A Pair of Published Posts

Forgive the alliteration. The Spyglass blog for Los Angeles is the latest venue to feature my writing. I covered a book-signing by Brian Wilson two weeks ago and a night of futurist excitement at UCLA last week. So it's official: I'm an LA-based writer now.

Just Published: Florencia Troisi Profile in The Argentimes

Just before leaving Córdoba in June, I met Florencia Troisi, a young artist/entrepreneur who was all over the city's art scene. Now the Buenos Aires-based biweekly, The Argentimes, has published my profile of her.

Just Published: Danny Cepero Profile in Pennsylvania Gazette

Earlier this summer, I got to meet one of the cooler graduates of the University of Pennsylvania, New York Red Bulls goalkeeper Danny Cepero. Check out my profile of him in this month's alumni magazine.

On the Road with Etgar 36

A lot of you know about my other job: When I'm not writing, I'm an informal educator of teenagers. Here are a few pictures of our current journey. We leave Denver tomorrow, and I'll be on the road for another four weeks, just about. More pics to come.

Leaving Cordoba (4 of 5): Signs Signs Signs

Almost every day, I go to the bakery. It’s less than a block from our apartment and the elevator ride down from the sixth floor takes longer than the walk along the street. And most days, I go twice; first, at around 8:30 am – medialunas for breakfast – and then again at around four or five for a bag of criollas, the crusty square biscuits that make for a perfect merienda, the third of an Argentine’s four daily meals. The sign above the bakery has faded over the years, but the name – Panaderia Gizeh – is still legible. (The Egyptian motif is limited to the name and a framed piece of papyrus with hieroglyphics that hangs by the oven.)

For months I didn’t know the bakery even had a name; I was too busy shaking my head at the sign above the Evangelina hairdresser next door, which has a picture of Brad Pitt on it. The actor stares off into the distance, his eyes shaded by dark sunglasses, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

It’s the kind of sign that could only exist here. Like those of most of Córdoba’s businesses, the bakery and the hairdresser signs are printed on a waterproof fabric that is then stretched over a metal frame. I have to believe these are at least somewhat expensive, for two reasons: First, Bien Casero, a shop near our apartment that sells prepared foods to go, has two signs that hang on either side of their front gate that get taken in every night at the close of business. Secondly, the signs of most other small businesses here are sponsored advertisements for the products of much larger companies.

Tiny kiosks usually announce their presence with ads for either Beldent or Topline chewing gum. (Beldent is made by Cadbury; Topline comes from Grupo Arcor, which, with 27 factories across Argentina, claims to be the biggest candy company in the world.) Small restaurants and food shops mostly get topped off with Coke or Pepsi signs. The beer companies seem to have more or less complete control over the look of the bars here, and their names appear everywhere. (The most popular are Argentina’s Quilmes and Brazil’s Brahma, both of which are owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev.) Folding chairs, umbrellas, ashtrays – every conceivable surface is plastered with the name and color of a particular brew, to the point that the names of the bars themselves seem secondary, if not completely unknown.

Which isn’t to say that the names aren’t occasionally clever. Near Córdoba’s central courthouse, for instance, right next door to the Justice Cyber internet café, is the El Veredicto kiosk. Across the street, El Codigo restaurant serves lunch to the lawyers. But more often than not, the corporations take priority, and nowhere is this clearer than at the unbroken string of seven bars along the canal in the city center. The sign of each bar advertises a different alcoholic drink (Fernet 1882, Warsteiner, Cordoba Cerveza, Jim Beam, Budweiser, Brahma, Quilmes, Heineken), and hardly anyone refers to a single watering hole by name. “Let’s meet at la cañada,” they say.

One of the seven – Morrison Bar – manages to upstage the name of its patron company (Brahma) by plastering its façade with a huge portrait of its namesake, Jim Morrison. Which brings us back to Brad Pitt, and to this country’s rampant disregard for intellectual property rights. The Coffee and Tea Cafe, an upscale café that serves Cabrales-brand coffee at its two Córdoba franchises, has not only adapted the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf logo to make it their own; they’ve also incorporated a Starbucks mermaid into the shop’s décor.

