasp!) tents. It’s camping like Mom used to make, even if the park itself is plain vanilla by New York standards.

What made my stay at Bowman Lake terrific was the people who ran it. It’s clear that this park is much loved by the people who maintain it and the campers who come back every year. I’ve hit dozens of state parks over the years for camping and needless to say, the quality of facilities and staffing can vary widely. Bowman, however, appears to have a dedicated squad of (local?) devotees who contribute to keeping the place neat. This is more than you can say for some of the more popular parks I’ve been to where the hired help has been ineffectual or even downright surly. (I won’t name names, but some of these parks are our so-called “jewels” of the system.)

Usually when I go camping I don’t really care much for sitting around in camp – I want to get out and see the natural attractions. Bowman isn’t the most photogenic park in New York, but that’s not its charm. Its charm is simply peace and quiet in the middle of nowhere. When I was there in August, the only exciting thing happening was preparations for a reception at the pavilion overlooking the lake. The family of the bride had just arrived and were joking about their “redneck wedding.” In Albany, they probably don’t see state parks as places where New Yorkers don’t just play, but also play out their lives.

I suspect that nowhere near 100 parks and sites will close, and that that number is just a trial balloon. State parks don’t have powerful unions to protect them. Everyone has their favorite parks, and that’s why the state isn’t telling us upfront what’s in danger. They want to divide and conquer – to pit more affluent New Yorkers and their parks against rural, perhaps less affluent New Yorkers and their parks.

New York’s state park system isn’t just a fancy amenity, or an afterthought as in other states (such as Arizona which has shamefully handled theirs). If the Adirondack Park, which is bound into our state constitution, represents the very idea of how people are supposed to work out living in the present and also keeping the land safe “to the seventh generation,” our state parks – which do not enjoy such constitutional protection – are the most immediate reflection of what danger that idea is really in. The state (and national?) park movement in many ways was invented in the Empire State. Now we are watching that idea coming undone. This is a universal political ground on which New Yorkers can and should fight together.

Further reading:

Soundpolitic: Throwing our state parks off the cliff
Officials worry about state park closings
No details on fate of Tompkins County parks
North Elba could take over John Brown farm

You would think, with all this snow falling on them, that New York City and other southern metro areas would be looking to the salt mines of our region to help provide more of their urgent road and sidewalk clearing needs. However, as this informative blog post reports, this is not the case at all. Find out why NYC imports its salt from Chile instead (and also a little more about where our local road salt comes from).

What? You want to read even more about snow removal? Google Books has a limited preview of Snow in the Cities: A History of America’s Urban Response, which mentions Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse throughout.

There is a tendency to view the destruction of James Street as inevitable civic change. Rusho breaks that idea on the rocks. She’s found clips from the 1950s that establish how James Street was targeted by a municipal plan that today seems absolutely mad. Indeed, even as our great landmarks were being razed, The Post-Standard of 1952 carried an article that mocked these “rambling homes, surrounded by acres of lawn (that) are of another era. People today don’t go in for big, ornate mansions. …”

It’s weird, but that’s pretty much what forward-thinking people say today about McMansions in the burbs! It’s an intriguing quote.

“What we see in the United States and some other economies is a statistical recovery and a human recession.”
–Larry Summers, Davos, January 30, 2009

“Of course; that was the intention. The stimulus money, QE, low rates, etc., etc, were geared toward goosing the stats. They were never directed toward middle or lower income individuals and reducing unemployment has not even been attempted. So now the stats are artificially inflated. Is the recession over? Of course not… it never was. This is 1936 with 1937 just around the corner.”
–A commenter on Calculated Risk

You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider ecomental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.

Not a new idea to me, but hopefully this article will bring it more exposure.

Andy Arthur (your expert blogger on the rural issues of eastern New York) has a thoughtful post up today about the physical, economic and social landscape where this sad event occurred. He points out that Copake is on the very front line between Upstate New York’s economic struggles and a rising tide of affluence coming ultimately from New York City (and Wall Street). It’s a line that used to lay much farther south. This is an on-the-ground situation which is still only abstract to us in other parts of Upstate, although became somewhat less abstract to more people during the regional anti-NYRI protests. Here’s a story about a “farm” (also in Copake, and on the same road as the farm with the 51 cows) that is not really a farm, but apparently a construction-debris dumping ground. With the advance of development-crazy newcomers, Columbia County farms are bearing some strange fruit.

Speaking of dumping — and closer to home — residents of the Town of Camillus’ Golden Meadows subdivision (a homedebtors farm?) are only just realizing how Honeywell has successfully managed to turn the Onondaga Lake sludge-dumping cleanup plan into a fait accompli. This is the same plan that the Onondaga Nation and other local activists have been vocally opposing for several years, but the residents of Golden Meadows seem not to have heard about it. I lost some nice neighbors a couple years ago to the lure of Golden Meadows, and I’m guessing they’re feeling like they’ve had the rug pulled out from under them; they probably didn’t think the waste beds would ever see use again, or were not warned. The sad thing is that if only the Nation, the local activist friends of the Nation, and the residents of the Town of Camillus had connected with each other a few years ago, they could have made a much more effective bloc to demand a better examination of the cleanup issues.

“Divide and conquer” still works, however. It works particularly well here, because some people don’t want to consider that while they may be in different boats, they are still riding down the same river. Simply put, the Camillus situation illustrates perfectly something I’ve been trying to imperfectly express for years: we here in Upstate New York are all “indigenous” now in the eyes of certain other people. We are seen as being as exploitable and disposable as the other natural resources on the land we occupy, whether it is over in Copake or over in Camillus. We’re becoming invisible. The people from the corporations, and maybe the second-home owners too (who are probably more intimately bound up with the interests of corporations than those who can’t afford second homes), tend not to consider “the locals” to be people, any more than the land speculators of the 18th and 19th centuries thought that the Haudenosaunee were people. No, they’re not evil, but they are losing their sight. All natives of this region, regardless of cultural background or skin color (but particularly those with brown skin, and also people of any color with farming or working-class backgrounds), are “removable.” How did this change in identity happen? I don’t know. But I do know that our historical ignorance and pride keeps us from acknowledging this new reality.

I’m not a second-home-owner who works for a Wall Street corporation (although I currently serve them) and I have never been able to think like they do. They see things differently. We’re not all the same people. But the even more ironic thing is that the second-home-owners are desperately seeking authenticity by (usually unconsciously) sweeping away the actual authentic culture (the indigenous peoples of all kinds, from the native nations to the farmers to the factory workers) and building artificial, pretend versions in their place. Yet their desire for cultural authenticity never seems to be sated, and they use their affluence to travel the world seeking it, creating “ideal communities” Upstate, or clearing out cities for gentrification, or buying dead factories to make shrines for art that strives to get them back in touch with the “authentic.” They’re always chasing the indigenous peoples away — but in the end, they’re always chasing after them.

What an absurd cycle. Does it have to be this way? And does there have to be conflict? The Two Row Wampum says no. It seems to me the indigenous peoples of today’s upstate regions, and the “new people” from elsewhere (I mean the affluent, not the immigrant), ought to work out a new agreement. But such an agreement won’t happen if we don’t have any good local leaders to articulate and respond to what is actually happening.

CNY is handcuffed to WNY in this scenario, but I suppose worse things could happen. The name seems well chosen (resonating with Lake Erie as well as the Erie Canal), although the northern boundaries ignore CNY’s current media market, which does so much to foster a sense of regional identity. I’m not sure if the North Country belongs with “Northern New England,” but maybe it does.

In all of my experience, communities — of people and animals — form instantaneously and rather effortlessly, based on a commonality of interests and needs. What takes a lot of work is not organizing communities, but preventing them from organizing — through the use of truncheons and tear gas, or evictions and mass imprisonment, or, more recently, more subtle and ultimately more successful techniques of the consumerist political economy… How representative a democracy the US ever was is rather beside the point; the point is, it was once a country where people could successfully and openly self-organize, and now it isn’t. Once there were strong, cohesive communities in the US, which could organize and bring pressure to bear on their elected officials. And now… there are no such strong, cohesive communities in the US, and so… they can’t organize, because, I would think, there is nothing for them to organize. Existence of communities allows communities to organize; lack of community prevents communities from organizing.

Thoughts?

It would be brutally honest about the weaknesses of New York City’s Wall Street-driven economy and cautionary about how long that particular economic engine can continue to support an entire state.

And then it would speak equally honestly about how this numb overreliance on New York City has damaged the bedrock of our economy, stunted its growth and sense of purpose as a (however loose) community, and ultimately has contributed to the diaspora of our well-educated young people, many of whom would really rather remain here near their families and friends than in the sticky, ant-infested South.

It would ask, “Do Upstate people really want to continue existing like this under this system? Can we do better with a different system?” And then it might suggest some achievable near-term goals for more Upstate autonomy within the current political system we have in Albany.

Don’t look to Michael Nozzolio for a real manifesto on Upstate independence, as he’s clearly not politically capable of it. (Never send a boy to do a man’s job.) Look for new candidates who are politically capable of saying these things.

View Larger Map

Keep driving north. Run the red light. You’ll find it.

(Note: This is only for those who have exhausted the entertainment possibilities of the Zombie Outbreak Simulator.)

New York State is home to an estimated 60,000 back office jobs. The Paterson Administration will focus on expanding the State’s back office opportunities by making Upstate New York the preferred back office for corporate America. There is no denying that we have the workforce, space and livable communities to support these office operations throughout Upstate New York.

For those of us with unglamorous back office careers in Upstate New York — getting up dutifully, eating our thin morning gruel, slogging through the snow each dawn to serve our daily 9 to 5 sentences — it’s comforting to know that soon we’ll be joined by thousands of economic refugees eager to compete with us for our Bartleby the Scrivener jobs. Because you know, in all seriousness, the Creative Class b.s. was getting hard to stomach (even the Creative Class itself can no longer stand it). Nice to see that our governor isn’t into selling snake oil either.

However, if this is what the governor means by “back office operations,” I really must protest:

When Tobias “Bags of Money” Boyland went looking for a new career after serving 13 years in prison for armed robbery and drug dealing, he quickly found something that suited his sensibilities: He opened a collection agency.

It was, in some ways, a natural move for a young man in Buffalo. Desperate for jobs, this chronically depressed Rust Belt city has become home to one of the biggest concentrations of debt collection businesses in the U.S. “Collections is the Bethlehem Steel of Buffalo,” said Boyland, 44, recalling the industrial giant that once employed 20,000 people in the region. “You can make a decent living in a town where there isn’t a lot of opportunity.”

Yet, law enforcement and consumer groups point to a dark side: Buffalo, they say, has also become a center for some of the worst elements in the business. Debt collectors, some of them convicted felons, have illegally posed as lawyers or unlawfully browbeat people — threatening to have them arrested or stripped of custody of their children — to scare them into making payments.

“Get some clean clothes because you’re not coming home any time soon,” one debtor was told.

Such a deal! Wall Street gets to remain the head of the business operation, while way way on the opposite end of the state, Buffalo gets to be its asshole. (As for the new revival of “Upstate’s traditional manufacturing industries,” as Paterson mentioned in his plan, there certainly will be an increased need for brass knuckles and tire irons.)

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it actually does. Wow. Why are we staying with this guy? Maybe the plan is not so bad. Is it?

The only other thing Paterson had to say about Upstate was highlighting Buffalo as the starting point for a Sustainable Neighborhoods Project:

“There is no other region of the country with the affordable housing stock, the close-by schools, the natural beauty and the untouched small towns that families would cherish.”

Yes, after a long hard day on the phone chain-smoking and threatening to take people’s kids away, you too can go home to your picket fence.

Oh, and he also mentioned the Erie Canal. Gotta do that, or else it doesn’t count as a State of the State.

Help.

It seems to me that many children are unable to leave due to the economy, but I’m not sure how many are returning. Maybe young Mr. Caliva’s message will be best received by people like young Mr. Tryt.

10. Senate seat follies. The controversy over Hillary Clinton’s vacant job – how long ago it all seems! Technically an end-of-2008 story, the hoo-hah spilled over into 2009 as David Paterson’s predictably lousy year (see last year’s #1 New York story) began with fear and loathing over the allegedly carpetbagging Caroline Kennedy and the nerve he had appointing Kirsten Gillibrand – who’s turned out to be, all things considered, a pretty shrewd and competent choice.

9. American Civic Association mass shooting in Binghamton. The second of two tragic events (after the Colgan Air crash in Clarence Center) that struck Upstate New York early this year which brought national news attention of the most unwelcome and regrettable kind. There once was a sort of pleasant imagination that we had here in quiet New York State that this was not the sort of place where these things happen. And there is just something ineffably sad about immigrants being shot by another immigrant in a “land of promise,” where they were supposed to be safe from violence they could have been fleeing in their home countries.

8. Joe Bruno’s conviction. Why isn’t this one higher up on the list? The blessed event was such a long time coming, after all. But to me his conviction has all the dramatic impact of a wet fart. Or maybe it’s just the cold wind blowing through the empty stable after the horses have already escaped. The only thing his conviction will change is the style by which Albany’s finest operate. (I still think he should help the state out and make some collectors’ license plates, though.)

7. Authority reform passes. A not very sexy story from Albany but one of the very few positive measures to come out of there in a while, signed into law earlier this month. It’s the Feel-Good Story of the Year! (the Bigger Better Bottle Bill being the runner-up). At long last, Richard Brodsky gets his pet issue in the spotlight (and there’s once again been some talk that he might run for AG if Cuomo goes for governor.)

Okay, no more feel-good stories.

6. The Marcellus Shale. Exit NYRI stage left, enter hydrofracking stage right. Again we have an environmental story that is only getting widespread state media attention because the potential health of New York City’s water supply is involved, but one can hardly complain. Because this story isn’t going away, I hope to be able to rank it closer to the top 3 next year. It’s that serious of an issue and again – anyone in Onondaga County who thinks this doesn’t affect them needs to look a little closer at the maps. The confluence of a state economic crisis and leasable state forest lands could make for a (literally) sickening future.

5. Gay marriage defeated. As someone on my Twitter list tweeted, wasn’t it truly bizarre to listen to the state Senate actually debating and orating over something of substance? Except it was unfortunately a very one-sided debate, since those Republican senators opposed to gay marriage opted not to get up and actually speak. We all lose when this lack of real public debate happens. To their credit, gay marriage activists have not been taking culture-war potshots in the wake of their disappointing defeat but have been trying to figure out what they did wrong.

4. The “conservative rebellion” in NY-23. Okay, I lied, this is one last feel-good story: a truly comic episode in which bemused, flattered and then irritated North Country voters hosted some very strange guests, all under the glare of the Fox News lights. It was their moment in the spotlight and they did not disappoint anyone who knows and loves Upstate New York’s Republicans, sending the outsiders fleeing with their tails between their legs to declare “victory!” and withdraw. (The national conservatives may have energized a few of their North Country sympathizers, but the fact remains that there is no organizational infrastructure to support a prolonged national GOP assault on Upstate. “Waterloo” or “Stalingrad” comes to mind here.)

3. The Senate coup. I have to be honest: I’ve mostly erased the details of this from my mind. I sometimes even have trouble recalling if this happened this year or last year. See? We don’t even need Joe Bruno any more to keep the slime und drang going.

2. New York’s population loss slows…

1. …but New Yorkers are the unhappiest people in the Nation. Does it get any worse, or more important, than this?

(For reference, here is the 2007 list and the 2008 list. You can also see Phil’s top Syracuse stories of 2009 at Still Racing in the Street.)

Just pausing for a quick farewell to the family car of my childhood. Back in the ’70s, Saab didn’t have such a yuppified reputation, and was just a weird European brand that few people drove. My dad thought they were very cool, however, and from the mid ’70s onward the family car was always a Saab — first, an orange ’74 sedan, then a silver ’75 EMS (whose name was “Emily”), and finally a red ’83 900. During the ’70s, you could cross the entire country in this car (and we did) and not see another one on the road. (If you encountered another one, there would be friendly honking of horns and flashing of lights – all Saab owners knew the code.) Financial circumstances forced us to get cheaper, more ordinary cars after that, but it was just as well, since Saab got picked up by GM and turned into a not terribly distinguished brand that was marketed as a Beemer wannabee.

