Category: Ramblings

Living in North Mexico City and liking it

Lisa Schweitzer2 Comments

Last night we went to Dodgers stadium to watch the Dodgers, who lost to Atlanta. Now my friend Casey is a fan of the Braves, having grown up in Atlanta and all, and he is by far one of the most genial, gracious, and decent men I have ever met. However, this woman behind us was a Braves fan, and she was obnoxious. Fine, cheer on your team, but not if God gave you a voice that sounds like a constipated muppet. She was entertaining visitors from out of town, so she was explaining her views on living in Los Angeles. At one point, she said in a loud voice, “LA is ****hole. I can’t imagine staying here because it’s just so…Mexican.”

Hellloooooooo racism!

Now there are million things that I would change about Los Angeles. The rats. The air. The hockey team. We need Trader Joe’s south of the 10 and east of the Harbor. But I wouldn’t change a thing about the people who live here. Not a thing. If I could move wealth around, I would, because I have always been a pinko, but Los Angeles is real cosmopolitanism. We fail at it again and again, but it’s not like we’re a metro area with a few little safe ethnic enclaves mixed in a reassuring way so we can give lip service to cosmopolitanism. It’s a place where people of color outnumber white people but where power is still inverted. LA burns, regularly, both physically and ideologically, and because it burns it requires us to take a hard look at ourselves and how we treat each other. It is a significant place because of these realities.

I, for one, like having my dogs blessed by priests with all my Mexican, south, and central American neighbors and their dogs, some dressed in little sombreros. I like the beautiful girls clacking up Broadway in their heels, all of whom look like they just got done filming something for Univision. I like the handsome old gentlemen in cowboy hats and ostrich-skin cowboy boots who try, with courtly grace, to give me their seat on the subway. I like the little old ladies that sell coconuts and tamales on the street corners.

I can only hope that she will, in fact, go away and grace somewhere else with her retch-inspiring presence. I generally don’t tell people how wonderful Los Angeles/North Mexico City is because I’d rather that people just stay away and indulge whatever biases they have based on whatever Mike Davis book they’ve skimmed or tv show they watch. There are enough people here already; I’m never going to be able to afford a house as it is, and the water situation–egads. But you shouldn’t stay away because it is “too Mexican.” That’s one of the best things about this place, along with it being “too Black” and “too Thai” and “too Korean” and “too Ethiopian” and “too Indian” and “too gay.” Suckitup if you don’t like the Other because the Other is in your face here–and should be.

Latin American and Caribbean players have completely transformed baseball in a magnificent way, btw, and it irks me that she can enjoy that aspect of heterogeniety without recognizing it. Her $#@#! team wouldn’t have won last night without a surprise shot from the slumping Diory Hernandez, brilliant relief from Rafeal Soriano, and good calls from Bobby Cox who had the sense not to give Manny Ramirez a chance to end his slump off his ace reliever (whom Manny has hit reasonably well in the past).


There’s no crying in national politics

Lisa Schweitzer

Sarah Palin’s resignation is getting an odd amount of attention here in the land of sausage and pastry. While I don’t study national politics, that doesn’t stop me from holding Very Important Opinions on the subject. It’s hard to buy the pundit’s line that she is quitting mid-term for a presidential run–there’s nothing about quitting which might give her a leg up unless she also stars in several successful barbarian movies in the interim. Leaving office marginalizes her from a platform, which you need in a campaign.

Instead, I suspect she’s tired of it; she had a mawkish start on the national stage (compared to that Barack Obama back in 2004), and she’s done a lot of hinting and complaining about how “mean” people and “the media” (like Fox News?) are to her because of her positions–an attitude you don’t get indulge in high-level public office.


Poorly thought-through numbers

Lisa Schweitzer

Peter Gordon notes this statement, from Secretary Ray LaHood’s blog, the Fast Lane:

In fact, each 1% of regional travel shifted from automobile to public transit increases regional income about $2.9 million, resulting in 226 additional regional jobs. Other economic benefits include increased productivity, employment, business activity, investment and redevelopment.

I wish he’d give a citation so that I could see where this came from, but let’s just think about this for a second. The yield of moving 1 percent of mode share to public transit is $2.9 million in personal income, which is probably more a reflection that transit mode shares are higher in metropolitan regions where incomes and regional products are also higher (as in, mode share isn’t a cause, it’s an effect). But even so…let’s think. So in Los Angeles, it cost us $875 million to build the Blue Line; it takes $65 million a year to operate it. That’s one line. Our subway costs us $92 million a year in operating costs; the other two light rail lines cost us over $40 million per year. We currently run about 2 percent transit mode share. Benefit numbers without cost numbers don’t mean anything, and vice versa. And this random number that LaHood relates doesn’t make transit look particularly good.

If we want to make the case that transit is good for cities, we can make those arguments. I am sympathetic to the idea that many of those benefits are not readily quantifiable. But….dang.

Star Trek

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

spock

Bear in mind, I have a life-sized standup poster of Mr. Spock in my office, so watching this movie and commenting on it was inevitable.

JJ Abrams, the director, along with his art directors have an interesting if not particularly hopeful view of future cities. Previous movies have established that Starfleet HQ is in San Francisco–which is interesting, as I can think of no other major US public institution headquartered west of the Mississippi. Starfleet is meant to be global and intergalatic body, so moving it from the traditional geographies of political power makes sense.

While the earth is still populated by the time our young, brash captain Kirk comes along, there are large, unmarked and unexplained crevices running through Iowa (what looks like west Texas in reality), the unnamed capitol city of Vulcan looks like a terrible place (particulate matter) and San Francisco doesn’t look so hot either, although the iconic Golden Gate and Bay bridges are retained.

Overall, a nice movie in the spirit of the Star Trek franchise. They did something here I’m glad they did, if I can chat about human and cultural symbolism for a bit here. For years, I have always grated against the way in which Spock’s mother, Amanda, happily trailed after Sarek, Spock’s father, to a ghastly hot planet full of condescending Vulcans constantly asserting their cultural superiority. This cultural superiority doesn’t go away in this movie: nasty little Vulcan bullies start a dustup with young Spock, and then later the head of the Vulcan Science Academy ostentatiously comments on Spock’s disadvantage (which brings the matter of cultural superiority home to basic racism; logic isn’t a matter of training; it’s a matter of breeding.) Honestly, if the benefits of logic are so apparent and the disadvantage is so real, then none of it needs comment, does it?

The question always raised throughout the series and subsequent films is why Sarek married a human. Here, he answers, and it’s a logical enough answer at the beginning. The question I always had coming up and watching TOS was rather the opposite: why did the beautiful, warm, generous and intelligent Amanda marry Sarek? I suppose it makes sense in the logic of the patriarchy: he’s a good catch financially, and he can provide her with a social mobility she didn’t have as a schoolteacher on earth. But in previous films Sarek is a hard and cold man, unworthy of either her loyalty or her son’s. In this film, he’s a better man even if he’s not human, and Ben Cross (one of my longtime actor-crushes) brings real complexity if not humanity to his character.