Breakin the law

Was listening to NPR on the way to the Central West Planning meeting last night and they were interviewing those two people who just published a book about Lance Armstrong and doping. They were talking about how over the top and outrageous the drug abuse was on the US Postal Service team, and I found myself ranting in my own mind about how absurd the culture of cheating was in sports and business and how it's absolutely correct that Armstrong should have every possible book thrown at him and his wealth confiscated, and Stevie Cohen too, and Barry Bonds.... and how necessary it was for our children to see that rule-breaking has consequences and how important it is to play fair...

And then, I remembered how, not two hours before, when a blonde field hockey player for Culbreth had a breakaway and was threatening to score (Phillips was up 4-1, with maybe 8 minutes left), and I found myself advocating to the other parents standing there that our defender should, in that situation, take the Culbreth player down, foul her intentionally to stop the breakaway.  Which is, tactically, the correct thing to do when there's a real threat of a goal in a low-scoring sport.

But, though it is tactically correct, it's not really rule compliant.  It is, in fact, the type of consequence-weighing behavior we all engage in all the time:  I'll break a rule if the legal recourse is not onerous and/or the probability of getting caught is low.  So, drive 67 in a 55 but not 74.

We do this all the time.  Armstrong was just gambling at a higher level, and in such a global way that it called into question the integrity of his sport.

I can't help but to think back to Luis Suarez reaching up with his hands to block the shot that the Ghanaians had headed over the goal line in the dying seconds of the World Cup quarterfinal in 2010 in South Africa. Ghana had done an incredible thing, had brought honor upon Africa, and what Suarez did seemed so dirty. And then the regal Asamoah Gyan stepped up and missed the penalty off the crossbar, and Uruguay won in a shoot out.  And, in retrospect, Suarez did the absolute right thing.  He did the only thing he could do, and he got a red card, but Uruguay advanced.  And that's how it is.  Perhaps the most dramatic moment I have ever seen in sports, and I hope to never see it again.

At a Bat Mitzvah

Went to the Bat Mitzvah of Natalie's friend S yesterday.  We were able to plunk Graham over at granny's, which was a fine thing, because he offered the opinion that Bar and Bat Mitzvah's are even "drearier" (his actual word) than funerals because of all the Hebrew.  And the service was, in truth, on the long side, though sung beautifully.

But I find that there's a special freedom to religious services conducted in languages you don't know.  Sometimes I try to figure out something about the language.  I'll never forget the time that I figured out that "Baruch" means blessing, hence the 17th century philosopher Spinoza (whom I've been meaning to read for 25 odd years) is alternately referred to as Baruch and Benedict. This was at Tanya and Jamie's wedding at Bard back in '94 or 5, where the rabbi had the most lovely voice and really had the literal enthusiasm of great clergy of any faith, or none. "Barack" is etymologically linked to Baruch.Yesterday I deciphered that Melech means king.

But mostly I just let my mind wander freely and ponder things, much like I used to in church, when the sermons might as well have been in a foreign language. I thought about other stuff too, some of it deep, which I may find time to get back to, though now I think I've gotta go feed Graham lunch.

What I will say is that there was a girl sitting right in front of us who was continually futzing with her hair.  She kept trying to braid it in one way or another, but it wouldn't stay back, and she was totally doing it obsessively the whole time.  I must say that I found this annoying, as it was interfering with my piece of mind and my ability to think extremely profound thoughts, the processing and recording of which is of the utmost importance to humanity.

Then, lunch was delicious.

Soccer dad

So, because I can, I have been going to as many of Natalie's field hockey games as I can, because I can.  And they haven't been winning.  Quite the contrary.

The big problem is that the other teams are, you see, better.  There are relatively few experienced players at Phillips, and only a few who are really dogged in wanting the ball and contesting for it.  Natalie is not one of them. She is largely content to be in the area where the ball is, close enough to the action to not feel guilty about shirking, but not actively interjecting herself into the flow.  The problem is, I believe, reaching back through the years to my own early and uncertain times playing sports, that she doesn't believe she can influence the play, or, that if she does, it will be in the wrong way. So why run the risk of messing up if you can be close enough where you appear to be trying?