Time drives on…

The Zombie Outbreak Simulator represents a new leap forward in zombie attack prediction in that it superimposes the action on a Google satellite photo/map of a real Washington, D.C. suburb. You can observe the progress of zombie infections in the area and see which streets and neighborhoods get taken over first. And also where specific buildings, physical barriers, or armed civilians and cops are having an effect. (Er, not a whole lot of effect, actually.)

If someone can do this with zombies, why can’t we plug in all sorts of data and factors having to do with decline of Rust Belt cities, flip the switch and see what happens? I’m serious. Obviously we wouldn’t be tracking zombies, but would be tracking the comings and goings (well, mostly goings) of various demographics and businesses, as well as local and national economic and political developments and initiatives — then waiting to see which houses’ lights go dark and which historical landmark buildings go “poof.” We would get a reasonable prediction of exactly where the changes would take place decades in the future. And it would take a lot less time and effort than actually sitting around and waiting for it to unfold.

Then, once you’ve got the algorithm going, you could program in new variables drawn from the strategies of your favorite urbanist thinkers or Syracuse.com commentariat cranks. Would anything new and interesting happen? Well, that would be the suspense of the game.

It could be, however, that the Urban Blight Simulator would just leave you staring at it listlessly and obsessively for days or years on end, turning you into a meta-zombie (as the Zombie Outbreak Simulator has an odd tendency to do) with its strange fascination. I think that’s a risk we’ll have to take.

Some of the commenters (see this thread for details) have come up with a brilliant three-in-one plan to rescue New York from its deficit, ease the public acceptance of the hated new Empire Gold plate, and give Joe Bruno gainful employment, all at the same time.

(Personalization is free, but for an extra $50 a year you can get the Bobblehead Edition, shown above.)

The jury entered the courtroom at 4:16 p.m. and as they retunred a not guilty verdict on the first two counts and no verdict on the third count, the mood among supporters of Mr. Bruno who were in attendance became euphoric. But when the jury declared guilty on the fourth count the mood quickly turned. Mr. Bruno became visibly deflated and his normally upright frame sagged.

Mr. Bruno faces up to 20 years and a $250,000 fine on each felony count. He is sure to appeal, and the Supreme Court is preparing to review the controversial “theft of honest services” statute underlying his case.

And speaking of Big Men and “honest services“…

Well, it was tough enough for my parents as voting Democrats to rely on them for a little while — imagine how tough it is for government-scorning Republican parents to swallow their pride, use the cards, and then go right back to cursing government programs once they get back on their feet. Cognitive dissonance requires a lot of effort to maintain.

The Times story breaks down statistics county-by-county. If the need for (and not the actual use of) the food stamp program is embarrassing, Onondaga County has the dubious distinction of being the county where the highest percentage of black residents are using the program. The ratio of black to white food stamp recipients (percentagewise) also seems to be most imbalanced here, and in Rochester. The total percentage of food stamp recipients (of any race or age) has gone up 33% in Onondaga County over the past two years. That isn’t as bad as some counties and boroughs downstate, but compared with the other major upstate metro areas, it’s a significantly greater change than in Rochester and Buffalo.

The article notes that food stamp usage in better-off “white” communities (like suburban Atlanta) is soaring. Twenty years from now, other middle-class Americans will be confessing this family secret and recalling “food stamp days.”

I’m wondering if police would simply put out Wanted posters for specific weapons, they might succeed in getting some of them off the streets. And I wonder if publicly listing the names of the former non-criminal dealers and owners might be worthwhile. Not fair? Well, let’s trace the whole story of these guns and the culture that loves them, and see what comes up. It would also be interesting if notorious weapons became more notorious than the people (criminal or otherwise) who are attracted to wielding them for whatever reason.

This rebellion seems to be a little more serious and widespread than the usual recalcitrant conservative county clerks, so we’ll see what happens. As for the design, more than one person I’ve talked to said they would willingly pay extra for the privilege of not having to use the new plates.

How appropriate… since we’re already headed back to the economy of the mid-1970s.

(I gotta confess: I’ve missed the blue and gold.)

Updated: BuffaloPundit is right…

Feel the excitement!

Our newly elected mayor has inherited a sick city. It’s been declining in most measures of urban health for a long time. There’s some disagreement as to whether it is really sick, or just old. Over the past few years, my concern about the various plans and pushes to heal Syracuse have had to do with the Richard Florida stuff that is highly theoretical – the whole “creative classism worked in Pittsburgh, so it should work everywhere, except in those cities which ought to go into the dustbin because they don’t respond to our theory.” While some would say that the Richard Florida view is “scientific method” based (hey, they’ve used other cities as laboratories), I wonder if it’s not just a big hunk of intuition that is off the rails, masquerading as scientific urban-renewal practice.

Syracuse stubbornly refuses to respond to grand, intricately and intuitively plotted plans for its recovery. Who could have expected that the new football coach would also suck, and that LeMoyne would beat the Orange basketball team on top of it? Who could have predicted that artists buying rundown houses for $1 in the Near West Side colonization effort would have their doors kicked in by well-meaning policemen with a healthy regard for ferocious Pomeranians? Who could have imagined that every time we resolve to hold a winter festival in the snowiest city in America, it doesn’t actually snow?

Yet we seem surprised by Syracuse’s complexity, every time. (Never mind being surprised by the complexity of the larger world of which it is part. Hoocoodanode that the housing-bubble-fueled economy would someday tank, leaving Citi reluctant to lend more money to a dodgy supermall?)

I am not sure if we need more intuition, or more scientific method, in our treatment of a uniquely sick city.

Also as of this writing, it looks like Republicans are sweeping all those races which are supposed to be a referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency. If Hoffman squeaks out a win in the 23rd district, I do hope NY Democrats are red-faced. I honestly have not been following this race closely and haven’t been reading the national coverage to see if any of the more astute political writers have bothered to study the regional-alienation angle as a factor (homely Upstate voters gladly taking the sweaty GOPcon hand at the big dance).

I was downtown to see the Turner to Cezanne show at the Everson last weekend. I heartily recommend it to anyone and everyone. I like art, but even if you aren’t artsy, you really owe it to yourself to be in the presence of these amazing works – there is something for everyone. You can even see one of Vincent Van Gogh’s final paintings, completed shortly before he tragically killed himself in 1890. I am probably going to even go see it again before it leaves after Christmas. Sean Kirst commented (can’t remember where, either on his blog or Facebook which I don’t think you can link to) that there were all sorts of cool things going on downtown this past weekend – the art exhibit, the horse show, etc. Notice that none of these events were connected to the University in any way. Hmmm.

Sean and Phil bring up Facebook. I still don’t enjoy Facebook as much as my friends and family seem to. I find it constraining and visually dull – no good for personal expression (unless you take those goofy quizzes that Facebook uses to gather data on your likes and dislikes, which they sell to advertisers). I feel like a wild animal not taking well to domestication. I can’t say I’m surprised at my reaction. Maybe this online “schism” says more about who we really are as personalities than we’d care to admit. And as Merlin said in the movie Excalibur, (and I quote),

“The days of our kind are numbered. The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits of wood and stream grow silent. It’s the way of things.”

Facebook is turning into the One God of the Internet. I maintain an outpost there, but it won’t ever be my virtual “home,” I’m afraid. (PS: Unfortunately if anyone tries to contact me via my Facebook inbox, your message is likely to go undiscovered for weeks. Sorry! I will try to do better.)

Onondaga County’s second oldest “mallspace” is 50 years old today. It opened on October 28, 1959. It may also be the only area shopping center that has a band named after it. (That’s actually not so weird: back in the ’60s, live bands did play there occasionally.)

Fairmount Fair was originally part of the large estate held by the Geddes family from 1796, but was sold off sometime in the early 20th century to the Terry family. Old topographical maps reveal that a horse racetrack once occupied the spot. By the time housing development began in earnest in the mid-50′s, it was a vacant lot where blackberries grew. In 1956, Eagan began developing the space for an open-air shopping plaza to be anchored by an Acme grocery. This was being done in tandem with their “Terrytown” housing development just above on the hill (where shoppers for the mall would be incubated in “Soylent Green” fashion).

Above is a view of Fairmount Fair in its earliest days. This view looks west toward Onondaga Road (where Target is today) and you can see the Acme grocery, as well as a fountain which later was included in the enclosed version of the mall better known to children of the ’70s and ’80s.

Fairmount Fair (still sporting its original name, though not its original signage) seems to be doing quite well in something like its third or fourth rejiggering since the dark days of the Syracuse area mall crash, (where the older Shoppingtown is currently being ignored by its owner, Macerich). It’s been through some bad times: drug deals sometimes went down in the parking lot, and the old mall building was reported to be sinking during the ’90s.

It’s not a place where someone would think to build a new mall today, but its small footprint (it is hemmed in on all sides by roads, streams and unbuildable topography) has probably contributed more than anything else to its longevity as a retail space. It’s not a space that can be overbuilt into sprawl. Fairmount Fair also benefits from a plum location bang off the Route 5 exit. It’s also one of a vanishing breed – a thriving shopping plaza that many local residents can walk to, on actual sidewalks.

There don’t seem to be any formal plans by current owners Benderson to note the anniversary – but in a way, none are really needed. It’s no secret that of Benderson’s two west surbuban properties (the other is Camillus Commons), Fairmount Fair got the better facelift and the cooler stores. It is certainly entering its sixth decade in style.

The socioeconomic ramifications of Fairmount Fair, of course, are also fascinating and I’ll leave those for another post (and another chapter in my ongoing Compleat History of Fairmount) – in the meantime I recommend SyracuseB4 for further reading.

Whatever activities a hierarchy undertakes initially to bond a population to itself… often thereafter becomes de rigueur, so that further bonding activities are at higher cost, with little or no additional benefit to the hierarchy. The appeasement of urban mobs presents the classic illustration of this principle. Any level of activities undertaken to appease such populations – the bread and circuses syndrome – eventually becomes the expected minimum. An increase in the cost of bread and circuses, which seems to have been required in Imperial Rome to legitimize such things as the accession of a new ruler or his continued reign, may bring no increased return beyond a state of non-revolt.

–Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Actually, the people with the real power would be those Senators named to the committee to consider Monserrate’s booting. This committee will be announced in Albany tomorrow.

These waves of popular opinion that never crest, have in the past simply just appeared to melt away harmlessly. I don’t believe that’s true, and I even think that if Monserrate is ejected as an example to others, it’s too little, too late. I think the uncrested waves are still under the surface and building into some kind of massive undertow that will only become apparent years from now.

I admit I’m just finding it very, very hard to care about any of this stuff any more. I’m not feeling the urgency, because it’s all just blending into one pointless dream of good government deferred. The New York Times is still flogging “Throw all the bums out,” but it seems no matter what you do, someone else has more money and influence than you. I don’t even know who the hell Monserrate’s constituents are. For all I know, they are just cool with the idea of slapping their girlfriends around. Why do these scumbags keep getting elected? They’re obviously making someone all tingly for some reason.

But, here’s my feeble attempt to help at least one wave crest:

I wouldn’t mind getting some nice pictures from a different park this weekend, but in the meantime, why not continue to worship perfection? Here again (with some newly added items at the end) is my ode to the greatness that was October 11, 2008.

On a personal note, I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark 14 times in the theater (a major Harrison Ford crush playing out in an era before home video) and spent the entire next year eagerly waiting and hoping and wishing to see Blade Runner. Then I found out Blade Runner was rated R and that there was no way in hell I’d be allowed to see it even once, much less 14 times. This is sometimes what happens to our great expectations.

This is the result of the Eva M. Walsh Memorial Experimental Potato Station, 2009.

I’m astounded at Mother Nature’s capacity to take my abuse. I honestly thought someone was screwing with my head when I dug these up, and had bought potatoes at the store and secretly buried them when I wasn’t paying attention (which was, like, all the time). I know potatoes are supposed to be easy to grow, but I’m just a serial plant killer.

Anyhow, I’m mentioning this partly to draw attention to a new comment I’ve received on the old Who killed the Genesee? thread. I’ve reprinted the comment below.

While researching for the Kallet Genesee page at Cinema Treasures, I came across a couple of bits of information not mentioned above that might interest you. The April 1, 1950, issue of Boxoffice Magazine published a rendering of the proposed Genesee Theatre by its architect, Michael J. DeAngelis. Construction began later that year. Albanese Brothers built the building, and it was operated under lease by Kallet Theatres.

I’ve been unable to find the exact opening date for the Genesee, but the March 14 issue of Boxoffice said that the theater had recently opened.

Michael DeAngelis was a Rochester architect who designed many theaters from the 1920s into the 1950s, some as far away as Florida, though I’ve been able to track down the names of only a few. His page at Cinema Treasures currently lists a mere dozen.

I’ve been unable to find out anything about Albanese Brothers, but it’s likely that they were a local firm of builders and developers in Syracuse.

Scans of Boxoffice Magazine and its predecessors are currently available at issuu.com, and there are many articles and brief items about upstate New York theaters, some going back to the mid-1920s. If you’re interested in the subject this is a good place to search for information about it. I’ve found it easier to search through Google than through Issuu’s own search box, though.

–Joe Vogel

If I was leader of the free universe and had a zillion dollars, I would buy the Genesee Theater space, rebuild the theater and show nothing but quality sci-fi from all film eras, starting with Forbidden Planet, maybe doing it Alamo Drafthouse style.

Our year and a half spent interviewing the more than 200 young people who had attended the town’s high school in the late 1980s and early 1990s led us to categorize our young Iowans according to the defining traits of where their lives had taken them by their 20s and 30s. The largest group, approximately 40 percent, consisted of the working-class “stayers,” struggling in the region’s dying agro-industrial economy; about one in five became the collegebound “achievers,” who often left for good; just 10 percent included the “seekers” who join the military to see what the world beyond offers; and the rest were the “returners,” who eventually circled back to their hometowns, only a small number of whom were professionals we call “high fliers.” What surprised us most was that adults in the community were playing a pivotal part in the town’s decline by pushing the best and brightest young people to leave, and by underinvesting in those who chose to stay, even though it was the latter that were the towns’ best chance for a future…

Small towns need to equalize their investments across different groups of young people. While it would be impractical, and downright wrong, to abort students’ ambitions, there must be a radical rethinking of the goals of high-school education. The single-minded focus on pushing the most motivated students into four-year colleges must be balanced by efforts to match young people not headed for bachelor’s degrees with training, vocational, and assorted associate-degree programs. Those programs fill the needs of a postindustrial economy but acknowledge that not every student wants to, or will, pursue a more traditional college path.

So, what kind of education are we “Saying Yes” to here exactly?

We live in a marvelous Internet age where we don’t even have to let on what color or gender we are if we don’t want to. I truthfully tell anyone who asks, that I don’t know what possessed me to choose the particular screen name I use. But why I have largely stuck with it is no mystery. It has seemed convenient not to completely get rid of it (except amongst those I trust). There is a different tone to online political conversation when people think you are this gender or that. And I know this contention is not going to sit well with some other women, but ask yourself who the original influential female political blogger was and I think you’ll say “that Digby guy.” Times have changed, or so they say, which is why my view on that may seem anachronistic, or my perceptions mistaken. Plus, much like it is bad form for a black politician to mention racism, it is bad form for a woman blogger to mention sexism.

So we need a respected white guy like Jimmy Carter to point out these things for us. I do respect Carter a lot and, having read some of his autobiographical books, I believe he is sincere and knowledgeable about our common American experiences with racism and politics. I believe there are racist and sexist implications in everything we all do and say, and it is hard to pin down because it is all about perception; but I also believe it is worth pinning down because perception becomes practice, and practice becomes policy.

One more word on sexism before I turn to the “race card.” It really hurts when you perceive that a friend or even a close relative is, in your view, on the other side of that perceptual fence. “Sexism” is such an ugly clumsy word, too, implying a system of beliefs rather than just a system of perceptions. Plus, it may just be your perception of someone else’s perception, stirring doubt and guilt. So who even wants to use the word in polite company? Isn’t it really bad form to mention, shouldn’t we just let it go in the name of longterm amity and in the words of Lincoln on his vision of the gradual abolition of slavery, slowly and gently “living out our old relations to one another”?

