Pittsfield, Close Up

One of the summer's thrilling moments came last Saturday, when the Globe gave its A1 centerpiece to a story about Pittsfield's resurgence. Even if the Globe's coronation doesn't equal the cultural cache I always want to associate with, Pittsfield certainly deserves all the publicity that comes its way. It's also nice to be on the inside before it happens. As a friend jokingly told me in a text message Saturday, "You're famous." (Hopefully he doesn't dispute this one in the comments section.)

The city, about 42,000 people and declining in Massachusetts' western corner, is an intriguing mix of urban, rural and post-industrial, and of the poor and the reviving. The perennial fear of gentrifying neighborhoods, especially when stories like the Globe's are published, is the real estate market's upswing eventually drives away natives who no longer can afford them. Not so with Pittsfield. It's too remote, too cold, too quirky, too entrenched to become such a place -- at least in the next 25 years.

The number of struggling people I see when I walk everyday down North Street, Pittsfield's main downtown street, is astonishing. But then there are neat stores, galleries, a new cinema that played all of the Celtics playoff games and World Cup for free, restaurants and streets fairs, all of which the Globe cited as proof of the city's return. (In fact, I swear I've seen about eight new hipsters in the week since the story, including a new gallery, an attractive 20-something on a bicycle and a guy who looked like a Web programmer. Maybe they read the story too and promptly moved?) These two cultures exist jointly in a very natural, pleasant way -- attractive and seedy at the same time. It's one of the city's great charms.

Usually the commenters at the bottom of news stories are noxious, but this time they correctly identified Pittsfield's problems, which the Globe's reporter chose to polish nearly out of existence. Jobs are scarce, both for the educated and uneducated. Median household incomes are low. Health figures go in all the wrong directions, such as the teenage pregnancy rate, which has increased the past few years as the state's has declined. And, to return to urban planning, a city based solely on the arts isn't a well-rounded one. It's certainly a good start, but, as my boss told me recently, expressing his reservations about all of this, arts districts, particularly in out-of-the-way 21st-century places that also heavily rely on tourism, create lots of service jobs that might have luxurious patrons but don't pay luxurious wages, or anything close to them.

Placemaking, one of contemporary urban planning's most popular terms, is an amorphous concept best defined by experiencing it in the moment. It has something to do with promoting the local, nourishing the homegrown across all the industries where it's found, supporting entrepreneurship and community, and creating something distinct. This is a very tricky thing to do in the 21st century. Increasingly, I don't think the Boston-to-D.C. corridor has it (though any city has it when compared to a metropolitan area). But Pittsfield -- and all of the Berkshires -- have it and they should run with it. Whatever that means, however it happens.

Everywhere Is Someone's Backyard

The greatest number of letters to the editor in the Berkshire Eagle this summer have been about wind turbines. The county's elevations and ridge lines make it Massachusetts' second-most desirable place to build turbines, after the Atlantic Ocean and its shorelines, so quite a few wind power developments have been proposed by corporate energy entities. Also, the state Legislature has passed a bill that would make turbines' permitting process less bound by the local municipality's oversight and thus, friendlier to the developer (though each house has passed its own version and a compromise is held up by the much more unseemly casino gambling bill, my boss says). People understandably have a reason to pen a letter.

Berkshire County is one of the state's most liberal places. Consequently, it seems to be one of the places where voters would most eagerly embrace renewable energy development. But these projects' litigious history and the letters suggest otherwise. They reveal an interesting divide in how one responds to wind energy: Are turbines an innocuous and deeply needed alternative to fossil fuel or are they, at about 450 feet tall with several serious blades spinning with the wind, as industrial and potentially dangerous as traditional energy sources? Do they blend into the landscape or do they ruin it? The latter is a particularly important question considering the Berkshires' landscape is one of its most economically productive assets. I find turbines to be a wonderful site. Every time I drive north on Rte. 7 and the one at Jiminy Peak comes into view, I get a little excited.