Pizza stores seem to be particularly enthusiastic “borrowers,” and Córdoba has a MoMA Pizza (as in the modern art museum in New York), a Cerebro Pizza (as in the brainier half of that animated duo, “Pinky y el Cerebro”), and Charley’s Pizza (as in Chaplin).

But when it comes to decorating the signs of otherwise unremarkable businesses, nothing can compete with the United States’ most famous animated family. The Simpsons are huge here – this despite the fact that Rebekah assures me that much is lost in the translation – and images of Homero and the clan are used to sell everything from cell phone plans to locksmith services.

Hamburguesas Krosty in Nueva Córdoba is a genius bit of marketing, although I wouldn’t eat there if you paid me – making the shop even more like its animated counterpart than its owners might have intended.

It’s important to know, though, that these are the exceptions to the Argentine urban landscape’s general repetitiveness. On every block of every neighborhood in every city, the businesses start to look almost identical, and the things they sell are even more similar still. I state this with confidence, because I spent part of last month writing a guidebook chapter about the province of Córdoba, and finding restaurants that didn’t look or taste like all the others was not that easy.

For better and for worse, every barrio has just about everything it needs within a few blocks – a bakery, a fruit & vegetable shop, a butcher, a kiosk, a newsstand, maybe a restaurant or two – with the result being that people stay in their neighborhoods, just like I’ve been staying in mine. Nobody travels across town to get a pizza from the place with the pretty sign, or the clever name. There’s little reason to: the Pizza Napolitana (tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, roasted red peppers, green olives) is just the same.

It’s the people who own, work at, and support these businesses who make each one unique, and this is probably the aim behind what would appear to be a very unusual guerrilla ad campaign. Large, handwritten signs have been popping up around Córdoba recently, and they look like messages from one person to another.

“Fernando: I am waiting for you at McDonald’s so that we can make a toast with Coke.”

This is how the world’s most popular restaurant is promoting itself here in Córdoba? Another:

“Ana: I’m sorry for standing you up when we were supposed to meet at McDonald’s. I hope you forgive me.”

Very uncool, dude. But now that you mention it, I could go for a Big Mac…

Leaving Córdoba (3 of 5): Hombre de Casa

Let’s go back to the mall for a second. It has all the standard stuff that you’d expect to find in a North American mall – a food court, a department store, lots of mid-aisle kiosks selling crappy jewelry – but there are a few surprises too. You can buy medical insurance. You can book a trip at the travel agency. You could even lease a car: In four small corners on the ground floor are four smaller cars – a Chevy, a Peugeot, a Citroën, and a Fiat – and each is accompanied by a man in a suit sitting at a desk, waiting to answer your questions.

The home exercise machines and fine leather products notwithstanding, the most luxurious item at the mall is the mall itself. The charms that have already worn off of similar malls in the U.S. still draw many people to spend parts of their weekends here. With wide stretches of polished stone floors and no sputtering cars to avoid, the mall is the perfect environment for parents, children, and baby carriages. Yet strollers are a rarity in this land of narrow and cracked sidewalks, so the mall has a fleet of loaners, and each is emblazoned with the Nuevocentro Shopping logo.

A word about “shopping”: What was a gerund in English turns into a noun en castellano. Shopping is not an activity; it is a place. The word, as far as I can tell, is always preceded by an article, and is used in sentences like:

• Vivimos en la esquina de Duarte Quiros y Rio Negro, al frente del shopping. (We live at the corner of Duarte Quiros and Rio Negro, right across from the shopping.)

• No, no vendo cospeles. Vas al shopping. (No, I don’t sell bus tokens here. Go to the shopping.)
  

Strange syntax aside, the mall is effectively just another Córdoba commercial street. Never mind the Lacoste, Timberland, and Puma shops. Never mind the Garbarino electronics store with its wall of flat screens playing nothing but futbol and Foo Fighters music videos. And don’t be fooled into thinking that only in the magical world of the mall do cafe waiters run around to the different shops with silver trays of coffee. No, this morning ritual takes place all over Argentina, the only difference being that on the streets outside, the trays are mostly plastic and are usually covered to prevent dust from settling atop the cafe con leche.