And, honestly, it's no biggie, because she's having fun and maintains a really good attitude. Making the high school team will probably be difficult, this may be her last year at this sport, and that's OK, because at this level, and not on turf, it's frustrating sport to watch. Ultimate is so much better.

But sitting there on the bench, watching the team underperform, watching the few aggressive girls play their hearts out, is challenging for me. I keep my yelling entirely positive, but under my breath, in my skull, it's difficult to do.  In my mind, I am the soccer dad of parodies, yelling out, correcting the coach (though not berating the ref). And I get it. I know I am playing out insecurities of my youth in there.  I just try to keep it there.

Long day

Was in Greensboro bright and early for the income tax planning exam of the CFP.  In the bag!  Box checked.

After a traditional Carolina burger at a NC Diner (vaguely an oxymoron?) I planned to make my way home via back roads, to with, what is known in Chapel Hill as Old Greensboro Highway.

Then I talked to my mom, who told me my uncle Ballard had passed away over the weekend.  Ballard was my dad's older brother, about whom I really need to write a little more, I see, having looked through the archives quickly.  But, as I was west of town, I stopped in to see his sister Frances on my way back, who lives out that way. Was greeted at my car by no fewer than 7 dogs, one of whom (Duncan), weighs about 135 pounds.  But, once they saw that I was kin, they all simmered down and begged to be pet.

In any case, would love to write more, but may not get back to it today.  My friend who's helping with some home repair stuff has gotten here, gotta go confer with him.

Cease to cherish opinions

Saw a great quote today: "Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions."

Turns out it is from a certain Hsin-hsin-ming, or so the Almighty Interweb tells me.

I may have blogged before on the subject of the fragment.  In western culture, the fragment has been a very fruitful form from Heraclitus forward, and one I have always been partial to.  There is a certain appropriate humility to the short form, an absence of overreaching and self-aggrandizement.  Plus it's impossible for the individual mind to try to hold the totality of something like the Critique of Pure Reason in mind, or the Bible or whatever grand text seems to be the big one for you.

Similarly, there's a certain justice in the fact that Alice Munro just won the Nobel for Literature, the first pure short-story writer to ever do so.  Certainly the short story is denigrated relative to the totalizing pretensions of the novel.

And yet, I am mindful of what Franco Moretti once said, somewhat sotto voce, about a certain globe-trotting rock star theorist in his department.  "(S)he has never written a book, only collections of articles."  I get that.  For personal development, for saying what you believe in and trying to bring threads together, there does seem to be a drive to write a book which hangs together and presents a unified argument.  Or is this also but a chimera?

Tax code

Studying Income Tax Planning module for the CFP course given by CFFP.  This is not more exciting then it sounds.

Some notes.  On the one hand, I can see how deucedly complex is US tax code.  It is layer upon layer of inducements, put on their year after year as the IRS caught up with those who would willfully dosey-doe with it and/or to incent or disincent behaviors at moments of economic stress.  So I get simplifying it.

Then again, it's equally hard to imagine actually doing it, because at any different moment, a million taxpayers might be planning, over the course of years, to take advantage of one provision or the other.

In time, thought, something will give. Simplification will need to happen.  The cost of complying with the Code is manifestly unproductive, and consumers a non-trivial chunk of GDP.

The Reason I Jump from subject to subject

I just read The Reason I Jump, by Naoki Higashida.  The author is a Japanese kid who wrote the book when he was 13, and he is, by most measures, apparently somewhere around the middle of the functioning range of the autism spectrum, I guess. I'm hedging because, although he apparently doesn't speak much, it's really an amazing book.  Through an arduous process of spelling out words using a special grid, he's given the reader fairly astounding access to the inner realms of his thinking, which is by no means simple for a 13-year old.  It is articulate and well-considered.  I really recommend the book to anyone, but particularly to others who have kids or other relatives on the spectrum.  It is more direct and human than anything else I've read, including John Elder Robeson and Temple Grandin.

There's a final story in it which doesn't address any specific questions of autism, but is incredibly sweet, so don't skip it.