That turbines meet such opposition says something elucidating about 21st-century politics and policy. Various constituencies support one policy or another until it arrives near them. The idea of a relatively small shared sacrifice (except for those who abut a turbine) for a large greater good is anathema. Even in as sparsely settled a place as the Berkshires, NIMBYism lives. It lives everywhere.

Then again, as one of my co-workers for the summer, who's in charge of helping towns write turbine-siting laws, says, the central Plains are perhaps a better location. The population is even thinner, the wind is even faster and human access to good sites is easier -- a very important consideration when planning and financing turbines' construction. For example, it's unclear how the 12 or so turbines for a development in Savoy, Mass., will get there considering none of the county's major paved local roads can handle them, let alone the mountain roads once those turbines get closer.

Update: Also worth noting is Berkshire County's legislative delegation and the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission oppose the wind-turbine legislation.

Broken Social Scene Is The New Ryan Adams

Of all the bands hurt by the 21st century's hype cycles, I place Broken Social Scene at the top of the list. Eight years ago, when its second album, "You Forgot It In People," was released it came out of nowhere and was brilliant. Back then, I wrote for my college radio station something about how the record managed to combine all these typically binary traits: electronic yet natural; planned yet spontaneous; eclectic yet unified. On the cover were a few members hunched over the instruments, barely visible but doing something amazing.

The indie-rock world went crazy and Broken Social Scene received lots of deserved accolades. Yet, in the following couple of years, the band quickly shot past the released-one-great-record stage to "One of the Decade's Defining Bands" without releasing any other great records. Since then, they've made lots of appearances at large festivals and on TV and been offered handsome recording contracts, which they declined. Meanwhile, their large collection of friends, who wove back and forth among Broken Social Scene and their other bands, apparently splintered.

Kevin Drew, the lead singer and the band's leader, more or less, seems to have had particular trouble coping with it. I sympathize because he sure got a lot more famous quicker than he expected or maybe even wanted (but the latter is doubtful, considering everyone in a full-time band, deep down in his subconscious thoughts, wants to be famous). But all the quasi-soulful ranting he does about this, about lost loves and lost friends and shipwrecked emotions, has gotten to be too much. He talks about it everywhere, it's splattered all through the liner notes, especially in the 2005 self-titled record, etc.

Drew -- and by extension, Broken Social Scene -- have reached Ryan Adams territory, which no musician should covet. The amount of huffing is far disproportionate to the amount of fame. And the songs are written very quickly, with very basic melodies that don't go very far and would benefit immensely from another week thinking about them. "Meet Me in the Basement," the newest record's newest single, consists of two lines: a mildly crushing five notes in the lower register, a trill in the higher ones. That's it. "Art House Director" is more fun when trying to make up replacement lyrics. And so on.

In reality, Broken Social Scene is playing this fall the same venue in Boston that it played five years ago, and the same appears to be true, at least in size, for other cities. The fan base hasn't grown, which is unfortunate, considering the band's immense talents. These days, the side projects (and actually, Broken Social Scene was originally the side project) are either better, in the case of Do Make Say Think and Feist, or more popular, in the case of Feist and Metric. Feist is obviously very good and very lucky.

Nonetheless, something about the band makes much more sense in concert, when everyone can be exuberant about playing with friends, which is why a video of "Sentimental X's" is above. That song is probably the new record's best because it keeps it simple and lets the women sing.

Good Intersection, Meet Bad Intersection

On my mile-long walk to work this summer, there are two consecutive intersections that are a prime example of what to do and what not to do when planning streets.

The first, top, has two banks, a CVS and a supermarket at its corners and despite having new walk signals, seems never to have considered walking when it was first designed. Each direction has at least three lanes, at least one of which is dedicated exclusively to turning, even though I've never seen more than seven cars wait at the light during the peak of rush hour. As a result, it takes a lifetime to cross what really should be a simple intersection. Concrete is everywhere and the new coat of pavement put down this summer smells horrid on humid days. The CVS' and supermarket's landscaping says, "We never expected anyone would drive here even though it's a five-minute walk from downtown."