Nuevocentro Shopping is also home to shops that play essential roles for the barrio. These less glamorous, quotidian businesses are clustered around the mall's western end, the one furthest away from the Sheraton (and closest to our front door). There’s a newsagent, a supermarket, a shoe repair shop, an ice cream stand; I once bought a plumber’s snake to unclog our shower drain at the hardware store. And the shop on this row that we patronize most regularly is – perhaps not surprisingly – the laundry.

Every day, from 10am to 10pm, they’re there, the team of white-uniformed laundresses, always in plain view, always washing, drying, folding, pressing, and steaming, and always ready to drop whatever it is to receive our weekly two-baskets-worth of dirty clothes. The kids hanging out at the bottom of the cinema steps don’t concern them; they smile at me as we count out piles of remeras, pantalones, y ropa interior.

Having someone do your laundry anywhere is a privilege, but here, even though it’s cheap by U.S. standards (about four bucks a load), it's a genuine luxury, and I am pretty sure that we’re their best customers. It’s gotten to the point that they no longer ask me my name (they just write “JONAS” on the little green ticket) or for my phone number (which I still have not memorized). They’ve stopped raising their eyebrows at the number of t-shirts I bring them, even if I’m still a bit embarrassed by the gargantuan size of the plastic bags in which our clothes are returned – cleaned, folded, and smelling strongly of chemicals.

Recently Andrea – she’s the one who pulls her hair back with a thick headband that makes her baby face look even rounder – remarked to one of her co-workers at the lavanderia how funny it was that I was the one who they saw all the time. “Hombre de casa,” I heard her say, laughing. The words translate to “man of the house,” but it seemed clear enough that what she meant by them was quite the opposite sentiment. My command of this language may not be great – I later found out that what she probably said was “amo de casa” – but my read of the speaker was dead-on: that phrase literally means "a male housewife."

To these women playing their gender-appropriate roles, I am a source of amusement – the guy who takes care of his and his girlfriend’s laundry. But even if it doesn't make sense, I'd rather think of myself as the hombre de casa, the man who is of the house – this means cooking, cleaning, and laundry, sure – but both inside and also around it. Being of a house, after all, is way more fun when that house is in a neighborhood like this one, even if the laundresses occasionally laugh at you. Everything I've been writing about our life here in Barrio Alberdi derives from the simple fact that I genuinely enjoy the errands I run around here. I go happily from shop to shop, talking to the owners, understanding less than half of what they say back to me, smiling at them awkwardly and feeling thankful that there's a script for what my response should be most of the time.

I carry my purchases in a reusable nylon shopping bag – I call it my “abuela bag” – and it’s coming back with us to Los Angeles, flexible plastic handles and all. Made of tight-knit nylon, its light-blue and white stripes are reminiscent enough of the Argentine flag to remind me where it came from. Here's hoping I can bring a bit of this barrio to wherever it is that we live next.

Leaving Córdoba (2 of 5): Raul

Raul, who looks about sixty and always wears a black knitted ski cap, is without a doubt the smallest of the small businessmen in our neighborhood. Every day except Sunday, directly across the street from the door to our apartment building, Raul sets up his spindly metal table, lays out his wares, and sells to the cars and people passing by.

This corner is a good one for him. Duarte Quiros runs straight from the center of Córdoba, past our shopping mall, and eventually out to the air force bases on the city’s Western outskirts. The intersecting two-lane calle – Rio Negro – takes cars from the south of Córdoba towards one of the city’s main avenues (Colón), its hideous central police station, and to the grounds of one of its better football teams (Belgrano).

Although I’ve never seen him make a sale, Raul says he’s been on this corner for the last twelve years. His business doesn’t seem to have a niche: Today, for instance, the red metal table was arrayed with tubes of flame retardant for fabrics and scrubbers that could’ve been for cars or bathtubs. It was pretty sunny today – nobody expected a 26-degree day in May, let alone three such days in a row – so most of Raul’s merchandise was propped up in the shade against the wall. On either side of his chair, from the door of Rebekah’s pilates studio to the door of the art-framing store, Raul had lined the wall with the following: A number of steering wheel covers (available in red or blue), two rubberized motorcycle cable locks (both blue), four stand-up air pumps for bike tires, ten tubs of a generic-looking pain cream, one large-button calculator, at least five unique wrench sets (both crescent and socket), and one of those beaded car-seat cushions that New York cabbies used to have. There was other stuff too that I can’t remember, but between what was on the table and what was against the wall, Raul couldn’t have had more than 150 products for sale, and he probably wasn’t stocking more than ten of any particular item. One thing I did know: All of it would fit into a single black plastic garbage bag at the end of the day.