And, having been schooled in literary criticism during the heyday of high literary theory, or maybe soon after it, I gotta tell you this throws a big brick through the window of any theory that calls into question the representational power of language.  I mean, it ain't perfect, but it's pretty damned good, and a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Theory is/was one of those intensely seductive things.  It takes so much work, and when you're enveloped in it it feels like it gives you so much power, but then you go to talk to somebody who's not bought into it and they're looking at you like:  "what the fuck are you talking about?"  In many ways, those most seduced and caught up in theory are not unlike the Tea Party, trapped in their own little self-referential self-reinforcing world.

Which isn't to say it's all bad.  It just must be leavened and tempered with an open mind.

Russia and the intelligentsia

When Boyzu and I went swimming the other day he was asking me about Russia.  To wit:  "What's up with Russia?  Why are they so angry and reactionary."

In the moment, all I could think of was to say that many of them were thugs, which is a gross oversimplification, to be sure.  Only slightly less crassly, I think it's fair to say that Russians have lived for a long time in a harsh environment which periodically becomes harsher for reasons both external (invaders like Napoleon and Stalin) and internal (tyrants like Stalin and the at times rather harsh autocracy of Tsars, to say nothing of Serfdom).  So Russians have learned to do what they need to to survive.

They are also naturally pissed off at having felt like they were a world power, and then to have been brought low and ground in the mire after the end of the Cold War. So the Russian Man, writ large, doesn't feel too good about himself.  Right now, to survive in his mind as a "man", he perceives that has to have somebody to kick around.  He's been kicking around the "black" people of the Caucasus and Central Asia for sometimes, the colonies they brought to heel from the 17th century forward that have now said "uh uh".  And they've had nasty wars and major incidents of terrorism blow back on them from that.



Women are already pretty much under control, and, in the absence of a bunch of Jews, many of whom have left for Israel or the US, homosexuals make an easy target.  They aren't likely to launch coordinated attacks on theaters full of adults or schools full of children.  Get drunk, bash some homos, what could be easier in terms of feeling like a man, and a righteous man at that?  The Klan used to love this, still does in some parts.


So what's the attraction of Russia for me?  The intelligentsia.  This is a special group.  From the 19th century forward, around the time of Pushkin, a group of Russians figured out that the way they could pull themselves out of the Ghetto of Being was through study and trying to live true to their principles learned thereby.  And the tradition has pretty much held up. They are people, yes, so prone to foibles, but it's a pretty extraordinary group of folx, very pure in their own way.

Anyway, I thought this post was gonna be more about them but I kept blathering about the mass of Russians, so more later.

The Vanishing of the Agora

There's a story in the NYTimes this morning about new ways retailers and payment companies are dreaming up zipless shopping:  read an ad, point, click, and one of those hunky brownshirts will show up at your door with it.  Or meet you in a parking lot at a precisely appointed time.

Great.  Last night, after being at my desk for almost the whole day -- save for a brief trip in the morning to a LabCorp phleb lab for some bloodwork where I got very pleasant service from a couple of nice young African-American women, one of them of near runway quality loveliness -- I went out to my neighborhood RiteAid to pick up some prescriptions and some dental and shaving stuff.  I could have saved my time and asked Mary to do it for me, there could have been noniminally more highly value-additive functions for me to perform at home.

Thing is:  I wanted to go to the store. To see people. And, when I got there, the eccentric guy with the funky moustache and the half gloves took good care of me, even made a joke about how many prescriptions people my age sometimes pick up.

The fact is, as more and more stuff gets delivered to our homes, we go out and rub shoulders with other people (or, as we used to say in the theory world -- The Other), less and less. Which makes us narrower and narrower as souls.

Marketers bemoan this fact. It becomes more difficult to sell things to us as we venture out less, and in more predictable ways. And this is true of politics and the marketplaces of ideas as well, as gerrymandering gets more and more extreme, it's harder and harder to communicate diversely with a diverse group, and less and less necessary to think in terms of crossing boundaries.

Do you remember when Bruce Springsteen sang about "57 Channels and Nothing On," and we all nodded our heads at the absurdity of it?  Well, how many channels are there now?

The big boxes are the great levellers.  WalMart, Target, CostCo, IKEA, each of them appeals to segments, but they are pretty broad segments.  For many reasons, I'm not a fan of WalMart, and yet the experience of going to WalMart is important, because America is there.  I think Whitman would like it.  But Bezos has it squarely in his sights.

