Roger O Green

A is for Albany, again

Ken Screven remembers Michael the Archangel

This is less an essay, and more a series of links to bits about Albany, New York’s past and present.

I just realized, though, that I’ve now lived in Albany, capital of the Empire State, for 35 years now. At least thirteen addresses, staying at the current one for the past 14 years.

The area’s airport has a great set of letters, ALB. Do you know how newspeople identify a state or country by its capital? “Moscow is thinking… Washington reacts…” People say that about our historically inept – though a little more ept in recent years – state government. “What’s wrong with Albany?” They MEAN the state; guess that’s the curse of living in the capital city.

Not that Albany itself doesn’t have its quirks. The current mayor is Kathy Sheehan, the city’s first woman mayor in its over 325-year history. The guy before her served 20 years; two guys before him, 41.
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Here’s a 17-minute video about the creation of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, a controversial project which meant dozens of houses and other buildings being razed. Then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, as the joke goes, developed an edifice complex.

This story puts the locally-familiar anecdote about the ESP in a somewhat different light:

It concerns a diplomatic visit to Albany from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, during Rockefeller’s first year in office, and the new Governor’s embarrassment and chagrin when she rode in his limo through the “Pastures”, and witnessed the seediness of the neighborhood around the Mansion– this was the moment, it is alleged, that Rockefeller resolved to build something monumental, fitting the grandeur of his administration, so that foreign dignitaries could pay calls without having to see the slime and grime of a typical Northeastern city. The story may contain a grain of truth–and the visit was certainly real–but it also seems clear that Rockefeller even before his swearing-in, had begun… to think about fixing up the deteriorating neighborhood where he’d be spending the next few years

Andy Arthur ponders what would have happened to downtown If Not For the Empire Plaza.
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Former news reporter Ken Screven remembers Michael the Archangel, a legendary Albany street person of about four decades until he died in 2002. Someone made an eight-minute film about him.

I’d see Michael, dubbed the Archangel by a local judge, on Lark Street often, especially in Trinity United Methodist Church in the 1990s. My girlfriend at the time (now The Wife) was a tad afraid of him, and understandably so, but I usually got along with him. When I saw him with a legitimate job at the flower shop in the aforementioned Empire State Plaza, I was floored. But the gig, to no one’s surprise, didn’t last long.

There will likely be a casino in the area – for me personally, a big yuck – but Albany’s Exit 23 is now out of the running. Dan thinks that’s a good thing.

Crossing the street in Albany is difficult. Fundamentally true.

Albany, in an alternate future. A comprehensive plan for redeveloping the city of Albany — as proposed in 1963. As Albany Archives commented: “A convention center on Elk St, housing at Jennings Landing, ‘The Washington Park Arterial’… it’s so scary! Here’s the takeaway quote: ‘By 1980, the central area of Albany, like cities all over the United States, will be almost completely rebuilt.'”

Amy Biancolli feels a lullaby.
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When Sir Mix-a-Lot rapped “Baby Got Back” with the Seattle Symphony, David Alan Miller, conductor of the Albany Symphony Orchestra, was in the house.

ABC Wednesday, Round 15

“TMI, mommy!”

“Mommy, everybody on the bus can hear you!”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

As someone who takes the bus at least part of the way to work most days, I am regularly reminded why I hate listening to other people’s cellphone conversations, and why some public conveyances thankfully ban the use of those contraptions.

I’m sitting across a woman and her daughter, about ten, give or take a year, on the CDTA (local) bus. The mom is on the phone talking to her friend, and I’m not paying attention, until she says: “Do you know what I really hate about Eddie*? He comes into the bathroom when I’m trying to pee and s###!” Then she goes on about how, when she closes the bathroom door, he pounds on the door and demands to know what she’s doing in there. And she repeats her intentions.

At this point, the daughter says, “TMI, mommy!” She actually used the initials, rather than “too much information.” But either the mom doesn’t hear her or feels the need to continue with this important telephonic conversation.

The girl is sitting right across from me and looks at me with this exasperated gaze. I give her the “what can you do?” shrug. She says a little louder, “Mommy, everybody on the bus can hear you!” This was probably true.

But the mom continues. She said, on her phone, just before I got off, “You know, we were going to get married today. Well, THAT’S off!” And I know TMI, so I nod affirmatively to myself.
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Sidebar: I went to the Tulip Festival on Mother’s Day weekend. As soon as he sees me, the guy at the CDTA booth immediately knows me by name. The one thing he noted is that, in my LAST blog post about CDTA, I mentioned a crazy woman on board. I’m sure he’ll love this one as well.