Two more different political figures than Paterson and Obama can hardly be imagined. Paterson wears his intelligence on his sleeve, and he has complained openly before — not just about racism, but about discrimination against the handicapped, and he should know. For all of the consternation about Joe Wilson’s untoward outburst toward Obama, Paterson has been the target of some really low jokes and smears related to his disability, which I felt he was right to stand up against (who would do it for him?) I’ve sort of admired him for that, really, since the sinking sensation of not knowing how to tell your friends (much less your enemies) that you’re bothered by something they’ve said, feels very much like a suffocating gag going into the mouth. When you speak up, you defy the gag.

The Obama approach, which is not to wear it all on one’s sleeve, also has its advantages, if you can get used to the taste of the gag without panicking, or wait for a more auspicious moment when you have more power to make your point. Easier to do when you are the latest incarnation of POTUS, the President Of The United States. But, how does one turn off one’s consciousness of the gag? The gag isn’t put there by Joe Wilson or any particular person or even political group. The conscious person senses that something else much bigger than the individual is running this show. We talk about racism and sexism, accuse each other of it, question our own feelings about it, but somehow never get close to it and it just seems to continue on as an objective reality. The consciousness of it hurts, but we are powerless to do anything about it but speak up, cry, scream, accuse… or deny, minimize, ignore, put off… It’s real, but we just can’t grasp it.

As for the levers we can grasp… Paterson isn’t going to win re-election (well, never say never, but some awfully weird things would have to happen first), but he seems more an overwhelmed player in a crumbling political edifice, the Democratic Party of New York, or even the whole elegant political system of New York, or New York itself. Why we are in this situation now seems a little clearer: Spitzer’s election was a sign of the weakness of the edifice, not of its strength. He was a barbarian at the gate, a strong personality with no real roots in an aging political system being run (at the time) by just a handful of old men. He chose a flawed but admirable man (like himself, I guess) as his running mate, and things snowballed from there. Paterson wouldn’t follow the script (erm… was there a script?), complaining about stuff and then (apparently) committing the terrible sin of picking Kirsten Gillibrand over the marginally qualified Caroline Kennedy, but that’s just my opinion.

And here we are, with POTUS telling “one of his own” not to run. Here, in the great Democratic state of New York. Even knowing full well that New York’s ridiculously late primary is a prime cause for potential chaos, I don’t know how I feel about that.

I wonder if Obama is still going to make the trek up to Malta Troy, a rare Upstate appearance for POTUS. What will the local birthers and tea baggers and town hall hecklers be more annoyed about: health care, or Obama’s perceived meddling in New York politics? I’m wondering how this visit is even going to help anything – anything at all, for anyone. Is it going to make any sort of difference at all? For anything? I’m very doubtful. But I suspect Obama will come anyway. And so it goes.

There is no better time to check out the flowers than this time of year. One last explosion of color amid all the serious business of going to seed and dying. I like to think of it as the pre-game special before the big October show.

Well, no. You still can’t find anything on Wikipedia about Stanislaw Kaszynski, the municipal official who was executed by the Nazis for trying to tell the world about what was going on at the Chelmno death camp in his jurisdiction.

Nor can you find much of anything on Wikipedia about the fascinating life and times of Upstate NY’s own Seth Concklin, who (among his other exploits) went down into Alabama to rescue a slave family during the height of tensions over the Fugitive Slave Law.

And until very recently, you couldn’t read anything on Wikipedia about Father Gerald Fitzgerald, who took no prisoners when it came to exposing and trying to deal with abusive priests in 1950s New Mexico. (This has since been rectified, but only after the New York Times printed his letters.)

The stories of the world: still a lot left to tell.

I saw the film last weekend and liked it a lot (with reservations), enough to want to see it again in a theater at some point. It isn’t the greatest movie ever made, and is sometimes so unconventional as to be disorienting (quite a few people have reported walking out on it for various reasons). But I think in years to come, it will be remembered among a select group of recent sci-fi such as ALIEN (the original), BLADE RUNNER and THE TERMINATOR and also non-Hollywood notables like MAD MAX (the original). If you haven’t seen it, go in with an open mind, a lot of patience and a strong stomach, and you may be rewarded.

The movie is also attracting a lot of attention because of its resonance with past and current events in South African society. The Canadian director grew up in S.A. and the lead actor is South African; the movie was filmed on location in the worst slums of Johannesburg. Although no explicit parallels are made, the commentary on apartheid and refugees is unmistakable. (There are even some controversial elements involving Nigerian characters which seem to have their roots more in modern-day South African xenophobia about newcomers than in overt stereotyping of Africans, but your judgment on this may be different.) What you have here is a sci-fi action movie that is completely informed by its real-life setting — passionately crafted by people who know and love their country and its great questions and struggles, confidently sharing what they know with the rest of the moviegoing world.

Why can’t Syracuse’s arts be more like this?

Every nation, society or even city, is cursed (or blessed) with some great unanswered question or complexity it is trying to work out in its own way. The greatest questions have to do with how we treat each other. Syracuse is also unique in that sense. Aside from the more familiar questions of what to do with a declining city and its people, a question many Rust Belt cities share, we also have our fingers more firmly on the faint pulse of America’s real original sin – the tragic relationship between Natives and the West. I can’t think of any other American city, large or small, that really does. We’re hardly close enough, but I believe we are the closest.

I sometimes think that public art in Syracuse is, as Isaac Newton said, more about “playing by the seashore [with] a few pebbles while the whole vast ocean of truth stretches out almost untouched.” I wonder where the muralists, sculptors, playwrights and filmmakers are, why we don’t seem to have an artistic consciousness that actually expresses who WE are, where we’ve been and where we are going in a non-generic way – a way that the rest of the world might actually sit up and take notice of. I don’t blame anyone for this – just expressing frustration.

Am I missing something going on here in Syracuse? I possibly am. But I worry that we are so obsessed with being cool that we’ve forgotten to be real.

But as always in California, boom times came again. During the 1990s, Moreno Valley became one of the fastest-growing cities in America, and it now has 190,000 residents.

I have never even heard of this place, and it’s about 50,000 people bigger than Syracuse. It’s just another one of those Rip van Winkle moments where you get a comprehension of how full the West has become while you were sleeping. In decades past, the West was a place where nearly everyone had a past residence or ties (within a few generations) to the East. But now we have entire generations of Americans who live in the West who know nothing else, their parents know nothing else, they don’t know anything besides low-density suburban development and “cities” that have no center.

We’re not all living in the same America.

One morning last week, I clicked on Syracuse.com to read yet another report about an unidentified cyclist who didn’t survive such a crash. I got a nervous call from my mom about it. I reassured her that there was no way my father would be on Route 11 in Hastings at 7 in the morning. After I hung up I suddenly had terrible second thoughts. I remembered that he had been anxious to take his bike in for an inspection. Maybe his inspection shop was in Central Square…? Coming from Mexico, where he lives, he would have to take Route 11. Maybe he wanted to get an early start…? Feeling silly I called his phone. It went straight to voice mail. And kept going there. Was his phone just being recharged, or…?

Well, after a horrible half hour of this he finally left a message on my phone (yes, his was being recharged). Unfortunately, some other guy’s family got terrible news that day.

My dad is 70 and has been riding since he was a teenager. He still rides several times a week and considers his Kawasaki Ninja to be his primary form of transportation. He went out to Seattle on this bike a few years ago and recently rode it back from Florida. Obviously, you don’t live to be 70 after decades of riding if you don’t strive to be a safe and sensible rider. Despite the bad reputation of a relatively few bikers (speeding, popping wheelies, antagonizing cops and the like), there are many more guys (and gals) who are just trying to get around efficiently. Why some people believe that motorcycle riders are second-class citizens is beyond me. The average motorcycle rider is very likely a safer and more serious driver than your average car driver.

Despite this, my dad is pretty fatalistic and he believes that if he is going to die while riding, it will happen exactly as it happened earlier this week to the two unfortunate riders who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone will turn in front of him. If chance is involved, after decades of riding the odds of it finally happening to him are getting bigger too. You can have the best safety gear, be completely alert and have a flashing neon bike the size of a Gold Wing on steroids, but there is not much you can do when an SUV driver decides to pull out in front of you. The sad part is that nobody wakes up in the morning and says “I’d like to kill a motorcyclist today.” They just don’t take that extra 2 seconds to make sure there isn’t one there. (Do any of us?)

I am not a bumpersticker kind of person but I am now making an exception. If even one person sees the message while stopped behind me at a red light, and remembers to take those extra 2 seconds, someone’s life might be saved.

This past weekend I took a camping trip down to Bowman Lake, a remote state park in the middle of Chenango County. There really isn’t much to see at Bowman Lake, which makes it the perfect place to relax and do nothing. Nowhere is usually a challenge to get to, however, and Bowman is the epitome of “you can’t get there from here” (and even more so when you are stuck behind a slow-moving manure truck). Even if you take the more direct route out, toward Route 12 (rather than 81), you are still going through an awful lot of “nothing.”

Stopped on top of a big hill outside of a small, lonely cemetery on a foggy morn, it really struck me how nature has us surrounded everywhere, even though we may assume otherwise. Even our bigger cities and towns in relatively civilized Upstate NY are merely smallish island outposts surrounded by vast fields of chirping crickets, nodding wildflowers, and untended shrubbery. And you will get very wet, dirty and itchy very fast if you venture even a few yards away from the pavement.

All of it going on day and night, year after year, not caring one bit about anything good or bad that goes on in Syracuse, Albany or even way far away in powerful New York City.

Though the wilderness available to me had shrunk to a mere green scrap of its former enormousness, though so much about childhood had changed in the years between the days of young George Washington’s adventuring on his side of the Potomac and my own suburban exploits on mine, there was still a connectedness there, a continuum of childhood. Eighteenth-century Virginia, twentieth-century Maryland, tenth-century Britain, Narnia, Neverland, Prydain—it was all the same Wilderness. Those legendary wanderings of Boone and Carson and young Daniel Beard (the father of the Boy Scouts of America), those games of war and exploration I read about, those frightening encounters with genuine menace, far from the help or interference of mother and father, seemed to me at the time—and I think this is my key point—absolutely familiar to me…

The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations—Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armored as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.

I’ll cut to the chase – past the arguments about crime statistics – and say that I think this trend is going to somewhat reverse, for some. As some American families and towns fall out of affluence over the coming years, there will be less time and energy to keep the kids away from the Wilderness — for better, or for worse.

TJ Edwards of Cinema Sightlines is also looking for more old photos of the theater. See his comment at the original post for more.

His latest post is about the Syracuse Common Council races and perennial multi-seat candidate Howie Hawkins.

The Syracuse mayoral election is probably going to be the only really exciting major mayoral one in the state this year. Check it out.

I’m conducting cruel experiments on potato plants partly for sentimental reasons. This spring it occurred to me that the only person who never tried to dissuade me from growing vegetables was my grandmother. Where other people would respond to my “let’s grow [something]!” by peppering me with doubts (“You can’t grow [something]! It’s too hard! The soil’s not right!”), my grandmother would just shrug and say “OK, let’s.” I still have fond memories of the scabby and inedible marble-sized potatoes I dug up one fall from the yard under her watchful eye. Gee, growing stuff is really hard.

Next year, I hope to do better — in an environment without deadly fungus lurking. The New York Times has a new report on the ramifications of this year’s outbreak in the Northeast. In addition, Paterson has moved to have 17 counties declared “agricultural disaster areas” not just due to the late blight, but due to the crappy summer weather in general. Organic farmers are really in trouble: playing by the rules, they can’t use any effective fungicides. Growing stuff organically — it’s hard.

I have to wonder if, for a lot of middle-class Americans (even those with some gardening experience), the expectation of “getting back to the land” and supporting one’s family with backyard gardening or even small farming might be as — dare I say — childish as my potato experiment? If farming was easy, why are so many farms failing? Farms do not exist in a self-sufficient vacuum, as any farmer can tell you. It’s all part of an economic and social web that is and has always been directed by people way more powerful than you. During the 1940s, my grandfather owned one of the largest poultry farms in western Pennsylvania, and all it took was one or two years of disease to wipe him out completely. (Urban Buffalo chicken farmers, be warned!) He moved back to Utica, bitter about the tainted feed he suspected was the cause, and especially about the people who ran the feed supply chain.

Backyard gardening alone cannot feed a family efficiently (or without a great deal of risk — see: the current outbreak of late blight, or just read your history books about the Irish famine since oppressed Irish farmers were forced to essentially “backyard-garden” with potatoes.) If you squint at it just the right way, the suburbanization of former farmland looks an awful lot like the land-enclosure process in old Ireland. Absentee landlords (developers) wrung profit from the land and subdivided it into tiny parcels for exorbitant rents (mortgages), and politicians and other powerful interests eventually forced the Irish to potato-garden (tomato-garden) on those little plots for subsistence. How far we’ve come since the bad old days, huh?

But in a way, agriculture itself created this situation. Agriculture can only feed people most efficiently when it is large-scale (up to a point). And large-scale agriculture requires specialization of social roles, i.e., modern complex society. And when you have specialized roles, you have differing levels of social status. We’re all still wrestling with the ramifications of that every day. Agriculture pretty much created civilization as we know it — including nearly all of its successes and injustices.

People today who dream about self-sufficient backyard farming are also maybe dreaming about the kind of personal independence, peaceful habit and social egalitarianism that really only exists in hunter-gatherer societies. So, if that’s what we really want, better start looking for local nut and berry patches, even to go along with our tomato gardens. Consider how much of them it takes to make one meal, and how far you will have to travel from your home (i.e., spend energy) to gather them. Now you understand why hunter-gatherers tend not to have permanent villages — much less walkable ones. Are we sure we want to pay the real price for peace, independence and egalitarianism?

Sad to say, if this summer’s blight is as bad as is being reported, more than a few marginal farmers are going to either abandon organic practices, or go out of business altogether. I wonder how that will affect the back-to-the-land narrative in certain middle class circles. I also marvel at how many aspiring middle-class small farmers don’t seem to be very up on the political struggles of today’s farmers, except in a very general “down with evil Monsanto” way.

Just remember: for two weeks in July at least, blackberries are free.

(Sorry for the light posting lately. Hoping to be back on a more regular schedule next week.)

A highly contagious fungus that destroys tomato plants has quickly spread to nearly every state in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, and the weather over the next week may determine whether the outbreak abates or whether tomato crops are ruined, according to federal and state agriculture officials… The spores of the fungus, called late blight, are often present in the soil, and small outbreaks are not uncommon in August and September. But the cool, wet weather in June and the aggressively infectious nature of the pathogen have combined to produce what Martin A. Draper, a senior plant pathologist at the United States Department of Agriculture, described as an “explosive” rate of infection. William Fry, a professor of plant pathology at Cornell, said, “I’ve never seen this on such a wide scale.”

The disease — the same thing that caused the Irish potato famine — can jump from species to species, from tomatoes to tubers. I’ve been growing some “highly experimental” potatoes this summer, and I’ve been checking them anxiously. So far, my tater tots are doing okay. (Or, as well as can be expected when they’re being grown by a doofus — let’s just say that they’re “giving their lives for science.”)

Professor Fry, who is genetically tracking the blight, said the outbreak spread in part from the hundreds of thousands of tomato plants bought by home gardeners at Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart stores starting in April. The wholesale gardening company Bonnie Plants, based in Alabama, had supplied most of the seedlings and recalled all remaining plants starting on June 26.

As I said earlier when I first noticed this story… “thinking globally, acting locally” is not necessarily going work out. Globalism (in the form of big-box agriculture) is always going to harm localism (the small farmer or backyard garden) in the end. Oh, and the organic farmers? Screwed. They aren’t allowed to use fungicides that would protect their plants against this disease. I wonder if this blight will grow large enough to cause the Northeast’s farmers to demand that their state governments initiate stricter controls on fruit and vegetable plants, like they do in Western states.

(As if this new plague weren’t enough, we are still under biological attack.)

You can find more information on late blight at this website: http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu.

Cities Rediscover Waterways They Paved Over

(Oh, I know why. It’s because Syracuse has no Seoul. ba-dump-bump.)

This evening, my black raspberries — running more than a week late this year, as you might expect — yielded the peak harvest of their (all too brief) season. Starting tomorrow, the daily take will grow steadily smaller.

