My Take on Green Gentrification

My summary of Green Gentrification, of which I'm sure others could handily school me on, as part of a Drawdown Ecochallenge activity, is that it's essentially just gentrification, except that it starts with a sincere attempt to protect a city against climate change or to increase green spaces. The articles shared in the Drawdown app were alright, but in search of solutions, I eventually made my way to this WashPo article with a summary of proposals for gentrification in general, which I think would apply to Green Gentrification as well.

"There are other ways to help people stay rooted in their communities: provide renters with the opportunity and financing to purchase their units; preserve and expand public housing; protect elderly and long-term residents from property tax increases; enforce building codes and offer easy options for renters to report bad landlords; negotiate payment plans with homeowners who have fallen behind on their property taxes; establish community benefits agreements with investors in large projects to ensure that local residents benefit from the investment; offer developers higher levels of density in return for funding more affordable housing units in their projects; establish a loan fund to help small business owners buy their buildings."

Obama's Healthcare Article in the New Yorker, Nov 2nd Edition

Just finished Obama’s article in the New Yorker I received the week of Halloween. I started reading it by the fireplace, in between sessions of the Shogun audiobook and my first copy of Sibley Birds East. It was frigid this Halloween morning and we hadn’t turned the heat on yet, stubbornly holding out for “real” winter, clinging closely to the hearth, always in need of a new log.

I enjoyed the essay. It was a kind of first person narrative of the legislative history of the Affordable Care Act, neither pompous nor self-aggrandizing, with unnecessary but delightful interludes with the Obama family. Bo, the Obama water dog, was by far the best character and actually somehow related to the narrative; Bo was given to the Obamas by Teddy Kennedy, the stalwart Senator who had for decades pushed for universal health care for the country.

I learned a bit about the history of healthcare in the United States, how we came to have a system of employer-based healthcare, with unions actually supporting this early on as a way of gaining members, to the detriment of anyone unemployed or not card-carrying.

I appreciated the nuance and the detail involved in getting a piece of legislation passed. As a relatively young person, and by that I mean, a person who is very unexposed to the inner workings on Congress and who has yet had no real understanding of “the art of the trade, how the sausage gets made, we just assume that it happens, but no one else is in the room where it happens.”

Would recommend it to anyone looking to increase their understanding of the legislative process, political points cost and spent, and to anyone who has benefitted from Obamacare, of which there are surely millions. Everything in 2020 has something to complain about, and Obamacare is no different, but I still think we should learn to celebrate the imperfect things wholeheartedly where they deserve merit.

Day 197: Lost another friend

Lost my second friend during covid, and again this time not because of covid. My friend’s name is Andrew Minigan. He was very dear to me. A true light of joy and wit and warmth. We were to be roommates until covid rolled around. He was going to live with me and my brother in Boston. I’m not sure where he ended up moving into after the landlord essentially borked our master plan. We had a lot of master plans. Master plans for mindfulness NGOs, master plans for for-profit education companies, master plans for being silly with life. He was 4 months away from completing his PhD in Education. A real giver. I wrote him some songs.

I struggled with whether I should share them or not. They were for me and they were for him. I burned incense and called his name. I printed a funny photo of him and put it on our family altar. He’s there with my grandparents and greatgrandparents and my brother Calvin’s high school friend who died from a heart attack on the quarter-mile track at school, just a healthy guy who’s heart gave out suddenly. Christian was a good guy. Andrew was a good guy. Norbu was a good guy. Noah was a good guy. Christiana was a good guy.

Death seems to have no apparent pattern, as far as I can tell. People really do randomly disappear from this world. There’s a pattern for like 5% of how it works: are you riding motorcycles too fast all the time, are you a very bad eater, do you have a history of depression. But the other 95% is not covered. My friends keep dying and it always catches me off guard. Why? Why did you die? Why am I still here?

I never know how to answer these questions. I never know what to do with my words. Usually when people die, I can feel them even though they’re not here in the classical sense anymore. I can feel their spirit inhabiting the green things of the world, inhabiting the cold air and the bright sky. This time was the same. I was able to play for Andrew. I was able to play for him my sadness and my grief and my confusion.

Young people shouldn’t die, is the common sense. And yet all my friends have been young. What’s the takeaway? I can’t take friends for granted. How many times do I need to learn this lesson?