*Not his real name.
Thanks, XKCD

Other than America; ending arguments

Moving closer to the equator doesn’t interest me much

Lisa of peripheral perceptions wonders:

I don’t know if you’ve answered this one, but I’d like to know in what city/country would you live if you could live anywhere else in the world. And why. 🙂

I don’t think I have. I did this with states – I came up with Vermont – but not countries.

Part of the problem is that I’m just lousy with languages, so it’d have to be a country where a lot of people speak English.

The default answer for a lot of Americans is Canada. It’s like the US, except they have better health care and don’t fear the metric system, the argument has been. And if the globe is warming, Canada might be a thought. But those waves of cold weather this past winter in the US, all stored to our north, and fueled by the Arctic melting, worries me.

The United Kingdom my wife loves. But it appears broken economically and is subject to that same nasty weather we experience on this side of the pond.

I don’t know enough about Belize, but moving closer to the equator doesn’t interest me much. I loved Barbados, but, in addition to too much heat, and hurricanes, I can’t imagine living on a small island. Not diverse enough geographically, and too expensive.

Ultimately, I think it’d have to be in the Southern Hemisphere. While Australia seems interesting, the ghastly warm weather that has been experienced in the interior the last couple of years, north of 125F/50C would keep me away from everything except the east coast cities.

Another option, I suppose, is New Zealand. This is in no small part because Arthur the AmeriNZ has described it so well in his blog and podcasts. It’s reasonably progressive. Now I may NEVER figure out its electoral system the way I know the US system. Then again the US system is broken, so no big loss.

Climate change will affect NZ too, but the southern landmass of Antarctica may make that a LITTLE less terrible, for a time. Now, it IS on the ring of fire of volcanic and earthquake activities, which makes me nervous. Still, I guess I’ll say New Zealand because at least I’d know someone there.
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SamuraiFrog wants to know:

At what point is an argument over for you? I know someone on Tumblr who recently engaged in victim-blaming just to end an argument. He felt bad about it, knew it was wrong, admitted it, and sincerely apologized. But some people are still invested in making him feel bad about it. At what point do you let something like that go?

It all depends. What is the “crime”, first of all? Some dumb comment someone makes in the heat of the moment might get a pass unless it’s so hateful and vicious that you have to surmise that, deep down, that he or she must be a really awful person.

Michael Richards of Seinfeld fame gave a really nasty racist rant, I hear. I didn’t listen to it. There’s a point, though, that it is in the past, and for me, Richards is there.

Of course, it matters if it is a real apology. Richards sincerely apologized. I’m sure I must have mentioned this topic somewhere about bad apologies. Oh, there it is, from 2009:

DON’T use the word BUT. An example would be, “I’m sorry, BUT you started it.”
DON’T use the word IF. My least favorite apology: “I’m sorry IF you’re offended.” The clear implication is that you really SHOULDN’T be offended, but I better say it anyway.

Lame apologies get zero points from me.

Nasty words written are more difficult to forgive. I do know that people can get caught up in a debate on social media, though, which is why I tend to minimize my contribution to the same.

But some acts are so egregious that even a sincere-sounding apology is hard to accept: “I’m truly sorry that I molested those boys over a 20-year period.” Not satisfactory.

Now, online fights, I’ll just walk away from, even if THEY think that, by not responding, they think I think they’re right. I suspect that your Tumblr acquaintance, assuming he keeps his nose clean, will come out OK, if only because his critics will latch on to someone else.

Whereas a face-to-face or phone argument might be a different issue, especially among friends or relatives. You may have heard stories of fights that went on for years or even decades. True of my maternal grandmother and her brother over the fact that he was “living in sin” with a woman in the 1960s.

And speaking of arguing – Not an ARA question, but rather a comment by Lisa to this post:

I would encourage you to try and get back into one of the groups at your church. That seems to be an area of importance for you and may be the best place to nurture those human interactions. But you’ll always have us…….:-)

As it turned out, I actually had an odd incident at one of these groups back in April, and it’s not entirely settled.

It was after The Daughter was starting to get better after her terrible March. I hadn’t gone to the previous meeting, partly because it was Lydia’s birthday, but partially because she was still having issues. Getting together with this group was something I was clearly looking forward to, as I had purchased lots of snacks.

But one guy dominated the conversation with references most of the rest of us did not understand for a good half hour. By the time I got to say something, someone made a joke that less upset me than distracted me from what I had hoped to be talking about. I angrily stormed out and didn’t come back for the last three or four meetings before the summer break. I may return in the fall.