The second, bottom, is the heart of Pittsfield's downtown. It has genuinely large amounts of traffic, but is a pleasure to walk because the intersections are split by nice islands. The new design has red faux-brick in the crosswalk that's attractive. The walk signals work well. And at the center is a lovely, small park with a monument that turns what could be an annoying rotary into a beautiful, picturesque attraction. The park and the turn-of-the-20th-century buildings surrounding the intersection make it a great experience every time.

The first is only two blocks west of the second, but instead of having downtown's handsome buildings and walkable street extend in that direction, that first intersection and the buildings that lead to it block that connection from happening.

On a related note, a small sliver of the Obama administration's stimulus bill is paying for the reconstruction of one of the Berkshire Mall's access roads, which also connects Rtes. 7 and 8, two of the northern half of the county's biggest roads. Sure, I went to the mall's Target on my first day in Pittsfield to buy some small items for my apartment and the mall is a shopping hub. But are the millions spent on this truly better used there, where someone will drive his car to a big-box store for an item rung up by someone paid slightly more than the minimum wage, than if they had been used on a project similar to the intersection in downtown Pittsfield that would substantially improve the quality of life in the city's core or one of it neighborhoods? I say no.

Update: I temper what I wrote about the mall's access road. The connection between Rtes. 7 and 8 is pretty important for getting from the major north-south road on the west side of the county to its counterpart on the east side.

Oh, No! Barack Obama Owns The USA Network!

There's really no way to explain the serendipitous timing between the State Department's bust of a Russian spy network and USA's premiere of a new series about a covert American spy, "Covert Affairs," except that the federal government nationalized the TV network. Clearly, President Obama was worried about the show's ratings and decided to use his power to time the arrests with the debut, so that "Covert Affairs" had great buzz and relevancy. The timing is too perfect to be coincidental. No independently owned network could develop a show for at least a year in advance, schedule the pilot's airing months ahead of time and then have the dumb luck the real-life spies brought. Not even Les Moonves can create this kind of synergy!

Perhaps the liberal lamestream media slept on this story because everyone was attending the weekly Socialist committee meeting when it was announced or was heading to the Vineyard for a long weekend and the administration released the news on a Friday afternoon, the perfect time for divulging an unseemly development like this?

Alessandra Stanley, in her review today of "Covert Affairs," notes that Angelina Jolie's new movie, a new AMC series, and a new NBC series, all coming in the next few months, are also about espionage. Uncannily timed trend? Or proof that the taxpayers, thanks to the most un-American president since Jimmy Carter, now own Comcast (NBC's and USA's soon-to-be owner), Sony Pictures Entertainment (the producer of Jolie's movie) and Cablevision (the owner of AMC)?

Howard Wolfson Said It, Not Me

In a recent post on TNR's World Cup blog, Howard Wolfson, a prominent Democratic political strategist for, among others, the Clintons and Bloomberg, raises a forever-present thought among Jews: Is it ever OK to root for Germany? Wolfson's family sounds a bit like mine; he says his grandparents refused to buy a German car. I can't bring myself to do that either, or take a vacation to Germany, or root for their national soccer team, etc.

Wolfson notes the, in his opinion, mildly overrated multiculturalism of this year's German team, as does Stefan Fatsis, who views it more favorably in a reply, as one reason to be less wary or weary. When I watched the players' brutally fast and efficient counterattack last week, all I could think was, Blitzkrieg. (I realize the analogy doesn't quite hold, though, because the blitzkrieg was an attack, not a counter.)

When do we forgive?

Destination Planning

North Adams, Mass., is in better shape than most hosts of weekend-long music festivals when Wilco and its Solid Sound Festival come to town next month. With the opening of Mass MOCA in 1999, North Adams, once a remarkably downtrodden former outpost of industry, has slowly grown into a hub of contemporary art, with several converted mills used as live-work artists' studios, intriguing events, some retail that has sprouted to serve it and a good but scruffy, New-England-Main-Street look. (Mass MOCA is the largest conversion project and one of the world's largest contemporary art museums in terms of its square feet, allowing it to host some gigantic exhibits.) As a small example of this, the Books, an indie-rock duo and one of the Solid Sound Festival's performers, calls North Adams its home.