Raul used to be a carnicero, a butcher – a not-uncommon profession here in this land of beef. But when he was hit by a car twelve years ago, he had to have a metal bar inserted into his lower right leg, and this left Raul unable to stand for long stretches of time. His career bagging, cutting, weighing, and flinging different cuts of Argentina’s best-loved food was over. Raul left his refrigerated display case in the city center behind, began selling here, and has been on the corner ever since.

Leaving Córdoba (1 of 5): Man about the barrio

Today, standing on the curb of the busy two-way corridor between our apartment building and the mall across the street, I watched a new-looking taxicab zip by. I don’t know why it first caught my eye, but as it sped away I noticed it had the words “El Sueño de Luis” written on it in black plastic letters stuck onto the trunk. Clearly the car’s owner had dreamed of the car before he could buy it, I thought, and now that he had it, he was announcing his dream-come-true to the world.

Or rather, to the people he had already passed by. This was Luis’s Dream, but only the very rare passenger would ever know it. Who manages to flag down a taxi from behind? And who watches a cab drive away after getting out? A young girl, dropped off at her door after a particularly good date perhaps – she might watch the car spirit her companion away into the night – but even if she could read the words in the low light, what of it?

No, those who ride with Luis – and since the vehicle's name betrayed a pride that only an owner-operator could feel, I have to believe that Luis was the driver as well as the owner – those who ride with him likely have no idea how important the vehicle is to the man behind the wheel.

* * *

We haven’t been taking all that many taxis in Córdoba. The city center is pretty compact, and from where we live it only takes about twenty minutes to walk to just about anywhere you’d want to go. But back when we were going to Buenos Aires every other week for rabies shots, we were in cabs all the time, going to and from either the bus terminal or the airport. Once, on our way to catch an early-morning flight, we found ourselves in the back seat of a cab we’d apparently been in before. The driver remembered us; he’d taken us to the airport on another morning, picking us up at the same spot, right around the same time of day – maybe a little earlier that time, he said. (It was true. We were running late.)

That’s how small Córdoba sometimes feels. This is a city of a million and a couple hundred thousand people, and at least 10,000 taxis, and yet if you stay in your neighborhood, if you cultivate a routine, if you go back to the same kiosk for a coke in a returnable glass bottle on two successive Mondays, people will start to remember you.

* * *

I was thinking about all this while waiting for the light to change, outside the Nuevocentro Shopping mall, holding two large plastic bags of our clean laundry. It’s pretty convenient to live right by a mall. We see movies at the cinema, we print out our documents at its two locutorios, and when we’re feeling too lazy to cook, we sometimes go out for dinner in the food court. There’s a Disco supermarket there, so we end up shopping a lot in the mall, too.

Over the last months, though, I’ve been trying to avoid it. The mall is impossible to ignore: it has a three-sided Coke-and-McDonalds advertisement that is just about the tallest structure in the neighborhood. But I’ve been trying to run almost all of my errands at the local shops in our neighborhood, and the owners have begun to get very friendly, very talkative. It’s partly because I show up every day, partly because these businesses don’t see all that many foreigners, and partly because I finally have mastered enough castellano to actually be able to engage people here in some conversation. Whatever the reason, it’s been fun to get to know a little bit about a few of the neighborhood's fixtures, and it makes me sad to be leaving it so soon.

* * *

I hope that I get to meet Luis the taxi driver before we leave Córdoba, but I wouldn’t bet on it. So instead, over the next couple of weeks – our last weeks in Argentina for the foreseeable future – I’ll try to tell you a bit about the different places and people that I see around here in Barrio Alberdi.

Bariloche & Mendoza

For those of you keeping track, we went to Bariloche and Mendoza for a bit recently. These are two of Argentina's biggest tourist destinations, and we certainly found out why. Check out some of the pictures to see for yourself. (Apologies for the silly captions. It started to feel very "children's book-esque," and I just decided to go with it.)