Still, it’s not the same as one-on-one conversation with an old friend.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Grand Seduction

Taylor Kitsch is best known for the acclaimed TV series Friday Night Lights.

The Wife and I went to the Spectrum Theatre on a recent Saturday night. I knew little about any of the movies, so we opted for the film down from four showings per day to two, The Grand Seduction.

From the IMDB description:
“The small harbor of Tickle Cove [probably Newfoundland, Canada] is in dire need of a doctor so that the town can land a contract to secure a factory which will save the town from financial ruin. Village resident Murray French (Brandon Gleeson) leads the search, and when he finds Dr. Paul Lewis (Taylor Kitsch) he employs – along with the whole town – tactics to seduce the doctor to stay permanently.”

This film is an English language remake of the French-Canadian Seducing Doctor Lewis (2003), originally called “La grande séduction”. Here’s a trailer of the current movie.

It takes a bit to set up the premise, but eventually, there are lots of laughs, coming from these folks who are looking for meaning in their life that work used to provide. We enjoyed it quite a bit and related to many of the characters. It also provided an interesting parallel about the value of honesty.

Gleeson is a versatile actor who often plays the heavy. Kitsch is best known for the acclaimed TV series Friday Night Lights. The last movie in which I saw Gordon Pinsent, who played Simon, Murray’s aide de camp, was in the very different Away from Her (2006).

The reviewers were mixed on this, 61% positive in Rotten Tomatoes. One of the negative reviews read, “Loved Local Hero? Charmed by Waking Ned Devine? Then go watch Local Hero and Waking Ned Devine.” Funny that, because right as the movie ended, this woman sitting right behind us said, “It was good but not as good as Ned Devine.” I did see that quirky film 15 years ago, and liked it fine, but don’t remember it well enough to make the comparison.

Don’t know that you need to run out to your local theater to see it – if you can even find it – but it’s worth at least a rental. Here’s a video review that doesn’t reveal too much.

PC, LGBT, 8-tracks, malls and dystopia

If you were beamed down from the USS Enterprise into most malls, you’d be hard pressed to know where you were geographically.

Uthaclena, who I know in terrestrial life, asks:

Okay: at what point does Political Correctness become absurd? Do public facilities need to be sanitized of all things religious to ensure separation of church and state? On Halloween can you only wear costumes of your own race/ethnicity/religion?

Okay. Here’s the thing; I don’t know what different people’s boiling points are, because I’m not them. For instance, it is the groups of Native Americans who have complained about the name of the Washington Redskins NFL team that makes me believe in the rightness of the complaint.

Too often, people wear the badge of political incorrectness, to show how much cooler they are than the “hung up” other people, and it ends up being a way for them to justify their racist and/or sexist and or/homophobic behavior.

Dan Van Riper noted: “As far back in the 1990s, Dan Clowes predicted the rise of this cultural phenomenon in David Boring (one of the last Eightballs.) If you complain about this kind of racist reference, then ‘you just don’t get it.’ Is it a way of depowering racism by appropriating it for entertainment, or is it providing a new kind of refuge for racist tendencies?” Or it’s framed as “you just don’t have a sense of humor,” and I do, but it’s STILL not funny.

Thom Wade would call it Bigotedly Correct. The general term is hipster racism.

See, e.g., this article about the Minneapolis area theater scene that Dan sent me, which I subsequently saw in BoingBoing. Referring to a purported talk-back session, in which a Native American woman protester was supposedly given an opportunity to speak, but she wasn’t:

“That’s the thing about privilege. It shows itself in many ways. This time, it just happened to pop up as a group of authoritative white people publicly tag-teaming a lone woman of color, and being so oblivious to the prevailing power dynamic that it never occurred to them that this was a problem, or that the reporter in the room might notice.”

And to that end, I thought this was rather entertaining: ‘Columbusing’: When White People Think They Discovered Something They Didn’t.

However, I DID think this July 2008 New Yorker cover was funny, because, I thought, it was making a commentary about how the Obamas were perceived, not as they actually were. Still, Colin Powell spoke well about the lie.

We don’t need to remove the Ten Commandments from the Supreme Court building. But I think those public, mostly Christian, prayers recently allowed by the Supreme Court suggest the establishment of religion. That’s not about being PC; that’s about following the Constitution.

I don’t believe white people should wear blackface for Halloween. But that doesn’t mean that blackface should NEVER happen, in an educational setting explaining why it’s so offensive to some people.

