On Hiatus, Part II

I won't be writing any new posts here for at least the next two weeks because I'll be traveling, surprisingly enough, to India. Unlike the last time I warned about this, I don't think there would be anything monumental enough to compel me to write from abroad, unless there were an announcement that John Cusack and Minnie Driver were starring in a sequel to "Good Will Hunting." Enjoy December's end and January's start, and I'll return with my annual, boring post about which records I liked in the past year and thoughts on the trip.

Also worth noting: I set a personal record for posts in one year, with 91! And I thought I was busy...

Two Sides / Monsieur Bloomberg

Liking and disliking Mayor Bloomberg is easy. His two most noteworthy decisions of the fall highlight his ability to charm and irritate. First, he hired as New York's new chancellor of public schools Cathleen Black, a longtime friend and successful media executive who has no experience in education and never went or sent her children to public schools. (The Bloomberg administration eventually also promoted someone to the district's no. 2 position to focus specifically on academics, so that state officials would confirm Black.) Second, when New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, shrunk from building additional lines between Penn Station and his state's Gold Coast, Bloomberg stepped in and decided to extend the No. 7 subway line farther west than originally planned, to Secaucus, N.J.

As an entrepreneur who went from the working class to one of the country's wealthiest people, Bloomberg believes in the private market's power and its benefits. He's been one of the finance industry's most vocal defenders during the past two years. He knows a woman who's run newspaper and magazine companies very well before, and assumes she will bring the same acumen and have the same results with the country's largest public school system. This is a nearly blind faith in the private market. Aren't there many educators who also know how to administrate? But then he realizes, as Christie misses, that for a place to remain relevant for the long term, it needs to make serious long-term investments in its infrastructure. Of course these projects are expensive. However, without them, places ossify and don't adapt well to new waves of businesses, people and investment. All three decide to head elsewhere.

Bloomberg understands the need to think comprehensively and strategically about what his city is today (or in the past, his company, and in the future, his philanthropy) and what it should be in 20 years, and knows how to work so that both visions are executed properly. Both sides of him are bold, more so than perhaps any other working politician today, which is why, even if one side is disagreeable and the other is winning, he always earns my respect.

Thanks to Spoon for inspiring the post's title. The record from which it comes has grown on me in the five years since it was released, not least because several acquaintances from my alma mater are in liner notes' main photo, standing in the front row at one of the band's shows.

Say It Ain't So, Sasha

What? Sasha Frere-Jones now works for Rupert Murdoch? For the past several months, Murdoch has apparently been planning a daily online paper for the iPad to add to his News Corp. assets, and has recruited Frere-Jones, the world's best music critic, to be the culture editor. The Times reports that Frere-Jones will remain at his day job, writing for the New Yorker, but it's doubtful that there's any more dissonant culture clash within New York media than the New Yorker and News Corp. Frere-Jones' writing is deft, nuanced, springy, fun and incisive. News Corp.'s attitude and reporting, best exemplified by Fox News and the Post, is superficial, bloated, histrionic and discardable. How this lasts is hard to see.

Anyway, here's to the good times: the video for "When I'm With You," by Best Coast, whose debut record is one of Frere-Jones' favorites of 2010:

So Now They Vote For A Stimulus

Amid all the squabbling about President Obama's compromise with Congressional Republicans to prolong the Bush administration's tax policy and extend unemployment benefits and tax breaks for the middle and lower classes, few have called it for what it is: another stimulus package. Considering its size -- about $858 billion -- and general purpose -- sending people more spending money, albeit at a disproportionate rate to the wealthy -- it qualifies. (To give them credit, Paul Krugman and John Cassidy have seen this; the former, to criticize it as weak medicine, and the latter, to mildly accept it as needed.)

Republicans chose to use the first stimulus, way back in January 2009, to define themselves as the "Party of No," intransigently opposed to Obama's presidency because he's a socialist and to federal spending because it irresponsibly adds to the U.S. deficit. Economists' general consensus since then, including the opinion of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, is that stimulus measure worked by grabbing the national economy by the collar and saving it from sliding off a cliff. Without it, the alternate course is easy to see.

That's far from why Republicans support the second one, though, meaning their rationale falls on at least one of these two explanations: 1. They don't really care about the federal deficit as much as they profess; or: 2. They really don't care about the federal deficit when the top 0.1 percent of the country's wealthiest benefit the most as a result of the added debt. Obama shouldn't now start skewing policy toward the wealthy to earn Republicans' support on other priorities of his, but it's certainly frustrating that it took us so long to arrive at this point, especially when there wasn't anything particularly principled about the GOP's stand from the beginning.

On a related note, after Republicans made a great show of their decision following the midterm election to stop putting earmarks in the federal budget for pet projects, it turns out many of them still put earmarks in the federal budget. So, as much as I dislike this cliche: They were against them before they were for them. Or is the other way around?