I am sending my heart out to all the people whose lives have touched mine. To all those who have loved me and trained me and held me and challenged me.

In the past week, I reached out to a number of friends I hadn’t talked to in a while. It’s interesting the names and faces that come up when you’re thinking of the people that are important to you. In this time of covid especially, why are they all so far away?

Eating Sustainably: A proof of concept for evaluating the footprint of any recipe

Published a blog post with some friends at work on a proof of concept we put together to evaluate the carbon, land-use, and water-use footprint of recipes. We imagined a person walking through the aisle of a grocery store, about to make a decision on what to eat. Suddenly, they’re aware of the alternatives they have to make a direct and immediate impact on the planet.

Most carbon footprint calculators are kinda clunky, or they ask you to remember everything you ate this week. We flipped the idea around from past-oriented to future-oriented. What are you about to do? We also added land use and water use, which is obviously also very important. The demo should be available soon.

The crazy hard part is that recipes all write their ingredients differently, with more than just units being all over the place, but also with style pizazz like, “a sprig of thyme”. Eventually we’d like to capture all of this in our footprint model.

See article here: What is the carbon footprint of my recipe?

Day 182: Riffing on Vampire Weekend

A friend of mine is a big fan of theirs. And I agree, what they do is wonderful. The ringing treble guitar, the syncopated drum lines, the weird ivy league timbre of the vocal track. I figured I’d give it a go for him, stealing with inspiration. Mind you, this was 3am. I sent it over to Eric to see if he could add a drum line to it. I tried, but I can’t handle the tempo with my remedial drumming skills.

Day 180: Dazed and Confused

Been a minute since I shared some new stuff. I’d like to try to develop a regular practice of sharing what I’m making. To me, creativity is more about routines and habits than it is about waiting for the perfect moment to strike. It’s ongoing. Those moments are a function of the number of hours you sit and stare curiously at your heart. I wish I had more poetry to show. I wish I had more demos to play. I wish I had more sixteenth-note snare fills. But these are all just expressions of how much you sit down and play.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is the degree to which I’ve hidden behind my own fear of not being good enough — by not letting my music or my art speak for itself. There’s always the caveat of, “Oh, this was just a little thing,” or, “I wasn’t going for perfect anyway.” Of course, one shouldn’t ever really be going for perfect. That’s how you make lifeless art.

But there’s a difference between perfect and excellent. Excellent is what you strive for, when you really put your heart into it, full-throated. Excellent is when you lay yourself out on the line and say, “Here is where I am.” It’s where you look back to in a few years and say, “This is where I was,” and there’s no sense of shame or embarrassment or regret.

With that being said, here’s a recording I made earlier today with me, myself, and I in the music room, aka basement guest room. There’s much left to be wanted in my drum playing, but hey, this is me right now, giving it a go.

The German Aviator

I have been in the habit of taking people’s contact information when I photograph them and sending them the results when I get them back from the lab. Most often, they never reply and I don’t know why I bother. In this case, I am so glad I did. This mother came back with more than a perfect caption, but also details on the caption, and a joke!

This is Mika from Konstanz. He's 10 years old and he decided to go as a balloonist at Fasnacht. So his Dad constructed this costume with a big water balloon, ropes, logs(?), a basket without bottom, old braces from his grandpa. On his leatherjacket he wears a lot of buttons from different "Fasnachts-guilds". He collects them. The aviator hat and the aviator glasses are also from his grandpa. The beard, of course, is his own... he let it grow for month.

Greetings from Konstanz,

Silke

Switzerland in Black and White

Visited family in Switzerland with Daniela last week. Brought along a fifty year old Rolleiflex 2.8F that shoots only square images. I figured with all the clouds happening in winter, black and white would be the move. I was mostly right, although we did have some epic sunsets that alas I had to resort to my iPhone to “capture”.

Miami during Superbowl LIV

It’s so lovely to be able to take a decent camera to the beach without being terrified of sand. The iPhone is of course an exception. The other right now is my $5 Ricoh AF-5 which is making a lot of appearances the past few posts. The sad news: I think the shutter might be freezing up a bit, hence the odd vertical lines in a number of the following shots.

Here, some shots of Miami Beach during superbowl weekend, shot on Ilford HP-5, rated at ISO 400.