Murciélagos!

At about 11:30 on our second Saturday night together in Alicia’s apartment, Rebekah and I lay down to watch a DVD we had rented from the shop downstairs. The titles had just finished when a tiny creature swooped in through the door and dove towards the foot of our futon. It came to rest atop the untucked sheet, and lay completely still.
We sprang out of bed.

“What is it?” Rebekah asked me.
“Turn it off,” I said, pointing to the television. I ran out of the room to get something with which to trap this intruder while Rebekah fiddled with the remote.
“Is it a bird?” she asked.
“It’s a bat,” I said.

* * *

Only hours before, while preparing what turned out to be an unexceptional pasta dinner, we were listening to an old episode of This American Life. When their scary-themed Halloween show first aired last October, Rebekah hadn’t wanted to listen to it alone. Now that I was back in Argentina, she cued up the episode. In the second act, Alex Blumberg tells the story of a woman bitten by a rabid raccoon in New York and, responsible reporter that he is, he decided to share “a quick public service announcement”:

“A bat can bite you in your sleep without you even knowing it and without leaving a mark. So if you find one in a room with a sleeping person, you have to catch it and have it tested. And if you can’t catch it, you should go to a doctor. I’m serious. I learned about this, it freaked me out and now I want to tell people.”

It worked. We freaked. We weren’t asleep when we saw the bat, but it was in our room, wasn’t it? None of the windows in the apartment had screens, but none of them were open at the time, either – too many bugs at night. Which meant the bat had been living with us! I mean, he could have spent many nights in our room! Couldn’t he have bitten us already? We wouldn’t have known a thing!

We trapped the bat under an overturned bucket and then started googling frantically. Everything Blumberg had said was true. Rabies is basically 100% fatal, and though bats aren’t generally rabid animals, the ones that act strangely – those that enter buildings or lie on bedroom floors motionless, for instance – are more likely to have rabies than others. And the disease, which exists on every continent except Antarctica, had reappeared in Córdoba only one year before.

We called our Argentine friends, Pamela and Martin, first. Then we called Candy, our landlord’s friend who had come to visit us at the apartment earlier that week. They were unfazed, neither by the fact that it was midnight, nor by our story. After all, the bat hadn’t bitten us. Pamela and Martin kindly indulged our yanqui paranoia, offering to take us to the hospital. Candy calmly told us that she had once seen a bat at the apartment before, but that they had managed to get it out of the house.

“Have you gotten rid of it?” she asked, as if it were that simple.

Rebekah was convinced that we should get rid of the bat. Alex Blumberg, however, had told us to keep it, to have it tested.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. “We’re going to go to a hospital, and they’re going to look at us like we’re crazy, coming in with a bat. And do you really think they’ll be able to test this thing?”

She had a point. I hadn’t yet seen the inside of an Argentine hospital, but from the stories I had heard, my confidence in the system wasn’t all that high. In fact, for precisely this reason, many American travel doctors recommend that people spending long stretches of time in developing countries (in other words, us) get all the vaccines they might need in the US before they leave. Including the vaccine against rabies. Neither of us had done this.

We slid a piece of cardboard under the bucket, walked it over to our kitchen window, and let the bat fly away.

We called my sister Lea (a 2nd-year med student) and Rebekah’s friends Puneet and Gurmukh (both doctors) for advice. “Our professors tell us that we shouldn’t get stuck with any needles unless we’re in the US or Canada,” Lea said. “And not really in Canada, either.” Puneet and Gurmukh were convinced we could find a private hospital that catered to rich people and foreigners, and encouraged us to get the vaccine.

We also called my parents, who began working their rolodexes. Within minutes, we were cc’ed on an email from a close family friend at the State Department, to the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. We later talked to the “duty officer” at the Embassy in Buenos Aires who gave us some names of hospitals in Córdoba. He assured us that Argentine hospitals – especially the private ones – were well equipped to administer vaccines. My mother began exchanging emails with a prominent medical anthropologist and medical doctor who runs an NGO that builds hospitals in developing countries around the world. He also suggested we get the vaccine.