Farewell, The Market

I try not to clutter my Facebook page with too many of the presents, fan pages and other applications that have sprouted the past three years, but if any place deserved a spot, it was the Market, a small deli in downtown Pittsfield. Its brow was certainly higher than the city's typical store, with well-made sandwiches, salads and pastries, beer and wine, and nice dry goods for sale. However, there was nothing fussy about it; in fact, the aesthetic was eminently approachable, amiable and uncomplicated. The store's owners even know their fonts well. I favor anywhere or anyone that knows it has something good happening, but doesn't need to broadcast it loudly.

Perhaps that humility was the Market's problem. At the end of last week, the store's owners unexpectedly wrote in a bittersweet tone on their Facebook page that they were closing immediately. Opening a store like this in downtown Pittsfield is a tough sell. As much as the city has tried to re-position itself as an upcoming, artistic secret that's so good that you want to tell your friends but don't want to tell your friends in case it spoils the scene, there are not many people walking down North Street who would patronize a grocer like the Market. Trust me, I walked it every day for three months this summer.

Gentrification is often discussed as a linear movement -- once a neighborhood changes, it never recaptures what once was. But in many places, change is topsy-turvy, as steps happen in one direction but are then foiled; things remain the same for a long time, lurch in one direction and then jerk back to where they were. I don't object to a store like the Market establishing a gentrifying flag in the sand in a place like Pittsfield (or to me also putting one in by patronizing it and [briefly] moving there) because there are places that the market, as in the real estate one, is never going to discover naturally.

Western Massachusetts isn't Brooklyn, where every neighborhood adjacent to Bushwick is the next candidate for gentrification, in a process that seems to repeat itself endlessly. Without some people willing to create their own scene and to try something new in a quiet place like Pittsfield, it's probably only going to continue its post-industrial parabolic decline. Introducing the gentrifier here is fine with me because she's never going to overwhelm the rest of the city's character. Rather, she'll create a very distinct combination of the rough and the refined, which is a pair that's quite hard to find these days, making the place all the more special.

Is Michelle Rhee My Generation's Robert Moses?

The education documentary "Waiting for Superman" is provocative and worth watching because it elevates a serious national issue -- the problems of urban education -- to a national platform. It's also not a very good documentary because the director throws lots of ideas together without examining them deeply. For example, the movie chastises teachers' unions as a bottleneck for reform, then acknowledges they've historically existed because teachers aren't paid well, but doesn't address this conflict. It also says there are countless underperforming teachers who need to be replaced, but doesn't wonder from where these replacements will come or why American society doesn't produce more high-quality teachers.

When Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of D.C.'s public schools, appears, all I could think was, Urban renewal. Rhee seems to take such glee in dynamiting the system, saying she can totally re-shape it because she only wants to be a chancellor once. (Ironically, she didn't realize how brief that one-time position would be: After she was interviewed, her patron, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty, was defeated in D.C.'s Democratic primary, which, as in most American cities, is essentially its general election. She then resigned.) She has no favors to ask or re-pay, and swiftly reorganizes the system, cuts the administration, closes schools, fires bad teachers, changes the union's contract, and sees results. How long those last is unclear, but it's clear the system needed to be changed.

However, her comments are also juxtaposed with a public meeting about the administration's plan to close some schools, where Rhee steps away from the microphone because there's no point in talking -- parents and students (and teachers and union members who mainly want to save their ranks) are shouting so loudly and holding signs in protest that Rhee wouldn't be heard. Obviously, parents are going to be pissed when their kids schools close, and it's impossible to transform any system without angering many people. But are the parents acting irrationally because they're scared of the impending change and, for several reasons, can't see the big picture, and Rhee is acting in their best interest? Or is Rhee overlooking something, that as bad as these schools are, they have a defined, longstanding community whose disruption is traumatic for everyone involved and shouldn't be discounted?

Urban renewal fits the same theme. In the postwar years, using money from the federal government, cities cleared neighborhoods, typically ones with minority-majority populations, that it declared to be slums, so that it could put high-rises, highways or large roads there instead. Even if residents objected, governments argued it was in their and the city's best interests to clean them. Many of the neighborhoods were in bad condition, but they were also functioning neighborhoods with communities of people -- and sometimes the judgment on their quality was truly subjective. The North End and SoHo, two of the most desirable places to live in the urban Northeast these days, were nearly cleared as part of urban renewal, before Jane Jacobs stepped in. Now, urban renewal is uniformly dismissed and has been for many years.

Rhee probably won't be Robert Moses, who led the massive redevelopment of New York City during the urban renewal years and was probably the most famous and controversial planner of the 20th century, because of her brief tenure. But she has many peers and followers implementing similar plans, and will probably at least advise powerful people in the future. It's hard to argue totally against them, but it's hard to argue totally for them as well.

Update: The Times reports that Rhee, after being considered for schools chancellor in Florida, New Jersey and New York City, is founding her own educational advocacy organization, to push her policies. That it's exploiting the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to raise more money from wealthy individuals and corporations than it could before only adds to the complexity.