This means that summer is now exactly half over.

It seems we have too many colleges with too many sports teams, all chasing the same money. I’m hard pressed to figure out what this current glut of college sports teams is really doing for the human spirit.

On a less cynical note, there is one sporting event that brings highly favorable national exposure to upstate NY every year. It’s not Syracuse basketball, it’s not Buffalo Bills football, it’s not a big golf tourney at Turning Stone. It’s the annual IRL Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, which gets serious prime weekend air time on ABC/ESPN. It’s safe to say that Watkins Glen is, next to the Indy 500 itself, the race that the Indy League drivers look forward to the most every year. They love the historic racing atmosphere of the village, they love the Seneca Lake scenery, and they adore the course — which no doubt reminds them of the Formula One courses they probably (in their heart of hearts) would rather be on. (Watkins Glen also hosts NASCAR races.)

Many of the Indy League drivers have taken to Twittering, and during the races there are large contingents of race fans watching and commenting on Twitter. This past weekend, when Watkins Glen hosted the race again, it was clear that the ABC telecast was doing for the Finger Lakes region (and Upstate) what a host of PR people only wish they could do: get people from all over America and the world interested and excited about the beauty and history of the region. Here are some comments by Brazilian driver Tony Kanaan.

It makes you wonder why so many alleged grownups are spending so much effort scuffling for the same tired old sports dime around here.

The article also notes a drop in demand for electricity – no doubt, a decline in the building of grandiose new homes has something to do with it.

That said, NYRI is not quite dead yet. The head’s been cut off, but the body is still flopping around.

The system is broken. Many of those people now in prison should not be there. They should be getting treatment. Instead of spending so much on incarceration, we should be spending more mental health and drug treatment. We must also be spending more on fixing our broken communities. Not only are the broken communities in New York City generating these broken persons who are forced into long-term incarceration in the North Country, the broken communities in the North Country host these prisons as one of the limited employment opportunities up there.

Click for full page.

(Discovered last week during cleanout of cellar)

Below the flip are a few thoughts on technology, apple picking, space travel, the State Senate crisis, DestiNY USA, the Connective Corridor, backyard gardens, physics, and youth and old age. Proceed at your own risk!

It’s been 40 years since Richard Nixon declared war on cancer. Why haven’t we won yet? The NY Times looks at one possible factor: the fact that, in a world with limited funding resources, researchers tend to grab at the lowest-hanging fruit.

We also have faith in the power of new technology to solve problems, and even more faith in the “inevitability” of the discovery of these new technologies, with little thought as to how expensive and complex these technologies will be to invent and maintain. But expense and complexity is visited on the flesh and bone of people, who either crack under its strain, or rebel. This is ironic, because the very technology we’re hoping will relieve some of these vaguely sourced stresses on our personal lives, is probably contributing greatly to said stresses.

In essence, the pursuit of a cure for cancer may cause certain types of cancers. This is apparently an OK situation to us, though, because we have faith that there will be a sudden, cancer-vanquishing breakthrough: a cure. We always have crises, and triumphant resolutions (as in our wars, at least until Vietnam), so there must be a crisis resolution in store for the war on cancer.

We are standing at the foot of a tall apple tree (medicine) whose lowest and easiest fruits (antibiotics,
vitamins, simple surgery) have already been plucked by those who came before us. We cannot see any more fruits in the tree – just vague shapes that may or may not be fruits – so we imagine there are plenty more fruits to be discovered if we just make a complex, all-out effort to harvest them.

The idea that we simply can’t invest all of our social organization and resource energy to harvest those (perhaps mythical) final fruits, is never permitted to be spoken aloud. (Much less the alternate possibility that there may not actually be more fruits up there in that particular kind of tree.)

So, what kind of a society are you left with, if you give up on the idea of these topmost fruits waiting to be harvested? What drives growth and expansion? Well, that’s it: you aren’t going to have growth and expansion any more. You are going to have decline, at least for the foreseeable future.

There is a whole body of recent literature related to “the end of expansion” which has become sort of a canon: the peak oil community, authors and lecturers like James Kunstler, Jared Diamond, Dmitry Orlov, Carolyn Baker, and then there is the seminal book by Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, which attempts a “grand unified theory” of the decline of many civilizations and states throughout history.

This post isn’t about Tainter, but I’d like to pass on his four theoretical principles, which can be usefully applied to any social organization great or small — a family unit, a tribe, a state government, a nation or a global society.

1. Human societies are problem-solving organizations. (They develop in order to solve human problems.)

2. Sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance.

3. Increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita.

4. Investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.

Consider interplanetary travel. We could put a man on Mars now – if we had the energy and gross national product to pump into the resources, logistics and training that would be necessary. We could have moon colonies. We could probably travel to the nearest star and back. However we recognize that interstellar travel is “impossible” because we know we couldn’t maintain the structure of our society and deal with our problems back on Earth, AND go to Alpha Centauri at the same time. The costs would be too great; even if we didn’t have some kind of global effort to launch the Starship Kumbaya, our leaders would have to extract so many economic and social resources in order to prepare for this multigenerational mission, that we’d have to impoverish billions of people or maybe even our planet’s own ecosystem. Even if we needed to leave the planet, we might not be able to maintain the complexity required to extract the resources to go on that mission.

Even a moon base isn’t feasible; we recognize that the amount we’d need to spend on it far outweighs any energy we might gain by it. Scientific knowledge is often thought to be an absolute gain that automatically translates – somehow – into increased energy, and in the past it has; but that relationship between scientific endeavor and energy surplus grows murkier the more complex that scientific missions and experiments become.

What we might not want to admit is that our reach exceeds our grasp on a great deal of other things. And it’s very hard for people to grasp that while mankind may have a future, maybe even a bright future – we living today are not going to be any major part of any future upward bound.

The happiest people, of course, won’t be thinking about that, but will instead concentrate on their own survival — figuratively speaking. There will at least be a pullback of the field of vision to inner space. If there are any forgotten stores of energy that lie in your backyard – a sunny plot of your yard you’re not farming, or some kind of personal creative or spiritual impulse you haven’t tapped and translated – that is what individual people (families, villages, states) will be mining.

And individuals who are engaged in cultivating these inner fields, are going to be increasingly unwilling to yield them to “The Greater Good” of “We-Are-the-World” style globalism. Or even that style of nationalism, which is what America has run on for a couple of centuries. Although human society isn’t going to turn into a global sequel to Mad Max, it isn’t going to particularly have a global consciousness either, no matter what sort of travel and Internet technology we will possess.

Recent news from elsewhere in the state highlights the problems of trying to set up a locally sustainable system (i.e., backyard gardens) in a world where big-box stores still sell most of the tomato plants. Scary stuff.

Devastating plant fungus found in Plattsburgh

This is the ironic tension I have always found in the whole Age of Obama: localism and globalism cannot realistically coexist as sociopolitical systems. They can certainly coexist in the mind’s eye (“think globally, act locally”) but when the rubber hits the road politically (and economically), more and more exhausted and exploited people will simply drop out of globalism, leaving it starved for participants — for globalism is “peak complexity,” and requires willing participation by locals. Unless globalism becomes even more militant than it is, and forces that participation… which, in turn, breeds more complexity that requires greater energy to maintain…

I hear echoes of this whole process at play in our own State Senate. We don’t even have partisanship (in an ideological sense) or even regionalism going on; we have pure self-interestedness, which probably draws from ethnic or borough politics at best. Globalism, in the form of Gov. Paterson, is now trying to assert itself, even with a threat of militancy (siccing the state troopers on legislators who won’t attend an extraordinary session). The State Senate is probably one of our state’s most corrupt and weak institutions, so you’d expect the process to begin at the weakest joints.

We are in the process of finding and polishing the edges of the broken pieces of a “global state” (New York, in all its diversity and dreams) that started falling apart a long time ago. In the absence of someone to glue them together, the sharp edges will gradually become smooth from this polishing and will no longer quite mesh. It’s still good and useful material. It’s just not in the shape of a mighty vessel any more.

What is to be done? How do you reverse this? Tainter’s observes that there may not be a way to reverse it. Certainly not in the short term – and by short term” that means centuries, if not millennia. Tainter’s theory points to a striking possibility: complex societies like ours are periodic anomalies in human history, and may always have natural lifespans that must obey certain laws of physics (yes, the physics of energy). If there is no longer any energy subsidy for the system you have built to deal with your problems, then increased complexity of efforts to maintain it will not only not be feasible, but may not even ever get you to the desired Point B. Eventually, the familiar cycle of “crisis and recovery” peters out, and there remains only “crisis” – unless you deal with the mega-crisis by throwing in the towel on complexity and evacuating into the scattered local lifeboats. (This was dealt with recently in Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency.)

In that sense, the “failure” of complex civilization may actually represent a successful adaptation that can preserve not just life, but values. And complex human culture – what of it does survive from civilization to civilization – may periodically be forced underground.

People who drop out of globalism tend not to announce what they are doing; they just do it. The “revolution will not be televised.” Many people who were energized by “political” battles of the earlier part of this
decade, have already drifted away to cultivate their own small plots. Some of them will form collectives (families, communes, or gangs), others will live more nomadic or self-contained lives and work on successful strategies to avoid predation while discovering secret personal sources of untapped energy for themselves — and maybe a few carefully chosen friends.

Of course, the search for untapped energy has consumed Upstate for a long time now — everything from willow shoots, wind, water and a mythical “youth energy” has been proposed as a way to “reverse” the decline of individual cities or even the entire region (and therefore the entire state). It is true that there are probably political changes we could make that would unlock some sources of energy we haven’t been using.

However, making political changes in New York has gotten to the point where few citizens have personal energy to invest in a “broken” system – “broken” as in split into many competing self-interests. The political system itself has become a vampiric energy sink. The reason why Espadas and DeFranciscos keep getting re-elected is because few citizens have the energy to do anything but concentrate on their personal survival. To many of them, I suspect, the antics of the senators (if noticed) are embarrassing, but merely a backdrop to their struggles against greater forces which they don’t believe that a functioning Senate could really help them with anyway. (Did a functioning State Senate stop massive job losses in the ’70s? The ’80s? The ’90s?)

Upstate and Downstate have been concentrating on their own survival for a long time, and now that Wall Street has failed, lessening the overall available “energy subsidy” for everyone, we can expect to see these fragmentational trends to continue in all aspects of New York State life. A disinvestment in complexity (“One New York” being exceedingly complex) will involve an increased unwillingness to cooperate with the taxman, with state regulations, with massive corporate and public schemes of all kinds (NYRI, anyone?). We will continue to scream for benefits and subsidies from the state (don’t kid yourself, the Republicans certainly will). More vulnerable people among us will certainly suffer. But we’ve already seen that happening. This is where our personal values come into play; we just may have to fight for them on more confined and personal battlegrounds.

Is there untapped energy to be found that will sustain a less complex version of New York? I think so, but many of the local suggestions we’ve seen involve…er… more complex re-engineering that seems to have no logical endpoint: DestiNY USA a big example, the Connective Corridor perhaps somewhat less so. (Keep in mind that the Connective Corridor is built not just on a plan for a streetscape, but on a whole set of assumptions about Syracuse and the higher education industry — assumptions that may start crumbling after the next few fiscal years).

Dmitry Orlov has scoffed that for some green activists, returning to a simpler time all too often involves re-engineering the humble compost pile. But the less engineering, planning, funding and committees you need for your local simplification, the more net energy you will actually gain from simplification.

In a sense, you also need to have people around who are more deliberate and efficient, and perhaps less active and exciting. Americans are big energy wasters. We like to think of ourselves as “energy exuders,” magically transmitting our boundless original enthusiasm across the ether to the entire world. But a lot of our mental and physical energy (not just oil and gas energy) gets leaked away on activities which are culturally popular and emotionally desired, but may not particularly efficient in a time of scarcity.

The idea that “youth” is, in itself, a potent form of elemental energy seems to be one of America’s most cherished illusions, and there’s nothing more that Upstate thinkers would like to do than gain the power of this inexhaustible magic fire. But the magic fire of American youth didn’t come directly as a gift from an approving God. It came from the affluence that we derived from the natural resources – the energy – that our forefathers took from the control of the people who originally lived here, and from the energy we took from the rest of the world with the help of our elegant “military-industrial complex,” as they used to say. What that energy runs out, so will the magic fire of American youth. They will become just ordinary youth, like Swiss youth or Malaysian youth or Cameroonian youth. Bummer!

The truth: we need all kinds of people, but especially we need more people who don’t waste the limited store of available energy. Unfortunately, young American college students don’t always fit that description… which is why Madison, Wisconsin has to have a lot of police on duty on boozy weekend nights. (Young foreign college students, who grew up in perhaps less affluent surroundings and in societies with less energy resources to waste, seem to be much more efficient users of their energy.)

You also might need to keep a few people around who are not spending their energy (or society’s energy) partying or raising children – a demographic not often included in the big re-engineering plans for Syracuse. The issue of the personal and societal energy costs involved in raising children in today’s society, is another sensitive topic not often discussed. At what point does an overemphasis on certain lifeways use up more energy than it gives back to a system?

Simply put, you cannot engineer a collapse. You cannot build a growth industry around collapse mitigation (and you certainly can’t call it “smart growth” unless you are thinking you know when the tide is going to turn, which probably none of us know). Collapse is something that is going to happen whether you organize it or not. Because we’re so afraid of the concept of collapse, we have never studied its physics, which is necessarily in order to understand how to step the hell out of the way, and live to dream another day.

The root of the word “emergency” is “emerge.”

Stranger still: Someone had the bright idea to write a theological novel about them all meeting at the Pearly Gates.

And then there are the Finger Lakes, which are so very beautiful and appealing. But for me, it is hard not to breathe in the heavy historical smog there. This was, after all, the scene of a massively destructive military campaign. Some today would call it a national security mission, others would call it ethnic cleansing. The atmospheric conditions there today are neither overtly “bad” nor “good” from a moral standpoint, but those clouds of history are still thick. And nowhere do they seem thicker than along the big lakes, Seneca and Cayuga, and particularly between them, in Seneca and Schuyler counties. This is where I was this past week.

One of the curious things about this unnamed land between the lakes is how laden with U.S. government presence it was and still is. Outside of New York City and Fort Drum, this has been the most federalized plot of land in the Empire State. One can’t trace a clear path from the Sullivan-Clinton days to the 20th century in this regard, but it still seems like somewhat more than a coincidence that a Naval base (later an Air Force base), a heavily guarded munitions depot, and (improbably) a National Forest took form here. Indeed, the two long lakes make ideal strategic barriers… but, these being the first lands that the newly minted U.S. government took from the native inhabitants by force, one must wonder if on some deep echoing level, “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

On a human level — today — I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to make that point. Nowhere in New York is organized anti-tribal sentiment more vehement than in Cayuga country. The prospect of the landless Cayugas putting 125 acres into trust has thrown the local chapters of UCE into high alert. “No Reservation, No Sovereign Nation” signs are still up everywhere. It’s a distinctly different vibe than even in the Utica-Rome area. There are any number of socioeconomic factors driving the rancor. Down on the shorelines are the sumptuous wineries with their newly surfaced parking lots, and up in the hills are the prim white farmhouses with their shaggy coats of peeling paint. But I think history’s miasma hangs heavily too. The land is beautiful, but it was acquired expressly by sword and fire. And that stone fact cannot balance lightly on any psychic sense of safety and permanence.

However, up in the hills between the two lakes is a strange, peaceful little oasis called the Finger Lakes National Forest. I went camping and hiking there this past weekend. This is New York’s only national forest, and the second smallest national forest in the country. It’s also probably the only one that has pastures (with cows!), neatly labeled with brown-and-white U.S. Forest Service signs. Originally a land reclamation experiment, it’s a patchwork of forest and farm lands that seems like a depopulated, idealized vision of the New York countryside — what it would look like if the state were a large outdoor museum. Because the land has hardly been touched by development since the 1930s, the plant diversity is pretty amazing. I counted at least 20 different species (not including shrubs and trees) bordering my campsite alone.

Needless to say, the views from the top of the forest are incredible. You can see Seneca Lake, and almost see Cayuga Lake as well… and you can almost feel that you’re above the mists of the past and present, too.