Graham on the fall of Eike Batista

So there's a cover story on the fall of Eike Batista in Businessweek, about how he managed to lose a fortune of $34.5 billion.  And I have to admit that's a pretty good question. Graham was likewise intrigued, and I found the magazine next to his bed as we got in to read and snuggle a bit.

So I asked him if he had read the article or if I had left it there myself, and he allowed that he had read it, but still couldn't figure out how he had lost all that money.

"Did he build a cruise ship?"  he asked, because there had been some talk of Batista's lavish yacht in the article..
"Well," I said, "you couldn't really spend that much on a cruise ship."
Graham paused, and then said, "Well, if it was an intergalactic one the size of Australia...."
And I had to admit that he had me.

Shall the Twain Meet?

Saw these two pix from the Courier-Times of Person County yesterday, they kind of jumped off the page at me in the theme of two Americas. In a sense, they both speak for themselves.  The first is very sweet, except for the angry hunting duck at left. Obviously fans of Duck Dynasty, which I watched once to see what the hullabaloo was about, and it's pretty clear what the show offers: strong validation of the rebel, rural white guy who both has dominion over nature and coexists with it, with the irony that these (to the well-heeled and well-shaven corporate man) guys look scary but have real "family values," which involves kind of respecting women, especially with big hair and tight clothes.

The second picture is obviously a whole nuther kettle of fish.  This is ruling-class nostalgia distilled to a purity I see only rarely. Forget about the shoe, just look at the diction, the luggage the girl is sitting on, and her coat.  This is culled from a timeless vision of the lady setting off on the "Grand Tour" of Europe, where she will acquire all the culture and refinement she will need to make her a good wife, mother, and hostess.

In a town as small and not particularly affluent as Roxboro, I've been surprised at the healthy persistence of the gentry class. A fundraiser for the local historical society with a $50 plate cost drew 300 a couple of weeks back, and the high school girls' tennis team (a bunch of classic tanned blondes) has done quite well, thank you.

So there's a big class divide here, which is no shocker, but nonetheless pretty well leaps off the page at you. All the same, it's not inconceivable that these people go to the same church, and by and large they vote the same way, as Fox News has successfully united them against their common enemy...  And therein, I would say, lies the problem.

Cary

Today saw the mighty Falcons of Phillips doing battle at Cary Academy, which is quite a jernt indeed. In actual fact, it looks like a small, well-heeled, Christian college, with all the appropriate athletic facilities, including a synthetic track. Sitting next to the SAS campus, and feeling like an extension of it, I was by no means surprised to learn that Jim Goodnight of SAS is one of the founders/funders.

In any case, on the field it was the traditional battle between good(us) and evil(them). They had it all over us in terms of skill, experience, ball control, etc., but our girls showed a lot of scrappy heart and fought them to a 0-0 tie.

I was so glad that I took Natalie out to Michael's last night to buy some ribbon, since special ribbon in the hair for each game is a proud Falcon tradition. Natalie bought awesome sparkly silver ribbon, so all the girls were covered in wee glitter afterwards. What's not to like about that?

Carrboro Music Festival, take 1

So I had never made it up there before, but yesterday was a beautiful day and I was determined to get up to the Carrboro Music Festival. I assumed that parking would be hell, so I rode my bike, which took a little cleaning, as she had been in the basement all summer, all year, just sitting there, getting a little dusty and moldy.  But nevermind about that.

So I got up there, and stashed the bike in the closet of an office building I conveniently have keys to, and set to galavanting about. There were many folx.  In front of Weaver Street, there was some pretty decent funk breaking out.  Imagine my surprise to go over there and see that the band that was belting it out was pretty much old folk, the woman on guitar was heavy set and maybe 50-55... but she was ripping.  And there was another woman up on stage painting on a black canvas with bright reds, oranges, purples and whatnot. That didn't do much for me.

Age would become a theme for the day.  Back in the day, it seemed like I would go to street fairs and all the people I would meet were young people. Now, everybody I know has grey hair or is balding, and sports a paunch or a poncho, or both. I just can't figure it out.

And many of the bands fit the bill.  Old grey-haired dudes belting out blues of ZZ Top songs or something.  Which is cool, but not all that exciting.  Many of them were accompanied by women of a certain age is day-glo tie-died stuff, dancing eccentrically with handsome-looking beers in plastic cups. Also kids,  and couples dancing together in that "I'm too old to care" way.  All good.