* * *

At the infectious diseases hospital the next morning, the waiting room seemed unusually full. A woman came out of one of the examination rooms, crying. She breezed right by us and out the door. Rebekah was talking to the receptionist. A man was sleeping in one of the molded-plastic seats, his nose sticking straight up in the air, mouth open, nostrils on full view. He looked the way Charlie Brown does when he sings. I noticed a young boy nearby who was covered in some kind of rash, probably a symptom of another disease I should be (but am not) vaccinated against. We presented our passports to the skeptical woman behind the desk, and took a seat near the window.

The man sitting next to me was holding something in a plastic bag, some kind of bug. From his explanation it sounded as though this bug had bitten someone, the woman sitting next to him, probably. She did not speak or do much of anything. Occasionally, she would massage her ankle. I turned to Rebekah.

“We should have kept the bat.”

* * *

When we finally met with him, the doctor at the hospital informed us that the only place in the province of Córdoba that had the vaccine was the Anti-Rabies Institute, and it was closed on Sundays. So on Monday morning, thirty-six hours after the bat entered our lives and our bedroom, we got in a cab and gave the driver the address of the Instituto Antirrabico. He didn’t recognize the street name, but he said he knew where it was.

The institute turned out to be in one of central Córdoba’s poorer barrios, set in the middle of a scrubby grass lot. The only sign of any sort is the iron lettering above the entrance, but the first indication of what purpose this building serves is the unsettling sound of dogs barking. Whether the dogs were particularly angry, actually rabid, or just tired of being cooped up, I couldn’t tell. There were even a few dogs milling around – no leash, no chain, no enclosure – and one came up to me and sniffed my crotch. I was not thrilled. Dogs may be “man’s best friend” . . . but at an anti-rabies institute?

Carlos, an agricultural engineer with a grey mustache and a horseshoe of white hair around his head, greeted us at the door with a smile. He told us he didn’t deal with “la rabia,” but with Chagas disease. Only endemic to the Americas, and primarily found in poorer communities, Chagas disease is a real concern for health workers in Latin America. Rebekah, a medical anthropologist by profession and an activist on behalf of those less fortunate by disposition, immediately began peppering Carlos with questions.

The building hasn’t been updated since 1970. Carlos’s office is separated from the rest of the space by thin wooden walls about ten feet tall, and every surface is covered with stuff: maps of the province hang on the walls, drawings of insects are draped over filing cabinets, and crammed onto the desk in the center of the office is an array of used food service containers that contain Carlos’s specimens. He jiggled some bugs out of a styrofoam cup onto a white paper plate. “Chagas,” he said, knowing that neither Rebekah nor I would know the name of the insect that transmits the disease. One of them was still moving, but Carlos didn’t seem all that concerned. Another worker who had been following us around (it isn’t every day that two extranjeros come to the institute and take pictures) picked up a glass jar labeled “ajies” and showed it to me. The brown thing inside was definitely not a pickled pepper. “Escorpión,” he said, jabbing his fingers at the air in front of my face, to simulate stinging.

At this point the doctor came into Carlos’s office, so we didn’t find out what poisonous creatures were being kept in the coke bottle or the empty Quilmes beer can. Like everyone else at the clinic, the doctor was male, mustached, and over fifty, and all that distinguished him from the others was his white coat, which didn’t look like it had been cleaned all that recently.

He didn’t ask too many questions.

“Did you get bit by the bat?”

We tried to explain that we had heard that a person can be bit and not know it, but he wasn’t buying any of it.

“Do you have the bat with you?”

* * *

Summer in Córdoba is famously hot, so much so that during the hottest month – January – many businesses close their doors, and people head for cooler climes in the surrounding hills. But the hot weather sticks around, and it was still with us in March.

It wasn’t just the heat that was keeping us up at night; it was the uncertainty. We vacillated countless times over the next three days, trying to decide whether or not to get this vaccine, and eventually, when Rebekah began complaining of mysterious itches, headaches, a cough, and feeling feverish, our rational thinking broke in the face of our fear.