Occasionally, I see these stories about a teacher going “too far” in an educational demonstration showing racism or Antisemitism, e.g. About 2/3 of the time, I think the teachers have it right, and about 1/3 of the time, the proper context is not related, and it becomes a humiliation to those participating.

Former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s attacks on large sodas annoyed me. But is that a PC argument or a nanny state argument?

I think the elimination of Halloween, in favor of a “fall festival”, is a bit silly, yet I’m good with celebrating “the holidays,” because there are several of them (Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa). Still, “Merry Christmas” is pretty innocuous, to me, because Christmas in America is not a particularly Christian holiday.

Did I ever tell you that I wished someone visiting my current church on Christmas Eve “Merry Christmas, and he said, “I don’t celebrate Christmas”? I stifled a laugh.

I’m in the Potter Stewart school; I know the PC line when I see it.

Arthur the AmeriNZ notes:

Yes, I did steal borrow the idea from you, but I do it far less regularly. Here’s a query for you: Tell us about the first time you realised that someone you knew was LGBT, like, how you came to realise that, consequences, that sort of thing. I’m thinking about someone you actually knew, though it could be someone in pop culture or whatever.

Well, the first person I knew to be gay was my late friend Vito Mastrogiovanni, who my sister had a crush on in high school. He was out to his friends, but not everyone at the time, I believe. Frankly, it wasn’t a big deal, and there were no “consequences.” He and I were part of that oddball intellectual, politically aware clique that opposed the Vietnam war, fought racism, and the like.

Now that you ask it, maybe I SHOULD have been more reactive, but I just wasn’t.

Now my freshman year in college, the guy next door was hostile, and as I’ve noted, he was possibly being preemptively nasty before I could be nasty to him; I thought it was sad.

But I knew a lot more lesbians, starting at that same time frame. Alice was the roommate of my future wife, the Okie. She fought the war with me, hitchhiked with me. Not sure what consequences I really discovered except this: with straight people, I generally preferred the company of women. With gay people, I generally preferred the company of women. This was informative because I realized that I wasn’t friends with them just so I could hit on them. Did I ever mention I went skinny-dipping with six lesbians back in the late 1970s?

In fact, most of the gay people I knew were women until I got to my current church in this century, which, I believe, has more openly gay men than lesbians, though I haven’t done a formal count.

Amy, with her Sharp Little Pencil, wants to know:

Why did cassette tapes overtake the 8-track market?

Because the eight-track was a stupid technology. I remember exactly when I realized this. I was in a car listening to someone’s Beatles Again/Hey Jude 8-track. The song Rain came on, and IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SONG, it did that weird grinding noise in the middle of it. I should note that Rain is a three-minute song.

I NEVER owned an eight-track machine.

Jaquandor over at Byzantium Shores, wonders:

1. Are there any topics that you’re surprised don’t come up more often during your Ask Me Anything’s?

Yes. Some REALLY embarrassing stuff. But if no one’s gonna bring it up, why should I?

2. I’ve heard your hometown of Binghamton described rather unfavorably at times. Do you LIKE Binghamton, or has it gone downhill?

I like Binghamton, and yes, it’s gone downhill. It had 75,000 in 1960, about 47,000 now. They built Route 17 so one can get through there more quickly. Like a lot of Rust Belt cities, it’s struggling economically; I always want it to do well.

3. I read an article the other day about the death of the shopping mall in America. Did you ever like malls, and if so, do you mourn their passing at all?

There was a place in Binghamton that had what we’d now consider a large strip mall when I was growing up. Had one anchor store, and I liked it well enough.

But, no I would not mourn their passing. I think attention to the malls have starved the downtown areas, which need to grow for a city, and its surroundings, to be socially and economically healthy. Moreover, malls are private property, so their presence had dampened the public square.

For the most part, the stores in a mall are the same, so the homogenization suffocates local personality and culture. If you were beamed down from the USS Enterprise into most malls, you’d be hard-pressed to know where you were geographically.

4. I’ve expressed dismay on my own blog and elsewhere about the dominant tropes in popular culture today being dystopian settings and a HUGE focus on anti-heroes — what I call “Awful People At Work And Play”. What are your thoughts on the tone of popular culture right now?

Not only am I uncomfortable with dystopian culture, but I’m also bored with it. Bored with the word “dystopian.”

Initially, I thought I was just getting older, but I now realize that these antiheroes just don’t interest me, don’t inspire me, but, rather, irritate me. I don’t need to identify with schmucks. I think a lot of people do, and they end up going online, emulating their schmuck heroes’ behavior. Yes, I’m pretty tuned out of most of it.

You can still Ask Roger Anything.

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