During this time of turmoil, let’s close our eyes and imagine New York as it once was, and could someday be again… a murky, stagnant breeding ground for mosquitoes, that no longer leads anywhere in particular.

I’m on vacation for a week. Don’t start the sacking of Albany without me!

Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg (about a famous Crimean War photograph)

Whose Father Was He? (about a family photo found on a Civil War battlefield)

Bamboozling Ourselves (about Nazi-era Vermeer forgeries)

I love his approach, which is both rambling and minutiae-obsessed at the same time.

The Roberts School student council happened to be in the Senate gallery on Monday when the coup unfolded. (They were there on a field trip to watch democracy inaction.) John DeFrancisco visited the school this week to explain to them what happened…

After urging the children to read and greeting by name the granddaughter of former city councilor Bob Cecile (“you know who talked me into running for school board? Your grandfather …), DeFrancisco took the children through the background of Monday’s history maker…

“Sen. Smith, the so-called leader, wasn’t there,” DeFrancisco said. “They didn’t know what to do. Finally, they took a vote. It was 32-30. The appeal was accepted. They had to take up the resolution.”

Remember that old Star Trek episode with the orphaned children and “Gorgon the Friendly Angel”? Yeah, I’m remembering that too.

Meanwhile, he said, the coalition has been trying to do business but was thwarted Wednesday when they found the Senate chamber locked, and thwarted again Thursday because the secretary of the Senate had locked up needed paper work.

Thursday’s session was particularly unfair, as protesters were allowed near the chamber doors for the first time in Senate history, he said.

So, that’s the scoop, kids. Remember, protesting is un-democratic and just no fairs!

Just one year after becoming the state’s economic development czar, Robert Wilmers is stepping down from the post, the latest in a growing line-up of officials departing the Paterson administration.

Wilmers, who is also chairman of the Buffalo-based M&T Bank, made his resignation known in a letter to Paterson, a government official said on condition of anonymity.

With much fanfare and as a bow to upstate, Paterson tapped Wilmers last June to lead the state’s Empire State Development Corp. At the time, economic development organizations praised the choice, which raised some eyebrows because of the stinging criticism Wilmers has leveled over the years at the state government and its handling of upstate’s economic problems…

It is uncertain why Wilmers is leaving. But the agency has seen its share of infighting, sources have said in recent months, with tension between the various upstate and downstate offices of the department. A source said recently that Wilmers also has expressed frustration with the musical chairs among high-ranking officials in the governor’s office over the past year — making it difficult for the agency to get adequate attention at the Capitol.

ALBANY – Republicans seized control of the New York State Senate on Monday, in a stunning and sudden reversal of fortunes for the Democratic Party, which controlled the chamber for barely five months.

A raucous leadership fight erupted on the floor of the Senate around 3 p.m., with two Democrats, Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate of Queens, joining the 30 Senate Republicans in a motion that would displace Democrats as the party in control.It was a noisy and acrimonious scene on the floor of the Senate as Senator Thomas W. Libous, a Republican from Binghamton and the party’s deputy leader, shouted for a roll-call vote, while Democrats attempted to stall the vote by asking to adjourn the session.

From Liz Benjamin at the Daily News:

An observer in the Senate chamber tells me Skelos was sitting in Smith’s chair with a BIG smile on his face and Smith was nowhere to be seen. The chamber has now emptied out and Republicans are talking about electing themselves to committee chairmanships.

Run, do not walk, to The Albany Project for more.

Updated: Coup not finalized? Yes, the Republicans and Democrats are busy fighting over custody of Hiram “The Slasher” Monserrate.

Also: Spitzer, who won’t go away, is loving the chaos and says it is good for us.

If anyone with money can set up their own government in New York, people without money should be able to do it as well. I mean, anything goes now, right? I used to be fascinated by the Boys’ State concept of learning about government, where you elect a mock legislative body. Call me crazy but I don’t think it would be a bad project for serious New York adults of all political persuasions and party affiliations. Call it Grownups’ State. Starting with the imperfect laws and rules we have now — or even the new ones just instituted by the Republicans — the idea would be to convene a new Senate, pass bills, make decisions on allocating funds, and then (to avoid diverging too much from “reality”) wipe the slate clean and start over again the next year. Eventually you will have a pool of people who have knowledge of how the legislature functions, and if the project gained credibility you could ask business and community leaders to interact with the decision-making process. (To keep Grownups’ State honest, you’d need media of course, and that’s where laid-off TV and newspaper reporters come in.)

Yes, it’s a shadow government concept. Why not? If a handful of “public” servants can devise a secret Senate takeover plan in an Albany bar, and then proclaim it legitimate, I suppose ordinary citizens can do the same. Enough with government watchdog groups: be the government. Then when every last crook in Albany — and their new friends — have lost all credibility, you’ll (theoretically) have a credible government of citizens ready to be installed. Just like heroin addicts need to have their blood completely changed, it would be a total government replacement. (Maybe Grownups’ State will even have stolen some of their funders, too. “Hey, you never know.”)

If the problem is the people we have in government — many of whom have been there far too long and are far too corrupted by the company they keep — the experiment should produce different results. If the problem is New York’s form of government itself, this would also become apparent in the experiment.

I’ve already selected myself alternative state senator for the 50th District, so DeFrancisco should know that in the reality alternate to the status quo — which not even a lifer like him can escape — I’m in charge. (No one else is here yet at Grownups’ State, so I’m also declaring myself Alternative Senate Majority Leader.)

In the end of the story, our heroine fights her way to the Promised Land… none other than the fabled, verdant lands of a Kunstleresque Upstate New York. By Jove, I think we have our marketing concept! “As seen on ABC’s Earth 2100… Upstate New York. Why wait for humanity’s collapse? Get YOUR piece of Upstate TODAY!”

(Looking for more dystopian visions? Check out Upstate 2050.)

Syracuse’s historical response was different from many cities’ responses. Goals of “slum clearance” and redevelopment in town converged with national planning that included money for transportation to eliminate congestion and improve mobility. Urban freeways were seen as vehicles to achieve those goals, according to [Joe] DiMento. “Furthermore, few of the influences in cities where interstates were rejected, mitigated or blocked were strong in Syracuse,” he wrote.

Also, “Major decisions, or at least important steps in decisions, had been made in Syracuse and Onondaga County well before these changes were introduced and understood.” Local planning, DiMento concludes, was “ambiguous and rudimentary in city government in the 1940s and 1950s. Syracuse’s planning department was made up mainly of engineers. The planning commission was not a distinct entity until 1953.”

Well, yes. The city of Syracuse was built by engineers. There wouldn’t be a city in this spot if it weren’t for engineers. If anyone had sat down and thought about it, nobody would have found this a congenial spot for a city. It’s a salt industry and Erie Canal boomtown – an artificial city on an artificial river. It grew like a weed, and its roots are fairly shallow. It developed problems (or perhaps, “problems”) of transportation, sanitation and (later) congestion faster than people had time to think about the long term. Some of the people who were instrumental in building the Erie were the only people around who had the wherewithal and expertise to tackle the problems the canal and booming settlement created. And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In my last post I mentioned George Geddes (son of James Geddes, one of the architects of the Canal). The only time I’ve seen Geddes mentioned in the newspaper was in a Dick Case column that dismissively noted him for wanting to pipe the crap out of Syracuse via Onondaga Creek. As distasteful and polluting as that was, it was considered highly progressive and eco-friendly back then. A quick, thoughtless fix? Fixes needed to be quick in an age of cholera. There would be no city today for us to champion if everyone had died in an epidemic.

Syracuse historians focus so much on muttonchopped abolitionists from the center of town, when much of the zeitgeist that we are still dealing with today is the legacy of engineers from outside the city who saw themselves as forward-looking problem-solvers trying to accommodate explosive growth. And these were not ignorant men of narrow interests. Syracuse was blessed with prominent men who had very active imaginations, who could both envision expanded rights for women and organic farming, and also epidemic disease and flood disasters lurking around every corner – fears which demanded progressive solutions. (One potential boondoggle that never happened was the draining of the Montezuma Swamp – Mr. Geddes ran out of money on that one and quickly gave up, but not before creating the island at Jacks Reef.)

The Syracuse community’s inclination to listen to energetic outsiders with schematic drawings is hardly new. We can’t get a grasp on why old patterns continue to manifest without a very clear picture of how the patterns got started, and how “progressivism” in the Syracuse area became less about man’s triumph over nature, and more about man’s triumph over other classes of men (a situation that George Geddes, being sympathetic to socially liberal causes himself, might have found distasteful and polluting).

Today, progressivism means the shrinking of Syracuse and the footprint of its metro area: should we tear down houses? Should we knock down 81? Again, we’re considering all this without a deliberation that breathes, although some people and organizations are trying to create one. There’s a historical human and social element in Syracuse that is unique to the area and involves the “artificial” nature of this young settlement in the first place – which is why it’s not profitable to keep comparing our story to that of other cities. And no doubt, if he were alive today, George Geddes would have a brilliantly progressive plan for long-term sustainability.

Over Memorial Day weekend, to the dismay of many, the original oscillating sound returned in full force. More e-mails and phone calls to town and village officials followed. I talked to the Town of Geddes code officer, who was patient but sounded a little frazzled (and just as in the dark as the residents as to what was wrong now). I could only imagine the irate calls he, the Geddes guy, was getting from people who didn’t even live in his town, yet he was very helpful. As it turned out, the new reign of throbbing terror only lasted a few more days and it got around through informal back channels that Suez was installing new energy-efficient equipment that was temporarily making the fan go screwy again and that they intended to recalibrate it.

Unfortunately this whole little reprise just makes me more reflective (and depressed) about how poorly we citizens on the ground are served by the arbitrary lines on a map that some bewigged clerk drew up 200 years ago. When the Suez plant gets a-whumping, those arbitrary boundaries become meaningless and the real community lines become clear. Solvay, Westvale, Fairmount, Taunton and Split Rock have always had more to do with each other socially, industrially and historically than they had with neighboring areas, from the days of the salt works on down. Yet this area is divided by three town boundaries (Geddes, Camillus and Onondaga) and even the City of Syracuse border gets in the way. Unfortunately an atmospheric noise problem does not respect these imaginary borders, it only respects the topography. At times like these, people sitting in their homes don’t know which official to call and this time around it was rather like reinventing the wheel.

Then there are the fire department wars (Fairmount vs. Camillus). And the library wars — Solvay vs. Fairmount/Onondaga/Camillus, whose residents voted down money for the Solvay library (which makes me feel guilty about going to Solvay library now). And the enduring mystery of the boundaries of the Westhill school district. (To be fair, some people also find the existence of Fairmount Community Library a mystery, not to mention its location.) At the rate this is going, I am expecting bloody pogroms between Holy Family and St. Joseph’s to begin any Sunday now.

Simply put, the problem is much much worse than town vs. village governments, or city vs. county turf wars. As things continue to break down in the economy and as New York State’s traditional complexity becomes less manageable, actual communities that are trapped between the lines of multiple artificial borders will suffer. The problem doesn’t seem to be in the people or the politics, but rather the sense of duty to these old borders that everyone still has. What’s depressing is that I know darn well that nothing will be done about it in my lifetime. So much of what we still accept in American political life makes no sense any more.

I am interested in the “ancient” history of our area, but not for fun. When the present arrangements finally break down, all we will have to fall back on is what was. Both interpersonal history (the people you know personally and trust from past experience) and the currents of history that happened before we were born and will continue after we die. People who stand on shaky ground (as we do today) need to know what happened and what sort of community they really have got once the artificial borders disappear. Willful blindness isn’t going to cut it.

A couple years ago I had gotten into researching the history of Fairmount and of the Geddes clan. (If no one is going to write a book about this illustrious but inexplicably forgotten family, so prominent in Central New York and in the founding of Syracuse in particular, I guess I’ll have to do it). I recently came across an 1860 survey of everything you ever wanted to know about Onondaga County agriculture, written by Mr. George Geddes for the annual publication of the New York State Agricultural Society. The survey begins with an exhaustive history of the Iroquois. It is history filtered through the 19th century American view on Native Americans, of course; but the author’s view is clearly also personal, and not entirely in sync with imperialism.

The introduction isn’t fascinating so much for the facts, legends and multifaceted attitudes of 19th-century whites towards Natives that are in evidence, but because it was included at all. Geddes apologizes in his preface; he knows it doesn’t belong there, but he can’t help himself. In his mind, the claim of history on the present was too strong, the lessons too valuable not to be noted and shared. The editors of the Society bulletin grudgingly allowed this digression to be published, probably because Geddes was such a BMOC in ag circles. (The irony is that Geddes’ report, drawing mostly from previously published sources, does not note traditional Iroquois agricultural practices. Their method of growing corn, squash and beans together might have fascinated Geddes had he known of it, since he was a champion of what we might call early “organic” farming, concerned with using less fertilizer and more intelligent crop rotation – ideas that made him one of the leading farmers of the day.)

When I write about George Geddes writing about history (history as he understood it), that too is a “digression,” so I understand his impulse. For me to claim, using a historical perspective, that four or five localities in three different towns ought to be considered as a more coherent entity even in the present, would probably be just as exasperating to serious politicians, as Geddes’s report was to serious agriculturalists. He colored outside of the lines. We can always do more of that.

The long-anticipated $2 million restoration of the Nine Mile Creek Aqueduct at Camillus Erie Canal Park is a “go.” This was what it looked like on Saturday. They are now just starting to place the watertight layer of boards on the floor. When it’s finished in October, it will be the only fully navigable canal aqueduct in New York (there are two others, in Pennsylvania and Delaware). The Camillus aqueduct was exceptionally made even by the standards of the day (1844) and had relatively few structural problems since it fell out of use early in the 20th century, making it a good candidate for this kind of project. The book Camillus, Halfway There by David Beebe, mastermind of the Camillus Erie Canal Park, describes some of the long road to restoration since the park’s establishment in 1972. There probably hasn’t been a moment since then when some sort of preparatory work wasn’t being done (by volunteers) to make the aqueduct and the park ready for this project.

I’ll miss the picturesque view of the aqueduct in its derelict state — where history was left up to the imagination — but the smell of the fresh lumber at the construction site is no less delightful. There is not the sense of pointlessness I get when I see them building DestiNY USA. For one thing, the benefits of the aqueduct project are clear. It will immediately double the size of the canal usable for boats and kayakers, which will attract more people to the park. It will also bring more people to the less-used eastern half of the towpath, which leads to Route 173 (Warners Road) and the Allied waste beds beyond, where the canal once ran. If this proximity to sad reality inspires some kayaker, biker or jogger to say I wish this trail went even farther…, and gets them dreaming about how to un-do the mistakes of the past, that will be a great service to the Syracuse area.

DestiNY USA, with its promise of jobs and greenery, is still in the end all about consumption. The aqueduct project is all about restoring connections.

Phil posts on gay marriage. He thinks some Democrats are batting for the other team.

Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation is trying to get the Syracuse Common Council to adopt a Resolution of Respect for and Reconciliation with the Onondaga Nation.

The location of Mordor having already been discovered, here are the Mines of Moria (and another view).

Cougars confirmed by DEC in the Adirondacks?

I didn’t know that Waterloo is the birthplace of Memorial Day. (Heck, I didn’t even know that Waterloo was more than just Waterloo Outlets…)

SyracuseB4 on enclosed shopping malls. I drove by the Great Wall of Congel the other day and felt like the future was finally coming into the present. That is, the future boondoggle many of us imagined years ago is playing out before our very eyes. A gargantuan tax-free edifice with no tenants, and the consumption-killing “crash” we all felt in our bones was coming, is finally here. It was supposed to be better than Dubai, remember?

Here’s what’s happening in Dubai these days. (Another article in the Independent is even more revealing.)

Back home, a sign of the times (via Capitol Confidential):

Upstate (excluding “downstate counties”): 6,656,251
Long Island: 2,795,000
Downstate (NYC including “downstate counties”): 9,854,000

(The “downstate counties” used for this purpose are Westchester, Rockland, Dutchess and Putnam.)

But wait! What about these Three New Yorks?