Most towns that host these events -- such as Manchester, Tenn., for Bonnaroo and Indio, Calif., for Coachella -- are nothing more than one-weekend hosts. They're chosen because they have a willing owner of hundreds of acres removed enough so that 65,000 people younger than 30 can go and party and listen to good music (and sit in traffic) without bothering the neighbors. There's no spillover to anything else locally and there isn't meant to be. This is the danger of hosting such events: Everyone comes for the affair and scoffs at the rest.

The Berkshires walk the fine line when it comes to this. After about 50 years of industrial decline, accelerated by GE's and Sprague Electric's departures, its only export is tourism. That tourism is driven by some of the country's greatest cultural institutions and scenery, though, giving the region a better shot than most tourism-driven ones. Most of the visitors are from greater Boston and greater New York, two of the country's wealthiest metro areas, meaning they spend money when they come, sometimes on second homes. Nonetheless, this is not a foolproof long-term strategy. Many jobs are seasonal and the places that don't have these destinations within their town lines suffer substantially.

Considering North Adams' artist scene is still fledgling, for the city to place its bets on this one path of urban planning is risky. If the artists follow Sprague Electric out of town, what's next? Festivals like Wilco's, as respected as the band is and as moneyed as its fans are, mean a lot of planning and money are spent on traffic cops waving drivers through, when they might be better spent on a new park that makes year-round residents stay. Overall, though, North Adams is probably making the right choice with this festival. It's not too wild to describe it as a very young, much, much cooler version of the Southern Berkshire County towns with all of those cultural destinations, so North Adams probably should focus on redirecting that momentum to its corner of the state however it can get it.

Really, the big loser in this is Califone, the avant-country band that is performing its most recent album, "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers," to the movie it soundtracks, only two weeks after Wilco comes to town. When events like this happen so close to each other, the latter loses customers. That's a shame considering Wilco hasn't made a good record in eight years (and generally hasn't been likable in about five years), while Califone is still one of indie rock's most inventive bands, more than 10 years into its career. To boost my case further, here's Califone's video for the title track to the new record:

Vamos, Argentina

Among the many reasons to love the World Cup: The national sides reflect their country's personalities exquisitely. As a friend said of the French players, who walked out of one practice on their way to a lame first-round exit marred by intra-squad fighting, "They're French. They went on strike. Check the box."

On a more heartening note are the Argentine players. They play with fluidity and lyricism, but also with an intense passion that implies waves of tension beneath the surface. Striker Lionel Messi is clearly the world's best player and moves like no one else; his passes feed the rest of the team's performance. But there are also these sturdy, attacking, somewhat ruthless players -- midfielder Javier Mascherano, defender Gabriel Heinze and most especially, striker Carlos Tevez, who prizes his childhood scar -- who serve as a counterbalance. They mix the sugary with the concrete. Not only is the team stacked with talent, but it also has complex emotions.

It's all steered by coach Diego Maradona, whose "insistence that greatness comes from the edge of illogic and madness" guides his leadership, writes Benjamin Wallace Wells, on the New Republic's excellent World Cup blog. Maradona's tenacity tempers Messi's elegance and also spreads through the field. Perhaps the team has looked so unstoppable the past fortnight because it finally has the perfect embodiment of its collective consciousness on the sidelines. (Maradona's also shown a surprisingly deft touch in choosing his players, argues Alex Massie, for those interested in something a little more objective.) Most fundamentally, though, the squad's seemingly incompatible mix of character traits also reflects Argentine living -- captivatingly cosmopolitan, jovial and exciting, yet also always cognizant that you might be standing on the edge of national fiscal ruin.

Here's to Argentina hopefully defeating Germany and then Spain on its way to the finals.

Update: Well, that one didn't end well. Germany 4, Argentina 0.