We got on a plane to Buenos Aires on Thursday morning and headed for the wonderful (and private) Hospital Aleman and began our series of vaccinations. This was more for our peace of mind than anything else, but it was well worth the 250 pesos a shot. The traveling back and forth to and from the capital (because the vaccine our friends at the Centro Antirrabico had was an older one that had a greater instance of negative side effects) is annoying, but it did allow us a few days to visit some shops in the Jewish barrio of Buenos Aires so we could stock up on food for Passover.

We’re getting our fifth and final rabies shot on Thursday. But we’ll still be sleeping with the windows closed. Especially since there is now officially a dengue epidemic in Argentina.

Published: Review of Two NYC Architecture Shows

"The Muni-meter. It won’t ever make it into MoMA’s design section, but here it is, on a pedestal, pushed up against a white gallery wall, accompanied by an explanation of how the increased cost of Muni-metered parking in Chelsea discourages people from driving into Manhattan and circling around looking for a spot on the streets, resulting in an improvement in the city’s air quality."

That's just a pull quote designed to lead you, dear reader, to the New York Art Beat blog. There you'll find an article I wrote about two current architecture exhibitions. It's on the site's front page now, but you can skip directly to the article from here.

Words of Inauguration Day

“The world has changed, and we must change with it,” President Barack Obama said in his inaugural address. It was one in a number of statements in the passive voice that characterized first speech as President. He used this mode not only when illustrating our present difficulties (“homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered”), but also when assuring Americans about the challenges we face:

“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: they will be met.”

No sooner had the words passed his lips than he quickly shifted gears. This generation of Americans would have to meet these challenges, and to inspire his people, Obama praised “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things,” and brought as a reference the accomplishments of emblematic Americans throughout history: immigrants, farmers, slaves, sweatshop workers, pioneers, and soldiers who fought in wars of all eras.

As the speech went on, the President’s sentences became increasingly activated, and not with the hopeful “yes we can” of his campaign, but with an expression of greater confidence: “We will.” He didn’t shy away from poetry either, even when talking about subjects as down to earth as alternative energy sources: “[W]e will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.”

In his closing paragraphs, he succinctly summed up, better than any of the moronic talking (white)heads who have been proclaiming the start of a new “post-racial” era, the meaning of this moment:

“Because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger, and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass, that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve, that as the world grows smaller our common humanity shall reveal itself, and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”

* * *

Can we all agree that Rick Warren was lucky to have been assigned the invocation? The uncomfortable task of speaking immediately after our Poet-in-Chief fell to Elizabeth Alexander, and her poem couldn’t help but fall short of Obama’s oratory. Its references to American workers fell flat, and because she spoke each syllable distinctly – as in “Any thing can be made / any sen-tence be-gun” – her reference to Obama’s comment about “the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables” felt stilted. (Almost as if it were being repeated by Senator John ‘I don’t quite know how many houses I have, but I can relate to your economic difficulties’ McCain.) If Alexander’s poem were given a public rereading, she would do well to ask someone else to do it.

* * *

Every good event needs a clear coda to let the audience know that it is over, and Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery provided just that with his moving benediction. He began, his face half obscured by the podium’s microphones, by quoting a verse from James Weldon Johnson’s poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The rhymes that inspired those who struggled for civil rights felt completely appropriate, as did the other diverse sources upon which Reverend Lowery drew. After lifting lines from traditional songs (“Because we know you got the whole world in your hand”), adapting from scripture (“tanks will be beaten into tractors”), and invoking Obama channeling the Constitution, (“yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union”), Reverend Lowery concluded with a gently humorous reiteration of the message of inclusion:

And in the joy of a new beginning,
We ask you to help us work for that day,
When black will not be asked to get back,
When brown can stick around,
When yella will be mella,
When the red man can get ahead, man,
And when white will embrace what is right.
Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen, say amen, and amen.

Unlike Rick Warren, who seemed to ask for forgiveness for our personal and national failings, Reverend Lowery asked god to “deliver us” and to “help us” to do right. With the wisdom of age, he imbued in age-old proverbs renewed wisdom.

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It was clear that Reverend Lowery’s words hit home. Thank you, CNN, for showing us our new President’s head nodding in agreement, for showing us our last good President’s head bowed in prayer, and for not showing us (except when absolutely necessary) whatever it was the Departing Dude was doing.