Upstate: 8,296,000
Long Island: 2,795,000
New York City: 8,143,000

Hm, Upstate is bigger than New York City if you let Westchester in…

But why stop there? Let’s add a 53rd state – the State of Western New York, which consists of all counties west of the soda-pop line. And what the heck, why not just make the Downstate Four (aka “Commuterland/Secondhomia”) into the 54th state while we’re at it.

Western New York: 2,772,172
The Upstate New York Where They Don’t Put that Silly “The” in Front of Highway Numbers: 3,884,079
Commuterland/Secondhomia: 1,640,000
Long Island: 2,795,000
New York City: 8,143,000

There! I don’t know about you, but I feel enlightened and refreshed.

Article IV of the Constitution requires any state separation to be approved by the state’s legislature and Congress. [Daniel Losquadro (R-Shoreham)] said the matter is serious enough to attempt to bypass Albany lawmakers. “By its definition, an act of secession is a revolt and it doesn’t necessary adhere to all the laws,” he said.

Yes, I always wonder at people who say “But that’s not legal!” Of course it’s not legal, but laws are only as good as they are efficiently enforced. The breakup of the Soviet Union wasn’t legal either!

(For those keeping score, here’s the previously posted item about a proposed referendum on Upstate-Downstate separation.)

Judging from John DeFrancisco’s section on the new site, it looks like the answer is yes. There’s a “Featured Video” entitled “Senator DeFrancisco Blasts Upstate Democrats on MTA Bailout,” and what appears to be a blog post about “Bailing Out Downstate.” (The Republicans get a maroon banner, Dems get blue ones.)

And “Happening Now,” Senator Kevin Parker gets kicked out of the Energy Committee and stripped of his Majority Whip position, for allegedly assaulting a photographer.

Technology: bringing your government into the 19th 21st century.

“Sinister” is possibly too harsh a word for the crime of simply not thinking things through – after all, who really eats homegrown garden veggies except hobbyists? – but the specter of environmental racism is not exactly non-sinister. The comments at the Syracuse.com posting of the story (which I have linked to) are the usual mix of shadowy characters dismissing any whiff of racism in the community. So maybe it’s more helpful to use the term “environmental classism” than “racism” since that’s really the underlying issue that lurks.

If there are any smug suburbanites out there thinking something like this could never be a concern for them, they’d better think again. I’m not going to reiterate all the latest thinking about peak oil and the future need for locally-grown food or even subsistence kitchen gardens; but I really doubt many suburban residents in Onondaga County really know what’s in their own backyard dirt, or in the dirt they buy at the garden store. They do not know the history of their own patches of dirt. Don’t know who farmed it before houses were built, what was grown, what fertilizers (chemicals) used, or what might have been dumped there. Does anyone know what their own back yard looked like 100 years ago? (I’ve done some nitpicky research on the history of my burb, and I still don’t know what precisely used to be where my house is sitting.)

And yet, some of these same scoffing locals – if they’re not thinking about it now in the backs of their minds – will someday expect to get some kind of yield out of their future kitchen gardens. I have a feeling that 20 years from now, they will be asking the “lowly” city gardeners for a lot of serious advice on how to raise healthy food from poisoned ground.

The whole goal of the Syracuse Film Office is to get more films made in central New York — and it’s already making progress. “We had a Hollywood group, they were looking for a series of highways with overpasses, and they were looking for large buildings that weren’t skyscrapers, but large public-looking buildings,” says Christine Fawcett-Shapiro of the Syracuse Film Office.

Hollywood likes you just the way you are, Syracuse! Don’t knock down 81… it’s your best feature! (?!)

But although I understand that, I still don’t grasp the process by which new blood gets into journalism locally. I know an excellent local writer who has blogged for several years on environmental subjects; he has a clear, engaging style and characteristic focus that would be a really good fit to the greater Syracuse community. If I was running things (and if newspapers were still making enough money) I would do whatever it took to get this person on board as an occasional paid columnist. But we don’t live in that kind of expansive era any more — newspapers these days have to be concerned with collecting content, and not with developing a farm team.

I had concerns about this before the Post-Standard started to actually shrink in page count. I sometimes wonder if blind spots in the talent development process, and not just money issues, have been a quiet problem in the community for many years. Not just with journalism, of course — in everything. This is a fear that has found expression in the undeclared “battle” between 40-Belowers (who feel they’re being held back from taking over, although can’t articulate why or who is responsible) and that shadowy yet openly-operating organization, the Treehouse Gang.

Thinking of 40 Below leads me to my second lingering concern. I’m worried that Syracuse still suffers from Richard Florida Disease, and some of its related assumptions about the future. Namely, that the higher education and healthcare industries will always be dependable drivers of growth in the Syracuse area. So many hopes and expectations have been hung on Syracuse University, SUNY Upstate, and the promise of a new revolution in technology and green-collar jobs, with the expectation that Syracuse will be, must be, peopled by newcomers drawn to the area for these always-burgeoning career fields.

It would be silly to say that none of this kind of growth (or at least, economic activity) is going to happen. But for several years, the great hope has been that the Hill would finally be wedded to Downtown in some way, bringing with it a rich dowry of state and corporate seed grants, student recreational spending, and revenue-generating buzz. All this seemed like a great idea when the sun was shining on the American economy, but now, I’m not so sure many of these plans aren’t going to fade away in the rain. People create real art in hard times — but they don’t spend so much money supporting it. Governments and corporations still have money to spend — but not so much on speculative initiatives. Students still go to college — but not so much at expensive private second-tier schools.

If a bedrock institution like the newspaper business falls onto unprecedented hard times, how can anyone suppose that higher education, or even the Colossus of our health care system, are immune? Higher ed and health care professionals are still whistling past the graveyard in many ways. And the new plan for Syracuse is still largely predicated on an increase in their numbers — their leisure spending, their energy, their needs and wants driving us all upward. But I see the dominoes of professionalism slowly falling, one by one. And Syracuse, like all modern American communities, is going to be hit by the falling plaster.

To bring this back to my original concern about local journalism… In a world where professionalism (for whatever reason) can’t support itself, maybe we can have a world where everyone knows how to practice good journalism for the good of the community. That means that professional journalism (or higher ed or medicine) to some extent dies, and general journalism survives in its place.

Dmitry Orlov speaks of a future where money is worth less, if not actually worthless — and that seems a little fantastic. But he also ventures, more plausibly, that a post-professional world would be one where we worry less about earning incomes in specialized fields, and more about learning to live in a more relationship-oriented future. When professionalism cannot continue, it could be that real society has space to be reborn. We give up the trade secrets of whatever it is that we do, and instead freely pass these skills on to each other. And hopefully in return, we receive not necessarily money, but whatever it is we need to continue living creative lives.

I think that’s something to hope for.

People have written me to ask a question or two. ‘When is collapse going to happen?’ Well, I do not want the economy to collapse before everyone gets a chance to purchase this book, so let us hope for the best. ‘What do I plan to do?’ Well, I am not sure. But I do wish to share this: I certainly do not plan to be trapped by any one plan. ‘What should I do?’ Well, you should figure out what it is you absolutely need to lead a happy, healthy, fulfilling existence. Then figure out a way to continue getting it…

I firmly believe that only an individual approach can bring something close to happiness. That is, ultimately no one can know what is best for you and no one can prepare you for anything except you yourself. This, unfortunately, is impossible to do without feeling the pain of loneliness when things are not going so well. However, this pain does not have to be permanent: it also allows you to feel joy and satisfaction when the situation changes for the better. What many people forget is that most everyone feels pain in their lives. Although superficially it creates a feeling of separation from the rest of the world, it can also bring us closer together.

–Dmitry Orlov, “In Conclusion,” Reinventing Collapse

The Decameron

Not that I’ve ever read it — but if by some chance we all get confined and quarantined, I should have plenty of time to do so…

But let’s remain calm.

The selection process requires that images chosen for the quarters must be national sites “under the supervision, management or conservancy of the National Parks Service, the U. S. Forest Service, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or any similar department or agency of the federal government,” according to the Mint. Mint officials say that their hands are tied and that it’s up to Congress to amend the law if members want nonnational parks included. But Paterson and Schumer believe that the Mint has some discretion in making the final decis

WURRRRRP! Okay, considering everything else that’s going on in the world and in the state, it’s pretty silly that this is some kind of federal production about these stupid coins (soon to be worth far less than 25 cents). Who cares? (Why do we even need these “state” quarters anyway? How much time and energy is being sunk into the designing, choosing and minting of these? Wasn’t one round of this enough?) However, this just goes to show that New York has a ton of cool stuff that the Federal government doesn’t control. I wish Paterson would just say “Eat it, Washington. We don’t need your steenking quarter.”

Richard Brodsky gets a big endorsement for his attorney general campaign:

In another sign that the campaign for state attorney general is starting early, the Communications Workers of America yesterday endorsed the candidacy of Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, one of the Democratic contenders for the position, now held by Eliot Spitzer.

The endorsement of Mr. Brodsky, who represents part of Westchester County, marks a significant boost for his campaign. The union represents 75,000 telecommunications, health care, media, manufacturing and public workers across New York State.

Glad to see Brodsky’s still in the hunt.

As for William Weld, his cheerful assessment of why New Yorkers should vote for him — he’s still got his places in the Adirondacks and the Catskills! — is just lame. Unless Republicans get all tingly over that sort of thing. Who knows.
And:

Foreshadowing their strategy against a possible Weld candidacy, several Democrats made light of his itinerant political career as a Massachusetts governor who seemed to tire of his job; ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1996; resigned in 1997 to make a failed bid to be President Clinton’s ambassador to Mexico and then moved to the Upper East Side in 2000 to become a partner in a private equity firm and a novelist.

Translation: Carpetbagger.

I was a supporter of the dark horse Brodsky in the all-important 2006 race for attorney general, though he was never really a serious candidate. Cuomo of course sucked up all the oxygen and is now Spitzer on steroids. (Hm. Scary image, there.) And once again Brodsky is being touted as a dark horse candidate to replace Cuomo. I still like Brodsky, but this is just a remake of “Groundhog Day” because you know it’s going to be someone from the city anyway, so why bother even following it. Does anyone remember Weld’s bid though? I’m surprised his name never came up during the Caroline Kennedy affair.

I began following the anti-NYRI effort because of my interest in the unprecedented level of unity between citizens in areas of Upstate that usually have little consciousness of each other. The opponents didn’t have a lot of power, but seemed to be doing everything right, for a change. The “divide and conquer” strategy did not gain enough momentum to scatter them. NYRI seemed not to understand that New Yorkers aren’t exactly hillbillies, and that people who are both educated and financially downtrodden don’t make the easiest marks. Of course, it didn’t hurt that NYRI’s public relations were inept and that the State’s PSC application process was glacial.

It also didn’t hurt that world economy went into the toilet. All congratulations aside, that was what really killed the project. The anti-NYRI people needed a miracle to go along with their ragtag cannon-fired silverware, and they got it.
What was really threatening the green hills of Madison County and the valley of the Delaware was a rising tide of affluence that was creeping steadily northward. It was not an inclusive affluence. It was affluence that was going to be good for those inside the charmed circle — the already affluent, of course, but also those who served the New York City economy. But bad for those on the outside, those who were not connected to the downstate economy. Those people would be expected to cheerfully relinquish their property values, and either take jobs servicing the summer people, or leave.

In order to believe that NYRI was a good thing for the region, you had to believe that Wall Street was a benevolent driver of “trickle-up” (trickle-North) prosperity for the entire Empire State. Up here people knew this was not true, unless one envisions that Upstate can exist forever as what the Brits would call a “dole queue” economy. And there’s just so long you can tell the provincials that pretty story. NYRI was an attempt to extend the NYC economy’s area of resource extraction out of the Catskills where it has traditionally remained confined. That the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had also declared Syracuse and Rochester to lie within a “National Interest Energy Transmission Corridor” (NIETC) should have been cause for alarm too.

We still don’t have a statewide conversation on what to do about energy generation and transmission to areas that need it (or “need” it – considering that people downstate are happy to tear down smaller homes and build bigger, energy-gobbling homes in their places). We still don’t have a statewide conversation on the vast economic imbalance between Upstate and Downstate, either, so… cry me a river about the demise of NYRI. Downstate needs power, Upstate needs a meaningful economy with a future.

However, the ongoing collapse of Wall Street has the potential to change everything, so this isn’t a time for an extended victory dance. We still need that discussion on energy transmission. We still need a discussion on whether we’re all in this together or not. But Wall Street’s answer has always been the clink of champagne glasses as they toast more wealth and more political status quo in New York.

Now that the champagne has stopped flowing, here’s the reply of the good people of Oneida, Madison, Chenango, Otsego, Delaware, Sullivan and Orange counties: not the hum of a giant new power line, but the sound of crickets.

Our friend Robinia writes at TAP on local higher ed as entrenched interests, and also wonders who died and left Robert Wilmers boss.

Celebrating the recent tea parties on Fault Lines, a funny and telling exchange about a “lack of turnout” in Utica.

Joebass123 explores the nature of urban congestion as community dialogue on Route 81 moves forward on Sean Kirst’s blog.

Today is Earth Day. I was surprised to read recently that Onondaga County apparently has one of the biggest Earth Day participations in the country in terms of how many area groups pitch in to whatever the county puts on.

Friday is also my grocery night. (What an exciting life I lead!) I frequently ask for paper bags at the grocery store. Evil, tree-killing paper bags. Why? Because I hate the recyclable plastic bags. Hate them. I don’t know why we’ve been subjected to them, probably because they’re cheaper to produce, more compact for storage and perhaps recycle easier. But boy, they sure suck. They are just plain difficult and awkward to carry in large amounts.

And there are always large amounts. What takes only two well-packed paper bags to carry in one trip from the car, usually takes 7 or 8 plastic bags, with just a few items per bag. Furthermore, carrying plastic bags is a pain in the ass, they’re uncomfortable to carry, and after a long day of the rat race, I find it actually a pleasure to carry my groceries into the house in one trip with some ease and dignity. Paper bags make me feel human. (And aren’t they recyclable too?)

Unfortunately, most grocery employees these days (yes, even at Wegmans), trained to throw 2 or 3 items into a single plastic bag, don’t know how to pack a paper bag. Which means that they throw just a few items into each paper bag, leaving me with 7 or 8 paper bags, and defeating the purpose of my asking for them.

It seems to me that the big problem today is not a lack of desire to recycle, save trees and so forth, but the simple lack of being able to think and plan ahead. Thinking and planning ahead is the core of wise use of our resources; it’s not just about saving trees at all costs.

When I see a 16-year-old who doesn’t know how to properly and efficiently pack a paper grocery bag, but just wastes as many plastic bags as she can because “they’re recyclable,” the point is being missed. In a huge way. For all of our slogans and policies and enthusiasm over recycling, we still believe that technology can relieve us of the responsibility to simply use our brains and be mindful.

Two years later, Wegmans would introduce reusable bags. Don’t have anything new to add to this… except that I now go to the grocery store on Saturday mornings.

Also highlighted recently in the Post-Standard was the Sibylline TXT SYRACUSE project. This is a deal where you take your cell phone, go to various locations around the city, punch in a code and get parts of an ongoing short story. This has been done in other cities around the world and someone thought it would be interesting to try here, ostensibly as a way to lure people to explore the city.

Neat idea, but unfortunately, the “story” appears to be just what I feared: it reads like an advertisement for the same revitalization initiatives we’ve been hearing about for five years, plus Armory Square. The map of planned thread release locations doesn’t give me much optimism that the story is going to take any unexpected turns, either. Excerpts:

the day kim got on the connective corridor bus to break up w her bf was the day the bus changed its slogan to “we will always love u.” that was awkward.

it was hard not to fall for eric at first. they met on comstock on halloween. the devil, the vampire, red plastic cups. ha. yea. that couldnt last.

now its the day aftr graduation and k is on the bus to go drinking @ salt, a new bar that has everyone in the cuse buzzing and buzzed.

But I can already read stuff like this from the comfort of my own home via Facebook or Twitter. Why go downtown for it?

This winter, we had the amazing experience of realizing that bald eagles had once again taken up seasonal residence on Onondaga Lake. Last year, there was the wandering bear in Geddes. Those are the most memorable communitywide encounters with animals we’ve had recently. (Downstate, there are persistent reports of a mysterious “black panther” surfacing, which could be a melanistic bobcat.)