But I was yearning to get beyond just acceptance to a place of being actively stoked to be there. By Glass Half-Full I came across a band playing reggae and soul, with a guy with long dreads, a flute, a sax, and a fine singing voice.  This was the Tim Smith Band, and I thought, this is plenty good, I'll call it a day and go home and see my kids.

But as I was crossing main street, I espied a mini-donut truck over by Cliff's, which I had to investigate, so I crossed over to check it out.  They looked good but were overpriced and sold in too large a unit, but I looked past the truck and saw a bunch of folks clustered by a corner. And there, under a little bit of shelter, was a fine 4-piece bluegrass quartet with two guys who had great singing harmony.  I caught their last two songs, and over my right shoulder, on the roof behind Cliff's, I saw a duo rocking out.  So I went over there.

And it turned out it was Aussies.  A real small woman playing a stand-up base, and a guy, apparently her husband, on guitar, and they had beer in cozies, a couple of small amps, and were rocking out. And she could yodel.

 

I stayed for 5 songs, but, clearly, it wasn't getting any better than this, so it was time to head home and hang out with the kids.

On the way out of Carrboro, I ran into Glenn from Local 506, and he told me that I had seen the Red Hot Polka Dots, transplants to our fair shores.  Here's a better video.

The US of AA

Just got back from an AA meeting.  There's really nothing quite like it, those without substance abuse issues don't, can't get it, from the perspective of coming to an understanding of being a human at a very root level.

Today there were lots of shares from black women of limited means.  First, one I'll call D talked about being at a dance last night and feeling shy and embarrassed about getting out on the dance floor, because she always used alcohol and drugs to push through that, and then finally going out and dancing and having a great time.  And then she shared about how happy she was to have 30 days sober, having made it to 27 and 28 on previous occasions but never 30, and how proud she was to have gotten there, and I remember that pride too, how awesome it was to just get some days under your belt.

And then another black woman I'll call N shared.  I remember a few weeks back at this meeting, a pretty big meeting, a lot of people had their hands up and an older white gentleman I'll call X -- a sage fellow whom I always looked forward to hearing -- had had his hand up and was having trouble getting the attention of the chair.  And I thought of putting my hand up just to get the floor and then ceding it to X.  And N did just that.  She pushed up her hand with huge enthusiasm, got the floor, and then passed the mike to X. It was beautiful.

But today she held the floor and talked about what she was going through, and she shared about how she picked up trash randomly to do a good deed and to feel good about herself (I do that too), and that she had picked up a little black baby doll, which she bathed and combed its hair, and had gotten a little bed for it.  And that she had been sitting at a bus stop the other day and there was a baby bottle lying on the ground, and she thought, God has left that their for my little baby, so she picked it up and took it home.  All good in my book.

And a bunch of other stuff, from a guy just out of the joint frustrated that he couldn't get a job and couldn't get back to Texas where he could, and a country white guy who took back a money order that had been made out for too much money and then bought a lottery ticket and won $75. Basically there are very few other places and circumstances where one can go and feel deep connectedness to people very different from oneself that are on par with AA, and in that it's a great blessing.

Mr Johnson goes to Washington

It is 1931, and LBJ, having made it through college by a circuitous and curious path, after frenetically teaching public speaking and debate in Houston for one year, has over a few short years passed from Cotulla, Texas, in the middle of nowhere between San Antonio and the Mexican border -- to the US Capitol building.

At times Caro lingers, fairly wallows, in so much detail that you think, like your subject, that you may never move on, but when the tide turns, he generates momentum and interest like no other. So when Johnson's debating team improbably makes its way to the Texas State Championship only to.... (win? lose? I will not be a spoiler), and Johnson passes from nothingness into somethingness with improbable speed, Caro has you, or me, and each paragraph snowballs in importance.

I almost can't believe I took time out to write about it.  Back to the drama.