There are two personal encounters I recently had with wildlife that come to mind. One was funny, the other profound.

The funny one happened a couple years ago when I was en route to a Christmas party in outer Strathmore, just below Woodland Reservoir. There I was, navigating the icy sidewalk in the dark, and I looked up to see a large deer walking toward me on a collision course. The fact that it was courteously using the sidewalk just cracked me up. (And, this is not exactly the booneys. Just another reason why I like living around Syracuse’s wild southwestern quarter, the only one not chopped up by a bypass.) Even funnier was my reaction: I crossed over to the other side of the street, like the deer was a shady character not to be trusted.

The other memorable encounter happened in my back yard. My neighbor has a chain-link fence. The smaller birds like to use it as a communal perch sometimes. One day I looked out and saw a bird struggling on the fence. I went out to investigate. In a freak accident, a male sparrow had somehow slipped down between one of the links, and now his leg was hideously caught, jammed between the metal wires right up to his body. He had beaten his wings bloody trying to get free. My neighbor was able to hold him still so I could work on getting him loose (and to prevent the total destruction of his wings), but his little leg was stuck in there tighter than you could imagine (and in a way that would have made using wire cutters impossible). And we couldn’t give up, because it would just have been a horrible way for him to slowly die.

I suppose that if we were guys, we would have had the guts to just break his neck and put him out of his misery. But finally after about 15 minutes, I was able to pop his leg out of there (which must have been double agony). Immediately he was off like a shot, fluttering on the ground and making for the bushes, before we could do anything else for him.

It was sad, because I knew he wasn’t going to live much longer. Even if a predator didn’t get him, he would soon starve. But at least he was now free to meet his own fate in a place of his choosing, not strung up like a free meal for any passing cat. In the end, that’s why freedom matters – it’s not how you live, it’s how you depart.

What have been your most memorable meetings?

Wobbly future for NY Dems?

A few years ago, a friend explained to me that there really wasn’t a State Democratic Party. There were several: one for the Assembly, one for the Senate, another for the Governor, and then others focused on Senate races. Any time those often conflicting pieces had to interact, even sometimes within the same person, chaos ensued.

Funny – though it does repeat the misconception people who use social media somehow “don’t have friends,” when the majority of people who use it are probably using it to keep in touch with existing friends and acquaintances. As for social media representing a fantasy escape from “real relationships,” ironically this skit ends with the two guys falling back down to “the real world”… which is nothing but their boring, sterile work cubicles. If that’s all there is to real life and real relationships – the straightjacketed “reality” ultimately defined by the corporations that employ us — well, no wonder people are hungering for such flights of fancy.

But it’s also true that some people use Twitter as a virtual stream of consciousness, and it can be exhausting. Have you ever thought about how much space we feel the need to fill up with reports about the course that society has planned for us? This isn’t limited to social media. Advertising, talk radio, and news are blared at us 24/7. Even coffeeklatsch chitchat about weekend errands, engagements, weddings, pregnancies, vacations… it’s the “stuff of life,” true, and social glue – but it’s everywhere. Even church services have become more enculturated – after mass, we seemingly can’t wait to return to the normal talkstream in the vestibule, or at the apres-church Sunday picnic. We have less and less actual space for divine silence in our lives.

Last Sunday I went to the second annual local International Tolkien Reading Day, which was held this year at the Eastwood Palace in the “upper room.” Last year, it was held at a cafe in the Valley, which I at first thought was a more congenial public spot for this kind of thing than the Palace. It turns out that the Palace venue worked well too. The event was a straight-through reading of The Hobbit (probably good that you don’t try that in a cafe). I didn’t make it nearly that far, but a handful of hardy souls did. For hours and hours they did nothing but read fiction aloud. The audacious eventual goal with the Tolkien day reading project is to one day read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy straight through, which would take days if they went nonstop.

Some people see a straight-through public reading as a cool thing to do, an achievement of endurance and focus – which it would be. But also, imagine days of this kind of breathing room hacked into the teeming sociality of our lives. Days during which there could be no chitchat about whatever it is that we all chat about. Reading silently to oneself is subversive — but so is a public reading, during which voices are focused completely on something other than the world we’re expected to constantly uphold, promote and amplify with our talk. That would be getting closer to the silence that has been missing.

I also watched the afternoon press conference, a little annoyed at the politicians’ statements when I wanted to hear facts from law enforcement. However, I’m told that Gov. Paterson gave a more than decent speech. And since facts (about the victims, about the shooter, etc) are still slow in coming, I admit my mind has started slipping toward thoughts about political implications, especially as I read raging new debates on forums about gun control and the NRA. (For the record, I think we need some form of gun control, but barring that, I’ll take a real conversation without extreme posturing.)

Reading the pro- and anti-NRA standoffs in the forums yesterday, it suddenly hit me that the vast majority (if not all) of large scale rampage shootings in America have happened everywhere but the Northeast. Any local citizen outrage over the availability of guns is usually deflected not just by a “gun culture” (rural NY has that too), but particularly by political structures of long standing that the NRA influences very adroitly. But New York is a different political landscape: much more diverse, more heterogeneous and more fluid. A landscape that the NRA is untried in defending, and the state has a very powerful media machine. We’ve never really seen what would happen if gun control suddenly became a front-and-center issue of debate throughout upstate New York State. Crime-related urban violence has been “ignorable” for too long, but something like this is hard for even the complacent to ignore.

And then there are the people who died, and what they died doing. This could have happened in any immigrant assistance center anywhere in the state. But I have to think that this story must hit many New York City readers where they live, more than they are used to when it comes to news items from distant Upstate. New York City is, after all, the “city of immigrants.”

Are we really One New York, after all?

It is unfortunate that President Obama is in Europe right now. It seems to me that the shooting in Binghamton represents America’s highest aspirations being laid low by everything wrong and out of control about America. This tragedy nightmarishly reflects the themes of his presidential campaign. We urgently need someone to make the right connections, and to get past the tired and destructive political dynamics surrounding the gun control issue (both liberal and conservative tiredness, since we should be wary of trashing the 2nd Amendment).

I’ll write more about it later, but today I just don’t have the heart to.

The U.S. Border Patrol is erecting 16 more video surveillance towers in Michigan and New York to help secure parts of the U.S.-Canadian border, awarding the contract to a company criticized for faulty technology with its so-called “virtual fence” along the U.S.-Mexico boundary. The government awarded the $20 million project to Boeing Co., for the towers designed to assist agents stationed along the 4,000-mile northern stretch. Eleven of the towers are being installed in Detroit and five in Buffalo, N.Y., to help monitor water traffic between Canada and the United States along Lake St. Clair and the Niagara River.

You know, if the government had just gone through with that plan to turn the Great Lakes into a Coast Guard “free fire zone,” they wouldn’t have needed to spend all this money on surveillance.

The original post was about what you would list as Syracuse’s (or Onondaga County’s, or Upstate’s) Seven Wonders. Horror being the opposite of wonder — and maybe somehow inseparable from it — now I turn the question upside down, and ask about your list of monumentally awful and wrong things about the land where you live. Maybe these could be physical places like that huge tire dump in Oneida County they haven’t cleaned up yet… or a particular blighted neighborhood. Or an unpleasant place in the natural world where you don’t enjoy being. Or they could be certain unresolved injustices or particular manifestations of official dysfunction. As with the Seven Wonders list… the more particular the list, the better (or worse, I guess)… What would you include?

A two-year investigation by state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Albany County District Attorney David Soares and the federal Securities and Exchange Commission has concluded that Hevesi’s top political adviser and the pension fund’s chief investment officer raked in tens of millions of dollars in what [Andrew] Cuomo has termed “one of the grossest examples of pay to play” in history. The two were indicted Thursday on numerous counts, including bribery, grand larceny, money laundering and fraud. One of the men is said to have personally pocketed more than $35 million in shakedowns. The investigation is continuing.

This kind of corruption makes the bonus/bailout scandals at AIG and other Wall Street firms look like small potatoes…

It does? Maybe it gets people outside the family upset, but it’s just business as usual here (much like Blagojevich didn’t make many Illinois voters bat an eye when he was caught). The big question: Is this finally the scandal that brings the social workers in to investigate the dysfunctional household, since everyone in the country is upset about AIG already? Or do we just leave it to Cuomo to punish? If so, don’t expect big changes any time soon. (By the way, Eliot Spitzer doesn’t think much of Junior’s use of the almighty subpoena.)

This makes me feel slightly optimistic about Paterson’s 2010 prospects. A year is a lifetime in politics, and if he cleans up his own act and lets Cuomo take himself out, things could work out for him yet.

Updated:

This story about the former commissioner of the state Department of Taxation and Finance, who allegedly broke the law by taking a rigged civil service test enabling her to create a new job (by which she could telecommute from South Carolina, under an assumed name no less), is pretty outrageous, right?

But at this point, you have to wonder if outrage over outrage over the faceless cheaters in state government keeps getting leaked in order to give us all outrage fatigue, and to sap the energy required to keep asking: Where DOES this AIG/state pension thing lead?

Whatever your opinion of his points about higher education, anti-intellectualism, and the uses of solitude, you will probably agree: this article sure explains George W. Bush.

Everyone’s moving into social media – enthusiastically or uneasily. Sean Kirst blogs about his new experiences with Facebook addiction. His post got me mentally picking around the edges of the social media trend. I remain slightly skeptical about it, and this is why:

I can’t help feeling like we’ve been here before. When our society experienced a shock to its system on 9/11, we should have slowed down and had a time of deep national reflection. That didn’t happen. Instead, we got increased spending — on wars (the ultimate spending spree), on gadgets, and especially on houses we couldn’t afford. It produced a busy, bubbly economy that proved not to be real.

Now, with another shock to our system — the economic decline that picked up speed last fall — we are again ramping up in frenzied activity. Social media nirvana, like the Ownership Society, is the new American dream. “Friends” and “followers” are amassed in great quantity. But what value do these so-called networks really have? Perhaps they subtly steal more time and energy from us than they give back. And if the last bubble resulted in an economic crash, what sort of crash might this next bubble end in?

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education provides much food for thought:

Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection… Friendship may be slipping from our grasp, but our friendliness is universal.

Even wordy blogs might be growing as obsolete as the much-lamented newspaper business, which is why I grudgingly accept that a little side project I’ve long wanted to do has got to be Twitter-based and not blog-based. It’s a Twitter stream called OutdoorsNewYork, and offers items of interest about camping, wandering wildlife (with an emphasis on unexpected encounters — think: Fairmount’s bear), and the New York/DEC parks system.

Because… you just can’t fight social media.

A year later, his approval ratings are in the toilet, he’s gotten at least one death threat, and some in Albany think Sheldon Silver is really in charge. So what did he do wrong?

The most obvious factor is that he made the mistake of presiding over the government during the worst economic slide since World War II, which is going to bring down anyone’s approval rating to some degree. People like hearing a governor raise alarms about the budget, but tend not to like it when cuts and taxes get discussed. The proposal to tax New York’s wealthiest remains popular, and Paterson has been reluctant to even talk about it, much less back it. The flurry of penny-ante taxes he wanted to impose were of course deeply unpopular. (But come on: did anyone seriously believe half of these proposals were going to make it into law, such as the soda tax for instance? Do we really still not understand how much of what politicians say is hot air that gets fanned away behind closed doors?)

As for the Caroline Kennedy affair, I would imagine Paterson made some powerful enemies with his choice of Gillibrand, but the issue was with how he and his staff managed the process, not so much the choice itself. Paterson’s biggest problem is that has difficulty projecting himself into the role of governor: he shrinks from it one moment, throws his weight around unnecessarily the next, in a kind of conflicted way. The whole strange Senate selection process was Paterson making it all about him and his authority: he was going to do what he wanted, behind closed doors, inscrutably, because he is Governor of New York, dammit. At the same time I think he genuinely wanted to avoid a three-ring circus, but wound up fostering one anyway. Whatever point he was hoping to make was lost in the din.

And as for the talk about Silver really being in charge, this can hardly be comforting, since Silver has always operated under the radar (and prefers it that way) and his thing has always depended on there being an opacity to the structures of power in Albany. A weakened governor does him and his agenda no favors.

Paterson is one of the brightest men to become New York governor in a long while. He seems to be struggling with the role, which is not one he may have the stamina or temperament for (spending so long as a legislator), but not a role he couldn’t have learned, if a truckload of economic manure hadn’t been dumped on him shortly after he started. It is amateur hour, but look how well we fared under professionals like Pataki. For better or worse, he’s going to be governor until January 2011 at least, so it’s in everyone’s interest he and his trusted advisors use their brains and senses of humor and figure it out. Right now he is only adding to the unsettling sensation that nobody in any position of American leadership knows what the hell they’re doing. At least he’s not alone.

It’s easy to hold up India as an example of extreme social inequality, but here in America we still are concerned mainly with the health of the more desirable and attractive middle class, since they appear to hold the world together. Not to get too unfashionably outraged about it all, but poverty has always been the American dream’s ugly stepchild that it would rather not confront directly.

So let’s continue talking about maple trees. We all love trees.

Something has been happening to the maple trees in the Adirondacks over the past hundred years: they’ve been disappearing. Not just the old-growth ones; all of them. They’re simply not being replaced. This old article from the Post-Standard tells the story. The problem is not so much with the beloved sugar maples, but with another kind of tree — less beloved, but usually innocuous — that has got a problem: the beech tree.

When I was up in the Adirondacks last summer, I noticed that our campgrounds were surrounded mostly by beech trees. They were nice trees, but not very big at all. Everything looked like relatively young growth, although there had been no logging in these areas for a long time. I remembered reading this story and could certainly see the evidence. There were a few maple trees around and some maple saplings, but they would never grow to maturity because the beeches were multiplying like wildfire.

Beech trees are very useful as wildlife habitat, and you can use them for wood, but they are not as well-loved as the maples. The beech is not even considered a “junk tree.” While I don’t know how any tree can be considered junk, it’s true that some trees are specially disliked by the experts — such as silver maples, so common around here but considered “bad trees” because of their shallow roots and tendency to topple in storms. Norway maples are also considered bad because of their big broad leaves which choke out “desirable” lawn grass.

However, there’s a good reason why tree and wildlife experts fear the spread of the beech in the Adirondacks. It’s because the beeches are sickly. It’s strange that sick trees should mean more trees. But the beech trees are trapped in a cycle. They have been infected with beech bark disease, a complicated blight imported from Europe that involves both fungus and insects. The disease causes the trees to die before they have reached full growth. Fortunately – or maybe unfortunately – for the beech, it evolved with an admirable survival trick: whenever its roots are damaged (by disturbance or disease), it responds by sending up new shoots that can become new trees. The new trees grow for a few years, crowding out sunlight for other species, then get infected and die. Cycle repeats.

The Adirondacks are becoming filled with dying young beech saplings that will never grow up. They will never shelter birds or other tree species, or provide food for ground animals, or wood for our use. Concerned environmentalists do not know what to do about it — either for the beech population itself, or for the more “desirable” trees that are affected, or for the entire ecosystem they all support. There is a hope that someday the fungal disease will burn itself out and restore balance to the forest, but that’s a big maybe. Brutally clear-cutting the beech thickets won’t help, for reasons already described. The only way we could stop this situation in our lifetimes is to find a way to cure the disease. That isn’t an environmental priority.

But we shouldn’t be thinking about human lives the way we think about trees. So why do we?

I would be in support of this initiative if it brings down the exorbitant price of maple candy, which is the surest way for someone to entice me to do whatever they want.

Come on, New York! Let’s kick Vermont’s ass on this one. All they have is better marketing. We have way more trees.

I don’t care about the old sign for the mall (which wasn’t the original sign anyway – it was replaced back in the ’90s with something very similar to the original). The name “Fairmount Fair” is what’s “historic,” and happily Benderson opted to keep it. I’m guessing the new sign has something to do with Benderson planning to lure more shops to the center. But boy, is it silly. Since Fairmount Fair is the most overt identity that Fairmount has as a spot on the map, it’s kind of a shame. Between this and Westvale Plaza, I’m always amazed at how horrific design finds its way into suburban sameness. Who designs this crap? Someone was paid to do this work? I WANT MY MTV!