The gentle riddims of the suburbs, part N, v 2013

A somewhat rough day here at my desk, as down across the gully I am continually serenaded by chain saws and their accompanying base line, the chipper. So, I think, I'll go running, figure out where the sound is coming from, and calm the noggin.  And so I do, and as I'm in the last mile, headed back home, I am passed on the curvy road by a loud, slow-moving truck carrying... mulch!  And so on one side somebody's using a two-stroke engine to cut and break down tree matter, while on the other more carbon is burnt delivering the same, maybe 3/4 of a mile from the chainsaw.

And then, and here's the kicker -- as I come into my yard I see a bunch of deer -- whose numbers have multiplied of late, brazenly grazing in Mary's hard-tended garden, which is ostensibly planted with plants the bambi set don't like. Problem is, it would appear, that the expanded population is hungry, and there's not enough wild underbrush to support them on things they like, so they eat things they don't.  It's as if Graham was hungry enough to eat something he really hates, like, maybe, cooked cabbage.  That's tough to imagine.

All of this makes it difficult for the Grouse himself to really bite down on such tender fare as the tax treatment of partial annuitizations, or the use of Qualified Personal Realty Trusts in estate planning.

I know, I know, you may well be thinking:  what the hell did you expect?

Making peace with the rural church

Almost certainly it's because I spent too much time as a management consultant, but my mind increasingly turns to the concept of alignment (earlier ramblings), and the lack thereof, to explain many of our society's woes these days. I.e. we aren't forced to a shared conception of direction by an external threat (Nazis, Communists, etc.), nor do we have a strong internal mission (right wrongs caused by racism, sexism, etc.).  In this situation, we need leadership to galvanize us, and in a fragmented million-channel landscape of the internet, cable TV, etc., it's very hard to get there.

Amongst the clearest indications of lack of alignment is the profusion of big-assed tattoos all over people's bodies, and in particular in places where they can't be hidden:  necks, arms, etc. I can't back this up statistically, but they seem to occur most frequently amongst those that feel they have no hope of joining the corporate ruling class. Similarly, idiosyncratically-spelled Afrocentric names are a pretty big lifetime commitment to self-marginalization. It's as if to say:  "I have no hope or concern with ever doing something where I'm going to have to integrate with the homogenizing corporate norm, so I might as well BE MYSELF, ie. way outside of the mainstream."

And if you drive through the country, by which I mean the country, not places that are within the fields of influence of major metropolitan areas where pumpkin, plaid and cider is served quick as you like from farm to table, you can see that there is a hopelessness rivaling that of those in the urban center.  Schools suck.  Try listening to the radio, it's nothing but Christian music and talk and commercial country, pop and, yes, rap.

And sure, it's hard as hell to farm for a living, factories have been shutting down, it's all the stuff you hear about in country music. In the land of oxycontin and methmouth, the church provides a reasonable alternative. As in the inner city, where black churches often feed homophobia, and Latino churches probably espouse a whole lot of stuff white liberals would disagree with if we weren't too lazy to figure out what it was, there's much to not like about rural churches. They too often oppose gay marriage and women's rights and support other aspects of conservative agendas, but in the end, they're often the only well-established alternative to nihilism and Sportzone.

So Democrats need to figure out a way to build bridges to them.

Read, pray, love

Just read the NYTimes magazine profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and other books, who (by coinkidink) has a new book coming out. So the article was pretty glowing, but I must say I'm buying.  She sounds like a rather energetic and cool human being.  Her new book (I'll watch for reviews) can join the queue with the many other books I've got to read.  I'm somewhere around the 3% mark of Caro's total published stuff on LBJ, but there will be many other tomes interspersed with each of those doorstops.

There is really no wealth quite like a fat backlog of reading material.

At the same time, I'm mindful of the curmudgeonly would-be sage and sometime Grousereader known as Blue who pointed out that, if you read other's stuff all the time, you don't do your own writing.  There is much truth to that, and it's one of those tradeoffs. On the one hand, you don't get to see your own ego and its yearnings objectified in words, and you don't get the so greatly desired attention and praise that comes from stroking by readers. On the other, there's just so much worth reading, and one is arguably more in the "flow" of the great stream of knowledge and being by continually dangling one's legs in it.

It is, as the tech geeks would say, about optimizing I/O ratios.