Most people in New York City don’t pay property taxes because they’re renters. Therefore, the crushing burden of property taxes that we feel in upstate is not felt in New York City,” Nojay says. One longstanding proposal that conservatives like Nojay want to revive is the plan to take New York state and split it in two. New York would be comprised of New York City and Long Island with upstate becoming the 51st state under the name “West New York.”

It’s details like this that make me doubtful that “Upstate New York” has a future as a coherent entity unto itself: the proposed name West New York — proposed, naturally, by a Western New Yorker. It’s an inappropriate appellation for a theoretical post-Empire State, a name that surely has no resonance whatsoever to anyone from, say, Watertown, Binghamton or the Catskills. It’s the sort of idea that still betrays how the rest of the state is still split into petty political fiefs. It is not ready for primetime.

I used to think that Upstate New York had a future as a region, but my feelings on that have evolved over the past few years. I find myself increasingly inclined to give up on the idea of any sort of coherent political union across that wide of an area. Central New York’s future is Central New York’s, and I’m beginning to think more and more that it lies along a north-south axis, rather than on the old east-west one (although I can see its relationship with the Mohawk Valley continuing). CNY is not a bad place to be when it comes to communicating with other regions of the state, country and continent.

And I don’t think much of Richard Florida’s “TorBuffChester” concept either – if we’re shopping for buzzwords, I’m still more impressed with “Atlantica” even though environmentalists and labor advocates have raised valid alarms. In fact, the already-joined battle over the future of the Canadian Maritime/New England/Upstate corridor shows that this area has the possibility of someday being a true pressure point (or flash point) of political and economic development. We here in CNY need to be paying more attention to these developments. Meanwhile, TorrBuffChester is just academic concept that is producing no light and no heat, merely the hope for a “new brand.” And in times like these when many are coming to believe that we are facing an economic reordering not seen in generations, we need more than simple rebranding.

Possibly this is me declaring my allegiance to the Judean People’s Front over the People’s Front of Judea, but… well… if I don’t want my region’s future defined by New York City and Wall Street, I’m not so sure I want it defined by Buffalo and Rochester politicians either.

There is an element to American culture that never ceases to amuse me. Even when grappling with the idea of economic disintegration, Americans attempt to cast it in terms of technological or economic progress: eco-villages, sustainable development, energy efficiency and so on. Under the circumstances, such compulsive techno-optimism seems maladaptive. I love the new advances in organic farming, which I find fascinating and very useful, but why do people seem incapable of doing the simplest things without making them into projects, preferably ones that involve some element of new technology? Thousands of years of happy composting using heaps and pits are behind us: now we need bins – and plastic, oil-based ones at that!
–Dmitry Orlov, Our Village

Just linking to another interesting article by recent Soviet historian and socioeconomic theorist Dmitry Orlov. Also re-linking to an old post of mine that touhces on the same ideas about village life, and to the dormant but still interesting collection of speculative fiction, Upstate 2050.

In several dozen recent interviews, Rhode Islanders agreed on this much: Their state’s smallness has contributed to its problems, but could be its best asset if properly exploited. Saul Kaplan, who until December was executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, called the state’s size a “secret sauce” that could help businesses develop products or services quickly. But many of those interviewed said that, instead, the smallness has trapped the state in parochialism, insecurity and outdated traditions that block change at every turn… State leaders cringed last fall when Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, said on Fox News that Rhode Island’s tax structure made it “the 48th-most-acceptable state for business.” In fact, a study last fall by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan group in Washington, ranked Rhode Island’s business climate the fifth-worst in the nation.

Hm, sounds familiar. Interestingly, Rhode Island is just about the size of Central New York (really, just the Syracuse metro area). This makes me wonder: if CNY was a state, would it be better or worse in that ranking than RI?

An intriguing fact about Rhode Island is that it used to control up to 90% of the American slave trade after the Revolution and up until the point when the forced importation of Africans was abolished. This dusty old historical fact somehow feels germane to the state’s current economic inflexibility and stagnation, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps it presaged a pattern of heavy overinvestment in unsustainable and doomed economic trends.

I can’t say we’ve been doing anything much smarter than Rhode Island in remaking the CNY economy, but I feel our long-term outlook is probably better. We have more alignment options and more potential communication with other countries and regional economies (i.e. Canada, the Midwest instead of just Wall Street). Maybe we can have a new twist on that old game of Upstate intra-city putdowns, and instead say “At least we’re not Rhode Island!”

When Emily Cook, a screenwriter, bought a house four years ago in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood on the Northeast side of Los Angeles, she fantasized what the area might look like in a year or two, with cafes and boutiques replacing tattered old businesses… A sad flower shop on the corner, she thought, could become a miniature Whole Foods. An upholstery store could be a gastropub where she and friends would grab a beer, and a neglected 1940s diner could become a retro spot for a quick meal.

Whereas, many of our local neighborhoods around here would be quite happy and relieved to have even a flower shop on the corner and an upholstery store…

This year, however, I’ve been finding myself less impressed with the snow removal performance. We’ve had more than one lake effect “event” that was predicted well in advance and yet the roads seem to be more neglected each time. It mystifies me why “they” seem to think that laying down lots of salt and not plowing makes road conditions better. It just makes for slippery brown muck several inches deep. What’s wrong with them?

Or, what’s wrong with me? I hired a guy to plow my driveway this season, for the first time. I spent the first few weeks of the snow season, getting all excited every time he showed up to clear out the driveway. Took a while for the thrill to wear down to normal levels. It’s going to be hard to go back to shoveling now. And I feel like I’m losing my good relationship with snow. I sort of miss going out there. But… I also don’t.

We haven’t really had that bad of a winter, and yet today I faced the morning commute with a tinge of dread. That isn’t a usual feeling for me when it snows. I’ve lost some confidence. Maybe we’ve also lost confidence as a community. Whenever we have a lake effect day now, almost everything gets cancelled. It didn’t used to be that way — or at least, it wasn’t hyped up so much on the news.

I wonder if the people who have scattered from CNY to the four winds will ever be able to bring themselves to come back and accept winter as one of the four seasons. I wonder if the change in American weather tastes is permanent — that most people will keep on living in the hot, humid, stinging-insect-infested South and West because they believe living and working in snowtime is just too much of a sacrifice. I wonder how long our snow belt communities can maintain the stiff-upper-lip semblance of productivity during the snowiest winter months, without making official the impulse to hibernate (or play) during this season. Maybe it’s not just me.

This is footage from ABC’s broadcast, but the audio was taken from live radio coverage (the game was not broadcast on TV live), so it’s a different ending than the famous “Do you believe in miracles!” but no less exciting. Check it out.

It’s much too soon to call the project “dead,” but NYRI opponents were handed a major win this week when the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) could not overrule any state’s decision on power transmission projects. NYRI is now arguing that this decision doesn’t matter because in their view, they filed their application with the PSC one year ago already, meaning that FERC has the right to decide (since allegedly PSC has not decided within a year). The PSC, however, holds that the application was only complete as of last August, meaning they still have until August to decide. So, the beat goes on. But in the meantime, the anti-NYRI coalition continues to receive funding for a prolonged fight, and there are other signs that NYRI’s investors are beginning to grow weary of determined opposition.

The deathly U.S. economy looms over everything these days. Not only must the financial downspiral be disheartening to NYRI’s investors, but it’s also slowing growth and development in the greater NYC area, which was clamoring for more and cheaper power. I’m not sure how this is really set to affect the “power imbalance” in New York State (both literal and figurative), but unless there is a slackening of resistance to the project and it becomes viewed as a job generator, I am not sure how much longer the company can continue to push their plan unless they receive special federal help.

Cheers!

Okay, did you really read all those? (Really?) Then it’s time to talk about that mysterious, perhaps misunderstood figure; the fly in the ointment who isn’t part of any of the discussions about downtown or city living but whose shadow hangs over all; the proverbial Man Who Wasn’t There: Joe Cicero.

I’m not going to try and turn Joe Cicero into a too much of a character sketch of modern suburban living. We know he’s married, probably with kids, working either in the city or out in the suburbs, in a house with the sort of front yard and square footage you just can’t get in Strathmore or Sedgwick. We know (or think we know) what he wants from Syracuse, and we believe he doesn’t want much but parking, chain stores and I-81 to get him back and forth from work, and maybe the odd SU game at the Dome. He has a lot of spending money, but we’ve given up on Joe where the future of Syracuse is concerned, because we believe he’s irredeemable.

If Mad Max-style peak oil was going to happen any time soon, Joe could possibly be “scared straight” back into town, leaving his dead SUV by the 481 roadside. But peak oil probably isn’t going to happen that suddenly, so forget about that kind of rapid reconditioning. But with the right initiatives, and smart planning, and a little bit of funding, we can have downtown Syracuse well-stocked with fresh new fish from somewhere else. Joe can stay out in suburbia; with some luck, city living might snag his kids.

Syracuse B-4 makes a very important point about downtown and malls (the places where Joe Cicero “likes” to go):

Let’s face it: as long as Downtown has the slightest hint of despair or decay, like the dying Fairmount Fair all those years ago, only the toughest of souls will want to venture its streets. Camillus Commons or Fayetteville Towne Center may be aesthetically depressing, but they don’t make you feel the weight of the world at every turn. And isn’t that what this is really all about?

It’s a big part of what it’s all about. If downtown has no pull of memory or spiritual pull (beyond memory, which is why architectural aesthetics are important), there is no reason for anyone to be drawn there.

But I also have to be honest and say that memories of the Edwards monorail probably mean nothing, spiritually, to Joe Cicero. It maybe meant something to Joe’s father, but Joe grew up under different circumstances. He grew up at a time when downtown Syracuse was already dead. To him, this is the normal state of affairs. How do you “re-citify” someone as far gone as that? Should you even try? Isn’t Joe just a lost cause? Shouldn’t we just import new Syracusans from the colleges or the Creative Class (and hope they don’t turn into Joe when they get pregnant?)

The “import new Syracusans” movement has been humming along, or at least not utterly spinning its wheels — but the looming “decession” (or whatever it’s now being called) very likely means that there is going to be less seed money available for this very expensive social re-engineering effort (and it is frightfully expensive here in dysfunctional, business-unfriendly New York). So perhaps that needs to be filed in the “Pending” folder along with peak oil. Any other approaches?

It’s no secret by now that I think “revitalizing downtown” gets a little too much focus in the community discussions about how to pull the Syracuse metro area back together in a way that will help downtown come back. I think the framework of the current discussion is skewed and is still at the shouting-match stage, as you can see in almost every thread about 81 or downtown on Syracuse.com. What the Syracuse area needs is a sort of Truth and Reconciliation movement that addresses the whole metro area, the history of the whole area (and I mean, the whole history), and one that identifies and reaches out to all the players in the cause of making this metro area’s footprint smaller for everyone’s benefit — not initially focused on creating a dense downtown again with an Edwards’. Being an inner-ring suburbanite, I see colors and shades in the journey to where we got to today. And I believe that you can’t merely put in a new system (such as the dreaded gentrification process), you have to reverse what happened.

How you do that, and how you attract Joe Cicero (and his downtown-centric counterpart, who I don’t have a cutesy name for yet) to that discussion, I’m not sure. I do know one thing: right now, fruitful peace talks, brainstorming or decision-making cannot take place at Fayetteville Towne Centre or at the Warehouse. We should look at the map and find a more reasonable place.

Chautauqua County Legislator James Caflisch, R-French Creek, sponsored a motion in recent days that would signal the legislature’s opposition to the relocation of Guantanamo Bay inmates to prisons across the state. To Caflisch, it is important that legislators be on the record when it comes to Guantanamo Bay prisoners being relocated to New York state. He believes it is a very real possibility some will be housed in prisons such as Attica Correctional Facility only 50 miles away from Silver Creek and Irving. ”There was a news report out there. … A couple congressmen or federal officials in Washington were saying Upstate New York is the perfect place to relocate Guantanamo prisoners,” Caflisch said. ”It wouldn’t be fair for New York state.”

Wondering how hard this Republican official campaigned against Guantanamo in the first place – chickens coming home to roost, anyone?

I’ve searched but haven’t been able to find any reference to the “news report” Caflisch is referring to, but at least one other observer appeared to be thinking of Upstate prisons in this British report, although in the negative:

Those found guilty face a very short life expectancy if they end up in a US prison. “You put them in a prison in upstate New York, those guys are going to get knifed in their bed the first night,” [intelligence expert] Bob Ayers added.

So, is this inconvenient problem potentially best solved by warehousing Guantanamo prisoners in the towns and villages of beautiful Upstate New York — New York City’s (and now America’s?) ever-popular human dumping ground?

Whatever the status of this horrible idea, it’s clear we don’t need toothless county legislature resolutions, but instead a regionwide discussion about this area’s economic overreliance on prisons full of Downstate inmates. This pattern has simply got to stop. Someone needs to ask Caflisch why Upstate Republicans have been so eager to house prisoners in their communities at all. Well, we all know the reasons why. But when are people and political leaders in Upstate New York going to stand up and have some self-respect in the face of the poisonous “business” of prisons? (Because frankly, I’m not too enthusiastic about the passive, “it’s none of our business” reaction of the Chautauqua County Democrats, either.)

Upstate officials can’t just turn a blind eye to Upstate prisons packed with Downstate prisoners, and then scream bloody murder at the idea that the Federal government wants to house Gitmo prisoners in their town. If you’ve got a problem with that, you’ve only set the table for that situation yourself.

Albany’s leaders refuse to deal with the ramifications of the Rockefeller drug laws which has swept up many people who may or may not be hardened criminals; and the Obama Administration can’t or won’t deal with the wider questions of why we have these un-charged Gitmo prisoners in the first place, who may or may not have committed any crimes.

This is a classic example of why all politics are local.

Just think about that for a second.

They’re “personal services,” but they’re also “self-directed,” so you’re apparently expected to handle them yourself, which implies you’re not exactly getting “personal service” (or indeed, “service” at all…)

And they’re “self-directed,” which means they don’t need a director… except that they do.

George Carlin could have built an entire routine around this one.

Well-known blogger BuffaloPundit is a resident of Clarence Center. His house was a half mile from the crash site (and he was out of town at the time). Sadly one family on the ground was not so lucky. This amateur video appears to have audio of the confusing aftermath and (apparently) of two family members who escaped the house. I couldn’t watch it without tearing up, especially since my grandmother used to live right under the flight path of Hancock Airport. I hope they will get some information out soon about how these people and the families of passengers can be helped.

On a grim note, this Associated Press fact sheet would appear to indicate that 5 of the last 10 commercial U.S. airline disasters (including 9/11) have taken place in New York State.

Hang in there Buffalo, we’re all thinking of you.

Updated: Among those lost on the flight was human rights investigator Alison Des Forges, whose book Leave None to Tell The Story is the definitive chronicle and analysis of the Rwandan genocide. Des Forges was a native of Schenectady and was married to a University at Buffalo professor.

Updated: An aviation blogger offers a highly detailed look at icing and how pilots deal with it, and offers his thoughts on what may have happened to Flight 3407.

The new Democratic Senate majority, for their part, are acting “shocked, shocked” that all this stuff existed… it was either “far off campus” (seven miles out of town) or on Long Island. You know, in darkest Africa and all. Now I’m intrigued to know what sort of sweet setups the Assembly Dems have.

Last June, I made note of a statement by Rem Koolhaas…

Famous Architect Rem Koolhaas is disappointed with American cities:

“Don’t tell anyone… but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.”

Today: Unfinished 40-story Beijing hotel designed by Koolhaas goes up in flames in a mere 20 minutes:

Yo, Rem! Maybe the 20th century city could teach you something about not designing perfect firetraps. (What the heck did they use for the framework, magnesium?)

(Rest of original post below the flip)

I live in Old America — the Northeast, the Rust Belt — and in decades to come, the rest of America will also become an old country. Many more of its people will embark on that twilight journey that is such a mystery (or a dead end) to Famous Architects — the one where you gain wisdom through maintenance, instead of knowledge through innovation. These are two different and possibly divergent paths of knowing. Not only will this play out in families that suddenly find themselves having to take care of aging Baby Boomer relatives, but yes, the establishment of a single new subway line will become a new kind of heroic struggle that they will not understand in Shenz