The Carolina Way is Dead, pt II

There has been a lot of chatter on Facebook about the Chapel Hill Town Council or whoever giving a thumbs up to the long-awaited plans for the redevelopment of University Square. First off, University Square is no beauty, though I have plenty of fond memories of the place, esp. around Time Out and Looking Glass and soccer camp and what's the name of that ice-cream place where Brooke used to work?  But it ain't pretty.  So in the end, it's no big loss.

What is proposed for the site should be better.  Moreover, the loss of character is minuscule compared to what happened when U Square went in in the first place, after the old high school got ripped out and the new CHHS was built way out on Homestead, which was nowheresville back then.  And the town survived.

The larger discussion swirls around the question of whether Chapel Hill is becoming a less distinctive, less funky place to live, whether it's even cool any more.  From my perspective, it is clearly lost some of its character, is less distinctive.

But, you gotta remember, we, or at least I, used to be such snobs. I thought I was cooler than sliced bread in the 70s, when I could go to Fats for my birthday and get a big plate of nachos (minus the hot peppers, since I was after all only 10 or so) with a candle on it.  Getting beef teriyaki at street fairs, even eating at Blimpies, I thought it all proved that we were the worldly sophisticates and therefore inherently superior to those who had to go to McDonalds because there was nothing better.  And this from a guy who liked his McMuffin no less than anybody else.

And so, much of Chapel Hill's becoming less cool has to do with the more even spread of goodness around the state and the country.  Even Kinston now has an apparently innovative restaurant.  What's not to like about that?

And, yes, as new buildings and more chains go in Chapel Hill loses its groove and its sheen, and as rents get jacked up it will be harder for indie entrepreneurs to establish toeholds and interesting businesses. Such is life, we have to patronize the more interesting ones, that's just it, and/or landlords will need to be less market-driven themselves.

So the interesting stuff gets pushed out to Durham, Saxapahaw, Hillsborough, Pittsboro (where it may soon be flattened by the massive development proposed there).  I just read on Facebook about a new brewery in Clayton! Hopefully one of these days it will get to Roxboro (actually, there's even a somewhat ambitious restaurant that just opened there).

Anyway, before we wring our hands too much we need to stick to our knitting and focus on what's important to us, doing the right thing on a moment to moment basis.  Support local businesses to the extent that it makes sense, be wierd, and Chapel Hill will be just wierd enough.

Or maybe one day Pembroke State will become the seat of the state's cultural life.  Would that be all bad?

The Carolina Way is Dead, pt 1

For those of you who haven't  watched this video, do so.  It's funny.  If you're not a Duke or Carolina fan, or don't follow sports, you may not get it all, but trust me, it's funny.



So the other day I was talking to a guy who works at UNC about retention.  Time was, when a Stanford or a Princeton would swoop in and try to buy up a UNC faculty member, UNC did pretty well retaining them.  Of late, the numbers have been slipping.  One of the big factors cited by departing faculty in why they left?  Athletic scandals.

And, indeed, they have been difficult.  They ended up besmirching a good Chancellor, who fell on a knife not of his own forging and skipped town for a less stressful job.

Meanwhile, up in Raleigh, another Carolina Way is threatened, not just with eclipse, but with extinction.  For all our lives NC has been the state that provided a winning formula of investing its own money in public education and attracting private money to exploit the synergies offered by its universities, thereby becoming a place where a range of educated people would like to live, allowing the state to rise up the value chain in its core exports, from tobacco to intellectual capital.

How does this all tie together, you may ask. Well, it ain't one neat package, but certainly there is a common theme of short-mindedness and narrow instrumental-functionalism to it all. The university has been too focused on the short-term glory of the light blue, as if Dean's great legacy was on the court more than off it, when I think the converse is, if anything, the case.  And the legislature, and the electorate with its support of Amendment One -- have turned their attention to restoring some mythical North Carolina of the past that has made us the laughing stock of the nation and the world.

At this point in time, the university has a to lead and reestablish a tone. It should forget about trying to keep up with Duke on the court and focus on being a center of learning and strength.  Fire Roy Williams. Anybody who can compare a bad season to a catastrophe-ripped nation doesn't belong in Dean's chair.  Get a coach in with his priorities in the right place, and have the university turn back to its core competency.... blah blah blah

(this so often happens.  What feels like a cogent blog post in the morning degenerates in the afternoon into a half-baked rant.  Oh well.  At least the video was funny)